January 14, 2011
Cold World
18 years old is a strange age. Legally, you’re an adult. But in many ways you’re still a child. Looking back on my own late teenage years, I’m astonished at how immature I really was.
Which brings me to Edward Woolard. There’s no doubt Woolard was an idiot at the precise moment he threw that fire extinguisher off the top of Milbank. Yet whether he is an idiot through-and-through is a different matter. Certainly the national media branded him a thug in its instant witch hunt. But in truth, none of us know whether he was simply seized by a one-off moment of immature madness.
Either way Woolard is paying dearly. 32 months in jail, at the age of 18. His life prospects in tatters, and a family no doubt heartbroken.
You may think he deserves it. And certainly, it seems clear he had to receive some sort of serious sentence. Not simply to act as a deterrent to other acts of idiocy, but also to reflect that he could have killed somebody. The state can’t, after all, have private citizens behaving in ways which recklessly endanger the lives of others.
And the authorities also had to send a clear message for their own purposes. That even though they lost control at numerous points towards the end of 2010, captured perpetrators can expect to pay dearly for their actions.
It is worth remembering, however, that Woolard didn’t actually kill anybody. And surely that matters (even if the reasons why are philosophically complicated). Two and a half years in jail is a long time. Especially for not killing anybody, in an unpremeditated single act of stupidity. I can’t help but find it excessive.
And that’s partly because I keep thinking: “that could have been me”. Not because I’d ever throw a fire extinguisher off a roof (‘tis not my style). But because when I was 18 I did something very, very stupid too.
Angry and frustrated at the world generally – and heartbroken because the girl I was head-over-heels about decided she preferred her boyfriend after all – I got into a drunken fight one Friday night. Except I’d also been doing some amateur Thai boxing. And I hit the guy in the sort of way that you don’t hit people, even in organised amateur fights. Because you can kill them.
Needless to say I didn’t kill anyone. But if the angles had been a little different, the impact a little more, his alcohol-levels a little higher, it’s very possible I might have. A moment of madness, and I could have killed a man. And gone to prison for 20 years.
But I’m lucky. My moment of madness didn’t go that way. I’m free to pursue a successful and comfortable life. As I sincerely hope the guy I struck 6 years ago currently does.
Incidentally, PC Simon Harwood is lucky too. As we all know, when Ian Tomlinson was walking home from work PC Harwood struck him without warning and pushed him to the ground. Not long later, Tomlinson was dead. Yet Harwood never saw the inside of a dock, and the Crown Prosecution Service decided this particular bobby wouldn’t even stand trial for assault.
No such luck for Edward Woolard. I guess that’s just the way the cookie crumbles. Of course I’d like to say that the hypocrisy of a judicial apparatus which allows the police to kill whilst giving children lengthy prison terms will lead the The People to rise up for reform. But that’s spectacularly unlikely, I’m afraid.
So all I really have to note today is that it’s a cold world out there. If you’re lucky enough to be sitting by the fire, think on that a little while.
January 12, 2011
“Alarm Clock Britain” vs. The Enemy
A lot of very good, very venerable political philosophy focuses upon the importance of consensus. This is quite clear in what usually goes by the name of the Social Contract tradition, where shared agreement underpins the basis for political society.* Much democratic (and democratic-friendly) thought emphasises that even if individuals in the demos disagree about specific issues, those disagreements can be accepted as resting upon a more basic consensual agreement on how to make decisions. The 20th century’s most impressive attempt to articulate a single political theory – John Rawls’s A Theory of Justice – put the (rational) consensus of free and equal persons absolutely centre stage.
In general the motivation for working within and towards consensus is well-grounded. Politics often means using force to control human lives. Force is generally nasty, and the more of it that gets nakedly deployed the worse people’s lives tend to go. The more consensus that can be established, the less force – and violence – we are likely to see. Furthermore, it will be much easier to justify any remaining necessary violence, insofar as it is founded in some sort of basis of consent amongst those variously subjected to it. (Though such attempts at justification will, of course, vary in success.)
It can be slightly troubling, therefore, to look at what we might call the anthropology of politics as practiced in modern societies and find significant instances of anti-consensual practice, which operate explicitly by exploiting insider/outsider dichotomies.
Take, for example, Nick Clegg’s rather distasteful sop to readers of The Sun. Attacking “scroungers” is, of course, a tried and tested ploy of the right. What attracts my attention is Clegg’s explicit drawing of an “us vs. them” dichotomy. On the one hand there is valiant “Alarm Clock Britain”, the decent folk like you, who get up every morning and go to work. On the other is the enemy within; the workshy scrounging layabouts stealing your taxes.
