Geoff Mulgan ‐ Hinton Lecture 2007

21 November 2007, address to the UK National Council for Voluntary Organisations (NCVO)

The paradox of civil society and the challenge of social growth

Nick Hinton was one of those people whose energy and idealism
were infectious and daunting in equal measures, and it’s a
humbling honour to be asked to deliver a lecture in his honour.
It’s now a full generation since Nick ran NCVO, and I want to use
this opportunity to reflect on where we are now, and what I see
as the paradox of civil society in Britain.

On the one hand more organisations, more turnover, more influence and more
visibility, perhaps than ever before. On the other, retreat in important areas,
values under pressure from growing inequality, the slow squeeze on civil liberty
and high levels of distrust, disrespect and disregard.

Let me start with the words of the poet Wei Wu Wei, who diagnosed the ills of an
over individualised, under socialised society more crisply than I could, and through
the lens of eastern philosophy:

Why are you so unhappy?

Because 99.9%
Of everything you think and
Of everything you do
Is for yourself
And there isn’t one

We are now roughly halfway through the inquiry commissioned by the Carnegie
Trust in part to look at the state of these bonds beyond our separate selves and to
consider the future of civil society in the UK and Ireland, taking a wide view of civil
society as meaning not just the voluntary sector but also the other places where
people come together as equals for common goals and beliefs, from faith to trade
unions.

Our first task was to make sense of where we are now. Here the raw facts are
striking, and familiar to an audience like this, whether it’s the number of charities
and voluntary organisations, their share of the economy and employment or the
growth of new fields like social enterprise and social investment.

There are many sectors where civil society has enjoyed strong growth over the last
generation. It dominates in social care, as well as in housing where it’s been
helped by a continuing stream of stock transfers and the guaranteed subsidies of
housing benefit. In health there are now some 34,000 third sector providers, under
contract to the NHS.

Civic activism has also grown – a rough doubling in a generation of many of the
indicators of civic activism, like taking part in consumer boycotts – and the rise of
sophisticated campaigns like the planes protests whose methods of consensus
decision making have a lot to teach other sectors.

No wonder the sector has become integral to political debate, and that NCVO has
no difficulty getting a hearing. The marginalisation that affected the sector in
much of the 20th century is over, and the sector can be proud of what’s been
achieved in policy: a remarkable proportion of the recommendations of past
commissions, such as Nick Deakin’s, are now either enshrined in law or at least on
their way, whether in the form of the Compact (which is bedding down, albeit with
important remaining issues about powers), or the new charity act (again, albeit
with remaining questions over how the Charity Commission will enforce it). If I
don’t say much about this policy agenda it’s mainly because so much has been
achieved.

But this rosy picture of influence and advance can be misleading. We know, for
example, that the small charities have been squeezed by the large in an era of
more competitive marketing, the less well connected by the well connected.
Overall giving is at best static – hovering under 1% of GDP

And there are many sectors where ground has been lost. Take the field of
information and knowledge, one of the commanding heights of a modern society. In
the media civil society does appear as a campaigner. But as a player it is utterly
marginal – with all the dominant channels owned by big business or by one public
sector organisation, the BBC. Just about the only other player that at one time
inspired hope – Channel 4 – has in some eyes lost its way. In print the Scott Trust is
about the only third sector player. There are the Community Channel and
community radio stations doing sterling work – but nothing remotely able to
compete with the big players.

In finance, another of the commanding heights of modern society, decades of

retreat, demutualisation and privatisation, have yet to be made up for by the
promising but still modest in scale achievements of the Charity Bank, Venturesome
and others.

Look through the lens of the stages of life, and the picture is equally uneven. Civil
society has certainly lost ground in childhood. Children growing up today are
bombarded by an intrusive and often shameless commercial culture and then taken
into the care of the state if things go really wrong, with the voice of civil society

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barely audible in the din. In the workplace where so many spend so much of their
lives, professional associations remain strong but for most of the workforce the
voice of self organisation has been greatly weakened by a combination of frontal
assault on trade unions and neglect.

