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The Examined Life
The Examined Life podcast explores the questions we should be asking ourselves with a range of leading thinkers. Each episode features a different interview, and appeals to those interested in wisdom, personal development, and what it might mean to live a good life. Topics vary from discussing the role of dopamine mining and status anxiety, to exploring the science of awe and attention.
The Examined Life
Ruth Taylor - How do we develop better cultural values?
Ruth Taylor explores how our cultural conditions shape our values and beliefs, revealing how we can build futures where humans and other life forms flourish together on our planet. She illuminates the often invisible narratives that guide our thinking and behavior, showing how these shape everything from our personal happiness to our collective response to global challenges.
• The "values perception gap" - most people prioritize intrinsic values like community and equality, but believe others are more motivated by wealth and status
• Deep narratives like "growth is always good" or "humans are fundamentally selfish" shape our entire approach to social and environmental problems
• Research shows prioritizing intrinsic values leads to greater well-being than pursuing external rewards like wealth and status
• Our society lacks spaces for reflection on values, leaving us vulnerable to constant messaging promoting consumption and competition
• Creating "glimmers" - spaces and experiences that demonstrate alternative ways of living aligned with our deeper human values
• Cultural change requires both individual reflection on our values and structural changes to systems that currently reinforce harmful narratives
• Real change happens at the deepest level, addressing the root cultural conditions rather than just symptoms of problems
Find out more about Ruth's work on her Substack channel Culture Soup, or take her Values 101 course with the Common Cause Foundation.
When you provide people with an opportunity to reflect on what is important to them, they shift intrinsically. Their intrinsic value is wired. It feels like just the deepest thing to be human is that kind of connection with other humans and other life on this planet. And yet we have created a world that is constantly drawing our attention to a different type of value, with the promise that you will be happy through prioritizing these things. And we just see time and time again that money does not buy you happiness and you could replace money with power, status, authority, whatever it might be. It does not lead to this feeling of contentment.
Speaker 2:Hello and welcome to another episode of the Examined Life with me, kenny Primrose. In this podcast, I speak to a range of leading thinkers about the question that they believe we should be asking ourselves. I personally find the conversations fascinating learning experiences. They've often really made me think again, and so I'm grateful for the people I've spoken to, for their willingness to come and share with me their insights. The series so far has included Michaelene Ducliffe on parenting, peter Gray on psychological development in children, catherine Burblesingh on education, michael Skassas on remaining human in a technological age and William Damon on what purpose is and how to find it.
Speaker 2:Today, I am delighted to be in conversation with Ruth Taylor, who's been working with values, deep narratives and culture change for many years. She's been doing this with the Common Cause Foundation, alongside other consultancy work. It's hard to overstate just how much values and narratives shape our lives and those of our institutions. Yet we barely notice them, though many of us feel like we're living in a time of collapse for the planet and for democratic society. So perhaps now would be a good time to question the narratives, the values that have brought us to this point and what might take us forward from here have brought us to this point and what might take us forward from here.
Speaker 2:In this conversation, ruth helps us to make often invisible values more conspicuous, to see the arms and legs that they have, the work they're doing for us, through us, in us, for good and ill. I found it really interesting, an important conversation, and I hope that you will too. As ever, do please share this with others if you enjoyed it, if you find it valuable, and I'd always appreciate a review on Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. Thank you for listening. I'll hand over to the conversation now, ruth. Thank you so much for joining me today on the Examined Life.
Speaker 1:Thank you so much for having me. I'm excited for the conversation. It's an absolute pleasure to have you here.
Speaker 2:So the peg on which the series runs is a question we should be asking ourselves and then hopefully, in the process of unpacking that question, we can unpack a bit of your background and where you're coming from with it. Maybe we could just dive straight into that. Ruth, what is the question that kind of preoccupies you, that you think we should be asking ourselves?
Speaker 1:So I spend a lot of my time thinking about how we can build the cultural conditions that are necessary for a deep-seated, foundational sort of transition towards a future where human beings and other than human life is flourishing on our planet, and I am fascinated by that conversation and I think it's one that can shed light on kind of new ways of thinking about change in lots of different avenues. So it's a question that I'd love to see picked up and asked more. Okay.
Speaker 2:Fascinating. I think, as you say, there's a huge amount in that. So the cultural conditions for a future where people and planet are flourishing. Can I ask you what you mean by cultural conditions? That could bring up a lot of different things. So what comes to mind for you when you use those words?
Speaker 1:Yeah. So that's a really good starting question, because the vast majority of the time when we hear the word culture we tend to think about cultural artifacts, so we think about kind of arts and culture and the idea of producing great pieces of art or film or poetry or writing books. Or we think about heritage and culture, so we might think about national trust properties and museums that we might go to and places like that, and all of those absolutely do come under a kind of definition of culture. I suppose for me I define culture in its broadest sense. I don't know if you're familiar with.
Speaker 1:There was a story that David Foster Wallace gave once in a speech and he said he gave this image of two young fish swimming in the sea and an older fish greets them and says oh morning lads, like how's the water? And they carry on swimming and then one turns to the other and says what's water? And there's to me there's this sense that culture is that water. It's the water that we are all immersed in and it's created by and it reinforces the kind of deep values, beliefs, traditions, rituals that we hold as human beings. So it underpins our politics, our economics, our sort of social institutions, but it really is that sort of fairly amorphous but absolutely foundational arena that we're all in, and cultural conditions are how do you go about trying to change that water to make a deeper level of social and environmental justice possible, even imaginable? So it's, I would classify it as really the deepest, most foundational type of social environmental change that we can do.
