The Progressive

A theory of relativity

I posted the following comment on Tom Harris's excellent blog in response to the flack he's receiving for asking why we are so bloody miserable when most of us have never had it so good.

No doubt in fifty years time when our standard of living will have trebled there will be an economic setback due to our insatiable appetites outrunning the resources available.

People will then be complaining about not being able to afford things like cordon-bleu meals every day, the latest hologramic TV, household robots to do all their work for them and flying cars to get them to where they want to go - all considered to be essential for a contented life.

And of course there will be those oh-so-caring opposition politicians and commentators arguing that they have every right to be upset about having to suffer such terrible deprivation.

Beyond the treadmill society...

In my previous post I drew attention to the new politics of well-being as the Big Idea of the 21st century. Here I provide a brief outline of how we might live in a society where the priority is maximising such well-being rather than maximising the Gross National Product .

The year is 2020. Despite the best efforts of Cameron's Conservatives and the oppositionist Left New Labour is still in office. It has achieved this by cleverly adapting its policies to the well-being agenda that dramatically captured the public's imagination in the later years of the first decade. Initially, the temptation was to dismiss these ideas as left-wing loonery or New Age nonsense (particularly as they were being championed by the touchy feely Tories). However,in the end, wiser counsel prevailed and by showing how only they could deliver on what needed to be done New Labour has reigned supreme.

The first thing to be noticed about this new social landscape is that there is less hurry and scurry. With a better work-life balance, people have time to dawdle and day-dream. Congestion charging and the slower pace of life have much reduced the flow of traffic. The wail of emergency claxons is no longer the backdrop to street sounds. Road and other kinds of rage are a thing of the past. Hospitals are fewer, doctors surgeries are emptier as stress-related illnesses subside.

In the high-street, there is less advertising. Amidst the hoardings that remain are posters proclaiming  that "happiness is not having what you want but wanting what you have", "enough is enough!" and "meet needs not greed".  Some betting and off-licence shops have been replaced by well-being centres, a supermarkets by  a local produce and health food store, a burger-bar by a  healthy eatery. Parks outnumber car-parks and they ,not the pub, are the first port of call to calm down.

In the workplace (where the guiding principle is there's a place for work but work must be put in its place), absenteeism and presenteeism is a rarity. With the spread of co-ownership and greater emphasis on welfare at work, employees are more contented and therefore more productive. Job-sharers are finding that two heads are better than one. Larger numbers in employment working shorter hours mean that there's  even someone to answer that telephone call! And there has been a shift to the relatively lower-paid educational, caring and creative professions as the culture of sensible consumption gains ground.

In the economy at large the changes have not produced the dire consequences that the pessimists feared. Working smarter has, for the most part, offset the impact of reduced working time and global competitiveness has been maintained. Certainly the growth rate is not as high as it could be but it's sufficient to improve material standards without harming the quality of life.

Public spaces are alive whatever the time of day or day of the week. In well frequented cafes and bars, people are engaged in long animated conversations. Binge drinking and other forms of anti social behaviour are in sharp decline thanks to character-building lessons now being taught in the schools. Relationship skills also learned at school and conflict resolution centres are helping them to be nicer to each other.

Subsidised theatres, museums and  art-galleries are milling with enthusiastic  spectators. Generously public-supported sports facilities are in much greater use. Musical groups, dancing, street theatre, arts and crafts are thriving as people have time to get themselves another life away from the workplace - aided by the emphasis in the education system on learning how to live..

People are discovering that their incomes go further as they become more choosy about what they buy and have more time for DIY. Community allotments are flourishing. PTA, and community groups are hives of activity. Political involvement has escalated due to the adoption of EDD (Electronic Deliberative Democracy) where issues are brought to life on-screen with attention-grabbing graphics followed by a balanced debate and electronic voting. Generally, political discourse is being conducted with less personalisation, exaggeration and distortion thanks to the introduction of logical thinking and emotional intelligence into the school curriculum. This is reflected in the media which is now providing a better balance between the good news and the bad news.

At home, gadgets are powered from rooftop photovoltaic panels or mini-wind generators. Less television is being watched, families are not so fragmented into their virtual reality worlds and books are actually being read. People are also finding time for each other and for doing things for themselves rather than  just  buying life over the counter all the time. With getting and spending no longer the dominant activity there is also time for all those extra tasks associated wth "going green" to combat global warming and carrying out other social responsibilities. Helping hands are being extended to the family and the less fortunate as the ethos of "being warm" replaces the ethos of "being cool".

Beyond the treadmill society life is about what REALLY matters!

Why well-being could be a worry and a winner for Labour

I was at the House of Commons last Wednesday, for the debate on the New Politics of Well-Being. It was standing room only, even after we moved to a larger venue to accomodate the 300 or so wishing to attend. Just goes to show how this topic has shot up the political agenda.

