Contemporary social evils

Joseph Rowntree Foundation

• Publisher: Policy Press
• Year: 2009
• Print ISBN: 9781847424099
• eBook ISBN: 9781447304500
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Social Policy
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Which underlying problems pose the greatest threat to British society in the 21st century? A hundred years after its philanthropist founder identified poverty, alcohol, drugs and gambling among the social evils of his time, the Joseph Rowntree Foundation initiated a major consultation among leading thinkers, activists and commentators, as well as the wider public. The findings have now been brought together in this fascinating book.

Individual contributors range across the political spectrum but the book also reports the results from a web survey and consultation with groups whose voices are less often heard. The results suggest that while some evils - like poverty - endure as undisputed causes of social harm, more recent sources of social misery, such as an alleged rise in selfish consumerism and a perceived decline in personal responsibility and family commitment, attract controversy.

1

Introduction

Julia Unwin

When Joseph Rowntree set up the trusts that bear his name in 1904, he urged them to “search out the underlying causes of weakness or evil in the community”. Strikingly, he also advised the trustees of his considerable wealth to keep alert to the “changing necessities of the nation” and ensure that they continued to focus on investigating the underlying causes of evil, rather than the superficial manifestations. He was clear that, while there were “scourges of humanity” that plagued his own times – including poverty, war, slavery, intemperance, the opium trade and gambling – times were bound to change. He wanted his trusts to be “living bodies, free to adapt themselves to the ever changing necessities of the nation”. It was in this spirit of inquiry that the Joseph Rowntree Foundation (JRF), a century on, decided to investigate the nature of ‘social evil’ in the 21st century.

To gather contemporary perspectives, we launched a national debate that proved to be more wide-ranging and more challenging than we dared hope. While allowing us to revisit our original mandate, it also prompted a large number of people across the UK to consider fundamental questions about the nature of society. The term ‘social evils’ can feel rather uncomfortable. As a Foundation we are used to considering the administrative improvements that can make a difference to the lives of people living in poverty and disadvantage. However, a discussion about ‘social problems’ would be unlikely to have prompted the same level of impassioned public engagement as our general invitation for people to send us their views on social evils. The concept of ‘evil’ appears to have led many people to look beyond commonly discussed social problems such as drugs, poverty or social exclusion, to express more fundamental, less tangible fears about the nature of society and how it is changing. It brought valuable urgency to the debate, and a palpable moral sense.

The national discussion engaged the thoughts and interests of more than 3,500 people who responded to an online consultation exercise initiated through JRF’s website, as well as those who took part in a number of public meetings and in radio phone-ins. It also gained the interest and enthusiasm of people whose voices are not usually heard in these discussions. Through focus groups and workshops run by NatCen (National Centre for Social Research), the work was enriched by the views of people with learning disabilities, ex-offenders, carers, unemployed people, vulnerable young people, care leavers and people with experience of homelessness. Their perspectives, and the results of the online consultation, are described in Section 1. Discussion of the major themes identified, both abstract and concrete, is augmented in Section 2 by 11 leading thinkers and writers from contrasted political and ideological perspectives who were asked to contribute their own viewpoints. We also invited Matthew Taylor, Chief Executive of the RSA to read the resulting wealth of material and set down his own, consequent thoughts (Section 3).

However, to begin with – and in order to place these contemporary views in perspective – we asked Jose Harris, Emeritus Professor of Modern History at the University of Oxford, to contribute a preliminary essay tracing the ways in which understandings of social evil have shifted and changed in the last 100 years. As she points out in the next chapter, Joseph Rowntree and other social investigators were active at a time when deep anxieties about the problems facing their society were matched by impressive optimism. They believed that scientific progress and rational thinking could bring solutions, and that the great scourges of want, disease and ignorance could be resolved by expanding wealth, as well as the growing abilities of people of goodwill. A belief in progress, and a courageous desire to recognise the value of all individuals, informed their view that society could be improved, and social evil eliminated.

Do people today believe that an Edwardian sense of optimism has in any sense proved justified or been maintained? Judged by the responses JRF received to its consultation on contemporary social evils, the answer is mostly, although not wholly, positive. People talked about the enormous advances and freedoms we now have that would have been considered impossible 100 years ago. The freedom for self-expression, the much greater tolerance of individual lifestyles and the ability to make choices, as well as the greater wealth available to us, were all seen as having brought huge advantages. So too was our ability to order information, to analyse material and to understand social trends.

This combination of freedoms and assets, as well as capabilities, is seemingly well designed to enable us to understand and address the social problems of our own age with relative rapidity and ease. Yet these advances, welcome though they are, were seen as having been achieved at a price that many considered we have yet to understand sufficiently or calibrate. The debate about contemporary social evils did not reveal any strong discomfort with modernity, or nostalgic desire to go back in time. There was little sense of a pre-lapsarian past; indeed, there was a delight in the benefits of progress, and recognition that freedom has brought vast benefits. There was, nevertheless, concern that in embracing these freedoms we have not sufficiently reflected on what we might have lost, and have not troubled to compensate for them. For example, as Anthony Browne points out (Chapter 7), growing sexual equality has made it possible for more women to leave abusive and unhappy homes. If this has resulted in different patterns of family life, we do not largely regret the freedom that has made this possible. But we are prepared to note the challenges that this now poses.

