August 25, 2009

Why Tories Should Bother to Watch The Wire

Posted in America, Drugs, Media, Other blogs, Political Philosophy, Politics, Society, The Police, The Wire at 8:13 pm by Paul Sagar

Liberal Conspiracy today reported that Shadow Home Secretary Chris Grayling claimed that parts of Britain are now akin to sublime American drama series The Wire’s depiction of Baltimore. He said:

“The Wire used to be just a work of fiction for British viewers. But under this government, in many parts of British cities, The Wire has become a part of real life in this country too. Far too many of those features of what we have always seen as a US phenomenon are now to be found on the streets of Britain as well.”

As Sunny Hundal at LibCon and Sunder Katwala at Next Left have already pointed out, Michael White at the Guardian politics blog has exposed Grayling’s claims as complete nonsense:

“Now down to the stats. The city of Baltimore, where The Wire was set by local reporter David Simon, has a population of around 640,000 and a murder rate – falling, I am happy to note – of 234 in 2008, down from 282 in 2007 after rows about fiddled figures – a detail which echoes the TV series.

Is that around 40 murders per 100,000? That’s around six times the New York rate of 6.3 per 100,000 in 2008 (523 murders, slightly up on 2007) and a lot, lot higher than the UK – where the murder rate per 100,000 is around 1.4, slightly higher than France, lower than Scotland (2.56), a lot lower than South Africa (49.6). The overall US murder rate is 5.5 – a quarter of post-Soviet Russia’s.”

Yet Grayling’s claims are to be lamented and criticised on a number of levels. As Sunder Katwala points out, this is indicative of the Conservative’s tactic of pounding out the mantra of “Broken Britain” which deliberately perpetuates a myth and lie about our society, in a cynical bid to gain votes through fear.

This cynicism is only made more tasteless by the fact that Grayling has clearly never watched The Wire. As Sunny Hundal reported, Grayling squirmed when questioned on BBC Breakfast:

Interviewer: Have you really seen any more than that first episode?
Grayling: Yes I’ve seen a number of … I’ve seen most of the first series. I have seen a number of the other episodes yes. I have.

But then, as Sunder points out, “Grayling won’t mind demonstrating his ignorance of The Wire – and he probably wanted a row about the state of our cities.”

Which is a real shame, because Grayling – and the rest of the Tories – could learn a thing or two from watching possibly the greatest television show ever created. To this end, there’s the more obvious points which have already been well-made in the LibCon comments thread:

“If Grayling had watched The Wire he’d have realised that it portrays the ‘tough approach’ to drugs to be an abject failure, and that the key lies in education and decriminalisation.”
“The final series also explored the role of the media in turning complex social and political problems into simple narratives of goodies vs baddies. You have to wonder if Grayling saw any of it at all.”
- Shatterface

“I would say it also demonstrates how good our relatively restrained policy on drugs is in comparison to the shit that Americans have to put up with.”
-Nick

Yet I want to focus on something specific about what The Wire achieves amidst those more general assesments. Namely, a sublime exposition of the importance of uncontrolled arbitrariness in life. The Tories would do well to pay attention.

Arbitrariness – and more generally, luck – have preoccupied a lot of the best philosophers of the last 60 years. John Rawls, for example, devised an entire political conception of justice around the idea that people could not be held responsible for arbitrary factors of their birth, and that social and material inequalities that result from such arbitrary factors can only be justified if they serve to make the worst-off better-off than they would otherwise have been. Ronald Dworkin and the late, lamented G.A. Cohen battled for decades about the role of luck in which socio-economic inequalities society ought to tolerate. Bernard Williams, probably the greatest moral philosopher of his century, spent many a paper exploring the impacts and effects of “moral luck”; the way arbitrary uncontrollable factors influence our conceptions of, and responses to, ethical situations.

The Wire is engaged in the same exploration of issues of arbitrariness and luck in determining socioeconomic distributions, and the attitudes we attach to them. In particular, it brings out beautifully the way in which one’s birth – over which one has no control – determines so much.

Take, for example, the character of D’Angelo in Series 1 and 2. Most viewers probably start out disliking D’Angelo: he is a murder, a drug dealer, and a man who conducts a long-running affair behind the back of the mother of his child. As clear a cut case of a conventional “bad guy” as you could ask for? Not at all. For one of the best aspects of the first two series of The Wire is the manner in which the D’Angelo is gradually humanised to the audience: he turns out to be a man of great integrity, loyalty, intelligence and honour.