Speaker 2:Okay, wonderful. So social and environmental. I'm glad you brought up the David Foster Wallace speech. I love that speech. I like the little, what do you call it? It's a parable, but the point being that the most kind of pervasive realities are hardest to see or perceive. And yeah, as you mentioned, you've got this culture. You think of museums and movies and national trust and so on, but really we're talking about something that goes much deeper, to the level of you mentioned narratives and beliefs, kind of what we're talking about here is it assumptions and beliefs?
Speaker 1:Yeah. So narratives are the kind of known knowns, if you like, the commonly understood ideas that are held by a group of people across a culture, and they help us make sense of the world that we live in. Obviously, as human beings, we are bombarded with so much stimulus, like every day, that we have to have these kind of internal stories within our minds that help us know what is true or what we perceive to be true and real, as well as a kind of a moral judgment of what is right and wrong. So they're the kind of I sometimes think of them as the kind of connective tissue between our everyday experiences and then the more foundational values and worldviews that we inhabit, and they're everywhere. We're surrounded by them. We don't necessarily think of them consciously as we're living our lives, but they're almost like firing in our brain all the time that we're interacting with the world around us.
Speaker 2:We've a kind of increasingly tribalised society where values seem to clash against one another. When you're talking about cultural change at a deep level, at a societal level, with a kind of concept of justice that can be shared by many, do you think there are certain stories that are shared by all of us?
Speaker 1:I'm sure that there are some. There are some that are definitely they are seen as being just the way that things are. They're common sense, true that really go across a sort of political divide of left and right, if you like. Deep narratives that come from our engagement with our economic system. So like an idea that kind of growth is good is a very deeply held embedded. It's embedded in the very cultural fabric that we are all existing within and it doesn't really matter where on the kind of political spectrum you are. That is something that we just deem to be true.
Speaker 1:So there are a kind of narratives that are very much part of the kind of modernity, if you like, that are just it's almost, is just so built into the ways that we view the world that it almost becomes, yeah, just ungraspable to think that, well, progress is a construct that we have made up and is something of our kind of modern times. And how does that impact? How, then, I, as a human being, come to see an issue like climate change? Like when I have that story at the back of my mind? That's the lens through which I am seeing a situation like climate change, like when I have that story at the back of my mind. That's the lens through which I am seeing a situation like climate change. What does that do to what I see as being possible, what I deem as being desirable in our kind of reaction to climate change?
Speaker 1:And they are so embedded that they're almost invisible, and I really believe that a job of changemaking is to make them visible, to try to understand. Do we really want to believe these things or do we not? And there are differences. Obviously. There are people who hold very different stories about the world. You used the word justice earlier and I immediately thought justice means different things to different people. There are different stories that you would bring to that kind of conversation, but there are some that are very deeply held, that I think are cross. They're almost like the cultural paradigm in which we're in.
Speaker 2:Thank you. My previous question was really clumsy, but you understood it anyway. That's exactly what I was wanting to get at the kind of modernity, the idea of progress and, as you say, calling out the kind of the dirty water in which we're swimming, evoking awareness. I wonder if we could maybe pull out some of those. I don't know what would you call them? Are they myths? Are they the stories that we've grown up just assuming to be true? I wonder if I could unpack a little bit more about that. So you have people like Hans Rosling or Steven Pinker, who Enlightenment. Now he is this data-rich tome of evidence that we're making leaps and bounds as a species. Violence has gone down, literacy has gone up, vaccinations and so on. There's so much that he would like to point to, to say progress is just axiomatic, it's a part of the way things are and we should keep progressing. I imagine that is a thesis that you might have a few questions about.
Speaker 1:I guess. So I remember watching Hans Roslin's brilliant sort of YouTube videos early on in my career and they're very gripping and there is something reassuring about hearing a story that is one that is positive and things are improving. We're surrounded by very negative content a lot of the time doom and gloom stuff and that obviously has an impact on the way that you are showing up in the world. So in in one sense I remember being very. I really enjoyed those videos when I first came across them. I suppose as I've gone on to learn more, I can see their limitations and I come back to that that I suppose that fail safe phrase that lots of things can be true at once. We can can be progressing in a particular measure, so we can be more children in school or less people are living on a dollar a day or whatever it is. We can be progressing in those ways and yet, because those are the metrics or the measures that we have deemed the most likely to tell us if progress is happening, but simultaneously we are threatening the very existence of this planet and all life on it. There is still much suffering amongst human beings and other than human life. Some things are not measurable on that progress spectrum, if you like, and that feels that they then get discounted, which I think is a real shame.
Speaker 1:I'm really influenced by an indigenous scholar called Vanessa Andriotti, who is involved in a beautiful piece of work called Gesturing Towards Decolonial Futures, and it's a collective of individuals from across the world and her book.
Speaker 1:She wrote a book called Hospicing Modernity which really shook the very foundations of my thinking as somebody who works in social and environmental change, and she talks about how we can talk about progress forever and ever.
