geoff mulgan - hinton lecture 2007

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Geoff Mulgan Hinton Lecture 2007

21 November 2007, address to the UK National Council for Voluntary Organisations (NCVO)

The paradox of civil society and the challenge of social growthNick Hinton was one of those people whose energy and idealism

were infectious and daunting in equal measures, and its a

humbling honour to be asked to deliver a lecture in his honour.

Its now a full generation since Nick ran NCVO, and I want to use

this opportunity to reflect on where we are now, and what I see

as the paradox of civil society in Britain.

On the one hand more organisations, more turnover, more influence and more

visibility, perhaps than ever before. On the other, retreat in important areas,

values under pressure from growing inequality, the slow squeeze on civil liberty

and high levels of distrust, disrespect and disregard.

Let me start with the words of the poet Wei Wu Wei, who diagnosed the ills of an

over individualised, under socialised society more crisply than I could, and through

the lens of eastern philosophy:

Why are you so unhappy?

Because 99.9%

Of everything you think and

Of everything you do

Is for yourself

And there isnt one

We are now roughly halfway through the inquiry commissioned by the Carnegie

Trust in part to look at the state of these bonds beyond our separate selves and to

consider the future of civil society in the UK and Ireland, taking a wide view of civil

society as meaning not just the voluntary sector but also the other places where

people come together as equals for common goals and beliefs, from faith to trade

unions.

Our first task was to make sense of where we are now. Here the raw facts are

striking, and familiar to an audience like this, whether its the number of charities

and voluntary organisations, their share of the economy and employment or the

growth of new fields like social enterprise and social investment.

There are many sectors where civil society has enjoyed strong growth over the last

generation. It dominates in social care, as well as in housing where its been

helped by a continuing stream of stock transfers and the guaranteed subsidies of


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housing benefit. In health there are now some 34,000 third sector providers, under

contract to the NHS.

Civic activism has also grown a rough doubling in a generation of many of the

indicators of civic activism, like taking part in consumer boycotts and the rise ofsophisticated campaigns like the planes protests whose methods of consensus

decision making have a lot to teach other sectors.

No wonder the sector has become integral to political debate, and that NCVO has

no difficulty getting a hearing. The marginalisation that affected the sector in

much of the 20th century is over, and the sector can be proud of whats been

achieved in policy: a remarkable proportion of the recommendations of past

commissions, such as Nick Deakins, are now either enshrined in law or at least on

their way, whether in the form of the Compact (which is bedding down, albeit with

important remaining issues about powers), or the new charity act (again, albeit

with remaining questions over how the Charity Commission will enforce it). If I

dont say much about this policy agenda its mainly because so much has been

achieved.

But this rosy picture of influence and advance can be misleading. We know, for

example, that the small charities have been squeezed by the large in an era of

more competitive marketing, the less well connected by the well connected.

Overall giving is at best static hovering under 1% of GDP

And there are many sectors where ground has been lost. Take the field of

information and knowledge, one of the commanding heights of a modern society. In

the media civil society does appear as a campaigner. But as a player it is utterly

marginal with all the dominant channels owned by big business or by one public

sector organisation, the BBC. Just about the only other player that at one time

inspired hope Channel 4 has in some eyes lost its way. In print the Scott Trust is

about the only third sector player. There are the Community Channel and

community radio stations doing sterling work but nothing remotely able to

compete with the big players.

In finance, another of the commanding heights of modern society, decades of

retreat, demutualisation and privatisation, have yet to be made up for by the

promising but still modest in scale achievements of the Charity Bank, Venturesome

and others.

Look through the lens of the stages of life, and the picture is equally uneven. Civil

society has certainly lost ground in childhood. Children growing up today are

bombarded by an intrusive and often shameless commercial culture and then taken

into the care of the state if things go really wrong, with the voice of civil society


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barely audible in the din. In the workplace where so many spend so much of their

lives, professional associations remain strong but for most of the workforce the

voice of self organisation has been greatly weakened by a combination of frontal

assault on trade unions and neglect.

