Intercultural Musings

Getting physical

2009-09-10T09:07:00.005+02:00

It turns out that the man who ran onto the court and kissed Rafael Nadal after a match at last year's US Open, creating a minor scandal, did it from the bottom of his heart. His name is Noam U. Aorta! It was a curious incident that highlights some of the ambiguity our culture demonstrates with regard to:
a) celebrities and the notion of celebrity
b) spontaneous demonstrations of affection
c) the "business" of security.

Nadal, the "victim", who was "hugged and kissed", took no offense and even seemed flattered by the gesture. In the video you can hear him say, "It's OK" and both during and after the incident he was smiling broadly. On that basis alone, I expect that, if asked (which is unlikely to happen), he would be opposed to prosecution. The law sees it differently:

Aorta will be charged with trespassing and faces possible jail time if convicted, prosecutors said.

“There was a breakdown,” U.S. Open spokesman Chris Widmaier said.

District Attorney Richard Brown, however, called it “particularly disturbing” because Aorta made physical contact with Nadal.

Of course, the law is the law, especially in the US. But I find it interesting that officials identified two distinct problematic actions: the physical contact of the anonymous fan with a celebrity and the "breakdown". Given Nadal's perception of the incident, the only thing that seems to me reasonable to worry about is the breakdown of the security system. And in that sense Aorta was rendering a vital service by demonstrating a hole in the system that could be corrected and possibly should be. If anything, he should be rewarded by the tournament management for it, just as software companies reward the "good" hackers who reveal holes in their security while going after the malicious ones who infect their software.

Unlike the man who tried, earlier this year, to place a hat on Roger Federer's head in the middle of the final of the French Open, Aorta approached Nadal after the end of his match. He shouldn't therefore be accused - as the French authorities did - of interrupting a sporting event. The intruder at Roland Garros also displayed a non-aggressive, possibly affectionate approach, but one which was disturbing for everyone (including Federer) as it took place near the beginning of the second set. In such circumstances, the timing was obviously calculated for maximum "attention getting", which is difficult to correlate with spontaneous affection. The quest for celebrity by intruding into the spotlight beamed on other celebrities is now a well-known social phenomenom. But Aorta appeared to be motivated by spontaneous enthusiasm rather than the desire to be noticed. He wasn't stealing the spotlight since the drama of the match was over and television was, by that time, probably airing commercials.

I think there are three interesting cultural issues here:

1. the fact that the prosecution implies an equivalence between "physical" and "disturbing", which may reflect attitudes in the US about intimacy and distance but possibly perceived differently in other cultures (e.g. Spain),

2. the recently acquired reflex in US society to see everything in terms of security, as the core US value of "control" seems to have morphed into an obsession with security (notice that in the video the commentators refer to two historical references: the attack on Monica Seles and 9/11!... the focus is on danger and risk),

3. the growing and somewhate paranoid trend of separating celebrities from real people, which also has negative psychological effects on celebrities, who often (Michael Jackson, Lindsay Lohan, etc.) lose their sense of their basic human identity.

Of course this last point is aggravated by the growing cult of celebrity associated very directly with the cult of success in capitalist cultures. It is linked to phenomena such as the emergence of "Reality TV", which should probably be called Irreality TV. Celebrity breeds success and success breeds celebrity and both produce wealth and/or what's perceived as easy money and lots of it. Everyone seeks success because they seek wealth. Instant success seems to have become a universal dream, which takes us one serious step further away from social reality.

In the original lyrics of "As Time Goes By" the first line contained the phrase "a kiss is just a kiss, a sigh is just a sigh", but when Warner Bros. integrated it so emblematically (and brilliantly) into the film Casablanca, Dooley Wilson sang, "a kiss is still a kiss, a sigh is just a sigh", highlighting, in Hollywood fashion, the positive side of kisses and the negative value of sighs (you always have to distinguish clearly the good from the bad).

I guess today it would be "a kiss is still physical contact".

Taking stock of Woodstock

2009-08-17T14:35:00.006+02:00

The big talking point of August is, for many, Woodstock, classified as a major historical event. As a jazz musician at the time, I was only peripherally interested in rock and paid little attention to the event itself. I did however identify with the political causes that were massively voiced at Woodstock (notice that "peace" is billed ahead of "music"). But apart from its being big, messy and reasonably pacific, I don't remember its making a major impact on the news cycle or a culture that was already imbued with love-ins, protests and other spontaneous manifestations of a highly visible counter-culture. It certainly didn't beat the Democratic convention in Chicago that took place a year earlier and that, in a certain sense, was still going on with the trials of the Chicago seven (plus one). Hoffman, Rubin, Seale and Hayden had achieved media celebrity status for purely politico-cultural reasons. And they were taken very seriously by foes and sympathizers alike.

So why do we remember Woodstock rather than Chicago? It strikes me as particularly odd that we have succeeded in sentimentalizing, as if it was a moment of triumph, an event that was clearly a swansong for the new culture it is reputed to represent. Some analysts have maintained, and I would agree, that Woodstock provided the rationale for the political culture embodied a decade later by Ronald Reagan (who at the time was already the governer of California, the state of the hippies)! The key to this sentimentalization and to the integration of Woodstock into our current cultural mythology was finding a way to eliminate its political and historical component. The singers and groups at Woodstock generated emotion by calling into question all traditional institutions, protesting against the war, demanding civil rights. But all that has been forgotten or simply vaguely recalled as part of the indistinct and very muddy décor, in spite of Bush policies that have provided a real political parallel. What has been retained today - thanks in part to the existence of the feature film of the event - is the celebration of individual talent and its exploitation through the music industry (1969 can be seen as the year when all music started to become intensely industrial and commercial, a phenomenon I hope some specialized historians will someday try to examine).

Woodstock is remembered for its stars, its great musical moments more than the mythical communal experience, which was certainly less idyllic to experience than to read about 40 years later. What is signifcant is that the idea of focusing on talent and stars (including star wars!) has dominated US culture ever since (think "American Idol" and "Dancing with the stars", both utterly unimaginable in the 60s; even Donald Trump's "the Apprentice" partakes of this celebrity ethos).

The strategy of encouraging celebrity ambition has proved powerfully effective in the short-term management of social conflict. For example, the key to reducing the racial tensions that had produced major riots regularly throughout the 60s was to encourage talented African American individuals to become full-fledged, fully integrated, and highly idealized celebrities, strongly admired by other white celebrities. Examples of popular African American celebrities "proved" that all are equal because even blacks can achieve the American dream, provided they make the requisite personal investment. The Will Smiths, Oprahs, Michael Jordans (even OJ in an ultimately less predictable way) have given the white community a better conscience ("we love and admire blacks and pay high prices to see them perform"), which has channeled a lot of the nervous energy of black youngsters away from protest against a system that remains structurally racist and towards goals of personal success (entertainment, sport, music) or, failing that, of collective aggression amongst themselves (gangs). Rap culture combines both by generating a series of media stars apparently whose unique selling point is their "gangsta" values. And while the white community occasionally disapproves of the rhetoric, it consistently celebrates the business acumen and the pure accomplishment and popularity of those who succeed! The rapper rhetoric is provocative in the extreme, but unlike that of the 60s isn't intentionally subversive. (The ancestor of rap was Gil Scott-Heron's 1970 song "the revolution will not be televised", which was totally political).

Of course it was always true that even African American individuals could succeed, but previously they had to make a point of espousing white values and accepting white rhetoric. Louis Armstrong - the smiling and utterly unprovocative entertainer (unlike say, Fats Waller, who never hid his irony) - was the epitome of the successful black at a time when African Americans weren't allowed to compete in major league sports, including basketball. (Yes, before MLK apartheid actually did exist in the US and not just in the South). Paul Robeson was the opposite of Armstrong, initially celebrated for his talent, which he deployed in opera and musical comedy - far more respectable and closer to standard white values than jazz - he was ultimately and brutally excluded from the system for his politics.

There's one other phenomenon related to Woodstock that intrigues me. In an era of burning flags and draft cards, Jimi Hendrix "desecrated" the national anthems, highlighting the mindless and uncontrollable violence couched behind traditional patriotic sentiment. It was incredibly provocative. At the time I assumed that, after the continuous assault on the symbols conducted by my own generation, the status of both the flag and the national anthem would be readjusted to a more normal emotional level (Nixon handled the problem of draft cards by abolishing the draft). Septemeber 2001 showed us that the flag survived the red glare of the cultural rockets and plastic cigarette lighters of the 60s utterly intact, but the fate of the Star-Spangled banner has been a bit different. Living in England at the time, I was a witness of sorts to the disappearance of God Save the Queen from cinemas. I assumed something similar might happen with the Star Spangled Banner at sporting events. I was wrong of course. But something did happen as an indirect result of Jimi Hendrix's performance at Woodstock. The song was increasingly given to black singers (celebrities, of course) to introduce sporting events. They interpreted it with inflections and vocal fioritura derived from motown, soul music, r'n'b, etc. creating a kind of subdued irony that persists to this day as if to say (ok, this is the obligatory tribute to honky culture, but we're going to add our own cultural contribution to it, even if that means taking it in a different direction, and we know you dumb ofays are going to applaud). When white singers (celebrities) are asked to do it, they can no longer "sing it straight". They generally follow the lead of the blacks, with their own original touches (which may, for example, be derived from country music), but one senses that the irony is lacking: it's an exercise of pure imitation or conformity to a media imposed norm.

And now we arrive at the era of Obama, the first black celebrity to be elected president, the man who was caught on camera not holding his hand over his heart during the national anthem! There's a lot of historical irony at play here. But it's clearly far too early to tell this will take us.

Reading facial expression

2009-08-15T11:29:00.006+02:00

A colleague in the Intercultural Insights group has just drawn our collective attention to an article on the BBC website entitled, Facial expressions 'not global'.

For this kind of scientific reporting, I always feel the need to look for missing significant variables, whose absence could have an impact on the general conclusions put forward by the researchers. It's important to remember as well that these behavioural/psychological studies themselves conform to an array of cultural patterns and rules related to how research is funded, conducted and its results communicated in the West, including the role of the media in selecting and publicising the "conclusions".

It isn't just to be captious that we need to look for missing parameters. If our aim is truly scientific, we must assume that the failure to take any vital parameter into account can seriously influence the interpretation of the results.

So concerning this study, as it is reported in the BBC article, I propose two major observations:

Real human emotions are never expressed as static poses... except in certain conventional iconographic and theatrical traditions, which vary from culture to culture! Emotion always derives from a context implying the presence of a number of dynamic elements in the expression of emotion, as well as a certain synaesthesia, or association of simultaneously processed sense perceptions (sound, movement, even smell as well as awareness of pbysical tension and what I would call "dramatic structure" or transitional logic in moving from one affective state to another, to say nothing about the phenomena related to unconscious synchronisation*).
Every culture has developed, through its artistic and representational traditions (including advertising), an iconography of the static expression of human emotions. These traditions, which appeal to formal narrative including poetry, drama and religious and moral allegory - have a powerful influence on our perception of new images but - I would maintain - far less on our reactions to real communication situations.

In short I think it is an error to draw any cultural conclusions from this type of experiment other than to observe that, in this type of artificial interpretative exercise, East Asians are more likely to look for clues in the eyes and Westerners in the mouth. There may even be a link to the phonetic characteristics of the languages as well as to the strategies related to saving or losing face and respecting a principle of harmony by refraining from openly expressing one's emotion (meaning that the eyes may be the only reliable, though still ambiguous, guideline to interpreting emotion, as experts in lie detecting tell us!).

For all these reasons I think it would be an error to use this experimentation to draw conclusions about how people of different cultures read emotions in real situations. A simpler, more coherent and probably more honest conclusion would be to point out how this experiment seems to validate at a more trivial level Richard Nesbitt's research that led him to conclude that Asians are more dependent on context than Westerners to identify "meaning". Take away context - as photographs do - and the results are bound to be different.

An example of the type of photographs used in the study

The exercise used in the experiments is closer to the act - privately individual - of reading a book than engaging interactively in dialogue with another person, and yet the researchers are suggesting it tells us something about how people react to human dialogue. The proposed conclusions about eyes and mouth may be no more meaningful than to say that Arabs have a tendency to focus on the right side of the page when reading a book, whereas Europeans tend to focus on the left side... and then to conclude by creative extrapolation that one or the other culture privileges the right of left hemisphere of the brain!

As for the emoticons, which were initially a form of wit as practised by geeks on the Internet in the previous millennium before the advent of the multimedia Web, the principal variable I should expect to find should be sought for in the contrast between populations that use alphabets and those that use characters, which are already drawings. I find it curious that the researchers didn't seem to consider that influence. After all, if you turn a word composed of letters of the alphabet on its side, people still recognize it, but if you turn an ideogram on its side (given the indeterminate number of ideograms as compared to a strict limit of 24 to 26 letters), people are likely to seek a different meaning or simply fail to recognize the ideogram (or logogram). Another factor worth considering might be that script itself can be presented in vertical columns (the traditional way) or horizontally.

I would therefore propose changing the tagline of the article from "A new study suggests that people from different cultures read facial expressions differently" to "A new study suggests that people from different cultures use different strategies to classify emotions purportedly represented in photographs of facial expressions". Not very exciting, but certainly true.

I should add that I've personally done a lot of work on capturing and representing emotions through still images taken from video in the context of my work on multimedia resources for language learning. Because my concern was to use such resources to sensitise learners to the semantic component of affect and to help them discover and appreciate phonetic variations (rhythm, intonation, intensity, tension, etc.) in their relation to the expression affect, I can witness to a simple fact: that the exercise of capturing and representing unambiguously any emotion in a photograph is a perilous enterprise! Facial expression alone is always ambiguous, even in so-called "direct" cultures where the norm is to signify verbally and non-verbally what you think, "harmony be damned". In the course of my multimedia work I have organised and exploited photography shoots with professional actors to get them to express specific emotions and attitudes. The result on the page is never wholly satisfying in terms of representation... unless it is specifically iconographic (e.g. imitating the poses of sorrow derived ultimately from Renaissance depictions of the Crucifixion). But so long as one accepts ambiguity as a structural principle (and that is a key but much neglected point in traditional language teaching), the pedagogical result can be satisfying... precisely because the objective is to augment the sensitivity of the learner to the effect of context and synaesthesia.

After reading articles like this one, I'm invariably left with the impression that a lot of popular science just doesn't do nuance... or if it does, the media won't bother with it!

* In “The Dance of Life: The Other Dimension of Time” Edward T. Hall maintians that “people are tied together and yet isolated by hidden threads of rhythm and walls of time.” This is not only true of dialogue, which seems fairly straightforward, but also of much more complex interactions, as the following passage illustrates:

Rhythm is basic to synchrony. This principle is illustrated by a film of children on a playground. Who would think that widely scattered groups of children in a school playground could be in sync. Yet this is precisely the case. One of my students selected as a project an exercise in what can be learned from film. Hiding in an abandoned automobile, which he used as a blind, he filmed children in an adjacent school yard during recess. As he viewed the film, his first impression was the obvious one: a film of children playing in different parts of the school playground. Then — watching the film several times at different speeds, he began to notice one very active little girl who seemed to stand out from the rest. She was all over the place. Concentrating on the girl, my student noticed that whenever she was near a cluster of children the members of that group were in sync not only with each other but with her. Many viewings later, he realized that this girl, with her skipping and dancing and twirling, was actually orchestrating movements of the entire playground! There was something about the pattern of movement which translated into a beat — like a silent movie of people dancing. Furthermore, the beat of this playground was familiar! There was a rhythm he had encountered before. He went to a friend who was a rock music aficionado, and the two of them began to search for the beat. It wasn’t long until the friend reached out to a nearby shelf, took down a cassette and slipped it into a tape deck. That was it! It took a while to synchronize the beginning of the film with the recording — a piece of contemporary rock music — but once started, the entire three and a half minutes of the film clip stayed in sync with the taped music! Not a beat or a frame of the film was out of sync!

...When he showed his film to our seminar, however, even though his explanation of what he had done was perfectly lucid, the members of the seminar had difficulty understanding what had actually happened. One school superintendent spoke of the children as “dancing to the music”; another wanted to know if the children were “humming the tune.” They were voicing the commonly held belief that music is something that is “made up” by a composer, who then passes on “his creation” to others, who, in turn, diffuse it to the larger society. The children were moving, but as with the symphony orchestra, some participants’ parts were at times silent. Eventually all participated and all stayed in sync, but the music was in them. They brought it with them to the playground as a part of shared culture. They had been doing that sort of thing all their lives, beginning with the time they synchronized their movements to their mother’s voice even before they were born.

The culture of business and the business of culture

2009-07-12T09:50:00.003+02:00

Confusion is rife about what culture is and what it means in the business world. Talking recently to the training managers of several major multinational companies, I discovered that in spite of thunderously significant statements about corporate values pointing to respect, innovation, creativity, diversity and ethics in the construction of a compelling corporate culture, the only thing that is actually done about culture is to prepare future expats for the practical concerns of living in a different country. Diversity training, on the other hand – where it exists - tends to be more about compliance than reaching out to understand and embrace other cultures. The organizational impact of the multitude of complex cross-cultural interactions that take place every day appears only randomly in the strategy and hardly at all in the area of training and knowledge management.

One of the areas of confusion that help to explain this situation may be the sheer diversity of meanings attached to the notion of culture. From the very start, we have to distinguish culture from Culture (the arts). Then we have to deal with the multiple and mysterious origins of any particular person’s cultural profile. The cultures that guide our perception and interpretation of the world and people's behavior are not only national or regional cultures. We commonly list alongside these linguistic, ethnic and religious foundations of culture. But we also include corporate culture (specific to particular enterprises), occupational culture (practised by people in the same job area) and generational culture. Interestingly the culture of business (that tells us how to think about and orientate business decisions), as developed through the dominant management models, has been largely – or should I say royally? - indifferent to the diversity of cultures in the workplace, even though everything people do is first of all filtered through their specific cultural lenses. In the dominant "business culture", only economic acts are significant and reasoning always and uniquely tends towards the "bottom line", generally meaning things that can be measured in terms of short term results. Alas, culture is by definition long term!

The dominant model I’ve just referred to is of course the Harvard Business School way of thinking, which is the object of very recent commentary by Shoshana Zuboff, a former HBS professor in an article in Business Week that starts like this:

"I have come to believe that much of what my colleagues and I taught has caused real suffering, suppressed wealth creation, destabilized the world economy, and accelerated the demise of the 20th century capitalism in which the U.S. played the leading role."

Towards the end of the article, the author talks about an emerging "economy of trust" and says this, "These economies of trust are becoming even more important than economies of scale."

Creating a basis for trust is a function of all culture. Creating trust among people of different cultures is the biggest challenge businesses (and governments!) are facing in the 21st century. The age of competitive nationalism and a purely competitive economy appears to be waning. Still there's a lot of work to do on the cultural side to make it work. Perhaps this Community of Practice can make a significant contribution.

2009-03-21T13:48:00.005+01:00

PC has struck again, and this time it's made headlines, revealing some interesting aspects of US culture.

I'm of course referring to Obama's self-deprecating joke in which he mentioned "Special Olympics". Whatever his humorous intention, which was clearly pointing at his ineptness at bowling, the nation as a whole (nearly) and the media in particular have decided that this enters into the realm of moral failure or "serious sin", with some debate (among Catholics only) about whether it is mortal or venial. (One female black TV journalist asked whether his apology to the Chairman of the Special Olympics was "enough" or did he need to do more... a pilgrimmage to Athens in a wheelchair?). Some of the commentators extend the moral fault to the audience who actually laughed. The LA Times quoted Maria Shriver, Schwarznegger's wife and sister of the Chairman of the Special Olympics, Timothy Shriver:

"While I am confident that President Obama never intended to offend anyone, the response that his comments have caused, coupled with the reaction of a prime-time audience, demonstrate the need to continue to educate the non-disabled community on the issues that confront those with a developmental disability."

This all seems to boil down to what I call the actively repressive impulse at the heart of US culture, the same that sees exclusion, shaming - followed by rehabilitation - and/or killing as the appropriate response to an undefined black list of things one shouldn't do or say, sometimes thought of simply as "un-American". The fact that such an state of affairs is a recipe for hypocrisy in a culture where hypocrisy is considered the worst of all sins is in itself both painful and amusing. Having two potentially contradictory ideas or changing one's mind is typically seen and highlighted by one’s critics as proof of hypocrisy. Politicians call it the sin of "flip-flopping", which sunk Kerry in the 2004 elections. The funniest and most extreme example I know of that is when, as a teenager, I and three other friends were interrogated by two policeman in a dark parking lot in downtown Los Angeles. They separated us and placed us in the four corners of the parking lot to interrogate each of us individually. Not finding any contradiction in our stories (we had gone to see a film and were getting back in the car) one cop came over to me and asked for my driver's license on which it indicated that I was born in Chicago and my address was in West Los Angeles. He repeatedly asked me - with a change of tone each time - "how do you explain that it says here you were born in Chicago and live in Los Angeles?", a question that showed an amazing ignorance of sociology, since 2/3 of the population of southern California at the time had migrated from elsewhere. But he obviously thought he was on to some deep contradiction, a flaw in consistency, a proof of guilt without there even being a crime. (Maybe he also thought anyone born in Chicago was a member of the mafia).

This may seem to have little to do with the original point, but there is a connection, one that Ralph Waldo Emerson had already noticed in his famous observation (in "Self-Reliance"):
"A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, adored by little statesmen and philosophers and divines. With consistency a great soul has simply nothing to do."

Had Emerson lived another century and a bit he could have replaced “statesmen, philosophers and divines” by "media". He would undoubtedly be appalled by the way all this has played out, even as his championing of self-reliance has been largely accepted. The concept itself has become a shibboleth but its meaning has come to represent the opposite of what he intended: an incitement to conformity and artificial consistency. Self-reliance now carries with it the obligation to be in phase with the crowd, which is precisely what PC tries to achieve: artificial consistency. Whatever people think or feel, they must conform to a formal code that will help them think and feel according to the norms. Self-reliance has become self-control. We see it in the concern with "continuing to educate" mentioned by Maria Shriver. Education in this usage has nothing to do with learning and everything to do with behaving predictably. It consists not only in knowing what not to say but also when not to laugh, even if you think it's funny. Some may remember Freud’s contention that humor and the ensuing laughter are the result of a spontaneous and pleasure-inducing shock between the unconscious and the conscious, which he considered a healthy way of letting off potentially unhealthy steam but which requires us to accept and appreciate ambiguity. This new form of PC education consists of not allowing any steam to escape and be perceived by others for fear of its corrupting effect.

And that leads me to an even deeper dimension of this question: the fundamentally and in many ways increasingly repressive impulse at the heart of a culture founded on the ideals of "freedom" and self-determination. Freedom has traditionally been seen as a good in itself and indeed more than a good, a moral ideal to be enjoyed at home and exported abroad, extending increasingly over recent decades to what Freud might call the right not just of the person but of the id (das Es) to achieve fulfillment so long as no visible damage is done to others (who can always sue if there is damage!). This freedom of the id – or the person as id - can be seen as the opposite of civilization, whose role is "sublimatation", avoiding both the direct expression and the systematic repression of the drives of the id. This new version of freedom (I have a constitutional right to do what I want irrespective of my social environment) inevitably requires some kind of mechanism to keep the lid on the id and its potential for chaos and destruction. Enter three actors (the ghostbusters!): repressive laws (including a deep commitment to capital punishment), PC and... silence.

If PC is a list of words people shouldn't say, silence is a quality forcibly attached to ideas one shouldn't have. There are many examples of this but I'll offer one that is very obvious today. As current events demonstrate the US economy and political system in the way it actually works (as opposed to the way it was designed and is believed to work) could be objectively described the opposite of democratic. Complicity between bankers, industrialists, politicians, the media and practically anyone who is assertively greedy and surrounded by good lawyers has made "the voice of the people" something of a sad joke, the realization of which has in recent weeks sent a shockwave through the population as it learns that the "average Joe" is nothing but a convenient sacrificial victim of those who run the show. This system built on cupidity and silence remained stable so long as trickle down economics seemed to work. All those greedy bastards tied to power mongers were actually keeping the machine going and therefore doing their job for the benefit of all. After all, if the crumbs that fall off the table are tasty and plentiful, who needs bread? But when you are required to collect the crumbs and give them back to the seated diners who have suddenly discovered that they've devoured all the bread (to say nothing of the meat and potatoes), one starts to feel the pain of hunger accompanied by pangs of resentment. And we begin to see who will ends up in tomorrow’s stew!

