Big Society is full of potential, but it needs more substance

Some type of shared utopian view is beneficial to a society, as it paves the way for large-scale coordinated reform. This view has to be positive in order to be truly motivating and empowering. Big Society has the potential to become the utopia of the 21st century, but only if two key concepts are included: mutual respect and open dialogue.

The archbishop of Canterbury recently denounced David Cameron’s Big Society as aspirational waffle “designed to conceal a deeply damaging withdrawal of the state from its responsibilities to the most vulnerable.” The response is understandable, as the ongoing austerity drive doesn’t show much of the responsibility, mutuality or obligation that Cameron underlined in his 2009 Big Society speech. On the contrary: cutting social benefits with the excuse of balancing welfare budget seems irresponsible and short-sighted – especially when billions of taxpayer pounds and euros flow to keep financial institutions up and running.

Big Society, as I understand it, refers to the joint effort and common responsibility in the society, and moving away from politician-centered and hierarchical government towards multilateralism and networked cooperation. The historical context of the Big Society is, of course, the crisis of the welfare state. An essential question in this ongoing crisis is: How to make the transition to socially and environmentally sustainable economy while remaining competitive and maintaining the living standards of most people?

This question has no answer, which refers to the fact that in the current crisis, we are dealing with one huge wicked problem:

A wicked problem is a social or cultural problem that is difficult or impossible to solve for as many as four reasons: incomplete or contradictory knowledge, the number of people and opinions involved, the large economic burden, and the interconnected nature of these problems with other problems.

Wicked problems of the society are rife with conflicts of interest, anxiety and fear. This is what has preserved them for centuries. Currently, however, they are getting out of control (see the news on Euro crisis or climate change), so new approaches are needed. Big Society is a utopian mindset with the aim of promoting a change in the culture – our patterns of thinking, feeling and potentially acting – that is at the root of these wicked problems.

The Big Society mindset is promising, but currently it has one big problem: it lacks a solid view of mutual respect – the cornerstone of social stability -, and open dialogue on policy decisions. The lack of mutual respect is deeply intertwined with antiquated party structures which manufacture dissent while maintaining the phenomenon of ‘preaching to the choir’. The absence of dialogue, on the other hand, enables decisions to be made quickly but at the expense of the wider social context.

So what should be done to promote mutual respect and open dialogue in the society? I set an open challenge to all citizens and parties, in Britain as well as in Europe. Together we should try to answer the following questions:

• What is good in the Big Society mindset, and what is lacking? If you fundamentally disagree with the concept, what is your alternative utopia?
• Big Society has the potential to guide global social policy efforts. Could it be the British approach to the crisis in Europe? Could the approach even be spread to development cooperation?
• Reducing the power of central governments also leads to gradually moving away from the war economy in which national politicians manufacture and support armed conflicts abroad for political and economic purposes. What kind of Big Society institutions encourage the use of soft power in global networks and make the use of violence unviable?

When we learn to maintain respectful dialogue throughout the society, we are much better equipped to face the long-awaited social reforms. At the same time it is essential that we find the fine balance between cynicism and idealism. In this process, approaches such as Theory U and participatory design may prove beneficial.

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PS. I wrote this text Comment is Free in mind, but as they refused I decided to publish it here. (I guess it was too intellectual for the general reader.)

On Social Innovations, and Politics as a Collective Innovation Process

One definition of politics is that it is the art or science of running governmental or state affairs. However, because it consists of social relations involving authority or power, it is rarely innovative; instead, it can take decades for new approaches to be accepted and spread.

Representative democracy has structural issues with innovations. The majority of the voters aren’t able to judge the quality of other people’s ideas because of lack of expertise:

“Very smart ideas are going to be hard for people to adopt, because most people don’t have the sophistication to recognize how good an idea is.”

