We Count, We Matter: Voice, Choice and the Death of Distance 9781138306219, 9781315141602

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We Count, We Matter

This book examines the meaning of Brexit, the election of Trump and the rising tide of populist revolt on the right amidst the collapse of the centre left. Exploring the reaction against the establishment or ‘the system’, the author contends that we are witnessing a new divide between those who wish to see an interconnected world and those who seek distance: as transport and technology shrink the world, we witness a backlash that favours protectionism and opposes immigration. Distance is the new frontier: for some, remote players are rejected in favour of identities closer to home. This divide plays out in relation to the notion of ‘face’, as individuals react to ‘faceless’ organisations and processes such as globalisation and automation, responding to a sense of alienation on social media and developing a conception of themselves as networked individuals. Thus, we move towards a type of society characterised not by honour and dishonour, or right and wrong, but by voice and choice. A fascinating and very accessible analysis of the divisions and transformations that have come to dominate the contemporary landscape, this book will appeal to political leaders and social scientists with interests in globalisation, social movements and social theory. Christopher Steed is Visiting Fellow in the School of Management at the University of Southampton, UK, and the author of Smart Leadership – Wise Leadership: Environments of Value in an Emerging Future.

A bold and wide-ranging book which isn’t afraid to look at the big picture and relate recent events to wider social trends. Linda Woodhead, Lancaster University, UK. In a world that is increasingly prey to populism and revolt, and is at the same time replete with the forces of alienation and marginalisation, we need clear-headed and far-sighted thinkers to chart the landscape that lies before us. Christopher Steed assesses the contemporary culture in which we find ourselves, and offers helpful critiques that will act as important guideposts for our futures. Steed’s accessible and penetrating insights are a must for all those concerned with mapping the way forward. The Very Reverend Professor Martyn Percy, Dean of Christ Church, Oxford, UK. What lies behind the political upheavals of Brexit, Trump and the rise of populist political parties? Chris Steed explores the paradox of a world that is both becoming smaller and leaving millions at the mercy of faceless forces. John Denham, University of Winchester, UK.

Classical and Contemporary Social Theory https://www.routledge.com/sociology/series/ASHSER1383

Series Editor: Stjepan G. Mestrovic, Texas A&M University, USA Classical and Contemporary Social Theory publishes rigorous scholarly work that re-discovers the relevance of social theory for contemporary times, demonstrating the enduring importance of theory for modern social issues. The series covers social theory in a broad sense, inviting contributions on both ‘classical’ and modern theory, thus encompassing sociology, without being confined to a single discipline. As such, work from across the social sciences is welcome, provided that volumes address the social context of particular issues, subjects or figures and offer new understandings of social reality and the contribution of a theorist or school to our understanding of it. The series considers significant new appraisals of established thinkers or schools, comparative works or contributions that discuss a particular social issue or phenomenon in relation to the work of specific theorists or theoretical approaches. Contributions are welcome that assess broad strands of thought within certain schools or across the work of a number of thinkers, but always with an eye towards contributing to contemporary understandings of social issues and contexts. We Count, We Matter Voice, Choice and the Death of Distance Christopher Steed Depressive Love A Social Pathology Emma Engdahl The New Narcissus in the Age of Reality Television Megan Collins Existence, Meaning, Excellence Aristotelian Reflections on the Meaning of Life Andreas Bielskis Ghosts, Landscapes and Social Memory Martyn Hudson Beyond Bauman Critical Engagements and Creative Excursions Edited by Michael Hviid Jacobsen Diagnostic Cultures A Cultural Approach to the Pathologization of Modern Life Svend Brinkmann

We Count, We Matter Voice, Choice and the Death of Distance

Christopher Steed

First published 2018 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN and by Routledge 711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2018 Christopher Steed The right of Christopher Steed to be identified as author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data A catalog record for this title has been requested ISBN: 978-1-138-30621-9 (hbk) ISBN: 978-1-315-14160-2 (ebk) Typeset in Times New Roman by Deanta Global Publishing Services, Chennai, India

Contents

Foreword viii

Setting the scene: waking the sleeping dog – a first draft of history

  1 Trump cards

1 9

  2 The irrelevance of geography and the forces of change

23

  3 Forces of reaction (identity, place and familiar face)

36

  4 Forces of reaction (immigration panic, walls and bridges)

51

  5 Forces of reaction and the flight from the impersonal

60

  6 ‘Weeks when decades happen’: alienation old and new

76

  7 The lonely exodus of the 21st century: the social cost of disconnection

88

  8 ‘So near yet so far’: Simmel, the stranger and the estranged

99

  9 The rise of voice and choice (thinking like a consumer)

106

10 ‘Facework’ and the rise of voice and choice

116

11 The battles we fought (the respect, human rights and dignity agendas) 133 12 From honour society to voice and choice society

Postscript: lord of the lies: the image system and a theory of emotional cognition

150

175

Index 187

Foreword Living in interesting times The Very Reverend Professor Martyn Percy Dean of Christ Church, Oxford

“May you live in interesting times” is a traditional English expression that is ­purported to be a translation of a traditional Chinese curse. Despite being so common in English as to be known as ‘the Chinese curse’, the saying is almost certainly apocryphal. The nearest related Chinese expression is “better to be a dog in a peaceful time, than to be a human in a chaotic (warring) period”. Our times are indeed interesting. So much so, it is sometimes hard to believe what we are witnessing. So what exactly are these times? What is the ‘Spirit of our Age’? An Age of Austerity, perhaps? Some would see it as an Era of Equality: meritocracy overcoming classist divisions. Our age is certainly more secular, at least in the developed world. Yet there is no sign of religions being on retreat elsewhere. In the developing world, religion is alive and kicking. Moreover, though the Western world has seen the decline of religious institutions through the forces of industrialisation, secularism and consumerism, this has been countered and challenged by emergent and multifarious forms of spirituality. And, of course, the rise of ‘furious religion’ in forms of fundamentalism and even terrorism – a phenomenon that Gilles Kepel teasingly dubbed “God’s revenge”. We do indeed live in interesting times. We are connected, as never before, and instantly, through social media. Yet alienated, as never before, from our nearest neighbours. (I was writing this on the day that the Grenfell Tower Inquest opened in London – into a fire in a 20-storey, 1974 tower block that claimed the lives of over 80 people on 14th June 2017. The flats were occupied by some of London’s poorest citizens, yet only yards away from some of London’s most expensive housing.) Yet I think we may be living in another era: what I might term as an Age of Contempt. It is too easy to label ‘others’, and in that process, create false distances between them and us. Labels are often platforms for some un-pasteurised rhetoric, and in the raw emotional terrain of what passes for public discourse, new binaries are formed. Correspondingly, society suddenly finds itself divided between Brexiters and Remainers; workers and scroungers; progressives and traditionalists; white supremacists and Black Lives Matter; public and private sector; fundamentalists and progressives; left and right; realists and fantasists. In the 21st century, it

Foreword ix seems, we have crafted the art of alienation and contempt like never before. So it is unsurprising that there is a lot of talk of oneness and unity, as a potential antidote. Our nation coming together. Americans coming together. Unity is flavour of the moment: united we stand, apparently. In 2016, the Oxford English Dictionary named ‘post-truth’ its word of the year. The term refers to statements that are manifestly untrue, but achieve a desired goal of persuading people to think or act differently. Specifically, it is: “relating to or denoting circumstances in which the objective facts are less influential in shaping public opinion than appeals to emotion and personal belief  ”. So, it is reasonable to peddle conspiracy theories for effect, even if the utterer does not believe one word of what is behind the theory. The use of language is designed to move, motivate and emotionally manoeuvre audiences. It is not about fact, but rather effect. Because what matters is that people change, not whether they change on the basis of truth or falsehood. The question of truth – or what is now referred to as ‘post-truth politics’ – is one of the defining questions of our age. To be sure, politicians have always been economical with the truth. But post-truth politics is arguably new. In 2016, Donald Trump swept to power in the USA, and the UK appears to be leaving the EU. And all of this socio-political change is riding on a tide of rhetoric pandering to racism, misogyny, nativism, fear of Muslims and immigrants, and much more besides. In his book, Faces of Moderation, Aurelian Craiutu argues that moderation is not an ideology, but rather a disposition. It is a composite of character and virtues that does not divide the world into light and dark, true and false, good or bad. At the same time, moderation does not accept everything as equal and valid. It accepts that some opinions and ideologies are irredeemable, and need to be rejected. In an earlier book Craiutu argued that moderation was a virtue for courageous minds. Tacitus mourned the lost virtue of moderation – calling moderation “the most difficult lesson of wisdom”. Moderation works at unity and harmony. It accepts that on our own, we cannot be entirely right or good. We need each other, and we need to value and cherish our differences – and sometimes our disagreements – if we are to progress. The distances between us, in other words, need to be overcome. Being a moderate is not weak-willed or sloppily liberal: it is about being charitable, generous and tough-minded. In other words, a difficult blend. In this original analysis, Christopher Steed draws attention to the confection of factors that produced Brexit, the rise of populism and of Donald Trump, who seemed to capture a new mood. Post-truth and the death of facts and ‘expert’ perspectives represent one aspect of this. What he labels as ‘the image system’ carries far more weight than truth. It is perhaps where the death of distance and growing alienation has taken us. The ‘death of distance’ is a metaphor for globalising forces that are steadily shrinking the planet. They are, however, evoking a reaction, countervailing forces that produce walls, nationalism and the assertion of boundaries and identities. Christopher analyses this with interesting and thought-provoking strokes.

x  Foreword ‘We count, we matter’ lies at the heart of the assertion in contemporary politics that is at the same time a sigh. ‘Don’t write us off’, it says. ‘Include us’. People will react against being locked out of the system. Another metaphor is deployed, that of ‘face’. A reaction against faceless players that control our world is a protest against de-personalisation. We are haunted by the loss of face of another. And so we seek the nearness of the neighbour. Christopher Steed’s book describes the death of distance. Yet in another sense, manifold distances that now exist between ourselves and our neighbours need to be comprehended and conquered. One of the fundamental tasks of hermeneutics – the art and science of interpretation – is to understand and overcome distances. The distances between, for example, rhetoric and reality; or promises and practices; or apparently plain texts and their complex meanings and applications. What Christopher Steed is offering in this remarkable and timely book is a way of conceiving distance as a social and political problem that we all need to recognise, reflect on and then address. In so doing, Steed’s book could not be more apposite for this age. It is worth pondering the contention he brings that we have moved from a society based on concepts of sin and duty into a society based on voice and choice. This, Christopher Steed suggests, is not individualism per se but a networked individualism. Certainly, we are witnessing the fall and fall of institutional faith. Are we seeing also the death of duty and of the unmoored self? It is my sincere hope that in reading this volume, readers will not despair of the decades that lie ahead, but rather find a renewed sense of purpose – and some faith in the future. As one former President of the USA said recently, when leaving office, and to those fearful about Donald Trump’s incoming presidency, it would be “a mere blip”. The coming age, said Barack Obama, “is just a little pit stop”. He then added, presciently, that “this is not a period; [it] is a comma in the continuing story of building America”. A comma, perhaps. But a continuing story, one hopes, where the distances between us do not grow ever-greater. But rather, we learn to live as real neighbours, and come to understand our obligations and duties towards those who live both near and far. In turn, that those same neighbours – in all their diversity and difference – are part and parcel of a world that enriches all our lives, helping to build a better society, and a finer future.

“This is a golden age for connoisseurs of anachronism. The perfect storm of Brexit, a dysfunctional US Presidential contest, murderous meltdown in the Middle East and the rise of autocrats around the globe has seen commentators scrambling around for often dubious historical parallels”.1 “Today, we are not merely transferring power from one administration to another or from one party to another, but we are transferring power from Washington, DC, and giving it back to you, the people”. – Donald Trump, inaugural speech. “Personalisation has sought to change the emphasis from what service people want, to what kind of life people want”. – Andrew Power, University of Southampton.2

1 Lay, P. (2016) The Golden Age of Anachronism. History Today. http://www.historytoday.com/paullay/golden-age-anachronism 2 Power, A. (2014) Active Citizenship and Disability: Implementing the Personalisation of Support. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Setting the scene Waking the sleeping dog – a first draft of history

A new time has dawned across the world. We are witnessing the opening shots of a new political era. From the groundswell of left-wing movements in the USA and the UK to the rise and rise of right-wing governments, 2016 saw revolt against globalised elites reach epic proportions. Then Britain triggered the withdrawal from the European Union (EU). The way the country works was clearly not accepted by millions. History books will be written about what happened and why. As if overnight, in a stunning rebuke, the vituperative billionaire Donald Trump became the presidential nominee of the Republican Party and then President; many Democrats revolted and passionately backed a socialist named Bernie Sanders; the UK voted to leave the EU; and a slew of rebellious parties continued to win election after election in countries and upset the establishment apple cart.1 Did that presage a new global order or bids by proud independent nations to reverse the centralising trend and assert the overlooked key of identity? As Lay suggests in the quote at the beginning of this book, “this is a golden age for connoisseurs of anachronism. The perfect storm of Brexit, a dysfunctional US Presidential contest, murderous meltdown in the Middle East and the rise of autocrats around the globe has seen commentators scrambling around for often dubious historical parallels”.2 The longer-term significance of these political dramas will take many years to play out. To try to understand what was going on in this rejection of the establishment is top of the agenda for leaders and social analysts. Brexit, the de-fenestration of a UK Prime Minister,3 a dysfunctional US presidential contest, the rise of autocrats around the globe, the agony of Syria amidst meltdown in the Middle East that generated a tidal wave of refugee humanity – these are puzzling times. It is not easy to grasp wide-reaching changes to business, society and politics that we are seeing around us or to work out how societies might best respond to them. Yet it is essential to make an attempt to understand the global forces on the march in 2016–2017. Why is Trump, Brexit, Austria’s Höfer, France’s Marine Le Pen and Holland’s Geert Wilders happening at this time? Leaders at every level need to understand the deeper forces driving political turmoil of the 2010s. This was not just a European or Western phenomenon, but a global one. 2017 was the year when the fate of populism would be clearer, whether it would fizzle out or could become a mainstream fixture. Wilders and Le Pen did

2  Setting the scene not happen. Most people breathed again. The centre had held. Game over? Yet in France, though Emmanuel Macron’s victory seemed to buck the international (and indeed domestic) trend towards populism, radicals of various stripes had won nearly half the vote. Another possibility was that populist parties would not gain more direct power but that their influence lives on through co-opting positions as the mainstream of politics tacks on to their ground. What would have seemed a nationalist stance had become centre-stage. Weakness of mainstream parties had been exposed; in the currents of the time, the centre-left was shrinking. No previously establishment party had got anywhere near the presidency. The French election was especially dismal for the centre-left, though the harder radical stance of Melenchon struck a definite chord. Can the left carry on when traditional parties have broken apart? It is a question to be left unresolved for a long while to come until a new social model emerges from disenchantment. As Europe breathed again, The Times of London remarked the next day, “the result inflicted a big reversal on the nationalist anti-globalisation cause that has made inroads in the US and Europe”.4 Macron’s success through a brand new party storming to power represented the curious triumph of the outsider. Le Marche had stood, not for the old type of right versus left politics, but a divide based on whether citizen voters stood for a more interconnected world with soft borders against a stance of reinforcing national identity and protectionism. The re-assertion of the nation state in 2016 seemed in direct contradiction to the globalists. On both sides of the pond, the issues were supposed to be mainly those of economics. But the real forces were cultural and political. In part, the folk devil of immigration took the blame for low pay and poor employment. According to the United Nations, campaigns advocating a leave vote presented a “divisive, anti-immigrant and xenophobic rhetoric”5 and in the three weeks following the Brexit vote there was a 20% increase in reported racerelated hate crime in the UK.6 As Vote Leave campaigners stated that leaving the EU would make ‘Britain Great Again’, anti-migrant and xenophobic narratives conflated. Migration threatens national identity. Not least of these upheavals was that sociological boundaries between historically distinct fields (migration research and race and ethnicity research) became blurred.7 The iconic UK Leave slogan ‘take back control’ symbolised the insurgent mood. Yet something was going on requiring deeper listening than repatriation of powers and restricting foreigners and immigrants. Beneath the surface noise, deeper themes were playing. What kind of control were people looking for? This essay seeks to argue that, conflated with concerns about immigration and the rise of networked individuals, there is a close link between the reaction against the establishment we are seeing everywhere and protest against ‘the system’ that has shown up in many contexts for a long time. Every age has to choose what sort of self it wants. The electronic public square that is the internet gives platforms for collective indignation and direct action such that 21st-century people have the means to assert their national or individual story even if such narratives bear the weight of nostalgia.

Setting the scene 3 “It cost me my job”, complained ex-Prime Minister David Cameron in his first major speech after leaving office following the UK referendum.8 Yet ‘populism’ is a loaded term. It is in the eye of a particular beholder – the speaker who feels ‘done to’ by citizens who act as a kind of rabble against the elites who control things. It is a signifier, indicating something that should be deprecated. It is highly misleading in its assumption of a ‘people’ with unified views differentiated against ‘an establishment’ that holds a unified view. ‘Populism’ could equally be construed as legitimating the release of tension from the general public, engaging with those who had been left out of politics – the face of ordinary people versus faceless elites who control things. If this thesis is correct, it is a marker to a new type of society, characterised not by honour and dishonour (losing face), right and wrong (a marred face), but by voice and choice (a bid for the recovery of face and recognition through being seen and heard again). This new global zeitgeist based on authentic autonomy and control over their world has at its heart an imperative towards asserting the value and worth of social participants. The essence is ‘we count, we matter’. Reaction against contemporary de-personalisation has strong implications for sociology as well as politics. It is not without its dark side. People become emotional about politics. That divides families and friendships. Populism thrives on dualities, pitting half of society against the other half. Is this a new development in the global zeitgeist? In Western-style democracies, subjects demand voice. Increasingly, they demand choice. This has become a mantra of our times. We are at the end of a ‘Government knows best’ era in favour of a doctrine of empowerment. Consumer rights, the demand for dignity and respect in the workplace, personalised education and health care so as to deal with people holistically – all this reflects a new consciousness that has risen. Bureaucracy, which relies on distance, is not a positive term, especially when faceless. While writing this, a United Airlines passenger was dragged from a plane in Chicago in April 2017 in an incident that sparked international outrage and turned into a corporate public relations nightmare. “For a long time airlines, United in particular, have bullied us”, his lawyer told a news conference in Chicago, outlining the action they may pursue against United and the city of Chicago. “We want dignity, we want respect”. Dignity; respect – this is the sigh of our times. A Government budget by the UK Chancellor of the Exchequer in March 2017 can try to position itself as supporting ‘ordinary working families’. Investing in education and skills, it was said, is the only way of delivering a fairer society, to ensure that the economy works for all. “We commit to this programme because we understand that choice is the key to excellence in education”.9 I argue that what we are seeing is ‘the death of distance’. Technology and transport have shrunk the world and built bridges but that is combined with reaction and backlash where protectionism and concerns about immigration result in a mood of building walls and ‘keep your distance!’ The rise of populism exposed depths of anger previously hidden in plain sight among people who felt betrayed by elites and out of control of their lives. Distancing ourselves from those who

4  Setting the scene claim purchase on our lives is perhaps the only way of ensuring group or national identity. This was nostalgia; nostalgia for a more orderly past when women ran the home, a past where the old identity categories held firm and where white skin should be given special consideration.10 A much quoted predictor of voting Brexit was support for capital punishment – law, order and justice. “One thing that makes my life great is being part of a community”.11 Such were markers of immediacy of recognition, of identity. The way this plays out is in the notion of ‘face’. Response to ‘faceless’ forces out there (such as globalism, administrators or EU bureaucrats) is of a piece with ‘faceless’ robotics stealing people’s jobs or immigrants who cover their face. This is fundamental to the reaction that is being termed ‘populism’. Yet what we may be seeing is people coming to think of themselves in a new way, as networked individuals connecting through social media to air their grievances. The subjectivity behind this new consciousness is deeply fascinating and warrants exploring! In 2016, Europe was marking the cataclysmic First World War; a time when a European order that had brought peace, prosperity and extraordinary artistic and scientific progress began to unravel. The catastrophe had set in train the Russian Revolution, Nazi Germany, the Holocaust, the atomic bomb, the Cold War and the emergence of the modern Middle East. In 1989, with the fall of the Berlin Wall, we entered a relatively stable period that coincided with the explosion of globalisation and the triumph of the liberal, rules-based social international order – the ‘End of History’.12 Now, that seemed to be crashing down as spectacularly as the Berlin Wall. The impact of 9/11, the rise of Russia and new economic nationalisms combined with the sting in the tail from the global financial crisis of 2008 that left a crippling overhang of debt on Western economies had all left their mark. An international order based on liberal values was crumbling. With it, a liberal sense of progress had been upset – the assumption that you get richer and better educated with successive generations. The post-war political settlement and a global way of thinking was being shelved. The forces of change were in evidence; global forces of free trade and an interconnected world, global forces of an astounding technology that shrunk the planet and annihilated distance. The plates are shifting; shifting so fast that everywhere on the planet is no further than hours away and no one further than milliseconds on the internet. Distance has all but died. Energised by social media and the revolution in communications and transportation; these were the forces of novelty. They contrast with the forces seeking cultural order and continuity. Powerful headwinds against these trends were in response to global liberal, economic institutions that did not seem to connect with the lives of people, who despised metropolitan elites espousing interventionism, multiculturalism and a secular liberal order that despised primeval, uncultured reversion to blood, soil and flag. At the same time, though seemingly disconnected, there continued to be strong reactions against inflexible bureaucratic systems, against experts, and in favour of such things as personalised medicine, voice and choice in health care and education and consumer power. Late modern life was far more impersonal – witness the self-service electronic check-out in supermarkets (often older shoppers lamented

Setting the scene 5 the loss of easy banter with a real person check-out and someone to talk to. ‘Likes’ on Facebook or comments on TripAdvisor are woven into the fabric of social selves. Those who run things cannot get away with it; like rabbits, they have been caught in the headlights of fierce electronic scrutiny. For these modern movements are energised by the internet. Individual right of protest against the system and collective rage are connected and are mobilised at the speed of a mouse. This goes across the piece; witness the way that Chinese citizens are increasingly angry at poor safety standards.13 The internet enables networked selves to reconvene in cyberspace. Consumer-citizens have voice. ‘Netizens’ flourish though trolls also stalk the electronic badlands. The cultural zeitgeist seems to be one of reaction against the impersonal and bureaucratic way people are often treated. The compression of time as well as space means that people expect fast solutions for complicated problems. Regularly, the sigh is that politicians do not listen to what people are saying. There is a disconnection between leadership in many walks of life and the people they serve. The crisis is one of authenticity. Hilary Clinton seemed to be associated too closely with the political ascendancy of the previous 30 years. Donald Trump rode to power clothed in outsider status. Supporters stressed that he was only saying and thinking what many were saying and thinking. That was barely half the story. He was saying and thinking it in a way that many working people recognised. Donald Trump was talking human, ‘like one of us’. The UK Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn looked genuine, not as if he had stepped out of an investment bank. Connoisseurs of anachronism need look no further than the intriguing resonance with the explosion that rent Europe 500 years before; a pent-up mood that awaited a spark. It was a German monk, Martin Luther, who supplied the spark. October 31st, 1517, was that moment. 95 Theses penned to a church door in Wittenberg invited debate and led to dramatic controversy. Luther’s appeal was to those who felt overlooked.14 Dissenting voices now flourished as alternative thought-leaders to the monolithic hegemony of medieval Christendom. The Reformation was born. It was many things with many strands. Amongst the impulses, both spiritual and cultural, was the desire to reject centralised authority, promote national identity and allow ordinary people to be more individualistic in a collectivised continent. Luther’s whole polemic 500 years ago turned on rejecting the idea of external authority having rights over the inner life. It could hardly have happened without a communications revolution that spread knowledge of defiance in barely a month. The printing press was the internet of its day, radical new technology that put the Bible and literature generally into the hands of anyone and everyone. Protestantism democratised knowledge. When the Reformation spread to countries like England, after a tumultuous period that saw King Henry VIII overthrow the central authority that ruled Europe amidst huge resentment, the old Catholicism became the vehicle for Protest of a different sort. Nineteen years after Luther’s Protest, the North was determined to reject King Henry’s attempt to nationalise the monasteries. In the rebellion that became known as ‘The Pilgrimage of Grace’, the distance from London played a big part.15 Although, as

6  Setting the scene we shall argue, we have moved from being a sin and grace/right and wrong society to one characterised by ‘voice and choice’, it remains true that distance creates an environment within which dissent can operate. The historical parallels 500 years on are deeply instructive. When populist political speech could hail the vote by the UK to leave the EU as being ‘a victory for ordinary people, for decent people, against the big banks’, it is plugging into a theme that has been running in cultural and political history for centuries. Distance and disconnect produce alienation. Paradoxically, they also create a climate of resistance by those who have either developed artful ways of dealing with those who call the tune or who want to shout and shout again. Luther was able to appeal to those who felt the Church had become bloated and rich on the backs of the exploited; ordinary people who felt that the expert theologians and official prelates of their day stood in their way and told lies. Today, ‘left’ and ‘right’, so potent for pundits positioning political players, is irrelevant to the lived experience of voters. Distance is the new frontier. Following Einstein’s conceptualisation of spacetime a hundred years ago, space and time are inextricably linked. A century later, both have been compressed. Remote, impersonal forces we cannot control such as globalisation and the EU bureaucracy are the villains of our age. In an internet era people expect responsiveness. Distance is the new alienation, a word that stirred from 19th-century views of life and society by Hegel, Karl Marx and many others. When it is perceived to be alienating, distance grows. Cultural distance or an existential crisis of alienation is one response to contemporary life, however. Distance also has another dimension that is central to modern times. Our global, connected world has seen the collapse of distance; its virtual annihilation in response to some spectacular technology. This is deeply problematic. Virtual reality pioneer Jaron Lanier argued that developments in our culture mean social networks replace individual creativity. His rallying cry was “you are not a gadget”!16 Some of these responses are shaped by consumer society. People shop for commitments. They get excited about a cause on social media that mobilises excitable support for a while but then moves on to something else. Consumer attitudes shape profoundly the way people access experiences on their own terms. The result is that voluntary association is declining. Individualism reigns. Instead of closing the gap, people are more socially distant from each other in unconscious alienation. Unless, that is, they have Facebook or its equivalents. Virtual connection with anyone at the speed of a mouse seems a good deal, perhaps with an ability to overcome the distance. As long as we stay open and connected, it is more likely we will be open and connected to the world outside surely? Unfortunately not. The Facebook filter bubble means that the more things you ‘like’, the more you will attract messages reinforcing your view of the world. The echo chamber effect portends a dystopian future. A large proportion of people receive their news from Facebook and social media platforms. How you take false news off the internet is seemingly intractable if many items have the feel of ‘truthiness’. Nevertheless, online platforms are an important new civic space. It opens up political engagement to new generations. Hackers protest that they do their work because of their belief that the internet should be an open space without walls.

Setting the scene 7 Be that as it may, it is clear that mobile technology has created new modes of civic engagement, though it is less clear that these innovations have mobilised a broader segment of the public. Surveys show that many who are politically active online are not newcomers, but veterans of offline political activities. Despite grievances about how government is currently working, ordinary citizens seem to believe they can influence those in charge or hold out of touch politicians accountable. So what does this populist tsunami overwhelming the Western mainstream portend? What is this insurrection about? Getting the diagnosis right is important. It is vital to step back and ask ‘what is going on?’ Is all this demand for recognition though a new way of defining ourselves? Are these disruptive forces the curtain-raiser to a new type of society characterised by ‘power to the people’? What would it mean to say that through assertion of individual and group power over and against globalised elites, the interconnecting thread is an assertion of a growing mood of ‘voice and choice’; ‘no decisions about us without us!’? With all possibilities of dystopian politics there is a baby in the bathwater. It is the shout of legitimate Protest – ‘we count, we matter’! It is not just through the wave of feminism in the 1970s that personal life has become a political demand. ‘The personal is political’ rang true in the turbulent politics of 2016. What perhaps we were witnessing were forms of social life that were becoming opposed to individual life. Fresh accounts of the self are probably needed now. For too long and for too many, the contemporary self was saturated with powerlessness and impotence in the face of faceless forces. The more people became aware of themselves, the more their personhood was triggered by the impersonal. It was push-back time! As the philosopher Christopher Hamilton observes, our ontological situation is cleaved; we are somehow separate from ourselves, ignorant of the ideologies that shape us and not in line with our desires. This was a dominant theme of Nietzsche, Freud and Marx. We are adrift, alienated and fundamentally homeless in the world.17 As we will explore, fuelling the discontent is a growing sense of being denied a voice, and of political institutions as being remote and faceless. Kenan Malik observes that “the new political faultline in Europe is not between left and right, between social democracy and conservatism, but between those who feel at home in – or at least are willing to accommodate themselves to – the more technocratic, post-ideological world, and those who feel left out, dispossessed and voiceless”.18 Against the roar of the anti-system voting and flight from de-personalisation that characterise our times, the homeless, sleeping dog has been awakened!

Notes  1 Judis, J. (2016) The Populist Explosion: How the Great Recession Transformed American and European Politics. New York: Columbia Global Reports.   2 Lay, P. (2016) The Golden Age of Anachronism. History Today. http://www.historytoday.com/paul-lay/golden-age-anachronism   3 Seldon, A. & Snowdon, P. (2016) Cameron at 10: The Verdict. London: William Collins.

8  Setting the scene   4 French Presidential Election, Financial Times. https://www.ft.com/french-presidentialelection. 8th May 2017.   5 Stone (2016) Monitoring Racial Equality and Non-Discrimination. The Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination (CERD), Office of Commission on Human Rights, Geneva, Switzerland.   6 Corcoran, H. & Smith, K. (2016) Hate Crime, England and Wales, 2015/16. Statistical Bulletin 11/16, https://www.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_ data/file/559319/hate-crime-1516-hosb1116.pdf. 13th October 2016.  7 British Sociological Association. (2017) Belonging in a Post-Brexit-Vote Britain: Researching Race, Ethnicity and Migration in a Changing Landscape. Migration Research Conference, 9th May 2017, University of Sheffield. Call for papers.   8 ‘Rise of Populism Cost Me My Job’. Speech at De Pauw University, Indiana, www. depauw.edu/news-media/latest-news/details/32760. 9th December 2016.  9 Budget statement, Chancellor Philip Hammond, and its response, www.bbc.co.uk/ radio4/worldatone, 8th March 2017. 10 Didion, J. (2016) South and West: From a Notebook. New York: Knopf. 11 Author client notes used with permission. 12 Fukuyama, F. (2012) The End of History and the Last Man. London: Penguin. 13 Witness popular reaction against an industrial accident in November 2016 that buried 65 workers, www.bbc.co.uk/radio4/sixoclocknews, 24th November 2016. 14 Stanford, P. (2017) Martin Luther: Catholic Dissident. London: Hodder & Stoughton. 15 Wood, A. (2001) Riot, Rebellion and Popular Politics in Early Modern England. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. 16 Lanier, J. (2011) You Are Not a Gadget. London: Allen Lane. 17 Hamilton, C. (2016) A Philosophy of Tragedy. London: Reaktion. 18 Malik, K. (2017) Populism and Immigration, https://kenanmalik.wordpress.com/ 2017/10/05/populism-and-immigration/

1

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The forces of seismic reaction had been building for a long time. They were cut from the same cloth as popular reactions to many social forces: forces that had been protesting for a while against the establishment that controlled how things were arranged and ordered the world in its own image. It was in 2016 that they burst through the dam. A wired-up, connected world open to trade and movement of people with acceptance and embrace is generating contrasting reactions. Those who are open and tolerant are more likely to be millennials or Facebook natives and have a world-view less rooted in communities and national identity. Others respond to a world where distance has collapsed by putting up the drawbridge; closing rank against free movement of foreigners and migrants. A populist has now assumed the US presidency by campaigning on a platform of stark economic nationalism and protectionism. By definition, walls and drawbridges sustain distance and separation. Donald Trump’s words at his inauguration (which appear at the beginning of this book) expressed the shift from the globalist tendency to the re-assertion of the nation state. “Today, we are not merely transferring power from one administration to another or from one party to another, but we are transferring power from Washington, DC and giving it back to you, the people”.1 In response to the election of Donald Trump, Pat Buchanan, who stood for the Republican Party’s nomination in 1992 and 1996 on an anti-trade platform, put it like this: “Globalisation is finished. The future belongs to ethno-nationalism and economic nationalism”.2 The slippery concept of nationalism can be extended to either its civic or ethnic forms. A networked world is creating two different reactions, one positive, one negative. Why? The lens through which this can be examined is that of ‘facework’ – the facelessness of invisible forces and elites or of accelerating technological change. These reactions map on to pre-existing ways of seeing the world. The supporters of Emmanuel Macron in the French presidential election of April 2017 tended to be well educated, more metropolitan but also more optimistic. A positive view of the world was held by 72% of his campaign constituency compared with 29% of those who backed Marine Le Pen and the Front National.3

10  Trump cards A marked feature of Western society at the present time is sweeping transformations in the social and political environment. The plates are shifting. The world works differently. In politics we see a fragmented landscape characterised by disconnect and the rise of nationalisms. Angst about Europe or globalisation is much about remote forces out there who control our lives. It signifies a retreat into identity. Community solutions are seen as preferable rather than centralised control where ‘we do things for you!’ In the economy we see a crowded marketplace replete with small business, the consumer and the rise of the social economy. Public ownership and centralised targets are perhaps on the retreat though it remains to be seen how the Corbyn political agenda will play out. Paternalism won’t work in welfare or indeed international development. In education too, a reaction against impersonal systems competes with systematised provision. Organisations are less top-down and bureaucratic, coming under scrutiny as never before as educated citizens realise their own agency. These changes indicate that just as technology has killed distance, distance is very much alive as an existential threat. The need is for human connection as a way of overcoming such alienation; local identities and personalised public services on a human scale. Political processes such as the Scottish National Party in 2014 and the UK Labour Party in 2015–2017 have deployed involve new approaches to collective action through building new mass movements. We are going to examine the notion that there are common themes in people rising up in protest as so many contemporary people appear to find that forms of social life do not match individual aspirations. The sense that there is something wrong with our world had replaced the broad acceptance of the political system. The thread running through reactions by people against ‘the system’, whether or not gathered into people movements, was two responses to ‘distance’. A pervasive perception of distant, remote forces who controlled your life and destiny engendered suspicion and hostility. Those ‘out there’ far removed had power over your world. It was unsurprising people reacted against them. In the UK referendum to leave the EU that summer of 2016, the key phrase was ‘bring back control’. People voted to wrest power back from the unelected (as they saw it) and restore it to our own country. The faceless who pulled the strings should be kicked away. In the event, the result was a chance for a free kick against all those who had seemed to hold ordinary people in contempt. “We’re putting power back in the hands of the people”, as Trump underlined. The buzz word was ‘populism’. The word raised many questions. What precisely is the difference between right-wing and left-wing populism? Does populism bring government closer to the people or is it a threat to democracy? Who are ‘the people’ anyway and who can speak in their name? What is their legitimacy?4 How far does the new populism bring a challenge to democratic politics? Or was it a slightly sneering term used by undemocratic commentators, purely in the eye of the beholder? Perhaps the meaning of this slippery term is best seen through what it does; populism performs. Literature has explored the backcloth to some of these themes. In Returning to Reims, Didier Eribon returns to his hometown and rediscovers the workingclass world he had left behind 30 years earlier. For years, Eribon had thought of

Trump cards 11 his father largely in terms of the latter’s intolerable homophobia. It is his father’s death that opens Eribon’s eyes to the way by which multiple processes of domination intersect in a given life and in a given culture. He reflects on how sexual identity can clash with other parts of one’s identity.5 In a similar location, The End of Eddy explores similar themes. Édouard Louis came from Hallencourt, a village in northern France where many live below the poverty line. Before he had a chance to rebel against the world of his childhood, that world rebelled against him. Confronting his parents, his social class, its poverty, racism and brutality followed inescapably. It was a serious attempt through a debut novel to try to understand that world, happy hunting ground for populist parties.6 It is not often that we get a bottom-up analysis from the grassroots. Amidst the political shockwaves that followed a stunned America, the election of Donald Trump elevated his own book, The Art of the Deal, to the number one position on the New York Times bestseller list.7 Number two on the list was an unusual choice, a book that offered rich insight into why ‘Rust Belt America had voted the way it did’. Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis was a passionate and personal analysis of a culture in crisis, that of white working-class Americans, searingly written from the inside. It was an urgent and troubling meditation on the demographic that has been slowly disintegrating over 40 years and the loss of the American dream for a large segment of the population.8 In a resonant elegy, Strangers in Their Own Land, the sociologist Arlie Hochschild embarked on a thought-provoking journey from her liberal hometown of Berkeley, California, deep into Louisiana bayou country – a stronghold of the conservative right. As she encounters those who strongly oppose many of the ideas she famously champions, Hochschild nevertheless finds common ground and quickly warms to the people she meets, people whose concerns are common to most citizens: the desire for community, the embrace of family, and hopes for their children. Her journey offers several interesting paradoxes: the main paradox about why people are so right-leaning, big government-hating in a state that relies so heavily on federal subsidies. The ambiguity is reflected too in the juxtaposition of people needing big industry for their livelihoods, but also hating that they have to live with its pollution and the corruption within the Government.9 Based on five years of immersion reporting among Tea Party loyalists, Hochschild’s journey uncovered a substantial group of voters who felt they were at the bottom of the hill; waiting in vain to climb up, waiting for a pay rise. At the top of the hill beckoned the American dream. Immigrants and black people had jumped the queue, waved to with encouragement by former President Obama. In short, the Government was not working for them. Her journey was one of engagement; engagement with people who thought differently from you. In George Santayana’s novel of 1935, The Last Puritan,10 he articulates an untrained, pushing, cosmopolitan orphan unleashed by industrial capitalism in America. The schoolmaster Cyrus Whittle signposted the liberal internationalist globalisers who promoted the Americanisation of the world. Confident in the easy assumption of progress, the aftermath of the Second World War saw the

12  Trump cards USA as the wealthiest, most powerful nation on Earth. It was the natural heir of the reason, freedom and democracy that Europe had forfeited. Now in 2016, a new ideological era had dawned. American society and culture seemed to have a big question mark over it.11 The lack of belonging is manifested in the alienated life that many perceived they were living. They felt they were losing themselves amidst the forms of contemporary life that were oppressing them. It all touched a cultural nerve. Donald Trump triggered a political earthquake, making promises to bring jobs back in abundance despite the manufacturing that had migrated overseas. Historical changes had taken place. Bringing American jobs back from the Far East meant a counter-reaction against free trade and open borders. Donald Trump had succeeded in rallying those who felt locked out of the system. It was not just those who had never been to university: a significant proportion of middle-class Americans voted for him, wanting to regain control over their lives. As a fervent Trump supporter, Cleveland Pastor James Davis, gushed, “the little guy who felt the country had been taken from them have now got the Republic back”.12 It was a moment of wide-scale rejection of establishment politics and the global rise of a right-wing populist movement. Being more cosmopolitan and not really grasping the new politics of identity rooted in place, few left-wing parties were succeeding. They had not connected with cultural concerns of voters about feeling overrun; the anger against the faceless. The outliers were Bernie Sanders and Jeremy Corbyn whose currency was the politics of hope. Political rhetoric had become stale and the mistrust of politicians made voters flock to populists who promised elemental authenticity or truth instead of spin, evasiveness and lies. Democratic fatigue had set in against the same type of people who seemed to come back into power each time. Public language seemed to be losing its power.13 Political, cultural and economic conversations were replete with the language of decay and corrosion. We were in a new era of ‘post-truth politics’ – a phrase that entered the lexicon of the Oxford English Dictionary as the neologism of 2016. An exclusive form of nationalism was on the move. Rooted in what Germans called ‘Blut and Boden’ (blood and soil), totalitarian nationalism was the hallmark of the 1930s. We were not in a moment like that. Russia and China excepted or possibly Turkey, there were few totalitarian autocrats on the rise in the global march of right or left of politics. It was economic nationalism that was the new concern; a growing mood that was generating an angry, uncivil tone to public conversation. The tides of reaction were those that rose up against the cosmopolitan, connected world and rejected the policies that left so many washed up on the shore. Reaction had set in amongst those who felt invaded by the greatest refugee crisis and movement of people since the Second World War. Reaction set in too against the policies of free trade and de-regulation that sent manufacturing jobs migrating to the East. It was not just traditional industries such as coal and shipbuilding. Automation had made secure, low-skilled jobs in manufacturing increasingly rare. This was but a curtain raiser on the digital economy coming towards us as virtually any repetitive action can be automated away.

Trump cards 13 The trends we will be probing that are important markers in global society reflect reactions to a concept central to the organisational environment of our times, that of ‘face’. Many reacted to faceless agendas from faceless companies that are out of reach; in London perhaps, or Washington or Brussels. They craved face to face contact, wanting authentic politicians and community rooted in something shared. Perhaps in an age of spiritual starvation, they sought meaning beyond themselves. As Nick Spencer observed, having arrived at the secular self, we kept on searching.14 Just as the ‘Prague Spring’ in 1968 attempted to bring ‘Communism with a human face’, there is greater demand now for capitalism with a human face. ‘Facework’ can sometimes take the form of reaction against ‘the wrong face’. The events of 2016 were not just about economic anxiety but a pervading sense of cultural dislocation. The unprecedented global refugee crisis spawned by the murderous Middle East compounded the problem hugely. It was perhaps less about globalisation than being overrun. Reaction by those who feel disenfranchised, those who feel that the rules are made by those who are political rulers, those who are big corporate players – all this is being mapped on to concerns about immigration. It is true that jobs had been moving abroad. But it was not just economic. Those describing themselves as ‘ordinary people’ felt they had lost out in their values, their identity scorned; those with a different face given favours by liberal elites determined to wave them on in welcome embrace. Ethnic change can happen nationally or locally, and it matters in both Britain and America. The USA was about 90% white in 1960, is 63% white today, and over half of American babies are now from ethnic minorities. Most white Americans already think they are in the minority, and many are beginning to vote in a more ethno-political way. The last time the share of foreign-born in America reached current levels, immigration restrictionist sentiment was off the charts and the Ku Klux Klan had six million members – mainly in northern states concerned about Catholic immigration; the portion of the white electorate that prefers cultural order over change.15 Now voters were obliged to imagine themselves as members of multiethnic societies. In Western politics, voters look more closely at politicians. Politicians are no longer granted automatic respect. Trump’s crude manner of speaking was all part of his appeal. He seemed to speak to voters’ own experiences. He spoke like them; a direct manner of speaking that did not allow for word mincing. Indeed, he seemed to be one of them. The more inappropriate things he said, the closer they felt to him. “He’s my kind of guy”, declared one Trump supporter.16 Donald Trump represented a cultural symbol – a different mood music. As The Economist observed, “Mr Trump’s much-decried egomania and contempt for conservative orthodoxy now looks like a stunningly successful formula”.17 The Democrats gave up on the working class in America a generation ago. It has not been their constituency. By contrast, the Republican Party occupied that space and that of religion that the Democratic Party had vacated. It was fundamentalism with different clothes.

