My new progressivism. Part three, politics
The third instalment of ‘my new progressivism’ (I haven’t yet been consumed by my own verbosity and pomposity, but we are only half way through the week).
On Monday I argued for progressives to aim for a step change in human capacity and well-being, applying new insights into both the limitations of individualism and into the way our identities and actions arise from social context. Yesterday I suggested that we needed to take the study of society more seriously, with a richer evidence base, and an understanding of communities as organisms not machines. Today, some points about politics.
The progressive approach to politics tends to be associated with the reform of institutions and systems. There is nothing wrong with this. From creating a modern, representative second chamber, to a more proportionate electoral system in UK national and English local elections I support democratic reform. But what puts the ‘new’ into my new progressive approach to politics is an equally strong, if not stronger, interest in the content and form of political discourse. This has two dimensions.
First, politics at all levels should be much more about the ends; what kind of society do we want to live in and what are the preconditions for that society, rather than simply being about means; who can best manage public services or deliver the highest level of national wealth (defined exclusively in relation to the formal economy).
Second, politics should much less be an ‘us and them’ debate between decision makers and the mass of disengaged and sceptical citizens. Instead it should be an ‘us and us’ debate, in which citizens engage with each others’ views and in which we understand and accept that social progress requires us all to show some consistency, responsibility and altruism.
Demands for reform of existing institutions have been made for many years, which doesn’t mean they are any less cogent, but we also need innovation. Vast resources have been spent on improving consultation between decision makers and members of the public, but because this is fundamentally about improving ’us and them’ communication it can only go so far. We need to be much more inventive in developing new opportunities and incentives for citizen to citizen dialogue, problem solving and collective action. Devolving power to the most local level helps to blur the boundary between vertical and horizontal discourse, but it will take time, creativity and long term commitment to create the kind of vibrant egalitarian democratic spaces we need. The internet promises much (as thinkers including Clay Shirky to Stephen Coleman have argued at the RSA in 2008) but has so far delivered little.
A focus on the content and form of discourse also leads to a greater concern about the information driven at citizens. I am not arguing for censorship but for an attentiveness to the impact of the messages of popular culture, advertising and the news media. We don’t swallow wholesale the idea that badness and madness is as common as in Albert Square, we have developed some resistance to the advertisers’ insistence that shopping makes us better happier people, and we recognise that our own experience often contradicts the grinding blame mongering and social pessimism of the news media, but taken together these influences make the already hard job or developing a powerful civic democracy even harder. It often strikes me as strange that those sectors of the economy which have such powerful cultural externalities are so unenthusiastic about entering the kind of hard edged and open debate about ethical responsibility that is common (albeit often only at a superficial level) in much less socially influential big businesses.
……………………………………………………………………………………..
I am grateful for all the comments I have been getting this week. By co-incidence I got an e-mail today from my old friend Anne McElvoy of the Evening Standard teasing me for the use of words like ‘hegemonic’ and ‘heuristic’. But I can have my revenge by suggesting that readers listen to today’s Media Show on Radio 4, which was discussing the kind of ethical questions I hint at above. Anne’s job is to try to defend the indefensible. And she really does try her best, including claiming in all seriousness that when the Sun asked its readers if they agreed with the paper’s campaign to remove the Director of Social Services at Haringey this was a serious attempt at reader consultation!
Taking society seriously – my new progressivism, part two
Yesterday I offered a new progressive view of the individual. I argued for an explicit commitment to significant advances in human development and well-being, delivered primarily by creating the kind of society conducive to such progress. I recognise the paternalistic, if not arguably authoritarian, overtones of such an argument. My answer to this lies, in part, in the need for a new democratic discourse, something I intend to return to later this week.
As progressives understand the individual as inseparable from the society he or she inhabits I wanted today to make some comments about how new progressivism implies taking society more seriously. More specifically this means three shifts in our ways of thinking and of making policy:
First, we need a credible social evidence base. An important starting point for modern public service reform was the need to develop reliable and useful metrics. Even today, the Government is unveiling a new source of information by encouraging patients to comment on the performance of NHS professionals on an officially sanctioned website. There has been also the development of much more fine grained information about key social indicators; we have access to demographic information and measures ranging from crime levels to morbidity right down to the level of polling districts.
However, this quantitative data is not matched by qualitative insights into the way in which communities (whether local, ethnically, religious or interest based) operate and generate capacity and meaning. It is only when something shocking like the London bombings occur that we get insight into how little we know about the web of subcultures that shape our communities and the attitudes and aspirations of those who live within them.
As I say when I am invited to speak to local authorities, councils should think about switching most of the money they spend on pointless opinion research (asking people things they don’t think about and getting answers that are as likely to reflect ephemeral influences as underlying beliefs) into employing ethnographers or social network analysts (the subject of an important upcoming RSA project). The national and local state spends huge amounts of energy and money blundering about in deprived communities about which they know little beyond the bare statistics.
