I have heard a lot of people trying to work with ideas about what it means to turn a blind eye, that John Steiner has written about. There are things we know about but we don’t know about.

As a citizen I know that the things being done on my behalf in the prisons and detention centres and the rest, in our society, are sickening and degrading and – if we survive to have future generations to look back at us, they will say, did they do that? Our Prime Minister apologises for the slave trade but not for what we are doing now to the socially excluded and mentally ill and the new underclass that we seem to need to create with our policies of counter-dependence. I also know that we import the carers that we need in our society – I could think about globalisation as creating a new kind of quasi slavery economy, where we plunder the capacity in other societies to look after their own so that they may look after us.

I know I am turning a blind eye to the prison services, to the fate of asylum seekers, and the rest. Following the Ipswich murders we have a temporary amnesty in our hatred and fear of what we are doing as a society that allows an unregulated market in drug dependent prostitutes working in the sex trade.

But I am still here talking about turning a blind eye and knowing – when I can think about it - that I am doing that.

And what is the turning of the blind eye that I can’t think about at all? I can’t think about the full horror and implications of what I have just written.

I have been talking in the last few days to friends working in the NHS. They are serious thoughtful, senior clinicians, and I have been shocked to by the despair in their faces and voices.

I have heard Margaret Beckett as Secretary of State for Health described as a cross between Mary Poppins and a Dalek, dislocated from the terrifying banality of her political message.

One of these friends talked about the turnaround managers. I had not heard about them, though I know in broad terms what is going on. She thought the public knew. But we don’t. The turnaround manager is not interested in the core business of the NHS, looking after patients, -‘not interested in clinical governance and all that rot’ – they have turned public services into failing businesses, which have to close down – exterminate, exterminate! the daleks have taken over the NHS, but where is Dr Who?

In the Oedipus story, the society of Thebes was devastated by all kinds of troubles and in the end they decided there must be something wrong here. In the end they got their man, for killing his father and sleeping with his mother.

Small beer compared to our current leaders, who have killed off shame and slept with money. And they are powerless to control the emotional famine that threatens our society.

My point is not to castigate our leaders. All kinds of talents are doing that – priests, military leaders, journalists, and it is not making a lot of difference.

My point is to ask about our own capacity for turning a blind eye. In ancient Greek drama the people were the Chorus. What is the role of Chorus now?

What is implicit and what is overt in our presentation of ourselves: in particular I am thinking of our cultural or spiritual identity?

I remember a Salvation Army officer saying that his uniform was helpful in his work, because people knew who he was. Religious sisters working in the community do not now wear the traditional habit. One sister, waiting to meet me at Dublin airport, had spent her time usefully with a woman, who was distressed. I asked, had the person known that this sympathetic listener was a nun. Almost certainly, in Ireland, and the sombre tailoring and neat hair style would have been an indicator. But my question was real – would you know you were with a professionally spiritual person just from being with her, without any external confirmation?
Perhaps it’s because I’m English and from a certain background, I prefer indicators of identity to be somewhere on a continuum nearer to subtle than crude.
But this approach has hazards. I was hearing about psychoanalytically trained workers in the NHS being so careful in not revealing this training that there could be several in the same Trust unaware of each other as potential under the surface allies against the in your face dynamics of the organisation. Can you not sense an intellectual as you can a sexual orientation?
Psychoanalytically informed organisational work should, I believe, be implicit rather than overt. Psychoanalytical understanding helps the organisational consultant to think but, except in some highly specific circumstances, he or she does not expect the client necessarily to share or even be interested in this understanding.
Another example is to do with group relations. It is a powerful – and to me a totally convincing - argument that we are influenced by issues of faith, belief and spirituality in the way we think and act. In society that is why we have churches and retreat centres and the like. And these things influence every aspect of our daily lives. But implicit or overt, that is the question. Overt speaks to the appearance of things. Implicit speaks to the substance.
We have had a sick person in our house, so a lot of different people have come to care for that person. From things they say and implicit data, I know that some are Muslim, some Catholic, others are other kinds of Christian, one is Pentecostal, another a Jehovah’s Witness. Others, I have no idea about. None speaks directly to their faith or belief. And all we are interested in is their capacity to care, and I am content to think that they are helped in this by the way they organise their values.
When I was young and less impressionable than I am now, Father (later Bishop) Huddleston came to our school to preach. He was an awe-inspiring and brave man, but what I remember is his saying he could not do it without his faith, and my thinking that it must be possible to do good without having faith.
Of course I was wrong. We all have mythologies that support us. But I want to distinguish the consulting room or retreat where we go to explore our mythologies and our work in the world where we help people to put their mythologies to good use.
I would like to find out about people through their actions even more than their words. Evidence-based identities – now that would be a fine thing.

