Organised Historical Rummaging: Lessons from my research

Image © National Library of Australia

The National Library of Australia is one of my many favourite national institutions in Canberra. After growing up in Cairns at the end of the bitumen in Far North Queensland, having access to such fine institutions has been a godsend! Today I had the privilege to present my research to my fellow readers as part of the Petherick Reading Room's end of year meeting. 

I am grateful for being able to share the virtual floor with Director-General of the NLA, Dr Marie-Louise Ayres, and former ACT Chief Minister and Senator Gary Humphries. 

The blurb from my presentation reads:

Dr Michael de Percy is Senior Lecturer in Political Science in the Canberra School of Politics, Economics, and Society at the University of Canberra . He will be demonstrating a form of process tracing of historical events over time using a model he has developed, incorporating historical material from Trove and other records provided by the NLA.

My PowerPoint slides are available below. There are some links in the slides that may be useful.

Well, that's a wrap for my speaking engagements in 2020. Merry Christmas!

My seminar attendance has increased significantly during the Covid-19 pandemic

Reflecting on my seminar attendance last week gave my writing a much-needed boost

The Covid-19 pandemic has made a vast array of online conferences, seminars, and webinars available, most of these for free. The professionalism of the online seminars has been exceptional, and I have found much inspiration and a new-found passion for my work by engaging more than I have for some time.

Conference attendance is usually reliant on my available disposable funds, especially when there is not much funding available for conference attendance. For many years I have paid for it myself until only recently.

But this year has been tremendous and I hope the energy that has gone into online seminars continues once the pandemic is over.

Here is a list of some the seminars I have participated in or attended since September this year.

• Dr Michael de Percy, Process Tracing in Comparative Politics: Operationalising Historical Institutionalism, presentation given to SchoPES via MS Teams, 28 September 2020.
• RegNet, Critical Junctures: Reimagining Regulatory Governance - Data, 6 October 2020. 
• CEDA, Federal Budget Address by Treasurer, Josh Frydenberg, 12 October 2020.
• CEDA, Budget response by Shadow Treasurer, Jim Chalmers, 15 October 2020.
• National Museum of Australia, Teaching Indigenous History, 14 and 21 October 2020.
• Dr Craig Applegate, Pushing on a piece of string? The Commonwealth’s Fiscal Policy response to the pandemic, presentation given to SchoPES via MS Teams, 26 October 2020.
• Lowy Institute, Francis Fukuyama: On Liberalism and the US Presidential Election, 18 November 2020.
• CEDA, Sustainable Development Goals can be a blueprint for COVID-19 recovery, 19 November 2020.
• Professor Lelia Green, Winning an an ARC Grant, University of Canberra via Zoom, 23 November 2020.
• RegNet, Financing energy transitions and environmental restoration: Who pays the price?, 24 November 2020.
• IPAA ACT, Defence Transformation Strategy Launch, 27 November 2020.
• CEDA, Public Interest Technology Digital Forum, 30 November-1 December 2020.
• RegNet, Street level bureaucrats in a relational state, 1 December 2020.
• BDO Australia, An Economic Perspective on Australia's Manufacturing Strategy, 2 December 2020.
• Dr Michael de Percy, Process Tracing in Historical Institutionalism, ACSPRI 7th Biennial Social Science Methodology Conference, 2 December 2020
• Professor David Hensher, Working from Home, Covid-19 and Implications for Transport Systems, ACSPRI 7th Biennial Social Science Methodology Conference, 3 December 2020.
• David Wilson, Parramatta Light Rail: Two massive projects to the north of Parramatta Railway Station, CILTA NSW Lunchtime Legends Series #2, 

The seminars highlight the important work that is being done on multiple levels and by people in all sectors of the community.

One of the highlights was learning about local manufacturer, AMSL Aero, and their latest Australian manufacturing venture into the electric air taxi industry with the Vertiia eVTOL aircraft. 

It is impossible to keep up with everything, but attending so many seminars would have been impossible if I had to attend them all in person.

My only hope is that the online seminars/webinars will continue on, or at least in hybrid modes, from now on.

It is surprising how much online skills have increased in a very short time, and while I still wish to travel and attend overseas conferences, there is much to be said for the efficiency of attending conferences from my own home office!

Operationalising Historical Institutionalism: Process Tracing in Comparative Politics

Vintage Tech and Map [CC0]

Yesterday Stephen Darlington and I presented on the panel I established for the 7th Biennial ACSPRI Social Science Methodology Conference.

I did a shorter version of my Canberra School of Politics, Economics and Society presentation but had some interesting questions from audience members about using the approach for social institutions.

Stephen's presentation went a little further with layering of institutional dynamics. His slides are reproduced below with his permission.

Diagrammatic Approaches to Analysing Institutional Stasis and Change Over Time

 

Stasis and Change: Italian cars on the Tagliamento bridgehead near Tolmezzo [Public Domain]

This week I am chairing a panel at the 7th Biennial ACSPRI Social Science Methodology Conference. The conference timetable is available here. 

A video recording of an earlier version of my presentation at the Canberra School of Politics, Economics and Society is available here.

My friend and colleague, Stephen Darlington, is presenting his recent work on comparing the transition from paper to electronic health records in Australia, the United States, and Canada. Stephen has added the concept of layering to the temporal sequence model and this will be a major contribution of his presentation.

The use of diagrams is unusual in political science. Most of our work is text heavy and devoid of long lists or other "easy on the eye" ways of communicating information. But diagrams can help to conceptualise the methods adopted in research projects.

Typically, articles on historical institutionalism talk about historical institutionalism rather than demonstrating how it was actually used in research.

