No entry

The March of Folly

I often wonder where the place is to be found between being entertained, being made to think, and being constrained by academic rigour.  We want to read books about issues that excite us or that confuse us, about topics we want to explore, and often wish to read stimulating contributions without being subjected to the demands of academic precision.  We also like to spend time looking at ideas, even if they turn out to be rather slight, oversimplified, and possibly somewhat misleading.

Of all the fields where this is a problem, history must be at the forefront.  Histories are always exercises in the imagination, as we can never go back to the past, or not yet anyway!  As we read reconstructed accounts of the way things were, we both know they are based on the writer’s views, and often nothing more than that.  At the same time, we can be captured by a writer who appears to make the past ‘live’.  As we read, we know that another writer will come out with another book that will reveal all the shortfalls in the book we’ve just finished.  Revisions and rethinking will continue, and, we are assured, each new work will be better:  more insightful, more accurate.  Where’s the stopping point – no, where’s the starting point?  At which point is this particular contribution one worth considering?

Barbara Tuchman is a case in point.  A 20th Century historian, journalist and writer, born in 1912 (and died in1989), she was known for compelling popular histories, and won the  Pulitzer Prize twice, the first time for the Guns of August, a history of the prelude to and the first month of World War I, and the second for Stilwell and the American Experience in China, a 1971 biography of General Stillwell.  However, for many people it was her broad-brush review of world history, the March of Folly, that they read and enjoyed.

She attended the Walden School on Manhattan’s Upper West Side, and received a Bachelor of Arts degree from Radcliffe College in 1933, having studied history and literature.  Working first as a researcher and journalist, it was following the Second World War, she began basic research for what would ultimately become the 1956 book Bible and Sword: England and Palestine from the Bronze Age to Balfour.  Its publication was the beginning of her commitment to historical research and writing, at a pace which soon saw her turning out a new book at approximately every four years.

She never claimed to be an academic and said that the norms of academic writing would have “stifled any writing capacity.”  She saw herself as having a literary approach to the writing of history, focussed on explanatory narratives rather than concentrating upon discovery and publication of newly discovered archival sources. Tuchman was “not a historian’s historian; she was a layperson’s historian who made the past interesting to millions of readers”.

The book has been described as concerned with ‘one of the most compelling paradoxes of history: the pursuit by governments of policies contrary to their own interests’.  Its four sections cover four major instances of government folly in human history: these are the Trojan’s decision to move a Greek wooden horse into their city; the failure of Popes in the Renaissance to stem the challenges that would lead to the Protestant Reformation; the catastrophic consequences of England’s policies relating to American colonies under King George III; and the United States’ mishandling of the Vietnam War.  This last topic takes up more than half of the book.

As a contribution to history, the book had a mixed reception.  The journal Foreign Affairs described the book as ‘in the Tuchman tradition: readable, entertaining, intelligent. It should lead a wide audience to think usefully about ‘the persistence of error.’  The New York Review of Books saw value in what Tuchman said, noting: “Systems and theories therefore should not be imposed on the past. The facts of the past should be allowed to speak for themselves. Why did history have to teach lessons anyway?  Why can’t history be studied and written and read for its own sake, as the record of human behavior…?”  The Review concluded “History is not a science, it is an art. History needs writers, or artists, who can communicate the past to readers, and that has been Tuchman’s calling.”

However, yet another review, Kirkus Reviews commented, “An exercise in historical interpretation such as this, tracing a single idea through a set of examples, is structured toward [Tuchman’s] weaknesses; and they are only too apparent. Tuchman applies the concept of folly to ‘historical mistakes’ with certain features in common: the policy taken was contrary to self-interest; it was not that of an individual (attributable to the individual’s character), but that of a group; it was not the only policy available; and it was pursued despite forebodings that it was mistaken. The only way to account for such self-destructive policies, in Tuchman’s view, is to label them follies; but that, as she seems unaware, puts them beyond rational explanation.

Similarly, another review criticised the book as having followed “the conventional, not to say threadbare, lines which the liberal media developed in the 1970s: that American involvement in Vietnam was, ab initio, an error which compounded itself  as it increased and was certain to fail all along. [Tuchman] thereby falls into a trap which a historian who seeks to draw lessons from the past should be particularly careful to avoid: to assume that what in the end did happen, had to happen.”  Finally, a review in the New York Times concluded “[A]ny way one approaches The March of Folly, it is unsatisfying, to say the least. Better books have been written about Vietnam, the American Revolution, the Renaissance Popes and the Trojan Horse. … Not only has [Tuchman] confined herself to the shallower wellsprings of history, she has committed the further sin of treating them superficially.”

These contrasting views from 1984 are illuminating, as they reflect the professional preferences and backgrounds of the reviewers.  A more recent commentary, Barbara Tuchman and the Unfinished March of Folly, by Armando Mariante appeared in the Brazilian Centre for International Relations.  The benefit of some distance from the original is revealing.  He comments “Barbara Tuchman died in 1989. Had she lived longer, she would have found no shortage of material for a new edition—a sort of Revisited March of Folly. The themes that haunted her—governments blind to reality, institutions acting against their own interests, and leaders trapped by hubris—have only grown more pronounced in the 21st century. From the invasion of Iraq to the climate crisis, from democratic erosion to reckless confrontations between nuclear powers, the world has continued along the same tragic trajectory she so carefully traced: the deliberate repetition of mistakes in the face of knowledge.”

His theme is clear, as is his perception of Tuchman.  He suggests many of the tragedies of history are not the result of ignorance, but of knowledge ignored or discarded.  Tuchman wasn’t trying to argue about error, but rather something worse, the stubborn persistence in error despite clear and repeated warnings.

We can think of many examples.  There’s the U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003 which can be described as a near-perfect reflection of her analysis of the Vietnam War 20 years earlier:   This was another conflict launched under false assumptions, driven by ideology, and resistant to correction even in the face of mounting disaster. Mariante suggests she had noted “the familiar manipulation of intelligence to justify policy, the suppression of dissenting voices, and the elevation of national prestige over prudent restraint.”

He has some other telling examples.  He suggests the COVID-19 pandemic, was a global crisis predicted by scientists, yet when it struck it was met with unpreparedness, denial, and politicisation.  He comments that she would have been “struck by how governments in many countries dismissed expert warnings, undermined public health authorities, and allowed ideology or image to outweigh clear medical guidance”.  He suggests she would have concluded the pandemic response wasn’t the lack of information, but a failure to act on what was already known—an archetypal march of folly, with devastating human cost.  More recently, if she had seen the recent U.S. strike on Iranian nuclear facilities, “she would likely see the familiar pattern of choosing force over diplomacy, ignoring historical context, and underestimating the dangers of escalation.”

Tuchman wasn’t trying to provide a detailed account of what happened back at the historical times she considered.  Rather she saw her account as ‘a ledger of warnings’.   From her perspective, history is not just a chronicle of the past—it is a mirror held up to the present. It is hard not to agree with Mariante, as he reflects on a world where people continue to make avoidable mistakes, that appears to almost deliberately forget what it once knew, and that as a result repeats tragedy of her ‘march of folly’.  If she had been a journalist, then her articles would be considered as offering an almost startling consistency.  Mariante suggests her voice still calls out, “not to admonish, but to remind us that knowledge and power without wisdom is peril. If the march of folly continues today, it is not because we do not know better—we do—but because we choose not to act on what we know. And in that choice, Tuchman might warn us, lies the gravest threat of all”.

I think that was the way in which many people saw her work.  However, others, like Keith Crook, saw Barbara Tuchman as a less than meritorious example of the popular history movement that emerged in the second half of the twentieth century. Crook summarises her model of folly as examining situations defined by actions being taken when there were feasible alternatives ignored in favour of the foolish course of action that was adopted.  However, The March of Folly is concerned with folly that should have been obvious at the time by rational observers, and her criteria included that it must be a group decision made “beyond any one political lifetime”.

Are these criteria met in her four examples?  As far as Crook sees it, possibly not in the eyes of an analytical historian. For that matter, he suggests, neither do many of the dozens of examples of historical folly that are included in her introductory chapter.  However, Crook isn’t offering unrelenting criticism, and balances his concerns about historical accuracy with other observations.  He notes how beautifully Tuchman uses the English language, as well as including very interesting anecdotes about the figures in her narratives. “For example, we learn that the then Chancellor of the Exchequer, Sir Francis Dashwood, was also a notorious rake who founded the infamous Hellfire Club. Make no mistake, this is a pleasant read for a reader interested in casual history, but is it good history?”

Here is the point:  it is clearly the case that she is wrong in many details, although some errors have only become apparent in the last forty years of continuing scholarship.  He is willing to concede she offers a great deal, but on the American Revolution he concludes “Overall, though this piece is masterfully written, I found it superficial and offering nothing new.”  That observation made me think.  Am I reading Tuchman on the American Revolution because I want a detailed and up-to-date review of the history of this event, or because she is offering a helpful and enlightening overview.  As he concludes: “I contend that Barbara Tuchman is a superb wordsmith but has aged poorly as a historian. By all means, read The March of Folly: From Troy to Vietnam for a masterclass in how to make history appear to come alive, but if one wishes to learn more about the historical follies covered in this book, there are much better options.”

Can I amend that closing comment: there are much better options available today, and Crook offers an interesting and important critique of The March of Folly.  Forty years after it appeared, we know so much more, and we are aware of many misunderstanding s that existed back in the 1980s.  Does that mean we can’t read and enjoy historical studies written back several years ago?

That takes me back to my initial comments.  We do want to read books about issues that excite us or that confuse us, about topics we want to explore, and often we wish to read stimulating contributions on a topic without being subjected to the demands of academic precision.  We also do like to spend time looking at ideas, even if they they turn out to be rather slight, oversimplified, and possibly somewhat misleading.  What we don’t like is to find ourselves embedded in non-fiction to then discover it isn’t non-fiction, it is a form of fiction closer to fantasy.  With so much being written in so many forms and in so many places, the task of judgement is almost impossible.  We read about some interesting research, and have relatively little confidence that this is accurate information, or sales-worthy exaggeration.

This must be especially critical in relation to works about the past.  History is a critical subject.  We can never experience the past.  Apart from physical objects, nothing else remains.  This includes both objects – clothes, swords, buildings and more – but also written records.  We are inclined to think that the written record from the time has to be a source of certainty.  However, we know enough to be confident that the written record of events in the past is as unreliable as the written record is of events today.  We read something happened:  then or now.  The explanation of anything more than physical matters is the result of interpretation, of what is included, what is left out, what is ‘understood’ and what has been ‘interpreted’.  That set of issues is further complicated by the fact that each successive piece of writing about an event is then also influenced by what has been written before, by the interests and prejudices of each succeeding commentator, and what has been learnt over time.

I sometimes go back to reading one of my older history books – Trevelyan on British History.  The story he tells is engaging, and paints a picture of how the Uk evolved from tribal enclaves through to a single unified (OK, almost unified) state.  It’s a compelling, fascinating account.  Today I am aware that much of it is incorrect in details, sometimes the result of misunderstandings, sometimes the result of relying on evidence that has since been overthrown, re-examined and re-interpreted.  I suppose this doesn’t concern me too much.  First of all, I believe that change is always taking place, and that the past isn’t just different but ‘a foreign country’.  Second, I am interested in the motives of writers, and know that putting pen to paper is a matter of what story you want to tell.

Does this concern me?  Not really, as I am well aware that I should read history books and articles and be clear in my own mind what it is I am considering.  If this is meant to be a ‘true account’ of what took place, I immediately read with caution.  If I am told these are the facts of what took place back then, I am equally cautious.  If the writer declares the account is intended to offer a picture of what took place at some point in time, based on what many agree was likely, I am reassured:  it’s a work in progress, and the author is being duly cautious.  If the writer is making it clear that this is a ‘story’, a faction if you like, offering a perspective on what might have happened, then I am intrigued to see what evidence is offered to support this version of the story of the past, but I am equally concerned to bear in mind that a good story doesn’t mean it is an accurate story.

My own view is that we need a current Barbara Tuchman, another articulate contemporary critic who will help us discern some of the latest examples of those ‘most compelling paradoxes of history: the pursuit by governments of policies contrary to their own interests’.  I am interested in how we view past actions, and what those accounts tell us about our views of human nature, of political and social systems and of so much more.  My personal interest is in viewing the past as providing insights into how the world we are living in today might have developed.  What I need from the books I read is to be encouraged to think, and to expand my understanding.  As I consider The March of Folly, I am hoping to be encouraged to think, but not to be persuaded this is some kind of final truth.  Perhaps I should ask, who should I be reading today who meets that need?

The Company

There are two usages that dominate the word ‘Company’, one very familiar, and the  other somewhat more limited.  That second usage is American, where The Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) is often called ‘the Company’ due to its role as the coordinator of intelligence activities and its origins in the Office of Strategic Services (OSS).  Indeed, it was first referred to as the Company during World War II.  The wartime OSS was the precursor to the CIA, and as a result the nickname carried over to the newly formed agency.  While The Company is an informal nickname, it reflects the CIA’s central position in the U.S. intelligence apparatus and its historical roots in the OSS.