All this was made possible by... silence, in other words the repression of both dialogue and debate. The particular form of individualism developed in the US has made it possible for those in control to program ideas in a way similar to the way PC programs words. There have been and still are subjects that simply cannot be talked about, tabu, repressed from public awareness. (At the same time intellectuals are free to examine these things in their ivory towers so long as none of it spills over into the public arena, which it won’t because the concepts they use are on a virtual black list). The concept of socialism and its multiple avatars in the real world - which used to be more conveniently lumped under the rubric of Marxist communism, aka totalitarianism - has been a constant in the list of "things to be rejected before being discussed". It's now making a virulent comeback - in its repressed form, i.e. as a hobgoblin, a factor of dread - in reaction to the rising danger of taking seriously the concepts and practices associated with it (e.g. managing the collective wealth) as a response to growing criticism from within of the capitalist system. How that will play out is anyone's guess, since it has less to do with political decision-making and everything to do with the viability of the current financial system and ultimately with the grasping, pinching, casting off, squeezing, smothering or caressing of capitalism's "invisible hand" (hand actually do other things than just pointing fingers). What's interesting - and infuriating - is that the PC effect is producing its usual Manichaean division into choosing between good and evil: capitalism (us) and socialism (them... i.e. the unenlightened). No need for nuance, which we all know is a time-waster that makes decision-making difficult, complex (beyond the average Joe's understanding) and impossible to rally around, the way one rallies around a flag.

Depressing? Not entirely. It’s just the media’s insistence on following the white lists and banishing everything on the black list that hurts. The LA Times article starts out with this sentence:
“Despite the president's apology, athletes and others say they are disappointed with his remark on Jay Leno's show”
It maintains the idea of a uniform consensus of umbrage and indignation until the final paragraphs of the article, which concludes in this manner:
_____________

Brothers Rich and Ted Olson have participated in the Games for more than three decades and don't have enough space in their suburban Glen Ellyn, Ill., home for all their medals and ribbons. The Olsons, whose scores typically run in the 140s and 150s, didn't find the joke offensive, but Rich laughed when he heard the president's score.

"That's not very good," he said. "It wouldn't beat us. He needs to practice."
__________

They actually didn’t take umbrage and pushed the humour even further.

Civilization is not dead or totally repressed. It has just been pushed to the end of articles, where people won’t read it (or worse won’t understand it because it doesn’t jibe with the rest)!

The culture of greed

2008-12-14T11:16:00.006+01:00

Today's LA Times report on Schwarzenegger's fund-raising proclivities (Where Schwarzenegger goes, money follows) includes this observation:

"That's the way the system works, and it troubles me," said Derek Cressman, Western regional director for Common Cause, who worked with Schwarzenegger on the initiative and has written a book critical of his fundraising. "The governor, like every other elected official in our state, pays more attention to those people who support him than those who don't. And those people who support him with big checks get noticed."

Schwarzenegger obviously has a better sense of the law than Rod Blagojevich, whose main excuse is that what he did is perfectly consistent with political culture in Chicago, where everything has always been up for sale. But how significant is the difference? And however signficant, what do the two cases - among thousands of others - tell us about "democracy in America"? To me the answer seems simple: politics is a marketplace and as with all marketplaces there is a white market and a black market. The white market is dominated by people who are usually (but not always) careful to remain within the constraints of the law, while manipulating those constraints is an integral part of their well-honed craft of business and art of politics. In both case this translates as a way of getting an unfair advantage over one's competitors and culling profit from unwitting consumers and voters. And because it's white it appears invisible. The black market is dominated by close and surprisingly secret networks of accomplices whose philosophy is less to "share the spoils" (sharing isn't a core value of their system) than to protect each other from discovery (the extreme case being omertà).

But when you look at the sociology of white and black markets you discover another signficant factor. White markets are dominated by those who have accumulated wealth (e.g. legitimately invested capital that then needs to be protected through persistent commercial advantage) whereas black markets thrive through the energy and initiative of those who have no capital but are intent on adopting the white life style. Schwarzenegger is a white market politician because his wealth came from another source. Blagojevich is a black market politician because 1) he's relatively "poor" 2) he was nurtured by the secretive black market system and remains loyal to its practices. Schwarzegger doesn't need to milk politics for his personal survival; Blagojevich does, at least insofar as "survival" is defined as living according to the minimal standards of the elite. He was driven by personal debt.

In other words, white markets and black markets are the US version of yin and yang, where the white, sitting comfortably on top, still depends on the dynamics and energy of the black, most of which is attracted to the white (wishing to stay legitimate) but a significant part of which remains attached to the values and habits generated by its roots in poverty, deploying its intelligence primarily to acquire enough to be seen as white and eventually to move over to the white side.

But the comparison with yin and yang should stop there. However similar the dynamics, all cultures are different. Chinese yin and yang is based on the value of harmony: natural opposites flow towards each other in order to establish a dynamic balance. US American yin and yang is based on greed, the belief that everyone pursuing his or her self-interest will automatically produce a better equilibrium as they move over to the other side or move up from where they were. And combined with the Puritanical ethos inherited from our historical predecessors, that equilibrium depends on the domination by the wealthy of the poor, since the wealthy are protected by their wealth from having to violate the laws in order to survive (and can, in any case, manipulate them, thereby attaining recognition, in the Puritanical scheme of things, as the "virtuous"), whereas the poor (the dark "yang") are forced to organize themselves outside the law and risk being caught before they are recongized as "yin" and so be considered automatically as virtuous. Blagojevich is a typical "yang" trying to become "yin" and almost making it, but still living within the yang system that is founded on black market principles.

Greed is indeed the motor of everything and officially recognized as such in the capitalist/puritan ethos. And so, in the midst of the biggest crisis of capitalism in 200 years (yes, bigger than 1929 because striking deeper into the system in a world that is now clearly post-industrial), the news is dominated by stories of greed, the latest and perhaps most spectacjular being the case of Bernard Madeoff (sorry for the spelling but it is true to say that he "made off" with $50 billion of other people's money). Was he yin or yang? Or does he just represent the principle at the middle of the whole dynamic... greed? Is he the black dot in the white or the white dot in the black? He went from investing "$5,000 that he said was earned from working as a lifeguard and installing sprinklers" (Wikipedia) to chairing the NASDAQ. And he used his "reputation" to cheat both hedge funds and charities out of their assets. And therein we discover the real secret of all societies and why greed is the least stable principle of social organization: reputation. Trust depends on reputationon and no society or economy can survive without trust. It doesn't matter how much law you have (and how many lawyers): trust is the foundation of everything. But in a society of greed trust is considered naive. Contracts replace promises and relationships. Yet human nature craves trust and human beings continue to build relationships around it... or at least around the illusion of trust. And so it has come to pass. Hasn't our whole commercial culture evolved away from the foundational principle of trust towards the subtler and more "businesslike" notion of creating the illusion of trust while at the same time seeking an infinite number of ways to betray it (legitimately or illegitimately, according to circumstance) ? I don't think the people who invested in Madoff's Ponzi scheme were inordinately trustful. They bought into his illusion because he was seen to be a solid symbol of the white market, legitimate - legally sanctioned and officially organized - greed as opposed to lawless greed. His reputation was such that they couldn't imagine he was operating according to the alternative laws of the black market.

We are living an historical moment when the culture of greed is undergoing a serious shock. Will the current crisis be solved by the self-policing of the greedy or by the radical calling into question of greed as a core value, the lowest common denominator of social motivation? In any case, the confusion is deep. The neat black and white of yin and yang has gone surprisingly grey. The economic and managerial culture, exported from the US to the rest of the world for the past 60 years, is unlikely to be the same in the decade to come and beyond.

Facebook and the culture of learning

2008-09-04T13:39:00.003+02:00

Jay Cross, following the lead of JP Rangaswami has provoked a discussion of the possible pertinence of Facebook as a tool for learning. As someone who attributes to Facebook a good part of the successful emergence of the Social Web as a general cultural phenomenon, which I see as the key to the future of learning in a radical break with the past, I have no axe to grind with Facebook itself. Yet I allowed myself to take a contrarian position on this question by proposing first to situate the cultural foundations of the Facebook phenomenon in very general terms (an appeal to US individualism with a strong appeal to ambient narcissism) and then to examine the possible factors of motivation behind some of the observable emerging trends in knowledge management through social tools. I could have gone much further by examining the nature of what I would call the collectivist impulse that is a very strong but perpetually marginalised component of US culture, but I was only making a brief commentary on the issue raised by Jay. A further comment by Clark Quinn, in which he takes the position that Facebook is about doing rather than being, provoked a further comment, which I published on Jay's blog. Since it raises a possibly controversial issue, I'm reproducing here to give it a specifically cultural (rather than learning-related) context. The starting point is the very civilized dialogue that is now taking place across blogs and on into conferences and unconferences in which people who generally think and work in similar ways have come together to predict and sometimes prepare the future of both learning and corporate communication. What follows is my second commentary to Jay's Informal Learning blog.

__________

It’s interesting how we can all be part of a culture that agrees on principles that include transparency, generosity and trust. I don’t think any of us would have a problem reaching a consensus on those ideals, their pragmatic interest and the necessity to promote them so that they become a part of the entire professional culture that surrounds us. But sometimes I have the feeling that our conversations resemble a political convention pushing candidates and platforms and engaging in massive self-justification. The risk is a lack of critical perspective.

The danger I see in this – as well as the explanation of the temptation itself – is that a different kind of command-and-control model is looming in the background. Could it be that having failed to establish control over subordinates and colleagues because of new lifestyles inaugurated and reinforced partly by technology within a culture that is, at bottom, both individualist and consumerist, we are seeking to create new norms of monitoring and surveillance built on the now trendy principle of gaining knowledge of everything everyone is “doing” in order to micromanage them? Knowledge is power. And the road to consolidating that power is the appeal to the narcissism of the few who set the standard for a newly idealized exhibitionism. The best way to do that is to create behavioral norms of self-revelation. Confession has always been the most efficient way of solving crimes!

When we began transforming corporate culture in the 1980s by getting people to learn how to use the PC, we had to struggle with the resistance of managers (IT managers being clearly the worst of the lot) to the idea of transferring power to lowly employees. This was a typical cultural problem… i.e. typical because it played out below the threshold of conscious awareness. But it was real. It helps explain the victory of MS-DOS over Mac in the corporate world: the austerity of DOS was a gauge of seriousness, ensuring a better focus on highly controlled work processes.

With the advent of the World Wide Web things got seriously out of hand after the only limited damage of Windows (tardily imitating Mac). With the Web, staff could do all sorts of things that had nothing to do with their programmed tasks: personal e-mail, games, pornography, blogging, etc. all of them considered to be absolute distractions from serious work.

So what’s the best cynical strategy for re-establishing order? Create a culture that makes spying the norm, not through clandestine operations and strict policing but through the provoked complicity of the spied-upon. Promoting the idea of self-promotion, encouraging exhibitionism as a basic value, one which will be perceived as a key to advancement, is by far the most efficient way of ultimately gaining control over behavior. Looked at from this perspective, Clark’s remark that it isn’t “look at me” but “look at what I’m doing” says it all. Command-and-control style management isn’t interested in the “me’s” that populate the workplace; they’re interested in controlling what those self-interested me’s are doing. And why not, if everyone agrees? It could be the solution to the problem. But I see it less as a question of learning than one of spying, controlling and “normalizing” behavior.

And are we sure everyone actually does agree with the permanent need for self-exposure? I’m not. Can we be sure that it truly will solve the problem of distraction? I’m not convinced of that either.

Is this a conscious strategy of subversion? Certainly not, but most of management and power culture isn’t conscious. My analysis may seem slightly paranoid, but I firmly believe society needs the milder forms of paranoia (conspiracy theories) as a ferment to help refine our analysis of innovation and the motives behind it. After all, it may be the only known antidote to the syndrome of the political convention!

__________

Going beyond the commentary published on Informal Learning, I should append my own belief that, as in all phases of cultural evolution (or revolution), there will inevitably be a pronounced struggle between centrifugal and centripetal forces. In such situations it's always interesting to see by what means and how thoroughly these conflicts are resolved. The centrifugal trend can lead to the emergence of new and multiple centers of gravity radically revising the old system or simply transfer mass within the existing system to other areas reconfiguring superficially the dynamic gravitional relationsuips. The centripetal forces can, when they are effective, pull in the energy and reverse the inertia of the forces that were initially directed outwards, creating new internal dynamics. It all depends on how flexible the systems are as well as how consolidated the force is in either direction. That is why I think that even when we are impressed by a new disruptive force, we need to look carefully at how the non-disruptive forces will react.

Phoning it in

2008-07-14T10:01:00.003+02:00

In response to some of the contributions to this month's Big Question (Lead the Charge?) on the Learning Circuits blog, I don't see this as a question of technology itself or even technology literacy. It's more a question of cultural shift.

When, more than a century ago, there were only a few telephones around, most people wondered how those damn things worked and some even wondered out loud whether they could serve any useful purpose. When I settled in France straight out of university in the 70s, telephones were few and far between. My wife had never had a telephone in her home! While she had no problem with the technology itself - thanks to pay phones! - she and her circle of friends definitely didn't have a telephone culture (in contrast to my own, acquired instinctively throughout my childhood in California). On the other hand, as soon as France modernized (very quickly), the whole population adopted a strong telephone culture. Nobody analyzed; nobody "organized" the cultural shift; nobody pro-actively developed telephone literacy. It just happened, though it took a few years. (I did, however, a decade later, work on an interactive video training program called “Make the Telephone Work for You” in the UK and “Le Téléphone à Votre Service” in France, which focused on telephone etiquette with clients).

Does the example of the telephone sound trivial? Perhaps it does to baby boomer nerds who have invested so heavily in building their own cutting-edge knowledge of all things digital that they are unwilling to admit that those who don't spend their days and nights meditating technological innovation are condemned to living in analogue un-networked hell. For them (i.e. us, or at least some of us), yes, it's complex, otherwise it wouldn't be worthwhile. But as Professor Mitra's "hole in the wall" experiments have shown, you don't need to be initiated into an exclusive club to use it... and to use it creatively and collaboratively!

The social Web has started off in a predictable way within the consumer society, with an emphasis on narcissism and self-indulgence. This puts it clearly at odds with corporate culture. That could be considered a more serious problem than complexity. But that reminds me of the work I did in the 80s when I was saddled with the task of trying to kickstart a PC culture in companies. My analysis of the Mac-MS-DOS war, ultimately won by Microsoft, was that enterprises chose IBM/Dos over Mac because it was LESS attractive than the Mac. You weren't likely to have fun with it, so it was less of a threat to the command and control culture of the corporate world. Senior management and IT departments were worried sick about the dispersal of authority that might occur if everyone was managing their own data and free to use such flexible tools. So what happened? Two things:

Client-server applications took over, creating a whole new culture for almost the entire workforce, a culture which is with us to this day.
Dos was replaced by Windows and PCs evolved, culturally speaking, into carbon copies of the Mac, with more and more multimedia frills (for a while Apple was even left behind as the much more democratic Windows concept produced more significant innovation).

Then of course came the Web, peer-to-peer technology and an emerging netcentric culture with the Web 2.0. The model hasn't changed yet, and there are numerous concerns and worries on the part of those who feel their authority may be threatened, but there's little doubt that it will happen. Pushing it through official channels may be the worst thing to do, because it will provoke resistance. I would put my effort into making it work from the bottom up and demonstrate how it can achieve other things than self-promotion.

The definition of informal learning

2008-07-13T10:39:00.008+02:00

My friend and colleague, Jay Cross, on his Learning Blog has challenged the community with the question “what is informal learning?". Here's my definition in a nutshell:

Informal learning is perception mediated by social interaction and converting into behavior, which in turn converts back into perception.

How do children learn their language? Answer: by actively constructing it informally. Second anwser: by staying free of any formal learning until the age of 5 or 6! A child's language learning goes through stages but the process is cyclical. It always involves:

1. listening and discriminating those elements (sounds, phrases, sentences) that appear to be meaningful, whose meaning is indicated by both emotion (affect) and action (association producing both causal and descriptive links between things, events and language),

2. participating in language production experimentally (speaking) before mastering the rules, starting with repeated syllables and growing incrementally as proprioceptivity develops,

3. Interacting in varied situations of real and simulated need (play), judging the value of the reactions provoked and adapting.

How the brain builds language competency (sentence forming capacity) only God and Noam Chomsky can tell us. But the easily observable fact is that the only way it can be achieved is informally. When children get to the phase of formal language learning (i.e. school, with a little bit of useless parental coaching before that: e.g. “not 'he goed' but 'he went'), it is style that is taught formally, not language. Why the educational systems of the world fail to recognize this is beyond me, although I can think of some good political motives for perpetuating this error. All of which may explain why it's so hard to learn style and so few achieve success with style. There are too many people teaching it and not enough learning it. This is also why no amount of formal teaching can result in the learning of a foreign language. At best teaching provides a map that gives enough spatial orientation for the learner to begin interacting with a real environment in a state of minimized confusion. And spending too much time on the map before confronting the real informally will distort perception of the real. But how many teachers think of their work as first of all provoking the growth of spatial orientation?

Informal learning can be thought of as the kind of mental map making we all end up doing on our own in any area where we feel minimally competent. Our map evolves significantly as we continue to explore our world and refine our skills through our interactions with people and things (think of Columbus's mental picture of the globe over the span of his four voyages). If we lack confidence in our own map and cling to the belief that the official map (e.g. curriculum) proposed in formal learning is the only valid thing, we end up learning... nothing! And although it's a notorious myth that Europeans believed the world was flat before Columbus proved otherwise – a falsehood that I was taught formally at school! - the formal learning of the time taught that there was nothing but a vast ocean between the west of Europe and the east of Asia. Thanks to Columbus's experience and evolving mental map we now know otherwise.

Franz Ackerman, Mental Map: Evasion V

Second Life... compared to what?

2008-06-09T10:43:00.006+02:00

The Big Question this month on the Learning Circuits Blog is:

Second Life Training?

I take a very simplistic view of this. I see SL as just another place to go, with its own set of rules and, inevitably, with its own culture. You can learn things at the street corner, as you can in Second Life. It depends on who and what is there and the culture shared by those present. This is already the case for Second Life, of course, since cultures are created by users sharing the same space and the same tools. SL could therefore become - or perhaps already is - another informal space in which human activity can be organized. From that activity learning is of course possible. But turning it into a formal space for learning is fraught with risks, as many of the contributors have pointed out. The problem with formal training is that there's always something planned, programmed and enforced about it. SL is designed to be both informal (unpredictable) and artificial (programmed and controlled). There will always be a risk of contradiction and cultural confusion if learners are expected to use it as anything other than an indicated resource. Bandwith isn't the only problem; implicit cultural values and questions of learner identity are as well. But if SL is simply an alternative resource, it doesn't seem to me very different from other resources, from books to sims. It's something that requires a larger framework, one that clearly belongs to the real world, to achieve its meaning.

More fundamentally I see the SL phenomenon as similar to Esperanto, though it certainly is considerably more seductive. Like Esperanto, SL proposes an artificial and simplified version of natural human activity. For it to be truly useful as a standard device for learning, its use would have to be very widespread and its acceptance (independent of use) universal. The barriers to that seem to me such that, apart from local initiatives characterized by strong direction and a clear notion of structured goals, this is unlikely to happen on a major scale.

On the other hand, I expect that in the near future other VR environments will emerge, environments whose base culture (the way people interact) will be radically different and much better adapted to learning. And if they are truly adapted to learning one could assume that they just might be adaptable to teaching as well! This would constitute the revolution many of us have been waiting for or even helping to provoke: turning the current educational paradigm - designed for teaching only - on its head.

Learner identity has always been the key issue for me in any learning process. Second Life does two things that I consider suspect: it promotes fantasized identity, possibly inhibiting the natural evolution of real identity, and it reinforces traditionally overblown instructor authority by compounding the manipulative powers and artificial power of "knowledge authorities" through the addition of technological prowess. The culture of instructional intimidation which has been with us for centuries is manifestly still with us today, even on the putatively democratic Social Web!

Although I see this side of things as a step backwards, the contribution of SL to the historical process of putting learning before teaching may be pertinent. It consists of provoking experiments and eventually identifying best practice. It also consists of demonstrating the limits of this type of environment. A little more practice, a little more cultural analysis and a lot more innovation might bring us to a truly useful version of the power of virtual worlds. There are already other initiatives taking place. There's no reason why the virtual cannot pay its respects to the real. For the moment, Second Life is drawing the buzz and the curiosity on the basis of the attraction of fantasy and escape. It may be nothing more than a necessary prelude to something deeper and richer.

Why Obama won't make it to the White House

2008-05-14T21:15:00.005+02:00

It's pretty clear now that Obama is the only possible Democratic candidate for the Presidency of the US. Any other scenario would be suicidal for the Democratic party, which would permanently alienate African Americans and youth, even more radically than it did in 1968, when it ushered in more than four decades of conservative Republican domination of national politics. The Carter interlude was a fluke due to Watergate and Bill Clinton was elected only because of the presence of Ross Perot on the ballot in 1992. Clinton managed to be re-elected only because Congress was dominated by the Republicans led by Newt Gingrich, whose policies Clinton deftly endorsed. And in spite of that "collaboration", Clinton and the Democrats were humiliated by the farcical impeachment drama.

The political history of the US over the past 60 years can be divided into two parts:

1.the 50s and 60s, when the young generation not only took an interest in politics but sought to revise the values behind political decision-making. The beatniks and a generation of young culturally sensitive intellectuals put their mark on the culture of the Eisenhower years without directly influencing the politics. But their contribution to US culture (poetry, jazz, neo-folk and to a much lesser extent - in political terms - rock'n'roll, which initially played a more conservative role) helped to create the atmosphere in which it was possible to elect the young John Kennedy;

2. the three and half decades from 1972 onwards, when the wild generation that had been given a free reign of expression in the 60s settled down to business as usual and began managing the nation’s and the world’s resources, as the empire invited them to do.

Within two years of the Kennedy assassination, when I was still a teenager at UCLA, it occurred to me that the rapidly emerging hippie movement was the direct result of that event. There were, of course, a number of other contributing factors, not the least of which was British rock’n’roll that redefined the internal logic of that eminently commercial musical medium. But the elimination of the long-haired pioneer of a New Frontier (Kennedy's hair prefigured the Beatles) was an immense catalyst of unpredictable change. The replacement of the young image-conscious Bostonian Kennedy by Johnson, the power-conscious political insider from Texas, thanks to the hopelessly undemocratic means of an assassination, ultimately achieved its intended effect by pushing the socially structured, collectivist energy and creativity of the young generation back into a more traditional model of rugged individualism, which after a phase of communal experimentation outside the official polis, could easily evolve into the standard “every man for himself” ideology that is sometimes called “libertarian” (as if it were an actual “political philosophy”) but is essentially reactionary individualism. Tuning in, turning on and dropping out only lasted as a philosophy for a few years, but it produced a major shock during the transition. In the end, when the baby boomers dedicated themselves to securing their individual futures, it was Ayn Rand who had won the culture war thanks to an assassination… followed of course by two others in 1968: those of Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy.

But let's jump forward in history. In another of those historical paradoxes that are magnified when they happen on US soil, George W Bush has single-handedly created a new political youth movement that has rallied around Barack Obama. The key to this identification is that he incarnates a true anti-war stance and represents an oppressed minority. An unpopular war and the challenge of electing a black to the presidency - recalling both the breaking of the tabu against Catholic presidents and the flowering of the civil rights movement - have combined to recreate an ambience similar to that of the sixties for young people. Hillary Clinton, by contrast to Obama, represents a “repressed majority” that is all the more irrational and unforgiving for not having to endure physical and economic hardship in its daily life, making it harder to “prove” the repression which it wants others to perceive as oppression. This has been on the ongoing drama of the radical feminist movement in the US, which has consistently been drawn towards a lobbying mentality and an ideological orientation, preferring various forms of intimidation and moral bullying to focusing on the raising civic awareness.

