Thirty years ago, the BBC programme Tomorrow’s World offered a prediction life in 2025. Whilst some of their ideas were wildly off (the reintroduction of the brown bear to the British countryside and the ability to travel to India in under an hour!), others were much closer to the mark. The prediction that corporations and the ultra-rich would control the internet has not come to fruition, but the activities of Musk, Zuckerburg, Cambridge Analytica and governments in Moscow and Beijing should, at least, give us some pause.
In many ways, Tomorrow’s World got the direction of travel right, if not the speed. What they failed to factor in was the resistance to change and innovation that is both a human characteristic and part of the fabric of our societies and institutions. For we have convinced ourselves that, for change to be truly effective, it must necessarily be slow and difficult. We have designed our politics to make change much more challenging to enact than the maintenance of the status quo.
No wonder then that when rapid change does occur – the Iranian Revolution in 1979, the fall of the Berlin Wall, the release of Nelson Mandela, the Arab Spring – our systems can’t cope and we are left shocked and unprepared and insecure. When Queen Elizabeth II, in the wake of the 2008 global banking crisis, asked a group of economists: ‘Why didn’t any of you see this coming?’, she had a point.
The fall of the Assad regime in Syria after fifty years of tyranny is just the latest change for which the world is unprepared. The sad probability is that, because our systems are not equipped handle rapid change, the small window of opportunity to embed positive transformation that now exists in this part of the Middle East, will be missed. We can only speculate now at the difference it might have made, had the West been prepared for the collapse of the Soviet Union in the early 90s, and stepped in with a modern Marshall Plan to stabilise the economy and prevent kleptocracy. Would we have seen the rise of Vladimir Putin, had he not been able to capitalise on the misery and corruption suffered by the post-communist Russian population?
We all joke about how economists have predicted nine of the last five recession. Tony Blair summed up the politician’s natural fear of predictions when he said:
‘I refuse to predict the future; I never have and I never will.’
However, our institutions and systems are, in fact, built on a preditciton: that the status quo is probably as good as it gets and so change inevitably means decline. To quote a 20th century hymn:
Change and decay in all around I see.
So my question is: how can we make ourselves more open to the possibility of possibility?
Nearly twenty years ago, I put myself forward as a candidate for my local Borough Council. I was living in London at the time and inevitably one of the central issues was parking. Simply put, we had too many cars wanting to park in too few spaces. But for many individual residents, all they could see (or wanted to see) was a council punishing them for wanting to park outside their own houses.
‘What if …,’ I wondered, ‘Every few years, the Borough removed all parking restrictions for a fortnight or so and all people to park where they wanted?’ The answer would probably have been chaos and a lot of frustration and anger, but it might have also served as a reminder to everyone of the necessity of the council’s restrictions. Needless to say that the voters never allowed me the opportunity to enact my thoughts.
When built-in reviews are included in laws, they are known as ‘sunset clauses’. Most famously in UK legislation, prior to 2000, the old Prevention of Terrorism Act required a debate and vote every year to ensure that the rather draconian powers it gave to the security forces were constantly under democratic review. What if most legislation had to a sunset clause? Instead of laws remaining on the statute books until action is taken to remove them, what if the onus is shifted onto those who oppose change? If laws simply lapsed after a period of time, think of the amount of parliamentarians’ time that would freed up and allow them to focus on the issues that really mattered.
I’m writing this in Belfast, a place that I have seen transformed since I left in the early 90s. Since 1998, N Ireland has been governed according to a set of internationally recognised political agreements that are intended to ensure parity of esteem and shared power between the Unionist and Nationalist communities. The official terminology for such arrangements is ‘consociational government’ and you can see different forms of it in Belgium, Switzerland, Bosnia and Lebanon.
In most cases, consociational arrangements were put in place after violent conflict as a way to enshrine peaceful coexistence. The trouble is that very few of these arrangements ever envisaged any significant changes in population. In Lebanon, the constitution allocated political power on the basis of relative population size. In the period since then, the Christian population has fallen from around 50% to roughly a third and the Muslim population now constitutes around two-thirds, though there has not been an official census since 1932. Under the Good Friday Agreement, special protections are given to those who designate themselves ‘Unionist’ or ‘Nationalist’, but since 1998, the number of those who identify as ‘neither’ has grown from 33% to now an estimated half of the population (NI Life and Times Survey). The lack of ability to change the system and adapt it to new realities means that, potentially, half the population has no real voice in the decision-making process.
My question, therefore, is whether it is possible to design laws, constitutions and institutions that fully embrace the reality of change and acknowledge their own limitations? I heard very recently of a Church denomination that insisted any buildings it constructed only lasted for 50 years. They sought to build redundancy into their planning, recognising that, within two generations, the building they had constructed would probably be in the wrong place or of the wrong design. If that policy had been in place in 19th century British Methodism, we would not now be lumbered with hundreds, if not thousands, of redundant buildings slowly falling into disrepair and disuse.
Is it possible for us to resist the desire for permanence that is so obviously a part of our innate resistance to change or innovation? What is it that inspires each generation to seek to build structures or legacies that will last for centuries? And why do we admire those structures that have stood the test of time?
We often talk about our roots, yet human beings are the most dispersed and migratory species on the planet (and beyond). In modern Methodism, we still require our ministers to itinerate, leaving their ‘home churches’ to be deliberately deployed elsewhere.
Movement, change, adaptation – all of these are part and parcel of the human story. So, rather than pretend otherwise, can we embrace that sense of the impermanence of life and design our common life – religious and secular – to help us better to live lives open to the possibility of possibility?
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