We simplify identity in crude ways. A woman takes her man’s name when they marry. Or she doesn’t, in which case she keeps her father’s name. Unless she’s Madonna or Beyoncé. Or there are other feminist solutions. At NCVO I worked with Susan Elizabeth. But I also worked there with Perri 6. He went on to work for Demos where he delighted the pundits who put him to scorn for his postmodern name tag. I only complained that it was hell to reference his publications – and convince sub-editors - a problem that people still have, as there is a a Yahoo query even now (‘I am trying to reference an article for a student and Dr Perri 6 keeps coming up - is it some kind of acronym?’), even when he is Professor of Social Policy at Nottingham Trent University.
My father was baptised Edward Robert Cecil: half the family called him Bob and the other half, Peter. But he also changed his family name, so that our name has association of a Devon village with a notoriously progressive school and also a renowned music school. And then Michael Young took the name Lord Young of Dartington.
What is it about these changes of name? The intention may be integrative but temporary – like Chinese students who take English names to make it easier for others, - accidental, like American immigrants who were renamed by clerks mishearing foreign sounds – or deliberate, like my father wanting a good-sounding name for a headmaster. Or those taking the name Windsor as good for a royal family.
In these last examples, is there an element of shame in wanting to get rid of a foreign sounding name?
There are other motivations. Those entering the religious life take new names. Sometimes the change is linked to status, bishops for example, or the Pope. As I have said, taking a peerage is also an opportunity for a makeover.
Tamil guerrillas take new names, and their ‘real’ names are only revealed when they are dead. And long before Perri, soldiers were known by their numbers.

Our relatedness to an other is as important as any relationship in determining identity. I was thinking this after two recent experiences of meetings, one a Buddhist retreat and the other a Quaker Meeting, where people spoke about unsolicited gestures of friendship or random acts of kindness.

We make a distinction between relationship and relatedness. I think Gordon Lawrence was the first to include relatedness in the title of a group relations conference. The essential point is that you do not have to be in or a relationship with some other to be influenced by what you think or feel about that other. Eric Miller used to give the example of another part of the organisation, with which you had no contact but a lot of feeling - marketing perhaps, if you were on the production side. These are often negative projections, the enemy you can only imagine because you are never really face to face. (Until you go to war.)

But altruism is, as they say, something else. Why do we do it? In the past I have fallen back on ideas of delayed gratification to argue that no act is really altruistic – there is always a pay off, even if that is feeling good about yourself.

But the stories I was hearing in these meetings were of something else, a potential to move from relatedness to relationship. The common example given is of the supermarket (en)counter. You are in your consumer identity, hot and bothered and paying for it. The woman (usually) at the check out is, as someone suggested, programmed to ask how you are, to wish you a good day, or suggest you take care. At the same time she may be looking bored and alienated – in her identity as downtrodden employee. Instead of ignoring the banality of the exchange, a Quaker responded that actually she would rather not be there, would not have been there but could not get what she wanted on the internet, and if she had , she could have stayed at home. ‘Watching television?’ ‘I don’t have television.’ The check out person was interested, and the shopper found she was talking to a philosophy masters student. A change in the relatedness led to a different relationship.

The Buddhist story was of paying the toll on the Severn Bridge between England and Wales - £4. A Buddhist teacher, herself dependent for her living on the freely given ‘dana’ from those who come to her retreats, thought to pay the toll not only for herself but the car behind. She could not resist looking behind to see what effect this had, but of course could see nothing, but then a large car passed, the driver honking and waving and grinning broadly.

My thought on hearing this story was: what if the next person, finding the toll was free for him, decided to pay for the car behind him. And so on through the day. Until someone, too harassed and indifferent, accepted the free offer and drove on. And I thought, that person would be me, because I am often harassed and indifferent.

So this is why I am thinking that identify is as much negotiated through relatedness as through relationships.

If, as OPUS makes claim, we have a role of citizen, this is about a relatedness to a society in the mind, not the only the relationships and relatedness we have with others in specific roles we take in the family, in the local community, in the organisation, etc.

This is a question I would put to Wesley Carr and Ed Shapiro, who argued at last year’s OPUS conference that interpretation of what is going on in society comes better from those in formal roles in relation to that society, than from some nebulous concept of citizenship.

But unnecessary generosity comes from our identity as citizen – where else could it come from?

The negotiation about who I am is subject to transference, counter-tranference dynamics in all kinds of authority relations, even as they go unremarked and uninterpreted. There is transference to a role as well as to a person. A priest is an obvious example. In certain cultures we even call him Father. I remember consulting to a religious order and an aged nun calling me Father, - I must have looked like a young priest to her, otherwise what was I doing staying in the guest room in the convent. I could feel my hand rising as if in blessing.