The Wardman Wire

Why do we change? What motivates us to do things differently? There’s a whole host of examples on show this week:

Targets: 4 police forces have abandoned some of the governments target-setting schemes because the targets weren’t actually helping. A good target is one that’s worth achieving. Is a slot at the Royal Variety Show, justifying the ‘years’ of work put in by the Britains Got Talent contestants, a target worth achieving? Piers, we’ll go to you first… Targets on their own usually aren’t enough, as the 3 words ‘New Years Resolution’ amply demonstrate.

Promises: by promising we choose to make ourselves accountable for something. Sometimes it’s loyalty to a promise which can hold us to a course of action when laziness or compromise would settle for less. The international cluster bomb treaty is a welcome promise by those nations who have signed up to it, though how much Peer Pressure it exerts on the nations who haven’t remains to be seen. It’s also a lot easier to promise never to explode a bomb you don’t have and can’t afford.

Encouragement: most of us thrive on good back-up, and only Apprentice contestants seem to lack the self-doubt that comes naturally to everyone else. Normal people need someone standing beside them saying ‘come on, you can do it.’ The best sporting captains know how to motivate their team, and know that each player is encouraged and motivated by something different. I can’t remember where I heard it this week, but someone was putting Alex Fergusons’ success down to his relentlessly positive attitude and ability to motivate his players.

Education: the great New Labour golden bullet; if you teach people ‘citizenship’ and respect for other religions, then you’ll create a society of good citizens and mutual respect. That went well. The jury is well and truly out on multiculturalism, and the use of exam targets actually signals that our priorities lie elsewhere. We measure what we value and value what we measure, and the message our children get is that we don’t really value personal and social education, because you don’t get tested on it.

Economics: we’ve known for years that our flights and car journeys were damaging the environment, but done very little about it. The oil price shock may change our behaviour overnight. It’s too soon to tell whether car sales and journeys are being affected, but air travel is already taking a hit. Where education has failed, economics has triumphed. (Not to mention making it a great time to smuggle in a change to nuclear policy).

Censorship: in a week where the Beeb has remembered Mary Whitehouse, with a surprising degree of wistfulness from some quarters, the debate still rumbles on over how much we’re influenced by what we see. It is surely a no-brainer that repeated exposure to a certain behaviour normalises it.

Religion: the Bishop of Rochester has been in the news again, arguing that the Christian faith which first knitted together British identity from a “rabble of mutually hostile tribes” is dissipating, leaving a moral and spiritual vacuum. Last year was 200 years since William Wilberforce, driven by his Christian faith, got Parliament to abolish the slave trade. Though the media focuses on people ‘radicalised’ by their adoption of religious faith (mostly Muslims), there are thousands of stories of people changed for the better by faith in God. Tony Blairs new ‘Faith Foundation’ recognises the potency of faith as a force for good, and in tackling global poverty and injustice.

Law: every law is an admission of failure. Whether we are protecting people from themselves, from others, or trying to restrain the darker aspects of human behaviour, criminalisation recognises that ‘all of the above’ still don’t work in certain areas. The mass of new trading standards crimes (why didn’t the fortune tellers see it coming) is just one example. Whilst some new laws are simply a reponse to increased complexity, in the main an increasing amount of legislation and state control is a symptom of an ailing society. And there are always people for whom the law doesn’t work.

So what works?

Buckshot or Golden Bullet

Very few of these work alone. Cigarettes have been attacked from all sides - education, economics, law, censorship, and voluntary acceptance of peer pressure through self-help groups. We also recognise that a society relying mainly on forms of coercion to produce good behaviour - law, tax, censorship etc. - is making up for what is lacking in its own citizens.

We’re a society in restless pursuit of change: detox, makeover, upgrade, there’s an ever increasing list of words for it. But the more we talk about it, the less clear it is what we want to become.

We also seem to live under the illusion that change is a commodity, something you can buy. But whilst furniture, appearance and location can be changed at the drop of a debt card, our character and personality aren’t so easily led. The moral vacuum that Michael Nazir-Ali talks about is partly a lack of ideals. We just don’t have any visions of change worth the candle, it’s just the consumer Nirvana of slightly more or slightly bigger. Political ideologies, for all their faults, at least had a vision of a better society, and better people within it. If the limits of our vision is a cheque for £100,000 from Simon Cowell, or Noel Edmonds, then God help us.

As Good as It Gets?

It’s in human nature to be restless. Being created in God’s image includes creativity and the divine call to ‘be fruitful’. It comes naturally to us to look at the world and think ‘can we do better than this?’ But that desire for change can be warped, and what counts as ‘better’ can be trivialised. When that image is crushed and bent we look at the world cynically, without hope, and fear that this is as good as it gets. Depression and violence are the two logical responses.

Augustine famously wrote “You have created us for yourself, and our hearts are restless until they find their rest in You.” For a Christian the inner impetus to change is directed towards God, and towards a world which embodies the divine kingdom of love and justice. That was written at a time when society was stable, with fixed social and sexual roles, when change was the exception rather than the rule. In our day that’s completely reversed, as we run to stand still on the information superhighway. Many of us are restless for a break, not for more change.

The Vision Thing

At its root, change = (dissatisfaction x hope) + opportunity. The moral challenge is to be dissatisfied with the right things (e.g. poverty rather than bad parking), and to find a hope worth having, rather than wishful thinking, or trivial tinkering. This is the vision thing. Any society without a life-giving vision - whether a family, a community or a nation - slowly but surely, dies.

David Keen blogs at St. Aidan to Abbey Manor