Friday, 28 May 2010

Selfishness: living in an 'impoverished emotional culture'

Occasionally you hear arguments defending individualism, and claiming that it is not directly related to issues of exclusion, disengagement or uncivil behaviour. The tide seems very much against these views now though, the bankers and the MPs have seen to that.

Here's an item in the Daily Mail, with its squeaky-clean reputation as a stalwart defender of selfless collectivism, reviewing a book called The selfish society by Sue Gerhardt, and folding-in some points from the Catholic Church's Choosing the common good report and the Children's Society's Good childhood inquiry.

Focusing on the influence of consumerism, Gerhardt identifies problematic styles of parenting which combine material indulgence with emotional neglect, speaking of 'an impoverished emotional culture'. The Good childhood inquiry emphasised the negative impact of individualism. So are we more selfish, or is it just that the ways our selfishness and selflessness play out have changed - perhaps not unlike the way our connections changed over a few decades from geographical community to social network?

We may find out. According to their latest bulletin, ippr is beginning a new programme of work exploring selfishness, in partnership with the National Centre for Social Research (NatCen).

'The work will provide unique analysis, drawing on a comprehensive range of data sets together with new evidence to assess how attitudes and values have changed.'

I can't imagine they'll keep the results to themselves.

28 May 2010 17:16:26 | Social capital

2 Comments

Thanks Kevin. In case ippr and NatCen do keep the results of the selfishness study to themselves, here are some articles on selflessness that had already been shared with the public by the good people of the Greater Good Science Center at UC Berkeley (my favorite source for hard science on mushy things like compassion and altruism):

http://greatergood.berkeley.edu/tag/altruism/
http://greatergood.berkeley.edu/tag/compassion/

And some on parenting:
http://greatergood.berkeley.edu/tag/parenting/

Posted by: Leo Romero | Sunday, 30 May 2010 at 12:25

Thanks for the links Leo, you are always such an impressive source of information!
k

Posted by: Kevin Harris | Monday, 31 May 2010 at 07:01

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Older people and local social networks Last week I went along to talk to a review group working on elder care for the Centre for Social Justice. They wanted my views on how neighbourhood support can be strengthened, and why it should be, to help older people to age in place. I put some stress on the unrealised potential of new technologies: not so much from the familiar applications like telecare, but more from the point of view of local social networks. It's remarkable how little attention has been paid to the contribution of social media in strengthening and sustaining local connections and thus supporting older people in their neighbourhoods. Here's an example. Independent Age have just published a report on Older people, technology and community, with the totally misleading subtitle 'the potential of technology to help older people renew or develop social contacts and to actively engage in their communities.' Unfortunately most of the report is about already-well-known barriers to and uses of technology, not about the development of social connections, although there are revelations for me among the case studies. A main theme for the report is: Increasing awareness in the public sector of the issue of social isolation and loneliness and encouraging public sector organisations to make adaptations to technology-based services that will help address the problem. This is all very well but it risks over-emphasising the negative, misses the potential for older people to play interdependent roles, and completely overlooks the opportunity of local citizen-based online resources. How come this lack of awareness persists? Three years ago Danny Bull, who set up MyNeighbourhoods told me: ‘Our senior citizens have been integral to our growth, fuelled by the possibility of real-world communication as a result of initiating contact with others online. We’ve witnessed everything from elderly users trading books locally to a bit of light hearted flirting.’ (I published the comment here in 2008) The potential has always been there but I'm beginning to suspect that much of the problem lies with the age agencies and the attitudes of professionals. Understandably perhaps, they seem too often preoccupied with technical barriers that diminish the quality of life of older people. The more you have to deal with those problems I suppose, the more you are going to look at them in mechanistic ways, rather than recognising organic social solutions. (As an aside, there's also a need to differentiate the important range of skills and experience represented by the term 'older people', even though there's been plenty of discussion about how the younger old can support the older old). Neighbours are seldom recognised as part of the solution to older people's care needs (so all credit to the CSJ for their awareness): and as this report shows, people can reflect extensively on technological applications without seeing the potential to stimulate neighbourly support. Then again, I may be wrong and very little online-enabled neighbourhood support is actually going on. But that's not the impression I've been getting.
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