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Monday 24 February 2020

4IR, the Wellbeing Agenda and the New Politics

Britain feels to me like a country that has lost its grip on reality. We are sorely divided with people living in different bubbles of delusion while flinging insults at those who are not part of their bubble. On social media you can flick from the sunlit uplands - 'We'll be living a prosperous dream now we're free of the EU' - to doom laden depths - 'Democracy is fighting for survival with the media and judiciary under attack'. There are two very different types of nostalgia on offer - Type 1, 'Britain has stood alone and will be great again,' and Type 2, 'Life in the EU was full of wonderful opportunities and the sooner we rejoin the better.'

Then there are the more personal lines of attack, 'It's democracy, get over it,' 'You only see it like that because you read the insert name of paper,' or 'You voted that way because you're uneducated and don't understand the consequences.' If you mostly read one type of propaganda you can feel quite optimistic. It's all about positioning ourselves globally so we can prosper by capitalising on the AI and robotics revolution. New wealth and jobs will filter into the economy and we are on the brink of a Fourth Industrial Revolution. Conversely, you can begin drawing up plans for emigration (or a move to Scotland) if you read other sources. It's the end of the welfare state as we've known it, the economy is doomed, free movement and necessary migration have been halted and the government is secretive and out of control.

What we seem to have lost is a sense that we are all in this together. The country has taken an enormous risk at a time when, globally, the known order of things is shifting in unpredictable ways. We are all responsible for the future we create. I find myself searching rather forlornly for groups, organisations, communities that are engaging in informed ways with the reality of the changes that lie ahead. We seem to have revised many of the previously defining categories that provided our landscape. In political terms 'conservative', 'liberal' and 'labour' appear to have taken on new meanings. It appears that to align yourself with current Conservatism is to be in favour of radical change and to be very right-wing. The liberal project appears to be floundering, partly as a result of the tensions that its own generosity to diversity breeds; there is a new sense that people don't trust Liberals. The Labour movement appears no longer to represent the interests and concerns of the working class and perhaps we are not even sure we can define groups by the kinds of work they have (or don't have) any more. Nationalism and regionalism are increasingly seen as ways out of intractable difficulties over the distribution of resources and power. Other than the fact we all inhabit the same little archipelago of islands, there appear to be few shared values that hold us together and our political landscape is undergoing some kind of revolution.

Without intending to be (she thought she was making a philosophical point), Margaret Thatcher was prophetic when she said 'There is no such thing as society.' What is 'society' the new British way? Some fundamental issues need addressing and a key question to ask is,'What does it mean to be human today on these islands?' It's as fundamental as that. What basic needs do we share? How can we meet them? What does almost every person value?

When we address our future in these terms, we come up with things like
  • a symbiotic relationship with the environment that supports our existence
  • food, warmth and a roof over our heads in a variable climate
  • provision of basic care and treatment in sickness and around giving birth and dying  
  • a means of earning 
  • education in the skills that are needed in our society and an appreciation of our common roots 
  • dignity and respect whatever our origins
  • freedom of speech and action tempered by the protection of laws that define and uphold limits for the good of the many
  • compassion - both directed toward ourselves, especially when vulnerable and the capacity not to be so self-obsessed that we cannot show care for others
  • space for creativity, invention, imagination, uniqueness
  • means of engaging in travel and trade

This picture does not accurately reflect my experience of British priorities today. We have a society where increasing numbers of people are excluded from even these basics. Different groups suffer in different ways - some lack food and a home, others lack care in their dying days, others experience their education as anything but conducive to creativity, others have no access to work and others lack basic respect due to difference or characteristics they can do nothing about. This happens in all societies. But today's levels of inequality in Britain are beginning to destroy us. We seem to have set our face to ensure, or perhaps turn a blind eye to, increasingly uneven levels of inclusion and provision. We have collectively said, 'That's OK.' We share no humanity that causes us to ask, 'What risks are acceptable to take with other people's lives and work?' 'Are there levels of cost-at-others'-expense to which we will not stoop?' We have moved to a place where our values are shaped by the overall wealth the country can generate and the conditions for this are set by those who will profit the most at the expense of those who will not profit at all.

There is no nice way to say this, Britain has become a place where greed, actual and aspirational, rampages unchecked while quality of life for many goes mostly unattended to. When teachers tell stories of washing clothes and feeding pupils before they can teach, someone will say, 'Well good for them, teachers have always done this.' When carers say, 'We need more resources,' they are told, 'Soon we'll have robots to do most of your work.' I'll be honest. I don't see leaving the EU as a sensible way to create a better future for Britain. However, there are many issues about our commonality (or lack of it) that urgently supersede the debate about whether we should have done it and the means by which it came about. The fact that we did it is one symptom among others of the very concerning malaise that pervades British life today.

If it is true that the world is entering a Fourth Industrial Revolution at a time of ecological crisis for the planet, Britain needs urgently to make changes in its habitual ways of categorising, thinking and participating. A new humane politics is needed that is a far cry from the political developments we see currently in the Johnson government or among opposition parties.