14  Trump cards The tale of two moments was the 2016 story, especially of the vote in the UK to leave the EU (Brexit) and the campaign of Donald Trump to become President of the USA. The conjunction of these two moments was symbolised by the appearance of Nigel Farage, erstwhile leader of the United Kingdom Independence Party (UKIP) at a Republican Party rally in August 2016.18 Farage told the ‘Brexit story’ to around 10,000 Donald Trump supporters in Jackson, Mississippi, framing the historic vote as a “victory of ordinary people against big business, big banks and big politics”. The significance of the moment was clear. Farage was the first British politician to address a Republican presidential rally. The message was equally clear. Little people are standing up to global corporations and big players. Government itself was recast as an agent of tyranny. Until the rise and rise of Jeremy Corbyn in the UK, the left of politics had not been doing well across the piece. Centre-left parties and social democracies had become too removed from working-class voters who felt left behind, perhaps become too obsessed with identity politics, taking too little account of immigration or the under-performance of white working-class boys and then men. The perceived cultural superiority of the elites had become unbearable. Voters would rather have gone for someone widely labelled bigoted than vote for a poster girl for the establishment. Trump – talk of jobs, lives and values under assault had won the day – even though to create a boom, his blue-collar supporters might be disappointed. Yet what was that surge about, on deeper reflection? Where were the social fault lines that the earthquakes revealed? Economic anxiety is certainly one candidate as is cultural dislocation or widespread resentment against incomers who threatened opportunity.

Economic anxiety Economic dislocation was widely hailed as THE driver of voter behaviour in the 2016 American presidential election. Candidate Trump spoke to those angry about free trade and globalisation. There is something to this. According to the McKinsey Global Institute, around two-thirds of households in rich countries saw their real income decline or stagnate between 2005 and 2014 (compared with a decline of less than 2% in the years from 1993 to 2005).19 Those who voted for Brexit in the UK referendum on membership of the EU thought that life was worse than 30 years ago by a substantial margin of 16%.20 Seventy per cent of Americans felt their country was on the wrong track.21 Economic insecurity is clearly something to do with the drivers of popular forces angry at the system. Globalisation has meant decline for former industrial towns that used to thrive. Those who are less well educated were ill-prepared to cope with change. Job losses had soared in uncompetitive industries. Good, highly prized blue-collar jobs were disappearing. Hillary Clinton lost the 2016 election predominantly in three Rust Belt states where the decline of manufacturing plagued local communities – Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin. Among

Trump cards 15 lower-income voters generally, there was a swing away from Democrats and towards Republicans. As the Washington Post observed, Trump’s most fervent supporters tend to be white men without college degrees. This same group has suffered economically in our increasingly globalised world, as machines have replaced workers in factories and labour has shifted overseas. Trump has promised to curtail trade and other perceived threats to American workers, including immigrants.22 A Joseph Rowntree Report on lack of opportunity showed how Britain was divided along economic, educational and social lines. The poorest households, with incomes of less than £20,000 per year, were more likely to support leaving the EU than the wealthiest households, as were people in low-skilled and manual occupations, the unemployed, those who felt that their financial situation had worsened and those with no qualifications.23 The sweeping economic interpretation cannot be the whole story, though. To put everything into that box marked ‘economics’ ignores some uncomfortable realities. Trump’s supporters tended to be blue-collar men with lower levels of education. As we will explore, it was education rather than economics that was probably the marker in political attitudes. Yet did those people support Trump because they are on the margins of the economy or was it for other reasons? Association is not causation. To say that Brexit was caused by a scream of anger and pain is all very well but does that mean 52% of the UK in June 2016 represented a country in pain and that is why they voted? Opinion polls suggested that voters trusted Clinton more than Trump on economic issues. Those most hurt by inequality voted for Clinton in the same proportion as they did for President Obama. Hillary Clinton won the popular vote – probably, in the end, by two percentage points or more.24 The villain of the piece in the narrative constructed by Donald Trump and his team was the trade deal. Invisible forces ‘out there’ were siphoning off American jobs with the collusion of elites back home to whom blue-collar workers were invisible. A Christian minister and Trump supporter argued, post-victory, that “as the factories close, small-scale farming vanishes, and the opioid epidemic rages, small towns look like apocalyptic wastelands in many parts of our country, parts that the ruling elite have largely ignored for decades”.25 The problem politically was how you bring fresh status and regeneration to areas that feel overlooked. Rust Belt voters in former industrial areas were clearly wary of promises of jobs. The politics of disillusion had set in. No politician was trusted to restore economic opportunity. There seemed to be a generation divide between young and old mapping on to a geographical gulf between new hi-tech hubs and the old districts devoted to mining and manufacturing. Voters across the West increasingly rejected politics or politicians who represented a bankrupt order of things. It all spoke into the crisis of masculinity in America. Male jobs, most notably coalmining, were disappearing fast. Soft jobs were there in abundance. But it was not the same.

16  Trump cards

Whitelash and the last hurrah Cultural nationalism was probably the largest factor in the rise of the right of politics in 2016. Hillary Clinton took almost three-quarters of the non-white vote. By contrast, her vituperative opponent took six out of ten white voters (who make up 70% of the US electorate). Blue-collar workers turned out in significant numbers in the so-called Rust Belt where manufacturing had declined and which had been a Democratic stronghold. Yet it was not just places that had been characterised by heavy industry. The ‘rural’ north also lurched dramatically to Donald Trump.26 The 2016 moment represented a new significant anxiety in the body politic and a new fault line. Donald Trump summed up one side of the anxiety. “Americanism, not globalism will be our credo”, he declaimed at the Convention that put him forward.27 It was an angry reaction that caught an angry mood. New trade deals would be blocked if he were to be elected; old ones ripped up. Donald Trump represented de-industrialised communities replete with grievance. Globalisation – connecting country after country to a world economy – had created many winners. It had created too many losers. Hence Trump’s campaign – the last hurrah of white American men – was about fear. As columnist Charles M. Blow observed, “his whole campaign slogan, ‘Make America Great Again’, is in fact an inverted admission of loss – lost primacy, lost privilege, lost prestige. And who feels that they have lost the most? White men”.28 The language of identity expressed their discontent. There is, however, counter-factual evidence to suggest the picture was more complicated. A large-scale survey of 87,000 Americans by the polling organisation Gallup showed that those who lived in areas less affected by globalisation – be it the loss of manufacturing jobs or influx of immigrants –were more likely to view Donald Trump more favourably.29 A simple narrative that white Americans disaffected by free trade and immigration were flocking to Trump could not be the whole story. More than 40% of the electorate backed him – more than support in deprived areas only would suggest. There was no doubt that those who favoured Trump were less likely to have a college degree and more likely to hold blue-collar jobs. They were more likely to live in areas with lower economic mobility for the next generation and with higher death rates. What was also clear was that Trump appealed more to Americans living in racially and culturally isolated neighbourhoods with few non-whites and immigrants. His positive ratings grew the further away from Mexico. White voters who lived in racially isolated areas had a higher opinion of Donald Trump. Racial resentment stood out from the extensive polling analysis. The polling question test was whether respondents strongly disagreed with the notion that ‘blacks have got less than they deserve’. Such resentment was tightly linked to support for Trump. The issue with an open, interconnected world where borders are porous is that it presents risk to those who want to keep a distance and maintain a separation. This brings us to a third key flashpoint for the revolt on the right.

Trump cards 17

Culture wars The momentous events of 2016 on the world stage seemed to demonstrate that it is the values divide between citizens that is the main axis of contemporary politics. The self that feels the world is slipping away from itself was not invented in the 21st century. ‘Culture wars’ were the crevasse in society in the America of the 1980s. Those who espoused traditional values, especially on the litmus test of abortion, were pitted against progressive values representing change – such as the woman’s right to choose. The polarisation was catalogued as ‘conservative versus liberal’; culture and tradition pitted against liberalism. Clearly, support for populist parties disrupted the politics of many Western societies. Yet according to Inglehart and Norris in a Kennedy School of Government paper, cultural backlash rather than just economic insecurity drove the rise of populism. They note the salience of the economic insecurity perspective, the consequences of profound changes transforming the workforce and society in post-industrial economies. The cultural backlash thesis, however, suggests that support can be explained as a retro reaction by once-predominant sectors of the population to progressive change in values.30 Against the rise of people against the system in our times, the logical extension is Donald Trump. Liberal critics of Trump, as indeed of Western right-wing parties, saw success as an age and rage of racists and bigots fuelled by hate. But this was a wrong lens. The ‘left behind’ had come to see their marginalisation in cultural terms. Culture was the medium through which wider economic and political problems were refracted. Language of class and politics as we knew it had given way to the language of culture and of familiar identity.

A sceptical Europe Dissent and discontent are part of a wider picture. The stage was set for another French revolution. Emmanuel Macron was a new face, neither left nor right. His party, En Marche, was a fresh face on the political scene. France had rejected the political extremes. His critics said he was but new wine in old bottles. He was pro-free trade and a Europhile. But one-third of the French people had voted for Marine Le Pen. The night of her defeat, she said that the revolution would continue. Mass migration had been perceived as a threat to traditional ways of life. Dupin argues that France was at the centre of an ‘identitarian tide’ (a word coined by French nativist writers concerned that they were being swamped by foreigners).31 Significantly, the most common banner at the rallies of the communist candidate Melenchon was not the red flag but the tricolour. Brexit was a very British revolt against the establishment. Furiously warring parties waged a rancorous battle that in the end sank Britain’s political class.32 It was, claimed the former Director of Politics and Communications for David Cameron, an unequal fight. Parish council deliberations of the genteel class wanting to stay in the EU ‘if that was all right with everyone else’ versus arsenic and razor blades served to the insurgents to fight an angry war.33 Not that they were

18  Trump cards united; two teams in the Leave campaign loathed each other as much as their Remain counterparts.34 Both UKIP and Donald Trump saw themselves as political arsonists.35 Yet populist parties in Europe and Euroscepticism had been rising for a generation – the Northern League in Italy and the Front National in France, Geert Wilder’s movement in the Netherlands, the Law and Justice Party in Poland, Austria’s Freedom Party, Vicktor Orban’s Fidesz Party in Hungary. European democracies saw populist parties claim headlines and shape agendas in their nations, pulling politics on to their turf. The German AfD (Alternative für Deutschland) went from 4.7% of votes in the 2013 elections shortly after its founding to some 10% at one time. In the elections of October 2017, the AfD achieved electoral breakthrough. Some 13% of the votes went to this anti-immigration, anti-Muslim party. The way populists were setting the pace in 2016–2017 was not just about electoral success. Like the killer blows in the Black Death contagion when infected bodies were hurled over the walls of cities under siege, the populist assault on globalisation and refugee movements was already making European governments look over their shoulders, ceding political space to their right-wing critics. There has been a fundamental shift in politics. As we will be probing, a strong revolt against facelessness has been growing for a while.36 The calling cards in 2016 were Euroscepticism and the EU referendum result for Brexit along with Donald Trump in the USA.37 Clothed differently, Donald Trump and Democratic presidential hopeful Bernie Sanders rode a wave that socialist movements in America and Europe demonstrated. In the UK, Jeremy Corbyn and the British Labour Party reflected this new agenda but so too did UKIP whose emphasis on place and culture wore a different costume than class. What was it that united young people in the USA to support Bernie Sanders and that saw young people rushing to man the phones for Jeremy Corbyn that year of 2016? It was a new era of movement politics offering hope and dedicated to smashing the system. Syriza in Greece and Podemos in Spain (an anti-austerity movement) were part of this trend. Yet can these phenomena be correlated with more nationalist governments emerging in Poland and Hungary that are less open, more anti-immigrant? In Sweden that year of 2016, the Democrats took power, promising to get tough with asylum seekers. Japan has seen a nationalist lobby Nippon Kaigi urging that a pacifist contribution be revisited and that schools adopt a more patriotic curriculum.38 It may be that modern politics has died a death. Or it could be very much alive and well. Certainly we are witnessing an anti-establishment mood and the strange death of centrist politics. The splitting of parties is commonplace; fragmentation has taken over.39 Amidst French romantic fascination for revolutionaries, pleasure in Paris at the Front National headquarters was palpable. A jubilant Ms Le Pen, who had argued that a Trump victory would be good for France, was swift to congratulate the American president-elect and praised the ‘free’ American people. “It’s not the end of the world”, she declared, “but the end of a world”. Her lieutenant and party strategist, Florian Philippot, summed up the mood: “Their world is collapsing;

Trump cards 19 ours is being built”.40 It was perhaps a strange mirror of the tendency amongst the left to conjure a revolutionary moment in a crisis of the system. Nevertheless, the demand for ‘Frenchness’ to be central to La France could not be gainsaid. In a situation where 40% of newborns had at least one parent of non-European origin, the white community felt on the defensive culturally.41 The European Economic Community (EEC) and a common customs union had been formed in 1957, 60 years before. Even in Germany, which had been a bastion of the centre ground since purging and renewing itself after the Second World War, the centre of gravity was shifting right for a while. A strategy paper for the rising AfD party soon after its launch in 2013 called for it to be politically incorrect and a “collection reservoir for protest”.42 All Western societies have a strong element of perhaps 20% who reject the mainstream and reject the political class and the system they uphold. It was a curiosity, however, why appealing to people’s basic instincts was the anti-politics, anti-establishment mood symbolised by right-wing parties thriving across Europe. This more conservative side of politics that stresses a strong economy, a strong nation and strong individual self-reliance had its own version of antipolitics as did the left. Europeans were simply not sure that establishment political institutions could help address their challenges.43 Often the populist challengers were coming from the ideological right, left-of-centre populist parties also emerged in Spain (Podemos) and Greece (Syriza). Left and right had many resonances. The country was in crisis; Western liberals are decadent having undermined traditional values. The Polish Law and Justice Party told a simple narrative about outsiders, promising to protect Poland from “disease-ridden migrants”.44 Membership of the EU was the central issue in the campaign in Austria that culminated in the presidential election at the beginning of December 2016. Voters rejected the far-right candidate, Norbert Hofer, in favour of his pro-European opponent, Alexander Van der Bellen, in a run-off election for the federal presidency. Austria’s Head of State is a mostly ceremonial post, but Mr Hofer could have used it to put pressure on the embattled coalition government of Social Democrats and the conservative People’s Party. The demography of the vote resembled that of the Brexit ballot in Britain and Donald Trump’s election in America. Hofer won majorities among men, those with less education and residents of rural areas. Women, those with higher education and city dwellers backed Van der Bellen. Hofer said he would call for a referendum if the EU aggregated more centralised power. Austria’s populists lost that election. Coalition by other parties with Hofer’s Freedom Party (FPÖ) to gain the Chancellory and real political power remained a real possibility. The anti-establishment wave continued that same December weekend in Italy in 2016. The Prime Minister, Matteo Renzi, had argued that a constitutional reform was essential to make Italy more governable, and so more amenable to structural reforms. Anti-EU populists spearheaded the ‘No’ campaign, though joined by establishment figures such as Mario Monti worried about too much centralisation of power. The background was that rates of inequality were amongst

20  Trump cards the highest in Europe. For those who had turned their back on mainstream politicians, it was an opportunity to bring the Government down. “Democracy has won”, declared Beppe Grillo, the comedian who led Italy’s second-biggest party, the maverick Five Star Movement (M5S). Italian referendum. It was an appeal to people’s emotions that fuelled impassioned charges by Pepe Grillo against elites and global forces. He called for an immediate general election under the current rules, widely seen as likely to greatly benefit his party. Matteo Salvini, the leader of the right-wing populist Northern League, did the same. Polls showed that an overwhelming majority regarded the referendum as a chance to render a verdict on the Renzi Government’s performance; in particular, its economic record. As with Donald Trump’s victory, it was a rude wake-up call for elites. The forces of reaction and re-assertion of both the nation state and a valuable personal identity that ought not to be trashed had been building for a long time. They were cut from the same cloth as popular reactions to many social forces: forces that had been protesting for a while against the establishment who controlled how things were arranged and ordered the world in its own image. Forces of reaction were both political and social. Politically, they took the form of revolt on the right, fed by those who felt excluded from the party the rest of the world had been throwing. The message was clear. Little people are standing up to big players and global corporations. Little people count. ‘Don’t write us off, don’t ignore us’. ‘We count, we matter’!

Notes  1 Washington Post, Trump’s full inauguration speech transcript, annotated. https://www. washingtonpost.com/news/the-fix/wp/2017/01/20/donald. 20th January 2017.  2 The Times, ‘Globalisation is finished’ reporting on speech by Pat Buchanan, 10th November 2016.   3 Surveys quoted in The French Election Briefing, The Economist, 22nd April 2017. Print edition.  4 Müller, J.-W. (2016) What is Populism? Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.   5 Eribon, D. (2013) Returning to Reims, Trans. M. Lucey. Paris: Semiotext(e).   6 Louis, E. (2017) The End of Eddy. Trans. M. Lucey. London: Harvill Secker.   7 Trump, D. & Schwartz, A. (2015) The Art of the Deal. New York: Baker and Taylor; Ingrams Reprint edition.   8 Vance, J. D. (2016) Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis. New York: Harper.   9 Hochschild, A. (2016) Strangers in Their Own Land: Anger and Mourning on the American Right. New York: The New Press. 10 Santayana, G. (1935) The Last Puritan. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons; FEP Removed edition. 11 Mishra, P. (2017) Old Glory, Times Literary Supplement. 27th January 2017. 12 www.bbc.co.uk/radio4todayprogramme, 10th November 2016. 13 Thompson, M. (2016) Enough Said: What’s Gone Wrong with the Language of Politics. London: Bodley Head. 14 Spencer, N. (2016) The Evolution of the West: How Christianity Has Shaped Our Values. London: SPCK.

Trump cards 21 15 Kaufmann, E. (2004) The Rise and Fall of Anglo-America: The Decline of Dominant Ethnicity in the United States. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. See also Kaufmann, E. & Harris, G. (2016) Changing Places: Mapping the White British Response to Ethnic Change. London: Demos Publications, https://www.demos.co.uk/ files/Changing_places, accessed November 2016. 16 www.bbc.co.uk/radio4/worldatone, 9th November 2016. 17 Donald Trump Wins the Presidential Election, The Economist, 11th November 2016. 18 www.bloomberg.com/politics/articles/2016-08-24/ukip-ex-leader, accessed 24th August 2016. 19 http://www.mckinsey.com/mgi/our-research, accessed November 2016. 20 Globalisation and Politics Briefing, The Economist, 30th July 2016. Print edition. 21 WSJ's Henninger: Trump Delivered ‘Excellent Speech’ about Economy; Now His Task Is to Stay On Message. RealClearPolitics briefing, http://www.realclearpolitics.com/, August 2016. 22 Ehrenfreund, M. & Guo, J. A Massive New Study Debunks a Widespread Theory for Donald Trump’s Success, Washington Post, https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/ wonk/wp/2016/08/12/a-massive-new-study-debunks-a-widespread-theory-for-donaldtrumps-success/?utm_term=.96d698c65dce, 12th August 2016. 23 Goodwin, M. & Heath, O. (2016) Brexit Vote Explained: Poverty, Low Skills and Lack of Opportunities. Joseph Rowntree Foundation, https://www.jrf.org.uk/report/brexitvote-explained-poverty-low-skills-and-lack-opportunities 24 http://www.nytimes.com/news-event/election-2016, November 2016. 25 Rev Mark Michaels, Rector of St Francis’s, Potomac, Maryland, USA. A Country Divided by a Great Gulf, Church Times, 11th November 2016. 26 US Election Results: The Maps and Analysis that Explain Donald Trump's Shock Victory to Become President, London Daily Telegraph, http://www.telegraph.co.uk/ news/0/us-election-results-and-state-by-state-maps/, 10th November 2016. 27 An Aggravating Absence, The Economist, 2nd July 2016, print edition; republicanconvention.org, accessed August 2016. 28 Blow, C. M. Trump Reflects White Male Fragility, The New York Times, https://www. nytimes.com/2016/08/04/opinion/trump-reflects-white-male-fragility.html, 4th August 2016. 29 Gallup Poll of 87,000 Americans, 16th August 2016, www.gallup.com 30 Inglehart, R. F. & Norris, P. (2016) Trump, Brexit, and the Rise of Populism: Economic Have-Nots and Cultural Backlash. Faculty Research Working Paper Series. Harvard Kennedy School of Government. RWP16–026. 31 Dupin, E. (2017) La France Identitaire. Paris: La Decouverte. 32 Shipman, T. (2016) All Out War. London: William Collins. 33 Oliver, C. (2016) Unleashing Demons. London: Hodder & Stoughton. 34 Bennet, O. (2016) The Brexit Club. London: Biteback. 35 Banks, A. (2016) The Bad Boys of Brexit. London: Biteback. 36 Mudde, C. (2007) Populist Radical Right Parties in Europe. New York: Cambridge University Press. 37 Norris, P. It’s Not Just Donald Trump: Authoritarian Populism Is Rising Across the West. Here’s Why. Washington Post, https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/monkeycage/wp/2016/03/11/its-not-just-trump-authoritarian-populism-is-rising-across-thewest-heres-why/?utm_term=.b8621f1fadab, 11th March 2016. 38 Ultraconservative Lobby Nippon Kaigi Backs Constitution Revision, Japan Today, http://www.japantoday.com/category/politics/view/ultraconservative-lobby-nipponkaigi-backs-constitution-revision, accessed August 2016. 39 Keating, M. & McCrone, D. (eds.) (2015) The Crisis of Social Democracy. Edinburgh: University of Edinburgh Press. 40 Europe Reacts to Trump’s Victory, http://openeurope.org.uk/today/blog/europe-reactstrumps-victory/, 9th November 2016.

22  Trump cards 41 Devecchio, A. (2017) Les Nouveaux Enfants de Siecle. Paris: Editions de Cerf. 42 Speit, A. (2016) Burgerliche Sharfmacher, Zurich: Orell Fuessli. 43 Wike, R. 4 Factors Driving Anti-Establishment Sentiment in Europe. Pew Research Center, http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2016/12/06/4-factors-driving-anti-establishmentsentiment-in-europe/, 6th December 2016. 44 Anti-Immigrant Party Sweeps to Power in Poland, The Times, https://www.thetimes. co.uk/article/anti-immigrant-party-sweeps-to-power-in-poland-, 26th October 2015.

2

The irrelevance of geography and the forces of change

“Every technological revolution mercilessly destroys jobs well before the new ones emerge”.1 “I must confess that I am a firm believer in the benefits of globalization. To my mind, the gradual interlinking of regions, countries, and people is the most profoundly positive development of our time”. – Mark Carney, Governor of the Bank of England, 6th December 20162

2017 saw the UK telecoms corporation BT, amongst others, celebrate 180 years since the filing of the first patent for the five-needle electric telegraph. Inventors of that device, Charles Wheatstone (a scientist) and William Fothersgill Cooke (an entrepreneur), worked together to turn a great idea into reality. It was an innovation that laid foundations for today’s intensely connected world. Contemporary life in the global village is radically different to what it was a generation ago. The forces of change had swept all before them, now tussling turbulently with the forces of reaction. The forces of change were evident everywhere; ubiquitous as well as dramatic. The internet has revolutionised connectivity and communication, and helped people share their ideas much more widely. The advent of email made communication faster than ever and that coincided with huge container ships plying the oceans. Faster ships, trains and airplanes allowed us to move around the globe much more easily. The planet was shrunk; distance became a negligible factor. In the more developed economies, manufacturing changed. Supply chains adding value leapt across continents and the role of factories in the West was that of assembling the various parts. Economic liberalism in the 1980s and 1990s coincided with the demise of Communism as an alternative way of life and antidote to the triumph of capitalism. The prevailing orthodoxy was that markets were the best way of ordering society and economy alike; markets fed and watered by consuming and the powerful mantra of choice. Free trade was dominant. As trade barriers came crashing down, anyone could trade with everyone practically everywhere and borders were far more porous. Goods, services, people and ideas moved together in free flows,

24  Irrelevance of geography like rivers that knew no frontiers. Technology also enabled the management of public services to be scaled up such that face to face human contact with someone in person or on the other end of a phone was reduced. The word for a world where time is compressed, where distance is annihilated and that is networked together in trade and connectivity is ‘globalisation’. In tandem with ‘the internet’, it became the iconic term for the forces of change. Then came a reaction. It came in the wake of a global financial crash that demonstrated how much the connected world system was, after all, a house of cards. Globalisation was blamed for everything. It was clearly profoundly unsettling. But what is it precisely? The forces of change that collapse distance and generate a far more interconnected world are at least four-fold: a b c d

Rapid acceleration of means of transport and communications; Rapid acceleration of urbanisation as power moves East to rising cities; Rapid acceleration of movements of capital, data and especially people; Rapid acceleration of technology and automation.

As we shall see, these forces of change are double-agents. They bring people together, but they also generate their own counter-reaction. The collapse of distance, time and the growing familiarity they accomplish bring anxiety about others in our world we can best describe as being about ‘face’. Globalisation is about connecting global neighbours and bringing people to each other’s front doors but paradoxically it is also about remote forces and invisible faces. Even as the operating system of a global economy and the lives of millions were being re-shaped, enormous insecurity was setting in. Globalisation did not force Western governments to engage in damaging austerity. Globalisation is a net positive, and has played a huge role in reducing poverty worldwide over the last 30 years. But there are winners and losers from increased trade and movements of capital, as there are from rapid technological change. Indeed, liberal economic policies are predicated upon generating winners and losers. Globalisation did not force governments to adopt policies that have divided their countries, exacerbated inequality and hit social mobility. Many governments did all this by choice.  “The problem is not that we have allowed an increased role for markets, as many on the left (and increasingly on the populist right) argue. Open markets remain the best way of generating wealth and opportunities, of challenging vested interests and of expanding people’s freedom. We are in this mess because we’ve forgotten the lessons of the post-war period. Basically, we have a crisis of distribution and opportunity”.3

Rapid acceleration of means of transport and communications Globalisation is not a phenomenon of recent history. In the days of the Silk Road, trade spread rapidly between China and Europe. Merchants carried goods for trade back and forth, trading silk as well as gems and spices and coffee. Ideas

Irrelevance of geography 25 and customs spread along the trade routes. The invention of the Model-T in 1908 not only made Henry Ford rich beyond the dreams of avarice, it set in train social and global forces that would take time to unfold yet which were profound in their scope. In their cars, people could go where they wished. Yet such democratisation of access was not the first wave of interconnectedness. The Victorian railways expanding exponentially at the same time as the Post Office, the telegraph and the steam ships brought national and international links to a whole new level in the 19th century. The Post Office is an instructive example of how mass transport and communications could be reduced to the cost of the ‘penny post’, within reach of most people. As Alfred Marshall, author of Principles of Economics (first published in 1890), commented: A farmer in the North West of America perhaps a hundred miles away from any good mechanic’s shop, can yet use complicated machinery with confidence; since he knows that by telegraphing the number of the machine and the number of any part of it he has broken, he will get by the next train a new piece which he himself can fit into its place.4 In the second half of the 20th century, globalisation speeded up enormously. Breaking down tariff barriers, repudiating protectionism went hand in hand with the astounding expansion of world trade combined with a revolution in communications that shrunk the planet. An interconnected global economy thanks to the rise of the electronic superhighway of the internet resulted in the spread of trade and investment on an unprecedented scale. Yet in the eyes of many, such progress was a party that someone else was enjoying. And now the party was threatened by outsiders.5 In the 20th century, humankind had taken to the air and learnt to travel long distances for holidays and work. Jets shrunk the planet forever. Developments in IT, transport and communications have accelerated the pace of globalisation over the past 30 years. The internet has enabled fast and 24/7 global communication and the use of containerisation has enabled vast quantities of goods and commodities to be shipped across the world at extremely low cost. Increasingly, every town and every person everywhere will be networked with global intelligence; the major hub cities connected with high-speed rail. Backed by container ships and continuing growth of communications (such as satellite technology), global movements of capital, trade and transport annihilated distance and brought intensified compression of time combined with an increasing awareness of the world.6 One of the immense social changes brought by rapidly accelerating transport and communication was that mass tourism took only about 15 years to take off. Nowhere on the planet is now more than 22 hours by plane. Falling costs of transporting across the world’s oceans or the skies of the world through air freight bring the local and the global together. Geography has little meaning. “This equality of access will be one of the great prizes of the death of distance”.7 Globalisation is a mysterious force that moves over the face of the deep, sweeping restlessly over the life of the world and re-creating. It used to be thought of as

26  Irrelevance of geography one country exporting and another importing goods and services. Now it is about global supply chains. The interdependence of nations is here to stay. People are able to communicate with each other instantaneously in a way that leaps across borders. Cultural globalisation means we buy clothing and food or listen to music from anywhere.8 Unprecedented transformation has resulted in changing expectations and wider horizons. Just as distance no longer shapes the cost of communicating electronically, companies are free to go anywhere they think the best talent will be available or can be drawn in. Location is irrelevant. It is, as Carl Bildt argued, and as the quote at the start of this chapter by Mark Carney also argues, a formidable achievement. “I must confess that I am a firm believer in the benefits of globalization. To my mind, the gradual interlinking of regions, countries, and people is the most profoundly positive development of our time”.9

Rapid acceleration of urbanisation as power moves East to rising cities Concentrations of populations we call cities have been a feature of the human landscape since Uruk in the Mesopotamia over 6,000 years ago. Cities became engines of growth as they were able to lure workers from the countryside. Humanity’s restless urge to belong had spawned community of many sizes, from the village to the city, from towns to nations. Civilisation meant urbanisation. The city became a way of thinking and acting. Living in towns and cities had transformed humanity. Urban society and the traditional way of life in the country were far removed. In the late 20th century, urbanisation had begun to go into reverse gear in the post-industrial West. Electronic communications meant work could be sited anywhere. But for the rest of the world, the tidal wave of people moving into the cities to find work was relentless. At the dawn of the century, one person in 12 had been urbanised. By the end of the century, more than half the world population was concentrated in cities. Human society was undergoing a major transformation. The rush of rural people to the cities was the greatest human migration ever. The environment would forever be dominated by cities and supergiant communities where more than ten million people were drawn together in noisy, sprawling relationship. It is estimated that between 2010 and 2025, nearly half of global GDP growth will come from some 440 cities in developing nations. Emerging market dynamos are names most executives in the West have hardly heard of. Yet Surat in the west of India accounts for two-thirds of its textile production and Foshan is China’s seventh largest city by way of output of GDP.10 By 2025, 46 of the world’s top 200 cities will be in China. The central Government is persuading 60% of the population to live in cities. Every city of more than 500,000 will be linked with high-speed rail networks.11 There are increasing numbers of world-class cities that are global hubs linked with immense connectivity. The Pearl River Delta, for instance, is China’s most dynamic, open and innovative region. Led by the city of Shenzen, “a place without legacy” as a Dutch architect at Harvard calls it, it has

Irrelevance of geography 27 thrived since Deng Xiao-ping designated a special economic zone in the 1980s as a welcome doormat to global investors.12 It is the city where the local meets the global. Cities in emerging economies are the focus for global manufacturing and economic activity. They are magnets not only for potential workers in the countryside but companies the world over. The scale of the seismic shifts here are staggering. The centre of gravity of the global economy has shifted East and South and creates consumers by the million. “We are in the midst of the largest mass migration from the countryside to the city in history”.13

Rapid acceleration of movements of capital, data and people Everywhere, unemployment and stagnation have been created by dynamic tides of global trade that has failed to lift all boats. The credo of contemporary liberalism, an interest in markets rather than socialism, was that the flow of goods, people and ideas was a good thing. It was after all what enabled the first industrial revolution to take off in Britain in the 18th century. Roads, transport infrastructure, an environment of free movement of ideas that fed entrepreneurship were intrinsic to the sustained growth that led to Britain and then the world being launched on an industrial path. The days had passed when a widget was made in one country and exported to another. Products were now built from parts from all over the world, manufactured by the same multinational firm according to where it made economic sense to locate. Built on manufacturing, low labour costs and large factories took advantage of the same economies of scale that had powered the first phase of the industrial revolution in the West. Globalisation has created a world where we drink coffee from Brazil, wearing a shirt stitched in Cambodia, checking a phone made in China, and think nothing of it. Increasing capital mobility has also acted as a stimulus to globalisation. When capital can move freely from country to country, it is relatively straightforward for firms to locate and invest abroad, and repatriate profits. The development of complex financial products enabled global credit markets to grow rapidly. Trade has become increasingly free, following the collapse of Communism, which opened up many former communist countries to inward investment and global trade. The growth of multinational companies (MNCs) and the rise in the significance of global brands like Microsoft, Sony and McDonald’s have been central to the emergence of globalisation. Across the globe, the food, clothing, pharmaceutical and extractive industries wield enormous power. McDonald’s or KFC represented the curve here. “Global firms run by global managers should sell global products to global customers”.14 They shaped the business environment and directed the flow of supply chains, goods and services of 50% of world trade. Even by the end of the 1980s, Giddens could claim that “the diversity of the human enterprise was said to be swamped by two hundred transnational corporations that ran the world”.15 By 2011, 40% of British large manufacturing companies of 15 years before had been either broken up or acquired by private equity/foreign owners. De-layering

28  Irrelevance of geography business generated a culture where there was an increased emphasis on profitability and the emergence of profit-motivated executives. ‘Greed is good’.16 “Even in blue chip companies, whose managements once built factories, market share operating management became an endless series of cheap financial dodges. This work is punctuated and interrupted by major restructurings and changes of ownership where it is the financial engineering which is crucial”.17 Hedge funds did not care for the industry they were entering or the assets they were stripping. Extracting maximum share values was top priority and capital investment now a revenue stream.18 Global flows of finance, goods and services rose from $2 trillion in 1980 to $28 trillion in 2014. McKinsey suggested this could rise to $84 trillion by 2025.19 Globalisation – the linking together of national economies into a global market economy – is a strongly contested phenomenon. To its critics, it continues to stand accused of undermining sovereignty, weakening democracy, widening inequality and foisting multinational corporations that are exploitative.20 There is another narrative, that difficulties in connection with globalisation are to do with politicians and policies, trade deals and so on rather than markets. The interdependence of nations is here to stay. Arguably, globalisation is total openness by any other name. Globalisation is the process by which people and goods move across borders. It goes hand in hand with a globalised world where economic transformations continue to be far-reaching. With high labour and high energy costs, the rich world cannot compete with global producers of low-value, bulk steel, for example. Entire steel industries and communities dependent on them are declining fast.21 But there is also a cultural aspect as ideas and traditions such as foods are traded alongside goods and services. Cultural globalisation means we buy clothing and food or listen to music from anywhere. The backlash against globalisation is a recurring theme in public rhetoric, it is usually spoken of negatively. It has brought many benefits to many people. But many millions have felt left out. “We may be at a point where globalization is ending and where provincialism and nationalism are taking hold”, said Ray Dalio, founder of the investment company Bridgewater Associates, responding to a question on the implications of US President Donald Trump’s economic policies. “You will see more protectionism, perhaps the reversal of the trend in the 90s of trade agreement and globalization”.22 Yet an oft-repeated observation is that being against globalisation is like being against breathing. It is so much a part of the world we live in. As UK Prime Minister Tony Blair said in a speech to the Labour Party conference in September 2005, “I hear people say we have to stop and debate globalisation. You might as well debate whether autumn should follow summer. They're not debating it in China and India. They are seizing its possibilities, in a way that will transform their lives and ours”.23 In the past few decades, globalisation has narrowed the wealth gap between rich and poor countries, but fed into a growing crisis of inequality within Western countries. Xi Jinping, the President of People’s Republic of China, came to Davos 2017 to stake out a new claim. In the wake of the turn to economic nationalism, China

Irrelevance of geography 29 would be the champion of open markets and globalisation. If the rules-based system would break down following the impact of Donald Trump on American leadership, the world could henceforth rely on China as the defender of globalisation.24 “It is true that economic globalization created new problems, but this is no justification to write off economic globalization altogether”, Xi Jinping said, warning that populist approaches could lead to war and poverty. “Rather we should adapt to and guide globalization, cushion its negative impact, and deliver its benefits to all countries and all nations”, he said. “We should commit ourselves to growing an open global economy. No one will emerge as the winner in a trade war”. Notwithstanding severe constraint upon the personal freedoms that make markets work, it came to something when the President of China quoted Abraham Lincoln and the Gettysburg Address about development being ‘for the people, by the people’. The Chinese word for ‘economy’ means ‘for society to prosper and benefit the people’, an aim of governance advocated by Chinese sages in ancient times. Some areas flourished, others were hard hit as jobs and trade moved elsewhere. Steel companies in the UK once thrived, providing work for hundreds of thousands. When China began producing cheaper steel, UK plants closed down and thousands of jobs were lost. In Europe, the signifier of attitudes towards outsiders was the hugely iconic and emotive issue of ‘free movement of people’. The ability of people to move freely around an economic zone raised huge issues for citizen voters who were not necessarily anti-immigration in an abstract way; they were against an influx of lowskilled workers that threatened jobs, hospitals and schools. The impact of migrant workers in neighbourhoods and local communities was far more than economics and the supply of labour. It was cultural – the threat of change. ‘Globalisation’ had become a pejorative term. Evidence shows that countries open to international trade tend to grow faster and provide more opportunities to their populations. Yet attacks on globalisation have been coming from all directions, requiring its defenders to raise their game and justify the case for the open, rules-based international trading system that globalisation evokes. The backlash against the global trade system had in its sights ‘new generation’ trade deals such as NAFTA (North American Free Trade Association), TPP (Transpacific Partnership) and TTIP (Transatlantic Trade and Industry Investment Partnership). TPP was to be jettisoned by the Trump Administration on Day One while TTIP evoked one of the biggest pan-European collective actions ever. This was toxic in Europe largely because of the power it gave to the ‘shadowy’ forces of the multinationals to override national governments in corporate courts if they felt governments were restricting their access to internal markets. The effect of such trade deals was to turn everything into a market up for grabs – including health care and education at local level. Free trade was no longer just about reducing tariffs but removing ‘regulatory barriers to trade’.25 The critique of open trade and lax border arrangements was pointed and hugely passionate in the US general election. The USA must free itself from the “bondage of bad trade agreements”, said Trump on the stump.

30  Irrelevance of geography It remains true that trading is easier with those closest geographically. Yet with capital, goods and people being so interconnected globally, we are living in an increasingly small world. The death of distance and global interconnections mean people live and work in each other’s countries to an unparalleled degree. The risks of this are as great as its potential. Yet it is what this transformative development does to human conceptions of time and space characterising modernity that exercises us here.

Rapid acceleration of technology and automation – lack of face Accelerating technological change is a feature of the forces of disruption that were in the background in the forces of reaction in 2016. Advances in technology have always upended business models. Yet current transformations cause tremendous upheaval on the contemporary scene. What is causing such insecurity and rejoicing in equal measure is the churn and speed of change that not only virtually annihilate distance but radically compress timescales, disrupting both business models and market assumptions about how things work. “In a process that is both gratifying and terrifying, the period between historic breakthroughs has been decreasing by orders of magnitude”.26 It is the digitisation of the world economy – converting everything into 1’s and 0’s so it can be stored in machine intelligence – that is the astounding breakthrough, changing all landscapes of present and future. Above them hover cloud technologies that enable new business models to unfold in rapid succession. A vast array of physical products from newspapers and books to music are converted. Going digital creates online platforms that rely on big data and open data. As a senior director at Microsoft blogged in 2015, “in the next five years, we’ll generate more data as humankind than we generated in the previous 5,000 years!”27 That will be an increase of an astounding 300-fold since 2005. Data is THE commodity of the 21st century rather than oil. Rejection of globalisation, free trade and open societies is linked to growing anxiety about the future of work. Every step forward in technology brings with it new dangers. In the run up to the American election of 2016, globalisation was blamed for taking American jobs. Those jobs are not coming back. Populist leaders are saying they will reverse jobs migrating abroad. The real culprit was probably automation. It was robotics that are stealing blue-collar jobs rather than Asian workers – witness petrochemical plants in the USA that don’t need working-class workers. A Ph.D. in chemistry and dozens of robots will do the job more cheaply. The world seems to be approaching a tech-driven employment crisis contributing to Donald Trump’s surprise victory in the US presidential election. As outgoing US Secretary of State John Kerry observed, “trade is not the most culpable entity for the loss of jobs. Eighty-five per cent of job loss in America is because of technology. I can’t wait to see how the incoming administration deals with AI”.28 The problem is that for 38% of people worldwide, the answer to what might keep them up at night would be unemployment. Work is not just what allows a means of livelihood: it is our primary source of validation and value, it expands

Irrelevance of geography 31 our possibilities to be and do what we aspire to; it gives meaning and rhythm to our endeavours as part of a broader social contract.29 Rapid transformation and automation raises fascinating questions in the growing fintech (financial technology) community about what happens when artificial intelligence (AI) runs the financial world where AI could decide who gets a mortgage or which companies to acquire and when AI starts creating its own companies, creating holding companies, generating new versions of itself to run these companies. The World Economic Forum (WEF) argues for a ‘Fourth Industrial Revolution’, with robotics and AI transforming economies around the world. The Fourth Industrial Revolution is a convenient mental model for the broad acceleration of change that is already engulfing us.30 Research by Citi and Oxford University published in 2016 estimated that 57% of jobs across the OECD are at risk of automation; a massive 77% of jobs in China are vulnerable.31 If a routine task can be performed cheaper, faster and better by a robot, there is a chance it will be. Jobs will be displaced. Many human tellers were made redundant once ATM machines became popular in the front of banks. Yet there are more human tellers in banks overall because, in principle at least, that enabled them to open more banks. The effect of automation is hotly debated. In the broader economic transformations we are facing now, the automation apocalypse is much discussed. During 2016, a whole host of AI devices came to market, ranging from gadgets, Amazon’s personal electronic assistant that answers the phone to drones to bring deliveries and a robotic nanny. We are a long way from a sentient human being yet many companies are using drones to carry out inspection duties. Many jobs servicing robots are being created. Yet there will be a considerable time-lag. Every technological revolution has destroyed jobs well before new jobs emerge. A universal basic income could be needed to provide a means of livelihood. Such de-personalisation is set to grow. The de-personalisation would widen. Nearly half of Scottish jobs could be carried out by machines in just over ten years’ time, the Institute for Public Policy Research Scotland warned at the time of writing. 46% of jobs – about 1.2 million – are at ‘high risk’ of automation in the period up to 2030.32 The Institute predicted that the world of work in 2030 will be very different to that in 2017. People are more likely to be working longer, and will often have multiple jobs, with multiple employers and in multiple careers. Scotland, it was argued, urgently needed to design a skills system able to work with people already into their careers to help them to retrain, re-skill and respond to the world of work of 2030. The social and economic challenges posed by the Fourth Industrial Revolution are too much for any one company or organisation to tackle alone. Speaking on a panel of global chief executives at the second annual HSBC Innovation Summit in 2016, Stuart Gulliver, the CEO of HSBC, said that it is “unlikely that there will be the same number of jobs in today’s skill set in five years’ time” and said that “our responsibility is to manage that transition”.33 Technology optimists argue that developments like AI or robotics will create more jobs than they destroy – someone has to build the robots, train the AI, and

32  Irrelevance of geography there will be new jobs that we cannot even imagine now. Yet as Mark Carney suggested, “the fundamental challenge is that, alongside its great benefits, every technological revolution mercilessly destroys jobs and livelihoods – and therefore identities – well before the new ones emerge”.34 The transformational role of technology and the accelerating global flows of goods, capital and talent result in the pace of change in the last two decades growing by several orders of magnitude. Urbanisation and the rise of emerging markets, the accelerating impact of technology on the natural forces of market competition, an ageing world population and accelerating flows of trade, capital, people and data are historical trends that have sharply increased.35 The puzzling times we are experiencing are the drama played out between the forces of change and the forces of reaction. The sharp end of this is what is probably a generation divide between those who embrace a technological, interconnected future and those who hold on to ways of life and values that constitute identity. As the world of work is transformed by the combined effects of globalisation and technology now computers have learned to think, the loss of stable patterns associated with traditional forms of employment is creating huge anxiety in the workforce. New technology and new business models to accompany it have given rise to the gig economy, allowing more people to access work and in ways they have not had before. For those who have a choice about the options, this can certainly be viewed as positive progress. But what about for those who have no choice? Data is one of the driving forces of the Fourth Industrial Revolution. But perceiving the world through data-driven models makes it harder to see the humanity behind the numbers. Technology thus has the potential to erode our sense of connection with each other. It may augment the human dimension or erode it; replacing a human face to face with an artificial one.

