Ms Z Josephs v Cambridge Centre For Sixth Form Studies: 3304286/2018
Employment Tribunal decision.
Read the full decision in .
Published 19 March 2019
Showing posts with label race. Show all posts
Showing posts with label race. Show all posts
Wednesday 20 March 2019
Thursday 21 February 2019
Shamima Begum has a right to British citizenship, whether you like it or not
Sajid Javid makes Britain look weak by refusing to take back a groomed teenager – nationality doesn’t depend on whim writes Gary Younge in The Guardian
When I was 16 I stopped off in Holland, during a camping holiday with a friend. We bought as much marijuana as we could and smoked it all in an afternoon. Sat behind a housing estate in the border town of Nijmegen, we giggled, rambled and lay around until the local police came. They took us back to the campsite (we found the fact that they spoke Dutch hilarious), where we were asked for our passports and train tickets. They already had our number: a couple of idiots out of their minds and out of their depth. They told us to get on the next train in the direction of the port. We’d stopped laughing by then. We went home.
Adolescents do stupid things. Often they know they are stupid at the time. But what’s stupid is often also exhilarating, particularly when the consequences are either not known or have not even been fully considered.
Shamima Begum, from Bethnal Green in London’s East End, did something extraordinarily stupid and extremely dangerous when she was 15. She, and two girl friends from school, told their parents they were going out for the day, and went to Turkey and joined Islamic State instead. Shamima lived in Raqqa, married a Dutch convert, had two children, both of whom died, and got pregnant with a third. She left Raqqa when it fell, saw her husband surrender to Syrian fighters and now sits in a refugee camp with her newborn son. Still only 19, Begum says she wants to come home to Britain. The home secretary, Sajid Javid, has revoked her citizenship. He has said she cannot come home because she is no longer British and that she should instead go to Bangladesh, where her parents are from. She has never been there; Bangladesh says it won’t take her.
A couple of weeks earlier Javid successfully deported several people to a country many did not know, according to David Lammy MP. A plane to Jamaica chartered by the Home Office left with 29 people on it. Of the more than 50 originally scheduled to go, 13 came to Britain as children, 11 had indefinite leave to remain and one had a British passport. Between them they would leave 36 children behind. Javid claims they had all committed serious crimes. One, who came to Britain when he was 14, had been convicted for dangerous driving. Among several to receive a last-minute reprieve was an ex-soldier; another had applied to remain under the Windrush scheme.
While the issue of Begum’s return, the Windrush scandal and the plight of these Jamaican deportees appear quite different, they in fact centre on the same two questions: what does it mean to be a citizen of this country? And how easily can the rights of citizenship be withheld? Evidently, the weight of the response and the burden of proof fall more heavily on those who are black and brown, whether we were born here or not.
Equal access to justice, regardless of race, has always been an issue when it comes to British citizens. But the right of British citizens to actually exist here, regardless of their race, has never felt more contingent. For those of us whose parents hail from elsewhere, our right to be here seems to depend on anything from what we think to whether and how we transgress. We must prove good character not to get here but to stay here.
Javid’s claim that allowing Begum to return might compromise public safety is not completely baseless. In August an 18-year-old woman was convicted of plotting to bomb the British Museum, along with her mum, sister and a friend.
Begum does not seem particularly remorseful. She said she knew what Isis did, including beheadings, and wasn’t troubled by it. “From what I heard, Islamically that is all allowed, so I was OK with it.”
In another interview she said: “When I saw my first severed head in a bin it didn’t faze me at all. It was from a captured fighter seized on the battlefield, an enemy of Islam.” It appears she doesn’t want to return because she now thinks joining Isis was wrong, but because Isis has, for now, been defeated and she wants her baby to survive. But the home secretary’s case is hardly watertight either. Begum has expressed regret. She said: “I was hoping Britain would understand I made a mistake, a very big mistake, because I was young and naive.” Of Isis-controlled Raqqa, she has remarked: “There was so much oppression and corruption that I don’t think they deserved victory.” We don’t know if she fought, but given that she had three children in four years it’s reasonable to guess she didn’t. She now says all she wants is a “quiet life with her baby”.
The risks are as much a test for us as they are for her. The notion that Britain could not handle her, could not show her a better future, could not try her, convict her, reorient her or support her, is worse than pathetic. Far from making Javid look strong, it manages to make Britain look both callous and weak. A government that thinks it can take on the world with Brexit can’t take back a bereaved teenaged mother with fundamentalist delusions.
Moreover, the risk does not obviate two crucial facts in this case. First and foremost, she is a citizen. That means something. Or at least it should. Citizenship is not about character. It is not about risk or regret. It is about rights and responsibilities. That’s as true for Stephen Lawrence’s killers as it is for Begum or the victims of the ongoing Windrush scandal. It applies to everyone who qualifies or it does not apply. It is not a status to be trifled with in cavalier fashion for the momentary advance of a political career. Whatever the prime minister feels about “citizens of the world”, the state should not be actively in the business of creating citizens of nowhere. A home secretary should know this, not least because last year his own department produced a report that presaged almost precisely Begum’s situation. Imagining the government response if a British woman flees Isis-held territory with a newborn baby, the Home Office report suggests “a police investigation”, assistance “reintegrating into society”, “sessions with a specially trained deradicalisation mentor” and “appropriate measures” to “safeguard the child’s welfare”. Nowhere does it mention stripping her of her citizenship.
Second, when Begum went to Syria she was a child. She must take personal responsibility for what she did. But our society understands that we have collective responsibility for children – it’s why we have child services and youth courts. We, as a society, should in some way be held accountable for how a 15-year-old girl went from watching Keeping Up With the Kardashians to joining a terrorist cult in a war zone. Begum was 15 when she did a reprehensible thing; Javid is 49. What’s his excuse?
When I was 16 I stopped off in Holland, during a camping holiday with a friend. We bought as much marijuana as we could and smoked it all in an afternoon. Sat behind a housing estate in the border town of Nijmegen, we giggled, rambled and lay around until the local police came. They took us back to the campsite (we found the fact that they spoke Dutch hilarious), where we were asked for our passports and train tickets. They already had our number: a couple of idiots out of their minds and out of their depth. They told us to get on the next train in the direction of the port. We’d stopped laughing by then. We went home.
Adolescents do stupid things. Often they know they are stupid at the time. But what’s stupid is often also exhilarating, particularly when the consequences are either not known or have not even been fully considered.
Shamima Begum, from Bethnal Green in London’s East End, did something extraordinarily stupid and extremely dangerous when she was 15. She, and two girl friends from school, told their parents they were going out for the day, and went to Turkey and joined Islamic State instead. Shamima lived in Raqqa, married a Dutch convert, had two children, both of whom died, and got pregnant with a third. She left Raqqa when it fell, saw her husband surrender to Syrian fighters and now sits in a refugee camp with her newborn son. Still only 19, Begum says she wants to come home to Britain. The home secretary, Sajid Javid, has revoked her citizenship. He has said she cannot come home because she is no longer British and that she should instead go to Bangladesh, where her parents are from. She has never been there; Bangladesh says it won’t take her.
A couple of weeks earlier Javid successfully deported several people to a country many did not know, according to David Lammy MP. A plane to Jamaica chartered by the Home Office left with 29 people on it. Of the more than 50 originally scheduled to go, 13 came to Britain as children, 11 had indefinite leave to remain and one had a British passport. Between them they would leave 36 children behind. Javid claims they had all committed serious crimes. One, who came to Britain when he was 14, had been convicted for dangerous driving. Among several to receive a last-minute reprieve was an ex-soldier; another had applied to remain under the Windrush scheme.
While the issue of Begum’s return, the Windrush scandal and the plight of these Jamaican deportees appear quite different, they in fact centre on the same two questions: what does it mean to be a citizen of this country? And how easily can the rights of citizenship be withheld? Evidently, the weight of the response and the burden of proof fall more heavily on those who are black and brown, whether we were born here or not.
Equal access to justice, regardless of race, has always been an issue when it comes to British citizens. But the right of British citizens to actually exist here, regardless of their race, has never felt more contingent. For those of us whose parents hail from elsewhere, our right to be here seems to depend on anything from what we think to whether and how we transgress. We must prove good character not to get here but to stay here.
Javid’s claim that allowing Begum to return might compromise public safety is not completely baseless. In August an 18-year-old woman was convicted of plotting to bomb the British Museum, along with her mum, sister and a friend.
Begum does not seem particularly remorseful. She said she knew what Isis did, including beheadings, and wasn’t troubled by it. “From what I heard, Islamically that is all allowed, so I was OK with it.”
In another interview she said: “When I saw my first severed head in a bin it didn’t faze me at all. It was from a captured fighter seized on the battlefield, an enemy of Islam.” It appears she doesn’t want to return because she now thinks joining Isis was wrong, but because Isis has, for now, been defeated and she wants her baby to survive. But the home secretary’s case is hardly watertight either. Begum has expressed regret. She said: “I was hoping Britain would understand I made a mistake, a very big mistake, because I was young and naive.” Of Isis-controlled Raqqa, she has remarked: “There was so much oppression and corruption that I don’t think they deserved victory.” We don’t know if she fought, but given that she had three children in four years it’s reasonable to guess she didn’t. She now says all she wants is a “quiet life with her baby”.
The risks are as much a test for us as they are for her. The notion that Britain could not handle her, could not show her a better future, could not try her, convict her, reorient her or support her, is worse than pathetic. Far from making Javid look strong, it manages to make Britain look both callous and weak. A government that thinks it can take on the world with Brexit can’t take back a bereaved teenaged mother with fundamentalist delusions.
Moreover, the risk does not obviate two crucial facts in this case. First and foremost, she is a citizen. That means something. Or at least it should. Citizenship is not about character. It is not about risk or regret. It is about rights and responsibilities. That’s as true for Stephen Lawrence’s killers as it is for Begum or the victims of the ongoing Windrush scandal. It applies to everyone who qualifies or it does not apply. It is not a status to be trifled with in cavalier fashion for the momentary advance of a political career. Whatever the prime minister feels about “citizens of the world”, the state should not be actively in the business of creating citizens of nowhere. A home secretary should know this, not least because last year his own department produced a report that presaged almost precisely Begum’s situation. Imagining the government response if a British woman flees Isis-held territory with a newborn baby, the Home Office report suggests “a police investigation”, assistance “reintegrating into society”, “sessions with a specially trained deradicalisation mentor” and “appropriate measures” to “safeguard the child’s welfare”. Nowhere does it mention stripping her of her citizenship.
Second, when Begum went to Syria she was a child. She must take personal responsibility for what she did. But our society understands that we have collective responsibility for children – it’s why we have child services and youth courts. We, as a society, should in some way be held accountable for how a 15-year-old girl went from watching Keeping Up With the Kardashians to joining a terrorist cult in a war zone. Begum was 15 when she did a reprehensible thing; Javid is 49. What’s his excuse?
Monday 3 December 2018
The Stark Evidence of Everyday Racial Bias in Britain
Poll commissioned to launch series on unconscious bias shows gulf in negative experiences by ethnicity
Robert Booth and Aamna Mohdin in The Guardian
Half of the respondents from a minority background said they believed people sometimes did not realise they were treating them differently because of their ethnicity, suggesting unconscious bias, as well as more explicit and deliberate racism, has a major influence on the way millions of people who were born in the UK or moved here are treated.
As well as demonstrating how much more likely ethnic minorities are to report negative experiences that did not feature an explicitly racist element, the poll found that one in eight had heard racist language directed at them in the month before they were surveyed.
It also found troubling levels of concern about bias in the workplace, with 57% of minorities saying they felt they had to work harder to succeed in Britain because of their ethnicity, and 40% saying they earned less or had worse employment prospects for the same reason.
The poll persistently found evidence that the gap in negative experiences was not confined to the past. For example, one in seven people from ethnic minorities said they had been treated as a potential shoplifter in the last month, against one in 25 white people.
The findings come a year after Theresa May published a race disparity audit that identified differences in living standards, housing, work, policing and health. The prime minister pledged to “confront these issues we have identified” but admitted: “We still have a way to go if we’re truly going to have a country that does work for everyone.”
In October the government said employers could be forced to reveal salary figures broken down by ethnicity, as they already do for gender, in a move that lawyers predicted could lead to a flood of employment tribunal cases. Black, Asian and minority ethnic unemployment stands at 6.3%, compared with 3.6% for white people.
Bangladeshi and Pakistani households had an average income of nearly £9,000 a year less than white British households between 2014 and 2016, and the gap between white and black Caribbean and black British families was £5,500.
One of the few positive findings was that just over half of those surveyed said they had either never experienced someone directing racist language at them, or had not done so for at least five years.
However, the results raise concerns over efforts to forge a multicultural British identity, with 41% saying someone had assumed they were not British at some point in the last year because of their ethnicity.
People from minorities are twice as likely as white people to have been mistaken for staff in a restaurant, bar or shop. One in five said they had felt the need to alter their voice and appearance in the last year because of their ethnicity.
The effects of bias are not the same for all ethnicities. Half of black and mixed-race people felt they had been unfairly overlooked for a promotion or job application, compared with 41% of people from Asian backgrounds. Black people were more likely to feel they had to work harder to succeed because of their ethnicity.
Muslims living in Britain – a large minority at around 2.8 million people – are more likely to have negative experiences than other religious groups. They are more likely than Christians, people with no religion and other smaller religions to be stopped by the police, left out of social functions at work or college and find that people seem not to want to sit next to them on public transport.
