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Thank you for inviting me to address you this evening and to Robin for that fascinating introduction. As someone who often finds himself preferring the hors d’oeuvre to the main course, Robin’s tasty starter has only added to my nerves.
It is customary for speakers to begin this annual lecture with their links to Cornwall. Everyone it seems has a Cornish branch of their family, memories of a childhood holiday or moments of inspiration sparked by the County’s countryside or history. I considered trying to win your approval with reminiscences of a week spent in a cottage by Lizard Point, or my appreciation of the Tribute Cornish Ale at my South London local.
As I desperately cast around for more substantial or lyrical references to Cornwall I found myself wondering why I was so anxious. The speaker’s calculation of how much local knowledge or outsider’s humility he should demonstrate is a function of the distance between home and platform. I wouldn’t bother myself much in Birmingham, a bit more in Cumbria but a great deal more in Scotland. The distinctiveness of Cornwall lies in a set of concrete characteristics – geography, history, demography, iconic buildings like the Eden Centre - but also in a less tangible sense that Cornish people have a different way of being and thinking.
One of my questions to you tonight is how different do the people of Cornwall want to be? The process of developing the Convergence Programme has led policy makers to explore the concrete solutions to the range of pressing challenges facing the County. As the quote behind me implies, I think asking a different kind of question, a more visionary one, one which starts not with Ministers, MPs, European Commissioners but with us and our future as citizens will ultimately help in developing innovative and effective solutions to these challenges.
My argument tonight has four parts. First, I will explore the idea of change in human consciousness, the goal being to remind you how much human beings can and do change in their ways of thinking. Second, I will argue that the particular change we now need is the emergence of what I term a new collectivism; by this I mean a renewed capacity to work together towards a shared idea of progress. Third, I will explain the problem that this new consciousness needs to help solve - I call this problem the social aspiration gap; the gap between the future to which we aspire and the future we are yet capable of building with current modes of thought and behaviour. Finally, and here I will have to crave your tolerance, I will explore what closing the social aspiration gap might mean for the people of this beautiful County.
What do I mean by change? My definition is ambitious. It is change not just in our knowledge, nor merely in attitudes but in meanings, norms, patterns of thinking; ultimately, in our consciousness. It is change the way we see ourselves and our relationship to the people and world about us.
Living in the permanent now we tend to be ethnocentric and ahistorical – assuming that the ways we think now are universal and timeless. Anthropology tells us differently. For example, Anthropomorphic cultures like that of the Australian aboriginals do not share our distinction between animate and inanimate objects. Closer to home, the eminent cultural historian Lynn Hunt has recently argued that the invention of human rights resulted in part from the popularity of the18th century novels of Samuel Richardson. By encouraging readers to empathise with the internal world of vulnerable heroines like Pamela and Clarissa, Richardson hastened our capacity to see every human being as fundamentally resembling each other and thus possessing natural and equal rights. Hunt cites evidence from cognitive science to argue that this change has become hard wired into modern consciousness.
As a novelist, Samuel Richardson set out to entertain readers not to transform citizens. Changes in our way of thinking may result from profound economic and social shifts, a particular co-incidence of forces or human action. Marx taught us that we make our own history but not in circumstances of our own choosing. Think of two recent shifts significant enough to be seen as consciousness changing.
There is the revolution in our attitudes to people of different gender and race, but perhaps most remarkably sexuality. There is plenty of bigotry still around, but the reaction of the man on the Clapham omnibus to being told someone is gay has, in less than a generation, gone from repulsion to acceptance. Not just our attitudes but our instincts appear to have changed.
Then think of how information technology has changed the way we think about the world we inhabit. For all but the last fragment of human existence, physical distance has implied communicative distance: out of sight, out of range. The people you knew and knew you were largely restricted to those you could meet in person. For today’s mobile phone carrying, Facebook blogging, on-line game playing teenager this idea is difficult to comprehend. The shape of their world, the fabric of their relationships, the way they think about information and knowledge is very different. It is mind boggling to know that more than three billion Google searches take place every month but maybe it’s more mind boggling to ask who answered all those questions before most of us knew Google existed, in that dim and distant past five years ago.
