How societies change

Watch the conversation here.

As someone interested in a massive range of aspects of the human condition - economics, politics, demographics, history, climate, and more besides - Danny is ideally placed to take a broad perspective. He can not only track changes and developments over time and across countries but also draw on multiple disciplines to help explain them. This is, we believe, the sort of multidisciplinary approach that is going to be essential if we’re to map, see, and understand the systems we’re in and draw on that knowledge and broad perspective to change them.

Major swings

Danny defined “major swings” as moments when two or more observable social trends move together across countries - birth rates, income inequality, health outcomes, and so on. His example was the synchronised shifts in age of first birth and inequality in the 1920s and 1970s across multiple countries in the Global North.

The question we raised in response was about how far people can shape these societal swings, rather than simply experience them. On reflection, though, perhaps that’s not quite the right question. Trends operate within deeper structures - ideas about how economies work, what counts as a social problem, and what kinds of solutions are imaginable. Whether we tackle inequality, and how, is always constrained by the conceptual frameworks available to us.

Those frameworks change through conversation. Anthropologists and sociologists - Foucault perhaps most famously - have long argued that knowledge and power are inseparable. Social systems get stuck when we become fixed in our assumptions about what knowledge is, who holds it, where it is shared, and how it is discussed. If we can shift our relationship to knowledge, we can also shift our relationship to power and agency.

Dominant narratives

Danny suggested that governments play a much smaller role in shaping societal shifts than we often assume. Politicians, he argued, ride social trends rather than initiate them. He pointed to the fact that national political discourses tend to move either left or right but rarely both at once; parties simply reorient themselves to match public sentiment.

This idea aligns with the concept of the Overton Window: the range of policies that can be publicly discussed without seeming implausible. Danny believes the window in both the US and UK has shifted sharply to the right, shrinking the substantive differences between Democrats and Republicans, Labour and Conservatives.

Bourdieu’s idea of the habitus feels relevant here: the notion that we inhabit worlds of understanding shaped by our histories, class, occupations, communities, and nations. These embedded dispositions shape - sometimes constrain - what we perceive as thinkable or doable. Although experienced individually, habitus becomes collective because of overlaps in people’s lives: gender, race, class, and so on.

For our own work, Bourdieu’s theory highlights the need to break down silos and create conditions in which different habitus can converge. It suggests the value of practices that help people step outside their familiar frames - through play, acting, and other embodied experiences. And it reinforces the importance of preparing people for the sometimes unsettling experience of recognising their own habitus. That work, as we’ve argued elsewhere, takes time, care, and support.

Living together

Danny reflected that one of the central challenges of our time is learning how to live well together at scale - a relatively recent human endeavour. We are, he argued, constantly evolving new social behaviours; he used the example of the unwritten rules that allow us to share roads safely. He suggested that at the heart of many political and philosophical traditions of the “left” sits a simple exhortation to ‘be kind’. The challenge is translating that into real policies, structures, and processes—ones robust enough that, for instance, someone with an anti-social disposition cannot rise to power.

One point we didn’t get to explore with Danny is that the aspiration to create egalitarian large-scale societies may not be as new as we tend to assume. Archaeological evidence increasingly suggests that some ancient large-scale societies organised themselves on egalitarian lines. There appears to be no necessary correlation between social scale and hierarchy.

Still, Danny’s core point stands: we face the task of humanising our relationships and societal structures. The historical evidence simply offers reassurance - we have done this before, so we can do it again. What is new is the scale and interconnectedness of modern society; our communities no longer end at geographical borders but extend globally through digital and transportation networks.

Yet the underlying structures we need may be similar. Past societies often relied on assemblies at neighbourhood, local, regional, and city-state levels. We have analogous structures today (extending into national and international bodies), but citizens are rarely involved meaningfully, and our institutions are built primarily to distribute power rather than cultivate understanding and consensus. They privilege outcomes (policy) over process (relationship, conversation, empathy).

What would it look like to design them the other way round? And what if such structures emerged not only in communities but also in workplaces and across sectors?

Staying hopeful

Danny described himself as an optimist - not only because he believes change is possible but because he sees that it is already happening. He pointed to the political - some might say radical - empathy of younger generations who are often highly intentional about the way they use language and behaviour to create care and inclusivity. He also referenced the many economies in Europe which are heading towards greater equality and the experiments, happening outside the Global North, with more alive and open forms of politics.

At the same time, it’s worth pointing out that our conversation did touch on areas of concern such as the rising rates of poor mental health amongst young people which seems, from the available data, to be a largely global phenomenon not limited to one country or region.

Perhaps we can square this circle by returning to the starting theme of our conversation: major social shifts. The experiences of young people touched on during our conversation - empathy, mental health, and a universal decline in birth rates - could all point not just to social ‘problems’ but also to massive change. How we respond depends on how we read the signs. The way forward should not be about re-acclimatising young people to society as it is (fixing them, essentially) but learning from what their reactions, experiences, and actions tell us about the way society could be changed for good.

Finally, it was striking that many of Danny’s sources of hope came from societies other than his own. Once again, this points to the need to look beyond our own habitus - to reach outward for examples, insight, and possibility. The question then becomes: how do we cultivate that curiosity? And how do we sustain it when empathy and inquiry can themselves be overwhelming?