Covid ripples with threat.. but opportunities too. I facilitated a webinar last week for Massey University on development post covid from my little mountain eerie in the New Zealand Alps. I was just throwing wild ideas into an even wilder norwest wind. Wonderful!
The ideal place to mull on the incoherence of the present human world
We opened with this definition (Merriam-Webster)
Coherence:
a. systematic or logical connection or consistency
b. integration of diverse elements, relationships, or values
Trying to be participatory despite the limitations I asked everyone to imagine arriving to pick up a child from a kid’s birthday party organised along the lines quirky and brilliant Welshman David Snowden suggests for complexity. Watch his two minute party planning tips here. Snowden meets them at the door and asks them to evaluate his party. Our evaluation criteria included whether injuries had occurred, food was good, healthy and shared, games highlighted different skills, activities included everyone, if factions and cliques had formed, and if the party room was damaged. Bottom line: Was this a good party to be at? Easy-peasy . We evaluated so well I said that when we turned up to pick a kid up form the next party the organising parent met them at the door saying:
The party room.
He sends us down to the party room where 7.5 billion boys and girls have self-organised around a blue green marble. This party has degenerated. A few kids are overly and unhealthily full, most are hungry and sad, they’ve self-organised into cliques and factions, fights break out all over, resources are unjustly divided, a couple of kids are playing the rest clean and serve. The party room is severely damaged, almost at the point of collapse.
We’ve just evaluated the current human development trajectory. There is no integration of the planet’s diverse human and physical elements, relationships from hyper local to planetary are in tatters and our relationship with the natural environment is fractured beyond breaking point. There is disintegration of values, competing goals and aims are tangled and tangential. Our evaluation report concludes its totally incoherent.
Covid forces us to re-examine political, military economic and relational dimensions of human self-organisation, the same unholy triad questioned by the 9/11 terrorists (They asked in a terrible way, but what good way is there to speak truth to western power?) Back then with a tangible human target a wounded west reactively launched its war of terror, grabbed even more resources and ignored the questions. Covid, devastating USA and Europe more than others, forces us to face the music- you can’t nuke a virus.
Some of the major incoherencies I see embedded in the present (three months ago) world are:
Western economico-politico-military development in a single visual icon. Rich, powerful, beautiful white people enslave and torture dark skinned subjects from around the world. Obama got his Nobel for this particular version of the model.
Our economic—military complex feasts on inequality.Adam Smith claimed his “invisible hand would make nearly the same distribution of the necessaries of life, which would have been made, had the earth been divided into equal portions among all its inhabitants”. In 2017 8 men owned as much as the poorest 3.8 billion. Empirically Adam Smith got it wrong. It’s a falsehood the present runs on.
It’s incoherent if the human faction with the biggest stockpile of weapons of mass destruction in human history can whistle up its poodles and illegally invade an oil rich country because it has non-existent WMDs, while the rest look on. The US purpose built torture camps to which it extraordinarily “rendered” victims. Rather than a cell in The Hague Obama got a Nobel Peace prize from Oslo for continuing torture. Totally incoherent.
Our hallowed economic system allows money and resources (and, it transpires, viruses) to flow freely but not people. Companies register themselves in tax havens like Monaco, Panama, USA Britain, have Indonesian solo mothers working for them for $ 1 a day, pay very little tax in the rich world and have precisely none go back to where the labour and resources come from. Free markets and enslaved people is called “globalisation”.
Our only global governance (the UN) is specifically set up to avoid structural change. Permanent membership of the UN security council is get out of jail free cards for the worlds big bullies. They self-righteously beat up any small playground bullies while still being able to extraordinarily render victims to torture camps -this comes from the same playbook Security council permanent member France used to bomb ships and kill people in New Zealand. Medium sized regional bullies coalesce like fractals (self similar at sampler scale) around this model. India followed the prescribed model to become a regional power. Today Indians would be much better off had they invested 5.7% of GDP in health and only 1.3% in weapons over decades rather than the other way around. You can negotiate with neighbours, but you can’t nuke a virus.
We all know we are cooking ourselves yet tie almost every policy to the very economy that provides the heat (via greenhouse gases). “Its the economy stupid” they say. Lets all agree now- the economy as we run it today is stupid.
Even more than selfish nation states global sovereignty is in the hands of corporations with no vision for global development or justice. Many have larger budgets than medium-sized countries. Their bosses deride government as impediments to development (ie their wealth). Now those who enforced small governement and low taxes and derided the “nanny state” are begging for bailouts from big governments out of those taxes they never paid. Economic historian Rutger Bregman’s Davos 2019 “Taxes, Taxes, Taxes. All the rest is bullshit” speech went viral. He was pointedly not invited back to the annual billionaires world policy forum in Jan 2020. Its hard to speak truth to power even for a white European.