I’m currently reading The The Social Innovation Imperative: Create Winning Products, Services, and Programs that Solve Society’s Most Pressing Challenges by Sandra M. Bates. In the book Bates argues that the time-tested tools found to be effective in corporate innovation should be spread to the social innovation sphere, too. At the core of this paradigm shift is the division to idea-based and needs-based innovation. Instead of trying to solve society’s wicked problems by coming up with lots of ideas which are then accepted or not accepted by the free market of politics, the innovating process should be needs-based. This means that the situation should first be studied and described as clearly as possible. This includes e.g. identifying the members of the social ecosystem, studying the social and cultural context and reviewing environmental and human constraints.

The book goes on into more detail from there (also covering practical innovation tools such as idea cards), but I find this initial phase key to the social innovation process. Many issues in the society (such as financing, environment or health care) are in a continuous crisis since no baseline review has been conducted which would seek to create as clear picture of the current situation as possible – so that everyone is talking about the same subject.

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Politics needs to be rebuilt so that it supports needs-based social innovation. This means it requires effective coordination rather than strong hierarchial leadership. Let’s approach this through a practical example: the US health care crisis. Coordination in this case can mean:

1. Establish an official, multilateral and inclusive project to study the situation, conduct research and give policy suggestions.
2. Create a website which features blog posts from the key actors: politicians, authorities and doctors. The message doesn’t have to be uniform, as the point is also to openly discuss the topic and resolve conflicts. There can be different series of posts under which the debate is conducted.
3. Use the website to collect research, and discuss the research in the blog posts. The idea is that all basic information is available that needs to be internalized by the participants.
4. Commenting is open to anyone, but the comments are moderated to make sure the discussion stays on topic.

One website makes sure that there is one body that is aware of the state of the discussion, which makes it easier to later put new approaches and innovations into practice. Inclusiveness ensures social legitimacy, since no-one can claim that the project is only for the elites. Gathering and displaying research openly makes the discussion accessible to anyone. The steps can be summed up as:

1. Create a platform for discussion and coordination of efforts
2. Include all stakeholders in the process
3. Direct the discourse with research

I call this the social project approach. Perhaps it could be thought as a primary innovation in the social innovation sphere?

My Tips for the Greek Crisis

• Start a democratic dialogue that seeks to dismantle hierarchial power relations inside the country and between Greece, EU and IMF
• Seek to understand the difference between a problem and a paradox:

Each human being has to see that the very feelings and ideas which he is inclined to identify with his “innermost self” are involved in paradox, through and through. A mind caught in such paradox will inevitably fall into self-deception, aimed at the creation of illusions that appear to relieve the pain resulting from the attempt to go on with self-contradiction. Such a mind cannot possibly see the relationships of the individual and of society as they really are. And thus, the attempt to “solve one’s own problems” and “to solve the problems of society” will in fact be found to propagate the existing confusion, rather than to help bring it to an end.

• Start building a political climate that is based on justice, trust and honesty and guided by “what is good”. This requires a philosophical, “unpolitical” approach towards politics already stated by Socrates/Plato:

You must contrive for your future rulers another and a better life than that of a ruler, and then you may have a well-ordered State; for only in the State which offers this, will they rule who are truly rich, not in silver and gold, but in virtue and wisdom, which are the true blessings of life. Whereas if they go to the administration of public affairs, poor and hungering after the’ own private advantage, thinking that hence they are to snatch the chief good, order there can never be; for they will be fighting about office, and the civil and domestic broils which thus arise will be the ruin of the rulers themselves and of the whole State.

Who understands the economy?

Mitt Romney understands the economy.

This quote keeps coming up in the discussion concerning the Republican party primaries. While the statement mostly symbolizes the attempt to unite the party against candidate Romney, we should anyway be interested in the truth value of this statement. So the question is: How can the economy be understood? Who can understand it?

The main problem with contemporary politics is that it doesn’t really seek to understand anything.

First off, you cannot understand the economy if you don’t understand the society. Economy isn’t something separate from “the government” (the social bureaucracy) but tightly intertwined with politics and everyday lives of people. Secondly, the economy is a feature of the organism of human society, so understanding organisms and emergence in them is the key issue in “understanding economy”.

The main problem with contemporary politics is that it doesn’t really seek to understand anything, but political action is haphazard, based on being hopeful while using abstract language. Rather than discussing “what is a good job, how are they created and should everyone have one”, the debate is on whether “jobs are created or destroyed”, as if “a job” is something self-evidently good and desirable and destruction of jobs is something unquestionably evil.