Following this conference, I am hoping that more scholars will be able to operationalise historical institutionalism as a result of these diagrams that help to explain what is otherwise a complex method in comparative policy research.

Later in the month, I will take the approach a step further to introduce the method to a multidisciplinary audience at the National Library of Australia's Petherick Reading Room. I hope to develop the approach to assist history researchers to provide a more systematic way of dealing with the past, as opposed to unguided historical rummaging!

One of the earliest citations of my work was of my diagrammatic approach to operationalising historical institutionalism. It appeared in a Whitlam Institute paper on climate change back in 2013. I've embedded the publication below.

Indigenising the Curriculum; or, How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love My Heritage

 

Kamilaroi Totem: Kaputhin the Eagle. [Wedgetail Eagle by Ron Knight CC BY 2.0] 

It hit me like a bomb. We are Indigenising the curriculum, and that's that. I have to attend Indigenous cultural awareness training. But I have Aboriginal heritage from my maternal grandmothers. I've just never identified as Aboriginal. Until now.

I didn't think I deserved to because I had always identified with my paternal side, a sixth-generation Australian of English stock with a strong ANZAC tradition (my youngest son carried the tradition on). I've heard all the family stories and I've spent many hours researching my family's history. The records of my paternal side provided a level of scrutiny, putting to bed many false rumours about certain ancestors. Yet there were actual records to consult.

On my maternal grandmother's side, there was a distinct absence of birth records, even after Federation. But there were lots of myths. A few years ago, I responded to a researcher who was looking into myths in family history - I had discovered plenty over the years. As part of an ethereal plan, the researcher contacted me to discuss my family "myths" just after the Indigenising the Curriculum project impacted upon me.

It brought up so much stuff. Growing up in Far North Queensland and being the only white kid in an Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander football team for several years was not much fun. On the field there was a strong sense of team spirit, but off-field interactions were quite different. All the stuff of politics and discrimination was played out then - and all this before Pauline Hanson. It was confusing and I had no idea of the plight of Australia's Indigenous Peoples at the time. I was only a child. Like most aspects of globalisation and cross-cultural interaction, however, family tends to break down any inherited political boundaries.

My brother-in-law, my "Thowie" (thow pronounced tow as in wow - as per the tradition for brothers-in-law, we call each other Thowie and not by our first names), is a Torres Strait Islander, and my niece and nephew are Torres Strait Islanders and part of my family. Family comes first, so their heritage is something I feel obliged to defend. In 2008 I was asked to deliver a National Sorry Day speech at the University of Canberra, and it struck me then the stupidity of racist politics. I am not one of them or one of you, I am one of us.

I was initially upset by the Indigenising the Curriculum project. It felt contrived, part of the greater Neo-colonial project, cultural appropriation at best. But as a scholar and a keen student of Stoic philosophy, I have learnt to suspend judgement on first impressions and to resist forming an opinion on external events. 

I consulted with a number of my Indigenous colleagues and decided that the angst was less important than the intention, so I attended the Indigenising the Curriculum project briefing, and then I completed the National Museum's Teaching Indigenous History course. I am yet to complete the Cultural Awareness training but I am booked in.

Now I am 50 and I have three grandchildren. My grandchildren don't know that they have Aboriginal heritage and my two sons don't know much about it either. When I met my long-lost maternal great-grandmother in the late 1970s, she claimed she was Cherokee Indian. That myth stuck so well that I find it difficult to point out the truth to other family members - who am I, after all, to tell another what their identity ought to be based on? It's not about identity politics. It's none of my business.

But why Cherokee Indian? I suppose it explained her skin colour. And delving into my great-grandmother's past (I had to obtain my grandmother's permission to access the records at Aboriginal Affairs in NSW), I found nothing. No birth record. And the marriage and death records were confusing.

A few years ago, I purchased the death and marriage certificates of my maternal grandmothers and was able to piece together a lineage back to an Aboriginal woman named "Kelly" (my 4 x great-grandmother). She married an ex-convict and they had children. The ex-convict later had his ticket of leave withdrawn for neglecting his "half-caste" children. I was able to follow the maternal lineage down to my great-grandmother, but there were some mysteries that remain.

I can be sure that my 3 x great-grandmother is Kamilaroi because she and her descendants are listed as eligible to be part of the Gomeroi (an alternative spelling for Kamilaroi) People Native Title Claim Group. But the mystery deepens when I look to my great-grandmother (the "Cherokee"). Why Cherokee and not Aboriginal?

There are numerous anomalies. I can be fairly certain that she was born in 1905, but there is no birth certificate. But her death certificate has Walhallow (Caroona) Mission as her place of birth. Her mother's marriage certificate claims that she was born after the recorded marriage, but this would make her far too young to be married. Her own death certificate suggests her father was the foreman at Walhallow, but this is impossible because the dates don't match. 

Whenever I talk to my Indigenous friends, they acknowledge the difficulty in finding one's "mob" - there is so much truth to the idea of "The Stolen Generation", but it goes back to the earliest days of white settlement.

My hypothesis is that my great-grandmother's father was an Aboriginal man. She was born at Walhallow Mission where discrimination remained a problem as late as the 1960s. But my great-great grandmother seems to have had acquired a sense of social capital from her extended family (one of her uncles was apparently well-dressed and well-educated). I suspect she created my great-grandmother's false history and assumed identity - Cherokee, a different surname, and at different times two different white fathers - and managed to get out of the mission.

Until her death, my great-grandmother claimed she was Cherokee Indian, but the records prove otherwise. I need to go back to my grandmother to obtain her permission to go back to Aboriginal Affairs to go through the records again with my new information. I get upset when I think about my great-grandmother and her mother navigating through such institutionalised racism. Regrettably, such stories are not uncommon.