A government spokesperson said the prime minister was determined that people of different ethnicities were treated equally. The spokesperson said: “One year on from [the race disparity audit’s] launch, we are delivering on our commitment to explain or change ethnic disparities in all areas of society including a £90m programme to help tackle youth unemployment and a Race at Work charter to help create greater opportunities for ethnic minority employees at work. We have also launched a consultation on mandatory ethnicity pay reporting.”
Robert Booth and Aamna Mohdin in The Guardian
Half of black, Asian and minority ethnic respondents in the poll said they believed people sometimes did not realise they were treating them differently because of their ethnicity. Photograph: Murdo MacLeod for the Guardian
The extent of racial bias faced by black, Asian and minority ethnic citizens in 21st-century Britain has been laid bare in an unprecedented study showing a gulf in how people of different ethnicities are treated in their daily lives.
A survey for the Guardian of 1,000 people from minority ethnic backgrounds found they were consistently more likely to have faced negative everyday experiences – all frequently associated with racism – than white people in a comparison poll.
The extent of racial bias faced by black, Asian and minority ethnic citizens in 21st-century Britain has been laid bare in an unprecedented study showing a gulf in how people of different ethnicities are treated in their daily lives.
A survey for the Guardian of 1,000 people from minority ethnic backgrounds found they were consistently more likely to have faced negative everyday experiences – all frequently associated with racism – than white people in a comparison poll.
The survey found that 43% of those from a minority ethnic background had been overlooked for a work promotion in a way that felt unfair in the last five years – more than twice the proportion of white people (18%) who reported the same experience.
The results show that ethnic minorities are three times as likely to have been thrown out of or denied entrance to a restaurant, bar or club in the last five years, and that more than two-thirds believe Britain has a problem with racism.
The ICM poll, commissioned to launch a week-long investigation into bias in Britain, focuses on everyday experiences of prejudice that could be a result of unconscious bias – quick decisions conditioned by our backgrounds, cultural environment and personal experiences.
It is believed to be the first major piece of UK public polling to focus on ethnic minorities’ experiences of unconscious bias, and comes amid wider concerns about a shortage of research capturing the views of minority groups.
The poll found comprehensive evidence to support concerns that unconscious bias has a negative effect on the lives of Britain’s 8.5 million people from minority backgrounds that is not revealed by typical data on racism. For example:
• 38% of people from ethnic minorities said they had been wrongly suspected of shoplifting in the last five years, compared with 14% of white people, with black people and women in particular more likely to be wrongly suspected.
• Minorities were more than twice as likely to have encountered abuse or rudeness from a stranger in the last week.
• 53% of people from a minority background believed they had been treated differently because of their hair, clothes or appearance, compared with 29% of white people.
The Runnymede Trust, a racial equality thinktank, described the findings as “stark” and said they illustrated “everyday micro-aggressions” that had profound effects on Britain’s social structure.
“Racism and discrimination for BAME people and minority faith groups isn’t restricted to one area of life,” said Zubaida Haque, the trust’s deputy director. “If you’re not welcome in a restaurant as a guest because of the colour of your skin, you’re unlikely to get a job in the restaurant for the same reason. Structural and institutional racism is difficult to identify or prove, but it has much more far-reaching effects on people’s life chances.”
David Lammy, the Labour MP for Tottenham, said the findings were upsetting. “Racial prejudice continues to weigh on the lives of black and ethnic minority people in the UK. While we all share the same hard-won rights, our lived experience and opportunity can vary,” he said.
Recalling being stopped and searched when he was 12, Lammy said: “Stereotyping is not just something that happens, stereotyping is something that is felt, and it feels like sheer terror, confusion and shame.”
The results show that ethnic minorities are three times as likely to have been thrown out of or denied entrance to a restaurant, bar or club in the last five years, and that more than two-thirds believe Britain has a problem with racism.
The ICM poll, commissioned to launch a week-long investigation into bias in Britain, focuses on everyday experiences of prejudice that could be a result of unconscious bias – quick decisions conditioned by our backgrounds, cultural environment and personal experiences.
It is believed to be the first major piece of UK public polling to focus on ethnic minorities’ experiences of unconscious bias, and comes amid wider concerns about a shortage of research capturing the views of minority groups.
The poll found comprehensive evidence to support concerns that unconscious bias has a negative effect on the lives of Britain’s 8.5 million people from minority backgrounds that is not revealed by typical data on racism. For example:
• 38% of people from ethnic minorities said they had been wrongly suspected of shoplifting in the last five years, compared with 14% of white people, with black people and women in particular more likely to be wrongly suspected.
• Minorities were more than twice as likely to have encountered abuse or rudeness from a stranger in the last week.
• 53% of people from a minority background believed they had been treated differently because of their hair, clothes or appearance, compared with 29% of white people.
The Runnymede Trust, a racial equality thinktank, described the findings as “stark” and said they illustrated “everyday micro-aggressions” that had profound effects on Britain’s social structure.
“Racism and discrimination for BAME people and minority faith groups isn’t restricted to one area of life,” said Zubaida Haque, the trust’s deputy director. “If you’re not welcome in a restaurant as a guest because of the colour of your skin, you’re unlikely to get a job in the restaurant for the same reason. Structural and institutional racism is difficult to identify or prove, but it has much more far-reaching effects on people’s life chances.”
David Lammy, the Labour MP for Tottenham, said the findings were upsetting. “Racial prejudice continues to weigh on the lives of black and ethnic minority people in the UK. While we all share the same hard-won rights, our lived experience and opportunity can vary,” he said.
Recalling being stopped and searched when he was 12, Lammy said: “Stereotyping is not just something that happens, stereotyping is something that is felt, and it feels like sheer terror, confusion and shame.”
Half of the respondents from a minority background said they believed people sometimes did not realise they were treating them differently because of their ethnicity, suggesting unconscious bias, as well as more explicit and deliberate racism, has a major influence on the way millions of people who were born in the UK or moved here are treated.
As well as demonstrating how much more likely ethnic minorities are to report negative experiences that did not feature an explicitly racist element, the poll found that one in eight had heard racist language directed at them in the month before they were surveyed.
It also found troubling levels of concern about bias in the workplace, with 57% of minorities saying they felt they had to work harder to succeed in Britain because of their ethnicity, and 40% saying they earned less or had worse employment prospects for the same reason.
The poll persistently found evidence that the gap in negative experiences was not confined to the past. For example, one in seven people from ethnic minorities said they had been treated as a potential shoplifter in the last month, against one in 25 white people.
The findings come a year after Theresa May published a race disparity audit that identified differences in living standards, housing, work, policing and health. The prime minister pledged to “confront these issues we have identified” but admitted: “We still have a way to go if we’re truly going to have a country that does work for everyone.”
In October the government said employers could be forced to reveal salary figures broken down by ethnicity, as they already do for gender, in a move that lawyers predicted could lead to a flood of employment tribunal cases. Black, Asian and minority ethnic unemployment stands at 6.3%, compared with 3.6% for white people.
Bangladeshi and Pakistani households had an average income of nearly £9,000 a year less than white British households between 2014 and 2016, and the gap between white and black Caribbean and black British families was £5,500.
One of the few positive findings was that just over half of those surveyed said they had either never experienced someone directing racist language at them, or had not done so for at least five years.
However, the results raise concerns over efforts to forge a multicultural British identity, with 41% saying someone had assumed they were not British at some point in the last year because of their ethnicity.
People from minorities are twice as likely as white people to have been mistaken for staff in a restaurant, bar or shop. One in five said they had felt the need to alter their voice and appearance in the last year because of their ethnicity.
The effects of bias are not the same for all ethnicities. Half of black and mixed-race people felt they had been unfairly overlooked for a promotion or job application, compared with 41% of people from Asian backgrounds. Black people were more likely to feel they had to work harder to succeed because of their ethnicity.
Muslims living in Britain – a large minority at around 2.8 million people – are more likely to have negative experiences than other religious groups. They are more likely than Christians, people with no religion and other smaller religions to be stopped by the police, left out of social functions at work or college and find that people seem not to want to sit next to them on public transport.
A government spokesperson said the prime minister was determined that people of different ethnicities were treated equally. The spokesperson said: “One year on from [the race disparity audit’s] launch, we are delivering on our commitment to explain or change ethnic disparities in all areas of society including a £90m programme to help tackle youth unemployment and a Race at Work charter to help create greater opportunities for ethnic minority employees at work. We have also launched a consultation on mandatory ethnicity pay reporting.”
Sunday 22 April 2018
Windrush saga exposes mixed feelings about immigrants like me
Abdulrazak Gurnah in The FT
In 1968, soon after arriving in England from Zanzibar as an 18-year-old student, I was talking with a friend while a radio played in the background. At some point we stopped talking and listened to a man speaking with tremulous passion about the dangers people like me represented for the future of Britain.
In 1968, soon after arriving in England from Zanzibar as an 18-year-old student, I was talking with a friend while a radio played in the background. At some point we stopped talking and listened to a man speaking with tremulous passion about the dangers people like me represented for the future of Britain.
It was Enoch Powell and we were listening to a clip of his “Rivers of Blood” speech. I knew little about British politics and did not know who Powell was. But in the days and weeks that followed, I heard him quoted at me by fellow students and bus conductors, and saw television footage of trade union marches in his support.
I have lived in Britain for most of the past 50 years and have watched, and participated in, the largely successful struggle to prevent Powell’s lurid prophecies about race war from coming true. But it would be foolish to imagine that all is set fair for the future of Britain and its migrant communities, because every few weeks we are provided with another example of the obstinate survival of antipathy and disregard. The treatment of the children of the “Windrush generation” who moved to the UK from the Caribbean several decades ago is the latest such episode.
The injustice is so staggering that Theresa May, the prime minister, and Amber Rudd, the home secretary, have been forced to apologise. But the consequences for Caribbean migrants who grew up in Britain of the “hostile environment” for illegal immigrants could hardly have been news to them.
In 2013, at the instigation of the Home Office, vans emblazoned with the message “Go home or face arrest” drove around parts of London with large immigrant populations. It may not have been intended that the clampdown on illegal immigration would snare such embarrassing prey as children of migrants who spent a lifetime working in the UK; but political expediency required that this small complication be ignored until it went away. That it has not is a result of the work of welfare, legal and political activists to make sure that the abuses against migrants and strangers are kept in plain sight.
Before the second world war, there was no law to restrict entry or residence in Britain for people who lived in her colonial territories. That is what it meant to be a global empire, and all the millions who were subjects of the British crown were free to come if they wished. There was no need to worry about controlling numbers because, if they became a problem, they were sent back, as happened after the race riots in various British port cities in 1919. In a rush of imperial hubris, the British Nationality Act was passed in 1948 to formalise the right of British colonial subjects to enter and live in the UK.
If the 1948 law was a desperate recruitment poster for cheap labour disguised as imperial largesse, the purpose of the successively meaner pieces of immigration legislation that began in 1962 was to slow and ultimately stop the arrival of dark-skinned former subjects of the British crown. It continued Britain’s centuries-long prevarication between sanctuary and xenophobia.
Why has the Windrush saga been so embarrassing for the government? The answer has to do with Britain’s fraught relationship with the Caribbean and a history of racial terror instigated and supervised for centuries by British money and power. Caribbean institutions are still largely modelled on British ones and, until recent disillusioning decades, the Caribbean sense of identity was linked with a connection to the British empire. It is remarkable that this should be so given the brutalities of the plantation economies that prevailed in the Caribbean territories. This is an ambivalence that Caribbean intellectuals have reflected on for more than a century. The most perfunctory browse through the writing of the region will provide examples of its intricate legacy.
What is now referred to as the Windrush generation was far from homogeneous. It included peasant workers, nurses, teachers, writers and artists. They came in response to the recruitment drive and because they were ambitious for a better life. They are in Britain for the same reasons that all migrants are here.
In time they brought their children, and those children grew up, were educated and worked all their lives in this country. As any stranger knows, particularly if he or she is black in Europe, it is vital to keep your paperwork in order. What recent events have shown is that not all the children of the Windrush generation did because they were confident that they were at home and had no need to prove their right to be here. It seems they reckoned without the ruthless politics of contemporary Britain, in which xenophobia and hatred do not repel, but instead win votes.
The Windrush saga has made headlines this week, but it has been going on for months — the bullying letters, the threatening sanctions against employers, the loss of employment, the withdrawal of benefits and healthcare, the detention and expulsion. Bullying in pursuit of bringing down the immigration numbers is never just or humane. But it is wrong to deny these people what are evidently their moral and legal rights. Their contribution to British society and culture has been immense.
When it became clear the law had caught the wrong people, someone should have called a halt instead of pressing on with the bullying. As Sentina Bristol, the mother of Dexter, a 57-year-old man born a British subject in Grenada who died after several months of going through this process, observed of the government in a recent interview: “They are intelligent people, they are people of power. We expect better from them.”
Saturday 28 October 2017
Yes, we must decolonise: our teaching has to go beyond elite white men
Something is very wrong when a simple request from a large number of students, that their reading lists be broadened slightly to include some black and minority ethnic writers, becomes the basis of a manufactured racial “row”.
Priyamvada Gopal in The Guardian
Something is very wrong when a simple request from a large number of students, that their reading lists be broadened slightly to include some black and minority ethnic writers, becomes the basis of a manufactured racial “row”.
