Rediscovering the Common Wealth

By Geof  Wood Professor of International Development Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences University of Bath

My father died in 2005. He was 100. His father died 30 years earlier aged 101. He was about 10 when General Gordon was killed in Khartoum (1885). My grandfather remembered it well. So I have a very direct bloodline back to 1874, when Victoria had been on the throne 37 years, and had another 27 to go. I overlapped with my grandfather for 30 years, so those paying attention can work out my age! And I have a 3 year old grandson.

My grandfather and I shared his past and my future through his endless stories and my aspirations. In the curiosity of my growing up, we shared a fascination for trying to explain the paths of society—ours and others. In the last decade of his life I lived at times in Africa, India and Bangladesh, always calling in on him on the eve of departure and reporting in on my return. I brought back stories to add on to his. Together, we spanned the heyday of British imperialism; the Boer wars; the two Great Wars; the intervening depression; the holocaust; the break up of empire with (strongly in his mind) the empire coming to Yorkshire through immigration; the rise of China; as well as my career focus upon the removal of poverty and alienation in poor countries of the world. And together, we witnessed the formation of the welfare state in the UK, reflecting the theory of Polanyi, the detail of Beveridge and the political acumen of Lloyd George through his reincarnation in Atlee, supported by the strength of Nye Bevan. This was a humane advance for my grandfather, with me as its beneficiary.

Never quite a racist, he was wary of the shifts in global power structures. But also he was not a nationalist or jingoist. He combined respect for powerful individuals in his personal history with a detestation of finance capitalism, venal bankers and self-serving priests, alongside all forms of aristocratic privilege. He rejected his letter from the Queen, despite my father’s best efforts, and would not let the ‘corrupt’ Mayor of Leeds over his threshold. He homeopathetically self-medicated, and smoked black shag pipe tobacco until he died, while instructing his other son, my uncle, in how to bath him properly. And, much to my embarrassment, he was a mason.

What did I learn from all this? Mainly, as in the view of Isaiah Berlin, that intelligent humans lead incommensurate lives and thoughts, rather than fully rational internally consistent ones. That their attempts at consistency are thwarted by events upon which they are called to make judgements. That the world and the configurations of power changed more dramatically in his lifetime than in mine, despite our sense of current turmoil. That conflict and struggle are endemic and chronic, and usually a function of inequalities of power and insecurity that need to be resolved. That technology was double edged in combining progress with destruction. That during his life the great post-enlightenment project of rational, secularised progress was implemented in many societies at the expense of others, while at the same time setting up the expectations and capacity to wreak havoc upon our common good. That his fears were well founded of excessive and exclusive values as the basis for political identities. That he feared prejudice would be to the detriment of the common good. You see, he regaled against priests of all hues, though for me the Hindu pantheon of Vishnu the preserver, Shiva the destroyer and Brahma the re-builder offers a cosmological framework for our times.

And I learnt about the strength of family and his concern for my life after his death: the inter-generational bargain, the legacy of the old for the young. This experience of having an argumentative but seriously engaged grandfather, has led me also to wonder at the world we have created and to puzzle over the question: why do we care about remote others in present and future time? This key question for all of us, also strikes at the heart of what I do and my whole career. In other words, if my career focus upon international development and global poverty reduction is an inter-generational preoccupation as well as an intra-generational one, what motivates me and many others to think beyond my immediate interests to the welfare of remote others in space and time?

It would seem that we are realising that it is not enough just to be concerned, intra-generationally, about the poverty and vulnerability of our global contemporaries, seeking resolution in their lifetimes and ours; not enough, therefore, to be only focussed on present, contemporary international development. As we know, the international discourse has become increasingly one of sustainable development—the inter-generational question. Globally there is an informed consensus around the principle of sustainability, becoming the sine qua non of any analytic, moral and policy test. Most obviously we think of sustainability in terms of climate change and the capacity of our physical environment to sustain the conditions for ongoing human life. As Jeffery Sachs has argued, this capacity issue has become, or at least should become, a global driver of environment and energy policy to reduce or at least slow the rate of global warming with all the ‘warming’ multiplier effects of sea level rise, changing weather patterns, crop management, food security, and residential security. However, the notion of sustainability extends beyond even this large and ambitious climate change agenda to the sustainability and life expectancy of institutions to act collectively over longer time horizons in contrast to short term selfish behaviour of individuals. In other words: the issue of sustainability involves not only the question of our motivations for caring about the future, for entering into an inter-generational bargain, but also the issue of our ability to create the appropriate institutions.