It makes me even more upset when I think about the Indigenous Peoples of this continent and how they have lived in harmony with the ecosystem for thousands of years, only to be relegated to a type of "fauna" by people who continue to destroy the ecosystem for little more than greed in the space of a couple of centuries.

When talking to my colleagues about my issues with identifying as Aboriginal, one said to me that it was much bigger than me and my ego. If I thought it was too much hassle for me, within about 100 years my descendants would lose that very heritage I have re-discovered. I'd never thought of it that way before. If I don't pass on that heritage, it will be lost again.

Recently I have been looking into the concept of stewardship in public policy, an undefined term that has been introduced into the Public Service Act 1999 as a responsibility of departmental secretaries. Generally, stewardship refers to the intergenerational custodianship of things like natural resources and the environment and requires policymakers to make decisions that take into account the next generation, typically a 30-year timeframe.

The Indigenous Peoples of Australia have been stewards of this place for tens of thousands of years. I daresay there is something very special in comprehending that level of responsibility.

Which brings me to the future. To identify as a person of Aboriginal heritage has some baggage attached to it. I have to go against the grain of my family's myths, unhinge myself from the institutional racism that was part of my upbringing, and add a new dimension to my internal sense of self. Or I can simply ignore it and let my Kamilaroi heritage disappear in a couple of generations.

On the Beach: The most disturbing novel I have ever read

Remnants of Chernobyl [Photo: CC0]

On the Beach by Nevil Shute
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Spoiler Alert: This novel is about how to die. Forget the reviews that wonder how people could conduct themselves so serenely and not go off like crazed rats. If I had the knowledge that I - and everyone else - would be extinct in a matter of weeks, how would I want the end to be?

I finished reading this novel last night with a powerful rush of emotion followed by involuntary tears and a horrible feeling of powerlessness. I tried to shake this off with a start on some absurd Nabokov (Despair) but it didn't work. All night I dreamt about how I would die in this situation.

In the first dream, everyone was scrambling into a cave. I was following a loved one. Deeper and deeper into the earth we burrowed. I wanted to stop and go back but I also wanted to be with the one I love. They went on. The effects of radiation began to tell on me and I wanted to be near my loved one but not in the dark, buried under ground. We died there and I felt so disappointed that I hadn't gone my own way. I awoke in a state, realised it was the novel and a dream.

My subconscious wasn't satisfied, so back into the dream state I go and the dream runs again. And again. And again. Finally, I wake and realise that life is not so serious. Dying well is more important than running on the rollercoaster of others' ideas. Trust the process. And off into the deepest sleep I go.

No art has ever affected me so. Arriving at this novel and discovering such powerful emotions was a fortunate accident of circumstance. Dilectio Libertas et Doctrina. Love, Freedom, and Learning. Such a powerful way to live.

My choice of books is often a result of random events that open an entirely new world of thought. On a recent road trip, my girlfriend selected the podcast The Cold War Vault, and we listened to the episodes about the Net Evaluation Subcommittee and how it painted an increasingly gloomy picture of the United States' ability to win a nuclear war in the late 1950s.

Dwight D. Eisenhower was President at the time, and Nevil Shute's novel was published in 1957, followed by the 1959 film starring Gregory Peck, Ava Gardner, Anthony Perkins, Donna Anderson, and Fred Astaire. The novel and the film painted a bleak picture that almost materialised during the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis. By then, Robert McNamara's strategy of "mutual assured destruction" (MAD) was gearing up, and the Net Evaluation Subcommittee had made itself obsolete. 

In 1983, Carl Sagan's warnings of a nuclear winter following even a limited nuclear war would ramp up the scientific debate about the end of the world. But Nevil Shute, a Brit-turned-Aussie (and author of A Town Like Alice and Beyond the Black Stump), had set it out already in On the Beach.

I had no idea about Nevil Shute. The connection to Australia came out in the Cold War Vault podcast, which referred to the film and "Anthony Perkins' non-existent Australian accent". I was intrigued and the next thing I notice, the book is staring at me in Elizabeth's Bookshop in Newtown.

These random connections in my various readings are wonderful. Even while writing this up, I looked for a link to Nabokov's Despair and discovered that it, too, had been made into a film starring Dirk Bogarde. Much like Shute, I knew nothing of Bogarde until I read Thomas Mann's Death in Venice and watched the 1971 film. I've since read several of Bogarde's autobiographical stories, opening up another world of French gardens and country living.

Back to On the Beach. Unlike the horror of dying from radiation exposure as thousands of people did after the United States bombed Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Shute tells of the various approaches to death taken by the characters left in Melbourne as nuclear fallout following the short World War III in the northern hemisphere slowly engulfs the rest of the planet.

The hopelessness of it all is symbolised by a trip in a nuclear submarine to test an optimistic theory that radiation levels are decreasing closer to the north pole and to investigate the origin of random morse code transmissions from near Seattle. Yeoman Swain escapes the submarine off the coast of his hometown and is later seen in his boat with an outboard motor fishing. He refuses to die in a strange land in a few weeks' time, preferring to die in a few days at home. It's the individual choices that make this story so vividly disturbing.

One character decides to remain faithful to his dead wife (unlike Gregory Peck in the movie version!). Another buys a Ferrari race car and pushes himself to the limit in scenes where several drivers die brutally in an ad hoc Australian Grand Prix. He takes his prescribed suicide tablets (provided free by the local pharmacy) while sitting, victoriously, in his well-preserved car.