Despite these recent changes in our self image and world view we find it hard to imagine what change might happen in the future. Just like TV costume dramas which have 17th century clothes and 17th century furniture but twentieth century language, the sci-fi view of the future is full of fantastic gadgets but assumes we remain unaltered in our modes of thought. In the 1960s a panel of futurologists was asked to predict the world in 2000. Their scientific predictions were pretty good. For example they foresaw something very much like the internet. But none of them predicted the decline of the traditional nuclear family.
Necessity is the mother of invention. We should expect change because we need change, particularly in relation to our collective capacities. This is why I will argue for a new collectivism. As Einstein said ‘We can’t solve problems by using the same kind of thinking we used when we created them’.
One of the most marked characteristics of our time is the contrast between the resources, the knowledge, the emerging capacities of human beings and the pessimism about our ability to work together to create a better future. At this time of ideological convergence the barrier to progress is not that most of us have very different hopes for the future of our world, but that the future to which we aspire is not one we can build relying on existing modes of thought or behaviour. This is the social aspiration gap.
Two processes have above others contributed to creating the social aspiration gap. The first is the long march of individualism. This has been a liberating process, bringing us great creativity and freedom but it has had its darker side. It has gradually diminished our sense of collective agency and contributed to the decline of those institutions that fostered and channelled collectivist spirit.
Consider again the contingent nature of our world view. The ancient Greeks developed the distinction between private and public. But for them the idea of private had largely negative connotations to do with exclusion and limitation while the idea of public was associated with the achievement of adulthood and citizenship. As Richard Sennett showed in his classic study ‘The Decline of Public Man’, in the era of the Enlightenment (when the RSA was established), the distinction between the internal life of the individual’s emotions and the public life of social manners did not assume the former to be any more authentic than the latter, indeed the reverse.
In the twentieth century the retreat from the collective and the privileging of the private has accelerated further. On the one hand, there has been the decline in self confidence and influence of collective institutions such as the organised church, trade unions, political parties, local municipal elites. On the other hand, a combination of modern psychiatry and consumer capitalism has led to an ever greater obsession with the inner life and the individual’s story – most vividly illustrated in our obsession with celebrity. Of course religion continues around the world to be the basis for collective action but it is a characteristic of the most dynamic religious movements that they tap into our mistrust of the modern world.
A second aspect of modernity reflects the pace and complexity of modern life. Human beings have set in train a number of processes of which we now often feel the victims; globalisation in its many manifestations, scientific and technological change, competitive acquisitiveness, climate change, the erosion of social norms. The recent squalls in the financial markets threaten to turn into a perfect storm because we have financial systems so complex, so dispersed and so fast moving no one knows how to chart them let alone control them.
Put these processes together.
We see huge change and challenge in the world around us. We are often shamed by the contrast between our wealth and knowledge and our inability to tackle inequality, ignorance, exploitation and environmental decay. We crave a better world. But the scale of change means that the old top down, paternalistic, mass produced solutions of the twentieth century do not work. In the face of this we retire further into individualism, thinking our duty is to protect ourselves and our families from what we see a hostile and intractable world.
Recently the Joseph Rowntree Foundation undertook a major public consultation to discover what people see as being the ‘new social evils’. You may not be surprised to hear that the new evils bore an uncanny resemblance to exactly those bemoaned by Joseph Rowntree himself a century ago: poverty, greed, intolerance, breakdown of family and community. The difference now is that while Joseph Rowntree saw his social evils as the unfinished business of progress we see ours as the unavoidable consequences of progress.
If this seems far fetched, consider the perception gap. When I was in Government we felt cheated by evidence that showed people had generally positive accounts of their experiences of public services – the schools their children went to, the doctor they used - but were prone to believe that services in general were in decline. Two weeks ago the BBC conducted a major survey of attitudes to the family. The Corporation found that 94% of us are positive and optimistic about our own families – up from forty years ago. Yet at the same time 70% are pessimistic about families in general – also up. What is true of public services and families is true also of our view of communities and of people of different cultures – we like the Muslim we know but we worry about Muslims in general. JK Galbraith talked about modern capitalist societies exhibiting private affluence and public squalor. Now we need to confront private optimism and public despair, or rather private agency and public impotence.
