Monday, 19 March 2007

Individualism, responsibility, and listening

I've been puzzled at how reluctant commentators have been to finger Thatcherite individualism in seeking to understand contemporary problems of anti-social behaviour. Just now, most of us are sufficiently detached from the present flashes of gun and knife violence glinting on our news-screens, and probably don't know what to make of it. These are local experiences for which broader cultural explanations are sought.

So thanks are due to Josh Freedman Berthoud who in a Guardian article this evening exposes the lasting twisted effects of individualism. He points out that these attacks can be - are sometimes meant to be - indiscriminate and unmotivated:

a chilling indication of the kind of society that many city-dwelling British youths now inhabit - a rampantly individualistic society, in which each boy does everything he can to prove that he has no sense of morals or attachment to the society around him.

We are finally beginning to gain focus on one of the central social policy issues of our age, in which notions of collective association or responsibility can readily be shrugged off, and behaviour that discounts the humanness of others has swollen grotesquely in the vacuum. Give them credit, government and agencies have spotted the connection here - hence the Respect agenda, among other things - but there's another message less well-grasped: a message about how to hear messages.

Certain messages that government sends out - if you do not consume, you have failed as a citizen; you are either with us or against us, so compete or be defeated, and so on - are hard to miss. I'm not sure that messages coming from citizens (or discarded citizens) by contrast, are being processed where government is.

A year or two back I heard a government minister refer to the community sector back in 1997, in the early days of 'the New Labour Project' (his words, worthy of capitals on the grounds of pomposity) as not getting the message and being 'somewhere else'. What a hollow irony. Given the inescapabale compulsion towards responsibilisation of the citizen, the possibility that others' views might be genuinely valid and not just there for the purposes of spurious consultation, may finally be unavoidable. Could it be time to stop telling people, from a position of moral bankruptcy, how to behave, and start listening to how they react to one another's behaviour and attitudes?

How about this at the simplest level, for example: I've often heard older people, in  discussion about kids causing trouble on their estates or in their neighbourhoods, make the point that there's nothing for them to do. It's not unusual to hear older people call for youth clubs and youth work: of course they are frightened by the hoodied clusters on the street corners but they also tend to look for understanding and solutions. So nothing happens for a bit, and then we get ASBOs.

It would be nice to think that we could clinch this notion of a conversational democracy, a style of government that listens and doesn't seek relentlessly just to regulate on its miserable moral basis. The idea continues to gather momentum and is echoed in another Guardian item, in today's published, by Lucy Ward.

Ward notes that when Gordon Brown recently met parents, they favoured 'an independent information and discussion forum separate from government.' She detects a need for 'some way of eavesdropping on a wider range of voices' and finds that what is crucial is not what parents say to the government, but what they say to each other.

19 Mar 2007 21:43:42 | Citizenship and democracy

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Collective behaviour and climate change: why would anybody bother? Twice recently at events, I've raised the possibility that responses to climate change represent a potential sea-change in collectively-oriented behaviour. More and more people, I suspect, are taking everyday life and lifestyle decisions less on the totally individualistic basis of our Thatcherite inheritance, and more in recognition that there are others around us and to follow, who might be affected by those decisions. And now I'm just catching up with a recent study by CDX and the Centre for Sustainable Energy on Mobilising individual behavioural change through community initiatives. The study investigated 'what kinds of local and community initiatives are most effective at influencing changes in behaviour and at what levels, and whether any lessons learned from these are transferable to the issue of climate change.' The report provokes thinking about important issues. The key message seems to be that what is lacking is 'a realistic sense of agency,' and this is the problem to be solved. Part of the argument is that people are not motivated to take action (jointly or individually) on an issue which is not local, where their action has no immediate impact (or indeed any significant impact), and where the scale of any action taken is dwarfed by the impact of the inaction of others. And yet, and yet. We know there is evidence of changes of attitude, and local councils have had relatively little difficulty imposing regimes of recycling which have transfomed attitudes. The media too have played a hugely significant role in the subtle shifting of attitudes. I suspect that because this is an (apparently hurried) report to government, the assessment remains implacably hard-nosed (indeed, in an odd sentence towards the foot of p7 the authors suggest that, in the absence of evidence that community-based environmental initiatives influence behaviour, the challenge for policy-makers and funders is to justify supporting them - the report thereby seems to defy its own existence). There have been numerous local projects over the years that have engaged people in reducing their negative impact on the environment and changed people's attitudes to the ways in which it is managed. Surely it's time for better evaluation, not time to abandon evaluation and pass the buck back to policy-makers? I think this is an issue where the notion that there is no such thing as altruism has become a blinding presumption, to the extent that we do not recognise the possibility that people will change their behaviour for any reason other than immediate personal interest. But some people will do, have done so, are doing so, and, crucially, are now living in a social context which encourages them more than it did in the past to engage with others and persuade others to do so. Perhaps the notion of a renaissance of collective behaviour is not so far-fetched. Where my naive optimism springs from I'm afraid I cannot say, since earlier this evening I felt physically sick at the televised image from our House of Commons, where elected members had committed...
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New fund to provide small grants to community groups In the budget the other day came the announcement of a new £80 million fund to provide small grants to community groups. 'The fund will be distributed over four years by local grant makers with the greatest knowledge of their areas and local community groups.' Once upon a time, this sort of funding all went through local authorities. Not sure who 'local grant makers' are but the details are being worked out as part of the final stage of the Third Sector Review. Press release.

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