The efficacy of Clegg’s gutter strategy lies precisely in creating an “us vs. them” opposition. He casts himself on the side of the Good, who are in turn invited to cast aspersions on the Bad. In the process, the target audience will (hopefully) see Clegg as One Of Them. In turn, any anger at Government policy will (so the strategy goes) be redirected towards the common enemy.
This is a staple ploy of effective demagoguery – but my suspicion is that the causality is uncomfortable here. I doubt that such dichotomies are created and effective because politicians somehow invent them. Rather, I suspect politicians find the use of such dichotomies effective because people already have a deep disposition towards employing them – whether that disposition be innate, or the product of deep social forces (as, say, Marxists would contend).
Furthermore, the desire and urge to form “us vs. them” dichotomies isn’t manifested only in straightforward politics. Look at the hysteria over paedophilia in recent years, or in the past (or contemporary America) over child snatchers. Or further back, fear and hatred of witches. The enemy within – the terrifying monster to be rooted out and destroyed – is hardly a new phenomenon. And neither, of course, is the perennial enemy without: the French, the Russians, and now the Muslims of the Middle East.
My worry, however, is that if a tendency to structure group organisation – and particularly, successful political practice – around insider/outsider dichotomies is pervasive and recurring, then it is quite likely that such dichotomies exist because they successfully fulfil some sort of purpose. For example, it may be that organising around an us/them opposition is what allows the people within the “us” to co-operate and put aside their own differences, in light of the threat posed by rivals (whether real or imaginary). This need not be at the level of crude resource competition, but of complex psychological accommodation. Accordingly, we must entertain the possibility that human society is only viable to the extent that opposition is found – or if necessary, constructed – between insiders and outsiders.
And if that is indeed the case, it is surely troubling for any politics which seeks to be built upon and/or broadly uphold consensus. Because it indicates that the prospects of consensus are inherently limited, insofar as human society – and in turn, much successful politics – transpires to be inherently and fundamentally oppositional. Which is not to say that we shouldn’t seek political consensus when possible; for the reasons noted above, consensus is generally very desirable. But nonetheless, we may have to set our goals rather lower than we would like, and grit our teeth rather harder than is pleasant.
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*Personally, I’m increasingly suspicious that this is an unhelpful label, lumping together very diverse thinkers. But no time for that today.
January 9, 2011
Rooting out the Nets
There’s a glaring logical fallacy at the heart of the rationale behind Saturday’s Netroots UK event, and Jacob knows what it is:
“the ‘new social media’ activist movement has found itself today in Congress House having an old-fashioned face-to-face discussion, with face-to-face networking at the Netroots UK event. The fact that you had to already be connected with these people on twitter, or if you’re lucky facebook, or be a reader of quite specific blogs, to know about this event adds to the irony of a movement that is claiming to be horizontal in a manner that avoids elites.”
If the importance of social media is that it allows people to connect and organise online, why the need for an enormous offline meet up?
With a somewhat relieving touch of realism, we’re reminded that Netroots’s purpose wasn’t to bring down the government, only to share strategy and experience. But again: why not do that online, if the New Technology Revolution is all it’s cracked up to be?
Fine, confession time: I didn’t go to Netroots UK. For various reasons.
Firstly, it was the 3rd Round of the FA Cup. Secondly, the train fare. Thirdly, I have better ways to spend my Saturdays than listening to people declare that we Need A Strategy and must Build Coalition Movements and Mobilise, without any actual concrete resolutions, or practical pay-out, in sight.
What actually happens over the coming year is going to be determined by individuals and groups taking specific, concrete actions to attempt to secure outcomes and goals. Such actions will happen when they happen, but are unlikely to be significantly shaped by large-scale group conversation and rhetorical grandstanding one Saturday in January.
Personally, I’ll turn up when things start actually happening. I have no particular use for big talking shops where people gesture vaguely at the inevitability of some undetermined actions. It may be different for serious organisers and activists (amongst which I do not class myself). But still, why not just do it online, or in the pub?
Of course I could have heard some nice tit-bits from various contributors. But then, I can just find out about them by, er, reading blog summaries. And the added bonus of staying at home is that I avoid interminable panel debates of “experts”, who actually don’t know very much at all. Hopi Sen, on the money:
“Dislike of panel q&a’s is based on fact when I’m in audience panel seem to know less than me, so if on panel, know audience thinking same… Also no-one in history of panel q&a’s has ever said ‘sorry, i don’t know’ then shut up. This would reduce bulls**t quantities tremendously.”
