Big Society can’t happen in a Consumer Society

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Whatever you may think of the coalition government’s ‘Big Society’ idea (and I have my reservations), it needs a certain type of population to make it happen – one that is politically engaged, community-minded and willing to give up time for the greater good. I hate to say it, but this doesn’t sound like modern society – where isolation, materialism and the pursuit of self interest seem to be greater priorities than compassionate collectivism for many people.

One of the reasons for this excessively self-oriented mindset is our dominant culture of consumerism, which can have a significant influence on us and affect the way we engage with the world around us. For example, studies (such as Greenberg and Brand, 1993; Shrum et al., 2005) show that increased exposure to commercial marketing is associated with increased levels of materialism in people. This can lead people to build their identities around extrinsic values (such as money, fame, and popularity) and stifle their concern for external issues such as poverty, suffering, discrimination and environmental challenges.

So, before we can realistically seek a truly progressive vision of society – whether that is indeed the Big Society or something else entirely – we will need to examine, and address, the social influences that militate against people’s participation, and this includes our culture of consumerism.

For more thoughts on consumerism, download ‘The problem with consumerism’ from Life².

A new focus for education

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Geoff Mulgan of The Young Foundation puts it well:

“Over the last two decades a gulf has opened up between what education systems provide and what children need. Education systems rightly provide children with skills in numeracy and literacy and academic qualifications. But the emphasis on a set of core academic skills, and a culture of intensive testing, has too often squeezed out another set of skills – how to think creatively, how to collaborate, how to empathise – at the very time when they are needed more than ever”

The need to educate people – adults and children alike – in various aspects of ‘the art of living’ is a theme running through much of my work, and this report (called ‘Grit: The skills for success and how they are grown‘) by The Young Foundation explores some of these skills in greater detail and makes a case for why they matter in our lives.

Although it perhaps focuses more on the benefits of these skills in people’s careers than in life generally (understandable as it needs to be ‘sold’ to policy makers), it contains an interesting overview of topics such as the need for people to be taught to be reslient in facing the adversity and challenges of life.

Why equality matters

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We’ve just added The Spirit Level by Richard Wilkiinson and Kate Pickett to our bookshop at Life², and I can’t believe it’s taken us so long to get round to doing so.

I remember being impressed by this book when it first came out in hardback, and since then it has become well-known and exhaustively referenced by people and organisations seeking a range of types of social change. Its success is hardly surprising, as it has provided progressives with an important resource – namely, hard evidence as to how almost everything – from life expectancy to depression levels, violence to illiteracy – is affected not only by how wealthy a society is, but how equal it is. Its stark conclusion is that societies with a bigger gap between rich and poor are bad for everyone in them – including the well-off.

If you haven’t checked it out yet, buy it now – and have a look at The Equality Trust – an organisation set up by the authors of the book to campaign on the same topic.

Change for the better

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There seems to be change in the air: not the vacuous, meaningless version of it pedalled by David Cameron and other election hopefuls, but a sense that we need to address some more subtle issues relating to how people see and deal with the world if we are to secure a better future.

We have been speaking to a couple of these initiatives recently with the possibility in mind of collaboration in the future – one is the Movement for Happiness set up by Professor Lord Richard Layard, Geoff Mulgan and Anthony Seldon, which is due to launch in September this year. Another is Citizen Ethics, set up by Madeleine Bunting and Mark Vernon. Check them out – each has its strong merits and areas of crossover with Life², but each is different from Life²’s work of equipping people with the tools, ideas and information to live more self-determined, wise, happy and meaningful lives.

I see Life² sitting in the middle of all this work, pulling together linked issues such as ethics, happiness and well-being – and I hope this puts us in a good place to move various strands of this agenda forward in the coming months and years.

Prosperity without growth?

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As a first post for this blog, and to give you an idea of some of the themes I work on, here is a link to a report from Tim Jackson at the Sustainable Development Commission which is well worth reading. It provides some commentary on the current economic crisis, but its main aim is to consider whether economic growth is essential to achieve a society in which we all flourish. The report has been updated and Cruz expanded and turned into a book – ‘Prosperity without growth‘ – click here for more details. This idea of ‘human suffering flourishing’ is a theme running through a lot of my work and no Smoltz doubt I’ll return to it in later posts! Check out my own book for some more ideas on this theme.