Conclusion — A Choice of Puddings
‘To be truly radical today is to make hope possible, not despair convincing.’
- Raymond Williams
‘I arise in the morning torn between a desire to improve the world and a desire to enjoy the world. This makes it difficult to plan the day.’
- E.B. White
‘So what is the point of Utopia? The point is this: To keep walking.’
- Eduardo Galeano
‘If success or failure of this planet depended on how I am and what I do […] HOW WOULD I BE? WHAT WOULD I DO?.’
- R. Buckminster Fuller
It’s late on a Friday evening and I am lying exhausted on the sofa. Rain is falling heavily outside the window. Dad is at his desk, working on his stamp collection.
The doorbell rings. I am off the sofa and away to the front door in an instant. It’s very unusual for us to have visitors unannounced. At the door is a friend of mine, Kimberley. She has a bicycle loaded with bags and is soaked to the skin. Hardly before we can speak, Dad has appeared behind me in the doorway. He seems terrified, and staggers back into the house. Since Dad has met Kimberley on a few occasions before, this is a bit puzzling, but perhaps he has not recognised her, or it is just the surprise of someone showing up late at night.
I usher Kimberley into the house and we unload her bike and put stuff out to dry on radiators. Then I set about making some food. Meanwhile, Dad has barricaded himself into his bedroom. Despite the lure of wine and extra biscuits, I cannot tempt him out to join us. Then the sofa is folded down for Kimberley and I see Dad into his own bed. He still wants his door closed, so I leave mine open so I can hear him if he needs help during the night.
The next day, Saturday, I suggest to Kimberley we head into Dundee, where the artists’ group have organised an event. I leave breakfast out for Dad, who still refuses to leave his room until Kimberley has gone. Then I leave a lunch for him in the fridge and set off to cycle with Kimberley into Dundee. Luckily the rain has stopped.
The event the artists have organised involves carrying a large length of rope through the streets of Dundee. We start off at a jute museum and then meander through the city, stopping at a few venues along the way.
The third stop is outside one of Dundee’s theatres. Here, we set the rope down and split up into pairs. One out of each pair is blindfolded and must be led by the other across the rather complicated front entrance grounds of the theatre. I am one who is blindfolded. It is something of a perilous trip. For genuinely blind people, I can imagine their guide dogs tendering their resignations. But with careful guidance, the journey is completed. Then we pick up the rope again and carry on our way.
After a few more stops, we arrive at last beside the River Tay. The tide is out and there are mud-flats stretching out from the shoreline. One of the artists, who is working on projects related to water, climbs down the stone steps to try to collect some of the river water in a test tube. When she steps off the last step, onto the mud, she immediately sinks to her knees. She is only a short woman, so there isn’t much left of her before things could get tricky. We are all immediately alert, and I think that perhaps the rope is about to find a very practical use! Luckily though, a sample of water is collected and the woman returns safely up the steps. The water in the test tube is filthy.
We settle again and at this point two children are approaching, heading for the nearby swimming pool. The leader of the artists’ group speaks to them. They tell him that they come from one of the housing estates in the suburbs of Dundee. They say that they feel safe coming into the centre of town together, but there are other parts of the city where they do not feel safe. It strikes me as remarkable that such frank answers to these questions should have been given to a strange group of people sitting with a coil of rope.
What was the rope walk really about, you may be wondering? Well, like many artworks, it leaves us open to bring our own interpretations, and sometimes these are can add to or diverge from the original intent of the artist. Some might not like this prospect, but for others part of the gift of art is that it invites new ideas and new imaginings as it goes along. For what it is worth then, here’s my interpretation.