And it doesn’t placate me that apparently audience “experts” were invited to spew forth. At these sorts of events, the few insightful contributions are usually out-weighed by floor-hoggers riding tedious hobby horses until their inner thighs bleed red raw.
So I stayed at home.
You, of course, may have felt otherwise. You may have enjoyed the prospect of meeting up with like-minded lefties. You may have found the panel debates interesting and insightful. You may, in short, have decided that listening to lots of people talk about politics was the way you most preferred to spend your Saturday.
And that’s fine. It takes all sorts. You’re free to get your kicks however you like. But here’s the rub, and where I get on people’s nerves.
Does the enjoyability of Netroots UK retain its sheen if we accept that it was, effectively, just a massive talking shop at which people cold enjoy their Saturday afternoon? I suspect not, because surely the appeal of these events is, precisely, the sense that you didn’t just hang out with your (e-)mates and hear people chat about politics, You Did Something Important With Your Weekend.
Yet if we admit that the political efficacy of Netroots UK was effectively zero, it’s difficult to see how the last bit can be sustained. Correspondingly – and somewhat ironically – if people were a bit more honest about the reasons and motivations for attending these sorts of events, they might in turn see such hootenannies as somewhat less purposeful.
But then, I can only speak for myself. And believe me, the Arsenal-Leeds game was terrific.
December 18, 2010
Gender and Protest
Following my recent posts on the student riots, Clifford Singer (of The Other Taxpayers’ Alliance) posed me a question:
“There’s one thing you don’t discuss: gender. Is the violence you explore all about men vs. men?”
As regards the violence that took place in Parliament Square, the answer is at some level “no”.
At the start of the protest, I watched as a group of Cambridge students linked arms and stood firm to prevent around 15 police horses entering the Square. There were, by my estimation, more women than men in that human barrier. As the police walked their horses straight into the line, each stood firm – literally shoulder-to-shoulder with a 600kg horse.
Eventually the police gave up, and the horses retreated (temporarily) to Millbank. Whatever you think of the student protests as a political endeavour, it takes guts to physically face-down a police horse. Anyone believing women to be somehow inherently timorous should think again.
When the protest degenerated into a riot, and the violence-proper began, it was clear that many women remained on the front line – even as the batons, boots and horses rained down. It is true that overall there were more men than women in the riot. But that mostly reflects the skewed demographic of political participation which, for social and cultural reasons (“politics is for men”), tend to ensure males are over-represented at any political event. Though the police did not hesitate to target women (their being typically both smaller and weaker), pulling them out of the lines to baton and kick them to the ground.
Women can be as brave (or foolhardy) as men. The conflict thrill of rioting does not divide on gender lines. At the London riots the commonplace clichés of female passivity and male aggression were shown up as complacent and boring stereotypes.
Yet if violent protest serves to discredit the mythology of female gender passivity, peaceful protest can sadly reconfirm the extent to which ours is a deeply patriarchal society. A society pervaded by macho and aggressive sexual norms, characterised by discourses infused with metaphors of male sexual dominance.
Here I can do no better than quote from this excellent set of reflections:
“In London it was the placards. The casual misogyny was rife: David Cameron was warned that if he fucked the country, SamCam was in for the same and Nick Clegg’s mother can apparently ‘bend over and take it’ just like he will learn to. As a woman, this was a pretty alienating experience: here I was marching shoulder to shoulder with people for whom I was meant to feel solidarity, but could really summon little but disgust. The language they chose to criticise the Coalition evoked the very real practices of London’s gangs, where the rape of a female family member has become a tool retribution amongst mini-mafiosos…I don’t want people paying more for Higher Education, but neither do I accept that there is ever a case for constructing political protest on these terms.”
What’s perhaps interesting is whether the people carrying the placards invoking sexual degradation and casual misogyny had any awareness that they were thereby deploying and perpetuating aggressively misogynistic gender values.
My guess is actually not: that the use of sexually-offensive and degrading language is unreflectively employed as a useful (political) weapon. The weapon’s relation to systems of social ordering and hierarchy largely goes unnoticed, even by those (i.e. men) who typically benefit from the hierarchy of gender embedded in the social status quo. Accordingly, misogyny and sexism are manifested and perpetuated even without conscious intention of the agents responsible.
In short, exactly what you’d expect to find in a thorough-going and deeply entrenched patriarchy. QED, as they say.
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See also the condemnation by Cambridge Defend Education of misogynistic protest language.
December 8, 2010
To Protect and Serve, not Dominate and Batter
Police authorities recently claimed they cannot guarantee the safety of children attending protests. This came after the same police compelled children (and thousands of other innocent citizens) to stand in freezing conditions for hours under mass arrest, as well as repeated instances of officers punching protestors in the face, and the charging of crowds atop 600kg horses.
