My new progressivism, part five – the world
Filed under: Credit crunch, Politics, Public policy, Social brain
The good news, I guess, is I’ve done what I said two weeks ago; one week of postings about the political situation and one about new strands in progressive thinking for the post credit crunch world. Sadly, I’m not sure this kind of sustained musing works as a blog. It will be a relief (for me and my reader) to go back next week to what does; short colourful riffs about new research, a topical incident or talking point.
I have even more need for self deprecation given the risible heading for today’s blog; part five, the world! So, to minimise my embarrassment I’ll be brief. The question I have been pondering is what might be a distinctive new progressive approach to globalisation and international politics? What is there to add to libraries of books examining dilemmas like the trade off between national interest and global responsibility, or between promoting human rights and security versus respecting every country’s right to self determination? Nor is there much to be gained from adding to the condemnation of the kind of double standards that leads, to take one example, to the US and UK having close links to a state like Saudi Arabia while supporting the blockade of a Hamas regime in Palestine which (however we might deplore its stated aspirations) was elected in arguably the most free and fair elections ever held in an Arab state.
From a progressive stance the problem with globalisation is that it is unbalanced. Not just in terms of who benefits, but that the globalisation of certain domains of human activity – finance, communications, terrorism and organised crime – is not matched by the development of global civil society, global governance or global accountability. In the wake of the credit crunch in which unsustainable mortgage lending in certain states in the US precipitated a crisis now affecting every economy in the world, there is renewed interest in effective global regulation. Time will tell whether this enthusiasm will last once the crisis has peaked or whether such regulation will be effective.
Progressives should support attempts to develop more credible and powerful global institutions and regulatory frameworks. This should be an issue as well understood and widely discussed as domestic democratic reform. Global governance feels a distant and opaque subject, so our politicians and commentators need to make the issues and choices clear and to be explicit that the UK seeks to be a leading nation in advocating more effective pooling of sovereignty, even where this may appear to conflict with our short term interests. This is the direction Gordon Brown is taking, but he is not always the best as popularising issues.
We also, and these have been themes of mine all week, need greater innovation and citizen-led action. Ideas to strengthen global democracy have been around for many years. But now may be the time to get behind ideas like the United Nations Parliamentary Assembly or innovations like the global e-Parliament. New times require bold new thinking. What if the next Secretary General of the UN was elected globally with every nation being able to participate as long as it is willing to hold fair and free hustings and elections? This would surely create an interesting dilemma for a country like China; would its fear of democracy lead it to disenfranchise its people from an election which one of its citizens would presumably stand a good chance of winning?
Bold ideas at the level of global governance need to be reinforced by new civic initiatives that seek to create benign bonds and solidarities across national borders, there are important initiatives in areas ranging from the environment to inter-faith understanding. These too need to be supported.
And at the local and individual level we need ways of making the idea of global citizenship real and vivid. Every school should be twinned with schools in other parts of the world, not just as a symbolic gesture but so that young people learn from and through the relationship (I understand this is happening in some schools, anyone out there got more information)
Municipal twinning, long mocked or reviled for its junketing potential, should be revived with the aim that any resident of a twinned community feels a genuine bond with fellow citizens in the partner locality in another continent. The internet makes all these ideas more possible and more exciting.
The ideal of global citizenship is has been around for a very long time and been confounded for just as long. The danger is that we don’t see that it was an idea that was awaiting its time and that the time has now come.
My new progressivism , part four – public services
The economy will no doubt be the dominant issue at the next general election, but we can also expect public service reform to feature highly. So, given their prominence in political controversy and their importance in so many people’s lives what might be a new progressive approach to public services?
The first imperative is to seek to depoliticise the debate. As the policy shifts of the major parties demonstrate, there is nothing inherently left or right wing about whether to centralise or devolve, whether to trust providers or empower users, whether to favour uniformity or responsiveness. Indeed as Christopher Hood argued back in 1997, using our old friend cultural theory, the ‘messy dialectic’ (my phrase) of public service reform is as much a story of the battle between hierarchical (centralised, bureaucratic), individualist (market based), and egalitarian (producer led, devolved) models as between political ideologies.
Every reform strategy has its flaws which lead, even if after some initial progress, to the emergence of contrasting strategies. I heard a vivid example of this the other day in the story of a head teacher operating in one of the largest chains of Academies. The head had resigned in frustration at the control over his school exercised by the chain’s national board. A governor of the same school confirmed to me that there is minimal devolved authority in areas like budget allocation. So, Academies, a policy which can be seen as the final stage in the process of liberating schools from local bureaucracy that started back with local management of schools in the late eighties, has recreated the very systems of control (albeit based on an Academy brand rather than a locality) which the original reformers set out to abolish!
Getting the right mix of national strategy and accountability, local responsiveness, professional esteem, user power, continuity, efficiency and diversity is a never ending juggling act. The politicisation of reform not only denies this complexity it encourages Government opponents continually to argue that services are in crisis (which helps to explain why when NHS user satisfaction rates are at an all time high 4 in 5 of us agree that the health service ‘in in crisis’!) and, worst of all, it encourages the myth that public services could solve all their problems, indeed all our problems, if only we found the right mode of delivery.
This is why the first imperative in a new progressive approach should be the encouragement of new public service alliances bringing together policy makers, managers, professionals and citizens committed to strong public services but also, instead if lapsing into shroud waving or special pleading, to facing up to the difficult issues. This is what the RSA is trying to do with its education charter, which we hope will gain support from everyone from employers and academics to governors and students.
A national alliance of this sort is the corollary of the local collaboration vital to the progress of public services. There are important examples of how public services can move from being services delivered to passive users to co-productions in which professionals and citizens work together. One is individual budgets in social care where the client’s and carer’s desire for dignity and control (previously seen as problem by the system) is now a resource to ensure people get the service they want while at the same time reducing the need for council bureaucracy. Another is refuse collection, where the expectations of recycling now mean many of us spend more time sorting our rubbish than does the council. But the insight that public service outcomes can best be delivered by a genuine collaboration between provider, user and the wider community is still too marginal, and we need more ideas and innovations about how to turn this insight not only into new forms of delivery but into new services.
Finally, and here I echo points I made yesterday about ‘us and us’ political dialogue, we need to get real about public services can be expected to deliver without our explicit commitment and practical support. The idea that in a society where economic inequality has increased substantially over the last two decades (albeit falling most recently), we can expect schools to deliver educational equality or the NHS to tackle health inequality is ludicrous. It is equally deluded to imagine that we can expect cash strapped public services to close the ever widening social care gap. If we can’t find better ways of mobilising family and community support only those with the most pressing and urgent needs will get the care they need.
The power of public services is that they express our collective commitment to each other and to the ideal of continually improving our well-being. But we need to be clear about the depth of that commitment, about what we can expect from public services, about the trade-offs that have to be made, and that services that operate without public engagement and support are like a brick wall without cement.
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.
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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.
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