What of the future? In the inquiry we tried to make sense of some of the big

trends. We looked at the impact of technology which is making organisation far

easier, but also strengthening surveillance and a concentration of power in the big

players, from NewsCorporations Myspace to Googles Youtube. We looked at how

globalisation is raising the importance of international NGOs and creating a quite

new pattern of diaspora organisation, but also concentrating wealth and power in

global cities in which many feel less commitment to the places they live and the

people around them. We looked, of course, at climate change, an issue which civil

society in partnership with global science has done so much to put into publicconsciousness, but also at how often it is squeezed aside when big business and big

government pick up its agendas (and we also looked at whether business would

become more socially engaged or whether we would only have more astroturf

campaigns mimicking real grassroots activism).

We then looked at how the very idea of civil society may evolve. Today very old

traditions of charity and mutual support sit alongside a much more modern idea of

civil society, well described in Jeffrey Alexanders monumental recent book The

Civil Sphere. This modern civil society is concerned with universal rights andvalues, democracy and equity, a bigger sense of us, a bigger sense of here, and a

bigger sense of now, concerned with ecology and future generations.

This more modern perspective often challenges older norms. So, for example, it

criticises traditional charity for only dealing with symptoms instead of addressing

the underlying causes of suffering and need, challenging power structures, and

acting to a theory of change. Kathryn Merchant, President and CEO of the Greater

Cincinnati Foundation even recently described philanthropy as applied social

science. It puts a strong emphasis on voice and sees beneficiaries as best placed todefine and understand their own needs, rather than donors or trustees which

challenges not only traditional charity but also venture philanthropy. It sees actions

in civil society as public in nature, rather than being extensions of private life.

Hence the pressure for greater transparency for charities (as promoted by

organisations like Guidestar International or the Center for Effective Philanthropy),

the view that large non governmental organisations should be more formally

accountable for their actions, for the bang they achieve for their bucks, and that

wealthy philanthropists exercising power in a community through spending money

should be in part accountable to the beneficiaries and others affected by theiractions.


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These ideas, which have their roots in ancient Greece in Rome, as well as in the

enlightenment, are still fuelling the social imagination, inspiring people to imagine

and create a radically different future: a society where the mentally ill, or children

have full voice, where the worlds poor are empowered not passive recipients,

where there arent gulfs of power or identity, an economy without waste, a worldof enshrined genetic rights.

This, the radical edge of civil society, reminds us that social realities are

constructions not part of nature and that societies are made and remade by the

people in them, not inherited fixed or immutable, finding new expressions for love

and care, and showing the future in the present whether in housing developments

like BedZed, or empowering people with disabilities through projects like In

Control, or showing a different kind of economy like PeopleTree in fashion.

Civil society often hopes too much in the shortterm. But it also often hopes too

little in the longterm and its vital that pragmatic managerialism isnt allowed to

obscure civil societys role as the restless agent of change, as a place where

society dreams as well as acts.

Yet of course any predictions are risky. Ive always liked the comment on one far

left leader who in 1930 said that it was proof of Trotsky's farsightedness that none

of his predictions has yet come true. A famous futurist Jim Dator also said that for

any prediction about the future to be useful it must at first must sound ridiculous.

We may have failed by that measure. But we did feel confident about what was

likely to be the biggest challenge over the next 1020 years. It wasnt that

independence would be lost or that there wouldnt be enough money. Instead it

was that society would become more fragmented, more disconnected and less

integrated, with wider gulfs between rich and poor, country and city, religious and

secular, and different races, and less social capacity.

The causes of this are many some are structural, some are consequences of

politics. But their common theme is a weakening of the horizontal connections

between people, bridging social capital to use the technical term, and the related

capacities to empathise, cooperate and get on with others.

A recent survey of 11, 13 and 15 yearolds in more than 30 countries asked the

question do you find your peers generally kind and helpful?. More than half were

able to answer 'yes' in every OECD country except the Czech Republic and the

United Kingdom where only 43% felt able to answer positively, half the figure in

Switzerland and Portugal.