The systems of modern life Parallel with the globalisation and automation that are now so fundamental to the interconnected world, the blurringly fast pace of technology has re-shaped organisations and workplace culture in our times. Citizens now have little idea of where their products come from or how they got there. It all happens ‘out there’ by remote players most people will never meet. The Fourth Industrial Revolution is based, not on rail or road but on the electronic superhighway of the internet. An entirely new economic and social world is being integrated into the old, at the same time making it hugely more efficient. The frenetic drive towards speed and output is not just about trade and industry. Education factories and health care factories set up to operate the systems of modernity are dominated by the technology-cum-efficiency mindset that facilitates delivery of public services. The inexorable growth of big business and the growth of technology are both exponential and digital. Automation has also enabled the rise of ‘big data’ based on deep learning. Given enough data, computers can imitate the neural networks

Irrelevance of geography 33 of the human brain and undertake tasks like powering search engines. Internetbased firms can experiment with big data, the accumulation and collection of vastly more data than before to analyse and improve performance. With big data, it becomes possible to analyse all the factors and all the detail rather than work on a few tweaks. Big data is transformative because it produces any amount of small improvements.36 Rather than oil that powered the 20th century, data is now the world’s most valuable resource. Big data is changing everything. The experience of what data we use and for what is becoming more personalised in real time. The infrastructure to allow people to access digital information has surpassed what anyone could have imagined. We are getting to the point where everyone has a digital phone. That means we now have an enormous amount of data about users we didn’t have before. What are the limits of gathering information, often without people even knowing it? To its advocates, big data means we can offer things more relevant to them. Public policy will be shaped around big data. If we look at that data, we can understand what people really care about, then create policy around that. Personalisation becomes more possible. Health care could see great leaps in efficiency. A particular health situation could be compared with millions from around the world within seconds, making a more accurate diagnosis and treatment possible.37 Enter the blockchain, the first native digital medium for peer to peer value exchange. Its protocol establishes the rules – in the form of globally distributed computations and heavy-duty encryption – that ensure the integrity of the data traded among billions of devices without going through a trusted third party. Business, institutions, government and individuals benefit in profound ways.38 Traders on the stock market make their money on small time-lapses across the world measured in fractions of a second. Thanks to the ubiquitous smart phones, the world is now so fast that if there is no e-mail reply within 24 hours, we wonder what is wrong; for texts, the compression of time and expansion of expectation are even more marked. Call centres can be located anywhere on the planet. Many hundreds of millions of people have freely handed over their private data to the likes of Facebook, Twitter, Google, Amazon, Apple and many others – who can use this data as they see fit. There are at least 4,000 data broker companies worldwide who gather, repackage and resell data derived from publicly available records and online activity. Areas such as security, censuses and health care are just another market opportunity for digital companies.39 An example of the systems of modernity that are having a major impact on people is the move in the UK to having a Universal Credit which replaces six separate benefits. The distress it is causing is due to insistence that claimants apply online. They are compelled to go through a complicated process that takes 30 minutes – an hour if a couple is claiming. This is bewildering to those who are not digitally savvy! “I am asking these questions because it is the computer that is asking these questions”, said an operator responding to a direct line for a UK National Health Service 111 service. “But I didn’t feel listened to”, complained the very sick lady

34  Irrelevance of geography on the other end of the distress call. It is reaction against the reductionism, the drama of our times played out in a micro-episode.40 ‘Computer says no’ – denying people exist very often, by turns not so smart and unbearably rigid. This is the high-speed, interconnected world we have created and are creating. Forces of change have left people disillusioned and disconnected. Globalisation is routinely and vehemently disparaged by any number of prominent politicians. It ought not to be over-interpreted; geography still matters. After all, 40% of UK trade was with the EU. Nevertheless, the disparaged spectre and to some extent pantomime villain of globalisation elides a curious ambiguity. Citizens reap the fruits of technology and modernity while often rejecting the means by which the fruit is served to them.

Notes   1 Bildt, C. Restoring Faith in Globalization, https://www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/ globalization-poverty-reduction-by-carl-bildt-2017-02?barrier=accessreg, 16th February 2017.  2 Williams-Grut, O. (2016) Mark Carney: Every technological revolution mercilessly destroys jobs well before the new ones emerge. Business Insider, http:// uk.businessinsider.com/bank-of-england-mark-carney-technology-jobs-marketfourth-industrial-revolution-2016-12, 6th December 2016.   3 Tilford, S. (2017) Crisis of Capitalism? Perhaps, But Don’t Blame It on Globalisation, Centre for European Reform. http://www.cer.org.uk/insights/crisis-capitalism-perhapsdont-blame-it-globalisation, 10th February 2017.   4 Marshall, A. (1920) The Principles of Economics, Book IV, The Agents of Production, London: Macmillan and Co., Ltd, 8th edition. First published in 1890.  5 Crisp, J. (2003) The Closing of the European Gates? The New Populist Parties of Europe. In S. Spencer (ed.) The Politics of Migration. Oxford: Blackwell.   6 Roberston, R. (1992) Globalisation. London: Sage.  7 Cairncross, F. (1997) The Death of Distance. Cambridge, MA: Harvard Business School Press.   8 Wolf, M. (2004) Why Globalisation Works. London: Yale University Press.   9 Bildt, C. Restoring Faith in Globalization, https://www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/globalization-poverty-reduction-by-carl-bildt-2017-02?barrier=accessreg, 16th February 2017. 10 Dobbs, R. et al. (2012) Urban World: Cities of the Consuming Class. McKinsey Global Institute report. 11 Roberts, D. China Wants Its People in the Cities. Bloomberg Business Week, https:// www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2014-03-20/chinas-urbanization-plan-sees60-percent-of-people-in-cities-by-2020, 20th March 2014. 12 Jewel in the Crown: The Pearl River Delta, The Economist, Special Report, 8th April 2017. Print edition. 13 Dobbs, R., Manyika, J., & Woetzel, J. (2015) No Ordinary Disruption. New York: McKinsey, p. 18. 14 The Retreat of the Global Company, The Economist, 28th January 2017, Print edition. 15 Giddens, A. (1989) Sociology. Cambridge: Polity Press. 16 Ackroyd, S. (2011) Post-bureaucratic Manufacturing: The Post-war Reconstruction of Large British Firms. Lancaster University Management School, www. w3.unisa.edu. au/management/research, accessed April 2013. 17 Froud, J. et al. (2000) Shareholder Value and Financialization: Consultancy Promises, Management Moves. Economy and Society, Vol. 29, No. 1, pp. 80–110.

Irrelevance of geography 35 18 Fine, B. (2011) Social Capital Versus Social Theory: Political Economy and Social Science at the Turn of the Millennium, Abingdon: Routledge. 19 McKinsey (2014) Global Flows in a Digital Age. New York: McKinsey. 20 Stiglitz, J. (2002) Globalisation and its Discontents. London: Allen Lane. 21 Wolf, M. (2004) Why Globalisation Works. London: Yale University Press. 22 The End Of Globalization: Davos Disagrees. https://www.weforum.org/agenda/ 2017/01/the-end-of-globalization-davos-disagrees 23 http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk_politics/4287370.stm, 27th September 2005. 24 www.bbc.co.uk/radio4/theworldtonight, 17th January 2017. 25 Dearden, N. Global Justice Now, www.globaljustice.org.uk, accessed November 2016. 26 Dobbs, R., Manyika, J., & Woetzel, J. (2015) No Ordinary Disruption: The Four Global Forces Breaking All the Trends. Public Affairs Books and McKinsey Global Institute, p. 33. 27 Howie, T. The Big Bang: How the Big Data Explosion Is Changing the World. Microsoft UK Enterprise Insights Blog, https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/microsoftenterpriseinsight/2013/04/15/the-big-bang-how-the-big-data-explosion-is-changing-the-world/, April 2015. 28 Donald Trump’s Inauguration: What They Had to Say At Davos. https://www.weforum. org/agenda/2017/01/donald-trumps-inauguration-what-they-had-to-say-at-davos, 21st January 2017. 29 Quattrucci, L. Automation Isn’t the End of the World. Here’s Why, http://www. brinknews.com/automation-isnt-the-end-of-the-world-heres-why/, 29th November 2016. 30 Schwab, K. (2016) The Fourth Industrial Revolution. Geneva: World Economic Forum. 31 The Future Is Not What It Used to Be. Technology at Work v2.0, Citi GPS: Global Perspectives & Solutions, http://www.oxfordmartin.ox.ac.uk/downloads/reports/Citi_ GPS_Technology_Work_2.pdf pdf, accessed December 2016. 32 http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-scotland-39830113 33 Williams-Grut, O. BT CEO: ‘It’s Possible That 80% of the Jobs People Do Today Won’t Exist In the Future’. Business Insider, http://uk.businessinsider.com/bt-hsbc-gavinpatterson-stuart-gulliver-technology-changing-jobs-market-fourth-industrial-revolution-2016-10, 29th October 2016. 34 Mark Carney, Governor of the Bank of England. 6th December 2016. 35 Dobbs, R., Manyika, J. & Woetzel, J. (2015) No Ordinary Disruption: The Four Global Forces Breaking All the Trends. Public Affairs Books and McKinsey Global Institute. 36 Mayer-Schonberger, V. & Cukier, K. (2013) Big Data. London: John Murray. 37 Manuel Rivera, CEO, Grupo Expansion. Big Data: How Much is Too Much? World Economic Forum, https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2017/02/big-data-how-much-istoo-much/, 28th February 2017. 38 Tapscott, D. & Tapscott, A. (2016) Blockchain Revolution: How the Technology Behind Bitcoin is Changing Money, Business and the World. London: Portfolio Penguin. 39 Maelle Gavet, COO, Compass. The Digital Revolution Is Destroying Our Democracies. It Doesn’t Have to Be That Way. World Economic Forum, https://www.weforum.org/ agenda/2017/02/the-digital-revolution-is-destroying-our-democracies-it-doesn-t-haveto-be-that-way/, accessed February 2017. 40 www.bbc.co.uk/southtoday, 16th February 2017.

3

Forces of reaction (identity, place and familiar face)

“If you’re English, or if you state you’re English … it flags up to some people, a lot of the people that I work with, that you’ve got some sort of racism going on. And I don’t see that”.1

Geographic justice and the return of place Arising from both Christianity and the Enlightenment, the unique legacy of Europe was universal values. The Enlightenment accentuated the autonomous subject, the person, who acted on what he or she wanted and pursued goals shared in common with others. Today we have identities rooted not in what people want, but in what they are. Identity was the place the politicians left behind. We have moved from the pursuit of truth to markers of being. In the UK referendum debate of 2016, the killer card was immigration. It marked a different form of identity politics than contested debates about gender or class. This was a resurrection of what politics had forgotten about (progressives assumed it was a by-word for xenophobia). The failure of the left was especially marked. Its particular outlook had paid scant attention to patriotism or concrete, spatial identities. It had despised nationalism, embraced internationalism and a shrinking world, though keeping its polemic against global corporate power. It was the return of place. The old industrial working class rooted in communities had been eroded by the move to a service economy where more people had gone to universities. ‘Place’ summed up identity based on two different ways of life and outlook. An old left-right divide based on class versus vested interests had given way to a new divide based on the forces of connection and reaction. ‘Place’ and ‘identity’ – who we are – had come thundering back. Strong nations must rise up against transnational elites who, like the Illuminati, were fundamentally rootless. As a French voter expressed about politicians during the 2017 presidential election, “none of them seem normal”.2 Or as a voter in an Italian referendum commented about the Italian Prime Minister Matteo Renzi, “we need someone who is close to the people, not close to big business”.3 The same zeitgeist in which people find it difficult to connect with politicians who were perceived as deserting the working classes seemed to be shouting, ‘we used to have community – we haven’t got it now. This used to be an interesting, vibrant place. Look at it now!’4 Or as another voter known to the author expressed, “I know the economy is going to be screwed but I still don’t care”. “If we don’t do something now, we never will”.

Forces of reaction 37 The growing sense of cultural insecurity may have been fed by the common narrative that external forces such as migration are eroding traditional sources of peace and stability. Globalisation was perceived as the chief culprit. It was not hard for nostalgia to become a rallying cry. They want to make America – or Russia, or Islam – ‘great again’. The past beckoned, notwithstanding that the return of place was not a place in the present. A mythical tribe was great in a mythical past. It was ours to re-create. Fukuyama worried that at the end of history, nostalgia would be an escape from boredom of the present. At the end of reality, nostalgia is a place to hide while the world burns.5 The appeal of the right across Europe was not to ideology but to national identity or cultural security. The failure of the left was that it did not have quite the same appeal to markers of identity: •• •• ••

Family Place Country

These markers of ‘who we are’ remained strong in an open-border world and were a bulwark against it. Anecdotally, here is the voice of someone moving from Marseilles to Liverpool: Despite language and history, it had the same feel to it. In Marseilles, people were proud of being despised by the rest of France. Coming from Marseilles was a badge of honour. Similarly with Liverpool. Being Scouse is a matter of pride.6 Politics had moved on from the importance of ‘place’ to another location. Grappling with the larger issues facing a nation and the wider challenges at supra-national and global level had by-passed the politics and concerns of the local. Except when votes were in it, such as the closure of hospitals, locality was not thought to be so prominent in an age when mobility was a given and astounding communications an ever-present dynamism. Being able to travel and interact anywhere meant that ‘somewhere’ – the particularity of time and location within a community – was much less important. In the UK, the factors that used to deliver traditional working-class communities to the left of politics and Labour in particular had been eroded: trade unions, working men’s clubs or musical bands. The relegation of geography by the communications revolution at the beginning of the 21st century had seemed to complete the shrinkage of the world steadily advancing by the transport revolution. First railway, then road, then sea and sky had dwarfed the world. If I am not particularly tied to the annoying people in my village, I can interact with anyone anywhere and form virtual communities. Yet we all come from somewhere and belong somewhere. The forces driving change are symbolised by ‘the faceless’ who power grievances. Often, a sense of Englishness was strong amongst those who felt they had not done well out of the system. Objecting with elemental anger against the iconic ‘metropolitan elites’, they

38  Forces of reaction do not have to live their lives shaped by remote, disconnected players so they seek radical movements or they seek refuge in local identities or nativism. They reject the label of ‘racism’, as the quote at the start of this chapter suggests: “If you’re English, or if you state you’re English … it flags up to some people, a lot of the people that I work with, that you’ve got some sort of racism going on. And I don’t see that”.7 Being English became more of an ‘ethnic’ national identity than British. A sense of ‘Englishness’ was stronger among working-class/poorer/less educated whites. Those who identified as English were more likely to oppose immigration and EU membership. “[The working class] are the bearers of a problematic whiteness, disavowed by liberal middle classes”.8 Or as a liberal middle-class respondent commented, “there’s nothing that’s very positive about being English, I think that’s the problem, other than the violence, thuggery, racism”.9 Community is a problematic concept. The word is fuzzy, imparting to us mutuality, a warm feeling, a feeling of being loved, valued and having a purpose in our world. It speaks of familiarity and continuity, a place small enough to know people. Community can be thick or thin. Thick community is characterised by a strong sense of togetherness. It is homogenous. One doesn’t want to be different. That gives a great sense of solidarity. Or there is ‘thin’ community with a greater sense of freedom and diversity, where people can no longer presume to know what their neighbours are thinking and where it is easier to find people ‘who are different to me’. This is more the urban pattern of life. There are many perspectives on what kind of social relationships should be characterised as communities – whether face to face or inhabiting the same locale.10 Communities are partly constituted by shared ways of life, rule-governed practices which are woven together to ensure cooperation and survival. Benedict Anderson’s idea of an ‘imagined community’ drew on those who conceive of themselves as related to each other in some way via shared narrative.11 Even when putting up protectionist barriers to imports, America has usually said that competition, including between nations, is a good thing. The contrast pole is ‘fair or unfair’. In French, Italian and Spanish culture, competition was either loyal or disloyal. The imagery is that of betrayal of local communities or trade guilds. Donald Trump seemed to echo that understanding of competition. During a 2015 radio interview on his Breitbart News Daily, his host and future White House Chief Strategist, Steve Bannon, said, “When two-thirds or threequarters of the CEOs in Silicon Valley are from South Asia or from Asia, I think, a country is more than an economy. We’re a civic society”.12 However problematic a concept, it is clear that there is a need to belong to or to identify with a group. Urban spaces reflect social and technological change. Twentieth-century planners designed the classic industrial city, intended to ‘design-out’ pollution, congestion and overcrowding, instead replete with walkable distances, open spaces and green parks. These were ‘technologically enhanced Edens’ that were intended to be the birthplaces of a ‘new man’.13 However, the urban model rarely succeeded in sustaining romantic visions of our place in nature. That task was left to the countryside where invented Edens were not needed. Here was the real thing. Here people were free of the sensory overload of urban life

Forces of reaction 39 and the overwhelming kaleidoscope of experiences that bombarded the senses and challenged their sense of self.14 We had become a far more diverse society; a nation of individuals. The forces of fragmentation are centrifugal, atomising nuclear communities. The social isolation of village ceased long ago.15 Today, national and international factors make inroads into local identities. The very pressures of social mobility remove working-class young people out of the communities that need them but into the diversity of outside. Many lament that rather than people looking out for each other cooperatively, they look out for ‘number one’. Yet there is a positive side to the (market-shaped?) atomisation of contemporary society. In many quarters, there is advocacy of small community to re-gain social connection, in line with Dunbar’s well-known observation that around 150 people is optimum for close ties. The post-industrial self is not defined alone as a single entity but by reference to family, to place and, increasingly, to social connection. This tension will remain. Too much community spirit can equate to lack of privacy. How we recreate bonds of civic society in a way that is compatible with individual sense of freedom will be an ongoing tension. It should not come as a surprise that individuals are more interested in what trade does to their locality or to their job than what it does to the economy in general.16 Figures published in the World Trade Report 201317 signal that the discrepancy between how voters expect globalisation to affect the economy as a whole versus how they expect it to affect their own lives may be starker than what economists had anticipated. Using survey evidence from European and Asian countries, the report showed that, in most countries, protectionist sentiment did not tend to be correlated with concerns about nationwide unemployment levels. Yet concerns about people’s personal work situation were positively correlated with protectionist sentiments. The surveyed population acknowledged the potentially positive effects of globalisation on the overall economy, but that many people expected not to be in a position to share in the benefits. In other words, in today’s world, a majority of individuals appear to expect the effects of globalisation on their lives to differ from those on the overall economy. Perhaps unsurprisingly, voters grasped the direct reality of jobs and communities better than indirect macro-economic benefits.18 Tristram Hunt saw the return of local identity as a key player in the 2015 General Election in the UK: Operating at a deeper and more insidious level was a sense that Labour did not really believe in England or the English. Time and again, I heard our political motivations questioned as though the party were somehow hiding a secretive, anti-English agenda from the public’s scrutiny. In short, we were seen as insufficiently patriotic. And because of that our ambitions to change the country for the better were simply swept away by a rising tide of antipolitical cynicism.19 It is this reaction against existential and not just geographic distance that might explain some of the forces that are shaping and re-shaping contemporary

40  Forces of reaction politics. Fewer people seem to identify as being European and those self-identifying as British in favour of being ‘English’, ‘Welsh’ or ‘Scots’ may well be waning. Love and affection for the signs and symbols of modern England grow as the unifying blocks of Britishness – Protestantism, heavy industry, Empire, mass-member trade unionism – are receding into history. More people now feel English-only than British, with over 70% choosing English either as their preferred or shared identity.20 This signifies a remarkable shift in the tectonic plates of our identity, with the English-only group expanding as the British-only group shrinks. There are two Englands generated by global ­economic forces. Cultural anxiety about immigrants, automation, bureaucrats and global actors drives the quest for more authentic politics in which citizens can see their own face reflected back to them in their leaders. These are trends harming consensual, pro-European, social democratic and socialist parties across the continent. Externalising global forces re-structuring economy and society creates a bifurcation in the way the world is perceived. In the UK, for instance, there becomes two nations, two Englands, Scotland versus England.21 We are in an age of critical citizenry demanding authentic politics and politicians. “It makes him a whole person, a real person”, declared a Marco Rubio supporter in the 2016 US presidential race.22

Familiar face In the surly, anti-establishment mood, disillusion with politicians seemed at an all-time high. “None of them look like me”, complains a voter about the political class having entrenched themselves as professional elites. “How can they represent me”?23 Politicians seem removed from the lived experience of contemporary people. This seems to matter more. Amidst the death of distance, the very idea of democratic legitimacy and representation is in crisis. A big complaint about the UK election of 2015 was that politics had become a profession. American politicians campaign as outsiders, running against Washington, DC. “We all need to remember, every day more and more, that in the last resort there is no such thing as the ‘common man’,” Richard Hoggart wrote in The Uses of Literacy. “If we do not, we may in the end have allowed individual decision to slip away in our dutiful democratic identification of ourselves with a hypothetical figure whose main value is to those who will mislead us”.24 To re-invent themselves so that citizens once again see the point of politics, leaders have to find a new language that speaks to people’s hearts and minds. The UKIP leader Nigel Farage portrayed himself as a ‘cheery, boozy bloke next door’ while Labour Party leader Ed Miliband claimed to “speak human”. Maybe the issue is not the language though so much as the content; what is said and not just how it is said. If the anti-politics disenchantment is tapping into the disregarded need that ‘we count’, ‘we matter’, human well-being and the value of both society and environment need to be the purpose and end to which politics is but a means. To that, elitism is a clear and present danger.

Forces of reaction 41 In these puzzling times, cultural protectionism matters as much as economic protectionism.

The global and the local The anti-politics mood is both dangerous and hopeful. It is dangerous because the economic crash handed power to populists with their easy solutions that appeal to the worst instincts. In many quarters, politics will be driven by a fear of immigrants. The retreat into tribalism is also the lure of the local, of identities closer to home. Making a local community work is more important than servicing the elites or being global citizens. People are suffering; it is the establishment that is selling them down the river. It was arguments about boundaries that turned up the heat. When boundaries are no longer safe, protectionism and pulling up of drawbridges are what is needed for security. The World Bank Group’s Dr Jim Yong Kim warning policy makers not to close borders or veer towards being xenophobic due to the urgency of the migration crisis and the overspill of the destruction of Syria. Here perhaps lay the readymade audience for Donald Trump. In the 2016 US presidential election, candidates spent a billion dollars on digital advertising, more than 50 times what they spent in 2008.25 Facebook now generated targeted advertisements. Seemingly, politicians can say different things to different groups without anyone noticing. The political winners were those who had more Twitter followers, not just votes. The UK EU referendum and upheavals of people movements generated questions about politics and the economy that would resonate for decades to come. It exposed the way that neglect of local needs generated a deep well of anger; the way that working-class areas felt ignored by London-centric elites. The killer card was that of immigration and therefore questions of identity. The young and particularly young women feel superfluous to the political process. Rather than micro-politics, often they look for idealism, for purpose. The extent to which it makes it easier to organise through e-mail and social media helps to make this a reality. The centre-left of politics does not seem to offer this, to judge from the current crisis of European social democracy. This anti-establishment rage drills down into a megatrend. Widespread disenchantment fuels public debate everywhere, giving it an angry tone from those who feel the world is not working for them. But there is also a hopeful, idealistic aspect to the reaction against the lack of trust in politics. The young may not vote but many are politically engaged nonetheless. They sign online petitions, support referenda on issues they care about and boycott goods. As Hind points out, against the backcloth of ever decreasing legitimacy by politicians and the anger many voters feel about having little say in decision making, a new participatory politics is in the making.26 In theory at least, a democratic style at whatever level creates a political space for voices to be heard. Democratic change across the world in the 20th century was a transformation in the hearing of voices to which rulers were previously

42  Forces of reaction indifferent. “We used to go down on our knees before the people in power, but now we have got to our feet”, declared Nadia Berezovska, a postmistress amongst the crowds in central Kiev protesting for a fresh election in what became known as the Orange Revolution in the Ukraine.27 It frames the Protest, a heightened selfconsciousness arising from reflexive awareness of being devalued.

The politics of authenticity The Scottish National Party stormed to victory in the 2015 British general election because they created a mass movement mobilised at the speed of a smart phone and a text.28 They drew on the enthusiasm of ordinary voters, on crowd funding and instant donations. Everyone felt part of the project.29 It bore the stamp of authentic politics, not remote public services operated from London. The quest for authenticity is related to the heady surge of populism in politics, the reaction against remote elites you never meet, transferring billions of dollars around the globe and shaping policies to suit their interests (or so runs the perception). The retreat into tribalism is the lure of the local, of identities closer to home. People are suffering; it is the establishment that is selling them down the river. Protectionism and pulling up of drawbridges are what is needed for security. Authenticity is a vital quest. It requires credibility and trust. One of the important issues in the growing mood of anti-politics in contemporary society is that people need representatives or key spokespeople for their concerns to be trustworthy. They have to look authentic and be genuine. Any role of intermediary bodies – from political parties to trade unions – is on the wane. Leaders attempt to connect directly with their audiences. Facing the incessant demands of social media news cycles, they look to other forms of legitimisation. The political theorist Nadia Urbinati called this “direct representation”.30 Authenticity is now the major social value. The demand for authenticity could help explain the anti-intellectual attitude towards ‘experts’; those who do a study and pronounce on groups in society rather than try to understand the lives and concerns of voters. The cultural drivers of the 2016 revolt were strong. Voters were turning with anger against the democratic system. They were having to see their community change, having to deal with people ‘who are not like you’. Once, the authentic soul was that of the artist or the lonely hero being true to his convictions. Then the tussle between self and society became central to a critique of modernity. ‘Look into your heart and be true to yourself’ was a familiar trope. To a large extent, authenticity is culturally determined. Moods change. For example, the predominant British Second World War general, Montgomery, rejected the style of the iconic general of the First World War, Douglas Haig. The First World War field marshal rejected generalship from a distant chateau in favour of being seen to be closer to the front line (enabled, be it said, by radio technology). ‘Monty’ dressed and behaved more informally in the style of an electioneering politician. A reserved and austere personality like Haig was also a man of his times – but times had changed.31 In a ‘touchy-feely’ era, authenticity is clothed differently.

Forces of reaction 43 Reality TV is now about watching the ordinary person. In the 1960s, no one would want to know about your neighbours. Now superior knowledge lies with the man in the street. Social media is exposing politicians to the wisdom of crowds. In place of the traditional system of checks and balances, there is pent-up fury against parliament or ministers for not reacting properly to events. Concurrently, there is a movement towards the tangible and authentic. The food industry is abuzz with enterprises that extol the virtues of local, seasonal, farm-to-table products and services – among them pop-up restaurants, street-food trucks, microbreweries, urban farms and cooperative shops. Much like the Arts and Crafts movement, born as a reaction to industrialisation, the resurgence of artisanal, ‘old world’ values signals not only a nostalgic desire for handcrafted goods, but a desire for a different model of social and economic progress. The German Social Democratic Party politician Martin Schultz won favour because he had talked in a vulnerable way about difficulties in his past. He seemed to be a real person. Vulnerability was authenticity spelt differently.32 Left versus right was replaced with the people versus politicians (of the old style). The new style of politics requires leaders to follow the people rather than lead. Something has happened. Leaders and traditional followers have changed places. Populist parties want leaders to look like the people, be one of them rather than distant from them. The fashion is ‘listening to the people,’ albeit with a potentially fake therapeutic effect giving people the illusion their voice is being heard. Maurice Glasman, pioneer of the community-organising movement, argued that to understand the self-identity of most working people in the UK, we need to understand three things: family, place and work.33 Family life remains strong through extended family networks. Place is not just about local communities but the constant refrain, for instance in the UK referendum, ‘to take our country back’. The outcome was a patriotic vote by those who took pride in flag and Armed Forces but felt misrepresented by internationalists and dismissed as racists. It had similar resonance across the Atlantic. “I’ve got my country back”, said a US voter celebrating Donald Trump’s victory.34 The reaction against globalisation has a great deal to do with elite groups pulling the strings who are not like us; ‘not our kind of people’. In popular narrative, they are the global leaders who fly over countries on their way to Davos in January; oblivious to real people living their lives down below. Electorates on both sides of the Atlantic had fallen out with governing classes because they had seemed to lack the voice of the common man. Large, disaffected populaces were, in effect, shouting loudly: ‘the system is not working for us and we have to change it’. Disillusion with the system is widespread. The number of young people in Arab countries is rising fast. The proportion – about 20% – peaked in 2010 but absolute numbers are swelling as populations grow. By 2025, there will be 58 million young people in Arab countries. With youth unemployment in Egypt currently standing at 40%, shabab al-ahawe (‘the coffee-shop guys’) spells danger. Elsewhere in the Middle East, it is on average 30%.35 On the Arab street, it was the young who clamoured for change in the temporary ‘spring’ of 2011. Pessimism

44  Forces of reaction and disenchantment with lack of hope for the future prevail. Morocco has its own word for the ranks of graduates without jobs – ‘diplomes chomeurs’.36 Women make up half of graduates in the Arab world and status is increasingly debated.

Death and after-life of the father A wide-ranging statistical analysis in December 2015 by MacWilliams of the University of Massachusetts of 1,800 registered voters across both the US country and the political spectrum found that education, income, gender, age, ideology and religiosity had no significant bearing on a Republican voter’s preferred candidate. Only two of the variables he looked at were statistically significant: authoritarianism, followed by fear of terrorism, though the former more significant.37 Authoritarianism was not a statistically significant factor in the Democratic primary race, at least not so far, but it does appear to be playing an important role on the Republican side. Indeed, 49% of likely Republican primary voters MacWilliams surveyed scored in the top quarter of the authoritarian scale – more than twice as many as Democratic voters. This is not a new concept in social sciences. Nor is it a stranger to the American political scene. In the 2008 Democratic primary, Marc Hetherington noted that authoritarianism mattered more than income, ideology, gender, age and education in predicting whether voters preferred Hillary Clinton over Barack Obama. There was polarisation between Democratic and Republican constituencies. On such issues as whether foreign policy should be dovish or hawkish, on moral questions perceived as right and wrong and on racial and ethical matters, there was much less common ground than a generation before. The faultline in American politics, Hetherington and Weiler suggested, was one of attitudes of citizens towards authority. They hypothesised that the trend began as Democrats embraced civil rights, gay rights, employment protections and other political positions valuing freedom and equality. Those who made sense of a confusing world by recourse to straightforward solutions espoused by strong leaders were more likely to be part of the Republican base.38 Hetherington and Weiler argued that the essence of authoritarianism is one of order: achieving it, maintaining it and affirming it when citizens are uncertain or fearful. Authorities of all stripes imposed order on an otherwise disordered world. Authoritarianism tended to seek simple rather than complex problem solving, and generally exhibited low levels of political information. Taken together, descriptive characteristics showed a composite image, that of rural, southern, under-educated, evangelical Protestant churchgoers. Hetherington and Suhay went on to argue that non-authoritarians behaved more like authoritarians if they perceived a major threat like terrorism.39 Against that background, it did seem that conditions were ripe for an authoritarian leader to emerge in the USA. Voters were susceptible to Trump’s message about protecting Americans. The methodology behind these surveys was well-established. Inclination towards authoritarianism was revealed in response to questions about child-rearing:

Forces of reaction 45 whether it is more important for the voter to have a child who is respectful or independent; obedient or self-reliant; well-behaved or considerate; and well-mannered or curious. Respondents who picked the first option in each of these questions are considered strongly authoritarian. The social psychology work of Karen Stenner developed a universal theory about what causes intolerance of difference in general, which includes racism, political intolerance (e.g., restriction of free speech), moral intolerance (e.g., homophobia, supporting censorship, opposing abortion) and punitiveness. These seemingly disparate attitudes are principally caused by just two factors: individuals’ innate psychological predispositions to intolerance (‘authoritarianism’) interacting with changing conditions of societal threat. Diversity and difference tend to alarm right-wing authoritarians, who seek order and stability.40 Similarly, Kaufmann found that a sharp divergence between support for Donald Trump or Hillary Clinton reflected the way two groups of people gave different answers to a highly innocuous question: ‘Is it more important for a child to be considerate or well-mannered?’ ‘Considerate’ taps ‘other-directed’ emotions while ‘well-mannered’ is about respect for authority. That mattered because it digs into a particular cultural worldview, that of right-wing authoritarianism (RWA).41 Perhaps this is a social faultline in contemporary politics. Kaufmann asked the same questions and controls, fielded on the same day, in Britain. The only difference was substituting people’s reported Brexit vote for Trump support. Poorer white British respondents were more likely to be Brexiteers than the wealthy. Again, income was not statistically significant. What mattered was the same gap between people who said that it was important for children to be well-mannered or considerate. That was the leading question that tugged into attitudes towards authority. The thesis was not without its critics. After all, it implied that Americans – and British as well – were open to a Mussolini-type strongman. In another survey, authoritarianism was less important than previously thought.42 Authoritarian leaders and their followers have been a much-studied species in social sciences since Theodor Adorno, a refugee from Nazi Germany and leading member of the Frankfurt School, had spoken about Fascist propaganda as simply taking people for what they are: “genuine children of today’s mass culture who have been robbed to a great extent of their autonomy and spontaneity”.43 An authoritarian leader such as Hitler must embody collective hopes and even virtues, Adorno suggested, arguing that Hitler posed as a cross between King Kong and the suburban barber!44 This work led Adorno to the famous F-scale, a personality test developed in 1947 with researchers from the University of California at Berkeley. The authoritarian personality, they suggested, was unable to handle the harsh authority of parents so they identified with authority figures subliminally.45 The point for the present time in the rise of a search for the Strongman is probably this. People born after 1945 and especially 1989 have little sense of what democracy means since they have not known anything else. Authoritarian followers obey. They rally to and follow strong leaders and they respond aggressively to outsiders, especially when they feel threatened. In Russia, China, India, Turkey and many parts of the world, a strong leader who gets things done has become the

46  Forces of reaction fashion. In a high-speed era when something happens so fast, democracy seems tedious, more cumbersome. Out of pseudo nostalgia for authoritarianism, some perhaps yearn for a strong father figure who is protective. That people are looking for a faster, simpler way of doing things is revolutionary nostalgia as much as the cry to make Britain the way it was before or ‘make America great again’. The essence of the populist and the Strongman who will reflect the real will of the people is pretence. A few solutions are all that is needed. It is all simple. A radical fix to the system will solve everything. That might explain the rising faith in authoritarian regimes and styles and the charismatic leader. It might also help to explain the rise and rise of Donald Trump. The 18-month election campaign was a long advert for democracy in the USA that was not positive. Few will want to be associated with that brand of democracy. The Democratic Party had perhaps seemed complacent, boring. Then comes Donald Trump, an outsider and paradoxically a billionaire, to protect them from other billionaires. This latest twist in the battle of political ideas has resonance with the tradition of the Strongman in Latin America, the Caudillo, of which Argentina’s Juan Peron was a conspicuous exemplar. As Eva Peron observed, it is important for a leader to feel yourself to be the people, to love, suffer and enjoy your pleasures like the people. Peru’s Alberto Fujimori or Venezuela’s Hugo Chavez continued in that mould. A national leader rides into office claiming to represent the politics of grievance against backstabbing insiders as well as external foes. His media image is skilfully deployed to create a sense of connection with the poor struggling masses yearning to be free. The historian Richard Morse argued that this caudillo tradition, influenced by ideas of St. Thomas Aquinas, has been the essential basis for the political culture of Latin America, a paternal notion of politics where the state is seen as a mystical body with a fatherly figure as the head who fully exercises dominating power.46 There are in this authoritarianism strong echoes too of the Fascism of the 1920s and 1930s. Across Europe, from Salazar in Portugal to Franco in Spain to Hungary, to France, Romania, Britain and of course Germany and Italy, Fascism was a revolutionary movement.47 Fascism was born from the ashes of the First World War amidst a nostalgia for the ‘traditional’ from whatever source the ‘traditional’ could be constructed.48 The right of politics and especially the far-right have been on the march. The ‘alt-right’ movement stakes its position as drawing on the heterosexual strong man, the rugged saviour in binary opposition to the gentle, homosexual type of man. Debates about Fascism reflect disagreements amongst historians about how it should be defined.49 Is Fascism synonymous with the German or Italian version with attitudes to race as a distinguishing and malignant feature? Then, as now, populist politicians sought to oust existing elites. Then, as now, there was a growing sense of alienation from the modern age or ‘modernity’. One of the marks of Fascism is celebration of being authoritarian, not in the sense of holding traditional loyalty to king or aristocracy or existing elites but holding loyalty to a new leader who promises security, hope, comradeship, and power through

Forces of reaction 47 obedience. Then, as now, the thread running through the way disparate social groups responded to society was the sense of disconnect. People wanted to do politics differently. They attacked effete liberalism, faith in science and reason. In their place, they asserted individualism and the nation, based not on reason but elemental emotion, on passion and on instinct. Bereft of a strong sense of ‘the nation’, the existing social order was ripe for disruption. The CNN national security analyst Peter Bergen asked whether Donald Trump is a Fascist. He argued that this could only be considered against the history of European Fascism, the rise of far-right nationalist parties around the West today and what historian Richard Hofstadter famously termed “the paranoid style in American politics”50 (referring to Hofstadter’s well-known analysis of an American far-right that believed vast conspiracies were undermining the USA).51 In his The Anatomy of Fascism, another historian, Robert Paxton,52 had suggested that Fascist movements of 20th-century Europe had some commonalities among them: ••

••

••

••

A sense of overwhelming crisis beyond the reach of traditional solutions. Trump’s ascendancy outside the structures of the traditional Republican Party and his clarion calls about America’s supposedly precipitously declining role in the world captured this trait well. The superiority of the leader’s instincts over abstract and universal reason. Trump’s careless regard for the truth – that thousands of Muslims in New Jersey cheered the 9/11 attacks, or that Mexican immigrants are rapists and murderers – and the trust he places in his own gut captured this well. The belief of one group that it is the victim, justifying any action. Many in Trump’s base of white, working-class voters feel threated by immigrants, so Trump’s solution to that, whether with Mexico (build a wall) or the Islamic world (keep them out), spoke to them. The need for authority by natural leaders (always male) culminating in a national chief who alone is capable of incarnating the group’s destiny – resonating with Trump’s appeal.

This must not be overdrawn. Fascist leaders in the 1930s glorified violence, almost never disavowing it. Trump did not seek to foment violence against the enemies, such as immigrants, he has identified as undermining the American way of life. Analysts such as Dylan Matthews in Vox noted that Trump organised no paramilitary groups to subvert liberal norms, he has not openly rejected democracy (although perhaps has tried to delegitimise the system by saying it is rigged), and he does not celebrate violence for the sake of violence. In 2016, which will no doubt be remembered as ‘junction year’, a time when the march of events was at a crossroads, there were no black-shirts marching.53 Yet, Bergen argued, it is surely right to place Trump in the long, American right-wing tradition of fearing ‘the Other’, whether they are Catholics or Jews or, now, Muslims. “Instead of a communist plot to take over America, the conspiracy theory favoured in the 1950s, the threat is now immigrants, whether they are Mexicans or Muslims. (Earlier waves of American jingoistic paranoia in the

48  Forces of reaction 19th century were directed at Masons and then Catholics)”.54 Trump’s ­ethnic demagoguery, his scorn for and ignorance of the existing democratic system, his indulgence in conspiracy thinking and his open admiration of autocrats seemed to support that view. It resonated also with far-right nationalist movements that swept Europe in recent years, defined by hostility to immigrants and minorities. One of the increasingly strong themes in this new global culture is that people are less willing to put up with big institutions. They want relationships with real people. Governments are perceived as a professional elite; patronising and paternalistic. Social theorists can ponder the rise of feminism concurrent with the decline of paternalism. But there is no doubt that in many social fields, we are seeing a paradigm shift. The attitude of ‘we know what you need’ is on the way out, especially if politicians don’t actually meet real people (apart from situations of grievance) let alone ask them! Whether it is perceived long-term dependency of benefit recipients on state welfare or developing countries on foreign aid, an attitude of ‘we know best’ is not the way the world works anymore. An empowered citizenry is realising its own agency. Local communities assert the need to wrest power back and re-build voluntary association. A strong feature of the 20th century was for governments to do more based on the power of the state to get things done. Doing things for and to people is not as effective as unleashing power in ordinary people coming together and doing things for themselves. Anti-intellectualism, elitist populism, distrust of global elites ranging from bankers and senior politicians to big business and multinationals – all this is a bewildering state of contemporary life, where many people feel at odds with the system. The death of deference has given rise to an after-life for the parent. Perhaps people yearn for someone to tell them what to do!

Notes  1 Working-class respondent, Garner (2012), p. 455, quoted in Kaufmann, E. (2016) Englishness and the UKIP Vote, www.winchester.ac.uk/research/attheuniversity, accessed August 2016.   2 A piece on the French elections. Newsnight, BBC 2, 4th April 2017.   3 www.bbc.co.uk/radio4/TheTodayProgramme, 29th August 2016.  4 As voiced by respondents during a by-election for Stoke-on-Trent, February 2017. www.bbc.co.uk/radio4/worldtonight, 23rd February 2017.   5 Fukuyama, F. (1992) The End of History and the Last Man. London: Hamish Hamilton.   6 Author’s client notes used with permission.  7 Working-class respondent, Garner (2012), p. 455, quoted in Kaufmann, E. (2016) Englishness and the UKIP Vote, www.winchester.ac.uk/research/attheuniversity, accessed August 2016.   8 Lawler (2012), p. 421, quoted in Kaufmann, E. (2016) Englishness and the UKIP Vote,. www.winchester.ac.uk/research/attheuniversity, accessed August 2016.  9 Middle-class respondent quoted in Fenton (2012), p. 478, quoted in Kaufmann, E. (2016) Englishness and the UKIP Vote. 10 Mason, A. (1996) Two Concepts of Community. In N. Snow (ed.) (1996) In the Company of Others: Perspectives on Family, Community and Culture. Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield.

