‘Something is in the air’: Ben Okri on the fight against racism

Ben Okri in The FT

‘Our lives begin to end the day we become silent about the things that matter’ — Martin Luther King Jr 

My first conscious experience of race was when I was six years old. My father had come to collect me from school. As we made our way across the snow-covered fields in Peckham, south London, in the winter of 1965-66, I felt something crack my head. Then I heard the voices of boys shouting the N-word, making animal noises and throwing packed snowballs with stones in them. 

We fought back as best as we could, father and son, but in the end had to run. When we got home we were bloodied. 

“Why were they throwing stones at us?” I asked. 

Dad struggled for words. 

“It’s because we are black,” he said. 

 At the time, what he said made no sense to me. With time, other things said didn’t make sense either. “You will never amount to anything.” “There’s no future for you.” 

I think the 12 weeks of lockdown have purified our sense of justice. They have given us time to think. I was on a short walk the other day and found myself wondering how it must be for a child to feel that the world thinks evilly of them for reasons that don’t make sense. Imagine the additional effects of being insulted, picked on, ganged up against, constantly harassed by the police, wrongly accused, mocked on TV, excluded — in short, the whole catalogue of injustices that people of colour withstand daily?

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If anyone wants an explanation for the scale of protests following the killing of George Floyd, they need look no further than the buried accumulation of racial prejudices endured for years, for lifetimes, by black people. 

A people endure and endure and then one day an event becomes a living symbol of what is being done to them, a symbol that they are perceived as less than human. How long are people meant to suffer before they cry out? 

Racism is the perception that one race is superior to another, that the colour of their skin determines their place in the human hierarchy. Pernicious and pervasive, it is supported by a matrix of power and history. For racism to be real, there has to be power. It has to be a hard and incontestable power. It is this that gives racism its vicious quality. For every George Floyd and Sandra Bland in America, there is a Stephen Lawrence, a Julian Cole, a Nuno Cardoso in Britain. 

The real question is whether racism is inherently human. Every people, in the depth of their hearts, think themselves superior to others. They think themselves the centre of the world until another people overpower them. If a people have power over other people long enough, they think themselves intrinsically superior. Soon their mythology will reflect this. Racism is merely the mythology of power seeded into the culture of a people. But racism can also be a compensatory mythology. 

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Racism does not reflect reality. It only reflects the current reality of power relations. If the western economy were to collapse today and all the financial and military power move eastward, the mythology of race would move eastward too. Mythology is often the storytelling of those who have gained power. Strip people of their power and the justification of their racism vanishes. Watch a people acquire power, and the justification of their racism emerges. 

Racism is destructive. Racism is really war declared. It is war threatened at every moment. If you remove all the social niceties, this is what racism says: “Your life means nothing to me; my life is more important than yours.” A logical conclusion of racism is genocide. 

It is amazing to me that people don’t see that it is a few short steps from polite, concealed, social racism to Derek Chauvin of the Minneapolis Police Department applying a knee to the throat of George Floyd, also of Minneapolis, for eight and a half minutes. 

But a mentality that secretly thinks one race not quite of the same level of humanity, with a bit of power, and a sense of immunity, soon finds that very mentality justifying such state-sanctioned killing. If you doubt this, have a read through the nastier chapters of apartheid or colonial history and see the things that well-educated people who thought of themselves as perfectly civilised sanctioned in the name of race. 

The aspect that causes the greatest difficulty is how a person can reconcile their sense of personal decency with the possibility of harbouring, perhaps unknown to themselves, racist tendencies. I know many good decent people who do things to their friends of colour which, if said or done to them, would fill them with outrage. Let’s call these racism blind spots. 

The forms that racism takes are legion. They can be as seemingly innocuous as being given the tables near the toilet in a restaurant, or the most isolated places at dinner settings, or the silent insinuation of having someone clutch their handbag tighter when they see you. It could be as vicious as being set upon by the police, or having someone call the cops on you when you go birdwatching in a park. It could be as indeterminate as being the first person suspected if a mobile phone goes missing in a friend’s house that you are visiting, or taking an hour to get a taxi in the 1990s, while seeing them stop a short distance away for someone of a “less threatening” hue. It could be the terrible case of John Bunn, who was wrongly convicted of murder and spent 17 years in prison. 

Racism is one of the greatest wastes of human resources. It would be useful to have a cost analysis of what is lost to nations from the effects of systemic racism, the loss of manpower that could be put to work in the great enterprise of civilisation. 

All people who endure racial prejudice just want the normal rights of human beings. They want to get jobs, have nice working experiences, enjoy friendships, fall in love, raise their kids, and make their orderly procession through life just like everyone else. 

