[Key words: human species; interdependency; narratives; social rights]
In a previous SPA blog in 2024 I attempted to elaborate upon a radical humanist approach to social welfare centred on the realisation of sociality. I should like in this article to go further and suggest, not merely a conceptual switch, but a methodological switch premised on a narrative reframing: a retelling of the account that our species gives of itself when describing itself as Homo Sapiens. Sylvia Wynter has suggested we might better describe ourselves as Homo Narrens, since it was not merely a capacity for practical communication that set the species apart from others in Nature, but the development of fictive language: the capacity to tell stories and, eventually, to write histories.
Telling stories
Stories elaborated by our forebears have informed a plurality of cosmogonical accounts around the world – mythological, religious, philosophical and ideological – fuelling diverse and contradictory interpretations of human progress and outcomes that are at best suboptimal and at worst intensely conflictual and destructive. Methods of scientific inquiry are framed within the context of narrative constructs. This strikes to the core of Social Policy as a field of study concerned with the social mechanisms by which members of our species collaborate to care for and maintain each other.
Titmuss, as one of the founders of academic Social Policy, drew from anthropological studies evidence that in early pre-literate human societies and within surviving indigenous cultures certain magical beliefs, embedded in orally transmitted mythical narratives, informed and instilled practices of gift giving and mutual support, playing an essential part in sustaining social functioning. The distillation and development of oral story telling into written narratives began in various parts of the world some 4-5,000 years ago. Elements of perhaps the earliest ‘grand narrative’, known to have been written in ancient Mesopotamia, appear to have been adapted, reflected or elaborated in other stories told both in the Hebrew Bible and in Greek Mythology. The Hebrew Bible would become a significant text for all three of the Abrahamic religions espoused what has come to known as the ‘Golden Rule’ – the principle of treating neighbours and strangers as one might wish to be treated oneself – and is also broadly shared by other world religions. The Rule has been a feature of moral exhortation for millennia, yet in the context of systemically increasing inequalities throughout human societies it is more honoured in the breach than the observance. Privilege and reward are inclined to accrue to the most powerful and the protection and care for the most vulnerable in society has often been entrusted to religious and other charitable institutions. The invention in ancient Athens of “citizenship”, the status conferred upon the patrician (property owning) inhabitants of the city but denied to women, slaves and migrants. Citizens were required to exhibit virtue by sharing equally not their wealth, but in their own processes of self-governance. This represented the emergence of Homo Politicus, a creature of the classical Greco-Roman world.
Inventing the individual
Homo Politicus, would be revitalised by the Renaissance, when European elites cultivated the understanding of a universal ideal distinctively conceived in the image of the white, educated European Man. This narrative realised the invention of the sovereign individual human subject, an ideal exported by European Man when he set out to ‘discover’ and colonise existing yet largely unknown civilisations nourished by differing narratives in other parts of the world. With colonisation came expanding international trade, including a trade in slave labour. The European Renaissance morphed into the so called ‘Enlightenment’ and a scientific revolution – which would eventually fuel a global Industrial Revolution. The scope of the citizenship ideal had begun to extend to territories beyond cities and to supposedly sovereign nation states. Citizenship came increasingly to confer not only political rights, but the civil rights necessary in trade and property dealings; and, by stages, citizenship would become potentially more cosmopolitan in reach, conferring sometimes qualified rights upon non-property owners, unenslaved waged-workers and eventually women (but not necessarily refugees). The process nurtured a new universal ideal, that of Homo Oeconomicus: a mythically independent, utility maximising, free-trading, individual economic actor, for whom the Golden Rule was re-captured in Kant’s formulation of the ‘categorical imperative’. That imperative constrains the freedom of the individual subject only to the extent that it imposes a ‘perfect’ duty that they should do no harm in their dealings with others. Kant acknowledged, however, there were still other ‘imperfect’ duties relating to the care and support of fellow humans and expressed his approval of the established pedagogical function of religiously informed teaching and activity.
Social Rights
T.H. Marshall, another of academic Social Policy’s founders, argued that the coming in the global North of capitalist welfare states amounted to the realisation of a new form of social citizenship. The duties human beings might owe to each other may be fulfilled in response neither to belief in magical forces nor obedience to religious injunctions, but in an acceptance of citizenship status whereby the realisation of duties to fellow citizens may occur through the agency of the state by means of public spending on the relief and prevention of financial poverty, the provision of health and social care, education and housing assistance. Nation states (like cities), however, are at one level mythical entities, whose boundaries have been narratively and more or less arbitrarily drawn by historical struggles and whose power rests on an abstract constitutional consensus as to what constitutes citizenship. Social rights as defined by Marshall are co-incidentally recognised in the UN’s Universal Declaration of Human Rights, albeit that they must be progressively realised through legislation by individual nation states.
I have argued that gift giving practices inspired by traditional beliefs, religiously inspired charitable intervention and social rights are all manifestations of human sociality, a constitutive characteristic of our essential species being. These manifestations stem from different narratives and relate to different idealised constructions of our species. In light of the damage it has and continues to visit upon itself, Homo Sapiens might at last demonstrate its self-proclaimed ‘wisdom’ by recognising that human beings are essentially interdependent with the Planet and upon each other and that we should better describe ourselves as Homo Interdependentes. Our focus of study must reach beyond individual wellbeing and national welfare states towards a better understanding of the constitutive interdependency of a global species.
Hartley Dean is Emeritus Professor of Social Policy at the London School of Economics. He had been for 12 years a welfare rights activist in Brixton, South London, before moving on to a 34-year academic career focussed on social justice issues. He has been continuing to write in retirement.
His forthcoming book, Human Narratives and Social Mindsets: Towards Methodological Humanism, to be published by Policy Press: