21st century enlightenment
As I said in Monday’s post, the most important and difficult question about human development (in the sense of people in general attaining a ‘higher’ level of capability) may concern whether there are practical, reasonably large scale, examples of such development taking place as an intended consequence of specific interventions.
But before turning to the practical challenge (thanks, by the way, for some useful pointers among the comments on the post), I wanted briefly to explore some of the assumptions underlying the advocacy of human development. As always, I offer little more than a personal and slightly arbitrary path through a small corner of a vast forest of ideas.
The most frequent arguments I have heard for the need for human development can be placed under three distinct headings.
The apocalyptic case is most often made by environmentalists: in essence, the world is doomed unless we change our ways, and such a change requires us to commit to new values and develop new capabilities.
The functional case – made for example by Robert Kegan – suggests changes in the modern world (particularly the human impact of globalisation and the rise of the knowledge economy) require us to develop new capabilities in order for us – as individuals and broader society – to thrive and be resilient. The functional argument has been doubly reinforced in recent times: by the (disputed) finding that rising affluence has not been associated with greater individual or social well-being, and by the growing gap between, on the one hand, social needs and expectations, and on the other, what the state and market can realistically provide (at the RSA we refer to this latter phenomenon as the social aspiration gap).
The idealist case (which might be termed neo-Aristotelian in that it is similar in form if not in specific content to Aristotle’s argument for eudaimonia) suggests that without development, people are being deprived of the opportunity to fulfil their potential and that this is a wrong in itself.
It is perfectly possible to subscribe to all three rationales. However, there are a couple of wrinkles. What if a huge carbon capturing machine was invented tomorrow which enabled us to churn out emissions with impunity, would environmentalists then have to abandon their interest in human development? The flip side is the tendency (which I have commented on in the past) for some green activists to appear to be smuggling in a progressive or anti-consumerist agenda under the cover of climate change concern. Similarly, the functionalist case runs the risk of encouraging an attitude of pessimism: we may feel compelled to reject the possibility of progress without advanced consciousness.
The idealist case avoids these risks but can appear either pious or elitist: why would we expect the human race to make a big leap forward in its functioning? And anyway, who are a bunch of touchy-feely liberals to tell the rest of the world who they ought to be and how they ought to think?
Another approach to human development involves applying new thinking about human behaviour to enduring debates about political philosophy. Aided powerfully by findings from social psychology and behavioural economics, the case for genuine autonomy involving capacities for reflexivity, mindfulness and self-control seems ever stronger. While the idea that we must learn to be free has authoritarian, or at least paternalistic, overtones it is surely, in essence, true.
The argument to social justice is both more complex, and arguably, more tentative. In my 21st century enlightenment lecture I reflected on the absence from most conversations about the content of social justice (the definition of equality, rights and entitlements) of this question: what is it that encourages to want to extend fairness towards strangers? Surely the answer lies, at least in part, in empathy, one of the most commonly cited attributes of higher order thinking.
If empathy is the affective foundation for a commitment to greater (wider and deeper) fairness, more universal higher order capabilities may also be the goal of social justice strategies. There is, for example, much evidence that social or ‘soft’ skills (ranging from inter-personal communication to team working to creative thinking) are becoming an increasingly ubiquitous requirement in the labour market. Many – including the RSA – have expressed concern that our modern education system shoves people through an examination system while failing to attend to precisely the capabilities most needed for modern work and citizenship.
The RSA’s strap-line - 21st century enlightenment – points to a human development project combining the philosophical ideals that became prominent around the time the Society was founded, contemporary thinking about human nature and behaviour plus an account of future challenges and what they require of us.
Developing development
Did you hear about the car aerial that married a satellite dish; the wedding was a bit boring but apparently the reception was brilliant. Sadly, I can’t apply this adjective to the response I received for my set of posts over the New Year about entitlement. Yet, unabashed by the evidence that the longer I talk about an issue the less convincing I become, I am this week planning to write a series of posts on aspects of human development…..
Last Thursday I chaired an event at which Richard Sennett spoke about his new book Together. As tends to be the case with Richard’s work the book is often fascinating, sometimes inspiring and occasionally baffling. His core thesis certainly struck a chord.
Sennett joins many other thinkers in identifying both the importance of collaboration to human prospects in the 21st century but also the challenges of living and working with people – often very different to ourselves in values, backgrounds and lifestyles – in a fast moving, shrinking world. He suggests three attributes which people need to be able successfully and enduringly to function together (and alongside these, three apparently similar attributes they must supplant).