However the proposition about sustainable development reveals hidden paradigm shifts, significantly re-adjusting past assumptions and bringing uncomfortable political philosophy into play. A recent book by Anthony Giddens ‘The Politics of Climate Change’ casts doubt on the utility of the term ‘sustainable development’ as a meaningless call for responsibility now via precautionary principles for distant threats that inevitably feel not very real. And clearly this is more difficult in societies where the urgent need to develop now to remove poverty takes precedence over trying to be sustainable about development and slowing it down. Too many people in India and China would be dead already under a slow down scenario. This helps to explain their apparently negative stances in Copenhagen. This lecture attempts to tease out some more of the thinking required by all of us, both in order to challenge the Giddens’ pessimism about the human spirit for collective survival and thereby to rediscover the elements of our common wealth.

Modernism, capitalism and the fallacious ‘end of history’ stances offered by Fukuyama have optimistically relied upon the capacity of technological advance and market forces to overcome and compensate for an inter-generational distribution of resource consumption which continuously privileges the present over the future. For the last 150 years, the rich world has based the formation of its wealth and lifestyles upon an unconstrained exploitation of available environmental resources without much care for the future. Much of this consumption has been fossil fuel based and carbon emitting. But we have also developed highly inefficient cropping patterns—favouring meat sources of protein intake over grain, pulses and vegetables, for example. And we have de-forested for land conversion and construction, also contributing to global warming. Past technological advances have lulled us into false senses of security that humans will always be able to overcome consumption frontiers—especially in energy but also food and other basic needs. Hence the nuclear energy ‘solution’ to carbon intensive energy. We have operated within a cosmology of ‘inevitable continuation’, with an assumption that our behaviour is both a product of technology but also infinitely to be compensated by it.

But what if our luck was to run out along with our ingenuity? Then we have to do things which are within our present control rather than expect our controlling abilities to ever expand. Hence, despite Giddens, we will have to adopt the precautionary principle as a feature of our time preference behaviour: that is, how we organise and sequence our priorities over time. But in order to move on practically from that normative, perhaps woolly, injunction, we have to understand, first, what motivates humans to be bothered at all about a future beyond their own lives, beyond their imaginative empathy? How to avoid the collective self-destruction of the Easter Island inhabitants, who put their ecosystem into irreversible decline?

We humans are essentially social creatures. Over time we survive collectively or not at all. We are also hard wired into a sense of life cycle in which our periods of personal autonomy, with others dependent on us, are dwarfed by our periods of dependency upon others especially at either end of our lives. Our social being is thus represented by vertical (or intergenerational) dependencies over time, as well as horizontal (reciprocal or collective and intragenerational) dependencies at any one particular point in time. Even Robinson Crusoe had his Man Friday. And even the largesse of a tropical desert island has limits to its carrying capacity if misused. Thus while we may not be time travellers like Dr.Who, we are time traders within a set of discount preferences. We have time preference behaviour which extends beyond the trading periods of our own lives into the periods occupied by our descendents. Most of the consumption or investment concepts through which we live are ‘time’ concepts: nurture, education, preparation, utility, health, pensions, care. Indeed most of our behaviour is about the future—some of it the immediate future, some of it about the medium term future and some of it in the much longer term. We rarely consume for the present. Even sex is not only about instant gratification, but can also be about longer term relationships, and even procreation! But although we may, in our dependent periods, receive and be grateful for the care of others (from adult carers when we were children, and the care of us by younger people when we are older), what motivates us to offer care to others dependent upon us?

