Society is changing. It’s likely that in the future we will have to make do with less and learn to live, and consume, more sustainably. And it isn’t just our lifestyles that will have to change. Our values and expectations will too.
It’s important that we start to rethink the way in which we structure ourselves as a society, to find a different, more satisfying and less wasteful, way forward. We have to face some hard facts and ask some big, difficult questions.
This isn’t an easy thing to do, particularly at policymaking level. Politicians face a tough balancing act. Frankness can sometimes be mistaken for negativity, even passivity, in the face of change, and no politician wants to be accused of that, particularly in an election year. There are also pressures from the corporate world that need to be confronted. And the recent record of British politicians here is mixed, to say the least.
Nevertheless, if we are not realistic about the changes taking place, and set out plainly the implications of those changes, it will be difficult to be as thorough and as radical as we need to be in reevaluating ourselves and our society. And nothing short of that is what is going to be required.
There are, however, some welcome signs that alternative ideas, different takes on the sort of society that we want to see emerge from recession, are beginning to filter into public life.
As Anna Coote notes in March’s Adults Learning, economists are increasingly turning their attention to how we can manage with little or no economic growth. Economic growth, she writes, has depended on ‘a volatile mix of depressed wages and escalating material consumption’. The years of ‘growth’ were characterised both by staggering levels of personal wealth and by unprecedented levels of personal debt and some of the highest levels of poverty and inequality in the western world. People borrowed to consume what they couldn’t afford until, one day, the ‘credit bubble’ burst.
With the ‘climate clock’ ticking the answer is not to ‘shop harder’, Coote says, but to ‘get off the consumer treadmill’ and reduce our carbon footprint. She argues that a shorter, 21-hour, working week would make more jobs available, close the gap between the richest and the poorest in society, give us more time to spend with friends and family, and more time to learn. Learning, she believes, will have a vital role to play in preparing us to live better, more fulfilling lives with less.
As Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett argue in their important book, The Spirit Level (just out in paperback and reviewed in Adults Learning), it is equality, not wealth, which makes societies happier, healthier and more cohesive. Richer societies do not enjoy better health, education or wellbeing unless there is a narrow gap between the economically successful and the economically disadvantaged.
Societies with a bigger gap between rich and poor are not only bad for the poor, Wilkinson and Pickett argue, but for the rich too. People in such societies are more prone to depression, less trusting and affiliative, more preoccupied with status and consumption, and more wasteful. These countries are, on the whole, less pleasant places in which to live. However much we consume, lasting satisfaction, with ourselves and with what we have, remains the most elusive commodity of all. Happiness, in consumer societies, is designed to be fleeting.
In fact, as the recent Compass paper, The Advertising Effect, argues, there is an entire industry at work to prevent us from ever feeling fully at peace with ourselves. Brand messages and advertising (the authors estimate we are exposed to more than 3,500 brand images each day) are not merely designed to sell but also to create a ‘mood of restless dissatisfaction with what we have got and who we are so that we go out and buy more’.
One of the most interesting ideas in the Compass paper is that we need to ‘reclaim’ public spaces from advertising. Our everyday environment, it argues, should be free from ‘the pressure to consume’. Instead, we need environments that invoke in us ‘a feeling of real belonging and citizenship’, a sense of place that reminds us of who we are and where we came from. ‘It is time to take back our streets, towns and cities as places to be citizens rather than just consumers,’ it says. Such a move would be an important, symbolic, step towards a
restoration of the kind of civic culture that will be critical in adapting to the changes ahead of us.
Clearly, a pattern of escalating consumption, driven by economic inequality and advertising, and fuelled by reckless borrowing, is no longer sustainable (in this context George Osborne’s promise to ‘unleash the forces of enterprise’ sounds more like a threat). The simplistic equation of economic growth and the development of the good society, which has caused so much damage to adult education, no longer seems as obvious as it once did.
The ground is shifting and it’s important that we, in the adult learning sector, ensure the wider contribution of our work, clearly relevant to many of these emerging agendas, does not get lost in the grand narratives that shape the future.