Moving on from sterile debates

A kindergarten teacher recently shared with me her observations of her young charges over a career that has spanned two decades. Twenty years ago the children arrived for their first day toilet-trained and polite but they could not read or write, she said. These days the children could read and write but had not been toilet-trained and had little conception of acceptable social behaviour.

At the other end of the age spectrum, veterans gathering round the War Memorial, in Floriana last November were striking in their demonstration of self-sacrifice for the common good. "Serving the country was part of the package of being a good Maltese citizen," one veteran told me; he was 18 years and 10 months old when he joined the RMA.

The teacher's and the veterans' experiences of individualism versus community illustrate the sort of dilemma that is at the heart of some new thinking about politics.

Political market researchers in several countries are highlighting a new mood among voters - especially since September 11. People want to be looked after, they want their problems solved, they think society is increasingly dysfunctional and should be fixed and they have developed new respect for institutions, tradition and patriotism.

In the 1980s and 1990s, the political debate centred on how best to make the economy function well. Now the emerging debate is how to make society work well - especially when it is under threat, whether from mindless terrorism over most of the globe or the faceless flood-tide of globalisation.

The argument is not so much whether we should have a level playing field to produce the best economic outcomes but whether a level playing field is enough for the best social and economic outcomes.

This is why the debate raging in Malta on whether taxes are too high and should be reduced versus increased spending on health and welfare seems old fashioned, even artificial. Like the Nationalist government, any future Labour government is likely to end up on the horns of the same dilemma, whether to offer relief to thousands of suffering tax-payers or spend more on health and education.

Instead of a re-run of an outdated economic rationalist debate, the Nationalists and Labour should be looking at new millennium policies that deal with how people run their lives.

Stress relief is just as important as tax relief these days. This challenge plunges politicians into new and unknown territory - how people behave and the intimate details of their lives.

Last September, The Economist reported on an unprecedented survey conducted by the British Home Office that set out to measure the extent of anti-social behaviour in Britain. British MPs were being deluged with problems from constituents that did not seem to have any obvious legal or government policy remedies. The problems were various forms of "neighbourhood rage" - especially by young people.

There was a gap on the political map. British Labour Party MP Frank Field identified the gap as behaviour and in his new book Neighbours from Hell: the Politics of Behaviour called for a response from politicians to ensure society is not engulfed by the disorder created by the anti-social behaviour of the few. He proposed controversial solutions such as linking eligibility for welfare benefits with acceptable social behaviour.

A number of forward-looking politicians in other countries are similarly worried about this new political challenge. Australian Labour frontbencher Lindsay Tanner in his book Crowded Lives describes the pressures on people and urges policy-makers to respond. "We've built a society in which we have less time for our children, less interaction with our neighbours, less involvement in the community and less participation in collective activities," Mr Tanner writes.

Social psychologists and social workers are calling for a new political framework to take account of people's various relationships to ensure national policies set by governments actually work. By creating a set of ideas around the aim of building better relationships we can reforge our public policy tools, they argue.

One tool in achieving this would be to ensure that political decisions are accompanied by statements showing their impact on society and relationships. Just as major cabinet decisions should be accompanied by formal assessments of their likely implications for the budget and the environment, as requested by the Federation of Industries recently, so they should be accompanied by assessments of their implications for our relationships.

It would be no magic solution, obviously. But at least it might help move our politicians to a higher level of enlightenment: It is the quality of our relationships, not the quantity of our material possessions, that is the true bottom line.

In this context, one cannot underestimate the unifying importance of national identity - in an age when individuals are often disengaged from their communities, society is confronted with a growing problem of young men who are alienated and angry. Society is also faced with new ethical and moral questions as a result of changes in science and technology that have an enormous impact on our daily lives.

Not too many people realise the importance of social and community relationships in underpinning modern economies and the need for greater engagement by individuals in society.

Our relationships have been affected by various revolutionary movements: The me-generation, sexual liberation, feminism. The point is not that these were retrograde steps - in any case, we could not reverse them if we wanted to. The subtler point is that benefits are almost always accompanied by costs.

What all those revolutions have in common is their promotion of libertarianism and individualism. And guess what? The political philosophy that lurks behind economic rationalism is libertarianism and individualism.

Freedom for the individual is fine - up to a point. That point is reached when the pursuit of individualism starts to erode the relationships that provide our emotional sustenance. It is reached when noble sentiments about individual freedom degenerate into the mindless pursuit of materialism.

One of the most interesting examples of politicians anywhere grappling with policies to help people better run their daily lives is the parliamentary inquiry in Australia into whether to introduce automatic 50-50 shared custody of children after a parental break-up. Prime Minister John Howard agreed to the inquiry after years of lobbying from backbenchers who had been deluged with requests from constituents. The inquiry's results are being finalised but it seems some lateral and quite radical ideas for encouraging shared parenting after a split are on the cards.

It could be a good example of how the national political agenda in Malta could change to meet the needs of people. Whether this translates into an imaginative quest for new ideas rather than regression into old ideology is the challenge facing our political, economic and social leaders.