Humans do actually behave as if they are bothered about the future: their own futures and those for whom they have a moral attachment. Thus those who can will not only invest for their own personal futures, for a time when they can no longer labour or earn via pensions and other savings, but they are also concerned about legacy and inheritance for their kin. But it is also true that for many families across the world, including in the UK, this comfortable scenario is out of reach. Indeed, one of the few ways poorer people, who nevertheless have long life expectations into old age and infirmity, can invest in their personal futures is via their children as sources of care to their parents in old age. Sometimes, I have referred to this personalised ‘survival’ formula as the ‘peasant analogue’: an intimate inter-generational deal between inherited property rights, labour and care services.

Moral attachments can be understood in terms of concentric circles of moral proximity. Our moral commitments to immediate and then wider kin are usually stronger and more comprehensive than to successively outer circles of friends, neighbours and broader identities (communities and nations). And moral attachments within these inner circles are more likely to be over longer periods of time and thus vertical and dynastic not just horizontal and contemporarily reciprocal.

As we move to outer circles, attachments are more likely to be less moral and comprehensive and more instrumental and specific, albeit bound together by the social and organisational needs for contemporary as well as future survival. As Benedict Anderson has observed in Imagined Communities, we have the imagination to conceive these wider communities of identity and interest. While it may be easier to understand intimate inter-generational bargains within inner concentric circles of moral attachments, the greater challenge is to understand such time preference bargains at the outer circles, since this is the arena of collective action between strangers and the underpinning for longer range institutionalised policy and strategic planning which gives the concept of sustainability its meaning.

We can connect such structures of motivation to both objective and subjective dimensions of wellbeing. Some of us at the University of Bath have recently been looking closely at ideas of wellbeing. It is a feature of human and social existence that an individual’s wellbeing is also a function of the wellbeing of others—organised through these concentric circles of moral proximity. So the question becomes whether my more immediate sense of wellbeing is also a function of securing a sense of wellbeing not only for myself but for others in the medium and longer term future. We don’t have to rely upon altruism to save us, or utopianism about which Giddens is rightly sceptical. A young colleague at Bath, Severine Deneulin, argues that we are motivated by a sense of the common good as necessary for our own wellbeing. And indeed an extreme inequality of wellbeing within the inner concentric circles will certainly undermine the quality of my own wellbeing. We are personally affected when those close to us are unhappy, and we become unhappy too. In that sense, as John Donne wrote, ‘no man is an island’. And inequality in outer circles beyond kin could also convert into the politics of envy and actually threaten my own wellbeing, thus giving an instrumental, politically risk averse reason for seeking at least functional fairness (equity if not equality) for the remoter inhabitants of my outer circles. This reasoning is part of contemporary thinking about global uncertainties, terrorism and security. Indeed such thinking about fairness should be the major guide to policy rather than the suppression of those who might threaten us. However, the point here is that both objective and subjective senses of wellbeing represent the cognitive and social basis of sustaining behaviours.

So far, therefore, we can explain vertical inter-generational behaviour within inner concentric circles via versions of the peasant analogue (i.e. versions of the time trade: the promise of future labour and provision of means of livelihood in exchange for care) along with senses of intimate interdependent wellbeing. We can also explain horizontal intra-generational behaviour towards outer circles via a combination of interdependent common good and instrumentality reasoning. But, crucially, we have not yet explained diagonal behaviour: i.e. inter-generational behaviour towards morally remote descendant strangers. This is the key test for sustainability motivation and collective human survival. My key argument here is based upon a combination of the two logics: vertical and horizontal. The axiom is as follows: the wellbeing of my intimate descendants is itself dependent upon the wellbeing of their contemporaries, ergo I have to be concerned about the wellbeing of remote strangers in the future in order to maintain and protect the wellbeing of my direct offspring or near kin with whom I have moral attachments.

This way of understanding the motivation for sustaining behaviour thus does not rely upon altruism. It also means that while desperate, insecure, poor and powerless people will have higher discount rates for the future than others, we are all predisposed, when able, to have lower discount rates—i.e. to attribute higher value to the future, and crucially not just for ourselves and the morally attached of our inner concentric circles. In this way, we can imagine collective intergenerational bargains embracing outer circles of moral proximity as well as for inner, more morally attached, circles. This is the key principle of continuing human existence.