However, the choice of the nickname influenced by the history of Ivy League universities, especially Yale.  The very first American spies against the British in the War of Independence were educated at Yale.  Further, Russell & Company, the most successful American Company in the opium smuggling business, was very influential in all of the Ivy League universities and the Russell Family played a key role in Yale’s Skull and Bones, from which many went into intelligence.  Gaddis Smith, a History Professor at Yale, said, “Yale has influenced the Central Intelligence Agency more than any other university, giving the CIA the atmosphere of a class reunion.” And “Bonesmen” have been foremost among the ‘spooks’ in the building known as the CIA’s ‘haunted house’.  Professor Antony Cyril Sutton of Stanford University wrote a book about how the Skull & Bones club focused on the Hegelian Dialectic: ‘Thesis Vs Antithesis which will create Synthesis’.  “The power elite applied this to Politics & Geopolitics with a few changes, rather than waiting for the Antithesis to evolve naturally, create the Antithesis in the first place and make gains & profits out of the evolving Synthesis. In other words, create a Problem against the established system, learn what type of Reaction will occur, find the Solution, and while achieving that collect the benefits.”

Then there is the more familiar usage, a company being “an organization that produces or sells goods or services in order to make a profit” (from the Cambridge Dictionary).  The word ‘the’ before ‘company‘ is key, of course:  by itself company refers to “the fact or condition of being with others, especially in a way that provides friendship and enjoyment’.  When 22 years ago, John Micklethwait and Adrian Wooldrige combined to write a ‘short history of a revolutionary idea’, The Company they were referring to the organisation (and not the CIA).

At the time, Micklethwait oversaw US issues for The Economist, and Wooldridge was the magazine’s Washington correspondent.  Micklethwait was appointed as editor-in-chief of The Economist in 2006, and in 2015, he was appointed as a Trustee of  the British Museum.  Currently he is the editor-in-chief of Bloomberg News, a position he has held since 2015.   Wooldridge worked at The Economist for more than 20 years.  In September 2021, he joined Bloomberg Opinionas the Global Business Columnist.

The Company is a fascinating book.  It was reviewed in 2012 in The Ratchet of Technology, by Michael Magoon.  He rated its scope 3.5 stars (out of 5); readability was 4 stars, while his personal rating was 5 stars.  He summarised its ideas in six key points.  First, he suggested it could be regarded as the most important organization in the world, concluding the modern company brought together three big ideas: “it could be an ‘artificial person’  with the same ability to do business as a real person; it could issue tradable shares to any number of investors; and investors could have limited liability.”

He went on to add some other factors.  He suggested that the modern corporation, invented in 19^th-Century Britain, has slowly spread throughout the world.  Americans added on some key attributes, that it employed professional salaried managers; that many had wide networks of suppliers; and it was organised into various operating units.  Later developments in Germany and Japan in particular enhanced the corporate model by utilising bank financing, largely through investment banks, and by focussing on developments based on connections with technical universities, combined with their own research and development labs.  In more recent decades the model has been complicated by developments such as the increasing use of lean manufacturing techniques, and by acquisition and selling by corporate raiders.  Today, especially in the West, it is often seen as the most important form of organization in the world.  Regulation has grown, and Companies Acts rapidly emerging in many countries, allowing entrepreneurs to raise money, safe in the knowledge that investors had protections.

Time has seen other gradual changes appear.  A company’s past is often more dramatic than its present, despite alarmist accounts in books like Barbarians at the Gate and Only the Paranoid Survive.  Many would also argue that, in general, companies have become more ethical, more honest, more humane, more socially responsible. The early history of companies was often one of imperialism and speculation, of frequent disasters, even the use of slavery and opium.  Generally free from these and other historical hangovers, the company today has given the West great competitive advantage. Finally, in more recent years we have seen a cluster of competing companies creating an innovative economy, like Silicon Valley.

As Micklethwait and Wooldridge make clear, today’s modern company has a long, varied and sometimes fascinating history.   In the early Middle Ages, the law began to recognize the existence of “corporate persons”: loose associations of people who wished to be treated as collective entities. These corporate persons included towns, universities, and religious communities, as well as guilds of merchants and tradesmen.  The sixteenth and seventeenth centuries saw the emergence of some remarkable business organisations: ‘chartered companies’ that bore the names of almost every part of the known world (“East India,” “Muscovy,” “Hudson’s Bay,” “Africa,” “Levant,” “Virginia,” “Massachusetts”).  Many were the lucky recipients of royal charters giving them exclusive rights to trade in specific areas.

These chartered companies also drew on two other ideas . The first was offering investment shares that could be sold on the open market. The other was limited liability. Colonization was so risky that the only way to raise large sums of money from investors was to protect them.  Approaches varied.  The Dutch East India Company obtained a monopoly from the state in 1602 and became a model for many chartered firms.  Investors were the first to trade their shares at a stock exchange:  the first was founded in 1611. Using a slightly different approach the English East India Company initially treated each voyage as a separate venture.

In the journal Medium, Rohan Murdeshwar, (on May 9, 2020) reviewed The Company, and noted: “One theme that flows through the book is the relationship between companies and the state. Between 1500 and 1750, the British and Dutch East India Companies grew to behemoths on the back of state-sanctioned monopoly power. Unlike their counterparts in the south of the continent, Northern European nations ‘subcontracted imperialism’ to privately owned companies resulting in a symbiotic relationship between company and state. The company was given monopoly rights and the state obtained a steady stream of revenue from the trade that followed.  Politicians in governments also received lucrative shares in the monopolies they’d delivered to the world, the world‘s first taste of crony capitalism.”

By the first half of the nineteenth century, the state began to step back, at first in the United States of America. There were three prompts for change. The most important was railroads, which by 1840 needed funds to build thousand miles of track to establish the bare bones of a national network.  This could only be financed by chartered joint-stock companies. The second was legal. In an 1819 ruling about the status of Dartmouth College, the Supreme Court found that corporations of all sorts possessed private rights, so states could not rewrite their charters capriciously. The last prompt was political. Concerns over losing potential business led legislatures to loosen control over companies.

However, these development were still a long way from modern shareholder capitalism. British law provided remarkably little protection for shareholders.   It was not until 1897, when the House of Lords ruled in favour of a leather merchant who had transferred his assets into a limited company, that the separate legal identity of the company, and the “corporate veil” of protection that it offered to its directors, was firmly established in UK law.

Why did these extraordinary organisations take off when they did? Alfred Chandler provided the classic answer: “Modern business enterprise” became viable “only when the visible hand of management proved to be more efficient than the invisible hand of market forces.” First, a new system of transport and communication was necessary.  The railroads were not just great enablers for modern business; they were also the first modern businesses.  The first American companies to take advantage of the railway infrastructure were in distribution and retailing.  In 1840, most goods were distributed around the country through a system of wheeling and dealing. Within a generation, distribution was dominated by giant companies. The 1850s and 1860s saw huge wholesalers emerge buying directly from producers and selling to retailers. Next modern mass retailers emerged, chain stores, department stores, and mail-order companies.  Integrated companies dominated most vital industries by the turn of the century.

From the middle of the 19th century to the early years of the twentieth, different approaches to capitalism across the world gave birth to different types of companies.  American and capitalism enthusiastically embraced each other, with a combination of light regulation, a scientific approach to management and a growing acceptance of business seeing the rise of large vertically integrated multidivisional firms. Across the Atlantic, a preference for small family firms meant British companies failed to develop the managerial expertise needed in in a globalising world. This was exacerbated by a “fatal snobbish distaste for business”.

In Germany and Japan, where companies were meant to serve the nation, stakeholder capitalism triumphed over shareholder capitalism. For example, capitalism in Germany “emphasised cooperation rather than competition”. The state took a leading role by legalising collusion and encouraging cartels as the resulting agreements on prices and output “benefited the country as a whole”.  Company boards included representatives from lenders, unions and government. Japan’s family-owned conglomerates, the zaibatsu, adopted western methods and hired managers from outside the family to run their business that “operated in a bewildering number of industries”. They were helped by the government which showered them with subsidies and put money into infrastructure, universities, helping business and offered credit.

America’s analytical approach to business takes us to the third theme in the book and the reason why American companies superseded their British counterparts in the early 20th century. The authors argue that the multidivisional firm, pioneered in the 1920s at General Motors, put American companies on the fast track to global domination. A centralised corporate strategy together with the latest “management science”, worked together like a well-oiled machine. Markets were segmented so that there was a car for “every purse and purpose” (General Motors), delivery trucks were painted with a strict shade of red (Coke) and “brand management” identified everyday items in people’s homes (Procter & Gamble).  Britain was reluctant to establish companies. Germany and Japan embraced the idea, but tried to twist it to rather different ends, such as workers’ welfare and the quest for national greatness.  British entrepreneurs clung to the personal approach long after American businesses had embraced professionalism. As late as 1939, a remarkable number of British firms were still managed by founding family members.  Germany’s companies were focussed on the new economy, especially metals, chemicals, and machinery. Both countries emphasised cooperation rather.

A second difference was the influence of the big banks. Germany’s capital markets were too localized and inefficient to power its industrialization. Germany’s bankers stepped into the breach by forming joint-stock and limited-partnership banks that duly channelled money from savers of all sorts, first into the railways and then, after the railways were nationalized in 1879, into young industrial companies like Siemens.   Germany’s success might owe less to stakeholder capitalism than to other practical issues. The first was emphasising scientific and vocational education, and technical universities acted as both research agencies and recruiting grounds.  German firms also developed internal laboratories investing in research and development.  Second was the relatively high respect accorded to managers.  Japan’s approach  had many similarities to Germany’s.  It embraced a conception of the company that combined up-to-date professionalism with a pronounced nationalism.  Mitsubishi was the model for the zaibatsu, Japanese conglomerates (“financial cliques”) that dominated business in the country until the Second World War (and were subsequently reborn as keiretsu.

The first two decades of the twentieth century saw the gradual separation of ownership from control.  By 1920, the ‘Company Man’ combined professional standards and corporate loyalty:  he was defined by credentials rather than by lineage or collective muscle.   The 1950s and 1960s were the heyday of Company Man, or Organization Man, as he became known.  Then came change.  The rate at which large American companies left the Fortune 500 increased fourfold between 1970 and 1990.  Big became a code for inflexibility. In 1974, America’s one hundred biggest industrial companies accounted for 35.8 percent of the country’s GDP; by 1998, that figure had fallen to 17.3 percent. Companies were gradually forced to focus on their “core competencies.”

Next came Silicon Valley which changed companies in two ways. The first was through the products it made. In the last three decades of the twentieth century, the cost of computing processing tumbled by 99.99%, 35% a year. Computers offered increasing power, while the growing Internet reduced transaction costs.  It also changed the company with an alternative form of corporate life. The Valley epitomized the idea of “creative destruction” with much of the Valley’s growth coming from gazelle companies, firms whose sales had grown by at least 20% in each of the previous four years.

The Company: A Short History of a Revolutionary Idea is just that, too brief a book to answer pressing questions that businesses and society are asking today: Who are companies meant to serve? How should governments regulate monopolies? And what do companies need to do to make profits without destroying the planet? Rather than provide original insight, the authors summarise research by previous business historians.  However, the book’s well worth re-reading now, as the study of the past offers insights into organisations that have become increasingly important to understand in solving the problems of the present.

DD79 – The Honor Code

There are some words that give us pause for thought, because their meanings turn out to be tricky, rather than straightforward.  The Oxford English Dictionary makes this clear as it explores meanings of the word ‘honour’.  To begin with it considers honour as opposed to disgrace: “Great respect, esteem, or reverence received, gained, or enjoyed by a person or thing; glory, renown, fame; reputation, good name.”  To act with honour is to demonstrate “Great respect, esteem, or deferential admiration felt towards a person or thing”. Frequently, the dictionary advises us, this leads to being held in honour.

From this first definition, we find that honour is also used as describing a quality of character, one entitling a person to great respect; nobility of mind or spirit; honourableness, uprightness; a fine sense of, and strict adherence to, what is considered to be morally right or just.  To continue, it is a short step to emphasise it is a code, a statement, often expressed as a  promise made on one’s honour.  If the usage is archaic, there is the sense that when a person gave his or her word, they gave it ‘on their honour”.

In many ways this takes us to the idea of ‘precepts, rules to follow’, and these have a long and complicated history.  To cite one example there are The Ten Precepts of Taoism , to be found in the Dunhuang manuscripts, generally regarded as  the classical rules of medieval Taoism.  They are often as cited in two parts: one rule that is divided into Ten Precepts. That rule is ‘the way’ (Tao), and The Precepts are:

1. Do not kill but always be mindful of the host of living beings.
2. Do not be lascivious or think depraved thoughts.
3. Do not steal or receive unrighteous wealth.
4. Do not cheat or misrepresent good and evil.
5. Do not get intoxicated but always think of pure conduct.
6. I will maintain harmony with my ancestors and family and never disregard my kin.
7. When I see someone do a good deed, I will support him with joy and delight.
8. When I see someone unfortunate, I will support him with dignity to recover good fortune.
9. When someone comes to do me harm, I will not harbor thoughts of revenge.
10. As long as all beings have not attained the Dao, I will not expect to do so myself.

They can be compared the Seven Laws of Noah in Judaism,  the set of universal moral rules given by God as a covenant with Noah, and, by extension, to all of humanity.  Hence we have the  Seven Laws of Noah :

1. Not to worships idols
2. Not to curse God
3. Not to commit murder
4. Not to commit adultery or sexual immorality
5. Not to steal
6. Not to eat flesh torn from a living animal
7. To establish courts of justice

Are these similar to modern ethical codes, developed by organisation to assist members in understanding the difference between right and wrong?  In modern usage a code of ethics will start by setting out the values that underpin the code and will describe an organization’s obligation to its stakeholders. The code is publicly available and addressed to anyone with an interest in that organization’s activities and the way it operates. It will include details of how the organization plans to implement its values and vision, as well as guidance to staff on ethical standards and how to achieve them. However, a code of conduct is generally addressed to and intended for the organization’s leaders and staff, although it may make some reference to customers. It usually sets out restrictions on behaviour, and it is often far more focused on compliance or rules than on values or principles.

