by 
There’s a lot of movement at the moment around questions of rebuilding after COVID (assuming there is an ‘after COVID’; I think this is with us for a while) especially in what is sometimes referred to as the “foundation economy” (health, social care, education, food – what Sydney University’s John Buchanan recently described as the “economy of everyday life”) or in care and caring more broadly.
The story goes that COVID has peeled back the lid, so to speak, to reveal a set of conditions and circumstances about the way we care, and the way we think about care, that suggest things are at one at the same time impressively resilient and dangerously fragile.
It’s not that COVID19 is the cause, so much as a brute catalyst that has brought into sharp and uncomfortable relief the precarious state of our framing, ethic and practice of care throughout society and the economy.
I was at the recent Australia Together Summit, put together by many including Michael Hogan, Matthew Cox and Tim Reddell, and had occasion to throw a question into the chat channel (aren’t we all getting good at having multiple meetings with the chat function?): why is it so hard to do what we know?
What does that mean?
For me, it means we’ve reached a stage where, for most of the big social and care challenges we face – disability, aged care, juvenile justice, mental health, child protection and family and domestic violence – in fact, as a rule of thumb, any area you can think of where there’s a Royal Commission going on now or in the last couple of years), we don’t need too much more research, discussion, debate, workshops, conferences and analysis. We know, for the most part, why these problems exist and what better looks like, especially for those whose “lived experience” is meant to be at the heart of the work.
We seem, though, either not to know how to do the work to turn our knowledge into action or we don’t want to.
Why is that?
I have three hunches.
Hunch 1
We’re actually happier admiring the problem and having workshops and conferences about the nature, scale and intransigence of the problems than actually doing the work necessary to make change happen. That work is hard, long and demanding and requires leadership and skill of a temper and intensity that are in short supply.
It also requires a distinction between performance and impact, between the (relatively easy) work to march, protest, design, tweet or pilot and the (very much harder) work that holds itself to one measure – is something changing, will the change stick and does the change matter? Does it bring about, or noticeably and measurably help to bring about, the conditions and result to which we aspire?
Hunch 2
We actually do need to keep talking about the same things over and over again because they are hard, complex, take time and rely on successive waves of analysis and debate to work out what to do. It’s hard work, it has to be repetitive and cumulative so get over it and keep talking.
The fact that we seem to find ourselves sometimes stuck in loops of unnervingly familiar conversation, research, analysis and posturing is, as the software writers would have it, a feature, not a bug. This is what it takes and, just when you’ve reached the point where you have to dig your fingernails into the fleshy part of your hand to stop you screaming with frustration and even anger, progress is made, however slight and grudging. Enough, at least, to get you to register for the next conference or webinar.
Hunch 3
Actually we are doing more of what we know than we think and that I am giving us credit for. Perhaps, even if it’s sometimes difficult to discern and not very visible, change is happening, gradually but inexorably. Again, the lesson is that we’ve got to hunker down for the long haul and become more adept at stitching together the ‘bright spots’ of change into necklaces of social change that glister and shine.
I don’t think it’s very honourable, but I find myself drawn to Hunch 1 too often for my own good and for the stocks of energy and motivation on which I rely, like others, to motivate the next assault on change.
Of course, all of these baleful reflections may reflect my age, longevity in some of these debates and (perhaps) personality. This may be much more about my own sense of weariness, through the haze of which I have lost the ability, or the will, to discern the movement and gradual shift that is actually happening.
Maybe the prize is only available to those who can combine their inner warrior with stamina I may not possess. I once described a true innovator as someone who never gives up, even when they should. Perhaps I don’t have that gene, although I like to convince myself I do.
But, when it comes to care, caring and ‘building back better” in the dimensions of our lives we share in common and which touch so many of the deepest and most vulnerable dimensions of the human condition, I am not sure how many more discussions we need about the why and the what of reform and change. No more Royal Commissions, surely?
I doubt our problems stem from a deficit of manifestos and white papers (or royal commissions for that matter). I don’t think we need much more research into ways we might unleash our collective impatience for better when it comes to the architecture of hope that should animate the reform process.