As perhaps you’ll be aware, Dundee was once famous for its manufacturing industry based around jute. So we started off in a jute museum, which had, in fact, once been a jute mill. The journey through the town was, if you like, the unravelling of the material economy of jute, back to its original source — the river that brought the boats in with the raw materials from Asia, and of course, also back to its original source in nature herself. On the way, whilst Dundee’s material economy unwinds, its cultural economy winds up. We stop off at university buildings, theatres, an arts centre and a science centre. And then our main stop, with the blindfolds. There is a side to our economies that remains hidden — and as such, we are blind to it — and this is care. All of our economies are supported by this, but it is, in turn, unacknowledged. We might even look at where we stopped for our blindfolded walk. Perhaps it tells us that the way to bring to society’s attention its reliance on care is through narrative — through stories. So the theatre, and the arts generally, are a potential source.
What made whole the event so memorable for me was that it was sandwiched between two examples of fear — my Dad’s fear of a stranger arriving late at night and the children’s fear about going into certain parts of the city. Both relate back to care. If you are a carer you will know that we can only do our best. An old person often has irrational fears that we might try to assuage, but might fail to completely calm. For children, perhaps there is more we can achieve. What better way for us to think about our towns and cities than to see them as places where children need to feel safe. And if we prepare them properly for life then they will grow in courage and strength into adulthood and then take on those responsibilities of care themselves.
Kimberley set off to visit other friends after the rope day and I went home to get Dad his dinner. After a few days more, he said to me one evening, ‘Kimberley’s really quite a nice girl, isn’t she?’
Way back in the Introduction, I raised three concerns. Where is the vision for a better world? Why are people’s visions for a good life so premised on wealth and materialism? Why is politics seemingly so polarised, with neither right nor left addressing the concerns of ordinary people? To these questions, I added a personal concern. Do I really trust people? Do I trust others enough to encourage deliberative democracy, where ordinary people have a say in how our society is run? As we reach the end of our pudding journey, it’s time to review where things stand with those concerns and questions raised at the start.
Where is the Vision?
I hope I’ve convinced the reader that there’s a lot of vision out there. We have studied the utopias that are alive and well in our society right now and named them with the three flavours, Privatopia, Cornucopia and Ecotopia. We could summarise the positive contributions of these utopias as follows: Privatopia — freedom, independence, autonomy. Cornucopia — positivity, hope, abundance. Ecotopia — recognising that we are all one eco-system with the Earth and the wider universe. Drawing on these positive narratives and collecting ideas from many sources, this book puts forward a new story. It’s a vision for a prosperous and happy future, but also, I believe, one that is pragmatic and most of all, based on the active participation of all of us. A utopia is built together, or otherwise it is a utopia for just a few and a dystopia for the rest. Participation is the key. We could add trust here, as the personal narrative of this book has tried to show. And our consideration of the commons suggests that fairness — equity — is also critical. So the three big things that form the vision of a new story are participation, equity and trust.
The Good Life
Why do people envisage a good life as consisting of financial wealth and material possessions? We explored this question through the dominant culture described as Privatopia. Some economic theories suggest that we are pleasure-seeking machines. The sources of pleasure on offer though are of the acquisitive, material kind — the substitute pleasures of stuff. We need the stuff for our sense of who we are, because relationships have suffered and we have been driven towards seeking self-actualisation and self-esteem as ends in themselves. But this reliance on stuff as a prop for the ego is a fragile arrangement at best. It leaves people stressed and defensive, narcissistic and vulnerable. Instead of ego plus stuff, I have suggested the alternative pleasures of beauty, silence, slowness, peace, grace, kindness, conversation, humour, art, play, celebration and carnival. That’s the offer of our new story. I’ve suggested that many people secretly long for these ‘different pleasures’ and a few are forging ways to realise them, through changed lifestyles. So the contrast with the materialist ‘good life’ need not be austerity. It might be termed ‘frugality’ instead — living within our means — or it might be termed ‘simplicity’ — a term we took up in Chapter 11. There we saw that simplicity represents an abundance of a different sort — meeting genuine needs in beautiful ways.
