Hazel Sheffield in The Independent
Sweden is so good at recycling that, for several years, it has imported rubbish from other countries to keep its recycling plants going. Less than 1 per cent of Swedish household waste was sent to landfill last year or any year since 2011.
We can only dream of such an effective system in the UK, which is why we end up paying expensive transport costs to send rubbish to be recycled overseas rather than paying fines to send it to landfill under The Landfill Tax of 1996.
The UK has made strides in the proportion of waste recycled under an EU target of 50 per cent by 2020. This has underpinned hundreds of millions of pounds of investment into recycling facilities and energy recovery plants in the UK, creating many jobs. We’re not quite at that target yet. Recycling in the UK peaked at around 45 per cent of all waste in 2014.
Since then, provisional figures from the ONS have shown that figure has dropped to 44 per cent as austerity has resulted in budget cuts. The decision to leave the EU could be about to make this situation worse. While Europe is aiming for a 65 per cent recycling target by 2030, the UK may be about to fall even further behind its green neighbours.
Why are we sending waste to Sweden? Their system is so far ahead because of a culture of looking after the environment. Sweden was one of the first countries to implement a heavy tax on fossil fuels in 1991 and now sources almost half its electricity from renewables.
“Swedish people are quite keen on being out in nature and they are aware of what we need do on nature and environmental issues. We worked on communications for a long time to make people aware not to throw things outdoors so that we can recycle and reuse,” says Anna-Carin Gripwall, director of communications for Avfall Sverige, the Swedish Waste Management’s recycling association.
Over time, Sweden has implemented a cohesive national recycling policy so that even though private companies undertake most of the business of importing and burning waste, the energy goes into a national heating network to heat homes through the freezing Swedish winter. “That’s a key reason that we have this district network, so we can make use of the heating from the waste plants. In the southern part of Europe they don’t make use of the heating from the waste, it just goes out the chimney. Here we use it as a substitute for fossil fuel,” Ms Gripwell says.
Sweden’s heating network is not without its detractors. They argue that the country is dodging real recycling by sending waste to be incinerated. Paper plant managers say that wood fibre can be used up to six times before it becomes dust. If Sweden burns paper before that point it is exhausting the potential for true recycling and replacing used paper with fresh raw material.
Ms Gripwall says the aim in Sweden is still to stop people sending waste to recycling in the first place. A national campaign called the “Miljönär-vänlig” movement has for several years promoted the notion that there is much to be gained through repairing, sharing and reusing.
She describes Sweden’s policy of importing waste to recycle from other countries as a temporary situation. “There’s a ban on landfill in EU countries, so instead of paying the fine they send it to us as a service. They should and will build their own plants, to reduce their own waste, as we are working hard to do in Sweden,” Ms Gripwall says.
“Hopefully there will be less waste and the waste that has to go to incineration should be incinerated in each country. But to use recycling for heating you have to have district heating or cooling systems, so you have to build the infrastructure for that, and that takes time,” she adds.
Swedish municipalities are individually investing in futuristic waste collection techniques, like automated vacuum systems in residential blocks, removing the need for collection transport, and underground container systems that free up road space and get rid of any smells.
In the UK, each local authority has its own system, making it difficult for residents to be confident about what they can recycle and where. “We need more of a coherent national strategy in England to the collection of recyclable materials, rather than the current approach, whereby it is largely left to individual local authorities to determine their own collection policies,” says Angus Evers, partner at Shoosmiths and a convenor of the UK Environmental Law Association’s Waste Working Party.
Local authorities will often start by recycling the highest volume materials because they are measured according to the proportion of waste recycled, so bigger items count for more. “Whatever we end up with in the UK, we need a system which collects all recyclable materials rather than cherry-picking the easiest and cheapest,” says Richard Hands, chief executive of ACE UK, the drink carton industry’s trade association.
Mr Hands points to his own drinks carton industry, which includes Tetra Pak, SIG Combibloc and Elopak. Through ACE UK, these brands have driven up carton recycling, more than doubling the number of local authorities collecting cartons from 31 per cent in 2011 to 65 per cent in 2016.