Similarly, in some cases an ‘honour code’ might be a code of practice is adopted by a profession (or by a governmental or non-governmental organization), which will discuss difficult issues and difficult decisions that will often need to be made.  Following this they will then provide a clear account of what behavior is considered ‘ethical’ or ‘correct’ or  even ‘right’ in the circumstances.  Ethical codes are often adopted by management and employers, not to promote a particular moral theory, but rather because they are seen as pragmatic necessities for running an organization in a complex society in which moral concepts play an important part.  They are distinct from moral codes that that may apply to the overall culture of society, to education, and to a religion.  Overall, a code of ethics can be seen as an attempt to codify “good and bad behavior”.

Within this thicket of ideas, a code of honor or honor code is often comprised as a set of rules or ideals or a mode or way of behaving regarding honour that is socially, institutionally, culturally, and/or individually or personally imposed, reinforced, followed, and/or respected by certain individuals and/or certain cultures or societies. Codes of honor frequently concern (often subjective) ethical or moral considerations or cultural or individual values commonly found in within the context of cultures, societies, or situations that place importance on honor.  In case it isn’t clear, an honour code is a very variable aspect of current society.

It is into this complex arena that understanding change is especially important.  How does moral progress happen? How are societies brought to repudiate immoral customs they have long accepted?  In The Honor Code, Kwame Anthony Appiah explores a long-neglected aspect of reform.  He suggests that moral revolutions happen because of many issues, but that there is one issue that is often overlooked.  In particular, he argues that examining moral revolutions in the past — and campaigns against abhorrent practices today — shows that appeals to reason, morality, or religion aren’t enough to bring about reform. Practices may only be eradicated only when they come into conflict with honor.

It might well be the case that Kwame Akroma-Ampim Kusi Anthony Appiah is particularly well qualified to write on this topic:  he is an English-American philosopher and writer who has written about political philosophy and ethics and the author of several books.  He is Professor of Philosophy and Law at New York University and has been a ‘Silver Professor’ there since 2025.  He was elected President of the American Academy of Arts and Letters January 2022.  He brings to bear an academic and a cultural lens to make sense of the place of honour in the way moral revolutions happen.

The Honor Code begins with Appiah’s portrayal of the often-deadly world of aristocratic Britain, where for centuries gentlemen challenged each other to duels.  Recounting one of the last significant duels in that world—between a British prime minister and an eccentric earl—Appiah shows a society at the precipice of abrupt change.  Turning in the next chapter to the other side of the world, Appiah investigates the end of foot binding in China. The practice had flourished for a thousand years, despite imperial attempts at prohibition, yet was extinguished in a generation.   Appiah turns his spotlight on this turbulent era and shows how change finally came not from imposing edicts from above, but from harnessing the ancient power of honor from within.

In even more intricate ways, in the next section Appiah demonstrates how ideas of honor helped drive one of history’s most significant moral revolutions—the fast-forming social consensus that led to the abolition of slavery throughout the British empire and recruited ordinary men and women to the cause.  Yet his interest isn’t just historical.  Appiah considers the horrifying persistence of ‘honor killing; in places like Pakistan, despite religious and moral condemnation, and the prospects for bringing it to an end by mobilizing a sense of collective honor—and of shame.

For an academic, he has something of a storyteller’s flair, combining this with philosophical rigour, and The Honor Code offers an accessible and rather different approach toward moral inquiry. Briefly ranging from a great mandarin’s abandonment of an ancient Chinese tradition to Frederick Douglass’s meetings with Abolitionist leaders in London, Appiah reveals some of the details as to how moral revolutions really succeed.

Honour or honor (in American English, which Appiah uses) is a quality of a person that is of both social and personal, relevance,  often described as a code of conduct, an abstract concept entailing a perceived quality of worthiness and respectability that affects both outward considerations, especially social standing, yet with an internal, self-evaluation, aspect, whereby individuals (or institutions) are assigned worth and stature based on the harmony of their actions with a moral code of the society or those that characterise specific institutions within a society.

It also refers to integrity, and he repeats Samuel Johnson who, in his 1755 Dictionary of the English Language, defined honour in relationship to ‘reputation’ and ‘fame’; to ‘privileges of rank or birth’, and even towards ‘respect’ of the kind which “places an individual socially and determines his right to precedence”. He also makes clear that this sort of honour is often not so much a function of moral or ethical excellence, as it is a consequence of power. Finally, with respect to sexuality, honour has traditionally been associated with (or identical to) chastity or virginity, or in the case of married men and women, even linked to ‘fidelity’.

Honour as a code of behaviour defines the duties of an individual within a social group. Margaret Visser observes that in an honour-based society “a person is what he or she is in the eyes of other people”.  A code of honour differs from a legal code, which is not only  socially defined but is concerned with justice and not set out in explicit rules.  Honour often remains somewhat opaque, implicit rather than explicit and objectified.

Various sociologists and anthropologists have contrasted cultures of honour with cultures of law. A culture of law has a body of laws which all members of society must obey, with punishments for transgressors. This requires a society with the structures required to enact and enforce laws. A culture of law requires members of society give up some aspects of their freedom to defend themselves and to retaliate for injuries, on the understanding that society will apprehend and punish transgressors.

However, in many societies an alternative to government enforcement of laws is community or individual enforcement of social norms.^. One way that honour functions is through reputation, and an honourable reputation is a very valuable way to promote trust among partners to some kind of transaction. To dishonour an agreement could be economically ruinous, because future potential transaction partners might stop trusting the party not to lie, steal their money or goods, not repay debts, mistreat the children they marry off, have children with other people, abandon their children, or fail to provide aid when needed. A dishonourable person might be shunned by the community as a way to punish bad behaviour and create an incentive for others to maintain their honour.

In the end, I begin to feel Appiah has done what we often do, which is to take a term and ‘stretch’ its meaning. Honor has been a very slippery notion, its use allowing an individual to include or exclude another on the grounds very specific attributes; honourable people often ending up ‘just like me’, not because they meet some externally validated standards. He makes me remember the challenge of claiming to do good.

In a sense, his examples do this.   As we reach the end of each of the sections, we have to face the complexity.  To end foot binding was the result of many factors. To see an end to duels was not particularly the result of honour as it was about self-interest and personal satisfaction.  To claim these as honourable actions is to ignore more pertinent issues:  in relation to foot binding the dominating concern was about the fear of being seen as backward as much as any other; in relation to duelling, it was often seen as action motivated by pride and an unwillingness to confront the nature of disagreement and avoid discussion.

Honor, Appiah makes clear, is often a mask to hide racist and sexist values, and the underlying principles are more to do with exploitation and shame. Appiah is most interesting when he moves to draw conclusions. He wants honour to be about respect, but honour codes are often used to perpetuate traditional distinctions, increasingly out of touch with our attempts to develop universal standards of equity and equality.  If an honourable person seeks respect, surely this is better addressed by seeking justice, an easier value to defend.  Appiah sees honour related to esteem and ethical behaviour, but it is more like a worrying synonym, uncomfortably associated with men seeking to mark or kill an opponent.

Despite these quibbles, in the end I gained a great deal from his analysis, and The Honor Code made me think without feeling obliged to accept his underlying thesis. Isn’t that what we want from an important thinker, to be kept alert and critical?  In doing that, he made me grateful and, I have to admit, left me with enough to think about that it’s a book I have returned to, and kept me asking is there more to a moral code than I have been able to understand?

I am clear that honour has played a role in the past, and perhaps still does today.  However, I suspect honour is one of those funny ‘portmanteau’ words that contains several aspects within the word itself.   As Appiah makes clear, it touches on ethics, morality, social differences, culture and convention.  His case studies are masterly exercises in teasing out the various factors at stake, factors that are sometimes only loosely linked to honour, but consideration of which illustrate that any effective and helpful exploration of honour inevitably forces us to examine a wide range of issues.

The Culture of the New Capitalism

It is often hard to explain – to oneself and to others – why you are drawn to one particular writer, especially when the books are non-fiction.  Fiction is easier, at least in some respects, because you may begin to identify with the characters, and want to know more about them.  Biographies can be engaging, too.  But broader based academic studies are more likely to ensnare you if there is a compelling underlying story, whether it’s about cosmology, class or computers.  Is this why I find Richard Sennett’s books so interesting?  I don’t really know, but I think it might be a combination of style and subject:  style, because he often writes in a conversational way, as if he’s sitting across from you; subject, because he manages to take contemporary issues and use them to carefully build an insightful explanatory framework.  He’s not a magician, but he does have a way with words.

Back in 2004, Richard Sennett was invited to give the Castle Lectures for Ethics, Politics and Economics at Yale University.  The Castle Lectures had become part of the university’s program as a result of an endowment by John Castle, who had given this endowment to recognise one of his ancestors, the Reverend James Pierpoint, one of the initial founders of the university.  The lectures are “intended to promote reflection on the moral foundations of society and government and to enhance understanding of ethical issues facing individuals in our complex modern society”.  The result, the series published as The Culture of the New Capitalism, is Sennett at his best.

Following a brief Introduction, the book comprises his four lectures, looking in turn at Bureaucracy; Talent (and the Specter of Uselessness); Consuming Politics; and Social Capitalism in Our Time.  It is a sociological study of the influence of what was described as the ‘New Economy’ on relationships, an influence that was leading  corporations to become more diffuse, unstable, and ‘distributed’.  Sennett wanted to show the differences between the rigid bureaucracy of traditional companies, with their pyramid structure and defined roles ensuring individuals knew their place and planned their futures , as opposed to modern corporations which provided no long-term stability, benefits, social capital, or interpersonal trust.  As he saw it, current capitalism had created the ‘modern corporation’.  This he described as an institution employing too many people, thereby creating an environment in which employees had to constantly adapt and prove themselves to be ‘assets’ or be tossed out.

It wasn’t an encouraging perspective.  As he observed: “Today … the emphasis is on flexibility. Rigid forms of bureaucracy are under attack, as are the evils of blind routine. Workers are asked to behave nimbly, to be open to change on short notice, to take risks continually, to become ever less dependent on regulations and formal procedures. This emphasis on flexibility is changing the very meaning of work … In attacking rigid bureaucracy and emphasizing risk, it is claimed, flexibility gives people more freedom to shape their lives. In fact, the new order substitutes new controls rather than simply abolishing the rules of the past—but these new controls are also hard to understand. The new capitalism is an often illegible regime of power.”

As you might expect, coming more than thirty years after he first began writing, these lectures bring together a number of themes to be found in his work.  The articulate maverick had become a distinguished professor.  However, that might imply his critique had now softened, and his comments were less acerbic.  Neither of those things were true.  Indeed, in various ways and quite clearly Sennett remains a maverick.

That he was a maverick was evident in one of his first books, The Uses of Disorder: Personal identity and city life (1970) in which he wanted to upset what he saw as careless thinking, doing so by explaining in the Introduction that the “jungle of the city, its vastness and loneliness, has positive human value”:

“… there appears in adolescence a set of strengths and desires which can lead in themselves to a self-imposed slavery; that the current organization of city communities encourages men to enslave themselves in adolescent ways; that it is possible to break through this framework to achieve an adulthood whose freedom lies in its acceptance of disorder and painful dislocation; that the passage from adolescence to this new, possible adulthood depends on a structure of experience that can only take place in a dense, uncontrollable human settlement—in other words, in a city” (page xvii).

It is an insightful thesis, one which explores the view that many people remain stuck in perpetual adolescence, and what he saw as a new puritanism was pressing on peoples’ sense of identity through the implementation of planning.  This led him on to think of the city as an anarchic system, and from there his critique expanded to address what he saw as ‘hidden injuries of class’.  This was part of his broader theme, which was focussed on the changes taking place in society and the way it is organised, changes with profound consequences.

One central issue that concerned him was that urban workers were “aware of the momentous change in their lives the decline of the old neighbourhoods has caused; these working people of Boston are trying to find out what position they occupy in America as a whole… For the people we interviewed, integration into American life meant integration into a world with different symbols of human respect and courtesy, a world in which human capabilities are measured in terms profoundly alien to those that prevailed in the ethnic enclaves of their childhood.”  His theme was dignity and respect, values he saw as under threat.

What his early work had made clear was that Richard Sennett was clearly independently minded, wanting to combine the roles of historian, essayist, and sociologist.   However, there was more than that.  Perhaps the best description of his approach is that he is a public intellectual.  As a historian his focus had been on developing a specific line of argument rather examining historical knowledge in a broader and more detailed fashion.  However, his preferred writing style is the extended essay, and this supports an intellectual style which is more concerned with social criticism or social commentary, rather than the development of social theory.  “As a public intellectual he doesn’t attempt sustained political analysis.  The result is a descriptive and compelling narrative style, one designed to make us think.”

For me, one of his major contributions was The Corrosion of Character (1998) where he explores the impact of new (flexible) capitalism on the experience of workers – and uses his by now almost familiar documentary approach, drawing on examples from people’s lives, and making links with different historical moments, writers and ways of thinking. He argues that the system of power inherent in modem forms of flexibility consists of three elements: “discontinuous reinvention of institutions; flexible specialization of production; and concen­tration of without centralization of power’”(page 47). One of the conclusions he reaches is that the experience of flexible capitalism is arousing a longing for community.

