Alternative Editorial: The New Post-Covid Logic
Image of Ecosystem Connectedness from Ecosystem Builder Hub
Week 10 of the lock down and all is tremulous. No-one seems confident about the way forward. At the heart of the UK government, Dominic Cummings – master manipulator of messages from Take Back Control to Stay At Home – betrayed his own advice, to do whatever he wanted during the lock-down.
While one man’s bad behaviour may not trouble us too much, as a symbolic action it has much to offer our political discourse. While Cummings’ job at Downing Street is to craft the nudges for the masses, what he constantly models is autonomy. No-one is going to tell him what to do, even in a pandemic.
The tragedy at the heart of our politics is that the two messages of self-interest and care for others are separated, as if we have to choose between the two. You’re either an individualist or a socialist. Worse than that, the party on the Right only truly believes in the freedom of the elites.
And the party on the Left believes in everyone, except the people who voted for the party on the Right (which, in the UK, is most people). There is no whole society politics available: it’s not designed that way.
How can we reconnect individual autonomy directly with social good? Doesn’t the dignity of every human being rest on their ability to decide for themselves? At the same time, doesn’t that independence depend upon the health and well-being of the whole community?
If Covid-19 has taught us nothing else, it is the inter-dependence of my health and yours – whoever you are and however you vote. Why is that so difficult to land as a coherent political action?
Well, maybe that isn’t so hard to do when you step outside of party politics and into broader society – where the personal is political in so many different ways. It’s here – from Facebook to Meet-ups - that we can display our personal take on shared issues. Where we can pay attention to our own needs while giving attention to the needs of others.
What is a family – or indeed a group of good friends, or close-knit community – if not a place to develop that convergence of I and We? Not everyone has these close, relational bonds: but the popular culture celebrates them continuously. They express and meet our emotional needs – and in so doing, equip us to get our physical needs met too.
How does that get lost so easily when we step outside of our circles and networks and onto the colder, harder stage of public life? While these qualities continue to shape the lower paid jobs of social workers and care professionals, why do the values of our inner lives not get carried successfully into the worlds of business and politics – where most of the power lies?
Except, of course, through the co-opting of these values for consumerism. Is it at least partly because, until now, there are still so few women in positions of decision-making power?
Historically, feminine intelligence – the intelligence of females - was confined to the private space and that is where it became distinct and strong. It spoke of nurturing, care, relationship – but also of the connection between self-development and social development.
Children were taught that it’s ok to be different from your sister or brother – your parents love you both equally. At the same time, you have to share and get on with each other if you want to be part of the family.
Sounds simple, but science tell us it takes 24 years to raise an adult capable of holding that tricky balance and not everyone gets there. Not least because the world they were entering outside of home, had quite a different logic. In the world run almost exclusively by men, everyone is your competitor, it’s the law of the jungle where you win or lose.
If after a long struggle for equality in the public realm, women had suddenly entered into the public space on an equal footing with men, we might have had a quick transformation of the public space as women brought their experience with them.
But instead, the female work force has remained concentrated in the lower paid, poorly equipped care work profession, with little purchase on decision making. In business and politics it has been a slow dribble, obliging women to take on the values and culture of the old public space in order to succeed.
As it stands, feminine intelligence is still seen as an innovation, rather than as the natural expression of the connectedness of the individual to the social – our very human way of being.
This is why we need a new politics- not just a victory of one party over the other in first past the post systems. But a new way of being political, connecting the agency of every human being to the agency of their community to the agency of the nation in an international realm that guarantees the flourishing of the planet.
And we are in the unique historic moment to achieve that. Why? Because the Covid crisis has opened a gap in the narrative of sustained dominance of the old system and more and more people are looking for alternatives.
Your health depends upon our shared health, which depends upon the planet’s health
The link between the hyper-growth economy and the dangers to our health have become clear. And our own reluctance to go back to ‘business as usual’ is surfacing in innumerable ways.
At the same time, our trust in familiar authority is being undermined each day. Not only because so many of our leaders got their responses badly wrong (ref) but because the double standards of those same leaders is increasingly exposed.
Trump claiming it’s safe for everyone to move out of lock-down but taking his own private medicine to protect himself. Brazil’s Bolsonaro putting the economy before the safety of the people, while totally losing his rag over his family’s security. Boris Johnson telling us to Stay Home to Protect the NHS, while protecting Cumming’s decision to flout the rules.
That may well translate into a win for Biden in December, or a progressive UK government in 2024 - but history tells us that is by no means certain. After the long-haul of Brexit before Covid and the self-sabotage of the US Democratic party the disillusion may be deeper, in fact with politics itself.
The alternative may arise from social rather than party-political change, where a new partnership between better organised communities – local and global - and the state can be brokered.
What might that look like in practice? Try and imagine better constituted peoples’ movements that become coherent enough within themselves (for example, Trust the People , citizen action networks) without reverting to the usual political culture and structure. These movements would draw on the cosmo-local intelligence of the regenerative economy. Could they become strong enough to be the shapers of public policy, but on terms that are profoundly human and social?
Going even further, imagine if some of those citizens, brought together in a community, wanted to take over the local council to guarantee people’s participation in spending the local budget? Could that not be the basis of a new socio-political-economic structure that starts from the bottom up?
(If you have any questions about that, hear Peter Macfadyen explain Flatpack Democracy on Radio 4 Monday and Wednesday, or listen to our Elephant Zoom event on the same subject.)
Finally, what if the notion of people’s power was captured at the national level by a Citizens Assembly with real teeth? A body that would invite at least three bills a year—based on an understanding of the interdependence of people and planet? That’s the petition, brought by Peter Colville, we are sharing with you today.
Finally, given that it is women who are traditionally the most active in communities, as well as in the lower paid caring professions we appreciate better now, isn’t the call for more feminine intelligence to shape the public space the very fulcrum of a new politics?
For more on that, check our newly completed video of The Elephant meets Karen Downes, Founder of The Flourish Initiative, co-founder of Femme Q. While you’re there sign up for The Elephant meets Katherine Trebeck, Chief Executive of the Wellbeing Economy Foundation, in the Zoom room Tuesday June 2nd.
All of these actions signify nothing more simple, or profound, than the interconnectivity of the human being, the community and the planet. I-We-World. Your health depends upon our shared health, which depends upon the planet’s health.
Welcome the new and simple logic for the post-Covid world.
