Art, Imagination and Public Service

By Hughie O’Donoghue, Brenda Hale, James O’Donnell and 3 more

A collection of three conversations between artists and public servants.

Intended to inspire public servants of all kinds to reconnect fearlessly with their fundamental humanity, the three conversations in Art, Imagination and Public Service present a way of thinking about imaginative, compassionate, and intelligent public service. The book consists of three dialogues: between former UK Home Secretary David Blunkett and poet Micheal O’Siadhail, former UK Supreme Court president Brenda Hale and painter Hughie O’Donoghue, and UK Permanent Secretary Clare Moriarty and musician James O’Donnell. Together they explore how art and imagination can sustain public servants and enable them to find new ways of addressing the problems facing government, parliament, and the law—problems that resist utilitarian responses in which people end up being treated only as statistics in a target-driven world. Through these conversations, the speakers discover surprising connections in approaches to their work.
 

• Language: English
• Publisher: Haus Publishing
• Release date: Sep 15, 2021
• ISBN: 9781913368197

Book preview

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Introduction

Claire Foster-Gilbert

If a politician or a judge or a civil servant takes time to look at a painting, or listen to music, or learn and recite a poem, will it make a positive difference to their public service? Monica Furlong writes:

It can feel an eccentricity to settle one’s tired body and mind down to pay attention to Shakespeare or Beethoven or an exhibition or an opera. But those who are addicts of such experiences know, as by a kind of faith, what they are about. However wearily and unwillingly they go they find themselves caught up, transformed by something outside themselves, which, without taking account of their particular problems, yet speaks to their universal condition.*

Art feeds the imagination and nourishes our souls. It helps us stay open and attuned to the deeper flows of life. Inevitably it will influence our beliefs, perceptions, and feelings, even though it can be hard to see exactly how.

* Monica Furlong, Contemplating Now (London, 1971), 102.

Beliefs, perceptions, and feelings matter because they determine the way we see the world and how we respond to it. They work at the level of the disposition of a person rather than what he or she objectively chooses to attend to. They form our character and seep into our outward decisions and actions, even as we seek to apply reason and rationality to all we do. They are, then, subtle policy drivers.

Westminster Abbey Institute seeks to nourish the roots of public service, believing that our public servants, and the institutions through which they serve, do not think and decide and act from nowhere. The dispositions of people and institutions need conscious formation because humans are not well disposed (or for that matter ill disposed) by default. If attention is not paid to what underlies public service, then the public service itself can be corroded.

Here in our dispositions lurk the unconscious biases that unintentionally make some people outsiders as we fail to notice the ways in which we recognise and promote those whom we feel are like ourselves. Here is the place where the charismatic politician is in danger of believing their own emotive rhetoric, employed to garner support, amounting to no more than empty populism. And here is where, even as science’s contribution to public policy is being outwardly recognised and championed, we are confounded by conspiracy theories whose influence is visceral, impossible to counter with rational