Speaker 1:But modernity is built on a 40 promise that it's this idea that we'll eventually just invite more and more people around the table until we've got this really long table and everyone is happy and we're all equal and it's all beautiful and how. That is just a lie. The kind of colonial modernity that we all live in now is founded on the suffering of other human beings in other parts of the world that are non-western, but also the kind of extraction and domination of our natural world. And that really clicked for me that there are lots of ways that we can say, see, say that the world is getting better, and for individual by individual, that could be true, and yet this is only going to go one way in terms of the kind of relationship that we have with our natural world and the fact that, as people get richer, there is an ever increasing gulf between the richest and the poorest, and that feels insurmountable when you're looking at the kind of economic and political structures in which we're living sustainability and progress.
Speaker 2:It entails this idea that you've got to replace what's come before, rip it up and move on to the next thing, whereas sustainability is like how can we get life to carry on? How can we care for the generation that's coming up on the planet and look after it? The idea of progress might lend itself to numbers, but, as you said, there are things that you can't measure In an increasingly utilitarian calculus of kind of happiness or success. There are things that will fly below the radar but are arguably more important.
Speaker 1:Yeah, absolutely, and all of this comes down to what those kind of cultural waters I was talking about. Within those cultural waters, the things that we desire are set. We experience cultural kind of cues. We're conditioned to believe that some things are more important than other things, and this is where we absolutely start talking about values that there are, that I should value wealth, I should value my own success, I should value how people see me, I should value being the sort of person that someone would say, oh, she's very successful and and she has a lot of money and she's very attractive and all of this.
Speaker 1:Those are the things that I am told repeatedly throughout my life that I should be putting worth in right, and I'm not hearing messages that are about actually what we should really value is ensuring that we as a collective ecosystem on this planet, are living with care for one another and with respect for each other's lives, and all of that like that isn't a message that I receive very often.
Speaker 1:And so what does that do to our inner lives and our inner assessments of the ways that we as individuals show up in this planet, but how we respond to one another and how we live together, but also the structures that we as individuals show up in this planet, but how we respond to one another and how we live together, but also the structures that we create the economy that we make, the school system that we create, the health system that we create. How are those impacted by this kind of weighting towards particular interpretations of what progress is and what success is and what it means to live a good life? I think if we were to shift some of those very, very deeply held ideas and ideals, we would be able to create a world that maybe we can't even imagine right now because we are so seeped in the waters that currently exist.
Speaker 2:Is it serving the people that have them? So if we've got let's say, we grew up in the West, in 21st century Britain, with social media and Hollywood influences or whatever, and we've got this hierarchy of values with a common sense idea of success, beauty and status and so on, I guess I'd like to ask whether, regardless of the impact on the planet, does that serve people well, do you think?
Speaker 1:No, I really don't, and I'm going to speak maybe this is in the world of conjecture, I don't necessarily have a nice social science study to back this up, but from my work at the Common Cause Foundation. We're a really small organisation and we work translating, if you like, a body of social psychology, academic research into the language of social and environmental change, and we look extensively at human and cultural values. And something that surprises nearly everyone I ever talk to about this is that what does come out in the research is that the vast majority of human beings do place more importance on what we tend to refer to as intrinsic values, so things that feel inherently worthwhile to us, and they are things like equality, protecting the environment, community creativity, things like that, and where we see this almost an individual level, but also almost like a cultural level. Cognitive dissonance is that we are constantly being told that what we should be valuing is what we call extrinsic values, values that require some sort of external approval or reward, so wealth, status, image, power, etc. And it does not feel good to us.
Speaker 1:Some people do place lots of importance on extrinsic values, and fair enough. We're all human and the beauty of humanity is its complexity, but it's it. I think you know why I meant about conjecture. Is I, to me personally, really feel that at the heart of our global mental health crisis is something to do with a culture that is leading us in a direction that maybe we do not intuitively, inherently feel is one that will make us happy and give us good lives and let us live in community with one another and in the incredibly, amazingly beautiful, intricate world in which we are a part and that, for me, feels just immensely sad. It tragic. That is the kind of fallout of a capitalist, neoliberal, separatist world that we've made what seems especially pernicious is that what's promised is happiness.
Speaker 2:Right, there's this kind of paradoxical get a truism that when you aim for happiness, you entirely miss your target. It's when you aim for other, you entirely miss your target. It's when you aim for other things that happiness is a byproduct that comes into view.
Speaker 1:The research shows that when you provide people with an opportunity to reflect on what is important to them, they shift intrinsically, they're intrinsically inspired. It feels like just the deepest thing to be human is that kind of connection with other humans and with other life on this planet. And yet, as you've said, we've created a.
Speaker 2:Whatever it might be, it does not lead to this feeling of contentment, and that is such a shame definition of sin was like disordered love is like you've got your priorities out of whack and I guess the studies you've looked at would say that intrinsically, we know what is actually of value. But I was reading something you wrote for the common cause foundation and the research you pointed to or maybe you did points out that we suspect other people's values are extrinsic, while we ourselves know what is intrinsically valuable, like social connection or nature or whatever. That's fascinating. Is this a product of capitalism, consumerism? Why are we cynical about what other people are after?