As the chair, Derek Draper (now a reformed psychotherapist), observed, the new politics are being driven by an awareness of how the way we live is contributing to the prevalence of discontent and mental illlness in wealthy societies.

Oliver James, the author of Affluenza, hyped up the proceedings by laying the blame squarely on the "selfish capitalism" being promoted by the likes of Blair (who he insists on calling Blatcher) and Bush. In an entertaining address sprinkled with expletives he emphasised the World Health Organisation's finding that English speaking nations were twice as likely to suffer from mental illness than people in Europe and Japan. In this country the figures were about one in four of the population with another quarter "feeling like s##t most of the time". Massive inequalities and the stress of keeping up in a highly materialistic, over-competitive, celebrity-worshipping culture (encapsulated in the word "affluenza") had a lot to do with what had gone wrong. The remedies? Reduce inequalities, nationalise estate agents, knock a nought off house prices, pay a parent the national average wage to look after their kids up to the age of three, which could be "easily" paid for by abandoning Trident and wars of aggression, like Iraq.  All good knockabout stuff but as I pointed out to him at question time, hardly conducive to winning over those who need to be converted.

Lord Layard (author of Happiness-Lessons from a New Science) lowered the temperature somewhat with a more measured and pragmatic contribution. His "killer fact" was that happiness in developed countries (which can now be scientifically measured)  has not risen over the past fifty years despite the huge increase in per capita income. He put this down to these societies being too centred on personal success at the expense of essential human relationships. "There has been a tsunami of individualism coming at us from across the Atlantic". His five remedies were (1) use schools to teach children how to live rather than just how to earn a living, (2) cut back advertising, especially where it is directed at children (3) stop reducing job-satisfaction in the public sector by an over-emphasis on modern management techniques, such as performance related pay, (4) address the increase in mental illness by boosting the numbers of psychotherapists available, particularly cognitive behaviour therapists (the government is understood to be acting on this recommendation) and (5) echoing Oliver James, reduce inequalities.

The non-parliamentary contributions from the platform were completed by a typically over-stated attack on globalisation and New Labour (it's not new or Labour enough!) from Neal Lawson of Compass, but with a telling point about how commodification had crept into every corner of our lives and by a passionate plea from Sue Palmer (author of Toxic Childhood) on -inter-alia-  the need to halt the atomisation of the family resulting from the personal technologies available.

The politicians (our own James Purnell, Minister for Pension Reforms, and Tim Loughton, the Shadow Minister for Children), predictably brought us back to party politics. Whilst both acknowledged that well-being was an idea whose time had come, James did his duty by reciting the facts and figures of what New Labour had achieved in this area, making the connection with the government's "choice" reforms in the public sector as a means of providing the personal autonomy that was such an important ingredient of contentment. Loughton in turn did his bit by holding the government almost wholly responsible for the sick society described by the other speakers. It was clear that his sharp and witty references to "the ticking time-bomb of mental illness" under this government, the need to reduce pressures at work, the over-testing of our children (what's next, a SATS test for embryos?), people having too much too soon, and mothers going back to work too soon , was striking a chord with the young, largely female audience (even though the meeting had been mainly advertised through the Guardian and Compass).

My own thought on the meeting, as someone who has been involved in these matters for the last ten years or so, is that the politics of well-being could well be the defining issue of the 21st century. Even if one regards social malaise and global warming as two of the greatest threats facing us, there is a good case for arguing that we won't be able to fix society and the planet until we have fixed our heads. Over-stressed people in a culture of competition, envy and greed veer towards addictive behaviour as some kind of solace, whether this be fast cars, drug-taking, binge drinking, or binge shopping, all of which feed into social and planetary breakdown. We don't have to invent fancy new names to describe the condition to be treated. The old name, the rat-race, is good enough. And as Jimmy Reid famously remarked "The rat-race is for rats. We are not rats. We are human beings!"

There is a distinct danger of the Tories outflanking us on this biggest of Big Ideas, if only because people notice what's going wrong in their lives more than they notice what's going right and tend to blame the government of the day for it. The Tories can therefore win their sympathies just by "feeling their pain" and sharing their concern about the direction of travel, without, of course, having the ideological means of changing that direction. New Labour with its belief in greater state intervention where appropriate does have the means of changing course.. That is why the well-being agenda can be a winner for us if we play our cards correctly i.e. by accepting what's wrong, whilst rejecting the excesses of the argument, and showing how only a New Labour government can put it right.

Postscript: After the meeting (as is my wont) I approached a young, trendy, well-spoken woman to find out what she thought of it all. Fully expecting the charismatic, Oliver James, Neal Lawson or our own James Purnell to be nominated "man of the match", she enthusiastically went for Tim Houghton. Moreover as a first time voter she was leaning towards David Cameron as the more touchy-feely (her words) of the candidates on offer. Be warned!