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We know the evidence about unwillingness to intervene in street issues and

disputes which shows the UKs citizens more prone to turn a blind eye than other

countries. Theres no shortage of evidence of people becoming less tolerant,

quicker to become angry whether in the form of road rage or attacks on NHS

staff. We know that levels of social trust declined steadily from the 1950s to the1990s, and although the overall trend appears to have stabilised its worrying that

48 per cent of young people aged 11 to 18 years would not trust the ordinary man

or woman in the street compared to 30 per cent of adults. Antisocial behaviour

continues to be a top public concern in many areas. And when people are asked if

life is getting better or worse, a large majority think its getting worse and the

specifics they cite are all about daily interactions, with 47% citing a lack of respect

and 46% levels of crime.

This isnt about young people and old, though its sometimes misleadinglypresented through this frame. Indeed in surveys of politeness to tourists in many

cities the young tend to score better than the old, and its men over 60 who come

out worst.

Instead it is about how we as humans relate to others, about the civilness of our

society, our ability to live together.

Its about the fear that although we may have a stronger civil society its far from

clear that our society is becoming more civil.

So why should any of this matter? It matters because distrust, unfriendliness, rage,

a society where people put up shutters, retreat to gated communities and put up

internal gates as well, is bound to be a stunted one unable to live up to its

potential. It matters too because the presence of a civil society in all its senses is

so critical to wellbeing and happiness. This is one of the messages from the

growing mass of evidence on wellbeing and happiness around the world. What

makes societies happy is in part income, in part good governance. But the evidence

again and again reinforces that its also about trust, about the quality of

relationships at the most micro level, how people live together, whether they feelsafe walking down their street, talking to a stranger, and whether there is a rough

and ready equality of recognition.

The sorts of trust and love which fuel social growth are the lifeblood for any

society. A metaphor for what isnt working can be seen on the streets and parks

this month. Look at any leaf and you see a brilliant structure for distributing the

essential nutrients to every part, a structure in which each part supports every

other part. Civil society at its best works in a similar way, distributing resources,

money, knowledge, trust and love.


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Yet in important ways this isnt happening. There are too many blockages, too

many barriers. Look at money. Were at what could be the tail end of the longest

sustained economic boom in British history, a boom in which the top 1% have

become phenomenally richer thanks to a winner takes all economy and generous

tax cuts. Yet how much of that wealth has been shared? Ive tried to find thefigures everyone agrees its well under 1%, and could be as low as 0.1%, 1p for

every 10 of city bonuses. The governments figures suggest that the most wealthy

1% with 23% of wealth contribute only 7.3% of giving, the top 10% with 56% of

wealth contribute only 21%. These are astonishing figures. They disprove any notion

of trickle down; they show that philanthropy is fragile. Twenty years ago, the

typical chief executive of a FTSE 100 company earned 25 times the pay of the

average worker. Now the figure is close to 120 times, and the numbers with liquid

assets over 5m has doubled to 9000 over last decade yet the recipients clearly

believe that such windfalls do not call for any proportionate generosity.

The US at least has the generosity of the Gates and Buffetts to temper its extreme

inequalities. We have some exemplary philanthropists. But overall we appear to

have got the American style inequalities but without the conscience of Americas

rich.

Despite a few glowing exceptions, most continue to put a higher priority on buying

another yacht, a fifth home or a tenth Aston Martin, than sharing their wealth with

people less lucky than them. This autumns arguments about inheritance have

posed the choice as one between money going to the state and money going to

children. Not surprisingly few are enthusiastic about their hard earned pounds

going to the taxman. Yet we know that large inheritances do few favours to

children either which is why so many of the wise wealthy from Andrew Carnegie

to Warren Buffett have kept these to a minimum. In the run up to the next

election the case needs to be made for a more balanced approach to how wealth

passes down the generations. Everyone draws on the legacy of the communities

around them, a legacy that goes far beyond the state. So any sensible inheritance

laws should provide for a three way split some money for family and friends;some for the state; and some for charities and the community.

Specifically, I would favour continuing to allow an untaxed band of say 500k.