Rather than acknowledge that a major university was right to be responsive to student concerns, two British newspapers saw fit to turn an open letter from Cambridge English students into a trumped-up existential crisis for white male writers. By “decolonising” the curriculum this endangered species would now be sacrificed, apparently, like so many hapless Guys on bonfire night, to the burning fires of black and minority ethnic special interest. Nice dramatic scenario, pity about the truth content.
The real danger is that the substantive issues at stake that concern us all, not just ethnic minorities, become obscured in this facile attempt at stoking a keyboard race war with real-life consequences at a time when hate crimes are on the rise. The young people who wrote this letter, however, have an admirable clarity of vision and a robust faith in knowledge that is inspiring. They are interested in asking challenging questions about themselves and others, and how we see ourselves in relation to each other.
Decolonising the curriculum is, first of all, the acceptance that education, literary or otherwise, needs to enable self-understanding. This is particularly important to people not used to seeing themselves reflected in the mirror of conventional learning – whether women, gay people, disabled people, the working classes or ethnic minorities. Knowledge and culture is collectively produced and these groups, which intersect in different ways, have as much right as elite white men to understand what their own role has been in forging artistic and intellectual achievements.
However, it is not only about admiring yourself in the mirror – a fact that eludes those shrieking about the nonexistent elimination of straight white men from the curriculum. Real knowledge is not self-puffery, the repeated validation of oneself. In English literature, it involves learning about the lives of others, whether these be Robert Wedderburn, the fiery black Scottish working-class preacher who believed in self-emancipation; the working-class poet Robert Bloomfield; or Una Marson, the suffragist and broadcaster who wrote eloquently about race and the colour-bar in Britain as well as resonant poetry about her native Jamaica.
Cape Coast Castle, Ghana: ‘Our students have rightly asked to know more about the colonial context in which much English literature was produced.’ Photograph: Alamy
Surely, Sultana’s Dream, the early 20th-century fantasy story by Rokeya Sakhawat Hossain – where men stayed home while only women went out – has a relevance for our understanding of Muslim women’s long and rich history of writing and debate. (Yes, it exists.)
To decolonise and not just diversify curriculums is to recognise that knowledge is inevitably marked by power relations. In a society still shaped by a long colonial history in which straight white upper-class men are at the top of the social order, most disciplines give disproportionate prominence to the experiences, concerns and achievements of this one group. In my native India, upper-caste Hindu men have long held sway over learning and efforts are being made, in the face of predictable resistance, to dislodge that supremacy.
Britain has a long history of black and Asian communities that contributed significantly to its wealth and heritage
A decolonised curriculum would bring questions of class, caste, race, gender, ability and sexuality into dialogue with each other, instead of pretending that there is some kind of generic identity we all share.
It is telling that efforts to inject some breadth and variety into teaching are being dismissed as “artificial balance”. The assumption here is precisely the problem – that the best of all that has been thought and said just happens to have been produced in the west by white upper-class people, largely men.
Scholars such as Peter Fryer and Rozina Visram have shown that black and Asian people have a history in Britain that stretches back nearly 500 years, and that these communities contributed significantly to its wealth and heritage. In fact, the very idea of what it meant to be “white” or “English” relied on the presence of those, including the Irish, who could be marked as neither.
Yet decolonisation is not just about bringing in minority texts but also how we read “traditional” texts. Our students have rightly asked to know more about the colonial context in which much English literature was produced – indeed, in which the very idea of “English” literature came to be.
The British empire, love it or loathe it, paradoxically provides the common ground upon which our histories and identities were forged, whether those be of a white Etonian with Sandhurst military training or a queer British Asian female social worker. Between total denial of imperial history and mindless celebration of it comes actual knowledge of what happened. British literature has a great dissident tradition which acknowledges this. Barry Unsworth’s magisterial 1992 Booker prizewinner, Sacred Hunger, a powerful novel set in the context of the triangular slave trade of the 18th century, shows how the emergence of capitalist greed, the “sacred” unquestionable value, inflicted suffering on black men and women, and on working-class Britons, in different ways.
Ultimately, to decolonise is to ask difficult questions of ourselves. The Antiguan author Jamaica Kincaid puts it thus: “And might not knowing why they are the way they are, why they do the things they do, why they live the way they live, why the things that happened to them happened, lead … people to a different relationship with the world, a more demanding relationship?” Our students have chosen the demanding way.
To decolonise and not just diversify curriculums is to recognise that knowledge is inevitably marked by power relations. In a society still shaped by a long colonial history in which straight white upper-class men are at the top of the social order, most disciplines give disproportionate prominence to the experiences, concerns and achievements of this one group. In my native India, upper-caste Hindu men have long held sway over learning and efforts are being made, in the face of predictable resistance, to dislodge that supremacy.
Britain has a long history of black and Asian communities that contributed significantly to its wealth and heritage
A decolonised curriculum would bring questions of class, caste, race, gender, ability and sexuality into dialogue with each other, instead of pretending that there is some kind of generic identity we all share.
It is telling that efforts to inject some breadth and variety into teaching are being dismissed as “artificial balance”. The assumption here is precisely the problem – that the best of all that has been thought and said just happens to have been produced in the west by white upper-class people, largely men.
Scholars such as Peter Fryer and Rozina Visram have shown that black and Asian people have a history in Britain that stretches back nearly 500 years, and that these communities contributed significantly to its wealth and heritage. In fact, the very idea of what it meant to be “white” or “English” relied on the presence of those, including the Irish, who could be marked as neither.
Yet decolonisation is not just about bringing in minority texts but also how we read “traditional” texts. Our students have rightly asked to know more about the colonial context in which much English literature was produced – indeed, in which the very idea of “English” literature came to be.
The British empire, love it or loathe it, paradoxically provides the common ground upon which our histories and identities were forged, whether those be of a white Etonian with Sandhurst military training or a queer British Asian female social worker. Between total denial of imperial history and mindless celebration of it comes actual knowledge of what happened. British literature has a great dissident tradition which acknowledges this. Barry Unsworth’s magisterial 1992 Booker prizewinner, Sacred Hunger, a powerful novel set in the context of the triangular slave trade of the 18th century, shows how the emergence of capitalist greed, the “sacred” unquestionable value, inflicted suffering on black men and women, and on working-class Britons, in different ways.
Ultimately, to decolonise is to ask difficult questions of ourselves. The Antiguan author Jamaica Kincaid puts it thus: “And might not knowing why they are the way they are, why they do the things they do, why they live the way they live, why the things that happened to them happened, lead … people to a different relationship with the world, a more demanding relationship?” Our students have chosen the demanding way.
Sunday 15 October 2017
Big data prove it is possible for a society to be riddled with racism in the complete absence of racists.
The government audit shows racism can be endemic even in the absence of racists
Trevor Phillips in The Financial Times
If Theresa May’s challenge to her own government on race equality does nothing else, it should take some of the terror out of talking about racial difference. Her government’s compendium of data about ethnic minorities’ experience across 130 public service areas, published this week, confronts us with a baffling puzzle: in a society demonstrably more open-minded than a generation ago, why do race and ethnicity remain such powerful pointers to an individual’s place in society?
You do not have to be a specialist in race relations to know that your doctor is more likely to be a Sikh than a Somali. Most of us can see that people from certain backgrounds — South Asians, Chinese — are more likely than others — African Caribbeans, Pakistani Muslims — to wind up as chief financial officers of big companies.
Sir John Parker, in a review that concluded this week, called out the paucity of non-white leaders in Britain’s top companies, confirming what most business leaders know: there are many available candidates but black and brown faces still do not turn up in the boardroom — except perhaps when they come to clean.
White Britons remain cautious about making such observations, for fear of being held personal responsible for racial inequalities. People of colour stay silent because nobody wants to sound like a grievance-monger. The race audit could be the best chance in years to break the silence.
Ministers have anticipated the charge of stirring up minority resentment by releasing a flood of data, some of which show that whites too can be at a disadvantage. White boys, for example, are far less likely to get in to a good university than the proverbial hijab-wearing Bangladeshi-heritage girl. By acknowledging that some differences might turn out to be intractable, Mrs May’s injunction that disparities should either be explained or eliminated could encourage a more open debate.
Some critics suggest that the audit will undermine minorities’ faith in public services. This underestimates the common sense of most people of colour. We do not live to complain about racism. On the contrary, we factor it into our daily lives, shrugging off discourtesies. But forbearance should not be confused with compliance. The data show that people of colour are right to have low expectations of their treatment by the healthcare system, the police or the courts. Their resentment should not be a surprise.
The audit is far from complete. Crucially, it tells us nothing about the UK’s most important economic issue — low productivity. Yet race relations can have a profound impact on the workplace.
A US survey shows that more than a third of white-collar employees think discussing race is off limits in the office, even though staff of all races think it affects their prospects. Blacks and Latinos believe their ethnicity holds them back; whites fear a word out of place will torpedo their careers. Annual appraisals have become stilted affairs: white bosses worry that too critical an assessment will land them in the dock for bigotry. Poor performance goes unchallenged and mediocrity protected.
The data released this week have all been available before. But together they could revolutionise our understanding of racism. Since the 1999 Macpherson Report into the death of Stephen Lawrence, the official doctrine has been that pretty much everyone everywhere was wrapped up in a racist conspiracy, even if they did not know it.
If that is true, how can we explain the fact that every measure of racial hostility has declined steadily over the past 40 years but there has been no corresponding fall in racial disadvantage? The answer is that most racial disadvantage is not the product of individual attitudes. Even if we were to adopt the widest definition of a racial incident, including online insults, and attribute every one of those acts to a prejudiced white person, it remains statistically demonstrable that the average person of colour will encounter such hostility once in their lifetime — not enough to produce the persistent patterns revealed by the audit.
So if Britons are individually better people what is preventing us becoming a better nation? Part of the answer is inertia: racial patterns we inherited and have not dealt with effectively. An example would be ethnic segregation in cities, baked into the geography because of settlement patterns generations ago.
A new source of racial disparities stems from what may be called techno-racism. Online decision systems use apparently neutral data: names, addresses, place of education. But these data carry racial markers that machines can read as reasons to reject minority applications for jobs, loans or insurance. In the US, companies are rewriting mortgage-lending programmes, having seen fines in excess of $100m for discriminating against African-American borrowers. Big data prove it is possible for a society to be riddled with racism in the complete absence of racists.
Mrs May says that government departments will have “nowhere to hide” in future. Unfortunately, her own privacy legislation will protect ministers from scrutiny. Data protection means that neither public bodies nor private corporations are allowed to keep ethnic data about individuals. A prime ministerial decision to allow companies, particularly recruitment firms, to hold ethnic data could be transformative.
Mrs May’s audit has opened a Pandora’s box. But when the first woman in the legend unleashed evils on humanity, Hope sat gleaming at the bottom. Our modern Pandora, lifting the lid on racism, is betting the facts may be the best way to solve our most toxic social problem. In this, at least, she has to be right.
Trevor Phillips in The Financial Times
If Theresa May’s challenge to her own government on race equality does nothing else, it should take some of the terror out of talking about racial difference. Her government’s compendium of data about ethnic minorities’ experience across 130 public service areas, published this week, confronts us with a baffling puzzle: in a society demonstrably more open-minded than a generation ago, why do race and ethnicity remain such powerful pointers to an individual’s place in society?
You do not have to be a specialist in race relations to know that your doctor is more likely to be a Sikh than a Somali. Most of us can see that people from certain backgrounds — South Asians, Chinese — are more likely than others — African Caribbeans, Pakistani Muslims — to wind up as chief financial officers of big companies.
Sir John Parker, in a review that concluded this week, called out the paucity of non-white leaders in Britain’s top companies, confirming what most business leaders know: there are many available candidates but black and brown faces still do not turn up in the boardroom — except perhaps when they come to clean.
White Britons remain cautious about making such observations, for fear of being held personal responsible for racial inequalities. People of colour stay silent because nobody wants to sound like a grievance-monger. The race audit could be the best chance in years to break the silence.
Ministers have anticipated the charge of stirring up minority resentment by releasing a flood of data, some of which show that whites too can be at a disadvantage. White boys, for example, are far less likely to get in to a good university than the proverbial hijab-wearing Bangladeshi-heritage girl. By acknowledging that some differences might turn out to be intractable, Mrs May’s injunction that disparities should either be explained or eliminated could encourage a more open debate.
Some critics suggest that the audit will undermine minorities’ faith in public services. This underestimates the common sense of most people of colour. We do not live to complain about racism. On the contrary, we factor it into our daily lives, shrugging off discourtesies. But forbearance should not be confused with compliance. The data show that people of colour are right to have low expectations of their treatment by the healthcare system, the police or the courts. Their resentment should not be a surprise.
The audit is far from complete. Crucially, it tells us nothing about the UK’s most important economic issue — low productivity. Yet race relations can have a profound impact on the workplace.
A US survey shows that more than a third of white-collar employees think discussing race is off limits in the office, even though staff of all races think it affects their prospects. Blacks and Latinos believe their ethnicity holds them back; whites fear a word out of place will torpedo their careers. Annual appraisals have become stilted affairs: white bosses worry that too critical an assessment will land them in the dock for bigotry. Poor performance goes unchallenged and mediocrity protected.
The data released this week have all been available before. But together they could revolutionise our understanding of racism. Since the 1999 Macpherson Report into the death of Stephen Lawrence, the official doctrine has been that pretty much everyone everywhere was wrapped up in a racist conspiracy, even if they did not know it.
