Iconoclasm: the literal death of a symbol

 

What is about Prince Philip that moved so many people? Even for those who met him, surely a brief interaction with a stranger is hardly enough to form an emotional connection? If it is, see a psychiatrist. Or if you’re attractive, come see me.

Only the normal number of people will be mourning the loss of someone they knew. Did the rest of us know him vicariously, through his celebrity lifestyle? Let’s ignore the fact that you don’t really know someone even then: you don’t have the interactions and relationship normal people do. But people can feel like they know a celebrity after watching someone’s intimate moments and reactions, or reading about them.

Prince Philip was not such a celebrity. The monarchy has survived precisely because the most regal of them are characterless, expressing no opinions, showing no unusual reactions and always following the crowd. We laugh about “And what do you do?” but they say that because that’s the line to say: their lines are predetermined. Prince Philip’s gaffes don’t change that; they barely form enough jokes for half a stand-up comedy show, even if they were all funny. They’re a tiny glimpse of humanity peeking out, and quite possibly that peek is of racism, which I suspect even racists don’t find endearing enough to be the entirety of an emotional connection.

That’s ruled out the obvious reason: there cannot be a genuine reason to mourn for any sane person.

Next then, is the nation in mourning simply because no-one is brave enough to question some sort of assumed default? Are we all secretly uninterested but pretending, like with baby photos? I don’t think so. There are enough of us being openly sceptical of mourning that the mourning bandwagon would have ground to a halt. There are people out there leaving flowers at Windsor (despite being asked not to), gobbling up ‘news’ articles and expecting national mourning, whatever that might be.

They’re not actually grief-stricken, but they would like people to ‘show some respect’. And that seems to me to be the key phrase. Prince Philip needs no more respect. What we must show is respect for these people’s feelings, attitudes and beliefs about our customs.

 

1.       The comfort of ritual

There’s a reason that religions (in particular) turn big life events into rituals. Knowing what to do, and that many others have gone through the same thing, is comforting. It turns the scary unknown into everyday life. That is a bad thing with death, which people sometimes seem far too comfortable with, but it helps everyone deal with major life events. Rituals allow you to turn off and simply go through the motions that are required.

I think that for many people, not just the mentally unusual, ritual is something pleasant and comforting even outside of their own major life events. From a church service every week to formulaic ‘call-and-response’ greetings and conversations, rituals provide a comfortable means of engaging with the world and feeling part of something bigger.

A ritual of national mourning is an opportunity to do the same thing, but on a national scale: a way to feel unity that surely only the disloyal or deliberately antisocial would ignore? Rituals do not unite us with those who do not take part.

 

2.       Shared grief

It’s beyond belief that strangers could feel any serious grief over Prince Philip. But the modern world is full of variations on voyeurism; the strange delight that people take in observing and, it seems, sharing others’ emotions. Soap operas, dramas, reaction videos, Gogglebox… this is entertainment. Hard to believe, and yet clearly true. It’s a weird sort of empathy in which we enjoy feeling or observing emotions, no matter what those emotions are, which is why embarrassment in comedy is so popular.

A period of national mourning is an opportunity to observe a whole nation displaying emotions; a drama to take part in and enjoy, just like all drama. But if people aren’t doing the displaying, preferring to be realistic or stoical, then they are deliberately sucking away the fun.

 

3.       Established culture

The death of a public figure is an opportunity to create or skew national culture. Adopting the behaviours of a culture is a way to enhance one’s belonging to it. If you feel that traditions and culture have been eroded too much, and a figure represents tradition, or your subgroup of the national culture, then it’s important to make as much as possible of his death, to help dominate national culture.

This is especially important when support for the monarchy is a divisive issue already, almost a proxy for other parts of the culture wars that have far more practical importance. A figure who represents tradition, in general, is very important for people who feel that tradition, in general, is being lost. His death is a metaphor for wider cultural loss, and therefore somewhat sad, but it can also be an opportunity to reinforce or create traditions, reversing some of the loss.

Except that some people seem to undermine this goal, betraying their country by choosing not to belong to this definition of what it is.