A couple and their daughter decide to just get it over with. A farmer worries about his cattle and makes sure they have enough feed. The naval officer goes down with his ship outside of territorial waters, and Ava Gardner's character gets sloshed and takes her suicide pills just as Gregory Peck's character (she doesn't shag him in the novel) sails off into the sunset and before diarrhea strikes her again. She's on the beach. Hence the name.

This novel demonstrates how stupid it all is - going through the motions because we don't know how to live, let alone die. I am still disturbed when I think about the novel, but differently than in my first nightmare last night.

Much like my literary idol Professor Harold Bloom said, as we age we read against the clock. But we might also prepare to die well. That starts now. And that, I believe, is what Nevil Shute was trying to say.

View all my reviews

Learning About Buddhism from Dr Sax: Jack Kerouac's Surprisingly Erudite Biography of the Buddha

 

Jack Kerouac. Photo by Tom Palumbo [CC BY-SA 2.0].

Wake Up by Jack Kerouac
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

I began reading this book back in 2016 but it was out of my depth back then and is only now something I can appreciate after much reading and research. Jack Kerouac has been a bit hit-and-miss for me. I loved On the Road and I didn't like Doctor Sax so much. But this biography of Gotama Buddha was as surprising for me as it was for Robert Thurman who penned the introduction to this Penguin Modern Classic.

I didn't know what to expect and although I had it bookmarked well into the main text, it had been so long I had forgotten everything I'd read so I had to start over. I find it interesting that some books, Like Tolstoy's War and Peace, I can pick up at any time and continue on as if I hadn't put it down so long ago. (Of course, one can do this for years it is so bloody long!) But this one I had completely forgotten so I began it all over again.

I was surprised by the style of the introduction by Thurman. It is very thorough, but he also doesn't hold back on his sense of surprise and wonder at Kerouac's expertise. I, too, am in awe. (Especially after reading Doctor Sax, one of Kerouac's less than appealing attempts at stream of consciousness writing!)

I have read some works that cover the basics, such as the Dalai Lama's How to Practise, Herman Hesse's Siddhartha (yes I know it is a fictional history of one of Gotama's contemporaries), and also to some extent Osho's Empty Boat, but I did not expect to receive so much "direct knowledge" from Kerouac!

I was introduced to Taoism and Buddhism by a friend in Shanghai in early 2019. I was fascinated by the similarities with Stoicism but also with Confucius' teachings. After commencing the Shiva Sutras and Yoga Sutras of Patanjali, I have also had some discussions with a colleague about Hinduism. He refers to Buddhism as "the daughter of Hinduism". This is an appropriate description, as I am learning while reading Karen Armstrong's Buddha right now. 

What I find most interesting is the concept of "perception" which appears equally important in Stoicism. The bottom line is that our ability to perceive is based on our senses which are subjective and we perceive objects according to our pre-programming. Transcending this knowledge requires other types of knowledge if we are to be at peace with oneself.

While I am still grappling with many of these ideas, I found the following helpful from Kerouac (2008, p. 88):

Perception is our Essential Mind; the sun's brightness or the dim moon's darkness are the conditional ripples on its surface... the phenomena that the sense-organs perceive does not originate in our Essential Mind but in the senses themselves.

The senses are changeable in that we can see space or a wall, lightness or darkness. But our Essential Mind is "neither changeable nor fixed" (p. 90). And from p. 91: 

Do not be disturbed by what has been taught, but ponder upon it seriously and never give yourself up either to sadness or delight.

I am grappling with the idea of perceptions from the senses in that this empirical knowledge is an illusion, like ripples on the sea, but our Essential Mind is pure. Or (p. 92):

...it is the eyes, not the intrinsic perception of Mind, that is subject to false mistakes.

So what is this Essential Mind? It is not any one perception of our individual senses, but some kind of whole:

There is neither Truth nor Non-Truth, there is only the essence. And when we intuit the essence of all, we call it Essential Mind.

I have many more notes on this work, but it has enlightened me to much of Buddhism that I did not know. In particular, the sense of individualism was surprising (p. 137):

...prepare quietly a quiet place, be not moved by others' way of thinking, do not compromise to agree with the ignorance of others, go thou alone, make solitude thy paradise...

And to echo James Allen's idea of conquering oneself, Kerouac writes of the Buddha:

As I am a conqueror amid conquerors, so he who conquers 'self' is one with me.

If I am learning anything from my philosophical and theological studies over the last three decades, it is that I am increasingly a Transcendentalist in the fashion of Ralph Waldo Emerson and his "Self-Reliance", and also his idea of finding one's "nature". 

But all of the philosophies and religions I am familiar with have, outside of the theological questions they address and the answers they provide, a requirement for self-knowledge. Kerouac's biography of Gotama Buddha demonstrates just how difficult that can be. 

If only we could "Wake Up".

View all my reviews

Video Recording: Process Tracing in Comparative Politics: Operationalising Historical Institutionalism.

 

Process Tracing in Comparative Politics: Operationalising Historical Institutionalism

Draft paper presented to the Canberra School of Politics, Economics and Society via Zoom, University of Canberra, 28 September 2020.

Abstract

Historical institutionalism (HI) is often regarded as the least rigorous and the more tautological of the ‘new institutionalisms’, but this reputation is undeserved. I argue that HI, when viewed as a method for, rather than a theory of, examining institutional stasis and change, can provide a rigorous approach to process tracing that is useful in examining the impact of institutional legacies on contemporary political issues. Famous HI scholars, including Kathleen Thelen, suggest that systematic approaches to comparative temporal analyses can help to overcome the shortcomings of the inductive method in comparative politics. While for Karl Popper the inductive method is, in effect, hopeless in its scientific utility, my contention is that the nature of the social sciences means that falsifiability is, for the most part, a bridge too far for comparative political research. Plausibility, as opposed to falsifiability, can be achieved using systematic HI processes that are more sophisticated than simply rummaging through the past to find evidence that supports a given hypothesis. In this seminar, I aim to present a method that is not only useful in conducting comparative political analysis over time, but that can also address some of the inevitable shortcomings inherent in the conduct of inductive, comparative political science research by providing a systematic and rigorous system of process tracing over time.