Forces of reaction 49 11 Anderson, B. (1991) Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. London: Verso. 12 Huffington Post, 16th November 2016, Steve Bannon Suggests There Are Too Many Asian CEOs In Silicon Valley. http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/steve-bannondisgusted-asian-ceos-silicon-valley, accessed February 2017. 13 Kargon, R. & Molella, A. P. (2008) Invented Edens: Techno-cities of the Twentieth Century. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. 14 Upton, D. (2008) Another City: Urban Life and Urban Spaces in the New American Republic. Princeton, NJ: Yale University Press. 15 Hoggart, K. et al. (1995) Rural Europe: Identity and Change. London: Arnold, p. 25. 16 Fernandez, R. & Rodrik, D. (1991) Resistance to Reform: Status Quo Bias In the Presence of Individual-Specific Uncertainty. American Economic Review, Vol. 81, No. 5, pp. 1146–1155. 17 WTO (2013) World Trade Report 2013: Factors Shaping the Future of World Trade. Geneva: WTO Publishing. 18 Cernat, L. & Jansen, M. (2017) Talking Trade In the Post-Truth Era: Bringing the Numbers That Matter. Vox, CEPR’s Policy Portal, http://voxeu.org/article/talkingtrade-post-truth-era, 7th February 2017. 19 Hunt, T. (ed.) (2016) Labour’s Identity Crisis: England and the Politics of Patriotism. Winchester: Winchester University Press. 20 ICM for British Future, 2013, www.britishfuture.org/contact, accessed September 2016. 21 Kenny, M. (2014) Englishness Politicised?: Unpicking the Normative Implications of the McKay Commission. British Journal of Politics and International Relations, Vol. 16, No. 4, pp. 152–170. 22 Marco Rubio: The Moral of his Story, The Economist, 27th February 2016. Print e­ dition. 23 Author’s Parish notes, September 2016. 24 Hoggart, R. (1969) The Uses of Literacy. London: Pelican. 25 Censors and Sensibility, The Economist, 21st May 2016. Print edition. 26 Hind, D. (2010) The Return of the Public. London: Verso. 27 Orange Revolution, Financial Times, 21st December 2004, p. 17. 28 Tierney, S. (2015) Reclaiming Politics: Popular Democracy in Britain after the Scottish Referendum. The Political Quarterly, Vol. 86, No. 2, pp. 226–233. 29 Hay, C. (2009) Disenchanted with Democracy, Pissed Off with Politics, British Politics, Vol. 4, No. 1, pp. 92–99. 30 Urbinati, N. (2014) Democracy Disfigured Opinion, Truth, and the People. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. 31 Sheffield, G. (2011) The Chief: Douglas Haig and the British Army. London: Aurum Press, p. 379. 32 https://www.facebook.com/martinschulz, accessed February 2017. 33 Sandbrook, D. Family, Faith and Flag, New Statesman, http://www.newstatesman.com/ society/2011/04/labour-party-english-england, 7th April 2011. 34 www.bbc.co.uk/radio4/todayprogramme, 8th November 2016. 35 World Bank, US Census Bureau, and ILO – see Look Forward In Anger, The Economist, 6th August 2016. 36 Schwarz, C. (2016) Trajectories of Youth Unemployment in Morocco: Biographical Processes and the Logic of the Political Protest of Unemployed University Graduates, http://www.academia.edu/12021578 37 The One Weird Trait That Predicts Whether You’re a Trump Supporter. http://www. politico.com/magazine/story/2016/01/donald-trump-2016-authoritarian-213533, accessed November 2016. 38 Hetherington, M. & Weiler, J. (2009) Authoritarianism and Polarisation in American Politics. New York: Cambridge University Press.

50  Forces of reaction 39 Hetherington, M. & Suhay, E. (2011) Authoritarianism, Threat, and Americans’ Support for the War on Terror. American Journal of Political Science, Vol. 55, No. 3. 40 Stenner, K. (2005) The Authoritarian Dynamic. New York: Cambridge University Press. 41 Kaufmann, E. (2016) YouGov / Policy Exchange / Birkbeck University Survey Results based on a sample size of 677 adults in the UK between 16th and 17th August 2016. https://d25d2506sfb94s.cloudfront.net/cumulus_uploads/document/u12mloq9ox/ PolicyExchangeResults_160907_Authoritarianism_UK.pdf 42 Trump and the Academy, The Economist, 3rd September 2016. Print edition. 43 Muller-Dohm, S. (2014) Adorno: A Biography, Cambridge: Polity, p. 293. 44 Adorno, T. (2006) The Culture Industry. London: Routledge, p. 141. 45 Drono, T. et al. (1950) The Authoritarian Personality. New York: Harper and Brothers. 46 Morse, R. (1981) Prospero's Mirror: A Study in New World Dialectic. Publisher: The Author. 47 Payne, S. (1995) A History of Fascism 1914–1945. Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press. 48 Griffin, R. (1995) Fascism. Oxford: Oxford University Press. 49 Payne, S. (1983) Fascism: Comparison and Definition. Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press. 50 Bergen, P. Is Donald Trump a Fascist? New Republic. http://edition.cnn.com/2015/12/09/ opinions/bergen-is-trump-fascist/index.html, accessed December 2016. 51 Hofstadter, R. (1964) The Paranoid Style in American Politics. New York: Vintage. 52 Paxton, R. (2005) The Anatomy of Fascism. New York: Vintage. 53 Heer, J. Is Donald Trump a Fascist? New Republic. https://newrepublic.com/article/137339/donald-trump-fascist, 30th September 2016. 54 Bergen, P. Is Donald Trump a Fascist? New Republic. http://edition.cnn.com/2015/12/09/ opinions/bergen-is-trump-fascist/index.html, accessed December 2016.

4

Forces of reaction (immigration panic, walls and bridges)

“The lack of economic development in the Middle East and in combination with a very young population will create an underlying long term engine for migration. Hundreds of millions of young men and women in the Middle East and North Africa have no better alternative than to try to make the crossing to Europe. The Mediterranean Sea can never be controlled and Europe has to step up the common efforts over years to come. A wall cannot be built in an ocean”. – Anders Borg1

As Anders Borg implies in the quote above, it is important to try to understand the phenomenon of our times; the forces of change and the forces of reaction. In this chapter, we are considering how this led to another facet of distance; the demand that undesirables should ‘keep their distance!’ With globalisation, the person who was ‘outside’ now becomes a neighbour. The inside/outside distinction falls and fails. That could have been said until recently. Suddenly it is much less valid. Forces of interconnectedness run up against another response, that of demarcating ‘who we are’ by building walls and fostering protectionism. Are there common threads to this upsurge on both sides of the Atlantic against how things are run? Or is this just fantasy based on Donald Trump saying in the election campaign, “I am Mr. Brexit!” The battle-cry of ‘build the wall’ proclaimed by Donald Trump or controlling borders was not new. President Clinton had talked about ‘holding the line’. A million people and a considerable body of trade crossed the border every day. There is a dichotomy here. Global and institutional interconnectedness is a reality. Real and imaginary walls and borders mark territory and force some distance between us and the outsiders. A separation barrier helps gives definition to a nation state. But walls and drawbridges also exist in the imagination. Donald Trump had emphasised ‘there will be A WALL!’ Walls are symbolic. We define ourselves by our boundaries. If we have a centre (us) we must have an edge. Borders and walls are harsh. They can also be porous. The path where the wall went was not agreed by both sides in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. The borderline was dictated by the Israeli side; frontiers imposed.

52  Forces of reaction It is, however, immigration that has proved ‘the trump card’ with the growth of populist-right parties. The Brexit referendum was, above all, driven by immigration, a vote to take back control of borders. Leaders of populist parties have portrayed themselves as the protectors of a welfare state under siege from liberal immigration policies. The Danish People’s Party, for instance, has branded itself as “representing classical social-democratic values combined with a tough line on immigration”.2 Klaus Petersen, a professor at the University of Southern Denmark, argues that the failure of centre-left parties to acknowledge and help those people negatively affected by the forces of globalisation and immigration has been a strategic error. Nordic countries had been standard bearers for social democracy. By 2016, right-wing parties controlled Denmark, Finland, Iceland and Norway, leaving only Sweden in the hands of the centre-left. In the Netherlands, Krouwel, a political scientist, argues that an intolerant streak has been exposed. “It’s evidenced by the strength of anti-Muslim parties compared to other countries like Germany”.3 Right-wing politicians have made it their stock in trade to proclaim that their country is in crisis and that outsiders are to blame. Invariably, ‘otherness’ is regarded with suspicion – especially amongst those who seek to maintain distance. Anti-immigrant sentiment was the killer card in the strange politics of 2016. In the USA, Pew Research found that 79% of Trump voters said illegal immigration was a ‘very big’ problem and 86% believed it had become worse since 2008, despite the fact that fewer unauthorised immigrants were living in the USA in 2015 than in 2009. More than one million migrants and refugees crossed into Europe in 2015 alone, provoking backlash across the EU. Hungary, Poland and the Czech Republic all refused to accept refugees. Clearly the forces of change were unsettling that portion of the white electorate who regarded refugees and immigrant workers as coming over here and changing our way of life. A declining sense of white privilege and white authority, hostility to immigration and dislike of multiculturalism have been well-documented by social scientists. Based on polling conducted after the Convention season had finished in August 2016, nearly 40% of those who gave Trump 0 out of 10 said inequality was the prime issue facing America. Among those rating Trump 10 out of 10, only 4% agreed. Immigration was the top issue for 25% of white Trump backers while hardly even registering among Trump detractors. Compared to immigration, the gap between supporters and detractors was not nearly so striking. Ethnic change can happen nationally or locally, and it matters in both Britain and America. The share of white Americans rating Trump 10 out of 10 rises from just over 25% in areas with no ethnic change to almost 70% in places with a 30-point increase in the Latino population.4 The last time the share of foreign born in America reached current levels, immigration restrictionist sentiment was off the charts and the Ku Klux Klan had six million members – mainly in northern states concerned about Catholic immigration. The USA was about 90% white in 1960, is 63% white today, and over half of American babies are now from ethnic minorities. As Kaufmann observes,

Forces of reaction 53 most white Americans already think they are in the minority, and many are beginning to vote in a more ethno-political way.5 It was the same story in the UK of 2016 where local ethnic change was linked with a much higher rate of Brexit voting. It was no coincidence that Boston in Lincolnshire, which had the strongest Brexit vote in the country, witnessed the share of Eastern Europeans moving from near zero in 2001 to the highest in the country by 2011 and some 70% by the time of the June referendum. In many areas, it was not so much the numbers of immigrants as perceptions about the extent that played strongly. “I stand in the playground and all I hear is Polish”, said a 27-year-old barmaid, who has lived in Lincolnshire her whole life. “They’ve got Polish teachers, too, and I’ve sometimes heard them talking to the kids in their language”. When she attended the school 20 years ago, there were no foreigners, she said, and all local children could get in. Not anymore. “My daughter couldn’t get a place here at the beginning and had to go to a school six miles away”. By contrast, Latvian Skaidrite Kolberga, who was on foot picking up four-year-old Vanessa from the Little Robin pre-school attached to Park primary, said it was easy to get a place. “Now Vanessa can speak better English than me”, she said. The biggest challenge posed by the wave of immigration is the perception of the disadvantages of immigration – particularly the notion ‘they come over here and take our jobs’.6 Immigrants and their political support base amongst most political parties had moved from the margins to the centre. Those who might have felt themselves in the mainstream were displaced. In many communities in the UK, the lack of enthusiasm for immigration combined with low wages drove a vote to leave the EU. Although in absolute terms there was no correlation with the size of the immigrant population and voting in the UK referendum, there was between the increase in immigration and the tendency to vote Leave. In short, it was rapid social change and a rise in immigration that was too swift that spooked local communities. Wages were falling and these were the communities that had largely been dependent on manufacturing. They could not adjust.7 Other areas such as South Wales exhibited low levels of immigration; votes to leave the EU were possibly fear-based. Shiny projects funded by Brussels did not make a difference to their lives. In Germany, the rallying call by Angela Merkel to take a million refugees in September 2015 caused intense controversy. She has had to tack slightly to the right to fend off challenges from the far-right. Terrorist attacks rarely pull leftward. For instance, the German party Pegida – Patriotic Europeans against the Islamisation of the West – was founded in October 2014 by Lutz Bachman, whose fine was upheld in November 2016 for calling refugees ‘garbage’.8 Concern over immigrants is not only between countries, it is between communities. The Casey Report on opportunity and integration in the UK called for greater action to promote integration.9 Cultural distance takes place between communities, not just between nations. Fears over immigration may have played a central role in the Brexit vote and the US election, but at a time when the world has more barriers than ever before

54  Forces of reaction (three-quarters of all border walls and fences were erected after the year 2000) the case for tearing them down is compelling.10 It is not just a problem for the West. Global flows of people and migrant labour result in poor, young South and South-East Asian countries suffering low wages and underemployment, while richer, ageing countries in the North need more people to bolster their workforces. In practice the Asian ‘model’ of migration tends to be restrictive, aimed at stemming immigration, rather than managing it. Entry is severely curtailed, permanent settlement strongly discouraged, citizenship out of reach.11

Keep your distance! The danger is that economic nationalism, erecting trade barriers, engaging in digital mercantilism and generally undermining the liberal world order will severely harm the extreme poor in Africa and elsewhere, while doing nothing to help coal miners in West Virginia. “They dictate what we can do in this country – there is a conspiracy to take over by Brussels”. Such voices heard all too frequently in the UK EU referendum campaign sum up the mood of the many, fed up with the politicians who didn’t listen to them. During the UK’s June 2016 referendum on EU membership, the Leave campaign also attacked so-called ‘fat cats’ and those corporate interests who argued for staying inside the EU. Bankers and business leaders were portrayed as the enemy, extracting excessive rewards for their work while ordinary people suffered. The difference in mood is marked, brought about by a new political landscape. The US election and populist votes in Italy and the UK highlighted a gulf between the political and business elites and the working people living outside of major metropolitan areas. Ordinary citizens around the world had sent a powerful message. Emotional, spiritual, political, occupational alienation is epidemic and growing. There is a common theme, that people are resentful of the elite. They felt let down by the bankers, let down by politicians who did not punish the bankers. A marked reaction had set in against the industrial society of modernity. It was a juggernaut rolling out from the West, sweeping everything before it.12 Too often, the result was brutality of exploitation and inequality arising from “the walls that globalisation is building – walls of insecurity and hatred and fear”.13 New social movements arose in revolt against impersonal Producers. Global flows of capital and trade were raising people out of poverty. But concerns about the vulnerable needing to be protected ran very high. The response to contemporary social alienation that is marked by anti-elitism and that shrinks distance and seems to generate risk is to build walls, to put the drawbridges up. Reinforce borders, emphasise protectionism and economic nationalism! In short, KEEP YOUR DISTANCE! This is the face of the new alienation. Distance is the new frontier. There is far greater emphasis on the need to re-connect people and politics, born perhaps from distrust of ‘the system’ run by vested interests and elites. Infantilising the electorate won’t work now. Grassroots activism in economic and political life as

Forces of reaction 55 people exercise agency shows they are less prepared to be passive observers of what is going on. Debate across Europe about Europe is not about the shape of bananas but remoteness. Along with citizens not identifying so much with their traditional base because it has passed them by – witness the white working class voting Labour in England or older, middle-class men in Germany anxious about social decline and cultural alienation14 – came the rise of nationalisms. When the post-war generation thought nationalism had lost its potency and Fascist overtones, from Greece to Scotland, from UKIP and Tory Euro-sceptics to Marine Le Pen, people wanted a national story. The ‘identitarians’ were Europe’s answer to the American ‘alt-right’ which helped propel Donald Trump to the pinnacle of power in the USA. The Germans called it ‘Identitare Bewegung’ (IB) that first emerged in France in 2003 and spread through northern Europe.15 Identitarians mythologised a past where borders were absolute and clear and nationals could establish cultural norms. Their leader, Martin Sellner, uses social media to promote the movement, telling other nationalities to go home. 2016 saw the continuing ‘Age of Jihad’, economically frustrated and disillusioned youth in the Middle East, Africa and European suburbs being targeted by extremists promising to give them meaning, significance and identity in supposed holy struggles. That creates a mood of insecurity that feeds a sense in the West that the world is a dangerous place, that risk society requires us to build walls.16 There is a strong sense too that politics is not doing what it should for people and that politicians are far too remote, not ‘people like us!’ Politics has passed them by. Many white working-class people felt marginalised. The subjectivity, the mood behind this is, ‘they want to recover a sense that they matter’. Yearning to feel a sense of being from somewhere, people retreat into assertions of identity. Amidst cultural anxiety that ‘this isn’t my country anymore’, populism thrives. The new divide in politics across the Western world is between those who perceive the global stage as a threat to react to and those who for whom connecting to the world economy and wired up life is both indispensable and natural. It is between those who want to keep the rest of the world out and those who want to engage with it but only on their terms. Global interests are said to compete with national interest; it is a zero sum game. The slippery concept of nationalism is alive and well! As Stephen Shakespeare, the founder of the YouGov polling organisation, observed, “we are now beyond ideology: the left have given up on the idea of total state control, even as a distant aspiration. The right have given up thinking about shrinking the state. The collapse of Rover is a political non-event. No-one seriously proposes a shift away from public services. Instead, there is a new line which separates one side of the electorate from another: recent YouGov research suggests that we no longer range along a left-right axis, but are divided by ‘drawbridge issues.’” Shakespeare was clear about the fundamental divide in the way people see the world. “We are either ‘drawbridge up’ or ‘drawbridge down’. Are you someone who feels life is being encroached upon by criminals, gypsies, spongers, asylum

56  Forces of reaction seekers, Brussels bureaucrats? Do you think the bad things will all go away if we lock the doors? Or do you think it’s a big beautiful world out there, full of good people, if only we could all open our arms and embrace each other? Depending on which side we take, we regard ‘drawbridge up’ people as unpleasant, or ‘drawbridge down’ people as foolish”.17 Significantly, the rallying cry of Donald Trump’s campaign for the presidency in 2016 was ‘build a wall’. It was aimed at Mexico, to put the drawbridge up against Mexican migrants in search of work and perceived criminal types. Protectionism and pulling up of drawbridges are needed for security. As President, Donald Trump immediately set about making good on his promises – to build the wall and impose new limits on immigration from some Muslim countries. Trump signed an executive order for the construction of the wall on 25th January 2017, less than a week after assuming office, despite fierce criticism within the country and outside. “I don’t kid about things like that, I can tell you. No, we will have a wall. It will be a great wall and it will do a lot of — it’ll be a big help”, he said. “Do walls work? Just ask Israel”, Trump added.18 Wall Street was not impressed. “American business and the American president are now at odds. It is impossible to be a successful global corporation with the ‘Trump Wall’”, warned the president of Financial Insights.19 It was fearful too of a growing mood of economic nationalism, of protectionism that Trump espoused with his ‘America First’ policy. China was set to take advantage of Trump’s protectionism, erecting trade barriers to prevent American jobs shipping to the East. “I would worry about disruptive measures and new-found nationalism closing borders”, remarked one CEO.20 Bogeymen always exist as dark foil as societies try to legitimise themselves. In the USA, Communists fulfilled the role. After 9/11, the lens of vilification was turned on Muslim extremists. Michael Flynn, Donald Trump’s short-lived national security adviser, said that the fear of Muslims was rational. As articulated by Donald Trump in his campaign, many working- and middleclass Americans believed that free-trade agreements were the reasons for their incomes having stagnated over the past two decades. This was a misdiagnosis. While globalisation is an important factor in the hollowing out of the middle class, so, too, is automation. As Baldwin notes, 21st-century globalisation is knowledge-led, not trade-led. Radically reduced communication costs have enabled US firms to move production to lower-wage countries. Meanwhile, to keep their production processes synced, firms have also offshored much of their technical, marketing and managerial knowhow. This ‘knowledge offshoring’ is what has really changed the game for American workers. In 2017, US workers are not competing with low-wage foreign labour, capital and technology, as they did in the 1970s. Rather, they are competing with a nearly unbeatable combination of low-wage foreign labour and deficits in US knowhow. The USA needs to restore its social contract so that its workers have a fair shot at sharing in the gains generated by global openness and automation. “Unfortunately, old-fashioned protectionism will not boost American industrial competitiveness, even if it saves a few thousand jobs in sunset sectors. Moreover, ripping up trade agreements and raising

Forces of reaction 57 tariffs will do nothing to create new, high-paying factory jobs. If anything, tariffs will only inflict further harm on workers”.21 President Donald Trump’s executive order to ban citizens of seven Muslimmajority states from entering the USA for 90 days, and to temporarily freeze all refugee arrivals (including Syrians indefinitely), was interpreted widely as an attempt to curtail the inward migration of Muslims, which Trump and his supporters argue pose a threat to national security. Trump’s policy generated a backlash among some of Europe’s leaders. By contrast, leaders of Europe’s populist rightwing parties, including Geert Wilders, Nigel Farage and Matteo Salvini, heaped praise on Trump. There is evidence to suggest, however, that both Trump and these radical right-wing parties reflect an underlying reservoir of public support. A Chatham House survey of more than 10,000 people from ten European states threw new light on what people thought about migration from mainly Muslim countries. The results were striking and sobering. They suggest that public opposition to any further migration from predominantly Muslim states is by no means confined to Trump’s electorate in the USA but is fairly widespread. In response to the statement, ‘All further migration from mainly Muslim countries should be stopped’, across all ten of the European countries an average of 55% agreed, 25% neither agreed nor disagreed and 20% disagreed. Majorities in all but two of the ten states agreed, ranging from 71% in Poland, 65% in Austria, 53% in Germany and 51% in Italy to 47% in the UK and 41% in Spain. Nowhere did a percentage that disagreed surpass 32%.22 Concerns about terrorism ran high in Europe, with on average 76% of respondents saying ISIS is a major threat to their countries. Only Greeks thought economic instability and climate change posed a bigger threat. The majority of respondents believe that refugees will increase the likelihood of terrorism in their country. Fears run particularly high in Hungary and Poland, where 76% and 71% respectively believe there is a link between the influx of refugees and terrorism. The exceptions are Spain and France where less than half subscribe to this view. Added to the perceived threat of terrorism, many Europeans feel that ethnic and national diversity is a negative influence in their country.23 The drive for greater security, national unity and patriotism was familiar to the experience of Russians under President Putin. It was also well-known to supporters in Poland of the nationalist conservative Law and Justice (PIS) Party who held a majority of seats in the Parliament since taking 38% of the vote in 2015. Its illiberal stance was revealed by its supporters picketing a liberal newspaper to purge it of demonic influences. In Hungary too, another key part of the ‘peripheral East’ of the European mainstream, Prime Minister Viktor Orban described refugees entering Europe as ‘looking like an army’ as he defended a hard-line stance against migrants: “What we have been facing is not a refugee crisis. This is a migratory movement composed of economic migrants, refugees and also foreign fighters. This is an uncontrolled and unregulated process”, he told a European People’s Party congress in October 2015.24 In the 2017 French elections, the tension was between hope (Macron) and anger (Marine Le Pen). Protectionism and economic nationalism threatened to beckon

58  Forces of reaction the way to a darker global future. In the event, the victory of Emmanuel Macron was hailed as a triumph of internationalism and openness over populism and protectionism. Yet he had never held elected office and had no political party behind him. A quarter of voters abstained, reflecting an antagonism to both candidates.25 There is a deep paradox here. The digital economy respects neither boundaries nor borders. Yet many who use its instruments daily argue passionately that frontiers should be strengthened and even that nation states should put up the drawbridge. Isolation and the digital economy are incompatible, however. An interconnected world economy with free flow of people, goods and services is fundamental to international trade. Global society is characterised by a fast-paced where breakthrough technologies, demographic shifts and political transformations have far-reaching societal and economic consequences that affect everyone. What seems clear is that we are seeing great acceleration in many fields at the same time. Globalisation and automation are setting the agenda for social change everywhere. This is profoundly upsetting. In short, drivers of the political upheavals of 2016, such as ‘taking back control’ and ‘restrict immigration’, had at their heart the imperative to assert distance and boundaries. Distance creates boundaries. For some, distance is there to be overcome. For others, it is to be sustained so that concrete identities can be held on to. Perhaps immigration and social change needed slowing down!

Notes  1 Anders Borg, chair, Global Financial System Initiative, Davos Download: Global Economic Warming, World Economic Forum, https://www.weforum.org/ agenda/2017/01/davos-download-global-economic-warming/, 22nd January 2017.  2 Kettunen, P. & Petersen, K. (2013) Beyond Welfare State Models: Transnational Historical Perspectives on Social Policy. Cheltenham: Edward Elgar Publishing.   3 Controversy over Dutch Santa’s Blackface Sidekick ‘Black Pete’, http://www.stcatharinesstandard.ca/2013/11/12/controversy-over-dutch-santas-blackface-sidekick-blackpete  4 Kaufmann, E. (2016) Economy and Society blog, http://www.sneps.net/blog, 9th November 2016.   5 Kaufmann, E., quoted in Wigmore, T. (2015) Why Are Right Wing Parties Thriving Across Europe? New Statesman, https://www.newstatesman.com/culture/observations/2015/10/why-are-right-wing-parties-thriving-across-europe, 8th October 2015.   6 Pidd, H. Census Reveals Rural Town of Boston Has Most Eastern European Immigrants, The Guardian, https://www.theguardian.com/uk/2012/dec/11/census-boston-easterneuropean-immigration, 11th December 2012.   7 A Portrait of Migrantland. The Economist, 15th April 2017. Print edition.   8 Rehburg, K. S. (2016) Pegida. Bielefeld: Transcript.   9 The Casey Review – A Review Into Opportunity and Integration, www.gov.uk/government/publications/the-casey-review-a-review-into-opportunity-and-integration   10 Rutger Bregman: Why Open Borders Would Make the World Richer, http://www. businessinsider.my/rutger-bregman-worldwide-inequality-borders-economist-authorjournalist-2017, accessed March 2017. 11 Workers in Asia: Needed, Not Wanted, The Economist, 8th February 2017. Print edition. 12 Robins, K. (1991) Tradition and Translation: National Culture in its Global Context. In J. Corner and S. Harvey (eds.) Enterprise and Heritage: Cross-currents of National Culture. London: Routledge, pp. 21–44.

Forces of reaction 59 13 Shiva, V. (2005) The Polarised World of Globalisation. UN Global Policy Forum­ from Navdanya, https://www.globalpolicy.org/globalization/defining-globalization/27674. html, 10th May 2005. 14 Vorlander, H. (2016) PEGIDA – Entwicklung, Zusammensetzung und Deutung einer Empörungsbewegung. Wiesbaden (i.E. 2016) (zusammen mit Maik Herold und Steven Schäller), www. http://dresden.de/die_tu_dresden/fakultaeten/philosophische_fakultaet/ifpw/poltheo/mitarbeiter/kurzvorstellung_vorlaender_englisch, accessed February 2016. 15 Wolves in Skinny Jeans, The Economist, 12th November 2016. Print edition. 16 Cockburn, P. (2016) The Age of Jihad. London: Verso. 17 They Seem to Be Campaigning for the Sake of It, The Guardian, 17th April 2005. Print edition. 18 Trump Says He Was Not Kidding About Mexico Wall, International Business Times, http://www.ibtimes.co.uk/trump-says-he-was-not-kidding-about-mexico-wall-it-­ getting-designed-right-now-1605561, 8th February 2017. 19 Trump’s Isolationism Is Bad for Business, http://money.cnn.com/2017/01/30/news/ economy/donald-trump-economic-risk-isolationism/index.html?iid=EL, 27th January 2017. 20 Frans van Houten, CEO of Royal Philips, Donald Trump’s Inauguration: What They Had to Say at Davos, https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2017/01/donald-trumps-inauguration-what-they-had-to-say-at-davos, 21st January 2017. 21 Baldwin, R. US Protectionism Won’t Work. This Is Why. Project Syndicate, https:// www.weforum.org/agenda/2017/02/us-protectionism-wont-work-this-is-why, 13th February 2017. 22 What Do Europeans Think About Muslim Immigration? https://www.chathamhouse. org/expert/comment/what-do-europeans-think-about-muslim-immigration? 10th February 2017. 23 Wike, R. 4 Factors Driving Anti-Establishment Sentiment in Europe. Pew Research Center, http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2016/12/06/4-factors-driving-anti-establish ment-sentiment-in-europe/, December 2016. 24 We Are in Deep Trouble, http://www.politico.eu/article/orban-refugees-hungary-weare-in-deep-trouble/, 22nd October 2015. 25 A New Battle Begins: How the World’s Newspapers Reacted to Emmanuel Macron’s Victory In France, http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2017/05/08/new-battle-beginsworld-media-reacted-emmanuel-macrons-victory/

5

Forces of reaction and the flight from the impersonal

“Patients seem to be becoming numbers not people. I am having to fight against what the system wants in order to provide dignified care to my patients”.1

Traditionally, the right had occupied the ground of meritocratic self-advancement and aspiration. The left had largely embraced the contested ground of culture – feminism, human rights, ecology and ethnicity. All this was now changing; landscapes transformed. We were entering an era of a fragmented politics, multiplicity of parties and the rise and rise of populism.2 Political movements which are against the elites, anti-establishment, have been making considerable headway. Brexit vote and election of Donald Trump was a cry from the disassociated who felt the system was not working for them. What then are we to make of these events that made 2016 so memorable? In this chapter, we will explore the idea that the populist revolt overthrowing social and political norms had a great deal to do with de-personalisation, that distance systems and social structures from people. These two factors encapsulate the forces of nationalism and ambiguity about globalisation that drive our times.

Rabotat June 1940. As France crumbled before the Nazi onslaught, Britain proposed an ‘indissoluble union’ between the two countries to keep the war going against “subjection to a system which reduces mankind to a life of robots and slaves”.3 Moving from a sci-fi world to our future, Isaac Asimov wrote some laws for robots.4 A robot may not injure a human; a robot must obey orders given to it (unless that contradicts the first law) and must protect its own existence (unless that too breaches the first law!). Robots have come a long way from the slaves depicted by Karel Capek, whose 1920 play coined the word ‘robota’, or forced labour5 (a word derived from the Russian verb, to work, ‘rabotat’). Firms like Toyota and Honda have now invested large sums of money in robots being domestic helpers as well as industrial partners.6 Robots will be safe, cheap and responsive. Under the conditions of mass-production, it has often been feared that humans become robots: the labourers in the West mostly rejected robotic

Flight from the impersonal 61 activity for themselves. Assembly lines cramped humans who were reduced to de-personalised automatons. “Working here requires you to be a machine. I’m not a machine; I’m a human being”.7 Reaction against the impersonal systems that shape people’s experience of everyday life was concern to try to connect the public more directly with the outcomes they want. The sigh was for human interaction. The flight from the impersonal, against systems that do not work for people, is much to do with lack of face to face contact in our world. The lament for a lost ‘face’ emerges in reaction against: 1 2 3 4 5

Globalisation and lack of face; Automation – lack of face; Bureaucracy and faceless systems; Immigration – the covering of face; The lack of authenticity – familiar face.

A student voice in defence of Euro-scepticism made this intriguing claim at year’s end of 2016. “As long as faceless foreign bureaucrats with their self-appointed six-figure salaries have a say in how our country is run, I cannot have confidence that we can achieve our full potential as a nation”.8 The various ways in which ‘face’ becomes an issue in contemporary society is a reflection of distance. Distance is another way of expressing estrangement, separation. Distance is the new alienation. In response to what seems to be a growing mood of disconnection, many citizens and nation states are putting up the drawbridge. Social distance is created through barriers. It is existential, not just about borders and boundaries. Paradoxically, alienation results in even greater disconnection. It widens the distance even further. The concept of ‘alienation’ has had a long running in social history and political thought. But what is alienation? Alienation has many faces. It is the human condition of millions. Is the trend towards virtual reality and immediacy about bringing things nearer, overcoming alienation of de-personalising distance? In human relationships, alienation is a withdrawing or separation of a person or a person’s affections where before there was a sense of connection. Separation results from temporary or lasting rupture. Things cannot be the same. Distance and lack of connection have set in. Barriers are in place; the walls are up. Social philosophers have applied that not just to being disconnected from others but from oneself. In existentialist writing the concept of alienation is used primarily to refer to a psychological, spiritual malaise which is pervasive in modern society but not specific to it. It is symptomatic of the human condition.9 For Hegel, the unhappy consciousness is divided against itself, separated from its ‘essence’, which it has placed in a ‘beyond’.10 Alienation, Entfremdung, is a foundational proposition about humanity’s progress towards self-actualisation. It is the nature of the alienated human situation that alienation engenders a reaction. Hegel said that in its abasement, it is the indignation against that abasement, an indignation to which it is necessarily driven by the contradiction between human

62  Flight from the impersonal nature and our condition of life; an outright, resolute and comprehensive negation of that nature. Concerns about de-personalisation have long been expressed, most notably through the angry writings of Marx and Engels. “The bourgeoisie, wherever it has got the upper hand … has resolved personal worth into exchange value”.11 In Marx’s narrative, production became a site where hapless workers were eroded in value and de-personalised (Marx preferred the word ‘alienation’). In handicrafts and manufacture, the workman makes use of a tool, in the factory, the machine makes use of him. There the movements of the instrument of labour proceed from him, there the movement of machines he must follow. In manufacture workmen are parts of a living mechanism. In the factory we have a lifeless mechanism independent of the workman, who becomes mere living appendage.12 Who is this ‘it’ to which I become an ‘it’? In Western economic landscapes, the main way productive forces have de-personalised us was to make us objects of their relentlessness. The classic analysis of this was that of Marx in the 19th century. The alienation of the worker means not only that his labour becomes an object, an external existence, but that it exists outside him, independently of him and alien to him, and begins to confront him as an autonomous power; that the life which he has bestowed on the object confronts him as hostile and alien.13 According to that analysis, we are de-personalised in a factory system by having little say over the conditions in which we work, how that work is organised, and how it affects us physically and mentally. We become alienated from our fellow human beings and from those who control the things we produce. To cap it all, there is our alienation from being human, our ability to consciously shape the world around us. Work bears no relationship to our personal inclinations or our collective interests. Those who create the wealth are deprived of its benefits. Marx’s description of this in his Manuscripts was a powerful indictment of the industrial revolution. It replaces labour by machines, but it casts some of the workers back into barbarous forms of labour and turns others into machines.14 The spectre of becoming automatons – even more relevant in an age of robotics – Marx saw as a worker’s alienation from his or her work. Distance from their own humanity takes place because a worker can only express labour through the capitalist system of industrial production in which he or she is a thing, a mere instrument; not a person.15 Alienation becomes the transformation of people’s own labour into a power which rules them as if by a kind of cosmic law.

Flight from the impersonal 63 In his 1845 text, The Holy Family, Marx went further, suggesting that alienation is experienced by both factory owner and worker. The propertied class and the class of the proletariat present the same human self-estrangement. But the former class feels at ease and strengthened in this self-estrangement, it recognises estrangement as its own power, and has in it the semblance of a human existence. The class of the proletariat feels annihilated; it ceases to exist. It beholds in estrangement its own powerlessness and the reality of an inhuman existence.16

De-personalisation It comes as a surprise then that in Russia, the early Communist state lionised ideas of the American engineer F. W. Taylor on scientific management. A culture of time and motion studies re-moulded the psyche of the workers and produced a disciplined being. The Bolshevik Alexei Gastov sought to train workers so they ended up acting like machines. He saw machines as superior to people. Mechanised people would be devoid of personality and become automatons. This was a good thing. They would be known by numbers. Workers must be human robots. A 1924 satire of this system, Zamyatin’s We, was the inspiration for George Orwell’s 1984. The satire was banned in Russia for over 60 years.17 It is both tragic and ironic that de-personalisation was the theme of an article in a special edition of the Russian newspaper Izvestiia published by the Kronstadt mutineers of 1921.18 Through the state control of the trade unions they have chained the workers to their machines so that labour is no longer a source of joy but a new form of slavery. The Soviet era painter Kazimir Malevich was denounced by the authorities in the late 1920s for failing to allow his art to express social realities. Yet he had captured well the loss of identity of the peasants as they faced collectivisation in Stalin’s first Five Year Plan. The industrialisation of agriculture was expressed in featureless faces.19 The term ‘agentic’ is used to describe an approach to others that views them as instruments to meet our needs. Psychology also describes a well-documented condition known as de-personalisation. The Depersonalisation Research Unit at the London Institute of Psychiatry endeavoured to come to grips with it; there are websites devoted to the condition featuring the work of Los Angeles psychiatrist Oscar Janiger (himself a former sufferer) and a book about it.20 The individual may feel like an automaton or as if he or she is living in a dream or a movie. There may be a feeling of detachment or estrangement from one’s self, a sensation of being an outside observer of one’s mental processes, one’s body, or parts of one’s body. Someone calls your name. But you don’t feel identified with it. Nothing seems real. There is too a well-known study by the psychologist Zimbardo into ‘deindividuation’, the feeling that you have lost your personal identity and merged

64  Flight from the impersonal anonymously into a group. Half the women in a group were dressed in laboratory coats that hid their faces. The experimenter never referred to any of them by name. That group delivered twice as much electric shock to a learner when an error was made as a group who were introduced to each other by name and their faces could be seen.21 Is ‘de-individuation’ a word for what happens to humans in industrial society? The anger against exploitation from trade unionism and socialism has been that, under the conditions of profit-hungry mechanised efficiency, humans become less than themselves, not more. To satisfy the producers, they are converted into objects. The post-feminist writer Martha Nussbaum came up with seven ways to treat a person as a thing: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7

Instrumentality – someone is a tool of someone else’s purposes; Denial of autonomy – as an object lacking in autonomy and self-determination; Inertness – someone is lacking in agency and perhaps in activity; Fungability – someone is interchangeable with others of the same type; Violability – someone is lacking in boundary integration and permissible to break; Ownership – someone is owned by another and can be bought and sold; Denials of subjectivity – being treated as something whose feelings and experiences need not be taken into account.22

Each does not entail the other. There are things that are acceptable to treat as not having autonomy – one’s small children or a painting, for instance – but inappropriate to treat as a tool for our purpose. That betrays a bad attitude to the child or the painting. Who is this entity to which I can become an object? It is a faceless and nameless non-person who refuses to greet my humanity. As the Harvard literary critic Barbara Johnson observes, “the desire to be human seems to inhere in the very being of a puppet: Pinocchio wants to be a real ‘boy’, little David in the film AI competes with a human child for his mother’s love”.23 De-personalisation can be traced across the economic landscapes of our time, from consuming24 to the reaction against globalisation, being used or exploited in less than ‘humane’ conditions or being treated as a mere cog in the machinery. From changing patterns of management25 to disbandment of assembly lines in a post-Fordist economy, reaction against the impersonal has been formidable. Gradually, it was realised that assembly line participation was de-personalising. That realisation was immortalised in Charlie Chaplin’s film, Modern Times. The little man in the bowler hat refuses to be the cog in the wheel he sits on. A post-industrial society began to emerge in the West. It was a transformation from a goods-producing to a service economy dominated by a professional and technical class; theoretical knowledge as a source of policy and innovation; control of technology and the creation of a new intellectual and information technology.26

Flight from the impersonal 65 It is the Protest against the crushing of corner shops by the remorseless onslaught of the supermarkets. Reaction against the de-personalising tendencies of modern times underlies debates, for instance, about returning call centres to the UK. A chorus of complaints have been common enough against the impersonality of a remote call centre where the operators do not seem to understand the concerns of customers. Indeed, frustration with call centres prompted some companies to try to humanise their activities and introduce items of TV and media interest or the weather into operating procedures. It all seems you are on a production line!

Alienation from remote global players The growing sense of distrust in politics is paralleled by disconnection from the way the world has become more entwined. The power of international financiers, multinationals and fantastically wealthy individuals over world trade and flows of global capital evoked strong reaction. The impetus to create an intricate web of a global economy became the focus of hot collective indignation as the 1990s and 2000s wore on. Going global had its human detractors. The coalition made itself felt at the World Trade talks in Seattle. The ‘Carnival against Capitalism’ in June 1999 kicked off the anticapitalist movement. It brought together the diverse range of protest groups and numerous activists – from revolutionary socialists, anarchists, environmentalists to trade unionists. When non-governmental organisations, churches and trade unions mobilised thousands to turn out to protest against the economic recession before the London meeting of the G20 in April 2009, the rallying cry was ‘put people first!’ Across the world, citizens’ movements fought the World Trade Organisation, the World Bank and the multinationals. The diversity of the human enterprise was said to be swamped by 200 transnational corporations that ran the world.27 They were too centralised, too undemocratic, too authoritarian. The human cost of a frenetic output system has been tension between worklife balance. When humans felt part of a production line or victims of the system, Protest was inevitable. It is the revolt against impersonal power of an enterprise of size and scale beyond the local. Those higher up the economic food chain were unknown so suppliers could be shrouded in anonymity. The little people ignored were rising up, reacting to an impersonal system; reacting to globalisation and its indifference to nationhood. In the world’s ten largest companies, 60% of revenues came from outside country of origin. Sixty per cent of their workforce was employed overseas.28 To a large extent, this has been a revolt by the left-behind against a globalisation that had worked for many people but by no means all. It was a slow-burning fuse against the post-financial crisis and the establishment that has brought instability and austerity to millions. The financial crisis had undermined the banks and ‘unelected, unaccountable experts’. People do not rebel when they are hungry but when the immediate crisis has passed and the memory of injustice is still fresh. The reaction was against bankers and big forces out there who pull our strings;

66  Flight from the impersonal a revolt against Eurocrats, bureaucrats and remote echelons of elites, divorced from everyone else and who appear to have little conception of the lives of ordinary people.29 Citizens everywhere seem more fearful of immigration, more distrustful of global actors. This is a pronounced cultural anxiety, widely reported on. The return of the public is fraught with both risk and opportunity.