Speaker 1:Yeah, so this is called the values perception gap, and it's exactly that. It's the idea that we assume that other people are much more motivated by what we might call extrinsic values than they actually are. So this idea that other people are out for themselves and all they care about is what's in their bank account or buying the latest designer labels or how many likes they get on social media, etc. And we tend to be fairly accurate when we're thinking about people that we know well. So when asked to reflect on the values of our friends and family, we tend to be more accurate. As soon as it's a little bit far removed, this kind of this seeming misperception comes into play, and it's dangerous One, because it means that on an individual level, we perhaps are less likely to act in line with our own intrinsic values because we feel like the odd one out and we with social norming creatures. So we tend to then think, okay, I'll just I'll, maybe I won't act as intrinsically as maybe I would have otherwise. Or if I do, maybe I'll give a more selfish reason as to why I'm acting like that way. But for me the interesting thing is what happens culturally. If you believe that everybody else is out for themselves. How do you build a social security system? It's all about catching out benefit cheats and that's the then, the framing, the messaging that we're hearing as human beings every time that we hear social security or how we even if I was somebody that then needed to interact with that as a system that's the tacit reminder that I'm being given. Everybody is out for themselves, and what does that do to our belief in one another and our ability to collectively change the pathway that we are on? It's a real problem and I think there are lots of culprits as to why we have these very deep seated beliefs about human nature, and you may have read Humankind by Rudger Bregman, who talks about this extensively. I think it does come through in things like political rhetoric and it comes through in definitely in the media's framing of social issues. But it comes through in more implicit ways too the fact that if I go to my local library and I get the latest book and I'm excited to go home and read it, I have to go through security barriers that are reminding me that, on the whole, people are more likely to steal these books than aren't, and that's another sort of tacit reminder of this very deep story. So there are lots of ways that is carried and if you think about social and environmental issues, the way that we understand human nature, the way that we understand our fellow human beings, has a huge implication on how, then, we conceive of change happening. Do we think it's even possible? It's very easy to just say we'll never solve climate change because everyone's too selfish, and that's it. End of conversation.
Speaker 1:Ngos, generally climate organisations and otherwise don't tend to work that upstream they're not working on. How do you create a cultural condition, ie maybe one where people have a better understanding and appreciation for one another, so that further downstream we're not experiencing something like climate change? That just doesn't happen. That is not the type of strategy that we employ in the change sector and it is, I believe, fundamentally. We have to start working more at that upstream level if we're wanting to actually tackle, enduringly, durably, the challenges that we're facing on a day-to-day basis in today's world.
Speaker 2:You mentioned humankind and this. The idea that we're potentially like the story we have is maybe the Hobbesian like life is short, nasty and brutish Lord of the Flies. If you leave us to our own devices, we're going to destroy each other, and there's some fascinating research that just turns that on its head. So I think there was and is it in humankind. There was a, a story of a kind of Lord of the Flies type scenario, and the reverse was the case they cooperated. There's also, is it Jamil Zaki, who studies hope and cynicism.
Speaker 2:He had an example of two Brazilian fishing villages One they competed against each other and the other they had to cooperate to fish, and the difference between those communities was profound, also in terms of well-being. They could leave the doors unlocked. Where they cooperated with each other, where they saw their neighbours as potentially getting the fish before them, there was an air of suspicion and, as you say, the way our cities are set up, you're being watched by CCTV all the time. What does that do to you? What does that make you think of yourself? Would all hell break loose if I wasn't being watched? Is that what you think of yourself? Would all hell break loose if I wasn't being watched. Is that what you think of myself? Is that what you should think of my neighbours? Does this make me feel more safe or actually less safe?
Speaker 1:Yeah, absolutely. It makes us feel that the equilibrium, to the extent that we have one, is very fragile and that it's the powers that be that keep us in the safety that we are in, and I think it was probably one of the ways in which the sort of status quo or the kind of paradigm that we are currently existing in is reinforced and continued. Is this sense that we can't trust?
Speaker 1:one another to show up as good, compassionate, collaborative beings, and I just don't believe that to be true. It's not my personal experience, and it's also not what you find in the science, and it's also not what you hear from indigenous wisdom keepers. It's, it doesn't seem to be to me. It's a fiction, it's a myth that has been created by those who have a vested interest in keeping us separated and keeping the kind of current systems in play that ultimately line the pockets of a very few individuals.
Speaker 2:So who wins from that, Herman, you took a suspicion you might call it? Who wins from keeping us looking over our shoulder?
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 1:I think, if you look at the growing, unfortunately, far right political rhetoric in this country at the moment, we're being constantly told to be suspicious of others and others and unease and sort of separation from one another, and I think ultimately that benefits people who wish to grab more power, to be able to create more money, to be able to extract more from the planet, to live a luxurious life which we are all told continuously is the life that we should be seeking and maybe that works for them for their short period on this earth. But it fundamentally is leading us on a course of complete destruction and I think on an individual level does not make us happy, makes us feel very insecure in what should be our one precious life.
Speaker 2:It literally is this kind of divide and conquer mentality. I think it might be helpful to bring in here a distinction that you make in your work between, like deep narratives the roots of what we're talking about here and then those other offshoot narratives which might be that asylum seekers are going to come here and take our jobs. Would you mind unpacking a little bit about what you mean, because I think that's essentially what we're talking about here.
