LEAN LOGIC. A Dictionary for the Future and How to Survive it

(David Fleming, environmentalist, author, founding member of the Green Party, early chair of the Soil Association, died, totally unexpectedly on 28th November 2010. For more see this post and this blog. Lean Logic, on which he had been working for the last 10 years, was published on 7th July 2011. See www.leanlogic.net )

How to give any savour of a book that contains 735 tightly packed pages and a whole life’s worth of thought – and yet is totally accessible and could provide either the basis for a PhD or the perfect reading for a comfortable and well appointed loo?…

‘How wonderful’, exclaimed on of the guests at the launch of Lean Logic in July, ‘It looks just like a hymn book! How David would have loved that.’ And he would, for David was extremely keen on hymns, sung in full voice and with much enthusiasm. And indeed, bound in green cloth with simple gold lettering, Lean Logic does look like an extremely fat hymn book – and in many ways, it is. A hymn to David’s own intensely personal, complex-ly simple, and not always totally logical (if always well argued) view of the world.

Lean Logic was the supposedly slim crib sheet for The Lean Economy, a blue print for ‘the future and how to survive it’, David’s massive tome that was rejected by innumerable publishers on the grounds of length and complexity. Lean Logic was to be a dictionary, giving a brief overview of the topics addressed by The Lean Economy. But, as dictionaries do, it grew – eventually to 735 closely packed, heavily referenced pages… And it came to include not only entries directly relating to the Lean Economy concept but to every aspect of David’s thinking and beliefs: narcissism, sleep, ‘Harmless lunatic’, charisma, accent, the fallacy of numbers, conversation, connectedness, lean thinking, cant, virtues, grammar…. Some entries are only a brief paragraph (thus its suitability for loo reading), some run to 10 or 15 pages.

Each entry is cross referenced via an asterisk system to other entries so you can find yourself moving seamlessly from ‘Sleep’  to ‘Private and Public Sphere’, from ‘Conversation’ to ‘Disconnection’, from ‘False Analogy’ to ‘The Straw Man’ to ‘Aunt Sally’. David’s immense erudition is evident in every entry, populated as they are by everyone from Philetas of Cos, ‘philosopher, romantic poet and tutor to the young Ptolemy II in the fourth century BC’ to contemporary economists and philosophers.  Yet every entry is also shot through with his own especial breed of irreverence and his lifelong and unshakeable faith in the ability of individuals, if left to themselves, to organise life to perfection.

‘Welcome to the Dictionary of Lean Logic’ it begins. ‘You might think that a good place to start reading is at the beginning. Well, that isn’t necessarily so….’

There follows David’s own brief suggestions as to how you, as a student of how our errant world could still be saved and renewed, might approach the book. A seven page introduction sets out his core belief that ‘if you declutter things so that problems become visible, and you set up things so that people can talk to each other and start to believe that they can work things out for themselves, you are calling on an information processing power which has a tendency to be overlooked….. it is called “lean thinking”’.

Then, lest you should fall into the ‘cant pit’ comes a four page mini-dictionary on ‘How to cheat in an argument (or even better) How to catch yourself doing it.’

Assertion – Simply state your case, without any argument at all….
Fluency –  Be so fluent in your delivery that no one notices that  you aren’t saying anything
Nit pick – Use an error of detail to rubbish the other side’s whole case
Lunch bias – Agree with anyone who buys you lunch.
Tainted source – Dismiss anything coming from a point of view different from your own.

Then you are in – starting at Abstraction and working right through to Zero Growth, passing by Common Capability, Elegance, Hippopotamus (‘a symbol of the limits to the ability of argument to make sense of things in the face of nature….’), Lean Food, Multiculturalism, Promiscuous Ethics, Tautology, Thermodynamics, and Usury among what must be well over 1,000 other entries.

The best possible way to give a flavour of the dictionary and David’s delightful and totally personal style, is to quote from it. But choosing just one or two quotes is all but impossible, so those below have been selected all but at random, on the basis of brevity (suited to a review) rather than their intrinsic merit or relevance to the central theme of the book.

Meanwhile, if you want a copy of the book for yourself, which you really should (you will not regret the purchase as long as you do not allow yourself to be put off by its size and apparent density), you can obtain one from the Lean Economy website at www.leanlogic.net

Random Quotes

Intoxication. The condition that arises when an enthusiast encounters someone with whom he can share his passion.

Sleep. Part of the progress towards ‘resilience’. You take a rest from planning, arguing, and campaigning and keep out of trouble for a time. You gather your strength. You come to see things differently, as discovered by Odysseus, who spent much of his epic voyage in negretos hypnos –  sleep deep enough to be the counterfeit of death – and eventually waking so befuddled  and different that he could not recognise his own homeland. This was a sleep which was taking him somewhere – on a ship travelling faster than the falcon can fly –  and he made it in the end.

