The Maholian Way - Part Five: A final word

This is an important question to address. What value does a description of Maholia’s relationalist system add to our understanding of how we human beings live today and how we might improve the way we live? Since Maholia adopted and adapted most of its policies and practices from elsewhere, would it not have been simpler to merely describe these policies and practices without reference to Maholia or relationalism?

The thing is, practices and policies don’t live in a vacuum. They exist in particular political, economic, social, cultural and ideological contexts. These contexts frame the goals that a society pursues and the means through which it pursues them. The reason why many of the policies and practices cited in this account remain marginalised in their countries of origin is that they run counter to the overall context in which they exist. Policies and practices can help to shape and change these contexts but, if they run counter to the contexts, introducing or maintaining them is a bit like swimming upstream or driving with the brake on.

In modern society, there tend to be multiple ‘domains’ of life, each with its own dominant context of beliefs (which might be called an ideology or a model). Herein lies a problem, for people’s lives and the consequences of their actions have the irritating habit of not sticking to one domain but spreading across many of them, and the different domains’ ideologies tend not to be consistent with one another. They also have other shortcomings. Let me explain all this more concretely by first describing some major domains and their ideologies.

In the domain of economics, the dominant ideology is the free market. It has many advantages, but it is not a good model for ensuring that everyone has work, especially people with disabilities and ‘deficits’. In theory it attends to the quality of experience of working life – because people can theoretically change to a job where the quality is better – but we have been socialised to not expect too much from our working life, and in practice other jobs may not be offering a better quality experience. This is partly because the model privileges the accumulation of more and more material possessions over the quality of working life, and over the way our working lives fit into our lives as a whole. The free market is blind to third parties and the environment, and only takes their interests into account when price signals are tweaked by government in order to make it do so. The market does not increase equality and in fact often does the reverse.

In the domain of government, the dominant ideology might be termed representative pluralism. According to this model, our interests are articulated by groups that we belong to – such as unions, green groups or business associations – and these interests are in turn aggregated and translated into government policy by competing political parties when they win power. The system has always been very unequal, and it has never worked as well as the ideology would have us believe, but today there is is the added problem that a lot of people are retreating from involvement in organisations of all kinds. This means that many groups don’t survive, and the ones that do rely increasingly on paid professionals and wealthy backers, neither of whom may have much contact or much in common with the group’s constituency. And as people retreat from community and political engagement, they tend to lose faith in the whole system – which, among other things, affects the quality of people standing for election. Moreover, as they disengage and lose faith, they tend to focus on what governments - conceived of as ‘they’ – should be doing, and not what ‘we’ collectively might do to better our society, including through the agency of ‘our’ governments.

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