Michael McDonald looks at the work of Robert Theobald
‘Why do so many of us fail to recognise the impact of our personal choices?
Part of the reason is the current belief that only those in power can create
changes in a culture, when in reality, the impact of a shared change in tastes
and styles is far more pervasive than that of orders given by those at the top.
Each of us needs to think about the things we buy, the ways we spend our time,
our use of resources and the possibilities we have for influencing patterns in
our place of work.’
– Robert Theobald
Shortly before he died in November this year, author, futurist, economist and
renaissance man Robert Theobald downloaded 50 years of experience into a book.
It’s called We DO Have Future Choices and was published by Southern Cross
University Press, together with a companion volume of speeches and essays,
Visions & Pathways for the 21st Century.
We DO Have Future Choices is rich with meaning. Not one paragraph is wasted. It
takes time to read because, like a book on cosmology or quantum physics, it is
stuffed with ideas.
While lacking the visionary style of someone like Aldous Huxley, Theobald more
than makes up for it with common sense. His writing is simple, straightforward,
clearly expressed. That his life was spent in communicating ideas is obvious.
A new era
Theobald aims to take the reader on a journey, from what he calls the
‘industrial era’ to the ‘compassionate era’. His book is not a dry
meander through the drought-stricken paddocks of Academe but a manual for social
change, a challenge to the individual, in the words of H G Wells, to ‘break
through the paper thin walls of everyday circumstance’.
Though trained as an economist, Theobald is one of the species, like E F
Schumacher, which managed to get beyond ‘Assume a human being and factor it
into the pattern of growth you want’. He spent his time getting out and
talking to real people and working with them, acknowledging their hopes and
problems. That helps to make his thinking valuable.
It also helps Theobald to avoid utopianism in his vision. He recognises that
conflict will happen, and offers ways to deal with it. Whether the angers and
frustrations of the human species will be allayed in time to preserve the planet
is debatable, but hope is essential to Theobald’s box.
According to Theobald, the four planks in the bridge we must walk across to the
compassionate era are:
• social cohesion, which requires reducing ethnic violence and the gap between
the rich and the poor;
• ecological integrity, obviously necessary for the planet’s survival;
• effective decision-making to deal with long-run and complex issues; and
• reaching these goals on the basis of values and spiritual understanding.
Before he sets out to describe the planks, Theobald first outlines the extent of
the 20th Century chasm over which they must be thrown. This in itself is
fascinating as Theobald gives us a potted history of politics, work, cultural
behaviour and how economic theories helped shape the formidable bastard called
modern society.
As a final point in this overview he looks at the impact of communication
technologies, at how we are overloaded with information (as any editor or
councillor will tell you!). There is even a fashionable new disease, Information
Fatigue Syndrome (IFS), and anyone who’s spent 12 hours straight trawling the
internet can tell you what the onset feels like.
‘And more and more of this information is designed to manipulate our thinking
rather than help us see clearly,’ writes Theobald. ‘Indeed, we can now see
that as information doubles, knowledge halves and wisdom quarters.’
Much of Theobald’s book is about communities and individuals reclaiming the
needle of wisdom from the haystack of information and using knowledge for good,
not necessarily as a weapon. To do this requires ‘courageous realists’:
‘These courageous realists look at the changes going on in the world and do
what they can, in their own situations, to improve dynamics. They are well aware
that positive directions do not develop as a result of orders from the top of
the society, but rather emerge as a large number of people do a wide variety of
things a little bit differently.’
A start in doing things differently is in changing the criteria for success,
especially the insane goals of economic rationalism. To bring about consensus in
changing criteria our ways of making decisions also have to change.
Search for consensus
‘There is also a growing sense that our decision-making mechanisms are failing
us. The adversarial models we have inherited from the past cannot cope with the
complex issues that are emerging at the current time. More and more people agree
that adversarial structures are ineffective in today’s conditions and must be
replaced by a search for consensus and common ground.