Bringing democracy nearer The march of tailor-made voice and choice, personalisation and customisation is witnessed on the political scene in another way, that of subsidiarity, bringing democracy nearer. The connecting thread behind this mood of our times is that of de-personalisation through distance. Anger against an out-of-touch establishment was palpable in 2016. Yet de-personalisation lay behind the talk a generation ago of being run by bureaucrats from Brussels. ‘Brussels’ has often been the iconic bogeyman. It was behind the talk in the 1990s of subsidiarity in the European Community, devolving power so that decisions could be made as close as possible to those affected by it. It was behind the alienation from politics or the resentment against the centralising tendency within the European Community that burst out when, in 2008, Ireland rejected the Lisbon Treaty and plunged the political landscape into chaos. President Sarkozy of France admitted that the Irish ‘no’ vote was “a rejection of a certain Europe that is too technocratic, too abstract, too distant”.30 If we had listened to the Protest against de-personalisation, that ought not to take us by surprise. Hostility towards Europe since, especially in the wake of the Eurozone crisis, has been, in part, a reaction against remoteness; ‘we didn’t vote for you – you don’t represent us!’ In the UK, centralisation feeds existential distance. Centralised government was the creation and need during the mass production era of the 20th century. Control of state levers was seen as vital. Amongst rich countries, only New Zealand is more centralised. The distance is widened because of the preponderance of London that sucks life and economy from everywhere else. In political cycles, handing power back from the centre is an intention for a while though Margaret Thatcher’s reign saw a great deal more counter-vailing consolidation of the centre. More recently, the ‘Northern Powerhouse’ was an emphasis of the Cameron years from 2010 to 2016 through his ally and chancellor, George Osborne. Following the successful Mayoralty of London, a slew of new city mayors dotted the landscape in 2017. The sense of local or regional identity no doubt grows when people feel the distance has grown. It may be the distance of Scotland from England; it may be the distance between a prosperous south east and a permanently struggling north. As many observed before Gordon Brown, it reflects the contrast of a London economy which is appearing to decouple from the periphery of the country. The contrast was an angry one, capable of whipping up popular feelings. Ostensibly, the success in mobilising a politically engaged electorate in the UK runs counter to a narrative of anti-politics. The UK political landscape has

Flight from the impersonal 67 witnessed new mass movements. In Scotland, the Scottish National Party (SNP) has grown exponentially. The British Labour Party saw more than 50,000 people joining it in the week after Saturday, 12th September 2015 when Jeremy Corbyn was elected leader. This compares to 47,000 people who were members of UKIP, around the 62,000 who were members of the Liberal Democrats and the 67,000 membership of the Green Party.31 What characterises growth in political movements is that these are citizens who may be united in wanting a new type of politics as the iconic statement went; rejecting an old style. Take the Spanish left-wing political party, Podemos (a party that grew out of anti-austerity politics in Spain), meaning ‘we can’. Anyone can have face to face meetings, complemented by the internet which boosts mass appeal and allows discussion on whatever people want to talk about. This is different from politicians setting out their stalls in the usual way and urging people to vote for them. With its appeal to pass power downwards, giving ‘the demos’ greater control, the Greek ruling party in 2015 and 2016, Syriza, reflects these trends.32

Objects of institutional provision We are probing the concern that producers of services de-personalise through making people the object of institutional provision, thus negating their subjectivity. As one interviewee complained, “I am not an agenda!” – “I feel treated like dirt by the system”.33 Against this, there is increasing reaction. The counter-attack was inevitable. We have come a long way from chaining people, the insane, to the walls of cells under insanitary conditions. Philosophers like Locke and Kant had re-configured the human mind as a combination of states and faculties. Then as society grew more specialised, standardised and mechanised, more people came to be seen as odd or even mad.34 Reformers sought to unchain the inmates of asylums. In the 19th century, some far-sighted UK Quakers had set up organisations such as ‘The Retreat’ in York. Quaker influence had been strong in the advocacy of prison reform; now it extended to a concept of treating lunatics humanely.35 The York Retreat served as an inspiration for a first generation of reformed asylums, using the built environment to modify human woe.36 Although a non-specialist, William Tuke and his colleagues established a space with a far more compassionate and understanding approach. Instead of being about bleeding, blisters, evacuants and a range of medicines, lunatics were seen as essentially human, although distressed. They were deemed to be in need of respectful management and homely surroundings, “treated as far as possible as if they were in full possession of their wits”. The role of visiting physicians was to attend to bodily needs only. Physicians protested that the disease of insanity was the province of the medical profession. Some were impressed though: “In the management of this institution, they (the Quakers) have set an example which claims the imitation and deserves the thanks, of every sect and nation”.37

68  Flight from the impersonal “If members of the royal and learned college of physicians were chained, or shut up naked, on straw saturated with urine and excrement, with a scant allowance of food – exposed to the indecency of a northern climate, in cells having windows unglazed – I have no doubt that they would soon exhibit as strong a tendency to mortified extremities as any of their patients”.38 This was a new approach. Lunatics were deemed to be humans, requiring dignity! They should not be chained to the wall. It was an inspiration for a first generation of reformed 19th-century asylums.39 Originally from Martinique, Fritz Fanon secured an appointment as a psychiatrist at Blida-Joinville Psychiatric Hospital in Algeria. It was there that he began to practise radical methods of treatment labelled socio-therapy, which connected with his cultural background. On the outbreak of the Algerian revolution in November 1954, he joined the Front de Libération Nationale. Fanon came to be seen as the pre-eminent thinker of the 20th century on the issue of de-colonisation and the psychopathology of colonisation. The de-humanising way that colonial psychiatry was practised and the effects on Algerians of torture by the French forces were entirely wrong. His works, especially Les Damnés de la Terre (The Wretched of the Earth),40 were to inspire anti-colonial liberation movements for more than four decades (and become required reading in the Pentagon as Iraq became a site of resistance in the aftermath of war). Fanon’s work was no doubt conditioned by his Marxist dialectical thinking and by the experience of armed struggle. The practice of psychiatry condemned patients, he contended in his letter of resignation in 1956 from the Blida hospital, to “absolute de-personalisation”. It seemed to be a method of social control rather than healing. The reality was more nuanced. France built three state-of-the-art psychiatric hospitals in North Africa when there was none at home. The Algiers school was at the forefront of modern psychiatric medicine, endeavouring to promote a more enlightened approach to mental illness than the barbaric methods that had been the case previously. But Fanon had a point. Though its doctors saw themselves practising in the tradition of Phillipe Pinel, who liberated the insane from confinement during the French Revolution, colonial psychiatry went in for the chilling practice of lobotomy in the name of cutting out the criminal tendencies of Muslims. They experimented with electric shock treatments, becoming, in one nurse’s words, “an assembly line of electroshock”.41 At the same time Fanon made his protest, Soviet psychiatry was also heavily criticised for treating so-called enemies of the state as being mentally ill. But it was becoming clear – to thinking people in the West at least – that this was an abuse of psychiatry because it was an abuse of the human. The practice of helping troubled people gradually took on board the need for people to be given respect and dignity. For most of its history, treating those who are troubled in mind did not reflect the need to value the human. In much of its early life, psychiatry and psychotherapy were landscapes where people were devalued. It took a long time for best practice to come around to valuing the

Flight from the impersonal 69 human. Psychological thinking had barely begun to adjust. Gradually, human value found an echo within psychotherapy and the care of people’s emotional and mental well-being. It was implicit in an ethos of caring for people and how patients or clients should be treated. Extending a sense of value gradually became an important concern to what it meant to operate ethically as a psychotherapist. The idea that people should not be subjected to certain forms of treatment or practice became essential to talking therapy. Practitioners, doctors and nurses should join the client on sentry duty and guard the dignity of the individual. The citadel of the soul needs to be opened from the inside. Ethical statements that began to operate in health or psychotherapy reflected these assumptions. The fundamental values of counselling and psychotherapy included a commitment to respecting human rights and dignity. The principles that those values shaped emphasised the need to value the human. This is embodied in a culture of respect for a client that will often stress: Autonomy: respect for the client’s right to be self-governing;Beneficence: a commitment to promoting the client’s well-being;Non-maleficence: a commitment to avoiding harm to the client;Justice: the fair and impartial treatment of all clients.42 Gradually, the task of the counsellor was seen as facilitating a therapeutic encounter which is more than a collection of skills and strategies. An effective counselling relationship came to be seen to include two core qualities – acceptance and understanding.43 Here was one definition of the former: “Acceptance means valuing others because they are human”.44 Carl Rogers, the psychotherapist who emphasised person-centred counselling, proclaimed the importance of “unconditional positive regard”.45 This was respect for the client,46 aiming to maintain a relationship that is as free as possible from value judgements. The client should not be blamed or condemned. While they may not be helping themselves, the strategies they have adopted are an effort to manage their lives and emotions. This does not mean that clients cannot change or that the therapist should collude with self-destructive behaviour. Clients should be given respect, their experiences should be given credence and their emotions validated. We should, argued Rogers, distinguish carefully between the behaviour of the clients and clients themselves, who are “valuable because they are human”.47 Best practice came to be unthinkable without such acceptance being a core value. Empathic understanding,48 trying genuinely to see the world from the perspective of the person in pain in front of us, was not only seen to be important as a basis for practice. It was part of the therapeutic process. It was liberating; people in pain can become active in their own healing and be empowered. By contrast, a former client writes of her personal experience in failing to communicate with her therapist. Her first therapy saw her descend into personal chaos. Problems were compounded by the way her therapist would not allow himself to be authentic with her. All she wanted was to encounter a human being and to

70  Flight from the impersonal connect person to person rather than encounter a blank screen. Her strong reaction to being treated as a patient rather than a person amounted at times to a hatred. It was the Protest against being objectified, being de-personalised.49 Most people react profoundly to being treated in a way that seems de-personalising. When there is a greater degree of self-disclosure needed, it matters more. Emotionally sensitive material is especially prone to perceptions of devaluation. We cry out to be heard, to be taken seriously, given our dignity, to encounter an authentic human being, especially when they come into our inner country. Emerging principles of self-determination and personalisation have been enshrined in the United Nations Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities. Andrew Powers notes the theme of personalisation of support; how different jurisdictions implemented them to enable meaningful engagement and participation by persons with disabilities in society. The philosophy of ‘active citizenship’ underpinning the Convention is that all citizens should (be able to) actively participate in the community. Personalisation has become central to what citizens want out of public services.50 The medical model was not exempt from holistic influences. Sickness came to be considered not just a disturbance in the self-contained arena of the body but a consequence of what we eat, where we work, the degree of exercise and emotional responses to or patterns of thinking about life. The shift from a biomedical to a bio-psychosocial medicine was marked by a change of talk from ‘treatment’ to ‘health promotion’. A person is not an eating disorder project, an entity wearing a label or to be regarded as merely the objects of our care. These are important markers of our times. Impersonal forces that accomplish de-personalisation are often a sense of being ‘out there’, larger, people you never see. Globality increases the distance. These are trends towards the local, forces pulling in different directions; local activity increasingly celebrated. Producers of services de-personalise through making people the object of institutional provision, thus negating their subjectivity. People become dependents, someone to whom something is done to or for. Who is this entity to which I can become an object? It is a faceless and nameless non-person who refuses to greet my humanity. Someone else makes the shape you have to fit into. A non-person, I will be ‘I’ no longer but part of its system. This will provoke the Protest, a response of both mental defiance and collective indignation that seeks the recovery of agency. The system is pervasive at such times. It is rarely personal or somebody’s fault. Something out there pulls the levers. People are at the mercy of forces they do not comprehend; impersonal forces that affect livelihoods; that strip us of our face and threaten to slay the personal, the subjective and the human. It is an ‘it’ before whom I become an ‘it’, converted into its de-sacralising image. It is also a protest against the tendency in bureaucratic organisations to have a life of their own. They become the kind of complex systems we are noting as a context in which the demand for the value of the human endeavours to trump the desire to monetise. In popular discourse, bureaucracy is seen as growing on

Flight from the impersonal 71 its own terms, simply because the task requires this form of operating as the only way of doing business. A hundred years ago, Max Weber saw this all too clearly. Bureaucratisation brings order though systematisation of the random and demystification of the unpredictable. Yet he could not have foreseen the extent to which institutions have a life of their own. Bureaucracies tend to increase and grow. Once targets are announced, proposals follow which convey implications. The flip side of this is a stance of institutional suspicion. In the public rhetoric of a reaction against de-personalisation, bureaucracy is a word that invariably has negative connotations. ‘Red tape’ is self-evidently something to oppose and cut through. This reaction may be cut from the same cloth as lack of popular engagement in politics. Cynicism suggests that politicians are to be distrusted; the political process is viewed amongst many citizens as a cause for indifferent lethargy. Indices of public trust in institutions do not make for happy reading. Amongst the European Community, those responding as ‘tend to trust’ are no more than a third.51 Such remoteness and sense of being de-personalised is devaluing precisely because a human subject seems to be bumping into a brick wall or having one’s life shaped impersonally. Contemporary life is caught in a contradiction. In the corporatisation of dreams and aspirations, targets and quotas have colonised the world. Yet there is also a strong reaction of Protest against objectifying distance in contemporary public services, in education, health care and policing. When those on the receiving end are objects of care, patients or pupils, something happens. From changing patterns of management52 to the disbandment of assembly lines in a post-Fordist economy,53 reaction against impersonal forces has been formidable. “I’m not an agenda!” – “I feel treated like dirt by the system”.54 Those on the receiving end are thereby made passive. They are not connected to the imperative need for seizing control of their destiny and becoming engaged. Protest against de-personalisation is everywhere, our lives are seemingly determined by forces we never even see. Personalising public services is part of a societal response to the impersonal. A statement on a school brochure read, “Our pupils are respected as people not treated as products”.55 As one interviewee pointed out, “in my company, it was always the same. You had to complete those endless statements of how you or your division were meeting performance criteria. Everything is measured; always measured. But developing people? Where was that in the scheme of things?”56 Far fewer babies and young children were now brought up in impersonal settings. There has been a strong reaction to what were labelled ‘industrial schools’ linked with foster homes in the UK and Ireland; highly regimented places where muscular discipline and sometimes institutional abuse was the order of things.57 More than 30,000 children deemed to be petty thieves, truants or coming from dysfunctional families – a category that often included unmarried mothers – were sent to Ireland’s austere network of industrial schools, reformatories, orphanages and hostels from the 1930s until the last facilities shut in the 1990s. They were now causing too much public outrage.

72  Flight from the impersonal The key problem seems to be systemic; not a failure on the part of a particular regulatory or management system but a confusion of means with ends. In postindustrial societies, systems are vital. Yet systematisation leads almost inevitably to de-personalisation just as assembly lines were characteristic of 20th-century industry. If a CEO will have lists, targets and objectives as a core value, delivering care and compassion for patients comes further down. The EU referendum outcome in the UK in 2016 was about more than the EU. It was a vote of no confidence against globalisation. It was also a vote against ‘faceless bureaucrats’ or anonymous ‘fat-cats’ in Washington. Yet the litany against ‘faceless bureaucracy’ was not invented when the UK joined the European Common Market in 1973. It is a tale as old as time. Bauman argued that modern institutions are characterised by dispassionate bureaucratic efficiency assisted by technology. Large government and corporate bureaucracies function in such a way that individual responsibility for the actions of the bureaucracy are dispersed. His concern here, the Holocaust was not the story of European civilisation gone awry; rather it embodies the most salient principles of modernity itself. It was “horrifyingly normal”. The logic of self-interest, rational management, modern bureaucratic order, technological efficiency, the relegation of values to the realm of subjectivity, science as intrinsically instrumental and value-free – all contributed to it.58 In the popular narrative, bureaucratic operations are often synonymous with faceless people moving resources around with no regard for those affected, only dispassionately involved. As observed to the author in client work, “for my routine prostate check-up, we had to go down to have the biopsy in theatre. This wasn’t because they needed to operate. It was because they needed to keep up usage rates in the theatre. It was all a matter of targets!”59 Weber could not have foreseen the way the digital economy upended everything. The pressure on corporate tax revenues and the looming impact of AI/automation on jobs make it harder for government to tax and regulate businesses. “The network effect digital businesses enjoy creates a winner-takes-all environment, while the consequent and ever-expanding data deluge enables such companies to drive efficiencies and do far more with less”.60 Whether it is companies themselves, their headquarters for tax purposes or the teams who build and run them, locations no longer matter and borders are irrelevant. Digital businesses, like talent and money, are fluid and can now base themselves anywhere. They become remote, distant, yet close-by; ever-present electronically. Across the spectrum of organisations and institutions, of companies and public services, this resonance makes itself known. The voices refuse to keep silent. “What politicians and the party need to do above everything is to listen. They come over as being above that. But learning to listen to the public is crucial and makes all the difference between a party that seems remote and impersonal and one which is in touch with voters on the doorstep”.61 Behind much contemporary Protest is the feeling people often express at not having a voice, of not being involved, of not encountering the real listening that affects outcomes because the outcome is perceived to have been decided

Flight from the impersonal 73 in advance. This is experienced as being devaluing, written out of the equation. Consultations are made that seem a fig-leaf; the outcome pre-determined. As a nurse bemoaned to Nursing Times, and as highlighted in the quote at the start of this chapter, “patients seem to be becoming numbers not people. I am having to fight against what the system wants in order to provide dignified care to my patients”.62 “I don’t want oxygen, I need love”, cries someone facing their last days.63

Notes   1 Promoting Patient Dignity in Healthcare, Nursing Times, UK, June 2008.  2 Kitschelt, H. with McGann, A. J. (1995) The Radical Right in Western Europe: A Comparative Analysis. Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press.   3 Cosgrave, P. (1974) Churchill at War. London: Collins.   4 Asimov, I. (1950) Robot. New York: Doubleday & Company.   5 Nothing to Lose but Their Chains, The Economist, 21st June 2008. Print edition.   6 March of Robotics, www.economist.com/technologymonitor, March 2009.   7 A young UK person experiencing factory work. BBC 2 Newsnight. 18th May 2009.   8 Dabral, A. In Defence of Euroscepticism. Student Voices, http://www.studentvoices. co.uk/2016/02/in-defence-of-euroscepticism.html, accessed December 2016.   9 Sayers, S. The Concept of Alienation in Existentialism and Marxism Hegelian Themes in Modern Social Thought, http://www.academia.edu/3035430/The_Concept_of_ Alienation_in_Existentialism_and_Marxism_Hegelian_Themes_in_Modern_Social_ Thought, accessed January 2017. 10 Gouldner, A. W. (1980) Alienation: From Hegel to Marx, Chapter 6, The Two Marxisms. New York: Oxford University Press, pp. 177–198. 11 Marx, K. & Engels, F. (1969) Manifesto of the Communist Party. In L. S. Feuer (ed.), Basic Writings on Politics and Philosophy. London: Collins Fontana, p. 51. 12 Marx, K. (1976) Capital, Vol. 1. London: Penguin, p. 460. 13 Rubin, I. I. (1975) Essays on Marx’s Theory of Value. London: Black Rose Books, p. 25. 14 Marx, K. (1975) Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts: Early Writings. London: Penguin, p. 325. 15 Marx, K. & Engels, F. (2011) Comment on James Mill, Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844. Radford, VA: Wilder Publications. 16 Marx, K. & Engels, F. (1845) The Holy Family, Chapter 4, https://www.marxists.org/ archive/marx/works/download/Marx_The_Holy_Family.pdf 17 Figes, O. (1996) A People’s Tragedy: The Russian Revolution 1891–1924. London: Pimlico, p. 744. 18 Figes, O. (1996) A People’s Tragedy: The Russian Revolution 1891–1924. London: Pimlico, p. 764. 19 Royal Academy of Arts exhibition, ‘Revolution’, Russian Art 1917–1932, March 2017. 20 Steinberg, M. & Schnall, M. (2000) The Stranger in the Mirror. New York: Harper Collins. 21 Zimbardo, P. G. (1970) The Human Choice: Individuation, Reason and Order Versus De-Individuation, Impulse and Chaos. In W. J. Arnold & D. Levine (eds.), Nebraska Symposium on Motivation (vol. 16). Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press. 22 Nussbaum, M. (1999) Sex and Social Justice. Oxford: Oxford University Press, p. 219. 23 Johnson, B. (2008) Persons and Things. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, p. 80. 24 Baudrillard, J. (1998) The Consumer Society: Myths and Structures, Vol. 53, Theory, Culture & Society. London: Sage.

74  Flight from the impersonal 25 Peters, T. H. & Waterman, R. J. (1982) In Search of Excellence: Lessons from America's Best-Run Companies. London: Collins. 26 Bell, D. (1973) The Coming of Post-Industrial Society. New York: Basic Books. 27 Giddens, A. (1989) Sociology. Cambridge: Polity Press. 28 Rothkopf, D. (2008) Superclass: The Global Power Elite and the World They Are Making. London: Little Brown. 29 Wodak, R., KhosraviNik, M., & Mral, B. (eds.) (2013) Right-Wing Populism in Europe. London: Bloomsbury; Carlos de la Torre. Ed. 2015. 30 Nicolas Sarkozy’s European Apotheosis, The Economist, 28th June 2008. Print ­edition. 31 More People Have Joined Labour Since Jeremy Corbyn Became Leader Than Are in The Lib Dems, http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/more-people-have-joinedlabour-since-jeremy-corbyn-became-leader-than-are-in-the-lib-dems-10512815.html, accessed August 2016. 32 Syriza's Victory in Greece Might Not Be the Radical Revolution You Were Hoping for, Independent newspaper, 30th January 2015. Print edition. 33 Reported to the author in client interviews, 2007–2008. 34 Davis, L. (2008) Obsession: A History. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. 35 Chadwick, O. (1966) The Victorian Church. London: A. and C. Black, Part 1, p. 425. 36 Yanni, C. (2007) The Architecture of Madness: Insane Asylums in the United States. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. 37 Johnstone, L. (2000) Uses and Abuses of Psychiatry. New York: Brunner-Routledge, p. 147. 38 Higgins, G. The evidence taken before a Committee of the House of Commons respecting the asylum at York; with observations and notes. Quoted in A. T. Scull (1979) The Social Organisation of Insanity in Nineteenth Century England. Harmondsworth: Penguin, p. 140. 39 Yanni, C. (2007) The Architecture of Madness: Insane Asylums in the United States. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. 40 Fanon, F. (1963) The Wretched of the Earth. Trans Constance Farrington. New York: Grove Weidenfeld. 41 Keller, R. (2007) Colonial Madness: Psychiatry in French North Africa. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. 42 www.bacp.co.uk, 2007, Ethical Framework: British Association of Counsellors and Psychotherapists. 43 Tyler, L. E. (1969) Work of the Counsellor. New York: Appleton Century Crofts; Gilmore, S. K. (1973) Counsellor in Training. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall. 44 Culley, S. (1991) Integrative Counselling Skills in Action. London: Sage, p. 12. 45 Rogers, C. (2004) On Becoming a Person: A Therapist’s View of Psychotherapy. London: Constable. 46 Egan, G. (1986) Skilled Helpers: A Systemic Approach to Effective Helping. Monterey, CA: Brooks & Cole, 3rd ed. 47 Culley, S. (1991) Integrative Counselling Skills in Action. London: Sage, p. 13. 48 Rogers, C. (1951) Client-Centered Therapy: Its Current Practice, Implications & Theory. Boston: Houghton Mifflin. 49 Sands, A. (2000) Falling for Therapy: Psychotherapy from a Client’s Point of View. Basingstoke: Palgrave MacMillan. 50 Power, A. (2014) Active Citizenship & Disability: Implementing the Personalisation of Support. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 51 Public Trust in Institutions. European Commission, ec.europa.eu/commfrontoffice/ publicopinion/archives/eb80, November 2012. 52 Peters, T. J. & Waterman, R. H. (1982) In Search of Excellence: Lessons from America’s Best-Run Companies. New York: Harper & Row. 53 Bell, D. (1973) The Coming of Post-Industrial Society. New York: Basic Books. 54 Author’s client notes, used with permission.

Flight from the impersonal 75 55 56 57 58 59 60

Llandaff Cathedral School, Cardiff, UK, January 2009. Author’s client notes, name withheld and used with permission. See the Ryan report on abuse by Catholic priests in Ireland – released 20th May 2009. Bauman, Z. (2001) Modernity and the Holocaust. Cambridge: Polity Press. Author’s client notes, name withheld and used with permission. Maelle Gavet, COO, Compass. The Digital Revolution Is Destroying Our Democracies. It Doesn’t Have to Be That Way. World Economic Forum, https://www.weforum.org/ agenda/2017/02/the-digital-revolution-is-destroying-our-democracies-it-doesn-t-haveto-be-that-way/, accessed February 2017. 61 A traditional Labour Party activist bemoaning a shock defeat in the European elections of June 2009. 62 Promoting Patient Dignity in Healthcare, Nursing Times, UK, June 2008. 63 Author’s client notes.

6

‘Weeks when decades happen’ Alienation old and new

“We are not cattle or slaves. We have voices and votes, and we have the power to uphold them”. – letter from a Russian blogger1

Lenin observed that there are decades when nothing happens, then weeks when decades happen. This was certainly true of the events of 2016, events that made elites tremble in the West. The word ‘elites’ featured a great deal in Lenin’s lexicon, referring to those needing to be overthrown in his day.2 Ironically, as the quote above alludes to, a letter from a blogger in the Russia that followed protested loudly: “We are not cattle or slaves. We have voices and votes, and we have the power to uphold them”.3 Ironically too, the billionaire Donald Trump complained to CBS News in September 2015 about elites: “It’s disgraceful … you see these guys [CEOs] making enormous amounts of money. It’s a total and complete joke”. During the UK referendum on EU membership, the Leave campaign also attacked so-called ‘fat cats’ and those corporate interests who argued for staying inside the EU. Bankers and business leaders were portrayed as the enemy, extracting excessive rewards while ordinary people suffered.4 “Financial globalisation and Islamist globalisation are helping each other out. Those two ideologies want to bring France to its knees”, Ms Le Pen told supporters as she launched her presidential campaign.5 Historians will debate why and how there were forces of reaction in early 21stcentury global society. In Chapter 1, we have considered the role of cultural backlash, reaction against immigration and the economy as shaping ‘Trump cards’ played during 2016–2017. Concerns about open trade and borders had been overlooked by the establishment for too long. The impact of glum economic prospects and globalisation on meaningful jobs, stagnant wages and people’s livelihoods was considerable. Growth was low but unemployment – usually a bell-weather of reaction as in the 1930s – remained punishingly high in France (10%) and elsewhere. We were surely seeing a sting in a long tail from the financial crash ten years before and the Eurozone crisis of 2011. There are a number of possible candidates to help explain the growth of alienation and sense of dislocation from the system. A multi-factorial explanation is

Alienation old and new 77 likely to apply: after all, citizen voters seem to have had different reasons for their preferences. As we will consider later, behind many social forces re-shaping contemporary landscapes is a strong sense of human devaluation. This is a sigh and cry in the kind of society we are becoming, characterised by assertion of ‘voice and choice’. Krouwel argued that the growth of ‘individualisation’ since the 1970s is the most important structural factor in the success of the political right. Moreover, “the idea of free and individual choice undermined the traditional drivers of leftwing thought: solidarity and state interventionism, the decline in trade union membership and the rise in self-employment”.6 The growth of individualism could indeed be a strong feature of the puzzling politics we are witnessing, associated with a particular formulation of the self, delineated here as ‘we count, we matter’. There are others.

1  Increasing expectations The first candidate for consideration is that the 2016 moment was the crest of a longer trend towards increasing expectations. On this reading, seeming to ignore people’s concerns drives them towards populism as a shout of protest. This can only be because they feel they have a right to be highly critical of politicians and those who shape their lives; that citizens will rise up and say they are not happy. A trip to the polling booth every four to five years no longer satisfies. The age of deference is out. Much of this is driven by the peculiarly late-modern quest for experiences. Direct experiences unmediated by those acting as filters is a feature of our times. Young people, for instance, hop from organisation to organisation more than their baby-boomer parents and grandparents. Yet, arguably, what they are restlessly searching for comes through hopping to and from experiences, not just organisations. They are searching for a great cause to align with. A crisis of expectations affects democracies and more authoritarian societies alike. Dangerous moment for societies when there is a gap between what people expect in their lives and what happens when opportunities begin to close. This was as true of the Arab Spring as it was of the Communist-era Soviet Union when there was nothing on the shop shelves. It is true of the political turbulence of recent times. When material security is no longer so strong, people become angry. They fight back against their insecurity. Increased expectations are to do with intergenerational dispute about younger generations feeling worse off by comparison with their parents and grandparents. Certainly, living standards in many countries have been flat since about 1985. People do not feel they are doing any better than their parents were. The assumption that became an implicit social contract about incremental progress seems to many younger people to be breaking down. They will not have the same entitlement to a decent pension, a house you own, a job you could walk into, and rising living standards could be a one-generation blip. The average incomes of each generation have consistently been higher than those of previous generations when they were the same age. But this crucial progress has so far not held true for

78  Alienation old and new millennials, whose incomes after housing costs are no higher than generation X before them. As the UK Resolution Foundation noted: ••

••

“Looking beyond averages, we find that higher income baby boomers saw much more generational progress than lower income boomers. This was driven by economy-wide changes in inequality. For this reason, as well as the unequal impact of higher housing costs, generation X has experienced the highest level of inequality of any generation to date. The overtaking of typical working-age incomes by those of pensioners is a remarkable shift. And the changing make-up of the poorest fifth of society has been even starker, with pensioners now disproportionately unlikely to be in poverty”.7

Arguably, such perceptions have exacerbated social faultlines that contributed to political turmoil. This is paralleled by a decrease in voting by millennials generally. OECD data suggests that highly educated young people are less likely to vote than older people with much lower levels of attainment. Turnout for elections had been declining across the rich world. Yet it had fallen fastest among the young.8 A slew of data from many countries indicates that the political voice of the young is weakening. Millennials do not see voting as a duty. Rather it is the task of politicians to woo them. Young people are less likely to read newspapers or listen to the news on either radio or TV. In the absence of personally appealing leaders, mistrust merges into cynicism about democracy itself.

2  The decline of democracy Increased expectations is related to demanding more accountability from leaders and institutions. Citizens have 24/7 access to high-quality information and, as a result, faith in many democratic institutions is undermined. Though citizens hold on to the belief that in theory the state can pull the levers and make things happen, this goes hand in hand with a marked sense of powerlessness in the face of remote forces but also much greater knowledge. Governments cannot get away with things so much. There is a strong imperative of mistrust against the impersonal, impatience with a plodding bureaucracy and demand for accountability and transparency. The mood in the global zeitgeist is that states as well as institutions should be held up to scrutiny. Across the Western world, the internet era fuels constant scrutiny. There is ‘a right to know’ that is felt with increasing strength. Clandestine, undemocratic conduct is much less tolerated. Holding elites to account, not letting criminal state actors get away with it is a feature of our age. There are few places to hide. Luce remarks in The Retreat of Western Liberalism that the challenge to globalisation is accompanied by a growing disenchantment with democracy.9 It goes hand in glove with low public confidence in governments. The Economist Intelligence Unit’s (EIU) latest Democracy Index 2016 shows 72 countries experienced a decline in democratic values last year. Countries with declining levels

Alienation old and new 79 of democracy outnumbered those becoming more democratic by more than two to one. The index measures the state of democracy by rating electoral processes and pluralism, the state of civil liberties, the functioning of government, political participation and political culture in more than 160 countries worldwide. Worryingly, the report found that less than half (49%) of the world’s population lives in a democracy of some sort, and only 4.5% reside in a ‘full democracy’. This is a steep decline from 2015, when it was just under 9%. Such dramatic decline is primarily down to the USA having been demoted to a ‘flawed democracy’, in the classification of the EIU – as a result of low public confidence in the government. The report stresses that this was strongly in evidence prior to the presidential election that saw Donald Trump become President. Similar trends were also in evidence in many other developed economies. Yet while disenchantment with political elites has led to a rise in populism, it has also sparked renewed political participation. In the EU referendum, 72% of the UK population turned out to vote, compared with an average of 63% in general elections over the past decade. This reversed a trend towards growing political apathy. The UK also saw a marked increase in membership of political parties. Britain’s democracy score went up slightly, placing it 16th among the ‘full democracies’.10

3  The ageing of the world Another possible explanation for the reactions against the forces of change is because the labour market and populations generally are ageing. In France, polling evidence taken before the presidential elections suggested that older voters were more likely to vote for anyone else other than the FN. They were shaped by protest on the left in the 1980s that were anti-Fascist and were hard-wired with warning signals. Younger people’s experience was shaped in a different climate, often characterised by unemployment and lack of good jobs. There are to be sure locations such as sub-Saharan Africa and the Indian sub-continent where the proportion of young people remains high and rising. In Pakistan, nearly 55% of its peoples are under the age of 25. In India, two-thirds of the population are under the age of 35.11 In China and Japan, though, people are living longer and having fewer children. Baby boomers in the West are levelling off into retirement. Fertility rates are falling below those needed to replace each generation. In Germany, concerns about an ageing workforce were underlined by a European Commission Report warning that the population could shrink and those of working age fall from 54 million to 36 million by 2060.12 This is a fall of 19% and no doubt underlay the welcome door to refugees proffered by Angela Merkel in September 2015. Immigration is needed to offset anaemic fertility rates. The twist in these forces on the march in our times is that life expectancy is rising at the same time as fertility rates are falling. A democratic pinch is getting sharper and there are numerous implications. Economies the world over are undergoing a transition from youthful to ageing societies. Growth is being driven by increasing numbers of older people and by the expansion of the global middle

80  Alienation old and new class. As these two groups grow, the higher levels of health care they demand will cause seismic shifts in the amount of money being spent in the health sector, driving employment. Ageing societies make it difficult to generate economic growth. They consume more and produce less. If older people remain in or re-enter the workforce (90% of new employment in the UK in 2008–2014 was accounted for by those over 50), their presence can depress wage growth. Increasing longevity also makes pensions, health care and other social services costlier. The disruption arising from this is immense, bringing with it considerable changes in social attitudes towards greater conservatism. The generational divide on Brexit was apparent in the demographic data, even if only weakly. Had turnout been higher among younger people its influence would have been even greater, but as is usually the case, there was a slight general trend for turnout to increase in line with average age.13 Technology accentuates the age divide. Forty-one per cent of people aged 65 and over in the UK feel out of touch with the pace of modern life; 12% say they feel cut off from society.14 Across Europe and the Anglosphere, the fact that populations are ageing “benefits the right, because voters shift right as they get older”, argues Eric Kaufmann. The ‘old vote’ counts even more because so few young people vote: across Europe, only 28% of those aged 18–24 voted in the European parliamentary elections of 2014 compared with 51% of those aged 55 and over. This is complemented by an apparent shift to the right in young people’s attitudes to the economy and Governments and its confidence in the welfare state.15

4  Greater education and the generation divide The Brexit referendum, and the Dutch and French elections, have shown that the traditional distinction between right and left is becoming obsolete. A strong possibility that might explain this animated, embittered protest against the system is that citizens are far more educated. It may be that the level of political education remains low but the level of education generally has risen massively and inexorably since the Second World War with huge growth in numeracy, literacy and college degrees. The public is simply better informed. Education has provided the tools and given a voice for people who will no longer be deferential and who vent a broadly shared perception that ‘the game is rigged’. Yet this is nuanced. It was education, not economics, that perhaps explained the new political cleavage. Citizens with high levels of education were in contrast with those who had lower levels of educational attainment. The former group was more likely to support green and liberal parties, and the latter drawn towards nationalism. The social characteristics across education divides were marked. University graduates will watch the BBC in the UK or its equivalent in other European countries (such as Canvas in Belgium) and read ‘quality’ papers, such as The Guardian, Die Zeit or Libération. They aspire to get their children into high-quality state schools or public school in the UK, a Gymnasium in Germany and the Netherlands or one of the Grandes écoles in France. They are more likely

Alienation old and new 81 to live in a university town, a green pre-war suburb or gentrified parts of the inner cities, such as Prenslauer Berg in Berlin, De Pijp in Amsterdam or Notting Hill in London. They will be positive about the EU; worry about climate change, the state of higher education and xenophobia; and vote for a progressive, socially liberal political party. By contrast, if someone’s education was over by the age of 16 or led to vocational training, they were more likely to watch commercial television, such as SBS, VTM or ITV, and read tabloid papers if at all, such as The Sun in England, Bild in Germany or BT in Denmark. They will live in former industrial areas and manufacturing towns or in the 20th-century outskirts of major cities. Their children will attend a local state school in the UK, a large ROC in the Netherlands or a lycée professionnel in France. They will be highly sceptical about the EU, worry about crime and immigration and vote for a political party emphasising nationalist identity.16 Arguing this in Diploma Democracy: The Rise of Political Meritocracy, Bovens and Wille showed that there is an increased stratification and segregation. The well-educated and the less well-educated live in different social worlds and do not mingle. They differ in health, in life expectancies, in wealth and in income. Cosmopolitans versus nationalists mark a new cultural conflict dimension that has manifested itself in the past three decades. Fuelled by the waves of non-Western immigration and the process of European unification, the education divide delineates the higher educated who accept social and cultural diversity and multiculturalism versus those who are highly critical of multiculturalism and who emphasise a more homogeneous national culture. These are predominantly citizens with lower education levels. In the 2016 Brexit referendum in the UK, strong educational differences could be observed. With the exception of Scotland, the Leave vote was much higher in those regions of Britain populated by citizens with low education qualifications, and much lower in those regions with a larger number of university graduates. According to Goodwin and Heath: “fifteen of the 20 ‘least educated’ areas voted to leave the EU while every single one of the 20 ‘most educated’ areas voted to remain”.17 Many young people felt let down by older Brexit voters. Among 18- to 24-yearolds, 72% favoured continued membership of the EU. As one young Briton explained via Twitter: “Today an older generation has voted to ruin the future for the younger generation. I’m scared”. Another millennial complained: “The fact older generations have reaped the benefits and pulled the EU from my generation? Furious”. As the leader of the UK Liberal Democrat Party, Sir Vince Cable, opined, “the old have comprehensively shafted the young. And the old have had the last word about Brexit, imposing a world view coloured by nostalgia for an imperial past on a younger generation much more comfortable with modern Europe”.18 Gen Y, born between 1980 and 1995, were deeply concerned about their futures, whether its focus was housing shortages, job prospects or general political insecurity.19 It is certainly true that Emmanuel Macron appealed to wealthier and bettereducated voters. Donald Trump claimed six out of ten non-college educated white women and seven out of ten votes from white men lacking a college education.

82  Alienation old and new That Hillary Clinton drew on the support of only a quarter of similar male voters showed how important traditional blue-collar workers were to Trump’s victory. Amidst rising levels of education generally, the astounding transformations in a digital economy and automation heighten expectations. They are, however, in danger of creating a generation divide. In a survey with 26,000 respondents, it was clear that young people do embrace technology, with 86% of them believing that new technologies create jobs though they are also concerned about online privacy. Top technology trends are seen as artificial intelligence, machine learning and the internet of things; millennials expect their lives to be affected by one or more of these, mainly in changes to their careers and education. They also expect that the top two industries to be transformed will be health care and education.20 Young people embrace an interconnected world. Tending mostly towards voting Remain in the UK referendum and for Clinton rather than Trump in 2016, they were less likely to put the drawbridge up rather than telling others to keep away and keep their distance. It is worth noting though that with technology dominating every aspect of millennials’ lives, 41% say they prefer to communicate electronically at work than face to face or even over the phone.21 However, alongside that, there is another reality. Despite being the most educated generation ever, financial insecurity is making young people who came of age at the millennium less entrepreneurial than previous generations. Millennials have seen the world transform from analogue to digital. They are the first generation of digital natives. They have not witnessed de-industrialisation personally. They know instinctively how to use technology in the workplace and social networking. Yet recent studies indicate that the share of people under 30 who own their own business is at its lowest in 24 years. Given such poor economic conditions, it is unsurprising that US millennials have returned home.22 It is unsurprising too that, in the UK, housing affordability and employment opportunities are the most pressing issues for millennials. While student debt is also an issue, the rapid rise in home prices in the UK has proven to be far more serious. Unemployment and underemployment of young people remain high.23 Millennials are the first generation that live through their phones. The smart phone is not to them a handset, it is their hand. They are not just world transformers as the baby boomers sought to be; they just want a better world. They want to be empowered and integrate life and work. Yet today’s 20- and 30-year-olds are half as likely to join face-to-face groups than their grandparents.24 This portends a different take on the blight of social isolation we will examine.

5  Growth of the global middle class Is it the rise of an educated middle class that fuels public dissatisfaction and distrust of politicians and business? China’s middle class, for instance, grew from five million households in 2000 to 225 million today. They are not clamouring for the vote, but they are unhappy – financially insecure victims of pollution and official corruption. Eventually, the Communist Party will have to meet their demands.25

Alienation old and new 83 The increase in average incomes and the fall in levels of absolute poverty, in particular during the last decade, suggest that an increasing proportion of the world’s population is neither rich nor poor by national standards but finds itself in the middle of the income distribution. By 2009 the middle class included 1.8 billion people, with Europe (664 million), Asia (525 million) and North America (338 million) accounting for the highest number of people belonging to this group. Even in Africa, where the middle class’s growth has not been very robust, it has nonetheless been noticeable and contributed to increased domestic consumption in many countries. Sales of refrigerators, television sets, mobile phones, motors and automobiles have surged in virtually every African country in recent years. Possession of cars and motor cycles in Ghana, for example, has increased by 81% since 2006. In Brazil, thanks to a decrease in poverty from almost 40% of the population in 2001 to around 25% in 2009, 31 million people joined the middle class. Today 52% of Brazil’s population is middle class.26 The internet’s consumer impact will continue to expand. Already, 68% of the middle class have access to it, compared with 57% of the total urban population.27 The magnitude of China’s middle-class growth is transforming the nation. This expansion continues. The size of the ‘global middle class’ will increase – from 1.8 billion in 2009 – to 3.2 billion by 2020 and 4.9 billion by 2030. The bulk of this growth will come from Asia: by 2030 Asia will represent 66% of the global middle-class population and 59% of middle-class consumption compared with 28% and 23% respectively in 2009.28 The developing world’s ‘emerging middle class’ is a critical economic and social actor because of its potential as an engine of growth, particularly in the largest developing countries such as China and India but also in sub-Saharan Africa. Those in the middle have in the past vigorously accumulated capital, be it physical (plant, equipment or housing) or human (education or health). In theory, consolidating this incipient middle-income group into a stable middle class provides a foundation for economic progress by driving consumption and domestic demand. The problem, however, is that if those in the middle have precarious incomes and unstable employment, their consumption cannot be counted upon to drive national development, nor can their growth be taken as a sign of social progress. Being middle class is about exercising a social role. Generally, they support democracy and progressive, moderate political platforms. Strong middle classes can influence economic development through more active participation in the political process. Their political preferences may embrace populist platforms if expectations are unmet. Middle-class expectations in emerging and developing countries are rising and evolving as their countries’ economic situations improve, following Hirschman’s ‘tunnel effect’.29 They are no longer satisfied with simply having access to public services; they are increasingly concerned with their quality. Providing the quality services that the middle class demands is far more complicated than simply providing access to them. It is a source of upheaval. After decades of high economic growth, Chile has become an international player with a competitive economy. Yet in the second half of 2011, students and others staged massive protests against the government,

84  Alienation old and new demanding greater access to high-quality, inexpensive education. They are no longer satisfied with having access to education. They want cheaper and better education, which is much harder to deliver.30 As middle classes remain vulnerable, they are dissatisfied with state services. The rising expectations of the expanding middle class in developing countries contrast with the stagnating living standards. Generational change and the rising prosperity of inland cities will power consumption for years to come. Indications are that within the burgeoning middle class, the upper class is poised to become the principal engine of consumer spending over the next decade. A billion older consumers will need attending to!

