Indra Adnan, New Integrity
Appreciated Alessandro Buonfino and Geoff Mulgan’s piece on Britain’s ‘quiet crisis of unhappiness’ in the Guardian today.Although it was relentlessly miserable, attributing loneliness, the prevalence of anger and distrust to the weakening of social bonds within families and local communities, it did suggest there were courses of action the government and other institutional powers could take to ameliorate the situation – from improved design to promoting new relationships between services. Missing from this article is a sense of positive development – any suggestion that our society may be evolving rather than just changing.
Two clichés need to be addressed here: one, an image we hold on to of the camaraderie of the past which leads us to yearn for a ‘return to’ something that we lost. Two, an indiscriminate rejection of individualism, causing us to confuse any efforts people make on their own behalf with selfishness. These two add up to a sort of impotence. On the first, we will never re-capture the post-war mutuality. It arose directly from shared crisis and collective re-building, a willingness to put difference aside at a time of continuing grief and a future we all had to pull our weight in. We don’t have those circumstances now. (Or do we? See James Lovelock’s description of the need to pull together now in the face of a vengeful Gaia).
On the second, throughout the period of decline that the Young’sters write about, there has been a steady rise of interest in self-help practices, evidenced by the huge growth in the market for books that help us to understand and motivate ourselves better. This development has been almost universally derided by the media, caricatured in TV shows like Absolutely Fabulous or just routinely dismissed by ‘serious’ professionals who challenge their scientific foundations. Yet, these books have helped to bring about a new psychological, emotional and spiritual awareness amongst ordinary people that can only be useful when tackling the very complex problems of our current social malaise. At the same time, we have developed tools of connectivity and agency (that we have ‘selfishly’ bought and skilled ourselves up in) that have allowed us to tear down barriers of involvement across the globe. What will arise from this generation of people who are currently living lives that contradict and frustrate their heightened sensibilities – limit their creativity, sap their energy, deprive them of their families?
Buonfino and Mulgan talk about ‘putting (it) right’ as if we already know what it is that we are aiming to create in our 21C society. Maybe there is no fully working model of society that we can aspire to: maybe the changes that need to occur now are beyond our ability to imagine – but that doesn’t mean we should hold back. Let’s not invest endlessly in new ways to preserve the status quo – let’s change the rhetoric to a common search for a new way of life that delivers more of our needs.
Great comment, and I entirely agree. Only thing I would add (because you don't seem to mention it) is that Mulgan & co are right about the necessity of finding new ways to 'do things together'. I liked the photo image of the street party at the top of the Guardian piece - which points towards the carnivalesque and the festival as ways wherein people can have some kind of unity-in-difference (and can contribute something from those 'heightened sensibilities' you point to). We need new forms of dynamic sociability, not static old nostalgias for 'solidarities' that were forged out of the brutality of war and heavy industry. It's a real opportunity for, literally, social innovation. As you've posted before, maybe Live8 - for all its flaws - is the experience of sociability that feels most natural, in a globally connected world?
Posted by: pat kane | January 18, 2006 at 08:43 PM