Maybe this is just me right now, but I feel I’ve reached a kind of ‘hit the wall moment’. I hear the same words, I hear the same tones of anger and frustration, I read the same research and listen to the same prescriptions that hover between piety and pragmatism, and I despair at the trudge of repeating circles of analysis, astonishment and inaction.
Right now, it seems to me, if we want to change the way we care, think differently about caring and turn our knowledge of “better” into recognisable change, we need do to one thing and one thing only – keep asking, and doing something about, why what we know about “better” isn’t happening and what can we do to make it happen?
We don’t need to talk much more.
We know the answer.
We have to find out what is blocking us doing what we know.
There must be ways we can do that.
Thanks Martin. It has ever been thus. It is human nature. The failure to act, even when we know intellectually that action needs to be taken, is our default. The philosopher Bernard Lonergan explains the reason why it is so hard to move beyond our existing horizon: “ The matter of going beyond one’s horizon is not simple. There is an organised resistance to going beyond one’s horizon. Within one’s horizon, one’s ready-made world, one is organised, one has determinant modes of living, feeling, thinking, judging, desiring, fearing, willing, deliberating, choosing. But to move beyond one’s horizon in any but the most casual and insignificant fashion calls for a reorganisation of the subject, a reorganisation of his modes of living, feeling, thinking, judging, desiring, fearing, willing, deliberating, choosing. Against such reorganisation of the patterns of the subject, there come into play all the conservative forces that give our lives their continuity and their coherence. The subject’s fundamental anxiety, his deepest dread, is the collapse of him self and his world. Tampering with the organisation of himself, reorganising himself, gives rise to such a dread.” Overcoming such dread entails moral and psychic conversion. So leaders need not only the courage not only to move beyond their own horizon but the ability to inspire others to overcome their own dread. That in turn requires persistence, a view to the long (sometimes very long) game.
https://www.google.com.au/url?sa=i&url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.pinterest.com%2Fpin%2F281193570463764464%2F&psig=AOvVaw3cHfuOfy1j86ptIn5WSvRO&ust=1593721927366000&source=images&cd=vfe&ved=0CAIQjRxqFwoTCIih3vzyrOoCFQAAAAAdAAAAABAU
Terrific point and I totally agree that we are programmed to avoid change. I get that and the Lonergan quote is almost poignant in its insight and humanity.
But I think there are two separate issues here, possibly connected. One is the question of mobilising change in general. I think Lonergan is right but it’s also true many people are less bound by the fear of their self space imploding and actively seek difference, perhaps with more of an instinct for the long term. People are just different in that regard.
My point was slightly different. I don’t think Lonergan’s insight explains or excuses serial and persistent failures in aged care, child protection of mental health for example. Here is seems to me something else is at play. Political feebleness, lack of money or at least perceived lack of money, variations on toxic power and authority games, bad design of markets and structures and an unwillingness to bring determination and compassion to the challenge of real leadership for change. These are failures of will, skill and capability. They reflect in some cases political and policy laziness and egregious lack of trust. There are a whole bunch of reasons, I know.
But to accept the Lonergan insight, which I do, risks letting us all off the hook for failures that are susceptible to disciplined and tough work to change those settings.
As you well know, in the end these shortcomings are fixable with the investment of you well know, in the end these shortcomings are fixable with the investment of political capital and a modicum of guts and capability. In some of our behind convenient shields of our human nature. Just rank poor performance. So that is what we should address.
I think this article is great and I could not agree more about the “care fatigue”. But I have a fourth hunch for your consideration – all these processes are about “listening” and not about change. Once the affected person has put as much energy as they can into a public hearing or similar they feel they have handed over their problem to someone else to solve. They are rightly exhausted and they cannot solve their issues alone. But the next step is about *someone, anyone* taking a role in curating all the experience, pain and human need for connection to a common solution – which is way too nuanced to be possible for each individual. Just a hunch.
Completely agree. That is a familiar and dispiriting rhythm which leaves everyone feeling both weary and disempowered, to use an ugly but useful phrase
I wonder if there is some sign that we’re willing to try different approaches for a more shared approach, so that the instinct is to solve problems “with and by” people, not “to and for” them, as Charlie Leadbeater would put it.