The RSA has been assisting the Joseph Rowntree Foundation with its fascinating project to identify ‘new social evils’. We held a launch event here in July and our Fellows were invited to contribute to JRF’s online consultation.

This week, I attended a day long discussion exploring the outcomes of that consultation and implications for the next stage of the project. A stage which we hope will involve further JRF/RSA events at John Adam Street.

I won’t steal JRF’s thunder by revealing the list of social evils that emerged from the over 3,000 online submissions and more in-depth focus groups.

Maybe it’s the wisdom of crowds, or maybe a failure of popular insight, but the list reveals a pretty strong consensus around the kinds of ‘evils’ discussed at the lecture here, with materialism, poverty, and the breakdown of family and community featuring highly.

The extended seminar this week was an opportunity to look behind the list and explore connections and deeper underlying trends. There was much of interest here, but, for me, three related points stood out:

• It is not useful to try to explain the widespread pessimism about the state and direction of society by saying lives are getting worse. Indeed many things, for example social tolerance, affluence, educational attainment are getting better. Our unease may instead reflect the sense that we are not equipped to deal with the kinds of new challenges presented to us by the modern world.

• In physiological terms human evolution is a slow process (although rising life spans and evidence of substantial increases in average IQs suggest it is possible to get much better use out of the equipment we inherit). Thus far, human history comprises a very long period of very limited change, followed by a much shorter period of much more profound change. Is the tragic paradox of modernity that we are able to unleash powerful, unstoppable, processes – most obviously scientific and technological change, and modern globalisation – but we do not have the tools (as individuals, communities or nations) to direct those processes to the achievement of a better human condition.

• Returning to the RSA theme of the social aspiration gap (between the future we say we want and the future we are likely to create with current modes of thought and behaviour), should we understand this gap less as a failure of will or leadership, but instead as a sign that we need to develop a new collective consciousness? It is only this new consciousness (what our trustee Sean Blair refers to as ‘post-enlightenment thinking’) that will enable us to thrive in the world we have created, or, as it increasingly feels, the world that is creating us.

In case this all feels a bit abstract let me offer one observation which connects a major social phenomena with the ways our minds work.

We know from the research of Richard Layard and others that economic progress and rising affluence have not been associated with higher levels of life satisfaction. This insight has given rise to the development of new policy priorities designed to increase happiness levels.

The impact of Layard’s work was seen most recently when the Government announced substantial extra funding for cognitive and behavioural therapy.  Studies of individual behaviour and brain processes suggests one reason for the social phenomenon of progress without happiness may lie in our individual mental processes (for a brilliant exposition of this and other research I can strongly recommend ‘Stumbling on Happiness‘ by Dan Gilbert).

It seems that we are all very bad at predicting the impact of events on our levels of contentment (systematically exaggerating the bad impact of what we fear and the good impact of what we desire).  So, how are we to create a more contented society when we are so bad at predicting what make us contented individuals?

As is the style of my blogs, I am skimming the surface of a deep and complex set of subjects. The idea of a new collective consciousness requires us to bring together insights from areas as diverse as anthropology, philosophy, social psychology and brain science. Unless debate is grounded in robust research and engages with concrete issues there is a danger of falling into a kind of new age mysticism.

But this feels to me like it could be a central project for the RSA, shaping both our thought and organisation for years to come.

Any other views?

P.S.

This week the Trustees approved a set of interesting new research projects on: learning in prisons; attitudes and behaviours among small investors; social care innovation; and pro-social behaviour.

I’ll ask Jonathan Carr-West to summarise these on the programme pages of the RSA site.

Thanks to Christine Richard and Liz Sewell for interesting responses to last week’s blog.

Those of you who listened to the Today programme last Saturday will know I got it wrong about the election. More embarrassingly, it appears that I was still saying the odds were marginally in favour nearly a day after the Prime Minister and his advisors had decided against.

Maybe this is the end of my punditry.

If so, I know some Fellows will be relieved.

I try to tread a fine line between providing insights from my old role in Downing Street and speaking from my non-affiliated position at the RSA. But this can sometimes be a difficult balancing act, especially when  I’m pitted against someone with a more partisan perspective.

Given these pitfalls why pundit (please forgive this new verb) at all?

I realise my answer will have no credibility unless I own up to enjoying low level celebrity. No one ever stops me in the street and asks for my autograph, but I get a warm feeling when the man in the dry cleaners asks if that was me he saw on Newsnight..

But I would like to claim a higher purpose to explain being in a taxi on the Western Avenue at 1 am after the Sky News paper review.

In a world where politicians and policy makers are usually portrayed as being either venal or stupid, I hope sometimes to shed a more sympathetic light on the pressures of those at the heart of the political system. I aim for empathy with the dilemmas faced by politicians and officials even if I disagree with their conclusions.

But media profile can become addictive. It is all too easy to say ‘yes’ to every bid without asking what purpose the punditry will serve. Thus I found myself last Friday and Saturday on three different radio programmes commenting on whether there would be an election (and later on two more explaining why was there was not). I had gone from being an informed commentator to a racing tipster.

