THUS Magazine

The mantra of the Third Way seems to be about “capabilities”. UK Foreign Secretary David Miliband pontificated in The New Statesman that this it is about creating an “I can” society. But what exactly is the point of all this? Coming from a Development background, it took me a while to realise that all politics, everywhere, is ultimately about selling one or another idea of progress. Politicians are in the business of borrowing biddable ideas of progress wherever they can find them. Rather like managers of the national football team, this need not be from the home country.

Miliband quoted Indian Economist Amartya Sen when explaining New Labour’s ideas on equality. I was surprised, not because it was untrue: – I had done the paper chase already through Antony Giddens via Stephen Lukes – but because he was happy to admit that we had outsourced our thinking about progress to the intellectual powerhouses of the subcontinent. In this slightly scary vision of progress we are all seen as “Human Resources.” The Human Development Report, published by the UNDP, which bases its numbers on Sen’s work, largely describes us in those terms. We are told that humans should be happy to be seen as a form of national wealth, because this is better than seeing progress as only being about money. Indian politicians, with the 1.13 billion people they serve, welcome this message, since it answers the question of what to do with all the poor people. Indeed, the politicians have so much taken this to heart that the Department of Education is now a sub-section of the Ministry of Human Resources.

But a tricky detail in the concept of progress throws this rosy vision of ‘useful’ human beings into question. If you are making progress, presumably it is towards a purpose. Some, such as Francis Fukuyama, see this as a quaint notion. He argued in The End of History 2003  that we were no longer making progress because we had already arrived. Hegel had called time early. 19th Century Prussia wasn’t Shangri-la. USA Neoconcon free market capitalism was the pinnacle of history. Then came the credit crunch. Fukuyama is not so sure any more.

This brings us back to the question “what should we be so useful for?.” In his introduction to the Happy Planet Index, Andrew Simms observes that Economics tells us an awful lot about the transactions in between, but almost nothing about the ultimate ends and means of development. The questions “where does wealth come from?” and “what should we do with it?” are hardly touched upon. Since the environment is the ultimate means for development, we should be aiming to use it efficiently to sustain as many long, happy lives as is humanly possible. All blindingly obvious. So how – and why – did we all lose our sense of purpose?