As society evolves, the arts will have an increasingly important role to play in developing social cohesion, argues Andrew Curry.
Britain, like much of the developed world, is facing a challenge of meaning. Fifty years of an increasingly prosperous consumer society has made us no happier. One indicator is our rising levels of depression and the increased incidence of mental illness. Another is that economists, who have long assumed that prosperity correlated with happiness, have started instead to explore the reasons why it does not. Richard Layard?s book on happiness, published earlier this year, is a good example. As he observed in his original set of lectures, ?People in the West have got no happier in the last 50 years. They have become richer, they work much less, they have longer holidays, they live longer, and they are healthier. But they are no happier.? So-called ?retail therapy? doesn?t help ? emerging evidence suggests that its effects are more akin to addiction than release.
For a while, for some, work managed to fill this gap in meaning. The data suggests that it doesn?t any longer, and companies can only blame themselves. The short-termist ?Greed is good? Anglo-American business cultures of the ?80s and ?90s stripped out people and knowledge from companies. Employees learnt the hard way that even if they were loyal, companies were not. Families? experiences of lay-offs have shaped the present attitudes of 20-and 30-somethings towards their working lives. They are more transactional about work, and less likely to define themselves through it.
Technology or, more specifically, digital networks, is the third strand in this story. It is a truism that people who are highly networked through mobile phones and Internet connections tend to trust each other?s opinion rather than official versions. But other effects are at least as radical. The digital world is one in which, to quote the musician Matthew Herbert, ?Sampling culture has fostered a sense that everyone has a right to everything.?
New networks
When combined, the decentralised nature of the Internet and the endlessly re-usable nature of digital content has created new forms of co-operation ? forms that echo pre-industrial gift cultures. The continuing rise of open-source software such as Linux and Apache (free to use, free to modify, provided one shares the changes with the community) has given new visibility to questions about why people choose to contribute, unpaid, when they could enjoy the benefits without contributing. One of the most intriguing metaphors is of the ?cooking pot? ? one shares the small amount one can bring to the digital meal in exchange for the richness of everyone?s combined contribution. The model of open source is now spreading beyond software to other areas where knowledge can be shared remotely among groups of committed people: there are open-source law projects, open-source architecture projects, an open-source encyclopaedia (Wikipedia), and so on.
The research suggests that happiness, or ?social well-being?, takes three things: sufficient money, healthy social networks, and engagement with the public world. As a society we may be stumbling, erratically, away from the alluring light of the market towards a more cohesive world. There is a 50-year shadow history ? from the Situationists to soixante-huiters to Yippies to Autonomia to Culture Jammers and the counter-globalisation movement ? that has rehearsed this journey. In the words of the Situationist Raoul Vaneigem, ?How can you live in a world in which you pay for everything?? The nature of our relationship with the arts gives them permission to help refashion the connections we need. As Lewis Hyde argued (in his book ?The Gift?), ?When we are touched by a work of art, something comes to us which has nothing to do with the price.? Only the gift is essential to the circulation of the work. And gifts, critically, are about reciprocity and obligation, the missing links in our struggle for social well-being. As the anthropologist Mary Douglas observes, ?a gift that does nothing to enhance solidarity is a contradiction?.
The signs are there that people understand this, that they are looking for relationships that enhance solidarity. They are seen in the rise of the ?slow? movements, in food and cities, by the emergence of fair trade as a significant force in some markets, increases in volunteering, and the popularity ? even pre-tsunami ? of charitable giving schemes such as Oxfam?s ?goats for Christmas?.
Only connect
Improving our happiness levels, then, requires us to rebuild our map of the world. It needs a weaker connection with the market, and stronger ties to each other and to our public life. The arts can join up these worlds. At a moment when we are searching for new values, and new sources of value, the arts have a rare opportunity to help us recreate our sense of meaning. But they will need ambition. To paraphrase Oscar Wilde, new maps of the world have to make space for Utopia.
Andrew Curry is a Director of Henley Centre in London, where he specialises in strategic futures, scenario development, and new media. He is Lead Adviser on Audience Development to Arts Council England. He writes here in a personal capacity on behalf of the Arts Marketing Association.
Further reading
? Ayer Ghosh, Rishab (1998) ?Cooking pot markets?, First Monday, Vol. 3, No. 3.
? Hyde, L. (1979) The gift: imagination and the erotic life of property, Vintage.
? Lane, R. (2002) The loss of happiness in market democracies, Yale.
? Layard, Richard (2005) Happiness: lessons from a new science, Penguin. His original lectures, the Lionel Robbins Memorial Lectures 2002/03, are online at http://cep.lse.ac.uk/layard/.
? Prime Minister?s Strategy Unit (2002) Life satisfaction, www.strategy.gov.uk.
? Weber, Stephen (2004)The success of open source, Harvard University Press.