 

4.       Authoritarianism

Some people just like rules and rigid structures that dictate behaviour. Diversity repels them; it makes the world feel chaotic and disorderly, and we all know that disorder is a synonym for anarchy. Respect for a death is a nice, vague phrase in which the ‘respect’ brings nice fuzzy feelings of respect for authority (the authority they trust and are a part of), respect for elders, and in general a humble population that thinks of others and doesn’t cause trouble.

One might even call such a population subdued.

5.       Awkwardness

It’s well-known that the British are a socially awkward culture who struggle with genuine, spontaneous and yet well-balanced displays of emotion. For those who are repressed by this stoic culture, but who would prefer to be French or even Italian, any opportunity to display some sort of feeling is good practice and feels good.

6.       Loyalty

Respect isn’t really needed for Prince Philip, but for the tribe of which he was the figurehead’s consort. As something vaguely connected to a figurehead (itself a weird concept for a society), he therefore also represents the tribe, and respect for his death translates to an acknowledgement of tribal loyalty for those who make all these subconscious connections.

As with hazing rituals, it’s not so much about what is done, but that an effort is made. Because it is almost exactly like a hazing ritual, for membership of the elite club of British patriots.

7.       Moral superiority

As with any display, a display of loyalty and belonging can turn into a competition for status. For those whose status is otherwise ‘dimwit’, the opportunity to achieve a moral victory can elevate them for a while. The whole point is to look down on and criticise others: to create a new (or perhaps remind everyone of a different) axis of worth. Virtue is in loyalty and sacrifice for the tribe and that means that those who do not are not virtuous and must be attacked.

By respecting a death that is only related to our national figurehead, mourners show themselves to be particularly attuned to the highs and lows of the tribe, since the figurehead represents the tribe and one needs to be especially sensitive to care about the wider web of connections. They show themselves to be the ‘best’, most loyal Britons.

What could be more respectful of a prince than chasing arbitrary and otherwise worthless concepts of social status? And what is more respectful of the traditions of the British monarchy than looking down on others whom we deem not British enough, no matter how worthy they really are?

 

I know that these all overlap, but that’s the nature of life: explanations, evidence or emotions merge into one another in a web of mutually buttressing facets. I personally have no interest in belonging to a group of dolts who think that belonging is itself the best virtue. That’s a circular argument and a pointless waste of time. I am happy being stoical and careful; I do not care for displays of emotion and think they have no value in their own right, and rarely any practical value either. I think for myself, and in so far as my national culture demands national mourning, I will refuse and play a small role in changing national culture to be sensible, instead of playing along.

It seems off to hold up national culture as great and important and yet by playing along to its importance fail to make it better. That simply makes it less great!

At root, I simply do not care for figureheads, and rather than refusing to be loyal, or virtuous, or part of Britain, I simply do not agree that these things are demonstrated by the logical fallacies of mourning for a stranger. Britain was once a proudly pragmatic, sensible country. That’s the Briton I am.

Caring about childcare

 

During the pandemic there has been a lot of concern about children and their futures, with a wide range of people keen to prioritise children’s future over the needs and desires of adults today. I read today, in Private Eye of all places (which is usually sane and balanced) that ‘the welfare of children in any society should be paramount’.

              I can’t think of any good reason for asserting such a thing, but what is even more strange is how little concern we have for children’s futures in a host of other ways. We have paid little attention to failures in schooling up to now. We have been uninterested in climate change, which will destroy prosperity and could easily turn humanity from a thriving species into one scratching around for survival. We have not given two hoots about the pensions pyramid scheme which will leave children paying exorbitant taxes to keep their parents wealthy; we even see people writing that it’s selfish not to have children precisely because their purpose in life is to support us when we’re old, as if they are merely a tool for our own welfare rather than beings who might want to choose their own purpose, and it’s selfish to think otherwise. We have fished the fish away and resorted to, literally, scraping the bottom of the ocean for last vestiges of life. We have burned as much oil as we could find with nary a thought about whether our children might like to use it for plastic themselves: we have heard stories about peak oil alongside those of climate change. Even if we miraculously find a way to avoid climate damage, there will still be relatively little oil left for all future generations to use for all its myriad purposes.

