Why are many democracies of the once ever-more-wealthy west now offering despair about their futures? Australia, as a relatively small and distant member of this grouping, is a much less optimistic place than it was in the decades after World War Two. As we move into the second decade of a still new millennium, there are widespread social tensions as major political parties compete for power by offering funding and policies based on self-interest and prejudices as the basis of their voter bribes.
What has changed over the decades since the optimism of the post-war assumptions that the future could and should be better than the past, and we could make it happen? These are questions I’ve tried to answer, as both a political activist and social scientist, but there were missing bits to the picture I tried to piece together.
One big change is the major public interests of those in power. We have shifted from conversations about making a better world to just discussing wealth, money and material goods. Why are the minutiae of daily life, the pleasures of being part of social networks and relationships and the feelings of belonging and contributing, no longer any part of political discourses and party debates?
We need to replace the idea that we live in an economy with the idea that we are all contributing citizens to a good society. Societies are collectives of people who are connected by a range of relationships from a single thread of sharing space through co-workers and common interest groups, to the complex multiple ties of friends and families. The intensity and resilience of these connections are based on mixtures of history, feelings, cultures, beliefs, pleasure and duty that operate through expectations, traditions and social mores as well as through the more formal framework of laws and institutions, and the power these have over the distribution of resources.
It really matters when there is a continuing disappearance of social well-being issues from the political and official public agendas. The last three decades have seen slow shifts in the public and political agendas to gradually replace social goals with economic ones, so we become a market society.
Put this set of changes into our public conversations about what really matters, and we can see a gradual shift to privatisation and the disappearance of ideas like the common good and the public sphere, as something we share.
This shift has created serious damage to our sense of who we are and can be as part of a wider social system. The major political parties’ adoption of this big ideological shift from collective and public services to markets and neo-liberalism, starting in the eighties, has fed pessimism. It undermines the beliefs we once had in nearly inevitable social progress as part of the enlightenment and modernity. While some of the ideas were flawed, they created social optimism and engagement in possibilities of a fairer system. Peace movements, civil rights, feminism, sexual freedoms and many other socially defined inequities were tackled and we made many changes.
Where once we saw ourselves as inherently part of, and belonging to, larger groups, the political pressures made us less able to see the good in others and options for making social progress. Instead, fear of loss of material security is being used cynically by those in power, via beliefs about threats of the “Other” and the need for ever more personal and individual financial security.
The sense of insecurity, the threats of individual unpredictable terrorist acts, the 3D printer that makes cheap guns, all on the news as I write this, suggest too many threats for comfort. This leads to an inevitable rise in anxieties amongst those in more secure nations. The risks to us in Australia are not high but the media, old and new, create a sense of emergency well above the threat levels. The more we distrust each other, the more people demand impossible levels of safety, the more civilisation is put at risk, the more the market runs free of control to exploit us.
Even sporting engagements seem to be reduced to debates about the costs of players, the betting odds of incidents or other monetised versions of the once sporting conflicts.
Does this matter in terms of widespread acceptance of material well-being? Yes, because it raises ghosts of the past I hoped were securely buried. As a child of that smaller generation, born in the late 1930s, a refugee child in England in WW2, I grew up questioning why we had to leave my birthplace, Vienna, because of Hitler. The world of the time saw the only solutions in the political hands of demagogues, as fear led to rejections of democratic systems and rights in favour of despots. So I became involved over the past six decades in trying to change what I saw as unfair in the hope that such risks would not reappear.
My feminism activist engagement is not about women sharing some parts of the many powers and privileges of masculine dominance but to change the macho-versions of priorities and possibilities. My feminism is about redefining what is valuable and valued so we can move back into deciding what makes up the good societies we want to live in.
Good societies recognise the importance of fairness, diverse members, good personal and social relationships, care, nurture and mutual respect. We need to value the best aspects of the feminised spheres of care and nurture and social ties as well rights and obligations to strangers, for making inclusive social institutions. The social currency is good quality relationships. Money is a useful way to count value but it should not replace it.
Therefore I am hoping to establish a loose network, some informal coalition of people to develop and put forward the proposals we need in a manifesto for a Good Society election. We need to release these options and criteria early enough to be read by policy makers and spinners, in the hope they will at least debate, if not adopt, them. We need many wider conversations to replace current destructive paradigms, reintroduce social equity and engage people!
