Stumbling and Mumbling

Class, sympathy & solidarity

The conviction of Ghislaine Maxwell has promoted some sympathetic headlines. Both ABC and CBS write of her “fall from grace” and the BBC of her “downfall”. All of which reflects Rachel Johnson’s attitude, that “it’s hard not to pity” her.

What’s going on here?

In part, there’s an echo of a sentiment we’ve largely lost – a tendency to sympathize with the criminal. Vast amounts of country music express this: The Banks of the Ohio, San Quentin, Folsom Prison Blues or Pancho and Lefty to name but a few. Tom Jones version of Green Green Grass of Home, remember, was one of the best-selling hits of the 1960s.

And there’s a reason for this pity. We don’t become criminals merely because we are irredeemable wrong’uns: to believe that is to commit a crass form of the fundamental attribution error. Instead, incentives, weakness of will, or peer pressure are all important causes. As David Friedman wrote:

A mugger is a mugger for the same reason I am an economist—because it is the most attractive alternative available to him.

Or as Iris Dement sang:

And I traveled to a prison; I saw my share of shattered dreams.
Were the tables slightly tilted I could be bound, they could be free.

Why not extend such thoughts to Ms Maxwell? She was born into and lived in a criminogenic environment.

But, but, but. The sympathy of headline writers is tightly circumscribed. They rarely speak of a downfall or fall from grace after working class people are convicted. Ms Johnson’s pity does not extend to them, and the BBC’s “due impartiality” does not apply in matters of class.

What’s going on here was pointed out by Adam Smith:

We frequently see the respectful attentions of the world more strongly directed towards the rich and the great, than towards the wise and the virtuous. We see frequently the vices and follies of the powerful much less despised than the poverty and weakness of the innocent.

This, he wrote, is because the wealth and comfort of the rich elicits not envy but sympathy:

When we consider the condition of the great, in those delusive colours in which the imagination is apt to paint it. it seems to be almost the abstract idea of a perfect and happy state…We feel, therefore, a peculiar sympathy with the satisfaction of those who are in it. We favour all their inclinations, and forward all their wishes. What pity, we think, that anything should spoil and corrupt so agreeable a situation!... Every calamity that befals them, every injury that is done them, excites in the breast of the spectator ten times more compassion and resentment than he would have felt, had the same things happened to other men. 

Reactions to the conviction of Ms Maxwell fit this pattern.

But Smith’s reasoning helps explain something bigger and more powerful – of why there is more class solidarity among the rich than among the working class. We see this in several contexts. One minor but nevertheless revealing example is in the circle jerk of blue-tick columnists praising each other, as Justin Horton has documented. Another example is that right “libertarians” are relaxed about clampdowns upon migrants and protestors because these bear upon the poor and weak rather than the rich and the great.

More importantly, this helps explain the unity of the Tory party. Johnson has – at least until recently – retained support from erstwhile Thatcherites even though his “fuck business” attitude is the diametric opposite of hers. And the party has almost seamlessly shifted from a social liberalism that supported gay marriage to a confected war on wokesters.

Of course, such deference-based unity is imperfect. But it is much greater than we see on the left, where divisions are rife and where working class consciousness has never developed to the extent that early Marxists had hoped.

Those headlines about Ms Maxwell, then, are not trivial. They shed light upon one of the great strengths the ruling class has over the rest of us.

On purified identities

One of my favourite social thinkers of recent years is Richard Sennett. There’s one particular idea of his that deserves especial attention today – that of a purified identity.

Such an identity arises, he says, when:

The threat of being overwhelmed by difficult social interactions is dealt with by fixing a self-image in advance, by making oneself a fixed object rather than an open person liable to be touched by a social situation. (The Uses of Disorder, p6)

People with such identities “create an aura of invulnerable, unemotional competence for themselves” by screening out or devaluing evidence that conflicts with that self-image. For such people, wrote Sennett, dissonances are “interpreted as less real than the consonances with what is known.” There are numerous psychological mechanisms at work in this: the confirmation bias, strategic ignorance, Bayesian conservatism and so on.

This is what Janan Ganesh is getting at here:

It is, at bottom, an almost childlike craving for the world to have order and structure. It is an intolerance of ambiguity….Life must answer to a system of thought.

You might think that although Sennett wrote all this in 1970 it applies to “snowflakes” today who are “triggered” by microaggressions, and so want to “cancel” them.

