The Moral Economy - 1

I went to a really interesting and inspiring event this morning: a talk by Stewart Wallis of NEF about the "moral economy". The audience was a gathering of folk from the arts world and Stewart's theme was the current and coming global economic, ecological and social crisis and what part the arts might play in responding to and addressing it. Stewart's analysis of the failings of the current economic system seemed to me to be spot on:

• Our consumption of finite natural resources and our damage to natural ecosystems is simply unsustainable
• The distributions of income and wealth within and between economies have reached grotesque and historically unprecedented levels in the last few decades
• The global economy is unstable - as the recent banking crisis has demonstrated all too painfully
• "More is no longer better" - in the West, we are no longer being made happier or have higher levels of wellbeing as a consequence of having more material possessions. Instead we have record levels of depression and other mental illnesses.

In response to this situation, we need a revolution in social values - away from seeking only to maximise narrowly-defined financial profit or personal financial wealth or national GDP and towards a more holistically-defined concept of personal and social wellbeing. I would add that we need to (re?)discover the ability to think and decide from the standpoint of what will benefit us all, not just what will benefit ourselves or our immediate families. In other words, we need to make a transition to a "moral economy" in Stewart's terms.

The arts community is surely in a potentially powerful position to respond to and help address some of these challenges. Theatre, literature, film/TV and the visual arts in particular can be powerful media for radically new ideas and imaginings about how society could be organised to be developed and communicated, to large numbers of people at once and to some extent by-passing the often reactive and sometimes plain obstructive forces of government and the mainstream media.

So..perhaps we need not only creative works that show us how things are (pace Dickens, Zola, Steinbeck, An Inconvenient Truth, Enron, Guernica etc) but some imaginative and radical works that show us how things could be..in a constructive sense rather than the Hollywood disaster movie sense (or even The Age of Stupid).

We also need to engage whole communities in a multi-stranded debate about how society needs to change in very practical ways - and arts venues and facilities and their community programmes could be important resources to be used in that process.

Why don't we...?

I was talking yesterday with a group of friends about schools and the seemingly endless agonies of choice which parents have to go through to find the right school for their children, be it junior or secondary school. State or private? Local or out of borough? What's the reputation like? How did they do in the latest league tables? How many places do they have? what is the admissions process? etc etc etc

A common problem is that once a school gets a bad reputation (whether deserved or not), parents no longer want to send their kids there if they feel they have a choice. So a lot of the brighter children with better, more supportive home environments don't go and the schools concerned then have a much higher concentration of children from more difficult backgrounds. So the school's reputation and league table performance then suffer even more..and a vicious circle is established.

So why don't we do what they do in France and much of the rest of Europe and simply say that children will go to their local schools and remove the exhausting and frequently illusory process of "parental choice"? And..if a school is not performing to an adequate standard, ensure that there are clear mechanisms by which parents, teachers, governors and students can rectify matters so that it DOES perform? And while we're at it, let's insist on ALL schools teaching emotional intelligence and communication skills to their students at all levels. Some do this already and it makes a great difference for the better to the school's atmosphere and culture and to the confidence and behaviour and attitude of the students - so why not all?