If that is true, how can we explain the fact that every measure of racial hostility has declined steadily over the past 40 years but there has been no corresponding fall in racial disadvantage? The answer is that most racial disadvantage is not the product of individual attitudes. Even if we were to adopt the widest definition of a racial incident, including online insults, and attribute every one of those acts to a prejudiced white person, it remains statistically demonstrable that the average person of colour will encounter such hostility once in their lifetime — not enough to produce the persistent patterns revealed by the audit.
So if Britons are individually better people what is preventing us becoming a better nation? Part of the answer is inertia: racial patterns we inherited and have not dealt with effectively. An example would be ethnic segregation in cities, baked into the geography because of settlement patterns generations ago.
A new source of racial disparities stems from what may be called techno-racism. Online decision systems use apparently neutral data: names, addresses, place of education. But these data carry racial markers that machines can read as reasons to reject minority applications for jobs, loans or insurance. In the US, companies are rewriting mortgage-lending programmes, having seen fines in excess of $100m for discriminating against African-American borrowers. Big data prove it is possible for a society to be riddled with racism in the complete absence of racists.
Mrs May says that government departments will have “nowhere to hide” in future. Unfortunately, her own privacy legislation will protect ministers from scrutiny. Data protection means that neither public bodies nor private corporations are allowed to keep ethnic data about individuals. A prime ministerial decision to allow companies, particularly recruitment firms, to hold ethnic data could be transformative.
Mrs May’s audit has opened a Pandora’s box. But when the first woman in the legend unleashed evils on humanity, Hope sat gleaming at the bottom. Our modern Pandora, lifting the lid on racism, is betting the facts may be the best way to solve our most toxic social problem. In this, at least, she has to be right.
Wednesday 6 September 2017
'Reputation laundering' is lucrative business for London PR firms
Oppressive foreign regimes are often such valuable accounts that they are considered worth the risk of a backlash
Mark Sweney in The Guardian
From foreign governments of dubious repute and dictators looking for an image overhaul to propaganda videos and fake Wikipedia entries – if there is a PR brief of dubious ethical nature that needs a fix then more often than not it is one of London’s big-name agencies that gets the call.
Bell Pottinger’s public vilification and expulsion from its own trade body for running a social media campaign to stir up racial tension in South Africa for the wealthy Gupta family has lifted the lid on the secretive and highly lucrative business of representing controversial clients.
Over more than three decades in the business Tim Bell, Margaret Thatcher’s favourite PR man, who left Bell Pottinger last summer, has amassed something of a who’s who of what could charitably be called sensitive clients.
These have included the Pinochet Foundation and the governments of Bahrain and Egypt, and there was a $500m (£384m) contract to make fake al-Qaida videos in Iraq for the US government.
“You say words like Pinochet and ‘oh my god that is bad news’, but I don’t accept that,” Lord Bell said. “There are two sides to every story and you have to handle it so your side is prevalent. I don’t know why they are [considered] risky clients. They are only risky if what you are trying to promote an idea that isn’t sound.”
He cited Alexander Lukashenko, the Belarusian president who has been called Europe’s last dictator, as an example of when taking on such clients went wrong. “There are lots of people I regret having got involved with. Lukashenko went well for six months then changed his mind [about the strategy], behaved differently and I resigned the account.”
Foreign governments with oppressive regimes are often such valuable accounts that they are considered worth the risk of a potential PR backlash.
The Portland agency, founded by Tony Blair’s former adviser Tim Allan, has previously advised Vladimir Putin and worked with Kazakhstan, Jordan and Morocco.
A contract with Qatar, which has been heavily criticised for its record on human rights, is focused on building a government affairs function. Portland declined to comment but Allan has previously said such work is about “openness and engagement” and that opening up secretive nations is “not an affront to democracy”.
Late last year the PR guru Matthew Freud picked up a hugely valuable brief from Saudi Arabia, which has executed more than 150 people in each of the last two years.
The account, led by deputy Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, was pitched to a number of corporate PR firms in London. The PR agency Freuds declined to comment but at the time of winning the business said it was focused on a “programme of economic, educational and cultural modernisation to help diversify the economy and create a sustainable and prosperous future for Saudi’s young people.”
A senior PR executive said: “Tyrants, dictatorships and governments that may not be democratic, or are sliding into one-party states, tend to come to places like London, New York and Washington effectively for reputation laundering. If you are cynical about it, that is what it is.”
A number of senior PR executives agree that Bell Pottinger working for the Gupta family, which has been accused of benefiting financially from its close links to the South African president, Jacob Zuma, is not in itself a PR crime.
But stoking racial tension in a country that has struggled to achieve balance in a post-apartheid era is a particularly egregious strategy to have pursued, and not one that is rife among the dark arts employed by UK agencies.
“I think that Bell Pottinger’s work is an outlier,” said Danny Rogers, editor-in-chief of PR Week. “They are accused of creating fake news and blogs, a serious transgression. It is not typical of what the British PR industry does. Work varies from what you would consider to be institution-building and opening communications by governments to the extreme end of the sort of work Bell Pottinger was doing for the Guptas.”
Francis Ingham, director general of the trade body PRCA for the last decade, said the UK industry was “overwhelmingly ethical and professional”.
“There is always the occasional rogue element and our role is to punish them,” he said.
Ever the risk-taker, Lord Bell, after leaving the agency he co-founded, immediately looked for more of the same, setting up Sans Frontières, the same name as the arm of Bell Pottinger that handled sometimes controversial geo-political work.
Bell, who has also represented clients including the News UK chief Rebekah Brooks and the entertainer Rolf Harris, said the Bell Pottinger scandal would prompt the industry to take cover for a while but then it would be business as usual.
“There will be a lull for a while, then people will forget the controversy and people will come back,” he said.
Yet, even the hard-bitten Bell admitted there were some clients beyond the pale even for him. He turned down representing Zimbabwe’s president, Robert Mugabe, as well as the Labour party (“I wouldn’t have done a good job”).
“I wish we hadn’t taken the Guptas,” he said. “And I would like to have worked for BP, to have handled the Deepwater Horizon incident. As long as there is controversy about things there will be controversial characters. You can’t spend your life regretting what you do.”
Mark Sweney in The Guardian
From foreign governments of dubious repute and dictators looking for an image overhaul to propaganda videos and fake Wikipedia entries – if there is a PR brief of dubious ethical nature that needs a fix then more often than not it is one of London’s big-name agencies that gets the call.
Bell Pottinger’s public vilification and expulsion from its own trade body for running a social media campaign to stir up racial tension in South Africa for the wealthy Gupta family has lifted the lid on the secretive and highly lucrative business of representing controversial clients.
Over more than three decades in the business Tim Bell, Margaret Thatcher’s favourite PR man, who left Bell Pottinger last summer, has amassed something of a who’s who of what could charitably be called sensitive clients.
These have included the Pinochet Foundation and the governments of Bahrain and Egypt, and there was a $500m (£384m) contract to make fake al-Qaida videos in Iraq for the US government.
“You say words like Pinochet and ‘oh my god that is bad news’, but I don’t accept that,” Lord Bell said. “There are two sides to every story and you have to handle it so your side is prevalent. I don’t know why they are [considered] risky clients. They are only risky if what you are trying to promote an idea that isn’t sound.”
He cited Alexander Lukashenko, the Belarusian president who has been called Europe’s last dictator, as an example of when taking on such clients went wrong. “There are lots of people I regret having got involved with. Lukashenko went well for six months then changed his mind [about the strategy], behaved differently and I resigned the account.”
Foreign governments with oppressive regimes are often such valuable accounts that they are considered worth the risk of a potential PR backlash.
The Portland agency, founded by Tony Blair’s former adviser Tim Allan, has previously advised Vladimir Putin and worked with Kazakhstan, Jordan and Morocco.
A contract with Qatar, which has been heavily criticised for its record on human rights, is focused on building a government affairs function. Portland declined to comment but Allan has previously said such work is about “openness and engagement” and that opening up secretive nations is “not an affront to democracy”.
Late last year the PR guru Matthew Freud picked up a hugely valuable brief from Saudi Arabia, which has executed more than 150 people in each of the last two years.
The account, led by deputy Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, was pitched to a number of corporate PR firms in London. The PR agency Freuds declined to comment but at the time of winning the business said it was focused on a “programme of economic, educational and cultural modernisation to help diversify the economy and create a sustainable and prosperous future for Saudi’s young people.”
A senior PR executive said: “Tyrants, dictatorships and governments that may not be democratic, or are sliding into one-party states, tend to come to places like London, New York and Washington effectively for reputation laundering. If you are cynical about it, that is what it is.”
A number of senior PR executives agree that Bell Pottinger working for the Gupta family, which has been accused of benefiting financially from its close links to the South African president, Jacob Zuma, is not in itself a PR crime.
But stoking racial tension in a country that has struggled to achieve balance in a post-apartheid era is a particularly egregious strategy to have pursued, and not one that is rife among the dark arts employed by UK agencies.
“I think that Bell Pottinger’s work is an outlier,” said Danny Rogers, editor-in-chief of PR Week. “They are accused of creating fake news and blogs, a serious transgression. It is not typical of what the British PR industry does. Work varies from what you would consider to be institution-building and opening communications by governments to the extreme end of the sort of work Bell Pottinger was doing for the Guptas.”
Francis Ingham, director general of the trade body PRCA for the last decade, said the UK industry was “overwhelmingly ethical and professional”.
“There is always the occasional rogue element and our role is to punish them,” he said.
Ever the risk-taker, Lord Bell, after leaving the agency he co-founded, immediately looked for more of the same, setting up Sans Frontières, the same name as the arm of Bell Pottinger that handled sometimes controversial geo-political work.
Bell, who has also represented clients including the News UK chief Rebekah Brooks and the entertainer Rolf Harris, said the Bell Pottinger scandal would prompt the industry to take cover for a while but then it would be business as usual.
“There will be a lull for a while, then people will forget the controversy and people will come back,” he said.
Yet, even the hard-bitten Bell admitted there were some clients beyond the pale even for him. He turned down representing Zimbabwe’s president, Robert Mugabe, as well as the Labour party (“I wouldn’t have done a good job”).
“I wish we hadn’t taken the Guptas,” he said. “And I would like to have worked for BP, to have handled the Deepwater Horizon incident. As long as there is controversy about things there will be controversial characters. You can’t spend your life regretting what you do.”
Tuesday 21 February 2017
We’re doomed by the identity trap, damned when we try to escape
Nesrine Malik in The Guardian
Diane Abbott: misogyny and abuse are putting women off politics
Since then, she has been forced to go further, revealing this weekend that she does not walk or drive around her constituency as freely as she used to because, in the wake of Jo Cox’s murder, the death threats she receives can’t be shrugged off any more. It was a piece in which she used the word “I” for the first time in respect of her identity – it wasn’t about her profession or her political views. It is this forced “coming out” by Abbott as a black woman in public life that was disheartening.
Contrary to the view so widely held on the right, of this country being in the grip of a constantly aggrieved professional-victim class, few people actually like to talk about their experience of receiving abuse. It is uncomfortable and excruciating and diminishing, and above all a distraction when one just wants to get on with one’s business.
It is also, as many who are on the receiving end of such onslaughts (including myself) can testify, boring and predictable to have to keep running the gauntlet between attack and defence. There is another, silencing fear, as the bile swirls and rises around you: that you come across as attention-seeking or fragile. Above all, you want to show that the blows have not landed.
But when somebody occupies a public position, not speaking out becomes an abdication. It is a decision that is never taken lightly because it plays into the hands of the racists and misogynists whose ultimate motivating animus is to disabuse you of the notion that you can ever be anything but a woman who does not know her place or a member of an inferior race.
Oh but now you wince at the N-word. Come on now, you might say, let’s not get carried away and blow it all out of proportion. And besides, Abbott is hardly a flawless political figure who doesn’t deserve criticism. OK, she gets compared to a monkey and is the butt of her male colleague’s jokes about being too unattractive to hug, but what about sending her child to private school?
This is the line of argument that enables the masking of abuse behind legitimate criticism of an individual or their views. As if calling for a tree strong enough to carry her weight so she can be hanged, as was said, is a logical follow-on from any of her failings or political hypocrisies.
And then there are the accusations of playing the race card or the gender card – both denying that the abuse is real, and blaming the victim for using their minority status as a shield of deflection. It is a closed loop, a circular firing squad. You either accept the abuse with grace, turn the other cheek, or invite more abuse and derision for speaking out against it. The logical conclusion is that the only winning move is not to play.
It is ultimately this potential chilling effect that forces people to break their silence. Abbott said she had never complained until now. And she will have known of the potential cost to her stature, not to mention the possibility that her perceived vulnerability might encourage trolls further.
But ultimately, she said, she went into politics “to create space for women and other groups who have historically been treated unfairly”. It is only by creating this space that the abuse will subside, and that an individual like Diane Abbott will no longer be an offending novelty who is seen to only represent her own narrow racial or gender interests, rather than the people who elected her.
Diane Abbott on abuse of MPs: 'My staff try not to let me go out alone'
She and others like her are obliged to confront one of the most persistent political myths: that identity politics is a divisive phenomenon that actively seeks to separate minorities or women from the mainstream, conferring on them dispensation to act with impunity because any criticism is automatically bigotry. It is a notion that fails to recognise what is obvious, which is that identity is dictated from above. Abbott’s defining character as a black woman is imposed and kept alive by others, not by her. She has spent decades integrating into the mainstream.