He says that the UK needs to build infrastructure around recycling plants so that it can stop sending waste overseas. Some local authorities already have a “no export” policy to achieve this. “Growing the UK waste industry will create jobs and generate UK-based revenue for the economy,” Mr Hands says.
Angus Evers says a better domestic recycling system should be a part of our strategy for leaving the EU. “The materials we currently export represent a huge drain of valuable resources going out of the UK that could be used in the UK economy to make new products and reduce our imports of raw materials. If we have aspirations to be less dependent on Europe, then we need to be more self-sufficient and recycle more,” Mr Evers says.
And what will Sweden do if we stop sending it rubbish to feed its heating system? Ms Gripwall says the Swedes will not freeze – they have biofuels ready to substitute for our exported waste.
Friday, 9 December 2016
Thursday, 8 December 2016
Why Corbyn could come up Trumps
Mary Dejevsky in The Independent
The season of looking back with big ideas has come early this year, thanks to Brexit, Donald Trump and now the referendum rout in Italy. And two of these big ideas tend to converge. The first is that populism is on the march, thanks to those “left behind” by free-market orthodoxies. The second is a despairing cry of: “Where, oh where, is the political left when we need it?”
In the UK, those “left behind” are now in the sights of all political persuasions, but most conspicuously from the right and from those experts so derided by the Brexiteers. Theresa May has made social justice a theme of her early months as Prime Minister, while the minuses of globalisation have featured even in a speech by the head of the Bank of England, along with arguments that something – though it is unclear precisely what – should be done.
The difficulty is that the mooted solutions are unpalatable, especially to those who have thrived amid free movement and the free market. More redistributive taxes in the Scandinavian mode; swingeing tariffs on imports of cheap foreign goods; walls, literal and metaphorical, to keep cheaper labour out; incentives for employers to keep jobs at home; subsidies for workers who would otherwise be priced out of their jobs by foreign competition – none of these are seen as desirable or realistic. They fly so much in the face of all the prevailing assumptions of a generation.
If the ideas about populism in the UK and its causes differ little from those swirling around elsewhere, we have our own local personification of the political left’s failure in the figure of the Labour leader. Jeremy Corbyn is seen as inept and divisive; a man who became party leader by a fluke and has no prospect whatsoever of becoming prime minister.
Why not? To his detractors, the reasons are so obvious that they hardly need to be stated. He is in every way a throwback to an age that is long gone. He may have taken the advice about suit-wearing offered vicariously by David Cameron’s mother, he may have learned from Michael Foot about how not to turn up on Remembrance Sunday at the Cenotaph. But he lauded Fidel Castro after his death, and he still harps on about exploitative employers and profiteering bankers.
He has absorbed nothing from the victories of Tony Blair and what makes a modern Labour party electable; nothing about aspiration from erstwhile Mondeo Man, and nothing about remaining “intensely relaxed” with people getting “filthy rich”. No wonder, Corbyn’s opponents would say Blair is contemplating a comeback.
The fact that Labour’s poll ratings are disastrous, that a party candidate lost their deposit at the last (Richmond Park) by-election, and that one-time safe northern constituencies are haemorrhaging votes via Brexit to Ukip are all reasons why Labour under Corbyn is supposed to be a lost cause. And, of course, to return to appearances, Comrade Jeremy just does not look or sound prime-ministerial, and everyone knows he is a hopeless administrator: not leadership material at all.
This is not, however, anything like the whole truth. Labour’s poll ratings are dismal at least in part because it is presenting itself as a divided party. And whose fault is that? There is an ideological rift between the mainly Blairite MPs and the grassroots who – post-Ed Miliband – were given a vote for leader. Under that system, Jeremy Corbyn has won the leadership convincingly, not once, but twice. So who is perpetuating the division – the majority or the minority? In other contexts, those who don’t accept the rules of the democratic game have been called variously “sore losers”, “Remoaners”. Who, I repeat, are the non-democrats here?
