Alternative Editorial: Don't Settle
When was the last time you were really surprised? When did something happen so completely unexpectedly that you couldn't see where that outcome originated? Maybe you called it random, lucky, 'like magic'. Yet if you paid attention to that result, you could trace back, step by step, how it came to be inevitable.
The most obvious are recurring events. There is clearly nothing random about blossom appearing from branches that appear dead until then. Because Winter never fails to turn into Spring, we have come to expect that lovely event - even if the beauty of it can surprise every year.
At the same time, we commonly don't expect our lives to take on that cyclical rhythm - even those of us who feel intimately connected with Nature. We impose a one-directional growth and decline narrative - birth, youth, middle age, old age, death. Always checking with whoever we meet what stage they are in that journey.
Lacking this cyclical (or regenerative) structure means that we also think of solutions as 'new' and of growth as 'change'. When someone invents a different response to long-standing problems, this is heralded as innovation rather than development. As if someone extraordinary invented something that didn't exist before. However, a deeper investigation would always reveal that several conditions had to mature for that idea to see the light: it is never the singular work of one person and many of the vital elements were taken for granted. (See the work of Mariana Mazzucato on why Apple owes the taxpayer).
For example jazz music, appearing in New Orleans about 100 years ago, was not a spontaneous event, combusting between a handful of talented musicians. Each of them had a musical heritage reaching back into both Africa and Europe although they had a unique synergy when playing together.
For a lot of people climate change is a surprise - a turn for the worse in our fortunes. They cannot see the clear path in our history that made it inevitable. It’s not dissimilar to the way that getting lung cancer was once seen as 'bad luck' - until cigarette companies admitted to their role in actively causing it. The media - particularly advertising - was deeply complicit in keeping this causality hidden, in the interest of the ongoing growth of the nicotine economy and reliable revenue for their business.
If we see reality through the lens of effect and cause it initially appears to explain a lot of the problems and solutions we are facing today. At the same time, it can trap us in the illusion that simply correcting the original cause will change everything.
If all that was needed to stop the epidemic of lung diseases was to stop smoking, we'd imagine that would be a no-brainer - easily done. But for decades people couldn't stop killing themselves because they were deeply entangled in a wider system that was acting upon them at multiple levels - psychologically, monetarily, socially - each with its own economy to protect. (For example, in the age of growing emotional and psychological literacy, the opportunity to earn money as a therapist can result in positioning professionals in roles that previously friend or family occupied - often with psychological costs to the client). Smoking was eventually revealed to be deeply constitutive of a person's identity: to stop was to be faced with inventing a new self. See here for a similar deep system analysis of the causes of obesity.
Alternatives to being harnessed in the old way
Yet attempting system change is never easy, largely because complexity itself still presents itself as manifested through piecemeal issues.
For example, this week we saw two signs of progress in “women's equality”: the attention being paid to women's football as a result of their magnificent win at the Euros and the rise of Liz Truss as a likely new UK Prime Minister. We celebrate the idea that the feminisation of the public sphere is key to political-economic transformation. But we are going to stay alert to settling for improvement on the old culture as the primary way to go. Having more women sharing the limelight (and spoils) in football is great – so long as that is not a trade-off for more equality more generally. Or worse, a way to maintain the status quo in other ways.
To illustrate: given that the men's team is 40% black, it's very noticeable how monocultural the women's team is. As Anita Asande says here, that doesn't take away the football achievements of the current team or manager—but it might be an alarm bell for wider social change. In the urgent evolutionary developments needed to face our common crises, let's watch out for women being used to uphold the old ways.
A good contrast might be the way the Commonwealth Games - similar to the Olympic Games in 2012 - offered a startling framing of history, with a young black woman standing in front of the raging bull of industrialisation (see our image above). While many of Birmingham's own residents understandably stayed away from a celebration of the former British Empire, the arts did its best to undermine the old colonial paradigm through spectacle.