The atmosphere around the Obama campaign is similar to the years between 1960 and 1963 when Kennedy was elected to the White House. The only difference – apart from what may (if permitted) be called the fratricidal feminist rivalry that has not hesitated to tarnish it - is that Obama has not yet been elected and there’s good reason to think that he may not be elected, in spite of the inevitability of his nomination and polls showing that he should easily beat a John McCain who has foolishly (but logically) aligned himself with the most unpopular and risky policies of the Bush administration.

Chief among the foreseeable obstacles to Obama’s effective entry in the White House are 1) character assassination including racist and anti-Muslim swift boat style propaganda and lies 2) physical assassination, although this doesn’t seem to be as standard a feature of the power toolkit as it was in the sixties (partly because of increased difficulty of mounting a hermetically secure conspiracy in our electronically febrile and highly porous Internetworked world). There is of course one other possibility: a form of subtle insider political blackmail that would ensure Obama’s transformation into a safe and interested spokesman for the military-industrial establishment that has been running the show since the Eisenhower years, as Eisenhower himself anxiously pointed out just before leaving office.

All that is idle speculation, of course. What is more easily predictable and far more interesting is the effect that any of the scenarios that imply the brutal scotching of Obama’s hope and change campaign will have on the younger generation. Idealism and optimism have been key triggers of emotion throughout US history and have always been associated with what I would be tempted to call the “good” or feminine patriotism, clearly distinct from the more modern aggressive defense posture, masculine patriotism, based on protecting what has already been acquired, either by the country in its imperial realization of manifest destiny or by individuals as property accumulators, certainly a more accurate term than landowners. The deepest irony of this campaign is that Mr Obama represents feminine patriotism (maternal, supportive, seeking harmony) and Ms Rodham-Clinton represents the masculine patriotism that was easily drawn into the “logic of war”* in Iraq.

It should be remembered that in the US intelligence – and in particular subtle manifestations of it - is seen as a feminine trait akin to sentimentalism, contrasted with reflex action, preferably ruthless and potentially murderous, as masculine. Hamlet is, of course, an anagram of Thelma! The producers and writers of Last Action Hero with Schwarzenegger deftly reminded us of this cultural décalage (with added irony by presenting the story of Hamlet with images of the androgynous blond Hamlet created by Laurence Olivier and projected in a classroom by a teacher played by Joan Plowright, Olivier’s wife!).

In the West Virginia primary, exit polls showed that according to the Associated Press “three-fourths of whites without college degrees were backing Clinton.” Racism was also noticed as part of the pattern since this profile of poor, uneducated whites (traditionally the butt of the insult, poor white trash), “clinging” (as Obama had already pointed out) to the typically masculine values associated with insecurity and confidence in firearms rather than dogs as man’s best friend, is now considered to be the loyal base of Ms. Clinton, who knows that her best hope of gaining some sort of advantage – beyond seeming to be the masculine candidate – is playing to the fear many people still have of blacks and their need to believe that their own pale skin somehow makes them superior.

In other words, a major drama is now playing out between the masculine and feminine elements in the symbolism of US identity. You could even say that in the country’s very name, the adjective “United” represents the feminine and the plural noun “States” (a collection of autonomous individuals who aggregate only for questions of convenience… and defense) represents the masculine. Furthermore, the two have ultimately proved to be incompatible, a fact that may also be reflected in the evolution of the divorce rate over recent decades. In the red/blue split that has come to epitomize the Bush era, the reds are male and the blues female. Hillary’s 3 a.m. message to the electorate seems to be “better red than dead” as she appears to be willing to “embody” the Bush image of a strong, decisive leader, who may be wrong but will always be strong, rather than the clever juggler of ideas who may be right but will inevitably be the victim of those who are better armed (which is why all good law-abiding citizens should carry concealed weapons – especially in the intellectual space known as a campus - in order to be ready take down the villainous enemies among us).

In conclusion: if the feminine takes a hit this year, as it did with the assassination of John Kennedy (a man who was totally dependent on women, unlike John Wayne!), something is likely to go awry, the usual premises of social behavior will be wrenched in a different direction. No one can predict how that may play out and who exactly will be involved. But it may once again be a curious cultural alliance of young whites and the black community who will find a way of expressing a spirit of revolt, incarnated in the sixties by Jimi Hendrix at Woodstock who parodied the extreme masculinity of the Star Spangled Banner. But there may be a great deal less joyful and carefree exuberance than the last time, when a belief in the right to continual prosperity was still in the background. And of course it was that core belief in the right to prosperity that brought things "back to normal" as the hippies left the communes to pursue their careers.

This time around it isn't sure that the belief in conquest and inevitable prosperity are sufficiently present in the background to ensure a safe issue from the cultural revolution born of sudden disappointment. So the real question for those who will do everything they can to protect the status quo from the risks of a black man who attended too many sermons by Rev. Wright is whether they can somehow avoid having the disappointment seem too brutal. Somehow, I don't think they even care. It is in the spirit of masculine US culture to look for the result and not worry about the consequences. The question is, will the patterns of the past hold true in the future. The answer is likely to be, as it always is: some will and some won't. The question is, which ones will and with what degree of force?

* ”Logic of war” is, I believe, a euphemism invented by François Mitterand to justify in advance the French participation in the first Gulf war. Although socialists clearly represent the feminine side more than the macho right, in a similar inversion to the Clinton/Obama one, Chirac was clearly a more feminine figure than Mitterrand, who was caricatured as “God the father”.

Instructional what?

2008-02-09T17:35:00.002+01:00

The Big Question on the the Learning Circuits blog this month is "Instructional Design - If, When and How Much?"

Instructional Design shares its acronym (ID) with Intelligent Design and deserves to be equally controversial. Anything that works needs to have some principle of design -- whatever the source or agent -- and most would spontaneously agree that design which is intelligent is better than, say, random design.

But is it? Evolutionary theory is about creative adaptation rather than wilful creation for a single or simple-minded purpose and evolution works because by definition it permanently and constantly takes into account everything in the environment, not just some key factor someone thinks may be the most important*. It would be nice if in the Intelligent Design debate people recognized that "creative adaptation", as the easily recognizable active principle, could, philosophically speaking, admit a number of forces, known and unknown. From an empirical point of view that's actually what we appear to observe. But civilized humans seem to have acquired the habit of referring exclusively or preferentially to what they themselves know, or rather what they have previously theorized, and generally reduce the principle of creative adaptation to a cause or set of causes which they believe explain everything. Whether it’s God (implicitly meaning an anthropomorphic agent with a cosmic drawing-board) or the “selfish gene”, we have a curious taste for seeing the universe as a purpose-driven vehicle and putting a single driver in the car… possibly because we’re more influenced and admiring of our own mechanical inventions than the world around us and that we assume they are an appropriate model for understanding the natural world. How many of us refuse any form of belief in the common idea that the brain is a super-computer, a belief that persists even when we admit it’s only a metaphor?

All this is to say that we need to recognize that the most effective way to provoke learning is not so much to impose our “instructional intelligence” on the process as to ensure that there is enough spontaneous interaction in the complex learning environment – some of which we can create, but most of which is already there – for evolutionary process to develop with regard to EVERYTHING in the environment. The Instructional Design debate always seems to boil down to selecting the best formula for getting people to understand something we already know. Doesn’t that in itself indicate a certain form of perversity? It assumes that our knowledge is sufficient and suggests the belief that it is also complete or reasonably complete. And it assumes that there are replicable and equally effective methods for influencing that form of evolution we call learning.

My own instinct is to drop the word “instructional” and replace it by, say, “emerging awareness”, because learning is always a complex set of continuous interactions with the environment. So that would leave us with Emerging Awareness Design, which sounds rather New Age, even Ron L Hubbardish, and still contains the general idea of Mechanical Control conveyed by Design. So let’s get rid of Design and maybe call it “adaptive strategy”. So that would give us Emerging Awareness Adaptive Strategy, EAAS, which seems a bit cumbersome. To simplify I would suggest moving to a different metaphor and calling it a Learning Game Plan (LGP) since games are by definition a complex set of unpredictable interactions (in that sense Simulations are not really games, but representations of games precisely because they have been “designed” to look like games). ID, including Sims, could still exist alongside LGP, in a totally subordinate role, as a set of preventive and curative tactics within the overall game strategy. But those tactics should not be abstracted from any real environment (the actual game) and imposed as a set model to be applied whenever a specific type of problem or gap occurs. It’s the LGP that will judge and adapt an ID template to the reality of the game.

How can this be achieved? Two answers are possible:

· Through increasingly “intelligent agents” (however, those agents do not come into existence through interaction with the environment, but rather through our own “intelligent” reading of the environment, not quite the same thing).
· Through social interaction, which includes both conscious and unconscious, seen and unseen factors of the environment.

So even if we could build reliable intelligent agents (quite a step forward from e-learning courses), they must be subordinated to the social reality in which people actually learn and adapt. Call it the principle of subsidiarity: all learning artefacts are only potential tools in an adaptive Learning Game Plan.

Coaches in professional sports always start with a game plan but use the actual circumstances of play to evolve it rather than stupidly hoping that the outcome they had foreseen would automatically emerge. Any particular technique used in the course of the game can be seen simply as a tactic producing an event that will inevitably provoke a reaction in the environment (e.g. by the opposing team). Both the coach and the players are learning as they try to execute the game plan, which is itself evolving. They use environmentally adapted versions of techniques they have worked on in practice. And in some cases they discover a “mutation” that allows them to solve a problem posed by the environment in a new way.

Now that is a Design strategy and I would say an Intelligent Design Strategy. That is my “Instruction” for the day.

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* The method of so much “evolutionary psychology” follows this pattern of imposing a brilliant and perfectly “logical” idea of causality on past stages of evolution. The exercise is fun but without knowing and calculating EVERY variable, our theories are about as reliable as a forecast of the weather for the third Tuesday of next month in Biloxi, Mississippi.

Technology Enhanced Social Learning and post-industrial knowledge development (Part 1)

2008-01-31T10:19:00.000+01:00

The industrial model of learning was based on the notion of competitive individual achievement. It implicitly and often explicitly encouraged the hoarding of knowledge, a certain form of passivity (or refusal of interaction) and a suspicion of colleagues and fellow practitioners who may be seen as potential rivals. On the positive side it also encouraged the ambition of leadership, but the practical problems associated with leading a group of individuals tend to diminish the effect of leadership, which is always easier to develop within collaborative teams. If I had the time, I would explore how the ideological individualism of the industrial age – in which individuals existed as resources to be allocated to profitable ventures (this capitalist logic is still the driver of an economy that is now global) – tends to create leaders whose most valuable skills are manipulation and various forms of collective brainwashing (the “science” of Public Relations). The twentieth century provided some stunning examples of masters of manipulation and the new century seems to have numerous examples of “leaders” ready to perpetuate the tradition, though there are a number of reasons for thinking that some kind of change is in the offing. One of the reasons for hope is that there are signs of a significant shift in the way culture (i.e. people’s behaviour) interacts with the economy.

Although the terms have been bandied about for some time, we have only recently entered a phase of transition from the industrial to the post-industrial age in learning, which will be characterized less by the instilling pre-defined authoritative knowledge than by managing the evolution of the capacity of performance in real contexts of production and social relationships. More than the mere transfer of knowledge, it involves the dynamic creation and restructuring of the myriad of things we know (more than what we traditionally think of as “knowledge”) accompanied by the generation of skills rooted in a rapidly changing context of performance. Although many experts and the media have focused on the extraordinary impact of information technology, which increases our ability to store and retrieve knowledge, the technology that has had the most radical impact on learning and indeed productive behaviour of all types is communication technology, both synchronous and asynchronous. It can of course be directly linked to knowledge creation and retrieval.

Recognizing the true source of knowledge development

The basic reality of human societies is that people learn from each other as complex social beings; not as repositories of bodies of knowledge, but rather as practitioners of professional and social skills that mobilise in non-linear fashion a wide range of forms of knowledge: gesture, attitude, perception, the ability to localize information, complex mental networks of association, visual, acoustic and kinaesthetic memory, etc. The post-industrial age has opened the channels of communication that until very recently were clogged by penury, handicapped by time delays and inhibited by unit costs that no longer exist. Bandwidth has ceased to be a problem; both spoken and written communication can be instantaneous; and the factor of cost has melted into the constantly diminishing price of access to the technology. This opening of the floodgates of communication is a far more radical change than all the advances in programming and storage, however impressed we may still be by tools such as Google Earth. One of the reasons this change is so radical is that, unlike programming and software manipulation, communication is a natural human skill that can be perfected, certainly, but doesn’t need to be formally acquired.

The transition from an individualistic model of knowledge acquisition to the much richer and more dynamic notion of “learning organizations” that create and transform as well as simply consult knowledge has only just begun. Our contexts of work and habitat, our routines and hierarchies, our behavioural expectations in our interactions with others are still modelled on or heavily influenced by the old paradigms, though the pressure is increasing on a daily basis to move towards something far more fluid. The advent of the Web 2.0, the Social Web, has opened up for the first time the possibility of shifting the model for learning away from the traditional institutional framework and the individualistic paradigm towards a model that embraces collectively constructed and shared knowledge.

Peering into the future

The challenge of the new paradigm is organisational, methodological and to a much lesser extent, technical. Software, networks and media must be conducive to easy appropriation and use, but that is already the trend that will undoubtedly continue as technology providers are obliged to make their products more attractive and usable at an increasingly rapid pace. New research will be concerned with design and production of optimally adapted technical environments, but the most urgent requirement – before optimisation can be achieved – is the social and methodological design that can incite organisations to renovate their practices of knowledge development.

The reality of the Social Web can be summarized by the notion of “gregarious exchange”, what Jay Cross usually refers to as “the art of conversation”. Interestingly, if the initial impulse behind Web 2.0 was typically individualistic consumer-orientated behaviour (expressing personal taste in music and entertainment, as well as “sharing” cultural content, legally or illegally!), the Social Web has already evolved into an informal publishing platform of ideas, opinions and personal cultural production. This means that users are spontaneously adhering to a culture in which an optimal balance between input and output will be progressively defined. For the training world, this is a major step forward in the culture of learning. Output becomes visible for the group to profit from, judge and criticize and (according to the wiki model) to evolve and perfect. Where for at least two centuries teachers and trainers have either struggled to incite the production of output of minimal quality and intended for the eyes of the teacher only, spontaneously formed social groups are producing and learning to refine the quality of their production thanks to what are now self-imposed and group-defined expectations. This constitutes the basis of a revolution in learning methodology whose long-term consequences do not yet seem to have been taken into account by most active decision-makers in the field of education and training.

Observation of current practice on the Social Web shows that while it is usually individuals who act (often driven by the kind of pride and ambition associated with past individualistic educational practices), the key to performance is the creation of groups, usually defined by some common interest or other principle of cultural proximity. At the same time the global nature of Internet based communication has changed the notion of “proximity” to one that it would be more appropriate to define culturally than geographically. The new geographical spread created by an increasingly “virtual” and therefore global environment that redefines cultural relationships is both a major opportunity to develop stronger relationships (commercial, cultural and even political) across borders and a potential source of discomfort if not disarray. A serious effort is required to define and secure the operating principles and social bearings of these newly acquired input/output reflexes.

What Saddam was too culturally blind to see

2008-01-26T11:33:00.000+01:00

From an Associated Press article that appeared today:
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"Saddam Hussein allowed the world to believe he had weapons of mass destruction to deter rival Iran and did not think the United States would stage a major invasion, according to an FBI interrogator who questioned the Iraqi leader after his capture."

“He told me he initially miscalculated ... President Bush’s intentions,” said Piro. “He thought the United States would retaliate with the same type of attack as we did in 1998 ... a four-day aerial attack.”
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I find this very intriguing and requiring some sort of cultural explanation. How can it be that the head of a government, who had been a close ally of the US for more than 10 years, couldn't see what was obvious to everyone else, to wit, that with or without justification, Bush was the kind of "cultural being" -- a certain style of AmerIcan, imbued with a certain form of AmerIcan values -- who was going to "just do it", Nike style?

Was there a single person in the US -- whether for or against Bush -- that doubted his intentions at any time in the year preceding the invasion? I don't think I knew any. So what led Saddam so far astray that he couldn't see or even learn from others what was so patently obvious?

The article doesn't answer this question, but I think the interculturalist community can help to do so. The article does provide a few clues, history a few more and psychoanalysis yet another!

Time and patterns of behaviour would be the first one. Almost all political entities, especially democratic ones, remain relatively stable and predictable in spite of changing parties or clans in power. Call it the illusion of democracy (the idea that the people can change things through elections, whereas elections merely serve to ensure continuity) or rather the rock solid logic of representative democracy. The more politicians replace each other, the more their policies remain consistent if not identical, which is the very spirit of "representation", since it's the mob or, to be polite, the "wisdom of crowds" that founds and defends not only general policies but also permanent styles of relationship with other cultures and peoples. There is always leeway for debate, which can on occasion become acrimonious, but the attitudes, within the accepted range, tend to remain stable. (A good example of the dynamics between stability and instability is the current status -- nearing a peak of instability -- of the US attitude concerning Mexicans both as a people and a cultural force. Since no society is capable of defining cultural issues with any sense of rationality - i.e. distance -, the range of emotions is wide during periods of instability, but the policy, in spite of numerous "democratic" initiatives, will inevitably tend towards some middle ground).

The difference between Reagan's, Bush the Elder's and Clinton's foreign policy with regard to Iraq and indeed everything else, was minimal. From Saddam's point of view, US policy was solidly based on Iran being seen as what might be called the "hub of evil", that is before Bush the Younger stretched it into an "axis" that included Iraq and North Korea (quite a geographical spread and, consequently, a clear tip-off to the culturally savvy that something was up). It was impossible for Saddam to think that his well-established strategic role in containing Iran would ever make him vulnerable to anything other than annoying skirmishes. The three previous presidents had used variants of a consistent strategy: Reagan by encouraging Iraq to attack Iran and directly supporting a brutal and aggressive war, Bush I by establishing a "New World Order" that humiliated Iraq for a moment but was careful to show deep respect for Saddam's regime by allowing it to stay in place and refusing to create the inevitable chaos that would come of giving power to a Shiite majority. Clinton predictably "managed" the ensuing state of relative equilibrium, engaging in the occasional skirmish and showing a certain level of satisfaction in the virtual control of Iraq ensured by the policy of US dominated no-fly zones. Although the ongoing role of Iraq as the antidote to Iran made no sense in terms of political or moral principles, it was a totally rational system created by Reagan, given formal definition by a man named Bush and ultimately inherited by the same Bush's son. Since the "clan" was back in power 20 years on, for Saddam nothing was likely to change radically. Such, in any case, was the likely reasoning of a man hailing from a clan culture. Saddam clearly didn't understand the individualism at the heart of US culture... nor the implications of the Oedipal tradition (which, by the way, everyone in the West still seems to consider universal, following Freud, but whose universalism Lacan -- Freud's most adamant orthodox defender -- called into question after spending some time in Japan, where he claimed the Oedipus complex simply didn't exist. For all his "parisianisme", Lacan was a true interculturalist). Is Oedipus -- the man who killed his father and married his mother -- a purely Western icon? And is Oedipus's self-inflicted blindness the emblem of our own cultural blindness?

On Saddam's perception of the political situation, here is what the article says: "Piro said Saddam also said that he wanted to keep up the illusion that he had the [WMD] program in part because he thought it would deter a likely Iranian invasion."

Clearly part of Saddam's problem was that he didn't have access to the writings of the neo-cons who had invaded the White House. Or perhaps like the rest of us, he considered those "thinkers" to be an academic lunatic fringe, a kind of sect that everyone tolerates but no one takes seriously. In all cases, he underestimated the possible effects of US individualism, the kind that allows certain personalities to rise to positions of unassailable power, control and a sense of manipulative mission, without relying on well-established social structures to get to their summit. Examples abound in business (Bill Gates, Donald Trump), religion (Jerry Falwell, Ron L Hubbard, Jim Jones, etc. ad inifinitum) and political bureaucracy (J. Edgar Hoover), but public policy had traditionally benefited from the Constitutional checks and balances that prevented similar "achievers" from attaining discretionary power capable of overturning the sense of existing institutions.

Over a 20 year period, however, something actually had changed in US politics, its clearest starting point being the election of Reagan in 1980 accompanied by the slogan "America's back". Pure patriotic emotion and media amplification rather than morally based reasoning and diplomatic tact were becoming the new "norm" for political action. But Reagan's own exploitation of it was more electoral than anything else. Hardly a brilliant man or an original thinker, Reagan actually made a point -- perhaps for reasons of personal pride -- of maintaining a tradition of "responsible political reflection" accompanied by a sense of RealPolitik that kept itself at a certain distance from the otherwise useful electoral illusions. Looking back at the new millennium, it may have required a Banana Republic style presidential election (2000) to provide the catalyst for a shift towards the definitive adoption of emotion and media amplification as the central source of policy. But other phenomena indicate that the time had perhaps come for pure emotion and the media to play their role in a world where the patterns of the recent past had produced another "grande illusion": the idea, confirmed in the Clinton years, of a permanently expanding economy fueled by stock markets and purely financial management (this in spite of the 2000 dotcom crash, which curiously -- because of the technology theme -- may have further confirmed the dominance of finance over any concrete feature of the "real economy").

Saddam had no perception of any of these changes in the political culture or the potential of US individualism to reverse significant trends. In particular it now appears that he had no idea what Bush the younger might do, even if after the shock of 9/11 -- and the political manipulation that followed in its wake -- we AmerIcans could see it coming as a virtual certainty and therefore were not surprised by Bush the Younger's New World Disorder inaugurated in March 2003 with the complicity of Blair and Aznar. And even that monumental political decision played out pretty much according to the pattern of the new stock market, not as a political event to be prepared, negotiated and managed, but as a bet on futures*. A majority of AmerIcans thought at the time that the aggressive "takeover bid" of Saddam's Iraq was a sound operation of strategic market positioning (i.e. invasion of Iraq as a prelude to throttling Iran and securing stable resourcing in oil from the Middle East). The rest of us were treated as irrelevant because the only argument we had was "moral" (and we all know the equation "performance efficiency trumps ethics...except when the law imposes compliance issues", a question recently discussed among our Yahoo interculturalists in relation to diversity training; see as well the Steven Pinker piece in the New York Times magazine, where using this sort of implicit logic he appears to place Bill Gates above Mother Teresa in terms of ethical worth.

Finally, the article offers us the following culturally significant anecdote concerning the first Gulf war:
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Piro also mentioned Saddam’s revelation during questioning that what pushed him to invade Kuwait in 1990 was a dishonorable swipe at Iraqi women made by the Kuwaiti leader, Sheik Jaber Al Ahmed Al Sabah.

During the buildup to the invasion, Iraq had accused Kuwait of flooding the world market with oil and demanded compensation for oil produced from a disputed area on the border of the two countries.

Piro said that Al Sabah told the foreign minister of Iraq during a discussion aimed at resolving some of those conflicts that “he would not stop doing what he was doing until he turned every Iraqi woman into a $10 prostitute. And that really sealed it for him, to invade Kuwait,” said Piro.

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That isn't the full story of course, but it's interesting to note the impact of Al Sabah's threat in Middle East culture. What was Al Sabah thinking? Did he fail to understand Middle East Arab culture? As an oil billionaire functioning within an economy dominated by the US, had he been infected by Texas culture, where such insults are mere expressions of macho bravado, the object of admiration for rhetorical skill? Or was he so sure of his position with the US that he felt he could afford to proffer such a hurtful insult?

One of the missing parts of the story is that the AmerIcan ambassador at the time had indicated informally that the US wouldn't prevent Iraq from invading Kuwait, which seemed logical enough to Saddam given his solid position as the buttress against Iran. For reasons of "global coherence", particularly in the wake of the fall of the Soviet Union, the US changed its attitude and quickly humbled Iraq but just as quickly re-established a political equilibrium that was at the limit of acceptable for Saddam and seemed, in its way, to guarantee long-term stability. Until, that is, Bin Laden (another US protégé during the anti-Soviet campaign in Afghanistan) provided an irrational (i.e. emotional) pretext to see all Arabs and Muslims as the enemy and set in motion the surreal neo-con game plan of taking over the Middle East to manage it on their enlightened terms (the triumph of the culture of rational economic individualism, for which the entire world has been waiting...manna in the desert).