The basic nature of bureaucracy is that it expels creative thinking in order to enforce the hierarchial power structure. This is why the people who understand the economy as a phenomenon (such as economic sociologists and social scientists) don’t end up working in the bureaucracy. All bureaucracies are fundamentally against innovation and for stability – this means they face enormous problems in the era of chaotic economy, as creative and effective economic policies cannot possibly emerge inside the system.

So from the government point of view no-one understands or is able to understand the economy. It has to be this way, because if someone did understand it, it would instantly start tearing down bureaucratic power structures. This would create democratic discourses in which all that matters is the truth. In such discourses, there is no room for the small-minded power play that plagues contemporary politics.

On Recuperation

All human behavior needs to be incorporated to the existing social structure on some time frame. Large-scale societies increasingly struggle with how deviant behavior and discourses can be effectively labelled. In the current bureaucratic framework criminalization is the most fundamental tool of this process; however, as the multitude of conflicting discourses have exploded, behavior such as copyright infringement has become very difficult to label sustainably as criminal.

In the context of more regular discourses such as politics and art this process can be described as recuperation in the spirit of Guy Debord:

Recuperation, in the sociological sense, is the process by which politically radical ideas and images are commodified and incorporated within a mainstream society and, thus, become interpreted through a more socially acceptable or conventional perspective. More broadly, it may refer to the appropriation of any subversive works or ideas by mainstream media or culture.

In art this takeover process takes place in music and theater reviews. Imagine a blues singer who sings about everyday racism as a black man. When the singer’s new album is released, it has to be incorporated to the existing interpretative frameworks. If the idea that “singing about racism is banal” is currently dominant, the album gets labeled “another boring lament, haven’t we all heard this before?”. On the other hand, if a theater piece describes life in the Soviet Union, it is labeled “glorifying history” if the current trend in the society in question is to reject historical review or contemplation. Studying book and art reviews and even newspaper columns can reveal much about the prevailing cultural atmosphere, as they are often the main tool of recuperation in the society of the late modernity.

Everything that is said and done needs to be integrated to the existing social order and understanding.

In politics (in the framework of social bureaucracy) recuperation occurs in using word labels that have the power to categorize, make harmless, create divide and boost our party against the other. Americans probably recall the incorporation of the Occupy Wall Street movement to the mainstream discourses in fall 2011 and labeling the movement as leftist, close to the Democratic party and “the tea party movement of the left” – trying to forcefully impose negative image was an essential part of the takeover process.

The cover of New York Post on November 3, 2011. The camp was removed on November 15.

Imagine this from another perspective. What kind of effect does it have, for example, that Jon Stewart of the Daily Show is described as a comedian rather than “sharp-sighted social critic”? What happens in the society when the text of Greg Smith, the former Goldman Sachs employee, is described like this: “Did it come to anyone as surprise that banks focus on making money?”

When you read those last two sentences, did you feel insisting that Stewart is just a comedian or Smith’s accusations “didn’t surprise anyone”? If so, then you saw recuperation at work: everything that is said and done needs to be integrated to the existing social order and understanding. The bigger the situation is (and thus, the greater the threat), the more aggressive framing is needed.

Public Deliberation Model

This model approaches all public deliberation as a process between the individual and the collective. Both of them affect each other through language, and also reality affects them when information from observation and research reaches them.

When the deliberation has continued long enough, the collective reaches common understanding (“truth”) on “what should be done”, acts and alters reality.

While Habermas approaches this as some kind of “ideal situation”, it actually is how politics has always worked. The difference is that the relationship and emphasis between individual and collective has fluctuated, and today there is lots of information, research and communication. Also social structures (such as the economy) have gotten bigger and more complex.

“I am holy, look at me”

In the core of holiness is the feeling of awe – this feeling both creates and reinforces the social structure.

When it comes to “manufacturing” holiness, religion is not that different from politics. While religion builds holiness on relics and tall buildings, politics trusts in black suits and bodyguards with a serious face.