Speaker 1:Yeah, absolutely so. I tend to think of this as a kind of nesting, like a nesting of narratives, it's Russian dolls and there's work to be done at every level. So it's not to diminish more surface level or what I tend to call issue specific narratives. They are important and we need to work on those today, but as well as being conscious of and having an eye to whether we are unintentionally reinforcing harmful, dominant, deeper narratives, that kind of keep the system or the status quo in play, if you like. So if I were to give you an example, today in the UK I could open a paper and let's say I open one of Rupert Murdoch's papers. I'm likely to read a story about, maybe a refugee or a migrant, and that story will be framed in a particular way. So, exactly as we've been saying, it's likely to try to incite me to feel a feeling of threat that this person is someone who is out to or is maybe not even intentionally, but is going to through the as a kind of consequence of their actions, is going to somehow harm my standard of living or the standard of living of people that I love. That's the sort of story, the narrative that falls out of that would be something about when I see those stories again and again and again not always about immigration, but a similar type of storyline and narrative forms. There'll be something about hardworking British families are suffering because people are coming over to our country and taking advantage of our generosity and our kind of goodness, if you like. That's the sort of narrative that is created and there'll be lots of work by migration or refugee rights organisations that will be trying to shift that narrative. How do you ensure that media articles are framed differently? How do you ensure that voices of the people that are on the move are being heard? All of that incredibly important work.
Speaker 1:What often gets missed is that, if we think of our kind of nest, the smaller kind of deeper narratives at play that allow that narrative of migration as being this kind of threat and taking advantage of our generosity to be powerful, there are narratives that exist that allow that to feel that it makes sense. Are things around British exceptionalism, things around racist ideas of white supremacy, things around what it means to have a home and to belong in a country. Those deeper narratives often are unmoved by the work that we do to shift a more issue-specific narrative and those deeper narratives impact. Let's take British exceptionalism. That's a very old and very embedded story or myth, and we carry that with us regardless of what issue area it is that I'm talking about or I'm having my attention brought to.
Speaker 1:So, yes, it impacts how I think of migration, but it also impacts how I think about homelessness or climate change or biodiversity loss or whatever. Just enter your social environmental issue area. Here there's something about how do we work at that deeper level, very intentionally, to not just shift the possibilities on one social environmental challenge but on a whole host, because ultimately they are the product of the same narratives, they are the product of the same skew of values, and I think there's work to be done at that, excavating down into that, the deepest part of this narrative nest, if you like, that we need to get better at doing more kind of fluent in that work, if you like.
Speaker 2:Have you ever felt your own narratives change as you've become aware?
Speaker 1:of them? That's a great question, yeah, and I probably I probably may think about this more intentionally or very have this under the microscope more than your average person, because this is my work, but I definitely have. My career is a like a demonstration of, if you like, of a shift in narrative. So I've always worked in social and environmental change. From the moment I was working and I did a human rights master's, I got a job at Amnesty International and I thought this is it. What an incredible job.
Speaker 1:Off the bat, I was ecstatic and then I very quickly became very frustrated with that way of working, the sort of traditional campaigning tactics that we draw on the unassessed assumption that through small, incremental changes, we will slowly but surely reach the sort of scale and depth of change that's required to solve all of these social and environmental challenges that we see around us all the time.
Speaker 1:And I just didn't buy that as a sort of theory, if you like.
Speaker 1:But I went in feeling that an organisation like Amnesty and lots of others are doing incredible work, that this is the forefront of justice, if you like, and that narrative for me has changed over time, that I no longer believe that it's just about tweaking the existing system to make more room for more people and more kind of life that actually the system itself is not. It will never be such that we will see real, true equality and human and planetary flourishing. That we need something actually drastically different, and that is one that's taken me years to feel comfortable with, because there's some very big implications for your personal life, but also for your sort of career, in thinking like that and to I now feel excited by it. It now feels, yeah, that is the work that that I want to be doing, but I believe that's the work that we all need to be doing to really see the depth and scale of change that's required. But it's taken me yeah, it's taken me some time to get there and that has been a real narrative shift thank you for sharing that.
Speaker 2:So your perspective now sounds like that of a revolutionary of ideas like the assumptions are just wrong-headed at the moment and the change needs to be so far upstream there requires an entirely different way of kind of thinking and inhabiting. And I wonder if so we've talked about a few things progress, the ideas of the good life, individualism, all of these are devastating for the planet, really bad for communities, not even good for our own happiness. Let's say I arrive at the same conclusion as you, which actually I have. I need to constantly call myself out and not be drawn in because the world outside is pulling me that way, but in my moments of sobriety there's zero appeal in being pulled towards it. What do I do then? How do I identify a different set of values that chimes more with flourishing? Flourishing is the word you used in your question.
Speaker 1:Yeah, it's a really good question and I do think there's something about bringing your values to the forefront of your mind. If, in today's secular world, if you are not religious, there are very few places, if any, where you can really reflect on your values, and I think that is a really terrible thing because it means that we live blind to our own intentions or our own motivations and it means that we don't have them at hand to help us assess different situations. If I'm presented with a decision to make, how do my values help me make that decision? There's something about being able to assess the primes, the cues that I'm experiencing around me. What values are these trying to draw to the surface within me? Are they the ones that I want to foreground in my life, or would I like to foreground different ones? I always find this.
Speaker 1:I went to the cinema yesterday to see Conclave, which is amazing, brilliant film, but anyway, at the beginning you sit there and you watch all of these adverts and there's always an advert of kind of the latest Audi or something in there, and your car advert's always very sexy looking and they really lean into extrinsic values that you are going to look immensely cool and you're going to be very popular and you're going to look really desirable if you have this car. And I'm someone who really wants to live my life prioritizing and foregrounding intrinsic values. I try to design my life as much as I can around those values, and yet you find yourself in that cinema thinking, oh, I would look great in the Lewis Audi. You can't help it. We're human. That's why advertising is so powerful it taps into our abilities. We also have those values. To a certain extent we also have them. So To a certain extent we also have them. So there is something really powerful about that. And so now I go into the cinema feeling this sense of I am armoured with the values that I know that I hold to be important. And when they tried to convince me to get the latest Audi, I won't spend 20 minutes fantasising about how popular I'm going to look with that new car.