* Has anyone noticed a major cultural shift in the economic press? The stock market used to be about "investment" and economic value, but now the press routinely talks about "betting" on markets, trends or specific stocks. Recent economic news has been largely financial: the subprime fiasco and this week's Société Générale scandal. Wall Street doesn't yet have a hotel in its name in Las Vegas (now that would be a clever new theme to exploit, wouldn't it?), but it does seem to have borrowed its culture from Nevada (or Atlantic City, the home of Monopoly as well as east coast casinos). Actually I think a squeamish sense of political correctness would prevent even the cleverest Las Vegas real estate investors (gamblers?) from pointing too clearly to the speculative and greed-orientated nature of the stock market.

The "logic" of networking

2008-01-08T09:22:00.000+01:00

This could be considered as a more focused comment on the main point of my previous post addressing the Big Question for January on Learning Circuits.

Stephen Downes has focused on the vital debate about what he quite rightly calls "the network way of thinking" and provides links to a debate that others have developed about the finality and mechanics of our emerging networking culture. From an intercultural perspective I find this debate extremely interesting, to be classified in the category of "how individualist cultures grapple with the utterly alien notion of group relationships". My conclusion is that they fail, much as the fictional inhabitants of a two-dimensional world cannot imagine what the world would be like with a third dimension (Edwin Abbot's classic "Flatland", 1884). In failing they reveal the limitations imposed by their obligatory frames of reference. It's money (markets and production efficiency) or love (family and sex) and nothing else. (Actually there is a third factor: sharing of obsessions among like-minded consumers and achieving admiration through the mutual perception of the quality of one's tastes).

For the first time in centuries the Web has, it seems, raised the question of how our white European civilization, whose recent evolution has been intimately linked to the development of capitalism (organization and ownership of resources, but also the creation of a value system derived from economics for defining the status of merit for the individual) can "use" the availability of tools that respond to the fundamental human instinct of relationship building. Given that relationship building has been strenuously repressed for the past three centuries or so as a source of inefficiency (it's even associated with cheating in the form of nepotism or cronyism) as well as a violation of principles of the equality of individuals, everyone seems to be in the dark about what relationships are good for and whether there is a legitimate justification for them. The fact that some people are actually making fortunes out of providing software that encourage relationship building has given the concept a new-found prestige. After all, the governing principles of all decision-making nowadays is "if there's money to made, go for it" and "if it's profitable, it must be good."

I would suggest looking at Asian cultures -- and in particular because of their current political and economic significance -- China and India to discover, first of all, that relationships/networks can be a natural part of both social and economic activity and a fundamental component of the value system; secondly, that they don't require specific communication tools (hardware or software) to exist; and thirdly that the "economy" of such networks is a subtle mix of efficiency and affect... which means that we in the west perceive it inevitably as messy, unfair and arbitrary. And yet, like Galileo, we have to add... "but it turns" (for them, of course, not for us) so maybe it's worth reviewing the model.

My prediction for the next ten years is that we in the west will undergo a major learning experience focused on new models of social relationships/networking. We will discover and begin to adapt to what the Chinese call guanxi, a concept somewhere between network and relationship, with multiple behavioral ramifications. With major geo-political shifts taking place against a background of continuing technological change, marked by the growing strength of Asia to counter the US economic hegemony of the past 60 years (the US representing the ultimate template for extreme individualism), we may discover -- or even be forced to discover -- the value of paying attention to the way guanxi works. It represents a much more complex model of "engagement" than anything that has come out of our "local" debates (we like to think they're global, but -- and this is a measure of our naivete -- we are all prisoners of our village culture).

How that "enlightenment" encompassing a new vision of networking will happen nobody can predict. But it's worth knowing that there are other models than, on the one hand, our hopelessly "logical" but poorer than destitute "free markets governed by the actions of rational agents" or, on the other hand, the newly constructed stages for narcissistic activism (Second Life, Twitter).

The paradox of change and learning technology

2008-01-04T20:27:00.000+01:00

If Iowa is any indication, 2008 looks to be a year of change, or rather of a growing desire for change. Of course, even when called for by the vox populi, change may not occur since we should never discount the resources of the powers of resistance -- always equal to the task -- who will find new ways of making sure the status quo maintains its fundamental rights. Pakistan gives us an idea of one tactic for protecting vested interests; a bit brutal, but there are other more subtle ways that can easily be mobilized in our western democracies.

So what does politics have to do with changes in the learning scene in 2008? The parallels are worth considering; to wit, the fact that in both domains the methods of the past have quite obviously failed to deliver anything but disappointing results. In politics, the received wisdom was that when there was a problem you carried a big stick, replacing it with a bigger one when necessary, and if you thought it was big enough for the annoyance you were faced with at any given moment you used it (whether preceded by talking softly or aggressively) to hammer home your favorite truth or doctrine and/or snuff out the enemy. In the field of learning, the stick had on its rough surface grades, degrees, diplomas and certification while its hard core consisted of controlling and amassing information (the equivalent of military might) and deploying it in places called, variously, "the classroom", "the training room" or "the learning management system".

But the big stick as the ultimate and unique solution seems to have failed once again and the choice between increasing its size or calling the premise into question has come to the fore. When that happens change becomes possible.

On both fronts, some things have visibly changed over the past 12 months and more is likely to change over the next 12. In 2007 the buzzword in the training technology sector, "Web 2.0", was transformed into a slogan and rallying cry. It is now perceived as corresponding to something that may just have a real and tangible impact on our lives. I call this the belief in the "tangible virtual" and it represents the major cultural innovation we're likely to see develop in 2008, although Second Life already pretends to be exactly that (whereas it is merely the graphic illusion of it).

I think two contrasting things will happen:

1) The Social Web as a cultural meme will gain credibility and draw towards it a sufficient number of users -- aware and unaware of the new culture they are associating with -- to validate at least the idea that it is a desirable general feature of the global environment (and this will be true even in the developing world where it is less present but ultimately more promising in terms of its transformative power and the human services that may for the first time be providable if not yet provided).

2) The myth that consists of thinking that the Social Web is authentically social will begin to be deflated, creating a desire for a truly social web, which we won't be tempted to call 3.0 because a truly social web doesn't need to be “semantic” (it seems that everyone is convinced that semantics will be the key feature for the “appellation contrôlée” of Web 3.0). The true Social Web (don't count on seeing it before 2012) won’t be defined by software but rather by human behavior. I prefer to think of it in terms of the Chinese concept of relationship and would call it the Guanxi Web. But we’ll have to learn a lot more about the way the Chinese do things before we get there. Or alternatively, wait for them to create it and follow in their footsteps (would our pride of technology leaders stand for that?).

In the more immediate future, starting this year, we will begin to understand that the relationship between what we now call the "social web" and human social interaction is as tenuous as the relationship we imagined between the artificial concept of “e-Learning” and actual human knowledge development, a disjunct we took nearly ten years to comprehend.

As soon as we realize, some time later this year, that everything we marvel at for being “the tangible virtual” is little more than an intriguing oxymoron (i.e. a poetic illusion) we will discover a need for something that would more appropriately be called the “tangible real” accompanied by a tangible virtual subtext, opening the gates of a new type of creativity rooted in the desire for the real rather than the desire to escape it. The historically minded may already have noticed that the tangible real coupled with the tangible virtual has been missing in our civilization since at least the 18th century, a period in which taverns, coffee houses, theatres and salons still actually encouraged people both to define and adapt to an intellectual environment created in common but spread and shared far beyond the local. The social intellect was subsequently corralled into universities as formal education, after laying the bricks of its buildings, laid the brakes on social learning and any kind of authentic intelligent (rather than intellectual) culture. This model needs to be dismantled and replaced, but don’t count on Starbucks or Second Life to take us there! In 2008 we will begin to see that Second Life is more like Second Wife, an object of fantasy (power and libido) that momentarily fulfils the individual while stifling communities by abolishing what is genuinely common or relegating it to the background. Second Life could be compared to an inflatable doll we fill with our own hot vapors (isn't that literally what we do with the avatars?). Of course it does serve a purpose in our global economy and culture (just as spam does) and so will continue to survive, but I don’t believe it defines our future in any serious way.

In conclusion, if this is a truly a period of change, as I think it is, that means we will be changing not only our ways of doing things but also our ways of thinking about change itself, and that applies to everyone including experts, thought leaders and fortune-tellers. We’d all like to be right in our predictions, but if we are tending towards something truly social, the result simply won’t resemble anything we individuals can imagine, however good we may be at analysing trends. Mainly because we all tend to reason like bankers, in terms of linear curves or market analysts in terms of product life cycles. After all, some of us still remember John Chambers’ “rounding error”, which with hindsight should be a sobering reminder of the value of "informed forecasting".

Self-organized groups and the methods and ethics of accessing learning resources

2007-12-12T09:07:00.002+01:00

Jay Cross has posted some further reflections on the Hole in the Wall project that was presented in a keynote speech by Sugata Mitra at Online Educa Berlin two weeks ago.

It seems to me that the key to the success of HiWEL is the notion of "self-organized groups" who learn on their own. If education is to become truly non-invasive, it must refrain from defining both the goals and the means to reach them, entrusting the groups with this task. If educational gurus notice that a group is neglecting what is considered "essential" in the curriculum (for whatever reason, whether it’s basic security, survival or simply an existing set of values), the group could be challenged to account for why they may be neglecting a certain topic or reminded of the interest in pursuing it. Respecting the self-organizing group and its decision-making capacity is the sine qua non of success. It also happens to be the absolute opposite of the organizational principles of traditional education and training.

It's worth reflecting on how learners in self-organized groups use external resources to solve problems. One of Sugata’s anecdotes in Berlin concerned a girl who was overwhelmed by the exposure to the micro-biology courses in English (a language she had to learn as the medium of instruction). She stole some money from her mother to phone her uncle in Delhi, who she hoped might be able to explain in simple terms what DNA was. His vague and unscientific but nevertheless informative answer gave her the minimum she needed to begin constructing her understanding of the lessons she wanted to explore.

In other words, everything one already knows or has access to in the world becomes a potential resource for building rather than simply receiving knowledge (traditionally from a single authoritative source). This is probably the best answer to Andrew Keen as well because it demonstrates that even not fully reliable sources of knowledge (the uncle) can contribute to the construction and refinement of knowledge. Being exposed to a multiplicity of sources and entering into dialogue with them is the best way of evaluating the components of knowledge and understanding relationships between complementary elements.

I expect that within the family (in Indian culture) the mother could forgive her daughter for the theft. It’s worth noticing that in some cultures – and especially within educational institutions -- that theft would not be forgiven and the child would be branded as a real or potential delinquent. It’s the old Jean Valjean problem that our western cultures are still struggling with, where the “rule of law” can easily become a rigid regime of “law and order”.

The risky way of making cultural discoveries

2007-10-08T16:15:00.000+02:00

We're now approaching the point where nearly everyone realizes that the actions in Iraq over the past four and a half years -- apart from the military and political toll -- have been an unmitigated cultural disaster. An article in the Washington Post brings the point home once again, pointing out the deluded nature of the most recent official strategy of the AmerIcan occupation.

Here's a sample from the article:
______

Humam Hamoudi, a prominent Shiite cleric and parliament member, said any future reconciliation would emerge naturally from an efficient, fair government, not through short-term political engineering among Sunnis and Shiites.

"Reconciliation should be a result and not a goal by itself," he said. "You should create the atmosphere for correct relationships, and not wave slogans that 'I want to reconcile with you.' "
______

One can find two of our classic tools of cultural analysis right there: task- vs relationship-orientated cultures and the status of time. Hamoudi identified "short-term political engineering" as something alien to his culture, seeing it implicitly as central to US culture.

The first step in cultural enlightenment for the invaders was to discover that military domination and the imposition of one's own system of law and order doesn't quite work. That is, law can be imposed, but order doesn't necessarily follow. (US culture would work a lot better -- even inside of the US -- if the core value were "trust and order" rather than "law and order", law being simply the formalization of trust).

The second step in cultural enlightenment is what we are now seeing, absorbing the lessons from the reaction of the local culture against the newer strategy of "short term engineering" that replaced radical destruction. The last two years have remarkably resembled the dance scene in West Side Story, where the social worker played by a smiling, optimistic John Astin tries to get everyone to mix and have fun. "Bright ideas" about democracy and "mixing" are just that, both "bright" and "ideas" against a dark background of concrete conflict.

I expect the next phase of analysis (following continued failure) will be to realize -- as hinted in a Newsweek article yesterday -- that the current celebration of deal-making ("let's make a deal" * is a fundamental AmerIcan reflex that is worlds away from diplomacy despite superficial resemblance ) considered an inspiring model by Bush and Patraeus and heavily vaunted in the media, is just another artefact of AmerIcan that makes no sense in Iraq. American deal-making isn't so much haggling or horse-trading -- traditional in the Middle East -- as fixing the "right price", making the sale and expecting the customer as well as the seller to respect the sales contract.

Here's a sample from the Newsweek article:
________

The U.S. military discovered too late that Iraq's tangled network of tribal leaders is a major key to security. Yet over the past year, "government from the bottom up" has become one of Ambassador Ryan Crocker's favorite catchphrases. As violence has declined in Sunni enclaves like Ramadi and Fallujah in recent months, commanders have
tried to replicate the apparent success of the region's Anbar Salvation Council elsewhere. Last summer American military commanders spent millions of dollars on "concerned local citizens" programs—essentially paying off tribal sheiks to keep their followers from planting roadside bombs.
________

Isn't there something fundamentally appalling about the number of things that are "discovered too late" on the part of a nation that has put itself in the position of teaching others how to behave?

Finally, when will the AmerIcans -- including the Democratic presidential candidates -- realize that culturally speaking the visible presence of occupying authorities (and their soldiers) as purveyors of a new social order, or even simply as mediators, is the principle obstacle to any spontaneous and home-grown reconciliation or stabilization? That too is cultural. So long as one is aware of the interfering Other in the midst of all of one's decision-making processes, the element of trust,
without which understanding can never be achieved, will be absent. The sad reality, however, is that so long as the question of who exploits Iraq's oil goes unresolved, the AmerIcans will be there, proposing one culturally inappropriate solution after another and "discovering too late" the cultural truths they hadn't anticipated.

Can two lame ducks walk?

2007-10-07T11:16:00.000+02:00

We need to beware of lame ducks, traditionally considered harmless especially when they are unpopular at home. Can the next 15 months prove that lame ducks may be dangerous, especially if they work in pairs? The Guardian hints that a duck-billed catastrophe may be in preparation.

The historical situation is unique. Bush and Cheney have, by their own consistent and unwavering choice, defined themselves as the "All-eXXon-dares the Great", conquerors of the Middle East and Protectors of the Mesopotamian Cradle of Petroleum (once quaintly known as the Cradle of Civilization). Cheney appears to be totally committed to the idea of complete conquest... and Bush appears to be totally committed to Cheney. If these two lame ducks manage to lean on each other (clinging desperately with Cheney's right wing), they may end up with two legs to walk on long enough to launch their Strangelovian attack on Iran, with Cheney in the role of Gen. Jack D. Ripper and Bush in that of TJ Kong (the TJ clearly standing for Texan Junior "King" Kong, an apt description of the son of the other President George Bush).

This is where the quagmire in Iraq and the sheer degree of unpopularity of the current administration may add fuel to the fire, or rather a few megatons to the bomb. In the waning months of his presidency before what looks to be the imminent victory of a Democrat, it may appear that the only way to force the future administration to "stay the course" would be to attack Iran, transforming the Iraq fiasco into a world war and a quest for absolute control. They might even consider that there's a remote but not impossible chance of cancelling the election.

This is where Gordon Brown could become a hero, because without a prominent and loyal European ally (sometimes referred to as a poodle), the chance of the US carrying out such a plan without being ripped to shreds by the international community is zero. The remaining question would be, if Brown refuses to join the coalition of the thrilling, would Sarkozy see that as an opportunity to put France in the coveted position of America's Great Ally (the AGA Con)? I don't think Sarkozy is that stupid, partly because the one issue on which he hasn't convinced the French to trust his self-proclaimed "new deal" is Bush's foreing policy.

The housing market crisis

2007-08-13T08:17:00.001+02:00

Everyone is worried not only about the US housing market but also about its ripple effects on the world economy. Oddly this demonstrates that what everyone considers a virtue -- the dynamics of the marketplace -- may well be a recipe for long-term disaster.

The economy -- as Panurge (i.e. Rabelais) understood it five centuries ago -- is based on the willingness of people to purchase the useless and, why not, nefarious to keep money (means of payment) circulating and expanding the overall supply. If people only looked after fulfilling their real needs, the economy would appear to stagnate. Of course, doing so might also impel them to think about what real needs are, which will always be a matter of controversy but happens to be one of the bases of human culture in general and all human cultures. Our clever deduction -- made concrete by the evolution of industrial economies -- that the only "serious" human need is for money is founded on our mathemetical intelligence: money is the only recognizable common denominator and furthermore is a (presumably) manageable resource. It is this "scientific orientation" that sets our "globalizing" culture apart from all other human cultures of the present or past.

It may seem odd to say that the crisis of the housing market is an instance of the perversity of our "needs analysis" glorifying the useless and nefarious since housing is unquestionably a basic human need. But does the suburban US house -- with all the sociology that goes with it -- really represent a human and social need? Can there be a problem of "lebensraum" at the level of families as there is with nations? Isn't the model itself one that creates a gravitational pull towards the fabrication and consumption of the useless and nefarious? This has in fact been seen, in Panurgian fashion, as the main driving virtue of the model, duplicating Panurge's insistence on enjoyment as the principal consequence. But with its long-term consequences on the environment (now readily recognizable) and its less apparent but possibly deeper effects on social relations, both direct and indirect (through the fraying of bonds of solidarity), the US housing market may be the indicator of the weakness of the paradigm. The useless and nefarious have a price, or rather two prices: the one you pay for the goods themselves and the one humanity pays for the unsettling effects of those goods on our physical and social environment, effects that will be magnified for future generations.

In cultural terms the analysis may seem so simple as to be simplistic. We deeply believe that a dynamic economy is good because it creates not only jobs, but also wealth itself (partly through jobs) and ever more virtuously spreads that wealth (partly through jobs). Politicians know that the only thing that "sells" is the promise of jobs ("It's the economy, stupid"). This becomes more morally complex when the suppliers of jobs are companies like Halliburton who prosper when the most morally contestable policies are enacted, but the overall impression is that its all for the good since activity is ensured (activity = money and money is the measure of all good). One of the reasons why war is actually perceived as “good” – especially since the “godsend” of WWII that allowed the US to emerge from the depression -- is that it is a guaranteed form of activity, creating credit and debt and employing millions of people within a system defined by a hierarchical logic that makes things easy to manage because not dependent on the anarchy of the marketplace and largely immune to the hazards and debilitating effects of moral reasoning (Hamlet style).

It is our belief in the "goodness" of the equation that appears to be unshakable and linked to our notions of the goodness of democracy. After all, it's people with jobs who vote! And it's people with jobs who buy houses. It may even be that the regular crises of the economy (recessions and even the occasion crash) serve the purpose of reinforcing our faith in the principles that underlie the system.

My feeling is that the predicted "clash of civilizations" will not be between regions or religions but rather between human cultures (which still do exist and whose most visible but not unique or even essential glue is often religion) and the globalizing Panurgian culture of debtors and creditors who thrive in a state of mutual dependence obliging them to create the useful and the useless, the good and nefarious. We may in fact have no choice as the price of our purchases continues to mount and the means of payment, constantly increasing, turn out to be permanently and fatally insufficient because with the creation of one type of value (mercantile) other more fundamental values are ignored in the best of cases and destroyed in the worst. Compounding the issue is that thanks to our unshakable belief in the virtue of creation for its own sake, we become unable (or at least unwilling) to measure what is being destroyed. Awareness of this principle and the severe risk it entails could be taken as the common denominator of the ecology and the global protest movement (altermondiste), which has yet to formulate an alternative set of cultural values, focusing primarily on physical conservation or the imaginary return to an undefined and idealistic status quo ante bellum (the war being the industrial-capitalist revolution). Not that it should be held to exercise that responsibility, since it actually belongs to the cultures of the world to do so more or less locally.

The clash I would foresee (but which I’m not predicting as an historical inevitability) is between the globalizing finance-rooted economy on the one hand, and, on the other, the world’s diverse cultures somehow allied with a global protest movement and endowed with a certain persuasive force that will be acquired lesst through efficient organization and more through the increasingly obvious failures of the Panurgian paradigm as the useless is increasingly revealed to be nefarious.

A brief reminder of Panurge’s ideal world of debt and credit :

« Représentez-vous un monde autre, onquel un chascun preste, un chascun doibve, tous soient debteurs, tous soient presteurs. O quelle harmonie sera parmy les réguliers mouvemens des cieulx...Entre les humains, paix, amour, dilection, fidélité, repous, banquetz, festins, joie, liesse, or, argent, menue monnoie, chaisne, bagues, marchandises troteront de main en main... »

Very modern vision, in’t? At least Paris Hilton (if she read French) might recognize it. Panurge continues

« Charité seule règne, régente, domine, triumphe. »

Charity (Agape) is here the notion of non-libidinous love (call it “loving concern and empathy”), not the giving away of surplus money. But the fact that Rabelais uses the word in this context (in the first quote he writes “amour”) shows how much of a visionary Rabelais was, hinting that the traditional Christian virtue of Agape would become a mechanism of the future debt-based economic culture!

Politics or the language and culture of sports

2007-07-16T14:56:00.000+02:00

MSNBC published an interesting article on the use of sports metaphors in politics.

While the anecdotes reveal a great deal about the trend itself, I found it worthwhile to delve a little deeper into the cultural meaning of the rhetoric. Below is the article with my interleaved comments.

Bush runs White House with sports terms
The Associated Press

Updated: 4:06 p.m. ET July 15, 2007

WASHINGTON - Running the country is no game. It just sounds like one sometimes. In the Bush White House, sports are a metaphor for life. Better keep up if you want to play.

Consider how President Bush describes his time left in office.

"I'm going to sprint to the finish," he likes to say.
Not content to run alone, he used the phrase to defend Tony Blair in Blair's dwindling days as Britain's prime minister.

"He's going to sprint to the wire," Bush declared of his pal.

The sports imagery changes when slow is the preferred way to go for the White House. Take the way the administration defends its global warming strategy against criticism it has lacked urgency.

"This is a marathon," explained Jim Connaughton, chairman of the White House Council on Environmental Quality. "It's not a sprint."

Sports metaphors have become a pervasive way for Bush and his team to describe almost anything. Expressing ideas in terms of athletics is so routine in the highest levels of government — just as it is in more typical workplaces — that even people who do not follow sports are used to it.

Fairness means leveling the playing field; focus is keeping your eye on the ball. Send in the heavy hitters if you want results. If sacrifice is called for, then take one for the team.

"It's just the way we speak. Our language is permeated with these terms," said Harold Ray, a sports historian who identified 1,700 sports metaphors in a book he co-wrote about the topic. "We just assume that everyone understands them."

It may seem to be "just the way we speak", but it’s also the way “we” think. Culture encourages and pre-validates certain ways of thinking. The view of historical events as a sporting event, with winners, losers, rules of the game (procedures) and time limits is deeply rooted in US culture. The reference to sport has become a pattern for dismissing responsibility (we played by the rules of the game, not by those ethics or logic). This possibly derives from the underlying Calvinist belief that games and theology are linked: the propensity to attribute victory in a sporting contest to divine intervention (predestination). Sport has consequently become more than a convenient metaphor. It has taken on an ontological, ethical and eschatological character. We are invited to believe that our responsibilities are defined in terms similar to those of athletes and that playing the game is a way of putting oneself in the hands of the Great Playmaker and fulfilling His objectives (concerning gender, in US sports coaches are almost always men, though women are now accepted as referees, even for men’s sports. “Playmakers”, on the other hand, are therefore typically male and usually white).

Football metaphors meet language barrier
When Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice was forced to answer critics of a plan to shut down North Korea's nuclear program, she needed a way to urge patience. So, naturally, the administration's top diplomat used the language of a football game.

"This is still the first quarter," she said. "There is still a lot of time to go on the clock."

The powerful notion behind this is that history radically changes when a “terminal” event occurs. US culture believes that all games have ends after which we play by a different set of rules, whereas other cultures see history as a continuous struggle or dynamic harmony (yin and yang) of cultural forces that do not fundamentally change. The US was founded on a revolutionary rewrite of the “rules of the game” following an act of will validated by a belief in “destiny” (the semantic link between “predestination” and “manifest destiny”).

