Yes it’s true: Alastair Campbell does indeed have a new book out called Persevilience: The Word the World Needs Now.
In an era of multiple unprecedented challenges, new ways of thinking about how we meet them are called for.
Enter Persevilience: Yes, it combines perseverance and resilience. But it does so much more than that. It is the ability to turn any setback into an opportunity, by embracing a mindset that is not just tougher, but more positive, and built on belief and integrity.
Blending the sharp political analysis for which he is known around the world with candid, personal reflections on grief, disappointment, mental health, friendship, family and love, Alastair Campbell’s latest work introduces a new value to strive for.
Like Nudge, The Third Way or The End of History, it has the potential to enter the bloodstream of political conversation and, ultimately, help us better understand and thrive in the ever more challenging world around us.
Kathleen Stock has actually read it. At UnHerd:
The publisher’s blurb, reproduced on Campbell’s personal website, even compares Persevilience to Francis Fukuyama’s seminal The End of History, trumpeting that it too “has the potential to enter the bloodstream of political conversation and, ultimately, help us better understand and thrive in the ever more challenging world around us”. (I know what you’re thinking — how very ambumptious — but that’s Alastair Campbell for you.)
My next burning philosophical question concerned what the attribute of persevilience really amounts to, given that our author keeps insisting it isn’t just perseverance plus resilience, plus a few semantic sprinkles. Anyone can take two familiar concepts, put them together, and make up a new name for the conjunction. You may have noticed that I just did. One could also observe that on his smash hit podcast The Rest is Politics, co-hosted with the intermittently prignorant Rory Stewart, Campbell is mostly hubristling and shrugnacious; while in the writing of his books, he tends more towards the mawkward. But is the discovery of persevilience any deeper than this?
Unfortunately not. Despite all that notable arrogiasm he apparently fails to define his terms.
On the plus side, this also means that the terrifying technocratic future Campbell enthusiastically conjures — a place where headteachers instruct their pupils about persevilience, and businesses do “persevilience audit[s]” — is unlikely. Surely even the civil service couldn’t operationalise something this chronically vague. Take my word for it: if you ever hear persevilience being talked about somewhere other than The Rest is Politics, it will be a sign that we are absolutely scrucked.
Leave a Reply