The Hungry Spirit: New Thinking for a New World

by Charles Handy

  It is every government’s desire to create their own Silicon Valleys. They will never succeed if they try to plan and control the whole process. It is the opportunities that the market forces throw up, and the sources of money to back the dreams, that are the necessary preconditions for any creativity. Remove the market and there will be little incentive for the bankers and therefore no seed money for the entrepreneur to build his or her dream on.

  For all its imperfections, the market remains the essential precondition of economic growth and development. More than that, it offers to each of us a way to express ourselves, because we all need our customers to reassure us that we are making a difference, are needed or wanted, appreciated or respected. If I could not sell my books to willing buyers I doubt that I would want to write. And if I could not find a publisher to back me the dream would go sour. Those potential buyers are the market whose promise prods the publisher’s support and whose satisfaction, if it comes, is my reward.

  It’s the economy, stupid

  This slogan was the Clinton campaign’s reminder to themselves in the 1992 Presidential elections in America, repeated, more gleefully, in 1996. The Democrats won both times, suggesting that voters are prepared to overlook all the disadvantages of capitalism, provided that it works.

  It is possible, however, that voters take a more restricted view of the role of government than politicians do. Voters can understand that the prime responsibilities of government are to defend the nation against its enemies, and to provide a sound and stable economic infrastructure along with the necessary rules and regulations for an orderly market. After that it’s up to us and our local communities, thank you very much. A sound and stable economic infrastructure typically means low inflation, a stable currency with moderate government expenditure and borrowing, resulting in moderate taxes and low interest rates. That is what voters want governments to provide and they will vote for those whom they think can deliver it.

  This does not mean that economics is the only thing on people’s minds. It means that they sensibly see that if the playing field isn’t properly prepared and tended it’s hard to get on with the game of life. There is a lot more to life than economics but most of the rest should not be the concern of central government. We should not be surprised, therefore, if foreign policy and economics dominate electioneering, but we should never imagine that elections have much to do with the meaning of life.

  THE PROPER PLACE OF CAPITALISM

  Capitalism, then, would revert to its proper role, as a philosophy designed to deliver the means but not necessarily the point of life. Such a redefinition would allow it to avoid the frequent criticism that communism had a cause for all – namely the liberation from poverty, the certainty of work and a home for everyone – but no mechanism to deliver it, while capitalism had the mechanism, but a cause that worked only for a few. The redefinition would make it clear that capitalism is only a mechanism, one that leaves the cause to be determined by individuals for themselves. It is a liberating not a defining creed, money as the means but not the end.

  Keynes, turning from economics to philosophy in his 1930 essay ‘Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren’ foresaw it all.

  We are being afflicted with a new disease of which some readers may not yet have heard the name, but of which they will hear a great deal in the years to come – namely technological unemployment. This means unemployment due to our discovery of means of economizing the use of labour outrunning the pace at which we can find new uses for labour . . . This means that the economic problem is not, if we look into the future, the permanent problem of the human race.

  Keynes goes on to say that once the economic problem is solved, mankind will be deprived of its traditional purpose and will be faced with the real problem, which economics will have won: how to live wisely, agreeably and well. He doesn’t think that this will be welcomed by all. ‘There is no country and no people, I think, who can look forward to the age of abundance without dread.’ But, ultimately, ‘when the accumulation of wealth is no longer of high social importance, there will be great changes in the code of morals . . . we shall be able to assess the money motive at its true value.’

  Nothing changes. Capitalism, no matter how successful, will never on its own give a complete answer to the question ‘why?’. We may look for solutions in better management theories, ones that actually take account of the limits of humanity as well as of its potential, or in a new economics which counts the real worth of something, not just its cost. But both these reforms can only be driven, if they ever happen, by a better understanding of what we want from life, both for ourselves and for others. Ultimately, we need a new understanding of life, one that gives money its due, but not more than its due.

  Capitalism is too strong for governments. If we want to control it we must do so ourselves. It will take the collective will of many individuals to make the market our servant rather than our master. For that to happen those individuals have to be clear about who they are, why they think that they exist and what they want from life. Not, unfortunately, as easy to do as to say, but crucial if we want to have control of our own lives and of our society.

  Adam Smith believed that virtuous men, or women, on their own, changed nothing, unless the system changed as well. He is, however, the lasting proof that good ideas, at the right time, can change systems, if the virtuous people help. Good ideas are, usually, not new ideas, but old ideas resurrected at the right time. Maybe the time is ripe for the resurrection of some old philosophies of life and society.

  Vaclav Havel, playwright, dissident, prisoner and President of the Czech Republic spelled out the challenge:

  The salvation of this human world lies nowhere else than in the human heart, in the human power to reflect, in human meekness and human responsibility. Without a global resolution in human consciousness nothing will change for the better and the catastrophe towards which this world is headed will be unavoidable.