It’s worth noting, however, that Condoleezza Rice has also used another clear beginning/clear ending metaphor, when she qualified the 2006 war in Lebanaon as “birth pangs” of the Middle East.

The lingo does not always translate, however.

The same day in February that Rice spoke in Washington, U.S. nuclear negotiator Christopher Hill was in Beijing and described what private discussions with North Korean officials had been like.

"For those people who are not Americans, you won't understand this metaphor," he cautioned reporters. "But it's always like 3 yards, 3 yards, 3 yards. And then it's always 4th and 1, and you make a first down and do 3 more yards."

Apart from not realizing that this must be utterly incomprehensible to most of humanity, Hill seems not to be familiar with American football itself, the source of his analogy. On 4th and 1 teams almost always choose to punt (surrender the ball to the other team). The lack of precision in the use of sports metaphors (see the Cheney example immediately below) is an indication of how they function culturally: as a means of persuasion based on referring to a mutually accepted norm, the “logic” of sports. Of course, the “logic” of any sport is an arbitrary, closed and artificial system unrelated to and certainly not constructed on the principles of logical reasoning. Deferring to the authority of the game and its rulebook has become a privileged means of avoiding logical and moral analysis.

Got it?

By his own admission, Vice President Dick Cheney fumbled his reference to football when he tried to describe progress in Afghanistan.
"It's sometimes 3 yards and a cloud of dust. There's no home run — touchdown, home run is a flawed analogy — no touchdown pass to be thrown here. But it can be done," Cheney said.

I’m left wondering where the “cloud of dust” comes from. American football is played on grass (real or artificial) so dust is foreign to it. Baseball – which Cheney has mixed in here – does produce dust when sliding into bases. Is he thinking of the dusty landscapes of Afghanistan? Does dust play a role in his typical “strategic thinking” (i.e. throwing dust into the opponent’s eyes)? Or is there some deeper unconscious meaning here which only his analyst might be in a position to reveal?

It is now understood that when a topic becomes popular to kick around, it is a political football. The White House has used that term to describe an eclectic range of matters, from medicare to taxes to former Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld.

Switch in power, not sports talk

In October, just before the congressional elections, Bush said Democrats were a tad arrogant in assessing their chances of winning control.

"They're dancing in the end zone," he said. "They just haven't scored the touchdown."

Fun is the reward of victory, which itself is – or should be – the reward of hard work. While fun appears to be a strong value in itself (or perhaps rather the visible outward sign of other deeper values) it is suspect if it isn’t related to merit. There seems to be a moral division of society into two opposing camps: those who try to have fun without earning the right (the lazy and irresponsible) and those who can flaunt it because they have proved their worth (through some form of accomplishment, which generally means through compelling assertiveness possibly associated with a talent or hard work).

Then the Democrats won.
So the power dynamic changed, but not the sports talk.

How does the White House choose to challenge leaders in Congress? "Step up to the plate," Bush spokesman Tony Snow said.

But in reality the White House ended up using “executive privilege” to refuse to send their batters to face the pitcher! This highlights the function of sports metaphors: to reassure, to give the impression that decisions taken are both logical and inevitable (the link between logical and inevitable is of course an extension of Calvinist predestination).

What is the Democrats' motivation for investigating the firing of eight fired U.S. attorneys? "An opportunity to score political points," Bush claimed.
Will Bush now start vetoing more bills? "The ball really lies in the court of those in Congress," Snow said.

At heart, Bush is a baseball guy, a former co-owner of the Texas Rangers. He knows the rule when the ball and the runner reach first base at the same time: The tie goes to the runner.

Turns out, that is exactly how Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts explained a ruling that loosened campaign finance regulations.

"Where the First Amendment is implicated," Roberts wrote, "the tie goes to the speaker, not the censor."

The notion of ties has an ambiguous status in US culture. Ties are difficult to tolerate because there always has to be a winner. Historically in US football it was possible to have a draw (as in soccer), but draws are associated with indecision and ambiguity, neither of which are tolerable and both of which can be associated with the moral crime (attributed by Bush to Keryy) of “flip-flopping”. I believe that draws were definitively eliminated from professional US football in the 1950s (but they may still exist in university football????). Ties are also messy when making calculations to produce statistics (which happen to be a key feature of US sports, eminently worthy of cultural analysis in its own right).

Even the spy world can be explained by sports metaphors; CIA Director Michael Hayden uses them all the time.

Pressed to justify why so many senior intelligence jobs are filled by people with military backgrounds, Hayden used a phrase better associated with a general manager of a football team: "They were the best athletes available in the draft."

The use of the metaphor permits evading the question and at the same time links with “beliefs” associated with meritocracy, a fundamental feature of US culture.

As for Bush, it is no surprise that sports metaphors come easily, said Ray, a retired professor from Western Michigan University.

"With his baseball background, and with the way presidents have honored sports champions, it's a natural," Ray said.

The underdog of politics

Indeed, if Bush is ever free to put life in the context of sports, it is when teams come by the White House. He loves relating an underdog story to his political career.
"They said you didn't have a chance," he told the Super Bowl champion Pittsburgh Steelers in 2006. "I kind of know the feeling."

One bit of caution, however, applies to explaining sensitive matters in sports terms — don't shoot and miss.

Just ask former CIA Director George Tenet.
In the run-up to the war in Iraq, Tenet chose a common basketball phrase to describe the strength of the case against Saddam Hussein. Tenet now says he was talking broadly about the case that could be made against the dictator — not a faulty assurance that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction.

Either way, his wording has come to haunt him.

It was not, as he infamously put it, a "slam dunk."

Copyright (of the original article) 2007 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.

The history of the “slam dunk” in basketball and the perception of its significance in US culture is interesting in itself. The inventor of basketball, Dr James Naismith (a Canadian), placed the basket at a height of 10 feet in order to put it “beyond human reach” (in itself an interesting cultural concept). When Lew Alcindor (later to become Kareem Abdul-Jabbar) dominated smaller players university basketball with the slam dunk, it was outlawed (a case of “levelling the playing field”!). But the gesture of aggressively slamming a ball through a hole struck such a vital chord in the perception of US sports spectators that not only was the slam dunk reinstated as a legitimate gesture, but professional basketball elevated it to the highest level of athletic expression and inaugurated the “slam dunk contest” associated with the All-Star game. The slam dunk – as used by Tenet -- has become a curious metaphor for assertiveness, power and minimization of risk.
_________

All cultures describe politics with sports metaphors and to some extent thereby recognize politics as a game, though the paradigm is more likely to be chess (pure strategy) than outdoor sports. Unlike the US example, they tend to distinguish more clearly between politics and government, the “game” being played by professionals amongst themselves but not extending to the lay population. On the other hand, “the ball in his/her court” has become a dead metaphor in most European languages. What appears to be fundamentally different in most of the examples cited in the article is the attitude behind the use of metaphor. The speakers – generally those who wield power – are in most of the cases (but not all) using the metaphor to establish less a comparison with the way politics “plays out” than the idea that government is an established game, where you (the governed) don’t discuss the rules but apply them or allow them to be applied. In other cultures, games do not have this level of authority or depth of metaphysical import, but in the US where the ideas of “challenge” and “fun” are close to being fundamental values and are certainly moral gauges (fun almost always trumps “seriousness” -- seen as a fussy Old World concept -- and ends up justifying outrageous and ethically suspect behaviour, as seen in the cult of celebrity, from Donald Trump to Paris Hilton).

It’s also worth noting that most of the speakers cited use sports as an analogy (in rhetorical terms, a weak comparison) rather than as a metaphor (suggesting identity or some form of umbilical link between the two terms), but implicitly rely on a common understanding of the validity of sport as a metaphor for life itself.

URL: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/19774480/

Example of e-learning

2007-06-09T09:47:00.000+02:00

As a contributing member of the Learning Circuits Blog I thought it my duty to respond to Dave Lee's appeal this month to point to some examples of e-learning. I expect that his intention is to use a bottom-up approach to help resolve the nagging issue of what e-learning is (i.e. how we can define it) and how whatever we think it is can actually solve practical learning problems. And we shouldn't forget the complementary issue of whether it will attract and maintain learners' attention to the point that they actually spend the time to get the results.

Below are some examples of e-learning that my team produced as part of a vast course of business English for non-English speakers. The focus is on the acquisition of language and communication skills in English, rather than what I call "knowledge about the language". The entire cycle of learning, starting at a fairly low level, is based on a film, with a main plot, multiple subplots and a wide range of communication-focused activities, that we authored and produced as interactive video specifically for this purpose. The main story is resolutely cross-cultural, the "star" of the film being an American consultant arriving in the UK and grappling with his own version of culture shock. This problem of adapting to a different context highlights the fact that learners are constantly working on three different levels:

Language acquisition (vocabulary, syntax, grammar... but all of it channeled through communication problems and stylistics, i.e. rhetorical strategy and choices in observable contexts),
Communication skills: the art of getting one's point across to others and reacting appropriately (interpreting and dialoguing) to theirs,
Adapting to a foreign culture, where even if the language is comprehensible the behavioral codes are different and permanent sources of misunderstanding.

The implicit strategy of this extended experience of e-learning is one of community dialogue, since each development (plot, relationships in the video, context, etc.) or set of activities is meant to create a shared experience that provides a base for reflection, discussion and creative development. In other words, the e-learning is there only to get the process going, not to account for the learning, which -- and this is particularly appropriate to the learning of language and communication skills -- can only be social.

For that reason, the material is accessed uniquely through a collaborative platform in which dialogue in the community (including learners and trainers) provides the true basis of a learning process that aims, under the coach or trainer's guidance, at achieving balance between programmed and unprogrammed input, on the one hand, and creative output, on the other. The mechanical output provoked by the programmed activities (quizzes, games, simulations) we consider as fundamentally trivial, serving the unique purpose of consolidating input and creating a common frame of reference facilitating social communication.

The first three examples offered here are part of a series of activities taken from the more advanced levels of the course. The final one comes from the first part of the course (a lower level), where learners are not expected to have achieved a basic comfort level in expression and communication. Quite noticeably, the more advanced examples are concerned with strategy and style, the less advanced with problems of basic recognition of meaning.

Word of warning: because everything turns around the video scenes, this will only work correctly with a reasonably fast connection.

Here are the advanced sequences:

Last minute preparations

Imperfect communication

Getting even

In the following lower level activity, the language is simpler and the challenge is focused first on identifying voices (a specific listening but also a social skill) and only later on the actual language. At the end of the activity (and only at the end), the learner can "study" the text through the Storyboard, which is only accessible after the final game in the series, in this case a multimedia crossword puzzle.

Fred arrives in London from Heathrow aiport

In the full set of resources, the types of activity are extremely varied, designed to address questions ranging from perception (visual, auditive) to negotiating strategy. But the basic rule is context first. It may be seen from these examples that the design of activities contains a specific strategy of inciting learners to go back to a context they have already discovered and even explored in various ways, to milk it further. This may seem to be superficially repetitive, but with a new learning objective it leads to the kind of creative redundancy that we all require to learn our native language or even particular professional skills.

Those interested in the methodology or in other aspects of this product are invited to contact me. We will be shortly launching a new course specifically aimed at intercultural business skills (nothing directly to do with language learning, though the two are always intimately related).

The perception of perception: a deeper dimension of culture

2007-05-15T10:25:00.001+02:00

A fellow interculturalist has drawn the group's attention to a book by Wayne Baker, Crisis of Values: Reality and Perception. It claims that the problem of a "moral crisis" within US society is merely rhetorical (the distortion of perception) and that, according to the blurb, " America has not lost its traditional values, that the nation compares favorably with most other societies, and that the culture war is largely a myth".

My first reaction is to place such books in their context, which is, at the same time, academic, commercial and psychological. In other words, a book about society is first of all an artifact that belongs to the culture and reflects the culture's values as much as it pretends to analyse them. Just to give one example of how the cultural system works in this particular case: Baker sets himself up as the opposing camp in a general trend (consisting of lamenting the deterioration of values) and cites all the successful publications that have taken what he suggests has become the dominant view. He clearly points them out as the adversary whom he has chosen to combat. He's the brash challenger, the righter of wrongs, the bearer of a contradictory truth. Creating polarity and thereby drawing the spotlight to oneself is a standard feature of US culture (assertiveness, linked to the cult of success and celebrity). Framing discussion not as a deepening dialogue but as a contest between opposites is a standard and respected reflex in US culture. I would even go so far as to call it a "value" (but more of that later).

Having read the introductory chapter (only), I think a lot more could be said about the cultural nature of Baker's book and the institutions involved (academe, the book publishing world, the media and possibly politics). I would suggest that this is the type of exercise we need to do with any and all books that pretend to reveal some new truth about society, or about anything else for that matter: science, literature, economics, etc. This is my suggestion to those who go on to read the book (thank you Barthes, Foucault and Derrida).

All this is to say that I agree with Baker's main thesis, which I take to be less provocative than his expected "perception" of it. US culture is still intact!. But that's something we interculturalists already knew. Fundamental values are never lost. And in every culture, they are constantly challenged (often but not exclusively on the basis of both generations and economic class), which rather than being a sign of weakness or fragility allows them to evolve and adapt to a changing context. Where Baker appears to be off the mark to me is in his failure to see that the rhetoric about "culture wars" in itself represents, not a recent deviation but the manifestation of a fundamental and stable US value. Although he repeats the famous quote from Clifford Geertz about culture as a web, he doesn't appear to approach culture in the sense that Geertz understood it. He claims that his "objective... is to interpret the changing webs of significance spun of values in American culture." But he also says, and even more assertively, "My main concern is moral values--fundamental values about right and wrong, good and evil, noble and base--that live in the hearts of people and are embodied in institutions." That is a far cry from Geertz's "webs of significance". And that places Baker squarely within the culture wars, rather than outside, at an objective distance as a cultural observer. He also seems to fail to appreciate the disconnect in all cultures between "the hearts of people" and "institutions". But that may well be a particular feature of US culture: the fusion of identity between the individual and institutions, real as well as imaginary (i.e. a government "of the people, by the people, for the people"). He actually alludes to this awkward fusion when he appeals to Habermas's theories, but doesn't seem to see the forest for the trees.

In short, I would issue this warning: all discussions of values will be vitiated if we mix or simply fail to distinguish
a) notions of morality that include criteria for determining "good and evil",
b) attitudes towards specific institutions (family, church or religion -- already not quite the same thing -- government, real and ideal, etc.)
c) lifestyle preferences.

Even more risky is isolating one as the key to the others, which Baker seems tempted to do when he talks about his "main concern" (moral values). I'm also far from sure that the World Values Survey gives us a fair picture of what interculturalists or what Clifford Geertz might want to see as "values".

Baker does offer us one bit of information to think about:

"A Pew survey of religion and public life, conducted in spring 2001, found that 55 percent of Americans felt that religion was "losing its significance" as an influence on American life. This figure dropped to 12 percent in mid-November 2001, two months after the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, but rose again to 52 percent in March 2002, six months after the attacks.21."

This suggests (and I must say my personal experience bears this out) that the confusion between religion and politics in US culture may be deeper than even Habermas suspected. But it also suggests that the Apocalyptic strain of historical hermeneutics, inherited from the Puritans, is still domiinant. That fact alone tells us more about the depth, less of values than of historical fantasies that permeate US culture (a good starting point would be the foundational castration myth implicit in the story of George Washington's chopping down the cherry tree and not telling a lie").

My tentative conclusion, which would only be justified after reading the whole book: Baker's book is in itself an example of how systemically coherent US culture remains today and how well it has adapted, as an economic force, to a changing world in which it is called upon (or has called upon itself) to play an increasingly dynamic role. The question he appears to elude is how that force, once it's in contact with other powerful cultural forces with "values" that draw their energy from other principles (and not only those recognized by the World Values Survey), may evolve both externally -- in conflictual international contexts -- and internally, through real or simply "perceived" "culture wars".

The real problem is both historical and semantic. The semantics concern the notion of "value" and I'm certain that there is little common ground among the various interlocutors, whether they be Baker, his declared opponents (the doom merchants lamenting moral decline), the World Values Survey, Hofstede (who claims that the WVS reflects his own findings), Clifford Geertz or our community of intercultural consultants and trainers. That problem alone would make the book difficult to read for me (I don't find his style very seductive either). As for history, it is as much economic as cultural, a nasty fact we tend to forget after Fukuyama's declaration of the "end of history". So long as the US can control or at least dominate the exploitation and distribution of global resources and markets, the culture will remain politically stable, which means that Baker's thesis is correct and US society will continue to cling to its beliefs (rather than values) about what is right and wrong, good and evil. The war in Iraq may, in the end, be less a question of economic and military overreach (controlling Middle Eastern oil) than a clever distraction intended both to hide and reinforce US domination of global markets elsewhere (especially financial). If that can be managed and military and economic dominance ensured, even at the price of local failure in the Middle East (as in Vietnam), then US "values" will remain stable for a long time to come even as lifestyles continue to conflict, generating the kinds of spectacles where groups or individuals can continually draw the spotlight to themselves, make the news and become celebrities. The "culture wars" are nothing more than a manifestation of one of the organizing principles of the US economy and culture.

In any case, the debate about what we mean by "values" seems to me wide open. It would be nice if we as a group (the interculturalist community) could contribute to a discussion focused a little too tightly on US "culture" and its états d'âme. By taking a broader perspective, we might just possibly manage to impose a definition that is closer to what we know about cultures and human psychology and less tied to the fairly recent historical tradition of nation-states. One senses in the background of Baker's preoccupations that the whole thing is about "America's self-esteem as a nation", curiously placing his contribution in the category of the omnipresent self-help books so dear to the publishing industry. The funny thing is that the same anguished soul-searching has been taking place not only here in France, but also in the UK, Spain, Italy, etc. Perhaps it's simply a general symptom of the waning of political modernism and specifically of the European style nation-state itself.

Big Brother

2007-01-21T11:58:00.000+01:00

A fellow interculturalist has pointed out the interesting ambiguities and contradictions in the recent incident concerning racist insults in the UK reality TV series, Big Brother. Rather than focusing on judging whether it's a reprehensible example of racism, he sees it as a reflection of reality from which we can learn. I totally agree and believe we can use this kind of public incident to examine some of the key features of our current "civilization".

In a BBC News item, here is what some Indians seem to be saying about the incident:

"People in Mumbai, Shetty's home city, were asked by BBC Radio Five Live whether they thought she was a victim of racist bullying and some said they thought it nasty without being racist."

The question underlying this kind of observation is "what is the status of nasty and what is the status of racist?"

Of course, the real cultural problem for me is less the behaviour of the individuals than the status of "reality shows", which I’ll come back to in a minute. The "racist or nasty" distinction serves to highlight the fact that what we call racism is not only complex (extending from simple racist reflexes to fully elaborated racist theory, with latent or manifest racist attitude somewhere in the middle), but also needs to be understood on several different levels: the public, the private and the unconscious. A good case could be made (and has been made) for the assertion that we are all unconsciously racist. Some would even say it’s a natural function of our “selfish genes” (not being a fan of Dawkins, I wouldn’t go along with the exploitation of this flawed metaphor). But if this is so, it belongs to the realm of the unconscious and if we accept the related notions of ethical choice and free will (notions that are contested by some philosophers), then unconscious predispositions do not determine our attitudes and our behaviour.

In a classical Freudian framework, a permanent dynamic relationship exists between the id (where the unconscious resides or is “structured” according to Lacan), the ego and the superego. This too is a flawed metaphor, but it has the merit of identifying three visibly active and well contrasted layers of human behaviour: the impulse (id), the calculated move or choice (ego) and actions that are influenced and in some cases determined by social norms, including culture and law (the superego). The incidents in Big Brother seem to be largely at the unconscious level, meaning that they can be corrected at the conscious level (ego) and the societal level (superego). It's interesting society is making something of a hash of it, which tells us a lot about our current culture, especially as filtered through – but more significantly – regulated by the media. And this is what I find most dangerous, that our thinking and our “new” cultural reflexes are being programmed by the media.

As for Big Brother itself, the question may legitimately be asked, “but what are we to expect when a group of people are held in close quarters for so long?” The idea of being in close quarters but at the same time visible to the public, while interacting with people one has not chosen oneself, is profoundly ambiguous in that it mixes up all three of the standard personae associated with the three levels of the personality. It is in the intimate sphere that the id has some room to operate. The privacy of such situations allows our psyche occasionally to let off the steam of the unconscious, since it will then encounter factors of resistance that will send it back into its normal unconscious state, usually with no long term consequences other than refining one’s behavioural learning process. Resistance comes in the form of the personal and moral reactions of those who share that space, who are usually people we trust and/or with whom we share our social culture. That certainly isn’t the case in Big Brother.

The private sphere is also where the ego is developed and modelled through interactions with others: Freud called the process a series of identifications, which I take to be Freud’s most pregnant contribution to cultural theory. The modelling of the ego allows it to take moral precedence over the unconscious impulses and establishes the legitimacy of the external, social point of view as a regulator of egoistic behaviour. As “regulation” develops the superego is formed, representing the “rules of the game” by which one is first judged (by others) and ultimately ends up judging oneself (our conscience).

The media quite obviously represent the public point of view that is instrumental in informing the superego. But in the context of Big Brother this is perverse, because the medium (television) is mixed up with aspects that in individual psychology would belong to the realm of the ego (survival and self-assertion) and even the id (the affirmation of impulses, which is what the spectators are “expecting” to see).

What’s ultimately both comic and tragic about this incident and its aftermath is the way “serious social commentary” is reframing the content of this literally perverse context. The perversity is exacerbated by the fact that the participants are already celebrities of a sort (having never seen Big Brother or any of its avatars, I’m not very sure about how this is structured – are they real celebrities or wannabes? -- or how it may play out, but it seems to me to be an obvious source of confusion).

The interest in analysing incidents such as this one for cultural as well as psychological and sociological reflection is indeed great, as my colleague, Steve Crawford, suggested. I’m sure there are many other interesting takes on it, including an analysis of the “legal” side of this (already a part of the official debate).

And just to complicate things further, there appears to be a somewhat similar incident taking place in the US around a more classic TV fiction series, Grey’s Anatomy, where one of the actors (black) used an insulting term for a gay colleague on the set (in private, of course) and this was reported to the media, creating a major scandal.

The past twelve months or so have brought a rich harvest of public/private racism: Mel Gibson, Michael Richards and now these two latest incidents. There are a lot of issues here. It would be nice if the intercultural community could show some leadership on helping to analyse these things… in public!

Reporting and building the new "new world order"

2007-01-13T15:52:00.000+01:00

Several colleagues have recently come back to a theme that has preoccupied a lot of people since 9/11: the docility of the US media in the face of policies that were manifestly mistaken or based on lies and whose long-term consequences were predictable, had anyone had the courage to predict. (Neutralizing this basic intellectual capacity seems to have been a permanent feature of the current administration's strategy, who even today claims a monopoly on prediction, the latest example being the justification -- via the utopia of a unified, stable Iraq -- of the coming "surge").

About a week ago I read an article by René Lefort in the Nouvel Observateur concerning the situation in Somalia. Having seen the news items in the U.S. press about the pursuit of "key members" of al-Qaida in Somalia -- articles in which no recent historical background was offered -- I was pleased to discover a journalist who could fill me in on a bit of context. What a difference when compared to the accounts in the U.S. press, where the Ethiopians were the good guys and the Somalians (because they had allowed themselves to rebuild their society from the ground up under the tutelage of Islamic Courts) were the bad guys. Now it may well be that since 9/11 the idea of Islamic Courts conjures up in Washington the idea of Taliban and/or al-Qaida (= evil), but the facts put forward by Lefort indicated that this wasn't the case at all. Lefort made some effort to explain the political and social logic behind a movement that had been increasingly successful in restructuring an anarchic society that had been effectively left in the hands of warlords, to the detriment of everyone else, including the clans (the basis of Somalian social organisation) and the nominal government, with no power or authority or historical basis. To keep the story short, Lefort recounts that the U.S. encouraged Christian Ethiopia to invade Islamic Somalia promising and supplying US military support, accompanied by specific actions against the culprits who provided the ultimate pretext for the invasion: 3 presumed members of al-Qaida (and this presumption dates back to 2000, when Clinton was president)!

