Politics tries to hide it but the only morality it is interested in these days is greed and avarice. It is this which has done endless damage and only a moral campaign can challenge it.
Robin McAlpine is head of strategic development at the Common Weal think-tank.
Cross-posted from Common Weal
It was outside our price range, but we decided to do the right thing, sacrifice somewhere else and move to electric cars. That was three years ago and the only thing I regret is car leasing (we had no option because there was no real second hand market then, but god, car leasing would bankrupt you…).
Now we have to replace that car so we’ve bought a second hand EV; again, a little outside our price range. I watch battery technology like a geek and have visions of 500 mile batteries which charge in six minutes. But that’s next gen, and here’s what I’ve discovered. I’ve discovered that a 150 mile range is just about manageable for me (old car) but you have to concentrate and make sure the car is charged. A lot.
But the new car can do a functional 250 miles on one charge, and (so far) it seems like that is plenty for me. Sure, 500 miles would be cool. But I can now comfortably get to Inverness and back with a half-hour top-up charge.
Functionally, that’s as much as I need except say the occasional visit to Ullapool or one of the islands. Like I say, plenty. And it has happened to me at a point where I have been thinking about this anyway – can we get personal morality back into politics? Should we? What would it look like? And what has it got to do with battery range?
I think we need to be more honest again; politics is a fundamentally moral pursuit. The whole root meaning of ‘politics’ is just old Greek for ‘of, about or for the citizens’. How can that not infringe on moral responsibility?
There are two big conceptual behemoths here and a course must be navigated between them. The first is the ‘invisible morality’ that is already there. Politics is constantly telling you how to behave, but it disguises the fact. And the second is narrow moralising, sort of the opposite – not a moral framework but a code of conduct that keeps most behaviours the same.
So what is the first, invisible behemoth? It is individualism. It is so infused in our contemporary culture that people invoke it without thinking. ‘I need to do what is right by me and mine’ is so taken for granted now that we don’t consider what it means. Yet it isn’t true. When an old lady gets on the bus and there is no seat, I do not think about the interests of me and mine. Because actually ultimately what is right for me and mine is a better society, a better world, someone who will one day stand and give me a seat when I need it.
Yes, you absolutely are ‘worth it’, but you’re worth more than cheap prosecco or luxury chocolates. You’re worth it more than another hour of doomscrolling. You’re worth more than taking someone else’s parking space because you can.
Yet the whole might of government is behind this selfish bollocks. Right now every step by John Swinney seems geared up to play to that ‘me first’ mindset. He could address the housing crisis by building council houses but he’d rather bung public money to the affluent middle classes because he thinks selfishness wins elections.
Every Burnham u-turn (they are really mounting up…) is about reverting to utter selfishness. Council tax reform? No – the wealthy like their unfair perks. Political donation reform? No – powerful people like to buy elections. Only build council houses? No – the developers have told him they must do what is right for developers and screw the young.
On energy, on justice, on immigration – government is now a permanent selfishness machine, less interested in what people really need (like a functioning GP service), much more interested in what they think they want at any given minute (like some cathartic immigrant bashing or tax cuts for high-voting home owners). Our morality is that any morality that gets in the way of greed is immoral.
This in part leads to the other behemoth. Despite what the politicians are trying to make you feel (on behalf of corporations), we actually dislike the guy who steals someone’s parking place out of selfishness. We are a social species which by definition means we have to be a moral species. Morality is just a framework that enables us to live together without strangling each other.
Which means that the more a politician is really pursuing a selfish economic agenda, the more they want to carve out a moral agenda for themselves. But a harmless one. The serious heavy lifting is being done by the selfishness, the performative morality is mainly for show.
On the right its personal behaviour – know your place, keep quiet young people, don’t have sex for various reasons. On the left its all re-education and micro-aggressions, a set of practices that do nothing to disrupt shopping, or doomscrolling, or house price inflation…
(To demonstrate this, I’m told reliably that about a decade ago Patrick Harvie was opposed to a campaign to require retail to close on New Years Day on the basis “people like to shop”. Yeah, and shop workers like to see their families. These are value judgements, moral decisions. They shouldn’t be treated like bribes.)
What very few politicians will say is that avarice is a sin, not a virtue. A life of self-pleasing is positively anti-social. It is not the rich who we should admire but people who really contribute to their society, their community. Paying a fraction of the tax you ought to doesn’t make you a good person or even an important one; wealth is not a moral pursuit.
