The Outsider

It is fitting that the pre-publicity for Afua Hirsch’s book Brit(ish) should have coincided with the death of Mark E Smith. What they have in common are stories of exclusion and isolation.

Ms Hirsch writes:

This country of mine had never allowed me to feel that it is where I belong. If I were to single out the most persistent reminder of that sense of not belonging, it would be The Question: “Where are you from?”

Not belonging, though, is also the experience of many clever working class people. Obituaries of Mark E Smith call him an outsider: The Fall were named after a novel by Albert Camus who also wrote The Outsider. As Mark Brown has written in a wonderful essay, “cleverness meant loneliness.”

And this has been my experience too. My grammar school was on the other side of town and it played rugby, the function of which was not so much to produce rugby players as to signal to people like me that we didn’t belong. And then I went to Oxford which was chocka with charmless dullards from “nice” middle-class backgrounds*. All along there were cues that I didn’t fit in.

Of course, the ruling class rarely gave overt outright messages of class hatred, just as Ms Hirsch rarely encountered crude racism. It likes to think of itself as open and tolerant. But this is self-regarding bullshit which rests upon a denial of the real lived experience of the tens of thousands of black, mixed-race or working-class people: Michael Henderson’s “review” in the Times is a wonderful example of this.

But the undertow is there. And it has real, material consequences. Black people earn less than whites with similar qualifications and are under-represented in influential jobs. Likewise, people who “rise” from working class backgrounds earn less for the same credentials, are more likely to live alone, and are even more likely to die early than those from posh families.

Even if we try to fit in, we never wholly do.

What I’m trying to do here is to lean against a regrettable tendency in identity politics. It is the case that everybody’s particular experience of isolation or oppression is different: Ms Hirsch’s experience is not mine, and mine is not that of a woman or a gay man. But these are different facets of a similar thing: the barriers we face from the beneficiaries of the existing order. Sure, capitalism, patriarchy or heteronormativity are different things. But they have something in common.

Yes, we should rail against the injustices here. But we should also – for the good of our health – remember our comforts.

One of these is the potential for a greater understanding of each other. It’s difficult (though not impossible) for insiders to understand outsiders because fish don’t know they are wet.; this of course was the message of that song. Many of us with experience of both sides, however, might be capable – should we choose to be so – of more empathy. One recent study has found that people from lower social classes are better able to think well about inter-personal conflicts. The divisions in the Tory party – drowning men fighting for a brick - are perhaps consistent with this.

Secondly, when you realize that there’s no point trying to impress some people you lose ambition and the need to work hard. That can be liberating.

And then, there’s art. There’s lots that we outsiders can feel more strongly about than the privileged – from Dostoyevsky** and Camus through to Bowie and Holland. We might have a material disadvantage, but not, necessarily, a cultural one.

* It’s insufficiently appreciated that the more typical product of Oxford is Theresa May rather than Boris Johnson.

** Fyodor Karamazov was just like my dad.

Another thing: there’s a link between this post and my last one. Both are about the need to hear the voices of the excluded.  

Comments

[Blissex]

«the barriers we face from the beneficiaries of the existing order. Sure, capitalism, patriarchy or heteronormativity are different things. But they have something in common.»

Well, "conservativism" is always and everywhere the furthering of the interests of incumbents, and indeed incumbency is one of the central english virtues, defended with great determination by the sharp-elbowed mothers of the incumbent classes.

[Nick Drew]

Paragraph 4 of the post applies to me also, word for word. And we should certainly rage against genuine injustices.

But let's not accept "micro-aggressions" as being meaningful in any useful way (I'm not suggesting you do), let alone as being a defining characteristic of genuine victimhood.

Rather, it should be recognized that whatever annoyances beset us from many directions, the vast majority of us here in the (ultimately benign) UK can advance ourselves against some chosen line of resistance we can reasonably overcome, and do just fine. I could never have joined the Brigade of Guards (I served in a much less "fashionable" regiment.) I will never be nominated for membership of Brooks's, nor be chosen to be Master of my own college, much as I would enjoy both. There's no pedestrian right of way through the park at Longleat. Are these micro-aggressions against me? Nope, it's just the way things are.

I'm not preaching quietism (as anyone who knows me could attest) nor have I ever settled for anything unduly lazy or unambitious (ditto).

As you say: art is there for all; and remember our comforts.

[Patrick Kirk]

I'm not sure that any society anywhere would be able to make Afua Hirsch feel included. Its hard to feel included when things like Nelson's Column upset you.