Maybe. But the phenomenon is much wider than that. Sennett gave the examples of people who choose career paths early in life and stick to them, or who believe in “the one”, an idealized romantic partner who overshadows actual real imperfect lovers. We might add to this people whose musical tastes are fixed in their adolescence and never progress.

Such purified identities contrast with people who are more open to new experiences, more accepting of disorder and dissonance – who have, in Sennett’s words, “the courage to be self-doubting and confused.”

What’s more, said Sennett, we don’t just fix a self-identity for ourselves. We also create purified identities of societies:

The image of the community is purified of all that might convey a feeling of difference, let alone conflict, in who “we” are. In this way the myth of community solidarity is a purification ritual. (The Uses of Disorder, p36)

In this sense, “woke snowflakes” and opponents of migrants have more in common that either would like to admit. Both are trying to screen out dissonant elements in an attempt to preserve a static purified identity. All nations are imagined communities, but many on the right see Britain (or is it England?) as one in which migrants or Muslims or the poor are less than fully typical members. Which is why the left has a problem with patriotism.

Saying this shows that the distinction between the fixed purified identity and the more open personality is orthogonal to the left-right divide. The city planning debates between Robert Moses and Jane Jacobs, for example, are better seen as between purified and open personality types than a left-right issue. And James Scott’s Seeing Like a State is an analysis of how rulers with purified identities try to impose their fixed rationalist plans onto complex societies whilst ignoring dissonant feedback from those societies which would complicate their visions. Yes, those plans are sometimes leftist (for example the Soviet collectivization of farms), but they are sometimes not – for example shock therapy or the Chicago Boys plans for the Chilean economy in the 70s.

Those political and economic pundits who go from one wrong prediction to another without any interval of self-doubt are other examples of the purified identity: we should contrast them to those who take dissonance, error and uncertainty more seriously, and ask about the sources and limits of predictability.

It's in this context that I get irritated when Marxists are accused of having a dogma. Yes, some do: Marxism is one of the many forms that a purified identity can take. But others of us are erratic Marxists, being self-doubting and more open to dissonant evidence. A good example of this were the analytical (pdf) Marxists of the 70s and 80s, who tried to reconcile Marxism with conventional social science. They had the exact opposite of a fixed, purified identity – and in fact in retrospect their mistake was to be too open, too sceptical of conventional Marxism.

By the same token, many centrists do have purified identities, being so closed to new evidence that they don’t realize it is no longer 1997.

There’s a sharp distinction between extremism and fanaticism. You can be a cool-headed sceptical extremist (I don’t use the word “rational” because nobody is wholly rational) or a fanatical centrist. The person with a purified identity can be found across the political spectrum, as can more open-minded types.

Now, this isn't to say there's a sharp distinction between purified identities and open personalities: they are two ends of a spectrum. And we can have purified identities in some respects but not others: I think I'm more fixed and dogmatic in my political views than in my day job, for example. 

Purified identities are a mixed blessing. Zealotry and fanaticism – passion if you like – spur people to work long hours and thus succeed in their careers to a greater extent than can more open-minded people with a range of interests. This gives us great musicians, but it also gives us single-minded fanatical politicians: one reason I could never have gone into politics is that it takes too many evenings.

And even if such identities are good for our careers they might not be so great for our mental health. If you don’t embrace the dissonance between your conception of yourself and the world and reality – and accept imperfection - it can destroy you. This was brilliantly described in a great song by Dar Williams*. “Once upon a time I had control and reined my soul in tight” she sings, but this leads to suicidal thoughts until she abandons control:

Cause when you live in a world
Well it gets in to who you thought you'd be
And now I laugh at how the world changed me.

* Songs are sociological, psychological and philosophical documents, every bit as valid (if not more so) as academic research.   

The decline of the impartial spectator

That video of Allegra Stratton laughing about a Downing Street Christmas party last year shows that the government is taking for fools those who observed the law – even to the point that it meant leaving relatives to die alone. There is indeed “one law for us and another for them.”  

Naturally, this has aroused widespread anger. As Adam Smith wrote, “All men, even the most stupid and unthinking, abhor fraud, perfidy, and injustice, and delight to see them punished.”

This poses the question: what is the disease of which Stratton’s laughter is a symptom?

