The Hungry Spirit: New Thinking for a New World Read online

  The first duty of a government, therefore, is to inform its people. It is, however, the assumption of most people in authority that the truth is too important, or too complicated, to be entrusted to ordinary folk. Sometimes this is true; in war, for instance, or in a national emergency. More often it is an excuse because explanations are too difficult or too painful. If, however, governments truly see themselves as the servants of the people they should accept the necessity of something akin to the open book management described in Chapter Nine and tell the people everything – well, almost everything. Secrets evaporate when exposed to the light and then we mostly wonder why they were ever secret.

  It is for this reason that I have also become a convert to the idea of referenda. It is argued that the decisions reached by this method are often wrong. But there is little evidence that they are any worse than those taken on the people’s behalf by their elected representatives. Those countries with extensive experience of referenda, find that the necessity for a referendum forces politicians to explain the issues. At the same time the populace is encouraged to focus their minds on the questions before them. Referenda make the symbolic point that some decisions are too important to be left to politicians, and that the people can be trusted to be responsible for their own future as a society. Referenda are a form of public education and for that reason alone we need more of them.

  Technology will help. When we can push a button, after inserting our identification into the computer, and no longer have to queue in the rain outside a commandeered schoolhouse in order to vote, we shall find referenda an appealing prospect. They have worked well in Switzerland for 130 years, with citizens able to challenge government decisions at each level of government, and even to put forward their own proposals if they can collect enough supporting signatures.

  In California referenda complicate the task of government with what look like irresponsible decisions by the majority of citizens. Maybe democracy by referenda has to be learned by long and hard experience. It is the democracy of mature states. That we shall get more referenda, however, seems certain as the electorate flexes its muscles, wanting to take responsibility for the more important decisions of the age. It will be more referenda or the alternatives, more pressure group politics, more demonstrations and more barricades. Referenda seem more civilized, even if they are more boring.

  Citizen juries, particularly where local issues are concerned, are another structure for information. Open hearings, with official witnesses appearing in front of fellow citizens to argue their point of view, provide an opportunity for those who wish to get involved, for others to watch or listen and for officials to have a chance, indeed an obligation, to inform and educate ordinary people about the issues. We shall see more of these, too, because they are one aspect of subsidiarity.

  Subsidiarity is the principle that decisions and responsibilities should lie as low down in the system as is possible. To make it work, the holders of the responsibilities, the repositories of subsidiarity if you like, have to be educated up to their responsibilities. You can’t, responsibly, give responsibility to incompetents. On the other hand, those people will remain incompetent unless they have the incentive of responsibility. It has to be a chicken and egg process, in step and by degrees. Citizen juries are one way into the process, but they are of no use if they are only cosmetic. Power has to be truly devolved if people are going to be committed to local decisions.

  Devolution looks to be inevitable – fortunately, in my view. A more prosperous and educated population wants more choice and more room to be different if they want to. Uniformity allows for too little of either. Yet a centralized government can only manage through uniformity. Uniformity stifles individuality and responsibility and it is for that reason that people will, in the end, pull power back to themselves.

  Fukuyama predicts that at ‘the end of history’ the combination of democracy and capitalism means that voters will be like dogs lying on their backs in the sun, waiting to be tickled and fed. There will be no great causes any more, or things worth dying for.

  Maybe, but there are many smaller private and local causes. Politics will increasingly be about the small things of life, not the bigger things. This is not necessarily bad or sad. The equality which uniformity sought to provide by law and regulation has in fact begun to happen. It has happened more informally as men and women start to do more things for themselves locally, empowering themselves and, as a result, treating each other in private and locally with more respect.

  The middle layers are disappearing, not just in businesses and organizations, but everywhere. Technology is the driver. So much of life’s hierarchies are determined by information. If you don’t know what your blood pressure is or what the danger levels are when you do know, then you have to ask the doctor. But if you have this information at your fingertips, then the doctor is there only to deal with the bad news, if there is any. As the information age gets underway, with so much of what we need to know literally at our fingertips and on our television screens, we will be able to buy and sell our own houses without the aid of lawyers, arrange our own holidays and travel without the help of travel agencies, buy and sell our own shares without any stockbroker, vote without leaving our home and educate ourselves and our children wherever we please, without the help of teachers.

  We can do most of this already, of course, but it will become much easier as the information providers get their act together and as computers and their successors become more user-friendly. We won’t want to abandon the human side of things entirely, but the role of the middle layers, the professionals, will change from information providers to interpreters, mentors and coaches. We will then, inevitably, decide more things for ourselves because it will be easier, in this ‘press, choose and press again’ sort of world. In the process we will learn, and as we learn we will develop our self-confidence. Once we have learned to decide more things for ourselves we will be reluctant to allow others to decide things for us.