6  Autonomy infringed In the UK referendum, citizen voters shouted loudly that they wanted to take back control of their own destiny. That iconic call was a key issue in demanding localisation of public services. “We need to take back control of our communities and have power over our own destinies”, said a supporter of mayoral elections in the UK Midlands in May 2017.31 Donald Trump emphasised the need to ‘make America great again’. This was protest against decisions made by someone else. It evoked sharply different visions of the future. People were tired of being pushed around; those who are disconnected whom they know to be corrupt yet having control. The quest for authentic autonomy has, as its heart, an imperative towards asserting the value and worth of social participants. It is fundamentally to do with citizens realising their own agency; a mood that asserts, ‘we count, we matter’, against the de-personalisation of existential distance. Globalisation had stolen autonomy – or seemed to. Geographical and spatial awareness has shrunk dramatically in the communications and transport revolutions. But the sense of needing to assert ourselves against the power of remote forces shaping our lives is a strong force of reaction. This drive is becoming increasingly important in the workplace. As The New York Times explains regarding the controversial two-way street options for the gig economy: “Gigs hold out the prospect of self-management and variety, with workers taking on diverse assignments of their choice and carving out their own schedules. Rather than toiling at the behest of some faceless corporation, they work for their peers”.32 Instead of being just another cog in the machine, there is a strong desire to retain the semblance of autonomy over our own lives – something not evident when working nine-to-five and selling our labour power to the major monopolies that are really in control. The ‘choice’ to work in the on-demand economy, therefore, is being taken by many as an act of rebellion; a stand against the system. This is the impetus often in a psychological reading of self-harming or anorexia. Starving yourself is a stand to make where no one else can exercise sovereignty; in cutting the flesh, the subject reigns supreme. The perception is that ‘they do not know us, they write us off; they are too far away, they are unelected and self-appointed’. Their actions result in one being at the mercy of impersonal forces. They are those who control

Alienation old and new 85 and shape so much of our lives and yet we never see them. The faceless threaten to leave me without face, take me for granted and devalue me. There is a strong degree of reaction against the runaway train of globalisation and impersonal forces that serve to highlight our sense of powerlessness. Big companies that operate worldwide, multinationals, have been the sharp end of these globalising forces. They came in for particular criticism in the popular revolution of 2016. “Faceless and rootless, they stand accused of unleashing carnage on ordinary Americans by shipping jobs and factories abroad”.33 Donald Trump’s answer was to domesticate them.

7  Risk society A core text of contemporary sociology was Ulrich Beck’s notion of ‘Risk Society’.34 The way society relates to production and distribution is shaped now by environmental impact. A totalising, globalising economy is based on scientific and technical knowledge becoming more central to social organisation. Yet controlling environmental or social risk in the future is a deeply uncertain project. Why should this be when our thoughts about the future are constrained by the locations technology wants to take us? The definition has become technological which ought to minimise risk. It does not. The compression of distance and space results in the compression of time. This is intrinsic to the compression of distance in the contemporary subjectivity. Time always was a slippery concept. Days can seem to drag but a year gallops past. Events when so much is happening will pass with evaporating speed. Humans always were poor judges of time. Augustine of Hippo was the first to recognise that time is a property of the mind, to do with perception rather than an absolute concept. Centuries later, William James observed that the mind does not perceive time itself but rather its passage. Any instant, he said, melts in one’s grasp, lost in the instant of becoming.35 We ask Amazon and we get something tomorrow. As the present bleeds into the future, technology offers a single vision of what is to come.36 A sense of blurred speed across contemporary landscapes accentuates loss of agency. The feel of things happening faster than the human capacity to absorb it may be artificial – after all, the spread of televisions in people’s homes was just as rapid as the smart phone – but it sustains the impact of rapid social change on perceptions of rootless people whose anchorage in durable certainties like place, family and occupation is gone. It did not help them with balance or finding fulfilling tasks that from things built over a lifetime, not just a year.

8  The weakening of social bonds Another candidate to help explain the growing alienation and response to it could be that this is of a piece with the separation of people from each other

86  Alienation old and new and the rise of a sense of autonomy that, arguably, is related. It is the close relationships people have that determine the strength of society. It is this that we will now examine.

Notes   1 Letter from a Russian Blogger, Time Magazine, 26th December 2011.   2 Service, R. (2000) Lenin. London: Macmillan.   3 Letter from a Russian Blogger, Time Magazine, 26th December 2011.   4 CEO Earns 130 Times Average Salary, https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2017/01/ ceo-earns-130-times-average-salary/, January 2017.  5 Marine-le-Pen ‘Front National’ Speech Campaign Launch, French Elections, http:// www.independent.co.uk/news/world/europe/marine-le-pen-front-national-speech-campaign-launch-islamic-fundamentalism-french-elections-a7564051.html, 6th February 2017.  6 Krouwel, A. quoted in Wigmore, T. (2015) Why Are Right Wing Parties Thriving Across Europe? New Statesman, https://www.newstatesman.com/culture/observations/2015/10/why-are-right-wing-parties-thriving-across-europe, 8th October 2015.  7 Corlett, A. As Time Goes By: Shifting Incomes and Inequality between and within Generations. Resolution Foundation, http://www.resolutionfoundation.org/publications/ as-time-goes-by-shifting-incomes-and-inequality-between-and-within-generations/, 13th February 2017   8 Berry, R. & Mcdonnell, A. Highly Educated Young People Are Less Likely to Vote Than Older People with Much Lower Levels of Attainment. Democratic Audit UK, http://www.democraticaudit.com/2014/03/13/in-britain-people-with-higher-educational-attainment-are-less-likelyto-vote-because-they-are-younger, accessed February 2017, 13th March 2014.   9 Luce, E. (2017) The Retreat of Western Liberalism. New York: Little Brown. 10 Economist Intelligence Unit. Democracy Index 2016, http://www.eiu.com/public/ topical_report.aspx?campaignid=DemocracyIndex2016 11 The Economist, World in Figures, 2017, https://worldinfigures.com/ 12 The 2012 Ageing Report, European Commission, ec.europa.eu/.../european_ economy/2012/2012-ageing-report_en.htm, February 2012. 13 http://blogs.ft.com/ftdata/2016/06/24/brexit-demographic-divide-eu-referendum-results/, accessed February 2017. 14 http://www.ageuk.org.uk/health-wellbeing/loneliness/, accessed January 2017. 15 Kaufmann, E. quoted in Wigmore, T. (2015) Why Are Right Wing Parties Thriving Across Europe? New Statesman, https://www.newstatesman.com/culture/observations/2015/10/why-are-right-wing-parties-thriving-across-europe, 8th October 2015. 16 Bovens, M. & Wille, A. (2017) Diploma Democracy: The Rise of Political Meritocracy. Oxford: Oxford University Press. 17 Goodwin, M. & Heath, O. (2016) The 2016 Referendum, Brexit and the Left Behind: An Aggregate-Level Analysis of the Result. Political Quarterly, http:// www.matthewjgoodwin.org/uploads/6/4/0/2/64026337/political_quarterly_version_1_9.pdf 18 Sir Vince Cable Attacks Elderly Brexit ‘Martyrs’ Who Have ‘Shafted the Young’. http:// www.dailymail.co.uk/wires/pa/article-4764540/Sir-Vince-Cable-attacks-elderlyBrexit-martyrs-shafted-young, 6th August 2017. 19 Dodgson, M. & Gann, D. (2017) Reach for The Stars. The Advice That Failed a Generation? https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2017/02/advice-that-failed-a-generation/, 27th February 2017. 20 What Do Young People Care About? We Asked 26,000 of Them. https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2016/11/what-do-young-people-care-about-we-asked-26-000-of-

Alienation old and new 87 them. 26th October 2017. Yemi Babington-Ashaye, Head of the Global Shapers Community, World Economic Forum. The Global Shapers Annual Survey received over 26,000 responses from 187 countries and territories. The survey polls 18- to 35-year-olds on five dimensions: Economy and Global Outlook, Technology, Values, Governance and the Role of Business. The Global Shapers Community is an initiative of the World Economic Forum. 21 Deborah Henretta (Group President, Asia & Global Specialty Channel, Procter & Gamble) Millenials at Work: Reshaping the Workplace, PWC, May 2016, www.pwc. com/people, accessed May 2016. 22 Chetty, R. et al. (2016) The Fading American Dream: Trends in Absolute Income Mobility Since 1940. National Bureau of Economic Research Working Paper No. 22910, http://www.equality-of-opportunity.org/documents/, accessed January 2017. 23 Laudicina, P. Chairman, A. T. Kearney Global Business Policy Council. Davos, What’s New, What’s Not. World Economic Forum. Bureau of Labour Statistics. 15th January 2017. 24 Campbell, D. C., Yonish, S., & Putnam, R. (1999) Tuning In, Tuning Out Revisited: A Closer Look at the Causal Links Between Television and Social Capital. Harvard Education Review. Paper presented at the Annual Meeting of the American Political Science Association, Atlanta, Georgia. 25 China’s Middle Class. The Economist, 8th July 2016. Print edition. 26 OECD (2011) Latin American Economic Outlook 2011: How Middle Class is Latin America? Paris: OECD Publishing. 27 OECD (2011) Perspectives on Global Development: Social Cohesion in a Shifting World. Paris: OECD Publishing. 28 Pezzini, M. (2012) An Emerging Middle Class. OECD Observer. (Mario Pezzini, Director, OECD Development Centre). See more at: http://oecdobserver.org/news/fullstory.php/aid/3681/An_emerging_middle_class.html#sthash.Vn7unxFE.dpuf 29 Hirschman, A. O. (2015) The Essential Hirschman. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. 30 OECD (2011) Latin American Economic Outlook 2011: How Middle Class is Latin America? Paris: OECD Publishing, http://oecdobserver.org/news/fullstory.php/ aid/3681/An_emerging_middle_class.html#sthash.W1ueq1RZ.dpuf 31 A mayoral candidate in UK local elections, May 2017, Newsnight, BBC2, 3rd May 2017. 32 Growth in the ‘Gig Economy’ Fuels Work Force Anxieties. New York Times, https:// www.nytimes.com/2015/07/13/business/rising-economic, accessed January 2017, 13th July 2015. 33 Global Companies Are Heading Home. The Economist, 28th January 2017. 34 Beck, U. (1992) Risk Society: Towards a New Modernity. London: Sage Publications. 35 Burdick, A. (2017) Why Time Flies: A Mostly Scientific Investigation. New York: Simon and Schuster. 36 Future Proofing, bbcradio4futureproofing.radio.net, 3rd May 2017.

7

The lonely exodus of the 21st century The social cost of disconnection

“A more globalistic and individualistic world can sometimes loosen the ties that bind our society together, leaving some people locked out and left behind”. – Theresa May1

As we have been charting, there are many losers from structural changes that are taking place in the global economy that experience a strong sense of disconnection from ‘the system’. Yet some of the fundamental forces generating a deeper alienation and distance have been at work for a long time in Western societies. Rapid social change over a generation is producing anxiety and insecurity at many levels. Here we are going to explore the way social change has generated distance from each other. The fragmentation of society carries risk. “Social relationships, or the relative lack thereof, constitute a major risk factor for health – rivalling the effect of wellestablished health risk factors such as cigarette smoking, blood pressure, blood lipids, obesity and physical activity”.2 Where human relationships and social bonds are weak, society is weak. When they are strong, society is strong. The individualised society described by the eminent sociologist Zygmunt Bauman3 shows markedly less connection with others. What was less apparent was the erosion of entire communities.4 Through many eyes, this is a side-effect of capitalism. It shatters communities and shapes individualised response. It deepens national divisions. Western societies have experienced accelerating social change and fast-track immigration. This has resulted in a turning away of each other from the Other. Linked with the individualising effect of the social order of shopping, it has created a disposable world inhospitable to the stranger or pilgrim in lonely exile.5 As the quote at the beginning of this chapter points out: new UK Prime Minister Theresa May observed this, and set out a vision of a ‘Shared Society’: “A more globalistic and individualistic world can sometimes loosen the ties that bind our society together, leaving some people locked out and left behind”.6 We will now probe this aspect of the contemporary flight from distance and the impersonal, returning subsequently to the sense of human devaluation recurrent in ‘voice and choice society’.

Lonely exodus of the 21st century 89 During the past 200 years, since the industrial revolution, we abandoned geographically close relationships with extended families. Underlying economic structures, both capitalist and Marxist, dissolved relationships that we as communal primates evolved within. The result is social blight and an epidemic of loneliness. As Public Health England observed: Factors that influence social isolation and loneliness operate at the individual level, the level of the community or local area and at the wider societal level. Individual and community level factors that impact on social isolation are nested in the wider social, economic, political and cultural context.7 The horizon of the present witnesses the fragmented self. Capitalism is often accused of leading to atomisation, to the ‘me, me, me’ society. On the other side of the argument is the proposition that by interposing itself as provider of welfare, it was the state that was saying, in effect, ‘we will look after you, not your family, your neighbourhood or your voluntary association’. There are many dimensions of this social dislocation. For example, elder suicide is on the rise, as highlighted by the UK Mental Health Foundation.8 Social isolation is very clearly a risk factor; boosting connection a possible remedy: We suggest that one mechanism shared by all preventive interventions shown to reduce the incidence of late-life suicide is the promotion of connectedness. For the clinician working with older adults, our recommendation is to not only consider risk factors, such as depression, and implement appropriate treatments but to enhance social connectedness as well.9 Or as reported in The Lancet medical journal, acting now on dementia prevention, intervention and care will vastly improve living and dying for individuals with dementia and their families, and in doing so, will transform the future for society. A strong risk factor in subsequent dementia is social isolation. Lack of connection reduces the social stimuli vital for healthy brains.10 As I write these words, research conducted for the [slain UK MP] Jo Cox Loneliness Commission suggests millions of men across the UK are hiding feelings of isolation, with men feeling most lonely at the age of 35.11 The study finds an estimated 8 million (35%) men felt lonely at least once a week, while for nearly 3 million (11%), it’s a daily occurrence. More than one in ten men also say they are lonely, but would not admit it to anyone. Those who felt lonely said the situations that made them feel that way were moving away from friends and family (18%), going through a breakup (17%), being unemployed (17%) and following the death of a family member (17%). Over a quarter of men aged 65–69 said retiring had made them lonely.  Other key findings from the research included: ••

26 is the age that men think they had the largest group of friends; 38 when they had the smallest. 

90  Lonely exodus of the 21st century •• •• •• •• ••

Of the men who had experienced or are experiencing loneliness the average age to feel most lonely was 35. Over one in 20 men (7%) say they have no friends, and of those who do, nearly one in ten (8%) have no close friends. Just under three in ten (28%) see and speak to friends/family regularly. Nearly one in ten men (9%) do not see anyone on a regular basis. Men who are, or have been, lonely say it makes them feel isolated (39%), depressed (35%) and less confident (27%).

Home alone Loneliness can increase the pressure on a wide range of council and health services. Addressing loneliness is, therefore, highly relevant to a number of important agendas for local authorities. Loneliness has risen up the public health agenda. It has gained the attention of health care professionals, community organisations and charities.12 Yet it is very difficult to address directly. Often used interchangeably with ‘isolation’, loneliness is slightly different. It is the subjective state of how people feel about their situation. People can live alone but not be lonely. Loneliness is an affliction of the heart – yet it does not show up on scanners. A broken heart at the end of a relationship or bereavement will not be expressed directly in cardiological terms. It cannot be medicated for. Social support – being well-plugged in – is far more relevant than pills. As an Exeter GP wrote in a ‘Health as a Social Movement’ research document:  It’s a rotating door — they just come back again. Patients need people not pills … I estimate that 40–55% of patients I see every week could be better supported by someone else.13 The hard data is about social isolation. This is where the effects of more of us living alone and for longer show up. It is here where an atomised society of individuals living out their lives cuts through. Rather than people looking out for each other cooperatively, they get on with individual lives.14 There is wider public recognition that significant increases in loneliness and isolation, depression and mental ill-health warrant societal action.15 How to do this is getting the attention of policy makers. Studies into how to improve overall health and wellbeing suggest that reducing social isolation is a key factor. A fascinating account of the 268 individuals selected for the Harvard Study of Adult Development was published in Triumphs of Experience, by George E. Vaillant, Professor of Psychiatry at Harvard Medical School.16 At a time when many people are living into their tenth decade, the longest longitudinal study of human development ever undertaken offers welcome news for the new old age: our lives continue to evolve in our later years, and can often become more fulfilling.17 Social isolation brings the same level of health issues as is caused by smoking and is a growing problem in an individualised society; arguably the greatest single

Lonely exodus of the 21st century 91 concern society faces, and the root of many issues.18 A recent statement about this issue is a 17-page discussion paper issued by the Church of England House of Bishops, adding to the much-cited five evils identified in the 1942 Beveridge Report on which the welfare state was based – Want, Disease, Squalor, Ignorance and Idleness. The sixth is the enemy ‘Isolation’: those coping without the support, friendship and sacrifice of others; isolation in old age; the lack of childcare options for mothers; the loss of neighbourliness; the loss of self-confidence among people made redundant; the breakdown of couple relationships; and the lack of trust between strangers.19 There is a reason why tackling the health effects of loneliness is now concentrating the collective minds of public policy advisers, churches, charities and social enterprises in the UK. According to Age UK, 1.2 million older people are chronically lonely. Fifty-one per cent of all people over age 75 live alone and almost five million older people say that television is their main form of company. This is a growing social issue: •• •• •• •• •• •• •• ••

Age Concern indicates that there are now 14.9 million people in the UK aged 60 and above.20 3.5 million 65+ live alone. This is 36% of all people aged 65 plus.21 A 2015 study indicated that loneliness can increase risk of premature death by up to one-quarter.22 A 2010 study shows the correlation between loneliness and increased blood pressure.23 Nearly one-half of older people (49% of 65+) say television or pets are a main form of company.24 11% of those aged 65 or over have less than monthly contact with their families.25 According to research for the UK Department of Work and Pensions, nearly one-quarter (24%) of pensioners do not go out socially at least once a month.26 In the biggest review into the subject ever carried out, the University of York looked at 23 studies involving 181,000 people for up to 21 years. They found that isolated people are around 30% more likely to suffer a stroke or heart disease, two of the leading causes of death in Britain (29% increase in risk of coronary heart disease plus 32% increase in stroke).27

Addressing loneliness and social isolation may, therefore, have an important role in the prevention of two of the leading causes of morbidity in high-income countries. Loneliness has an adverse effect on both physical and mental health with lonely people being more at risk of high blood pressure, early onset of cognitive decline and dementia and depression.28 The charity Age UK claims the issue “blights the lives of over a million older people with many going for weeks without any meaningful human contact. It is a serious condition which can be enormously damaging, both mentally and physically”.29 The UK Local Government Association (LGA) said that urgent action must be taken to address the issue. The consequences of loneliness are “devastating and costly”.30

92  Lonely exodus of the 21st century The literature shows that it is the elderly who live alone more than any other demographic group, often through circumstance rather than by design.31 Amongst the impacts of social isolation are the capacity to participate and be valued.32 This is important. It is the erosion of worth that is the killer. Yet social isolation is not just a problem for the elderly. As Public Health England reported in September 2015, “while social isolation is more commonly considered in later life, it can occur at all stages of the life course. Particular individuals or groups may be more vulnerable than others, depending on factors like physical and mental health, level of education, employment status, wealth, income, ethnicity, gender and age or life-stage”.33 The Mental Health Foundation found that 18- to 34-year-olds were more likely to feel lonely more often than over-55s.34 Higher rates of mental health problems such as depression and anxiety have been associated with loneliness, isolation and social rejection during adolescence.35 Mental health can impact on how we connect with others and how we develop relationships. Mental health problems such as depression and anxiety can influence whether someone is able to interact and connect with others.36 There is a strong link between loneliness and depressive symptoms.37

The loneliness of the contemporary subject It is a salutary comment on the disruption of tradition and cost of modernity that nearly half of UK adults (41%) admit to being worried about being alone in later life. Two hundred thousand older people have not had a conversation with friends or family for a month.38 The pressing issue of social isolation may be a casualty of the growing sense of disconnection arising from the decline in communal association and the days when people looked out for each other. The theme of ‘active communities’ is becoming a strong script, challenging old models of top-down practice. Whatever happened to the old places where neighbours knew each other? Clearly the Global Village is no substitute for its antecedent in smaller communities with a direct human scale that the individual can form his or her personhood through choice and will power, and make a life without the support, friendship and sacrifice of others; that our responsibilities begin and end with ourselves and that the good of others is purely their own affair. It may be the direct result of the breakdown of the extended family where a bereaved grandma was invited to come and live with her offspring. The shrinkage of the network to the nuclear family is combined with, or consequent upon, mobility of the labour market and dispersion of employment. This is ‘Gesellschaft’, urban mass society; densely populated and with a much smaller sense of community than the traditional ‘Gemeinschaft’ culture.39 In Gemeinschaft, the neighbour is someone you see and know; their face recognised. Marx would have seen it perhaps as a consequence of individualistic capitalism. In his famous introduction to Das Kapital, he spoke of a community of free individuals carrying on their work much like Robinson Crusoe but with the difference that tasks are social rather than individualistic. Progress would mean the creation of a co-operating, caring community.40

Lonely exodus of the 21st century 93 He may have a point. Consumer society has resulted in desire replacing c­ ommunity, looking out for number one and the privatisation of life. It intensifies social comparison. Vibrant communities are replaced by individualised lives. As Bauman warned, ‘individualised society’ has become our fate.41 Today, individualism and the decline of the communal is a major concern across civil society. Eric Hobsbawm argued that “the values of consumer-society individualism and the search for private and personal satisfactions above all else” were responsible for the decline in fortunes of the Labour Party.42 In fact, for political parties, churches, trade unions and community organisations, the decline in participation and volunteering has been marked in a single generation. Trade unions’ share of the workforce in the large OECD countries exposed to globalisation, such as the UK and America, has shrunk steadily to approximately half its 1980 levels. Much of this may have been due to the move to a service economy since specialist workers in manufacturing have more bargaining power. It may be too that other political avenues are open to workers. But it seems clear, as in the words of the chief union representative at a Swedish vehicle manufacturer, Scania, that “the younger generation is more individualistic”.43 This is not just a European story. China’s turn to capitalism occasioned widespread comment and concern about how a focus on social solidarity and the righting of historic inequalities has led to gated communities, deepening health inequalities and the widening of distance between rural and urban realities.44 Inequalities mean we withdraw from the others who make us human. The result can be that life is about ‘me’ rather than ‘we’. We take less notice of each other or are less inclined to help neighbours when under pressure. It is a real challenge. Living in tight community conflicts with the very strong sense of individuality that has been a growing element in our subjectivity for several centuries. Robert Putnam, in his much-cited text Bowling Alone, draws attention to the decline in community civic mindedness. During the Depression years in the 1930s, membership of 32 organisations in civil society fell dramatically.45 Invoking the aftermath of the Second World War, President Kennedy invoked communal ties and collective sacrifice in his inaugural speech, “ask not what your country can do for you; ask what you can do for your country!”. At the end of the 1960s, Daniel Bell observed that “there is more participation than ever before in America … and more opportunity for the active interested person to express his personal and political concerns”.46 Yet Putnam showed that things were changing in the later decades of the 20th century; indeed squandering the ‘social capital’ built up through civic associational ties hitherto. Civil society institutions such as youth clubs, churches and trade unions, post-offices and pubs are less in evidence; either weakened or absent. The individual in isolation from society is a legacy of the hedonism and individualism from the 1960s onwards. This individualism was, he argued, due to spending more time alone on the internet and in our cars and crucially in front of the television. Atomisation was also exacerbated by pressures of time and budget. When these inputs of association came under considerable strain in the age of austerity, the effect on community bond seems to have been significant. One survey charted a decline from 44% of citizens in England and Wales who volunteered some unpaid help in 2005 to 37% in 2010.47

94  Lonely exodus of the 21st century Evidence is mixed regarding the contribution of community ties to recruiting political activists.48 One analysis of the strength of community ties in the UK in 1999 suggested that “aggregate levels of social capital have not declined to an appreciable extent in Britain over the post-war years”.49 But this was before the recession impacted on the economy and community life. The average time Britons engaged in volunteering dropped markedly. Across the whole population, it fell from three hours, seven minutes a month before the financial crash to two hours, eight minutes in 2010 data.50 Bringing together formal volunteering with informal offers of help points to a fall in community engagement of around 25%. In 2017, figures analysed by the UK Office for National Statistics (ONS) showed that although more people are offering to volunteer than previously, they are offering less time. Due no doubt to time pressures in the workplace, the amount of volunteering time offered by those aged from 25 to 34 had shrunk from 15 minutes a day in 2000 to six minutes in 2016. Those aged 65 who at the turn of the century had spent 19 minutes a day volunteering were giving 13 minutes a day on average. There does seem to have been a social as well as economic recession.51 The number of hours we spend socially interacting in person has fallen dramatically in the last 25 years.52 A lack of meaningful connection is a risk factor for heart attacks and death. By contrast, being part of a community helps us feel connected, supported, and gives us a sense of belonging. Involvement in local activities, such as volunteering or playing sports as part of a team, has been shown to improve mental health and wellbeing. This is markedly true for the USA also.53 An argument can be made that instead of society, we have been left with transient groupings of individuals who come together only to best pursue special interest claims based on identity or ask for handouts for their particular victim claims. Authentic association is based on subjects forming voluntary groups to pursue common undertakings. They associate, not because of who they are, but because of what they want. It is based on differences tolerated because of a shared, universal foundation. Relativism shattered that foundation giving rise to a deep intolerance and indifference to others: to groupings based on different identities. This was the de-humanisation of the human.54 The death of that kind of subjectivity results in a lonely world of humans disconnected from each other. Under the surface of many social housing estates are young, single tenants or the isolated and anchorless, scarcely motivated by age and responsibility to involve themselves in social activities. Often people do not see anyone other than a partner or their children from day to day.55 Structures of neighbourhood and community are weakened. This is the shadow side of growth in individual freedom and mobility. A generation ago, well before the internet economy started to re-shape everything, Richard Sennett argued that the quest for small-scale face-to-face communal relationships posed social risks. His argument was that it led to ‘the fall of public man’ (written in the days before gender consciousness-raising became fashionable!).56 Sennett’s point was that the horrors of the early industrial age caused many to retreat into the family as a haven and heaven from which to escape the moneycentred, machine-driven world we were creating. Public life came to be judged

Lonely exodus of the 21st century 95 through the prism of close, familial relationships. Sennett came to believe this was destructive. All of social life cannot be reduced to small-scale social relationships. Longstanding social arrangements were formed around large hierarchical bureaucracies and small densely knit groups such as households, communities and workgroups. Network society creates new efficiencies and affordances in the ways people solve problems and meet their social needs. Whereas in the past, it was not easy for people to get real-time information to help navigate a place, now it is as easy as operating a satnav or Google Maps. Unlike the days of village life when everyone knew everyone else’s affairs, participants in the high-tech era of augmented reality are more liberated now to work on their own projects or in arrangement with fellow-actors in their network. Some worry that it is this new high-tech environment that makes us isolated and lonely. Yet the large, loosely knit social circles of networked individuals expand opportunities, not just for learning, problem solving, decision making but for personal interaction. The new social operating system of “networked individualism” liberates us from the restrictions of tightly knit groups; it also requires us to develop networking skills and strategies to maintain ties. Rainie and Wellman argue that the “triple revolution” that has brought on this transformation – social networking, the way the Internet can empower individuals, and connectivity – has not only changed the way people obtain information, it has expanded personal relationships beyond households and neighbourhoods and encouraged individuals to create and share content.57 The boundaries of networked individuals who recognise each other in cyberspace are similar to spatial boundaries but have a synthetic quality. Entities being synthetic or artificial bothers contemporary people; their ambivalence illustrated in the varying fortunes of e-books as against the physicality of ‘real’ books! Relationships are stretched by work, stretched by stress, stretched by time. Time is the scarce commodity of late capitalism. Some social commentators observe that there are encouraging signposts away from the expansion of personal rights and towards greater communal civility.58 Nevertheless, somewhere along the line, we became estranged from each other. It has not arrested the drift toward greater isolation and the loss of connections. And the burden on the state has become unsustainable, outstripping the willingness of the people as a whole to pay for it. As the informal structures of neighbourliness have diminished, the structures of state welfare have had to carry greater and greater demand. When people appear again and again at a doctor’s surgery because it is the only place where they are guaranteed a chance to talk to another person, something vital is missing from the fabric of the community around them. But what is this estrangement and distance that has such salience on the contemporary scene?

Notes   1 www.bbc.co.uk/radio4/worldatone/, 9th January 2017.   2 House, J. S., Landis, K. R., & Umberson, D. (1988) Social Relationships and Health. Science, Vol. 241, pp. 540–545.

96  Lonely exodus of the 21st century   3 Bauman, Z. (2001) The Individualised Society. Chichester: Wiley.   4 Caryl, C. (2013) Strange Rebels: 1979 and the Birth of the 21st Century. New York: Basic Books.   5 Bauman, Z. (1995) Life in Fragments. Oxford: Blackwells.   6 www.bbc.co.uk/radio4/worldatone/, 9th January 2017.  7 Local Action on Health Inequalities: Reducing Social Isolation across the Lifecourse. Public Health England and UCL Institute of Health Equity. September 2015.   8 https://www.mentalhealth.org.uk/a-to-z/s/suicide, accessed July 2017.   9 Van Orden, K. & Conwell, Y. (2011) Suicides in Late Life. Current Psychiatry Reports, Vol. 13, No. 3, pp. 234–241. 10 Livingstone, G. et al. Dementia Prevention, Intervention, and Care. The Lancet. 19th July 2017. 11 Loneliness is a ‘Silent Epidemic’ Among Men, with Those Aged 35 Suffering Most. http://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/entry/loneliness-is-a-silent-epidemic-among-menwith-those-aged-35-suffering-most_uk, 3rd May 2017. 12 Cattan, M., White, M., Bond, J., & Learmouth, A. (2005) Preventing Social Isolation and Loneliness Among Older People: A Systematic Review of Health Promotion Interventions. Ageing and Society, Vol. 25, pp. 41–67. 13 Conway, R. Loneliness is a Health Issue Needing a Human Response. www.thersa.org. uk, January 2017. 14 Dunbar, R. (1998) Grooming, Gossip, and the Evolution of Language. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. 15 Dickens, A., Richards, S., Greaves, C., & Campbell, J. (2011) Interventions Targeting Social Isolation in Older People: A Systematic Review. BMC Public Health, Vol. 11, p. 647. doi:10.1186/1471-2458-11-647. 16 Vaillant, G. E. (2012) Triumphs of Experience. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press. 17 Jivraj, S., Nazroo, J., & Barnes, M. (2012) Change in Social Detachment in Older Age in England: in The Dynamics of Ageing: Evidence from the English Longitudinal Study of Ageing 2002–2010 (Wave 5). London: The Institute for Fiscal Studies. 18 Nuffield Foundation (2012) Social Trends and Mental Health: Introducing the Main Findings, www.nuffieldfoundation.org/sites/default/files/files/Changing 19 Thinking Afresh about Welfare: The Enemy Isolation, House of Bishops Report, https:// www.churchofengland.org/media/2524695/welfare.pdf, accessed January 2017. 20 Mid-2014 Population Estimates, UK Office for National Statistics, 2015. 21 Labour Force Survey, UK Office for National Statistics, 2015. 22 Holt-Lunstad, J. et al. (2015) Loneliness and Social Isolation as Risk Factors for Mortality: A Meta-Analytic Review. Perspectives on Psychological Science, Vol. 10, No. 2, pp. 227–237, found through http://www.webmd.com/mental-health/ news/20150317/could-loneliness-shorten-a-life 23 Hawkley, L. C., Thisted, R. A., Masi, C. M., & Cacioppo, J. T. (2010). Loneliness Predicts Increased Blood Pressure: Five-Year Cross-Lagged Analyses in Middle-Aged and Older Adults. Psychology & Aging, Vol. 25, pp. 132–141. 24 TNS survey for Age UK, April 2014. 25 Victor, C. et al. (2003) Loneliness, Social Isolation and Living Alone in Later Life, ESRC Growing Older Programme. 26 Households Below Average Income 2012/13, Chapter 6, Department for Work and Pensions, 2014. 27 Valtorta, N. et al. (2016) Loneliness and Social Isolation as Risk Factors for Coronary Heart Disease and Stroke: Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis of Longitudinal Observational Studies. Heart, April 2016, http://press.psprings.co.uk/heart/april/ hrt308790.pdf 28 Evangelical Alliance (2014) Loneliness in the UK. The Extent of Loneliness in the UK. http://eauk.co/1bdhtqB, accessed January 2017.

Lonely exodus of the 21st century 97 29 http://www.ageuk.org.uk/, accessed January 2017; see also http://www.telegraph. co.uk/news/health/news/12126606/Loneliness-is-a-major-public-health-issue-localgovernment-body-claims.html 30 Local Government Association spokeswoman for public health Izzi Seccombe. Papers for Annual Public Health Conference, January 2016, http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/ health/news/12126606/Loneliness-is-a-major-public-health-issue-local-governmentbody-claims.html, accessed January 2017. 31 Holt-Lunstad, J., Smith, T. B., & Layton, J. B. (2010) Social Relationships and Mortality Risk: A Meta-Analytic Review. PLoS Med, Vol. 7, No. 7, http://dx.doi.org/10.1371/ journal.pmed.1000316, accessed January 2017. 32 Findlay, R. (2003) Interventions to Reduce Social Isolation amongst Older People: Where is the Evidence? Ageing and Society, Vol. 23, pp. 647–658. 33 Local Action on Health Inequalities: Reducing Social Isolation across the Lifecourse. Public Health England and UCL Institute of Health Equity. September 2015. 34 Relationships in the 21st Century: The Forgotten Foundation of Mental Health and Wellbeing, https://www.mentalhealth.org.uk/publications/relationships-21st-centuryforgotten-foundation-mental-health-and-wellbeing, accessed January 2017. 35 Ditch the Label (2015). The Annual Bullying Survey 2015, http://ditchthelabel.org/ downloads/abs2015.pdf, accessed January 2017. 36 Mental Health Foundation (2012) The Lonely Society? London: The Mental Health Foundation. 37 Cacioppo, J. T., Hawkley, L. C., Thisted, R. A. (2010) Perceived Social Isolation Makes Me Sad: 5-Year Cross-Lagged Analyses of Loneliness and Depressive Symptomatology in the Chicago Health, Aging, and Social Relations Study. Psychology and Aging, Vol. 25, No. 2, pp. 453–463. 38 http://www.ageuk.org.uk/health-wellbeing/loneliness/, accessed January 2017. 39 Tonnies, F. (2001) (ed. Jose Harris) Community and Civil Society, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 40 McLellan, D. (1983) Karl Marx: The Legacy. London: BBC Publications. 41 Bauman, Z. (2001) Individualised Society. Cambridge: Polity. 42 Hobsbawm, E. (1981) Observations on the Debate: in M. Jacques, & F. Mulhern (eds.) The Forward March of Labour Halted? London: New Left Books, pp. 167–182. 43 Unions Are in Trouble. But Some Are Learning New Tricks – From the Bosses, https:// www.economist.com/news/international/21575752-unions-are-trouble-some-arelearning-new-tricksfrom-bosses-unions-inc, 6th April 2013. 44 Biehl, J., Good, B., & Kleinman, A. (2007) Subjectivity. Berkeley: University of California Press, p. 2. 45 Putnam, R. D. (2000) Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community. New York: Simon & Schuster. 46 Bell, D. & Held, V. (1969) The Community Revolution. The Public Interest, Vol. 16 p. 142, quoted in Putnam, R. D. (2000) Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community. New York: Simon & Schuster, p. 17. 47 Lim, C. & Laurence, J. (2015) Doing Good when Times Are Bad: Volunteering Behaviour in Economic Hard Times. British Journal of Sociology, Vol. 66, No. 2, pp. 319–344. 48 Lim, C. (2008) Social Networks and Political Participation: How Do Networks Matter? Social Forces, Vol. 87, No. 2, pp. 961–982. 49 Hall, P. A. (1999) Social Capital in Britain. British Journal of Political Science, Vol. 29, No. 3, pp. 417–461. 50 The 2010/2011 Citizenship Survey Questionnaire, www.nationalarchives.gov.uk. See also www.communities.gov.uk/documents/pdf and Lim, C. & Laurence, J. (2015) Doing Good when Times Are Bad: Volunteering Behaviour in Economic Hard Times. British Journal of Sociology, Vol. 66, No. 2, pp. 319–344.

98  Lonely exodus of the 21st century 51 Changes in the Value and Division of Unpaid Volunteering in the UK: 2000 to 2015, Office for National Statistics, 16th March 2017. 52 How Lonely Are We? Evangelical Alliance, http://www.eauk.org/culture/statistics/ how-lonely-are-we.cfm, January 2017. 53 Myers, D. G. (2000) The American Paradox. London: Yale University Press. 54 http://instituteofideas.com/events/the_academy_2017#.WKHcU4XXLIV, July 2017 programme. 55 Willats, S. (2016) Vision and Reality. London: Uniformbooks. Also author client notes. 56 Sennett, R. (1973) The Fall of Public Man. New York: Vintage. 57 Rainie, L. & Wellman, B. (2014) Networked: The New Social Operating System. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. 58 Myers, D. G. (2000) The American Paradox. London: Yale University Press.

8

‘So near yet so far’ Simmel, the stranger and the estranged

“The modern is defined by the way in which prior valences of social life … are reconstituted through a constructivist reframing of social practices in relation to basic categories of existence common to all humans: time, space, embodiment, performance and knowledge”.1

In a campaign speech before his election as President of France, Emmanuel Macron said that the EU must reform or face the possibility of a French campaign to leave – ‘Frexit’. I’m a pro-European, I defended this constantly during this election because I believe it’s extremely important for French people and for the place of our country in globalisation. However we must face the situation. People are angry.2 The same day, his opponent, Marine Le Pen, proclaimed on the stump that the difference now was not between right and left but those pursuing globalisation against those who protected national identity. Passions around what was happening to France and assimilation or not of immigrants raised the question of what is French society about. Is it a Republic where everyone is welcome if they play by the rules? Or is there a concept called ‘France’; a spiritual entity symbolised by Joan of Arc? For Marx, the process of self-creation through realising a new consciousness is the gateway to self-emancipation of the working classes. The argument we are exploring is that ‘distance’ constitutes a lens on the social processes behind Brexit, Trump and populism. Many citizens feel locked out of the system, pushed to the margins. People ‘over there somewhere’, faces you never see, have control over our destinies. The sigh and cry behind such contemporary alienation can be articulated as a question of distance. Responses to distance, that moves from the physical to the existential, fuel the new consciousness of our times, expressed as ‘we count, we matter’. Gathering around it numerous strands of protest against the impersonal, the ‘distance’ hypothesis is more than class based. Goodhart argues that several decades of greater economic and cultural openness in the West have not benefitted everyone. A populist politics of culture

100  ‘So near yet so far’ and identity has successfully challenged the traditional politics of left and right, creating a new division: between the mobile ‘achieved’ identity of the people from ‘Anywhere’, and the marginalised, roots-based identity of the people from ‘Somewhere’. This schism accounts for the Brexit vote, the election of Donald Trump, the decline of the centre-left and the rise of populism across Europe.3 Bridges used to symbolise the connection between place and people. But now, distance is shrinking. This was the achievement of modernity that saw steam ships, railways and the telegraph knit the globe together in the 19th century before going on to collapse space and time in the spectacular communications and transport revolutions of the past generation. The near irrelevance of geography is a distinguishing feature of our times. It is similar to the way that, thanks to neuro-science, the human brain is increasingly understood as a pattern of connections. Ontologies of connection are de-centred and our view of the world much more dispersed. Yet what we also find is that this stupendous achievement of late modernity is generating a counteraction; a reaction that is existential. Many late-modern people are adopting a highly cautious attitude towards the nearness of those who were previously far by urging policies that proclaim: ‘keep your distance!’ Particularly when it comes to immigration, rapid social change that seems to result in the world moving next door is threatening. Identity is in danger of being swamped by the outsider who threatens to become the insider. Those who perceive themselves as former insiders, now locked out, have to find someone with outsider status – like Donald Trump – to come to save them. Hilary Clinton would not do. She was too much the insider who had let the strangers in. Modernity constitutes a re-formulation of time and space. Compression followed comprehension. As Paul James notes in the quote that begins this chapter, “The modern is defined by the way in which prior valences of social life … are reconstituted through a constructivist reframing of social practices in relation to basic categories of existence common to all humans: time, space, embodiment, performance and knowledge. The word ‘reconstituted’ here explicitly does not mean replaced”.4 Embodiment is central to our way of understanding our place in the world. The defined boundary of our physicality represents ‘us’. Similarly, the body politic (or the imagined space and precise legal territoriality of national writ) defines nation states. It is this crucial question of identity that is under threat when distance collapses and others come into our sacred space that sets out who we are. Under modern conditions of life, distance becomes salient because it is a symbol of social relations. Those who are perceived to represent distant, invisible forces that shape our lives and pull the strings are not welcome. Despite geography being far less important in an age of instant access or high-speed trains, planes and automobiles, there are strong countervailing drives towards bringing governing forces nearer. Even in a world of cyberspace, we want those who shape our existence to step out of the shadows and be one of us; authentic rather than synthetic (neither wooden nor plastic!). On the one hand then, the physical and technological factors that collapse distance can remove the barriers and create a

‘So near yet so far’ 101 greater sense of interconnection. On the other, we want to protest against such globalising forces and maintain distance while at the same time bring our many rulers closer to home. The funeral of distance is incomplete until we have resisted faceless forces and brought control to a sphere that is more recognisably ‘us’. Collapsing existential distance runs in parallel with the near annihilation of geography. Yet these drivers of social life are not natural allies. Some welcome an interconnected world, an open society plugged into an open globe. Others reject it. The tendency is for those who believe walls and borders should be strengthened to ensure foreign faces keep their distance while at the same time protesting the distance of faceless powers that rule. Distance thus plays out in two contrasting ways. One is physical, the other is existential. The death of distance as a dominant feature of modernity seems to go hand in hand with a strong reaction against those who are far. One is to be welcomed; the other is not. ‘Bring them nearer’, we cry, when it comes to the stranger who is invisible. Such ambivalence towards distance is a marked characteristic of the contested modernities we inhabit now. The pilgrim is just passing through. We will go on to ask how these tendencies are an inevitable result of ‘voice and choice society’ before probing the big question of ‘why’ these differing reactions to distance are polarising societies. In the 19th century, ocean-going ships played a fundamental role in the geopolitical transformation of the world and its shrinking – the so-called ‘great acceleration’. In Giddens’s view, it was increased ‘social speed’ that led to post-Fordism and more flexible capitalism. It is the internet that multiplies connection today. Connections are entities in themselves. Global connections may be conceptualised as providing mediators; that which happens in-between different frames of reference. There is no simple change in resolution that connects one perspective of collapsing geographical distance to the existential sense of distance that people react against. These are what the intellectual historian Miles Ogburn calls ‘frictions between potentially incompatible worlds’.5 Walls and borders demarcate territoriality and thus constrain. To some extent, we are dealing with familiar ground about the construction of difference on the contemporary scene and who claims to be ‘the centre’ against which ‘the other’ is further away. Much social analysis is performed at the borders; focusing on those who are on the edge and the processes by which they move from the margins to the centre. Edges allow for entry and exit. They exist in time as well as space. The urban design theorist Kevin Lynch analysed urban interaction in terms of paths, nodes, districts, landmarks and edges. For Lynch, edges represented “boundaries between two phases, linear breaks in continuity … they may be barriers, more or less penetrable, which close one region off from another”.6 The philosopher Derrida de-constructed the ‘either/or’ patterns that governed the world. Such binary thinking lay behind West versus East, North versus South, male versus female, culture and nature, the social and the self, agency and structure, knowledge as being split into arts or sciences, the economy as production or consumption. Derrida said, “We are not dealing with peaceful co-existence of

102  ‘So near yet so far’ a vis-a-vis but violent hierarchy”.7 Social pressure is often expressed in binaries, oppositions that are set in contrast with those with most power. Forms of binary divisions implying lesser worth could be: •• •• •• ••

the city and urban life versus rural experience (encoding anti-urbanism or urban superiority)8; (mind versus body) – suburbs versus inner city – left versus right; normal versus abnormal; public versus private sector – orient versus occident – north versus south.

