We have a crying need for new stories

They are our way for imagining a better future

[The] “what if“ question is not asked out of mere idle curiosity. It is asked because I, and many others, consider there to be a crying need for a more human and humane response to the many challenges currently experienced in our social world: a response driven by a profound sense of our responsibility to others as the primary ethic. (Penman, Justice in the Making, p. 211)

I wrote those words towards the end of a book passionately arguing for a seismic shift in our way of understanding justice. I’ll continue that passionate argument here, although not just for matters of justice. There are so many other aspects of our social world that impact on how we live our lives, some to the extent that they even threaten our existence.

I’m a practical scholar, a long-time observer and critic of our social world, and, hopefully, a useful way-finder to another better social world. Asking “what if…?.” is the key to opening a path to a new world of being with others.

For me the social world is everything. It is the world of lived experience felt by us in all our relations with others, whether it be at work, at home, or in the broader civic sphere. And it is the civic sphere, the arena of public life that most engages me.

In the political sphere we can see all manner of disasters unfolding before our very eyes, or even in our very neighbourhoods. The rise in totalitarian and fascist regimes is alarming and when it appears to be happening in a country once claiming to be the leader of the free world it is beyond alarming.

In the economic sphere there is the parallel rise of neoliberalism with its cultivated misunderstanding of the foundational economic myths related to money, inflation, deficits, and the regulatory role of the marketplace. As one of many consequences, there is the exponential increase in the gap between the wealthy and the not-so-wealthy and an accompanying increase in a range of social injustices.

And on top of that—and because of it—we have a world-threatening environmental crisis, arising from economically driven abuse of our natural resources and intentional ignorance about all manner of consequences to our very survival. This no longer feels like a long-term threat either: it is in front of us, now.

All of these disasters are interrelated. They feed of each other and they breed more disasters.

The Doomsday Clock of the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists is now set at 89 seconds to midnight, indicative of how perilously close to the precipice we are.

So what can we do?

There are all sorts of obvious answers to the above question. We can put our heads in the sand and hope somebody else will do something about it. We can complain to whoever we talk with about the disastrous state of affairs. We can take up a banner and march. We can engage in civil disobedience. And we can work to elect a new government—one we hope will make things better.

But none of these responses will be enough in the end. They are definitely Important, and maybe even necessary, but never enough for the change we really need if we are to avoid such disasters in the future.

The response repertoire we typically draw upon is reactive. It consists of actions to resist or deny the present state of affairs; to say that is enough, it is wrong. And there is no doubt so much of the current state of affairs is just that. However, to live into a better social future, we need to do more than react and resist.

We need a both/and approach in response to the many crises threatening us: Both creative resistance and constructing a way forward.

We need new ways of making sense of, and acting into, the world, in ways that transform, not just reform.

Changing our stories

To transform our social world, we need to be hell-bent on creating new stories.

Storytelling is a fundamental human activity. We tell stories about ourselves—what sort of person we are, what we value, what is important to us. And we tell stories about our social world—how it functions, how it ought to be.

Our storehouse of stories is our storehouse for meaning-making. This cultural and personal storehouse of meaning provides the rationale for how we act across the economic, political, legal, and personal spheres of our social world.

Our stories are based on some pretty fundamental, and rarely questioned, assumptions about the nature of the world. In pre-modern times in the West the world was imagined as an enchanted place in which it was impossible not to believe in a God, evil spirits, and the like. In contrast, it is impossible not to question those things in the modern social imagination where we are far more likely to believe in the god Science. Our stories have changed considerably as a consequence.

It can be easy to forget that our vision of our social world and the stories based on it, are not just descriptors of our world, they create the world envisioned. What we have imagined, makes the imagination possible. Conversely, if we cannot imagine it, it just is not possible to bring it into existence.

I hope by now you are starting to get the first hint of why I have called my substack “What if?...“ I want to talk about a new imagination, to make new things possible. But, to get back to the flow of the proposal here, the begged question is why would we want to change our social imagination?

Well, one of the inevitable problems with any particular social imagination is that it not only accounts for a particular vision of the social world but it can block any other vision. More than that though. We can become so wedded to the taken-for-granted beliefs in how we envision our world and our role in it, that we get frozen in place. We zealously resist change. We cling to an assumed certainty of existence. We violently oppose difference. Starting to sound like our social world of today?

If we want to change the way we do things in our social world, and especially those things generating the interrelated disasters that have led us to the precipice we are now on, we need to change our stories. And we need to do so quite radically.

Away from?

One of the rarely questioned assumptions underlying much of the everyday stories of our social world is based on a belief in the autonomous individual. We think of a person as a self-contained entity, that should be autonomous, able to be their own person and operate independently.

In political and economic contexts our story of the autonomous individual is premised on the tenets of liberal individualism. Essential to these stories is an unquestioned assumption that the individual enjoys some sort of essential priority over the community or the broader society. It is also unquestionably believed that the freedom of the individual is an inviolable right.

In some ways it is easy to understand why such a belief persists. We each physically appear as coherent entities—so of course we are autonomous individuals. Yet in other ways the persistence of this belief is quite strange.

It is strange when you consider it is not a belief common to all cultures. It is strange when you consider it is not supported by some powerful scientific theories or developmental evidence.

It is also strange when you consider that the entrenched Western view of self has been subject to an increasing number of social commentaries and critics linking it to a range of social ills, from fragmentation of society, to inequality and social injustices, to ecological destruction.

So, if these problems are known why does the belief persist? There are few issues here.

First, the belief in the autonomous individual persists because it is so deeply entrenched and it is hard to conceive of any alternative. Because of this, solutions to social ills are directed to mid-range beliefs. Solutions of this ilk typically are addressed at legislative changes to improve things. Or to diplomatic manoeuvres within the existing western power structure.

Second, the problems persist because the more obvious attempt to readdress the basic belief, more often than not, simply reverses the priority. It is argued that the community needs to take priority over the individual. This alternative reflects the very conventional either/or thinking of binary logic. Sadly, this reversal of priority can be a precursor to the development of a fascist regime, when the individual is subjugated to the state.

To persons-in-relation

There is another alternative that we have yet to take on board in our way of thinking about our social world. This is an alternative based on both-and thinking that envisions a social world of persons-in-relation.

Rather than prioritise the individual or the group, this way of thinking prioritises our relation with each other. With this shift in thinking, relationships move from the periphery to the center of political, economic and legal thought.

This change in imagination from entities to relationships is akin to moving from Newtonian physics to quantum theory in the way we understand our physical world. Contemporary quantum theory offers a vision of an entangled universe where everything is interconnected and everything needs to be understood in terms of relationships.

Quite extraordinary changes occur when we imagine our social world through a quantum lens. In this imagination, our social world is understood as being brought into being in our relating with others. And, if we are to change our social world it is through changes in how we relate with others.

Our crying need is for new stories based on the quality of our relating with each other.

These new stories will unfold here. They will include ideas about a radical relationality, and being wise in our manner of our communicating with each other. There will also be stories about how these changes in being-in-relation in our social world could bring about ways of acting justly, of engaging in genuine democratic functioning, and in co-creating better social worlds from the ground up.