Permission granted to choke on your tongue.
One of the primary functions of the police is supposed to be to to protect lawful citizens engaging in legal activity (like peaceful protest). And yet demonstrations in Britain are increasingly characterised by heavy-handed physical intimidation, dished out by the boys in blue. For the police to warn that children will not be safe on protests is a little like Harold Shipman warning the elderly he can’t guarantee their full recovery when undergoing medical treatment.
But it gets worse. Yesterday, the Met Police started issuing sombre warnings:
“We have seen groups of youths descending on the last few student protests as the day progresses, purely with the aim of using the event as a venue for violence and to attack police,” said Commander Bob Broadhurst, head of the Met’s public order branch.
“It has been obvious that these particular elements are not genuine protesters.
“They have no intention of protesting about cuts to tuition fees or any other issue. They have turned up purely to take part in violence and disorder.”
The claim that “violent extremists” would “hijack” peaceful protest is exactly what the Met declared in the run-up to last year’s G20 demonstrations. It turned out to be false; protests were largely peaceful except for a few smashed windows (to delight the hordes of journalists).
But the macho tough-talk duly fired-up the Met, generating an aggressive fight mentality. On the day of protests, police officers covered their faces and removed badge numbers, in preemptive efforts to avoid accountability for their actions in the anticipated ruck.
That day a completely peaceful demonstration at Bishopsgate – containing many young children and elderly participants – was violently and forcibly evicted by riot police. Even worse, the aggressive over-enthusiasm of officers resulted in an innocent man being attacked from behind as he walked home from work. As we all know, Ian Tomlinson died from the injuries he sustained in the assault. But thanks to the lies and spin of the Met, the findings of its tame pathologist, and the pusillanimity of the Crown Prosecution Service, no justice will ever be done for Tomlinson’s memory or family.
It is a brute fact of politics that all functioning states must successfully monopolise the legitimate use of violence. A police force – the institution applying coercive force against citizens – is necessary; anarchy or rampant gangster thuggery are the unattractive alternatives.
But one of the great advantages of modern liberal democracy is its capacity for instituting checks and balances which control the state-sanctioned executors of physical coercion. Indeed it is precisely the possibility of a police force ruled by the same laws it enforces which makes modern liberal democracy a far favourable arrangement to the historical and geographical alternatives.
Yet the British police increasingly behaves – and speaks – as though it is above and outside the law it is supposed to uphold. To illustrate: this article would naturally be concluded with a cliché; “that it may take an innocent death to bring the police into line”. But that’s already redundant. Last year an innocent man did die at police hands. And nothing at all was done, and nothing at all has changed.
The Met are apparently gearing up for a ruck on Thursday. Those of us taking part in the legal and peaceful protest ought indeed to worry for our safety. Not because of “violent extremists”. But because of a police force increasingly forgetful that its function is supposed to be to protect and serve, not to dominate and batter.
November 30, 2010
Windbag
Nick Clegg appears to be descending into a world of fantasy and illusion.
Last week he delivered a seriously confused lecture on how raising university fees and slashing higher education budgets – as well as abolishing the Education Maintenance Allowance – will boost social mobility.
He also had the audacity to suggest that opponents to the Browne review haven’t understood it, because if they did they’d know supporting Browne’s proposals is unquestionably right. Call me elitist, but I can’t help thinking Cambridge professor Stefan Collini possess the analytic acumen to analyse the Browne proposals and come to a valid – hostile – conclusion. Ditto the numerous distinguished academics recently condemning the report in a letter to The Telegraph.
Yet Clegg is already back up on his patronising high horse, insinuating that student protestors themselves are a threat to more equal university access:
“However, I also believe that all of us involved in this debate have a greater responsibility to ensure that we do not let our genuinely held disagreements over policy mean that we sabotage an aim that we all share – to encourage people from poorer backgrounds to go to university.”
Put aside Clegg’s apparent inability to grasp the causal relationship between the policies he’s supporting and the substance of the opposition they’re arousing. Ignore the rather insulting implication that poor students are so stupid they’ll just rule-out university because they saw some protests on the telly.
Focus instead on what connects today’s statement with earlier ones: Clegg’s repeated insistence that everything that’s going wrong is everybody else’s fault, and that if they just listened to him they’d see the light.
Now also recall his response to the Institute For Fiscal studies condemnation of the Comprehensive Spending Review as deeply regressive. Namely, to accuse the independent and highly respected IFS of using the wrong (i.e. non-Cleggist) understanding of regressivity in the tax and benefit system.