Then for a second band up to a million, Id offer a choice so that 40% can either go

to an endowment or charitable donation, or in tax. Then, for legacies over a

million, why not combine a slightly higher default tax rate of perhaps 50% with a 25

or 50% tax credit for charitable donations. This would achieve a better balance

between the three claimants to any legacy, and a Community Legacy Tax Credit

scheme of this kind might in time contribute to a norm whereby wealth is ploughed

back into the community, where its put to work reflecting the values and


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commitments of the donor, rather than just the narrow interests of their family. It

could fuel the many community foundations growing across the country. Andrew

Carnegie said that its a disgrace to die rich. We dont need to go that far. But it

should be a matter of some shame to die rich and pass nothing on to the wider

community, and reforms to inheritance tax could play their part in changing theculture.

Well, even if we dont have US levels of philanthropy, at least we have a welfare

state, and decent public services, you might say, and its true that these have

protected millions from the insecurities that can be seen on the other side of the

Atlantic.

But how weve organised public services may sometimes have exacerbated the

problem rather than solving it, and gone against the imperatives of social growth.

One of the most important jobs of any state is to reward cooperation and punish

predatory behaviour. Indeed this is what states came into existence to do. Yet in

recent decades policies have, de facto, done much more to promote a competitive

individualism and distrust of others. When services are simply delivered to passive

consumers; when they are portrayed only through the lens of choice; when power

over services is centralised; this is bound to reinforce that British characteristic of

being a society of strong verticals and weak horizontals.

Worse, when public services do little or nothing to strengthen peoples abilities to

collaborate, to work with others, they undercut the very outcomes they exist to

achieve, like better health, regeneration or learning.

This is for me the key issue in public services for the next decade more important

than the precise balance between the different sectors, or the next phase of cost

recovery, or whether there should be a few more or a few less targets. Instead the

key issue for governments and for this sector is whether policy and its

implementation enhances peoples capacity to collaborate and to govern

themselves, or whether it erodes it; whether it strengthens selfefficacy and social

efficacy; whether it reinforces the inner disciplines we need to succeed in life as

well as the outward facing habits of mutual respect and recognition.

This is very evident in education. The advent of citizenship education five years

ago was welcome, but far too little time and attention in education goes into

cultivating the social skills of cooperation and collaboration, skills which can only

be learned by doing things with others rather than through pedagogy, and through

learning how to reason and discuss. This isnt some luxury though the elite

schools are often much better at using sports and volunteering to teach

cooperation. Instead its the absence of precisely these social, noncognitive skills

that is proving so debilitating to young people, particularly men, and particularly


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from the traditional industrial white working class. Certainly this is what employers

continually say.

Much is known about how these skills can be cultivated through everything from

enterprise projects that get young people out of school working with adults, toclasses in philosophy in primary schools, to the resilience lessons which some 4000

pupils are now receiving under the Young Foundations local wellbeing

programme. But these tend to be marginal addons, not central.

In a very different form this is also the critical issue in health. The biggest

challenges of the next two decades arent primarily about how to manage

hospitals, or waiting lists. Instead theyre about how to help a growing population

with long term, chronic diseases from diabetes and MS to heart disease and

cancers look after themselves and those around them. Most of the care provided

in this century wont come from hospitals, or doctors, or polyclinics it will be

provided by people themselves, and by those around them day in and day out,

supported by the NHS, informed by the best knowledge available, and with periodic

visits to clinicians and it will require new skills of selfresponsibility and

cooperation, as well support networks constructed around the frail elderly or

disabled children. It will, in other words, require a much more humancentred,

holistic approach that builds on the work of projects like the Expert Patients and so

many voluntary organisations. But the critical point is that it will have to be

grounded in selfefficacy and social efficacy too, especially if it is to make inroads

into inequalities that in the borough where I work Tower Hamlets have left life

expectancy 13 years longer at one end of the borough than the other.

Much the same is true in the environment. We know that progress depends not just

laws and regulations, and a treaty to replace Kyoto, but also on how people can

together change their habits, pooling cars, switching to neighbourhood energy

systems or locally produced food.

In crime the big issue is not whether to build more prisons, its how to really get to

the underlying causes of crime, which are so often about structures of opportunity

but also about basic things like the ability to communicate, to get on with others.