Women or minorities aren’t droning on about discrimination and abuse because they’re snowflakes demanding special treatment. They do so because they keep being limited, circumscribed, told that they cannot have roles in public life that extend beyond their identity. But then they are condemned when they respond in terms of what is being attacked. But what else can one do? Hannah Arendt said: “If one is attacked as a Jew, one must defend oneself as a Jew.”
Playing identity politics, as critics describe it, seems less an offensive ploy than a defensive posture, akin to raising your arms to cover your face when it is repeatedly being punched.
The whole affair exemplifies the precariousness of how to deal with what is now an epidemic. Silence is not an option. Even those not personally distressed have a duty towards others – those younger, more vulnerable or just made of different stuff – to clear the way for them to claim their rightful positions in public life. But there is also a risk that by doing so, any progress minorities or women have made to break out of their pen is undermined. It is a quiet stranglehold. Diane Abbott is trying to break free of it, but at what price?
Illustration by Andrzej Krauze
Diane Abbott wrote a powerful article in these pages last week about the hatred she receives. Whatever one thinks of her politics, the veteran Labour MP has for decades been a fireball of public service. But her star has always been followed by a comet tail of toxic vapour. This personal abuse is at times snide and implied, at other times explicit, vicious and unprintable. But it is a constant in her political life, following her round, undermining her, consistently framing her in terms of her gender and her race.
Abbott’s article came just days after she received an exceptional and sustained amount of personal abuse over the article 50 vote, culminating in a leaked text sent by Brexit secretary David Davis, in which he made derogatory comments on her appearance. Her article was necessary and timely, but something about her speaking out made my heart sink. It felt like defeat; the ultimate feeding of the trolls. It is important to look beyond the headlines and understand the significance of what happened.
The fact is that her tormentors had hounded this most resilient of characters to a point where she finally cracked and, breaking a longstanding habit in a 30-year career of not commenting on personal insults, she laid it all out. She was forced to sound an alert, warning that something must be done before we get to the point in our democracy where women and minority candidates, already low in number, are bullied out of the political arena altogether.
Diane Abbott wrote a powerful article in these pages last week about the hatred she receives. Whatever one thinks of her politics, the veteran Labour MP has for decades been a fireball of public service. But her star has always been followed by a comet tail of toxic vapour. This personal abuse is at times snide and implied, at other times explicit, vicious and unprintable. But it is a constant in her political life, following her round, undermining her, consistently framing her in terms of her gender and her race.
Abbott’s article came just days after she received an exceptional and sustained amount of personal abuse over the article 50 vote, culminating in a leaked text sent by Brexit secretary David Davis, in which he made derogatory comments on her appearance. Her article was necessary and timely, but something about her speaking out made my heart sink. It felt like defeat; the ultimate feeding of the trolls. It is important to look beyond the headlines and understand the significance of what happened.
The fact is that her tormentors had hounded this most resilient of characters to a point where she finally cracked and, breaking a longstanding habit in a 30-year career of not commenting on personal insults, she laid it all out. She was forced to sound an alert, warning that something must be done before we get to the point in our democracy where women and minority candidates, already low in number, are bullied out of the political arena altogether.
Diane Abbott: misogyny and abuse are putting women off politics
Since then, she has been forced to go further, revealing this weekend that she does not walk or drive around her constituency as freely as she used to because, in the wake of Jo Cox’s murder, the death threats she receives can’t be shrugged off any more. It was a piece in which she used the word “I” for the first time in respect of her identity – it wasn’t about her profession or her political views. It is this forced “coming out” by Abbott as a black woman in public life that was disheartening.
Contrary to the view so widely held on the right, of this country being in the grip of a constantly aggrieved professional-victim class, few people actually like to talk about their experience of receiving abuse. It is uncomfortable and excruciating and diminishing, and above all a distraction when one just wants to get on with one’s business.
It is also, as many who are on the receiving end of such onslaughts (including myself) can testify, boring and predictable to have to keep running the gauntlet between attack and defence. There is another, silencing fear, as the bile swirls and rises around you: that you come across as attention-seeking or fragile. Above all, you want to show that the blows have not landed.
But when somebody occupies a public position, not speaking out becomes an abdication. It is a decision that is never taken lightly because it plays into the hands of the racists and misogynists whose ultimate motivating animus is to disabuse you of the notion that you can ever be anything but a woman who does not know her place or a member of an inferior race.
Oh but now you wince at the N-word. Come on now, you might say, let’s not get carried away and blow it all out of proportion. And besides, Abbott is hardly a flawless political figure who doesn’t deserve criticism. OK, she gets compared to a monkey and is the butt of her male colleague’s jokes about being too unattractive to hug, but what about sending her child to private school?
This is the line of argument that enables the masking of abuse behind legitimate criticism of an individual or their views. As if calling for a tree strong enough to carry her weight so she can be hanged, as was said, is a logical follow-on from any of her failings or political hypocrisies.
And then there are the accusations of playing the race card or the gender card – both denying that the abuse is real, and blaming the victim for using their minority status as a shield of deflection. It is a closed loop, a circular firing squad. You either accept the abuse with grace, turn the other cheek, or invite more abuse and derision for speaking out against it. The logical conclusion is that the only winning move is not to play.
It is ultimately this potential chilling effect that forces people to break their silence. Abbott said she had never complained until now. And she will have known of the potential cost to her stature, not to mention the possibility that her perceived vulnerability might encourage trolls further.
But ultimately, she said, she went into politics “to create space for women and other groups who have historically been treated unfairly”. It is only by creating this space that the abuse will subside, and that an individual like Diane Abbott will no longer be an offending novelty who is seen to only represent her own narrow racial or gender interests, rather than the people who elected her.
Diane Abbott on abuse of MPs: 'My staff try not to let me go out alone'
She and others like her are obliged to confront one of the most persistent political myths: that identity politics is a divisive phenomenon that actively seeks to separate minorities or women from the mainstream, conferring on them dispensation to act with impunity because any criticism is automatically bigotry. It is a notion that fails to recognise what is obvious, which is that identity is dictated from above. Abbott’s defining character as a black woman is imposed and kept alive by others, not by her. She has spent decades integrating into the mainstream.
Women or minorities aren’t droning on about discrimination and abuse because they’re snowflakes demanding special treatment. They do so because they keep being limited, circumscribed, told that they cannot have roles in public life that extend beyond their identity. But then they are condemned when they respond in terms of what is being attacked. But what else can one do? Hannah Arendt said: “If one is attacked as a Jew, one must defend oneself as a Jew.”
Playing identity politics, as critics describe it, seems less an offensive ploy than a defensive posture, akin to raising your arms to cover your face when it is repeatedly being punched.
The whole affair exemplifies the precariousness of how to deal with what is now an epidemic. Silence is not an option. Even those not personally distressed have a duty towards others – those younger, more vulnerable or just made of different stuff – to clear the way for them to claim their rightful positions in public life. But there is also a risk that by doing so, any progress minorities or women have made to break out of their pen is undermined. It is a quiet stranglehold. Diane Abbott is trying to break free of it, but at what price?
Thursday 8 December 2016
Welcome to the age of anger
Pankaj Mishra in The Guardian
The election of Donald Trump as president of the United States is the biggest political earthquake of our times, and its reverberations are inescapably global. It has fully revealed an enormous pent-up anger – which had first become visible in the mass acclaim in Russia and Turkey for pitiless despots and the electoral triumph of bloody strongmen in India and the Philippines.
The insurgencies of our time, including Brexit and the rise of the European far right, have many local causes – but it is not an accident that demagoguery appears to be rising around the world. Savage violence has erupted in recent years across a broad swath of territory: wars in Ukraine and the Middle East, insurgencies from Yemen to Thailand, terrorism and counter-terrorism, economic and cyberwar. The conflicts, not confined to fixed battlefields, feel endemic and uncontrollable. Hate-mongering against immigrants and minorities has gone mainstream; figures foaming at the mouth with loathing and malice are ubiquitous on old and new media alike.
There is much dispute about the causes of this global disorder. Many observers have characterised it as a backlash against an out-of-touch establishment, explaining Trump’s victory – in the words of Thomas Piketty – as “primarily due to the explosion in economic and geographic inequality in the United States”. Liberals tend to blame the racial resentments of poor white Americans, which were apparently aggravated during Barack Obama’s tenure. But many rich men and women – and even a small number of African-Americans and Latinos – also voted for a compulsive groper and white supremacist.
The Nobel prize-winning economist Paul Krugman admitted on the night of Trump’s victory that “people like me – and probably like most readers of the New York Times – truly didn’t understand the country we live in”. Since the twin shocks of Brexit and the US election, we have argued ineffectually about their causes, while watching aghast as the new representatives of the downtrodden and the “left-behind” – Trump and Nigel Farage, posing in a gold-plated lift – strut across a bewilderingly expanded theatre of political absurdism.
But we cannot understand this crisis because our dominant intellectual concepts and categories seem unable to process an explosion of uncontrolled forces.
In the hopeful years that followed the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, the universal triumph of liberal capitalism and democracy seemed assured; free markets and human rights would spread around the world and lift billions from poverty and oppression. In many ways, this dream has come true: we live in a vast, homogenous global market, which is more literate, interconnected and prosperous than at any other time in history.
And yet we find ourselves in an age of anger, with authoritarian leaders manipulating the cynicism and discontent of furious majorities. What used to be called “Muslim rage”, and identified with mobs of brown-skinned men with bushy beards, is suddenly manifest globally, among saffron-robed Buddhist ethnic-cleansers in Myanmar, as well as blond white nationalists in Germany. Violent hate crimes have blighted even the oldest of parliamentary democracies, with the murder of the MP Jo Cox by a British neo-Nazi during the venomous campaign for Brexit. Suddenly, as the liberal thinker Michael Ignatieff recently wrote: “Enlightenment humanism and rationalism” can no longer adequately “explain the world we’re living in.”
The largely Anglo-American intellectual assumptions forged by the cold war and its jubilant aftermath are an unreliable guide to today’s chaos – and so we must turn to the ideas of an earlier era of volatility. It is a moment for thinkers such as Sigmund Freud, who warned in 1915 that the “primitive, savage and evil impulses of mankind have not vanished in any individual”, but are simply waiting for the opportunity to show themselves again. Certainly, the current conflagration has brought to the surface what Friedrich Nietzsche called “ressentiment” – “a whole tremulous realm of subterranean revenge, inexhaustible and insatiable in outbursts.”
By contrast, the fundamental premise of our existing intellectual frameworks is the assumption that humans are essentially rational and motivated by the pursuit of their own interests; that they principally act to maximise personal happiness, rather than on the basis of fear, envy or resentment.
The bestseller Freakonomics is a perfect text of our time in its belief that “incentives are the cornerstone of modern life,” and “the key to solving just about any riddle”. From this view, the current crisis is an irruption of the irrational – and confusion and bewilderment are widespread among political, business and media elites. The ordinarily stolid Economist has lately lurched from dubious indignation over “post-Truth politics” to the Rip Van Winkle-ish declaration of “The New Nationalism”. Many other mainstream periodicals now read like parodies of New Left Review, as they attend belatedly to the failings of global capitalism – most egregiously, its failure to fulfil its own promise of general prosperity.
We can now see, all too clearly, a widening abyss of race, class and education in Britain and the US. But as explanations proliferate, how it might be bridged is more unclear than ever. Well-worn pairs of rhetorical opposites, often corresponding to the bitter divisions in our societies, have once again been put to work: progressive v reactionary, open v closed, fascism v liberalism, rational v irrational. But as a polarised intellectual industry plays catch-up with fast-moving events that it completely failed to anticipate, it is hard to avoid the suspicion that our search for rational political explanations for the current disorder is doomed. All of the opponents of the new “irrationalism” – whether left, centre, or right – are united by the presumption that individuals are rational actors, motivated by material self-interest, enraged when their desires are thwarted, and, therefore, likely to be appeased by their fulfilment.
This notion of human motivation deepened during the Enlightenment, whose leading thinkers, despising tradition and religion, sought to replace them with the human capacity to rationally identify individual and collective interests. The dream of the late 18th century, to rebuild the world along secular and rational lines, was further elaborated in the 19th century by the utilitarian theorists of the greatest happiness for the greatest number of people – and this notion of progress was embraced by socialists and capitalists alike.
After the collapse of the socialist alternative in 1989, this utopian vision took the form of a global market economy dedicated to endless growth and consumption – to which there would be no alternative. According to this worldview, the dominance of which is now nearly absolute, the human norm is Homo economicus, a calculating subject whose natural desires and instincts are shaped by their ultimate motivation: to pursue happiness and avoid pain.
This simple view always neglected many factors ever-present in human lives: the fear, for instance, of losing honour, dignity and status, the distrust of change, the appeal of stability and familiarity. There was no place in it for more complex drives: vanity, fear of appearing vulnerable, the need to save face. Obsessed with material progress, the hyperrationalists ignored the lure of resentment for the left-behind, and the tenacious pleasures of victimhood.
And yet modern history provides enormous evidence for the persistent power of unreason. It was not so long ago – in the early 19th century – that French pretensions to a rational, universal, and cosmopolitan civilisation first provoked resentful Germans into the militant expression of what we now call “cultural nationalism”: the assertion of authentic culture rooted in national or regional character and history.