How to reconcile these apparently contradictory  characters? There’s no quick answer – in part because the beauty of The Wire is that it doesn’t deal in quick answers – but in large measures the contradiction is resolved as one comes to see that D’Angelo is who he is because he was born a member of the Barksdale crime family. He was born into a life of crime, raised to be a drug dealer from day one. Thus the extent to which he is a man of integrity, honour and loyalty is forever reflected through the prism of the arbitrary fact that he is a Barksdale.

What The Wire shows is how powerfully that arbitrary fact of his birth controls D’Angelo’s destiny – and how different it could all have been. For if D’Angelo had been born on the other side of the tracks, if his mother had not been the sister of a drug lord, he could just as easily have grown up to be a cop as a criminal. It’s the arbitrary fact of his birth – the sheer luck of the matter, for which he did nothing to deserve – that dictates his future.

The Wire not only explodes the conventional myths that there are “good guys” and “bad guys” by presenting every character as multi-faceted and complex, it goes further and shows that if there are such things as clear-cut bad guys, understanding why they are bad is no easy task. What it certainly shows is that in many cases bad guys no more choose to be bad than good guys choose to be good; that arbitrary factors of birth play a far greater role in determining fates than choices individuals make. And it is the brutal, unflinching realism of The Wire’s character depictions which make this lesson so compelling and hard to refute.

It is against this backdrop that the Tory’s attempt to co-opt The Wire as part of its rhetoric about “Broken Britain” is so misguided, and why the Tories would do well to actually bother to watch the programme from start to finish. For a key component in Tory rhetoric about “Broken Britain” is the notion that society is disintegrating because people do not take personal ‘responsibility’ for their actions, choosing to blame external factors instead. Accordingly, the way to “mend” Britain – we are told – is to increase the focus upon ‘personal responsibility’, reflected in an emphasis on retributionist punishment of the individual as oppose to society-wide attempts to deal with situational causes. Indeed, just last Thursday David Cameron managed to include such rhetoric in his speech about the NHS:

“I stuck my neck out on this before when I said that instead of blaming external factors for everything, it’s time we recognised that there is a moral choice…that personal responsibility cannot be shirked.”

Presumably when he spoke of “sticking his neck out”, Cameron is referring to his speech of July 2008:

“society…is in danger of losing its sense of personal responsibility, social responsibility, common decency and, yes, even public morality.”

Yet these are messages about society which are completely antithetical to the lessons of The Wire: that life and society is complex, that much is determined before one is even born, that judgements about good and evil cannot be reduced to simple, convenient narratives about “personal responsibility”. Because such a notion is worse than meaningless in the real world: it is positively dangerous because it leads politicians to advocate simple solutions to complex problems, with disastrous results.

Which is not to say that The Wire removes all questions about personal responsibility and reduces everything to simple determinism. It doesn’t. But what it does do is show that it is wholly inadequate to just emphasise personal responsiblity at the expense of situational factors and determinants over which one has no control.*

That’s why the Conservatives should bother to watch The Wire. Without leaving the comfort of the Westminster Village they could learn more about the real world than they have ever yet managed to grasp. All they need are some DVDs.

There is, however, a final and considerable irony to Grayling’s attempt to appropriate The Wire to promote social policies which are completely contradictory to the programme’s message. And I’m not thinking of the quote from Wire creator David Simon that’s already been remarked upon:

“It is possible that a few thinking viewers, after experiencing a season or two of The Wire, might be inclined, the next time they hear some politician declaring that with more prison cells, more cops, more lawyers, and more mandatory sentences that the war on drugs is winnable, to say, aloud: “You are hopelessly full of shit.”

Rather, I draw your attention to the following:

“Why is it that it’s so hard for everyone to focus on these problems? What are we paying attention to? What gets our focus, and what doesn’t? And why? The Wire spends a lot of time pointing its finger at this institution and that institution, and deconstructing a lot of the dysfunction slice by slice. But the last finger to point is at our selves. So to quote the great line from Pogo: “We have met the enemy, and he is us.” That’s kind of where we’re going with the last season. If this is really what ails us, and if this is really what needs to be addressed, where the fuck are our heads at as a people?”

That final question remains unanswered. Grayling and the Tories, by pumping out their tired, simplistic rhetoric about “personal responsibility” can only cause such a question to remain unsanswered. That’s the biggest – and most egregious – irony of it all, because I want to know, where the fuck are our heads at as a people?

–

* This paragraph is an edit made in response to a comment from John Meredith at the Liberal Conspiracy shortened version of this piece.

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