In the prologue to Hannah Critchlow’s book, Joined Up Thinking (2023), she notes, “The range and complexity of problems that we face, from the climate emergency to global water and food shortages and the threat of the next pandemic, mean that we need all brains on deck. We must develop ways of collaborating across groups of people with different perspectives and experiences from our own.”
I was thinking about this challenge just yesterday when talking to the lovely lady on the checkout in our local supermarket, who has recently steered herself through a degree in psychology whilst caring for both grandchildren and an elderly mother. She was, unusually, less than positive; and it was politicians who were the target of her despair, in the context of really upsetting global news stories. ”They are all corrupt,” she said. ”They are only in it for themselves.”
I have met a fair few politicians from across the political spectrum, and most – at least at a national level – struck me as being intelligent, decent human beings, genuinely trying to be of use. They face complex and entrenched challenges with no easy answers, usually surrounded by a range of stakeholders with often contradictory objectives. One definition of politics is the allocation of scarce resources to unlimited needs. Compromise is therefore a fundamental political skill: the ability to find a way forward that may improve things overall, even if it does not entirely satisfy any one interested party. When a compromise is reached, because each camp will not get all they want, they may imagine that the compromise facilitator, the politician, is favouring the others – that they are corrupt.
(Politics may often be corrupt, of course. But the point is that compromise, which is politically ubiquitous and necessary, is often confused with corruption.)
So the big challenges we face as a species require greater collaboration. Collaboration requires compromise; and compromise is an essentially political activity.
Let’s take climate change, an existential threat for our species and many others, and therefore the biggest issue of them all. What is the political challenge here, the compromise challenge? It can be stated very straightforwardly as a tension between two forces: on the one hand the evidence is clear that it is a problem; that we are collectively causing it; and we need urgently to respond. On the other hand, people in general, especially in the developed world, don’t want to change the way they live their lives, for instance the dependence on sustained economic growth based on consumption, on short and long haul flights, and on out of season cross-continental food.
It is not easy to achieve a progressive compromise in this context. Any intervention runs the risk of being insufficiently radical to address the science, or being too great a change for the electorates to stomach – or, more likely, both. Politicians trying to force the pace of change would quickly be removed from office for having the temerity to take away our Teslas and avocados. We despair that our politicians are not responding with urgency to the crisis, yet we refuse to live the smaller lives that are required of us.
So how do we move the situation on? How do we reset the tension so that a workable compromise is possible? I’ll make that the subject of my next blog.
Peter Gelf 