"If I could see any purpose in life as to why I should go on existing — and I see this in everyone when they are working, when they are selfless in their selfishness — it is that they are trying to bring about the future."

Alan Garner

The return of ideas

There is a passage I keep coming back to in Karl Polanyi’s The Great Transformation. He is talking about what today’s policy-makers would call “innovation”, the process by which new things — products and practices, institutions and enterprises — enter social reality.

During the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, Polanyi observes, this process was closely bound up with intellectual curiosity and discovery. Thinkers were very often doers, pioneers of new kinds of factory, bank or school. It was the age of Robert Owen and Jeremy Bentham. And it was an age which came to an end:

Since the 1840s projectors in business were simply promoters of definite ventures, not any more the alleged discoverers of new applications of the universal principles of mutuality, trust, risks, and other elements of human enterprise. Henceforth businessmen imagined they knew what forms their activities should take; they rarely inquired into the nature of money before founding a bank.

I come back to this, because it seems to me that we are living through the beginning of another such age. Today, more than at any time since the early Victorian era, to think seriously about social questions is to be drawn into projects to bring about the future.

To start with Polanyi’s example, I lose track of all the projects towards the creation of new kinds of currency and exchange which pass through my inbox, but I am sure that a few of them will be of real significance; and they certainly reflect a renewed practical inquiry into the nature of money. The same goes in education, urbanism, publishing or any of the dozen other worlds in which I take an interest.

Why this should be so becomes clearer as an increasing number of mainstream voices acknowledge what some of us have been arguing for years: that we are not living through a cyclical recession, but a structural crisis with multiple causes, in which a return to business as usual is not an option. (See, for example, two excellent articles from the past fortnight by the economics editors of Newsnight and the Guardian: Paul Mason on the situation of the Eurozone, and Larry Elliot on the triple crunch.)

When the things which are supposed to work break down, the commonest response is denial, and we will see plenty more of that before this crisis has played out. Yet among the more thoughtful and independent-minded individuals within institutions and organisations, there is another response: a search for what still works, and an openness to possibilities which a few years ago would have been written off as wild, or academic.

In a time of great uncertainty, ideas are back, and this means — among other things — that the life of those of us who are driven by intellectual curiosity takes a different shape.

Industrious procrastination - or new habits for old vocations?

“I’ve always put life before writing,” John Berger tells his mother’s ghost, in the opening story of ‘Here is where we meet’. (“Don’t boast,” is her reply.)

I am writing through clenched teeth here. I look at the men of my grandfathers’ generation whose work has inspired mine — Ivan Illich, Alan Garner, Berger himself — and I envy them being born into quieter times. That seems madness, for they were young during a global war, faced the new threat of nuclear annihilation, and emerged as public voices among the hopes and disillusions of the 1960s. But their lives could centre around the writing of books, because that was the appropriate vehicle for a restless mind, given to the play of ideas and the telling of stories.

Over the past couple of years, when people ask me to describe what I do, I’ve sometimes said: I start organisations as a way to avoid finishing books. Lately, I’ve realised, it’s worse than that: the same kind of vocation which drew the writers I admire to their desks, and which drives me when I make it to mine, demands action today as well as words.

The result — for me, at least — is chaos and sleepless nights; the headaches of putting an ill-suited brain through the world of spreadsheets and tax office forms, as the founder of a series of companies and organisations; an economic precariousness which would, at least, be familiar to previous generations of writers and thinkers; and a series of projects which have gained attention as instances of something larger and still only part-articulated, a loose movement of new ways of working and making things work. (Perhaps the closest there has been to an articulation of it is the Compendium for the Civic Economy, published last month by NESTA and CABE, and produced by my friends at 00:/.)

Let me be clear: it is not that writing is impossible or unimportant, but that it happens in the early hours of the morning, or in snatched escapes from the action. To organise life around it, however desirable this often seems, would be incompatible with the things which demand to be written. Those other demands on our time are not just distractions or industrious forms of procrastination, but manifestations of the same work of remembering the future which is at the heart of what I write.

All of this is, among other things, a way of putting off the answer to the question I’ve been asked plenty of times over the past four months: whatever happened to the last five days? To recap, I returned from Brussels in March with a bright idea: faced with a spread of new opportunities and growing projects for which I’ve been responsible, I would ask the internet (or at least my online neighbours) for help. Seven requests in seven days, that was the plan. I’ll post again shortly about what happened next and where the missing five days got to. But sometimes a subject has to be approached indirectly, and before I could get back to those remaining requests, I needed to make sense of how it is I find myself tangled and stretched in these seemingly different directions, to give a pull on the thread which links them up.