  PART B – A LIFE OF OUR OWN

  Capitalism, efficiency and markets have their flaws, but also their uses. They are neither the complete answer to our dilemmas nor the only cause of them. They provide some of the context of our lives but not the purpose. For that we need a philosophy not an economic system.

  In this part of the book I examine the quest for a purpose in our own lives. I suggest that the purpose has to be an attempt to leave the world a little better than we found it. Forced to be free to shape our own lives, we can, by example and initiative, slowly change the bit of the world around us. That process, however, starts with us and our own lives. Our duty to others is founded on our duty to ourselves. It seems a self-centred and selfish place to start, but selfishness can be ‘proper’ and for the good of others. In any case, we have no choice. More than ever before, we are on our own, left to forge our own destinies.

  FOUR

  THE AGE OF PERSONAL SOVEREIGNTY

  IN 1959 I went to Moscow on my way back to my first job as an oil executive in Malaysia. It was unusual and difficult, at that time, to go to Russia as a tourist. The only flights into Russia were from Copenhagen, and every visitor had to have an escort throughout their stay, an Intourist guide, supposedly for your convenience. Mine was an attractive young woman so I wasn’t objecting too much. We got on well.

  One day she said to me, ‘Is it true that in your country you have to find your own job and your own place to live?’

  ‘Yes, of course,’ I replied.

  ‘Oh, how frightening for you,’ she exclaimed. ‘I wouldn’t like that at all.’

  ‘We call it freedom,’ I said, rather smugly, and thanked my lucky stars that I didn’t live in Russia.

  It was only later, on the plane leaving Russia en route to my oil company, that I realized that my benevolent employers also told me what job to do and where to live, and would do so for the rest of my working life. In those days they also insisted on the right to approve my choice of wife, and once we were married, they wrote appraisals on her
as well as me, arguing that, if we were to represent them in the far corners of the world, they had a right to make sure that the other half of the partnership was up to scratch. They don’t do that any more, I hasten to add, but in the 1960s the practice was not unusual among international firms.

  Of course it was true that I had the freedom to make that big initial choice of what work to do and which firm to apply to, but my Russian guide had also had that initial choice. She could have decided to be a space scientist or a teacher, and, had she been good enough, a job would have been found for her. We weren’t, perhaps, so different after all.

  I left my oil company after ten years, when I refused their offered posting and they said that, sorry, there was nothing else on offer. Looking back now, I am amazed that I was, initially, both pleased and proud to have handed over my life to that company. Good as the company was, and is, as an employer, it was my life and my destiny and I wanted to be responsible for both. Not everybody in that company felt the same way, I must add. Many liked being chucked around the world, knowing that they would retire with a generous pension, a nice collection of mementoes of faraway places and some good stories to tell. It can be cold outside, as I soon discovered.

  You didn’t have to join an international oil company to have your life arranged for you. Many large organizations aspired to do the same, whether in business, government or the professions. People generally made one big choice at the start of their careers and hoped that their working life was then settled for the duration. For some it was the mines, for others ‘the works’ or the farm, for others the family firm, the church, teaching, medicine or the law. If you were a woman, and this was not that long ago, marriage was, usually, the important initial decision. After that, life would be organized for you, like it or not. In Britain, at that time, there were ‘finishing schools’ for young women of the richer classes which explicitly set out to prepare them for married life, a life which did not envisage careers or paid work outside the home. They learned such things as flower arranging, glove making, household management and the arts of conversation – on the assumption that the rest of life would be dictated by their husband-to-be.

  THE NEW ERA

  The real social revolution of the last thirty years, one we are still living through, is the switch from a life that is largely organized for us, once we have opted into it, to a world in which we are all forced to be in charge of our own destiny. An evolution in social values, pushed by breakthroughs in technology – the contraceptive pill as much as the computer – and a more competitive world in which changes are forced on us whether we like them or not, all conspire to loosen the bonds between institutions and individuals. Whether the institutions be those of work, of marriage or of community, the contracts now seem to be endlessly renegotiable. For some this is exciting freedom. We can write our own script for our life instead of acting out a part that someone else has written for us. For others it is a horrible insecurity.