Under Corbyn, Labour’s record in by-elections has been creditable – it has not lost a single seat it previously held – despite the fervent hopes of some that a loss would offer a pretext to oust him. And after the Brexit vote, has Labour’s record been any worse than that of the divided Conservatives? On the contrary, in the former Attorney General, Keir Starmer, the non-managerial Corbyn has somehow found a persuasive spokesman. Emily Thornberry is making a decent job of shadow Foreign Secretary. Labour has been scoring points on benefits and the NHS.
If it were united, it could do much, much better. But it would have to be united on Corbynite, old-Labour terms – the very terms, in fact, which explain Labour’s appeal to a whole new constituency: all those young people allegedly turned off by politics, who thronged the rallies of a bearded 67-year-old. At a time when the great and the good lament the political disengagement of the young, Corbyn has struck a chord with a programme of back-to-basics leftism from which he has barely deviated over decades.
After Iraq, the financial crisis, the spinning away of the super-rich, and the legions “left behind” by late 20th-century capitalism, those basics have a new resonance. This is why one of the big questions of the year has been: where is the left when we need it? But it is also why those who embraced Blairite centrism don’t want to know. It is their model of ideological flexibility and economic compromise that has aged badly, not Corbyn’s attachment to the old verities. It is the old left – of workers’ rights, the social-safety net, redistribution, and equality, of opportunity if not outcome – that has to be the source of Labour’s revival.
These are not my politics, and – according to some – Labour is already up to its old “splittist” tricks, with Trotskyite entryism again a threat. But there is a place for an old British left perspective on the world and its coherent critique of capitalism could yet enjoy electoral appeal. Corbyn is building a passable team; he has scored points at Prime Minister’s Questions, and in tapping into the youth vote, he has done what no other party leader has managed to do.
He may not look, sound or behave as a prime minister-in-waiting and the polls have him doomed – but these are not necessarily counter-indicators in this perverse age.
The season of looking back with big ideas has come early this year, thanks to Brexit, Donald Trump and now the referendum rout in Italy. And two of these big ideas tend to converge. The first is that populism is on the march, thanks to those “left behind” by free-market orthodoxies. The second is a despairing cry of: “Where, oh where, is the political left when we need it?”
In the UK, those “left behind” are now in the sights of all political persuasions, but most conspicuously from the right and from those experts so derided by the Brexiteers. Theresa May has made social justice a theme of her early months as Prime Minister, while the minuses of globalisation have featured even in a speech by the head of the Bank of England, along with arguments that something – though it is unclear precisely what – should be done.
The difficulty is that the mooted solutions are unpalatable, especially to those who have thrived amid free movement and the free market. More redistributive taxes in the Scandinavian mode; swingeing tariffs on imports of cheap foreign goods; walls, literal and metaphorical, to keep cheaper labour out; incentives for employers to keep jobs at home; subsidies for workers who would otherwise be priced out of their jobs by foreign competition – none of these are seen as desirable or realistic. They fly so much in the face of all the prevailing assumptions of a generation.
If the ideas about populism in the UK and its causes differ little from those swirling around elsewhere, we have our own local personification of the political left’s failure in the figure of the Labour leader. Jeremy Corbyn is seen as inept and divisive; a man who became party leader by a fluke and has no prospect whatsoever of becoming prime minister.
Why not? To his detractors, the reasons are so obvious that they hardly need to be stated. He is in every way a throwback to an age that is long gone. He may have taken the advice about suit-wearing offered vicariously by David Cameron’s mother, he may have learned from Michael Foot about how not to turn up on Remembrance Sunday at the Cenotaph. But he lauded Fidel Castro after his death, and he still harps on about exploitative employers and profiteering bankers.
He has absorbed nothing from the victories of Tony Blair and what makes a modern Labour party electable; nothing about aspiration from erstwhile Mondeo Man, and nothing about remaining “intensely relaxed” with people getting “filthy rich”. No wonder, Corbyn’s opponents would say Blair is contemplating a comeback.