The reason for sharing all this is not merely to make excuses for my own promiscuity. After all my media sins are small in comparison to rigged phone polls, racist house mates, the antics of  Jeremy Kyle and his ilk, and the misrepresentation of our Monarch.

Resulting from the reputational crisis facing our broadcasters we can expect many new safeguards to be put in place. The daytime shows will keep psychiatrists on call, the phone-ins will be better labelled, and – as I found out the other day – interviewees will no longer be asked to do the silent ‘noddies’ that used to form the opening shot of news segments.

But I can’t help thinking that all this quasi-regulation – much of which will be quietly dropped when the spotlight has moved – misses the point. Surely the question our beloved media need to ask more often is: ‘Why are we doing this?’

In other words the problem is motive as much as process. The phone-in rules may have been broken but the point is that viewers thought these were genuine forms of consultation or competition when in fact they were merely ways of making money.

Similarly, the issue with the Queen ’storming out’ was not just bad editing or oversight, it was the desire of the film makers to make us to think badly of someone for the sake of entertainment.

Behind the veils of ‘public service’, ‘creativity’ and ‘entertainment’, representatives of the broadcast media seem to offer a less credible account of their corporate responsibility than a high street coffee shop.

With a backdrop of falling audiences and proliferating channels and platforms, public service broadcasting will come under ever greater pressure to provide a rationale. My hunch is that the focus on high quality content will need to be complemented by an account of how broadcasters build relationships, both with and between audience members.

Motives matter in relationships.

At our RSA Screen events Channel 4 programme makers discuss their work with a mixed audience. It is a fascinating and often challenging exchange, with the inspirations and objectives of the film makers coming often to the fore.

Whether you are an occasional pundit or a highly rewarded TV presenter, the question ‘did I do good’ may be harder than the self-serving ‘was I good’. But maybe it’s one we should be asking more often.

The project continues…

The last few days have given me lots more opportunities to talk to Fellows about our plans for the Fellowship to become a network for civic innovation.

A great day in Bristol with the Wales and West Region turned up a couple of interesting ideas for RSA interventions.

The first was for us to host an impartial and rigorous debate on the Severn Barrage proposal that has been put back on the agenda by recent ministerial announcements and a report from the Sustainable Development Commission.

The second was for us to work with the excellent Watershed Centre and DEMOS on a project around making the night time culture in the harbour area less exclusively focussed on young people and drinking.

Like most of the other ideas we are mulling over these are only on the drawing board. But they are interesting examples of what emerges when we ask the question: “How can the RSA make a difference?”  Any answers you might have are, of course, welcome.

The challenge will be encouraging Fellows to do as much development work as possible at local level and then – when we are happy that the project is a sound one – thinking about how we can best use the RSA’s resources (and particularly the wider Fellowship) to bring these ideas alive.

These are among the important issues we will be discussing at our Fellowship engagement event here on 22 November. We have over 200 Fellows signed up so far which is great news.

The event will be helped by some valuable preparatory thinking going on through the Open RSA network on Facebook. Open RSA met here the other day and generated some very useful ideas. Part of the event was live blogged by Bill Thompson and is available here.

Also, thanks to the ever-enthusiastic Ann Packard for organising a really well-attended and lively meeting of the Fellows’ creative industries special interest group. I am sure Ann will be telling us more about this group as it develops its activities, and in time I hope the group will develop its own thoughts about the impact the RSA might make.

Farts and ecology…

Yes, I know it’s a cheap joke (and only funny if you know we have an RSA project called Arts and Ecology).

But there is a serious point. On Monday I was honoured to attend a lunch with Helen Clark, the very successful Prime Minister of New Zealand.

The focus of the discussion was sustainability and the bold and ambitious plans the NZ Government has made as they aim for carbon neutrality by 2050.

Two of the big challenges for NZ are what is tastefully referred to as ‘pastoral emissions’, and the impact of transporting NZ agricultural goods around the world.

The former is a big problem and there is to be a major international conference on the issue later in the year. In this area I suspect we will need technological solutions rather than appealing to the cows themselves!

But while it may be hard to talk about pastoral emissions without a snigger, it is not so easy to understand why so little attention is given to the contribution of shipping (especially freight shipping) to global emissions.

These emissions are on a par with those of aviation, so is their lower profile in debate simply because that we find it hard to believe that the sedate movement of boats can be as damaging as the roaring acceleration of planes?

I remember a wonderful cartoon of a huge rabbit tearing down New York skyscrapers while in the foreground among pedestrians going calmly to work, a bystander is saying: “I suppose if it was a giant gorilla people would be taking it seriously.”

It may seem odd to think of cow farting and shipping as big issues for the future of the planet, but they are.

Why I want an early election…

The fact is that Governments (and dare I say Oppositions too) make better policy when they have some time to let difficult change pay-off.

On election footing the horizon of politicians is no longer than a couple of months, and the demands of popular support tend to drive out those of policy rigour.

So, whoever wins, given the need to grasp some big nettles, I can’t help thinking it would be better for us all if we had a Government with a five year mandate.