Character, institutions & the left

What’s the relationship between personal character and political institutions? I’m prompted to ask by Laurie Penny’s call for us to change the world, not ourselves:

Why should we improve ourselves? Wouldn't it be a lot more useful - and a lot more liberating - finally to accept our own filth and fallibility and try instead to change the world for the better?

But is it possible to have a significantly better world, given the crooked timber of our own humanity?  Socrates seems to have thought not:

In each of us there are the same principles and habits which there are in the State; and that from the individual they pass into the State.

This suggests that a just society requires a just people. Which we don’t have. The brute fact is that there is no public demand for liberal socialist policies. Voters don’t want worker ownership, a citizens’ basic income, a liberal immigration policy, steeper inheritance taxes or many other items on the left’s wish list. I’ll grant that there is some demand for higher taxes on the rich, but I fear this is arises less from socialist ideals than from the same motive as hostility towards paedophiles and immigrants - a hatred of people who are different.
Sadly, some on the left seem unwilling to acknowledge this fact. As Norm and Paul have rightly complained, this piece by Priyamvada Gopal seems to conflate a lack of leftist policies with a lack of democracy, when in fact the truth is the opposite: democracy, as it exists, is antipathetic to leftist ideals.
This conflict raises two awkward issues for the left.
First, why is the public so antipathetic to leftism? It would be wrong merely to blame the media. I suspect its influence is over-rated. Instead, it could be that capitalism generates cognitive biases - ideology if you like - which predispose people to tolerate inequality. Which raises the question: how, if at all, is it possible to combat such biases? Simply telling people they are stupid is unlikely to work.
Secondly, are there any social institutions which can use people’s imperfections - their selfishness, greed and stupidity - for beneficial purposes?
And herein lies yet another embarrassment for much of the left. There is indeed one such institution. It’s called the market. The left - so far - has not found anything to match it.

Comments

[Mark]

Excellent post today, really good. How else to break the success to the successful paradigm?

[Nick Rowe]

Yes. A very good post.

[Phil]

From a Marxist point of view, the problem isn't the market in products but the market in labour hours, and the fact that the two are denominated in the same currency. If you can buy more carrots than me, that's inequality. If you can buy my time and get richer by doing so, that's injustice.

[Adam Bell]

I have to say, you're making the same mistake you level at Gopal, but less egregiously. There's a tension between advocates of improving individuals to lead to an improved society, and those who advocate improving society to lead to improved individuals. Your linked pieces very clearly put you on the latter side of the equation; your emphasis on structural factors indicating that you believe these are important - perhaps more important - than individual behaviour. This is very revealing.

Markets are an effective institution not because they rely on selfishness, greed and stupidity, but because they require the individual to improve themselves in order to succeed. This is why Adam Smith advocated participating in the market as a better form of tutelage than military service; it forces you to analyse your own actions and improve your judgement. Abdicating responsibility for doing so to the State fails to have the same effect - which is why I'd argue you're on the wrong side of the equation.

[Phil Ruse]

The left could start by not confusing equality with equality of opportunity.

[guthrie]

Ummm, have you actually checked with the populace if they know what
"worker ownership, a citizens’ basic income, a liberal immigration policy, steeper inheritance taxes"
actually are, what they would really mean for them in real life rather than in Daily Mail world? I don't think so. Thus I find your assertion rather like chopping people's legs off and then saying there is no demand for shoes.

For toleration of inequality, it isn't just a matter of the media. It is also the culture in general, for which the media is merely the conduit. The way that modern commercial culture is in every part of society these days means alternatives are harder to bring to the attention of the general mass of people, those who have not been asked about their preferences. This is all sounding a bit like the "Why do people vote BNP?" malarkey, where the answer is that they do so because the current parties and political way of doing business ignore them and their views. Many of these people could be won for a more left of centre viewpoint, if people were making more effort in general to do so. I note that A very public sociologist, for example, is a member of the labour party for precisely that reason, and there are others out there doing what they can.

But until people (ie the general populace, or at least those in the great flabby middle of society) get as much chance to be exposed to leftist type political views and whatever such institutions remain/ are being rebuilt/ whatever, then things will indeed appear as hopelss as you present them.

[Straus]

There are, I think, more and better motives for the hostility towards paedophiles than the fact that they are different.

[Major Plonquer]

The truth is that Capitalism is where man exploits his fellow man. Socialism is the other way round.

[Anon E Mouse]

Perhaps your description of a "just society" (The brute fact is that there is no public demand for liberal socialist policies) is how "just people" define the term.

Once explained there seems to be no appetite anywhere in the world for Socialism and certainly not from the Labour Party in government or not.

Maybe you were brainwashed about socialism in university and need to move on...

[Fubar Saunders]

Good article... subjected I see, to the usual knee-jerk reactions from the left leaners who insist on calling anyone who doesnt agree with them stupid... entirely proving the writer's point.

[CharlieMcMenamin]

Chris,
The Left doesn't deny that markets *can* harness selfish motives to socially beneficial effects it just takes the (empirically demonstrable) line that this is far from an assured outcome and that markets can also, and often do, produces seriously socially destructive effects.

I think you economists call such things 'negative externalities'. But, of course,they're only 'external' to the people involved in the market transaction, not to the rest of us. Your profession also has a wider concept of 'market failure' which I understand to be situations where market exchange results in inefficiencies. The Left , in all its forms, is naturally interested in these phenomena and advancing ways of correcting them.

Where it does get more intellectually challenging, of course, is in the Left's attitude to property rights. It seems impossible to me to be anywhere on the spectrum from a full blown Council Communist to the mildest social democrat and *unequivocally* respect existing property rights per se. If one did, the idea of redistribution would be anathema. Yet markets depends secure(ish) property rights. So there is a tension there.

[vimothy]

Chris,

This is interesting but I think the truth is a bit more complicated. Not only is the population to the right of Gopal and Penny, but it’s to the right of the entire political class, give or take a few loonies at the fringe. The shortest path to a more left-wing politics is simply to bypass the great unwashed and completely ignore them. Which, of course, has already happened. More democracy would take us to the right, not the left—tighter immigration policies, capital punishment, etc.

[James Parry]

Isn't part of the problem this talk of 'The Left' as if it is some identifiable community of believers, and of 'left-wing policies' as if they come in some kind of well-understood package. In reality the so-called left is heterogenous and full of contradictions (as Chris shows week in week out). So is it a surprise if the public's responses fail to conform tidily to this rickety left-right abstraction?