In this violent hierarchy, pre-eminent terms preserve their status by excluding and marginalising what they are not. Groups, individuals and ways of thinking assume they are centre; the ‘Other’ is marginalised or excluded from the circle altogether. “By assembling the heterogenous possibilities of meaning within language into fixed dichotomies, binarism reduces the potential of difference into polar opposites”.9 Arguably, retaking control of borders to slash immigration is binarism in action. In an interconnected world, the collapse of distance and the irrelevance of geography mean that the centre is everywhere. Spatial relations are no longer the only condition of human relations. The nexus of global forces is disbursed; the neural network map of the social brain looks very different. It maps also on to the ambiguity of space-time compression described by Giddens’s theory of time-space distanciation. The objective qualities of space and time have been so revolutionised we are forced to alter how we represent the world to ourselves. Giddens refers to a process of disembedding “which tears space away from place by fostering relations between ‘absent’ others, locationally distant from any given situation of face-to-face interaction”.10 The effect is of “lifting out of social relationships from local contexts of interaction and their restructuring across time and space”. Time and space become distant from each other. The need for a physical space to communicate is becoming less central to our lives – hence humans are lifted out of time and space. Harvey’s idea of time-space compression is another important marker of how, in a globalising world, those who live in very distant places are able to experience the same things at the same time. Though contested categories, Harvey thought that, for modernists, space means to be subordinated to larger social plans; for postmodernists, space is independent and autonomous. Contemporary people inhabit the same space, having the same experiences during the same time period.11 In contemporary social psychology, another relevant theory is that of Henri Tajfel who argued that the point about the groups people belong to was that these are markers of pride and self-esteem. Groups give us a sense of social identity: a sense of belonging to the social world. To augment self-image, people boost the status of the group of which they are part.12 Self-image [read value] rises through discriminating and holding prejudiced views against the out group that people do not belong to. ‘Migrants are stealing our jobs’!! Therefore, we divide the world into ‘them’ and ‘us’. This is what Tajfel saw as the core of social identity theory.

‘So near yet so far’ 103 Such bifurcation comes as the in-group responds negatively to or discriminates against the out-group to enhance their self-image. Social identity is not something foreign or artificial attached to a person: it is a vital part of the person.

Near and far However, it was well before contemporary societies generated such ambivalence towards an interconnected world that George Simmel wrestled in an earlier sociology with the concept of those who are near and far at the same time. Simmel differentiates the stranger both from the ‘outsider’ who has no specific relation to a group and from the ‘wanderer’ who comes today and leaves tomorrow. In this conceptualisation, the distance of the stranger is emphasised more than his proximity.13 It is in his Fundamental Problems of Sociology that Simmel emphasises that one of the responsibilities of sociology is to reflect on its epistemological and metaphysical underpinnings. The conditions, fundamental concepts and presuppositions of concrete research cannot be taken care of by research itself since it is based upon them. Simmel lists categories of social relationships that we should expect to find in most societies, such as super-ordination and subordination, domination and freedom, hierarchy, ritual and ‘the stranger’. He posits the notion of the stranger as a social category, noting four particular aspects: (1) the stranger as one not fully integrated into society, but living on its margins; (2) the stranger as trader and intermediary between cultures; (3) the stranger as objective and free; and (4) the stranger as the fully other, deprived of humanity. Because of the relevance of this to the quantum-esque world of the early 21st century where superposition suggests you cannot have location and time (where and when) concurrently, it is worth exploring this in more depth. The very concept of an in-group requires the concept of an out-group; the notion of a home community is understood against the concept of the stranger, the individual (or individuals) on the borders of any in-group. Wandering is the liberation from every given point in space. It is the contrast pole to fixity at a given point. In Simmel’s words: “Here, by stranger, we do not mean … the wanderer, who comes today and leaves tomorrow but he who comes today and stays tomorrow”.14 The stranger is a potential wanderer: located for the time being in a spatial group but who does not belong to it. The stranger fosters a unity of nearness and remoteness implicit in every human relation. In relationship to him, distance means that he, who is close by, is far, and strangeness means that he, who also is far, is actually near. The stranger belongs to the group itself. In relation to the stranger, that which increases distance and actually repels also fosters a pattern of coordination and interaction.15 The stranger stirs up ambivalence. He or she is not organically connected and has only some general qualities in common with members of the home community. Their identity is rooted in the commonness of specific differences which marks them out as ‘belonging’ in contrast to everything outside of it. Relationships between the participants in a given community are specific rather

104  ‘So near yet so far’ than a more generalised social identity that comes from membership of a larger entity such as Europe or global society. The stranger is close to us to the extent that we share characteristics of an occupational nature (read ‘nurses’, for example) or wider international groupings. Yet the stranger is also far because what we have in common also connects countless others. When only that which is fairly general binds us, it is insufficient to remedy the sense that there is a strangeness of origin. Strangers (read ‘refugees’) are not really conceived as individuals, but as strangers of a particular type. Distance adheres to them as much as the element of nearness.16 It is the synthesis of nearness and distance which denotes the formal position of the stranger who has to be in close relation to the in-group in order to be repelled. European Jews were in that subject position for centuries, paying tax as Jews rather than property owners, intruding as external players into the economic group while often resented as ‘the outsider’. The concept of the eponymous ‘Port Jew’ carried the burden of the stranger who is both near and far. A stranger as wanderer was signified by the Jewish stranger, depicted in the story of Ahasver, the Wandering Jew, cursed to roam the world until the return of Jesus. Such representation was used from at least the 17th century onwards, portraying Jews as cursed, and was mobilised after Simmel’s death in Nazi propaganda. Interestingly, it parallels Simmel’s biography as offspring of parents who had converted from Judaism, subject to the typical marginalisation of Jews in late 19th-century Germany. Many Muslims evoked a strong passion related to those covering their faces. These strangers are not wanderers, but are those permanently at the margins. Perhaps in this era of globalisation, the stranger takes the form of the trader or external producer. The trader as stranger is not needed when an economy does not trade or a country pursues economic nationalism.17 In many societies, Romany gypsy peoples have been the group that threatens a particular vision of ethnicity held by the mainstream. This sociology engages with the conceptualisation of Parks and Stonequist about the stranger as a ‘marginal man’. Immigrants in the USA were oriented towards assimilation into a new nation. Yet Parks and Stonequist also emphasise the positive role these new immigrants play as intermediaries between cultures, as cosmopolitans or internationalists; that is, those versed in one or more cultures, and whose identities transcend that of the local groups, possessed of broad experiences of the world not accessible to local peoples.18 For the most part, however, attitudes to the stranger are negative. Attributing the trouble within a community to outsiders within it creates potentials for xenophobes and scapegoats. Rather than being rooted in the country through which he or she is wandering, the stranger is an unassimilated intruder, embodying foreign values that are to be distrusted. Because they are on the boundaries of society, the strangers do not have the same power as those dominant in a culture to define the relationship.19 All this is not unlike existential anxiety about life brilliantly conveyed by Camus’s novel, L’Étranger (translated in many English language editions as The Outsider). Meursault has a glaring fault in the eyes of society. He observes the

‘So near yet so far’ 105 facts of life and death from the outside. He lacks basic emotions expected of him. Individual lives, as Camus described, have no rational meaning, hence we strive to create order and meaning: we are estranged from ourselves.20 This is the pantomime of the absurd. It is what we have been left with after the death of distance generated such ambiguities and contested modernities. What we are left with is, as Bauman signifies, ‘life in fragments’. Contemporary life creates strangers and pilgrims, those who are passing through yet who have ambivalent connections with fixed places. We will probe why it is that distance and not just difference evokes sharply differing reactions.

Notes   1 James, P. (2015) They Have Never Been Modern? Then What Is the Problem with Those Persians?. In S. Pascoe, V. Rey, and P. James (eds.) Making Modernity from the Mashriq to the Maghreb. Melbourne: Arena Publications, pp. 31–54.   2 BBC World News, 1st May 2017.   3 Goodhart, D. (2017) The Road to Somewhere: The Populist Revolt and the Future of Politics. London: C. Hurst & Co. Ltd.   4 James, P. (2015) They Have Never Been Modern? Then What Is the Problem with Those Persians?. In S. Pascoe, V. Rey, and P. James (eds.) Making Modernity from the Mashriq to the Maghreb. Melbourne: Arena Publications, pp. 31–54.   5 Ogburn, M. (2013) It’s Not What You Know … : Encounters between Go-Betweens and the Geography of Knowledge. Modern Intellectual History, Vol. 10, No. 1, p. 170.   6 Lynch, K. (1960) The Image of the City. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, p. 47.   7 Derrida, J. (1981) Positions. Trans. Bass, A. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, p. 41.  8 Jerram, L. (2011) Streetlife: The Untold Story of Europe’s Twentieth Century. Oxford: Oxford University Press.   9 Rutherford, J. (ed.) (1990) Identity: Community, Culture, Difference. London: Lawrence & Wishart, pp. 21–22. 10 Giddens, A. (1990) The Consequences of Modernity. Cambridge: Polity Press, p. 18. 11 Harvey, D. (1990) The Condition of Postmodernity: An Enquiry into the Origins of Cultural Change. Cambridge, MA: Blackwell. 12 Tajfel, H. (2010) Human Groups and Social Categories. Cambridge, MA: Cambridge University Press. 13 Wolff, K. H. (1967) Introduction. The Sociology of Georg Simmel. Trans. and ed. K. H. Wolff. New York: The Free Press, pp. xvii–lxiv. 14 Simmel, G. (1967) Fundamental Problems of Sociology. The Sociology of Georg Simmel. Trans. and ed. K. H. Wolff. New York: The Free Press; The Metropolis and Mental Life. The Sociology of Georg Simmel. Trans. and ed. K. H. Wolff. New York: The Free Press, p. 402. 15 Levine, D. N. (2004) Some Key Problems in Simmel’s Work. Georg Simmel. Ed. L. A. Coser. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, pp. 97–115. 16 Arnold, D. P. (2000) Nineteenth Century Life Sciences and Hegel’s Organic View of Systems. Diss. Universität Bielefeld. http://bieson.ub.unibielefeld.de/volltexte/2003/ 305/index.html, accessed April 2017. 17 Spykman, N. (1964) The Social Theory of Georg Simmel. New York: Russell & Russell. 18 Stonequist, E. V. (1961) The Marginal Man: A Study in Personality and Culture Conflict. New York: Russell & Russell. 19 Coser, L. (2003) Masters of Sociological Thought. Longrove, IL: Waveland Press, Inc. 20 Camus, A. (1961) The Outsider. Harmondsworth: Penguin.

9

The rise of voice and choice (thinking like a consumer)

“Globalisation acts in the interests of the most powerful corporate concerns to siphon profit out of local communities into global pockets. Conversely, localisation rebalances the economy by redirecting profits back into rebuilding local economies worldwide rather than serving global competition in which the poorest and most vulnerable lose every time”.1

At the same time as the shift has occurred in the mood of Western publics, we are witnessing extraordinary global forces re-structuring the world economy. Far more power resides not with the producer interest but with consumers – and they know it! The golden age of globalisation has been a golden age of consumer choice. The ‘user experience’ style of thinking has taken over. Chakhoyan observed that “international institutions need to learn from Facebook, WeChat, and Twitter to deploy technology and connect directly to the people”. They need to adopt, embrace and internalise the ‘user experience’ style of thinking, leverage the existing social network infrastructure to connect to individuals from every corner of the world, engage with them, learn about their issues and develop response mechanisms.2 Central to the conceptualisation of the self in contemporary forms of capitalism is that people think of themselves in new ways. They see themselves as subjects possessed of a high value. We are not just part of a producer economy, we are consumers; not easily content, restless and quizzical. Complete consumption is now a way of life. Consumer spending drives modern economies. The Bretton Woods conference in 1944 created the foundations for a huge rise in international trade, enabled by new institutions such as the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund (IMF).3 Increased trade in goods, greater flow of investment restored prosperity in the 1950s. But it was demand for products that went hand in hand with the means to purchase them. After the stagnation of the 1970s, there was a new phase of capitalist world development with the accession of Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan. There had been growing dissatisfaction with the role of government in the economy alongside the welfare capitalism associated with social democracy. The turn to the market led to a freeing up of regulation and reduction of trade tariffs (the Uruguay Round). Communist regimes began to totter and then collapsed spectacularly. They had

Rise and voice of choice 107 been very good at producing iron and steel but not the items people wanted, such as their own car. 1989 represented the revolt of the frustrated consumer. Capitalism had finally won over Communism as a way of organising society and the economy. As we have been noting, the way the world works is different – and not just for Western nations. Politics is far more a grassroots affair. There is a new mood including a reaction against the statism of former generations towards an agenda acknowledging the need to release free enterprise and personal responsibility (strong themes in the new democratic economy that emerged to some extent following the economic crash of 2008). Corporate Europe used to be held back by the heavy hand of the state but the trend towards privatising industries, make them answerable to investors and ‘go global’, has transformed things. The most striking feature of business today is the entrenchment of a group of large, powerful firms at the heart of the global economy. Although companies such as Coca-Cola and Shell had operations that spanned the world in the 20th century, a crop of new multinationals wanted to be truly global. Internationalising their business became the strategic priority of firms with global reach, selling to new markets horizontally as well as locating production and supply chains that were anywhere cost-effective. Yet in the new times that contested modernities highlight, the increasingly integrated global pattern has gone into reverse. In 2016, investment that transcends borders may have fallen by 10–15%. It is no longer true that global firms inexorably are growing faster and making ever-greater profits.4 The retreat of the global company as it no longer achieves superior performance matches the decentralising trends we are noting throughout this book. As the quote at the start of this chapter sets out, localism is gaining ground once again: Globalisation acts in the interests of the most powerful corporate concerns to siphon profit out of local communities into global pockets. Conversely, localisation rebalances the economy by redirecting profits back into rebuilding local economies worldwide rather than serving global competition in which the poorest and most vulnerable lose every time.5 A centrally planned economy is a failed model – as China’s economic explosion attests. Doing economics as if people matter is a growing emphasis; witness the rise of social enterprise amidst a recurrent emphasis on consumer rights as businesses fuss about that most precious of all commodities, the consumer. Small businesses can enter market space and, under the right conditions, thrive. The lifetime of a FTSE 100 company is falling fast due to churning. Though insurgent companies have a hard time against big concentrated power that controls a market, we could be seeing the eclipse of the capitalist model of organising society. Either that or the democratisation of productive forces by consumers is its latest evolution. The old corporate top-down machine model is passé. Old state monopolies have been broken up. Traditional lines between producers and consumers have blurred. The communications internet, energy internet and logistics internet are converging to create a neural network at a global level that connects everything.6

108  Rise and voice of choice From bitcoins creating a dispersed public ledger to nimble enterprises seizing opportunities, virtually everywhere we are seeing new forms of economic organisation. Mostly, they benefit the consumer. The lure of consuming is everywhere. China is full-wired into the global economy, though on its own terms. The American taxi-ride-hailing firm Uber lost vast sums in China trying to compete with Didi Chuxing, a native rival. WeChat is the omnipresent Chinese hub for all internet activity from dawn to dusk and beyond. It provides a platform through which customers access other services and, crucially, it allows them to navigate their lives without spending cash or deploying plastic. This is the dream of the cashless society that has haunted the internet ever since its inception.7 Traditional businesses are being unbundled. The digital economy poses changes and challenges that are vast in scope and urgent in timescale. It is growing exponentially. In Egypt, for example, 90% of the young adult population do not have bank accounts. But many do have smart phones. ‘Going digital’ and ‘mobile-first’ strategies are fundamental to how maximising customer experience maps on to vast new opportunities for growth and investments. Robotics and artificial intelligence (AI) are now prevalent in wealth management. Completely new vistas of interaction and customer service are possible. In India, e-commerce firms are in a frenzied fight. The prize is the growth of online consumers that will exceed every other country. From e-commerce sales of about $16 billion according to Morgan Stanley, the online retail market by 2020 was forecast to grow seven-fold. Amazon wants India to be its second biggest market after the USA, “to transform how India buys, how India sells, and even transform lives”.8 A few companies in the sharing economy are performing particularly well, overtaking established competitors in traditional industries. Yet, there are commentators who counter that these commercially successful companies are not really part of the sharing economy. Others question whether the sharing economy is actually a new phenomenon or, for example, if it is simply renting by another name. The sharing economy has become confusing in recent years as technology enabled diverse business models to emerge under the system. Many find the growth of new online platforms to be disorienting. Uber is now the world’s largest taxi company (owning no taxis); Facebook, the world’s largest media owner (creating no content); Alibaba, the world’s most valuable retailer (with no inventory); and Airbnb, the world’s largest accommodation provider (owning no property).9

‘People-first’ economics New ways of thinking about economics are in the air. Economists are often accused of ‘physics envy’ – concerned above everything with constructing precise models rather than the messy world of real people. At the heart of the new economics is seeing humans as very different from the rational, calculating machines that prize efficient working. The ‘adaptive markets hypothesis’, for example, suggests that human beings make decisions through shortcuts. They adapt their behaviour to make new patterns. What may be termed ‘emotional cognition’ means that emotions play a major role.10

Rise and voice of choice 109 Rationality has been central to modernity. In the thought of someone like Kant, freedom means the ability to be governed by reason. The political presence of visceral emotion could be changing all that. John Ruskin would have understood that wealth is synonymous with wellbeing. An economy that exploits people along with the environment can hardly bring sustainability and happiness. As Ruskin put it, “there is no wealth but life, life in all its powers of love, joy and of admiration. That country is the richest which nourishes the greatest number of noble and happy human beings”.11 This was an insight grasped by Schumacher. Small is beautiful. The market should be neither deified or reified. Psychologically attuned economists are exploring the implications of research about happiness. It is problematic and often too consumerist. Nevertheless, the central economic dilemma – how you allocate scarce resources – is after all a problem of desire. Scarce items are deemed to be of greater value; ‘plenty’ seems to be inversely correlated with ‘wanting’. One main finding of the research is that gaining extra income, winning the lottery or seeing your share prices rise will bring a short-term boost, after which emotions return to conditions of baseline happiness.12 Or the movement towards social entrepreneurs could be cited as an example of a more ‘people oriented’ approach. This is a very different approach to the topdown model of addressing social problems which creates dependency and fails to address the issues. A business model is very clearly cited by such leaders in social business as Andrew Mawson in the UK as providing a far more responsive environment, which releases the energy of local people.13 The ‘dead hand of government’ is being challenged by new thinking that connects those immediately impacted by problem and solution. So it is that the social economy is growing stealthily as people take their future into their own hands. The sharing economy movement began with locally based, grassroots-funded initiatives such as tool libraries and time-banks, but now seems to be led by global, venture-backed corporations and new forms of corporate power. While the sharing economy is exceeding most expectations of its business potential, it is disappointing those who were more excited by its social promise. As online platforms have scaled, they have found it increasingly difficult to sustain their initial social impact. In the participative paradigm that is emerging, a new economy is being shaped. Companies serious about climate change, through peer to peer lending schemes described as shadow banking to social enterprise and crowd-sourced investment like Kick-starter and sharing platforms abound. Some of these relate to the Gift Economy in which we borrow and lend items we do not use often and can therefore be leased and lent rather than owned. Why, after all, do we need to own everything? Through the new technology acting as midwife to the social economy, collaborative projects and democratic initiatives are becoming common. On contemporary landscapes, a hundred flowers are blooming. These are different to the kind of initiatives envisaged and prescribed by Chairman Mao. New forms of economics and finance include credit unions, co-operatives and social enterprise. Such straws in the wind operate within the rules of the global, interlocking structure of capitalism, not outside it. Along with many companies

110  Rise and voice of choice operating by conventional business models, they help make capitalism a more humane place, renewing the economic and social order through the moral order; ensuring that a business or bank behaves with correctness in the absence of relevant controls. There are many voices campaigning for an economy that works for people and communities. Power must be put in the hands of people, fostering bottom-up economic growth and taking advantage of the many innovations that the UK’s social sector has created. From community energy to housing, from business to public services, the growing emphasis is that economic and social policy can and must reinforce the social economy.14 The contemporary landscape is unthinkable without the drive towards replacing monolithic operatives. Yet in the last provision of social services with a political economy replete with social enterprise, mutuals and co-generation, an anthropological shift has taken place – a trend towards choice, self-determination, towards consumers being active. No longer acting as deferential or passive, the unit of contemporary society is an active individual, a consuming individual, and yet people possessing a conceptualisation of themselves as networked individuals.

Consumers of the world unite … Chronic shortage was the problem of centrally planned economies. In capitalist societies by contrast, consumer rights are an inalienable right of our times. The law protects our consumer rights when we buy goods or services and things go wrong. It may be problems with credit cards, faulty goods, counterfeit goods, poor service, problems with contracts, problems with builders or rogue traders.15 Consumer protection has become an organised social movement with powerful consumer organisations operating in the field, who challenge corporate power and hold governments to account. The movement has spawned a plethora of grassroots activism to promote consumer interest by reforming the practices of corporations or policies of government. Consumer activism took off in the USA. Lobbyists in 1960s America used the term ‘consumerism’ in a pejorative way though demands for product testing and raising standards in purchases go back to at least President Herbert Hoover.16 The public was clearly being set up as a hundred million ‘guinea pigs’ and the only way to restore market confidence was through consumer regulation. Despite sensational, destructive propaganda, I know for example, that when I buy nationally known drug products I don’t have to wonder about their quality, purity, and ability to give me my money’s worth in satisfaction. The real guinea pigs are the people who experiment – take chances – with products which are NOT backed by a well-known house.17 Psychoanalysis contributed to the growth of consumerism. The form of capitalism taking off in 1920s America was fuelled by a psychological reading of people’s desires. Freud’s nephew Edward Bernays helped to create a vision of free market

Rise and voice of choice 111 capitalism – and became a wealthy man.18 As the World’s Fair of 1939 went on to demonstrate, democracy and capitalism could co-exist. A new form of democracy was fuelled by business responding to people’s wants and needs – passive consumers! The counter-reaction was both visceral and dominant. Citizens or consumer organisations who criticised corporations were un-American. Nevertheless, consumer movements were here to stay and indeed spread across the globe. As market de-regulation unfolded at the end of the 1980s followed by the dissolution of the Soviet Union, consumer protection became ever more important. A plethora of activist organisations sprang up everywhere, often associated with human rights concerns, economic development and women’s rights. Amidst the activity of powerful corporates and multinationals, many were founded by women, to give women more equal access to basic goods and services and to make connections between women. Indeed, women’s organisations and consumer groups often worked hand in hand. In both India and Africa, consumer groups were among the fastest-growing of new social movements, integrated into international development groups. They had an enormous fight on their hands. The forces of economic liberalisation and globalisation were immensely powerful.19 Nevertheless, consumers in these countries were only too happy to reap the harvest: touching screens made by the very companies they decried. Who is this ‘it’ to which I become an ‘it’? Consuming is the other side of the coin in which the economic landscape of our time can de-personalise us. Whether we worked in manufacturing and our working lives oblige us to turn out tangible things, items for sale; or we worked in financial or legal professions and were producers of services; or we laboured in institutions and were producers of educational output – what we are doing is acquiring status and offering our time and skills in return for money. This enables us to become a consumer so we can acquire objects. The social order of shopping, however, leaves a disturbing legacy of restless replacement and a quest for something new. In a social media age, even identities are up for sale and the self becomes a consumer product. Our relationship to things is complex. The world over, regardless of their level of material culture, people talk about themselves in terms of possessions. But what happens to humans shaped by the new social order of consuming? When we were production units, we were reduced to our use-value for what we could produce. Yet in late capitalism, everything has been turned into a consumer product, even the body. To those caught up with consuming, all they can feel is a sense of inadequacy. It is a form of worship that calls for imitation and obedience. We know that we are imperfect but material things have the power to complete our lives. The non-stop culture colonises us, causing us to judge people by what they have and define ourselves by the level of materialism. This is a world of more, drawing its consumer customers through the steel and glass cathedrals of our time. Defining ourselves by what we buy and not just what we do, late modernity constructs its subjects and then imprisons them within a straitjacket of imitation. In its endless pursuit of things and objects to populate the landscapes of our lives, the objectification of humans occurs as the boundaries of our self grow

112  Rise and voice of choice wider to take in objects. In psychoanalysis, object relations theory was developed to show how things became a projection of the internal drama of the infant. If one adopts the approach of Melanie Klein,20 we take objects into ourselves to reverse the separation brought about by birth. What is inside us and outside us is the same. Or there is Winnicott’s idea of a transitional object (blankets or toys) as a child strives to let go of mother.21 Maturity demands that we allow our world to become populated with other human images, not objects. Do we thrive when we become an object too? As Karl Marx observed: I am ugly, but I can buy the most beautiful women. Which means to say that I am not ugly, for the effect of ugliness, its repelling power, is destroyed by money. As an individual I am lame, but money procures me 24 legs. Consequently, I am not lame … Does not money transform all incapacities into their opposite?22 Production has shaped our world but so has consuming, aided and abetted by the flickering images of television. Consumers are treated as objects by the producers, intent on selling their products. They are also kings and queens! But beyond that, there is something about the act of unreflective consuming that has de-personalised. Advertisements both represent and feed the demand for the reproduction of lifestyles based on wealth and privilege. Advertising now stands for something about us – symbolic of status and lifestyle rather than intrinsic quality. Material goods double up as signs of status.23 Consumer objects became a means of classifying behaviour and social groups. Advertisers generated symbols of difference and status that transferred meaning to consumers.24 The object became a signifier of the self. Lifestyles belong to consumer groups who display their life narrative by assembling a designer package of clothes, appearances, practices or experiences.25 Chris Anderson asks what happens when there is almost unlimited choice, when everything becomes available to everyone? And when the combined value of millions of items that only sell in small quantities equals or even exceeds the value of a handful of best-sellers? The future of business, Anderson argues, does not lie in the high-volume end of a traditional demand curve, but in what used to be regarded as misses – an endlessly long tail of the same curve. As our world is transformed by the internet and the near infinite choice it offers consumers, so traditional business models are being overturned; new truths revealed about what consumers want and how they want to get it.26

Customers first The power of consuming nowhere shows up more than in the trend towards customer service. Customers are consumers on the doorstep of any product. In Hyundai, the strapline boasts of building connections with customers in this way: “We promote a customer-driven corporate culture by providing the best quality

Rise and voice of choice 113 and impeccable service with all of our efforts aimed at satisfying our customers”.27 The concept of relationship management was shaped by larger societal expectations. Such ‘interactive marketing’ keeps them coming back for more. Cottle estimated that high-quality service firms are twice as profitable as others.28 In the UK, the Institute of Customer Service Annual Conference brings together best practice in the field. In vogue now is customer relationship management (CRM), a term that refers to practices, strategies and technologies that companies use to manage and analyse customer interactions and data throughout the customer lifecycle, with the goal of improving business relationships with customers, helping customer retention and sales growth. CRM is designed to compile information on customers across different channels – or points of contact between customer and company.29 A particularly postmodern form of consumer pressure came through the founding of TripAdvisor in February 2000. Founded by Stephen Kaufer and others, the original idea was not a user-generated social media site to swap reviews. “We started as a site where we were focused more on those official words from guidebooks or newspapers or magazines. We also had a button in the very beginning that said, ‘Visitors add your own review’, and boy, did that just take off. Pretty soon the number of average consumer reviews far surpassed the number of ‘professional reviews’”. The site became mainstream for what the normal traveller was saying wherever he or she was going. In April 2012, the company launched a connection to Facebook to allow users to select reviews from people in their particular social group. By 2014, a survey found that TripAdvisor was the most widely recognised, used and trusted travel website. The company itself claims to be the world’s largest travel site. TripAdvisor is not without its critics – for allowing unsubstantiated anonymous reviews to be posted about any hotel, B&B, pub or restaurant.30 Its claims to provide trustworthy and honest reviews from travellers were investigated by the UK Advertising Standards Authority.31 Wally Olin, guru of a brand revolution, urged companies to think seriously about the collective identity of their organisation and how that translates into a unique selling proposition (USP). In his hands, branding became not just an addon to company strategy but an integral part of long-term strategy. The essential point that Olin grasped is that the most precious resource in a noisy, crowded market is the attention of consumers. Consumers are not merely looking for utility in purchases. They are looking for meaning.32 Whatever the merits of consuming as social signifier, it is clear that there is a considerable emphasis now on customer service. Customer feedback and evaluation is routinely sought, however much this is a ‘tick-box’ exercise. The marketing guru David Hieatt argues that “the most important brands in the world make us feel something. They do that because they have something they want to change. And as customers, we want to be part of that change. These companies have a reason to exist over and above making a profit: they have a purpose”. With its unusual song ‘Buy the World a Coke’, Coca-Cola understood back in 1971 that they were not just urging consumers to ’buy the world a Coke’, they were portraying a positive message of hope and love. A multicultural collection

114  Rise and voice of choice of teenagers appeared on a hillside singing the jingle. The song made marketing history as it was then re-recorded by The New Seekers as ‘I’d Like to Teach the World to Sing’. More than merely selling a product, Coca-Cola sought to market a lifestyle. A series of clever advertisements have followed linking Coke with friendship, hope and happiness. Today, there is no limit to the supply of entertainment choices. Facebook, YouTube and Snapchat deliver huge amounts of entertainment free and tailormade to consumers while finding audiences for artists, writers and performers anywhere. The internet has made it possible for anyone to become a star in their own live-streaming or video clips. Olin might have seen all this as a spiritual issue. As the Catholic writer Henri Nouewen observed, “post-modern people are looking for experiences that give them a sense of value”.33 On a similar note, and as outlined in the quote at the beginning of this book, Andrew Power points out that “personalisation has sought to change the emphasis from what service people want, to what kind of life people want”.34 It is this expression of voice and choice that we will now probe.

Notes   1 Ledwith, M. & Springett, J. (2010) Participatory Practice: Community-Based Action for Transformative Change. Bristol: Policy Press, p. 43.  2 Andrew Chakhoyan, Director of Government Relations, VimpelCom, 3 Ways to Reboot Globalization, https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2017/02/3-ways-to-rebootglobalization/, 23rd February 2017.   3 Skiddelsky, R. (2004) John Maynard Keynes 1883–1946. London: Pan Books.  4 Multinationals, The Economist briefing, 28th January 2017.   5 Ledwith, M. & Springett, J. (2010) Participatory Practice: Community-Based Action for Transformative Change. Bristol: Policy Press, p. 43.   6 Rifkind, J. (2014) The Zero Marginal Cost Society. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.   7 Uber Gives App, The Economist, 6th August 2016; WeChat’s World, The Economist, 6th August 2016.   8 Online Retailing in India, The Economist, 5th March 2016.   9 Goodwin, T. (2015) In an Age of Disintermediation the Battle Is All for the Consumer Interface, TechCrunch. www.techcrunch.com/2015/03/03/in-an-age-of-disintermediation-the-battle-is-all-for-the-consumer-interface 10 Lo, A. (2017) Adaptive Markets: Financial Evolution at the Speed of Thought. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. 11 Ruskin, J. (1862) Unto This Last. London: Smith Elder. See Rosenberg, J. D. (ed.) (1998) The Genius of John Ruskin: Selections from His Writings. London: University Press of Virginia. 12 Frey, B. (2008) Happiness: A Revolution in Economics. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. 13 Mawson, A. (2008) The Social Entrepreneur: Making Communities Work. London: Atlantic Books. 14 www.socialenterprise.org.uk/social-economy, accessed May 2014. 15 https://www.gov.uk/consumer-protection-rights, accessed November 2014. 16 Sklar, S. H. & Walker, P. (1938) Business Finds Its Voice. New York: Harper & Brothers, pp. 22–23. 17 Advertisement by American Druggist Magazine (November 1938), Who’s a Guinea Pig? Hearst’s International Cosmopolitan, Vol. 105, No. 5, p. 103. 18 Justman, S. (1994) Freud and His Nephew. Social Research, Vol. 61, pp. 457–476.

Rise and voice of choice 115 19 Brobeck, S. (1997) Encyclopedia of the Consumer Movement. Santa Barbara: ABC-CLIO. 20 Klein, M. (1975) Envy, Gratitude and Other Works. London: Hogarth Press, p. 179. 21 Winnicott, D. (1971) Playing and Reality. London: Tavistock. 22 Marx, K. (1975) Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts: Early Writings. London: Penguin, p. 377. 23 Hall, S. (1988) The Hard Road to Renewal. London: Verso. 24 Baudrillard, J. (1998) Consumer Society. London: Sage Publications. 25 Featherstone, M. (1991) Consumer Culture and Postmodernism. London: Sage Publications, p. 86. 26 Anderson, C. (2007) The Long Tail: How Endless Choice is Creating Unlimited Demand. New York: Random House. 27 http://worldwide.hyundai.com/WW/Corporate/CorporateInformation/Corporate Philosophy/index.html, accessed January 2016. 28 Cottle, D. W. (1990) Client-Centred Service: How to Keep Them Coming Back for More. Chichester: John Wiley. 29 https://www.instituteofcustomerservice.com/events/annual-conference, accessed January 2017. 30 Smith, O. TripAdvisor Removes ‘Reviews You Can Trust’ Slogan from Website, The Telegraph (London), 13th September 2011. 31 Sweney, M. ASA to Investigate TripAdvisor. The Guardian, Guardian.co.uk, 2nd September 2011. 32 Brobeck, S. (1990) The Modern Consumer Movement: References and Resources. New York: G. K. Hall. 33 Nouwen, H. (1994) The Wounded Healer. London: Darton, Longman and Todd, p. 7. 34 Power, A. (2014) Active Citizenship and Disability: Implementing the Personalisation of Support. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

10 ‘Facework’ and the rise of voice and choice

The dawn of the European project in the late 1950s began to feed a popular reaction against ‘unknown people in Brussels’ who had the real power over our lives. As we have been thinking about, this has contributed to a sense of ‘faceless bureaucrats’ who evoke de-personalisation and the spectre of distance. The rising sense of ‘we count, we matter’ in the human subject is played out in another trend where the second half of the 20th century has seen a steady reaction against the conversion of human agents into non-subjects. The shift towards adoption of the consumer voice as having great authority is related to a growing mistrust of institutions and bureaucracy and political elites. Institutions – formal and informal – remain the contexts of our freedom, the secure foundation for the diversity and innovation that modern life offers us. With public service, voice and choice is shaped in no small measure by the emphasis on driving up standards and offering free of charge the allure of choice to parents and other customers that the better off have always been able to afford. It is connected with the way social groups feel entitlement to an equalising of voice and levelling of power as the old deference breaks down. De-personalising is not the loss of face but its erosion. It comes from those who may be perceived as faceless and distant, in whose social mirror human participants or customers in an organisation or polity see themselves as faceless. In those very human encounters in the mirror of the other, they react against it. This is a strong current of response to the anonymous systems of our contemporary world. The more centralised and larger scale the public service was, the more it became de-personalising. It is not so much that we are objectified by distant people or amorphous forces as that they render us faceless precisely because they are faceless. Their facelessness triggers the threat of that as we are re-made in its image. This matters. Rather than protesting in the abstract, it matters when they have power over us and the ability to affect lives in some way. Because what so many contemporary people seem to crave is authenticity – those who talk human – there is a premium on leaders at whatever level to be ‘real’, not machine-like or robotic. That is, and is likely to be so increasingly, at a premium when robots will be doing the jobs that people do now. Politicians who can speak to the emotions of people will do well. Visibility is needed; the

‘Facework’ and rise of voice and choice 117 kind of visibility in which people can see your face and in your face see their own gazing back. Yet who is this IT who assaults me, re-makes me in its own image and denudes me of being an ‘I’? Anecdotally, what customers complain of in this regard has many heads. It is the National Health Service (NHS) where patients have been numbers, not even names. It is the hospital where patient-centred caring is very far from being demonstrated. It is the stock letter – not being treated seriously because yet another institutional response has been made and the whole thing seems wooden; anywhere in fact where people risk being objectified and made instrumental to a cause. The response so often is a perception of being de-personalised. Being treated mechanically, on a product line, leaves customers powerless in the face of bureaucracy. Companies and organisations that seek to address the distance inherent in modern life are surely on to something. “Bringing health-care nearer” is the strapline of a well-known care provider. It endeavours to close the distance. As the digital revolution takes hold and transforms the relationship between the citizen and the state, there are winners and losers. Huge concern about digital inclusion remains. Those who try valiantly to speak to a human being say things like one member of a focus group: “The Government is like a big machine. You’re just not treated with respect. You’re part of a busy system. Plus you’re talking with someone who is just part of a little cog in a big machine”.1 Or as a former UK Prime Minister observed, “I know that there are millions of public sector workers who frankly today feel demoralised, feel disrespected, feel a lack of recognition”.2 Yet ironically it is machines in the form of mobile technology that offers great potential to eliminate distance between students and teachers, doctors and patients. The drive to improve government services and make them more humane was the focus of a UK Government Digital Service (GDS). The lab is intended to help make public services more human – and more humane.

Isolated from their communities The Protest is a capacity to subvert being devalued. In response to social groups claiming that they are higher-value people, it sounds its trumpet call as ‘we will not be edited out of the picture!’ In response to de-personalising encounters, organisational activity devoid of either name or face, the Protest cries out, ‘I am not an it!’ This reflex underlies much of the contemporary search for dignity and respect from organisations. Finally, reacting to de-humanising or demonising forces that strip away human dignity and desecrate the sanctity of life, indignant Protest of the victim (or those who mobilise on their behalf) is, ‘you shouldn’t treat us like this … we won’t put up with this anymore’. “Police forces could be ‘sleepwalking’ back to an old model of policing where they are isolated from communities”, a UK Government Inspector warned. HM Inspector of Constabulary cautioned that police are taken away from a community and into a police station. Out there on the street, they could nip anti-social bullying in the bud. How much is preventative work and how much is crime investigation?

118  ‘Facework’ and rise of voice and choice Fifty per cent of police time is spent in the station, outside the community. “Frontline neighbourhood police officers have told us repeatedly that they are being pulled from their vitally important preventative work in communities to fulfil other duties, like guarding crime scenes, spending time in stations investigating crimes or staffing police station front counters”, reported Zoe Billingham, HM Inspector. Crime prevention work was “at risk if neighbourhood policing is further eroded. Losing our eyes and ears in the community is only likely to hamper good performance in preventing crime”.3 In the world of policing, the trend was reversed to police re-defining their relationship to local communities, being more accountable, more visible. Bringing democracy nearer was the motive behind appointment of police and crime commissioners in the autumn of 2012. The outcome was less than satisfactory. A 15% turnout was hardly an exercise in democratic legitimacy. It was the policeman on the beat rather than a squad car that turned up when there was crime. Personalisation was the police you knew, the local officer with a face and a name. There was a strong reaction against police who seemed to greet a complaint, a problem with a yawn. It was reported that the London police themselves were frustrated by the way they performed their tasks. “There’s been a detachment from the people we’re here to serve”, said the Chairman of the Police Federation. It seems the public too felt estranged. In 1981, 43% of the public had contacted the police, usually just to ask directions. By 2006, it had fallen to 27%, of whom most had reported a crime.4 There is an irony here. It was partly to avoid ethnic bias that the culture of obsessive recording had developed. It is that loss of face and presence that compounds a sense of distance. The BBC came under the spotlight too in the UK as institution after institution was sharply scrutinised. ‘Auntie’ seemed to be over-managed. Institutional sloppiness allowed standards to fall. Producers and creative minds seemed confused by the management above them. What emerged in public discourse about the BBC seemed to be the same story in all public service provision. Management spoke an arcane language; bureaucracy was self-perpetuating; and how reducing the frontline and service tended to be the default position. What indeed was the ‘frontline’?

