Rebirth requires learning/2 - Big changes do not always happen in small steps; and the need to proceed step by step must not become an obstacle to taking urgent initiatives
by Luigino Bruni
published in Città Nuova on 24/01/2024 - From the Città Nuova magazine, n. 10/2023
We recently commemorated sixty years since Martin Luther King's great prophetic speech, I Have a Dream, delivered in Washington on 28 August 1963. Looking back on that speech, there was one passage that struck me: “This is not time to engage in the luxury of cooling off or to take the tranquilizing drug of gradualism”. He was very critical of gradualism, of the deeply ingrained idea that big changes cannot happen immediately because the great complexity of the reality to be changed requires a gradual process and a policy of small steps. Gradualism receives much consensus because it emphasises a true value, that of inclusion, of the need to involve the various players who have a role in the creation of problems and thus also in their solution. Hence the great processes of grass root consultation, questionnaires, and the many commissions to ensure the synodality of the entire process of change.
I do not want to claim that the gradualist method should never be adopted or that it is always wrong. The question is a different one: why was Martin Luther King so opposed to gradualism? Because, quite simply, in those who invoked the politics of small steps he saw an alibi for continuing to postpone urgent and obvious reforms and changes (apartheid, for example), and because it acted as a ‘tranquilliser’ of conscience for those in power. Appealing to a value, even if it was a valid one in itself, only became a justification for the status quo - those who oppose a necessary process almost always do so in the name of some good reason.
Not all changes happen in small steps. In physics, water turns from liquid to solid in an instant. Revolutions do not happen gradually either, because certain processes explode when a critical threshold is passed. Today, for example, those who continue to advocate gradualist policy in the area of climate change and ecological transition (the very word transition incorporates the idea of small steps) almost always use this fine word to slow down a change that was ever so urgent already twenty years ago. The inclusion of all governments and various economic stakeholders is an essential part of the environmental problem; it is the prime cause of why we are watching motionlessly as the climate declines rapidly and inexorably. When the ship is sinking, or when a house is burning, no one thinks of calling together an assembly to decide what to do through complex procedures: there would have to be a captain to take responsibility for the choices and to make those choices. The world does not have a captain (and that is just as well) and in fact we are sinking; but this ‘captain’ can and must emerge from below, from the world's population, from civil processes that can lead to quick and effective decisions to replace the lack of ‘captains’ - and let's just hope they are peaceful and non-violent.
But what is astonishing is that gradualism takes hold even in ideal driven communities and movements which do have ‘captains’, where there is a government that could and should take urgent decisions. And instead, all too often, even in these, when faced with general and serious crises that would require rapid change, the gradualist method is preferred, and with it the creation of commissions that will one day report on the needs that have emerged with the (somewhat naive) hope that in the end a synthesis will be made of all the information that will have been gathered. And so the years pass, and the governments with them, the disease worsens, and while the doctors are discussing what to do, the patient is nearing death.
Furthermore, a typical error of these gradualist methods concerns economics. The economic aspects are the first to emerge during a crisis, but they are the last to be addressed, because the economy is an indicator of much broader and deeper phenomena than just the economy. Economic indicators are the red light in a car that signals an engine failure: it tells you to fix the engine and after that, once it is repaired, the light will go out on its own. Instead, they start fixing the economy first without understanding the structural illnesses that generated the economic crisis, and the more they fix the economy, the more the illness grows in the depths.
The quality of a government in times of crisis depends a lot on the ability of those in charge to sense, by instinct, where the problems are in the ‘engine’, and to start from there. They will receive criticism, accusations of authoritarianism, but perhaps they will save the body that is suffering.
Credits foto: © Unseen Histories su Unsplash