First, we must seek dialogic rather than dialectic communication (in essence this means conversation which accepts and negotiates different perspectives rather than seeking to find a single shared view). Second, we should aim for a subjunctive rather than a declaratory form of expression. Sennett writes:
‘The subjunctive mood counters Bernard Williams’ fear of the fetish of assertiveness by opening up instead an indeterminate mutual space, the space in which strangers dwell with one another…’.
Third, the sentiment that suits modern togetherness is empathy rather than sympathy:
‘Both sympathy and empathy convey recognition, and both forge a bond, but one is an embrace the other an encounter…Sympathy has usually been thought a stronger sentiment…I feel your pain puts a stress on what I feel; it activates one; own ego. Empathy is a more demanding exercise, at least in listening; the listener has to get outside him- or herself’.
Rather like the objects in an impressionist painting the edges of Sennett’s concepts tend to blur into each other, but what struck me was the congruence with the idea of self-authorship developed by developmental psychologist Robert Kegan. Using a similar framework to Jean Piaget’s pioneering work on child cognitive development, Kegan’s masterwork is The Evolving Self, in which he describes the stages of psychological development, each subsuming the one before, which take place not just in childhood but throughout life.
Kegan argues not just that we should aspire to greater self-awareness but that we need to reach a higher, more empathic, level of functioning to meet the practical requirements of twenty-first century citizenship. In particular, successfully functioning in a society with diverse values, traditions and lifestyles “requires us to have a relationship to our own reactions, rather than be captive of them”. Kegan writes of an ability to “resist our tendencies to make ‘right’ or ‘true’ that which is merely familiar and ‘wrong’ or ‘false’ that which is only strange”. In a 2002 overview of survey evidence for the OECD, Kegan concluded than only one in five people across the world have achieved the competencies necessary for what he termed a ‘modernist’ or self-authoring order of consciousness.
The view that there is both the need and the scope for human beings to develop to a ‘higher’ level of functioning has many adherents. Another version lies in my articulation of the RSA strap-line ‘twenty first century enlightenment’. But many questions arise?
How distinct is such a view from well-meaning but vacuous view that it would be a better world if we were all better people?
Among the different accounts of human beings need to develop to thrive in the modern world, what are the important similarities and differences?
How credible is the view that human development can enhanced. Perhaps it happens anyway (cf the Flynn effect or Steven Pinker’s recent evidence of declining violence) or perhaps, as John Grey would no doubt argue, we flatter ourselves with the idea we can somehow transcend the flawed character of our species.
Broadly, what routes to enhanced human development hold out the greatest promise: education, culture, institutional innovation, spiritual awakening?
Specifically, what examples are there of sustained improvements in human psychological and behavioural development and can these examples be scaled?
As a strong advocate of a necessary human development thesis, my aim here is to sharpen the case rather than find holes in it. I was excited last week to be contacted by Robert Kegan himself who has said some very generous things about the RSA’s 21st century enlightenment thesis. But I am also impatient of making the same broad case time and again but not yet feeling it carries sufficient conviction let alone a concrete set of policies and practices. Of the questions above my sense is that the last is both the most important and the hardest.
‘Wrong’ said Fred
This morning on the Today Programme I heard Labour MP John Mann question whether the public humiliation of Fred Goodwin might detract from the need to engage in deeper questions. It put me in mind of a personal dilemma.
Preparing for conversation in which my starting point is contrition, I find myself rehearsing the words; ‘I am asking you to understand, not to excuse’. You may have said or heard something similar. Sadly, although this sounds like a thoughtful and humane distinction, it is probably fallacious; a consideration which may be relevant to the preponderance in recent times of mass outbursts of vilification (think celebrities, think MPs, think bankers).
The idea of pure personal blame involves putting a punctuation mark in the narrative of cause and effect. Something bad happened because someone who was free to make a good decision made a bad one. Attributing personal blame (rather than mere proximate cause) involves adhering to a robust sense of free will; a bad decision was the result not of what led up to it but of a freely made choice.
But when we ask for our actions to be understood we are suggesting they were, at least in part, the consequence of factors other than a free and bad decision. Explanation dilutes blame. Clarity isn’t helped by the different associations of the word understanding (the verb to comprehend ‘he is good at understanding maps’ and the adverb meaning sympathetic ‘he was very understanding’). While the conflation or overlaying of the positive meanings of understanding is common, it is logically necessary. It is perfectly possible to separate them entirely as in ‘I understand exactly why you did it and that’s why I want you to suffer’.