“All the emotional conditions we have explored in the workplace animate that desire: the uncertainties of flexibility; the absence of deeply rooted trust and commitment; the superficiality of teamwork; most of all, the spectre of failing to make something of oneself in the world, to “get a life” through one’s work. All these conditions impel people to look for some other scene of attachment and depth.” (1998: 138)

According to the writer Marina Warner, Richard Sennett has a great ability to re-invent himself (Benn 2001). The more of his work you read, it is clear he tends to take on different personae in his books. His philosophical orientation alters too, as Boyd Tonkin comments:

“In a previous interview, Sennett described himself to me as “an old-fashioned humanist and, I suppose, an old-fashioned democratic socialist”. Now he adds to this profession of lightly-worn faith an intellectual calling-card: “I am a pragmatist. That’s my philosophical church.” “The pragmatist movement from [William] James and [John] Dewey to Richard Rorty, Amartya Sen and myself is about discovering what people are capable of doing,” he explains. “It tries to understand social injustice and oppression by finding something positive that has been suppressed.” (Tonkin 2008)

There are a number of recurring themes in Sennet’s work, in his essays on class, capitalism, craft and the city.  Several of his critiques are wonderful stand-alone contributions, written over five decades:   these include The Uses of Disorder, Authority, and Respect in a World of Inequality; The Hidden Injuries of Class (with Jonathan Cobb); and The Corrosion of Character.  His whole body of work has offered a wealth of insights and understanding about the experiences of working-class employees within current and newly emerging forms of capitalism.  Another series, including The Craftsman, Together, and Building and Dwelling provides the benefits of his searchlight-like examination and analysis of the ‘working experience’ today, and the importance of personal investment in workplace activities.

This takes us back to The Culture of the New Capitalism.  The book is a sociological study of the influence of the New Economy on human relationships.  Sennett describes the ways in which the transformations that have taken place in postmodern capitalism have pushed corporations to become more diffuse, unstable, and decentered. Contrasted with the ‘iron cage’ of bureaucracy described by Max Weber – those pyramid-like corporate structures in which individuals knew their place and planned their futures – modern corporations provide no long-term stability, benefits, social capital, or interpersonal trust.

Sennett first looks at bureaucracy in early capitalism. Most businesses were short lived and unstable. However, in the latter half of the 19th century, major businesses were modelled on predictable military lines where all roles were defined and career progression could be mapped out. This new model was aimed at social inclusion, that most would start at the base of the company pyramid, then to hopefully progress over time to end up near the top.

Modern capitalism looks at this model with disdain – based on the perspective that too many superfluous people are employed for an organisation to remain competitive and that people should constantly adapt and prove themselves to be assets. The inevitable consequence of this view is that in large modern businesses the majority of workers face uncertainty and find it difficult to conceive of work providing a meaningful life narrative.  Further, more recent decades have seen and increasing emphasis on mechanisation and the concomitant need for upskilling, both for managers as well as for their subordinates, and all facing the possibility of obsolescence. Concepts such as craftmanship and a focus on ‘getting the job right’ are seen as wasteful and somewhat obsessive.

At the same time, the modern corporation is constantly demanding new areas of expertise.  Capitalism’s need for ‘potential’ is increasingly reflected in the education system.  Tests like SATS favour superficial and adaptive reasoning rather than deeper introspection on the meaning of things. Finally, comparisons are made between branding and politics.  Products such as cars are physically very similar, but branding creates differences on minor issues revolving around appearance and emotion. Sennett views this same ‘gold-plating’ process as having a largely negative influence on modern politics where presentation is key.

A change in current institutional structures has accompanied short-term, contract or episodic labour.  Corporations have sought to remove layers of bureaucracy, to become flatter and more flexible organizations.  In place of organisations constructed as pyramids, “management now wants to think of organizations as networks … This means that promotions and dismissals tend not to be based on clear, fixed rules, nor are work tasks crisply defined; the network is constantly redefining its structure …Corporations break up or join together, jobs appear and disappear, as events lacking connections. Creative destruction … requires people at ease about not reckoning the consequences of change, or not knowing what comes next” …

In work, the traditional career progressing step by step through the corridors of one or two institutions is gradually withering away; so too Sennett argues is the deployment of a single set of skills through the course of a working life “An executive for ATT points out that the motto ‘no long term’ is altering the very meaning of work. ‘In ATT we have to promote the whole concept of the work force being contingent … “Jobs” are being replaced by “projects” … ‘No long term’ is a principle which corrodes trust, loyalty and mutual commitment …  Detachment and superficial co-operativeness are better armor for dealing with current realities than behaviour based on values of loyalty and service … ‘No long term’ means keeping moving, don’t commit yourself, and don’t sacrifice …”

Sennett suggest that perhaps the most alarming aspect of these demands for flexibility is their impact on personal character .  As he sees it, character is especially likely to develop as a function of the long-term elements of our emotional experience.  “Character is expressed by loyalty and mutual commitment, or through the pursuit of long-term goals, or by the practice of delayed gratification for the sake of a future end.”

It is as a reaction to all this that Sennett focusses on craftsmanship, an approach that he identifies as ‘an enduring, basic human impulse, the desire to do a job well for its own sake’ (2008: 9).  However, he reminds us that the craftsman often faces ‘conflicting objective standards of excellence; the desire to something well for its own sake can be impaired by competitive pressure, by frustration, or by obsession’ (op.cit.). S/he conducts a dialogue between concrete practices and thinking and this ‘evolves into sustaining habits, and these habits establish a rhythm between problem-solving and problem finding’.

Is there a place for craftmanship today?  In his perspective, there are several aspects to retaining a craftsman-like approach, including:  skills formed in bodily practices; technical understanding developed through the powers of imagination, and motivation mattering more than talent.  To all this, Sennett adds his view that cooperation is a craft. It draws on “the skill of understanding and responding to one another in order to act together, but this is a thorny process, full of difficulty and ambiguity and often leading to destructive consequences” Given this focus is on ‘responsiveness to others, such as listening skills in conversation, and on the practical application of responsiveness at work or in the community’ he argues that responsiveness is less an ethical disposition but emerges from practical activity.  Is he just being nostalgic?  I like to think he is setting a path to make work meaningful and rewarding.

Boom and Bust

I might have mentioned that I love Alice in Wonderland.  In fact I might have mentioned this several times.  If you know the story (which I hope you do) it begins in Chapter 1 with Alice daydreaming, then seeing a white rabbit checking a pocket watch, a possibly slightly odd sight!  She follows the rabbit, and as it disappears into a rabbit hole, she follows it, falling a long way down, ending up in Wonderland.  It was a memorable image to introduce a story set in another and quite strange world.  Today, the term ‘falling into a rabbit hole’ has been used in many ways, but it can still refer to ending up somewhere unlike where you had intended.

Every so often, I find myself falling down a rabbit hole, especially when thinking about topics for this blog.  I can find myself reading more and more about colour blindness, the physical kind, when I meant to write about colour blindness in terms of relationship between people.  I can find myself reading more and more about bird migration, and then find I’ve moved on to different sensory skills.  I can find myself getting more involved in trying to understand gravity, which leads on to trying to understand the universe, which leads on to trying to think about the origin of the universe, which leads on to … usually, leads on to confusion, and a sense that much of what I’d read I simply didn’t understand.

However, another kind of rabbit hole which temps me is new technologies.  I am a sucker for reading about a new device on the market, and developing a desire to acquire it, to be one of the early adopters.  So it was with video recorders.  Back in the 1970s, in 1975 to be precise, Sony announced the first digital video recorder, the Betamax.  It wasn’t pushed hard in Australia for the first couple of years, but soon after that and with some money in my pocket, along with a state of excitement, I bought a Betamax recorder.  This was at the cutting edge, a device that could record television programs, as well as give access to pre-recorded material you could buy, and play and play again.  The recording medium was a ¾” magnetic tape cassette called U-matic, a now-obsolete format that was developed by Sony.  It was the kind of technology designed to appeal to a moderately technically inclined person like me, and I loved the idea of being in the vanguard.  Oh, and the recording system was brilliant:  played back on a television, it was hard to believe this was only a copy.

Today, the Sony Betamax is lost to history, a great device that disappeared, almost completely forgotten.  When working with groups at Cisco in California a few years ago, I had the opportunity to visit the Computer History Museum in Mountain View.  There I could indulge my desire to look at examples of Babbage’s Differential Engine, parts of the first computers life EDVAC, and more.  On one visit, I decided to look at objects from the recording side of the industry, like tape decks and massive disks.   I couldn’t find a Betamax there, but there was a description of what had happened.  I knew JVC had released the competing VHS format in 1976, a year after Sony’s Betamax, but I also remembered that, at the time, Betamax was higher quality than VHS, if also somewhat more expensive. VHS machines could record a full movie, while to begin with  the Betamax was limited to only one hour.   More to the point, Sony refused to license their system format to other manufacturers, but JVC built an ecosystem of partners and offered a greater selection of films.

Sony’s Betamax was in trouble.  By 1980, VHS had proven favourable among consumers and was successful in controlling 60% of the North American market.  By 1981, sales of Beta machines in the United States had sunk from 100% in 1976 to 25% of the VCR market. As movie studios, video studios, and video rental stores turned away from Betamax, the combination of lower market share and a lack of available titles further strengthened VHS’s position.  What Sony hadn’t considered was what consumers wanted. While Betamax was believed to be superior format in the minds of technologists and press (due to excellent marketing by Sony), consumers preferred an affordable VCR (which often cost hundreds of dollars less than a Betamax player.  By the middle of the 1980s, VHS had won the war.  Sony saw what was happening and redirected its efforts.  Building on the technologies they’d learnt with Betamax, they were to lead the field in camcorder development by the end of the 1980s.

So much for the Betamax.  However, my interest in that technology was part of what me led, many years later, to teaching innovation. Indeed, that was the reason I was contributing to some courses at Cisco, encouraging staff to think carefully about innovation (at the time I was discovering the Betamax video recorder didn’t even rate a mention in the Computer History Museum – yes, I know because it wasn’t a computer!).  My focus was linking innovation to entrepreneurship.  Innovation is the task of finding something new, and while it can be rewarding to be an inventor, success comes from application.  Entrepreneurs are the people who see there is a gap or an opening in a market that is being ignored or missed, and who are able to identify ways to exploit that gap.  Unlike innovators, entrepreneurs are driven by business or organisational sense: take a promising and innovative idea and create a business.  Most are in startups, but without getting too technical, there is an in-company variant of the entrepreneur, the intrapreneur, who does the same thing:  sees opportunities and finds ways to meet those gaps but does so within the organisation.

This is an area full of rabbit holes.  When Alice fell down the rabbit hole, she had an adventure, courted with disaster, and eventually returned back above ground in one piece.  Multiply her experience a thousandfold, most new products fail or end in disaster, and that is a simple summary of the life of entrepreneurs.  Leaving on one side innovations that never got off the ground (there are so many of them), history is full of innovations taken up by entrepreneurial individuals and organisations that have seen limited success.  However, what makes this especially curious feature of this is that there are successful innovations that do build businesses, but many of them will still eventually collapse or disappear.  The timescale for the Betamax might have been shorter than several others, but the path is familiar.

What are some major innovations in the 20^th Century?  We are well aware of successes.  I could mention prescription drugs, cars, or plastic.  Actually, that was a bit sneaky, because these are innovations that have lasted, but have brought with them all sorts of problems and challenges.  Prescription drugs continue to see innovations, although now most new drugs are simply tweaking existing treatments, and often with unfortunate side-effects for users.  We have become a drug-dependent society, and we live with the problems they cause in the rather odd hope that the drugs are good for us:  some are, but many bring as many problems as they solve.  Drugs exemplify the Betamax problem:  when the innovative product doesn’t work as hoped, then a competitor will come up with one that is ‘better’.  Remember, too, that VHS replaced U-Matic tapes … until it no longer did so.  Now we record on solid-state interfaces, originally laser discs, and now thumb drives and the like.

Perhaps cars are a better example.  The motor car has been around from some 140 years and must be seen as a successful innovation.  Thank you, entrepreneurs, like Henry Ford, Alfred Sloan and more.  I suppose it would be churlish of me to point out that the motor car has transformed how we live, where we live, and how we use our time, and not all of this has been positive, with suburbia, motorways, interstates, ubiquitous fuel outlets, drive-in stores and more, with the additional ‘downside’ that people continue to die in traffic accidents, and many more are permanently injured.  It is easy to forget that the internal combustion engine wasn’t the only key factor, it was the creation of a massive private transport network.  Although there is some small evidence the young are not as enamoured of cars as previous generations, it still seems the case people want to own their cars.  I could make similar comments about the ubiquity of plastic, which has highlighted a problem at that motor cars also present, which is the challenge of getting rid of either when no longer wanted.  Scrap metal yards full of squashed cars are obvious; millions of tons of plastic gathering in the oceans are less easily noticed.

Some innovations have been successful for a long time, and then suddenly recognised as dangerous.  Some well-known examples of this ‘boom and bust’ process are leaded petrol, DDT, or chlorofluorocarbons.  Now we know these were disastrous technologies, and only if we had known more at the time they should never have been adopted.  Actually, I shouldn’t have included leaded petrol as an example, as we knew the dangers of lead right at the start, but leaded fuel allowed cars to run smoothly and efficiently.  There are others where we are still having a challenge in recognising they are dangerous.  Nuclear fission has to be the outstanding example here.  It has been deployed commercially and does generate electricity, but most countries allow only it to provide a small share of energy, and just in case we forget its limitations, we suffer a different kind of ‘boom’ as a plant goes wrong.