What of the future? In the inquiry we tried to make sense of some of the big
trends. We looked at the impact of technology – which is making organisation far
easier, but also strengthening surveillance and a concentration of power in the big
players, from NewsCorporation’s Myspace to Google’s Youtube. We looked at how
globalisation is raising the importance of international NGOs and creating a quite
new pattern of diaspora organisation, but also concentrating wealth and power in
global cities in which many feel less commitment to the places they live and the
people around them. We looked, of course, at climate change, an issue which civil
society in partnership with global science has done so much to put into public
consciousness, but also at how often it is squeezed aside when big business and big
government pick up its agendas (and we also looked at whether business would
become more socially engaged or whether we would only have more ‘astroturf’
campaigns mimicking real grassroots activism).

We then looked at how the very idea of civil society may evolve. Today very old
traditions of charity and mutual support sit alongside a much more modern idea of
civil society, well described in Jeffrey Alexander’s monumental recent book ‘The
Civil Sphere’. This modern civil society is concerned with universal rights and
values, democracy and equity, a bigger sense of us, a bigger sense of here, and a
bigger sense of now, concerned with ecology and future generations.

This more modern perspective often challenges older norms. So, for example, it
criticises traditional charity for only dealing with symptoms instead of addressing
the underlying causes of suffering and need, challenging power structures, and
acting to a ‘theory of change’. Kathryn Merchant, President and CEO of the Greater
Cincinnati Foundation even recently described philanthropy as ‘applied social
science’. It puts a strong emphasis on voice and sees beneficiaries as best placed to
define and understand their own needs, rather than donors or trustees – which
challenges not only traditional charity but also venture philanthropy. It sees actions
in civil society as public in nature, rather than being extensions of private life.
Hence the pressure for greater transparency for charities (as promoted by
organisations like Guidestar International or the Center for Effective Philanthropy),
the view that large non governmental organisations should be more formally
accountable for their actions, for the bang they achieve for their bucks, and that
wealthy philanthropists exercising power in a community through spending money
should be in part accountable to the beneficiaries and others affected by their
actions.

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These ideas, which have their roots in ancient Greece in Rome, as well as in the
enlightenment, are still fuelling the social imagination, inspiring people to imagine
and create a radically different future: a society where the mentally ill, or children
– have full voice, where the world’s poor are empowered not passive recipients,
where there aren’t gulfs of power or identity, an economy without waste, a world
of enshrined genetic rights.

This, the radical edge of civil society, reminds us that social realities are
constructions – not part of nature – and that societies are made and remade by the
people in them, not inherited fixed or immutable, finding new expressions for love
and care, and showing the future in the present – whether in housing developments
like BedZed, or empowering people with disabilities through projects like In
Control, or showing a different kind of economy like PeopleTree in fashion.

Civil society often hopes too much in the short‐term. But it also often hopes too
little in the long‐term – and its vital that pragmatic managerialism isn’t allowed to
obscure civil society’s role as the restless agent of change, as a place where
society dreams as well as acts.

Yet of course any predictions are risky. I’ve always liked the comment on one far
left leader who in 1930 said that it was ‘proof of Trotsky's farsightedness that none
of his predictions has yet come true.’ A famous futurist Jim Dator also said that for
any prediction about the future to be useful it must at first must sound ridiculous.

We may have failed by that measure. But we did feel confident about what was
likely to be the biggest challenge over the next 10‐20 years. It wasn’t that
independence would be lost or that there wouldn’t be enough money. Instead it
was that society would become more fragmented, more disconnected and less
integrated, with wider gulfs between rich and poor, country and city, religious and
secular, and different races, and less social capacity.

The causes of this are many – some are structural, some are consequences of
politics. But their common theme is a weakening of the horizontal connections
between people, bridging social capital to use the technical term, and the related
capacities to empathise, cooperate and get on with others.

A recent survey of 11, 13 and 15 year‐olds in more than 30 countries asked the
question ‘do you find your peers generally kind and helpful?’. More than half were
able to answer 'yes' in every OECD country except the Czech Republic and the
United Kingdom where only 43% felt able to answer positively, half the figure in
Switzerland and Portugal.

