Seven Ways to Change the World

The ‘responsible cooperation’ I favour and the ‘society of states’ I advocate are both forms of an enlightened patriotism that recognises, and does not undermine but upholds, the rights, identity and character of our individual nations as we seek shared solutions to shared problems. If power is defined not in abstract and unrealistic terms – as a sovereignty that is unlimited, indivisible and accountable to no one – but rather as our ability as a community to shape our destiny, the ‘national interest’ can often be better expressed in the collective sharing of power, rather than seeking to exercise it over others.

The situation is perilous, but we are anything but powerless if can bring together our galaxy of 8 billion individuals, 8 billion different people with different interests and passions, recognising that they have much more in common than they have that separates them. This is not to advocate a world government or some post-national future, but simply to recognise the value and importance of us coming together to build a fairer and better world.

But the reader will rightly ask: what role can I play in shaping the story that is being told, when elites with money seem to exercise so much more political power than I do, when political parties seem to be less effective than ever in bringing people together and performing their traditional function of aggregating opinion, when the institutions of our democracy seem so tarnished and unfit for purpose and opportunities for – and gains from – participation seem so limited. And of course when, as we discussed in the last chapter, strong-arm dictators are in vogue and demagogues can manipulate democratic institutions to preach messages of hate and ‘divide and rule’.

But distrust of the actions of leaders should not lead us to withdraw from acting ourselves. We should not allow the public square to be colonised by leaders whose talk of a silent majority’ – or, as ex-President Trump put it, the ‘real people’ – is to ascribe views to people that they have never expressed, and to act as if the natural reticence of people gives demagogues permission to speak on their behalf.

‘Silent majority’ is a term popularised in its post-1945 form by the disgraced US president Richard Nixon to distinguish the vast mass of people from anti-government demonstrators whom he portrayed as an angry and villainous anti-social mob; but his summoning up of the ‘silent majority’ was not a call to empower the mass of people and to invite them on to the public stage. Rather was an attempt to co-opt their support for his own personal prejudices, irrespective of what their views really were. And the lesson is clear: if we fail to make our views known, others will define them for us.

So we must not resign ourselves to a world where we, as citizens, allow ourselves to act as if we are powerless. Quite the opposite. My answer is that progress is possible. Progress in history – to eradicate slavery, to counter gender, sexual and racial discrimination, to win the right to vote, to access decent working conditions and universal healthcare – happened because of the inspiration of social movements that were built on strong ethical foundations. And so too progress can, in future, come from sustained movements of people imbued with a strong sense of what is just and fair, who see the bigger picture, can explain and motivate people through telling a story that captures their passions and who can bend what Martin Luther King[, Jr.] called ‘the arc of the moral universe’ in favour of change.

We cannot talk of ‘success’ if we simply stop climate change in one part of the world but everyone goes hungry in another. For I have found that even those campaigns that define themselves as single-issue initiatives – on homelessness, drugs, nutrition, cancer – come down in the end to justice for all and the dignity of all. Oxfam was started to deal with an African famine but its basic objective is ‘a just world without poverty’. Save the Children started off as a fundraiser for refugee children left behind in Eastern Europe after the First World War but its inspiration was always – and is still – a desire, and a demand, that every child can realise their potential.

And so it’s not just a commendable willingness to work together that marks out successful movements: we should not think of ourselves coming together simply for instrumental reasons or in a transactional way that suggests expediency rather than principle: we connect because we want to emphasise the ties that bind us not the differences that divide us and because out of challenges we have in common can come a shared vision of what’s possible.