Common Purpose. Common purpose is a shared intention to achieve a shared goal, where collective aims are advanced by individual purpose and individual aims are advanced by the collective purpose.

Harmless Lunatic. A person whose interpretation of a problem is radically different from the received view and who therefore lives in a storm of ridicule and contempt before turning out to be right. Oh, all right – not all harmless lunatics do turnout to be right, not all lunatics turn out to be harmless and not all harmless people are lunatics, but the record of dissidents in thinking afresh about problems, and developing solutions despite expert scorn is impressive. In the cooler language of the research monograph:
Local level institutions learn and develop the capability to respond to environmental feedbacks faster than do centralised agencies.

Larders.  Cold food storage rooms. North-facing in northern hemisphere. Thick stone shelf to keep some of the night coolness circulating during the day. Window with fine wire mesh to keep out the flies. Uses no energy (except perhaps a light bulb). Large enough to allow entry, followed by extended reflection on food, and some petty theft of a bit of moist, aromatic chicken if there is one in residence. Sadly displaced by the fridge, which uses a lot of energy. And hums. And uses noxious gases. And costs. And needs to be made, transported and then unmade.

The larder is temporarily obsolete. It will be back.

Cant. Little Red Riding Hood and her grandmother were suckers. First, the grandmother opened her door to the bass-voiced wolf claiming to be Little Red Riding Hood. Then Little Red Riding Hood got into bed with, and then eaten by, the wolf who had disguised himself  by wearing the grandmother’s clothes. She had noticed some anomalies: ‘What big ears you have,’ she said doubtfully. ‘The better to hear you with’, said the wolf. Oh, that’s all right then.

The story, though changed in many details over the centuries , maintained its role as a warning against cant: do not fall for affectations of goodness or for sanctimonious declarations of morality even if  smooth, reasonable and convincing…..

More recently, Valery Giscard d’Estaing, president  of the European Convention,  provided an illustration of cant with a  sing song description of the European constitution as only a ‘coordination of competences’. What big competences you have, M. Giscard d’Estaing.’ The better to coordinate you with’……

Pascal’s Wager. An argument set out by Blaise Pascal in his Pensées (1670). If God exists, and one commits oneself to a life of faith, the rewards in Heaven will be infinitely greater than any benefit one would get in life by not committing oneself to a life of faith (perhaps a bit of extra time for gardening on a Sunday morning?). It is therefore a good bet to assume that he does exist and to commit oneself to a life of faith. It would only be a bad bet if we knew for certain that God does not exist, which we don’t.

The Wager is a version of the Precautionary Principle, but it is less vague, and it is a reasonable approach to risk in a constructive argument with (say) sceptics on climate change. If a breakdown of the present climate equilibrium – an event of infinitely high cost – were not more than a minor possibility, it would still be rational to take action, even expensive action, to try to prevent it. You do not have to be convinced that climate change is real to justify doing something about it.

The Peasant’s Defiance against the Advance of Rationalism
by David Fleming

Our place was made by long cooperation
With nature, rock, the rain, the ancient dead.
The living, by their day-by-day invention
A local ecosystem slowly bred –
All grievous error to the Enlightened head.

But we’ll outlive the onward march of reason;
Our science rings true with system, time and season.

The Rationalist comes with plans for demolition;
He has no time for detail and repair,
Of loyalties and doubt he has no notion’
His certainties and sameness  everywhere.
No meeting-up in conversation there.

But we’ll outlive the onward march of reason;
Our science rings true with system, time and season.

To local detail, Gaia’s rich endowment
He comes with  high IQ and empty mind;
To trust, to inspiration, to enchantment,
He brings reforming regulation – blind
To local insight, life of every kind.

But we’ll outlive the onward march of reason;
Our science rings true with system, time and season.

September 2011

Asked to help compile a review of Lean Logic for the Quarterly Review, Shaun Chamberlin  supplied two quotes which are so ‘David’ that I am taking the liberty of adding them here:

Localisation stands, at best, at the limits of practical possibility, but it has the decisive argument in its favour that there will be no alternative.” Resurgence Magazine

“I am a capitalist and I am a bit of a right winger, and I think in many ways the system we have got at the moment is really not a bad system. I think capitalism is a good thing. The only problem with capitalism is that it destroys the planet, and that it’s based on growth. I mean apart from those two little details it’s got a lot to be said in its favour.

It’s not necessarily against a system that it collapses, because most systems do collapse in the end. That’s a part of the wheel of life – systems do collapse. So I’m to some extent slightly inclined to forgive capitalism for being about to collapse. I mean there are lots of fine things, lots of love affairs and the like which have come to a sticky end. On the other hand, it is quite an accusation – quite hard for it to live down – that it’s going to destroy the entire planet with it.”
www.uptrees.net