Hans Rosling’s ‘Factfulness’ - and ‘Race’ 2. # 194. 18/03/2025.
Out of Many, One People
Welcome, to comments on a book which set me thinking sufficiently to run over into two blogs. I appreciated Rosling’s discursive style. I hope my comments are also stimulating
Hans Rosling’s ‘Factfulness’ - and ‘Race’ 2.
In last week’s blog I identified Hans Rosling’s ‘smart thinking’ 2017 book ‘Factfulness’ as being a helpful combination of evidence-based and positivity that combats widespread misunderstandings about the world that we live in, and (the concern of thse blogs) can illuminate how we understand and respond to a multi-racial society. Last week I looked at the first four of his ‘Instincts’ that over-dramatise and distort what we think, the other six follow below.
The Generalisation Instinct – Question your categories.
My parents never had passports and never left Britain. My wife’s parents never travelled outside the line that connects Kerala in South India and Malaysia. Yet the startling thing about our respective homes was not the differences but the similarities. Whereas in one home we sat round the fire and in the other sat under the fan, at a more basic level the ‘feel’ of the two homes was remarkably similar. Both our families were heirs to what historians have called the ‘industrious revolution’, a process starting over two centuries ago and emerging in several parts of the world, whereby people found that sobriety, hard work, domestic stability, expenditure on quality and durability rather than ostentation and display, and by focussing on the education of the next generation the outcome was steadily incrementing security and prosperity. The national and cultural backgrounds of our families may have been different. Their social or class identities very similar.
‘Find differences within countries and similarities across countries’ Rosling urges educators (p 250). Similarly C A Bayly in ‘The Birth of the Modern World – 1780-1914’ (2004) points out how globalisation has increased the differences within countries and the similarities between them. The upshot is that whilst some generalisations may be inevitable, we need to make sure we are not confusing or falsely eliding categories.
For example, we misleadingly generalise across regions. If the 22 miles of the English Channel mark strong differences between the English and French, then in other regions also there can be noteworthy differences between neighbours. When someone in a factory where I once worked commented on the difference between Barbadians and Jamaicans, I thought she was stereotyping. Subsequent experience made me recognise her point.
The Destiny Instinct – Slow change is still change.
Like many people of my generation the ‘West Indies’ first referred to cricket – the powerful three ‘W’s batsmen: Worrell, Weekes and Walcott; the clever spinners Ramadin and Valentine. But whilst the love for cricket in India, Pakistan and Sri Lanka has transferred to grandchildren in Britain; instead, just as the term ‘West Indians’ has changed (sadly?) to ‘African Caribbean, so the preferred game has changed from cricket to soccer. England football teams routinely include several players of African Caribbean background, cricket teams increasingly rarely. Changes happen. My experience of Somali young people twenty-five years ago(mostly with recent experience of civil conflict) was that they were often alienated and aggressive. Today they impress me as hard-working, and polite to the elderly.
‘The destiny instinct is the idea that innate characteristics . . . are as they are for ineluctable, inescapable reasons: they've always been this way and will never change’ (p 167). However, making assumptions about people is not entirely negative. As David Livermore has pointed out in ‘Cultural Intelligence’ they often make a good first guess. The early exploration of whether a South Asian likes cricket can be a good way to establish rapport, as long as it is done tentatively, and you are flexible enough to change tack quickly if you are wrong. But today assuming a young black man likes cricket when he is devoted to Arsenal simply implies you are out of touch. More broadly, assuming you ‘know’ somebody just because of their ethnicity is arrogant and demeaning. So, whilst not being alert to possible pointers given by a person’s ethnicity hinders establishing rapport, then, more seriously, persisting with false assumptions becomes insulting.
This is especially relevant with ethnicity because it is only one of a number of pointers to their backgrounds. Rosling includes scores of pictures of domestic life showing the strong parallels not between ethnicities but among social classes: the bedrooms of the comfortably off the world over look remarkably similar, as do, say, the cooking methods of those placed between grinding poverty and affluence. Many migrants come from societies where there are marked differences between the wealthy and the poor. We too easily assume that ‘Global Majority’ means impoverished.
The Size Instinct – Get things in proportion.