When it comes to individual blameworthiness, as in the case of Fred Goodwin, our options could be put in a two by two matrix using the different meanings of understanding as the x and y axis.
Square one: neither understand/explain nor understand/sympathise, is associated with total personal blame. Fred should be punished to the max.
Square two: don’t understand/explain but do understand/sympathise might be the space for the religiously humble (‘let he who is without sin…’). A person holding this view would probably not want to punish Fred gratuitously.
Square three: understand/explain but not understand/sympathise could be the position of the anti-capitalist. Such a person night argue that to single out Fred from all the other ‘evil bankers’ is to excuse ‘the system’.
Square four: understand/explain and understand/sympathise might be the square either of other bankers or soft hearted academics. Presumably they too would hesitate before taking Fred’s knighthood.
There may be utilitarian or symbolic reasons why Sir Fred should have been stripped of his title but of these four positions it seems to me only the first is commensurate with taking such a rare and exceptional action (there are after all plenty of rogues with honours). So, on balance, I think John Mann is right; there is at some level a trade-off between a desire to punish the man and a willingness to question the system. This approach also throws up an irony; advocates of lightly unregulated financial capitalism should presumably be relieved that the public seems more inclined to blame Fred than explore how he came to be so powerful and why his decisions caused such mayhem.
Mr Gove’s hidden devil
There has been a great deal of attention paid to Mr Gove’s long predicted move to scrap some BTecs and reduce the league table value of the rest to one GCSE (from as many as four). But what will be the result in terms of secondary school priorities? Looking at payment by results (PBR) systems might be a useful starting point for debate.
PBR schemes in which the payment is connected to a specific outcome will tend to see clients divided into three groups. I’m sure there are other terminologies, but these groups could be called ‘the cream’, the people who would have achieved the outcome (getting a job, staying out of prison etc) without any support, ‘the core’, who may be more likely to meet the outcome or meet it more quickly as a result of support and ‘the hard cases’, who are unlikely to achieve the outcome without a level of support which is unfeasible given the terms of the contract.
Cream skimming and parking (what is done with the hard cases) don’t happen because contract providers are bad people, they are the inevitable consequence of certain PBR systems. The main way to avoid these tactics is to move from a focus on a specific outcome to ‘direction of travel’ measures. In this approach the provider doesn’t get much money for the employment of cream clients but can get a payment for getting a hard case to, say, attend a literacy course. For several years the view among employment policy makers has been that this direction of travel is dangerous; leading to providers putting core clients on access courses of dubious value but never getting them anywhere near a job.
Schools aren’t paid by results but they are paid for places. The number of pupils they attract and the status of the school and its staff depend on key performance measures. Mr Gove and Alison Wolf have today repeated the allegation that many schools have pushed pupils into BTecs of dubious value because they are an easy way to lift a school’s GCSEs score. However, both have had to admit the evidence is circumstantial; lots more pupils do vocational qualifications like BTecs and as this isn’t in children’s best interests – according to Gove and Wolf – schools must be guilty of putting their institutional needs above the interests of pupils.
My own experience suggests that the motivation is somewhat more complex. Schools encourage less academic pupils to take courses which they may find more engaging and in which they have more chance of success and the welcome by-product of this strategy has been – until now – that it helps with the GCSE score. A more charitable interpretation of school behaviour might have been a bit better for staff room morale but it wouldn’t have made such good headlines.
But there is a perverse incentive I have frequently seen at play. It lies in the power of the five GCSEs (including Maths and English) target. This clearly encourages many schools, particularly those worried about their overall OFSTED ranking, to focus resources (for example, small group and Saturday top up classes) on those at the border line of attaining the magic five (rather than those who could get many more or have no chance of making the threshold). This incentive remains in place. Indeed, as Mr Gove presses harder on attainment of the EBac - in which there are five required subjects not just two – the key measure of school performance, the channelling of resources into the borderline pupils may be accentuated.
The latest school performance tables offer a lot more information in a more accessible form than before. I particularly welcome the information about how low, medium and high attainers have done based on their level leaving primary school. This is a direction of travel measure; the top-line school rankings have for some time combined absolute and progression targets, but the latter are made more vivid in the new performance information.
The excellent Conor Ryan has suggested that the proliferation of measures could cloud rather than enhance accountability. He may be right, but, then again, perhaps a more pluralist approach in which different schools can pursue different measures of success would be good. (Although the hard part of choosing something other than headline GCSEs is persuading parents to shift their focus from this measure.)