A pattern, it seems, is emerging. One that has precedent.
By the end of Tony Blair’s time in power – particularly after the full nightmare of Iraq was under way – he had clearly descended into a world of fantasy. One in which the Mesopotamian Adventure had been a triumphant success. Where Britain was safer – despite the heightened risk of domestic terrorism. Where the Middle East was stabilised – despite increased Iranian bellicosity and justified regional paranoia. Removing Saddam was A Good Thing; those who didn’t agree were moral hypocrites merely using Iraq as a beating stick.
For Blair, this was clearly a psychological coping mechanism. Living in his world of fantasy, he remained the champion of Goodness and Light. Outside that world he was the man responsible for hundreds of thousands of deaths.
Nick Clegg appears to be treading a strikingly similar path. The problem, he insists, is students and an unreasonable public. He correspondingly shut-outs the fact he has systematically betrayed his party grassroots and (former) principles. He ignores the fact he’s reneged on core, vote-winning promises with the likely result of electoral decimation and a return to the political wilderness for his party.
He pretends he’s not the man enabling the most viciously right-wing and socially-destructive government in Western Europe; a Government now launching a drastic programme of enormous, ideologically-motivated cuts far removed from liberal democratic principles. Cuts which Lib Dem voters expressly did not vote for.
What perhaps differentiates Blair and Clegg’s trajectories is the sheer speed with which the latter has descended into fantasy and blame-gaming. But, ultimately, they both come out as pathetic – if increasingly damaging – political figures. These are men who, as Max Weber put it so well, lack the true calling for politics; a calling which depends upon taking self-reflective responsibility for one’s actions. They parse the maxims:
“ ‘The world is stupid and base, not I’, ‘The responsibility for the consequences does not fall upon me but upon the others whom I serve and whose stupidity and baseness I shall eradicate’. ”
They are “windbags who do not fully realize what they take upon themselves but who intoxicate themselves with romantic sensation”.
November 19, 2010
Tuition Fees, Social Justice and Social Mobility
Long-winded attempt to articulate some thoughts that have been kicking around my head for a while. Apologies for the lengthy post – but this one is complicated, and so needs the more detailed treatment.
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There’s a lurking problem in much of the opposition to increased university tuition fees, and it’s a deep one.
Most student campaigners oppose increased tuition fees at least partly on grounds of social justice (i.e. in addition to worries about the wholesale restructuring of academia as a private rather than a public good, plus wider concerns about the Coalition cuts to wider society more generally). Specifically, campaigners typically claim increased fees will deter the poor from applying to university. (Some early evidence seems to support them.) This outcome is taken to be morally bad and unfair in itself, as well as carrying the further and significant negative consequence of reducing social mobility between class and income groups.
At a certain level I am (heavily) sympathetic to opposition of this form, because I agree that reforms which disadvantage the poor and reduce social mobility are undesirable. But focusing on this level alone risks missing deeper and more serious issues.
It is broadly speaking true that university education significantly increases earning potential. So a straightforward thought goes: if more poor kids go to university, then we should see more poor citizens moving up to higher income and class brackets. (In practice of course this didn’t really work, because New Labour increased the absolute number of people going to university, and thereby inadvertently triggered what we might term “degree inflation”. Employers who previously differentiated between “degree/no degree” increasingly now differentiate between “good degree/less good degree/no degree”. Thus, the income stratifications that are at least partly a function of people’s educational differences continue.)
Given the socio-economic structure of our society, there will always be jobs that pay more than others (though how much more is an interesting question; Martin O’Neill reminds us that things weren’t always as extreme as they are now). Further, it’s a brute fact of existence that some people will always be cleverer than others. Given the structure of late capitalism, it tends to be the case that the cleverer get better paid jobs than the poorer. (Things are obviously complicated by the fact some people are cleverer because they were better off to begin with, i.e. had the benefits of bed-time reading, domestic stability, and access to higher quality primary education which all make a dramatic difference in early childhood development. But let’s ignore those complicating factors today).
Now, much opposition to fee increases broadly centres on social mobility claims: that fee increases must be opposed because university-access is a key mechanism whereby some members of the poorest demographics can leapfrog out of their class into the higher echelons of society. But the flip-side of this position is that other people have to travel downwards, and take the places of those who have leapfrogged them. Focusing on social mobility arguments alone therefore neglects to pay attention to the underlying fact of inequality between socio-economic income groups that makes the “trading-places” approach to social justice possible in the first place.