The reason why it is so important to establish this basis for sustainable behaviour is precisely to understand the motives to adopt the precautionary principle as an insurance against an insufficient technological response towards renewables in energy, carbon emissions, food supply and waste disposal. In the absence of an adequate pushing back of the technological frontier, sustainable development requires sacrifice of present consumption/lifestyle preferences in some form or another by most people. In other words, when we cannot presume future compensation for present unsustainable behaviour, the intergenerational bargain has to be explicit and perhaps painful, entailing a redistribution of harm across time periods. We have to be prepared to experience that pain in our lifetimes, instead of continuously postponing it onto our descendents. The argument being, therefore, that our present sense of wellbeing is a function of not postponing material pain to ensure the wellbeing of descendents—mine and yours. If we know we are suffering to good effect for the future, we will feel good about it in the present—the joy of virtuous suffering.

However, it is easy to agree with Giddens that doing the right things within our present spheres of control is essentially a political and social problem, given that there is a consensus over much of the technical definition of what is right to do even while acknowledging the presence of those in denial or just plain stupid and selfish. It is certainly a relief that US voters have replaced Bush with Obama rather than a neocon clone or indeed clown. But it is clear that plenty of clowns exist in Congress and the Senate, even among the Democrats. So how do we get beyond the exhortation to the tough behavioural choices, given the failure of Copenhagen? As an example, the Cap and Dividend legislation currently being negotiated through the US Congress is an interesting mix of state regulation (carbon cap) and private incentives (dividends) to redistribute carbon use as well as lowering it overall.

Any given population will comprise a demographic distribution across the life cycle, prompting a spread of differential interests in consumption at any one point in time. And the global population contains a distribution of both a propensity to consume (reflecting wants, needs and effective demand) as well as a set of historically derived expectations about consumption reflecting political economy, social status and culture. These distributions entail a variable of ‘distance’ between individual self interest and immediate as well as longer term collective interest with respect to harmful consumption in terms of carbon status, use of scarce finite resources (like land) and slow renewables (like water and forests). At any one time, through these consumption choices, there will always be a proportion of the population (nationally and internationally) which seeks in effect to ‘free ride’ both more than others, and also more than at other times in their own lives. There is much theory around this issue of managing the commons both in its common pool forms as well as common property forms—for example the classic work of Eleanor Ostrom inter alia.

For me, the political and social problem alluded to by Giddens is whether this embedded, collective free riding resulting from a profile of consumption spreads can be managed for sustainability through precautionary action, requiring interference with the prevailing distribution of the propensity for unsustainable consumption. That partly requires disconnecting/de-linking consumption interests from a sense of wellbeing—re-defining wellbeing away from the material more toward the spiritual and emotional. This delinking proposition tunnels deep into the psyche of capitalism and growth, where consumption acts as a proxy for status and identity.

I indicated at the outset of this lecture that ‘the proposition about sustainable development reveals hidden paradigm shifts, significantly re-adjusting past assumptions and bringing uncomfortable political philosophy into play.’ What if, for example, pursuit of the principle of sustainability makes it necessary to be motivated by forms of wellbeing which send signals to the market in contradiction to incentives for technological innovation, and incentives thereby for profit? The fundamental issue at stake here is the cultural basis of capitalism. Thus for Max Weber, the Protestant Ethic was a metaphor for ascetic, sacrificial behaviour which lends itself to accumulation not through the hedonistic enjoyment of money and consumption power, but through the eudaimonic processes, advocated by Aristotle, of creating it as an index of one’s essential worth and status, as well as happiness—a commodification of the soul, in effect. But if the precautionary version of wellbeing takes hold, then the asceticism and sacrifice entailed will have the reverse effect upon the business of accumulation, as ironically hedonistic happiness, re-formulated as a denial/rebuttal of unnecessary consumption, will restore the soul to its pre-commodified state.