I ask because to someone formed in the 1980s the sight of a Tory showing contempt for the law is perplexing. Thatcher often and loudly proclaimed the importance of the rule of law; I can’t imagine her laughing about illegal parties in Downing Street. What we have here is another example of how today’s Tories are anti-Thatcherite.

Nor, I think, is it simply a matter of class difference. The Queen, famously, observed social distancing rules even during her husband’s funeral.

Instead, I want to suggest that this reflects something else, something found in Adam Smith.

We are, he wrote, naturally selfish: “we are always so much more deeply affected by whatever concerns ourselves, than by whatever concerns other men.” But, he said, this selfishness is restrained by an impartial spectator who lives within us – what others call conscience. It is this spectator who “shows us the propriety of generosity and the deformity of injustice”, and who reminds us that if we act unjustly we will “render ourselves the proper object of the contempt and indignation of our brethren.” The fear of such contempt keeps us honest, thought Smith. And even if our misdeeds go undetected by others, this “man within” will give us an “inward disgrace.”

D.D. Raphael summarized Smith’s theory thus:

The approval and disapproval of oneself that we call conscience is an effect of judgments made by spectators. Each of us judges others as a spectator. Each of us finds spectators judging him. We then come to judge our own conduct by imagining whether an impartial spectator would approve or disapprove of it (The Impartial Spectator p 34-5)

The fact that Stratton saw flagrant injustice as a matter for laughter rather than shame suggests that, within her, the impartial spectator is weak.

And not just in her. One purpose of the spectator, said Smith, was to remind us that “we value ourselves too much and other people too little.” But this over-valuation – what Smith called self-love – is evident in others: in Johnson attempting to place himself above the law;  in the Luckhurst’s contempt for their customers at Durham University*; in Rees-Mogg thinking the party was a laughing matter; or in Geoffrey Cox’s disregarding his constituents in favour of more lucrative employment. Indeed, we could see the cult of shareholder value and profit maximization as examples of capitalists generally acting in an anti-Smithian way, by “prefer[ring] the interest of one to that of many.”

And of course, if one’s peer group are pursuing self-love there is no shame in doing so oneself. What Smith considered to be a great restraint upon selfishness – fear of disgrace in the eyes of others – thus disappears.

But why is the impartial spectator so weak? I’d suggest three reasons.

One is the decline of religion. One difference between the Queen and Johnson is that she is religious, and has thereby acquired a greater sense of duty and (a Smithian word) propriety.

A second force is the rise of a perceived meritocracy. When he coined this word in 1958, Michael Young meant it as a warning:

If the rich and powerful were encouraged by the general culture to believe that they fully deserved all they had, how arrogant they could become, and, if they were convinced it was all for the common good, how ruthless in pursuing their own advantage. (The Rise of the Meritocracy, pxvi)

You might think that Stratton and her like have little merit. But that’s not the point. They think they have, and so become “insufferably smug” as Young predicted.

A third factor is that recent decades have seen an significant form of increased social distancing. For a long time, the ruling class was dominated by men who had done military service and so come into close contact with working class men – an experience which reminded them of their own good fortune and taught them respect for that class. For them, the “man within” at least occasionally spoke with the voice of a working-class soldier. The Times’ obituary of Lord Carrington wrote:

He found himself sleeping in a hole beneath his tank with his four crew who came from poor backgrounds and had suffered hardship during the pre-war years. The experience shaped his politics, he said later. “You could not have got a finer or better lot than they were. They deserved something better in the aftermath of the war.”

Something like this attitude persisted into my adult lifetime. In my first job most equity salesmen had army backgrounds and so were accustomed to working with the working class. It might be no accident that some of the Tories most critical of the government, such as Tobias Ellwood and Tom Tugendhat, are army men.

It’s not just the decline of military men that has weakened the impartial spectator, though. Perhaps the decline of manufacturing has had a similar effect. Factory bosses who encountered working class men on the shopfloor had some arrogance knocked out of them in a way that those who travel the private school-Oxbridge-professions escalator have not.

Of course, in saying all this I don’t mean to romanticize the past: exploitation and injustice have always been with us – although remember that inequality was lower in the post-war era than it is now. All I’m suggesting is that class arrogance and over-entitlement is more obvious and egregious now than it used to be.

Which is a counterweight to calls for Johnson to resign.

Maybe he should. But what we also need to be rid of is the mindset which he represents. And disposing of that is a much bigger task.

* Yes, customers. If you are charging £9250 a year you are in the customer experience business, not the vigorous debate business.