I think it is essential that every child be educated about race. An understanding of justice ought to be a basic part of their education. Our children carry forth the assumptions we make about the world. If we leave the moral education of our children to the schools, then they simply absorb the dominant views. A sense of justice can only really come from the home. The trouble is that so many parents have no idea of the injustices into which they are raising their children. People are not born hating, Nelson Mandela once said, they must learn. The parents needed to be educated first but weren’t. 

Children can be better educated on race, most importantly by being taught history more fully. They must be taught about the slave trade and that it was an evil. They should be taught about the empire and colonialism, but they must also learn about the legitimate voices against its cruelties and how people fought for their independence. They should be taught about the civil rights movement and apartheid. Every child should know that people are equal before God and their fellow human beings. It can only make them stronger and more in tune with the future, because they stand in truth with justice and their times. Every child should be raised with the fundamental assumption that all races, all colours, are valid and equal. This single thing alone would make the world a truly extraordinary place, rich with the possibilities of our commingled genius. 

The effect of racism on education is devastating. Not long ago, I visited a prison for a BBC programme. All of the black prisoners I spoke to fell out of the educational system because of how it made them feel. 

The issue of race is more than a moral problem. It is an existential one. The reason the issue of race keeps coming back is because people cannot face the truth about what they have done to one another. They cannot face the truth about the secret thinking that is behind the strangeness of their racial actions, or about the real reason why the ideology of race came into existence in the first place. 

The modern idea of race began with Europeans coming to Africa in search of gold. When the trade degenerated from gold to human beings, it was the ideology of racial hierarchy that was used to justify that monstrosity. 

The idea of race is not just black and white. A species of racism is there in the Bible, and in most sacred texts. It is there among the ancient Egyptians. It is there in the ancient Greeks towards the Persians, and with the Persians towards the Greeks. A casual reading of Caesar’s “Commentaries” shows that the Romans believed the British tribes to be a race of barbarians. 

Maybe all mythologies of origin are by implication racist. Tribalism is the microcosm of racism. It may well be that humans are inclined by nature to their own kind but over the course of years people learnt by trade, by the fact that no one can have all the blessings or resources, that it is better to have dealings with other peoples. They discovered in the process that the other is not so very different from them, or that their difference is not apocalyptic. Without this overcoming of prejudice to some degree, civilisation could never have happened. 

It seems that the idea of tribal or racial superiority belongs very much to the primitive stage of human development. Because, ultimately, thinking yourself superior to others is bad for business and fatal for progress. It causes possibilities to diminish around you. Those who respect others do better trade with others, and win their friendship and support. All the high-minded ideas of Rome’s superior destiny could not keep it from being torn apart by the concerted effort of the Goths. 

We have really misapplied the idea of civilisation. We think civilisation is Plato, the Acropolis and the classics. To my mind, civilisation is the unleashing of the noble impulses of the human spirit for the greater good of the human race and the beautification of the earth. The real civilisation begins when people realise that being human is one of the greatest miracles of the universe. 

Racial thinking is a toxic pathology, and at the heart of it there is a kind of madness. It is the madness of a denial of a reality which the inward mind knows to be true. The house of racial thinking is a divided, unstable house. It is unsustainable. And like the Berlin Wall, it will fall. Keep in mind the image of Chauvin with his knee on George Floyd’s neck. This is a police officer who should be protecting the citizens but who is in effect being an executioner. “It is the job of thinking people not to be on the side of the executioners,” wrote Camus. 

This is a clamorous age of freedom. The young, the old, women, LGBT people, the differently abled, all demand their full human rights. 

Something is in the air. In the past, the big clashes were around visible, measurable events: the Berlin Wall, apartheid. There is some of that going on now, the tearing down of the statues of the Bristol slave trader, the removal of the statues of King Leopold II in Belgium. Maybe these protests are about an idea that is long overdue, an idea that will tear through our societies and reinstate the place of true justice in all aspects of our lives. 

Maybe the human race is growing up at last, refusing the horrible shackles of racism, rejecting all of its injustices. Maybe the time of that primitive idea of racial superiority is finally over. Black people and white people are joining forces in their monumental protests to rip this evil from our societies, our institutions, our hearts. 

In which case, the real birth of modern moral civilisation began on May 25 2020, when, for eight minutes and 46 seconds, George Floyd said 16 times over that he could not breathe.

Why good forecasters become better people

Tim Harford in The FT

So, what’s going to happen next, eh? Hard to say: the future has a lotta ins, a lotta outs, a lotta what-have-yous. 

Perhaps I should be more willing to make bold forecasts. I see my peers forecasting all kinds of things with a confidence that only seems to add to their credibility. Bad forecasts are usually forgotten and you can milk a spectacular success for years. 

Yet forecasts are the junk food of political and economic analysis: tasty to consume but neither satisfying nor healthy in the long run. So why should they be any more wholesome to produce? The answer, it seems, is that those who habitually make forecasts may turn into better people. That is the conclusion suggested by a research paper from three psychologists, Barbara Mellers, Philip Tetlock and Hal Arkes. 