Last autumn, the Prime (First) Ministers of Iceland, New Zealand and Scotland put forward a proposal for a new way of looking at the performance of governments here. In their Well Being Agenda measurements of GDP take second place to, or at least are considered alongside, indicators of sustainability and equity. GDP is put alongside its cost to the environment and its effect in creating inequality. Factors that take into account well-being and happiness for the whole population have as much weight as the raw creation of financial wealth. The argument is not that GDP does not matter, but that its importance must be balanced by other indicators when it comes to assessing the overall success of a government or the health of a country. This is not dissimilar to the kinds of priority found in the Scandinavian countries and Finland. More detail can be read  about this challenge to conventional economics on the Wellbeing Economy website and in Professor Alister McGregor's recent book Well Being, Resilience and Sustainability: A New trinity of Governance.



I am struck by a very sharp contrast between the contribution women make to the governments employing this new approach and the overwhelmingly male composition of the British government and parliament. The recent furore over the hiring of a government minister with statistically-driven views on eugenics highlighted the extent to which government policy is now formed by an elite, largely male group who act on highly rational approaches to statistically based data without drilling down into things like motivation, empirical evidence of consequence or emotional engagement. Their thinking, research and prediction-power is predicated on a startlingly truncated and one sided understanding of life embracing limited fields of experience. In short, our political life manifests a desperate loss of balance - female/male, right brain/left brain, affective/intellectual, symbiotic/autonomous - in terms of ideology, education and experience.

One of the new political groupings that ought to be emerging in this climate is surely a constituency around sharing and balance, with values drawn from recognition of the emotional bonds that tie us to our planet and bring people together. The dangerous loss of such perspective in Westminster politics accounts for many of the imbalances we see in the way politicians and the media conduct themselves and for many of the features of society that have caused the disillusionment leading to the Brexit vote. We urgently need a feminising and a greening of our political system. The Women's Movement marches that followed the election of Donald Trump have, as yet, failed to live up to their promise in terms of delivering a realistic challenge to mainstream politics. The ecological movement appears to be having a little more impact. One thing that these groupings have achieved is the bringing to light of alternative ways of assessing data and even deciding what data is relevant. As movements they meet with much opposition by dismissal and ridicule (think of Trump's criticisms of Thunberg) but slowly and surely some inadequacies and blinkered attitudes are starting to be be confronted.   

The problem with both the climate crisis and British politics is that we do not have much time. The pace of change is measured in years not decades or centuries. There is little point in putting energy into trying to return to a glorified past (of whatever variety). It's equally pointless to expend disproportionate amounts of effort trying to hold to account those who have shown themselves oblivious to laws, rules and codes of ethics. What Britain needs now is people who will grasp the new ways of trading and generating wealth with a firm and vocal commitment to ensuring they deliver sustainability and rising levels of national and international equality. Or to put it more radically, people who demonstrate a commitment to making sure the sustainability of the planet and decreasing inequality between people shape what it is possible to produce and sell.       
   

Tuesday 18 February 2020

Murky Waters

Two months into this Government's term of office, what might be called the Sabisky Affair has, perhaps fortuitously, brought to light the darker side of some of the influences that shape thinking going on behind the scenes at Downing Street. And very dark it is too. Who would have guessed, even a year ago, that large chunks of the British media would be having conversations about the rights and wrongs of eugenics and the merits (or otherwise) of research into relative IQ levels reported among different races? More alarmingly, who would have foreseen conversations about whether highly questionable research into such subjects is now shaping Her Majesty's Government's policy formation? For the last forty eight hours I have been pinching myself. This is the British Government we are talking about?

Having not woken up and found it's all a bad dream, I've turned to reflecting on the nature of any signs that this was coming. We know we have elected a right-wing, authoritarian Government that wants to overthrow or radically reshape the institutions that hold the balances of power in our democracy. We've observed their increasingly cavalier attitude toward honesty, transparency and shame. It doesn't seem to matter any longer if you are dishonest or even if you are caught out being dishonest: the thing, if you have enough power, is to soldier on in the knowledge nothing can be done to stop you. Last autumn, we saw attempts at holding the Government to account crumble, become relatively meaningless and, more significantly, fail to prevent their re-election. All in all, we appear to be witnessing a slow, determined power grab, aided by parts of the press, over a population that is relatively unaware (for complex reasons that intersect in potent ways) of what is really happening.

Perhaps what has happened to Sabisky (appointed an adviser to Number Ten then quickly resigning following an outcry about his alleged opinions) has done us a favour.