Are you a scholar or a subject matter expert? Some thoughts...

Lord Shiva Statue in Murdeshwara (Photo by Vivek Urs / CC BY-SA).

Recently I've been struggling with academic seminars where people are subject matter experts in health or refugees or some other specific topic. Not that there's anything wrong with this, but it struck me how little scholarly content there is now in "academic" presentations.

I have always had an interest in the use of the general versus the particular and how scholars often use these approaches interchangeably to suit their purposes. I am fascinated by such rhetorical tactics but I must admit that I have not seen much of this sort of debate in academic circles for some time. Is it a case of the short-termism that has arisen in academia?

Reading the Siva and Yoga Sutras had me thinking back to the concept of "varieties of particularism" that I developed in my doctoral thesis. Strange as it may sound, the idea came to me in a dream. To explain the concept (and to remind myself), I quote at length from my thesis (de Percy 2012, p. 28, Box 1.3):

A major finding of this research is that, in an era of technological convergence, providing a single technological solution to solve various connectivity problems is slower in addressing the diverse connectivity-related issues associated with various communications technologies in the near term. Similarly, grand, long-term approaches overlook regional and local opportunities and, in the pursuit of standardisation or quality/equality of service, ‘lock-in’ users to a technological solution designed to solve yesterday’s communications problems. Over time, the process of central control prevents the development of community expertise, or cultural capacity (see Hughes 1993), which leaves citizens as passive recipients of communications services, rather than being an integral component of these systems.

In his study of electricity systems in Germany, the US and the UK, Hughes (1993 : 405) found that local conditions resulted in distinct technological styles, defined as ‘the technological characteristics that give a machine, process, device or system a distinctive quality’. Hughes defined the local conditions external to the technology as cultural factors: ‘geographical, economic, organizational, legislative, contingent historical, and entrepreneurial conditions... factors [that] only partially shape technology through the mediating agency of individuals and groups’. However, electricity systems are passive networks where users have limited choices about how the network is deployed or used, whereas modern communications systems provide suppliers and end-users with a variety of choices about the means of delivery and the use of such networks respectively. For the purposes of this thesis, the various ‘cultural factors’ (as defined by Hughes) and the various connectivity requirements of users present particular circumstances which must be taken into account to enable greater penetration of a particular technological function.

In the absence of a term to describe the connectivity problems dictated by the varieties of particular individual, organisational, geographic, demographic and infrastructure situations that policy makers may need to address (while attempting to predict the current and potential uses of communications technologies in such various conditions), the term ‘varieties of particularism’ is adopted here to encapsulate these diverse circumstances. The term is borrowed from moral philosophy where it is used to explain a form of morality where particular circumstances dictate particular approaches to morality, on a case-by-case basis, as opposed to a single moral principle that dictates all action (see Sinnott-Armstrong 1999).

During the present period of institutional disruption (created by technological convergence), attempts to address these varieties of particularism have been referred to elsewhere as technological neutrality, where the technology used to achieve a particular function is left to supplier or consumer choice, rather than being predetermined or directed by the state. In Australia, however, the policy preference for delivering communications technologies over time has been to offer centrally-controlled, limited technologies in an attempt to create a sense of universal, standardised service. Canada, on the other hand, has attempted to achieve universal service through a mix of technologies devised and deployed at the regional and local levels to work within the regional and local varieties of particularism. Further, Canada’s approach provides greater access for citizens to the political process at the provincial and local levels, whereas state and local politicians in Australia have limited ability to influence centrally-controlled communications technology systems. This leaves citizens waiting until the federal government enables the deployment of infrastructure, as is occurring with the NBN today. 

Hughes (1993: x) found that the policy issues in deploying electricity networks were more regional than national in three different national contexts. The present study finds that the same principle applies to communications networks. Therefore, a major explanation for the divergent communications technology outcomes in Canada and Australia, and indeed, for Canada’s faster speed in achieving greater penetration of new technologies over time, is that decentralised institutions are better able to address the regional and local varieties of particularism, hence providing greater citizen involvement in the policy process and faster penetration of new communications technologies.

The above was a major finding, but it was readily dismissed by subject matter experts at the time who continue to provide political explanations for shortcomings of the NBN. Technical experts using politics as an excuse. Where is the scholarly thought in such explanations?

Consider scientific reasoning in the utility of the universal versus the particular (or in this case, local) from Shapin (1998, p. 5):

...post-Popper philosophers were willing to acknowledge that the production of scientific ideas was thoroughly bound up with the psychologically idiosyncratic and the culturally variable, they nevertheless insisted that the context of justification - the transformation of idea into knowledge - was a matter of context-free reason and logic.

Context-free reason and logic. And here is the first issue with being a subject matter expert rather than a scholar. See how I did that? Above I argued that the particular was more important than the universal in communications technologies, but now I am going to argue that the universal is more important than the particular. Let me explain.

This is rather abstract but there's something in the argument by Stilpo of the Megarian School about the universal being separate from the individual and concrete and the Siva Sutra 1.16 about the Great Point and the One Reality which is our consciousness and universal. There's also something from James Allen (2007, p. 24) about our environment being our mirror, whereas Sutra 1.16 admits that environment can help or hinder the process of union with the divine (see Worthington 2016, pp. 27-28).