One revolution after another since then has demonstrated that feelings and moods change the world by turning into potent political forces. Fear, anxiety and a sense of humiliation were the principal motive of Germany’s expansionist policy in the early 20th century – and it is impossible to understand the current upsurge of anti-western sentiment in China, Russia and India without acknowledging the role played by humiliation.
Yet a mechanistic and materialist way of conceiving human actions has become entrenched, in part because economics has become the predominant means of understanding the world. A view that took shape in the 19th century – that there is “no other nexus between man and man than naked self-interest” – has become orthodoxy once again in an intellectual climate that views the market as the ideal form of human interaction and venerates technological progress and the growth of GDP. All of this is part of the rigid contemporary belief that what counts is only what can be counted and that what cannot be counted – subjective emotions – therefore does not.
A Brexit supporter, and a Vote Remain campaigner exchange views in Market Square, Northampton, on 31 May Photograph: Christopher Furlong/Getty Images
Our current disregard of non-economic motivations is even more surprising when we learn that less than a century ago, the Enlightenment’s “narrow rational programme” for individual happiness had already become “the butt of ridicule and contempt” – as the Austrian modernist writer Robert Musil observed in 1922. Indeed, the pioneering works of sociology and psychology as well as modernist art and literature of the early 20th century were defined in part by their insistence that there is more to human beings than rational egoism, competition and acquisition, more to society than a contract between logically calculating and autonomous individuals, and more to politics than impersonal technocrats devising hyper-rational schemes of progress with the help of polls, surveys, statistics, mathematical models and technology.
Writing in the 1860s, during the high noon of 19th-century liberalism, Fyodor Dostoevsky was one of the first modern thinkers to air the suspicion, now troubling us again, that rational thinking does not decisively influence human behaviour. He pitted his Underground Man – the quintessential loser dreaming of revenge against society’s winners – against the idea, of rational egoism, or material self-interest, then popular in Russia among eager readers of John Stuart Mill and Jeremy Bentham. Dostoevsky’s protagonist obsessively assaults the shared rationalist assumptions of both capitalists and socialists: that human beings are logically calculating animals, driven by perceived incentives:
Oh, tell me who was it first announced, who was it first proclaimed, that man only does nasty things because he does not know his own interests; and that if he were enlightened, if his eyes were opened to his real normal interests, man would at once cease to do nasty things, would at once become good and noble because, being enlightened and understanding his real advantage, he would see his own advantage in the good and nothing else?
Dostoevsky defined a style of thought that was later elaborated by Nietzsche, Freud, Max Weber and others – who mounted a full-blown intellectual revolt against the oppressive certainties of rationalist ideologies, whether left, right or centre. This is an intellectual revolution that is barely remembered today – but it erupted at an emotional and political moment that would seem eerily familiar to us: a period of uneven and disruptive economic growth, distrust of politicians, fear of change, and anxiety about rootless cosmopolitans, aliens and immigrants.
This was an era when the disaffected masses – recoiling from the 19th century’s prolonged experiment in laissez-faire economic rationalism – had begun to fall for radical alternatives, in the form of blood-and-soil nationalism and anarchist terrorism. This anti-liberal political uprising forced many of those we now regard as central figures of 20th-century intellectual life to question their fundamental notions of human behaviour, and to discard the positivist nostrums that had taken root in the previous century.
By the late 1850s, Charles Darwin had already shattered the notion that human beings could control how they develop – let alone build a rational society. Novelists, sociologists and psychologists examining the turbulent mass societies of the late 19th century concluded that human actions could not be reduced to single causes, whether religious and ideological faith, or the rationality of self-interest.
Freud, who lived in turn-of-the-century Vienna while demagogues were scapegoating Jews and liberals for the mass suffering inflicted by industrial capitalism, came to see the rational intellect as “a feeble and dependent thing, a plaything and tool of our impulses and emotions”. “One gets the impression,” Freud wrote in The Future of an Illusion (1927) “that culture is something imposed on a reluctant majority by a minority that managed to gain possession of the instruments of power and coercion.” Long before the 20th century’s explosions of demagoguery, Max Weber, as he observed Germany’s hectic industrialisation, presciently speculated that individuals, unmoored by socioeconomic turmoil and alienated by bureaucratic rationalisation, could become vulnerable to a despotic leader.
The problem for these critics of Enlightenment rationalism, as Robert Musil defined it, was not that we “have too much intellect and too little soul”, but that we have “too little intellect in matters of the soul”. We suffer even more from this problem today as we struggle to make sense of the outbreaks of political irrationalism. Committed to seeing the individual self as a rational actor, we fail to see that it is a deeply unstable entity, constantly shaped and reshaped in its interplay with shifting social and cultural conditions. In our own time, amid what Hannah Arendt described as a “tremendous increase in mutual hatred and a somewhat universal irritability of everybody against everybody else”, this fragile self has become particularly vulnerable to ressentiment.
Ressentiment – caused by an intense mix of envy, humiliation and powerlessness – is not simply the French word for resentment. Its meaning was shaped in a particular cultural and social context: the rise of a secular and meritocratic society in the 18th century. Even though he never used the word, the first thinker to identify how ressentiment would emerge from modern ideals of an egalitarian and commercial society was Jean-Jacques Rousseau. An outsider to the Parisian elite of his time, who struggled with envy, fascination, revulsion and rejection, Rousseau saw how people in a society driven by individual self-interest come to live for the satisfaction of their vanity – the desire and need to secure recognition from others, to be esteemed by them as much as one esteems oneself.
But this vanity, luridly exemplified today by Donald Trump’s Twitter account, often ends up nourishing in the soul a dislike of one’s own self while stoking impotent hatred of others; and it can quickly degenerate into an aggressive drive, whereby individuals feel acknowledged only by being preferred over others, and by rejoicing in their abjection. (As Gore Vidal pithily put it: “It is not enough to succeed. Others must fail.”)
Such ressentiment breeds in proportion to the spread of the principles of equality and individualism. In the early 20th century, the German sociologist Max Scheler developed a systematic theory of ressentiment as a distinctly modern phenomenon – ingrained in all societies where formal social equality between individuals coexists with massive differences in power, education, status, and property ownership. In an era of globalised commerce, these disparities now exist everywhere, along with enlarged notions of individual aspiration and equality. Accordingly, ressentiment, an existential resentment of others, is poisoning civil society and undermining political liberty everywhere.
But what makes ressentiment particularly malign today is a growing contradiction. The ideals of modern democracy – the equality of social conditions and individual empowerment – have never been more popular. But they have become more and more difficult, if not impossible, to actually realise in the grotesquely unequal societies created by our brand of globalised capitalism.
The past two decades of hectic globalisation have brought us closer than ever before to the liberal Enlightenment ideal of a universal commercial society of self-interested, rational and autonomous individuals – one that was originally advocated in the 18th century by such thinkers as Montesquieu, Voltaire, Adam Smith, and Kant. In the 19th century, it was still possible for Marx to sneer at Jeremy Bentham for assuming “the modern shopkeeper, especially the English shopkeeper, as the normal man”. In our own time, however, the ideology of neoliberalism – a market-centric hybrid of Enlightenment rationalism and 19th-century utilitarianism – has achieved near total domination in the economic and political realm alike.
The success of this universal creed can be attested by many innovations of recent decades that now look perfectly natural. The rational market is expected to ensure the supply of valuable products and services, while the task of governments is to ensure fair competition, which produces “winners” and “losers”. The broad intellectual revolution in which an all-knowing market judges failure and success has even more forcefully insisted on the rationality of the individual.
Issues of social justice and equality have receded along with conceptions of society or community – to be replaced by the freely choosing individual in the marketplace. According to the prevailing view today, the injustices entrenched by history or social circumstances cease to matter: the slumdog, too, can be a millionaire, and the individual’s failure to escape the underclass is self-evident proof of his poor choices.
But this abstract conception has no room for the emotional situation of real, flesh-and-blood people – and how they might act within concrete social and historical settings.
One of the first people to notice the disturbing complex of emotions we now see among self-seeking individuals around the world was Alexis de Tocqueville – who was already worried in the 1830s, that the American promise of meritocracy, its uniformity of culture and manners, and “equality of conditions” would make for immoderate ambition, corrosive envy and chronic dissatisfaction. The passion for equality, he warned, could swell “to the height of fury” and lead many to acquiesce in a curtailment of their liberties, and to long for the rule of a strongman.
As De Tocqueville pointed out, people liberated from old hierarchies “want equality in freedom, and, if they cannot get it, they still want it in slavery.”
We witness a universal frenzy of fear and loathing today, because the democratic revolution De Tocqueville witnessed has spread from its American centre to the remotest corners of the world. The rage for equality is conjoined with the pursuit of prosperity mandated by the global consumer economy, aggravating tensions and contradictions in inner lives that are then played out in the public sphere.
“To live in freedom,” De Tocqueville warned, “one must grow used to a life full of agitation, change and danger.” This kind of life is barren of stability, security, identity and honour, even when it overflows with material goods. Nevertheless, it is now commonplace among people around the world that rational considerations of utility and profit – the needs of supply chains and the imperatives of quarterly shareholder returns – uproot, humiliate and render obsolete.
The widespread experience of the maelstrom of modernity has only heightened the lure of ressentiment. Many new individuals now “live in freedom”, in De Tocqueville’s words, even as they are enslaved by finely integrated political, economic and cultural powers: the opaque workings of finance capital, the harsh machinery of social security, juridical and penal systems, and the unrelenting ideological influence of the media and the internet.
Never have so many free individuals felt so helpless – so desperate to take back control from anyone they can blame for their feeling of having lost it. It should not be surprising that we have seen an exponential rise in hatred of minorities, the main pathology induced by political and economic shocks. These apparent racists and misogynists have clearly suffered silently for a long time from what Albert Camus called “an autointoxication – the evil secretion, in a sealed vessel, of prolonged impotence”. It was this gangrenous ressentiment, festering for so long in places such as the Daily Mail and Fox News, that erupted volcanically with Trump’s victory.
Rich and poor alike voting for a serial liar and tax dodger have confirmed yet again that human desires operate independently of the logic of self-interest – and may even be destructive of it. Our political and intellectual elites midwifed the new “irrationalism” through a studied indifference to the emotional dislocation and economic suffering induced by modern capitalism. Not surprisingly, they are now unable to explain its rise. Indeed, their universal assumption, hardened since 1989, that there are no alternatives to western-style democracy and capitalism – the famous “end of history” – is precisely what has made us incapable of grasping the political phenomena shaking the world today.
It is clear now that the exaltation of individual will as something free of social and historical pressures, and as flexible as markets, concealed a breathtaking innocence about structural inequality and the psychic damage it causes. The contemporary obsession with individual choice and human agency disregarded even the basic discoveries of late-19th-century sociology: that in any mass society life chances are unevenly distributed, there are permanent winners and losers, a minority dominates the majority, and the elites are prone to manipulate and deceive.
Even the terrorist attacks of 9/11 left undisturbed the vision in which a global economy built around free markets, competition and rational individual choices would alleviate ethnic and religious differences and usher in worldwide prosperity and peace. In this utopia, any irrational obstacles to the spread of liberal modernity – such as Islamic fundamentalism – would be eventually eradicated. Fantasies of a classless and post-racial society of empowered rational-choice actors bloomed as late as 2008, the year of the most devastating economic crisis since the Great Depression.
Today, however, the basic assumptions of cold war liberalism lie in ruins – after decades of intellectual exertion to construct flimsy oppositions between the rational west and the irrational east. The political big bang of our time does not merely threaten the vanity projects of an intellectual elite, but the health of democracy itself – the defining project of the modern world. Since the late 18th century, tradition and religion have been steadily discarded, in the hope that rational, self-interested individuals can form a liberal political community that defines its shared laws, ensuring dignity and equal rights for each citizen, irrespective of ethnicity, race, religion and gender. This basic premise of secular modernity, which earlier only seemed menaced by religious fundamentalists, is now endangered by elected demagogues in its very heartlands, Europe and the US.
Where do we go from here? We can of course continue to define the crisis of democracy through reassuring dualisms: liberalism v authoritarianism, Islam v modernity, and that sort of thing. It may be more fruitful to think of democracy as a profoundly fraught emotional and social condition – one which, aggravated by turbo-capitalism, has now become unstable. This might allow us to examine the workings of ressentiment across varied countries and classes, and to understand why ethno-nationalist supremacy has grown alongside economic stagnation in America and Britain, even as it flourishes alongside economic expansion in India and Turkey. Or, why Donald Trump, the flashy plutocrat tormented by his lowly status among Manhattan’s cultivated liberals, obsessively baits the New York Times and calls for a boycott of the Broadway show Hamilton.
That a rancorous Twitter troll will soon become the world’s most powerful man is the latest of many reminders that the idealised claims of western elites about democracy and liberalism never actually conformed to the political and economic reality at home. A rowdy public culture of disparagement and admonition does not hide the fact that the chasm of sensibility between a technocratic elite and the masses has grown. Everywhere, a majority that was promised growing equality sees social power monopolised by people with money, property, connections and talent; they feel shut out from both higher culture and decision-making.
Many people find it easy to aim their rage against an allegedly cosmopolitan and rootless cultural elite. Objects of hatred are needed more than ever during times of crisis, and rich “citizens of nowhere” – as Theresa May dubbed them – conveniently embody the vices of a desperately sought-after but infuriatingly unattainable modernity. And so globalisation, which promotes integration among shrewd elites, helps incite ressentiment everywhere else, especially among people forced against their will into universal competition.