Polarised Politics
We’ve seen that the word politics has its roots in polis and polity, so is ‘of the people’. By contrast, the state, and ‘statecraft’ are the troubling aspects of governance that should be our real worry. There is not actually much true politics going on. Instead, there are states threatening each other with nuclear annihilation, conducting trade wars and condoning the actions of big business, which is trampling on human rights and destroying natural ecosystems with little or no accountability. Meanwhile, ordinary people, and true politics, actually have very little say. Party politics — partisanship, the politics of the state — is the danger then, and not the true politics of the people. So maybe this section should be called ‘polarised statism’. We will stay with the more familiar labels, but I hope the reader will keep in mind that the issues addressed here may well be there because of statism and would largely become irrelevant if we had a true polity and a real politics.
Why has politics become so polarised and why do politicians on both left and right not seem to be addressing the concerns of people they claim to represent? This is probably the most complex problem to answer. We have described it partly as the dichotomy between left-wing equality and right-wing freedom. On the left there are two main concerns. The left still looks for equality of outcome. But, equality of outcome, in the main, is not seen as fair. People are generally more inclined towards ‘proportionality’, in other words, society rewards a person according to how much they contribute. Alongside this, the left still continues its valorisation of the underdog, which some would claim is, in reality, a contempt for those whom they perceive as holding power. It used to be greedy fat-cat capitalists, but now it tends to be capitalism itself and its most visible protagonists, the big corporations, the neo-liberal elite and the ‘paternalist’ hierarchies of society — real or perceived. To make matters worse, ‘the left’ in the UK (I use the quote marks advisedly) has been off on a thirty year bender where it embraced the neo-liberalism of the right and tried to mix it with a liberal internationalist and intersectionalist stance. No wonder we’re confused. No wonder at the rise of populist right-wing parties that take away this conflicting narrative. Another rather awkward aspect of the left is picked up by Darren McGarvey (Poverty Safari). He says: ‘I no longer believe poverty is an issue our politicians can solve. Not because they don’t want to, but because an honest conversation about what it will require is too politically difficult to have. If those in power were straight about what addressing these problems would require it would shock us to the core. And not merely because of the magnitude of the task facing society, which is unconscionable in scale, but also because there is a certain level of personal responsibility involved that’s become taboo to acknowledge on the left. For all the demand we in left-wing circles feign for fundamental change and radical action, people get a bit touchy and offended when you suggest that might apply to them too…’
McGarvey goes on: ‘In Scotland, the poverty industry is dominated by a left-leaning, liberal, middle-class. Because this specialist class is so genuinely well-intentioned when it comes to the interests of the people in deprived communities, they get a bit confused, upset and offended when those very people begin expressing anger towards them. It never occurs to them, because they see themselves as the good guys, that the people they purport to serve may, in fact, perceive them as chancers, careerists, or charlatans. They regard themselves as champions of the underclass and therefore, should any poor folk begin to get their own ideas, or, God forbid, rebel against the poverty experts, the blame is laid at the door of the complainants for misunderstanding what is going on. In fact, these types are often so certain of their own insight and virtue that they won’t think twice before describing working class people they purport to represent as engaging in self-harm if they vote for a right-wing political party. Not only does this broadcast a worrying lack of self-awareness regarding why many are turning away from the left, but it also implies that those who no longer see the value in our ideas or methods are not just ungrateful, but stupid.’
From these comments we can appreciate the paternalism that can come from supposedly left-leaning and sympathetic sources and as McGarvey himself observes, how poorer people may be driven towards ‘populist’ right-wing parties. If they can express simple messages then such ‘populist’ parties (and we will unwrap this term a bit more below) have a broad appeal. The generally tougher and more nationalistic stance of such parties further adds to their appeal. In times of trouble — economic and climatic — tough policies offer a sense of security. We can also note (from Jonathan Haidt — The Righteous Mind) that the left traditionally only tap into a few aspects of the ethics that people hold together in life — namely care and fairness — the basis, as we have seen, of our emotional economy. The right take on a much broader range, to include liberty, loyalty, authority and sanctity.