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We know the evidence about unwillingness to intervene in street issues and
disputes – which shows the UK’s citizens more prone to turn a blind eye than other
countries. There’s no shortage of evidence of people becoming less tolerant,
quicker to become angry – whether in the form of road rage or attacks on NHS
staff. We know that levels of social trust declined steadily from the 1950s to the
1990s, and although the overall trend appears to have stabilised its worrying that
48 per cent of young people aged 11 to 18 years would not trust the ‘ordinary man
or woman’ in the street compared to 30 per cent of adults. Anti‐social behaviour
continues to be a top public concern in many areas. And when people are asked if
life is getting better or worse, a large majority think it’s getting worse and the
specifics they cite are all about daily interactions, with 47% citing a lack of respect
and 46% levels of crime.

This isn’t about young people and old, though it’s sometimes misleadingly
presented through this frame. Indeed in surveys of politeness to tourists in many
cities the young tend to score better than the old, and it’s men over 60 who come
out worst.

Instead it is about how we as humans relate to others, about the civilness of our
society, our ability to live together.

Its about the fear that although we may have a stronger civil society it’s far from
clear that our society is becoming more civil.

So why should any of this matter? It matters because distrust, unfriendliness, rage,
a society where people put up shutters, retreat to gated communities and put up
internal gates as well, is bound to be a stunted one unable to live up to its
potential. It matters too because the presence of a civil society in all its senses is
so critical to well‐being and happiness. This is one of the messages from the
growing mass of evidence on well‐being and happiness around the world. What
makes societies happy is in part income, in part good governance. But the evidence
again and again reinforces that it’s also about trust, about the quality of
relationships at the most micro level, how people live together, whether they feel
safe walking down their street, talking to a stranger, and whether there is a rough
and ready equality of recognition.

The sorts of trust and love which fuel social growth are the lifeblood for any
society. A metaphor for what isn’t working can be seen on the streets and parks
this month. Look at any leaf and you see a brilliant structure for distributing the
essential nutrients to every part, a structure in which each part supports every
other part. Civil society at its best works in a similar way, distributing resources,
money, knowledge, trust and love.

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Yet in important ways this isn’t happening. There are too many blockages, too
many barriers. Look at money. We’re at what could be the tail end of the longest
sustained economic boom in British history, a boom in which the top 1% have
become phenomenally richer thanks to a winner takes all economy and generous
tax cuts. Yet how much of that wealth has been shared? I’ve tried to find the
figures – everyone agrees it’s well under 1%, and could be as low as 0.1%, 1p for
every £10 of city bonuses. The government’s figures suggest that the most wealthy
1% with 23% of wealth contribute only 7.3% of giving, the top 10% with 56% of
wealth contribute only 21%. These are astonishing figures. They disprove any notion
of trickle down; they show that philanthropy is fragile. Twenty years ago, the
typical chief executive of a FTSE 100 company earned 25 times the pay of the
average worker. Now the figure is close to 120 times, and the numbers with liquid
assets over £5m has doubled to 9000 over last decade – yet the recipients clearly
believe that such windfalls do not call for any proportionate generosity.

The US at least has the generosity of the Gates and Buffetts to temper its extreme
inequalities. We have some exemplary philanthropists. But overall we appear to
have got the American style inequalities but without the conscience of America’s
rich.

Despite a few glowing exceptions, most continue to put a higher priority on buying
another yacht, a fifth home or a tenth Aston Martin, than sharing their wealth with
people less lucky than them. This autumn’s arguments about inheritance have
posed the choice as one between money going to the state and money going to
children. Not surprisingly few are enthusiastic about their hard earned pounds
going to the taxman. Yet we know that large inheritances do few favours to
children either – which is why so many of the wise wealthy – from Andrew Carnegie
to Warren Buffett – have kept these to a minimum. In the run up to the next
election the case needs to be made for a more balanced approach to how wealth
passes down the generations. Everyone draws on the legacy of the communities
around them, a legacy that goes far beyond the state. So any sensible inheritance
laws should provide for a three way split – some money for family and friends;
some for the state; and some for charities and the community.

Specifically, I would favour continuing to allow an untaxed band ‐ of say £500k.