  It is tempting to deny that this new era of personal sovereignty is happening to any great extent, or, alternatively, to assert that it has always been this way, and that I am exaggerating the stability of the past and the hold of the institutions. It is true that there have always been many exceptions to the general rule of an ordered life. It is also true that the expectations of an ordered life did not always, or even often, work out. Nevertheless, my recollections of my generation, growing up forty years ago, are that we accepted, largely without too much questioning, that our life would not be completely our own to organize, whatever we were going to do. Distasteful though it was, a society structured around class, property and education, was a more predictable place if you were content to accept the place where you found yourself. I am sure that life was even more structured in earlier generations. Long ago, Plato believed that a properly structured society, in which everyone knew their place, was the basis of a just society, and many have since agreed with him – particularly if they were at, or near, the top of that society.

  Today, the divorce statistics, and, more interestingly, perhaps, the new varieties of family, illustrate how much has changed on the domestic front. It is accepted as a matter of course that women should have the choices that men have always had, and, to a large extent, that we can choose who should or should not make up our families. Anna Brooks-Kastel, a 15-year-old pupil at Islington Green mixed comprehensive school in North London, spelled out the new way of looking at things when she spoke to the Independent newspaper in 1996 in the middle of an anguished debate in Britain about the teaching of morality in schools:

  If [the government] believes in Back to Basics and the traditional family, that’s not what other people believe in. I’ve got two mums and two dads, lots of brothers and sisters, and none of them are actually whole. They are all half and steps and bits and bobs and I love them. I just call them my brothers and sisters because that’s what they feel like. If they’re talking about love from your family I suppose you should have as many parents as physically possible. Everyone you consider family is family. Friends can be family.

  Not everyone would want such a flexible family, but more and more people are experiencing some version of it.

  At work, the labour market facts are also there for all to see, although some prefer not to look at them. Most of our lives are now only loosely linked to institutions. The following table, taken from a study prepared for the British Government in 1996, illustrates both the situation and the source of the confusion.

  Source: Labour Market Flexibility. Business Strategies, London.

  If you add the unemployment figures (8% in 1995) to the combined total of part-timers, self-employed and temporary, you arrive at a figure of 51% for 1995. In other words more than half the available workforce do not have a proper full-time job inside an organization. This is the outward and visible sign of the new flexibility, which many believe to be essential if we are to remain agile enough to keep up with the changing world. The defenders of the status quo, however, point to the ‘permanent’ figures, which, they argue, show that the great bulk of the workforce is still in permanent employment, although what ‘permanent’ means when applied to part-timers or the self-employed is hard to work out.

  It is also true that the average length of a job has hardly changed over the last ten years in Britain or America, remaining constant at around six years. A full-time career is, therefore, a succession of six-year jobs. This, again, is a rather niggardly interpretation of ‘permanent’, and no one has yet established how many of these six-year jobs now make up a career. What is clear is that many people are opting out of the official workforce earlier than they used to, in their early or late fifties, and that those holding those six-year jobs are now only a minority of the workforce.

  Britain appears to be leading the field in this new flexibility, if leading is the right word for what many would see as a disturbing trend. The official figures for America show rather fewer part-timers and temporary workers than in Britain (26%), many fewer self-employed (6%), and fewer unemployed (5%) making a total of 37% ‘outside’ the proper organization, compared with Britain’s 51%. Other European countries flicker between the two, with unemployment taking up a larger share everywhere and self-employment a smaller one. In every country these numbers are growing, slowly but inexorably.

  Whatever the correct numbers, it is clear that the psychological contract between employers and employed has changed. The smart jargon now talks of guaranteeing ‘employability’ not ‘employment’, which, being interpreted, means don’t count on us, count on yourself, but we’ll try to help if we can. No longer can anyone expect to be able to hand over their lives to an organization for more than something like six years. After that you are on your own again, either by your initiative or theirs, and can only hope that you are, indeed, as employable as it was promised. We are, in effect, all mercenaries now, on hire to the highest bidder, and useful as long as, and only as long as, we can perform.

  In such a world, it is wise
and prudent not to make long-term plans or invest in the distant future; not to get tied down too firmly to any particular place, group or cause, even to an image of oneself, because one might find oneself not just un-anchored and drifting but without an anchor altogether; it is prudent to be guided in today’s choices not by the wish to control the future, but by the reluctance to mortgage it. In other words, ‘to be provident’ means now, more often than not, to avoid commitment. To be free to move when opportunity knocks. To be free to leave when it stops knocking.

  The words are not mine. They come from Zygmunt Bauman, one of the world’s most distinguished philosophers, in ‘Alone Again: Ethics After Certainty’. It is an essay for our times. Bauman is worried by the privatization of society – not the vogue for turning every state activity into a business, although that is part of the argument, but the fact that, increasingly, we now belong to, or are committed to, nothing besides ourselves. Even the family can often turn out to be a relationship of convenience, to be discontinued if it doesn’t suit. At work, our loyalty and responsibility is first to ourselves and our future, secondly to our current group or project, and only lastly, and minimally, to the organization.