In my "varieties of particularism" explanation above, I used the techniques of scientific method in a quasi-experimental, most similar systems design comparison of Australia and Canada holding communications technology outcomes as the dependent variable with institutions as the independent variable. I also adopted a consistent method of process tracing to compare the two countries over time. I used context-free reason and logic to arrive at a conclusion. I did not have a preconceived conclusion, although I did have a hypothesis that I tested using the above approach.

Now consider the subject matter expert. All of my work is poppycock and if only the Coalition had kept the original NBN model introduced by Labor then all would be well.

Subject matter experts have their place and some subject matter experts have their place in the academy. But I am increasingly concerned that we are all being forced to become subject matter experts who can provide a simple answer to a complex problem for people who are not subject matter experts.

My point is that the bureaucratic pressures of the contemporary academy are influencing our thinking, and it is hard to resist. The three-minute thesis competition is the antithesis of scholarly behaviour. Three minutes? Please! In an era of complexity, such parsimony, or "Occam's Razor", if you will, is tantamount to the stupidity that we are seeing played out in daily global politics.

There are parts of me that want to excel and other parts that want to rebel against the system. But what am I bucking against? I keep thinking there is no temporal aspect, the past has been forgotten, the classics are but facsimiles of misinterpretations, and that scholars are pretending to be journalists. So what is it to be a scholar?

When I went searching for the "scholarly tradition", all I could find were references to Confucianism. Interestingly, the Scholarly Tradition is what Confucianism ought to be known as, but the European neologism has stuck!

I then turned to the Enlightenment Tradition, and I was surprised to find I have been fooled by the myth of the "hidden hand" (Anchor 1979, p. xii):

This myth assumed that there was a basic harmony of interests among men in the long run, and it was only necessary to release everyone to pursue freely his own self-interest in order to realize a harmonious social order, similar to that which reigned in nature... that unity resulted "naturally" from diversity...

As I tend to do, I favour Rousseau's approach (Anchor 1979, p. xvii): 

...if a man wanted a better life than he had, he could not depend upon some transhistorical agency to provide it for him; he would have to create it himself, in pain and suffering, and on behalf of a morality that honored the inner man as well as the outer.

Here I find myself getting closer to my issue with the bureaucracy. How do I honour my inner self? Is it even relevant if as a political scientist I ought to be using "context-free reason and logic" in my work?

I turn now to Emerson and the Transcendentalists:

They were critics of their contemporary society for its unthinking conformity, and urged that each person find, in Emerson’s words, “an original relation to the universe”... The transcendentalists operated from the start with the sense that the society around them was seriously deficient...

This is what I see. In architecture, the gig economy, in medium to high density living, in food production, in having to physically be at work to ensure one's mental health. I see unthinking conformity and unoriginality. 

I went on one of my most comprehensive journeys of self-discovery recently and found three things I value most: love, freedom, and learning (Dilectio Libertas et Doctrina). I think I can honour my inner self using these values as a guide.

But I can also use reason and logic to change, either myself or my perception. If success is being promoted in the current academy, then I will have to stop honouring my inner self. If I want to honour my inner self, then my perception of success must change. I have the freedom to choose!

If I were to be a subject matter expert in, for example, transport and telecommunication policy, then I would not need to travel on this journey of self-discovery. Instead, I choose to use reason and logic to dispel the myth of the "hidden hand" as a justification for the way I choose to work. I can also choose to work in accordance with my own sense of purpose.

Would a subject matter expert need to think through all that? Could a subject matter expert, using their knowledge of a particular subject, encourage transformative experiences in their students? Could they guide a student in honouring their inner self? Or would it be in accordance with their expert opinion?

I would rather be a scholar.

References

Allen, J. (2007/1920). As A Man Thinketh. Mineola, NY: Dover.

Anchor, R. (1979). The Enlightenment Tradition. Berkeley: University of California Press.

De Percy, M.A. (2012). Connecting the Nation: An historical institutionalist explanation for divergent communications technology outcomes in Canada and Australia. Doctoral Thesis, The Australian National University, Canberra. DOI: 10.25911/5d514f57acdb6.

Shapin, S. (1998). Placing the View from Nowhere: Historical and Sociological Problems in the Location of Science. Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers. Vol. 23, No. 1, pp. 5-12.

Worthington, R. (2016). A Study of the Siva Sutras: Finding the Hidden Self. Allahabad: Himalayan Institute India.

Political map of the world, 2001. Levanthal Map Center (CC BY 2.0)

My PowerPoint Presentation from Today

Using historical institutionalism as a method for qualitative process tracing in comparative politics from University of Canberra

The flyer for my presentation today The School of Politics, Economics and Society Presents September School Seminar   Presented by : Dr Michael de Percy FCILT