In the political sphere, Liz Truss, like Margaret Thatcher before her, has had to fight her career battles in an overwhelmingly male environment. Success to both of them looks like 'being the best man' in the room. Tougher, more growth oriented, never swayed by the complaints of others (even if the complainants are the most vulnerable). Although this election is woefully misdescribed as a rehearsal for a General Election to come (Sunak may well regret burning his capital on Tory party members as 0.3% of the population), it tells us enough about Truss for the future. If we need more relationality and regenerative principles in government - qualities many feminists would be hoping for - she won't be the person bringing them.
None of this means that we shouldn't drive ourselves towards newness, hoping to progress. But focusing on fixing problems keeps us in thrall to the old ways. We only have to cast our minds back to what seemed to be the major problems of previous decades - lack of choice, or access to consumption - to know the limitations of our present perspective. The Labour Party is fixated on whether or not Sam Tarry did the right thing in backing the Unions. This looks self-obsessed, compared to how a Johnson or a Trump has no qualms at all about shaping the public space, regardless of morality. They know how to steal attention - our most precious collective resource.
There are at least two alternatives to allowing ourselves to be harnessed this way. Firstly, we should focus on development rather than fixing problems. Think about the networked, communicational revolution we have been in for thirty years, and use that to build the infrastructure that capitalises on the acceleration of more diverse human agency.
Then, radically redesign education to enable networked and self-aware children to leverage their social capital to meet the current crises. Help them turn their anxiety into activity that can answer the need for meaning, purpose, belonging and security (see our blog this week on how UBI might help in this way).
All the skills they have acquired for themselves - without their parents' help - is currently being squandered by distraction and their inability to self-organise. It's time to move on from preparing youth for 'fitting-into' the current economy: we need to encourage their creativity, self-mastery and collaboration across society.
Let the future speak to you
Of course, this would be part of a wider culture of development stretching across the whole of society. While levelling up is an attractive conservative notion (to the Red Wall at least), it's divisive and easy to manipulate. Alternatively, whole-nation development helps us all to see ourselves as upgrading - taking on new insights and responsibilities. As the most recent IPCC report suggests, this is a moment requiring conscious evolution - reconnecting with the planet and steeply enhancing our individual and collective capacities. All the emotional needs currently being met by consumerism can be met by developing a new intimacy with community and nature.
This developmental focus implies pushing ourselves forward to the best of our ability. But there is a second alternative – which is to be pulled forwards from the perspective of a fully potentiated future. This doesn't mean simply imagining crazy technology and going along with it - like Zuckerberg’s metaverse, losing numbers daily. It’s more like inviting Utopian visions of flourishing futures (see our blog), and reverse-engineering them to the present, which will reveal our next steps.
It's an exercise most of us do routinely - whether we are planning for our holidays, or the birth of a child. We start with a dream of how things would ideally turn out and then create a schedule working back from the big event to the one thing we must do today. Whether in the case of a holiday (we now must work out our vaccine requirements) or in the case of pregnancy (we must figure out our resources), the future always presents itself as a challenge to our way of being in the present.
As with the smokers, this is never simply about material considerations: when we dig deeper into our motivation, it always requires a reckoning with our identity. What kind of person do I need to become, to occupy the future I'm dreaming of? When smokers took on the goal of a smoke-free environment for their children, many had to drop the uber-masculine image of Marlboro Man, sitting atop a restless horse as the sun goes down. Others had to drop the weapon they were persuaded protected them in the public gaze and accept being more vulnerable.
It's not a small challenge - to recognise what you’re unthinkingly buying into as a consuming, holidaying, debating adult. And who you might be required to be now, in order to be part of a future that we can all look forward to. How might you redesign your daily life? What novel range of experiences can you admit? What kinds of emotions and ways of being social can you welcome?
It's quite possible that many of us reading are completely up for that transformation - might even find the challenge compelling. While many will demur, preferring to stick with tried and tested selves in the battle with 'the other'. Still more will never read a blog or hear the argument we're making here.
To those of us - or our friends, family, colleagues - in that category, the changes that result from the determined self-development of the few, will appear out of the blue. A surprising set of solutions that, come the hour, they might claim they always knew were coming.