Of course, that socio-economic inequality between classes might in principle be something we can identify, accept, and decide to tolerate. This might be the case if, for example, such income and class inequality is sufficiently restricted and/or corrected for because (say) income differentials between top and the bottom are fairly circumscribed, perhaps due to established redistributive measures put in place to reduce the gap between the haves and the have-nots.
Yet this is manifestly not the situation in Britain at present (at least from the perspective of most leftist social justice campaigners and egalitarians). In Britain, the gap between the top and the bottom has grown enormously over the past 30 years – and is set to get even bigger thanks to the regressive measures of the current government.
Ironically, by focusing on the detrimental impacts to social mobility that fee-increases will elicit, student campaign groups do not pay much attention to what is arguably the more fundamental and pressing social justice issue at play: that the enormous wealth and income differentials between socio-economic classes experienced at present are what underpin the social mobility view which takes a university degree to be a golden ticket for leapfrogging out of the lower classes into the higher echelons (or in many cases, to stay put and avoid trading downwards or being leapfrogged). In the process, questions about who is left behind in the great game of leapfrogging (because there are, after all, a finite number of golden tickets to be had), and why there is such a gap between classes to begin with (and why the gap is continuously tolerated), are quickly obscured from view.
Now, I certainly don’t blame student campaigners for this situation – it’s clearly a profound, society-wide phenomenon that’s been in effect since before I was born. And in particular, student campaign groups have to pick winnable battles, both in terms of ambition and of what will resonate with the public and with policy-makers. Given the times we live in, campaigning on grounds of social mobility certainly seems more likely to succeed than challenging the fundamental inequalities characterising our society (and which anyway go far beyond issues specific to higher education).
But here come two final ironies. Firstly, by working within the “paradigm” of social justice as a model of individuals leapfrogging between classes – rather than reducing the differentials found between classes themselves – anti-fee campaigners focus on what is surely a relatively superficial aspect of a deeper social justice problem: the existence of significant class and income differences to begin with. In turn, campaigners inadvertently allow that deeper problem to continue going unaddressed and unconsidered in wider debates, even though it generates the social justice issue that they take themselves to be preoccupied with. The rub, of course, being that it’s hard to see how campaigners could do anything else, at least at present.
Secondly, social mobility campaigners somewhat unwittingly accept and perpetuate the “discourse” within which university education is increasingly seen as an instrumental economic good (e.g. one that facilities inter-class mobility). Yet the cumulative effective of this is presumably that it makes it ever harder to argue for the value of higher education as something worthwhile in itself. Correspondingly, this makes it more difficult to defend (in particular) the arts and humanities when the politicians come a-cutting: by over-investing in the language of social mobility, opponents of higher education reform find themselves increasingly locked-in to the instrumentalist economic views that motivate much of the current reform programme itself.
The road to hell, as they say, is paved with good intentions.
November 16, 2010
Domination and Welfare Reform
Over the past two decades, philosopher Phillip Pettit and historian Quentin Skinner have led a revival of interest in how freedom can be compromised when people lose their independence. Rather than freedom being lost only when a person’s actions are interfered with, Pettit and Skinner argue that freedom can also be lost if one is “dominated”, i.e. if one lives under the arbitrary power of another. As Stuart White helpfully put it:
“It is about not being subject to another’s power to intervene in one’s life at their discretion. Freedom is, in this sense, independence – the power to refuse dependency on others and their uncertain goodwill.”
Although Skinner and Pettit have tried to present this conception as a radical (and now somewhat lost) alternative to a “liberal” view of freedom, the historical story is rather complicated. In particular, theorists in the 18th century were very much alive to the threat that arbitrary domination posed to freedom – in the form of the power of rulers over subjects. Thus, Montesquieu made as a central pillar of his weighty treatise The Spirit of the Laws the claim that the state must be ordered by legal structures which constrained the actions of rulers just as much as of subjects, precisely to ensure the freedom of the latter from the dominating despotic ambitions of the former. (This vision has now come to be known as that of a “Rechtsstaat” – the state as ordered by law, not the whims of political rulers).
This view of liberty in modern mass-society was developed by French liberal Benjamin Constant, with his famous distinction between the liberty of the “ancients” (living in small, militarised, republican city-states) and that of the “moderns” who must appreciate the new and previously unknown conditions within which freedom could be practically and conceptually realised. Like Montesquieu, Constant saw legal structures as paramount: “[modern liberty] is the right to be subject only to the laws, such that one cannot be arrested, detained, executed, or mistreated in any way by virtue of the arbitrary will of one or more individuals”.