For most English people the sight of an old parish church nestling in a small rural village is heart-warming. It is a reminder of a long and stable history. It speaks of continuity, of a faith that has been held by others, and in some undefined way is being held on our behalf. ‘Save the Parish’ is a growing movement in the Church of England, primarily that sufficient clergy should be provided to sustain such gems, especially when their fabric requires increasingly costly maintenance. Yet even when half a dozen such parish churches are grouped together, the total population may not reach 5,000 people. Meanwhile urban churches that I know of have seen their parish population grow by that size in the past half-decade, perhaps adding a further third to the size of the total population that a single minister is commissioned to care for.
Rosling’s rule of thumb to ‘Get things in proportion’ is partly a call to allow statistics rather than sentiment or institutional inertia to guide our decisions. The reality is that where the church places its personnel and spends its money is still strongly focussed on rural areas. Implicit is the notion that rural or small town areas should still have a greater right to pastoral care than urban dwellers, including all the large proportion of people from ethnic minorities that inhabit those 20,000+ urban parish populations. Large swathes of north London where I live are now effectively abandoned as clergy are withdrawn from churches. Curates are less and less trained in such parishes with the result that it is becoming increasingly hard to find clergy with previous experience of multi-ethnic communities to become leaders in such churches.
‘Institutional racism’ is an over-used and under-defined term. But it is indicated by our lack of attention to size and ethnicity in our under-resourcing of areas of high population density.
The Single Perspective Instinct – Get a tool box.
My friend was angry. He had just discovered that the black clergy in the diocese were disproportionately non-stipendiary (that is, unpaid) ministers or in secondary rather than main leadership roles. His assumption was that it was institutional racism. The diocese was guilty. Not so. My friend was guilty - guilty of ‘univariate social analysis’. He was analysing the institution through the lens of just one perspective – that of race, when there were a whole range of other factors that could determine the roles that people played in the church. Age of being ordained was one factor, experience of leadership another, and particularly people’s educational background. Leading a church with members from several different cultures is not a simple task. It means recognising and making allowances for the different cultures that have formed people, which requires some capacity for abstract analysis.
This is in contradiction to the assumed mindset in both our society and church that the differences between different cultures don’t really make any difference - at root they are all identical. Therefore any variations in outcomes between groups that are thought to be very largely identical, apart from the names we give to identify them, means that there must be some form of racist prejudice at work that produces unequal and distorted results. That happens when you see ‘race’ as the only significant variable between racial groups, and assume that they have (or ought not to have) varying levels of – amongst many variables - education, cultural values, social status, or legacies of pre-migration experience. Rosling’s advice ‘to get a tool box’ is a call to vary the bases on which we analyse situations. Adding to our analyses whether a person grew up with a father in the home could well be a more important indicator of success or struggle in contemporary British society than their ethnicity. I would argue that of the ten ‘Instincts’ that Rosling identifies as confusing or distorting our understanding of the world, then as regards ‘race’ his ‘Single Perspective Instinct’ is the most damaging. The need to learn ‘how to hold two ideas at the same time’ (p 248) is a vital capacity when we tend to approach differential outcomes with only the idea of ‘race’ in mind.
The Blame Instinct – Resist pointing your finger.
When Enoch Powell gave his infamous (and inaccurate) ‘rivers of blood’ prophecy in 1967 liberal opinion in Britain was outraged. He was condemned in the press. He was expelled from the Conservative Party. But the London dockers marched in support of him. ‘Racists!!’ ‘Ignorant, bigoted fools’. People who made their living primarily by their brains looked down on those who made their living by their backs. But who were these people demonstrating against? People who for centuries had also had to make their living by their backs - physically strong people who supplied a large share of the world’s top boxers and sprinters. The dockers main employable asset – their strength – were now having competition from immigrants with similar assets. So too Brexit was fuelled in part by skilled workers whose capabilities were being challenged, and undercut, by similarly skilled workers from eastern Europe. In these and many similar instances, not least last summer’s riots, we should heed Rosling’s advice to ‘resist pointing the finger’ at identifiable individuals and instead focus on how systems can cause people to find themselves in competition with each other.
