In the pandemic, democratic governments have relied strongly on moral appeal. We’re being asked as individuals to do the right thing. Staying home isn’t only sensible, it’s responsible. Raiding the supermarket for toilet paper isn’t just unnecessary, it’s selfish.
In reality, though, most of us haven’t treated our decision-making on Covid-19 as a binary choice between selfishness and altruism. Rather, we struggle to weigh the interests of our own small platoon against the interests of countless others we don’t really know. And that’s a crucial difference. Pressed far enough, all of us will put our loved-ones first. That’s how we’re made.
Trust, engagement and loyalty – the socially valuable behaviours without which business and democracy would both fail – sit pretty squarely on our ability to feel attachment to others. Even if, as with patriotism, those others are numerous and not all close by.
In political theory, though, liberté and egalité get far more air time than fraternité. In fact, the togetherness politicians love to cultivate on the campaign trail (America First! Take Back Control!) is little in evidence in the way institutions actually work. Which is probably why we’re making such a hash of climate change.
But what would happen if we put human connectivity front and centre?
For one thing, it would open the interesting possibility that networks have properties distinct from those of their members. For example, looking at the constraints imposed by distance, time, culture, custom and – most of all – institutional rules, it appears that networks can be connective in at least three ways.
(1) They affect information flow and how well people know one another.
(2) They affect how far people are directed toward the same goals.
(3) They affect how much fairness people detect in the arrangements that tie them together.
At a personal level we instinctively grasp the importance of these. But as a culture we haven’t been good at building them into organizations. Which means that organizations often fail to make us visible to one another, fail to align our interests, and fail to establish fairness across the sometimes diverse stakeholders they link together.
Take the global financial markets.
When an oil rig blows up in the Mexican Gulf, our first instinct is to pin the blame on greedy, corner-cutting corporate bosses. But while they may be complicit, a much larger problem lies in the way financial networks are constructed, and particularly the fact that investors (including, by the way, you and me) have no knowledge of other stakeholders, no interest beyond the financial, and a disproportionate amount of power to bend company priorities toward short-term profitability.
Another example is Brexit. “Ever closer union” should have meant a willing convergence of nations. But that’s not what emerged from the Treaty of Lisbon in 2007. Except for business travel and the occasional budget holiday, Europeans are most likely to meet their EU neighbours as migrants (in the north) or as property investors (in the south). Economic interests have not been conjured into alignment by the euro. And the terms of membership give national electorates little control over the EU’s direction of travel. It’s not surprising some want out.
Even the pandemic may be a product of poor connectivity. Would the current outbreak be as bad if the late Dr Li Wengliang had been able to talk to his local party bosses; if Chinese bureaucrats had been able to distinguish political from public health objectives; or if whistle-blowers in the PRC were not routinely treated as a threat? Probably not.
This is, of course, a 30,000-foot view. But if networks can influence human behaviour, it surely follows that some network designs may be more useful, effective, or ethical than others – more open, more able to self-correct, more sustainable. And networks have the advantage of being changeable without apportioning blame.
In the West we’ve long polarised the individual and the collective, and this polarity has shaped our thinking, our language, and the political axis of Left and Right.
Ideals like freedom and equality, though, can be made real only in the context of actual relationships. So perhaps what we need is a revolution of approach in which cities, companies and governments look first to the quality of the mass connections they create.
If the future depends on becoming better people, we’re probably lost. But we can start to build our shared institutions in ways that systematically encourage mutual understanding, synergy and fairness. And that might make the other, bigger problems easier to fix.