In search of a balm for these wounds, many intellectuals have embraced nostalgic fantasies of vanished unity. Earlier this year, the New York Times columnist David Brooks returned from communist Cuba gushing about Cubans’ “fierce love of country, a sense of national solidarity and a confident patriotic spirit that is today lacking in the United States.” More recently, Simon Jenkins, in this newspaper, and the intellectual historian Mark Lilla – in a widely circulated New York Times opinion piece – have urged the rejection of “identity liberalism” and the necessity of embracing national unity and common identity. As Trump’s victory was declared, Simon Schama tweeted that we need a new Churchill to save democracy in Europe and America.
A Trump supporter in Ambridge, Pennsylvania during the presidential election campaign. Photograph: Evan Vucci/AP
Such breast-beating amounts to a truly irrational demand: that the present abolish itself, making way for a return to the past. Ideally, to the time when paternalistic white liberals occupied the vital centre, little disturbed by the needs and desires of history’s forgotten, humiliated and silenced people.
These lamentations for simpler times – that all we lack is the right sort of spine-stiffening democratic leader, or rational culture, or cultural unity, or patriotic spirit – ignore the fragmented nature of our politics. Social and technological developments are not liberal or conservative, democratic or authoritarian; they are as prone to enshrine LGBT rights as to reinstate torture and disseminate fake news. Nor does the longing for the good old days adequately respond to the massive crisis of legitimacy facing democratic institutions today.
Political antidotes to the sinister pathologies unleashed by Putin, Erdoğan, Modi, Brexit and Trump require a reckoning with the bad new days – something a lot more forward-looking than models of solidarity inspired by Cuba or Churchill, nationalist pedagogies for the oppressed, or dauntless faith in globalisation eventually delivering the promised goods.
This work is necessary – but it can only proceed with a more sophisticated analysis of how today’s landscape of hyperrational power has coerced a new and increasingly potent irrationalism into existence. And such analyses would require, above all, a richer and more varied picture of human experience and needs than the prevailing image of Homo economicus. This intellectual effort – which was first undertaken more than a century ago by the thinkers cited here – would necessarily take us beyond liberalism and its faith in the curative power of economic growth.
What Robert Musil called the “liberal scraps of an unfounded faith in reason and progress” have yet again failed modern human beings in their all-important task of understanding their experience. We once more confront the possibility, outlined in Musil’s great novel about the collapse of liberal values, The Man Without Qualities, that the characteristic desolation of the modern human being – his “immense loneliness in a desert of detail, his restlessness, malice, incomparable callousness, his greed for money, his coldness and violence’ – is “the result of the losses that logically precise thinking has inflicted on the soul”.
For nearly three decades, the religion of technology and GDP and the crude 19th-century calculus of self-interest have dominated politics and intellectual life. Today, the society of entrepreneurial individuals competing in the rational market reveals unplumbed depths of misery and despair; it spawns a nihilistic rebellion against order itself.
With so many of our landmarks in ruins, we can barely see where we are headed, let alone chart a path. But even to get our basic bearings we need, above all, greater precision in matters of the soul. The stunning events of our age of anger, and our perplexity before them, make it imperative that we anchor thought in the sphere of emotions; these upheavals demand nothing less than a radically enlarged understanding of what it means for human beings to pursue the contradictory ideals of freedom, equality and prosperity.
Otherwise, in our sterile infatuation with rational motivations and outcomes, we risk resembling those helpless navigators who, De Tocqueville wrote, “stare obstinately at some ruins that can still be seen on the shore we have left, even as the current pulls us along and drags us backward toward the abyss”.
The election of Donald Trump as president of the United States is the biggest political earthquake of our times, and its reverberations are inescapably global. It has fully revealed an enormous pent-up anger – which had first become visible in the mass acclaim in Russia and Turkey for pitiless despots and the electoral triumph of bloody strongmen in India and the Philippines.
The insurgencies of our time, including Brexit and the rise of the European far right, have many local causes – but it is not an accident that demagoguery appears to be rising around the world. Savage violence has erupted in recent years across a broad swath of territory: wars in Ukraine and the Middle East, insurgencies from Yemen to Thailand, terrorism and counter-terrorism, economic and cyberwar. The conflicts, not confined to fixed battlefields, feel endemic and uncontrollable. Hate-mongering against immigrants and minorities has gone mainstream; figures foaming at the mouth with loathing and malice are ubiquitous on old and new media alike.
There is much dispute about the causes of this global disorder. Many observers have characterised it as a backlash against an out-of-touch establishment, explaining Trump’s victory – in the words of Thomas Piketty – as “primarily due to the explosion in economic and geographic inequality in the United States”. Liberals tend to blame the racial resentments of poor white Americans, which were apparently aggravated during Barack Obama’s tenure. But many rich men and women – and even a small number of African-Americans and Latinos – also voted for a compulsive groper and white supremacist.
The Nobel prize-winning economist Paul Krugman admitted on the night of Trump’s victory that “people like me – and probably like most readers of the New York Times – truly didn’t understand the country we live in”. Since the twin shocks of Brexit and the US election, we have argued ineffectually about their causes, while watching aghast as the new representatives of the downtrodden and the “left-behind” – Trump and Nigel Farage, posing in a gold-plated lift – strut across a bewilderingly expanded theatre of political absurdism.
But we cannot understand this crisis because our dominant intellectual concepts and categories seem unable to process an explosion of uncontrolled forces.
In the hopeful years that followed the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, the universal triumph of liberal capitalism and democracy seemed assured; free markets and human rights would spread around the world and lift billions from poverty and oppression. In many ways, this dream has come true: we live in a vast, homogenous global market, which is more literate, interconnected and prosperous than at any other time in history.
And yet we find ourselves in an age of anger, with authoritarian leaders manipulating the cynicism and discontent of furious majorities. What used to be called “Muslim rage”, and identified with mobs of brown-skinned men with bushy beards, is suddenly manifest globally, among saffron-robed Buddhist ethnic-cleansers in Myanmar, as well as blond white nationalists in Germany. Violent hate crimes have blighted even the oldest of parliamentary democracies, with the murder of the MP Jo Cox by a British neo-Nazi during the venomous campaign for Brexit. Suddenly, as the liberal thinker Michael Ignatieff recently wrote: “Enlightenment humanism and rationalism” can no longer adequately “explain the world we’re living in.”
The largely Anglo-American intellectual assumptions forged by the cold war and its jubilant aftermath are an unreliable guide to today’s chaos – and so we must turn to the ideas of an earlier era of volatility. It is a moment for thinkers such as Sigmund Freud, who warned in 1915 that the “primitive, savage and evil impulses of mankind have not vanished in any individual”, but are simply waiting for the opportunity to show themselves again. Certainly, the current conflagration has brought to the surface what Friedrich Nietzsche called “ressentiment” – “a whole tremulous realm of subterranean revenge, inexhaustible and insatiable in outbursts.”
By contrast, the fundamental premise of our existing intellectual frameworks is the assumption that humans are essentially rational and motivated by the pursuit of their own interests; that they principally act to maximise personal happiness, rather than on the basis of fear, envy or resentment.
The bestseller Freakonomics is a perfect text of our time in its belief that “incentives are the cornerstone of modern life,” and “the key to solving just about any riddle”. From this view, the current crisis is an irruption of the irrational – and confusion and bewilderment are widespread among political, business and media elites. The ordinarily stolid Economist has lately lurched from dubious indignation over “post-Truth politics” to the Rip Van Winkle-ish declaration of “The New Nationalism”. Many other mainstream periodicals now read like parodies of New Left Review, as they attend belatedly to the failings of global capitalism – most egregiously, its failure to fulfil its own promise of general prosperity.
We can now see, all too clearly, a widening abyss of race, class and education in Britain and the US. But as explanations proliferate, how it might be bridged is more unclear than ever. Well-worn pairs of rhetorical opposites, often corresponding to the bitter divisions in our societies, have once again been put to work: progressive v reactionary, open v closed, fascism v liberalism, rational v irrational. But as a polarised intellectual industry plays catch-up with fast-moving events that it completely failed to anticipate, it is hard to avoid the suspicion that our search for rational political explanations for the current disorder is doomed. All of the opponents of the new “irrationalism” – whether left, centre, or right – are united by the presumption that individuals are rational actors, motivated by material self-interest, enraged when their desires are thwarted, and, therefore, likely to be appeased by their fulfilment.
This notion of human motivation deepened during the Enlightenment, whose leading thinkers, despising tradition and religion, sought to replace them with the human capacity to rationally identify individual and collective interests. The dream of the late 18th century, to rebuild the world along secular and rational lines, was further elaborated in the 19th century by the utilitarian theorists of the greatest happiness for the greatest number of people – and this notion of progress was embraced by socialists and capitalists alike.
After the collapse of the socialist alternative in 1989, this utopian vision took the form of a global market economy dedicated to endless growth and consumption – to which there would be no alternative. According to this worldview, the dominance of which is now nearly absolute, the human norm is Homo economicus, a calculating subject whose natural desires and instincts are shaped by their ultimate motivation: to pursue happiness and avoid pain.
This simple view always neglected many factors ever-present in human lives: the fear, for instance, of losing honour, dignity and status, the distrust of change, the appeal of stability and familiarity. There was no place in it for more complex drives: vanity, fear of appearing vulnerable, the need to save face. Obsessed with material progress, the hyperrationalists ignored the lure of resentment for the left-behind, and the tenacious pleasures of victimhood.
And yet modern history provides enormous evidence for the persistent power of unreason. It was not so long ago – in the early 19th century – that French pretensions to a rational, universal, and cosmopolitan civilisation first provoked resentful Germans into the militant expression of what we now call “cultural nationalism”: the assertion of authentic culture rooted in national or regional character and history.
One revolution after another since then has demonstrated that feelings and moods change the world by turning into potent political forces. Fear, anxiety and a sense of humiliation were the principal motive of Germany’s expansionist policy in the early 20th century – and it is impossible to understand the current upsurge of anti-western sentiment in China, Russia and India without acknowledging the role played by humiliation.
Yet a mechanistic and materialist way of conceiving human actions has become entrenched, in part because economics has become the predominant means of understanding the world. A view that took shape in the 19th century – that there is “no other nexus between man and man than naked self-interest” – has become orthodoxy once again in an intellectual climate that views the market as the ideal form of human interaction and venerates technological progress and the growth of GDP. All of this is part of the rigid contemporary belief that what counts is only what can be counted and that what cannot be counted – subjective emotions – therefore does not.
A Brexit supporter, and a Vote Remain campaigner exchange views in Market Square, Northampton, on 31 May Photograph: Christopher Furlong/Getty Images
Our current disregard of non-economic motivations is even more surprising when we learn that less than a century ago, the Enlightenment’s “narrow rational programme” for individual happiness had already become “the butt of ridicule and contempt” – as the Austrian modernist writer Robert Musil observed in 1922. Indeed, the pioneering works of sociology and psychology as well as modernist art and literature of the early 20th century were defined in part by their insistence that there is more to human beings than rational egoism, competition and acquisition, more to society than a contract between logically calculating and autonomous individuals, and more to politics than impersonal technocrats devising hyper-rational schemes of progress with the help of polls, surveys, statistics, mathematical models and technology.
Writing in the 1860s, during the high noon of 19th-century liberalism, Fyodor Dostoevsky was one of the first modern thinkers to air the suspicion, now troubling us again, that rational thinking does not decisively influence human behaviour. He pitted his Underground Man – the quintessential loser dreaming of revenge against society’s winners – against the idea, of rational egoism, or material self-interest, then popular in Russia among eager readers of John Stuart Mill and Jeremy Bentham. Dostoevsky’s protagonist obsessively assaults the shared rationalist assumptions of both capitalists and socialists: that human beings are logically calculating animals, driven by perceived incentives:
Oh, tell me who was it first announced, who was it first proclaimed, that man only does nasty things because he does not know his own interests; and that if he were enlightened, if his eyes were opened to his real normal interests, man would at once cease to do nasty things, would at once become good and noble because, being enlightened and understanding his real advantage, he would see his own advantage in the good and nothing else?
Dostoevsky defined a style of thought that was later elaborated by Nietzsche, Freud, Max Weber and others – who mounted a full-blown intellectual revolt against the oppressive certainties of rationalist ideologies, whether left, right or centre. This is an intellectual revolution that is barely remembered today – but it erupted at an emotional and political moment that would seem eerily familiar to us: a period of uneven and disruptive economic growth, distrust of politicians, fear of change, and anxiety about rootless cosmopolitans, aliens and immigrants.
This was an era when the disaffected masses – recoiling from the 19th century’s prolonged experiment in laissez-faire economic rationalism – had begun to fall for radical alternatives, in the form of blood-and-soil nationalism and anarchist terrorism. This anti-liberal political uprising forced many of those we now regard as central figures of 20th-century intellectual life to question their fundamental notions of human behaviour, and to discard the positivist nostrums that had taken root in the previous century.
By the late 1850s, Charles Darwin had already shattered the notion that human beings could control how they develop – let alone build a rational society. Novelists, sociologists and psychologists examining the turbulent mass societies of the late 19th century concluded that human actions could not be reduced to single causes, whether religious and ideological faith, or the rationality of self-interest.