The problems on the right are even more difficult to unravel. One issue plays on something often heard on the left. Leftists sometimes claim to be ‘citizens of the world’. In other words, the issue of achieving equality of outcome is going to be played out across all nations. But this internationalism is probably a step too far for many folk. Perhaps you felt a deep sense of unease about the suggestions of tariff-free trade and open borders given in this work? One of the problems of the right is that it can take the polar opposite view. As humans, we identify most with groups — communities, religions, ethnicities, nations. The left can sometimes drive too far towards dissolving all differences; the right can narrow the group identity too much. One aspect of this is to focus only on individuals — so no group at all. It encourages the kind of self-actualisation that is the hallmark of Privatopia. It favours equality of opportunity over equality of outcome. The middle-class right are all for the individualism and the free-markets of neo-liberalism. (Remember Mrs. Thatcher’s famous quote about there being no community.) The other aspect of course is nationalism. The working class right tends towards the fierce group identity of nationalism, with results that are as damaging as the autonomous self-actualising mindset of the middle-class right that we mentioned above. Conservatives and republicans are the more neo-liberal, which seems to be a contradiction in terms. What are the links? Perhaps the most obvious one is through commodification. There is a ‘tradition’, unfortunately, of colonisation, of enclosure and therefore exploitation, that monetises the commons and ultimately monetises our relationships with others. This is the status quo that conservatives seem to want to maintain — they wish to ‘conserve’ the exploitation of nature and the appropriation of the commons — and neo-liberalism is just a further way to achieve this. But we should note that the term ‘conservative’ — with a big or a small C — is a very broad term (as indeed is ‘Republican’). So this is all something of a moveable feast. As we saw earlier in the book, the right might get around to conserving things that really do matter to us — there’s could be a broad church.
The hard-right sometimes use the term ‘cultural Marxism’ when referring to left-wing policies. Meanwhile, the left deny that any such phenomenon actually exists. It does however have a meaning of sorts. The idea is that Marxism saw an underdog — the proletariat — and sought their emancipation. Left-wingers arguably take up this idea and apply it to many different situations, seeing an oppressed underdog that needs freedom and equality — such as women, immigrants, homosexuals, and so on. The left have a term — ‘intersectionality’ — which touches on all these issues, so we could say that cultural Marxism is just a more pejorative term for the aims of intersectionality. By opposing cultural Marxism though, the hard-right reveal where their concerns and fears reside. Think back to Nick Griffin at the start of Chapter 6.
Cultural Marxism is sometimes conflated with post-modernism (the idea that there is no ‘grand narrative’ explaining the world, but rather a series of alternative narratives — each of which could be considered legitimate). Jordan Peterson is especially prone to making this connection. There is a link of sorts — the minorities favoured by intersectionality can hold alternative narratives and be validated in this by post-modern thought. But really, it’s a bit of a stretch.
Meanwhile, the left often use a term described as the ‘red pill meme’ — a reference to The Matrix series of films — in which ‘taking the pill’ is the means of revealing the true nature of the world. In the left-wing scenario, taking the pill reveals the neo-liberal hegemony of our culture. But this suggests there is some kind of elite conspiracy to remain in power. Recently the red pill meme has come to be adopted for many other kinds of ‘seeing the truth’, so the term is used now as much by the right as the left. The Red Pill is also the title of a film about a feminist discovering the men’s rights activist movement.
I hope it is clear in this work that I am very much in favour of identity that is derived from place — thus communities, neighbourhoods, cities, counties and nations need strong identities. This might be seen as potentially leading to an inward-looking and an exclusive attitude that, in turn, might reflect the more negative side of nationalism. But the critical difference is that this strong affiliation is about patriotism, not nationalism. Patriotism is place-centred. The patriot celebrates the place to which they belong and seeks to honour it, improve it, respect it. Most critically, the patriot welcomes the stranger, the visitor, the newcomer. The patriot can afford this generosity because patriotism is about having something to give not something to defend. It is generous, welcoming, kind, considerate. Those who are strangers and visitors are not just ‘tolerated’, far less, abused. Rather they are treated with even greater care and respect. Patriotism celebrates place by celebrating others and sees that we share more similarities than differences.