‘The real difficulty of our times is that the needed changes have to take
place at the deepest level of our consciousness. Some talk about a religious
revival that would bring the core messages of all faiths together. Some believe
that spirituality is a better way of thinking about the issues. Some choose to
work from the emerging intellectual understandings in system theory and around
chaos and complexity.’
Self-interest
Theobald then goes on to outline methods of achieving consensus and applying
them to community and world issues. In summary, the methods aim to use
people’s self-interest to effect change, by allowing them to express their
views and become informed at the same time in a neutral forum. The recent
Deliberative Poll on the republic issue was a good example of the process.
Stress, conflict and uncertainty are part of the equation: ‘All too often
people are unwilling to push events to the crisis point where something
significant can happen. They prefer to come up with slick and easy answers to
complex questions, to avoid facing the hard questions of their lives and their
institutions. The only way that anything significant can be achieved is to
continue to live in the question until a moment of illumination arrives which
shifts the nature of perceived reality.’
Side-stepped
The classic example of avoiding the hard issues, or side-stepping them for the
sake of big business, is in environmental problems. According to a 1999 report
from Red Cross, in 1998 natural disasters created more refugees than wars and
conflicts. ‘Declining soil fertility, drought, flooding and deforestation
drove 25 million environmental refugees from their land and into the already
vulnerable squatter communities of fast-growing cities.’
In startling contrast a 1999 report from the United Nations Development Program
declared that the three wealthiest officers of Microsoft had more assets than
the combined gross national product of the 42 least-developed countries and
their 600 million inhabitants. Surely that is an environmental disaster as well.
Both are tied to politics, and Theobald urges his readers to see the politics in
everything. So who is equipped to make the necessary rapid changes? Certainly
not the big political parties in a democracy, and bloodshed is a well-tried but
unwelcome technique.
Grass roots
The changes in a democracy come from empowered people at grass roots level. This
has been seen in the green movement, which is essentially a citizens’ movement
acting on the consensus of its communities. Similar citizens’ movements are
emerging from the work of Theobald and his peers in the field of social change,
which in the end means political change. Only when informed citizens see that
environmental interests are in their self-interest will new political leaders be
elected to replace the dinosaurs of the two party system.
Leadership is a fundamental question in any culture and the focus on a strong
leader is often used to disempower individuals of their own activism. Theobald
is fond of a quote from Lao Tzu, which is also a favourite of mine: ‘When the
leader leads well, the people say they did it themselves.’ That state is
reached, according to Theobald, when leaders choose to use discussion and
dialogue rather than coercion. And the first challenge for the leader is ‘to
help people move beyond their cultural trance’.
While earlier acknowledging that ‘the needed changes have to take place at the
deepest level of our consciousness’ Theobald fails in the end to tackle the
issue of spirituality, upon which any real evolution in the human condition is
pinned. He may have been wise not to do so, as spirituality is often tied up in
the human mind with the thorny briar of religion, hung about with ethnic and
moral dilemmas.
Common ground
Nevertheless common ground must be found among religions and each individual –
either through revelation, personal or planetary crisis – must acknowledge
that they are more than their thoughts and their television habits.
But even money can be the common ground necessary to bring about change when it
comes to religious fundamentalism. Witness the Taliban in Afghanistan
considering restoring some human rights in exchange for western aid packages to
rebuild their country.
I have failed in this small space to touch on all the contents of Theobald’s
encyclopedic mind. There is much more to be discovered but that must be left to
the keen reader.
Suffice it to say that Theobald’s work is a good starting point for anyone
interested in social change. It makes a good textbook, manual and primer.
Theobald’s local legacy has more dimensions than just his writing. It is
creating a network of groups in dialogue, some with quite disparate aims, and
bringing people of like enthusiasms together in ‘passion cafés’. If they
encourage a multitude of invisible leaders, we may see some interesting changes.