Inequality and the realignment of the right
This blog repeats an argument I made a couple of weeks ago, but, for once, the more I hear, the more sure I am…
A few years ago, when I was Director of IPPR, I developed what I thought was a ‘big idea’. Sadly, I was almost alone in thinking this. But this week I have found myself returning to the same idea.
My argument five years ago was with the left. I suggested that its obsession with inequality was a mistake – my view was that what people want is to live in ‘the good society’ which will tend to mean a place that is fair, safe, pleasant etc. The left, I reasoned, needed to demonstrate that greater equality was necessary to have such a good society. In doing this, it also needed to recognise that the public’s commitment to fairness is not the same as the left’s definition of equality: people may well feel that ‘unequalness’ is fair if, for example, it’s based on merit or effort. By taking it for granted that equality was something everybody signed up to, the left was in danger of distancing itself from the public’s priorities.
So, it has been fascinating this week to hear a powerful argument that ‘the good society’ must be reasonably equal. This is the core thesis of Richard Wilkinson’s and Kate Pickett’s book, The Spirit Level, which we discussed here at the RSA yesterday.
Furthermore in the work of Elizabeth Gould (speaking here in two weeks’ time) and in the answers given to me by Jonah Lehrer at our event last night, we can now see a strong causal argument linking inequality, status anxiety, and a variety of social problems.
So now my question is to people on the political right: given the strength of the argument that high levels of inequality are socially pernicious, will the right accept that reducing inequality is a valid and important policy objective? If so, there is a perfectly valid argument between left of centre strategies to achieve more equality, and right of centre.
The electoral triumph of New Labour came in part from a willingness of the centre left to see that markets are a powerful tool and are not inherently socially divisive. Just as Labour was able to grab the political centre ground by saying ‘markets work’, can the right do the same by saying ‘inequality matters’?
Here is a brief video of Jonah Lehrer speaking about his ideas
Jonah Lehrer and the social brain
I am even more excited than usual about our forthcoming lecture programme. In two weeks we award the RSA Benjamin Franklin Medal to Elizabeth Gould, the discoverer of neurogenesis, the process by which the brain generates new neurons. Professor Gould is one of the world’s leading neuroscientists but tonight we have a world leading populariser of research on the brain and behaviour: Jonah Lehrer. As well as his two fantastic books, ‘Proust was a neuroscientist’ and ‘The decisive moment’ (the latter of which he is in town to publicise) Lehrer has his own website and blog, The Frontal Cortex, and is editor at large of SEED magazine.
As I’ve said in past blogs, I am working away with my colleague Matt Grist on the RSA Social Brain project. We are still at the stage of identifying the conceptual framework for the project. The aim now is to distil what we see as being the key insights from recent neuro-scientific and behavioural research as we try to develop an integrated model to challenge a cluster of myths about human agency derived from the overlapping perspectives of Cartesian philosophy, neo-classical economics and common sense.
This was in part the focus of my annual lecture in 2008 but we need to move beyond myth-busting, and citing of individual bits of research, into the development of a model which could be of practical use to decision makers, organisational leaders or anyone else interested in influencing behaviour and developing human capability.
For myself I already have a sense of some of the key broad insights that we need to be using as the foundations for our new model:
- Human decision making takes place on many levels. Although the conscious level is much less important than common sense tells us, one of the things that makes human beings different is that we can, within limits, determine which bits of our mental apparatus does which job. For example, learning a skill is about making something we start off trying to do through conscious effort – and as a consequence do badly – into something that becomes automatic and effortless (like learning a language or musical instrument) by hard wiring our learning
- Our personalities are much less fixed than we tend to think they are, but our sources of well-being are much more constant. In a recent blog Lehrer quotes philosopher Alva Noe “Consciousness is not something the brain achieves on its own,” Noë writes. “Consciousness requires the joint operation of the brain, body and world. … It is an achievement of the whole animal in its environmental context.”.
- More controversially, human decision making strategies in organisations (defined simply as a group of people trying to achieve something together) derive neither from a single way of viewing the world (as is asserted in neo-classical economics) nor by an infinite number of possibilities but by way of a limited array of (antagonistic but mutually reinforcing) paradigms.
By the end of the month I hope we will have developed and refined a list of about ten of these broad foundations and then started to look at how they link together, or possibly, are in tension.
David, Hillary and the power of face to face
By all accounts the meeting between David Miliband and Hillary Clinton went very well. The foundations for a strong interpersonal working relationship may be affection and respect, shared values and purpose, or a hard headed sense of mutual dependence. It looks like Miliband and Clinton have all three.
The recession is now leading to deep cuts in corporate travel budgets, but the defenders of executive jet-hopping emphasise the importance of face to face contact in deal making. In contrast, on-line collaboration is proving to be an elusive goal.
Personal collaboration, involving working through different interests and perspectives, relies on a high level of reciprocal communication. If we disagree on one topic I need to know, or sense, enough about you to calculate what appeal I might make to other values or interests that you hold. I have also to believe that if I give up some ground, you may too. Face to face, most of this happens though processes of unconscious communication (the evidence for this has been gathered by Daniel Goleman in his book, Social Intelligence).
There are, of course, many examples of collaboration on-line: Linux, Wikipedia, campaigns like Obama’s, but these are all vertical processes in which participants contribute to a central shared objective on the basis of agreed rules of engagement. Horizontal collaboration, when people of the same status agree their own objectives, ways of working and mutual commitments, is different and much harder. This is one reason for the limited success (in relation to the overall scale of on-line activity) both of attempts to translate on-line exchange into off-line activity and of forms of web-based deliberation designed to get people of different views to listen and learn from each other. The unconscious clues that tell us co-operation and compromise will be matched and rewarded are simply not there.
Another dimension of this is reported by Jonah Lehrer. It turns out that the social networks on Facebook are significantly different to those off-line. Whereas in the off-line world popular people tend to network with other popular people, in Facebook the networks of the most popular are often inhabited by those whose own networks are very small. As Lehrer concludes:
Facebook is a new experiment in human social interaction, and we shouldn’t be surprised that the network dynamics of Facebook don’t resemble the network dynamics of the real world, whatever that is.
The big question is whether on-line collaboration will always be much weaker and shallower than off-line or whether it is simply that we haven’t yet developed the tools to compensate for the absence of the kind of face to face dynamics seen yesterday in Washington.
A trip to Hamlet (and, yes, it was Dr Who!)
I had the privilege this week of seeing the Royal Shakespeare Company production of Hamlet starring David Tennant. The quality of the production was underlined by a spontaneous standing ovation, directed mainly at our Prince but deserved by the cast in general. I particularly enjoyed Oliver Ford Davies who played Polonius as a slightly senile actor who keeps forgetting or mangling his lines.
Hamlet is, of course, all about the mind. It contains a line which must be one of the most commonly repeated in popular mind science books:
“there is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so”
Neither Hamlet nor Shakespeare feature in the book I am now reading which, had I been reading it before Xmas would definitely have made my list of books of the year. It is ‘Proust was a neuroscientist’ by Jonah Lehrer. In each chapter of the book Lehrer looks at the work of a creative artist, ranging from George Eliot to Stravinsky to Escoffier, and shows how careful analysis of this work reveals sophisticated insights into the workings of the brain. Lehrer has a great website. A few weeks ago he picked up on Zadie Smith’s powerful piece on the lyrical realist myths that form the heart of most modern literature. This theme of the relationship between how art understands our minds and what science is now telling us is fascinating. I have a meeting in a few weeks with some people from the RSC – I must see if they might help us commission Lehrer to do an RSA speech on Shakespeare the neuroscientist
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