Firstly, it has brought to light the quality of thinking among the Prime Ministers' advisers. It appears inventive, scattered, at times driven by rationality, at others by emotion or intuitive leaps. This makes for flexibility and ingeniousness but also renders it difficult to identify underlying motivations. Motivation becomes an important question because arguments appear to rely on somewhat capriciously chosen research, inadequately, even uncritically, digested by thinkers who do not grasp the full implications of the disciplines they are engaging with. (In the Sabisky case, this has been effectively pointed out online by Adam Rutherford, a geneticist and author of Creation: the Origin of Life and Creation: the Future of Life). There are some interesting historical parallels with the attitudes and working style of Winston Churchill's wartime adviser, the physicist Frederick Lindemann (quite well summarised on Wikipedia here). 

Secondly, the Sabisky episode has confirmed publicly what many have suspected, namely that some of the attitudes taken seriously by people influential in Number Ten circles are beyond the scope of conventional morality, or at least any kind of morality that is based on common understandings of virtue and common 'goods' for society. (I think, for example, of the kinds of approaches to ethics taken by philosophers like Alasdair MacIntyre or, more popularly, writers such as Iris Murdoch.*) This poses a significant problem. Much of public life is still predicated on assumptions about fairness, decency and honesty and the ultimate subjugation of personal or party ambition to the exercise of these virtues. Yet we are dealing with a group of Government ministers and advisers who do not share such assumptions and do not play by the rules that might be expected to flow from them. Sabisky's appointment may be the wake up call we all needed to realise what is going on. I'm encouraged that just about every part of the press did indeed grasp the outrageous nature of some of the statements he is reported as having made.** Sabisky's resignation may also be the wake up call Boris Johnson, Dominic Cummings and the cabinet need to realise that there are limits to what the electorate, the press and even their own MPs will tolerate.

I don't often find myself quoting Margaret Thatcher but she notably said, 'Being democratic is not enough, a majority cannot turn what is wrong into right.'  She went on to talk about 'the deep love of liberty' and the rule of law which are certainly things this government might ponder long and hard. But I think she was, in fact, on to something deeper than the question of how we protect our democracy. She recognised that there are some values that pervade our humanity and others that destroy it. Protecting ourselves from those that destroy it is the highest calling. Though I am not a Conservative or even, by inclination, a conservative, I recognise some truth in her words. 

When it comes to this government planning, discussing or implementing policies influenced by notions of

  • superiority by dint of race
  • the subjugation or objectivisation of women
  • enforced mass control of the bodies and choices of citizens
  • people as 'underclass' groups

I refuse to tolerate what they are doing. The only reasonable response is to question and expose their intentions and overthrow their actions, if necessary, by every legal means possible. 

As a child, the first 'grown up' book I read was Anne Frank's Diary. It alerted me to the fact that liberty is very, very fragile. It also showed me how thin can be the veneer of civilisation that keeps us all humane. In Britain, our education system has been poor at helping the past two generations understand what happened across Europe in the 1930's. What we are witnessing with the UK government today worries me greatly because it manifests the same creeping approach to dismantling institutions that need reform. Outwardly this is planned and achieved in the service of the common good, but covertly it is done in the service of undeclared ends that help those with power and wealth accrue much greater power. If you put this alongside bland propaganda and engagement with ideologies of superiority and control, this becomes dangerous.

While preparing this article, I've come across writing by people connected to Number Ten that is frankly shocking. Indeed some of the press articles I've looked at about attitudes to women have contained warnings about the 'upsetting' nature of the content. I have no intention of giving such ideas the oxygen of publicity by reproducing what was written here. I've been careful to check out sources and contexts. My research has led me to the conclusion that, if we are to resist attempts to control people on grounds of gender, race or questionably measured characteristics like ability and intelligence, the whole electorate must be far more vigilant and politically active than we are used to being in the UK. We can no longer leave it to opposition politicians, the judiciary and the press to hold this Government to account or to keep them within past bounds of decency and honesty. We must all be aware and active. If you are black, or a woman, or have uncertain status as regards nationality, if you are unwaged or on a low income, the impact of factors that are being considered with seriousness and attitudes that are coming to be accepted as normal is somewhere between anxiety-provoking and scary. 

* Some really interesting work has been done on the less discussed virtues of civility, decency, truthfulness and ambition which seems especially relevant to the kind of politics we are seeing in the UK - e.g. Pettigrove 2007 Ambition in Ethical Theory and Moral Practice 10 (1) p.53ff. Colhoun 2000 The Virtue of Civility in Philosophy and Public Affairs 29 (3) p.251ff 

**I'm aware of the debate about the context of some of Sabisky's remarks and that it may be the impact of the remarks as reported rather than the original intention that has caused offence. I think Tom Chivers, in his article "'Eugenics is possible' is not the same as 'eugenics is good'" sums the dilemma up well here. He says, 'I don’t think, as some people do, that these remarks have been “taken out of context”, as such. I think that even with the context, lots of people would still assume that when he says “FGM isn’t a major risk” he means “we don’t need to care about FGM”.It’s a translation problem: some people think they’re having a cold, rational discussion; other people are alive to the implications; there will be frequent occasions when the two groups will hear the same words and yet understand totally different things by them.'