Indeed contemporary theorists are likewise alive to the changed conditions of freedom for “moderns”. Chris Brooke has specifically urged Pettit and Skinner to realise this point:
“[I]nsofar as we are egalitarian citizens today, or consider that perhaps we have a serious prospect of becoming such…this may owe a great deal to the “awesome” power (that is, quite straightforwardly, the power to keep us in awe) of the more or less Hobbesian social institutions that we have constructed for ourselves since Hobbes’s time; in particular, to the bureaucratic welfare state that is able, among other things, to humble the proud, to enforce the law, and to deliver a uniform mass education.”
But equally, we must remember that the “bureaucratic welfare state” may offer not only the potential for escaping or ameliorating domination, but also become a source of domination in its own right. And given the literally awesome power of the modern state, that domination can be profound and extremely serious – even if actualised in what may appear to be petty and minor ways.
Which brings me to my point. Amidst the new “get tough” reforms to welfare being pushed through by the coalition, there’s something that’s been widely overlooked:
“But unemployed people who persistently fail to turn up, or turned down and refused to apply for jobs, will lose their £65-a-week job seeker’s allowance for up to three years.
The allowance will be removed for three months on a first offence, six months the second time and three years on the third breach of the new rules – with no right of appeal.”
If that final caveat – that there will be no right of appeal – for those who have their benefits withdrawn is true, it is very worrying. Such reforms will put an enormous amount of arbitrary power into the hands of (presumably) administrators at Job Centres. As somebody who has had (albeit mercifully brief) experience of claiming unemployment benefit, the prospect of being made dependent upon the whim – and just as importantly, the mistakes – of Job Centre staff would fill me with dread.
For amongst the hard-working and well-intentioned, there are also the petty tyrants, the plain vindictive, and those who see everybody sat in the chair in front of them as a work-shy scrounging layabout – as well as the plain incompetent. To put the power of what is almost literally life and death – for what else is withdrawing the final safety net of meagre state support? – into the hands of individual petty bureaucrats, and not even enshrine a right of appeal, is a dangerous and profoundly troubling move. Not just for the welfare of individual claimants, but for their freedom from the arbitrary abuses of power by those placed over them, and their freedom in the independence they receive from having the guarantee of even the meagre bare minimum currently provided by the state.
The potential for individuals to become subject to domination is precisely what the modern welfare state should be trying to eradicate. The coalition is moving in exactly the wrong direction.
November 15, 2010
The Joys of Work?
In recent discussions of benefits reform, I detect two main strands of thought from advocates of getting the “workshy” – i.e. long-term unemployed – into jobs.
The first is a straightforward claim about desert: that the long-term unemployed are free-riding on the efforts of others. That it isn’t fair for the taxes of those who work to be used to support those who don’t. And at some level this is an eminently sensible thought. Yet I’m not going to explore it here, except to warn against the potential power of ressentiment.
The second strand I detect is that the “workshy” must be helped (of if necessary, coerced) into work for their own good. Andrew Rawnsley is an exponent:
“It helps that few question that Mr Duncan Smith is a serious-minded man genuinely moved to try to release people from the welfare dependency which impoverishes those trapped in it and their country…
…[IDS] has also received a generally warm reception because there has been a growing, but until now rather covert, cross-party consensus that welfare dependency is a terrible social and economic sickness.”
It’s OK to shunt people into work (perhaps forcibly) because work is good for them. Not only is it fair to lever people off benefits and into jobs – we’re doing them a favour too.
Sharper commentators have already pointed out that a far bigger problem in Britain than out-of-work poverty is actually in-work poverty. That millions cannot properly make ends meet even if they have a job. That low wages and inadequate state support mean 1.7 million children are growing up in poverty, despite hailing from working households.
But I suspect much of the belief that working is good for people rests not on a thought about higher remuneration at all, but about the benefits of work itself. Take Rawnsley’s piece again, where he acknowledges that UK out-of-work benefits are “quite stingy by western European standards”. Yet he immediately opines that: “The trouble is that too many people are on benefits.” It’s not lack of money that’s the problem, it’s lack of work itself.
A powerful (but unacknowledged) assumption here is that earning a crust is somehow inherently dignified and psychologically fulfilling. That it raises a person above the indecency of vegetating into the sofa prostrate before re-runs of Jeremy Kyle. Call this the unreflective assumption of a protestant ethic in the spirit of capitalism, if you like.
But this belief in both the inherent and the instrumental dignity of work is plain wrong when applied to many of the so-called “work-shy”. Because for the long-term and persistently unemployed, assuming (as is likely) that they are extremely low-skilled and can therefore hope for no more than minimum-wage labour, the prospect of work is a rather bleak and unfulfilling one.
