Conscious Choice: Ideas of Social Invention

August 1999 | Citizen at Large

Ideas of Social Invention

by Jay Walljasper

I am worried about intellectual biodiversity — the rich ecosystems of ideas that sustain human culture in the same way that natural living systems sustain biological life. Indeed, the possible extinction of numerous cultural traditions — from socialist thought to indigenous people’s cosmology — could be propelling us further in the direction of social and ecological breakdown. As ideas that stand in the way of the continuing expansion of our free-market, globalized, centralized, urbanized, technologized society are successfully discounted as old-fashioned and wrong-headed, resistance to the status quo diminishes. This is the social equivalent of a monoculture. A system dominated by a single set of political and economic ideas, like an ecosystem populated by just a few plants and animals, is far more vulnerable to disaster.

That aptly describes what happened to the Soviet Union and other authoritarian command-economy systems in Eastern Europe. They collapsed almost overnight because diversity in thought was not allowed — no fresh ideas ever emerged that could be implemented when things started going wrong. The global economy in many ways mirrors this precarious political situation. The global mindset says there is just one way to organize a society: the market economy dictated by the G-7 and the World Bank. When the weak links of this system become apparent, as nearly happened last year when the Asian economic crisis sent tremors through Wall Street and the City of London, we may have little to draw upon in our efforts to mend the mess.

So to me, it seems ideas that depart from the conventional wisdom that pounds us each day in the major media are cause for celebration. Here are a few enticing ones from England’s Institute for Social Inventions — a virtual rainforest of intellectual diversity, teeming with wonderful new notions about everything from geopolitical theory to home economics. Everyone owes it to themselves to check in on the institute’s wonderful treasure chest

No Taxation without Participation

It must be clear to even the most casual observer of the political scene that taxes are wildly unpopular with the average citizen. Many candidates for public office in the United States build their entire campaigns on noisy denouncements of opponents as "tax-and-spend" liberals, often with great success on election day. Even among alternative thinkers, there is widespread resistance to how much of our tax dollars goes to weapons, dams, corporate subsidies, and motorways. Yet at the same time almost every reputable opinion poll shows that people everywhere — even America — are overwhelmingly committed to public education, environmental protection, law enforcement, medicare and other social services, all of which are funded by (you guessed it) taxes.

It’s not taxes themselves that make people so ornery, but the sense we have little say in how our tax money is spent. If we could directly participate in deciding priorities for public investment, then the angry backlash against taxes and government itself, which has fueled right-wingers around the world, from Newt Gingrich to Augusto Pinochet, might fade into the dim mists of history.

One intriguing suggestion on how to do that comes from David Wallechinsky, editor of People’s Almanac. He proposes that national governments return a certain sum of money ($100 dollars U.S., $25, or even $500) to each citizen, not on an individual basis but to community groups created by dividing the nation into units of 1000 people. Each group would meet to decide how $100,000 (or $25,000 or a half-million) might best be spent to improve their community — perhaps funding a small business to create new jobs or pooling their money with other communities to refurbish a park or build a new library. Poorer communities should probably receive additional funding because their need for public services is greater.

While this would amount to only a small portion of the federal budget (and should not be used as a pretext to slash existing social programs) it would bring visible and significant improvements to every neighborhood in America. The idea could also work on the state or local level, as in my hometown of Minneapolis where a percentage of property tax revenues was redistributed to elected organizations in each of the city’s eighty-one neighborhoods to undertake community projects. Not only did everyday people become involved in putting their tax dollars to work, but some neighborhood groups conceived practical new approaches to community problems that would never have been considered inside city hall.

Co-parenting

Mother Nature made a serious miscalculation when she made it possible for humans to make a baby with as little as two participants. It takes far more people than that to comfortably guide a child toward a happy and meaningful adult life. That’s the message of the African proverb — "It takes a village to raise a child"— that Hillary Clinton borrowed for the title of her bestselling book on how we can improve the lives of kids. In Western culture, this role has traditionally been played by the extended family, who pitched in with advice and hands-on help. While rarely a perfect arrangement, it was preferable to the isolation, loneliness, and exhaustion often experienced today by the typical nuclear or single-parent family.

Just because grandma no longer lives down the block shouldn’t mean parents are left all on their own. Taking a cue from the Christian custom of godparents as well as the highly successful Big Brother and Big Sister programs, we should establish a new tradition. Couples expecting a baby would designate two "co-parents" who would be present at the birth and maintain regular contact with the child ever after. There would be an independent dimension to this relationship, with each co-parent spending regular time alone with the child and becoming an advisor and, maybe, confidant. Many co-parents might be drawn from among the growing numbers of childless people, a lot of whom would welcome a bond with the coming generation.

Sustainable Extravagance

Theodore Roszak, the noted environmental philosopher and activist, raised eyebrows a few years back with his book The Voice of the Earth, which suggested that being extravagant is a basic human need. "We all need to have a certain sense of opulence or extravagance in our lives," Roszak told the British magazine Self and Society. "Environmentalists will never achieve their ends by creating a sense of privation, which can lead to hostility against those who are seen to be censoring people’s real needs. It’s rather like Puritans telling people to rein in their sexuality."

In traditional cultures, people’s impulse for excess is expressed at special festivals, where people dress up, feast, and dance through the night. But for many of us in the modern world, the natural impulse toward extravagance has been distorted into compulsive shopping, which can be as joyless as alcoholic binges.

"I would like to see addiction to consumption replaced with the idea of sustainable extravagance," Roszak says. Instead of harping on how we must all lead ascetic lives, environmentalists ought to be offering ideas on how basic desires for excess can be fulfilled without endangering the planet. Indeed, many of the loveliest, tastiest, most exciting pleasures on earth don’t necessarily take a high toll on the environment . People need to be reminded that occasional splurges — fancy cheese, bubble baths, a night on the town — offer far more satisfaction than the dreary day-to-day consumerism that captures so much of our time and money. And time itself can also be the ultimate indulgence. Nothing feels more delightfully decadent than taking a day away from working and shopping to do the things you really love.

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