Freud, who lived in turn-of-the-century Vienna while demagogues were scapegoating Jews and liberals for the mass suffering inflicted by industrial capitalism, came to see the rational intellect as “a feeble and dependent thing, a plaything and tool of our impulses and emotions”. “One gets the impression,” Freud wrote in The Future of an Illusion (1927) “that culture is something imposed on a reluctant majority by a minority that managed to gain possession of the instruments of power and coercion.” Long before the 20th century’s explosions of demagoguery, Max Weber, as he observed Germany’s hectic industrialisation, presciently speculated that individuals, unmoored by socioeconomic turmoil and alienated by bureaucratic rationalisation, could become vulnerable to a despotic leader.
The problem for these critics of Enlightenment rationalism, as Robert Musil defined it, was not that we “have too much intellect and too little soul”, but that we have “too little intellect in matters of the soul”. We suffer even more from this problem today as we struggle to make sense of the outbreaks of political irrationalism. Committed to seeing the individual self as a rational actor, we fail to see that it is a deeply unstable entity, constantly shaped and reshaped in its interplay with shifting social and cultural conditions. In our own time, amid what Hannah Arendt described as a “tremendous increase in mutual hatred and a somewhat universal irritability of everybody against everybody else”, this fragile self has become particularly vulnerable to ressentiment.
Ressentiment – caused by an intense mix of envy, humiliation and powerlessness – is not simply the French word for resentment. Its meaning was shaped in a particular cultural and social context: the rise of a secular and meritocratic society in the 18th century. Even though he never used the word, the first thinker to identify how ressentiment would emerge from modern ideals of an egalitarian and commercial society was Jean-Jacques Rousseau. An outsider to the Parisian elite of his time, who struggled with envy, fascination, revulsion and rejection, Rousseau saw how people in a society driven by individual self-interest come to live for the satisfaction of their vanity – the desire and need to secure recognition from others, to be esteemed by them as much as one esteems oneself.
But this vanity, luridly exemplified today by Donald Trump’s Twitter account, often ends up nourishing in the soul a dislike of one’s own self while stoking impotent hatred of others; and it can quickly degenerate into an aggressive drive, whereby individuals feel acknowledged only by being preferred over others, and by rejoicing in their abjection. (As Gore Vidal pithily put it: “It is not enough to succeed. Others must fail.”)
Such ressentiment breeds in proportion to the spread of the principles of equality and individualism. In the early 20th century, the German sociologist Max Scheler developed a systematic theory of ressentiment as a distinctly modern phenomenon – ingrained in all societies where formal social equality between individuals coexists with massive differences in power, education, status, and property ownership. In an era of globalised commerce, these disparities now exist everywhere, along with enlarged notions of individual aspiration and equality. Accordingly, ressentiment, an existential resentment of others, is poisoning civil society and undermining political liberty everywhere.
But what makes ressentiment particularly malign today is a growing contradiction. The ideals of modern democracy – the equality of social conditions and individual empowerment – have never been more popular. But they have become more and more difficult, if not impossible, to actually realise in the grotesquely unequal societies created by our brand of globalised capitalism.
The past two decades of hectic globalisation have brought us closer than ever before to the liberal Enlightenment ideal of a universal commercial society of self-interested, rational and autonomous individuals – one that was originally advocated in the 18th century by such thinkers as Montesquieu, Voltaire, Adam Smith, and Kant. In the 19th century, it was still possible for Marx to sneer at Jeremy Bentham for assuming “the modern shopkeeper, especially the English shopkeeper, as the normal man”. In our own time, however, the ideology of neoliberalism – a market-centric hybrid of Enlightenment rationalism and 19th-century utilitarianism – has achieved near total domination in the economic and political realm alike.
The success of this universal creed can be attested by many innovations of recent decades that now look perfectly natural. The rational market is expected to ensure the supply of valuable products and services, while the task of governments is to ensure fair competition, which produces “winners” and “losers”. The broad intellectual revolution in which an all-knowing market judges failure and success has even more forcefully insisted on the rationality of the individual.
Issues of social justice and equality have receded along with conceptions of society or community – to be replaced by the freely choosing individual in the marketplace. According to the prevailing view today, the injustices entrenched by history or social circumstances cease to matter: the slumdog, too, can be a millionaire, and the individual’s failure to escape the underclass is self-evident proof of his poor choices.
But this abstract conception has no room for the emotional situation of real, flesh-and-blood people – and how they might act within concrete social and historical settings.
One of the first people to notice the disturbing complex of emotions we now see among self-seeking individuals around the world was Alexis de Tocqueville – who was already worried in the 1830s, that the American promise of meritocracy, its uniformity of culture and manners, and “equality of conditions” would make for immoderate ambition, corrosive envy and chronic dissatisfaction. The passion for equality, he warned, could swell “to the height of fury” and lead many to acquiesce in a curtailment of their liberties, and to long for the rule of a strongman.
As De Tocqueville pointed out, people liberated from old hierarchies “want equality in freedom, and, if they cannot get it, they still want it in slavery.”
We witness a universal frenzy of fear and loathing today, because the democratic revolution De Tocqueville witnessed has spread from its American centre to the remotest corners of the world. The rage for equality is conjoined with the pursuit of prosperity mandated by the global consumer economy, aggravating tensions and contradictions in inner lives that are then played out in the public sphere.
“To live in freedom,” De Tocqueville warned, “one must grow used to a life full of agitation, change and danger.” This kind of life is barren of stability, security, identity and honour, even when it overflows with material goods. Nevertheless, it is now commonplace among people around the world that rational considerations of utility and profit – the needs of supply chains and the imperatives of quarterly shareholder returns – uproot, humiliate and render obsolete.
The widespread experience of the maelstrom of modernity has only heightened the lure of ressentiment. Many new individuals now “live in freedom”, in De Tocqueville’s words, even as they are enslaved by finely integrated political, economic and cultural powers: the opaque workings of finance capital, the harsh machinery of social security, juridical and penal systems, and the unrelenting ideological influence of the media and the internet.
Never have so many free individuals felt so helpless – so desperate to take back control from anyone they can blame for their feeling of having lost it. It should not be surprising that we have seen an exponential rise in hatred of minorities, the main pathology induced by political and economic shocks. These apparent racists and misogynists have clearly suffered silently for a long time from what Albert Camus called “an autointoxication – the evil secretion, in a sealed vessel, of prolonged impotence”. It was this gangrenous ressentiment, festering for so long in places such as the Daily Mail and Fox News, that erupted volcanically with Trump’s victory.
Rich and poor alike voting for a serial liar and tax dodger have confirmed yet again that human desires operate independently of the logic of self-interest – and may even be destructive of it. Our political and intellectual elites midwifed the new “irrationalism” through a studied indifference to the emotional dislocation and economic suffering induced by modern capitalism. Not surprisingly, they are now unable to explain its rise. Indeed, their universal assumption, hardened since 1989, that there are no alternatives to western-style democracy and capitalism – the famous “end of history” – is precisely what has made us incapable of grasping the political phenomena shaking the world today.
It is clear now that the exaltation of individual will as something free of social and historical pressures, and as flexible as markets, concealed a breathtaking innocence about structural inequality and the psychic damage it causes. The contemporary obsession with individual choice and human agency disregarded even the basic discoveries of late-19th-century sociology: that in any mass society life chances are unevenly distributed, there are permanent winners and losers, a minority dominates the majority, and the elites are prone to manipulate and deceive.
Even the terrorist attacks of 9/11 left undisturbed the vision in which a global economy built around free markets, competition and rational individual choices would alleviate ethnic and religious differences and usher in worldwide prosperity and peace. In this utopia, any irrational obstacles to the spread of liberal modernity – such as Islamic fundamentalism – would be eventually eradicated. Fantasies of a classless and post-racial society of empowered rational-choice actors bloomed as late as 2008, the year of the most devastating economic crisis since the Great Depression.
Today, however, the basic assumptions of cold war liberalism lie in ruins – after decades of intellectual exertion to construct flimsy oppositions between the rational west and the irrational east. The political big bang of our time does not merely threaten the vanity projects of an intellectual elite, but the health of democracy itself – the defining project of the modern world. Since the late 18th century, tradition and religion have been steadily discarded, in the hope that rational, self-interested individuals can form a liberal political community that defines its shared laws, ensuring dignity and equal rights for each citizen, irrespective of ethnicity, race, religion and gender. This basic premise of secular modernity, which earlier only seemed menaced by religious fundamentalists, is now endangered by elected demagogues in its very heartlands, Europe and the US.
Where do we go from here? We can of course continue to define the crisis of democracy through reassuring dualisms: liberalism v authoritarianism, Islam v modernity, and that sort of thing. It may be more fruitful to think of democracy as a profoundly fraught emotional and social condition – one which, aggravated by turbo-capitalism, has now become unstable. This might allow us to examine the workings of ressentiment across varied countries and classes, and to understand why ethno-nationalist supremacy has grown alongside economic stagnation in America and Britain, even as it flourishes alongside economic expansion in India and Turkey. Or, why Donald Trump, the flashy plutocrat tormented by his lowly status among Manhattan’s cultivated liberals, obsessively baits the New York Times and calls for a boycott of the Broadway show Hamilton.
That a rancorous Twitter troll will soon become the world’s most powerful man is the latest of many reminders that the idealised claims of western elites about democracy and liberalism never actually conformed to the political and economic reality at home. A rowdy public culture of disparagement and admonition does not hide the fact that the chasm of sensibility between a technocratic elite and the masses has grown. Everywhere, a majority that was promised growing equality sees social power monopolised by people with money, property, connections and talent; they feel shut out from both higher culture and decision-making.
Many people find it easy to aim their rage against an allegedly cosmopolitan and rootless cultural elite. Objects of hatred are needed more than ever during times of crisis, and rich “citizens of nowhere” – as Theresa May dubbed them – conveniently embody the vices of a desperately sought-after but infuriatingly unattainable modernity. And so globalisation, which promotes integration among shrewd elites, helps incite ressentiment everywhere else, especially among people forced against their will into universal competition.
In search of a balm for these wounds, many intellectuals have embraced nostalgic fantasies of vanished unity. Earlier this year, the New York Times columnist David Brooks returned from communist Cuba gushing about Cubans’ “fierce love of country, a sense of national solidarity and a confident patriotic spirit that is today lacking in the United States.” More recently, Simon Jenkins, in this newspaper, and the intellectual historian Mark Lilla – in a widely circulated New York Times opinion piece – have urged the rejection of “identity liberalism” and the necessity of embracing national unity and common identity. As Trump’s victory was declared, Simon Schama tweeted that we need a new Churchill to save democracy in Europe and America.
A Trump supporter in Ambridge, Pennsylvania during the presidential election campaign. Photograph: Evan Vucci/AP
Such breast-beating amounts to a truly irrational demand: that the present abolish itself, making way for a return to the past. Ideally, to the time when paternalistic white liberals occupied the vital centre, little disturbed by the needs and desires of history’s forgotten, humiliated and silenced people.
These lamentations for simpler times – that all we lack is the right sort of spine-stiffening democratic leader, or rational culture, or cultural unity, or patriotic spirit – ignore the fragmented nature of our politics. Social and technological developments are not liberal or conservative, democratic or authoritarian; they are as prone to enshrine LGBT rights as to reinstate torture and disseminate fake news. Nor does the longing for the good old days adequately respond to the massive crisis of legitimacy facing democratic institutions today.
Political antidotes to the sinister pathologies unleashed by Putin, Erdoğan, Modi, Brexit and Trump require a reckoning with the bad new days – something a lot more forward-looking than models of solidarity inspired by Cuba or Churchill, nationalist pedagogies for the oppressed, or dauntless faith in globalisation eventually delivering the promised goods.
This work is necessary – but it can only proceed with a more sophisticated analysis of how today’s landscape of hyperrational power has coerced a new and increasingly potent irrationalism into existence. And such analyses would require, above all, a richer and more varied picture of human experience and needs than the prevailing image of Homo economicus. This intellectual effort – which was first undertaken more than a century ago by the thinkers cited here – would necessarily take us beyond liberalism and its faith in the curative power of economic growth.
What Robert Musil called the “liberal scraps of an unfounded faith in reason and progress” have yet again failed modern human beings in their all-important task of understanding their experience. We once more confront the possibility, outlined in Musil’s great novel about the collapse of liberal values, The Man Without Qualities, that the characteristic desolation of the modern human being – his “immense loneliness in a desert of detail, his restlessness, malice, incomparable callousness, his greed for money, his coldness and violence’ – is “the result of the losses that logically precise thinking has inflicted on the soul”.
For nearly three decades, the religion of technology and GDP and the crude 19th-century calculus of self-interest have dominated politics and intellectual life. Today, the society of entrepreneurial individuals competing in the rational market reveals unplumbed depths of misery and despair; it spawns a nihilistic rebellion against order itself.
With so many of our landmarks in ruins, we can barely see where we are headed, let alone chart a path. But even to get our basic bearings we need, above all, greater precision in matters of the soul. The stunning events of our age of anger, and our perplexity before them, make it imperative that we anchor thought in the sphere of emotions; these upheavals demand nothing less than a radically enlarged understanding of what it means for human beings to pursue the contradictory ideals of freedom, equality and prosperity.
Otherwise, in our sterile infatuation with rational motivations and outcomes, we risk resembling those helpless navigators who, De Tocqueville wrote, “stare obstinately at some ruins that can still be seen on the shore we have left, even as the current pulls us along and drags us backward toward the abyss”.
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