It is the prospect of a mundane 8-10 hours on the tills at Tesco, or stacking the shelves at Asda. It is back-breaking early mornings mopping floors, or cleaning shit off the inside of toilet bowls. It is standing around bored stiff on a shop floor, waiting only for the day to end. It is hours in the din of a call centre, being insulted by faceless clients. And mixed into all that is the reality of much every day labour for many ordinary workers: the petty tyranny of the line-manager; the bitching and gossiping of bored colleagues; the sheer futility and boredom of it all for the meagre reward of £5.93 an hour.
Work, for most people, is not enjoyable. Low-paid work, as a general rule, is even less enjoyable than most. Now you may reply: “that’s not the point, fairness dictates that the long-term unemployed pull their weight and stop living off our taxes”. And that may be a perfectly respectable position to hold. The right conclusion may indeed be that the long-term unemployed must be forced to work, whether they like it or not.
What I find far more suspicious, however, is the pious insistence that we will be doing the low-skilled, long-term unemployed a deep existential favour by introducing them to the unbounded joys of labour. Given the prevalence of in-work poverty, and the sheer nastiness of much actual low-paid work, that strikes me as patently self-serving nonsense.
November 4, 2010
Blogging, Status and Nasty Competitive Animals Like You
Shift your gaze to the sidebar on the right. See that little Wikio icon, which gives me a UK-wide blog ranking? The one that is replicated across hundreds of blogs in the UK. What’s that little button doing there?
I guess I’d like to say that it’s for purely instrumental reasons. That when people first visit this site they will note it as widely endorsed, and thus pay more attention. But let’s not pretend that’s doing the serious work.
That little button is there partly as a marker of my status. It’s there to tell people “not only is this a popular blog, but it’s author is successful”. That little icon is thus a mark of my competitive tendency – and more importantly, of my success in that competitive process. I take the same to be true for all the other blogs carrying such icons.
Am I just an over-competitive freak, who needs to get a grip and swallow a heavy dose of modesty? That’s certainly possible, and people have been suggesting so for a very long time. But it may not be the end of the story.
Much of what I’m reading at the moment – like this, this, this and this – argues that competitive status-seeking is in some way what fundamentally characterises absolutely all of us, even if we seek and achieve it in different (often secret) ways.
That is, and to simplify horribly: human beings are creatures who are inherently disposed to compare themselves to their neighbours. But when they compare poorly, this causes them psychological pain. As a result humans develop strategies to successfully compete with – and ultimately dominate – their neighbours, thus achieving reflected glory in the minds of the more lowly.
In stable politically organised societies, the more brutish outlets for competition and subjugation – violence, murder, rape, enslavement of rivals – are prohibited and controlled (perhaps even “monopolised by the state”, as some have had it). But nasty, comparative-competitive humans don’t suddenly become placid saints. Rather, they find new outlets for competition and domination. Like having the fanciest most expensive clothes, or the biggest cars. Or, if they’re really clever, developing self-assured auras that tell others that they don’t care about fancy material goods, because they are above all that.
This is potentially problematic, for leftists in particular.
Typically, rightists – example – aren’t troubled by this diagnosis of inescapable competitive-comparison. They shrug it off or even embrace it as a fact of life, and look for systems to channel, direct and control it without worrying about its consequences for human well-being (which they generally deny or downplay).
Leftists, however, don’t tend to like this sort of thing at all. In fact they really hate it. But here comes the nasty rub, inspired by giving a careful reading to this guy and this guy.
Most leftists tend (I think) to assume that nasty competitive comparisons are a product of material inequality: that because some have more than others, psychological hierarchies emerge and mental and emotional suffering for losers is the result. But what if it is in fact the other way around? What if material inequality – i.e. wealth, unequal possessions, riches and the power they all bring – are employed by already competitive-comparative animals as markers of differential status? That is, material inequality doesn’t so much cause competitive status-seeking and psychological inequality, as the reverse (though the process will be complex and dynamic, and to an extent flow in both directions at different times).
Indeed if that is the case, then there may be a bleak outcome for leftists: reducing material inequalities may well temper the worst excesses of status competition and subjugation, and potentially halt vicious cycles of psychological decline. But the nasty competitive animals will remain, even in a more equal world, and promptly seek out new ways of asserting their deeply-desired status superiorities. Thus, whilst a more equal world may very well be nicer than the one we currently live in, it may inevitably be a lot less nice than many leftists would like to imagine.
UPDATE: Chris Dillow’s response to/development of the above ideas is very much worth reading. Here.