By contrast, a running, and positive, theme in Rosling’s book is the tributes he pays to ‘the faceless’ – to institutions and technology, and the unheralded administrators, researchers, and backroom staff that make them run. Instead of searching for villains and heroes we should rather be identifying processes. For example, compared to virtually every other nation in the world, Britain credits itself – justly – as being one of the least racist. So, are we moral heroes? Not really. Rather Britain is marked by high standards of orderliness in public life. We are renowned for our queuing. More than in most nations, progress at work and promotion is determined by capabilities, not by who you know, even though there is still too much sycophancy or racism in play. Able people do get promoted. One consequence is that workplace pyramids increasingly include people from ethnic minorities in the higher levels. Again, this is not without tensions or discrimination, but overall – to use Rosling’s phrase – we are moving from bad to better. So, when Britain is adjudged to be the least racist society in Europe, instead of patting ourselves on the back, be grateful that we live in a society which has had the long and undisturbed accretion of governance by law and commonly recognised procedures - the rules of a great many international sports were formalised in Britain. And be vigilant against the ever-present tendencies for the rule of law to be corrupted for personal or sectional gain.
The Urgency Instinct – Take small steps.
George Floyd died at the hands of the police on 25th May 2020. The result was an explosion of anger and outrage, shock and shame around the world. Similar things had happened before (including to white people) but this one stuck in the public consciousness, perhaps because as the comedian Eddie Murphy commented ‘Racism hasn’t got worse, it has just got filmed’. The consequence was what has come to be termed as a massive ‘racial reckoning’. For many white people it meant recognising for the first time the reality and depth of racism in themselves and society; for others it confirmed what they already knew, and which they expressed in supporting demonstrations or Black Lives Matter protests. Politicians, public leaders and footballers took the knee in support. The dial on ‘Colonialism’ took a sudden surge towards the negative pole.
The ‘Urgency Instinct’ took over. Organisations – shocked to see how ‘white’ they were – hurriedly made black appointments, not necessarily wisely, even at the most senior levels. Black speakers were invited. Sales of books by black people rocketed or got published. In critics’ evaluation of the greatest popular music of the past seven decades, performers like Aretha Franklin or Marvin Gaye suddenly leapt to the fore. The Archbishop of Canterbury appointed a Commission. Urgency creates pressure for high profile ‘trophy’ responses. Removal of putatively offensive memorials and the payment of reparations became the leading policies for the Commission on Racial Justice.
So will May 2025 be a big improvement on May 2020? Yes, a more sensitive awareness of the seriousness of racism, a more humble recognition of the damage as well as the achievements of empire. But urgency also brings danger. It has created what Doug Stokes has called a ‘perma-crisis of catastrophisation’ (in ‘Against Decolonisation’, reviewed in blog # 131). Rosling points out the misjudgements that come from a hasty ‘we must do something’ panic. He writes: ‘The overdramatic worldview in people's heads creates a constant sense of crisis and stress’ (p 236). Instead we need to ‘worry about the right things’ (p 241). Patiently working at long-term goals can be neglected. Alongside the Archbishops’ Commission for Racial Justice’s industrious concern with reparations and memorials, simple tasks, such as offering all theological institutions a simple eight week introductory course on ‘Ministry in a Multi-Racial Society, have not been done. Similarly, if we heed one of Rosling’s solutions, ‘to insist on the data’, then the church might start to get serious about studying growing multi-ethnic churches, and seeing what transferable lessons might be learned.
A sobering coda: 2017 was then, this is now.
Whilst I personally respond to Rosling’s positivity, I often found myself suspecting him of over-egging the cake, of under-estimating how really bad things were in the world. It is significant to note that towards the end of the book he looks seriously at five potential global risks:
Global Pandemic: don’t tell us! It hit us with devastating impact just three years after his book’s publication;
Financial Collapse: not yet, but 2008 could repeat itself, and worse.
World War 3: very much closer than we thought could happen in 2017.
Climate Change: Rosling was aware that things look bad. Trump’s withdrawal from the Paris accords increases the danger.
Extreme Poverty: Trump’s tariff wars, growing military spending, increased climate change could all spark a tragic resurgence.
Sadly, Rosling died from cancer before his book came out. It was completed by his son and daughter-in-law, Ola Rosling & Anna Rosling Ronnlund. For the mere eight years since publication, his list of possible risks to global security is uncannily and unhappily prescient. Then, ‘Factfulness’ didn’t claim to tell us everything will be all right, and whilst it did warn against undue pessimism, it also encouraged the realism and vigilance which has become even more important. Rosling shows that the world isn’t such a bad place as most people, perhaps even especially the experts, tell us. However, since he wrote his refreshingly positive book it does seem to have got worse.