              We have failed to invest in good infrastructure, and when governments have finally decided to invest in the future, the investments have been more about helping their friends and getting good media coverage than about the hard, boring task of providing children with a good future. HS2, for example, is a waste of money, except that it’s a massive project that politicians can point to nice and easily. Spending that money on thousands of small local projects would be invisible and therefore pointless for a politician.

              We continue to allow poor housing conditions, overpriced housing, poor job prospects, bad diets, junk food advertising, traffic pollution, mercury in fish… there are so many examples.

              If children’s futures were really important, you’d think we’d have acted on some of these; that the cacophony of voices, both right wing and left, that insisted that children were so important, would also have agreed that they were important at other times.

              Children only became important when two factors arose: their parents were inconvenienced because the children were at home and they had to take responsibility for their own families; and when they could predict an immediate effect.

              As with everything else in society, what mattered was immediacy and convenience. It’s not about the children at all.

              Caring about the future would mean an entirely different society, and that’s not something most people are willing to countenance. We want our children to be kings of the dungheaps we leave behind.

Un-blackening the race report's reputation

 

I finally read the much-maligned race report today and found it both sensible and mostly reasonable. I was not surprised; the criticisms I have read were not substantive. They did not carefully explain the errors. They were wails of outrage because the report offered insight and an attempt to reach the truth, rather than merely unquestioningly echoing what those commentators have pushed as truth.

The report cited and attempted analysis of data, but for many commentators in our political climate, on this and many other issues, their opinions are more important than the truth, and if the truth disagrees, it must be discarded and the messengers attacked.

The report contained some important conclusions that race campaigners were not expecting, such as this:

 Put simply we no longer see a Britain where the system is deliberately rigged against ethnic minorities. The impediments and disparities do exist, they are varied, and ironically very few of them are directly to do with racism. Too often ‘racism’ is the catch-all explanation, and can be simply implicitly accepted rather than explicitly examined.The evidence shows that geography, family influence, socio-economic background, culture and religion have more significant impact on life chances than the existence of racism. That said, we take the reality of racism seriously and we do not deny that it is a real force in the UK…

Another revelation from our dive into the data was just how stuck some groups from the White majority are. As a result, we came to the view that recommendations should, wherever possible, be designed to remove obstacles for everyone, rather than specific groups.

It did also have a couple of off-colour sentences that a sensible editor would have removed, even though they were surrounded by important context, such as the below and the contextual paragraph I’ve put below it.

There is a new story about the Caribbean experience which speaks to the slave period not only being about profit and suffering but how culturally African people transformed themselves into a re-modelled African/Britain…

We do not believe that the UK is yet a post-racial society which has completed the long journey to equality of opportunity. And we know, too many of us from personal experience, that prejudice and discrimination can still cast a shadow over lives. Outright racism still exists in the UK, whether it surfaces as graffiti on someone’s business, violence in the street, or prejudice in the labour market. It can cause a unique and indelible pain for the individual affected and has no place in any civilised society.

That first paragraph seemed to be the main thing the commentators I have come across took from the report. The two criticisms that came up repeatedly were that it was outrageous to suggest that we should tell a nice new story about slavery, and that the idea that wealth inequality is more important than race is clearly wrong because it’s not what those commentators have been saying.

I agree with that first criticism. But this seems like a crazy thing to focus on. The report is 258 pages long. It has plenty of places which are obviously guided by current Conservative policy and campaigning, but this is the only one I can remember (and that I bothered copying as I read) that is so outrageous. An article listing the rest, with alternatives, or merely noting the trend for the authors to hope for individual innovation and self-help, with the right tools, would be an important comment on the report. I think that self-help, even with more policies to enable it in small ways, is not enough when society has so much wealth inequality. We need massive changes; wealth inequality is an elephant in the room. I could have written a few paragraphs contrasting report recommendations with the effects of proper government focus on inequality. But the recommendations are, within the remit of not rocking the boat too much, very wise and sensible ones. For example, here’s one that all race campaigners have been asking for:

Recommendation 20: Making of modern Britain: teaching an inclusive curriculum

Produce high-quality teaching resources, through independent experts, to tell the multiple, nuanced stories of the contributions made by different groups that have made this country the one it is today.