The fact that Labour’s poll ratings are disastrous, that a party candidate lost their deposit at the last (Richmond Park) by-election, and that one-time safe northern constituencies are haemorrhaging votes via Brexit to Ukip are all reasons why Labour under Corbyn is supposed to be a lost cause. And, of course, to return to appearances, Comrade Jeremy just does not look or sound prime-ministerial, and everyone knows he is a hopeless administrator: not leadership material at all.
This is not, however, anything like the whole truth. Labour’s poll ratings are dismal at least in part because it is presenting itself as a divided party. And whose fault is that? There is an ideological rift between the mainly Blairite MPs and the grassroots who – post-Ed Miliband – were given a vote for leader. Under that system, Jeremy Corbyn has won the leadership convincingly, not once, but twice. So who is perpetuating the division – the majority or the minority? In other contexts, those who don’t accept the rules of the democratic game have been called variously “sore losers”, “Remoaners”. Who, I repeat, are the non-democrats here?
Under Corbyn, Labour’s record in by-elections has been creditable – it has not lost a single seat it previously held – despite the fervent hopes of some that a loss would offer a pretext to oust him. And after the Brexit vote, has Labour’s record been any worse than that of the divided Conservatives? On the contrary, in the former Attorney General, Keir Starmer, the non-managerial Corbyn has somehow found a persuasive spokesman. Emily Thornberry is making a decent job of shadow Foreign Secretary. Labour has been scoring points on benefits and the NHS.
If it were united, it could do much, much better. But it would have to be united on Corbynite, old-Labour terms – the very terms, in fact, which explain Labour’s appeal to a whole new constituency: all those young people allegedly turned off by politics, who thronged the rallies of a bearded 67-year-old. At a time when the great and the good lament the political disengagement of the young, Corbyn has struck a chord with a programme of back-to-basics leftism from which he has barely deviated over decades.
After Iraq, the financial crisis, the spinning away of the super-rich, and the legions “left behind” by late 20th-century capitalism, those basics have a new resonance. This is why one of the big questions of the year has been: where is the left when we need it? But it is also why those who embraced Blairite centrism don’t want to know. It is their model of ideological flexibility and economic compromise that has aged badly, not Corbyn’s attachment to the old verities. It is the old left – of workers’ rights, the social-safety net, redistribution, and equality, of opportunity if not outcome – that has to be the source of Labour’s revival.
These are not my politics, and – according to some – Labour is already up to its old “splittist” tricks, with Trotskyite entryism again a threat. But there is a place for an old British left perspective on the world and its coherent critique of capitalism could yet enjoy electoral appeal. Corbyn is building a passable team; he has scored points at Prime Minister’s Questions, and in tapping into the youth vote, he has done what no other party leader has managed to do.
He may not look, sound or behave as a prime minister-in-waiting and the polls have him doomed – but these are not necessarily counter-indicators in this perverse age.
Calls for 'complete overhaul' of UK university application process
Sally Weale in The Guardian
University and College Union wants to move away from applications based on predicted grades after study finds just 16% are correctly forecast
University and College Union wants to move away from applications based on predicted grades after study finds just 16% are correctly forecast
UCU is calling for a post-qualifications admissions system. Photograph: Frederick Florin/AFP/Getty Images
University workers are demanding an overhaul of the UK higher education application system after a report revealed that five out of every six predicted results for A-levels turns out to be wrong.
Research commissioned by the University and College Union (UCU), which analysed the results of 1.3 million students over a three-year period, found that the majority of students applying to university are predicted better results than they ultimately achieve.
The study by Dr Gill Wyness of the University College London Institute of Education revealed that just 16% of applicants’ grades were predicted correctly; three-quarters were over-predicted and 9% were under-predicted.
Under the current system, most students make applications to universities based on their predicted grades, which leads to uncertainty for both students and institutions when results differ from predictions – as they frequently do. Many students end up securing places through the clearing system.
The UCU is advocating a new post-qualifications admission system where students only apply after they have received their final results, which would create greater certainty for both student and institution. The union also believes it would get rid of the growing use of unconditional offers, which it describes as “unethical”.