Second, new progressives should promote an organic understanding of society. This is, of course, an essay in itself. Suffice to say here that the state tends towards a mechanical view of society and the communities within it. Arguably, the left has traditionally been most guilty of a mechanical approach, on the one hand, putting too much faith in the logic of planning while on the other, being insensitive to the impact on community cohesion of changes like rapid inward migration. The state’s (or the third sector’s) intentions in seeking to address problems, add resources and create capacities is commendable. But because this is too often done without an appreciation the way in which behaviours arise from, and changes impact upon, the social ecology, the consequences are at best disappointing and at worst counter productive.
Third, we need a social equivalent of the slow food movement. It is not that taking time is a good in itself but that sustainable and benign change in the ways people live their lives together (changes they themselves are fully part of) can rarely be delivered in a handful of years. By insisting that enduring improvements in community capacity and well-being can be delivered time limited programmes (and even a ten year programme is in fact six or seven years if set up and wind down times are factored in), and by translating this insistence into crude targets, progressives set themselves up to fail and to discredit the very idea of intervention or even social progress.
These points may seem more methodological than political, much less visionary. But people can only be expected to take ideas seriously is they make sense and seem that they might work. New progressives cannot expect successfully to make the case for social strategies to achieve a step change in human capacity and well-being if our account of society itself is shallow, insensitive and unrealistic.
Towards my new progressivism – part one
In my earlier posting I promised to explore some ideas for a new progressivism growing from the rubble of the hegemonic individualism of the last thirty years. This turns out to be a lot more difficult to write than it seemed when I was thinking great thoughts out running in Saddleworth. Still, on the basis that this is a blog posting to stimulate debate rather then a meticulously argued thesis, here goes.
The individualist paradigm rests of a series of interconnected views, assumptions and methodologies. Politically, individualists see the promotion of personal freedom as both the means and ends of progress. Analytically, individualists see society as no more than the aggregation of individual preferences and actions. The content of those preferences is sufficiently explained in terms of each person maximising utility based on a perfect knowledge of their own best interests. Whilst this idea is best understood as a heuristic device (the ‘least bad’ basis for policy, perhaps) rather than an attempt to describe reality, it relies upon and reinforces the importance of conscious human calculation as the driver of behaviour; the invisible hand is powered by individual choices.
Social progressives are unwilling to leave progress to the aggregation of individual choices. The fulfilment of human potential requires more than freedom, it depends upon access to a culturally determined range of resources. Progressives are not satisfied with the individualists’ absolute notion of ‘freedom from’, wanting to balance against it the inherently negotiable idea of ‘freedom to’. ‘Freedom to’ is socially constructed and socially realised therefore the individual can only be fully understood in relation to society. Society acts upon the individual and has its own dynamics beyond the aggregation of individual preferences.
There is nothing new to this; it is political philosophy 1.01. But in recent years, as the critique of political and analytical individualism has grown, three important new arguments have been added to the progressive case. First, measures of self defined well-being at the aggregate level contradict the assumption that greater freedom leads to greater personal satisfaction. As Avner Offer shows in ‘The Challenge of Affluence’, and as research by Andrew Oswald and by Richard Layard has reinforced, greater personal freedom and affluence do not seem to be leading to more enjoyable lives. Also, greater personal freedom seems to be associated, if anything, with a higher incidence of pathologies ranging from obesity to violent crime.
Second, social science (in particular social psychology and behavioural economics) has convincingly demonstrated the systematically non-utility maximising nature of human preferences and actions. For example, human beings are bad at both calculating and acting upon what is – according to their own stated views – in their best long term interests. Quite apart from its impact on individuals this can have problematic social consequences, seen, for example in the inadequate pension savings rate in societies like the US and UK which most emphasising economic freedom.
Third, neuroscience has finally exploded the myth that human behaviour can be fully, or even adequately, seen as being primarily the result of conscious calculation. Most of what we do (arguably, all that we do, but this is a bigger philosophical question) is the result of unconscious responses to external stimuli. The mind does not police the boundary between the individual and the world outside, instead the individual is a nodal point in a web of unconscious stimulus and response. Indeed, from the perspective of neuroscience it is easier to argue there is no such thing as the individual (understood as the conscious, independent decision maker) than there is no such thing as society.
Based on a crude understanding of evolution and a superficial interpretation of human behaviour, individualists used to claim they were the hard headed realists while progressives were starry eyed idealists (all too ready to turn into authoritarians when their hopes of human perfection were thwarted). But we now know beyond question (as if there was ever any doubt) that human beings have socially constructed identities, that they rely on social interventions to provide the conditions to develop their potential and their scope for well-being, and that the choices we make are as much if not more dependent on the social context in which we find ourselves as any fixed individual preferences.
At the level of the individual, the new progressive agenda differs from a more traditional social democratic perspective in insisting on a more nuanced, ambitious and research-based idea of capacity and well-being. To be sure, freedom and fairness are likely to be important components of the objective conditions for, and subjective experience of, well-being. But the way we experience and express freedom, and the translation of objectively fair rules into a society in which people both feel equally valued and committed to reciprocity depend upon the development of individuals as social actors and the creation of the contexts which encourage individually fulfilling and socially benevolent preferences and actions.