Most of the globe has chosen nationalistic loud shouting, small minded tribal leaders in the Trump, Bolsanaro, Modi, Johnson mould. Virulent Hindu nationalism, a crap public health system and nuclear weapons is a useless combination for Indians in the face of covid. The people who voted for Trump and his wall are being decimated by a virus their wall could not have stopped even as they kill others with their CO2. Covid exposes narrow factional small-minded leadership for what it is.
Handing over global decision making to the most heavily armed is a recipie for a tribal party. Resources are expropriated (even labour), profits sequestered, without global vision or taxation. Inequality inexorably increases despite myriad beautifully worded constitutions and global charters about equality.
The party is over.
Let’s not just try to wind the clock back to how it all was- that was the problem, Covid is just the question. Lets listen this time.
“We can’t return to the present, because the present we have is precisely the problem” -graffiti in Hong Kong.
What next? Who knows how far Covid will run and run. Deaths may be in hundreds of thousands, millions even tens of millions? Maybe it’s a few months more, maybe a year, maybe five. We will surely enter a significant global depression for several years. After that maybe, returning to tribal instincts we’ll have another party run by big bad boys - just different ones. I hope not- US leading the world was a disaster for most humans.Britain was as bad in their day, China will be no better. Its not about Americans Chinese and Brits, it’s about people playing with power, that dark material that is uncontrollable unless shared. Maybe the soon to be eclipsed bullies will start wars with their stockpiled weapons that may soon be irrelevant. It’s a well known way to stimulate the economiy, stupid. Maybe terrorist groups will see the opportunity to strike at weakened opposition (Oh how USA, Israel, Russia etc must wish they’d used justice not power to solve their issues.). This party has ended in tears, maybe in wars too. Maybe.
Maybe not. In all this there might be a role for development. From the rubble I challenged my webinar to think of development practitioners as facilitators of emergent beneficial coherence at multiple scales. Its our job to stimulate deliberately designing and building a better world in which multiple voices are heard, wealth and power structurally distributed, nimble decisions are made by listening to all people not just homogeneous European elites. A party that celebrates the best of humanity not just the most powerful. For me that party would have:
A much smaller role for nation states. Governance would be local for local issues, regional for regional (probabably ecological regions) issues, and global for globa issues. In place of factional power passed governeance at all scales lets have coherent scale related governance. Global governance is our only chance of integrating gloval environmental realities into human decision making.
An end to adulation of free markets as our master and teacher in exploiting and distributing resources. Clearly the invisible hand has invisible morals and vision. We need visionary governance to fairly (coherently) gather and distribute resource in times of plenty, not just to bail our big business in times of crisis Adam smith might have been right for his time. Smith is wrong now, “Dead wrong” according to Covid. Lets leave Smith behind and develop coherent alternatives like this.
Coherent justice at all levels in place of the power and weapons based tribal system of the present. A coherent global to local justice system would de-incentivise factional actors (e.g. nation states) investing in caches of weapons to bully. Indians might now wish they had demanded their politicians invest their money in health not weapons. Maybe Americans, British French and even Chinese citizens too.
Issue based, expert led aproach to global issues rather than political based politcian led nationalistic approaches as we have now. Specialist agencies might deal with planetary Issues by integrating science and 7.5 billion people’s social imperatives. (cf the present in which global decisions integrate a tiny fraction’s of humanity’s wishes).
Usually, deep structural change is hard to achieve because the beneficiaries of the present both resist change and, by definition, have the resources to do so and no incentive to change.. Maybe, just maybe, when 80% of cases and most covid deaths are in the old world centres of power,, when small minded fist waving leaders are impotent, when declaring war on Covid is impossible (although USA looks like it is trying to find an excuse for an economy stimulating war)… maybe maybe In this crisis even the powerful will perceive they have more to gain than lose by structural change. Maybe. Maybe we will recognise Covid as merely a question, a wicked global, cross border cross speciality problem just like climate change and refugee issues and water and fisheries and myriad current and future challenges for humanity. Maybe we’ll see Covid as an important invitation to a new future, not just an urgent crisis in the present. Important vs Urgent. If we do, then there is a role, at all levels from hyper-local to massively global for visionary development practitioners.
My latest definition of development?
“Facilitating a planetary party where everyone has fun and the party room is not damaged.”