Then for a second band up to a million, I’d offer a choice so that 40% can either go
to an endowment or charitable donation, or in tax. Then, for legacies over a
million, why not combine a slightly higher default tax rate of perhaps 50% with a 25
or 50% tax credit for charitable donations. This would achieve a better balance
between the three claimants to any legacy, and a ‘Community Legacy Tax Credit’
scheme of this kind might in time contribute to a norm whereby wealth is ploughed
back into the community, where it’s put to work reflecting the values and

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commitments of the donor, rather than just the narrow interests of their family. It
could fuel the many community foundations growing across the country. Andrew
Carnegie said that it’s a disgrace to die rich. We don’t need to go that far. But it
should be a matter of some shame to die rich and pass nothing on to the wider
community, and reforms to inheritance tax could play their part in changing the
culture.

Well, even if we don’t have US levels of philanthropy, at least we have a welfare

state, and decent public services, you might say, and it’s true that these have
protected millions from the insecurities that can be seen on the other side of the
Atlantic.

But how we’ve organised public services may sometimes have exacerbated the
problem rather than solving it, and gone against the imperatives of social growth.
One of the most important jobs of any state is to reward cooperation and punish
predatory behaviour. Indeed this is what states came into existence to do. Yet in
recent decades policies have, de facto, done much more to promote a competitive
individualism and distrust of others. When services are simply delivered to passive
consumers; when they are portrayed only through the lens of choice; when power
over services is centralised; this is bound to reinforce that British characteristic of
being a society of strong verticals and weak horizontals.

Worse, when public services do little or nothing to strengthen people’s abilities to

collaborate, to work with others, they undercut the very outcomes they exist to
achieve, like better health, regeneration or learning.

This is for me the key issue in public services for the next decade ‐ more important
than the precise balance between the different sectors, or the next phase of cost
recovery, or whether there should be a few more or a few less targets. Instead the
key issue for governments – and for this sector – is whether policy and its
implementation enhances people’s capacity to collaborate and to govern
themselves, or whether it erodes it; whether it strengthens self‐efficacy and social
efficacy; whether it reinforces the inner disciplines we need to succeed in life as
well as the outward facing habits of mutual respect and recognition.

This is very evident in education. The advent of citizenship education five years
ago was welcome, but far too little time and attention in education goes into
cultivating the social skills of cooperation and collaboration, skills which can only
be learned by doing things with others rather than through pedagogy, and through
learning how to reason and discuss. This isn’t some luxury – though the elite
schools are often much better at using sports and volunteering to teach
cooperation. Instead it’s the absence of precisely these social, non‐cognitive skills
that is proving so debilitating to young people, particularly men, and particularly

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from the traditional industrial white working class. Certainly this is what employers
continually say.

Much is known about how these skills can be cultivated – through everything from
enterprise projects that get young people out of school working with adults, to
classes in philosophy in primary schools, to the resilience lessons which some 4000
pupils are now receiving under the Young Foundation’s local well‐being
programme. But these tend to be marginal add‐ons, not central.

In a very different form this is also the critical issue in health. The biggest
challenges of the next two decades aren’t primarily about how to manage
hospitals, or waiting lists. Instead they’re about how to help a growing population
with long term, chronic diseases – from diabetes and MS to heart disease and
cancers ‐ look after themselves and those around them. Most of the care provided
in this century won’t come from hospitals, or doctors, or polyclinics – it will be
provided by people themselves, and by those around them day in and day out,
supported by the NHS, informed by the best knowledge available, and with periodic
visits to clinicians – and it will require new skills of self‐responsibility and
cooperation, as well support networks constructed around the frail elderly or
disabled children. It will, in other words, require a much more human‐centred,
holistic approach that builds on the work of projects like the Expert Patients and so
many voluntary organisations. But the critical point is that it will have to be
grounded in self‐efficacy and social efficacy too, especially if it is to make inroads
into inequalities that in the borough where I work ‐ Tower Hamlets – have left life
expectancy 13 years longer at one end of the borough than the other.

Much the same is true in the environment. We know that progress depends not just
laws and regulations, and a treaty to replace Kyoto, but also on how people can
together change their habits, pooling cars, switching to neighbourhood energy
systems or locally produced food.

In crime the big issue is not whether to build more prisons, it’s how to really get to
the underlying causes of crime, which are so often about structures of opportunity
but also about basic things like the ability to communicate, to get on with others.

