A System Change Almanac
It’s time for 2nd Opinion — my running notes on the prospects for systemic change. This substack is my independent view on the obstacles, remedies and inventive steps worth watching. Any misapprehensioons are mine, as I make a first attempt to pick out emerging patterns in the shifting sands of influence.
System change is planetary in scope, so the emphasis here is on the particular. Next to practical examples of innovation, I’ll try to build a perspective shaped by (in aphabetical order) observations spanning culture, energy, industry, literature, politics and psychology.
System change can be hard to decipher. I’m encouraged by the novelist J. G. Ballard’s concept of science fiction as a commentary on the present - the ‘now’, not the future - and by the activist Bill McKibben definition of this moment as “the crucial years”. Tolstoy’s famous comment about the happy families - “you know it when you see it” - might apply also to the inflection points and catalytic moments for system change.
Or if you can’t see it, you sometimes feel it. Like the Indian fable of an elephant identified by six blind men, I’m trying to decipher the shape and momentum of forces we don’t fully understand, in places where humankind and ecology collide, as they emerge in the second quarter of the 21st century.
COMING SOON:
For an organised, indexed and more considered summary of these posts, the System Change Almanac will be available to paid subscribers only.
I’m Mark, and system change has been the central preoccupation of my work since well before the term was coined a few years ago by sustainability experts, management consultants and impact investments. For me, it’s the basic responsibility of journalism. And helpful that I was entirely unprepared for my early formative experience of system change when I arrived as a recent graduate in the bright dawn of post-apartheid South Africa.
Points of departure
Then as now, the post-colonial compass — in Africa, but also in every foreign government or diplomatic mission. Nobody had yet got their bearings. In the brittle optimism of that new order, the pieces of an old society exploded and fell back to earth in new configurations. Incumbents were no longer incumbents.
I count myself lucky on two counts: first, that I landed my first job as a journalist with a local newspaper, writing for local readers; second, that I was obliged to reframe my perceptions to serve a vastly different readership, when I joined the Financial Times as Johannesburg correspondent.
Adapting my liberal instincts, first to fit local interests, and then again to meet the editorial imperatives of FT readers with day jobs in the world’s major capital markets, has been my good fortune - albeit frustratingly difficult at the time. My antennae were shaped by that work, at a formative age, in a formative moment. Inevitably, I have been drawn to other transitions: less by intention than by intuition.
The connecting threads became apparent over time. Today, the vision of pan-racial harmony and the defeat of a racist oligarchy embodied by the frail, dignified persona of Nelson Mandela is distant history. The southern tip of the sub-Sahara has lost its unique gloss in the canon of liberal fantasy, becoming first one of the BRICS (Brazil-Russia-India-China-South Africa), and more recently a supposed “middle power” in the disparate community of so-called non-aligned nations.
If the vivid black-and-white morality of the anti-apartheid struggle has dimmed, the epic liberalisation that marked the end of southern Africa’s 20th century — in government, business and civil society — has lost none of its relevance for me. Those upheavals feel closely analogous, still, to the tumult and disruptions of the 21st. We live now amid concurrent and parallel transitions, inspired by an end-of-days rhetoric, freighted with the same promise of renovation and renewal.
This is the urgent work of the converging energy and materials transition; of navigating generational conflict; of the so-called populist movements and rising ethno-nationalism. Against this backdrop, momentum is building for the urgent tasks ahead: to slow the rate of global heating, curb emissions, build the clean-powered electro-states and participative systems.
Now as then, there are grounds for optimism. We know what to do to stall climate breakdown and authoritarianism. Incredibly, given this unprecedented techno-economic know-how, it has become necessary, and realistic, to contemplate the end of literary culture. The heights of technocratic knowledge co-exist with the imminent end of reading, the post-book world.
The future of learning and of work are a different concern: they will acquire new forms. The meta-crisis for literature is happening now. Just at the point when humankind must grasp a mind-boggling calculus of machine learning, policy renewal and social cohesion! At the very moment when we need to decipher the forces shaping these “crucial years” — we hope (and pretend) that coming generations will navigate and manage these risks, while denied the large part of all that the humanities teach us.
This, then, is the Anthropocene - in the term coined by Dutch ecologist Paul Crutzen (1933-2021), an epoch defined by the impact of humanity on our planet. I’ve written here about Paul Crutzen, whose research anticipated a hole in the ozone layer - leading to the first-of-a-kind global ban on chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs) in aerosol cans under the 1987 Montreal Protocol in 1987 - and also introduced the term ‘nuclear winter’, a legacy that has entered our langugage.
Crutzen is a figure of seminal importance, for science and for the planet. If the specificity of his arguments was new, the Anthropocene is a concept that seems to have many corollaries in literary criticism. Frank Kermode (1919-2010) wrote powerfully about the function of culture as an attempt to reconcile human justice with inhuman reality. (His essays on the theory of fiction, The Sense of an Ending, were published in 1965, following a lecture series initially titled: The Long Perspective.)
Kermode was a critic who made his reputation writing for newspapers, transposing the weighty knowledge of academia into spry, provocative prose. When I read The Sense of an Ending in the honeymoon period of Mandela’s post-apartheid South Africa, I felt he had decoded the emotional trajectory of the rainbow nation: Apocalypse - Transition - Renovation. Here were the keys to system change.
At that time, I rented a room in the inner-city suburb of Yeoville, unusual for its mixed racial demographic, where I lived a block away from the South African Communist Party leader Joe Slovo, a stalwart of the anti-apartheid struggle, Mandela’s closest white ally, whose wife Ruth First had been killed in 1982 by a parcel bomb sent by the South African police to their home, in exile, in the Mozambican capital of Maputo. Slovo was minister of housing in Mandela’s cabinet, and in that odyssey - the ferment of goodwill, the culmination of long resistance to brutal oppression - I thought that I saw something defiantly new. Modern. A resolution.