UCU general secretary, Sally Hunt, said the report exposed the majority of predicted grades as little more than “guesstimates”, which were an inadequate basis on which young people and universities were asked to make key, life-changing decisions.
“This report is a damning indictment of a broken system, not the hardworking teachers tasked with the impossible job of trying to make predictions,” said Hunt. “The results strongly support our call for a complete overhaul of the system, where students apply after they receive their results. It is quite absurd that the UK is the only country that persists in using such a broken system.”
The research found that state schools were most likely to overpredict; it also found that the grades of the most able students from disadvantaged backgrounds were the most likely to be underestimated, which in led them to apply to lower-tariff institutions for which they were overqualified.
Wyness’s report states: “The UK’s unique system of grade prediction has been widely criticised by policymakers and the media, yet the system has remained unchanged for many years. I find a high level of inaccuracy of grade prediction. Among the best three A-levels students achieve, only 16% of higher education applicants’ grades are accurately predicted.
“However, the vast majority of applicants actually receive predictions that are too optimistic for the grades they actually go on to achieve, with 75% of applicants achieving lower grades than predicted.
“It seems highly inefficient to continue with a system in which life-changing decisions are made, and scarce university places are allocated, on the basis of inaccurate information.”
Researchers analysed the top three A-level results from all participants who sat A-levels in 2013, 2014 and 2015 and went on to higher education, involving approximately 452,000 entrants a year.
A UCU survey last year found that 70% of staff were in favour of change to a system with applications after results rather than before. The UCU argues that it would enable greater transparency in the application and admission process, particularly given the lifting of the cap on student numbers.
University workers are demanding an overhaul of the UK higher education application system after a report revealed that five out of every six predicted results for A-levels turns out to be wrong.
Research commissioned by the University and College Union (UCU), which analysed the results of 1.3 million students over a three-year period, found that the majority of students applying to university are predicted better results than they ultimately achieve.
The study by Dr Gill Wyness of the University College London Institute of Education revealed that just 16% of applicants’ grades were predicted correctly; three-quarters were over-predicted and 9% were under-predicted.
Under the current system, most students make applications to universities based on their predicted grades, which leads to uncertainty for both students and institutions when results differ from predictions – as they frequently do. Many students end up securing places through the clearing system.
The UCU is advocating a new post-qualifications admission system where students only apply after they have received their final results, which would create greater certainty for both student and institution. The union also believes it would get rid of the growing use of unconditional offers, which it describes as “unethical”.
UCU general secretary, Sally Hunt, said the report exposed the majority of predicted grades as little more than “guesstimates”, which were an inadequate basis on which young people and universities were asked to make key, life-changing decisions.
“This report is a damning indictment of a broken system, not the hardworking teachers tasked with the impossible job of trying to make predictions,” said Hunt. “The results strongly support our call for a complete overhaul of the system, where students apply after they receive their results. It is quite absurd that the UK is the only country that persists in using such a broken system.”
The research found that state schools were most likely to overpredict; it also found that the grades of the most able students from disadvantaged backgrounds were the most likely to be underestimated, which in led them to apply to lower-tariff institutions for which they were overqualified.
Wyness’s report states: “The UK’s unique system of grade prediction has been widely criticised by policymakers and the media, yet the system has remained unchanged for many years. I find a high level of inaccuracy of grade prediction. Among the best three A-levels students achieve, only 16% of higher education applicants’ grades are accurately predicted.
“However, the vast majority of applicants actually receive predictions that are too optimistic for the grades they actually go on to achieve, with 75% of applicants achieving lower grades than predicted.
“It seems highly inefficient to continue with a system in which life-changing decisions are made, and scarce university places are allocated, on the basis of inaccurate information.”
Researchers analysed the top three A-level results from all participants who sat A-levels in 2013, 2014 and 2015 and went on to higher education, involving approximately 452,000 entrants a year.
A UCU survey last year found that 70% of staff were in favour of change to a system with applications after results rather than before. The UCU argues that it would enable greater transparency in the application and admission process, particularly given the lifting of the cap on student numbers.
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”.
Subscribe to:
Comments (Atom)