In local government our biggest problems stem from the excessive scale of local
government (ten times as large as in most countries), as well as centralisation in
London, which deny people the day to day experience of cooperating,
compromising at the very local neighbourhood level.

The big challenges of diversity too – in a society experiencing unprecedented in‐

migration – are also not just, or even primarily now, about laws and anti‐
discrimination but also the daily patterns of contact, friendship, understanding and

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the ability of neighbourhoods to solve clashes between generations and races –
something we’re working on in neighbourhoods in Tottenham and Limehouse, and
that’s done brilliantly by projects like Peacemakers in Oldham. The bigger
structural changes of the last few decades have certainly made this harder. Richard
Sennett wrote not long ago that ‘the inequalities of class and race clearly make it
difficult for people to treat one another with respect’ – but this makes the task all
the more important.

There’s a connecting thread in all of this – and that connecting thread is precisely
the importance of connecting threads, and of the skills that make societies work.
Much more is known about these skills than in the past – about empathy and how its
cultivated; about social intelligence; about how to reduce conflict, arbitrate or
mediate. After all these are the decisive skills of a democratic age, an age when
people sort themselves out rather than relying on hierarchy and authority. They are
skills which are grounded in human nature itself – but they also need to be
nurtured, enhanced, trained.

This was well understood by civil society in the past. In the 19th century,
responding to the shocks of an often brutal industrialisation, the Sunday Schools
and cooperatives, mutuals and libraries, all worked to support the qualities of
character, and mutual respect, that I’m emphasising, while also campaigning for
such things as clean water and decent education.

Now there are two characteristics of these skills which stand out. One is that they
all carry within them an ethic of care – the ethic which lies at the heart of every
true profession and every true vocation. At its purest it offers unconditional love –
the love that so many people from damaged backgrounds have never had. That
ethic is in my view rather weaker and less supported than its sister ethic, the work
ethic, as can be seen by the still small amounts invested in paying for carers, or
training them up, even though we know that we will need far more of it – perhaps
5% of GDP within a generation.

Its fragile state can also be judged by comparing a cult of celebrity in which
anyone can be famous for 15 minutes for doing something useless, but most people
who do something useful remain invisible.

The other characteristic of these skills is scale. Care always happens on a small
scale, face to face, with the empathy of understanding the loneliness of a
housebound octogenarian, or the self‐hate of an abused teenager, and it’s at a
small scale that all social skills become most apparent, in the walking distance
world of the GP’s surgery, the church, the childcare centre.

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This is where voluntary sector faces both opportunities and challenges. At first
glance this should be ideal territory for voluntary sector. It should be more
responsive, more human scale, better able to tap into motivations to care and
help, better placed to forge the support systems of this century. The sector should
be the obvious place to cultivate society.

Often it is. But by no means always. I was impressed by Community Links recent
report on the sector’s values which reminded us that ‘if the sector is to continue to
inspire people to get involved both as volunteers and as paid workers, then it has
to be able to rigorously and passionately demonstrate these values. Values are the
sector’s most important asset in recruiting people and sustaining their
commitment.’ But as they also said the sector has no monopoly on these values,
and certainly doesn’t always live by them. Whenever serious research has been
done comparing the sector’s performance against others – as in the NCC’s survey
earlier this year ‐ it’s been found wanting. It’s not automatically more innovative,
more responsive, or more accountable.

Now small isn’t always beautiful. It can be inefficient, parochial. I’m all for growth
and being more professional. But history shows that greater scale can make it
harder to remain true to values, and that when voluntary organisations grow they
risk becoming more like other big organisations, bureaucratic, risk‐averse,
dedicated more to their own survival than change. I remember hearing one Chief
Executive of a big voluntary organization joke that ‘the true benefit of rising to the
top of a large organization is not money or perks. It's never again having to listen to
anyone who disagrees with you’, and we all know of third sector organizations that
have lost touch with their values.

Many have grown successfully – both as organizations and more often as looser
federations which combine the benefits of scale with the benefits of localness. But
the key point is that if you focus on growth then you need to also focus even harder
on values too.

