Social Currency - Protecting the Countryside

We all have experiences of "common sense" of "group think" of "tribal (in the broadest sense) culture". There are things that are just right, and to be part of a group or a movement you need to have that general idea. That is “Social Currency”.

In his brilliant book ‘Contagious: How to Build Word of Mouth in the Digital Age’ Jonah Berger posits the idea that to build social currency you “give people a way to make themselves look good… make people feel like insiders.” That insider idea is linked to marketing of products and services in Berger’s book, but it’s equally important when it comes to thought, morality, and policy.

We all want our own forms of social currency, and it’s something that the right in British politics does very well. In the UK the idea of preserving things carries more social currency that changing. Think about the defining moment in the boomer generation and of many of their gen-x children – the Second World War.

War propaganda was all about fighting for a way of life, preserving the British way (though I should probably be saying the English way), and that repeated sense of preservation carries through, preserving our buildings, preserving our wildlife, preserving our countryside, preserving our culture – whatever the hell that is.

To be a conservative (with a deliberate small c) is to be on the side of history, it’s churches and cricket teas.

A never changing image of a world that only half existed sits in our collective culture both benign and poisonous - It can be used for saving the hedgehog and protesting about asylum seekers.

Big Nigey-Nigel F is really good at leaning into the social capital of preservation.

I was thinking about this at the end of the National Housing Federation’s Rural Housing Week.

Rural Housing Week is a chance for Housing providers across the country who have rural homes, to highlight how important they are. The NHF focus on the deep inequality of rural communities, how those who want rural homes can’t get them and housing providers certainly can’t build them.

The conversation is around the people, and the personal, and the communities that are having problems, and all of that is important and powerful. However, I’ve been reading Jonah Berger, and it struck me that maybe the housing sector is missing a key front to fight on – the social capital of preservation.

Those opposing affordable housing in rural areas aren’t opposing change, they are protecting the countryside, their way of life, their culture, it’s bigger and more powerful that not wanting change. Everything that it means to be English – warm beer, long summer days, regional brown stew, a carvery on a Sunday - that's the social currency of more than a Conservative movement, it’s bats, and foxes, and badgers, it’s protecting those who can’t speak up… they understand that people need homes, but they KNOW that the countryside must be protected.

When I was last working at a Housing Association, I had a ham-fisted attempt to try and tap into this ‘preservation’ narrative. I made a video that took 2 fictional villages and compared how they changed. One had affordable homes one didn’t, the one with homes kept the shop and the school, and the pub, and the one that didn’t sort of died… I got into the weeds having fun making it, and it certainly didn’t swing public opinion, but I think there is a deep untapped well of social capital that the housing sector could mobilise.

Yes, those who are in opposition are often monied, powerful, and connected, and there’s little that can be done with that, but if all they keep saying is ‘we are protecting the countryside’ shouldn’t we simply joint them in that?

We are protecting warm beer and low-quality cricket, we are protecting gala pies and harvest festivals, we are protecting newts and dogging – all the things rural communities are known for.

Would ‘yes, and…’ carry more social capital?