We need to regain confidence in our capacity to forge a better future together. In short, we need to a new collectivism. Like the old collectivism it is about individual responsibility and solidarity but in keeping with our times it must be bottom up, egalitarian, flexible, self actualising. This new collectivism needs to be forged at every level – from the neighbourhood to the global.
I will turn to what the practical elements of this new collective consciousness might mean. But first I should address a legitimate concern about the direction I am taking. I gave a different version of this speech a week ago on a platform with Professor Patrick Minford the eminent neo-Liberal economist and former advisor to Margaret Thatcher. When I talked about new collectivism and the need for people to change, the good Professor accused me of advocating social engineering.
There are two responses to this. First, the question is not whether we are socially engineered it is how we are socially engineered. We are social animals; we are born into, grow up in and live in society. Society engineers us, whether we like it or not.
The second response is that the combination of our evolutionary engineering and our social engineering seems to play unfortunate tricks on us.
If anyone offers you a book for Christmas I encourage you to ask for ‘Stumbling into Happiness’ by Dan Gilbert. Gilbert marshals decades of research, primarily from social psychology to demonstrate how bad we are at happiness. It turns out that we are terrible at predicting what will make us happy, or unhappy. Furthermore, most of what we say about what makes us happy is a better guide to our capacity to rationalise our life choices than it is to what actually brought contentment in our lives. The discovery of this individual idiosyncrasy has a powerful echo. It is in the evidence that our society as a whole is on a happiness plateau; we are twice as productive and rich as our parents but we are no more content.
One of the key characteristics of modern consciousness is what sociologists call reflexivity. That is the capacity of us all – not just an intellectual elite - to reflect upon ourselves as individuals, constructing our own accounts of our lives as they are and as we want them to be. But it turns out that the mirror we are holding up to ourselves is distorting. Modern social science and neuro-science is now providing us with more insights into these distortions. Not just about happiness but about solidarity, aggression, desire.
Consider the perception gap I described a moment ago. It is in part down to the fact that we tell an average of two people when we are surprised by a good service but ten people if we feel let down. Is this because we are hard wired to see warning as more essential than celebrating? It is more important to the survival of the tribe for its members to hear there are crocodiles in the river than to be told of its beauty. But while our instincts endure our needs change. Social pessimism is bad for us. It encourages apathy, cynicism and disengagement. However necessary this piece of evolutionary hard wiring was for most of our past, today it looks like a hindrance.
The point is not that there is a correct way to feel emotions but simply that the way we do now – shaped by the idiosyncratic workings of our brains, implicit social norms and deliberate attempts to manipulate us - is not the only, nor necessarily the best, way. The promise of a more developed consciousness may not simply be that it enables us to contribute to social progress but that it helps us better to live the lives we want to live.
I want now to focus on three dimensions of what I call the social aspiration gap; three lenses through which we need to re-imagine our membership of the human race. The argument is not that in each case change can only happen through voluntary collective action: far from it. But just as history reveals the irony that it was often the success of collective institutions and actions which created the right circumstances for the rise of rampant individualism, so a new collectivism can only emerge from a combination of public policy, social innovation, and a shift in our values and commitments.
The first part of the social aspiration gap concerns our relationship to politics, by which I mean not just what goes on in Westminster and County Hall but the wider process by which public opinion is shaped and people make policy decisions. The relationship between politicians and people is increasingly unable to do the job now required of it. On a bad day citizens view Government like teenagers view their parents – demanding omnipotence while assuming incompetence. When I was in Downing Street I expected to have to deal with conflicting opinions and demands from different sections of public opinion. What I did not predict was that Government would need to deal with contradictory demands from the same sources of public opinion: voters demanding on Monday affordable homes for their children but on Tuesday objecting to homes being built near them; demanding action on climate change and congestion on Wednesday but signing the petition against road user charging on Thursday; enjoying the benefits of migration but complaining furiously about the costs. The nature of citizens’ attitudes was nicely captured on a recent edition of Any Questions when a member of the audience said – and I quote - ’Given the latest evidence of the scale of climate change what are you going to do to make me stop driving my BMW Turbo?’.