Similarly, the greater mobility of individuals, and their ability to exercise choice and freedom, makes communities different, and in some senses unrecognisable. Welcome interventions, such as greater protection for vulnerable people, have also brought new challenges. Julia Neuberger (Chapter 9) describes how gains in child protection and the protection of older people have also, paradoxically, contributed to a stifling of the impulse of kindness. The human and humane response of compassion is all too frequently tempered nowadays by concerns about regulation and hostile perceptions.

Yet it will be seen that this was by no means an entirely negative or pessimistic debate. The urgency and enthusiasm with which people responded to the challenge of defining contemporary social evils suggested a willingness to get engaged, and a desire to effect change. Even the lament of people who felt they had little connection or control within their communities implied a deeper desire for involvement. Commentators like Stephen Thake (Chapter 14) talk about an entirely new approach to the development of civil society, recognising that its form and shape in the 21st century will be different from the institutions that Joseph Rowntree knew in 1904. Equally, Jeremy Seabrook (Chapter 17), with his interest in sufficiency as a defining feature, highlights the need for new models that will allow people to contribute to a fairer, more just and ultimately freer society.

While this book was being prepared, Barack Obama was elected as President in the US, acclaimed by crowds shouting “Yes, we can!”. JRF’s social evils debate strongly suggests that this slogan has a powerful resonance in the UK as well as the US. We have learned that in the diagnosis of social evil, as well as in prescriptions and remedies, there is more common ground than many would imagine. Respondents to the website, those at the meetings, the ‘unheard voices’ and the eminent commentators, focused on many of the same issues, even if they sometimes used different language and expressed contrary views.

Concerns about individualism and greed, and anxieties that individual preferment has become valued over common good, were to be found across the respondents. So, too, was a conviction that inequality is damaging for all. The nature of community, and the strength of the ties that bind us, were frequently raised as issues. Thus, a study that shone a light on a more fragmented, more stratified society, also – paradoxically – drew attention to an array of common, and commonly shared, concerns.

Inviting contemporary views of social evil risked, as one commentator put it, “swimming in a sea of social pessimism”. There was a danger of producing a false dichotomy in which the apparent gains of recent decades were contrasted with the gloom and doom of the present day. But to dismiss the voices raised as simply ‘miserable’ would be to misread the findings. Those who responded did so with a real desire to look at the underlying causes of today’s social ills, motivated by a powerful sense that so much of the way we are currently living is not sustainable.

These are voices to which we all need to listen, as we work together to design and build a good society. We might also agree that this is increasingly true as people experience the consequences of a global downturn that rapidly developed from a distant cloud at the start of this project into potentially the most severe economic storm in 60 years. Notwithstanding the additional difficulties that the recession has created in people’s lives, JRF’s inquiry into the nature of social evil demonstrates a desire to grapple with difficult issues, a commitment to identify the common good in shaping a better society and a passionate conviction that our unsustainable present offers an unreliable route map for our future.

2

‘Social evils’ and ‘social problems’ in Britain since 1904

Jose Harris

Definitions of ‘social evil’

What is meant by a ‘social evil’, and how does it differ from the more familiar and less dramatic concept of a ‘social problem’? A working definition might be that a ‘social problem’ suggests an undesirable state of affairs for which people hope to find a practical cure. A ‘social evil’, by contrast, suggests something more complex, menacing and indefinable, and may imply a degree of scepticism, realism or despair about whether any remedy can be found. In everyday speech, both terms are often used rhetorically and interchangeably. At a deeper, more technical level, however, the language of social problems may be seen as linked to the Anglo-French ‘positivist’ tradition, endorsed over the past century by many prominent British social reformers. The language of social evils is more difficult to pin down. But it is used by people from a variety of traditions – radical and conservative, secular and theological – who see individual and social action as, in some sense, shaped and constrained by moral, natural or transcendental laws.

Questions also arise about the meaning of the term ‘social’. For much of the 19th century, ‘social’ responsibilities in Britain were largely thought of as civic, voluntary or ‘associational’ ties, to be discharged by local agencies of the Poor Law, by charity or by self-governing friendly societies that insured their members against sickness, old age and death. It was only in the early 20th century that social evils and the responsibility for dealing with them came to be identified as ‘national’. A hundred years later, that perspective has shifted again, as social relations, obligations and the mysterious entity of ‘society’ itself are increasingly reconceived as cross-national, or even ‘global’, in their scope. A further complication arises from the fact that some perceived social evils of the present time were seen in the past as quintessentially private. Thus, addiction to opium (casually smoked by Sherlock Holmes), supplying cocaine (sold over the counter by Edwardian pharmacists) and the physical chastisement of children (a routine adjunct of parenting) were scarcely viewed as social offences at all, let alone as criminal.

