Cuttings: September 2021

I was a therapist to killers in Broadmoor and felt ‘radical empathy’ for them – article by Gwen Adshead in The Guardian. "In our book, The Devil You Know: Stories of Human Cruelty and Compassion... [Eileen Horne and I] take the reader into therapy rooms where I am assessing or treating people who our society labels 'monstrous': a serial killer, a stalker, a child sex-abuser, a girl who killed an old man as part of a teen gang, and others. These accounts demonstrate how radical empathy differs from 'regular' empathy; I am not trying to 'walk in their shoes'. Instead, I keep them company on their painful road towards greater self-knowledge as we work to get to the meaning of their violence. We are not always successful: without an ability to self-reflect, someone will have little capacity for recognising other people’s pain.... I have long wanted to try to share the things I’ve learned about human nature with a general audience, but my patients have also taught me that stories will find their moment to emerge when the teller and the listener are ready. As I watched the increased polarisation in our country and elsewhere in recent years, it struck me that ... we can still be blind to the essential truth that we are more alike than we are different.... I wonder if the present imbalance between condemnation and compassion might be righted if the methods my colleagues and I use in working with violent offenders were implemented at a societal level. This might mean more listening and less condemnation, fewer assumptions and more curiosity, and the willingness to get up close while maintaining both detachment and discernment."

What personality are you? How the Myers-Briggs test took over the world – article by Elle Hunt in The Guardian. "In 2018 [Merve] Emre, now an associate professor at Oxford University, wrote The Personality Brokers – an account of the strange and often troubling history of the MBTI.... Briggs Myers’s intentions ... were idealistic: she envisaged type as a way of achieving society-wide equilibrium, helping people to be efficient and at ease at work and home.... What Briggs Myers grasped, says Emre, was that the system would be more effective if it showed everyone to be good at something.... With just four letters, Briggs Myers created a simple, affirming framework in which we’d want to sort ourselves.... Yet what the MTBI’s mainstream impact belies is that most psychologists believe it to be deeply flawed – if not meaningless. With neither Jung, nor Briggs and Briggs Myers testing their theories against controlled experiments or data, it has no basis in clinical psychology. It parses people through false binaries, when most of us fall somewhere along a spectrum; and it produces inconsistent and inaccurate results.... Today, though the Myers-Briggs Company forbids unethical use of its assessment, its underlying logic of 'people sorting' has been absorbed by the growing use of data in human resources. As exposed in the recent HBO Max Documentary Persona (of which Emre is an executive producer), sophisticated psychometric testing is used to streamline hiring processes and filter candidates. [John Hackston, head of thought leadership at the Myers-Briggs Company] says, the MBTI is not a test with a right or wrong answer: 'It’s a process for you to find out for yourself, what type fits you best.' What you do with that information, he says, 'is entirely up to you – but it’s yours'."

Index, A History of the by Dennis Duncan: scholarly anarchy – review by Peter Conrad in The Guardian. "Indexing is so arbitrary and anarchic. It chops up texts and can make prejudicial choices about what deserves to be emphasised; by following alphabetical order, the index, as Duncan says, 'turns from content to form, from meaning to spelling'. .... The index has often pretended to be morally useful. It began as a convenience for medieval preachers, who needed easy access to biblical quotations; more censoriously, it mimics our index finger, which we use to jab the air and make angry accusations..... Duncan can’t ignore the current worry about instantaneous online searches, which have slashed our attention span and made memory redundant..... [The subtitle is] A Bookish Adventure. It is certainly bookish ....-But [Duncan] is adventurous as well, often writing as if academic research were as revved-up as a Formula One race." See also review by Keith Khan-Harris in The Guardian.

Picture Stories: how one news magazine blew up British photography – article by Phil Hoad in The Guardian. "Rob West’s inspiring documentary about the British news magazine Picture Post, which was published between 1938 and 1957, lays out the case for its pioneeringly demotic photojournalism, high artistic credentials and impact on public policy. Picture Post was the brainchild of Hungarian émigré Stefan Lorant... He brought his antifascist, socialist sympathies with him to Britain – as well as a troupe of superb photographers, schooled by the European photojournalist tradition and able to frame these islands with an outsider’s eye. Selling nearly two million copies a week by the mid-40s, it featured itinerant jobseekers, sex workers, blitz firefighters and so on, socially conscious chronicling of day-to-day life that was also unafraid to make clear entreaties to those in power. After the war, the magazine canvassed readers about what kind of healthcare they would like to see."

Laura Jean McKay wins the Arthur C Clarke award – article by Alison Flood in The Guardian. "The Arthur C Clarke award was originally established through a grant from Clarke, and goes to the best science fiction novel of the year.... Australian novelist McKay won for The Animals in That Country, a depiction of a world where a 'zooflu' epidemic allows 'enhanced communication between humans and nonhuman animals' sending many people mad. When wildlife park guide Jean’s son loses his mind and sets out with his daughter Kimberly to find out what whale song really means, she follows him, along with Sue the dingo. 'In many ways Laura’s book could be considered as a first contact novel, only the multiple alien species that humanity encounters have been sharing the Earth with us all along,' said the award’s director, Tom Hunter.... McKay wins prize money of £2021, as part of a tradition that sees the annual award money rise incrementally by year from the year 2001 in memory of Clarke [and] 2001: A Space Odyssey."

My Secret Brexit Diary by Michel Barnier: a British roasting – review by Jonathan Powell in The Guardian. "Five basic reasons for the EU’s success and the UK’s failure jump out of these pages.... First, the EU side was professional and properly prepared, whereas the UK was not. Barnier ... focused from the beginning on the landing zone for the negotiation and prepared a full legal text of the free trade agreement before the talks began.... Second, Barnier says it was the unity of the 27, 'so unexpected for the British, that forced them to finally agree to pay their full share'. The British side repeatedly tried to negotiate with individual member states rather than the Commission, but kept being sent back to Barnier.... Third, the EU knew what it wanted and stuck to it. The British government spent a year negotiating rancorously and publicly with itself, which allowed the EU to take the initiative, set the agenda and frame the negotiations as it wished. It decided from the beginning that it would separate the divorce agreement from discussions on the future relationship, so the British could not use paying the leaving bill to buy access to parts of the single market.... The fourth reason for British failure was that Johnson made the disastrous tactical decision to try to provoke the EU in the hope it would be shaken, even briefing it as 'the mad man strategy'. .... Most disastrously, the threat of a no deal fell flat.... Finally, the EU used deadlines effectively to get its way, whereas the UK walked into a series of traps.... The fact is, the die was cast from the beginning. ... As Barnier writes: 'I still think it is insane that a great country like the UK is conducting such a negotiation and taking such a decision … without having any clear vision of it or a majority to support it.' ”