[Blissex]

«It’s difficult (though not impossible) for insiders to understand outsiders because fish don’t know they are wet.; this of course was the message of that song.»

I'll also mention R Kipling's

"And what should they know of England who only England know?"

verse, which I had always taken to be sarcastic, but have realized thanks to an observation it is to be read straight.

[Dave Timoney]

@Blissex,

Kipling's view was that Englishness was indivisible from empire. His famous line was not only an insistence on the essential role of colonial whites, it was also a criticism of the metropole as lacking in responsibility. In other words, it was not just racist but anti-democratic. Giving the British working class the vote was, in Kipling's eyes, tantamount to betraying the empire.

[Adrian]

”What writers belonging to the upper class have received from nature for nothing, plebeians acquire at the cost of their youth. Write a story of how a young man, the son of a serf, who has served in a shop, sung in a choir, been at a high school and a university, who has been brought up to respect everyone of higher rank and position, to kiss priests’ hands, to reverence other people’s ideas, to be thankful for every morsel of bread, who has been many times whipped, who has trudged from one pupil to another without galoshes, who has been used to fighting, and tormenting animals, who has liked dining with his rich relations, and been hypocritical before God and men from the mere consciousness of his own insignificance — write how this young man squeezes the slave out of himself, drop by drop, and how waking one beautiful morning he feels that he has no longer a slave’s blood in his veins but a real man’s...“

[Steven Clarke]

@Chris

“Fyodor Karamazov was just like my dad.”

Who do you most resemble? Alyosha, Mitya or Ivan?

[chris]

@ Steven - probably mostly like Ivan, except that I never wrote the best story ever.

[Emma]

I want to thank you for posting this. I’m an American, and female, and of mixed race, and not heterosexual, but this is me too. My (white)(and doting) father made a good living in a coal mine for 37 years, my mother is/was an extra-traditional housewife, and I was popularly supposed to use the skills that made me excel in school to go out and stride around authoritatively and make millions of dollars. I can’t get anyone to understand how repulsive an outcome that would’ve been for me, now and always. No one understands why I don’t have a nice, well-off husband and a few drooling brats to cart around, either. This is the foremost source of sadness in my life. Conservatives in the US like to excuse their structural bigotry by praising “equality of opportunity” over “equality of outcome” — but what most people actually approve of is “sameness of outcome.” I find this confusing, on the merits.

I also struggle with the maintenance of sympathy for straight people and men, and also for economically-challenged people who are incapable of seeing themselves as “poor,” no matter how poor they actually are, because that would mean acknowledging that they're losers. You don’t have to like someone or agree with their politics to understand that their deprivation is connected with, and indeed a part of, your own. Okay, straight white people who are suddenly finding yourselves economically “othered,” your turn!

I do wish my fellow SJWs hadn’t chosen to depend so heavily on academic jargon, though. Lots of people can’t get past it. “Micro-aggression” is a word once used by social scientists to denote a particular kind of behavior which is the subject of certain kinds of academic study. The term can’t be exported into the wild without losing most of its meaning and all of its objective usefulness. Instead of “micro-aggressions” people should read “the many ways in which a person is beset by ignorance and unasked-for argumentation related to their externally-imposed identity label.” Not “the petty universal irritations with which everyone living in a modern culture has to deal.” Or “the sad results of coming to terms with your own limitations.”

Progress. I didn’t even use a curse word.

[MJW]

As someone from a working class background who grew up in a northern English town in the era of de-industrialization I find identity politics a boring dead end. I especially dislike people who make professional careers out of identity politics, because instead of focusing on finding practical solutions that can improve life for the disadvantaged they obsessively look for differences to perpetuate identity politics (which is conveniently sold on to perpetuate their careers).

Somebody above mentioned 'micro-aggressions', this is one of those trivial concepts that are a symptom of identity politics. In this case it's where anti-racists with legitimate grievances morphed into 'professional' anti-racists who had a living to make. Not unique in any way to professional anti-racism, it can happen wherever personal conviction turns into professional living.

What's perverse is that the more tolerant British society becomes of diversity, the more trivial and noisy professional identity politics has to be to sustain itself. Although weirdly it seems to overlook where 'identity' groups are actively and explicitly trying to keep themselves separate, different and unintegrated from the rest of society.

[Brian]

You might find this interesting Chris, about the change of identity that comes with change of class.

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2018/feb/01/poor-americans-poverty-rich-class