  There will, therefore, be a split in politics, with the really big issues being decided, whether we like it or not, beyond the boundaries of the nation state, either by the pressures of the global markets or by economic and military alliances such as the European Union, NATO or their equivalents, while the smaller, but, to many people, more important issues of roads and schools, police and hospitals, will be regional decisions, taken more locally by locals. The nation state may, in the long term, turn out to be one of those middle layers which disappears unless it is already, in reality, more like a region, as countries like Ireland and the Netherlands arguably are.

  From my point of view this is mostly good news, because it allows individuals to become more involved with the things that matter most to them. They will be more in charge of the decisions of their personal lives and more able to have a voice in the affairs of their region. Responsibility, both for themselves and for those around them, will be enhanced. Self-respect will grow, as a result of that enlarged responsibility, and with self-respect a greater tolerance for others’ rights and ways. Society should gradually become less angry. Proper Selfishness will have prevailed.

  The end point of the journey may be desirable, but getting there won’t be easy. Governments will twist and turn in their efforts to keep control. Professionals of all types will resist the change in their status from being the guardians of knowledge to being counsellors and interpreters. There will be the temptation to make things more complicated than they need be in order to retain the need for the expert. We will all take some time to realize that we can do more for ourselves than we had thought. But just as Do-It-Yourself took off in the home improvement area once technology made it easier, so it is likely to be in the information area.

  We will, however, feel naked at times, bewildered by a surplus of information and by the complexity of much of life. If we are to be free to experiment with this new extended responsibility there has to be a bottom line of personal security. For that reason Britain needs a Bill of
Rights. America has its Constitution and a Supreme Court to protect the individual Rights enshrined in it. Britain has only an accumulation of precedent. It is not the same, partly because it is not as visible, partly because precedent can be overturned by politicians. At the very least the articles of the European Convention on Human Rights should become part of British Law, backed by a Human Rights Commission to ensure that legislation and policy do not infringe our rights as individual citizens. To do it piecemeal, by small individual laws, is to miss a symbolic opportunity. Most of us don’t notice the small print of legislation. We need to have our rights printed large and clear so that we can more boldly exercise our responsibility. Responsibility is born of rights, not the other way round, and responsibility remains the essential key to a truly Proper Selfishness.

  AN EPILOGUE

  THE WORLD IN 2097

  Country Life, the British journal of the countryside, celebrated its centenary in 1997 in some style. They got headlines for their photograph of a lady wearing nothing but her pearls (so tastefully done that few would have noticed anything unusual), but they also distributed a copy of their first edition, dated 8 January, 1897 and commissioned a book A Vision of the Country AD 2097, edited by the economist and environmentalist David Fleming.

  The combination of past, present and future, spanning two hundred years, is unusual outside the fantasies of science fiction. Country Life admits that this particular fantasy makes for uncomfortable reading. People will be eating algae when conventional food sources fail to cope with a doubling of the world’s population. They will watch athletic 90-year-olds competing at the Gera-Olympics. Yorkshire might become the British Provence because of climate change, our summers will be too hot and the sun too dangerous, but our winters will be more severe.

  The rich will be very rich. Global communications and a global economy will bring global fortunes to those few who can succeed in a fiercely competitive world. It is a world in which the best are everywhere and the rest are nowhere. Since much of this money will be generated in cyberspace it will be difficult to tax. The state will not, therefore, be able to support the growing numbers of old and unemployed beyond the most basic of subsistence levels. The bands of the dispossessed will wander the land like the beggars of Elizabethan England, threatening the private oases which the very rich will create for themselves, protected by their private armies. Democracy may crack under the strain, giving way to new systems of power and patronage where the rich decide on behalf of the rest. Offices won’t be needed and cities will crumble into urban wastelands.

  We have seen the future and it is the Middle Ages. It is tempting to dismiss it all as fiction. After all, looking back at that first edition of one hundred years ago, the changes are not as dramatically different as the future is assumed to be. There have been social and technological developments, certainly, but in spite of two disastrous world wars most of the country is better off and its citizens at least as happy as they were.

  To think that way would be dangerously complacent. Change may not be as violent as a world war but demography, climate and environmental decay can be much more potent although less obvious, because they creep rather than erupt. The global market is not going to be a comfortable place. The sorting of the business wheat from the chaff will be much more brutal, and any talk of national sovereignty is futile in the borderless world of cyberspace.