Using historical institutionalism as a method for qualitative process tracing in comparative politics Abstract Historical institutionalism (HI) is often regarded as the least rigorous and the more tautological of the ‘new institutionalisms’, but this reputation is undeserved. I argue that HI, when viewed as a method for, rather than a theory of, examining institutional stasis and change, can provide a rigorous approach to process tracing that is useful in examining the impact of institutional legacies on contemporary political issues. Famous HI scholars, including Kathleen Thelen, suggest that systematic approaches to comparative temporal analyses can help to overcome the shortcomings of the inductive method in comparative politics. While for Karl Popper the inductive method is, in effect, hopeless in its scientific utility, my contention is that the nature of the social sciences means that falsifiability is, for the most part, a bridge too far for comparative political research. Plausibility, as opposed to falsifiability, can be achieved using systematic HI processes that are more sophisticated than simply rummaging through the past to find evidence that supports a given hypothesis. In this seminar, I aim to present a method that is not only useful in conducting comparative political analysis over time, but that can also address some of the inevitable shortcomings inherent in the conduct of inductive, comparative political science research by providing a systematic and rigorous system of process tracing over time.   This seminar is aimed at improving my work-in-progress paper for a panel I am convening at the ACSPRI conference to be held via Zoom from Tuesday 1 December to Thursday 3 December 2020. The conference website details are here: https://conferences.acspri.org.au/2020/ and the call for papers here: https://conferences.acspri.org.au/2020/cfp. If you are interested in presenting, you can enter submissions until 8th October 2020 23:59 (Australia/Sydney time).   Bio Dr Michael de Percy FCILT is Senior Lecturer in Political Science in the Canberra School of Politics, Economics, and Society at the University of Canberra. He is a graduate of the Australian National University (PhD) and the Royal Military College Duntroon, and he is a Chartered Fellow (FCILT) of the Chartered Institute of Logistics and Transport. Michael maintains a blog on his research, teaching and community engagement activities at www.politicalscience.com.au and you can follow him on twitter @madepercy.

Perception in Stoicism, Buddhism, and New Thought: Creating an inner life through imagination

Drinking tea and reading books and enjoying the life of the mind. Photo by Dr Michael de Percy.

Mastering Your Inner World Neville Goddard Explained: Manifesting with Ease by Rita Faith
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

There will be no more academic snobbishness from here on in. Reading this book, it hit me like a thunderbolt, bringing back a bunch of lessons from earlier readings and confirming so many life experiences. I've noticed the difference already with some simple techniques that make life so much better. Is it the book, the techniques, the confirmation of naturally acquired skills? I don't know. But here is my attempt to explain.

I am at the Royal Military College, Duntroon, in early 1993. The ropes test. 6 metres up and down then up and down again in patrol order (rifle and webbing). Not my greatest strength and I am on "sluggers" or remedial physical training until I pass. I am talking with a colleague about it, that last "bite" on the rope that we struggle to make. We decide that we should just do it. Take that last bite. The body won't let us down. Wrong. And the blisters are worse than the thump on the ground from 6 metres up. No shame though, I gutted it out.

That  night, I dream about the ropes. While everyone else is eating dinner tomorrow night, I (along with the other sluggers), will get another crack at the tests we haven't passed. All night I toss and turn and I am up the rope and then down and then up again and then down and it all flows. The dream repeats, repeats, repeats, repeats... zzzzzz.

The next day I pass and I never fail the ropes test again. It was a purely mental issue from an earlier experience with the rope obstacle on an obstacle course and an arsehole I have since cursed and forgiven and now whatever. I was just a boy. A feeling of cowardice and not good enough and immorality in that sense of the bayonet as a moral weapon and I was immoral. So much conservative crap that did more for that arsehole's ego than my motivation. Life experiences have proven the opposite and I have learnt to be much kinder to myself.

Recent experiences with Eye Movement Desensitisation and Reprocessing (EMDR) have revealed a bunch of parts of me that I wasn't aware of. I have learnt to recognise the various parts of me, the good, the bad, the evil, the off with the daisies naive kid, the arsehole dirty fighter, the whole shebang. They are all part of me and they won't go away. But my imagination has been fired up to see the Council of Me, the various parts that run riot if the conscious me doesn't acknowledge them and keep them under control.

It all sounds hokey. I felt this recently when I decided that I needed to find my inner compass. I found the website Wanderlust and an exercise by Melissa Colleret to do just that. It felt hokey, but I came up with three of my core values that echo past exercises I have done. Love, Freedom, and Learning: Dilectio Libertas et Doctrina.

I realised that I have been manifesting my entire life. Be an army officer; be a theologian; be a politician (oh no, not for me! Well saved!); be a political scientist; live the life of the mind; live in the country but work in Canberra (my favourite city in Australia); live in a federation house (and other things too personal to mention). I remember after graduating from Duntroon how it struck me: Now what? It makes me think of a quote attributed to the actor, Lily Tomlin:

I always wanted to be somebody, but now I realise I should have been more specific.

I've been trying to practice Stoicism for the last four years, and along with every other endeavour of my idealism, I have trashed my ideals. My enthusiasm for Stoicism has not been able to overcome its shortcomings. Are we really to resign ourselves to our circumstances? Imagine if I'd done that when I was stuck in a job that was so bad, I contemplated the main problem concerning philosophy, a la Albert Camus.

Often, when teaching leadership classes, I get to re-live my shortcomings. For example, James Clawson's work separates the "what do I want to be" from the "how do I want to feel" (the Internal Life's Dream - LDint - versus the External Life's Dream - LDext - otherwise known as "Resonance").

I have found my calling and I am living in accordance with my inner compass (even when I felt I wasn't).  Nothing hokey about any of that.

But the Stoics don't feel too much. And, like Buddhists, they focus on managing their perceptions or impressions. And here is the common ground I have found with Goddard's ideas:

Imagination is God and God is imagination.

And finally I arrive at Rita Faith's book. It isn't hokey. Neville Goddard was an inspiration to Wayne Dyer. So you don't like Hay House? Well Dyer's PhD supervisor was Abraham Maslow. You know, the first theory you learnt at uni and the theory you tried to fit into all your first year essays because it was the only one that made sense? Yeah, him.

As I finished reading Faith's work on Goddard, I was half way through Jack Kerouac's Wake Up, a biography of the Buddha. I've been thinking a lot about Herman Hesse's Siddhartha. (I am still trying to work out whether Hesse was writing about Buddha or a parallel to Buddha. I suppose it doesn't matter.)

