Alternative Editorial: Right Here Right Now
One week on in the world of global emergencies and a new political landscape seems to be emerging. No dramatic resignations or admissions of failure on the part of the current leaders, but small signs of a subtle new relationship between governors and governed.
We reported in last week’s editorial that what looked like an unassailable political hierarchy in China, was showing signs of tiny cracks. Due to the early, poor handling of the coronavirus in Wuhan, including the suppression and subsequent death of a young whistle-blower, the people of Wuhan have been protesting. That’s not a first of course, but with the global interest in what is now a pandemic, it becomes part of a bigger, changing story about power.
The US story is still unfolding, as President Trump slowly wakes up to the crisis in his own country. The mix of factors promises to be explosive: Trump’s strong denial of a problem, his refusal to take responsibility, the rejection of the WHO virus test in favour of a home grown one that subsequently failed and the absence of accessible health care for a significant majority of citizens is likely to add up to large numbers of people becoming ill.
In the UK, the Prime Minister seemed to take his time to respond to the emergency. While reports of the fast-growing problem in Italy began to cause Europe wide alarm, there was no official guidelines. Eventually on Thursday, Johnson announced the government was adopting a delay strategy- meaning, not taking any strong action for the time being. Everyone should continue as they were – including children going to school. Only elderly people were recommended to desist from taking a cruise.
The logic offered came from behavioural scientists who claimed that people would not be able to endure staying indoors for too long, so it would be better to wait until the crisis was at its peak before closing public spaces. A plan similar to shutting the door after the horse has bolted.
It was serendipitous that the annual budget was announced on the same day. On the front pages of our major papers was an Eton Mess of announcements that will have caused severe cognitive dissonance in the most enthusiastic of voters. On the front page of the Daily Mail, the PM was lauded as the champion of the people, ending austerity (his own party’s invention), cutting taxes (again) and spending billions on the NHS—while, with his tentative coronavirus precautions, effectively creating the conditions for its imminent failure.
Former health secretary Jeremy Hunt took to the airwaves the very next day to directly contradict his former boss. News programmes carried fierce debates about the government’s decision. Groups of scientists wrote to the PM to challenge this strategy. Of course, it’s not unusual for the public to question the PM, but this had the distinct character of a politician caught infantilizing the people. Also present in the media debates was a suspicion that the old and sick were being conceived as collateral damage, while the rest of the “herd” took a rocky road towards immunity. (An idea that was later corroborated by the ‘new science’ from Imperial College that as many as 260,000 would die if we stick to that logic).
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What happened next was interesting. Sparked by the news that Mikel Arteta – manager of Arsenal football club – was diagnosed with the virus after a match with Olympiakos (European football continues despite Brexit), the football Premier League came to a quick decision to stop all football matches for the next three months.
At the same time cancellations began to happen in all fields of society. The Skoll Foundation postponed its highly anticipated annual gathering. Concerts, festivals – even restaurants began to take decisions into their own hands. There’s no doubt that business owners are going to face hardship by closing down, even temporarily. Yet the strong feeling they described was not wanting to collude unnecessarily in the suffering – or “untimely loss” - of others.
While it’s by no means common yet, plans to spontaneously self-isolate and set up community strategies to distribute food and other forms of help are popping up everywhere. Check here for a plan that can be used by anyone, from the Mutual Aid Networks being set up to support communities in the face of Covid-19. Or, on a smaller scale, how to set up a local gifting economy to help those who will lose work.
Do we have the mind-set to create a new normal?
What we’re pointing at here is a teachable moment: a new lens through which to see the evolution of power. It’s a perceptible shift of agency from governments – particularly those led by autocratic or charismatic leaders – to multiple levels of new people taking responsibility for themselves. Whether it’s grass roots communities who are self-organizing better, or civil society organizations who have more soft power – influence – than before: they are all beginning to tell a new story of what may be emerging for the future.
Yet it needs to go so much faster. Imagine now if we already had citizen action networks in place all over the country. How would we be dealing with the virus today?
Firstly, everyone would have somewhere to turn, rather than sitting in an existential nightmare of competing truths. There would be a reliable source of information about local resources – food, medicine, hospital beds, numbers of people affected – and agreed ways to plan for an extended period of home isolation.
Instead of panic buying, where people second-guess the next person’s greed, there would be an expectation of light-touch rationing to get people through any interruption of supply lines. People would already be aware of their neighbours and able to contact them easily, sorting out care arrangements for elders and children. They would already know how to get on Skype, Facebook Live or Zoom and chat through the issues, having built up relationships of trust over time.
(We’ve blogged before on how a local “action network”, diligently constructed in steadier times, can build up this daily fabric of understanding and trust – and becomes tangibly valuable and supportive to communities, in moments of crisis. See “Vermont's Front Porch Forum is brilliantly successful at putting the Net at the service of communities”.)
If this became a regular aspect of people’s lives, bringing them a greater sense of belonging as well as a new sense of control over their lives, what could happen next? There are many groups who have been actively dreaming of and planning for new whole-system change for decades. From those working on forms of devolution including municipalism and confederalism to those working from the bottom up, such as commoning, Transition Networks, Flatpack Democracy, 4th sector economies and others. Could their work offer structures and models to this emergent community sensibility so that they have greater purchase at the national level?
What would it take, for example, for the citizens of a community to discuss together how to provide a basic income for all those who will lose their jobs to keep others safe over this period? Or for local schools to easily collaborate to offer on-line classes and creative challenges to pupils across the city? Imagine a cross-schools discussion group amongst the pupils about how this relates to School Strikes? Local artists could design place-specific activity like the Italians’ balcony choir over the weekend.
In other words, no-one would be alone. Through established lines of communication, the people of the town or city could decide quickly how to take care of everyone and leverage all the local resources. They could hear directly from other CANs around the world how best to face the crisis, keeping the numbers of casualties low. This kind of integrated action would easily contradict the idea coming from government right now, guided by their use of behavioural psychology - that people are Homer Simpsons, easily bored and likely to be unmanageable. People would be seen as the very source of creative responses now needed. Can you imagine that?
Last week we asked if this moment was some kind of harbinger of the future, a preparation for the environmental collapse coming down the line. There’s a danger there of us not being able to see, or appreciate, the real-time vulnerability of so many in the present moment. Right now.
Life does not offer rehearsals, it only offers us the constant possibility of responding to the present better than we have done before. The opportunities before us now should not just result in temporary measures. They should be regarded as a unique moment in history, where we might have the mind-set to create a new normal.
For the forseeable future, The Alternative UK will be offering fortnightly Zoom sessions for co-creators to plot and plan real-time responses to crisis – present and future. Each one starts with recognising the complex challenge of us showing up in all our diversity: different perspectives, needs and offers. Through listening to each other, we build relationship and gently disaggregate into groups with a focus for action.
To join in, become a co-creator and move into this real time experiment to build an alternative with us.