The defeated American Senate candidate Dick Tuck famously said ‘the people have spoken – the bastards’. Having been a political insider it is tempting to blame the poor quality of policy debate on the people, but politicians have made their own bed by practising the politics of consumerist populism. In their desperate desire to win favour politicians repeatedly tell voters they can have their cake and eat it. When they do tell us we need to change they irritate us even more. Being used to indulgent leaders we are not about to take it when they go all strict on us.
The positive reason we need to change our relationship to collective decision making is that on more and more of the issues that most matter to us, the kinds of things highlighted in the Cornwall Convergence bid, from tackling climate change to generating new high value businesses to meeting the demands of population ageing - it is inconceivable that we can make the progress we need unless we combine the efforts of Government, communities and individuals.
So, just when we need a stronger relationship between people and their chosen decision makers, we find ourselves with one that feels ever weaker. In recognition of this there is much talk of the need for the reform of democratic institutions and processes. But remember that no Government was more reforming than Blair’s. Devolution to the nations of the UK and to London, abolition of hereditary peerages, reform of the House of Lords, Freedom of Information, PR systems in European and devolved elections, on the record lobby briefings, Prime Ministerial press conferences etc. Yet none of this protected Blair from public hostility and distrust. Institutional reform has to be accompanied by something much more difficult – a change in the way we frame political debate. In essence, we need to move from what I call a Government-centric way of thinking – ‘what should they decide, what should they do for us’ – to a citizen centric way – ‘what do we want’, ‘how are we to resolve our differences’, ‘what is required from us to achieve progress’.
The commonplace idea of renewing politics might seem a long way from the bigger idea of a new collective consciousness. But for politics to work we need to go through a process of healing akin to the process used by psychological counsellors. We have to take ownership ourselves of the things for which we currently blame others, particularly our deeply disappointing political parents. This, by the way, is why the modern news and entertainment media can be such a problem. How hard is it to move to a mature and responsible political discourse when the modern media is in essence a disorganised conspiracy to maintain us in a perpetual state of self-righteous rage?
The second way in which we as citizens need to change concerns our own personal impact on the world. To put it simply, we need to understand what it is to live more self sufficient and sustainable lives.
We will need to be part of an ever more educated, flexible and adaptive workforce. What future do we have when a third of children leave school without adequate qualifications and the Government has to bribe employers and employees to take up training?
As public service consumers, global competition, population ageing and rising expectations mean we face a tightening fiscal squeeze unless we become better at meeting our own needs. How can the health service cope if the biggest new demands are the result of our lifestyle choices? If my generation doesn’t save a great deal more than it is now doing my children and grandchildren will find themselves weighed down by the demands we will make for state support. The idea of self sufficiency doesn’t mean we are blind to interdependence or reject altruism. We will always need reliable collective services and support from the state when things go wrong. It does mean living healthier lifestyles, being responsible parents, managing our own care, preparing for long retirements working with others to maintain greener, safer neighbourhoods.
And citizens will be much more able to meet their side of this new contract if they work together. Schools of the future need to be intelligent communities, the NHS will benefit from patients developing strong self-help groups, individuals will better be able to reduce their carbon impact if communities band together to develop new energy solutions and ways of reducing waste. This is the new collectivism.
And in the market place too we will need to be responsible consumers. Fair trade points the way ahead but we still have far to travel if our patterns of consumption are to be truly ethical and sustainable.
The third way in which we need to change our citizen outlook concerns what philosophers call other regarding behaviour and involves how we relate to others and how we give back to those who need our help.
For the vast majority of our history we have been used to living with and generally only meeting people much like us in appearance, in culture and in attitude. Technology is shrinking the world, population mobility is shrinking the world, the threats we face are shrinking the world.
We have to empathise with and get on with people very different to ourselves. You don’t have to be racist or reactionary to recognise that human beings find this hard, especially when they are under strain or competing for scare resources. There is a famous experiment by the economist Thomas Schelling in which he ran a computer programme involving thousands of white and black draughts chequers. In the programme he spread the chequers randomly and then applied only one rule which was that chequers of one colour – while they were happy to be next to the other colour and while they would even be happy to be in a minority of neighbouring chequers - would move if they were in a minority of less than thirty percent. Few of us would see this desire not to be in a small minority as racist, yet if you run this experiment within a short period of time the effect is to create a huge chequer board of totally segregated areas.
