Every era has a prevailing mood and ours feels unmistakably like exhaustion.
A low-level pessimism hangs over public life with the sense that things are getting worse and the forces shaping our world are beyond our influence. At this point, even a good summer seems beyond our reach! Is it surprising that many appear to believe that the sensible response is to disengage? Apathy, increasingly, has become a form of self defence.
That is why Rutger Bregman’s recent BBC Reith Lecture Series, Moral Revolution, really resonated with me. Bregman, the Dutch historian and author, advances a deceptively simple argument that the central problem of our time is not a lack of knowledge, talent or resources, but a lack of ambition directed toward the common good. Too many capable people, he argues, are encouraged to aim low morally, to prioritise comfort, careerism or prestige rather than asking what it would mean to use their influence and skills to confront the defining challenges of our time.
In the second lecture (and my favourite), How to Start a Moral Revolution, Bregman sharpens the argument. Today’s great crises, from entrenched inequality to climate breakdown and from technological excess to fiscal irresponsibility to name a few, persist not because they are poorly understood or intractable, but rather because we collectively lack the courage to act on solutions we know to be both correct and workable. Bregman illustrates his point with a discussion about the abolition of slavery which began with a small, determined group who refused to accept the limits of what was considered appropriate or realistic and acted anyway.
At the centre of this concept is what Bregman calls moral ambition. This idea instantly appealed to me and it starts by redefining success. Instead of measuring achievement by income, status or titles, moral ambition asks deeper questions. Did we reduce harm? Did we expand opportunity? Did we leave the world a better place than we found it? Faced with the type of widespread systemic failures we are experiencing today, these are the sorts of questions we need to be asking. Serious challenges require seriousness of intent, a lot of imagination and sustained commitment to solutions.
Crucially, moral ambition is not about uniformity or heroics. It does not demand that everyone do the same thing at the same time, only that people contribute where their skills and positions matter most. Nor is it about lone saviours. Meaningful progress is collective work, carried out by the many, in small ways, every day. Underpinning it all is a demanding form of optimism, the belief that better is possible and that choosing engagement over cynicism is ultimately a moral act.
In the work that I do, I meet people every day who have made that choice. The choice of optimism over cynicism, of engagement over apathy, of genuine moral ambition. And they often make this choice at the cost to themselves of what society might recognise as success. Living one of the core tenets of moral ambition, their success comes through the success of others. I’m thinking here of the unheralded women who offer tireless support to immigrants struggling to adjust in their new home, the campaigners working to end domestic and sexual violence and the people setting up social enterprises for the good of the communities in which they operate.
These groups, organisations and businesses embed care, dignity and respect into their daily operations. By doing the work they do, in the way that they do it, they reject the notion that social good is peripheral, someone else’s concern. They make moral responsibility central to their process of creating value. Like Bregman’s vision, their efforts demonstrate that ambition doesn’t need to be divorced from ethics and their success demonstrates that lasting impact is created when professional expertise and moral commitment are aligned to protect the vulnerable and expand opportunity, not only for those often excluded but ultimately, for everyone.
I know that most of us already make small, morally ambitious choices every day. Choices such as choosing ethically made clothes, selecting compostable packaging or walking to the supermarket. Many others will be involved in supporting those they know doing the hard yards, speaking up against injustice or choosing work that aligns with their values. In a moment defined by widening inequality, displacement and persistent injustice, these individual, incremental good choices are great steps on the way to accepting Bregman’s challenge of scaling up these choices, to start thinking more boldly about how our time, skills, influence and resources might be directed toward more meaningful change.
Expanding the scale of moral ambition means refusing the comfort of quiet intention and choosing collective impact instead. It means moving beyond isolated acts of care toward sustained effort equal to the urgency of the moment in which we are living. In Mt Albert, I see this moral ambition already operating in the many people who make the everyday choice to expand the opportunity around them to include others. My job as your MP, and my commitment as a longtime resident, is to amplify that work, eliminate apathy and promote moral ambition as our animating force.
When we aim high and act with bold purpose, we will start to make the kind of world shaping change our time demands. (Helen White)