Speaker 1:There is something about being able to navigate your world with your values on your sleeve, if you like, so that you can constantly refer to them. Are these the things that I'm wanting to prioritise in this world, in this life, this one life that I have? I think that's really important, and it comes with practice. It's a habit like anything else, leaning into it further and making yourself fluent in your values and giving yourself practice at assessing a situation in the world and thinking through. How does this align with the values that I want to prioritise in my life? And I think perhaps people would change their actions, definitely, but perhaps they would reflect differently on the ways that they think change is going to happen at a bigger scale. I think you become more reflective on what you think is needed to make that change happen. Are we going to solve climate change just by everybody doing a bit more cycling? Probably not. There's something about being more reflective and that being a kind of primer, if you like, for reflecting more deeply about the world and what it needs.
Speaker 2:The idea of value-ception, as I understand it, is that we have, if you like, an innate ability to perceive what is of value in the world, and you might say, truth, goodness and beauty that isn't told to us by the culture around us or by our parents or whatever we kind of sense it. Is that something you'd go along with? And do you think if we all took a step back, we paused, spent more time in value-ception, trying to sense what is of value, there'd actually be a good deal of consensus between us of what's of value, as in we wouldn't end up with 100 people with 100 different ideas of what's of value yeah, I think there's something in there.
Speaker 1:there's many indigenous scholars that talk of kind of this deeper type of knowledge, so a knowledge that isn't like brain first, it's not a kind of rational assessment, it's like knowledge that you feel in your gut and how much of the time we are able to understand something about the world through that type of wisdom that we can't access just through our brain and what is scientifically or data driven or proven or whatever. And I do believe that that to be true, there is something about the patterns that you see throughout human history that lead us to the same kind of creation again and again Truth, beauty and goodness that you referred to. There is something about the fact that we have always been drawn to particular ways of being. That is incredible. And, again, indigenous scholarship will often say something about how those types of senses are being muted by our culture. So today, perhaps in the modern Western world, that sense, that ability to intuitively lean in to what is inherently good on this planet, is dulled, or where that kind of definition of what is good is defined by the culture in which we're in and we're not really provided much opportunity to do that value exception ourselves.
Speaker 1:So I think there's. I think there's truth in it. I also think that there's complications to it in the kind of culture in which we are a part. Perhaps if we had less which we are a part, perhaps if we had less conditioning or less kind of primes constantly trying to interfere, that sense would be stronger. And there's definitely work that tries to strengthen those senses that maybe we once had, or had to a strongest degree, if you like, as humanity, and that maybe have lessened over time as we have continued on this like modernity voyage. But yeah, I think there is something there and those kind of conversations that you have with people in spaces that provide you opportunities to really lean into those kind of deep, meaningful conversations, people tend to gravitate towards the same sorts of things. Those are what it means to be truly human and alive. I think and it's just a shame that we don't have a culture that kind of allows us to explore that to the extent that we need to.
Speaker 2:What's coming to mind as you're speaking is Johan Harry's book Lost Connections. Are you familiar? Yeah, yeah, so I find it really helpful and in it I guess he talks about modernity, alienating us from ways of living that we're just wired for. It's a social connection working with our hands. I don't think he includes spirituality as a chapter. I felt like that was lacking, because I see that running through humanity, across time and space. Anyway, as we become alienated from those ways of living, and the consequences being a mental health crisis, among other things, my suspicion is we're also alienated from our values, like part of I don't know which comes first. Maybe you would say the values comes first, or yeah, there's probably a question in there somewhere. I'm just trying to figure out what it is. It's like practicing certain things changes your values, or do you change your values and therefore you change your practice, or is there some complicated conversation between the two?
Speaker 1:I definitely think it's the complicated conversation option. It's very chicken and egg and I just don't think there's an answer. I think there are feedback loops between both of them. So there is something in psychology about how, when you witness yourself acting in, say, a pro-environmental way, you witness yourself taking out the rubber, taking out the recycling, and then you witness yourself lowering the temperature on the wash or whatever you build a story internally in your mind that I am someone who values protecting the environment, and so when you are then next faced with a decision where you could act pro environmentally or anti environmentally, you're more likely to act pro environmentally. So there is something.
Speaker 1:There is a feedback loop here about the values that we show up with in the world and how that affects our action, but also how we respond to the primes and cues around us and what is deemed acceptable or normal behaviour for all attitudes for us to hold. I think it would be impossible to untangle the relationship between those two things, and you do need to come at it from both ways. Ideally, we have more people intentionally reflecting on their values, but we also have systems and structures that encourage or lean into the most compassionate parts of human nature instead of the most domineering or extractive parts of human nature, if you like. So I really think it's balance. It's about ensuring that both are at play at once.
Speaker 2:It feels and I think probably it's a whole other discussion that our mutual friend Alex Evans we obviously discussed this the decline of religion has meant the decline of lots of these things, including a space to reflect and understand your values and working together in community, but also the presupposition that there's something sacred about the planet, that we're stewards of it and so on, the kind of stories that religion traffics in for lots of people. So let's say the biblical narrative. That's obviously serving a lot of people, but it's also serving increasingly few at the moment but is also serving increasingly few at the moment. Do you see this as leaving a kind of myth vacuum, something that can scaffold a different set of values?