But consider this quote from Karen Stenner on celebrating sameness and difference:
‘All the evidence indicates that exposure to difference, talking about difference and applauding difference — the hallmarks of liberal democracy — are the surest ways to aggravate those who are innately intolerant… Paradoxically, then, it would seem that we can best limit intolerance of difference by parading, talking about, and applauding our sameness… Ultimately nothing inspires greater tolerance from the intolerant than an abundance of common and unifying beliefs, practices, rituals, institutions and processes.’ (Karen Stenner — The Authoritarian Dynamic, as quoted by Jonathan Haidt — The Righteous Mind)
After quoting from Stenner, Haidt continues:
‘The small scale and particular is what matters to most people. Politics should build these up where possible from the affections that people have for their localities. (It should perhaps start with naming places with their historic and popular names. According to Maurice Glassman a Labour party survey discovered that about two thirds of the population misname the places they live, having failed to keep up with multiple local government reorganisations.)’ (Jonathan Haidt — The Righteous Mind.) The difference between nationalism and patriotism takes a bit of explaining, and it is not an argument that is easy to present, especially to people who may be burdened by austerity and looking for a scapegoat. Unfortunately nationalists will tend to describe themselves as patriots, so we need to be watching their actions to see if these really square with their words.
We mentioned populism above and it is helpful to consider the meaning of populism here. The term means gaining popular appeal by means of identifying some external threat. Often that threat is perceived as coming from some minority of the population. Populism channels resentment against this perceived cause of the nation’s problems. We can see how this links to the right-wing nationalist parties, where it may be immigrants or some other section of society who are demonised in order to gain popular appeal. But, although it is not commonly done, we could accept populism as equally applying to left-wing politics, where it is the 1%, big corporations, or the ‘neo-liberal hegemony’ that are demonised in order to try to appeal to the majority of the population. So, nationalism, patriotism and populism are slippery terms, and it may be that within a few years of writing these words their meanings will have shifted. David Goodhart (The Road to Somewhere) speaks of ‘Somewheres’ and ‘Anywheres’ and suggests there are left-wing and right-wing versions of both. In Goodhart’s terms, our left-wing parties are too much ‘anywhere’ at the moment (internationalist and intersectional) whilst the right-wing populist parties are too much ‘somewhere’ — too much rooted in group, tribal and national identities to adjust to multi-cultural societies. But I hope this essential distinction is clear — we can be united with others in affection, or we can be united with a few and exclude others — united therefore in hate. It is in groups that we find our strength. It is in groups that we can celebrate all that we share as people living in a particular place. We honour ourselves by honouring and respecting others. We serve our town, city and nation best by making it a place where everyone feels safe.