Prof Tetlock won attention for his 2005 book Expert Political Judgment, which used the simple method of asking a few hundred experts to make specific, time-limited forecasts such as “Will Italy’s government debt/GDP ratio be between 70 and 90 per cent in December 1998?” or “Will Saddam Hussein be the president of Iraq on Dec 31 2002?” 

It is only a modest oversimplification to summarise Prof Tetlock’s results using the late William Goldman’s aphorism: nobody knows anything. 

Yet Profs Mellers, Tetlock and Don Moore then ran a larger forecasting tournament and discovered that a small number of people seem to be able to forecast better than the rest of us. These so-called superforecasters are not necessarily subject-matter experts, but they tend to be proactively open-minded, always looking for contrary evidence or opinions. 

There are certain mental virtues, then, that make people better forecasters. The new research turns the question around: might trying to become a better forecaster strengthen such mental virtues? In particular, might it make us less polarised in our political views? 

Of course there is nothing particularly virtuous about many of the forecasts we make, which are often pure bluff, attention-seeking or cheerleading. “We are going to make America so great again” (Donald Trump, February 2016); “There will be no downside to Brexit, only a considerable upside” ( David Davis, October 2016); “If this exit poll is right . . . I will publicly eat my hat” (Paddy Ashdown, May 2015). These may all be statements about the future, but it seems reasonable to say that they were never really intended as forecasts. 

A forecasting tournament, on the other hand, rewards a good-faith effort at getting the answer right. A serious forecaster will soon be confronted by the gaps in his or her knowledge. In 2002, psychologists Leonid Rozenblit and Frank Keil coined the phrase “the illusion of explanatory depth”. If you ask people to explain how a flush lavatory actually works (or a helicopter, or a sewing machine) they will quickly find it is hard to explain beyond hand-waving. Most parents discover this when faced by questions from curious children. 

Yet subsequent work has shown that asking people to explain how the US Affordable Care Act or the European Single Market work prompts some humility and, with it, political moderation. It seems plausible that thoughtful forecasting has a similar effect. 

Good forecasters are obliged to consider different scenarios. Few prospects in a forecasting tournament are certainties. A forecaster may believe that parliament is likely to reject the deal the UK has negotiated with the EU, but he or she must seriously evaluate the alternative. Under which circumstances might parliament accept the deal instead? Again, pondering alternative scenarios and viewpoints has been shown to reduce our natural overconfidence. 

My own experience with scenario planning — a very different type of futurology than a forecasting tournament — suggests another benefit of exploring the future. If the issue at hand is contentious, it can feel safer and less confrontational to talk about future possibilities than to argue about the present. 

It may not be so surprising, then, that Profs Mellers, Tetlock and Arkes found that forecasting reduces political polarisation. They recruited people to participate in a multi-month forecasting tournament, then randomly assigned some to the tournament and some to a non-forecasting control group. (A sample question: “Will President Trump announce that the US will pull out of the Trans-Pacific Partnership during the first 100 days of his administration?”) 

At the end of the experiment, the forecasters had moderated their views on a variety of policy domains. They also tempered their inclination to presume the opposite side was packed with extremists. Forecasting, it seems, is an antidote to political tribalism. 

Of course, centrism is not always a virtue and, if forecasting tournaments are a cure for tribalism, then they are a course of treatment that lasts months. Yet the research is a reminder that not all forecasters are blowhards and bluffers. Thinking seriously about the future requires keeping an open mind, understanding what you don’t know, and seeing things as others see them. If the end result is a good forecast, perhaps we should see that as the icing on the cake.

An Article against MBAs

Bloodless bean-counters rule over us – where are the leaders?

The inexorable march of the managerialists is creating resentment and social division. 

Charles Moore in The Telegraph

Recently, a man got in touch with me who works for the defence services contractor QinetiQ. He wanted to complain about the way it was run. The company, in his view, suffers from “managerialism”.

Managerialists, he says, are “a group who consider themselves separate from the organisations they join”. They are not interested in the content of the work their organisation performs. They are a caste of people who think they know how to manage. They have studied “The 24-hour MBA”. There is a clear benefit from their management, for them: they arrange their own very high salaries and bonuses. Then they can leave quickly with something that looks good on the CV. The benefit to the company is less clear.

I also spoke to a former senior employee of QinetiQ. He corroborated my informant’s points with gusto. He said managerialists were particularly unsuited to industries such as QinetiQ’s, where scientific knowledge is all. He put it simply: “People who are making bits of technology, or servicing them, should know about technology.”

Skills are not infinitely transferable. “You used to be the editor of a broadsheet newspaper,” he said to me. “How do you think a former chief executive of Ford would perform if he suddenly came and edited a national title?” (or, he politely didn’t say, if the reverse were to happen).