Speaker 1:Yeah, I really agree, and Alex and I've talked about this lots of times, and it's a fascinating kind of question of what is left when membership of various religions is declining. What kind of comes in to take that place? And often you do see, is this kind of consumerist narrative of with through more consumption will you become your full self and feel fulfilled and happy, etc. Or we have the kind of this rise in mindfulness or similar types of spiritual endeavor which, again in our capitalist world, often come with price tag, and it doesn't. There is a gap that remains, and so what is it that fills that void? And at the moment I really don't think there is a kind of answer to that question. We don't really have many potential players lined up to come in to fill that void. Under capitalism, everything sort of becomes about wealth accumulation and capital gain, and that doesn't feel true to the same type of narrative that we see in religious tradition, and I really don't know what the answer to that is.
Speaker 1:I think there is something about community, something about human beings having spaces and places to come together that are not dependent on some unifying factor. You will work together, or you will support the same football team, or whatever it might be, but also places that you it's not the capitalist kind of cultural hegemony, if you like isn't the unifying force. When at the moment we can all go to a shopping centre together or we could all go to a coffee shop where there's a some sort of transaction that's being expected there. There's the loss of kind of those like third spaces, if you, you like, where we can come together, so not house or home or workplace, but these kind of third community spaces. And I think that's from work I've done. I think there's real appetite for places like that rise of kind of public living rooms and street parties and community connection. That way and I'm not saying that replaces religion in any way, because of course it doesn't, but it offers an interesting place for narratives to form that is not dependent on capitalism.
Speaker 2:Basically, I'm glad you said that. So there's a place near me in Newcastle it's called Star and Shadow and it's a community run cinema, all volunteers, and they have things like a fix it cafe, so you can bring your toaster there and someone will figure out how to fix it. I think it's amazing and it's quite like a simple idea, beautifully executed, with uh yeah, a rabidly left-wing book case for those who are interested. But it there's something special about it and you get a kind of glimmer I think I would call it a glimmer of something when you're there that just like taps into this. For me it's a kind of core value of kind of community, something not transactional or utilitarian or instrumental, and that excitement that I feel around those kinds of places, that I also feel in religious spaces, is there's a feedback that I'm being told something there.
Speaker 2:Right, when I get a glimmer, I think I'm trying to pay closer attention to those moments that I'm like this is different. This is so different from the pervading norm of my day in the supermarket, in the workplace or whatever, and I don't think it's just the novelty that excites me. There's something deeply humanizing going on in those places which I think the inverse of that is, there's something deeply dehumanizing going on outside of those spaces and there's a sense in which I guess what we're talking about is values are humanizing things like those deep intrinsic values. Extrinsic values To some extent. They feel, as you say, extractive or dehumanizing to an extent, and perhaps there is inner wisdom, if we're listening to our bodies, that can help you identify what those places are and your need for them yeah, absolutely that.
Speaker 1:So I've been doing some work recently with them the emerging futures team, who are a department in the joseph roundtree foundations, a large funder in the social justice space here in the uk, and theures team. They talk about glimmers too. They use the exact word. How do you find those glimmers that give you a sense of what could be, what the world could be, if we were to design that world from a different set of values? And I think partly it's that.
Speaker 1:It's time travel.
Speaker 1:It allows you a way of seeing what a future could be and feel like, which I think is really important.
Speaker 1:But two, it has that feedback loop of telling you that actually there are people alive on this planet today who care about that stuff, who do embody those values and are living, that are living as much as they can in alignment with those values, in a world that is maybe attempting to steer them differently, along with everybody else, and creating different pockets of reality that sit outside of the sort of the structures that we currently are surrounded by and that I think is just so important. And we need more funding to pull into those places, to allow them to grow and to not be co-opted importantly back into the system of today, and I think a lot of that work happens intuitively. I'm sure that the people that are running that incredible space that you mentioned in Newcastle have not set out with a kind of we want to offer a glimmer of what an alternative reality could look like. They are doing it because it feels right. It's an intuitive, emotion-driven, values-driven action, and that, I think, speaks volumes about what it actually means to be human.
Speaker 2:I find that really helpful. I find I think back sometimes to the initial lockdowns and COVID and although it was a dire time in lots of ways and lots of people had a horrific experience, I also thought there was this liminality to it, that there was a space where people certainly my experience was values changed, like things paused. People had dinner with their families, they helped out their neighbours, they clapped for carers. There was so much that and then my experience at least was doubling down on what it was before. It was depressing, but there was that. There was a glimmer. There was the liminal space that suggested different approaches to life. Cultural conditions were being built that felt qualitatively different.
Speaker 1:I really agree with you, and it's not to diminish the struggles that were felt in that time and the limitations of the way that cultures and societies did show up to meet those struggles. Clapping for carers was never going to, that wasn't needed. We did need real payment and PPE. But at the same time you did feel this sense of a bit of a vortex, a kind of oh we, at a moment where we recognize collectively that we have designed our world and we could design it differently, and that, I think, is so powerful and so rare. And again, how incredibly quickly did the existing system, the existing paradigm, swoop in there and co-opt us all back into? You know nothing to see here. Close that let's all carry on with business as usual. What we need to do is eat out to help out.
