The Hungry Spirit: New Thinking for a New World

by Charles Handy

  ‘But it’s only pennies,’ we exclaimed.

  ‘I know,’ he said, ‘but that only shows how little they trust us!’

  Writ large, that sort of attitude means a paraphernalia of systems, checkers, and checkers checking checkers – expensive, and deadening. Some commentators have argued that what they call the ‘audit mania’ or the need for some independent inspection, is a virus which is infecting our society. It is happening, they suggest, because we no longer trust people to act on behalf of anything except their own short-term interests. This, too quickly, becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. ‘If they don’t trust me, why should I bother to put their needs before mine?’ Responsibility then becomes unnecessary, and, where there is no responsibility there is no sense of pride, of ownership, of self-respect. But, on the other hand, without some commitment from the individual, trust will not be on offer. To be good at your job, or even renowned in your field, will not, in itself, be enough, because we all have to work with others, one way or another, and that requires a degree of mutual trust.

  My Oxford college was noted mainly, people used to say, for its ability to go backwards faster than all the others. They were referring to its skill on the river, and that odd phenomenon, at which it excelled, of eight people going backwards as fast as they can without speaking to each other, steered by the one person who can’t row – a typical example of an English team, I would joke, and a demonstration of the English class system at work, the incompetent in charge of the competent. I stopped joking after one Olympic oarsman pointed out that it was the perfect example of a team, for how could they go backwards so fast without communicating, unless they had great confidence in each other’s skill, trusted everyone to do their best, knew what their goal was, and were totally committed to reaching it, whatever the inconveniences or personal sacrifices?

  It was intriguing, therefore, to see the same message emerging from a 1996 film, True Blue, which was even filmed in the self-same college. The film would seem too corny to be true, except that it was true. After Oxford’s defeat by Cambridge in the annual boat race, some star-studded American rowing champions are drafted in for next year’s race, as temporary students at the University. They try to take over the running of the boat and the preparations for the race, effectively mutiny, are outfaced and dropped from the crew. With only 25 days remaining the coach has to train up a new crew against all the odds, but he builds a team and they win the race.

  ‘Eagles don’t flock’ was one of Ross Perot’s trademark phrases in the last two American Presidential campaigns, arguing that it was only a gutsy individualism that made a nation great. It’s a theme that is hammered out in True Blue, with the Americans and their supporters convinced that the eight best individuals will make the best team, and that it won’t matter that every one of those individuals is, if they’re honest, doing it for their own sake and to boost their own career. In the end, however, as all managers know well, a good team is more than the sum of its individuals, and prima donnas can, sometimes, do more harm than good to the common cause.

  Yet it is prima donnas whom we seem to want these days. One effect of the rise of the professional, I have argued, is that the best individuals now have access to a global marketplace, giving the elite few a choice of rewards far in excess of those available to people who are almost but not quite as good. The very best lawyers, the cream of the traders, even the best managers, are now like sports stars, wanted everywhere, at any price. Asked how one member of a finance house could possibly be worth the £7 million bonus that he was awarded this year, the chief executive explained that he had earned the firm £42 million in extra profits. If his work had not been so highly rewarded, the argument went, that individual would have gone elsewhere in due course. What does loyalty mean when the stakes are now so high?

  Building a flock with these sorts of high-priced eagles around is not going to be easy, but in life, as in a boat: one star does not make a great crew, unless that star is prepared to commit himself or herself to the common cause. The complicated rearrangements of the order of rowing in the boat, which are made much of in the final part of True Blue are a demonstration that individuals have to be prepared to sacrifice their personal preferences if the team is to win. For that to happen the cause has to matter. Where that cause is missing or mundane, the temptation to maximize personal ambitions or personal gain is understandable and often irresistible.

  Ross Perot is wrong. Untrammelled individualism corrupts a nation. It leads to an emphasis on rights, with no regard to duties or responsibilities. It breeds distrust and jealousy – and lots of lawyers. If we can leave families when we feel like it, are free to ignore or insult our neighbours, treat organizations as stepping stones on a personal trip, and only make friends with people who will be useful contacts, to be discarded when no longer needed, we will erode that ‘social capital’ which more and more people are recognizing as the bedrock of a successful and prosperous society.

  Bribery won’t win the lasting loyalty or the readiness to sacrifice of the rich eagles. They can always get more elsewhere. ‘All our best workers are volunteers,’ says Microsoft, meaning that, being already millionaires several times, there is no financial need for them to work. The excitement and the challenge of the work are what keep them there. We do not have to emulate either the rewards or the workaholism of Microsoft, but we can still accept the challenge of asking, ‘Would they work here if they didn’t need to?’ It is a question that even the old vocations of medicine and teaching are having to ask as we all become more mercenary. Unfortunately the answer is not going to be as easy as the challenge of winning a boat race.