All this is by way of an introduction to a current boom, that of artificial intelligence.  Will Lockett, in Freemium this month, has given an important assessment of AI in his review AI Is Hitting a Hard Ceiling it Can’t Pass.  A lot of what follows comes from that article, which he introduces with the observation; “There has been an insane amount of hype surrounding AI over the past few months. Supposedly, Teslas are going to entirely drive themselves in a year or two, AI will be smarter than humans next year, and an army of a billion AI-powered robots will replace human workers by 2040, and that is just the AI promises made by Elon Musk so far this year. The entire AI industry is awash with predictions and promises like this, and it feels like AI development is on an unstoppable exponential trajectory we humans simply can’t stop. However, that is far from the truth.  You see, AI is starting to hit a development ceiling of diminishing returns, rendering these extravagant promises utterly hollow.”

To explain his perspective, he starts with looking at how AI works.  Basically, despite all the hype, AI uses what are called ‘deep learning algorithms and artificial neural networks’.  These software tools look at data, masses of data, to identify trends and links.  To be clear, they are not intelligent in the way we usually think of the term, they are merely identifying that an item of data is frequently and significantly associated with another piece of data to identify trends in the data.  Provide enough data, and what seems amazing becomes easy.  Scan enough tagged photographs of people, and the AI system can identify each person in new photographs.  Scan enough Google queries and answers, and the AI system can ‘answer’ a question from you, by finding examples of the question and the answers that have been provided.  This is, of course, why many interrogations of AI systems lead to foolish or dangerous answers, because there are enough crazy people out there providing silly answers to questions on the internet, all of which will be scooped up and used by an AI system.

Lockett notes that AIs have become significantly more capable recently.  He points out that this “has been partly due to better programming and algorithm development.  But it is also 90% thanks to the fact that AIs have been trained on significantly larger datasets. … But there is a problem; we are seeing drastically diminishing returns in AI training, both in terms of data and computational power needed.”   He provides an example: lets “build a simple computer vision AI designed to recognise dogs and cats, and we trained it using images and videos of 100 dogs and cats, and it can correctly identify them 60% of the time. If we doubled the number of training images and videos to 200, its recognition rate would improve, but only marginally to something like 65%. If we doubled the training images and videos again to 400, its improvement would be even more marginal, to something like 67.5%.”  This is because as a dataset grows, “finding new and novel trends and connections that work for the entire dataset becomes harder and harder.”

It’s more than that.  AI is very resource hungry.  AIs are  trained by comparing each individual point of data to every other data point in a set to find connections and trends, so that for each bit of data you add to an AI training database, the amount of computational work it takes to train that AI on that database increases exponentially, and with that the amount of physical computing power and energy required grows rapidly.  Lockett suggests “there is evidence that we are at a stage where both the diminishing returns of training dataset growth and the exponential increase in computing power required to use said datasets are enforcing a hard ceiling on AI development. … Take OpenAI’s flagship AI ChatGPT4. Its improvement over ChatGPT3 was smaller than ChatGPT3’s improvement over ChatGPT2, and even though it was more accurate, it still had the same problems of hallucinating facts and lack of understanding as ChatGPT3 did.”

He reports investigations have shown ChatGPT3 used a training dataset about 78 times larger than ChatGPT2, and ChatGPT4 uses a dataset 571 times larger than ChatGPT3.  Despite this, ChatGPT4 still has significant flaws that significantly limit its use cases. It can’t be trusted to write anything remotely fact-based, as it still makes up facts.  “Some estimates put ChatGPT4’s raw training dataset at 45 TB of plaintext. This means that for the next iteration to be as big of an improvement as ChatGPT4 was over ChatGPT3, the training dataset would need to be tens of thousands of TBs.”  Accessing and preparing that amount of plaintext data, together with using this dataset to train their AI could use so much energy that it’s unviable.

Guess what.  I think we are on the edge of another boom to bust cycle.  What AI does is collate a whole lot of information – unthinkingly.  It would be like students writing their essays by simply quoting anything they see in books, with explanations or analysis.  Oops, that’s what students do now!  Seriously, AI is faster at retrieving data than a person can, even in a very good library.  However, it can’t think about the data, which requires human skills, making judgements, considering evaluating, and even rejecting  what is discovered.

Understanding AI’s ‘unthinking’ process also helps us see its limits.  The danger is simple.  Unless we are very careful, we are about to go down another rabbit hole, just like those that existed for DDT and chlorofluorocarbons, and should exist for motor cars.  We will suffer from reading the results of unthinking AI collated data and believe what we are told.  If humans are often foolish, this has the potential to make us foolish slaves to data.

Perhaps a final word should come from an educational perspective.  Good teachers know that

real learning doesn’t come from lectures or essays.  They can help put come building blocks in place.  However, if you want students to gain understanding, insight and creativity, that comes from interaction.  Send the students off to read, get them to put ideas on paper (knowing full well it might well be parents or AI that does the work).  However, when that initial work is done, sitting round a table and talking about the topic, finding out what was learnt and what was challenging, that’s the process by which we acquire understanding and wisdom.  Think of AI as a new and (possibly) better encyclopedia:  print versions of those tomes went boom and then bust.  I think AI may be heading in the same direction.

Cities, Suburbs and Local Shopping Centres

I live in Canberra, and in some respects I can claim to live in an ideal neighbourhood.  My apartment is just off Northbourne Avenue, perhaps 300m away from a stop on the light rail that can take me down to Civic, the ‘centre’ of Canberra, or up to Gungahlin with its convenient pedestrian shopping centre.  I am within a few yards of a crossroads where three suburbs join, Dickson, Lyneham (where I live) and Downer.  I’m within 500m of the Dickson Shopping Centre, where there’s branch of the Canberra public library system, a number of excellent shops, supermarkets and other outlets, and a key junction for several public bus routes.  I’m probably a kilometre from the Lyneham shops, and close to four schools and three parks.  There are a variety of cafes, coffee shops and restaurants in easy reach (I no longer have a car), and from my place I have quick access to such delights as a tempting second-hand bookshop and the wonderful Tilley’s Devine Cafe Gallery, both in Lyneham.

Look, I wasn’t going to do this, but I have to say a bit about Tilley’s.  It’s an institution, named after the colourful Tilley Devine, Sydney’s infamous madam and ‘Bordello Queen’ of the 1920s.  The café was opened in January 1984 by Paulie Higgisson.  To quote: “With elegant, dark wood fittings, a moody, deep red colour scheme, and soft jazz wafting between the old-fashioned booths lining the walls, there are some things essentially nostalgic and cinematic about Tilley’s romantic atmosphere, reminiscent of a Hollywood film noir. Its timeless in a way that’s hard to emulate in a youngish, fickle town like Canberra, where high turnover of night spots seem inevitably dictated by the relative hip-factor of the décor, the DJ and the cocktail menu” (from The Australian Women’s Register, 2006).

Initially established to create a safe and comfortable environment for women, for its first two years Tilley’s banned groups of men drinking inside unless accompanied by at least one woman. It was the first licensed outdoor venue in Australia and the first bar to ban smoking indoors, eight years before any laws.  For 21 years it was famous for its weekly schedule of concerts.  The stage remains, with live jazz many Saturday nights.  It’s a community focus.

Community is what takes me on to my main theme, which was talk about Jane Jacobs.  Born Jane Butzner, she moved to New York City in 1935 with her sister Betty.  Initially, she worked as a stenographer and a freelancer writing about city working districts.  She joined the staff of a trade magazine, first as a secretary, then as an editor. She sold articles to the Sunday Herald Tribune, Cue magazine, and Vogue.  After two years at the School of General Studies at Columbia University, she joined Iron Age magazine. Her 1943 article on economic decline in Scranton was well regarded , but after experiencing job discrimination at Iron Age, she became an advocate for equal pay for women and for the right of workers to unionize.

She moved on, spending several years working for a magazine called Amerika, published by the U.S. State Department for distribution in the Soviet Union. In the mid-nineteen- fifties she began writing about urban issues and architecture, first for Architectural Forum and then for Fortune, which offered a surprisingly welcoming home for her polemics against edifice-building!  She married an equally cheerful, nonconformist architect, Robert Jacobs, and they moved, just before the first of their three children was born, into a house at 555 Hudson Street, (which for some has attained the status of Thoreau’s cabin at Walden).  A sceptic of authority, she staged a grade-school rebellion against pledging to brush your teeth (she wasn’t against the brushing, just the coercion) and was being briefly expelled. She believed that authority could be laughed away, a powerful notion for a provocateur to take through life.

Though Jacobs was later portrayed as an engaged, block-party concerned mother, in fact she was much too busy writing and working to do much real street living; her shopping was mostly done by phone!  It was her more abstract experience reading about large-scale urban renewal elsewhere, particularly in Philadelphia under the then much praised Edmund Bacon, that really developed her growing indignation about what was happening to cities.

A paragraph in Fortune summed up her new belief on the ‘smallness of big cities’.  “Big cities thrived”, she wrote, “because they were full of healthy micro-villages; small ones became overdependent on one or two businesses, turning into plantation towns with company stores”. She became notorious for attacking Lincoln Center, then under construction.  Described an example of everything forward-looking in urban design, she saw it as an example of the ‘super blocks’ destroying  the hurly-burly of city life.  She was an early anti-modernist.  In 1956 she was invited to a symposium on cities at Harvard.  It was to prove transformative:  she went up to the lectern an unknown and came back to her seat a star.

It was against this background of established notoriety that Jacobs published The Death and Life of Great American Cities, very much under the guidance of an editor.  Written in 1961, I think the book is still astonishing and fascinating.  That’s not because it is written in brilliant prose so much as its analytical style, making unexpected connections among things which are illuminating yet you’d missed, but had always been there if only you had paid attention.

In a celebration of what she described as the unplanned, improvised New York City of streets and corners, Jacobs praised an urban landscape that architects at time were seeking to replace with large-scale apartment blocks adorned with balconies and surrounding inner-courtyard parks.  She was determined to make clear these super blocks tended to isolate their residents, depriving them of the ‘eyes-on-the-street crowding’ she argued was essential to city safety. She used stories, like one about a little girl apparently being harassed by an older man when all of Hudson Street emerged from stores and stoops to protect her (Jacobs later confessed that the man eventually turned out to be the girl’s father!).  Famously, she pointed out that informal local ‘eyes on the street’ were replaced on the new rich city blocks with a whole class of hired eyes: “A network of doormen and superintendents, of delivery boys and nursemaids, a hired neighbourhood, keeps residential Park Avenue supplied with eyes.”  As she saw it, a hired neighbourhood was replacing what a local network did for free, obvious once said, but no one had noticed what the neighbourhood had been doing.

Describing eyes-on-the-street was an important contribution, but it was far from observing something new.  When I was a child in suburban London, with semi-detached houses strung along low-density streets, there were watchers there, too. They were usually women, either not working or looking after young children, keeping an eye on the outside world through their windows’ net curtains.  When boys like me were up to no good, they saw.  When we needed to be brought back in line, they reported.  Regarded as busybodies, they had their role.  When my mother was told the grocery delivery man often took the boxes inside at one house to ‘unpack’, but was there for quite a long time, my mother said “Pigs” (‘pigs might fly’!).

The book is really a study in the miracle of self-organization, like the nature of living things that  D’Arcy Thompson’s studies of biological growth On Growth and Form had revealed.  Without plans, shapes and systems can emerge from necessity.  One of the unforgettable passages in her book is a revealing commentary on  the “sidewalk ballet”:

Under the seeming disorder of the old city, wherever the old city is working successfully, is a marvellous order for maintaining the safety of the streets and the freedom of the city.  It is a complex order.  Its essence is intricacy of sidewalk use, bringing with it a constant succession of eyes.  The order is composed of movement and change . . . an intricate ballet in which the individual dancers and ensembles all have distinctive parts which miraculously reinforce each other and compose an orderly whole . . . Mr. Halpert unlocking the laundry’s handcart from its mooring to a cellar door, Joe Cornacchia’s son-in-law stacking out the empty crates from the delicatessen, the barber bringing out his sidewalk folding chair, Mr. Goldstein arranging the coils of wire which proclaim the hardware store is open, the wife of the tenement’s superintendent depositing her chunky three-year-old with a toy mandolin on the stoop, the vantage point from which he is learning the English that his mother cannot speak. . . . [A]fter work, the ballet is reaching its crescendo.  This is the time of roller skates and stilts and tricycles, and games in the lee of the stoop with bottletops and plastic cowboys; this is the time of bundles and packages, zigzagging from the drug store to the fruit stand and back over to the butcher’s; this is the time when teen-agers, all dressed up, are pausing to ask if their slips show or their collars look right; this is the time when beautiful girls get out of MG’s; this is the time when fire engines go through; this is the time when anybody you know around Hudson Street will go by.

When I went back to rereading this commentary, it now seems rather long and over-dramatic.  However, one writer observed that anyone who lived on a New York block would have recognized its essential truth, adding:  “a single Yorkville block, when I moved there, thirty-five years ago, had a deli, a playground, and a funeral home; the guys from Wankel’s Hardware on an avenue nearby gathered for lunch at the Anna Maria pizza place on the corner. The ballet happened.”  (Adam Gopnik, Street Smarts, New Yorker, September 2016).

