Dialogue: Glue that holds society together lost in a culture of disposability

We have created a dysfunctional society which can be repaired only by policies promoting social connection and cohesion, says RICHARD WHITFIELD*.

I both love and am sickened by this country, which I am visiting for the 13th time. This small, well-endowed democracy of paradise islands has intense and ugly social decay, and seemingly lacks the guts and political cohesion to do something radical about it.

Since 1997, when the Herald first involved me in the debate about educational values, I have followed the ensuing exchanges with growing doubts about whether anything concrete and transformational will emerge.

Debates about values can lead to more heat than light, more fog than blue sky, if participants fail to articulate a sufficient view of what it might mean to be a whole or rounded person.

Amid technological sophistication, Western societies have lost a grip on that. Consequently, our politics, commerce and public services have fallen prey to manipulative managerialism, a form of bullying that reflects a vacuum in ethical leadership.

Thus highly competent people are denied promotion because their capabilities are perceived as a threat to management; a factory making a product in demand is shut overnight by stealth, causing chaos in a thousand households; two highly experienced teachers, having great rapport with adolescents, are marginalised by their schools; superficial and socially sick indoctrination on human sexuality for senior school students is lavishly funded by the Government; beat policemen displaying courage in difficult situations are rusticated by their commanders; and expedient school trustee boards fail to foster rooted innovation through seeking and nourishing visionary personnel.

We inhabit a culture of disposability, so that human capital is too often unvalued. The most basic requirement for boards, chief executives and principals is to search out and nourish the potential and richness in others.

Many paper-chasing chief executives have tenuous egos, anxiously needing to make their mark, living on the private edge of a fear of failure that might tarnish their next promotion. Leadership demands courage and ethics, while ethics must be rooted in sensitivity about human wholeness, potential and capability.

Here, as in other westernised countries, there is a war of social values that stems as much from confusion about who we are as from differences of view about how we should live together. The crux is one of social connection and cohesion, and the life meaning and purpose that grow from that.

That crisis now sits uncomfortably alongside widespread disillusion and cynicism about political processes, as all parties seem now to be prisoners of a crimped materialism and a quasi-scientific secularism.

Neither of these can provide a sufficient basis for human motivation and meaning, let alone national identity. Technical cleverness is no basis for human contentment. Sadly, the goals of sound character and good life adjustment are largely absent from education assessments.

Issues of education are central. Daily, they involve the challenge to articulate and share the knowledge and insights of most worth, so that both external adjustment and inner contentment become possible.

Unsurprisingly, employers still seek reliability, honesty and loyalty rather than simply paper qualifications, so character formation should be to the fore.

New Zealand has been seduced by the insidious view that society is only the sum of individualistic and, therefore, aggressively competitive interests. Given the many long-standing indicators of dysfunction, why are there so few educational and social policies in place that will in the long term provide reliable glue for the social fabric, so as to make communities both cohesive and compassionate?

Social glue, of which the main component is reliable love, is refracted from people's priorities, commitments and skills that reflect what has been valued in formal and informal learning. It grows, or otherwise, from a sufficient core of shared and lived values.

Yet sincere love of self, others and universe is not innate. It has to be learned through long social experience of its gift. In its absence, people are mentally and emotionally wounded.

There is now detailed knowledge of the likely consequences when nurture and love felt as reliable are significantly absent. Mental health indicators, such as depression, fractured relationships, distrust and bitter loneliness, reflect the social sickness.

Despite the endeavours of the education industry, we no longer excel at deep thinking about the human predicament. A holistic view of persons is worthy of collective application if worked out by patient reflection and engagement with the fragmented stories on the interior of the emotional mind. This is partly a spiritual process, though it uses science to bear upon the issues wherever relevant.

Contemporary time and project-rush too often distract from that imperative discipline for planning and acting wisely, individually and corporately. That bad habit has to be changed in the formation of young people, the leaders of tomorrow, and demands new educational vision now, before social atomisation becomes too hard to reverse.

The Herald's educational values debate so far has flaky, confusing, and, to many, nebulous outcomes. New Zealanders, desiring the modish idealisations of inclusiveness and diversity, now baulk over the real ethical choices that have to be made, between right and wrong, between truth and falsity, and between beauty and ugliness.

Having created huge postwar inner discontent and much avoidable psychological and social pain amid affluence, social sustainability is stretched close to its limits. The practical impacts are widespread, including strains on civic engagement, home life and public services. A new dynamic involving discernment, moral judgment and scholarly holistic teaching has now become imperative if civic endeavour and natural neighbourliness are to be regenerated.

Nobody is perfectly formed of character or of competence. We are highly complex, vulnerable organisms, yet with a potential for resilience given half a chance. We are born in total dependence. About two decades of nurture and learning are necessary before we reach anything approaching autonomy. Creating the optimum conditions for citizen nurture is the most important social objective in any culture.

Parenting, reliable family structures and sound teaching relevant to the human condition now have to be centre stage as a condition for future economic and cultural prosperity. The core values have to dwell first upon what we know permits human beings to thrive rather than become disillusioned and broken.

When we reflect upon values, advocacy is distorted if we have left aside the wounded nature of the human condition. Though we can still muster without much difficulty around the great universal virtues, such as courage, honesty, justice and compassion, we may paradoxically have to examine what bothers us when things go wrong to get a better grip on our ultimate core values.

In short, dare we look to our wounds for our foundation values? So, as a crucial example, if trust is shattered, as happens in all too many of our relationships, what are the preconditions to build it?

The long-term answer is to make sure that every child is securely attached to preferably one parent of each gender by the age of three, through serious investment in partnering and parenting, and by discouraging habitual outsourced parenting. Much scholarship shows that secure attachment early in life is our best predictor of all good life outcomes, including mental health, relational and educational success and avoidance of crime.

Yet this birthright is not being delivered for about half of New Zealand's children. This is a scandal, with likely impacts to the fourth generation, the child being father-mother to the man and the woman.

No culture has survived without sufficient care over the relations between genders for procreation and childrearing. There is no remedial system that can ever compensate for loss of that prime law of society, and there is much avoidable suffering.

Our full nature in Nature demands respect. We have to become more mindful of ancient wisdom within the seismic shifts of cultural consciousness; superficial and pernicious distortions of reality must cease to be peddled, not least to the young.

Given courage first to treat our amazing emotional minds and bodies with respect, much more is possible, even deep individual and collective joy and contentment. Amid its natural bounty and ethnic diversity, our world needs New Zealand to show how this may be done on a small scale, rather than to continue to replicate, sometimes in more severe forms, the stark ugliness present elsewhere.

Therein lies a unique challenge for New Zealand's nationhood and 21st century identity. What other nation has a better chance of securing a good modern society?

* Richard Whitfield, lately warden of St Georges House, Windsor Castle, is an emeritus professor of education.

Herald Online feature: Common core values

We invite to you to contribute to the debate on core values. E-mail dialogue@herald.co.nz.