British history is not solely one of imperial imposition – Commonwealth history and literature reveals a more complex picture, in which ideas travelled in multiple directions, cultures mixed and positive relations formed that today underpin diaspora around the world, which many ethnic minority children in the UK will feel part of. All this makes up the British story, our story, which has episodes of both shame and pride.

No-one seemed to celebrate this, and adduce it in support of their pre-existing campaigns for a better curriculum. They probably didn’t bother even reading the recommendations, let alone the detail later explaining how the recommendations were reached.

The authors anticipated many of the criticisms, and have their own thoughts about the current state of race campaigning. True, their comments will be welcome to Conservative ears. But they have important points to make: even in 258 pages, there isn’t room for everything, and they have been careful about which Conservative talking points they have no time for and which are actually reasonable to repeat.

[Re BLM:] We understand the idealism of those well-intentioned young people who have held on to, and amplified, this inter-generational mistrust. However, we also have to ask whether a narrative that claims nothing has changed for the better, and that the dominant feature of our society is institutional racism and White privilege, will achieve anything beyond alienating the decent centre ground – a centre ground which is occupied by people of all races and ethnicities.

We suggest that pessimistic narratives about race have also been reinforced by a rise of identity politics, as old class divisions have lost traction. Well organised single-issue identity lobby groups also help to raise the volume. These organisations can do good work protecting the vulnerable, but they also tend to have a pessimism bias in their narratives to draw attention to their cause. And they tend to stress the ‘lived experience’ of the groups they seek to protect with less emphasis on objective data.

I think that, hidden in that quotation, is the most important point of the whole report. Old class divisions based on wealth have faded and been replaced by organised single-issue groups colonising the space. Like colonial entities in the physical world, they cannibalise what was there before, claiming that they have brought goodness, order and improvement and that the previous set-up was primitive. And they are wrong. ‘Lived experience’ in place of objective data is quackery, just like fad diets, homeopathy and crystal healing. And like all quackery, it creates cult-like devotion and adherents who do not realise that it is all a deception.

The Commission saw this all-too clearly, and neatly described the problem.

In the call for evidence, the Commission noted a tendency to conflate discrimination and disparities; whilst they sometimes co-exist they often do not. The Commission believes this is symptomatic of a wider, repeated use and misapplication of the term ‘racism’ to account for every observed disparity.

Where ‘institutional racism’ is used too casually as an explanatory tool, it can also lead to insufficient consideration of other factors which are also known to drive such differences in outcomes. If accusations of ‘institutional racism’ are levelled against institutions, these should – like any other serious accusation – be subject to robust assessment and evidence and show that an institution has treated an ethnic group differently to other groups because of their ethnic identity.

The Commission therefore proposes the following framework to distinguish between different forms of racial disparity and racism:

1. Explained racial disparities: this term should be used when there are persistent ethnic differential outcomes that can demonstrably be shown to be as a result of other factors such as geography, class or sex.

2. Unexplained racial disparities: persistent differential outcomes for ethnic groups with no conclusive evidence about the causes. This applies to situations where a disparate outcome is identified, but there is no evidence as to what is causing it.

3. Institutional racism: applicable to an institution that is racist or discriminatory processes, policies, attitudes or behaviours in a single institution.

4. Systemic racism: this applies to interconnected organisations, or wider society, which exhibit racist or discriminatory processes, policies, attitudes or behaviours.

5. Structural racism: to describe a legacy of historic racist or discriminatory processes, policies, attitudes or behaviours that continue to shape organisations and societies today.

Arguments about discrimination almost always start with data but how that data is framed and selected is crucial, and differences in outcomes need understanding and explaining. Differences – or ‘disparities’ – are not always sinister and do not always arise from discrimination.