Rereading Death and Life of Great American Cities sixty years later it is easy to see that some of Jacobs beliefs and expectations weren’t born out in practice.  She believed the long block lengths on the Upper West Side would keep its streets stagnant, compared with those of her Village.  In fact, streets like Columbus Avenue have become as lively as the Hudson Street she had described.  This is because it isn’t block lengths that mattered as compared to attractive rents.  However, she was right about many things.  She suggested bad old buildings are as important to civic health as good old buildings because, while the good old buildings get recycled upward, the bad ones prove to be a kind of ‘urban mulch’ in which prospective new businesses could make a start, a process we still can see in cities around the world.

Through its anecdotes and analyses, Jacob’s book emphasises two core principles.  First, cities are their streets. To use a human analogy, streets are not just a city’s veins but rather they represent its neurology, the distribution and concentration of knowledge and intelligence.  Second, urban diversity and density can reinforce each other in a virtuous circle. The more people there are on the block, the more kinds of shops and social organizations they demand; and the more kinds of shops and clubs there are, the more people come to seek them.  This is a message about diversity:  the greater the city density there’s increasing  diversity, and if you have diversity things get denser and deeper.  Jacobs was making explicit something we see so clearly now:  the more you build major isolated suburbs, or what Americans call  plaza-and-park housing, the more the city declines as a living centre.  Perhaps Jacobs’s idea can be summed up simply: If you don’t build it, they will come.

Today, she seems like a figure addressing a past long gone.  She wanted to see New York as a city of  short blocks and small green spaces.  Now the city has standardised blocks and a proliferation of tall buildings.  Old neighbourhoods are helpless in the face of new pressures, from market forces. Even when she observed it, the intricate ‘ballet’ Jacobs described was, of course, supported by commerce.  Today small business can’t compete with retail chains and  can’t pay their landlords high rents.  City governments seek ways to sustain micro business zones and foster diversity but often end up promoting conformity – a Starbucks everywhere!

Jane Jacobs’s perspective was focussed on the small scale. Her name is still associated with such ideas as eyes on the street, the much-watched corner, the mixed-use neighbourhood.  Her admirers and interpreters fall into almost polar opposites: leftists who see her as the champion of community against big capital and real-estate development; and free marketeers who see her as the apostle of self-emerging solutions in cities. In his commentary Gopnik observed “In a lovely symmetry, her name invokes both political types: the Jacobin radicals, who led the French Revolution, and the Jacobite reactionaries, who fought to restore King James II and the Stuarts to the British throne.”   Today she would be called pro-growth:  she made it clear ‘stagnant’ was one of the worst terms in her vocabulary.  But if she had been asked to choose any term that offended her most it would be ‘planned economy.’ A cultural liberal, she was opposed to oligarchy, suspicious of technology, and hostile to big business and the military.  She offers a rich, original mixture of ideas illuminated with some lovely, observational details, and reading Jacobs seriously today is still delightfully informative.

Polarisation always leads to exaggeration, and I think it is easy to believe suburbs move to one extreme or the other.  I have to be careful, of course.  I am living in Canberra, not New York.  However, it is tempting to over-amplify difference.  There is continuing real estate development around me.  Much of the time that is both necessary and acceptable.  Necessary, because the population of Canberra continues to grow, and there is an evident need for more housing.  Acceptable, because Canberra, possibly unusually, still manages to build suburbs with parks, relatively low-density housing, new schools and shopping areas, and yet retain some sense of being a cohesive city.  It’s easier in a small city.

Equally, technology that Jacobs couldn’t have imagined is having an impact.  The Internet has made it simple to directly order some goods from almost anywhere in the world and have them couriered to your home.  Local stores deliver everything from beer to baked goods, bananas to complete meals.  Despite this, people eat out frequently.  You can have all your entertainment delivered through your PC and television, but cinemas, concert halls and theatres continue, though it’s possible the downturn during the Covid years might continue.

Cities have neither died nor have they flourished.  The city is an amazing solution to a problem:  how enable huge numbers of people to live together.  While the pace of the world’s population growth may start to slow soon, we will need cities for the foreseeable future.  However, there isn’t a template for the ideal city.  The cities I know and the cities I have lived in are always developing and changing.  Some solutions are discouraging to people who have lived in a different way before.  I still find the huge tracts of Melbourne’s suburbs off-putting.  But I am not so foolish as to believe that big cities are failure, and I know that we find ways to create neighbourhoods as best we can, whatever the overall urban landscape.  I don’t read Jane Jacobs outstanding books as nostalgic descriptions of a world we have lost.  I don’t read them as guides to how we should live to today.  I read them as a reminder that cities are about people, and that people keep finding new ways to deal with the problems technology, growth and resource challenges present to us.  I like to think that were she assessing what is happening today, she would comment, as she did sixty years ago, by pointedly highlighting poor strategies, praising good ones, and helping us see more clearly the ways cities can and frequently do enrich the lives of the people who live in them.

Self-Employment

Several years ago, the Australian Institute of Management would hold regular one-day briefings on the economy and future trends.  Many of us enjoyed contributions from what became a familiar trio, comprising Neville Norman, from the University of Melbourne, Alan Carroll, an international management consultant running his own business, and Phil Ruthven, the head of IBIS, a data analysis company.  Each would contribute to painting a picture of the changes they could see.  Neville Norman would examine the economy, and the various actions the government was pursuing or proposing to keep growth on track.  It was always growth back then!  Alan Carroll would then set this within an international context, his analysis always combining strategic insights with witty insights into and quick portraits of international leaders.  Finally, Phil Ruthven would summarise the changing situation with a series of graphs and tables showing areas of growth and decline.

Could we have guessed back then how the apparent story of never-ending overall growth was heading for a shock?  Ruthven’s charts showed us the patterns of change in the economy.  His interest was in the longer trends the data revealed.  However, none of the three could have predicted the emergence and impact of Covid.  Years later, we can look back and check if any of the trends outlined have continued.  In their day, Australian was described as “a quarry, a farm and a hotel’.  Manufacturing was dying.  Also experiencing a slow death, the media hung on, largely through overseas ownership and overseas content.  The hope for the future was in innovation and entrepreneurship, especially in medical devices and products.

Little has changed.  The quarry remains central, even if it is gas and some rare earth metals that now contribute as much as iron ore and coal once did.  The farm has had a tough time in recent years, with restrictions on international trade, and spectacular growth in agricultural products from other parts of the world.  The hotel is re-emerging after the Covid downturn, but some of the facilities look shabby today, and threats to such natural phenomena as the Great Barrier Reef have left the industry with a sense the best days are clearly over.

However, a focus on the big trends that Normal, Carroll and Ruthven documented might have taken attention away from some other changes.  If, like me, you are older and a working hours walker, you will have been struck by the numbers of small businesspeople you see today:  there are local builders, air-conditioning repairers, dog-washers, people contracted to mow lawns and clean up gardens, as well a plethora of delivery trucks, meal services, and so the list goes on.  This is the ‘gig economy’ at work:  and it seems self-employment is growing at the same time as larger companies are shrinking their employee numbers.

Who are these ‘gig workers’.  They are self-employed, independent contractors, and contract firms with on-call teams and temps.  Gig workers are the people who are employed through formal agreements with on-demand companies to provide services to the company’s clients.  Are they employees?  It’s a contested area.  Companies prefer to classifying their gig workers as ‘independent contractors’, whereas workers’ advocates (unions and other membership organisations) push for them to be classified as ‘employees’, to pressure the companies to provide the same employee benefits their fulltime staff possess, like overtime, paid sick leave, employer-provided health care, bargaining rights, unemployment insurance, and more.

Gig work began to grow around the middle of the 20^th Century.  Back in 1952, Jack Kerouac was the first to use the term to describe a form of employment when writing about his time as a brakeman for a US railroad company.  This was in his book On the Road, a novel, but perhaps better described as a ‘faction’, as it charts of evolving impact of the Baby Boomer generation on themselves and on others.  Initially described as a book charting youthful exuberance, it has become seen as an account of “gloomy middle-aged disillusion” (as David  Brooks was to describe in the New York Times, 2 October 2007).   Brooks saw the emerging gig economy as possessing a reckless and youthful confidence that was to slowly decline as those same gig workers became more and more absorbed into the economic system.  Of course, Kerouac wasn’t interested in analysing economic trends:  his focus was on the characters in his novel, who sought to assert their independence, replace the traditional model of manhood with a model rooted celebrating conquest and self-discovery, affirming male brotherhood and the freedom of the road as primary measures of male identity.

Kerouac was a novelist, but he was addressing something that was to grow in salience:  being a worker, but not in the sense of not being the employee of a major company (a theme of many academic studies for the next few decades), but with ‘being your own boss’, free from managers and bureaucratic controls.  Also, it offers a contrast with the traditional model, where employees seek an employer for the long term, to be paid by the hour, week or month,  earning a wage or salary. Gig work tends to be temporary or project-based, often with the workers hired and paid to complete a specific task or for limited period of time.  The lack of traditional benefits is balanced against the fact these workers have greater flexibility around their work hours.

In recent years, the growth of online work has taken this further, allowing some gig workers to become ‘digital nomads’.  Digital nomads have acquired a mobile lifestyle, combining work and leisure though possessing transferable skills and equipment.  For them, gig work offers flexible, location-independent opportunities that can be performed remotely, typically accessed through using digital platforms, allowing many of these people to live a lifestyle combining travel and work, all enabled by internet connectivity.

Reading various reports extolling these changes, you discover gig workers may have high levels of flexibility, autonomy, task variety, and complexity.  However, the gig economy has also raised concerns. First, these jobs generally confer few employer-provided benefits and workplace protections.  Second, technological developments occurring in the workplace have come to blur the arrangement between ‘employee’ and ‘employer’ to the extent these gig alternatives can result in low pay, social isolation, working unsocial and irregular hours, overwork, even sleep deprivation and exhaustion.   The downsides are not trivial.  A 2021 report by WHO and ILO suggests the expansion of the gig economy appears to have been a significant factor for the increase in early age deaths for gig workers.  The study also suggests there’s evidence of gig workers experiencing relatively poor mental health outcomes.

Inevitably, national legislatures have proposed and often adopted regulations intended to protect gig economy workers.  The overall approach tends to be one forcing employers to provide gig workers with some of the benefits previously reserved for traditional employees. Critics of such regulations have asserted that these obligations have negative consequences, with employers almost inevitably reducing wages to compensate for increasing benefits or even terminating employment when they have no leeway to reduce wages.

It’s not just pay.  There are gender differences in participation in the gig economy.  In the United States for example, female gig workers making up 55% of the gig work population, often earning at a rate less than their fulltime equivalents.  The figure for Australia is around 43%.   Gender differences are revealed in the ‘platform economy’, another aspect of gig work, segregating some areas of employment, and a way to allow women to participate in paid work without disrupting social hierarchies, as many are still being expected to manage household and childcare responsibilities. Well, perhaps that was concept, but it’s not the way many see it.  It seems the advent of home service providers and beauticians within the gig economy has not so much been about ‘platforms’ as it has led to the formalising and feminization of casual labour, an area dubbed as “pink collar work”.

How does this look today?  A 2023 McKell Institute study of worker perspectives on the gig economy, Tough Gig, found that “Workers face abuse, assaults and injuries.  One in seven experienced sexual harassment, while over a third have been physically injured while working. While women only made up one in ten survey respondents, they experienced over twice the rate of sexual harassment as men – at 26 per cent compared to 12 per cent. 55 per cent of total respondents have experienced threatening or abusive behaviour, with 43 per cent noting the risk of being abused by a customer as a significant concern.”

Instant job loss through ‘deactivation’ is common. 79 per cent of respondents use ‘multiple apps’, 74 per cent of them doing so to receive adequate jobs and money, while a third said they use multiple apps for job security in case they are dropped by a business.  More than a quarter have had their accounts deactivated or suspended, and half listed this ‘deactivation’ as one of their top three concerns.  Low pay is a health and safety hazard.  51 per cent of all respondents have felt pressured to rush or take risks to make enough money or protect their job, which puts both worker safety and customer safety at risk.  Over half of the respondents have experienced work-related stress, anxiety, and mental health issues.

Looking at the data, the major factor cited in workers’ concerns was income:  low pay, followed by no income while sick or injured, unpaid time waiting for jobs and uncertainty of income.  45 per cent of gig workers have struggled to afford everyday items like groceries and household bills, with the same proportion reporting earning less than minimum wage. If this finding is reflected across the gig economy, it would mean 90-112,000 Australian workers are earning less than minimum wage.  Drivers working longer hours are worse off.  Of those working over 40 hours a week, at least two thirds earn less than minimum wage.  Food delivery workers were the most likely to report earning less than minimum wage.  Delivery workers must work long hours to make enough money.  81% of respondents depend on the money they earn from rideshare, food delivery, or parcel delivery to pay bills and survive, and 41% of workers reported working overtime (gig workers don’t earn overtime rates).  Overall, 74% of workers reported working long hours to make enough.

The gig economy is ostensibly less gender-segregated worldwide than the traditional labour market. However, women across the world continue to protest against gender gaps such as lower wages and working hours and the lack of flexibility. Gig workers want reform, and almost all responding to the McKell survey supported government regulation of the sector.  The COVID-19 pandemic highlighted the need for worker protections for women who work in the gig economy for supplemental income.  The platform economy has attracted female service providers due to the flexibility it offers. 80% of women on one food delivery service said that flexibility is the main reason they pursue gig work, (Axios, 26 August 2021), mainly  many women need to balance work with familial responsibilities (surprise!!) and are therefore more likely than men to participate in gig work due to scheduling reasons.

