Ours is the Future
(This was the first of a series of three articles, all published in Community Living Magazine - year 2000- trying to introduce partnership theory to learning difficulty services.)
We look round at our services, those of us who still have some spark of vision left that hasn't been knocked out of us by a system that has let us down, and we wonder what happened to our dreams and ideals. What we've created, albeit in the face of adversity, is a great deal better than the old hospitals - but - it's so dull now, it's all just drifting along and yes, getting more and more institutionalised every day; as my recent trawl through the first 10 years of Community Living revealed.
It's simply not working. Tired, weary services abound. There is little status in being a front-line worker. People and staff are cramed into their little houses, just hoping to get through the next shift. Tinkering around the edges.
Where's the passion nowadays ? And not just in our services. Take a look around and what do you see ? 840 million people going hungry in our world, every day. "The threat of nuclear war, dwindling resources, overpopulation, pollution, the drug war, the death of God, the erosion of the family, the crisis of belief.." (Montuori & Conti p.4) You come face-to face with gigantic corporations : Wal-Mart - the new owners of Asda - has a larger economy than Israel. What sort of world are these corporations bringing about ? Is this a vision of consumerist heaven ? :
"Some day it may be possible to be born, go from preschool through college, get a job, date, marry, have children..get a divorce, advance through a career or two, receive your medical care, even get arrested, tried and jailed; live a relatively full life of culture and entertainment, and eventually die and be given funereal rites without even leaving a particular mall complex - because every one of those possibilities now exists in some shopping centre somewhere." http://envirolink.org/issues/enough/enough08.htm
Is it a pipe dream - all our normalisation theory ? Can it really happen ? And that Gentle Teaching talk of a posture of solidarity - where does that fit into the real world ? The radical webzine AdBusters describes very well the short-term, reluctant-to-act culture that we live within :
We in the affluent West the children of Socrates, Plato,
Pascal, Descartes, Hegel, Nietzsche, Marx and Wittgenstein
now live almost exclusively in the left cortex of our brains.
The dominant personality in our culture is the logic freak: the
macroeconomist, the biotechnician, the investment guru, the computer
whiz; the obsessively dispassionate thinker. Mesmerized by binary
options black and white, good and bad, right and wrong,
heaven and hell, 1 and 0 we've become a McLaughlin Group
culture. We just talk. We don't actually do anything. And why
should we? Why would the people living the cushiest lives on the
planet want anything to change? Why should we spoil our sinecure
when we can pretend to be deeply concerned, keep the analysis
humming and the big salaries and consulting fees rolling in?
(http://www.adbusters.org/magazine/26/newactivism/5.html
No wonder then, that the graph, the chart and the behaviourist have flourished as the tools of choice in our services ! No wonder that for all its rhetoric this Government's approach to social care is still so managerial in tone, and so authoritarian in practice.
Yet there's hope. Once we have faced up to the fact that our services are simply not working; that society is not working very well ; that the world is hurting and anguished then we can start to think of new ways of doing things. Here at the end of the most violent century the world has ever known, perhaps we need to ask : does it have to be like this ?
Change is happening. Look at the uproar over GM food, look at the phenomenal growth in organic foods, recycled packaging, lead-free petrol, cruelty-free cosmetics.
Consider the emerging paradigm in big business : the emphasis upon "feminine" values like intuition, creativity, consensus, co-operation, sharing and the decline of traditional "masculine" values like control, dominance, conflict and order. Think about how the internet - even though it is being increasingly used for shopping - has the potential to turn so much of the present system on its head.
Change is on its way, bringing hope, challenging us . And it's
called "partnership. "
A major wave is breaking over us, and not an area of our work,
even our lives, will be left untouched. If you thought Normalisation
was big, then watch out. This is massive. Normalisation, you see
was simply a step along the way. So was Gentle Teaching. Heading
towards us , at a speed of knots, is partnership.
If you have any inkling to maintain the status quo, if you have any fear of change, stay away from partnership. Because true partnership is a whirlwind, that is going to blow you away !
But for those who dare to ride the wind, those visionary souls - those of us who have held onto our values - like this magazine, in the face of a increasingly mechanistic culture, who have walked our own - often lonely road, who know there's a better way, ours is the future.
The incredible thing is that for the first time we have a mainstream culture that is potentially open to all that we have stood for for so long - those of us who have dared to walk a person-centred path of solidarity. I say potentially, because to make partnership sing, to bring it alive, to change the world, we need to look beyond the managerial way that partnership is promoted in legislation, and discover the heart and soul of what is called "partnership theory".
For here we find a radical theory of human rights - probably as radical as anything the Western world as ever known.
In part two we will show how partnership theory issues a passionate challenge to how we think, act and be.