The lack of knowledge at the top of a firm obviously creates a practical problem – “You don’t have people to get under the bonnet. They can only kick the tyres and change the oil.” They don’t understand the needs of the core customer. It also, in his view, creates a moral problem. The workers cannot respect their bosses. Management becomes “not symbiotic, but parasitic”.

I do not know whether these men are right about QinetiQ. I have no experience of the company and no technical expertise. One must also allow for the fact that, in any organisation, there are people with axes to grind. But I did find the way they talked striking. It seemed to accord with so many things I hear about life in so many organisations.

It is a big complaint, for example, about the modern National Health Service. Nowadays, on the dubious principle that all businesses and services are essentially the same, managers are a non-medical breed. The effect can be laughable. I heard of a case in which the managers told the doctors in a big hospital to save money by sending all their instruments away to a centralised off-site sterilising unit. Fine, said one mischievous consultant, but in that case may I have a second set of instruments so that I can work on my patients in emergencies? The managers, having no idea about his instruments, thought he probably could. “That’ll be £2 million then,” he said.

Comparable problems afflict the Armed Forces. They have fought several wars in the past 15 years, dealing with a Ministry of Defence staffed by people who know nothing about war. More generally in the Civil Service, it has become common to reduce specialist skills – language training in the Foreign Office, for example – and to move able people around from department to department. The present permanent secretary of the Home Office had never worked there before she took her present post at the beginning of last year. Since it is a department of fantastic complexity, it is perhaps not surprising that it has recently taken a series of tumbles on such issues as deportations and borders.

You find this hollowing-out everywhere. In schools, the head who does not teach is now a familiar, indeed dominant figure. University vice-chancellors, instead of being dons who move from their subject into administration for a period of their lives, are now virtually lifelong managers, with hugely increased salaries to match. It is even commonplace for charities to be run by people with no commitment to the charity’s specific purpose, but proud possession of what they call the necessary “skill-sets”, such as corporate governance.

With the rise of the managerialist comes a special language – a weird combination of semi-spiritual banality (“unlocking energies”), euphemism, and legalese. If you want to see the difference between people steeped in their trade and people steeped in managerialism, compare the testimony, at the Leveson Inquiry, of the Murdochs, father and son. The wicked old man spoke in the language, simultaneously sharp and blunt, of people who know and run their business. The evasive son adopted the locutions taught in business-school courses, honed by big law firms, footnoted by anxious compliance officers.

My friend at QinetiQ draws my attention to some of the usages which predominate where managerialism rules. The system of internal communications becomes a platform not for sharing knowledge but for propaganda. Human Resources invent things like the Personal Improvement Programme, which is really a means of punishing staff. “Consultation”, he says, is a word meaning that managerialists “tell you what they are going to do, 30 days before they do it”.

These habits are now pervasive across industry and the public services. “Diversity” is always “celebrated”, but it never means diversity of thought. The people who tell you they are “passionate about” X or Y are usually the most bloodless ones in the outfit.

In such cultures, just as the experts, the professionals and the technicians bitterly resent the managerialists for neither understanding nor caring, so the managerialists secretly detest the professionals who, they believe, get in the way of their rationalisations. They are desperate to “let go” of such people. Very unhappy organisations result.

A few weeks ago, after Dr Rowan Williams had given notice of his retirement as Archbishop of Canterbury, there was a story about his potential successor, Dr John Sentamu, the Archbishop of York. Dr Sentamu’s critics, apparently, had been saying that he was too much like an African tribal chief. Friends of Dr Sentamu were angry at what they saw as a racial slur.

But it struck me that the qualities of a tribal chief are now shockingly rare in big modern organisations. They might be just the job, and not only for the poor old C of E. The point about a tribe is that it unites its members by ties that are very hard to break. Tribalism, for sure, can be a bad thing, but a tribe understands matters of life and death. It recognises the importance of yesterday and tomorrow as much as today. It maintains the interest of the whole over that of a particular part. The chief of the tribe is not a manager: he is a leader.

No one sensible thinks that a large organisation can exist without being managed. Old stagers in companies, regiments, professions and, in my own experience, newspapers, easily over-romanticise their achievements and are unfair about the poor “bean-counters” who make the sums add up. But management should not dominate. As Lord Slim, who brilliantly led the British Army through the Burma campaign, put it: “Managers are necessary; leaders are essential.” We now have unprecedented numbers of the former, not so many of the latter.

Because, since the credit crunch, Everything Is Different Now, this problem is causing real social division. It explains much of the rage about executive pay. It is not so much the numerical difference between the top and the bottom which causes the anger, as the sense about why that difference exists. It has been arranged by the managerialists. It may even be the chief purpose of the managerialists’ working lives, as they edge towards the exit with the largest portable share of the takings available.