I think that this long quotation is a superb way of explaining the inappropriate approach of many social campaigners. They see 1 or 2, and assume 3-5. Correlation does not equal causation: one of the most famous rules of statistical interpretation. The Commission did not dismiss the existence of racial disparities: it merely analysed their cause. And despite trying to pre-empt campaigners by explaining for the angry toddlers exactly how logic works, there was still the usual outrage that someone had an opinion about racism that wasn’t theirs.

The Commission also had a very wise approach to helping people in general, one that I have supported for many years:

…with some exceptions, the best and fairest way to address disparities is to make improvements that will benefit everyone, targeting interventions based on need, not ethnicity [or any other social category]…

‘nudge’-style procedures (such as name-blind CVs, transparent performance metrics, family-friendly policies, proactive mentoring and networking procedures) are more useful than methods that overtly discriminate against some groups, for example quotas.

It even directly stated something that I’ve been shouted down for saying myself, so I am both happy to see it repeated and sad to see that it’s no longer novel insight, although it clearly needs repeating.

The Commission recognises that employers will want to do something to show a commitment to fairness. However, finding one ethnic minority face for a board, for example, is not a substitute for a proper fairness strategy. It should not be assumed that someone’s ethnic background will change a board’s culture, nor that when people from different backgrounds come together they will be more creative. Greater emphasis should be placed on diversity of thought and perspective around a board table which is not associated with anyone’s race or ethnicity.

Diversity is indeed a cause of better performance. But diversity isn’t about ticking boxes for prominent campaign groups. A rich black man who went to Eton will bring less diversity to the wealthy elites than a typical white university academic: the job environment and modes of thought are a greater cause of difference than skin colour.

The Commission did mention a few times that poor white people, especially boys, do very badly. At 4 million strong, they easily outnumber poor people in ethnic minorities, even if those have other disadvantage – which the Commission found was not always the case.

Overall, pupils from ethnic minorities perform better than White British pupils when accounting for socio-economic status…

For many key health outcomes, including life expectancy, overall mortality and many of the leading causes of mortality in the UK, ethnic minority groups have better outcomes than the White population. This evidence clearly suggests that ethnicity is not the major driver of health inequalities in the UK but deprivation, geography and differential exposure to key risk factors.

The Commission also optimistically tried to pre-empt all the howls of indignation with one simple comment that is probably the most-ignored piece of advice in the whole report:

This also means that an open climate of debate must be encouraged in which it is as legitimate to question explanations based on discrimination as it is to make them.

If something can’t be questioned, it isn’t truth, it is religion.

People who care about improving this country can deduce a lot from this one report. The vocal attention on single-issue campaigning, or specified-minority help, has drowned out the great truth that the left-wing of politics used to centre all its messaging on: that wealth inequality has been, and remains, the biggest cause of other inequalities. In a market society - in which money buys many other things - it could hardly be otherwise.

The 4 million white left behinds in the north know this well: to dismiss their ‘lived experience’, in the parlance of the day, is no more tolerable than to dismiss the lived experience of vocal campaign groups. This report is emphasising that Labour, in its postmodern, post-truth spiral of ever more wacky self-righteous identity politics, has left behind people whom society has left behind: people whom Labour was founded to help.

The Conservatives have stepped into the gap with more lies: a xenophobic, self-reliant message of pride that gives these people a way to feel good, but only a feeling. The Liberal Democrats offer help to everyone, but their careful thoughtfulness struggles to hook a population looking for emotional engagement. Other parties offer nuances on these approaches. Who has betrayed these people more: Labour that ought to be representing them, or the Conservatives who have now deceived them despite contributing most to their poverty?

It doesn’t matter. We’ve had four years of analysis repeating these facts, and yet still we get outrage every time the truth emerges: a witch hunt of splat-the-rat, knocking the truth back down and providing ever more opportunity for falsehood to spread, or for malign people to claim the mantle of truth as their own. Another four years is unlikely to make a difference. We need eighty years that we don’t have, until everyone alive is dead and historians can dispassionately (if such a thing still exists) tell the story.