Is there a middle position implied here whereby precautionary wellbeing as a cultural form becomes the cultural underpinning of sustainable capitalism? As an illustration, this might entail, for example, far more technological effort towards reducing energy use than finding cleaner substitutes for present or higher levels of carbon based energy use. We already have local sourcing movements in food—not least our own Bath Farmers’ market. But can we induce less energy using travel (I am a culprit given my particular job), convincing people to rediscover the value and pleasures of lower carbon leisure, or at least video conferencing and skype? Can work, or education, for many families be re-structured to reduce travel, given IT connectivity? Can IT home working enable the re-grouping of families now dispersed through work locations? Can a demand for insulation materials be met through re-cycled waste? Do we need daily newspapers, given IT connectivity? Should we live colder or warmer lives, depending on global location and seasons? Can we reduce leakage of energy via transmission? Can such behavioural changes, and many more, send different sets of signals to the market, thus re-directing investment in technology and skill sets? Can the advertising industry reflect sustainable patterns of demand rather than promoting artificial demand through supply-led products in order to realise sunk capital? Can we talk to markets rather than them talk to us? Can expectations about the good life be lowered towards simpler pleasures?

There is another dimension to precautionary wellbeing which addresses the equalisation of advantage and the underpinning of universal socio-economic security as the route to sustainability, again with profound implications for political philosophy and political culture. Clearly embodied in the notion of wellbeing, as observed earlier, is a sense of common good as a precondition for personal wellbeing which is both moral and instrumental. The inequality of insecurity has always been a threat to political order and privilege, in addition to being an ethical issue. In other words, sustainability and long term wellbeing is an equality issue.

While hitherto, nation-states could contain inequality in their own societies through a combination of political control, including state violence, the formation of public goods and concessionary distribution, this national ‘wellbeing’ settlement has been increasingly substituted in recent decades by neo-liberal globalisation. Such globalisation has reduced the ability of state levers and domestic political consensus to compensate for weakness and alienation in the marketplace. Rampant globalisation has undermined a Polanyian basis to welfare through market moderation (via regulation and redistribution using fiscally progressive public revenues). The game is up for the neo-con project, whether represented by Bush, Blair, Brown or Cameron. The current global economic and financial crisis, intersecting with the climate and environmental one, heralds a second Great, this time Global, Transformation and the prospect of a neo-Polanyian revival in social policy terms. This will require clear, unambiguous attention to the promotion of universal socio-economic security, as the basis of spreading wellbeing sufficiently to induce other forms of sacrificial behaviour. Our wealth is common, and should be enjoyed as such not just because of ethics, but also it is the cultural basis of avoiding competitive free-riding via the relentless pursuit of unsustainable growth. In other words, adequate equality is a social precondition for sustainability.

But given present inequalities not only within societies like the USA and UK, but within many others (China and India for example), how far can this necessary change of culture be engineered by mutual exhortation or by the ideological apparatuses of the state? Mutual exhortation has a role, but any effectiveness is vulnerable to free-riding and the risk aversion of individuals, groups, classes and countries to being lone pioneers of pain and sacrifice as the expression of low discount rates, or a faith in the future. It is the state, more than the community, which has the power rather than just moral pressure to suppress free-riding through regulation and sanctions and to re-order incentives through fiscal policy. However there is what I have termed a permeability problem when considering the role of the state to achieve the cultural basis for this transformation. If the institutions through which we negotiate and pursue wellbeing (state, market, community and family) operate within the positive permeability of fairness, equity, transparency and trust, then they have the legitimacy to confront individual selfishness. Some democratic societies are close to this model. Of course, even in these kinds of society, people are selfish and engage, for example, in tax avoidance and cheating, but they have tended not to do so to the point of allowing anarchy and chaos to prevail over order. I accept that the recent behaviour of some in the financial sector questions this axiom. But mainly it is as if people know their own predilections for selfishness in their private market and community domains and deliberately accept the obligations of citizenship enacted through the state domain. We think of the Scandinavian countries as having fulfilled these conditions. We accept the state because we acknowledge our propensity along with those of others to otherwise free-ride. This is the qualified freedom of much bourgeois political philosophy, though a voter based state is still critiqued for being unable to deal with the wellbeing of remote descendants.