Speaker 1:That's what happened and it shows you how incredibly we are swimming upstream to to try to land these narratives, and so it's by no means an easy task. But occasionally, you see, and I think exactly as you've said, the beginning of COVID was a moment where we had this kind of I don't know the foundations wobbled and we saw, oh okay, actually this could be different. And how do we try to sustain that feeling in times of in air quotes, normality, if you like?
Speaker 2:Yeah, interesting. It's made me think. Our discussion of surveillance and things like that gives us the impression that the social is actually very fragile and beneath it something could emerge into, something generative that that would give way to flourishing.
Speaker 1:But yeah, and how do we steward the what I believe to be the collapse of a kind of capitalist, modernist, colonial world? How do we steward the collapse of that in a way that leads us to a more generative and flourishing time for humanity and for the rest of the planet? With care, because it does feel. At the moment, people are scared, and understandably this. The ground that we are standing on feels very insecure and wobbly, and fear is the reaction to that, and I completely get it, because I feel it myself.
Speaker 1:And there's something about how do we allow for the closure, the closure of this chapter, with it being led with our values, like, with care, with compassion for one another, with an ability to harvest whatever has been good from colonial modernity into our next chapter. And that's hard work and, of course, none of us have done it before. So we're all feeling in the dark here. But I think it's the big questions that we do need to be thinking about, and not just the more immediate. How do we deal with the challenges that are slapping us in the face on our day-to-day lives, which are important, and we do need work at that more downstream level too. But but if we're not considering these larger questions and these more upstream root causes of the challenges that we're facing, we risk replicating them in whatever way comes next.
Speaker 2:So it's that question, that kind of Dougal-Hine question of how do we make good ruins, how do we, yeah, hospice modernity if you like. So one of the ways, I think, is by reading your sub stack.
Speaker 1:I don't want to say I'm the saviour of the world.
Speaker 2:No, but you are working in this space and you're working, I think, really helpfully in this space. So the sub stack I write is called Positively Maladjusted and it's based on that Krishnamurti quote a measure of health to be well-adjusted to a sick society. One of the things that I think has been clear in this chat is that becoming aware of the values that we're surrounded by and what our own values are, and taking the time to understand them, I wonder if we could land here on. Are there any other things we can and should be doing, looking for glimmers, if you like, for different ways of being that will help create cultural conditions necessary for flourishing, and let's say, not just as a. It's too abstract when you think of national or global or planetary flourishing, but if we start in our own backyard, what comes to mind?
Speaker 1:So I do think there's something about, so say, in our workplaces most of us are working in some capacity and have that kind of setting that we're in there is something about reflecting on the values and the narratives that are instantiated in the way that we are interacting with one another and reflect. I really believe that the work of social and environmental change does not and cannot be the responsibility of NGOs. It just can't be. It's a collective. These are collective crises, and NGOs, as powerful as they can be, are not the only organisations that have a role in shaping those kind of cultural value waters that we're all in, if you like. And so there's something that, if you are working in a space that has an impact on the narratives that other people hold, becoming really cognizant of what is it that? What are those narratives that we are reinforcing? Because often we're reinforcing harmful ones very unintentionally, just because they are the waters that we swim, reinforcing harmful ones very unintentionally just because they are the waters that we swim in. And so there's something that there's a reflective piece there, as I've already said, about becoming really aware of our own values. I think, using it as a lens when we are receiving cues from when you watch the news, what narratives are being reinforced in me? Are they narratives that I choose to inhabit, to internalize, or Are they narratives that I choose to inhabit, to internalise, or are they ones that I wish to reject? I think that's important and not something that we are ever really given opportunity to do. You never learn that as a skill, if you like.
Speaker 1:There's something there the young people in our lives. Making sure that we're being really conscious of the narratives that we are reinforcing in people at a very fluid time in their life, where our values are being really influenced by the world around us and the conversations that we're having with others, I think that's also really important. More tangibly, I run a course called Values 101 with the Common Cause Foundation, which you are very welcome to come to. They're public and so we always have a real mixture of humans on each one. I'm obviously very biased, but I love it. I think it's brilliant, and so this has sparked interest for you. There are places to go to have these conversations more, yeah.
Speaker 2:There's loads to go on off the back of that. So, thank you, thank you so much, ruth, for sharing your wisdom and your insight, and my hope is it certainly made me think about priorities and values and how these shape life today, and also what's leeching into me that I'd actually like to become more aware of from the world around me. So, thank you, thank you very much for your time and this conversation. Oh, thank you. Thank you very much for your time and this conversation.
Speaker 2:Oh, thank you I hope you enjoyed listening to that episode of the examined life podcast. If you did, then do please rate it and share it with others. You can peruse the back catalogue of conversations and questions on the website examine-lifecom and sign up for the Substack newsletter called Positively Maladjusted. In the next episode, I'll be in conversation with the writer and journalist, rosie Spinks, talking about what we do now that we are here. If that sounds ambiguous and vague to you, then you'll have to wait till the next episode to find out more. In the meantime, I will leave you with this taster.
Speaker 3:Is it? You know weekend trips or shopping, or you know expensive beauty treatments, like? Can you dial back on some of that stuff and start spending your time and energy on generative things or free things like singing in a choir, working in a garden? You know like singing in a choir, working in a garden? You know creating art, doing things that are more cyclical and generative and give back to the world around you rather than just taking from it.