Let’s be realistic, I am now from another generation. I saw a picture of myself as a baby and I realised it could have been the 1950s. I was in my gran’s house and she was washing me in an old iron children’s bathtub. That bathtub probably saw the war; things lasted then. I lived in what I now realise was the end of a post-war period. When I was at primary school, almost anyone who was an ‘adult’ had experience of rationing.
My gran was pathologically opposed to waste. If it could be mended it should be mended. It was a moral purpose. She had lived through privation (twice, given her childhood). Waste was taking something from someone who needed it. If that sometimes meant making do, it meant making do.
That’s what I grew up with. I still struggle to throw out old clothes I don’t wear anymore while wearing tatty old t-shirts because they look rubbish but they’re still perfectly functional. (The kids have had words with me about scruffiness).
Which means I look at the modern world with horror. We did an all-inclusive holiday a few years ago and the performative food waste horrified me. People were stacking plates with food they could never have eaten almost as if they were gorillas beating their chests to show just how well they’d ‘won the game of life’.
Of course I haven’t invented the idea of ‘greed might not be good’. On the left it probably best currently exists in the ‘degrowth agenda’. That’s part of the point. I don’t like waste but I don’t live in austerity. I like nice things. The language of degrowth doesn’t properly engage with that. It sounds like it’s part of the ‘punishment agenda’. It sounds like the wrong kind of morality. It crashes into the ‘moralising’ behemoth.
We need a Scottish version of the Swedish ‘lagom’ – not too much, not too little. But it needs to sound aspirational, not like a warning. And we do have our own version. It’s Jack and Victor from Still Game. We have to find a way to say ‘that’s plenty’ which focusses on the plentiful, not the admonition.
That is a large part of what we’ve tried to do at Common Weal. We have never tried to sell ‘green austerity’. That’s the opposite of what we want. But it’s not a choice between austerity and greed. We need to encourage people to want plenty. There is nothing wrong with that.
And this is the moral point – if you’re still hungry you should be able to eat more. But if you put it on your plate and you’re so full you throw it out, that’s wasteful greed. The way to have plenty is not to have waste. When Jack and Victor tell you ‘that’s plenty’, they are not offering you a sermon on degrowth, they are drawing some sort of line we agree is being crossed.
Can you imagine how revolutionary it would sound for a politician to stand up and say ‘you are not the content of your shopping bag, you are not a collection of whims, you are not a walking wallet, you are not a repository for addictive ultra processed food, you are worth so much more than this’.
We value social connection, a sense of personal purpose, a calm environment, green space and nature, the chance to make meaningful choice, a degree of control over our lives. Once you have sufficiency (enough to live a good life) and security (confidence you’ll always have enough to live a good life), these are the things that actually improve your life. And they’re the opposite of consumption.
So why is politics all about facilitating you to shop more, to spend more, to give corporations your money? Ah, wait, it’s the last one. That is what has destroyed our economy, our communities and our environment. Only a moral stance can get us out of this.
I have started to think about a lot of things in terms of ‘what does this look like if it serves 99 per cent of the people, 99 per cent of the time?’. A lot of human energy and resource is wasted on that extra one percent. I have software that I need to do various things I do but it is very expensive because it can always do dozens of things I’ll never, ever need. I’d be so much better of with a sufficient platform at half the price.
And that is why my new car has been a lesson in what I already knew – there really is such a thing as ‘plenty’ and there really is something which is ‘too much for what I really need’. The difference is that the politics of ‘GDP growth’ require you to believe neither of these things. It is the source of our misery.
I’m happier when my world exists with moderation. I’m happier when I eat less sugar. I’m happier when I’m not in a shopping mall. I’m happier when I go and do ‘something else instead’. Balance makes my life better. I can’t tell you how much I would love a political party that spread this message.
We all deserve to have plenty. To get there we need to not take too much. My gran knew this. So do Jack and Victor. So do the social theorists and the psychologists. So do we all, somewhere deep inside. I’m sure very, very deep down even the oligarchs know this.
Yet, politics (‘by, about and for citizens’) gives the impression that it will be the last in the room to realise that greed doesn’t build a better society. A lot of words are wasted on why people are losing faith in democracy. This amoral mortgaging of our society in pursuit of everyone’s narrow self interest is a major part of it. A society cannot run successfully on greed.
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Robin McAlpine – That’s Plenty! The church of Jack and Victor
Aggregated summary from an independent source. Read the original at BraveNewEurope.