Social evils in the 21st century: reframing the debate

The Joseph Rowntree Foundation's consultation exercise has unearthed a chaos of social evils. This raises a concern that by concentrating on a multiplicity of social evils, we are focusing on symptoms rather than causes. The ‘evils’ identified – ranging from individualism and consumerism to loss of social solidarity – all strike me as symptoms of our bewildered response to rapid technological and scientific advances, climate change, globalised economic activity and the eastwards shift of economic power.

The pace of change has accelerated in our lifetime and presents challenges to the agencies of the state, commerce, organised religion and the media; challenges that they have failed to respond to adequately or fast enough. A failure of agency has led to a withdrawal of authority from and trust in those institutions and people responsible for managing them (Figure 14.1). All this helps to explain the retreat into individualism. Consumerism, like comfort food, has become displacement behaviour to mask the stress. The consequence is that we consume more than we need, and thus contribute to the larger forces driving the destructive dynamic.

My proposition is that it is important to understand the existing dynamic in order to establish agencies that are better able to manage technological and economic changes and their environmental consequences for the wider good. That requires intervention at all levels. But change at the local level is capable of engendering new forms of action and solidarity that in turn provide the drivers that can reinvigorate existing and establish new forms of agency. It is, therefore, important to support behavioural change at a local level that is consistent with addressing the larger issues.

Scale of change

In 1904, when Joseph Rowntree set up his philanthropic trusts, the earth was thought of as a solid object. Germany and Great Britain, the pioneers of the first Industrial Revolution, were still engaged in a competition to carve out and control a world dominated by the concept of physical empire. The First World War was still over the horizon, as was the Great Depression and the rise of totalitarian socialism and fascism. Since then the face-off between the US and the Soviet Union, the leaders of the second Industrial Revolution, has come and gone.