Progressives have tended to play down the challenge of getting on with others, while reactionaries have gloried in the difficulties. But the answer is surely to try to make diversity work while understanding how difficult it can be. If you want an example of this in practice, there is a council in East London that is having to dispel myths about housing allocation peddled by the BNP. These myths persisted in part because people have stopped talking to their neighbours. So what is the Council doing? They are hiring a tent putting on entertainment and food and successfully holding what they call ‘neighbour speed dating’ sessions.
Negotiating diversity and recognising interdependence are necessary human capacities for successful twenty-first century citizenship everywhere from the local neighbourhood to the United Nations.
So this is the argument in its general form. To create the future we want for ourselves and future generations we will need to change, to understand our relationship to the society and world around us differently, and be more able and willing to develop a new collectivism in which our sense of personal agency is matched by our capacity to work together to meet shared goals.
If this sounds unrealistic you might be comforted by the words of the world renowned anthropologist, Margaret Mead. Her studies of peoples around the world led her to say: ‘never doubt that a small, group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world. Indeed, it is the only thing that ever has’.
With that quote ringing in our ears, let us return to the question of Cornwall’s difference. Cornwall may not be an independent nation, it may be governed by laws and policies laid down in Westminster and Whitehall but that does not mean Cornwall cannot develop its own citizens’ strategy. If the people of Cornwall were to accept the argument I have sketched tonight and were to commit to becoming the people tomorrow demands what might you do together to meet this ambition?
Go back to the three ways in which I suggested we have to change. How might Cornwall develop a different type of public discourse and political process; a citizen-centric rather than Government-centric discussion? On the one hand this means encouraging a debate, in church halls, on street corners, in schools, in newspapers, on local radio, on line about the big questions – what kind of place do we want Cornwall to be in twenty years, how do we balance the scope for economic growth with the desire to protect and enhance our quality of life? What are the different priorities and interests of different groups within the County and how can we reconcile them? These are not the kinds of questions that can be resolved quickly or permanently but if they don’t form the backdrop for the detailed discussion of policy or resolution of disputes then politics remains dull, disengaging, narrowly self –interested.
On the other hand, it is about exploring different sites for decision making and action. Cornwall is to be a unitary authority and that may be right for the strategic decisions but it is only by devolving power to the most local level that we can blur the boundary between traditional politics – in which we tell other people what to do – and self government in which we decide to do things for ourselves. The other day I was observing a dynamic tenant management organisation in London. At the residents’ meetings they spend half the time as the client of the housing management organisation feeding back on their performance and giving them instructions, but they spend the other half discussing what is happening on the estate and what they need to do as residents to address problems, for example teenagers hanging around with nothing to do. If my local Council asked me to volunteer to tidy up my local park I would probably laugh but if the park was managed by local residents I might feel it was part of being a good and connected citizen.
How about my second challenge – citizens living more self sufficient and sustainable lives? Let me suggest some ways in which Cornwall could get ahead of the game. First, and most obviously you have the scope to be innovators and world leaders in reducing your carbon impact. Robin has made the case for Cornwall to be a beacon for sustainable design. Indeed, with the scope for wind, wave and tidal energy could Cornwall and the wider South West aspire not only to be low carbon but ultimately to be carbon neutral?
Today’s youngsters will live with climate change as a pressing reality of their lives. But this is one of the few things we can predict to them with confidence. Children who entered secondary school this September will probably leave the labour market sometime in the 2070s. We have absolutely no idea what the world will be like then. So, given our inability to predict the future, we seem to have decided that the safest thing is to prepare children for the world that existed fifteen years ago. So a second way Cornwall might explore developing self sufficient citizens would be to develop a new Cornish model of schooling, one actually fit for the twenty first century.
This would be a model with the simple overriding objective: that every young person left compulsory education with the confidence and desire to continue to learn throughout life. It would be a model that recognised that children (and where possible parents) have to be active partners in learning, not passive consumers. It would be a model that put an emphasis on building competencies rather than remembering knowledge. It would be a model that understood that no individual school is able to provide children with the range of opportunities they need and that schools need to be connected parts of the communities in which they reside. It would be a model that tried to balance the demands made on the education system by universities, employers and Government with our desire for our children to have fun, to make friends, to develop as rounded, healthy, responsible citizens whatever their narrowly defined academic abilities. The issue of design is important here too. I’ve heard the suggestion that the Government’s programme Building Schools for the Future ought to be renamed Building Museums for the Future. If we are to have schools fit for the twentieth century we need a step change in our ambition and imagination about the design of schools.
