The world turned upside down ... and inside out!

Leading to a solution that is simply complex.

In an earlier post in my ‘personal life’ series I mentioned a book titled The World Turned Upside Down: Radical Ideas During the English Revolution.

In 1978 I was given the best possible introduction to this book by the actor John Bird. He and I sat and talked about it - or, to be more accurate, he talked a great deal about it and I mostly had the good sense to listen and learn.

The book, written by historian Christopher Hill (1912-2003), covers the extraordinary range of ideas that emerged during and after the Parliamentary victory over the Royalists in the English Civil War.

The extensive list of religious (and social) expressions that arose at that time included the Baptists, the Anabaptists, the Diggers, the Levellers, the Ranters … and more besides.

And at the heart of it all was a fundamental concern and conundrum - how should we be governed?

The essence of the argument was summed up by speakers at a series of debates that took place between 28 October and 08 November 1647 between Grandees (conservative) and Agitators (liberal). It all happened in the village of Putney which, at that time, was six miles from London but has long since, been subsumed into the city itself. Logically enough these were called the Putney Debates.

The argument came down to a tussle between, on the liberal wing and presented by Colonel Thomas Rainsborough who was for the Levellers, …

... I thinke that the poorest hee that is in England hath a life to live as the greatest hee; and therefore truly, Sir, I thinke itt's cleare, that every man that is to live under a Governement ought first by his owne consent to putt himself under that Governement; and I do think that the poorest man in England is not at all bound in a strict sense to that Government that he hath not had a voice to put Himself under.¹

… and, on the other side of the argument a chap called Henry Ireton, who’s view it was that …

… no man hath a right to an interest or share in the disposing of the affairs of the kingdom... that hath not a permanent fixed interest in this kingdom.

So, there we have it, the argument about who belongs where and what that means insofar as the right to a vote is concerned. This argument, which had been at the heart of a civil war that tore England apart, rumbled on for centuries.

Here, for example, is an engraving published in 1755, one of a series of four images by William Hogarth (1697-1764) that satirized an Oxford election of 1754.

In a scene that visually parodies the Last Supper, we’re looking, here, at a tavern dinner organized by the Whig party (which eventually morphed into the Liberal party) while, outside, members of the Tory party (the Conservatives) are protesting.

A great deal of naughtiness is going on to try to get people’s votes but the core beliefs of either side are succinctly expressed by the banners on display.

In the tavern room itself, the Whig banner reads “Liberty and Loyalty”. In the street outside, the Tory banner reads “Liberty and Property” … pretty much the same duality that had been posited a century earlier in Putney.

The idea of Property ownership as a qualifier of democratic rights is straightforward enough. You have made an investment in ‘place’? Okay, that signifies commitment.

The idea of Loyalty is also logical. In Putney in 1647, Colonel Rainsborough made the point that, if someone had joined the army and risked their life for the victorious Parliamentary cause that was surely a sufficient proof of loyalty, and therefore a right to the franchise, whether or not they owned property. And, apropos 1755, note the old wounded soldier in the foreground of the Hogarth image having gin poured into his head wound - there’s a reward for loyalty for you.

That just leaves the fact that both sides feature Liberty … which is a Very Big Deal.

Indeed, just 21 years after the Hogarth print was published the Founding Fathers of America set forth their Declaration of Independence, starting with those oh so familiar words:

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.

There we have it, Liberty as a fundamental human right that can neither be taken away or denied. And the very next sentence of the Declaration explains how Liberty and the other fundamental rights are to be assured:

That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness. (My emphasis)

And so the ups and downs of life continued. And humans being humans, some adhered to these principles and some did precisely the opposite. There’a a snippet in the dystopian novel and satire Brave New World that conjures, for me, the attitude to Liberty of so many less liberal thinkers …

There was something called liberalism. Parliament, if you know what that was, passed a law against it. The records survive. Speeches about liberty of the subject. Liberty to be inefficient and miserable. Freedom to be a round peg in a square hole.²

Might this be the attitude of what today gets called the elite class - that minority of the populace that seems to believe it absolutely knows best how things should be run?

A hinge of fate

We are now 377 years on from the Putney Debates, 269 years since the publication of the Hogarth engraving, 248 years after the Declaration of Independence. And we are in a position to get things oh, so right! And yet, and yet, there is a serious possibility that we mess it all up.

Here, I want briefly to address two things that seem to me to be potential progress-jammers. No doubt there are plenty more but these two are quite sufficient for a start. Let’s call them Perpetual Presentism and Digital Dogmatism.

Perpetual Presentism

Up until recently, we understood past, present and future as a sequence whereby the past informed the present, and the present might hold clues to the future. This way lay progress.

Indeed, we got to be really quite sophisticated in our thinking on the topic. From a scientific perspective, we took on board Einstein’s findings that time is an abstraction that is dependent upon the observer. And from a literary-philosophical perspective, we admired T.S. Eliot’s skill, in Four Quartets, to poetically reflect upon the topic, starting with:

Time present and time past
Are both perhaps present in time future
And time future contained in time past.³

BUT … never previously did anyone suggest that a person was guilty of a crime because one of their predecessors did something that does not conform to today’s version of moral rectitude.

Having said that, I suppose I should acknowledge that Moses or whoever was or were the author(s) of Deuteronomy did include that bit about the penalty for worshiping idols:

You shall not bow down to them or worship them; for I, the LORD your God, am a jealous God, punishing children for the iniquity of parents, to the third and fourth generation of those who reject me. (Deuteronomy 5:9)

The third and fourth generations? Pah, that’s nothing. Today’s post-crime accusers insist upon an open-ended eternal-hate remit.⁴

This can constitute a serious distraction from real issues and opportunities in the present.