But the deeper problem arises when this permeability functions with the opposite effect and when alternative principles prevail: of privilege; of natural superiority of socially exclusive rights and entitlements; of selfishness; of private short-term gain; of fission; of social closure. Here all domestic institutions exhibit failures. Markets are imperfect, communities clientelist and socially exclusive, households patriarchal and states marketised and/or patrimonial. Under such conditions, how does it make sense to expect the state to disentangle itself from deep social and political structures and function to compensate for them, initially ideologically and then with policy and implementation? In this situation we are all prisoners within unsustaining institutions, where the state cannot gain a purchase on free-riding. Unfortunately these are the conditions which pertain across much of the poorer world, removing any immediate prospect for a neo-Polanyian route to sustainable development and enactment of our common wealth.

Thus the challenge for contemporary societies is whether the ‘distance variable’ between self and collective interest can be overcome through the contemporary normative, and rather Western, paradigms of democracy, good governance, citizenship and even cooperation. Recent events in financial markets are showing us extreme market failure even within the context of this normative paradigm, where for a whole class of global traders any motivations for sustainable behaviour that might have been out there have been replaced by those of greed and extreme acquisitiveness. No doubt, as Tawney argued, acquisitive society is a precondition for capitalist growth, innovation and new technological frontiers. But he also argued for its moderation. Unfortunately new technological frontiers in financial markets have dangerously exaggerated the distance variable for a subset of powerful actors putting us all at risk. Perhaps we will look back at the turmoil of 2008/9 as the time when rampant, unrestrained capitalism was found wanting even by a global public, all dependent however reluctantly upon capitalism to some degree. There is some irony in this scenario. Poorer countries are undoubtedly negatively affected by these current events, but substantial swathes of their populations have been too remote from globalisation (especially its financial instruments) to be directly damaged, except those who have been remittance dependent. And even my friend, the Governor of the Bangladesh Bank, feels that the Bangladesh economy is relatively insulated.

Certainly the hope is that out of our current conjuncture of crises (economic, climate and values) a more favourable climate for regulation to control the venal dimensions of capitalism may translate or read across into a broader, more favourable climate for regulation of self interest towards sustaining behaviours. I would argue that people worldwide are now more prepared to accept regulation to reduce the distance variable. And furthermore, that willingness increases if several conditions are fulfilled: individual free riding declines if free riders are convinced that others cannot cheat either; if cheating is thereby punished; if governments are transparent, with non-free riding leaders; if the principles of regulation have been established as the result of public consultation and debate; if the intragenerational distribution of sacrifice is perceived to be a fair and equitable (not necessarily equal) reflection of the history of global political economy; and if people are educated in individual and collective transcendence of the distance variable. Certainly this places a renewed onus upon a clean state (including in so-called advanced societies like the UK) but perhaps now we are going to have a cleaner slate in terms of more active political voice to will the instrument of our collective survival.

Fulfilling these conditions has to be the basis of the urgent global social contract for sustainable behaviour. And the basis for enactment of the precautionary wellbeing principle in the event that our technological ingenuity is finite, wherein future generations cannot expect technological compensation for today’s excesses. This has to be the manifesto for political actors and leaders in the world we face.

I am fortunate to be an academic at the University of Bath in the UK where increasingly the efforts of my fellow colleagues address the different aspects of this global social contract, alongside the pursuit of continuous scientific ingenuity. We are forging large scale interdisciplinary research and application to this effect.

In the meantime, in the words of the American poet, Frank Scott (brought to my attention by Leonard Cohen):

This is the faith from which we start:

Men shall know commonwealth again
From bitter searching of the heart.
We loved the easy and the smart
But now, with keener hand and brain,
We rise to play a greater part. 
The lesser loyalties depart,
And neither race nor creed remain
From bitter searching of the heart. 
Not steering by the venal chart
That tricked the mass for private gain,
We rise to play a greater part.

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