Some have advanced the opinion that two of the issues identified above are linked. It is suggested that the paranoid and aggressive nationalism is deliberately stoked up by the right as a distraction from the actions of the big corporations and the tiny elite of the super-rich. Like the left-wing red pill, it verges on a conspiracy theory. Whatever the truth, or otherwise, of this suspicion, I feel we must treat the nationalism of the right with special care. Trying to bring these things together — in terms of left and right — consider this quote from Jonathan Haidt: ‘Now imagine society not as an agreement amongst individuals [as with John Stuart Mill] but as something that emerged organically over time as people found ways of living together, binding themselves to each other, suppressing each other’s selfishness, and punishing deviants and free-riders who eternally threaten to undermine co-operative groups. The basic social unit is not the individual, it is the hierarchically structured family, which serves as a model for other institutions. Individuals in such societies are born into strong and constraining relationships that profoundly limit their autonomy. The patron saint of this more binding moral system is the sociologist Emile Durkheim, who warned of the dangers of anomie (normlessness) and wrote, in 1897, that “man cannot become attached to higher aims and submit to a rule if he sees nothing above him to which he belongs. To free himself from all social pressure is to abandon himself and demoralise him.” A Durkheimian society at its best would be a stable network composed of many nested and overlapping groups that socialise, reshape, and care for individuals who, if left to their own devices, would pursue shallow, carnal and selfish pleasures. A Durkheimian society would value self-control over self-expression, duty over rights, and loyalty to one’s groups over concern for out-groups.’ (Jonathan Haidt — The Righteous Mind.) Conservatives tend to fear change — in case things get worse instead of better — and prefer the authority and power of the state over the liberty of the individual, so we can see how the Durkheimian society might have its appeal. (Although, as we saw in the discussion of neo-liberalism in Chapter 7, right-wing governments will usually claim they are seeking the exact opposite of this — a limited state and maximum personal freedom. So I suppose we should see this as referring to a conservative mindset, with a small c.) The right of politics are ‘conservative’ about human nature — about our ability to change and to achieve personal autonomy. Therefore leadership, authority and control are important elements in their mindset. The reader may well agree with this stance, of course, and see this as pragmatic rather than overly-controlling or patronising. But most of this book relies on a more positive view of human nature and our ability to change for the better. So this book is suggesting ways to live and govern ourselves that would move us beyond the polarisation of politics. In particular, we brought in the social commons (re-making) as the true base of society. This aspect of our society is already there, but it is suppressed and disregarded, and to some extent the mindset of consumer capitalism has polluted our own individual mindsets and means that we just don’t see the underlying and neglected realities. So it is changes to people that will bring about real change in society. We need kindness and compassion and to look out for our communities and care for the planet. It is narratives, above all, that will foster such change. It is accountability — where we endeavour to retain a vision of heroism for ourselves — that is the driving force. Governance systems such as Sociocracy and Parapolity reinforce this, and offer us an escape from polarised politics. These systems, as we have seen, are bottom-up systems — they rely on the local and the small-scale. We can have both the freedom of the right and the equity of the left. The freedom is the ‘freedom to’ of forging our own stories as individuals and as communities. The equality of the left is through our understanding of the commons.
Three Utopias
We set out on this journey by considering three types of utopia — Privatopia, Cornucopia and Ecotopia. Referring back to the three utopias, we observed that the current culture of consumer capitalism is best described as a Privatopia. In Privatopia the system is accepted, either grudgingly or enthusiastically, as inevitable. Everyone looks out for their own best interests and compassion does not extend very much beyond one’s own family. Whilst concerns over environmental destruction may be voiced, in Privatopia it is seen as something governments need to sort out. People pay lip service to this need, but if it is suggested that citizens may need to make changes or sacrifices in order to protect the environment then this is met with serious opposition.
Within Privatopia are the seeds of a future utopia called Cornucopia. Cornucopia more or less agrees that current lifestyles should not need to be compromised. The Cornucopians will point to a steady improvement in all aspects of human life over the last two centuries or so, and suggest that there is no reason why this should not continue into the future. The Cornucopians downplay the accelerating problems with the climate and habitat destruction and species extinction. A better future (at least for humans) is promised, mainly by way of technology.
Ecotopia, by contrast, is a vision that takes the environment much more seriously. Ecotopia covers a broad range of beliefs. We noted that sometimes a better world is thought to come about because of the collapse of capitalism. Or it may be that future large-scale disruption to the climate forces us towards a more sustainable existence. The speed of such changes is critical and it has to be said that rapid changes of the sort envisaged by some Ecotopians are likely to bring chaos to the world rather than the harmonious new existence that they sometimes promise. A slower, smoother transition, however, can only be welcomed and would be more manageable.
Ecotopians don’t often suggest political change to sit alongside the necessary lifestyle and business changes that would be needed to bring about an ecologically-sustainable world.
We’ve seen that Privatopia and