Notes on a Mission (for talk on Monday afternoon)
Here’s a proposition for you:
Human beings are thinking beings
Human beings are passionate, feeling beings
Human beings are constituted so as to experience the need for change and to want to act on it:
- to bring greater justice for themselves
- to bring greater justice for the community/everyone/society
And so there is always going to be agitation
And where the new (the need for change, or rebalancing) meets the old there is going to be confrontation, or even conflict.
There is conflict even within ourselves as between our selfish and more utopian, egalitarian, altruistic selves. Or at least a tension.
So society, or civilisation, has needed to create channels, or vehicles, for these potential sources of conflict to both contain and articulate them towards constructive outcomes.
Even war, when it happens, is meant to be governed by certain rules.
And dispute will nearly always refer to what is fair, even if it is also prompted by passion or self interest (more, or only less, recognized).
So society has needed to create forms of governance which reflect and cater for all these things:
- Keeping the peace
- Observing rules of combat/conduct
- Moving things forward
And we have a sense of things moving forward when we examine changes to the way we are governed, and govern ourselves:
- from hierarchy to more equality
- from autocracy to democracy
- from the divine right to rule to forms based more on what seems right to us all, religious or not, and to be fair and reasonable
And politics has been the way to achieve all these things since Greek Times (Plato’s Republic, for example).
But as human beings develop, as humanity develops, so must our forms of governance - and self governance - develop also
- Nothing is right for all time
- It must be kept under review
- And review must mean that we see how a system needs to change
- This must be on the basis of what we experience
- Also on whether or not it continues to really fit the human needs
- And what experience itself is telling us about this
And I believe experience itself is telling us of the need for change
It is in response to that I am standing for parliament
+ + +
There is tension in the fact that one has to use the existing means, or system, to try to move things forward; to bring about change, or improvement
One has to engage something first in order to try to change it
And aspects of the old will continually try to claim, or reclaim, the new as it attempts to move things forward
They will attempt to do likewise with its representative!
But in looking at how things are to be moved forward, you can look for what is already emerging elsewhere in response to the same features.
What has been emerging for 20 to 30 years or more now, in response to current experience, are conflict resolution skills and modelsThese are not just about keeping the peace - through compromise - but building the peace through solving joint problems that also see mutually beneficial solutions in which everyone can be more aware of the gain than the loss.And can feel in ownership of both the gain and the loss - or the attendant individual sacrifice towards accommodating the needs of the other - something more than mere compromise with its sense of limitation and bargaining
One can feel that one has taken ones experience of problem in a situation and discovered more of the solution also inherent in it
And here is a source of fulfilment, and satisfaction, in having participated in and moved forward development: personal and societal. Here, really, on fronts both personal and practical, is progress
But we will never achieve this unless we accept that there are multiple points of view and ways of seeing and experiencing a problem, or situation, and accommodating them.
It is in the forms of accommodation that change needs to occur, that systems or structures need to develop
Our current system - either through its nature or the way it is managed/applied - tends to leave us increasingly or remorselessly with binary choices. You are either ‘for’ or ‘against’. But this really is extremely primitive whatever the levels of sophistication also built into it.
And we can see that it is an ill fitting garment for our increasingly varied society, with its multiplicity of views, expressions and self experiences.
Much seems to be built on the premise of a need for confrontation. That may be true but so is the need for accommodation and mutual responsiveness.
We would never design forms of governance based on notions of right or left, bosses and workers deriving from much earlier experience if we were starting from scratch now.
So we have to be prepared to allow and assist the old forms of governance, based on social circumstances that have largely past Or are trying to) to change and be renewed to meet the experience and expectations of the new and the now.
Otherwise you won’t have evolution, as a result of your adaptations or mal adaptations but revolution as the need for evolution is not recognized and responded to but is denied.
And we don’t want to go down that road.
So how do we evolve a system now to accommodate the pressures for change by way of adjustment to its present requirements rather than creating the conditions - by neglect and denial - for increasing unrest and or a further migration away from it through disinterest, dismay, disenchantment, disenfranchisement, demoralisation or rage?
That is the challenge before us now and as stated the means whereby it can be achieved are all around us.
We just have to be mindful of them, realise their importance, and utilise more of what they have to offer.
They all call upon processes that can accommodate a multiplicity of views and find a way of working with them which produce solutions acceptable to all (if still not perfect in everyone’s eyes) rather than advance certain interests or agendas (however well meant) at the expense of others.
We must not be fettered or compromised in our problem solving choices when we address the problems themselves; when we bring ourselves to the processes actually intended to address them. We must not be confined to BINARY choices and we will be more handicapped than helped by a mandate fashioned beforehand which intrudes upon the ability of everyone in the process to do what the process itself is offering us. Many current features need to yield sufficiently to allow that
Our MPs need to be given every incentive and assistance to develop the necessary skills and to do so for the benefit of all of us. We need to tell them to do this on our behalf.
In fullness of time, it may be that our representatives will be chosen on the basis of their ability to do this as much as or more than their other qualities. For otherwise these qualities will stand in a way of progress in this domain - the domain of rights. And those they represent will be increasingly encouraged to engage more of the process too. This will see less emphasis on parties and something that better expresses the current social demographic.
But all that is for the future. What matters now is the way we address the current situation and current experience, in terms of what seems to be striving for recognition within it.
Richard Shaw, 25th November 2019 |