In local government our biggest problems stem from the excessive scale of local

government (ten times as large as in most countries), as well as centralisation in

London, which deny people the day to day experience of cooperating,

compromising at the very local neighbourhood level.

The big challenges of diversity too in a society experiencing unprecedented in

migration are also not just, or even primarily now, about laws and anti

discrimination but also the daily patterns of contact, friendship, understanding and


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the ability of neighbourhoods to solve clashes between generations and races

something were working on in neighbourhoods in Tottenham and Limehouse, and

thats done brilliantly by projects like Peacemakers in Oldham. The bigger

structural changes of the last few decades have certainly made this harder. Richard

Sennett wrote not long ago that the inequalities of class and race clearly make itdifficult for people to treat one another with respect but this makes the task all

the more important.

Theres a connecting thread in all of this and that connecting thread is precisely

the importance of connecting threads, and of the skills that make societies work.

Much more is known about these skills than in the past about empathy and how its

cultivated; about social intelligence; about how to reduce conflict, arbitrate or

mediate. After all these are the decisive skills of a democratic age, an age when

people sort themselves out rather than relying on hierarchy and authority. They areskills which are grounded in human nature itself but they also need to be

nurtured, enhanced, trained.

This was well understood by civil society in the past. In the 19th century,

responding to the shocks of an often brutal industrialisation, the Sunday Schools

and cooperatives, mutuals and libraries, all worked to support the qualities of

character, and mutual respect, that Im emphasising, while also campaigning for

such things as clean water and decent education.

Now there are two characteristics of these skills which stand out. One is that they

all carry within them an ethic of care the ethic which lies at the heart of every

true profession and every true vocation. At its purest it offers unconditional love

the love that so many people from damaged backgrounds have never had. That

ethic is in my view rather weaker and less supported than its sister ethic, the work

ethic, as can be seen by the still small amounts invested in paying for carers, or

training them up, even though we know that we will need far more of it perhaps

5% of GDP within a generation.

Its fragile state can also be judged by comparing a cult of celebrity in whichanyone can be famous for 15 minutes for doing something useless, but most people

who do something useful remain invisible.

The other characteristic of these skills is scale. Care always happens on a small

scale, face to face, with the empathy of understanding the loneliness of a

housebound octogenarian, or the selfhate of an abused teenager, and its at a

small scale that all social skills become most apparent, in the walking distance

world of the GPs surgery, the church, the childcare centre.


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This is where voluntary sector faces both opportunities and challenges. At first

glance this should be ideal territory for voluntary sector. It should be more

responsive, more human scale, better able to tap into motivations to care and

help, better placed to forge the support systems of this century. The sector should

be the obvious place to cultivate society.

Often it is. But by no means always. I was impressed by Community Links recent

report on the sectors values which reminded us that if the sector is to continue to

inspire people to get involved both as volunteers and as paid workers, then it has

to be able to rigorously and passionately demonstrate these values. Values are the

sectors most important asset in recruiting people and sustaining their

commitment. But as they also said the sector has no monopoly on these values,

and certainly doesnt always live by them. Whenever serious research has been

done comparing the sectors performance against others as in the NCCs surveyearlier this year its been found wanting. Its not automatically more innovative,

more responsive, or more accountable.

Now small isnt always beautiful. It can be inefficient, parochial. Im all for growth

and being more professional. But history shows that greater scale can make it

harder to remain true to values, and that when voluntary organisations grow they

risk becoming more like other big organisations, bureaucratic, riskaverse,

dedicated more to their own survival than change. I remember hearing one Chief

Executive of a big voluntary organization joke that the true benefit of rising to the

top of a large organization is not money or perks. It's never again having to listen to

anyone who disagrees with you, and we all know of third sector organizations that

have lost touch with their values.

Many have grown successfully both as organizations and more often as looser

federations which combine the benefits of scale with the benefits of localness. But

the key point is that if you focus on growth then you need to also focus even harder

on values too.