Earlier in this article, one of the historical points of reference that I used was the publication of the Declaration of Independence. This wonderful document was drafted by Thomas Jefferson. He apparently worked intensely on the draft for seventeen days and was proud of the end result, but was then deeply hurt when Congress insisted on amending it.

Congress sharpened the Declaration’s attacks on George III, but removed Jefferson’s contention that George III was responsible for slavery and the slave trade - almost certainly to remove a weak link in an otherwise strong argument. (After all, given that slavery and the slave trade were in existence for decades before the king’s birth in 1738, blaming George III for slavery and the slave trade was at best implausible).⁵

But Jefferson’s antipathy towards slavery and the slave trade in the past was not sufficient to save him from some crude attacks in the present. For example, in November 2021 a statue of Jefferson was removed from New York City Hall. Why? Councilwoman Adrienne Adams explained:

It makes me deeply uncomfortable knowing that we sit in the presence of a statue that pays homage to a slaveholder who fundamentally believed that people who look like me were inherently inferior, lacked intelligence, and were not worthy of freedom or right.

This seems to me to be very unfair considering the numerous surviving documents that show Jefferson’s wish to put an end to slavery in what one might term a manageable manner.⁶

But Perpetual Presentism abhors subtlety. It is wielded like an axe, to deface and devalue the past so as to promote a Year Zero approach in which the successors of those who most successfully pursued human progress are knocked down.

It is a terrible waste of time and an appalling distraction from many more important and productive things.

Digital Dogmatism

Then, there is the issue of digitalization. It has revealed itself as nothing short of magic - science fiction pulled out of the hat as fully operational science fact.

It has put supercomputers in the pockets and purses of individuals. It has enabled those individuals to interconnect, regardless of time and place. And it has done the same for processes of all kinds. Which has meant, not least, that it has enabled businesses to redistribute themselves with functions spread around the globe.

So, what’s the problem?

In a funny kind of way it has links back to the Perpetual Presentism issue because it relates to perceptions of the passage of time. Here are some snippets from a great book, published in 2000, by business strategist, Gary Hamel. The intro starts …

The Age of Progress is over. It was born in the Renaissance, achieved its exuberant adolescence during the Enlightenment, reached a robust maturity in the industrial age, and died with the dawn of the twenty-first century.⁷

… and concludes …

The age of progress began in hope - it is ending in anxiety. Life is no longer defined by the gentle meandering of the seasons, but by the pell-mell pace of ‘Internet time’, where life’s passing is measured in dog years.⁸

Hamel goes on to outline what he identified, around the time of the millennium, as the requirement for the new era - basically, an entrepreneurial mindset. You get the idea when he says this …

Traditional metrics don’t force a company to consider how it is performing against new and unorthodox competitors.⁹

… and poses these questions:

• How many measures do you have in your company that focus explicitly on innovation (versus optimization)?

• How many individuals in your company could say as much about your company’s innovation performance as they could say about your company’s cost efficiency?

• How many people in your company have any personal performance metrics related to innovation?

• Does your company systematically benchmark other companies on innovation?¹⁰

Okay, Hamel was writing a quarter of a century ago but I believe he was fairly on the money. So how have things progressed?

Well, admittedly, some organizations are entrepreneurial but the vast majority are anything but. And there are many reasons that many fail to understand and respond to the entrepreneurial challenge.

Key among them, I suggest, is the fact that digital technology seems to demand adherence to strict, inflexible ways of working.

The protocols are reinforced, not least, because business functions are geographically separated and, anyway, “It’s a requirement of the system. If you don’t do exactly as you are told your colleagues in Location X will not be able to pick up on your work.”

Is this what led to the ‘best practice’ movement - the idea that there is one specific ‘best’ way to do something?

How different it all is from the thinking, in the late twentieth century, that was so lauded when particularly the Japanese turned their attention to refined industrial production processes.

Here’s the renowned Taiichi Ohno, the brain behind the Toyota Production System:

A business organization is like the human body. The human body contains autonomic nerves that work without regard to human wishes and motor nerves that react to human command to control muscles. … At Toyota, we began to think about how to install an autonomic nervous system in our own rapidly growing business organization. … In our production plant, an autonomic nerve means making judgments autonomously at the lowest possible level; for example, when to stop production, what sequence to follow in making parts, or when overtime is necessary to produce the required amount.¹¹

In conclusion …

It’s all very simple. Let’s continue the evolution long-since started towards individual Liberty. And please let’s stop diverting precious time and energy onto some war against the past. And let’s temper our digital dogmatism with humanness.

Oh, I guess that’s a little more complicated than one might think, isn’t it.

Thanks for reading.

The photo at the top, shot from the inside of a cooling tower, is from Shutterstock.

1. As recorded in the Putney Debates record book 1647, held at Worcester College, Oxford. The spelling and capitalisation as per the original manuscript.

2. Aldous Huxley. Brave New World (1932)

3. T.S. Eliot. Four Quartets: Burnt Norton (1935)

4. A fuller explanation of Presentism (The Present Eternalized) and its dangers is provided in a brilliant new book from Frank Furedi titled The War Against the Past (2024)

5. R.B. Bernstein. An Expression of the American Mind (2013)

6. To give just one example, Jefferson’s letter to Edward Coles, from Monticello dated 25 August 1814.

7. Gary Hamel. Leading the Revolution (2000)

8. Gary Hamel. Ibid.

9. Gary Hamel. Ibid.

10. Gary Hamel. Ibid.

11. Taiichi Ohno. Toyota Production System: Beyond Large-Scale Production (1978)