Now if Ethiopia's invading Somalia reminds me of anything, I'd have to say it's Saddam's invasion of Kuwait in 1990 (for which there's good reason to believe that the US initially gave a tacit blessing) and which provoked a strong international alliance intent on establishing a "new world order". But let's not talk about double standards, since the the "war on terror" does away with all nuance, providing a much simpler key to the new "new world order" of the future.

There's obviously much more to the Somalia story, so I thought I'd look at what the US press had to say now that things were seriously hotting up. Lo and behold, in the best, most thorough and "analytical" articles, there are only the vaguest hints about the actual historical context. Hints that do more to hide the historical facts than to reveal them. The rest is about who is against whom, and what religion or state they represent. Nothing about the political evolution of the country over the past 15 years, its social structure, its specific traditions, the status of Ethiopia, the intricacies of US strategy, etc. In short, it's treated somewhat like a sports story, an account of who's winning or which team is rising in the standings.

The Washington Post offers the most "thorough" article I've been able to find in the mainstream US media (the NY Times remaining far more superficial and the LA Times -- usually fairly analytical -- only giving the equivalent of a "box score" in sports). For those interested, here's the WP link.

The Guardian doesn't do much more, though they align some interesting facts about recent events in the Ethiopian-US dialogue. Still, they seem not to want to know about any context not furnished by the Pentagon. The Independent doesn't do much more, but the Times finds another ruse for avoiding the issues: developing the travelogue approach, highlighting local colour and the semi-modern folksy reality of the locals (including their links to British popular culture!). The conclusion is consistent with what we know about the situation, but the article gives no indication of why it is so in terms of context.

So where can we find some more thorough analysis that corroborates many of details of context in the Lefort article? Try the Toronto Star.

This article by Thomas Walkom offers a range of detail that Lefort didn't mention and generally conveys the same message, laying out the longer-term political implications as well and drawing parallels that help illuminate our understanding of US foreign policy and where it's taking us.

Two things emerge from this:

the US mainstream press is still beholden to the administration and the Pentagon and seems unwilling even to suggest that there are other angles of interpretation of what amounts to unprovoked acts of military invasion (as I say, to be compared to Saddam invading Kuwait),
US foreign policy has taken on a knee-jerk regularity of encouraging and allowing destruction and murder -- but even worse, the dismantling of local social infrastructure -- whenever there's a vague reason to suspect the "harboring" of enemies, even if the number of those enemies can be counted on one hand.

This last point seems to me to sum up the difference between the pre-9/11 political world and the post-9/11 one. What used to be seen as a problem for criminal justice (the model used in Britain to combat IRA terrorism) has been transformed into a pretext for regime change, nation-building and "regional remodeling". Read some of the quotes from US authorities about how they consider themselves responsible for defining what kind of government Somalia should have and who deserves to be a part of it. As the Toronto Star points out, the parallels with Iraq and Afghanistan seem obvious.

The final lesson in all this: read the Canadian press whenever you have doubts about the thoroughness of what the press in any of the "coalition of the willing" countries offers you.

And the final lesson for us interculturalists: don't take seriously any news article that doesn't lead you towards an understanding of the society itself, however superficial (you can always learn more). Politics abhors sociology because it fears social reality. The pattern of cultural blindness behind political and military action is, as the Toronto Star hints, one that is being repeated in many different places, but because mere political/military solutions no longer have the lasting power they once had, we're plunging ever more deeply into cultural conflict. It isn't a clash of civilizations, but an organized power struggle.. and it's getting more and more frightening.

Last minute execution

2006-12-31T11:51:00.000+01:00

The execution of Saddam Hussein in the hours before the start of the feast of EID demonstrates one of the key aspects of the ongoing tragedy in the Middle East, riddled as it is with huge intercultural errors. However it may have been officially managed, it looks to the world as if it was engineered according to some recognizable principles that have been at work throughout the period of American occupation.

The official comments by various world leaders (always meant to reassure their own electorate) reveal the cultural logic behind the operation. The first thing to notice is the importance given to the "formally legal" within US (and to some extent Anglo) culture. It can become a tragic source of cultural blindness. One only has to be convinced that a particular act is consistent with the law (i.e. not in flagrant contradiction with it) and all other considerations -- including the potential impact of the act on other people -- may be waived. Because "no one is above the law" (would this were true! -- but that's another question), the law is above everyone.

An act that is vindicated by the "law of the land" may not be appreciated by all but it cannot be called into question or criticized on moral, psychological or cultural grounds. Even when objections are recognized as "subjectively" real or sociologically true, the "objectivity" of the law always trumps the "subjectivity" of personal feelings. Low context cultures find it difficult to see feelings -- even when shared by a significant swath of the population -- as being anything other than individual "opinions", whereas history teaches us that when shared by sigfinicant numbers they may become social forces capable of producing revolutions and radical change.

What is now being presented as a "clash of civilizations" in the Middle East (what Condoleezza Rice describes euphemistically as "birth pangs") derives from the deeply held cultural conviction of Western political leaders that the existence of a legal framework (the "rule of law") cancels out and invalidates considerations of moral relationship, seen to be messy and undefinable. The law constitutes the sole standard of public morality, binding on all. It's also worth remembering that, in spite of appearances, the current "clash" was precipitated not by the logic of war (rivalry, aggression, revenge, domination), but by well-prepared Western low-context government decision-making (i.e. legal) as a response to terrorist attacks (illegal)*. The battle was and is over legal frameworks (regime change), legal philosophy and legalist culture, not over territorial control as in traditional wars. Legality replaces morality. In spite of the official rhetoric or propaganda, it isn't at all the clash of good and evil, concepts that belong to the domain of morality, although it's also true that the prevailing culture assumes and insists that "rule of law" = good and anything else = evil..

Here is what Bush had to say: "Bringing Saddam Hussein to justice ... is an important milestone on Iraq’s course to becoming a democracy that can govern, sustain and defend itself, and be an ally in the war on terror." "Milestone" unsurprisingly reflects a managerial culture (business within the law, much of the law being concerned with how business is conducted). "Bringing... to justice" in a "democracy" sets the legal framework (it also implicitly recognizes the US as the police force and the Iraqis as the judiciary). Once the framework of judicial procedure is clearly established, there can be nothing to criticize or regret. Executing Saddam is a milestone on the road to progress and profitability. Bush characteristically takes it one step further by pushing his standard political agenda, identifying the good not only as "democracy" but also as being "an ally in the war on terror". This fittingly reminds us that, according to his logic, the law isn't designed to bring peace and reconciliation, but to justify war. Quite the opposite of the spirit of Eid. Which makes the act of pushing the execution to the pre-dawn of Eid doubly insulting to many in the Muslim community. The timing (last minute, before the official start of the feast) smacks of legalism, a US speciality.

The critical factor in all this appears to be the conviction within US culture that recourse to a legal and judicial framework (a democracy with a constitution and "a fair trial by one's peers") -- even in an extremely unstable and historically ambiguous political environment -- authorizes the neglect of all the standard elements of human relationships: identity, empathy and even self-preservation or survival. Interestingly, the British put the emphasis on personal justice:

In London, Foreign Secretary Margaret Beckett said Saddam had “now been held to account for at least some of the appalling crimes he committed against the Iraqi people,” while at the same time condemning the death penalty.

Perfidious Albion (as the French would say)! They'll always try to have it both ways. Justice is served (at least partially) but the way barbarians carry it out is reprehensible (or merely distasteful). It's the "at least" that I find intriguing. Does she mean that if the Brits had had their way Saddam would have been condemned for more of his crimes... but still not executed, of course? I detect behind the rhetoric an appeal to the standard Blairist justification for invading Iraq: punishing an evil man. "Held to account", like Bush's "milestone", also reveals a nod to low context managerial business culture.

Curiously I find a parallel in the reactions of the Arabic community -- a part of which sees Saddam as a martyr to Western "management" of the Middle East -- and the the acquittal of O.J. Simpson in his murder trial in Los Angeles a decade ago. Those who felt a form of justice was served by acquitting OJ (essentially the black community) did so not because they thought the man was innocent (they didn't), but because they saw it as a symbolic victory of their community against a legal system heavily weighted against blacks. I remember seeing a black man interviewed on TV who described it succinctly: "The support of our community for O.J. was a mile wide... and an inch deep." That's a high context comment, if ever there was one! OJ, the murderer, was seen as a successful resistant to a system that oppressed blacks. Saddam, the mass murderer, is a resistant and martyr to a system that oppresses Arabs. For both communities, official justice (the laws and the courts) is what money and power can purchase, neither more nor less. It is clearly not the idealized "rule of law" that sets everything right and makes everyone equal.

What could interculturalists have done to limit the damage? (We shouldn't forget that some intercultural experts probably were in fact consulted in all this business, but what they may have said we don't know and whether they were listened to at all begs another question). They might nevertheless have reminded the US authorities that revenge is a dangerous horse to back and that Saddam's Shiite enemies were motivated by revenge. They could have highlighted the moral contradiction associated with the feast of Eid, especially as US citizenstend to see such things as "holidays" rather than "holy days", devoid of any meaning other than historically anecdotal and serving principally as a pretext for taking time off to pursue one's leisure activities. (The status and meaning of "feasts" is a factor of cultural differentiation at least as important as power-distance and the other traditional dimensions). They could also have pointed to the role of martyrdom in all cultures and in middle eastern Muslim cultures in particular (the West still has difficulty understanding the psychology of suicide bombers and therefore appreciating the "extent of the risk", to put it into management terminology).

What the interculturalists couldn't do was to influence an overall political situation that has been based from the start on culturally insensitive calculations -- from the price of a barrel of oil to the cost of regime change -- and is now concerned with manipulating whatever forces that remain (or appear to remain) manipulable to create a semblance of stability. Unfortunately, the very act of manipulating certain people, parties and communities renders them suspect, augmenting the instability and undermining the "progress" represented by the significant "milestones".

For a more realistic reading of the situation, I suggest this article:

The waves of the past and tsunamis of the present

2006-12-04T10:37:00.000+01:00

Many years ago, when I was living in the UK as a student, the bitterest struggles in the headlines were in South Africa, Nigeria (the Ibo rebellion), Pakistan, Bangladesh, Palestine and Northern Ireland. It occurred to me that all of these issues were the part of the sour and sulfurous heritage of Empire and, perhaps worse, of post-imperial political and economic rationalism. In the intercultural community the issue has recently come up concerning, quite obviously, Iraq, Sri Lanka and even Fiji. The list is far from exhaustive. The long and the short of it is that the Brits spread more durable havoc across an empire on which the sun never set than anyone else. How did they do it? Where did the talent to do it come from? And how is it that the spirit and the beat goes on, more than half a century after decolonization?

Britannia ruled the waves and made new ones wherever it went, producing a few tsunamis along the way. Of course some of the ingredients were: pragmatism (capitalistic rationality or working for profit), organizational skills (political and entrepreneurial management), scientific research (the mastery of the physical universe along with the domineering attitude that mastery entails), industrial production (requiring the massive transfer of resources -- including human ones -- across vast distances, taking only minimal account of borders, populations or local conditions), a sense of destiny (manifest or not) and finally the subversion of the notion of "common wealth" by turning it into "the Commonwealth" with the implicit governing principle of the sacredness of private property, individual ownership as well as "initiative" and manipulative control (military, economic, cultural) under a sun that never sets.

The rise of Britannia's subsidiary, the US (flanked by the wholly owned local branch of Brittania, Canada) made it possible to consolidate and spread radical individualism and invasive capitalism under the banner of democracy, which was already the trend in the mother ship in spite of a lingering affection for an animated figurehead (especially as a female avatar). In this permutation, what started off as "commonwealth" became the "common individual quest for wealth", the ultimate "common denominator" of global culture.

What can any culture do in the face of such powerful forces of organization and ideology apart from build its own museum to preserve some tenuous visual vestiges of its ill-remembered past and lost values? There is, of course, one alternative: cultural and religious fundamentalism, which is another variation on how to pervert rather than how to preserve the past. Once the vital principles underlying the spontaneous (i.e. culturally conditioned) perception of the world, its inhabitants, its structure of meaning, etc. are replaced by an alternative configuration of perception and reasoning (i.e. pragmatism, profit, control, manipulation), a return to the original culture becomes as utterly illusory as a Jurassic Park-style dream (and nightmare) of discovering or reinstating a lost world of dinosaurs.

The challenge for interculturalists is, as my friend George Simons has pointed out, keeping track of history and realizing that today is part of history as well. The other challenge is to bear in mind that culture is like prose for Monsieur Jourdain: it's there whether we recognize it or not ... unless replaced by poetry! It doesn't die even when it's totally metamorphosed. Because it's there, and because its rules apply to everyone within its purview, we can have some very limited influence over how it evolves, depending of course (in today's world) on how good we are at... appropriating resources, controlling and manipulating!

Or simply communicating through the "social Web"????

Therapy for Michael Richards

2006-12-04T10:32:00.000+01:00

I'm surprised that I haven't seen anyone in our intercultural community voicing an opinion about the Michael Richards affair in the US. (Richards was famous for playing the character "Kramer" in the TV series, Seinfeld) For those who haven't followed the story, several weeks ago, he was caught in the act of insulting black members of the audience in a night club where he was performing as a stand up comic. He shockingly used what in the US is now called "the n-word", a fact which has led to a complex debate about its use and non-use... but not, of course, about the absurd appellation, "n-word". I managed to see the scene on the Web, as captured in video on someone's mobile phone during the performance, and was shocked myself, but by the speaker's attitude, not by the word. Used to express hatred and contempt against people of a certain ethnic origin and, worse, cultural condescension, it is quite rightly considered to be utterly reprehensible, which is why blacks alone can and do call each other "nigger" (sorry, I wrote it!!!!). No one could suspect them of using it to express racial hatred.

Richards used the word repeatedly in the most odious way, directed at specific individuals, and that is disturbing. But far more troubling was his statement, "Fifty years ago you would be hanging upside down with a fork up your ass". (The press in the US squeamishly refuses to print the final word in full!!!!). Never having participated in a lynching, I remain blissfully unaware of the the ritual use of eating utensils (though I suspect that if you cover your entire figure with a tablecloth you might be thinking of what to do with the cutlery).

Whatever Richards manages to work out with his psychotherapist, he has revealed something that, in my naiveté, I find difficult to understand: the persistence of a semi-conscious nostalgia among modern "liberals" (Richards claims to be one) for a time when racial violence was "permitted" (of course it wasn't permitted even 50 years ago; it was merely practiced!). Is there any way anyone other than a died-in-the-cotton Ku Klux Klansman could regret no longer having the right to torture and murder blacks? And am I wrong to think there isn't a cannabilistic impulse that has come to the fore? (What, indeed, are the "literary" origins of the image of the fork?).

Rather than spend hours on the couch with an analyst, perhaps he could just be sentenced to spending a day listening to Billie Holiday's "Strange Fruit" (Nina Simone's version could also be used, for variety). For anyone who doesn't know the lyrics to that song -- composed by a New York Jew, Abel Meeropol, in the 1930s -- here they are:

Southern trees bear a strange fruit
Blood on the leaves and blood at the root
Black bodies swingin' in the Southern breeze
Strange fruit hangin' from the poplar trees

Pastoral scene of the gallant South
The bulging eyes and the twisted mouth
Scent of magnolia, sweet and fresh
Then the sudden smell of burning flesh

Here is the fruit for the crows to pluck
For the rain to gather, for the wind to suck
For the sun to rot, for the tree to drop
Here is a strange and bitter crop.

For more about this very special song: Strange Fruit

Informal culture in a formal setting

2006-07-18T08:38:00.000+02:00

Nothing is more revelatory of culture than the trivial, especially when the circumstances are untrivial. Bush's lunchtime banter made the headlines yesterday because it contained what is considered to be an "unprintable" word, "shit". (The New York Times calls it "a vulgarity"). Interestingly, CNN played the video + audio over and over again with full subtitles, including the forbidden word, but the website spelled it "sh_t" (actually, they cleverly turned it into a pun "the sh_t heard round the world"*). Apparently, we're allowed to hear it and read it as a subtitle that appears and disappears, but cannot print it on a page, where it might be duplicated, circulated or simply meditated. What set of implicit (or for that matter explicit) cultural rules does this practice suggest?

More to the point are other clues about culture (and the lack thereof) in the substance of what Bush said. For example, he said he “felt like telling Kofi to get on the phone with Assad, make something happen” and in the "vulgar" passage said, “See the irony is that what they need to do is get Syria to get Hezbollah to stop doing this shit and it’s over,” What better illustration of the logic of sequential instrumentality than this "get x to get y to do...". This also reveals the curious use of "irony" in U.S. culture (it tends to designate any statement that appears to be mildly unexpected). I sincerely believe that one of the "dimensions" -- or differentiators -- of culture forgotten by Hall, Hofstede and Trompenaars is the status and meaning of irony. Perhaps someon would like to run a statistical study of it and then develop a marketable theory based on the spectrum of strongly ironic to weakly ironic cultures.

Bush's instrumental view of problem-solving -- which helps to explain the "reasoning" behind the Iraq war -- appears almost as a parody of the language of a top manager in a Hollywood film about Wall Street (or maybe the Sopranos). Bush's culture -- and much of U.S. culture -- is one of getting things done by giving orders and establishing deadlines. It's also one where results are definitive; throw a stone in the water and there will be a splash but no one need pay attention to the ripples. "Stop doing this shit and it's over" he tells Blair. This should remind us of Bush's remarks in the buildup to the Iraq war ("game over!") and its immediate aftermath: "Mission accomplished". If he still doesn't understand that social and political problems cannot be resolved definitively by simple authoritarian decision-making and subsequent action (what a famous fictional Dane once called "taking arms against a sea of troubles"), it may reflect not only his own incapacity to learn from experience but also some of the reflexes inherited from his culture. As I myself am a product of U.S. culture, I prefer to think there's more of the former than the latter. But I have to recognize that this corresponds to a certain well-established mythology in U.S. culture: if the whale is tormenting you, take a boatload of people and a healthy supply of harpoons and go out and kill it (achieving quietus with a bare bodkin, to quote the Dane again). Melville had already made observations similar to mine about the values of his countrymen.

The NY Times has this description of the event:

"The microphone caught him discussing global trade talks, his impatience with long speeches, even his preference for Diet Coke. For four minutes, the world was given an unscripted look at how he does business with his international counterparts, especially Prime Minister Tony Blair of Britain, who, apparently alert to the peril, brought the episode to a conclusion by turning the microphone off."

All reports noticed his impatience with anything but the nitty-gritty and his insistence on respecting timing, which shouldn't surprise anyone. “I’m not going to talk too damn long like the rest of them. Some of these guys talk too long.” Complaining about the behaviour of "the rest of them" is always a clear indicator of cultural isolation. (By the way, "damn" used to be "vulgar" but has clearly changed status over the past 30 or 40 years and has become eminently printable, possibly because it doesn't refer to a bodily function).It's interesting to note that Blair was much more discreet and showed some good English pragmatism by turning the microphone off.

The episode on geography could have been scripted by a Middle School student:

But Mr. Bush sighs, and explains, “Gotta go home, got something to do.”

Then, more likely to Mr. Hu, he asks: “Where you going? Home? This is your neighborhood; it won’t take you long to get home.”

The response cannot be heard, but Mr. Bush exclaims, “You get home in 8 hours? Me too! Russia is a big country, and you’re a big country.

China and Russia are apparently in the same "neighborhood" because they are both far from Texas! Since Bush had never travelled outside the U.S. before becoming president, this is perhaps understandable.

But the most delightful is certainly the moment when the most powerful politician on the planet explains why he must leave the seven next most powerful politicians, “Gotta go home, got something to do.”

There are many other observations that could be made about this episode, but they range from the cultural to the political to the psychoanalytical. In the end -- just like the current problems in the Middle East -- it's just a little too much for any one person (or eight leaders, for that matter) to handle.

* For those who are not familiar with "the shot heard round the world", it refers to the opening salvo of the American War of Independence (in a Ralph Waldo Emerson poem).

Accenture opens our eyes

2006-07-17T11:07:00.000+02:00

Last week Accenture released a study of intercultural issues for U.S. companies that have outsourced business processes. It demonstrates what should be obvious to most of us but has been insufficiently documented: a growing awareness of the economic interest of improved intercultural communication. This is the kind of study the profession has been waiting for: something to convince decision-makers of the strategic importance of intercultural skills. The fact that it concerns critical business processes should be counted a major breakthrough since management has traditionally considered intercultural issues to be an HR problem and little more. A report on the report can be found here.

Here are some examples of the findings:

Executives believe adopting cross-cultural communication training programs can increase productivity by 26 percent, on average. This is consistent with the productivity increases of 30 percent.
reported by executives whose companies already provide training in this area.
Two thirds (66 percent) of all respondents said they had experienced miscommunication issues within their global sourcing operations.
"The soft issues, particularly cross-cultural communication, will continue to present the main challenges to realizing global sourcing's full potential for the foreseeable future."

It's interesting that the productivity gap between companies that provide intercultural training and those that don't is only 12%, with 60% (as opposed to 72%) of those companies still experiencing communication problems. This can be interpreted in two ways:

Training helps because it reduces problems by 12%.
Training doesn't help very much! (because it fails to provide solutions to 60% of the cases).

The statistics are probably fairly meaningless as they are based on subjective appreciation, but gaps always tells us something. I would suggest that -- based only on the first impressions gleaned from the Yahoo article -- we could draw two tentative conclusions:

The training currently proposed is probably inadequate or badly targeted (e.g. focusing on intercultural theory rather than psychology and personality) and therefore we are faced with the challenge of re-inventing intercultural training.
We should be thinking in terms other than simple training (pre-defined courses) and looking at how an intercultural culture can be developed and maintained.

These are just random thoughts about the findings of a report I haven't seen. If anyone consulting this blog has information about the report, access to it or feedback from other professionals, it might develop into a productive thread.

Multiple choice or Multiple strategies

2006-05-26T09:40:00.000+02:00

In the delightful Business Creativity discussion group (an international but essentially IndianYahoo group), the moderator challenged the list with a multiple choice question in the form of a human resource case study problem (essentially, whether or not to grant paid leave to Don, an employee seeking to further his education on company time). This provoked some interesting feedback, but most of the contributors stayed strictly within the implicit reasoning of the initial choices.

I saw this discussion as an opportunity to review some of our classic pedagogic strategies and made the following reply:

I see this exercise as a first phase of creative thinking, and this for three reasons.

As in most multiple choice questions (and many case studies) there is no developed context, which means the intangible, invisible aspects of social reality are absent and we are condemned to work at the level of abstract principles, which never apply “cleanly” to reality, but do provide some “reasoned guidelines” (unfortunately in our pedagogical tradition nobody ever makes this capital point about the relativity of the principles we are meant to learn).
In people management, there are plenty of wrong answers but never a totally right one (precisely because of context), yet multiple choice in the teaching-learning tradition leads learners to believe, first, that there is one right answer; second, that the trainer knows that answer; and third, that we will "know" that answer for eternity at the end of the exercise.
Multiple choice questions limit the horizon if we use them as a strict frame for reflection, but their value can be to open the horizon by showing that there are indeed multiple possible answers. They can start the brainstorming process going by challenging people to imagine the variables of context that will influence the best selection of strategy. Doing it in multiple phases, as is the case here, is one way of opening the horizon.

In other words, questions like this can be a springboard for creativity so long as we accept to think outside of the box and even aim precisely for that by pushing the cases further and, if need be, to their breaking point. Two of the techniques we use in training where an activity starts with a multiple choice are:

1. to use it to brainstorm on ANY and ALL kinds of similar cases within the experience of the group of learners, who then must account for as many elements of context as possible (including, for example, personality issues, social networks, etc.), all of which allows us to discover the importance of these “social reality” issues. In other words, the learners fill in the missing context from the initial case by relating it to real, known contexts. This actually helps, on another level, to build group and individual confidence and to create the reflex of relating what would otherwise be considered as "canned wisdom" to their own very real human context.

2. to go back through a deconstruction phase and find out why each of the initial choices was proposed (i.e. what kind of reasoning lies behind them -- including the good reasons that lie behind faulty choices -- but also, what was the didactic strategy of the author of the question! – a process which often makes people think on a different and highly stimulating level).