Given this, there has been a recent rise in women joining the platform economy as gig workers.  Women now make up just under half of the delivery people on Uber Eats. There are other issues aside from the flexibility.  Women tend to prefer delivery work to ride-sharing work because of safety concerns if you are a female driver offering ride-sharing services. There have been proportionately more sexual harassment claims filed by female Uber drivers.

These issues with gig work lead to an obvious question:  how big has been the impact of the gig economy?  The Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS), like most national statistical organisations, has begun working to expand its statistics on relatively new and emerging forms of employment, including digital platform workers.  It has developed measures of this area of activity, with an initial survey module of digital platform workers collected through the agency’s Multi-Purpose Household Survey during the 2022-23 financial year.   That first survey revealed the proportion of people who reported undertaking digital platform work (in the last 4 weeks) was relatively small, at just under 1% (0.96%), of the employed population, (these results are similar to those seen in other OECD countries).

In the ABS data, not all digital platform workers considered themselves employed. Only 87% of digital platform workers reported their Labour Force Status as employed, with the remainder reporting they were either ‘Not In The Labour Force’ (10%) or ‘Unemployed’ (3%).  This reveals some see this work as a ‘side hustle’, rather than a ‘job’. This has also been found in other countries, such as Finland, where surveys have found under-reporting of multiple jobholding by employed people.  However, as digital platform workers are a very small proportion of the employed population, it’s been challenging to obtain detailed data.

What did this initial survey tell us?  For those undertaking digital platform work:

• the majority were male (66%), representing a higher proportion of males than in the total employed population (52%)
• the average age was 38 years for males, compared to 36 years for females
• there was a large proportion of people between the ages of 25 to 34 years (30% compared to 23% in the total employed population).

In 2022-23, the most popular digital platform tasks undertaken included:

• food delivery (35%)
• personal transport (27%).

Of all digital platform workers, males were more likely to undertake transport and goods delivery tasks (46%) and females were more likely to undertake food delivery and other work (18%):  ‘other work’ includes a broad range of tasks beyond delivery and transport, such as conducting voluntary surveys and market research.

For those undertaking digital platform work:

• 53% undertook this work in addition to their main job, though only 11% reported that they were multiple job holders in the Labour Force Survey
• that proportion of multiple job holders is higher than the multiple jobholding rate reported by respondents in  the employed population.

It seems to me Phil Ruthven had it right.  Labour force changes take place slowly, and, despite all the hype, gig work and the platform economy remain a small part of the overall picture.  It may grow, but articles about ‘new ways of working’ are largely imaginative projections.  I think I am observing a very different and new economy on my morning walks, but I’m wrong.  Little has changed; for most people, there’s nothing new:  Same old jobs, same old employers, same old worries about keeping a job, and not earning enough.  What’s that phrase again:  plus ça change …

Transitions

I first read about ‘rites de passage’ back in the 1960s.  I was a student, enrolled in a social anthropology course, and Arnold van Gennep’s book Les Rites de Passage was listed.  It had appeared in an English translation back in 1960.  A key text, it described the process through which a person or a group goes through a change in social status.  Van Gennep explained that rites of passage have three phases: separation, liminality, and incorporation.

In the first phase, people are withdrawn from their current status and prepared for the move from one social status to another. “The first phase (of separation) comprises symbolic behaviour signifying the detachment of the individual or group … from an earlier fixed to point in the social structure.”  There is often a detachment or ‘cutting away’ from the former self in this phase, which is signified in symbolic actions and rituals. One of the examples Van Gennep uses is the cutting of the hair for a person who has just joined the army.  He or she is ‘cutting away’ the former self:  the civilian.

The transition (liminal) phase is the period between stages, during which one has left one place or state but has not yet entered or joined the next.  “The attributes of liminality or of liminal personae (“threshold people”) are necessarily ambiguous.”  I’m not sure why this example came to me, but this is a bridegroom on a stag night or bride at a ‘hen do’.  This is a sanctioned time when misbehaviour is permitted – even encouraged.

In the third phase (reaggregation or incorporation) the passage is “consummated [by] the ritual subject”.   Having completed the rite and assumed their ‘new’ identity, the individual re-enters society with anew status. Re-incorporation is characterized by elaborate rituals and ceremonies, like debutant balls and college graduation, and by outward symbols of new ties: thus “in rites of incorporation there is widespread use of the ‘sacred bond, the ‘sacred cord’, the knot, and of analogous forms such as the belt, the ring, the bracelet and the crown.”

Anthropologists like to observe these rites de passage in societies, as they are often insightful:  they demonstrate the markers of social status, and the symbolism is a guide to other rituals in behaviour, both on special occasions and in more mundane activities.   This perspective received considerable impetus with the development of the sociological theory of symbolic interaction, peoples’ use of shared language and rituals to create and reinforce symbols and meaning.  It’s a frame of reference that helps us better understand how individuals interact with one another through symbolic worlds, worlds that shape individual behaviour.  For theorists symbolic interactionism was a framework that helped understand how society is preserved and created through repeated interactions between individuals. It is the shared understanding and interpretations of meaning that shape many of the significant interactions we see between individuals. Individuals act on the premise of a shared understanding of meaning within their social context.  People live in both natural and symbolic environments.

I wasn’t a sociologist, but I was interested in this perspective.  However, that interest grew significantly once I met Anselm Strauss .  Anselm was a short, slightly overweight and quietly spoken man, a professor of sociology at the University of California Medical Center in San Francisco.  I think the best word to describe him was gentle.  He loved music, played the piano at home, and had a fascination with kinetic sculptures.  From when I first met him at the end of the 1960s, I realised he was the teacher I aspired to be, never lecturing but always asking questions, and by that means revealing understanding and insight.  He set a standard for how to be a university professor that remained my goal for the years I worked in academic institutions, a standard I longed to meet, but one which was always just beyond my grasp.  If you think about it, that’s always the best thing to aim for, something that is almost there, encouraging to strive to be better.

Perhaps there is no better way to explain what he was like than to quote from the introduction from an Anselm Strauss’ festschrift, written by Roberta Lessor in 2000 (in a supplement to Sociological Perspectives):

Anselm Strauss was the most unpretentious academic I have ever known. In his nearly sixty years of working and publishing, Strauss advanced symbolic interactionist theory and method remarkably, yet he was soft-spoken and unassuming. His dress and demeanor mirrored his personality. He preferred open-collared shirts and his trademark pullover sweaters to coats and ties, and he was even known to carry drafts of whatever he happened to be working on in a plastic bag—much lighter and easier on the back than a briefcase. He lived most of his life with chronic illness and worked the small necessities of self-care into his daily routine. Totally the sociologist, he used his experiences both in and out of the hospital as data, observations of “medical work” from which he could draw insights. This was a life lesson I took from Anselm: observe what life hands you as data for a sociological analysis. It makes life more interesting, you may improve your analytic skills, and it may even help your situation. Sometimes Anselm needed to take a short rest, and if he were working with students in a seminar, he would give a characteristic, almost dismissive, small wave of his hand and say, “just go on, I’ll be right back.” That might mean his reclining on the bench beside the fireplace in the Third Avenue Victorian (which housed the sociology program) while we went on with our seminar for twenty minutes. Or it might mean his closing his eyes as he sat in his chair, to return to the conversation in a few minutes with a smile and his full attention.

I had first met Anselm on one his early visits to the UK.  Initially I saw him as some variety of kind uncle, enquiring about what I was doing.  As he would draw me out, wondering about why I had mentioned something, querying what I meant by the words I used, initially I didn’t ‘get it’.  It took some time before I realised how extraordinarily effective he was as a teacher.  Indeed, he was never a ‘teacher’, but rather a friend on a journey, who appeared to know something about the territory, and would every so often point out a possibly worthwhile detour, or a reason to stope, reflect and reconsider.  At my first acquaintance, I didn’t realise he was a wonderful guide:  I suspect I imagined that, back in the US, he gave lectures like everyone else did.  It took a visit to see him in beloved San Francisco for me to understand how he was helping me learn.

He also wrote several insightful books.  Time for Dying is one of these (it was preceded by Awareness of Dying).  As he explained in the preface, he and co-author Barney Glaser (a researcher in the department) saw the book as directed to two audiences.  ‘Because we wish to contribute toward making the management of dying – by health professionals, families and patients – more rational and compassionate, we have written this book, first of all for those who must work with and give care to the dying.”  The second audience was social scientists, a contribution to exploring the “temporal aspects of work”, a group  that included those with interests in many areas, some far from interested in health care and hospitals.

Time for Dying was published in 1968.  My copy is hand dated 1971.  Reading it more than fifty years later was a shock:  not because it wasn’t the book I had thought it to be, but because its underlying approach has become so firmly embedded in the way I have worked.  Anselm Strauss described his approach as ‘grounded theory’ in a book published a year earlier (The Discovery of Grounded Theory, also written by Strauss and Glaser).  They made it clear they had had several goals in mind when writing about their approach to developing theory.  They wanted to:

• to legitimise qualitative research;
• to criticise the functionalist school in sociology;
• to demonstrate the possibility of building theories from the data, instead of choosing to rely on ‘ethnographic’ description (what a man from Mars would see).

My copy of Time for Dying still has the original paper wrapper cover – which shows eight people, all in medical whites, standing together and clearly discussing a case.  At the bottom of the cover we read the book is “a detailed analysis of the reciprocal effects of patients, staff, and institutional structure in the management of terminal patients in institutions”.  The Introduction makes it clear that the book was written ‘first of all’ for people who have work with and give care to individuals who are dying.  It notes that in 1963 53% of all death in the US were in hospitals and nursing homes.  I suspect the figures are higher today:  a 2019 Australian study found 51% of deaths were in a hospital/medical service area, and 29.5% in residential aged care facilities (although this is a wider category than nursing homes.  This is, of course, an indicator of how far death is managed ‘out of sight’, with a little under 15% taking place at home.  As the Introduction made clear (and must be even more the case today), “outsiders to the family have been delegated responsibility for taking care of dying during their last days or hours”.

Time for Dying focusses on the ‘temporal features of terminal care’.  It is an important perspective, as we often are encouraged to think about the psychological or ethical aspects of behaviour towards a dying individual.  However, they want to remind us that this is also about ‘work’, both routine, around meals, drug administration and the like, and the less predictable, including tests, interventions and responses.  It is a complex work management process, especially as many patients approaching death may be heavily drugged, temporarily comatose or even unconscious, and typically having little conversational interaction with the staff.  Inevitably, while many staff may be involved when there are critical incidents occurring, for much of the time attention is limited and relies on impersonal monitors as much as on staff observation.

As Glaser and Strauss point out in their Preface, “the training of physicians and nurses equips them principally for the technical aspects of dealing with illness.  Medical students learn not to kill patients through error, and to save lives through diagnosis and treatment.  But their teachers put little of no emphasis on how to talk with dying patients; how – whether – to disclose an impending death; or even how to approach the subject with wives, husbands, children and parents of the dying”.

In 1971, I arrived at the University of Edinburgh, where one of my interests was looking at ways in which the social and behavioural sciences could be introduced into the medical school curriculum.  The two books on dying had made an impact on me, although not just in relation to the dying:  as I saw it, medical students needed a better appreciation of sociology and psychology to be able to fulfill their roles effectively.  I continued to look at ways to enhance student understanding of these issues for the next ten years, in Scotland and then in Australia.

Fifty years later, an appreciation of the social sciences is now a standard part of the medical school curriculum, and nurses and doctors are much better prepared to deal with the families and friends of patients.  Inevitably, some will be more able to deal with social and psychological issues than others.  Individual differences will always be evident.

When my wife was dying some years ago, the contrast between her two principal doctors was vivid.  Her medical oncologist was open and helpful as he explained progress, and later the lack of progress to me and my children.  He explained his strategies, and his enthusiasm for measures, his warmth, and his devotion was evident.  So was his distraught appearance as it became clear that the measures he was trying were failing.  His colleague, the surgical oncologist, was clear, direct, and basically impersonal.  It was only after an unexpectedly long surgery, that the other side of his character emerged:  he was tired, frustrated, and – although he couldn’t bring himself to say it – defeated.  He knew the prognosis was bad, but he couldn’t find the words to explain.  He left that to his colleague.  To be clear, I don’t mean to imply any criticism:  both dealt with what they knew and communicated well, but their approaches were a reflection of personalities that were intrinsic.

That time illustrated an important lesson about transitions.  Van Gennep was an astute observer of rites de passage.  However, describing social process and symbols is an account that is essentially de-personalised.  It is concerned with identifying the underlying ways in which we manage changes in social status.  It influences the way the ‘work’ is executed.  However, at the level of specific transitions, variation is enormous.  In that sense, ‘real’ status passage in a task that involves many participants, each one of whom contributes to shape the process.  Perhaps I can best explain that by example.

Marriage is a very important kind of status change.  While occasionally the bride and groom might feel it is all about them, they are one, albeit important, part of a complex process of negotiation.  In addition to the couple, others who take part, and often have important parts to play as well as very real interest in the outcome, can include parents, other family members, friends, colleagues, officers (whether priests or delegated officials), not to mention musicians, choirs, caterers, waiting staff, and so on.  In some cases, the cast can be hundreds!

I have managed to get married three times.  On the first occasion, it was essentially a ‘family’ business, with several family members on both sides.  The next time, it was a tiny group, little more than my wife and I, a few members of her family, one child, and a few others.  The third time around, it was largely an event for friends.  Each time around, it was a time of transition:  a brief interlude before becoming a married couple.  However, the symbolism, the process, and the participation of others varied enormously.  To return to Anselm Strauss, he would observe that this is a matter of ‘work’.  People have roles and tasks, for a short-term project.  There is a clear outcome, and certain rules that shape the way the work is undertaken.  But each marriage was undertaken in its particular way.