My point is slightly different. I agree with Mr Gove, Professor Wolf and many others that if vocational qualifications are weak and equivalences unjustified then something should be done. But just because Government removes one allegedly perverse incentive doesn’t mean everything now lines up in a natural and benign way. It would be very interesting to see from Government an analysis of how they think the different measures now applied to schools will affect how schools use resources and guide pupils.
The fear about the EBac – that it will increase the proportion of pupils who fall into the hard case/parking category – will probably have been increased by today’s announcement (as it cuts off some routes for lower attaining pupils to achieve results for themselves and their schools). Mr Gove is a powerful communicator and decisive policy maker but he doesn’t always seem very interested in the detail, but when it comes to the way national targets shape school policies that’s exactly where the devil is hiding.
PS Since first posting I have discovered that Graham Stuart, independent minded Conservative Chair of the Education Select Committee made a very similar point today, but using rather more forceful language.
A bad Monday for principles
As two of today’s news stories underline, utilitarianism tends to put common sense and the short term ahead of principles and the long term.
This tendency helps explain the apparent hostility to using human rights as a criterion for arbitrating on domestic policy. Arguably, the most important aspect of the idea of rights is that they are absolute: not only should rights be protected in hard cases (cases, which, for example, offend our sense of fairness or common sense) but this is indeed the test of whether a right is really a right rather than merely a contingent entitlement.
This principle has featured recently in debates about prisoners. Most high profile has been the UK Government’s resistance to the imposition by the European Court of a prisoner’s right to vote. In keeping with this position the Government is now seeking largely to remove the right of prisoners to seek compensation as the victims of crime.
The most important question here is not whether victim compensation is a right but whether the state’s scope to remove rights from prisoners should be seen as restricted or open ended. Even the most liberal minded will accept the right of the state to remove those rights which are lost as a direct consequence of incarceration, for example freedom of movement or association; while even the most punitive would not want to deny prisoners the right to basic health care. But should the state be free to add further losses of rights and entitlements which are not a necessary consequence of the loss of liberty?
The UK Government clearly feels the answer is ‘yes’ and no doubt ministers have public opinion on their side, but it is perhaps reasonable to ask where this discretion should end. Given that neither voting nor access to compensation are a necessary consequence of the loss of liberty how about, let’s say, access to nutrition or warmth above the absolute minimum required for survival? After all common sense might argue that many law abiding citizens are cold and hungry; surely it goes against decency that prisoners should be more fortunate? This is indeed the kind of argument which has driven prison policy in some of the more punitive American states.
Another example of the logic of utility was the announcement by the Home Secretary of a new ‘five calls and we’re in’ rule for anti-social behaviour. On common sense grounds it is difficult to argue against the police being compelled to intervene if five different people have reported the same incidents of anti-social behaviour. It has certainly made for some good headlines at a time when rising crime and falling police numbers are making the Coalition vulnerable on law and order.
But Ms May’s announcement does beg some questions. Such targets are bound to generate anomalies: for example, should the police direct resources towards the fifth complaint about children kicking balls over garden fences at the expense of intervening in a case where there have been only three complaints about a vulnerable person being systematically bullied? On other policy areas the Coalition has exposed the danger of these kinds of unintended consequences. Ms May’s apparent abandonment of the principle of localism may now be used when ministerial colleagues in other areas seek to resist calls for national safeguards.
Indeed, with the direct local election of police commissioners taking place in the autumn, policing is often mentioned in the Coalition’s localism script. Whether these elections will attract candidates of calibre and a reasonable turnout remains to be seen, but it is unclear what the value of a local mandate will be if policy can be dictated by Whitehall on an issue as detailed as how many telephone calls trigger action on anti-social behaviour.
Human rights and localism are very different kinds of principles. Both, it seems, are vulnerable to the pressure on all politicians to meet the voracious appetite of public opinion and the 24 news cycle.
RSA Animate
RSA Mobile
RSA Comment- RSA Projects Blogs
- Twitter @RSAMatthew
- RSAMatthew: Half the people who've read the RSA maths report http://t.co/TbhXYag9 think it's great - we don't know about the remaining 60 percent
- RSAMatthew: Matthew's blog: 21st century enlightenment http://t.co/SuRt44wq
- RSAMatthew: Chairing London Well-being Conference 2012 #LWB12 - nice mood in the room
RSA Bookshop
The RSA Bookshop, in partnership with Blackwell's the UK's leading academic bookseller, offers Fellows and friends an opportunity to purchase books and to explore our speakers’ ideas in greater detail. Visit the RSA Bookshop.