The costs of poshos

Nick Cohen has brilliantly described how the arts and media are becoming dominated by public school products to the exclusion of people like us. This makes the irrational class-hating part of me - which is the biggest part - want to take up arms. But the rational bit of me wonders: what exactly is the problem here?

I don't think the problem is that talent is being wasted. Maybe it is, but having a few jobs done by second-rate public schoolboys rather than first-rate state school ones is surely a second-order cost. Remember that the single individual who's probably done most damage to the economy in recent years - Fred Goodwin - went to state school.

Nor even is there a huge injustice here. The financial payoffs to acting and journalism are on average small (and in journalism the non-pecuniary rewards are even smaller). Forcing bright state school people out of acting or the media and into other professions might even be doing them a favour. The biggest injustice isn't what happens to clever state school kids after 18, but rather the fact that people from poor backgrounds are much less likely to go to good universities than the rich, and that unqualified people suffer unemployment or poverty wages.

Instead, I suspect that there's another cost of having public school people dominate the media and arts. It's that this domination produces systematic ideological distortions.

For example, a Dulwich-educated stockbroker who wants to destroy workers' rights is presented in the media as a man of the people. And a man who consorts with a violent criminal and who has twice been sacked for dishonesty is spoken of as a potential Prime Minister. Such an inversion of common sense is surely facilitated by a media which regards public school backgrounds as normal and therefore unthreatening. The BBC's three most senior political reporters (Norman Smith, James Landale and Nick Robinson) were all privately educated; I suspect this imparts a bias, consciously or not.

Secondly, a media which is dominated by people from posh backgrounds is prone to over-estimate middling incomes; if you, your family and friends are on six-figure salaries, you'll regard these as more normal than they in fact are. This can lead to the interests of the well-off being wrongly conflated with those of the average person, which the result that political discourse is biased towards the interests of the rich.

Thirdly, an arts establishment dominated by the well-off is less able to portray the realities of life for the poor.

To see what I mean, picture the 1930s depression. If you're like me, your visual images come from Steinbeck and Orwell, and the aural ones from Woody Guthrie and the Carter Family. Picture the 1980s recession, and we (I?) recall the Specials, Brookside and Boys from the Blackstuff. Now picture the recent Great Recession. What do you see? What do you hear?

Nothing. Culturally, the recent recession didn't happen. And this is perhaps not unrelated to the fact that people from poor backgrounds - with the sensibilities this implies - are excluded from the arts establishment.

I'm tempted, therefore, to claim that there are costs to having the arts and media dominated by public schools.

Except that is, for one thing. Capitalism tends to produce false perceptions in people anyway; it sustains itself in part by producing an ideological bias. A public school establishment might contribute to this bias. But it would probably exist even without their efforts.

Comments

[Sophia Grene]

I would argue that participation in the arts is a good in itself, as you can deduce from the fact that so many participate despite the lack of material reward.
Making it harder for poorer people to become artists or performers is yet another limitation to their lives.

[Stevenclarkesblog.wordpress.com]

You're overlooking the most important point.

Compared to the working class output you've cited, what the poshos produce is utter shite.

[Trofim]

The arts and media have been dominated by people down in London for as long as I can remember, but I don't recollect any lefties getting worked up about it.

[gastro george]

"Culturally, the recent recession didn't happen."

I'd contend that this is your most succinct and accurate insight for a while. [That's meant as a compliment, BTW]

[Boursin]

In terms of contemporary stature in the 1930s, neither George Orwell nor Woody Guthrie remotely resembled what they are now, posthumously. Orwell's early work did not sell well at the time and was only discovered in the wake of his two late 1940s novels. And roughly the same goes for Guthrie and the 1950s/1960s folk revival.

So perhaps there was an artistic equivalent to them even during "the recent Great Recession", but it still remains to be discovered very widely.

From today's viewpoint, what is perhaps more striking about the 1930s recession is all the popular art that did comment on current affairs quite explicitly, but in an optimistic vein - without yet sounding false or propagandistic. If it's hard to imagine a contemporary Orwell, then to imagine a contemporary Gracie Fields is positively insuperable. And of the two absences, hers may be inadvertently revealing of something even more important than his.

[Dave Timoney]

The leading contemporary depictions of the slump and working class life in Britain were sentimental works like 'Love on the Dole', 'The Stars Look Down' and 'How Green was my Valley', rather than the novels or reportage of the old Etonian Orwell. Popular social comment meant Max Miller and George Formby, not the Left Book Club.

Similarly, Steinbeck's contemporary popularity depended on his conservatism. 'The Grapes of Wrath' is a 19th century template of rural dispossession and revenge updated with pro-union and New Deal advocacy. 'Of Mice and Men' is a peaen to property (George and Lenny's dream of their own bit of land) and is blithely misogynistic (women were being better served in Hollywood).

The quality of popular art in the early 80s owed much to institutional factors, such as the investment in regional arts (Bleasdale, Russell et al) in the preceding decades, and the availability of social security and relatively cheap housing for budding artists. Culturally, the recent recession was reduced to improvised street theatre in the summer of 2011, though there may also have been a passing reference on Mock the Week.

[Churm Rincewind]

I notice that both Nick Cohen and your good self pass over the predominance of Oxbridge graduates in senior positions, as described in the paper you cite, and prefer instead to offer a critique of the "domination" of those who have attended private schools.

Yet the access to power afforded by an Oxbridge education would seem to be significant. In the case of journalism, for example, only 44% of columnists attended private school while 47% are Oxbridge graduates.

Yet both of you avoid mentioning this point. I can't imagine why.

Well yes I can, but irony has its limits.

[Xerxes]

what do i see

benefits street

new york skyscrapers with peter gabriel booming out big time

pikettys plot of capital destruction and rebound

del boy and rod oh wait

[rogerh]

Perhaps this is a symptom of job pressure, we are all middle class now and the nice jobs are getting fewer and harder to get into. So nice boys and girls are migrating into jobs they would otherwise have passed over, cooking, doorstepping, shopkeeping. Anyway, how can an uneducated oik do justice to a proper acting job, it takes sensitivity and years and years of History of Art degree courses daaaaarling, or a couple of seasons on Corrie.

[windsock]

The only TV series I have seen that referred to austerity was Mrs Brown's Boys, where her son and grandchild needed to emigrate from Ireland because there was no work. Weird, huh?

[RoyLonergan]

The arts/media need to open themselves up to the Ron Atkinson effect? http://stumblingandmumbling.typepad.com/stumbling_and_mumbling/2014/02/equality-the-ron-atkinson-effect.html

[Phil Beesley]

From the Telegraph: "Emma Thompson speaks of her nerves and "nausea" as she returns to the London stage for the first time in 25 years for Sweeney Todd"

Don't fret, lass. The woman who has been marking you can do the job equally as well. She won't show you up on the stage.

[Socialism In One Bedroom]

"The careers of Edward and James Fox show there have always been upper-class actors, and I would not have it any other way"

Cohen sort of destroys his entire argument with this line if you ask me.

I think Churm has a point re Oxbridge. This is the only thing that explains Owen Jones for example, no offence to Jones whom I have a lot of time for,