How can we rejuvenate public institutions?
Institutions are increasingly the subject of public ire. How can we bring about their restoration and rejuvenation?
by Anthony Painter
A century ago, the industrialising world was in the foothills of a remarkable revolution in institutional creativity. This would not have been apparent in the aftermath of the First World War, and this institutional spring almost became winter in the shadow of the Great Depression. But, by the late 1950s, most of the institutional architecture on which we now rest — international, economic, state and cultural — was largely in place. In recent decades, however, decay has set in. Why?
Institutions exist to pursue and safeguard a common purpose. They embed values such as fairness, freedom and the rule of law in ordered human relations. Institutions safeguard values and seek equity. They are ethical in character. In contrast, organisations pursue goals and objectives (such as profit) that are often private in character. Of course, institutions are also organisations, and therein lies a tension. The NHS, for example, has high reserves of public legitimacy, as it protects our health and is available to all citizens; it has become a source of national pride. When institutions combine efficiency of outcomes with equity of values and a sense of emotional commitment, they flourish. When any of these elements decay, they fail.
Arguably, one of the emblematic creations of the institutional revolution was the EU, or so it became in 1993 following four decades of evolution. The bloc started as the European Coal and Steel Community before becoming the European Economic Community and, finally, the EU. Established to help solder a fractured European continent, the EU has two fundamental functions: peace and prosperity. Its values can be found in its key documents; it aims to achieve peace and prosperity through strengthening democracy and the rule of law. The EU has been deemed so successful in achieving these goals that it was awarded a Nobel Peace Prize in 2012.
Yet, when the prize was awarded it felt incongruous to many, coming as it did in the aftermath of the financial crisis and the European debt crisis. At the time of writing, the UK, one of the three biggest members of the bloc, is attempting to leave the union. And while Brexit has seemed to bolster support for the EU, this is based on the fear of undergoing the exit process rather than being a positive affirmation.
Gaps have emerged between its values as expressed and its values as experienced. According to Dijkstra, Poelman and Rodríguez-Pose’s paper The Geography of EU Discontent (2018), in 2004, 28% of the EU population over the age of 15 did not trust the EU; this had grown to 39% by 2018. Opposition to further integration has soared despite the ambition of ‘ever closer union’ embodied in EU treaties. This is even though a healthy majority of Europeans (including, ironically, in Britain) see the benefits of membership, according to Eurobarometer.
From the left, the critique is one of a superficial commitment to solidarity, especially in the aftermath of the eurozone crisis. On the right, the critique is one of a commitment to solidarity that is too great, particularly when it comes to multiculturalism and the movement of people. The realities of Brexit may have caused a pause for thought among the EU’s populace on how far to push anti-EU sentiment, but this may well turn out to be a temporary deceleration in the context of wider institutional decay. A misalignment of efficiency, values and emotional commitment comes at a time when the EU has few authentically democratic tools, in terms of direct public engagement, to respond.
There is similar dysfunction at national level, not least within the UK, where successive governments have pursued national growth as a primary goal. This has meant focusing on industries and sectors that have the greatest growth potential and prioritising their needs. The global leaders in such sectors (which include finance, pharmaceuticals and digital technology) are often clustered in or near to London. Until the austerity years, regions that were losing out were partly compensated through redistribution; this has now broken down completely. A blinkered Whitehall perspective on efficiency — including the ugly process of centralised austerity — has concentrated power and resources and overridden concerns for equity. Discontent in the UK’s nations and regions furthest from the capital has proliferated. Populism and nationalism have become more widespread, fragmenting the country politically across geographical lines.
The end of consensus
After decades of institutional revolution, the social theorist Herbert Marcuse became deeply concerned about the absence of critique within advanced, industrial society. Describing the modern sensibility as that of “one-dimensional man”, he outlined how a modern consumerist economy, facilitated through industrial technology, mass media, politics and corporate culture, had combined to create an insipid consensus. People bought into capitalism and became inhibited, unable and unconsciously unwilling to challenge the structural power inequalities undermining what he saw as real human freedom.
Now, that consensus has broken down. Our world is increasingly dominated by digital technologies and operates very differently than it did at the time Marcuse was writing. In the age of Cambridge Analytica and online extremism, we now know that our darkest psychological recesses can be plundered and mobilised to confuse, disorient, misinform and deploy us against one another. No longer one-dimensional, we are now increasingly tribal and angry.
Brexit was one of the most spectacular deployments of real discontent as efficiency and equity in institutions became misaligned. The ‘take back control’ slogan of Vote Leave deployed psyop, psychological and emotive hyper-targeting, to great success. At the time of writing, the government is turning its political power against public representatives in Westminster, with a ‘People versus Parliament’ election coming up. In the 1960s, Marcuse feared the obsolescence of critique to the intersection of capitalism, politics and culture. Today, we face the opposite risk: pervasive critique and a shattering consensus.