This implies a series of connected aspects of a new progressive agenda.
A wider frame: New progressives believe it is useful for society to seek to define and pursue human development and well-being (whilst recognising the definitions will be contested). This is not simply about maximising the potential for free choices but about creating the context and capacities for wise choices.
A greater ambition: New progressives believe that through social action it is possible (and desirable) substantially to increase aggregate capacity and well-being. This goes beyond achieving higher levels of equality and material wealth to a qualitatively different level of individual and social functioning. Progressives argue that such a shift may be necessary if human beings are to manage key aspects of the modern world including globalisation, climate change and technological complexity.
The good individual in the good society: Progress for the individual relies not only on ‘freedom from’, nor even ‘freedom to’, but on the individual’s place in a society that nurtures, develops and continually reinforces the individual’s potential as a social being. Politics should be largely concerned with debating what kind of society this is but the evidence suggests it will have relatively low levels of social inequality.
Towards a new progressivism
Society can be imagined as a huge orchestra playing a never-ending symphony. At any moment all the sections are playing but one can be dominant for long periods with the other heard only faintly or in short bursts. Using the categories of cultural theory, I have argued in earlier posts that roughly between rearmament in the 1930s and the oil shocks of the 1970s hierarchical solutions were predominant. This was a time of large corporations, national planning, a relatively structured global politics and a faith in technological expertise.
This period was superseded by the long era of dominant individualism which may finally have come to an end with the credit crunch and subsequent downturn. Individualism fostered a remarkable era of innovation and freedom but was already subject to powerful critiques, especially from egalitarians emphasising growing inequality, high levels of social and individual pathology and, most of all, the dangers of climate change.
This week I want to explore what may now be possible. Who knows what new ways of thinking and behaving will emerge from these new times. For at least the next year things are going to be very tough, we will be open to accept solutions from any quarter, but in the longer term different ways of thinking about human progress and how to secure it will fight it out. Progressives, who I define as enthusiastic believers in the capacity of human beings to collaborate to achieve qualitative advances in individual and social welfare, have an opportunity not only to develop new ways of thinking but to have their ideas heard by people who might previously dismissed or ignored them.
This week, starting later today, I will attempt to lay out key planks of a new progressive platform. These combine enduring progressive values, new insights and innovations not available to previous generations and a view of the urgent demands posed by today’s world. I intend to do this at different levels, starting with the individual and working up to the global. It will all be very rough and ready, but as the New Year dawns it would be great to get a debate going.
Preparing for the economic marathon
One of the pleasures of spending Christmas on Saddleworth Moor, better even than the wonderful beer, is being able to run in the bleak but beautiful countryside. The other day I admitted to someone that one of the main reasons I run regularly is that it means I can feel less guilty about drinking and eating more than I should. I suspect that the health consequences of over consuming and exercising are no different to consuming less and being more sedentary but the former makes for a more interesting life. I ate the equivalent of several horses yesterday, behaviour I was able to excuse by the 45 minute run up and down hills on Christmas Eve and the propect of its repeat this morning.
As anyone reading this blog all week (and I’m not sure I can even rely on my mum) will know I have been focussing on poltics; voter volatility on Monday, Cameron’s faltering rise on tuesday, Brown’s fragile recovery on Wednesady and the Lib Dems undeserved doldrums yesterday. One question to be asked of all our poltical leaders is have they prepared us for what lies ahead?
The current recession is not yet as bad as that of the early nineties but not only do most experts think it will turn out to be worse, the bigger probelm is how unprepared we now are for the depredations of a downturn. I only come to Saddleworth once or twice a year and nowhere else to do I take on hills as steep and frequent as round here. But becuase I run twenty miles or so every week in london I set out from the cottage reasonably confident that I’ll make it back.
For the family finanances of millions of people 2009 and 2010 are going to be a long uphill struggle. Like embarking on a marathon most of us think we will somehow get to the end but we know there is going to be a lot of pain and self doubt along the way, and inevitably some people won’t make it. After the years of excess and debt we are very badly prepared for the rigours ahead. We could do with some last minute coaching and then strong encouragement along the way. Politicians aren’t the only coaches we need but we do listen to them sometimes, esepcailly if they are saying something brave. But the political class as a whole seems to lack the self confidence, sense of responsibility or vision to give it to us straight; telling us how hard things are going to be and convincing us that good can come out of the struggle ahead. Like other bloggers I was dismayed a few weeks ago when Andrew Lansley was forced to apologise for pointing out that one good consequence of a recession may be that we are less prone to over consumption of food and alcohol.
Society needs a broad and deep debate about how we should tackle the financial downturn marathon. We need words that can ring in out ears when we hit the wall. We need to beleive that we can come out of this fitter, stronger and wiser. But in the absence of the leadership we need, too many people are embarking on 2009 feeling nervous, pessimistic and alone.
Twitter @RSAMatthewRSA 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.