“A successful society must provide its citizens with a dream of the future.”
James Marriott, Journalist at The Times
(note: '++' = shorthand for 'Archbishop')
In his keynote speech welcoming Anglican Communion bishops to the Lambeth Conference, Archbishop Justin Welby urged them to turn ‘outwards to the entirety of the world’ and, in particular, to the pride of ‘lions’ threatening humanity with attack, hostility, danger and uncertainty. He summarised these as climate change, religious extremism, war and government oppression, economic injustice and poverty, and culture wars. Meanwhile his comments on science and technology were more circumspect: he accepted their capacity to deliver solutions as well as to present challenges.
It's a well-constructed speech, steering the focus of his audience away from internal issues and hypocrisy towards showing genuine care for the world and its citizens. But while that motivation for a better world is widely shared, what was — and often is — missing is an appreciation of how long-term and short-term motivations are so often in conflict. In a world where our actions today influence the long-term more acutely than at any time in history, we must re-balance our search for solutions in order to avoid the long-term being continually eclipsed by, and often sacrificed to, the short-term.
So in this commentary we call for a conscious distinction in our perspective in tackling Archbishop Justin's real-world ‘lions’, so that long-term intentions remain in focus during short-term crises.
One of the most comprehensive analyses of competing ‘motivation durations’ was provided in the ‘Stern Review on the Economics of Climate Change’, published in October 2006. ‘Discounting the future’ is a phenomenon widely understood by economists, but Nicholas Stern brought it into sharp public focus for the first time, for an area in which people increasingly understand its relevance.
Our opening quotation today is drawn from a lead commentary article in last Thursday’s ‘The Times’, entitled ‘The young are in desperate need of optimism’. The author, James Marriott, points out that ‘the abandonment of the future is naïve, because societies need optimism for their values to persist’, and he deplores the vacuum of a future to hope for amongst the young.
++ Justin Welby, however, clearly holds young people’s capacity for seeking change in high respect. Referring to a ‘passionate commitment that did not exist with what were called the ‘baby boomers’ … to justice, equality and freedom’, and an aversion to self-seeking and hypocrisy, he finds ‘genuine energy around the world, especially by people under thirty’. But I suspect James Marriott has his finger more on the ball when he deplores the lack of optimism amongst the young, while at the same time defining it as ‘the most abstract of political values, but one that holds everything else together’.
A typical example of the ‘motivation duration’ challenge lies between economics and climate change. Just last autumn politicians applauded the COP26 climate conference: but now, threatened with recession, falling living standards and inflation, those same politicians are advocating cutting VAT on fuel and removing the green levy.
And when we look at economic influences and how to address them, we see the short-term much more in evidence than the long-term. For example, we can all conclude that soaring prices have been driven by the Russian stranglehold on energy, but there has been no longer-term investigation into potential driving forces behind transference into wages and the associated impact on living standards.
In order to do this, we would need to take into account not only shrinkage of the working population caused by Brexit, but also changes in working practice caused by the pandemic lockdown and the furlough scheme. It may be a significant factor that large swathes of the population are now granting themselves a 4-day week on a 5-day salary. A deeper look at this change in productivity might help us to understand the social divisions now being brought to a head by inflation, because those on lower incomes do not usually enjoy that same discretion.
Meanwhile and as we reported on Sir Stephen Lovegrove’s comments last week, engagement is the only long-term answer to international relationships: the rash of tensions and conflicts today show that our ability to tame this ‘lion’ has slipped considerably over the past thirty years. As for the Archbishop’s other ‘lions’, religious extremism and culture wars: these are best left for him and his colleagues to wrestle with.
‘Motivation duration’ is not an academic curiosity — it needs proper focus within our system of governance. Electing democratic representatives for up to five years is never going to provide the necessary focus for addressing the Archbishop’s long-term roaring lions, whether in climate change or to enable the introduction of the more egalitarian form of capitalism for which we argue so persistently.
We need to reform systems of government to do this — giving a stronger voice to young people, reforming the second chamber here in the United Kingdom for a long-term democratic perspective, and by doing some serious work on how to improve the translation of long-term good intentions into a programme of consistent implementation.
Gavin Oldham OBE
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