Richard Shaw

Sovereignty and Consensus

I am not an agitator.
I was an advocate once but essentially I am a mediator and counsellor who seeks to cultivate the tender new shoots where they appear.

So I seek to respond where such new shoots of growth appear to me.

I find that many new shoots are appearing now within the political arena and have been present for several years. But the moment they appear they face monumental forces which would overwhelm them.

So it was with Brexit and so it is now with the pandemic. All ultimately present us with binary choices which are about polarisation or mobilisation of the people against a common enemy where individual choice and the individual voice is carried away by a bigger wind just at the point where it was about to come to expression. And individual choice is likewise made subject to bigger considerations which to some extent require its suppression or its annexation to a bigger cause. It is therefore managed towards more generalised ends and the individual is asked to endorse a cause presented to him rather than contribute to a whole made up of all the individual contributions.

Everywhere, when you hear individuals say of politicians ‘why can’t they just talk together and listen to one another; everyone has something valuable to bring or to add to the whole’ you are hearing a plea for this new direction, this new manifestation, this new expression and mobilisation of human sovereignty. In the Brexit debate we prized sovereignty more than anything else. But we nationalised it and failed to see how individual sovereignty, the right to have our own voice heard and recognized in what then emerges, was being sacrificed to a bigger movement which essentially required from us a yes or a no. This also offers a sort of sovereignty in a way but much less directly and much more in accordance with old conceptions.

And to a degree that’s fine and true. Ultimately it will be a ‘yes’ or a ‘no’ to a basic proposition. But when the process of getting there, of getting to this ‘yes’ or ‘no’ is also an almost completely binary one from the start, then you have a binary process as well as a binary product. And the product, actually, is compromised or diminished as a result of this. What or who, underneath it all, is really satisfied? It has become a mess because we didn’t engage the proper process. It was a mess right from the start.

On the other hand, if you want order in the end, you have to allow a bit of chaos at the beginning. It’s how brainstorming works. It’s how the rampant, exuberant child ultimately brings its free will to the requirements of society and civilisation rather than is chastised towards that so that he can never then fully experience himself within it.

Our political system is binary from the start. This is the problem. At one time, the underlying social and economic realities underpinned this. That is no longer the case. The underlying social and economic realities have changed, or want to or would if left entirely to themselves; to evolving human consciousness and outer conditions. The political situation has yet to catch up with that reality. This is what this website and my approach is about.

If we could really talk together and share our actual experiences towards a particular problem solving end, what would we discover? What form of representation would we find to be appropriate to that? Why do we resist the changes that would bring this about? Why do we need to carry so much of the old into the new the circumstances themselves are calling for?

These are the questions that matter. I am not proposing any new formula to deal with them, although Citizens’ Assemblies probably come closest to what is envisaged. It requires a whole new approach but a transition towards this - evolutionary change by consent not revolutionary change by force. And this only requires us, I think, to do more and more of what comes naturally to us or would do if we decided to give it a chance.

Proportional representation is not the natural embodiment of this. At best it could be a staging post, because proportional representation also builds on a party system and it is the party system itself which increasingly is getting in the way of change. It is disenfranchising at just the point where it would seek to offer is further and better enfranchisement. This is because the spectrum of human experience and wisdom or just raw instinct cannot be swept up or channelled into just so many party political perspectives. It is so much deeper and wider than this and seeks to form or fire its own dynamic. Proportional Representation cannot really represent this or provide the means for this dynamic to really fire itself. It is an endless set of compromises waiting to happen, rather than a dynamic process of consensus building. There is a difference and it is of the essence. Consensus does not mean everyone agreeing about the same thing; far from it. It allows certain things to go forward and other things to fall back within a general level of consent which has been won from a much more inclusive process of. The essential nature of consensus is often misunderstood and misrepresented. But it is time for it to come much more to the fore.

PR cannot really represents this or provide the means for this dynamic to really find itself and energise the whole engagement we have in ‘politics’. PR is still a part of the party political system and to that extent perpetuates what is already past its ‘sell by’ date. Although the ‘use by’ date imposed by an over cautious manufacturer or distributor can often be extended a little while with safety, it is still on a life support machine. It is just in this grace period before its inevitable demise.

The sooner we can realise this and catch the wave, the sooner we can something to share with more comprehensive and compelling something and the better we will all feel, the better represented we will all be. But I am not here to ‘agitate’ for all this; just to respond to any call for conversation there is out there that wants to look at how we can begin to make some of these ideas into realities; how we can act as midwives in the birth of this new life.

But I am only really interested in facilitating conversation towards that end, not instigating mass movement. So to that end I invite and encourage people to approach me, I do not insist that they follow me!

I hope this is a significant difference!