  As I write, the people of Tirana and Seoul are raging on the streets because uncontrolled capitalism has robbed them of their rights and of their savings. Next year it will be somewhere else. Maastricht has become a dirty word in much of Europe as countries cut their public spending to meet its arbitrary criteria. In Paris and Rome – and maybe yet in Bonn and London – the crowds gather to demonstrate their anger at the rule of the money men. In the post-Soviet world of Russia and the old Soviet Republics carpet-baggers and mafiosi steal the riches that were once supposed to be the property of the people. In the Valley of the Sun, in Arizona, Mexicans work 16-hour days for $5.00 an hour or less, peanuts in a world of affluence. How long before they and their fellows rebel against the inequity of a system which grows richer as they grow poorer and calls it productivity?

  Equality for all turned out to mean poverty for all. Now liberty for all means riches only for some. The French are right – only fraternity can link those two opposites of liberty and equality, but fraternity too seems in short supply. To restore the balance between the freedom to be ourselves and the need for a decent society around us, we need to combine a concern for ourselves in a dangerous and uncertain world with a due regard for the needs of others – a Proper Selfishness. We cannot legislate for that, only hope that more people see the sense in it.

  THE GOOD NEWS

  The future is not all gloom. Perhaps economic growth and the ‘cultivation’ which Adam Smith thought should be the proper purpose of society, are no longer incompatible. One pleasing outcome of the information age is that more of us can enjoy the good things which life can offer without spoiling the world for everyone else. There are some interesting possibilities on the horizon.

  1.Many of the things for which we will be shopping in future use up much less of our environment. A CD ROM, for example, which can contain on one disc all of the Encyclopaedia Britannica, leaves the forests untouched, takes up less shelf-space in the shops, needs no sweat-shops to produce it and no huge lorries to transport it. Many of the consumer goods of the information age are as environmentally neutral as the computer disc – you only have to be careful that you don’t get back ache from sitting too long in front of your screen, cruising on the Internet.

  2.There again, the new age fashions will help. The new growth areas include the health business – not healing but keeping healthy, through exercise, sport, walking and cycling – all environmentally friendly activities as well as being good for both mind and body. To the health business we can add education, not the educational drilling we received as children but the enriching education of adulthood when we choose what we learn and where we learn. Half of the students in higher education are now ‘mature’, over 25, and the proportion will surely grow. If some of the buildings of this education business still look ugly, we should not despair – much of the learning can now take place anywhere, in groups of any size, thanks to the new technologies. Less travel and more of the cultivation that Adam Smith wanted.

  3.Health and education are the two most prominent examples of the new scene in economics. As we get richer we spend more of our money on time than on things: time to invest in our own lives, time to learn, time to walk, talk and eat with friends, time to travel and time to read, time to go to theatres, cinemas and concerts as well as race tracks and bingo halls – all cultivation of a sort. Time, also, to sit and watch the square box in the living room or the bedroom, which may not always be ‘cultivation’ of the highest order, but at least it keeps us off the streets and out of our cars. Before long, too, that square box will become the information centre of the home, an essential interactive piece of equipment, no longer merely passive entertainment or wallpaper sound.

  4. Who, one might ask, will have the time to spend all their money on time? Many more people, is the answer, as more and more of us become members of the Third Age, that chunk of life beyond full-time work and parenting. As we live longer and as work lives shorten, the Third Age stretches from about 55 to, with luck, 80 or beyond. By the end of this century one third of the adult population will be in this Third Age. These twenty-five years can, if we are sensible and plan for them, be very productive years, but they will not be years when we try to accumulate more ‘things’. This is a slimming-down time of life, a time for being more than for getting, a chance to catch up on all the things we wish that we had done or seen or been in earlier years. With luck and good medicine we shall be healthy, able to enjoy all the ‘time products’ we can buy, and, with better financial planning in our earlier years, more of us could have the money to spend.

  5. There will, however, n
ever be enough of this Third Age money, because, for most of us, the Second Age of work will have been too short and our savings too frugal to cover twenty-five years of income-less retirement. We shall both need and want to do some work. That work, however, will most often be advising or caring in one way or another, or it will be helping out, doing some part-time work in the service sector. Such work can add great value but leaves no clutter. More people contributing some of their wisdom, time and experience either as consultants to businesses or as para-professionals in schools, hospitals, welfare organizations and churches, create economic growth both through their earnings and by the value added.

  6. People are more adaptable than we give them credit for. I was recently given the opportunity to travel around Britain interviewing, for a radio series, some twenty-five assorted individuals who were selected as a reasonable cross-section of people working in the so-called new age of work. There were portfolio workers, telecommuters, people who had started their own businesses after redundancy, dual career couples with children, individuals in the heart of the knowledge organizations (consultancy, finance and advertising), a house husband and two unemployed men, as well as a group of 15-year-olds at a normal country school. The adults were all living lives that they had never planned on. They had had to adapt to both unexpected success (the chief executive of the large advertising agency was only 32 and already at the top of his career) and to unexpected shock.