These are processes that work well within a group of learners in a seminar but aren’t easy to apply in an online discussion group, where the level of mutual knowledge and personal trust is impossible to assess. They also work well in CoPs (Communities of Practice), which is one of the themes my multinational team is specialized in, in conjunction with informal learning. As a case in point of the deep compatibility between formal and informal learning, multiple choice questions -- the simplest of teaching tools -- are highly formal but can provide occasions for animated informal learning. We maintain that in all configurations people learn mostly from informal exchange, but that formal learning can be structured in such a way as to encourage it. Unfortunately, that rarely happens.

At the end of the day, my answer to Don (in my own context, not the abstract one proposed in the question) would be to throw two questions back to him: what do you need to learn and what are you expecting to learn from the course you want to enrol in? I wouldn’t try to dissuade him from taking the course (and discussing how that fits in to his work schedule), but I would try to better understand what his goals are and how they correlate with mine (i.e. the organization's). I would use the knowledge gained from this exchange to understand in what form what he needs to know professionally exists (or fails to exist) in our real work context. I would then look at ways in which three separate things can happen:

How to make more explicit within the workplace the “knowledge” or skills he's hoping to acquire.
How to foresee support within the workflow for what should have been learned in the formal phase (to avoid the highly predictable loss of formally acquired knowledge).
How existing social networks (determined through ONA, Organizational Network Analysis) can be used to support, develop and share this kind of kind of knowledge in informal settings.

This would probably lead to the definition of one or more CoPs, as well as the integration of Don into one of them.

Of course, everything I’ve said above focuses only on the learning side of the problem, which certainly wasn’t the initial intent of the question. But I hope this serves as a demonstration of how something as formal as a Multiple Choice Question built around a specific learning point (in this case, how to manage work time in relation to personal and organizational goals) can stimulate creative contributions. That works, of course, only if the trainer’s attitude is also creative. Unfortunately, many trainers are thinking in terms of pre-established “teaching points” and fail to recognize what I would call “lateral wisdom”. But there's increasing reason to believe the old school is losing ground and new approaches to learning -- first as a complex personal, social and professional goal, then as a process -- are truly emerging. The process has always been put first, but the priority of goals is finally being recognized, at least in some quarters. And that should lead to some unexpected new conclusions.

The act of interacting: is it interactivity and/or interaction?

2006-05-14T09:18:00.000+02:00

Historians of technology assisted learning -- if such people exist -- should by now have noticed that there have always been two alternating and possibly opposed trends. (I say possibly because I believe they can be reconciled, but I can see that the tendency to align with one side or the other in the aim of promoting a simple, saleable solution is as strong in the "learning industry" as it is in politics).

I call these two contrasting (and potentially converging) trends interactivity and interaction. Apparently the general idea of interacting has convinced everyone that that's what technology is all about. That's where we expect our payback for supporting and investing in technology. But what does interacting mean? To answer that question we have to ask another question: "who is interacting with whom or with what"?. Beyond that (i.e. at the heart of everything) are the whys and wherefores, long before the how. The fact that no one seems willing or able to formulate clearly why we learn or why we should learn may explain some of the confusion.

Depending on how you answer the question "interacting with whom or with what?", you are likely to align yourself either with the humanists (salvation will come from dialogue, social learning, facilitated by flexible user-friendly networks) or the technologists (salvation can be found in computing power: expert systems, realistic graphics, animation and simulations). It's possible to embrace both, of course, but the trend is to opt for one or the other. Personally I give priority to the humanist side, considering everything else to be a flipchart, an immensely valuable instrument that can provide specific services in the interest of improving and refining interaction. Giving priority is not choosing one against the other: it is simply taking a first step towards recognizing the importance of why rather than deciding in favor of one with whom or another. And priority should be determined by finality not by personal preference.

Technological innovation in interactivity has driven the marketplace over the past 30 years, laregely on the basis of
1) fascination with technology in the press and general public
2) the visibility and marketability of finished products as compared to the unmarketable nature of processes to be learned, acquired, spread and applied by groups of people.

Can the two worlds converge? The promise of the Web 2.0 seems to indicate yes, as we move away from a product and broadcast based model to one of dynamic networks that includes all forms of innovation. It's similar to moving from a Ptolomaic (mechanically organized) to a Newtonian universe (organized around gravitional cores, to borrow Tim O'Reilly's notion), while waiting for some future Einsteinian revolution (where gravity is still the fundamental force but where we all become relatives in the same family!). Ptolomy's planets and stars are still there to be observed as units, but they are no longer confined to their set spheres. Morevover, in a gravitational universe, we finally recognize their own principle of power and influence (gravitational force) rather than seeing them as simple objects placed in a set position in a stable and totally repetitive machine.

The real hope of interacting -- at least for those who see the finality as dynamic and evolutionary -- is to escape the logic of pure repetition that is so pleasing to both the representatives of the establishment, where the function of instructing is more important than the reality of learning, and to the marketing people who want you to believe that using their product will solve all your problems.

I believe the next couple of years will bring about some serious changes. Some things are now coming to light that will change our vision of the relationship between interaction and interactivity.

More news on this in July!

The future of blogs in organizations

2006-03-17T08:29:00.000+01:00

On the Learning Circuits blog Jay Cross raised the question of the use of blogs for organizational puposes, in particular bottom-up knowledge management. This has sparked a debate about how useful blogs are within organizations and what is required to turn them into tools of productivity. It occurred to me that there are two issues that need to be clarified before this straegy can become successful. One is technical (the evolving range of functionality of blogs) and the other -- far more important -- is cultural. The following expands on a comment I left in the Learning Circuits blog.

One of what I would call the "cultural" problems with blogs is that, although manifestly public, the implicit model of a blog is the personal diary. This apparent contradiction may help to explain some of the frustration we feel with certain blogs. It conditions how we write in a blog as well as how we read it. It also conditions our expectations as to what we might get out of a blog in terms of information, enlightenment or even a "sense of community".

When considering how the blog can usefully and naturally fulfil an organizational role, I expect that we will have to let the concept (and the blogging tools) evolve towards something that is more team-oriented and less linear in structure. The reliability of information offered by individuals qua individuals will always be suspect and the principle of growth by simple accretion (creating amorphous “heaps” of information mixed with opinion) may not be the best way of clarifying or even exploring important issues. If blogs were truly redesigned for team rather than individual expression, the teams could find, define and redefine objectives and then measure their performance against those objectives. They might thereby achieve the kind of focus that would make it easier for those consulting the blog to understand and use.

Blogs are currently purely vertical structures. Perhaps they need to become horizontal as well and to move away from the model of private individual expression “shared” with the public. This would be a cultural shift that would have an impact on how we contribute to blogs. The question then arises, "which comes first, the new architecture of the blog or the cultural shift?". The only possible answer, as with chickens and eggs and all other evolutionary questions, is "both". But this will only happen if our dominantly individualistic IT culture and global capitalist economy can themselves integrate concepts that are more specifically collectivist. I tend to believe there are powerful economic and political (and therefore cultural) forces that will seek to prevent this from happening in any significant way. The consumer society depends on the atomization of society, ensuring that people cannot easily and spontaneously organize into effective teams that may generate their own values at odds with the dominant ones. Effective teams born of bottom-up initiatives may be suspected of challenging existing power structures as well as disrupting planning based entirely on predictable (and/or controlable) trends.

Which, of course, shouldn't prevent us bottom-uppers from trying!

Race and the imperial elite

2006-03-05T16:58:00.000+01:00

To help situate the debate on power, powerlessness and race, it’s worth having a look at an article by Ron Suskind in the New York Times Magazine published just a few weeks before the 2004 presidential election in the U.S.
The journalist explains:

“In the summer of 2002…I had a meeting with a senior adviser to Bush” who was unhappy about something Suskind had published. Here is the journalist’s account of that interview:

The aide said that guys like me were ''in what we call the reality-based community,'' which he defined as people who ''believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality.'' I nodded and murmured something about enlightenment principles and empiricism. He cut me off. ''That's not the way the world really works anymore,'' he continued. ''We're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you're studying that reality -- judiciously, as you will -- we'll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that's how things will sort out. We're history's actors . . . and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.''

_________

We thus discover that the problem I recently described as one of racism is not uniquely founded on race. It appears that there’s a specific ideology of superiority even within the dominant race: the idea that there is, on the one hand, a breed of leaders (hovering above reality and controlling politics and the economy) and a breed of followers (rooted helplessly in reality). Bush’s senior adviser understood that this was a consequence of empire as well as an inevitable historical evolution (perhaps in the Hegelian sense). In short, he’s describing a three-tiered system: dominant leaders who dominate the dominant nation and region (identified with a racially determined culture: white northern Europe/U.S.) which in turn dominates the struggling masses spread out over the rest of the globe. One is left wondering what the Bush administration means when it claims to encourage “democracy” (is it a special kind of democracy, fuelled by economic influence, that can be counted on to consistently plebiscite an neo-aristocratic elite?).

It’s rare that elite poker players or politicians show their hand before raking in the chips. So such an instance of frank testimony on the part of a “senior adviser” is precious. And what he describes appears to be true, especially to those who find themselves at the end of the line, i.e., the dominated masses in the rest of the world. Might this feeling of belonging to the third tier on the periphery of an empire be part, not only of the reaction to the Danish cartoons, but to the malaise in India and Pakistan at Bush’s lightning visit to define single-handedly the world’s nuclear policy and to a growing anti-U.S. sentiment detectable all across the globe?

This painting by Thomas Cole in 1836 represents the imaginary creation of an empire in the U.S. Click here to see the painting in detail (with an option full screen) and to learn about it.

______________

The question of race comes up again in the article in the context of a luncheon for supporters of his campaign:

In response to a question, he talked about diversity, saying that ''hands down,'' he has the most diverse senior staff in terms of both gender and race. He recalled a meeting with Chancellor Gerhard Schröder of Germany. ''You know, I'm sitting there with Schröder one day with Colin and Condi. And I'm thinking: What's Schröder thinking?! He's sitting here with two blacks and one's a woman.''

Colin Powell and Condolezza Rice provide the answer to diversity. Their presence is designed to make it impossible to suspect the system of being racist because it visibly and ostentatiously accepts people from any race, provided, of course, that they fully identify with the system. The important thing isn’t diversity in society, but diversity within the imperial ruling class. The status of being a member of the ruling class (which isn’t the same thing as ruling) requires two things: personal choice, effort and ambition (i.e. a form of devotion on the part of the racially heterogeneous) and selection by the leaders of the elite. It is not achieved through democratic representation nor does it reflect the idea of representation of the their community. The effect is primarily one of image, which is what so delighted Bush in the presence of Schroeder. It turns out that politics is the third and potentially most glorious avenue of success for any young black, after the entertainment industry and professional sports. It’s also the most difficult because it requires being selected, or rather co-opted by the powerful to join their club. It cannot be achieved through talent and perseverance alone (the virtue of assertive self-reliance).

Will these trends continue or are they ephemeral accidents of history? Was the senior adviser describing the ethos of Bush’s private governing club, in power for twice four years, or that of an imperial elite that is broader in scope and longer in duration, and includes Democratic administrations as well? Did Clinton see the world, and act in it, in pretty much the same way? How much are the Blairs, Berlusconis, Schroeders, Merkels and Chiracs also part of it, as regional prefects?

If we had the answers to these questions perhaps we could develop a plan for training the racially diverse in the intercultural skills they need to migrate from their peripheral communities to the heart of the empire. But somehow I think the imperial elite has already created its training curriculum and don’t really need outsiders from the “reality-based community” such as ourselves.

Perhaps it’s time for those of us who hail from the reality-based community to create the RBC party to oppose the principles and pretensions of the RC (Reality Creation) Party. Then when we take over the reins of imperial government we can create our own reality and justify the trust the RB community has placed in us. We will finally have overcome our pernicious enslavement to the “judicious study of discernible reality”.

Levels of racism

2006-03-02T11:41:00.001+01:00

Some people have attempted to argue that racism can be seen as a kind of zero-sum game. If the Danish cartoons reflect a certain form of racism, the disproportionate reaction to them in so many different places can be seen as a competing form of racism. The implication is that one cancels out the other and, after all, human nature isn't perfect. But neither, I would submit, is the symmetry we're expected to recognize in this putative face-off of complementary racisms.

The drift of this reasoning often goes one step further by suggesting that complaints about racism on "our side" (white western civilization) are attempts to excuse or mask the racism on the other side, thereby denying the reality of the zero-sum game. One interpretation of my previous posting suggests this idea. In that message, however, I specifically mentioned and condemned the extremist Muslim minority responsible for the more violent and well organized reactions. There is no question of excusing excessive behaviour, though I feel as interculturalists part of our job is to try to understand where it comes from and how it is structured. I should add that, however reprehensible this sometimes programmed and manipulated violence may be, I don't think it should be called racism. Rather it's a form of direct resistance and refusal of the dominant and dominating influence of another culture, an act of open and aggressive public defiance, a phenomenon not unknown even in our own enlightened history (the standard stuff of insurrections leading to wars of independence, Boston Tea Party style). Such organised or impovised resistance may be fully or partially justified, or not justified at all; but it isn't quite the same thing as racism.

I have to admit that I am increasingly appalled by our complacency with a state of general insensitivity to the fate of people who are 1) living in "less advanced" countries and 2) have darker skin than the Europeans who created modern democracy and its sidekick, global capitalism. The best we can do is hope they will become more like us and possibly help them to do so! I recently tried an online "psychological test" designed to determine whether the person taking it is racist and the result for myself said that I was positive. I discovered that I am unconsciously racist. The only comforting factor for me - because I pride myself in not being racist -- is that 50% of American blacks apparently also test out as white racists! This may be an indication of the deep success of a culture that is built on some invisible but fundamentally powerful racist values (in total contradiction, of course, with other visible and explicit values, such as democracy and equality).

My point is that I am neither attempting to blame one party nor excuse another. I'm not even trying to define parties. Rather than looking for a culprit (or group of culprits), I'm trying to recognize a problem and discover where the roots are and how deep they penetrate into our cultural soil. The cartoons, by the way, are only one factor in my outburst. And that fact highlights what is perhaps the most important point in my previous posting. We're wrong to think of it as a problem of the "clash of civilizations" between the post-Christian west and the Muslim world. It's something more fundamental residing in our deep-seated belief that western whites have reached a higher stage of cultural (if not biological) evolution than the rest of humanity. The result is pity and/or contempt of the rest of the world (or mere indifference).

Another contributing factor to my current rage, and this is strictly a matter of chance, is a television documentary I happened to see last week on the history channel (Histoire) here in France. It was a BBC documentary about the end of WWII and the two spectacular A-bombs dropped on Hiroshima & Nagasaki. Hundreds of thousands of people were sacrificed for no other reason than geo-political strategy (to wit, showing Stalin how "advanced" we were and preventing the Russians from invading Japan). Japan had already offered to surrender but insisted on maintaining the Emperor, considered to be a god. It was all they required to save face, but Truman insisted on "unconditional surrender". After the horrendous, wanton destruction of two cities, Truman got his unconditional surrender, thought this was primarily because in the meantime Russia declared war on Japan. And of course once they had surrendered, Truman generously "offered" the Japanese the very condition they insisted on: maintaining Hirohito as emperor. Although I was already aware of most of the facts, I felt literally sick watching it. Can politics be so inhuman? ... apart from intercultural questions such as the importance of face in Eastern Asia and respect of the symbols of other people's religious, whether one finds them absurd or not.

The documentary consisted almost entirely of interviews. There was very little pure narration. Some of the people interviewed pointed out how the war propaganda developed the idea that the Japanese weren't human beings (a racist sentiment echoed publicly by French prime minister, Edith Cresson, just over ten years ago!). If we had considered them to be our equals, could we have envisaged and accepted massacring entire civilian populations? Not only were the Japanese guilty of Pearl Harbor, but they weren't really human beings anyway.

Because Truman considered it irrational to think of a hereditary monarch as a god, he allowed himself to murder hundreds of thousands of people. That's a cultural problem similar in some ways - but with far worse consequences -- to the insensitivity of the Danish magazine. But provoking death or engaging in torture is only possible, however inexcusable, 1) if you are directly threatened 2) you are not threatened but you consider the other as less than human. Pinochet's torturers and murderers were professionals: they were paid for a specific task; they didn't need to think about why they were killing and torturing. The "enthusiasm" of Abu Ghraib, on the other hand, which we claim was not a matter of policy, can only be explained by ambient if not actively encouraged racism.

Another telling symptom: Samuel Huntington wants to re-establish and protect the WASP tradition in the U.S. from multiculturalism. He has a point, but the point - when you work out the details - is fundamentally racist, though the racism is implicit rather than explicit or possibly unconscious rather than conscious. It certainly isn't a paean to the Ku Klux Klan.

My point is that we tend to do a lot of things "innocently" and "normally" with good intentions, but with an effect that is clearly racist. One of the contributing factors is the belief that everything that's "most advanced" comes from the West (which seems so obvious when you compare measurable "standards of living"), though such a belief is not necessarily founded on the idea that it's advanced because it is Western (which would be simple cultural bigotry). The concept is rather that we - as a people (sometimes a nation, sometimes a race) must be more advanced to have created so many advanced things. Therefore we are implicitly endowed with a "civilizing mission", which we nevertheless seek generously to share with the not yet civilized others (for a small price, of course, since getting people to pay the price is what made us so advanced in the first place).

Those who profit from the advance of our civilization tend to agree; the others simply seethe with frustration until some incident comes along that makes them explode. The reaction of of the Indian population to Bush's visit to India is a demonstration of this divide. There is a class that can negotiate, partner and profit from the adoption of Western economic institutions and styles of consumption. There is another class -- much larger -- that is condemned to follow and occasionally protest. This method of divide and conquer can also be seen in the strategy for integration, particularly of blacks inside the U.S. in the wake of the civil rights movement of the 60s. The strategy consists of building a class of privileged "leaders" who profit from the extension of white civilization into their communities. You can then count on them to "govern" or at least guide their populations, less through political control than through the diversion of glamour. Sports heroes, movie stars and media figures constitute the "proof" of successful integration that rarely extends to the majority of a population still subjected to economic apartheid. A significant and sufficient number of the victims allow their identification with celebrities of their own race to shape their personal ambition, confirming their acceptance of the values of the dominant culture, one of which is individualism over collectivism (the ever threatening solidarity of the oppressed). The classic example of this is the ambition of black youngsters to play basketball in the NBA, where they can wear real diamonds in their ears (i.e. demonstrate and represent glamourous black culture). This phenonomen concerns hundreds of thousands (if not millions) of youngsters and has a powerful effect on the community's acceptance of persistent inequality, partly because it creates a feeling of racial pride (blacks are better basketball players or at least have a cultural style that is better adapted to the principles of the sport), but more significantly because it encourages individualism, self-reliance and capitalistic ambition in a community where none of these correspond to the structure and successful workings of the real economy and society confined as they are to the perimeter of white post-industrial civilization.

To some extent this malady of racism infects our own community of intercultural professionals. After all, much of what we do follows in the wake of globalisation and our job is as often as not one of supporting the trend, helping civilization advance. Can this be done ethically? Can we avoid racism? Should we counter it? Or is it better - or at least easier - simply to remain blithely unaware? These are questions we might want to ask ourselves (after taking an online psychological test), independently of what our employers or clients expect of us.

We could of course complicate the debate by citing the many examples of ethnic rivalry where race isn't the critical factor but the forms of behaviour are similar. But if race isn't the critical factor let's not call it racism. And especially let's not use the sins of others to excuse ourselves from thinking about our own contradictions.

Curious assumptions

2006-03-01T21:42:00.000+01:00

One of the things I find extraordinary in the continuing saga of the Danish cartoons is how easy it has become to polarize and demonise other groups, races and religions in the name of cultural (rather than racial or religious) superiority. To some extent it's a concession to PC. We're no longer allowed to frame issues publicly in terms of race or religion, so let's do it with culture (in particular political culture, culture's most superficial veneer).

In the controversy about the Danish cartoons, a bewildering myriad of variations on hate have emerged. The extremist Muslims have had their part in it, of course, but the violence of this tiny minority, who illegitimately echo the authentically wounded pride of the peaceful majority, is also being transformed by numerous intellectuals into an implicit "proof" of what should be recognized as fundamentally racist theses. The atmosphere appears to be one of backlash, i.e. growing intolerance and persistent misunderstanding. The breakdown isn't the west vs. Islam, but white civilization vs. the ambient disorder, Prospero vs. Caliban. I'm sorry to say this after the orgy of "awareness" spawned by the civil rights movement, but I have the impression that everywhere in the western world it has produced a small stream of selective integration and a flowing river of politically correct discourse.

The trend can be pernicious. I notice Francis Fukayama's at it again: . Having predicted the end of history 15 years ago - an "end" attributable to the globalizing triumph of the value system of the U.S. - he's now offering us (both Europeans and US Americans) the "truth" about Europe's identity crisis, which of course, in his comprehensive view, turns around the inability of European countries to integrate the Muslim minorities (it may just be his way of conceding victory to Samuel Huntington in the rivalry between two simplistic versions of the post-Cold War world, a rivalry in which Huntington scored the winning run on September 11, 2001).

What struck me while reading Fukayama's article is,

1) that he assumes last November's riots in France were an expression of Muslim identity and fails to realize that there's a long colonial and post-colonial history to what is essentially a racist status quo.

2) that he sees the model of U.S. immigration as the key to the salvation of Europe and practically gives straight A's to the U.S., whose colonial history is far different and no less inglorious, especially if one builds into one's account - as Fukayama fails to do - the fate of blacks, Native Americans and most Latinos (Fukayama seems to be thinking about voluntary "civilized" immigrants who arrive as individuals, not the groups sucked into the economy or pushed towards its periphery for the convenience of the masters and the "integrity" of the dominant culture*).

In other words, it seems to me glaringly obvious that the debates about clashes of values and civilizations have become a hypocritical means of denying the heritage and persistence of racism. Whether conscious or unconscious, it's clearly visible everywhere unless we refuse to see it (which seems to be the cosmetic role of PC). We continue to view the world in missionary-conquistador terms ("the good, advanced culture" of economic liberalism and its attendant values will inevitably triumph). Thus whenever friction arises between two cultures - as in the case of the cartoons -- we see it as an opportunity to analyse, as "objectively" as possible, which of the cultures is more advanced and draw conclusions from that rather than try
to understand how cultures (and not individuals) react to assaults on their values and the principles of their identity. This is the kind of reasoning that enables us to export "democracy" in the form of war and to condemn whole populations for reacting inappropriately (according to our values) to manifest insults. We don't despise the people whose affairs we have volunteered to manage; on the contrary, we are acting in their best interest by bringing them universal values (ours). The fact that they happen to have darker skin than ours is immaterial. The fact that they both have darker skin and maintain retrograde collectivist instincts (tribalism!) instead of embracing enlightened individualism makes them both suspect and easy to identify and eventually quarantine. This, I would submit, is racism.

Am I being paranoid (odd, because I'm definitely white)? Am I just imaging all this? Can anyone speak up and show me that racism is definitely not a part of what's going on? I'd be relieved to know it since that would make it much easier to begin to grapple with the monumental problems that are facing us (e.g. the fate of the planet, the stupidities of nation-states, large and
small, the corruption that appears to be built into our economies, liberal or constrained, etc.).

* Raising the question of the dominant culture has long been taboo in the U.S., thanks to the melting-pot theory, though left-wing intellectuals have, at least since the 50s, pointed to the historical domination of WASPS and the emergence of WASPism as a feature of the new extreme right wing (McCarthyism, John Birch Society, etc.). Huntington's latest contribution "Who are we?" very directly expresses his worry that white Protestant culture may be submerged by multiculturalism in general and Latino culture in particular. This isn't racism of course; it's "academic sociology" with a bit of cultural patriotism thrown in!

Mark Twain, misquotes and leadership culture

2006-02-27T09:39:00.000+01:00

Leadership training is a growing business. It's as if our complex economy, which has consistently moved away from managing the human in favour of managing money alone, felt guilty about this fundamental tendency and wanted to prove that the pursuit of gain is about the respect of human beings. I can't help feeling that there's a strong measure of hypocrisy in it, but perhaps that's a natural consequence of assuming a role of detached social observer.

Looking at the "field of leadership" (an interesting metaphor!) can be both amusing and frustrating. Those who teach it have, of course, to exemplify it in some way. The easiest way is to appear to be more knowledgeable than others and to be closer to a mythical community of the wise. Offering "inspriing quotes" is part of the process. The following is an example of where this can lead, something that is particularly painful to serious lovers of the arts, who will always prefer the artist's effort to highlight the complexity of reality to the moralist's campaign to simplify it.