Likewise, most 19th-century economists believed that ‘artificial’ public strategies to counteract unemployment, however well intentioned, would inevitably exacerbate the social evil they were trying to prevent. Many Victorian reformers and moralists felt the same about hunger and destitution: it was a moral duty to assist the victims of these conditions, but unthinkable to expect such evils ever to go away. Charles Dickens, for example, dramatically highlighted a series of appalling social evils, including death by starvation, child cruelty and paedophilia, sexual exploitation, compulsive gambling and environmental filth. Yet he and other literary figures rarely pointed to practical solutions, other than calling for greater personal generosity and the softening of human hearts.

Such attitudes provide a backcloth and a clue to the philosophy of Joseph Rowntree. As a largely self-made Quaker chocolate manufacturer, Rowntree reflected many of these Victorian beliefs. He fully endorsed public scepticism about treating ‘social diseases’ by applying ‘worse remedies’ (a charge famously levied by T.H. Huxley against the ‘Darkest England’ policies of the Salvation Army in 1891). But he also shared the commitment of other philanthropists to a moral, spiritual and personal element in promoting social reform. There was, however, a distinctive third element in Joseph Rowntree’s approach. This was his belief in the possibility of transforming certain social evils into defined, measurable social problems, by subjecting them to systematic research. One of the long-term results of this new approach was a gradual shift of public attitudes away from the fatalism of earlier epochs. Over the course of the 20th century, many dire social conditions that earlier generations had accepted as unavoidable facts of life were to be either eliminated or transferred to the domain of remedial social policies. Malnutrition, mass unemployment and the treatment of many fatal diseases were among them. Nevertheless, the lurking notion of amorphous but intractable social evils, beyond the reach of constructive intervention, never entirely went away. Instead, it ebbed and flowed at different moments of the 20th century. Most strikingly and recently, something akin to the ill-defined sense of unease and social disintegration that pervaded the late-Victorian and early-Edwardian epochs has resurfaced during the present decade. For evidence of this, it is only necessary to turn to a daily selection of newspapers or the results of the Joseph Rowntree Foundation’s (JRF) online consultation on contemporary social evils described in the next section of this book.

Both the causes and the content of surges in collective anxiety remain, to some extent, conjectural. But the present chapter will seek to offer a brief history of such concerns over the course of the 20th century, and to pose questions about the social realities behind them. How far did the periodic resurgence of public anxieties accurately reflect objective conditions? Should they be seen as indices of more indefinable factors, such as changing moral, religious, behavioural and gender norms and adaptation to ‘advanced modernity’? To what extent have such moments of malaise been not just socioeconomic in character, but also political and moral, reflecting some kind of breakdown in ‘public trust’? Why have some social difficulties that were thought to have been ‘consigned to history’, re-emerged? How far has the widespread Victorian belief – that certain kinds of remedial social policies inadvertently generate further evils – re-acquired credibility in the early 21st century? How far have such cycles of moral anxiety been peculiarly British concerns, or do they mirror similar concerns in other countries?

As the subject is vast, I shall take as one of my reference points the researches of Joseph Rowntree’s youngest son, Seebohm, who eventually succeeded his father as chair of the York chocolate firm, but also pursued a career as Britain’s most prominent empirical social scientist throughout the first half of the 20th century. Like his father before him, Seebohm Rowntree harboured a lifelong interest in the moral, cultural and spiritual aspects of social and economic relations, together with a commitment to developing a ‘value-free’ social science.¹ Although his primary interest lay in analysing different kinds of poverty, the range of Rowntree’s inquiries encompassed much of what he saw as the attitudinal and ‘communitarian’ strengths and weaknesses of the periods he was investigating. His surveys over half a century provide a significant thread of evidence concerning changing social attitudes and values from the 1890s through to the 1960s. As such, they offer an important benchmark from which to contrast earlier perceptions of social evils with those of the present day.

Edwardian Britain: poverty and ‘degeneration’

The creation of the Rowntree trusts in 1904 coincided with an unusual moment of malaise and uncertainty in British social history. This was linked to a prolonged fiscal crisis, the after-effects of an expensive and unpopular war in South Africa, and international economic recession. The results were widespread unemployment and the first shrinkage in average real incomes in Britain for more than half a century. One immediate result was to concentrate public attention on certain longstanding social conditions, no longer as matters of merely philanthropic conce...

Table of contents

• Front Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Foreword
• Acknowledgment
• Notes of Contributors
• 1 Introduction
• 2 ‘Social evils’ and ‘social problems’ in Britain since 1904
• SECTION 1 PUBLIC VOICES
• SECTION 2 VIEWPOINTS
• SECTION 3 REFLECTIONS
• Appendix How the ‘social evils’ consultations were organised
• Notes
• References