Here I want to take a turn back into history because it can illuminate our choicestoday. We use many ancient words sometimes interchangeably civil, civic,

voluntary, social, public. But they have different histories and meanings. The

oldest of them is probably the word social, socius in Latin meaning living together,

which came from an even older IndoEuropean root sequ which meant following

along a path together, an idea that takes us back to the times when we lived in

groups, depended on their care and protection.

The words civic and civil come later, from the life of towns and cities that took

that idea of the social up a stage and embodied it in institutions. The word civil

came to be associated with states, with the townspeople (who were civil in the


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sense of courteous, in contrast to the rough soldiers), and a civil service (that

contrasted with the military side of the east India company). For anyone whos

interested this was the topic of Norbert Elias, one of the 20th centurys greatest

sociologists who was based in Leicester and whose importance has only slowly been

recognised in the decades since his death. His masterpiece on the civilising processshowed how life changed as people became more interconnected, and learned to

restrain their impulses to violence, and how the aristocratic notions of courtesy

were democratised into the more encompassing ideas of civility (theres also a

parallel literature on civility in other cultures like Eiko Ikegamis extraordinary

book Bonds of Civility on Japans networks of artists, poets and craftspeople that

provided outlets for individual selfexpression in a still largely feudal society).

These words then overlap with the work public which at root means of or

pertaining to the people but which came in time to link the ideas of universalityand equity to the state.

Now I mention this history because you can see the progression from the very

everyday social into words and ideas of ever greater abstraction. That abstraction

has been one of the forces for human progress in that it has expanded our sense of

possibility, of rights and power. But its always vital to keep in mind the roots, to

remember that the social precedes the civil or public and is what they depend on.

Thats why we need social growth that isnt just about rights and provision but that

also strengthens our horizontal rather than vertical bonds; that promotes self

knowledge and everyday care, and that encourages mutual respect and recognition

without the submissive hierarchy of the past.

Let me draw these threads together. From a global perspective civil society is in

remarkable health. In retrospect 1989 signalled a shift all over the world as civil

society found its feet and its voice. It reinforced a slow intellectual revolution and

a burgeoning understanding in academia of how people cooperate and collaborate

thats come from game theory, economics, psychology, even physics as well as

sociology, from the new understandings of social capital, of wellbeing and what

makes for good governance.

Much of this work is taking us back to the fine grain of social relationships.

This is important for Britain. For a generation the dominant debates have been

about organisational form how to achieve better legal recognition, fiscal

recognition, a place at the table. These were important and necessary moves and I

pay tribute to the contributions of Nick Hinton himself, and to others like Nicholas

Deakin and Stuart Etherington. Its only because of their achievements that we can

complement the attention to form with attention to content.


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That content is about how society is made, at the micro as well as the macro level.

It requires new skills, new methods and I suspect some new institutions. And it

requires forensic attention to what really works in promoting these skills and

enhancing social growth.

The ecological movement has forced much more serious attention to how we live

with nature and as part of nature. But we also need similar attention to how we

live together, and a similar combination of civic activism and innovation, creativity

and design, as well as hard science, measurement and learning.

This thinking informs much of what we are doing at the Young Foundation from

new models of schooling and healthcare, to developing leaders in marginalised

communities, to working with neighbourhoods and promoting wellbeing. All are at

heart about remaking society from the ground up.

Societies arent machines. But they are like machines in one important respect.

However imposing they look, they are only as effective as the small screws that

hold them together, and the thin layers of oil that help them move. If they neglect

these they seize up altogether.

What holds societies together is not glue or fabric. Instead its the skills of

interdependence. One of the classic prescriptions for depressives is to each evening

write down three people who deserve gratitude that day. Simply doing this has a

marked impact on recovery levels, and its something I would recommend foreveryone in this room and to teach children too. Reflecting on the gratitude we

owe to others makes us more content with ourselves too. We thrive in other words

from our interdependence, and yet by an optical illusion that interdependence so

often gets obscured. Thats why I hope we can make social growth as natural a goal

as economic growth has been and why I hope that the voluntary sector can lead

the way.

Thank you.

source : The Young Foundation website Geoff Mulgan Hinton lecture 2007http://www.youngfoundation.org.uk/node/641

geoff mulgan - hinton lecture 2007

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