A Cornwall of self sufficient citizens would also be one which has renegotiated the contract between citizens and public services, in which shared responsibilities and outcomes were agreed between service providers and service users, at the level of the whole County, the local service and the individual family. Users would not only be given choice and voice, not only would they be the co-producers of services but they would be actively involved in designing new ways of meeting social needs that are more effective and empowering. Does this sound like your County?
We won’t be able to meet the demands of population ageing just by paying as little as possible for care imported from Poland or Latvia. Cornwall needs a new caring contract between state, community and family. But it also needs to foster a different way of thinking about the place of older people in society. The same ancient or enlightenment philosophers who would bemoan today’s insipid idea of citizenship would be horrified at our disparaging attitude towards old age.
We need to be different kinds of public sector and private sector consumers. How about Cornwall becoming the centre of ethical, sustainable private consumption; how about a Cornish carbon trading scheme in which every citizen lives within their carbon limit and those who consume above their allocation have to buy allocations from those who live below. This might all seem unrealistic but, before you dismiss it, ask whether the real unrealism is thinking we can expect to develop tomorrow’s citizens in exam factories, whether an ageing population can demand better public services and demand lower taxes, and whether we can meet the ever more ambitious carbon targets being set by Government without changing our lifestyles.
Finally let me return to the issue of other regarding behaviour. Cornwall is less diverse than many other places in Britain. But this is already changing, particularly with the influx of Eastern European migrants, and the people of the County will need to feel able to adapt. Wound up with the issue of national or racial diversity is the continuing scale of economic inequality. Behind the picturesque exterior Cornwall is a place of huge divides. Could Cornwall develop its own strategy, engaging not just policy makers but the wider population in asking what might the County do to become the most inclusive part of the United Kingdom?
Try this for a thought experiment. Imagine a debate about how to make Cornwall a fairer place with higher value employment. Imagine that debate concluding that Cornwall might benefit from a higher minimum wage; after all it’s not as if the tourist couldn’t pay a bit more and if employers had to invest more in their staff they might be tempted to think harder about training them. Then consider the idea might be implemented not through statute and regulation but simply through the voluntary action of employers and customers. You couldn’t force people to pay or demand a Cornish fair wage but if most people signed up to it could make a real difference and demonstrate a powerful capacity for collective action. The point is not whether the policy is right, it is whether it is possible to conceive of politics being as much about what we choose to do voluntarily together as about reacting to what politicians are telling us what to do.
And however far behind the poorest of this County are from the rest they will be ahead in wealth and opportunity of those in the poorest parts of the world. How would it be if Cornwall was to develop its own CSR programme – Cornwall Social Responsibility. How about the County developing a mass participation twinning project with a region with geographical similarities to Cornwall but in a developing country? Every school in Cornwall could twin with a school in that region. Through the internet this children to communicate, work and play with children on the other side of the world and a world away in the lives they lead.
I began by talking about a sense of humility on making this annual lecture and I end up proposing a shopping list of measures to make Cornwall the most engaged, most self sufficient, most resourceful and most altruistic part of the United Kingdom.
Seen from our current ways of thinking such a list might seem both unrealistic and unreasonable. But if my speech has had any impact you will know by now that I am not a great fan of current ways of thinking. We are children of the Enlightenment but the individualistic, materialistic, self righteous citizenship of the early twenty first century is a long way from the ideals of those who argued for the freedoms we enjoy. Here is Adam Smith seen by many as the champion of individual self-interest. Smith said “He is not a good citizen who does not wish to promote, by every means in his power, the welfare of the whole society of his fellow citizens”.
In 1754 the Cornish natural historian William Borlase persuaded his friend Henry Baker, one of the co-founders of the RSA, to sponsor a prize for the production of high quality County maps. These maps were vital to the economic development of the County at the outset of the industrial revolution.
The map we need now is different. It is a map to take us to the future we want. It is a map we must start to draw ourselves.
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