Strauss and Glaser on dying describe this feature of status passage brilliantly.  The two books, and especially Time for Dying, capture both the characteristics of the underlying process, while carefully noting variations and unpredictable alternatives.  However, as is also true of some other major rites de passage, success is determined by all the participants in the process feeling ‘it was done right’, respecting the unique elements of the event, while also knowing that the appropriate social proprieties were respect.  We are all involved in social transitions, and we want to feel good about how they were accomplished.

Here and There – Spain

Am I really going to write about Spain is a brief four-page blog?  It’s a vast and varied country, and for many visitors Spain is about food, festivals and fun, especially with its beach resorts and ‘holiday’ climate.  However, in addition to many delights, it contains two extraordinary 20^th Century buildings, the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao and The Basílica i Temple Expiatori de la Sagrada Família, shortened as the Sagrada Família, in Barcelona.  Taken together they represent examples of the most outstanding architecture of recent times, and more than enough to occupy one blog.  They couldn’t be more different:  one is a temple to modern imagery and materials, the work of Frank Gehry, the other a testimony to religious architecture of the past, a building yet to be completed although it was  begun by Antoni Gaudi more than one hundred years ago.  Each is, in its own way, not just unique but quite breathtaking.

The Guggenheim Museum has close to a perfect location.  It was built alongside the Nervion River, and the sight looking from across the river is close to amazing.  The museum’s base is constructed in  beige limestone from a quarry near Granada.  However, you would be forgiven for not even noticing the stone, as almost the whole building is covered in titanium plates, some 33,000 of them, resulting in a brilliant flashing silver finish, stunning in the sunshine, as often seen in Bilbao.  When I first saw the museum from across the water, and despite all the photographs I had seen, I was still delighted and amazed.  It was as if a strange creature from outer space had arrived in Bilbao and was resting by the river before moving on.  What’s the word?  Gobsmacked!!

As an example of contemporary architecture, it has been described as a “signal moment in the architectural culture”, and it was claimed to represent “one of those rare moments when critics, academics, and the general public were all completely united about something”, well, that’s if you believe architectural critic Paul Goldberger!  Even if not everyone agrees with Goldberger’s comments, it is frequently named as one of the most important works completed since 1980 in world architecture surveys.

We can thank the initiative of the Basque government for its construction, which approached the Solomon R Guggenheim Foundation in 1991, explaining it would fund a Guggenheim museum to be built in Bilbao’s somewhat rundown port area, no longer in much use by shipping companies.  The Basque government agreed to cover the US$100 million construction cost, to create a US$50 million acquisitions fund, to pay a one-time US$20 million fee to the Guggenheim and to subsidize the museum’s US$12 million annual budget. In exchange, the foundation agreed to manage the institution, rotate parts of its permanent collection through the Bilbao museum and organize temporary exhibitions.  It cost US$89 million to build, and the museum was opened on 18 October 1997. 

I wonder how often a city has the confidence to commission something as daring as the Guggenheim in Bilbao.  I suspect it took some courage, and possibly quite a lot of criticism from the residents.  If the building comes across as ‘daring’, so were they, and thank goodness they were.  Incidentally, in 2008, the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao announced that it was looking into building an expansion in an area to the east of Bilbao, and to date 40 million euros have been contributed toward the expansion.  However, let’s stick with the completed museum.

Before I say much about its impact, a little more background.  This memorable building includes  nineteen galleries, of which ten are rectangular, and distinguishable by their stone exteriors, while the remaining nine are irregularly shaped:  these are the ones whose exteriors are distinguished by the swirling shapes and titanium cladding. The largest gallery is huge, 98 × 427 feet.  When it opened in 1997 it had more exhibition space than the three Guggenheim collections in New York and Venice combined at that time.  The highlight of the collection, (and its only permanent exhibit inside), is The Matter of Time by Richard Serra, a 100-metre-long spiral series of weathered steel sheets, looking somewhat like an ammonite from above.

The other striking work, also permanent, is called Puppy, a sculpture by Jeff Koons.  Puppy stands outside the museum building.  It is  a 43 feet tall topiary sculpture of a West Highland White Terrier.  It was originally created in 1992 for an exhibition in Germany.  The first version was constructed with a variety of flowers growing on a transparent colour-coated chrome stainless steel substructure.  In 1995, Puppy was dismantled and re-erected at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Sydney (located on Sydney harbour) with a new, more permanent stainless-steel structure and an internal irrigation system. While the original version had 20,000 plants, the Sydney version held around 60,000.  It was purchased in 1997 by the Guggenheim Foundation and transferred to Bilbao.

Somehow, something by Jeff Koons is likely to create controversy:  in this case, not Puppy itself (although I am certain there have been many negative views expressed about the sculpture).  However, the drama at the beginning was memorable.  Before the dedication of Koon’s sculpture at the museum, an ETA (Basque Homeland and Liberty) trio disguised as gardeners attempted to plant explosive-filled flowerpots, (flowerpots – now that was clever), near the sculpture.  They were foiled by a Basque policeman, Jose María Aguirre, who was shot dead by ETA members.  Puppy is impressive, but the story is even more so.

The two permanent works are big and memorable.  All the other works you see in the museum are there for the duration of specific exhibitions only and change frequently.  The result is rather strange.  Puppy and the Matter of Time are undeniable drawcards.  Whatever else you see is serendipitous, and when I was there, most of the other works on display were good, but not compelling.  I was reminded of that sexist but memorable line from the Monks’ song ‘Nice Legs’: “Nice legs, shame about the face”.  Outstanding construction, but pallid collections inside.  I guess I was there in the wrong month.  For sure, Bilbao is not an exciting city:  pleasant, enjoyable, but not compelling.  The Guggenheim has put it on the map, and that shows the wisdom of the City.  A good investment?  That is harder to answer, but I suspect Bilbao has seen its tourist revenue grow many times over.

If Bilbao is not an exciting city, the same cannot be said about Barcelona.  It is Spain’s second largest city, some 1.5m people (Madrid has around 3m, but Bilbao has only 350K, considerably smaller in size).  Barcelona is like a magnet, especially for soccer fans, and full of great sights.  There are the two ‘Casas’, fascinating buildings designed by Antoni Gaudí, the Picasso Museum and the Museum of Contemporary Art.  There’s the Cathedral, and a swag of shops packed out with the very best in Spanish design.  There’s Montjuïc, ‘Jewish Mountain’,  the birthplace of the city, the site for the 1929 International Exposition, which led to the construction of Paulau Naacional and the Estadi Olimpic, and now home to the Museu Nacional d’Art de Catalunya.  Best of all, you can visit using the Montjuïc Cable Car.

However, plonked in the middle of Barcelona, just north of the city centre, is the truly amazing Basílica i Temple Expiatori de la Sagrada Família, the  Sagrada Família.  Wonderfully described as the “largest unfinished Catholic church in the world”, the masterwork of Antoni Gaudí, construction began in 1882 (on 19 March), and is now around 80% complete, with it likely the remaining final work will only be finished in 2040.  Incidentally, Gaudí died in 1926, and the project is now the responsibility of chief architect Jordi Faulí.   Just to complete the dates, it was consecrated by Pope Benedict XVI on 7 November 2010.  Starting on 9 July 2017, an international mass is celebrated at the basilica every Sunday and it’s open to the public (until the church is full).

I am not sure I know how to describe this amazing building.  Wikipedia advises that the style of the Sagrada Família is variously ascribed to ‘Spanish Late Gothic, Catalan Modernism or Art Nouveau’.  It is probably best described as unique Gaudí.  Unlike most cathedrals, it is closer to having a square floor plan (but it still has a rectangular footprint).  The basic layout is in the form of a Latin cross, albeit with five aisles wide.  Wikipedia describes it well “The central nave vaults reach forty-five metres (148 feet) while the side nave vaults reach thirty metres (98 feet). The transept has three aisles. … The crossing rests on the four central columns of porphyry supporting a great hyperboloid [rather like a cone supporting another facing downwards] surrounded by two rings of twelve hyperboloids (currently under construction). The central vault reaches 200 feet). The apse is capped by a hyperboloid vault reaching up 246 feet. Gaudí intended that a visitor standing at the main entrance be able to see the vaults of the nave, crossing, and apse; thus the graduated increase in vault loft.”

Forgive me for taking a bit more from Wikipedia “The columns of the interior are a unique Gaudí design. Besides branching to support their load, their ever-changing surfaces are the result of the intersection of various geometric forms. The simplest example is that of a square base evolving into an octagon as the column rises, then a sixteen-sided form, and eventually to a circle. This effect is the result of a three-dimensional intersection of. Helicoidal columns (for example a square cross-section column twisting clockwise and a similar one twisting counterclockwise).  Essentially none of the interior surfaces are flat; the ornamentation is comprehensive and rich, consisting in large part of abstract shapes which combine smooth curves and jagged points. Even detail-level work such as the iron railings for balconies and stairways are full of curvaceous elaboration.”  That leaves out mention of the colours used, which are prolific, almost ethereal in some sections, and close to overwhelming.

There’s more.  Gaudí’s original design calls for a total of eighteen spires, comprising in height order, the Twelve Apostles, the Virgin Mary, the four Evangelists and, tallest of all, Jesus Christ. Thirteen spires have been built as of 2023.  The Evangelists’ spires are surmounted by sculptures of their traditional symbols: a winged bull for St Luke, a winged man for St Matthew, an eagle for St John, and a winged lion for St Mark (the only one I knew).  The Church is designed to have three grand façades: the Nativity façade to the East, the Passion façade to the West, and the Glory façade to the South.  This last is yet to be completed and is planned to include elements such as the seven deadly sins and the seven heavenly virtues.  Visitors won’t be bored!

In case my description hasn’t make this clear, it is the kind of building determined to bring out extreme reactions.  I loved it, many hate it.  Gaudí was a unique architect.  Apparently, historian Nikolaus Pevsner referred to  Gaudí’s buildings as growing “like sugar loaves and anthills”, combining ‘bad taste’ with vitality and ‘ruthless audacity’.  Others have called the Sagrada Família as the “greatest piece of creative architecture in the last twenty-five years. It is spirit symbolised in stone!” and  “a marvel of technical perfection”; even “sensual, spiritual, whimsical, exuberant”.  However, George Orwell called it “one of the most hideous buildings in the world”, and a British historian, Gerald Brenan, said “Not even in the European architecture of the period can one discover anything so vulgar or pretentious.”  For once I don’t mind being identified with liking something so crazily magnificent!

I have been to other parts of Spain, but Bilbao and Barcelona, the Guggenheim and the Sagrada Família are unlike the rest, where the architecture is familiar grand European style for the major buildings, and the parks and gardens extensive and pleasant.  How do we deal with such exceptional monuments like these?  A monument, a “a type of structure that was explicitly created to commemorate a person or event, or which has become relevant to a social group as a part of their remembrance of historic times or cultural heritage, due to its artistic, historical, political, technical or architectural importance”.  Does the Guggenheim commemorate great art?  Does the Sagrada Família commemorate Christian religion?  Probably, but each does much more than that.  For me, they are statements about innovation, similar perhaps to Apple’s amazing headquarters in Cupertino, California.

However, it is time for a confession.  The Guggenheim and the Sagrada Família are two extra-ordinary drawcards in their respective cities.  However, they are only one among many places to visit.  They are drawcards, offerings to encourage you to visit.  However, like many invitations, once you arrive you realise there is so much more to see.  In the case of both cities, once I think about them the museum and the church are only one part of what I loved about them.

Bilbao is a low-key city, but it has some delightful streetscapes, and a quite extra-ordinary entrance to the main railway station.  It has several museums, including a Museum of Fine Arts with a collection that ranges from early Catalan artists through to El Greco, Goya, Gaugin, and even a Francis Bacon work, and the smaller Next Museum with a collection of Van Gogh works.  It has, improbable as it sounds, a ‘garden of light’: the Museo Farolas de Bilbao, which is a collection of streetlights, clustered on a lawn near the Museum of Fine Arts:  improbable but curiously compelling!  It has the advantage of size.  You can wander around the city centre quite easily, as its laid out on a rectangular basis and about a square kilometre in size, just like the centre of Melbourne.  Above all, it has food, delicious food, with many small, mouth wateringly inviting, restaurants.

Bilbao can’t compete with Barcelona, which is some six times larger in population, with its 1.5 million residents (and a lot more people in the tourist season, or when the soccer team is playing at home).  It’s the capital of autonomous Catalonia, and it is the 20th-most-visited city in the world, ranking seventh in international visitor numbers in Europe.  It has beaches, museums, a castle, a cathedral, and a very large number of fancy shops and restaurants, one with a bull poking its head outside!  For tourists, one of the most visited places is its popular tree-lined pedestrian street, Las Ramblas.  I’ve managed to get there a few times (but only once to Bilbao).  If it has a downside, it is that it is packed with tourists in the summer (and in the Spring and Autumn, too).  It is just as well as there are other places that Antoni Gaudí designed, as some are much easier to get into than the Sagrada Família.

I am not certain if I can explain why this is the case, but Barcelona, and Bilbao too, are places that feel like home.  While some of the architecture is unlike anything in Australia, some of the streetscapes are quite like those in Melbourne.  No, not a ‘home away from home’, but a place in which I felt comfortable, much more so than Madrid.  If the invitation to visit was the chance of seeing the Guggenheim and the Sagrada Família, both cities are in my ‘top ten’: their city centres are places I could drift around happily for days.