The exponential gap
This great unravelling of faith in common institutions has emerged just as we face extraordinary collective challenges. As the entrepreneur and analyst Azeem Azhar has described, there is now an exponential gap between accelerating new technologies and institutions’ ability to respond. As we have seen with Brexit, this is compounded by a democratic deficit as polarisation leads to a fraying of faith in political institutions.
In the shadow of a climate emergency, we are also facing an existential gap. Action on climate change, the necessity of which has been scientifically clear at least since the 1980s, has been slovenly, to say the least. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) is already in its Sixth Assessment Cycle. The Kyoto Protocol was signed a generation ago. Nonetheless, global carbon emissions are still rising. Even to keep global temperature rises to 1.5˚C requires a 55% reduction in greenhouse gas emissions by 2030. Such a temperature rise would still cause enormous ecological disaster and result in the mass movement of people. The institutional response to climate change, including the creation of the IPCC, has been real. Unfortunately, we have been fighting with two hands — equity and emotion — behind our backs.
Some, including the American writer David Wallace-Wells, have suggested that the climate crisis is so urgent that business as usual, including the reliance on representative democracy, might have to be deprioritised. Yet, institutions thrive when they align efficiency goals (such as emissions targets) with values (such as commitment to the universal welfare of humanity and the wider biosphere) and emotion (such as a sense of potential deep psychological loss through a failure to protect the sanctity of humankind’s home).
To succeed, institutional responses must safeguard existing values. In the west, this includes the belief that public policy should be accountable to the people. Without the democratic process, shifts of policy that require enormous resources can never have legitimacy. That is why the emergence of the Extinction Rebellion movement is so encouraging: it helps to create a fertile ground to connect rationality to values and emotion.
The story of a failure to decarbonise is a warning shot. When science, expertise and rationality are in the driving seat, we often struggle to find lasting solutions, or solutions that operate with enough urgency. As radical technologies spread into public services, including health and the workplace, this lesson will become ever more pertinent.
The academic and innovation communities surrounding the introduction of these technologies — such as artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning — are acutely aware of the need to put them on an ethical footing. For instance, trade unions in Denmark are seeking to understand how new technologies can benefit workers; healthcare providers, including the NHS, are seeking to understand how AI can improve care grounded in ethical codes; and academics are developing frameworks and practice to embed the ethical application of technology in arenas such as public order and safety.
Healthcare is one area where change could not only be radical but also revolutionary. As the American cardiologist, geneticist and scholar Eric Topol has outlined, AI fundamentally recasts the relationship between doctor and patient, redistributing knowledge and power to the latter over the former. It remains to be seen whether the current professional configuration will adapt to these changes, which will require a greater sharing of understanding between medic and patient if trust in the system is to be maintained.
Technologies such as genetic screening and CRISPR gene editing raise fundamental issues of access and power. What will be sanctioned, on what basis, and who has access? A Chinese scientist, He Jiankui, has already claimed to have ‘edited’ the genome of embryos of two girls born in 2018. How can we protect the rights of the unborn? What new inequalities will emerge if technology to manipulate genes that influence our cognitive capability, our physical strength, wellbeing and personalities becomes feasible and affordable? What data do we want to share, and for what benefit, in a world where our potential future health can be known through our genetic make-up? What will that mean for us psychologically and for equality and fairness in society? All these questions are critically questions of power; it is far from clear that we have the institutional capability to respond with legitimacy.
Polarisation
One significant threat is deep polarisation. Humanity could be separated into those who have access and agency with regard to critical technologies and those who do not. The worst of both worlds could be access without agency. If we access systems that manage our behaviour through monitoring, ‘nudging’ and other forms of behavioural manipulation, then we are faced with a substantive loss of freedom no matter how happy we may be.
This polarisation would take place in public spaces, determined by who has control of technology. It would occur in workplaces; access to control of AI and algorithms could be a new class divide. Within services, the divide will open: who has access to the resources, knowledge and technologies that enhance their health, education, wealth, and access to networks of power and influence?
Polarisation will play out in politics as behavioural technologies, targeted on our own individual cognitive frailties, turn us against one another, possibly cocooning the wealthy and powerful in the process. And polarisation could be coded into the social contract: perceived ‘good’ behaviour, defined in a manipulated political space, will be rewarded, and perceived ‘bad’ behaviour will be micro-managed beyond the point of coercion. For example, Philip Alston, the UN Special Rapporteur on extreme poverty and human rights, has highlighted a harsh regime of welfare conditionality under Universal Credit and disability benefits that is backed by algorithmic systems, with no transparency or accountability. From targeting resources on crime to sentencing, new technologies already contain biases that disadvantage minority groups.