  The eagles, too, have to ask themselves whether the prizes are really worth the loneliness of the high flyer. If friends are only contacts, they can drop you in their turn, when you are no longer useful. To those who make no commitment, no commitment is on offer when it is needed. A champion’s life is often short, and trophies are no substitute in the end for a shared commitment to something beyond oneself.

  CONNECTED TO OTHERS

  Francis Fukuyama, in his important book on trust, takes the matter of trust beyond the boundaries of the organization. The prosperity of societies depends, he says, on relationships of trust which reach beyond the family or the organization. Familial societies such as Italy or China today find it hard to put their confidence in anyone outside the family. They cannot therefore build large organizations, because these inevitably involve outsiders. Fukuyama believes that this will prevent these countries creating truly global organizations. Maybe they do not want or need to.

  On the other hand, individualist countries, such as the Anglo-Saxon societies of America and Britain, can become very legalistic places, unwilling to believe that the hospital did its best or that the other driver was not at fault. Such a lack of trust in others can become very expensive, because neither the law nor the insurances come cheap.

  de Tocqueville, looking at America a century and a half ago, was worried about individualism which, he said, ‘at first, only saps the virtues of public life, but in the long run . . . attacks and destroys all others and is at length absorbed in downright selfishness’. He believed that the network of civil associations (clubs, churches, schools, political parties, community groups, sports clubs etc.) played an important part in combating individualism and limiting its potentially destructive consequences. This is the ‘social capital’ that writers like Robert Putnam in America are worried may be eroding. In my terms, selfishness is no longer ‘proper’ in a society which has allowed individualism to become so isolating.

  America grew rich because its individualism was tempered by a willingness to trust or rely upon outsiders who held the same values and beliefs. Thus there was this paradox in America of a very individualist ethic combined with a conformist society. A good paradox, one might say, but confusing when you first meet it – all these individuals trumpeting their individuality but wearing exactly the same clothes and eating the same food. Ameri
ca was, and is, a society which prefers to put its trust in civil associations rather than government, a society which has defined rights but accepts some civic responsibilities as the norm. More than any other country, local officialdom is elected locally, and religion, with its codes of behaviour, plays a larger part in American life than in most other Western countries. Trust, in the sense of confidence in the community, was once high, and probably still is, although there are signs, now, of a retreat into their very different ghettoes by the rich and poor alike, with their differing value systems going with them.

  Apart from our kith and kin, we soon establish other sorts of families: networks and professional associations, or ‘hives’, for the knowledge workers; clubs for the enthusiasts and teams for the sportive; committees and campaigns for the civic minded. These ‘communities of interest’, some of them now meeting in cyberspace rather than the clubroom, are the new kinds of neighbourhoods, more important in the lives of many than the physical neighbourhoods where they live. People need people, and they find them, most of the time. It is these communities that give real expression to our concern for others, to our need to belong to something wider than our own little nest. In all of them trust is balanced against commitment. Where there is no commitment there can be no trust.

  It is fashionable both to speak in favour of ‘community’, ‘partnership’ and ‘responsible citizenship’ as the link pieces of an individualist society, and at the same time to lament the demise of our traditional communities. Matthew d’Ancona’s study of Swindon, one of Britain’s old industrial towns turned into a new-style hub for the technological and information businesses of today, should give us hope.

  Swindon is not a place to lift the heart at first sight. It has, d’Ancona says, no focus, no cathedral, no university, no beauty. Its citizens are mainly technological sophisticates but they have suffered from labour mobility, de-industrialization and delayering in the organizations. Nevertheless, he left Swindon an optimist. ‘The town’s capacity for civic regeneration has proved considerable. Its citizens . . . have achieved quietly successful race relations; they participate in an ever-widening range of voluntary groups; their churches are diversifying the services they offer, and their schools are expanding their role as civic institutions. In ways mundane and intriguing, the people of Swindon are learning to live with the hectic forces of modernity which one of them described as “the vagabond way”. In their unhistoric acts there are lessons for us all.’

  This latticework of ‘families’ is one way in which society bonds together. As important is the set of codes by which people behave and relate to each other. These are the accepted rules and values without which any society disintegrates because there is no restraint on individualism. In their absence the world does indeed become a jungle where only the most improperly selfish survive. These codes are caught, however, not taught. They are caught from the examples that we find in the different ‘families’ we meet over time.

  The genetic family is the first of these, soon augmented by the school and, perhaps more crucially, by the peer group of our school mates. These early groups establish the framework through which we view the world. Their importance cannot be exaggerated, because young children accept whatever they are given as the way the world is. As they grow older they need more models to choose from. They should, therefore, be exposed to as many different groups and associations as is possible. Until I left college I had not met any adults other than my parents and their friends, or my teachers. Cosy universe though it was, in my case, it was also a partial world. Other worlds are not so cosy or so decent, yet they set the rules and the codes for the young who grow up in them.

