the cognitive legion etrangere

no shame in asking for help

A while back in the day, I made this suggestion about the Anglosphere:

[…]every large English-speaking country has a nearby, smaller and slightly nicer English-speaking population, like a little brother that people can feel good about when the bigger version has pissed them off. So America has Canada, Britain has Ireland and Australia has New Zealand. It sometimes even works in fractal fashion – North Island of New Zealand has South Island.

You can actually use this presumable accident of geography to your own advantage as a consumer of political news, because the smaller population acts as a noise filter for the larger one. What I mean is that, for example, any piece of British news which doesn’t make it into the Irish press is probably the sort of chatter and noise that you always tell yourself to ignore; similarly for American and Australian news that doesn’t make it into the Canadian and New Zealand media respectively.

In general, what the great financier Nils Taube called “global thematic investing” when talking to his clients, and “cross-border plagiarism” when talking to his brokers is a secret weapon. As a young man I used to gain an incredible and undeserved reputation by simply taking a few minutes before meetings to look up what might have happened in other countries. When someone has spent half an hour explaining why something is impossible or dangerous, it is absolutely devastating to be able to tell them “well they’ve been doing it in Sweden for the last five years and the sky hasn’t fallen in yet”.

Geography is, basically, an even better valve amplifier than history. If something works in one place, it’s really likely to work somewhere else, often with no adaptation at all and even more frequently with only a few common-sense tweaks to the local market. So it makes sense to do as much of it as you can, and to look as widely as possible. (At Kilkenomics last week, David McWilliams talked about the need for Ireland to get over the tendency to be “bullied by the English language” into always assuming that things from America or the UK were more likely to be relevant than from Asia or Europe).

I think, though, that it ought to be taken further, even into the heart of our systems. To take a topical example, let’s think about the governance of the British Broadcasting Corporation. This is an absolutely thorny one, because it’s such an intrinsically political role that it’s incredibly difficult to resist the temptation to play politics with selection of key personnel. And once they’re there, it’s equally difficult for those people to avoid the temptation to play up to domestic political interests in order to get reappointed.

So – why not just give the decision to parties who definitionally don’t have a horse in the race, but who benefit in the long term and in general from the BBC’s presence as an independent and stable source of high quality English language media? What I’m saying here is that the Director-General of the Beeb should be chosen by an ad hoc committee of the Oireachtas, possibly including a few representatives from the faculties of Trinity College, UCD and the University of Cork[1]. We could pay them a small fee for the trouble but I bet there would be plenty of volunteers to do it for free.

I’d even extend this as a way of making the Commonwealth a more useful and substantial decision making body – give its members a role in making senior civil service and quango appointments in other members’ governments. Not on things which are properly in the realm of democratic accountability, but for things which have already been recognised as needing to be taken out of the realm of party politics, why not take them all the way out of party politics, by asking for reciprocal help from a friendly overseas country?

This sort of neutrality with respect to political factionalism was, of course, one of the reasons behind France having a Foreign Legion, and there might have been some similar idea behind Alfred Nobel’s decision to ask the Norwegians to decide on the Peace Prize rather than the Swedes. Obviously it’s not quite politically neutral, because it means that xenophobic and ethnonationalist candidates will never get a shot, but in many ways that’s another advantage of the system. It would also be another potential benefit from Welsh and Scottish independence, that the overburdened English system of governance might gain two helpful and sympathetic, but disinterested, friends.

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[1] Nobody from RTÉ please, we would end up with far too many co-productions.