Each of these challenges requires more than the efficient pursuit of utilitarian ends. Ethical bolt-ons where norms are devised to deal with new technologies are also insufficient. A bolder impulse of institutional creativity is imperative, something akin to Theodore Roosevelt’s vision of a ‘Square Deal’ society. The incredible aspect of the institutional revolution of the early to mid 20th century was the fusion of goals such as health, growth and economic security with values such as universalism, fairness and solidarity, all bolstered by emotional connection with the people. Modern institutional innovation is thin and slow by comparison, even with its technical, problem-solving approach. In an age of technology, technocracy is not enough.
Bolt-on solutionism
Recently, the US Business Roundtable, comprising the CEOs of the US’s leading companies, redefined the purpose of the corporation as serving an array of stakeholders, rather than shareholders alone. Major corporations have a clear sense of unstable legitimacy, an organisational existentialism. Taken at face value, corporations are accepting that the age of shareholder primacy and even ‘shared value’ (how to exploit environmentalism and social justice to create wealth) are moving to the past. In reality, the commitment is weak, not because it is insincere, but because it expresses a new bolt-on solutionism, albeit with wider goals than shareholder value. Corporations still hold control, although this new stakeholder initiative could mean that their power is exercised more benevolently.
In this, the state and corporations have much in common. States act like states, setting administrative goals and turning administrative efficiency towards them. As Max Weber described, the iron cage of bureaucracy takes over. And corporations act in much the same way. The modern state and modern corporations ‘think’ in similar solutionist ways. What is missing is something essential: democracy.
When facing rational efficiency, people are basically left, in terms explored by the German economist Albert Hirschman, with two options: exit or loyalty. Exit occurs when trust breaks down. In the case of states, this involves citizens not engaging with a state’s services, or not voting or opting for anti-establishment parties and candidates. With corporations, they lose business and access to the best employees.
In a democratic society, a third response to failure is critical, and that is voice. And as modern states and corporations seek to respond to the gulfs that have emerged between themselves and people, they seem incapable or unwilling to truly open up to greater voice. Business and government have become problem-solving-centric, each offering solutions of different types. But what of values and passion? For that we need not simply a redefinition of goals or stakeholders, but an opening, an injection of what the German philosopher Jürgen Habermas calls “communicative action”. In other words, a sense that we have an ethical voice and deep attachment to the social institutions we nurture.
Expanding the ‘lifeworld’
Habermas is concerned with the increasing invasion or colonisation of what he describes as the “lifeworld” by the instrumental rationality of “the system”. The system had two elements: power as derived from administrative authority, the domain of the state, and money as derived from the market and the organisations that populate the market. In the modern environment, we should also see technology and the organisation of the biosphere through energy and food systems and the like as distinct though overlapping elements of the system.
The lifeworld is where human interaction is sacrosanct. It is where families, community, friendship, creativity, civic life, art, culture and, perhaps, one should add, where the personal relationship to nature and the environment, are to be found. It is a place of ethics, human connection and meaning. This interface between the lifeworld and the system lies right at the fault line of failure of institutions: the lifeworld becomes encroached upon rather than aided by the system of money, power, technology and our relationship with nature.
Whether through lack of empowerment at work for many, or through our smart devices and their ever deeper intrusion into our lives, or in facing the amplifying consequences of climate change, an array of institutions need to find new means of alignment with our goals, values and passions. This applies to international institutions as much as to public services. The system spreads further and further into the lifeworld. It should be the opposite: we should be expanding the humanistic lifeworld further into the system.
In seeking to lean into the social challenges, the RSA cares about what is meaningful, significant and possible. Seeing the whole and shifting the possible is what we have termed ‘think like a system, act like an entrepreneur’. We see ourselves alongside an array of fellow travellers in civil society, including the commercial world and public entrepreneurs, in an endeavour that is both positive and realistic about the future. Fundamentally, an institutional restoration — a redesign on universal, ethical and humanistic lines — and revolution on a scale of the early to mid 20th century and its Square Deal become necessary to counter current and potential ill effects of the system. This process is the next great democratic step. The consequence of not responding with vigour is that we are risking further alienation, anger and disillusion, and the collapse of the viable natural system on which stable human life depends.
The challenge is not a pause of the current institutional unravelling or its reverse. Instead, we must seek to bring about a second creative explosion and a new institutional landscape; one that reunites our sense of what is efficient, what is equitable and what also harnesses our emotional commitment. If a politics of meaningful democracy cannot be cultivated then we are left with a reactionary politics of divided identities, impulsive populism and ethically simplistic ideologies. That is where we currently are. There is a bigger progressive and humanistic project that could be within reach. We should reach out.
Anthony Painter is the RSA’s Chief Research and Impact Officer
This article first appeared in the RSA Journal — Issue 3 2019