The Britannica entry on Herman Hesse's Siddhartha reads as follows:

Despairing of finding fulfillment, he goes to the river and learns to simply listen. He discovers within himself a spirit of love and learns to accept human separateness... As Siddhartha grows older, a fundamental truth gradually becomes apparent both to him and to us: there is no single path to self-growth, no one formula for how to live life. Hesse challenges our ideas of what it means to lead a spiritual life, to strive after and to achieve meaningful self-growth through blind adherence to a religion, philosophy, or indeed any system of belief.

There was my connection. The aptly named Rita Faith tells me that Goddard says I have to die to my former state of mind. I have to imagine not how I will achieve what I want to achieve, but how I will feel (there's that Clawson again) when I have achieved it.

The Law of Attraction and other New Thought self-help books go back to the 19th century. The latest iteration by Rhonda Byrne, The Secret, has some major issues. For starters, Wayne Dyer wanted nothing to do with it. Second, Neville Goddard didn't think it was a secret at all and (apparently) he taught for some forty years never charging for his lectures, only asking for a contribution to his travelling expenses.

And more recently, Mark Manson has called "bullshit" on The Secret. And then it takes an interesting turn:

Call me crazy, but I believe that changing and improving your life requires destroying a part of yourself and replacing it with a newer, better part of yourself. It is therefore, by definition, a painful process full of resistance and anxiety. You can’t grow muscle without challenging it with greater weight. You can’t build emotional resilience without forging through hardship and loss. And you can’t build a better mind without challenging your own beliefs and assumptions.

Call me crazy, but isn't that what Goddard said? Isn't that what Rita Faith says, too? You have to actually DIE to your former self, not think it positively away with other positive delusionals!

Here is the key takeaway from Faith's short book. We can manage our impressions (or perceptions). For the Stoics, events are facts neither good nor bad, only our reaction to our impressions of these events is good or bad. To the Buddhists, as far as my reading takes me, our impressions of the world are the cause of our suffering. What if there was another way? And what if it wasn't a secret?

The Stoics leave out the how of managing our impressions. I still use Stoic philosophy, but as Seneca would have said, if Epicurus tells me something good I should use it. Rita Faith is telling me something good and I'm using it.

For all the times I have dwelt upon negative thoughts, becoming jaded at being overworked or overworking myself out of some sort of fear or self-doubt, or been afraid to be happy about something in case I jinx it, I can finally call bullshit.

There is no single way, religion, or philosophy. Human separateness (from Hesse), and individualism as a reaction to my senses (from Kerouac), versus re-programming my senses, or dying to my former state of mind, has provided me with a way to use my imagination to control my inner world. The Stoics tell me to do this, but they don't tell me how.

It's not the kind of delusional positive thinking that I abhor. It's like the law of attraction but it is also more like the experiences I have had when all of my mind and energies were focused and brought to bear on some purpose. And it can be done with memories, too. The idea of revision is to go back and reimagine the past. Not the events per se but the feelings.

It struck me that during one of my EMDR sessions, I recall an event as a kid in Western Sydney. I am in a fight with another kid. The mother of the kid I am fighting and her friend are standing by, telling the other kid how best to hurt me. 

I had mostly forgotten about the experience, but I remember a moment of clarity that makes me laugh. The mother's friend had mini-fox terriers. I looked at them and thought "wow they are cool dogs!" I have two of my own mini-foxies now! And so the memory is revised. No longer crapping on about a crappy situation, but grateful for my mutts and the revised memory.

And every day I think about how I will feel when I accomplish the things I aim to accomplish. Not how I will accomplish them. And much like giving myself time to think really works, giving myself time to feel works remarkably well, too. I am delighted that this book fills some gaps in my knowledge. Or, in the words of my sister:

Learning is cyclic, not linear. There are never any gaps, just the right timing and prior knowledge to build upon.

And all this from a 46-page page quick-read at AUD$3.99 via Kindle!

View all my reviews

Invitation to Submit a Paper to a Panel on Historical Institutionalism: 7th Biennial ACSPRI Social Science Methodology Conference

Source: De Percy, M.A. & Batainah, H.S. (2019). Identifying historical policy regimes in the Canadian and Australian communications industries using a model of path dependent, punctuated equilibrium, Policy Studies, DOI: 10.1080/01442872.2019.1581161.

If you are interested in participating in the panel (or other panels), please visit the 7th Biennial ACSPRI Social Science Methodology Conference website at https://conferences.acspri.org.au/2020/. The early bird rate is half-price and is quite affordable at $20 for a an employee at a member institution and only $10 for students. The non-member price is $50.

Panel Details

While there has been much debate about the theoretical strengths and weaknesses of historical institutionalism (one of the three main approaches of "new institutionalism"), there have been relatively few examples of the use of historical institutionalism as a method in comparative politics research. Yet historical institutionalism provides rich and rigorous ways to conduct process tracing when comparing institutions over time, particularly at the meso-level (industry or sectoral level) of analysis. This session is designed for researchers interested in adopting historical institutionalism as a method for conducting cross-national comparisons of politics and policies over time. The focus is on the use of historical institutionalism as a method of process tracing and a way to organise qualitative data in political science research. Participants will be introduced to the concepts of institutional theory, path dependency, punctuated equilibrium, critical junctures, momentum, and stasis. The approach will focus on developing quasi-experimental qualitative research projects to produce plausible (as opposed to falsifiable) explanations for cross-national institutional outcomes. At the end of this session, participants will have the skills and knowledge to develop their own model for adopting historical institutionalism as a form of process tracing in cross-national comparative politics research projects.

Questions?

If you have any questions about the panel, or if you wish to submit a paper, please contact me via email at michael.depercy@canberra.edu.au.