  An American study, Beyond the Classroom, by Laurence Steinberg, which looked at the academic results of 20,000 high school students, came up with convincing evidence that Asian children did better than other groups, not because of any genetic differences, nor because of better parenting, but because of the norms and values of the peer group. Black students, according to Steinberg, do not really believe that doing poorly in school will hurt their chances of success afterwards. Asian students have a greater fear of the consequences of failure and this provides a strong motivation to work hard at school. ‘Something in Asian students’ lives protects them, even if they are exposed to less than perfect parenting,’ concludes Steinberg, ‘while something in black students’ lives undermines the positive effects of parental involvement.’

  Communities, or ‘families’ of different sorts are, therefore, the moral reinforcing rods of society. When they fail, the law has to fill the gap, but laws are clumsy instruments, expensive and often applied after the event. We need to be connected to others more informally in order to learn the rules of life. It is always possible, of course, that we find ‘families’ whose codes may be antithetical to a good society, a mafia of one variety or another. That has always been one of the unwanted outcomes of prison – the introduction to a new criminal ‘family’, with its own codes. To this there is no answer except to find more appropriate ‘families’ to provide examples of other codes. It is for this reason that community service of one sort or another is championed by many as a better alternative than prison. It won’t, however, prove to be better unless the service is built around groups or ‘families’ which will offer not only work and a disciplined structure but also some unconditional support, forgiveness for genuine mistakes and a tolerance of differences.

  In time we learn to build our own ‘families’ with their own rules and support mechanisms. Life would be empty without them. One friend wrote recently of her field in Wales. She grows trees there, trees given to her in memory of loved ones. It is a field for others. She also wrote of her long correspondence with one Leroy Simmonds who was, she said, on Death Row in Jamaica when they first started corresponding. Now, she said with some pride, he is in the General Penitentiary and she is still working with Amnesty and the United Nations to get him released. I don’t think that she has ever met him, but by taking some responsibility for his life she has given him the kind of unconditional support he needs and has been able to live out more of her personal dream.

  Cousin Mollie was 95 when she died. For the previous ten years she had lain in bed, weak but not ill. She had never married and had no close family. She saw only her paid carers, of whom she regularly complained. Life, on the surface, had no meaning for her. Yet her funeral was attended by sixty people of all ages, many from distant parts of the country. It turned out that she was a great letter-writer and had maintained a steady correspondence with a wide range of people over the years. She had created her own family. Her life was not the empty shell it seemed.

  PART C – TOWARDS A DECENT SOCIETY

  The ideas in the second part of this book apply to the institutions of society as much as they do to individuals. Capitalism needs to be reinterpreted to make it decent, and companies, which are the key institutions of capitalism, need to be rethought. Education should be redesigned to prepare us all for more personal responsibility. Government needs to return responsibility to the people. Only then can we feel that life and society is ours to shape. Were that to happen our values could dictate the way things worked, rather than the other way round.

  EIGHT

  A BETTER CAPITALISM

  LEFT TO THEMSELVES, things do not necessarily work out for the best. Laissez faire is value free. No one is responsible for anyone else. That is improper selfishness and can self-destruct. We need something better. Capitalism as an idea includes social capital as well as economic capitalism. One without the other will not work for long.

  A decent capitalism will be built on enterprises that are Properly Selfish. They will be properly concerned with survival and achievement but will strive to be Inner Directed, to express their personalities and their beliefs in what they do. They are not just the instruments of their owners. They will be companies who aim for immortality and hope that they will deserve it, companies who are communities not properties, who see their peop
le as citizens with all that that implies, and who understand that they need an implicit licence to operate in their societies, where they are citizens too. These changes require a change in attitude more than a change in law. We can make it happen ourselves, if we are so determined.

  THE PRIVILEGE OF IMMORTALITY

  Business is wont to say that its purpose is to create profit and improve the bottom line, or, more grandiosely, to increase shareholder value. Profit is essential for survival, and survival, I have argued earlier, is the first of the three steps to fulfilment, for business as well as individuals. But to make survival your priority still begs the question, Mahler’s question, survival for what? If a business cannot answer that question, it will seem, to outsiders, to be interested only in itself. Its owners and managers will regard it as their instrument, having no personality or purpose of its own.

  If business in the past had a tawdry image among the British; if it was seen as an unworthy profession by those who aspired to a worthwhile life, then it may have been because it was seen to have no proper answer to that question ‘survival for what?’ other than self-enrichment, a scherzo for the fortunate. I have used the past tense because things have changed in recent years. There is more talk now of working for the customers, not just the shareholders, of quality, excellence and pride in one’s product, a hint, if no more, of the sublime, and a desire for continuity if not immortality.