In those days there were bookshops on Rockey Street, the main thoroughfare of bars and clubs and restaurants where the activists and journalists and NGO-types mingled among the reporbates and night owls. I found paperback copies of Future Shock, Alvin Toffler’s 1970 bestseller - a prophesy for Amercan consumer culture, predicting more of everything, from instantaneous communication to international crime; and The Culture of Narcissism by Christopher Lasch, 1979, a synthesis of artistic, historical and psychological measures of western vanity and decline.
These tomes, of course, explained why the end of apartheid mattered. Just as, a decade later, the Montreal Protocol had mattered. They were signposts of human progress, of constitutional order, of history doing what people of faith expected. Proof, in the oft-cited phrase of Martin Luther King, that “the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends towards justice”. Inherent in this solidarity - in the ideology of Hope, claimed by Barack Obama - is the idea of struggle, complicated by violence, but redeemed by good decisions and collective good sense. A triumph of reason and shared humanity.
The Oedipal theory of system change
These of course were Enlightenment values, a sober mix made heady with the flavours of romanticism. Howard Bloom, the pre-eminent American literary critic of the last century, argued that creative works are fuelled by an “Anxiety of Influence” - the role of the artist is to wrestle with the past, to struggle with the legacy of his predecessors, to contest and transcend all that has come before.
The 21st century is another age of anxiety, shaped as every epoch is shaped, by disruption. Kermode accused Bloom of advancing “an Oedipal theory of culture” — recognising, for example, that Sigmund Freud’s best ideas in psychoanalysis drew on scenes from Shakespeare. As a working title for this substack, I considered an Oedipal Theory of System Change. Not a bad description — but verging on hysteria.
For Karl Marx, a first condition of progress was “to secure the base” — at the level of personal identity, of personality, he was surely right about this. We need stability, values, a guiding sense of ourselves: none of us can solve the facts without also tackling the fictions. Only then comes the renovating force of creative destruction, the theory of economic innovation honed by Joseph Schumpeter, drawing inspiration from Marx.
So I think it’s self-evident - “We hold these truths to be self-evident,” declared King - that system change is another kind of cultural industry. Those Marxist convictions about historical determinism and inevitability are out of favour, denied kudos in liberal thinking. Suffice to say, instead, that we need the culture from our past to navigate the future. We need the long tail of old ideas, of dominant tendencies and their challengers, of all the accumulated anxieties.
And this is the real work of the humanities, the preoccupation of artists, and futurists, and their fictions. We need their suffering and their achievements: the discomforting logos of psychoanalysis, the tragic conception, the capacity for re-invention. We need their example to motivate the hard cerebral and emotional labour of system change, so that we are not alone. So that we remember we are equal to the task.
In science, we stand on the shoulders of giants - among them Paul Crutzen, a Nobel Laureate. Yes, we need digitalisation and super-computers and machine learning and artificial intelligence. Even general intelligence, now said to be inevitable. We need all this to deliver the vision of system change, a vision that is taking shape, that is coming to pass - in first projects and increasingly at scale - although not fast enough.
It is a race against time. In the carbon war, Bill McKibben reminds us, “winning slowly is the same as losing”. And now, confronted by the immense work of multiple transitions, by the prospect of abundance in energy, by the possibility of renewal, we are losing contact with the regenerative force that is literary culture. So I will mix it all up, mix it all in, as I go.
A note on style and content
I’m Mark, mostly in London. This substack started in 2021, when I lived in Amsterdam, as an occasional digest of the Dutch press intended. My intention then, as an often bemused expatriate in Amsterdam, was to capture the breadth (or narrowness) of perspectives in culture, politics and business.
As a former foreign correspondent, I feel yoked - still - to the old standard of objectivity. In the Netherlands, I set out to report on de manier waarop de kranten het zeggen, the way the newspapers put it. Then I stirred my own research into the mix, hoping to find what’s known in Dutch as pittig, spicy.
These posts remain in the archive. Although my theme has evolved into something much bigger, I am surprised at how often those topics seem to anticipate what I now report under the rubric of ‘system change’. Most of my professional career has been spent in journalism, think tanks and thought leadership with a variety of corporates, civil society organisations and industrial alliances.
In these walks of life, people need their own jargon - like everyone else. To my ears, the language of system change often feels flat. The terminology is derived from United Nations’ Millennium Development Goals, then its Sustainable Development Goals, from recent green deals in Europe, and President Joe Biden’s confusingly named Inflation Reduction Act in the United States. I’m hoping still to bring out the flavour: the pittig. Spicy, sweet and sour.
Please help this foray in cross-cultural understanding. Feel free to comment, critique and point me in the right direction. When I miss something useful or telling, send it my way.
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Met vriendelijke groeten,
— Mark
A newsletter with films, capturing the breadth (or narrowness) of Dutch perspectives in culture, politics and business.
Written without fear or favour, I look for the most insightful, revealing or just quirky stories in print or online — whether the action is local or further afield.
One topic per post, generously defined. Occasional posts.
A note on editorial: I’m Mark, an Englishman in Amsterdam and an ex-foreign correspondent still yoked to the old standard of objectivity. What I report here is de manier waarop de kranten het zeggen, the way the newspapers put it. Then I’ll also stir my own research into the mix. Above all, I try to find what’s pittig: the spicy, sweet or sour. Nutritious or not.
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Please help this foray in cross-cultural understanding. Feel free to comment, critique and point me in the right direction. When I miss something useful or telling, send it my way.
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Met vriendelijke groeten,
— Mark
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