Alternative Editorial: Committing To The Future

Our editorial is a little later than usual to give space to Easter - a national holiday that holds the space for both suffering and resurrection.

As we enter Week 4 of the Covid-19 lock-down the public space abounds with theories of causation and future visioning. How did we find ourselves in this global, yet very personal and social dilemma? What conclusions should we make about what is wrong with our system and who is to blame? How should we plan for the future?

The diversity of responses, even in our little bubble of connections, threatens to be overwhelming. Whereas once, in our not-too-distant memory, only experts took it upon themselves to share their perspectives, today we live in a culture of react and response. 

If you have a good filtering mechanism – tech or human - that defends the boundaries of your attention, this abundance is welcome. If you don’t, the sheer volume of opinion – sometimes seductive, often aggressive – can cause tharn: meaning, freezing like a rabbit caught in the headlights.

Where we are, temporally, is hard to assess. Are we at the beginning, middle or near the end of the Covid-19 crisis that, once over, will return us to business as usual? Without knowing that, what kind of hindsight – or foresight - is useful?

As we publish this, for example, we see some notable figures about number of cases arising per million of population, and how many of them will survive. The first figure will give us, eventually, some idea of how well the country was able to respond to the crisis appearing. And by extension, how well it contained the outbreak. 

The second will indicate how good the health system was – how resourced and prepared. However, at this moment, we can only count cases as they are making themselves known in hospitals. Millions more will be affected and never counted.

Even so, while each country is at a different point on the Covid-19 cycle – or at least the beginning, middle or end of this first phase – it’s worth making some crude comparisons. China, now considered past the worst, has only ever recorded 2 deaths per 1 million population. Meantime the USA is already at 57 per million and not yet peaked; the UK is at 145 at a similar point in the trajectory. Italy (312) and Spain (350) are much higher, but arguably much further along the path. At the other end of the scale, Czechoslovakia is at 11 and already allowing people back on the streets. Opposition parties everywhere will be gearing themselves up to take their governments to task if they haven’t performed well (ref).

Probably the two most remarkable figures are Taiwan (0.3) and New Zealand (0.7) – the latter only having recorded 2 deaths in total to date. Those observing have remarked on the leadership styles of the two women – Tsai Ing Wen and Jacinda Adern as quite different from those of the countries at the other end of the spectrum. 

One of our blogs this week quotes this piece in The Byline Times, a study by the  Harvard Business Review in 2019, which found that, in times of crisis “women outscored men on 17 of the 19 capabilities that differentiate excellent leaders from average or poor ones”. 

The qualities range from the ability to inspire trust under stress (largely deferring to experts) to consistency and decisiveness. Leaders at the other end of the scale tend to over-rely on personality and attitude, switch between different experts’ advice and give out orders without a clear rationale.

In the UK, after a slow start to getting into action, we are now experiencing a significant power vacuum. With the PM himself in hospital after several days in intensive care there is no clear leader. Although Dominic Raab is Deputy in charge, he is not assuming leadership of the country, making big decisions in his boss’ absence.

Instead we have rotating members of the cabinet making cautionary remarks about the developing scope for action a little like an older brother warning the younger one not to go out yet “because Dad said so”. 

What’s the alternative to watching that familiar old space of politics, hoping for direction? We’ve noticed a plethora of online offerings about how to think about the present and future, some of which we are sharing in our Daily Alternative. 

To stay true to our own agenda, we’re paying more attention to identifying new ways of seeing, organising and building, less to the mounting criticism of current authority. Or to newly imagined theories of change that have no inclination to test themselves on the ground.  

Less emphasis on what authors suggest we ‘should’ be doing, or ‘need to’ do. And more on good planning, best practice and new- or next-system collaboration. 

At the local level this looks like a generic version of what we’ve been calling (for some time now) “citizen action networks”.. Interventions like Covid-19 Mutual Aid (ref) are moving into their next-stage organising, as more and more neighbourhoods connect up. We’re seeing, amongst others, Extinction Rebellion Future Democracy Hub volunteers offering the Mutual Aiders the toolbox of methods and practices they’ve built up for the past year. These are designed to help engage and organise people who are very new to self-organising. 

At civil society level, we are seeing funders begin to release funds quickly to empower communities to become more resilient. This includes helping establish better digital networks for quick decision making and participatory budgeting. Some of the projects currently in prototype (having to remain confidential until launch) do the job of completely re-imagining our economy—including what gets measured, what counts as value. 

At a global level we highly recommend Alex Evans and David Steven’s overview on World Politics Review for a mutually inclusive look at what’s been occurring from We to World. Meantime, we are witnessing – and A/UK is participating in - radical new moves to integrate and operationalise global social enterprise to help design what happens next. At best, this connects what occurs as best practice in California or Taipei to what is needed in the most impoverished communities in Mumbai. 

The long-established SDGs Transformation Forum, working within Catalyst 2030, WeAll and others is deep in planning for crowd-sourcing commitment to a shared idea of a new economy. With a relatively small but diverse group of economic actors working at every level of society , they can model new ways of working together that others can have access to. It’s an ambitious goal, but there is no mistaking the new organisational will to make an impact that has sprung up during Covid-19.

At the personal level, we hear so many different tales of intense human experience. From nurses and doctors, cleaners and maintenance workers literally being sent into the front line of battle in the hospitals, afraid they may not return. To the young and inventive at home, initiating new on-line social gatherings and growing their own vegetables in pots. 

James O’Brien for Quanta Magazine

For many, the lock-down is a nightmare – those at risk of abuse, or the homeless. Yet there is also evidence that more attention is being paid to their plight than before. Whatever your starting point, as a society we seem to be becoming more connected.

If that sounds unreasonably positive, it may be called for. Two of the most inspiring conversations we had this week were with women who, in quite different ways, reminded us of the relationship between commitment and futuring. 

Karen O’ Brien has been studying the phenomenon of quantum social change. Moving beyond the language of classical physics, Karen aligns the findings of quantum mechanics with potential shifts in our experience of daily life. How we look at choice, time and relationship can radically affect how we think about our agency. Karen’s assessment of what is possible at this time of uncertainty chimes closely with ours – watch the Elephant series for further exploration.

In a different key but with a similar game-changing impact, Adah Parissh describes her work as ‘cyborg shamanism’. Like Karen, Adah is focused on human potential and quantum social change, but specifically through the medium of technology. 

Adah begins with looking at the revolutionary effect of tech on marketing and communication strategy. She sees similar possibilities for re-orientation in other human areas of practice, leading to the exponential growth of our reach and power. If that sounds intriguing to you, join us and Adah, in the second of our Elephant events on Tuesday, April 21st. (See here for a recording of the first public event, The Elephant meets Peter Macfadyen).

Both Karen and Adah share The Alternative UK’s sense of human and social potential, but also an idea of individual and social power which comes with our rapidly evolving response-ability. While none of us know how our society will change over the next year, there is an important distinction to be made – that between being prepared for all outcomes (good or bad) and being skeptical about any positive vision.

When we founded A/UK, it was specifically to draw attention to the solutions already available, which means accelerating already promising projects and actions. Through our joining up the dots between the different parts of a new system – one that is capable of delivering on our goals - we are telling a radical new story about human and social potential. 

In this moment of accelerated crisis, we are not going to swerve from that commitment. 

Easter offers rich metaphors for the Covid-19 moment