The secular society concentrates its holiness in commodities and consuming. Can you think of anything more convenient than holiness that can be bought?

On Religion

Santorum: JFK speech ‘makes me want to throw up’
Republican presidential candidate Rick Santorum says the notion of religion not playing role in politics “makes me want to throw up.”

“To say that people of faith have no role in the public square? You bet that makes me want to throw up. What kind of country do we live in where only people of non-faith can come in the public square and make their case? That makes me throw up. And that should make every American [throw up],” Santorum said on ABC’s “This Week.”

The former Pennsylvania senator was referring to John F. Kennedy’s famous 1960 speech that argued religion should be separate from politics. “I don’t believe in an America where the separation between church and state is absolute,” he said.
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Rick Santorum’s presidential run may well mark an era of transformation for religion in the contemporary society.

Limiting religion to the private sphere is the favorite project of the uninitiated mind; when the nature of religion cannot be understood – it seems to defy the natural laws of reasoning – the role of religion must be restrained to make sure no major damage gets done.

Religion has many faces, of course – being the elephant examined by blind men. The most visible side in the contemporary society is the moral structure (which, however, has been effectively deconstructed by the sexual abuse cases), but the descriptions of 1) God, and 2) creation is what baffles the consciousness most. Nonetheless, confusion shouldn’t be mixed with irrelevance. Quite the contrary: how we define God and creation has all the significance for political matters.

Attempting to frame God as unpolitical is a little amusing, since historically speaking God is the most political figure: claiming to be of divine origin has been the usual means to legitimize dominance ever since the times of Amun. The power of religion as a sort of opiate during the various phases of cultural evolution shouldn’t be depreciated either, as talking to God is usually much more joyful than participating in human affairs. Even Siddhārtha Gautama, after seeing what “life in this world” was about, abandoned his luxurious life for meditation and enlightenment.

At this point the duality of religion and politics becomes evident. They cannot be separated, because religion describes what politics is about – creation by man – and politics sets the playfield for religion. They are two separate worlds, inherently tied together under the concept of human affairs. So, why not go for a fruitful dialogue between them?

Such endeavour might just enable both sides to learn something.

On public justification

Luc Boltanski and Laurent Thévenot have developed their justification theory to explore the various ways claims are morally justified in the publicity. I quote Wikipedia:

In their book On Justification: The Economies of Worth (2006, French original: 1991), Boltanski and Thévenot argue that modern societies are not a single social order but an interweaving of multiple orders. Boltanski and Thévenot identify six “orders of worth” or “economies of worth,” systematic and coherent principles of evaluation. These multiple orders (civic, market, inspired, fame, industrial, domestic [and ecological]) are not associated with particular social domains but coexist in the same social space—as Boltanski and Thévenot persuasively demonstrate through a content analysis of texts used in managerial training in contemporary French corporations.

Based on this framework, Eeva Luhtakallio and Tuomas Ylä-Anttila have developed a research method, analysis of public justification that focuses on exploring these justifications.

Inspired by the orders, I started imaging them on the layer approach. I understand them as the intertwined spheres of society of the late modernity that have their own value systems that are referred to in the public discourse.

Of Grand Politics

The most important requirement for democracy to emerge is that all participants can recognize the possibility of truth. This makes it possible for the political discourse to get over the argument stage, in which there are no values to guide the process and so all opinions are considered equal – no matter if they are self-formed thoughts or just learned phrases that are known to satisfy the audience.

The late modern society is indeed characterized by this endless war that assumes that there are no values shared by everyone. In a sense this is true: disagreement is structurally built by left-right divides, elections that concentrate on finding the winner (never mind the actual decisions) and individuals who need to define who they are by defining who they are not. In this war, truth is always sacrificed for power.

The answer to this dilemma is to leave petty power politics in the name of Nietzschean Grand Politics: a process of building a new cultural edifice, a new style of human dwelling whose foundations will no longer be solid earth because it is built ‘right into the sea’.

Grand Politics is limitless and placeless; all small-minded debates about the powers of this or that political institution are abandoned in the name of greater philosophical consideration. In Grand Politics, purpose becomes a central part of the debate.