Here I want to take a turn back into history because it can illuminate our choices
today. We use many ancient words sometimes interchangeably – civil, civic,
voluntary, social, public. But they have different histories and meanings. The
oldest of them is probably the word social, socius in Latin meaning living together,
which came from an even older Indo‐European root ‘sequ’ which meant following
along a path together, an idea that takes us back to the times when we lived in
groups, depended on their care and protection.

The words civic and civil come later, from the life of towns and cities that took
that idea of the social up a stage and embodied it in institutions. The word civil
came to be associated with states, with the townspeople (who were civil in the

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sense of courteous, in contrast to the rough soldiers), and a civil service (that
contrasted with the military side of the east India company). For anyone who’s
interested this was the topic of Norbert Elias, one of the 20th century’s greatest
sociologists who was based in Leicester and whose importance has only slowly been
recognised in the decades since his death. His masterpiece on the civilising process
showed how life changed as people became more interconnected, and learned to
restrain their impulses to violence, and how the aristocratic notions of courtesy
were democratised into the more encompassing ideas of civility (there’s also a
parallel literature on civility in other cultures – like Eiko Ikegami’s extraordinary
book ‘Bonds of Civility’ on Japan’s networks of artists, poets and craftspeople that
provided outlets for individual self‐expression in a still largely feudal society).

These words then overlap with the work public which at root means ‘of or
pertaining to the people’ ‐ but which came in time to link the ideas of universality
and equity to the state.

Now I mention this history because you can see the progression from the very
everyday social into words and ideas of ever greater abstraction. That abstraction
has been one of the forces for human progress in that it has expanded our sense of
possibility, of rights and power. But its always vital to keep in mind the roots, to
remember that the social precedes the civil or public and is what they depend on.
That’s why we need social growth that isn’t just about rights and provision but that
also strengthens our horizontal rather than vertical bonds; that promotes self‐
knowledge and everyday care, and that encourages mutual respect and recognition
without the submissive hierarchy of the past.

Let me draw these threads together. From a global perspective civil society is in
remarkable health. In retrospect 1989 signalled a shift all over the world as civil
society found its feet and its voice. It reinforced a slow intellectual revolution and
a burgeoning understanding in academia of how people cooperate and collaborate
that’s come from game theory, economics, psychology, even physics as well as
sociology, from the new understandings of social capital, of wellbeing and what
makes for good governance.

Much of this work is taking us back to the fine grain of social relationships.

This is important for Britain. For a generation the dominant debates have been
about organisational form – how to achieve better legal recognition, fiscal
recognition, a place at the table. These were important and necessary moves and I
pay tribute to the contributions of Nick Hinton himself, and to others like Nicholas
Deakin and Stuart Etherington. It’s only because of their achievements that we can
complement the attention to form with attention to content.

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That content is about how society is made, at the micro as well as the macro level.
It requires new skills, new methods and I suspect some new institutions. And it
requires forensic attention to what really works in promoting these skills and
enhancing social growth.

The ecological movement has forced much more serious attention to how we live
with nature and as part of nature. But we also need similar attention to how we
live together, and a similar combination of civic activism and innovation, creativity
and design, as well as hard science, measurement and learning.

This thinking informs much of what we are doing at the Young Foundation – from
new models of schooling and healthcare, to developing leaders in marginalised
communities, to working with neighbourhoods and promoting well‐being. All are at
heart about remaking society from the ground up.

Societies aren’t machines. But they are like machines in one important respect.
However imposing they look, they are only as effective as the small screws that
hold them together, and the thin layers of oil that help them move. If they neglect
these they seize up altogether.

What holds societies together is not glue or fabric. Instead it’s the skills of
interdependence. One of the classic prescriptions for depressives is to each evening
write down three people who deserve gratitude that day. Simply doing this has a
marked impact on recovery levels, and its something I would recommend for
everyone in this room and to teach children too. Reflecting on the gratitude we
owe to others makes us more content with ourselves too. We thrive in other words
from our interdependence, and yet by an optical illusion that interdependence so
often gets obscured. That’s why I hope we can make social growth as natural a goal
as economic growth has been – and why I hope that the voluntary sector can lead
the way.

Thank you. 

source : The Young Foundation website  “Geoff Mulgan – Hinton lecture 2007” 

http://www.youngfoundation.org.uk/node/641

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