Imagining Brexit in 2010? Absolutely Zeke...
Drafted in 2010, and presented unamended
I may march fearlessly into the future if I am confident it
will be better than the past. Whither such
confidence? Perhaps I have simply been lucky thus far and the story that I tell
myself of life is imbued with positive expectation. Perhaps I am a member of a class that has
control over the means of production, or a profession that has erected barriers
to entry, and I envisage my control continuing.
Perhaps I live in a society in which material and cultural changes have
within living or recent memory lifted my forebears from penury and ignorance,
so I find it straightforward to believe that this will persist into the
future. Perhaps I have been inculcated
with the Enlightenment orthodoxy of ‘progress’; or I am persuaded that neo-Darwinian
processes of change, whether smooth or punctuated, are inevitable and if met
with positive intent will culminate in positive outcomes; or perhaps the tenets
of my faith – Christian, Muslim, Confucian, Buddhist - supply a psychological
shield of hope or serenity.
In the absence of such confidence, if I do not have these
various protections, I am fearful of change and I shall resist it if I
can. I foresee the loss of income or
status: I shall fight for my job. I
dread the collapse of my community: I shall march with my brothers and sisters
to defend our tradition. I have lost
faith in my leaders – their gods and their policies – and I shall blame
immigrants, I shall seek vengeance, I shall use violence.
Afraid of the future, unable or unwilling to countenance
changes to my life that are beyond my control, I shall hunker down, I shall
look the other way, I shall take refuge in trinkets and mysticism. I shall, like a child, hope that it will all
go away. My resistance shall, if all
else fails, be passive and stubborn.
Entreaties may be made to me. I do not trust them. These people – these politicians, these
scientists, these journalists – the people have lied to me before. Me, my family, my neighbourhood, my class –
we have suffered before. You – the
confident, the prosperous, with the control and the power – you will be
fine. Again you seek to assuage us. Your philosophies and your theories and your
models mean nothing to me: I believe only the practical, the manifest, the
real.
Don’t tell me, show me.
*
* * * * *
Professor Richard
Sennett gave the closing address at the Compass annual conference in
2006. Sennett’s theme was trust. In those dog days of the Blair
administration, Sennett was concerned, in particular, to explain the processes
that shape the degree of trust between citizens and their elected
representatives. Blair had, post-Iraq,
achieved an acutely refined condition of being distrusted, not least by those
comprising Sennett’s audience, which had indeed spent its day in various
apoplectic states of dismay at the way in which Blair had traduced, misled and
generally betrayed them. Sensing the
mood, Sennett (a gifted lecturer) abandoned his prepared speech and sketched
the bare bones of an alternative talk whilst sitting in an anteroom only
minutes before he took the lectern (a truth to which I can testify because I
had the privilege of sitting next to him on a bench as he did it). His principal assertion was this: that trust
is grounded not in conviction, but in consistency (the unfinished sixth of
Calvino’s memos).
Sennett invited his audience to reflect on the superabundance
of policies and initiatives that had characterised the Blair years (a character
that has hardly subsided since). Barely
was the ink dry on last year’s initiative when this year’s arrived. What is the citizen to make of this? It would seem to indicate that last year’s initiative
could not have been much good, else why would they need a new one this
year? And this new one – well, we should
probably expect another one next year, should we not? Not much point in changing everything to cope
with these latest initiatives if we’ll have to do it all again next year; and
no point at all in investing any trust in the people responsible, since they
clearly have no idea what they are really doing.
The most trusted politician in Europe
– Sennett intoned – is someone most of you will never have heard of. He is Matti Vanhanen. He is the Prime Minister of Finland. He is well known in Finland for not
doing very much. He is not especially
liked (he doesn’t smile much in public and is considered boring). But he is very highly trusted because when he
does say he’s going to do something, he does it. He doesn’t do much, but what he does do, he
does.
Trust comes from consistency.
*
* * * * *
One can see the dilemma.
Governments are elected to ‘do’ things and so that’s what they do:
create new crimes, reform education on a continuous basis, overhaul the organisation
of the health system at regular intervals, and so forth. It is hard to imagine a form of politics in
which one might hear a statement such as: “It is important that recent changes
have the opportunity to bed down and for everyone to adjust to the new
rules. I am therefore announcing a
moratorium on new initiatives of at least twelve months.”
All change brings uncertainty, and the majority of us who do
not have the resources to defend ourselves against the anxieties that may be
prompted by such uncertainty look to particular people or particular organisations
to reassure us, to help us. For that
reassurance to be useful, for it to have the necessary resilience and strength
to do its work, we have to have trust in the individual or organisation to
which we look.
This, for example, is how – and why – a brand like Marks
& Spencer is able to initiate a programme such as Plan A, a programme that is, in
the words of its [then] Chairman Sir Stuart Rose, ‘half a step ahead’ of its
customers. M&S customers ‘know’ that
their food and clothing needs to be produced in a more sustainable way: they
know, too, that, as individuals, they cannot possibly attend to the full gamut
of environmental and ethical and supply chain and pricing and other issues
implied by sustainability; but they trust M&S sufficiently to be guided by
them towards sustainable choices.
M&S is just ahead, leading, but not so far ahead that we get lost.
We need the same of our politicians. Only when they have regained our trust – by
slowing down, by speaking clearly and directly and, most of all, by being
consistent – only then will they be able to lead us towards the sustainable
lifestyles we know we need.
And if they can’t do it, then we’ll get new leaders.
[If there's a photo down here it was added
August 2017 as part of blog refresh. Photo is either mine or is linked to
where I found it. Make of either what you will.]
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