In our world we face a plethora of crises. Society is breaking down, with growing economic inequality, an increase in far-right politics and violence against marginalised communities, and we face multiple ecological crises, climate change and biodiversity and freshwater to name a few. Culturally, there are crises in mental health and loneliness, and a loss of soul and spirit. Even before Covid-19, the standard way of things was deeply inadequate. Our societies must transform to avoid catastrophe.
While struggles against injustice and for freedom are woven throughout modern history, our ecologically unsustainable way of life and destruction of the Nature we live in is a more recent development.
These crises show that our systems are fundamentally broken. Mild reform will not save us from the apocalyptic effects of climate breakdown or other ecological crises. Nor will it address wealth inequalities and the fundamental exploitation of workers in our economic system, or the kyriarchal oppressions woven into our social systems, from racism domestically and internationally through to gender-based violence of all types.
Another world is possible, oh, so possible, and we must find new ways of living.
We can imagine of ways of living in which freedom and wellbeing are at the heart of social relations, in which people do not need to spend most of their waking energy working for somebody else’s profit and the focus is on meeting everyone’s material needs. In which we live in harmony with Nature, in wonder at its beauty and with gratitude for what it provides us, without taking more from it than we should. In which social relations are based on a society of love and decency, of care and nurture, instead of individualistic striving which pits person against person competing for fundamental human needs or for consumerist extravagance.
Seeds of this world are all around us, they have been being sown for decades. We must continue to realise it and breathe it into being, weaving it in our own communities and working to transform our societies.
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We can look at our social system, our economic system, our political system and our legal system in isolation. Academic disciplines, semantics and frames of reference separate them. Yet these different approaches to our systems are all interwoven: what counts as economics is political; who has resources is political; matters of justice are in many aspects of social relationships, intimate personal relationships and culture more broadly; our political and legal systems uphold our economic and social system; and so many other connections.
Our current dominant paradigm, across all disciplines, in the western-liberal way of life, is not fit for purpose. It is wrong, and it harms us. Humans are seen as dominant over all other parts of Nature, and we treat our science and knowledge as if it has no limits. We learned to fly, not knowing and then not caring that this chokes us and our planet. We destroy forests and plunder the earth for resources, paying for the present with the future. We conceive of human life as being fundamentally about individuals, the free-standing person who each lives in their own world, conceptually separated from others, seeking freedom for their own domain, and often encouraged to push others down to get ahead themselves.
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In our dominant legal, philosophical and social understandings, in the mainstream at least, our approach is based on individuals. Individual rights, individual freedom, individual security, justice for the individual. We are conceived of as conceptually distinct and separate from everybody and everything else.
Yet this is not who we are, not who we should be.
We live in a network of relationships. Both in terms of our material reality and what it takes for social flourishing, wellbeing and freedom. The reality is that every person is interconnected with other people. We live in a dense web of relations, from intimate social and familial relationships through to the communities and societies we live in, the economic and political relations we have, and the relationships we have with the environment that we live in.
We will all be better off if we change this, save, perhaps, for those who currently dominate and have extravagance and freedom through the exclusion and exploitation of others. If we recognise that we live in a network of relations, and seek freedom for the individual and collective through improving these relations. If we put care and support and love for one another at the heart of our social, economic and political relations. If we recognise that communities are only as strong as the least well-off in them. If we recognise that without a harmonious relationship with the rest of Nature, we will not survive. If we do all of these things, we will be better off and, hopefully, avoid the worst and possibly catastrophic effects of the crises which we face.
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This paradigm shift is happening in many areas. Feminism seeks to transform our social relations, both to liberate women and everyone from patriarchal oppression and to show a better way of living, with love and care. In science, ecology and systems thinking recognises the interconnection of all things and helps us to better understand the world. In politics, struggles for freedom are almost as numerous as the oppressions faced all over the world and throughout our society, challenging ruling classes and systems of oppression. In economics, ideas like doughnut economics, human rights based approaches and capability approaches challenge the idea that those who cannot afford things simply go without and those who can hoard wealth like dragons. Instead, they point towards a world in which resources can be more equitably distributed, everyone can have their basic needs met to survive, and in which human activity can stay within safe ecological limits.
In law, though, this paradigm shift is in quite early stages. The Interconnected Law project seeks to show how our legal systems should change, how they must change, if we are to collectively live well and avoid catastrophic breakdowns.
Our legal systems conceive of society as a collection of atomistic individuals, individual rights and remedies, and seeking freedom for the individual. Instead, the fact of human interconnection in social, environmental, economic and political domains.
On a formal level, law would function better to whatever end if it recognises the interconnected and relational reality of human life.
Normatively, the role of law in society should be to foster and strengthen the relationships that make up our society, to unweave oppressive relations and create conditions in which people can flourish, with autonomy and agency and freedom.
An interconnected approach to law has implications from the practicalities of how legal systems function through to the theoretical ideas of how we conceive of freedom, justice, security, equality, dignity and the other values that we see are core to law. This recognition of human interconnection, instead of a society of free-standing individuals, necessitates a gestalt-like shift in our approach to law.
Of course, law alone cannot do this, yet positive changes to our way of life cannot happen without law either. Law, economics, politics and social relations must all be transformed together, in a symbiotic and mutually positive way, as we work to realise a better world, a just world, a world in which systems of oppression are transformed and true equality and freedom abound.