Leadership gurus like to use the following misattributed quote:

"The miracle power that elevates the few is to be found in their industry, application, and perseverance, under the promptings of a brave determined spirit." - Mark Twain

In all fairness to Mark Twain, who was known for his sense of irony and his contempt for pretension, the text is not his. It is part of a quote from an unknown source which the young Samuel Clemens (Twain) copied into a notebook. He gave it the title “How to take life”. Twain probably used these words for his own inspiration as a young writer trying to make his mark (not as a team leader!). They reflected the dominant individualist values of the ambitious classes in the U.S. in the 19^th century.

It’s interesting to read what immediately precedes the oft-quoted sentence:

“Now and then a man stands aside from the crowd, labors earnestly, steadfastly, confidently, and straightway becomes famous for wisdom, intellect, skill, greatness of some sort. The world wonders, admires, idolizes, and it only illustrates what others may do if they take hold of life with a purpose.”

If this is about leadership, it is about a particularly romantic and probably now outdated U.S. brand of it in which the enterprising individual seeks to become an icon or, as the quote indicate, an idol (it is no coincidence that the TV show is called “American Idol” or that individuals such business-media figures as Donald Trump can still successfully transform themselves into idol-icons even after showy public demonstrations of their fundamental moral and even practical flaws: e.g. personal scandals and bankruptcy). The aim of the individual targeted in the quote is to stand above the others. Admiration and idolization are more important than substance and far more important than shared effort and the good of the community. The elevation “of the few” mentioned by the author whose words Twain copied describes the process of creating an elite – a caste of captains of culture and industry – who will acquire the “right” to dictate to others. As the author says, the individual “stands aside from the crowd” and proves himself without reference to it. Ultimately, by becoming an idol, he may control the destiny of the many.

I would submit (as many leadership experts actually do) that leadership is about interaction, not about isolated glory. The mature Mark Twain – and probably the young one as well, if he had had any reason to think about it -- would have agreed with me! In the field of intercultural communication, when we analyse U.S. culture we identify among its core values two that are highlighted in this quote: control and self-reliance (these are two of the seven core U.S. values developed in Cultural Detective, a method for training people to deal with other cultures). These values may be very positive of course – particularly when they are balanced with social goals – but they may also be sources of perverse action, as can be seen in some aspects of the relations the U.S. has with the rest of the world. This is particularly true, and very visible today, in foreign policy. And these are the values that helped define “the ugly American” back in the 1950s.

Control is a positive value when it leads to creation and innovation by seeking to make things easier and more rational (innovation, invention), particularly when its goal is productivity not just for oneself, but for the many. This is what’s behind the much admired “American ingenuity”. But control quickly becomes negative when it denies significant features of the reality it seeks to control, and is utterly deleterious when it leads to wanting to control everything, to the point of feeling anguish and stress when confronted with elements of reality that are – and should always remain -- beyond its control. It may be symptomatic that our culture is having a harder and harder time recognizing that there actually might be things that should be left beyond our desire to control. Some call this area of denied reality the sacred; others call it simply “the environment”.

Real leaders, of course, do not seek to control; their mission is to build that network with others that will make it possible to control their own well-defined challenges and point out the complex way towards harmonizing the particular efforts of control that each person is making in pursuing his or her own set of tasks. The key to this is not pulling the elaborate set of strings that force people to obey, but rather vision (seeing the whole, comprehensively and holistically) accompanied by communication (helping others to see their role in the whole).

Self-reliance is a positive virtue when it is seen and practised as autonomy, the ability to act without systematic dependence on others and particularly on the appointed elite. But it can become dangerous when it develops into pure competitiveness, the pursuit of isolated personal goals and the refusal of collaboration, communication and communion with others. U.S. culture often fails to distinguish between the two because it has turned the value itself into an icon.

What all cultures need to remember is that there is no positive value that cannot, under social pressure or through the effect of human ambition, transform into a frighteningly negative one. Real leaders remain acutely aware of these dangers.

Productivity and U.S. values

2006-02-23T11:47:00.002+01:00

Today's news contains an interesting article about feelings in the U.S. concerning personal productivity. Reading the comments reveals, in a general way, a lot about U.S. values. At the same time the implicit link with other events -- in particular the image of the U.S. in the world (see a Newsweek article published today) -- casts a melancholic light on history itself as the feeling that things are degenerating on many fronts is starting to make this début de siècle feel more and more like a fin de siècle.

Here's one of the interesting quotes from the article on productivity:

“We never concentrate on one task anymore. You take a little chip out of it, and then you’re on to the next thing,” Challenger said on Wednesday. “It’s harder to feel like you’re accomplishing something.”

Information technology -- which has driven the U.S. economy over the past 30 years -- has put a new and unexpected kind of cultural pressure on the U.S. Americans. Ironically, multi-tasking comes naturally and is easily dealt with in polychronic cultures, but has a disturbing effect on the monochronic culture that invented and promoted the technology.

A second quote reminds us of some of the basics in the U.S. value system:

“We think we’re faster, smarter, better with all this technology at our side and in the end, we still feel rushed and our feeling of productivity is down,” said Maria Woytek, marketing communications manager for Day-Timers, a unit of ACCO Brands Corp.

"Faster" reminds us of the importance of speed, which is pretty straightforward. When we analyze "smarter" in this context it has little to do with increased intellectual ability. It refers to the fact that, thanks to technology, we have accumulated more information, linking with notions of ownership and capitalism. It reflects the naive belief that more in quantity necessarily converts to more in quality. "Better" of course reminds us of the deep-seated need to feel at the forefront of history, as the pionneers and leaders who are showing others the way, the "city on the hill".

Ronald Downey, the psychologist interviewed for this article aptly states that technology “... just increases the expectations that people have for your production” and the consultant Don Grimme adds,

“The irony is the very expectation of getting more done is getting in the way of getting more done,” he said. “People are stressed out.”

Speed used to be seen as manageable in U.S. culture. But the acceleration has been so great and the returns so consistently diminishing that the "speed culture" of the U.S. is entering into a real crisis. Much of it is probably economic and linked to globalisation: to maintain the traditional lifestyle of conspicuous consumption more output is required and therefore more work is required. The convergent effects of feminism and overseas competition for jobs has begun to take its toll. One of the effects of feminism was to put the majority of child-bearing age women to work, presumably by their choice as a gauge of equality, but it also created the conditions in which normal household revenue had to include two salaries, which wasn't the case before the 1970s. So what was first a choice became a necessity, a condition which inevitably produces stress as the awareness of a margin of maneuver disappears.

There is one positive finding, reasonably consistent with the bases of U.S. culture:

Companies that are flexible with workers’ time and give workers the most control over their tasks tend to fare better against the sea of rising expectations, experts said.

I say "reasonably consistent" because freedom of action is a fundamental U.S. value and therefore flexibility fits in nicely and naturally with work practices. On the other hand the importance of control -- especially in capitalistic economic settings -- has made it difficult to transfer power to lower levels even if responsibility is easily transferred (the mismatch between power and responsibility is a phenomenon that deserved to be studied). Shareholders increasingly control management and management, though judged on overall performance (particular in terms of pure financial results) is tempted on the one hand to micro-manage, thereby restricting flexibility (though theoretically respecting it) and to transfer concern to the purely financial side of operations, to the detriment of production and productivity. These contradicatory tendencies may turn out to be destructive in the end, especially as finance has become the principle obsession of management to the point of "cheating" both honestly (boosting value through acquisitions) and dishonestly (hiding economic reality, Enron-style) in order to shore of share prices.

The end of the article is somewhat depressing:

Finally, there’s a trend among companies to measure job performance like never before... There’s a sense that no matter how much I do, it’s never enough.”

It's a fitting conclusion that the concern with measurement and quantification -- considered to be the keys to rational organisation -- should have the effect of augmenting stress. This leaves a definite feeling that we have entered a crisis of civilization where the actions associated with basic values have begun to lose their stable meaning and deep doubt is starting to take root.

Contextual richness, mystery and informality in learning

2006-02-22T07:38:00.000+01:00

Earlier this week I posted a note on the Learning Circuits Blog about a powerful new communication environment and operating system (called Croquet) that may finally constitute the breakthrough we've all been waiting for to make e-learning collaborative, multimedia and contextually rich. For intercultural questions (coaching, learning, building awareness, developing perception, honing communication skills) contextual richness is the key to everything. I'm the first to admit that everything we've tried up to now has been pretty flat and lacking in mystery. This is partly because we've been dragging the culture of academe along with us in most of what we do, especially when technology is involved.

As a proponent of informal learning, I not only believe that we need to create occasions and reflexes for informal learning, but also that we need to build informality into our more formal learning experiences. One of the motivating dimensions of informality is precisely mystery. When we learn formally we slot ourselves into a pre-designed pattern where someone has taken the responsibility for deciding what we will learn. In informal learning, nothing is predictable and much of what happens can be called social "Eureka" events. Unlike the classic Eureka event, where an individual finally discovers a solution (and knows that he can take credit for it), the social Eureka event is midwived by a colleague or friend, but without any elaborate planning or preparation (apart from acquiring and deploying complex competencies over time).

Anything that is unpredictable and contains a real payoff also contains mystery and excitement. Without this affective dimension planned or programmed learning never produces significant long-term results. Now the advantage I see in an environment such as Croquet, in particular for all things intercultural, is that the environment is flexible and complex enough to represent, rather than simply to "account for" the culture being "studied". Study begins to resemble exploration rather than retention of canned knowledge. What we learn takes place within a context and the context can be used in dynamic ways to reinforce the learning, while at the same time creating the kinds of webs of association are brains are structured to crave for. Nobody ever seems to have noticed that because our brains can be aptly described as both infinitely complex networks and dynamic energy fields functioning according to holistic principles, the one thing they are NOT structured to crave for is the storing of isolated bits of knowledge. And yet traditional learning and teaching has always worked on the model of the presentation of systematised knowledge, delivered in the form of a series of utterances based on facts that are linked either by logic or rhetoric (and it's never clear which of the two is at work!).

The quick conclusion is that if we have a dynamic environment with a rich context that allows for free interaction and improvisation, we may be moving towards new ways of thinking about learning. Richness provokes an attitude of exploration and an activity of discovery. Mystery incites learners to investigate and interpret, integrating complex clues and associations along the way. And informality increases the possibilities of exchange, often of unformulated knowledge, which is often richer and more complex than the formulated knowledge presented as "curriculum".

The question of identity in learning and the link with culture

2006-02-08T11:07:00.000+01:00

On the Learning Circuits Blog, Clark Aldrich posted an article on the importance of honesty in training design. He then suggested some practical methods for homing in on the truth. Let's call his approach "objective". It is valuable but I think limited by a cultural bias in favor of facts and procedures accompanied by a certain "benign neglect" of affective reality. To build a more accurate and complete picture of training needs, I believe Clark's suggestions should be completed by an approach that takes subjectivity into account.

The basis of such an approach should not be limited to questions of appreciation and reactions to training methods and content, nor should it focus on the now traditional distinctions of "learning styles". I propose using a more fundamental cultural concept: identity. This means how individuals engaged in learning something feel about who they are and the image they project in social and professional contexts. These feelings are elaborated largely at the unconscious level. For that reason, polling people about the effects of learning will produce only a very partial picture of what has occurred. As in all cultural questions, it's less what you know than how you spontaneously interact with others in real situations that define competency.

Going beyond Clark's suggestion, let me relate the initial experience that led me to define an approach that focuses on the subjective and this question of identity. This was my very first complete project building a multimedia learning module.

In 1986, I was put in charge of developing an interactive video program for helicopter maintenance. As project manager my first task was to begin working with the training team to understand the nature of the problem to be addressed. The subject was the most complex and delicate chapter of a five week course for certification in helicopter maintenance: "flight control rigging". The trainer I was working with started off by explaining to me what the team usually taught, step by step. As the whole thing was a foreign language to me (with terms like "clinometer", "collective pitch", "geometrical precession"), after a very short time I stopped him in his tracks and looked for another angle of approach. I simply asked "who are the learners?" After the usual superficial description (work experience, educational background, social class, etc.) I asked, "and who will they be after the training, on the Monday following the final Friday of the final week of the course course?" The trainer had to think long and hard, straining his imagination to encompass events he had never really thought about. I refined the questioning. "Why did they enrol in the course? What did they feel about themselves and who they were when they made the decision?" He began reviewing the hundreds cases he and the other trainers knew but had never tried to analyse. He was quickly able to propose a typology of learner profiles that turned out to be extremely varied and that helped to define the challenge that lay ahead of us: addressing their common and particular needs.

I then continued by asking "how will they feel about themselves when apply for a job with their new qualification and confront a prospective employer?" As the trainer's imagination was already activited, possible answers began to appear, with a vision of the likely behaviour of the newly certified mechanics. But it didn't stop there: "how will they talk and think about themselves at a cocktail party or a dinner with friends? What will have changed in their idea of themselves?" By asking these questions, we could begin focusing on the unconscious side of professional identity, including, "in what voice do I authorize myself to speak to others?" The answers given by the trainer were far from complete case studies, but they gave me enough to go on to make some fundamental design decisions.

The trainer had never considered any of these questions because his job started on the morning of the first Monday of the five week course and ended on the afternoon of the last Friday. That's all he's was paid for (in addition, he had his Wednesday afternoon off for golf!). Asking these questions and listening to the trainer's replies enabled me to work with him productively on building the contents that addressed the issue of how the learner's identity could be constructed. One of the key decisions I made was to include a character played by a mime, representing both a learner (he was discovering a new world) and a mechanic (he quickly transformed knowledge into physical gesture). Moulding a learner's identity requires providing models of both learning and practice to work from. Another technique that proved useful was to oblige the trainer to draw what he saw as visually useful for each new learning point in the course, rather than to explain it in purely linear verbal terms. After that we could talk about questions of learner perception and relationships between ideas, principles, objects. This was fundamental for a project built around video, but I submit that it is equally useful for any document that aims at teaching or training.

The initial tests of the product with actual learners proved to be very positive. As shortly after the completion of the project I left the company (which, though part of the powerful Thomson group, itself had serious problems at the time) I'm not sure about the long term effects of this project on the learners, but I can say it was perhaps the greatest learning experience I've ever had!

What this crisis should teach us

2006-02-08T09:42:00.000+01:00

Before things get even worse (which seems to be the case as I'm writing this), we need to remind ourselves that this isn't a clash of civilizations, as predicted by Samuel Huntington, but a problem within what has become the common or globalized culture of western civilization.

Newsweek ran an interesting article yesterday about how Japan is ceasing to be Japanese. This actually throws some indirect light on the cartoon conflict because it highlights the strength and degree of the undermining effects of global culture. If Japan can't resist, who can?

Though the trend dates back at least to the end of World War II, our globalizing world has radically changed. I have little doubt that ten years ago the cartoon crisis would either not have existed at all - thanks to an attitude of passive submission on the part of the Muslim minority -- or would have produced merely local incidents in Denmark. Why has it taken on the dimension it has today? I would suggest a number of contributing causes:

The emergence of a US driven "global" culture that has moved beyond the phase of co-existence with other cultures and has begun to show signs of seeking to replace them (see the Japan article: I call this the Halloween phenomenon, driven by "innocent" commercial interests but carrying a powerful cultural payload).
The need for the U.S. economy - totally organized around the military-industrial complex Eisenhower warned us about upon leaving office in 1960 - to have an identifiable global enemy in order to justify its budgets and increase its margin of manoeuvre. (see the remarks of Bush, the presidential candidate in 2000, wistfully regretting the clear-cut dichotomy of the Cold War),
The disastrous (and culturally insensitive) invasion of Afghanistan and Iraq and the consequent political and military bridling of Pakistan, three Muslim countries.
The failure of most European countries to integrate their growing Muslim populations, half a century after decolonisation and at a time when birth rates for the "indigenous" (white) population are constantly falling.
Europe's culturally motivated dilatory tactics to keep Turkey from joining the union.
A gradually increasing crassness of U.S. culture, provoked and justified by commercial interests and highly visible in all exported media.
Talk of having God on our side when going to war against Muslim nations (this wasn't a problem during the Cold War, because the enemy was godless communists, so there could be no theological rivalry in the contest).
The double standard on nuclear policy concerning Iran, a line promoted by both the U.S. and Europe: in particular because India, Israel and Pakistan have never been singled out in the same way.
The new ethos and rhetoric of the "war on terror" (the Pentagon now calls it "the long war"), which insists that everyone's duty is to attack sources of terror (e.g. suspect Musims, even when they happen to be Brazilians on their way to work in the London tube).
A psychological threshold shared variously by Arab and Muslim cultures that determines when collective action should be taken.
The more universal laws of mob psychology (e.g. the French or Bolshevik revolutions).
The confused, directionless and mostly bungled "attempts" to settle the Palestinian situation (I sensed we were in trouble when we moved from "peace process" to the "roadmap" metaphor: what better way of saying "we're lost!").

This ethos of the "long war on terror" plays a very important role, because:

It confirms the feeling of Muslims in western society that they will always be considered a potential enemy,
It motivates the occasional newspaper editor and cartoonist to "feel good" about lashing out at everyone's favorite enemy. Isn't that the way cultural as well as moral values work: they enable us to feel good about doing what society or our moral teachers recommend? "Do the right thing".

The result of all this is that Muslim are under pressure to 1) accept a permanent status of outsider, without even the promise of evolution felt by the first post-colonial generation, 2) accept to be associated with the enemy in the "long war" that produces such good feelings in the "long warriors" (a category that includes publishers and cartoonists*).

Justifying this by invoking freedom of the press or freedom of expression can only be seen (and felt) as hypocritical, since the press is not a simple platform of personal expression but a powerful organ of cultural and political orientation.

As interculturalists it seems to me we should be dealing not merely with abstract ideas about cultures and societies but with people's real feelings. As westerners we take comfort in "pure knowledge", which as suppliers of a brain-based service we see as a commodity. If we can't take the time to explore what external factors influence people's feelings, but only content ourselves with reciting the litany of "dimensions" and behavioural trends, God help us (and inch'Allah)! On the other hand, our clients rarely ask us to solve the world's problems, so why not just continue on our merry old way and at least feel comfortable in our own culture among all the other "long warriors"?

__________

What does it mean to publish cartoons? Is it simply a form of expression or a power play to model contemporary culture? Some people claim that the sole issue is honouring everyone's right to say what they think (an axiom in cultures that value explicitness, directness and outspokenness). They argue that a cartoon isn't an action, but an idea. Let's see what action is in fact involved. I count the following:

* Commissioning the cartoons
* Drawing by the author-artists
* Paying for the cartoons
* Publishing
* Distributing to a wide population.

I'm surprised that such a complex and public process can be characterized as "personal expression" and defended on the basis of the "freedom of expression". Once again (I've already made this point), we seem to have a cultural and historical problem that stems from having lost the distinction between public and private. A similar phenomenon can be found in the debate around the 2nd amendment in the U.S.: "the right to bear arms". It was framed as a means of defining collective responsibility not as an individual right (in a society that had no standing army and a fear of colonial invasion, citizens were encouraged to be ready to organize into a local militia). And yet this historical reality is utterly forgotten, not because the information isn't available, but because we have lost all awareness of the vital (but difficult to define) distinction between public and private.

The case of the Danish cartoons

2006-02-06T08:49:00.002+01:00

It has been suggested that what this crisis is all about is "the perception of freedom of the press and freedom of information" It seems to me, however, to be a more general problem of how cultures differentiate between the rules (etiquette) of public and private expression and the status given to respect for deeply held personal convictions, especially those values that are clearly linked to the sense of personal and cultural identity.

In a culture (e.g. US and apparently Denmark) where "speaking up" (assertiveness) is seen as a core value, there appears to be a growing obsession with the principle of possessing – and affirming -- the right to say whatever's on your mind and exercising that right with a double objective: to prove the unlimited scope of your freedom and to attract attention, often with a commercial goal or simply to obtain some sort of competitive advantage (recognition, reputation, public image, etc.). This leads to the equally principled denial of any form of self-restraint in the name of another complementary core value, "healthy competition".

Because in such cultures outspokenness and competition are seen as overriding principles, it's easy to forget that all civilization have carefully codified tacit protocols of respect that govern everyday "public" social relations. In the intimate private sphere, the nature of freedom of expression changes and one can vent one's prejudices or provocative opinions freely. I would submit that our obsession with individual rights has partially broken down or at least obscured the natural frontier between public and private. This may be potentially as dangerous as losing the distinction between ego and id (and the two phenomena may well be related).

This may also explain why Political Correctness has become such a major issue in the U.S. If society loses track of the implicit and tacit rules of politeness and restraint in public expression and accepts provocation as a positive norm and an object of universal admiration, it has to invent artificial principles to compensate for this loss. PC does this in the most artificial and hypocritical way by imposing set rather than mutually understood rules.

In other words, I don't think we can reduce the question of modes of public communication to the purely political or judicial issue of "freedom of expression". What the Danish (and now European) issue raises is the deeper question of confidence in our institutions. To what degree are public institutions and the associated voices (the press, the state, authors, publishers and public speakers) responsible, not so much for the content of what they transmit or protect (with their laws) but for the psychological effects they provoke? Publishing is a complex communication activity engaging multiple responsibilities and creating an impression of complex complicity. What one man on a soapbox says - and his freedom to say it - should be seen as very different from what public institutions (protected by the law) disseminate in the guise of information.
____________________________________

In a Newsweek interview the Danish publisher responsible for the cartoons that have unleashed global violence makes an interesting remark:

"This is a clash of cultures and, in its essence, a debate about how much the receiving society should be willing to compromise its own standards in order to integrate foreigners. On the other hand, how much does the immigrant have to give up in order to be integrated?"

I presume the "standard" he's referring to is that of free speech, or rather the free commercial press, which isn't really the same thing since the Muslims wouldn't go to such extremes in the way of protest simply because certain individuals are anti-Muslim. I think confusing the two is part of the issue, just as Bush's pronouncement in September 2001 that the attacks on New York and Washington were an "attack on freedom" was a misleading, tendentious and ultimately bellicose "interpretation" which drove us further from understanding the nature of the tragedy.

What strikes me in the publisher's account is that there are some serious cultural "idées reçues". Isn't it a bit odd to suggest that recognizing another culture and respecting its sensibility is a "compromise"? And should we be thinking in terms of the necessity of "giving up" aspects of one's culture to be integrated into another culture? It sounds to me like a one-way street even though it's framed in terms of a trade-off (i.e. a commercial transaction, which should in itself provide a major hint concerning the cultural asymmetry at work here).

The "positive" side of this incident (and sadly the one that will ultimately justify the violence) is that it will likely produce a new code of conscious and explicit self-restraint: in other words, a new article of "PC". In future, no newspaper editor will take the risk of offending on this issue.

Supposing everything calms down and this turns out to be the final result, should we consider it a good thing? I sincerely doubt it. It turns a living tacit relationship into explicit PC. It's interesting that no one protested when Oriana Fallacci or Michel Houellebecq - both using the leverage of their international fame - wrote anti-Muslim texts that were somewhere between provocative and racist. Why? Because they were just expressing their individual opinions in words. Even printed on a page, words are nothing but wind. Part of the reason for the reaction to the cartoons can be traced to the iconoclast tradition of Islam, which gives special importance to images. But I suspect the deeper reason is that a newspaper cartoon is "editorial" and therefore represents the public face of an approved institution (an organ of the respectable and respected press) rather than simply the utterance of an isolated individual expressing his point of view. What the editor tells us bears this out: the cartoons were commissioned and were not simply the spontaneous "opinion" of individual authors.

The question I ask myself is, why can't we in the post-modern (and post-Christian) Occident see that this is where the issue lies?

Here is the end of the interview:

So where do you draw the line between censorship and freedom of speech?
My newspaper has its limits. In a pluralistic society where you do have freedom of speech, my limits should not be the limits of others. We do have laws against racism and blasphemy.

Didn't your newspaper commit blasphemy by depicting Muhammad?
Danish prosecutors determined around a month ago that the cartoons were not blasphemous.

Will Jyllands-Posten apologize?
For what?

Now isn't this a nice illustration of how explicit low context cultures work? The law determines all questions of relationship. Discussion over. Once you know that you are within the law, nothing else matters.