Alternative Editorial: A Change of View
At heart of agility is an ability to look at the world through a different lens: Julian Stodd
One of the most noticeable shifts in the age of Covid (Week 159) has been in communications – how we connect and who we connect with. While the mainstream news focuses on loss of the normal – being able to congregate the way we did with the people we know – underneath something more subtle has been developing.
On the streets we were forced to look at each other in a new way. Only a year ago the wearing of a mask belonged only to young Muslim women, their niqab often raising comment. Did the half-hidden face have an impact on our social environment? With the whole population obliged to wear a mask in the public space for over a year, has that separateness changed? Since we have all had to rely more on eye-to-eye contact with each other, are we now more capable of seeing the whole human despite the mask?
In the absence of face-to-face meetings across coffee or boardroom tables, many of us moved into the Zoom room – a strange antechamber to the public space. At first, this was a poor substitute for being in the presence of living, breathing, warm – or cold – human beings.
But quite early in our habituation, we noticed the opportunity for unexpected intimacy. The exchange of check-ins, so perfunctory in real time, became the first item on everyone’s agenda. What used to be dealt with a simple ‘how are you?’ – answer, ‘fine’ – has for many become the chance to express quite personal observations, desires and anxieties.
The effect of watching a face close-up, set against the backdrop of that person’s wallpaper, bookshelf or kitchen sink has shifted relations. We now know each other in different ways. Within that, it’s been interesting to experience others with their cameras turned off, or the artificial virtual backdrops that give an individual a much more liminal quality. Suddenly they are the people we feel cut off from, refuseniks with co-presence.
It’s notable that this shift was not only occurring in the worlds of the super-privileged. Anyone with a piece of technology – phone or computer – could move into this rent-free space, so long as you were happy to talk in 40-minute bites. The UK has never felt so rich with the diversity of accents on the small screen - a genuine development from the preponderance of one kind of voice (still, too often, male and Oxbridge educated, living in London) that dominate our official media and communication channels. This democracy has unwittingly been upgraded, without any political party owning it.
In the A/UK Zoom room, another sharp shift has been from the national to the global. In our work to connect with citizen action networks all over the world we find ourselves in Costa Rica, Mexico, India, Africa, Indonesia – witnessing the contrasting experiences of life in lockdowns across the world.
But we also note the remarkable similarity of human responses, despite our cultural differences. Tijuana may not look much like Coalville or Cape Town but in our regular CANs gatherings they are swapping tools and practices as well as deep thinking about human motivation. Of course, the Facebook, WhatsApp and other mobilising tools are playing their part in homogenising forms of human connection. But maybe that’s more acceptable than McDonalds or Nike dictating global culture – time will tell.
In addition to shifting to a wider global network of CANs to CANs (C2C rather than B2B?) we have also been taking part in other supra-national networks. For example, the EU funded LIFT project that is chronicling the emergence of an integral politics globally. Or Bounce Beyond, mapping and cohering ‘next economies’ as they appear globally.
Alongside these projects, there is an obvious shift in perspective in how others in the wider world see the UK – both as the three nations of Scotland, England and Wales, and one Britain This global view is something of a contrast with the way it is portrayed in the mainstream British press, which till now, dominates all three nations’ communication systems.
What is most notable is the difference in viewpoint – meaning from which level are you observing the world at large? With few exceptions, the British press tends to look at the world from the national level. The “global” is a sports field in which we must win each game. From other, more connected meta-spaces, Britain is one actor amongst many in a field of global development – like a member of a family who behaves in a particular way with certain consequences.
From the latter perspective, Britain appears to be deeply parochial – not only self-interested but blinkered in its capacity to see the effects of its actions on others, and on itself. This week, we saw Rishi Sunak claiming to be the architect of the important – if flawed and insufficient – agreement to hold global tech corporations accountable for their taxes. It was an embarrassing display - particularly given the decades of efforts others have put in to even get it on the agenda with this party.
More discomfiting is Boris Johnson pledge to ‘vaccinate the world’ and save it from a sorry fate, partly of Britain’s making. Both of these happened while the UK’s aid budget was cut from the promised 7% of our budget to 5%. A difference of four billion to the very countries struggling to survive this devastating period, largely brought about by the privileged nations, among which Britain is central.
For the British on a Zoom call, it’s a training ground for humility: no one outside the UK is fooled for a minute. We are a spectacle of failing to perform the magic trick – of getting people to look away while we rob them.
The Trump era was a prolonged exposure to the tyranny of swagger: at one point the US President offered to buy Greenland from Denmark as if he was playing a global board game. We’re not yet sure if that era is over with Biden in charge: stepping up the story-war with China is one to watch. And while Putin has been annexing territory and supporting the oppression of free speech, he was not wrong in calling out the Americans for their hypocrisy in keeping those who ‘stormed the capitol’ in solitary confinement.
Others observe wryly, we might say, in a more accepting way except that we have no authority and not enough love for those acting out. It’s closer to watching a tennis match, each player trying to ace the other but mostly failing. We have to keep reminding ourselves that the participants are not the nations’ people, but their leaders, deeply entrenched in the structures and cultures of our failing socio-economic-political system. One that the vast majority did not participate in designing and continue – with only 5% becoming members of a political party in US and Europe - to abstain from joining.
Instead, more and more of us have started to do what Buckminster Fuller recommended, namely, to look away from the old system and start to build a new one that makes the old one obsolete. For some that means re-focusing on the local community and re-orienting ourselves to new sources of narrative, so that we are not overwhelmed by the dysfunctionality of the mainstream public sphere.
Others are going the full cosmolocal. Not only do they reach out to people everywhere around the planet, but they also call on their imaginative and spiritual capacities - identifying new ways of being and doing we might be able to make real, through taking everyday action wherever we are. This is closer to occupying a new planet in our minds and inviting others to join us there.
It’s time to stop chopping down the future and start seeding it, building the greenhouses for this new territory. And then engage anyone and everyone willing to till the soil to ensure its biodiversity, without which nothing will grow healthily. It’s a somewhat ambitious metaphor - so we’ll need a lot of artists and creatives to be actively evoking the space. Whichever role you might play, you will be welcome.
