The Athenaeum Club

St. Cecilia’s Day Members’ Entertainment - 2010

Park by Our Place

his summer we’ve been remembering the Battle of Britain and the
T sacrifices made by the 2,937 British and Allied airmen who saved our
islands, and freedom itself, from the Nazi aggressor. And happily our
clubhouse is honoured by the Nation’s belated memorial to Sir Keith Park
who for 16 perilous weeks in 1940 led those knights of Fighter Command
(Dowding’s ‘chicks’) into their aerial battles.

Undoubtedly the selfless actions of those airmen echoed the code of chivalry
established by Charlemagne and later described by Chaucer, whose worthy
knight in The Canterbury Tales

. . . loved chivalry,
Truth and honour, freedom and courtesy.
Sadly, such a deep-rooted spirit of chivalry isn’t something that those whom
we might today refer to as the “i-poloi” readily understand.

In the mid-1930s, Dowding’s main concern was about the defence of his
country from German bombers. Together with Keith Park he crafted Fighter
Command’s control system, centered on RAF Bentley Priory. They knew the
purpose of Fighter Command; they understood how to organise the resources
needed to sustain Fighter Command; they knew how to process the
information from various sources about the enemy of Fighter Command and
they were thus able to provide the pilots of Fighter Command with their best
chance of success and survival within their fast changing, four-dimensional
battle-space.

Their control system was able to both adapt and respond to new
circumstances rapidly. It was viable. It gave freedom to participants at each
and every distinctive level of control to know when, where and how to do
their best. Dowding controlled events day by day; Park controlled them hour
by hour and the individual Spitfire and Hurricane pilots controlled them
moment by moment. Without absolute trust between participants at each
adjacent level the integrity of the system would not have held.

In the political and economic spheres of influence today, trust often seems to
be asserted more than it is practiced. With hindsight the captains of the day
too often resolve (or do I mean dissolve?) into masters of confusion and
material seduction. None-the-less, we traditionally rely on them to do the right
things rightly. Sometimes they do; sometimes they don’t.

For millennia the human brain has coped with changes in its surroundings by
simple step-by-step problem solving. However with the acceleration of change
problems can no longer be resolved using simplistic action-and-reaction
models. Today’s problems are complex, multi-dimensional and time-
dependent such that without systemic analysis, reflection and testing they
cannot be solved any more successfully than by guesswork alone.

The Dowding System held together when under attack due to the nature of its
people, the qualities of its processes and the determination of its leaders. The
only spin in Fighter Command came from the Merlin engines. Such was not
the case in the self-serving, personality-ridden, fear-driven, toadying
traditions of the Nazi command structure across the Channel.
So it seems chivalrous behaviour has today all but given way to a rather
refined form of conspiracy - the domain of social goodwill being now
supplanted by political sound bites and economic manipulation. Further, the
conspiracy is not even circumspect. It cares not for consequences. Failures are
explained away after each (usually inevitable) disaster by reassuring and
innocent reference to the so called Law - more properly an adage - of
Unintended Consequences.

Such comfortable obfuscation emphasises the importance of the careful use of

words. Consider those extreme examples of where the rules of chivalry have
been discarded and, as some may say, replaced by the ways of those siblings
‘treachery’ and ‘treason’. Such words are today deemed too coarse by a
society that eschews blame, favours ‘illusory superiority’ and believes in the
values of Garrison Keillor’s town of Lake Woebegon "where all the women are
strong, all the men are good-looking, and all the children are above average." But,
without these T-words how are we to describe the acts of betrayal served on
us from time-to-time, and in our name, by our leaders?

We need look no further than to the writings of a member of this Club. In

December 1992, Stafford Beer noted in his paper “World in Torment - A Time
Whose Idea Must Come”, that government and business are too often guilty of a
blissful ignorance of the consequences of their actions. They have no
legitimate excuse to justify their use of fragmented guesswork in place of
systemic thinking.

Imaginatively and usefully he coined a word to describe this dangerous and

fatal condition. That word is ‘culpabliss’. So while we cannot today accuse any
leader of treachery, let alone treason, I suggest that the charge of ‘culpablissity’
can be justified. And there is a lot of it about!

And so back to Park’s statue which, serendipitously, overlooks Wellington’s

mounting block. Park’s features radiate integrity and felicity and remind us
that he countered every move of his opponent just as successfully as
Wellington had done at Waterloo in more chivalrous times. But while
Wellington bore the strain of battle for five hours, remember that Park had to
endure it for five months.

We are indeed fortunate that by our place there stands the quintessential icon
against which leaders defending a charge of culpablicity can now be judged.

David Howard : 25 November 2010