Inadequate processes are not the source of the problem, although they are part of it. The word that has been used most frequently to describe the source of Oxfam’s malaise is its “culture”, the corporate equivalent of “character”.
ReadHow habits of thinking can challenge unthinking habits.
ReadLast week I went to Bangkok. Returning home, the question on my mind was how did such an astonishing statement become so mundane?
ReadBy the time you read this, something truly dreadful might have blighted the world. Pinker does not prophesy that this won’t happen; he simply reminds us why it should not and need not, as long as we don’t give up the notion of the emancipatory power of reason to help illuminate the way forward. If that is naive, even more naive is the belief that despair, fatalism or superstition supplies a credible alternative.
Read“UK plc” has become part of the ordinary lexicon. If anyone finds it objectionable, few say so. No one announced that from now on we should conceive of our country as a business, but gradually, imperceptibly, it became natural to do so. This is how so many cultural shifts happen. Ways of thinking mutate gradually, helped by changes in vocabulary that we accept without question.
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