Voice and choice in education “I left teaching because of the cramping of imagination and creativity and the standardisation which brings boredom and low morale”.5 Behind a reaction against economic constraints that seem to de-personalise us is a consumer urge for ever-improving public services. That is combined in the UK with an impetus on ideological grounds to devolve power to local authorities and communities – outsourcing more and more activity to competing social enterprises. All this is central to ‘voice and choice’, the mantra of our times. When it comes to the institutions that shape our public lives, voice and choice is a deeply problematic concept. Its critics would say it is an implicitly class-based

‘Facework’ and rise of voice and choice 119 demand as it empowers pushy middle-class customers and privileges those who have a stronger sense of their own voice. From health care to education, the feeling is pervasive of being trapped in a system which is too narrow in scope and choices, and too regulated. Many schools highlight real problems in staffing, general recruitment and retention. “I currently work in a school where seven of the maths team left with a further three leaving in the summer. Stress and job dissatisfaction are the cited reasons”.6 The impact of voice and choice is strongly apparent in contemporary education. Consumer choice has led to a very different, market view of schools as a kind of market rather than a public good. Voice and choice should be unleashed to drive up standards so that the public could vote with its feet and have the freedom to ‘shop around’. Universities felt the impact strongly as consumers could opt for courses and course providers that met their needs. Further down the education provision, competition in the form of school league tables could only have the effect of driving up standards. At least that was the theory. The reality was rather different as schools were ‘competing’ on very different terms. Efforts to get good exam results out of children in areas of deprivation could hardly be compared with those expected from pushy, middle-class children who did not have the same uphill struggle against disadvantage. The thinking began to shift to measures of improvement, of ‘value added’ to denote the efforts that schools were making. Nevertheless, the gold standard of comparison remained that of ‘5 A–C’ grades in UK terms. Elsewhere, the formidable pressure on children to perform, perform, compete and compete was shaping Asian culture and all who carried it with them. It was eerily reminiscent of how the West was won. In his novel Hard Times, Dickens describes how education on a production-line breathed in and out the spirit of industrialism. Thomas Gradgrind was a parody. But fears about de-personalisation are heard in contemporary education. Amidst a concern for school improvement, the constant need to drive up standards became part of mainstream culture in schools.7 So had parental choice in the name of bringing education nearer, deploying parent power to drive up standards. Reactions against corralling students into the target-driven culture are commonplace. The incoming leader of Ofsted can warn of a situation where some schools are fudging their exam pass numbers in order to ensure that they ride high in the league tables. Too many schools are trying to ‘game’ the system by entering pupils for ‘Mickey Mouse’ qualifications to move up league tables, the Ofsted head warned. In her first major speech as chief inspector of schools, Amanda Spielman hit out at the ‘scandal’ of heads who jeopardise children’s education to boost their own performance ratings. She proposed to launch a major Ofsted investigation into whether schools are using the curriculum to give children a broad enough education. Evidently, Ofsted had found some schools entered children for easy, non-academic qualifications in an effort to ensure they got better grades. Others were even taking poor-performing pupils off their roll so their low grades did not impact on the school.8

120  ‘Facework’ and rise of voice and choice Yet who is this IT who assaults me, re-makes me in its own image and denudes me of being an ‘I’? The problem with standardised solutions is that the individual is in danger of getting lost – especially within a wider culture of an atomised, fragmented society. Driving up standards is one thing. But teaching for result meant that publicly validated outcomes threatened to convert young people into objects, pupils not children. Hence, we hear the Protest against de-personalisation in the debates about performativity, an instrumental view of education as a means to an end. Tension about the validity of performance measures was seen by some as a deeper crisis in the human sciences. Philosopher Jean-François Lyotard suggests that pervasive in modern society is “performativity, the reduction of all judgement to the criterion of efficiency of input-output relations”.9 Performativity is elevated to a general principle when other grand narratives of social coherence lose their power. A quantitative culture at the heart of a performance and evaluative culture could forget that it was fundamentally about people. The search for objective knowledge, counting and measuring tends to remove subjective experiences from the equation, “problematic because this is research on people, it is violent, and it reduces people to inanimate objects”.10 Qualitative research sought to place a person at its centre, to open the black box of interpretation. It can be Protest against detachment, against failure to connect ideas to the messy daily lived reality which shapes people’s lives. If knowledge was ‘out there’ as something to be reached towards rather than being generated from within a learner or in the space between learner and what is learned, de-personalisation took place. It denied the humanity of the learner, subordinating learning to the system. So, personalised learning was featuring on the radar and became an essential feature on the political landscape of government manifestos.11 Its particular pedagogical turn is an embedded and embodied journey moving from personal desire and motivation to the achievement of verifiable public competence. In the UK, education policy agenda has moved significantly in the direction of ‘personalisation’. The ‘Every Child Matters’ agenda12 and the ‘New Relationship with Schools’ all expressed a clear, public purpose of ‘putting the user’s experience at the heart of everything we do’.13 Central to this agenda was choice. Parental power was enlisted to help drive up standards on the basis that education was too remote, and families needed to engage and register disapproval where justified.14 There is a negative side of the coin in a purely instrumental view of education. But the target-driven culture in education was intended to equip and empower people through giving them qualifications and confidence to compete; to find and discover a sense of value that was more than just economic because it was also economic. In the 21st-century transparent world, every stakeholder has radar. Knowledge is ‘out there’ at bewildering speeds.15 Yet not trusting bureaucracy is a theme of our times. Existential philosophers since Kierkegaard have stressed subjectivity of the individual. Central to much contemporary protest is the sigh to rescue the human person from absorption into processes you never see that create the shape

‘Facework’ and rise of voice and choice 121 you have to fit into. By a sleight of hand, the subject has been converted into an object. The Protest in the West against objectification is a strategy aimed at reversing that.

The rise and fall of expert knowledge The way that public institutions work is changing fast. Traditionally, the service delivery model begins with a statistically based research assessment of social issues to be addressed. This is used by statutory, voluntary or faith-based groups to identify the scope for their engagement analysis in line with their sense of mission (and passion). Service users will then be the subject of action by ‘professionals’ who bring their ‘expertise’. This dominant model in both statutory and voluntary provision defines people by their ‘need’. In the case of social isolation, loneliness can be reduced to individual problems to be treated, rather than taking a holistic view. User groups come to ‘experts’ who will ‘solve their problems’ – hopefully.16 The power dynamic of ‘expert–client’ puts professionals in a role of authority and creates passivity in the individual. Where professionals have a monopoly of the power and solutions, people can become passive recipients with little sense of control. Those on the receiving end of provision can define themselves by their need. A mindset in which people feel they have nothing of value to contribute increases dependency and the tendency to rely on others to solve problems. The move towards personalised public services is part of a trend towards bringing accountability nearer, focusing on outcomes rather than targets and helping people connect with the provider. Making human connections has been seen as vital to effective delivery of public services. The world of caring professions in the West is in flux as the assumption is no longer taken for granted that expert knowledge qualified practitioners to make interventions in a way that disregarded the experiences and wishes of those they were helping.17 The demands of a range of client groups who were asserting themselves – women, the elderly, ethnic minorities, gay men and lesbians, disabled people – led many practitioners to question traditional relationships with them.18 Do we mind if we see little of the human face of a provider that does not concern us? If my children are not in school, it does not matter if parents are bumping up against impersonal systems. Yet if I need something or want something from public services, it helps if that encounter is rich. For between the target-setting and evaluation, amid the performance criteria and value for money analysis of our time stand real people. It is the reaction of ‘ordinary people’ to the managementspeak society that marks the strength of contemporary Protest against the negation of subjectivity. The reaction against the impersonal is a flight from an institutional activity that devalues. That is surely why respect and dignity have become mantras of our time, a quest for the personal and the recovery of the subject against being perceived to be an object. Ways of doing things that did not see customers as people did not succeed so well. Organisations were labelled ‘bureaucratic’ if they did

122  ‘Facework’ and rise of voice and choice not seem to act responsively to emotional needs or human suffering that presents itself. Those organisations that responded with an air of indifference were not taken seriously by those who need what they have to offer. In relation to them, people became an object. The classic sociologist Max Weber saw a world being disenchanted in favour of economic and technical progress.19 The rise of industrial society was accompanied by rational decision-making processes, expert knowledge and calculation. It was bureaucracy, a regime of rule-governed activity, and its essence lay in it being impersonal.20 Operating a system is the hallmark of urban mass society. People complain about the effect of regulation but there is invariably a decent aim inherent in the regulation. In education, the teaching of literacy through phonetics, for instance, is widely hailed as widening access en masse to struggling pupils. Standardisation is intended to drive up standards. It is the same principle as funding for Improving Access to Provision of Treatment (IAPT) in the delivery of mental health care in the UK. A one-size-fits-all approach aims at rolling out treatment for the many rather than the few.21 The quest for standardised solutions was not malign. It sought to ensure that all would benefit. As individuated human beings, if the anonymity of contemporary life is not enhanced by the very institutional provision intended to serve the common good, the question is, ‘can we design public services better? Can we reduce top-down command and control systems and mobilise volunteering?’ In the UK, the welfare state and explosion in public services was an outcome of the Beveridge Report in wartime Britain with its concern about five social evils. The state effort of a wartime command and control economy should be deployed to produce cradle to grave care for people. The architect of the NHS, Nye Bevan, did not want to regulate what doctors do so much as ensure they offered it to everyone. The result of the post-war landmark legislation was a considerable rise in bureaucracy, gradually linked to the new technology. Fifty years after the Beveridge Report, it was clear that the solutions of one era were not those of another. One response to the structuring of relationship between the state, market and civil society was to bring in the private sector. Could the market do the job better? Experience of the marketisation of welfare was mixed. Another response was the Big Society, famously espoused by the Conservative Party before and during coalition. The Big Society motif called on community groups to undertake tasks previously undertaken by Government. It seemed to recall an earlier time before welfare was run primarily through Government, an era of friendly societies, churches and charities committed to those less well-off and at risk. Developing civic society and social action volunteerism opened up provision to groups including social enterprise. The motivation for individuals to get involved was fundamental to this attempt at re-design of public services. Certainly, the capacity of volunteerism to replace the state seemed timely (and to its critics, cynically so) against a background of austerity. Solidarity between people in the interests of the common good could be viewed as an antidote to a dominating state and the all-powerful free market.

‘Facework’ and rise of voice and choice 123 But the beginning of the 21st century saw state withdrawal from welfare. In the USA, Bill Clinton emphasised the need for public service reform. His fellow ‘third-way’ practitioner, Tony Blair, made it a main focus of Government policy to re-shape state provision and think radically. “So began a re-consideration of the basic principles on which these services were run” but from the middle-class perspective of being more ambitious. It was not acceptable to have mediocre schools, health care or criminal justice because behind each service and its delivery stood a person on the receiving end. “I wouldn’t stand for my own loved ones waiting that long”, comments Blair on hospital waiting times. “Why should anyone else?”22 Frustration with ‘the forces of conservatism’ led the Blair Government to take on vested interests that institutions cemented. There was huge debate about whether market-based health care was the right way of delivering health outcomes for a wide population (the same debate in parallel taking place in education). It challenged notions of the common good. In the days when, in the UK, New Labour was getting tired, a beleaguered Prime Minister Tony Blair put the spotlight on public service reform. The emphasis heralded a move towards ‘voice and choice’ and away from the professional domination of service provision. This was, he claimed, the cornerstone to creating public services that people need, in the way that they want them. The centralised grip over local service delivery from Whitehall needed to be loosened and the public given a greater direct say in creating “services fair to all, personal to each”.23 The principle tying together the different elements of change, Blair argued, was “to put the public at the heart of public services, making ‘power to the people’ the guiding principle of public sector improvement and reform”. A market model was regarded as valid because the important point was not who provided the service but its delivery. And the delivery had to be focused on people, otherwise means and ends were swapping sides. Critics said, however, that it was no longer possible to equate state provision with social justice. This represented the marketisation of public sector provision, what in many eyes was an improper extension of market thinking into health care and education, “the expansion of markets and of market values, into spheres of life where they don’t belong”.24 A market economy is one thing; but the power and prestige of free markets had created a market society. It raises hard questions about how the public good can be served and maintained. Austerity measures in the UK resulted in major reductions in spending on local public services. This retrenchment had significant impact on both the level and quality of provision. Even so, support for local services remained high.25 Reactions against the top-down, centralised state had been the model in the industrial era. Now the emphasis would be on devolving down to local level, to active communities to do the job. The problem is that public services are failing to bring about the hoped-for change because they do not ask people to contribute their skills, experience and capacities. As a result, assets atrophy, creating increasingly passive consumers, with stressed and over-stretched professionals.26 Making it Personal was the title of a report by the think-tank Demos. It advocated a simple yet transformational approach to public services – self-directed

124  ‘Facework’ and rise of voice and choice services – which allocate people budgets so they can shape, with the advice of professionals and peers, the support they need. This participative approach delivers personalised, lasting solutions to people’s needs at lower cost than traditional, inflexible and top-down approaches, by mobilising the intelligence of thousands of service users to devise better solutions. The self-directed services revolution, which began in social care with young disabled adults designing and commissioning their own packages of support, could transform public services used by millions of people, with budgets worth tens of billions of pounds. From older people to ex-offenders, maternity to youth services, mental health to long-term health conditions, self-directed services enable people to create solutions that work for them and as a result deliver better value for money for the taxpayer.27 Hence the rise of ‘co-production’, a new way of thinking about public services. It has the potential to deliver a major shift in the way we provide health, education, policing and other services, in ways that make them more effective, efficient and hence more sustainable. Individuals are empowered to increase their feelings of self-worth by taking control of their own lives.28 Co-production means delivering public services in an equal and reciprocal relationship between professionals, people using services, their families and neighbours. Where activities are co-produced in this way, both services and neighbourhoods become far more effective agents of change.29

Voice and choice in health care Who is this ‘it’ to which I become an ‘it’? The Protest is a reaction against a production-line system in health that can seem to de-personalise the objects of their care. In contemporary psychiatric services, there is a growing emphasis on models of recovery that embody the idea of a whole person getting back on track, maybe participating in education programmes. It is in part a reaction against the doctor-patient relationship in mental health that is sustained by a model of illness and dependency. The Protest is against the passivity that this model can engender – amongst those on the receiving end of treatment. Within mental health provision, ‘Parity of Esteem’ has become a UK Government objective since 2011. The aim is to place mental health care on the same basis as physical health so that both have the same value and importance and the stigma is lessened. Experiencing depression should be the same to talk about as experiencing a broken leg. The objective has had mixed fortunes. Reports were all too common of sufferers having to go far further to receive treatment than those with physical problems.30 “Half the battle is to get a GP to take you seriously”, complains a patient with a cocktail of depression and bi-polar personality.31 In the UK, based on a changing understanding of rights and choice, the trend is towards rising expectations about being patient-centred. It means trying to shape more services around the user. Putting patients first meant that ‘no decision is made about me without me’, patients having more clout and choice in the system, better information about how the NHS is performing, choice amongst providers

‘Facework’ and rise of voice and choice 125 and being able to choose the name by which they are addressed. Personalised health care meant negotiation and agreement of plans of care.32 Patients were promised a stronger voice on NHS services locally through the creation of Healthwatch groups. Personalised health care amounts to a superseding of the ‘doctor knows best’ era.33 Far fewer babies and young children are now brought up in impersonal settings. The shift from a biomedical to a bio-psychosocial medicine has been marked by a change of discourse from ‘treatment’ to ‘health promotion’. A person is not an ‘eating disorder project’ or an entity carrying around a label and ought not to be reduced to an ‘object of the caring system’. It is the same principle as funding for IAPT in the delivery of mental health care in the UK. Policy background is that a one-size-fits-all approach aims at rolling out treatment for the many rather than the few.34 The quest for standardised solutions was not malign. It sought to ensure that all would benefit. The concern for equality could, in practice, mean that groups or individuals who sought to take health care or education into their own hands were frowned on as being inequitable. Despite the pressures on health care to deliver greater output at less cost, at least in the UK, there is considerable agreement (or maybe nostalgia) that ethical ideals should be central rather than profit. Anecdotally, what many most wanted out of the NHS was a doctor who would visit at home even if out of hours. The NHS Direct Line 1111 was sustaining distance, it was alleged, between health care provision and needs of families when worried about a sick child or loved one. Doctors, an institution generally trusted in society, were becoming distant professionals.35 Concerns about health care becoming a field where systems and productivity are dominant are heightened when patients and their families are confronted with the medicalisation of death. Doctors have been trained to do everything possible to keep people alive. About two-thirds of deaths take place in hospital or a nursing home, usually following desperate attempts to keep patients alive. Almost onefifth of Americans will experience surgery in their last month of life. The medicalisation of death results in well-meaning, zealous intervention and often drastic treatment. Yet as the Kaiser Family Foundation reports, most people do not want death to be a medical experience; they would prefer to die at home.36 A poster was placarded in my local hospital. It conveyed statements from a website setting standards for treatment in the NHS to be based on ‘dignity’.37 Amongst the statements made in this ‘Dignity Challenge’ were: •• •• •• •• ••

zero tolerance of all forms of abuse; support people with the same respect as you want for yourself and your family; treat each other as an individual by offering personalised service; enabling people to maintain maximum possible level of independence, choice and control; listen and support people to express needs and wants;

126  ‘Facework’ and rise of voice and choice •• ••

respect people’s privacy; assist people to maintain positive self-esteem.

Symptomatic of the Protest, hospitals were going to be rated if people felt they were being treated with dignity. Patients are to be able to rate the treatment they receive in hospitals to ensure that people are treated with dignity and respect on wards. Prime Minister David Cameron pointed out that the simple ‘friends and family test’ will ask whether patients would recommend their hospital to loved ones.38 The results would be published and hospital leaders who fail the test will be held to account. There is a widespread perception across the West that there is a growing problem with the provision of public services. Whether it is health care, education or the police, the traditional approach of the state has been concerned with systems and processes that become divorced from the people they seek to serve. The language of analysis, statistics, reports, targets and evaluative criteria for service delivery fail to capture the reality of what makes for social change. Such tools seem to leave behind a sense of innovation and creativity that encourages people to move from the passivity of grant-dependency or recipients of services into release of inner valuing. Management language has been about what administrators could reduce to systems, not about people being served. The medical model of health care, for instance, is intrinsically top-down. The person becomes a patient who IS a diagnosis. They are not just a recipient of health care; they are defined by their diagnosis. The medical model, no less than other professions, attracts the aura of expert knowledge. This too can be a top-down vision of people which is profoundly depersonalising. It is not just that the expert knows best – of course he or she does by reason of their training. Rather, the medical expertise easily becomes a strategy of power and the patient is passive in its face. It is difficult for those who lack capacity to argue back, to articulate a different perspective.39 A patient is prepared to trade this for the confidence in the ‘top-down’ expertise of medical practitioners. Popular perception that nurses sit too much in front of a computer is cut from the same cloth. In part, it may reflect the trend towards professionalisation. Nurses (and teachers) are required to have degrees; some tasks seem menial. Protest against the impersonal is part of the agenda of our times. The 2014 Care Act was the Government’s response to a rising demand on increasingly stretched services. The Act put an emphasis on the ‘wellbeing’ of the individual, working preventatively and taking a more holistic and participative view of welfare provision.40 In May 2015, the newly elected Prime Minister David Cameron announced that more doctors would be recruited to meet future needs. This had to be set against many doctors in General Practice leaving the profession in droves. Doctors spoke of being on the hamster wheel, ten minutes maximum to sort out the problems of their patients. There was simply not enough time to deal with patients as people and give them quality time. “We need person care”, said a doctor. “GPs need to feel they are valued. It is the first thing they say puts them off  ”.41

‘Facework’ and rise of voice and choice 127 Making health care more responsive, less reliant on intermediary administrative tiers is arguably part of the agenda of our times, a reaction against ­de-personalisation through centralising tendencies towards engagement at local level. It poses the question, not of ‘Facebook’ only, but of ‘facework’ – seeing a human face and not being only a networked individual.

Facework ‘Facework’ is to do with the recovery of face. This is not just by those on the receiving end of institutional provision; it is to do with the institutions themselves that are not being seen to wear a human face, being cold places which reinforce the atomisation of everyday life. Lack of face evokes a reciprocal reaction of denial of face in which my personhood is negated. The subject is objectified. Humanity needs to call to humanity to be verified through answering response. We are relational. In the wake of austerity and recession, institutional presence is in retreat. Public services are being slim-lined and shrunk to fit a smaller resource base. Relentless public sector reform is here to stay. ‘Facework’ could be crucial to the re-design of public services to make them environments that are friendlier to human value. Perhaps this is why both the Arab Spring protests and the Occupy movements combined face-to-face presencing with electronic elements, especially social media.42 One response to the automated systems that characterise modern life is to seek alternative networks and communities. Seeking network through Facebook and other social media is an explosive contemporary form of new patterns of apparent familiarity and friendship. It offers face. In a technocratic age, people are as swayed as they ever were by the desire to maintain relationships. By contrast, reactions about de-personalisation are often associated with automated systems. People want to hear a human voice on the other end of the phone. The lack of human face generates a lack of face in its mirror by which I am disregarded and devalued. We need to get this into perspective. Some de-personalisation is essential to the mass production system rather than a village economy. You do not need to know the salesperson in the superstore by name. The producers operate through impersonal forces. It cannot be otherwise. Professionalisation of role almost inevitably de-personalises by creating distance. Go to see a lawyer, a doctor or a teacher and you experience a professional aura that comes with specialism. Technology solidifies systems and considerably strengthens the capacity of public services to deliver. Institutional provision would be unthinkable without the systemic capacities granted by computers. Being seen totemically as a number and subject to management information systems is heavily dependent on the leap forward in capability made possible by the explosion in information technology in a single generation. ‘Big data’ enables civil servants now to be more responsive. The USA publishes information about public services on a single website so as to improve transparency and, since 2010, the UK has done this too.43 Big data enables crowd-sourcing of ideas and solutions. One market leader here is Singapore

128  ‘Facework’ and rise of voice and choice where fast-track civil servants have placements where they learn to plan and also to listen to people’s complaints. Officials investigate how their ideas will work on the ground. The result is that Singapore delivers high-quality public services more cheaply. Less than 5% of GDP is spent on health care; about half the global average cost. It re-shaped its criminal justice system and made a much better attempt at joined-up working between different agencies working towards rehabilitation. As a result of prison education, mental health services and drug treatment, reoffending fell from 44% in 1999 to 27% in 2010.44 It seems that institutions can be liberated to offer opportunities to become more human. Despite the name, ‘facework’ is not usually part of the Facebook experience and the distance is not always offset by the potential for webcams or that small static picture in the corner. One could pass many Facebook contacts in the street and not notice. But small communities do seem to offer an antidote to the anonymity of urban spaces and, often, people value the intimacy and sense of the familiar that come with small groups. The familiarity is that of knowledge; knowing and being known. This is possible in community in a way that networks rarely offer. Despite being problematic, networks and online communities do perhaps constitute a wiring up of human interaction that is some kind of remedy to contemporary de-personalisation. How we make online interactions more humane is a major question in a post-industrial age. It is all a far cry from a more regimented machine age. Communities are being re-drawn around groups of the like-minded rather than being based on geography. Yet still the need to see ‘face’ is paramount. Between the target-setting and the evaluation, amid the performance criteria and value for money analysis of our time stand real people. The reaction of ‘ordinary people’ to the management-speak of our society marks the strength of contemporary Protest. The Protest responds loudly by proclaiming, ‘I am not an it!’ We are in an age of choice-driven, customer service-based, patient-centred provision. Yet in a post-bureaucratic age, the very idea of institutional position that ignored and marginalised was strongly attacked. One part at least of the solution could lie in re-design of public services so as to allow ‘facework’ back in; in other words, more face-to-face contact.

Case study45 As part of the five-year forward view for the NHS, Morecambe Bay is one of the largest Vanguard sites in the UK working on an ambitious programme to reorientate our health and social care system to be one that breaks down barriers, shares budgets and partners together for a more effective way of operating together for the sake of the population we look to serve. The traditional doctor–patient relationship could also be termed the expert– pleb relationship. But I try to think of myself as a servant and not a guru. I want the kind of relationships with my patients where I recognise that I have some expertise, but that is not for me to lord it over them, to control them or to tell them what to do. My job is to really listen, to find out about what their own ideas, concerns and expectations are, to help them think through what could be going

‘Facework’ and rise of voice and choice 129 on, work with them around the options available for treatment and then work with them as they make the choice that best suits them. Or when people come for a review of whichever chronic condition they have that needs a review, I look to subvert the pressures about what I must tell them and find a way to partner with them to talk about what most catches their attention at that particular time. So, when Jack comes to see me with his diabetes, the government tells me that I must talk to him about his average blood sugar level, his blood pressure, his kidney function, his alcohol intake, his smoking status, his diet, his exercise, his medication and the compliance thereof and of course his ability or not to achieve an erection – and all of that in 10–15 minutes. In most consultations, practitioners feel pressured to give out loads of information, they tick the boxes and Jack goes home with lots of leaflets changing nothing at all and will come back dutifully and slightly more guiltily six months later for the whole chat to happen again! But if you are about others, empowering love, then you change the way you consult. You list the things that you could talk about with Jack and see what is important to him to focus on. And not only does this empower him and form a partnering relationship, but it also brings about the most effective change. In my work as the Director of Health and Wellbeing I have two foci. The first is to help change the culture within the NHS itself. When I became the lead clinical commissioner for maternity services in Morecambe Bay three years ago, we were in the midst of the Kirkup enquiry into the very sad and difficult maternal and infant deaths at Furness General. One of the things that Kirkup especially criticised was the toxic culture between the various parties who actually should have been partnering together for effective and compassionate care. Over the time I have had this role, I have consistently refused to get on with meetings and do business as usual. At the start of every meeting, I make an attempt to rehumanise our times together. We go round in a circle and talk about genuinely how we are doing, and then we talk about what we love about the person on our left and what we most appreciate about working with them. We have moved from the awkward to the profound and built a culture of love and trust where previously there was suspicion and division. So many of the ways we have done leadership and ‘public health’ initiatives over the last 20–30 years as a health care system have utterly failed. They have failed because each new government scraps the last scheme and cracks on with another idea from on high. The perspective is too short. But the other reason things fail is that we have not yet really learned to listen! We have not allowed our perspective to be changed. We think we are the experts that know what communities need and we go and do things to them rather than being quiet, listening and learning from those who are the experts in poverty, deprivation and ill health. I believe the key to the health and wellbeing of our communities is to let love come first. Love forces us to put away the pointing finger and work collaboratively. It causes us to put away suspicion of the other and embrace them, forging a way ahead for positive peace. It causes us to embrace the unlovely, wash the unclean, bandage the broken and heal the wounds of our bodies and society. Love motivates us to overcome our own selfishness and greed, our own lusts and

130  ‘Facework’ and rise of voice and choice destructive thought and behaviour patterns and inspires others to help us in the process. Love sets us free to live for the wellbeing of everybody, everywhere. -------------------------------------------------Sweeping changes are needed as states try to work out how to pay for the needs of an elderly population. People used to see the GP as someone who tells them what to do. In such groups as the UK Patients’ Forum, language is important: ‘we are part of a team’ – rather than GPs being the expert out there. ‘We’re working on this together’. There seems to be more understanding of the pressures GPs are under. A doctor is not just ‘a doctor’ but a person with skills. The question that health care leaders ask more is, ‘what would the clients or patients want to see?’ Often the answer to this is a less macho style of ‘the expert’. It is such ‘factory’ issues that prevent humanisation of health care. Being person-centred is more accepted as the right way of delivering care. As a sign in a care home stated,46 being person-centred means: “Listen to me. Think about me as a whole, I am an individual. See my essence. Involve me. Keep my identity. Remember I’m a person not a resident. Look after the whole person that is me. Include me!” A final marker of current trends, at least in the UK, is how issues of the value of people play out strongly in dementia care.47 For instance, the UK NICE guidelines on person-centred care point out: “There is broad consensus that the principles of person-centred care underpin good practice in the field of dementia care”.48 The principles assert: •• •• •• ••

the human value of people with dementia, regardless of age or cognitive impairment, and those who care for them; the individuality of people with dementia, with their unique personality and life experiences among the influences on their response to the dementia; the importance of the perspective of the person with dementia; the importance of relationships and interactions with others to the person with dementia, and their potential for promoting wellbeing (i.e., the imperative in dementia care to consider the needs of carers, whether family and friends or paid care-workers, and to consider ways of supporting and enhancing their input to the person with dementia. This is described as ‘relationshipcentred care’. “I would argue that a culture of care would need to support paid carers in a direct engagement with the needs of people with dementia and recognise that they are also people with diverse emotional needs who need to feel supported and valued”.49

A seminal text influencing practice in the UK towards stronger emphasis on those with dementia being people was by Tom Kitwood. Researchers Mills and Coleman had provided case studies which suggest that people with dementia retain a personal awareness of their individual uniqueness of being until death.50 Kitwood highlighted work based on interviews and observation suggesting that it is the social and public self that is lost in severe dementia but not the private

‘Facework’ and rise of voice and choice 131 sense of self.51 Though small in scale, these studies suggested that the way that people define or understand personhood may affect whether or not they find it. As Kitwood pointed out, someone might walk through a field of dandelions and claim that they saw no flowers: they consider dandelions as weeds.52 Kitwood asked what theory of personhood should underlie the treatment and care of people with dementia. It is the right question to ask. What subjectivity, people’s sense of themselves, is being formed and re-shaped? Before we try to answer that question, we need to sharpen our focus on the changing mindset and attitude in the contemporary West over the last generation. How have the norms of liberal democracy, the international community assumed some notion of the value and worth of people?

Notes   1 Transform for Work Focus Group, Ilfracombe, UK. 15th October 2014.   2 David Cameron Mutualising Local Government? http://ibanda.blogs.com/panchromatica/2010/02/mutualising-local-government.html, 16th February 2010.   3 Report on Neighbourhood Policing, HM Inspector of Constabulary, 18th February 2016.  4 The Economist, 24th January 2009.   5 Author’s client notes, name withheld and used with permission.   6 Author’s client notes used with permission.   7 Bourdillon, H. & Storey, A. (2002) Aspects of Teaching and Learning in Secondary Schools. London: Routledge Farmer, Open University, p. 208.   8 Amanda Spielman’s speech at the Association of Colleges, Ofsted conference: ‘A new direction’. https://www.gov.uk/government/speeches/amanda-spielmans-speech, 17th March 2017.   9 Lyotard, J-F. (1984) The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge. Trans. G. Bennington & B. Massumi. Manchester: Manchester University Press. 10 Postle, D. (2008) Validity in the Psychological Therapies. Self and Society, Vol. 36, No. 1, pp. 8–9. 11 Deakin-Crick, R. (2007) Personalised Learning for the Post-Mechanical Age. Journal of Curriculum Studies, Vol. 39, No. 4, pp. 423–440. 12 Every Child Matters Green Paper (2005) London, Department for Education and Skills. 13 Gilbert, C. (2006) 2020 Vision: Report of Teaching and Learning in 2020 Review Group. London: Department for Education and Skills. 14 Department for Education and Skills (2005) Schools White Paper: Higher Standards, Better Schools for All. London, Department for Education and Skills. 15 Tapscott, D. & Williams, A. D. (2008) Wikinomics. London: Atlantic Books. 16 Boyle, D., Slay J., & Stephens, L. (2010) Public Services Inside Out, London: NEFNESTA. 17 Belenky, M. F. et al. (1997) Women’s Way of Knowing: The Development of Self, Voice and Mind. New York: Basic Books. 18 Dominelli, L. (ed.) (1999) Community Approaches to Child Welfare: International Perspectives. Aldershot: Avebury. 19 Radkau, J. (2008) Max Weber: A Biography. Trans. P. Camiller. Cambridge: Polity Press. 20 Weber, M. (1978) Economy and Society: An Outline of Interpretive Sociology. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. 21 Perren, S. & Robinson, L. (2010) Improving Access, Supporting Choice. Therapy Today, Vol. 21, No. 1, pp. 24–27. 22 Blair, T. (2010) A Journey. London: Hutchinson, pp. 271–272. 23 Blair Hails 'Voice and Choice' Future for Services, The Guardian. https://www.theguardian.com/society/2004/jan/29/publicservices.politics, 29th January 2004.

132  ‘Facework’ and rise of voice and choice 24 Sandel, M. (2012) What Money Can’t Buy: The Moral Limits of Markets. London: Allen Lane. 25 Besemer, K. & Bramley, G. (2012) Local Services Under Siege: Attitudes to Public Services in a Time of Austerity. Working Paper Analysis Series No. 2. ESRC Grant RES-060-25-0052. 26 Eckley, B., Ruddick, A., & Walker, R. (2015) The Fullness of Life Together: Reimagining Christian Engagement in Our Communities. London: Church Urban Fund. 27 http://www.demos.co.uk, January 2008. 28 Federation for Community Development Learning website for the Community Development National Occupational Standards, http://www.fcdl.org.uk/about-us/community-development, accessed January 2017. 29 Boyle D. & Harris M. (2009) The Challenge of Co-production, http://www.nesta.org. uk/publications/challenge-co-production, p. 11. 30 www.bbc.co.uk/radio4/thetodayprogramme, 6th May 2014. 31 Author’s client notes, name withheld and used with permission. 32 HMSO (2010) Equity and Excellence: Liberating the NHS. White Paper. London: The Stationery Office. 33 The Times (London), 22nd January 2009. 34 Perren, S. & Robinson, L. (2010) Improving Access, Supporting Choice. Therapy Today, Vol. 21, No. 1, pp. 24–27. 35 www.bbc.co.uk/questiontime, 2nd May 2013. 36 Kaiser/Economist Poll examining end-of-life care in four countries. http://kff.org/ 37 www.dignityincare.org, regarding a programme of training to facilitate culture change in the UK NHS. 38 Cameron Announces Patient Rating System, Nursing Times. https://www.nursingtimes. net/roles/nurse-managers/cameron-announces-patient-rating-system/5045324.article, 25th May 2012. 39 Author’s client notes. 40 Care Act (2014) http://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/2014/23/section/1, accessed 16th September 2015. 41 www.bbc.co.uk/radio4/todayprogramme, 12th May 2015. 42 Gitlin, T. (2012) Occupy Nation: The Roots, the Spirit, and the Promise of Occupy Wall Street. New York: Harper Collins. 43 www.data.gov.uk, accessed October 2014. 44 www.psd.gov.sg, accessed September 2014. See also, Singapore: The Singapore Exception, The Economist, 9th August 2014. 45 Dr. Andy Knox Warrington, lead clinical commissioner for maternity services, director of health and wellbeing for Better Care Together, Morecambe Bay. Talk, BSA Sociology of Religion Conference, UK, July 2016. 46 Author, 2015. 47 Brooker, D. (2004) What Is Person-Centred Care in Dementia? Reviews in Clinical Gerontology, Vol. 13, pp. 215–222. 48 NICE guidelines on dementia care, accessed May 2014. 49 www.dignityincare.org, regarding a programme of training to facilitate culture change in the UK NHS. 50 Downs, M. (1997) Progress Report: The Emergence of the Person in Dementia Research. Ageing and Society, Vol. 17, pp. 597–607. 51 Sabat, S. R. (2001) The Experience of Alzheimer's Disease: Life Through a Tangled Veil. Oxford: Blackwell. 52 Kitwood, T. M. (1997) Dementia Reconsidered: The Person Comes First. Buckingham: Open University Press.

11 The battles we fought (the respect, human rights and dignity agendas)

“We should all be treated with respect, everyone should be included in the unit”. – spokesperson for the UK military1

Crumbling certainties The liberal, global social order had seemed triumphant after 1989, having swept the field. No alternative system was left standing to global capitalism undergirded by democracy. Politicians, policy makers and global business knew what they were dealing with. The populist revolt of 2016 upended all such certainties. The stable, international, rules-based order was under siege. In February 2017, Mark Zuckerberg announced Facebook’s plan to bring the global community together. “Today we are close to taking our next step. Our greatest opportunities are now global – like spreading prosperity and freedom, promoting peace and understanding, lifting people out of poverty, and accelerating science”, Zuckerberg wrote. “Our greatest challenges also need global responses – like ending terrorism, fighting climate change, and preventing pandemics. Progress now requires humanity coming together not just as cities or nations, but also as a global community”.2 A few months earlier, a Swedish billionaire, László Szombatfalvy, established the Global Challenges Foundation and announced a $5-million prize to solicit ideas for remodelling global cooperation. “Our current international system”, Szombatfalvy argued, “including but not limited to the United Nations – was set up in another era, following the Second World War. It is no longer fit for purpose to deal with 21st century risks that can affect people anywhere in the world. We urgently need fresh new thinking in order to address the scale and gravity of today’s global challenges, which have outgrown the present system’s ability to handle them”. These concerns were against a backcloth of what many pundits saw as an unravelling of the global order, exemplified by a surge of anti-system political movements. As Chakoyan observes, “global and regional institutions, such as the U.N. Security Council or the EU, are widely criticized for their shortcomings. Yet, it’s terrifying to imagine what the world would look like without them”.3

134  The battles we fought It was not always like this. One way of reading the last 200 years in the West is the long journey towards emancipation, the emancipation not just of the working classes but of women, the disabled, ethnic minorities, colonial subjects and those of diverse sexual orientation. The white Anglo-Saxon male version of the world and its hold on the levers of power gradually yielded to a different reality. As the tide of rule by a few Europeans receded, more and more social groups pursued their dream of inclusion, equality and a place in the sun. They were no longer prepared to be written off. The view had taken hold that equality could not be held in the abstract. It was no longer possible to affirm the worth of people in general but not give value to women, working-class or black people. The fight against prejudice was not just about demanding equal rights but recognising equal status. It was about the dispossessed refusing to be exploited or continue in a lifetime of toil; regaining dignity and asserting a new identity as part of creating a more equal society. Protest has usually been understood in terms of grievance and aspiration. But it is also the politics of claiming equal value against those who seem to hold the cards. It was significant that the story of one life shaped by the struggle for emancipation, that of Mary Robinson, former President of Ireland and UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, was entitled Everybody Matters.4 In her struggle for the hungry, the hunted, the forgotten and the ignored, Robinson’s campaign lit up a better future rooted in equal value. In the same vein, Sergio Vieira, a senior UN official, has drawn attention to the importance of paying attention to the dignity of individuals and nations in international relations.5 Francis Fukuyama, in his 1989 essay ‘The End of History’, read the end of the Cold War as marking the final triumph of Western liberal democracy, and thus the end of our collective ideological evolution. The end of history had been proclaimed centuries earlier by the philosopher Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, for whom the victory of Napoleon’s forces over the Prussian army at Jena in 1806 represented the triumph of the values of the French Revolution over aristocracy. As Fukuyama sees it, world history between 1806 and 1989 was just the working out of the logic of those principles against monarchy’s successor ideologies, including Fascism and Communism.6 One does not have to subscribe to an end-of-history hypothesis to note that a struggle for global justice has taken place at the conjunction of important trends. Defining moments of the 20th century saw civil rights, human rights and colonial recession. The Cold War froze politics but the break-up of the Soviet Union led to a de-stabilised international order. The democratisation of Latin America led to the demise of authoritarian regimes desperate to cling to power. The Arab Spring of 2011 saw a massive turbulence in the Middle East, the downfall of some dictators and retrenchment by others. It is difficult to discern a unifying narrative that set Arab pulses racing in Egypt, Syria, Libya. To be sure it constituted returning power to the people through social media. And it threatened to lift the lid off tribal, ethnic and religious divisions that go deep. But then in the wake of the 2016 revolt on the right, the bankruptcy of interventionism and open borders, a postliberal future was beckoning.

The battles we fought 135 Three features of the contemporary landscape stand out as signifying a move towards a more sensitive human culture and a rising working assumption that people have high value and worth: •• •• ••

The politics of voice versus indifference; The politics of equal worth; The politics of dignity – human rights, human wrongs.

The politics of voice versus indifference The global spread of consensual government highlights a key arena of contemporary life in which there is a rising working assumption about the value of the human. Much of the political landscape, especially the fairer and more inclusive vision of liberal democratic polities, is based on absolute values (plural) that grow out of recognition that humans have value (singular). The move towards democracy as underpinning major parts of the international order is rooted in voice; the principle that all adults within a political community have an equal chance to vote and to shout. Democracy is a system of checks and balances that walks on two legs: i The principle that the majority vote of voices will win; ii The principle that minority voices should be respected, whatever their views. Democracy mandated participation on the grounds that those previously excluded from national life should articulate voice. In its triumphant march, democracy is associated with a set of expectations; the expectation of transforming the material conditions of life but also the expectation of freedom from coercion by the state. ‘Democracy’ became a style, a culture of leadership, a collaborative way of doing things, often accompanied by a personal style that could bring people to work together and allow for different voices to be heard.7 Zeldin argues that one of the most important promises of democracy is that it will provide respect for everybody. But mutual respect in Athens only worked because Athens depended on an empire, slaves and women to keep wonderful philosophical discussions going.8 Otherwise it was inclusive, unifying disparate groups – hoplites, wealthy cavalrymen and poor sailors – in a shared experience glamorising a notion of everyman as Achilles.9 When societies became increasingly complex, the project of maintaining stability necessitated an understanding and channels of communication between governments and people that only a democratic system could provide. Freedom of association, economic activity, regular and competitive elections allowed the political process to be responsive. It is an open question how the voices that value the human can be heard in a way that ensures some voices are not shouting too loudly at the expense of others. Should those voices be as representative as possible and how do we achieve that? Does a political system allow for direct democracy in the form of computerised referenda or alternatively a system like the UK

136  The battles we fought with a five-yearly trip by the electorate to the polling booth to review its national Government? How does a polity ensure that no one is left behind? Despite such practical difficulties, democratisation has been about bringing other voices into the conversation. From a situation in 19th-century Britain where only male property owners over the age of 21 could vote, extension of the franchise to anyone over the age of 18 was a strategy of growing recognition; that no voice should count more loudly than others. Arguably, such an exercise in political equality and indeed democratisation generally is rooted in the equal worth of all citizens. People matter; there is not a hierarchy of value but an equality of voice. Modern European democracies focus on respect for the equal dignity of each individual. This has been an outgrowth of the Western liberal tradition that political communities should pay attention to people. Legal punishments try to take this into account. Liberalism had undoubtedly been the most powerful ideological force shaping the Western political tradition. Its protagonists had seen a vision of the importance of the individual and liberty. Liberalism proclaimed humans as self-reliant, capable of personal development, most notably through education. It was a vision of human flourishing linked to personal autonomy, justice, reason and tolerance.10 Freedom is not negative – wanting to be left alone – but a positive view of autonomy with freedom to act.11 It is based on valuing the human, giving voice because each voice has equal worth and deserves to be heard. The political significance of the value of persons is often overlooked; nevertheless, a strategy of evolving democratisation was vital to the progress of Western society. In the West, it has become unacceptable for practical policy to trash minorities either within its population or within its orbit. Political, social or religious communities often define themselves by what they are not. The weak and vulnerable are those who have less power, less access to resources, and are persistently threatened with devaluation: written down as being worth less. Arguably, the moral test of a political system is how far it allows the weak and unproductive to stay on the radar. Both Bobbitt12 and Fukuyama argued that the long war between the liberal democracies ranged against Communism and Fascism had been won. When they wrote, about two-thirds of the states in the world had political systems that enshrined some competitive party systems and market reforms. It would, however, be naive to indulge in a one-sided narrative about democracy. Democracy can be a recipe for debating and delay. Elected governments can be subject to factions and interest groups: democratic systems the basis for what John Stuart Mill warned about – ‘the tyranny of the majority’. Under the heading of national security, democracies can turn into police states. Democratisation has actually stirred up xenophobia and increased instability in places like Gaza, Russia and Iran13 (though this may be linked to the reaction in these places to previous lack of recognition or high-handed politics). What is needed for democratisation to succeed is an intrusive media that can turn the spotlight of accountability on to any individual life being treated as an object by the system. Democracy enables people to speak their minds, to fight corruption.

The battles we fought 137 Significantly, a debate has raged in the Shi’ite world about the nature of clerical rule. The father of the Iranian revolution, Ayatollah Khomeini, provided the idea of submission to a trained religious scholar who would be supreme leader in an Islamic state. But top Shia scholars questioned this principle of ‘velayat-e-faqih’ – guardianship of the jurist. Even Khomeini said that the popular vote was a test of legitimacy. And Ali al-Sistani, one of the most revered Shia scholars, argued that in order to be legitimate, the supreme leader ought to win acceptance from a majority of believers.14 What modern Islamism proposes is a mix of popular sovereignty of the people and the sovereignty of God – the fundamental building block in Islamic political theory. To many Muslims, political theory arising from faith is the only compelling alternative to totalitarianism.15 The observation that democratisation tends towards respecting life does not imply anything about its inevitability. Periodically, democracy is in intellectual retreat. Democracy often has a difficult time. The practice needed defending also. The annual assessment of an American lobby group, Freedom House, charts the varying fortunes of liberty. Often, democracy had taken a turn for the worst.16 Yet during the last 200 years and more, beginning with the US Declaration of Independence heralding that all men are created equal, issues of human value have been prominent, though implicit, in the public square. The abolition of slavery assumed the value of people as did subsequent movements for emancipation. All this shaped the context of politics beyond recognition for it is the politics of recognition; paying attention to people – all of them.17 The 2016 Democracy Index report, Revenge of the ‘Deplorables’, examines the deep roots of today’s crisis of democracy in the developed world, and looks at how democracy fared in every region. Sub-Saharan Africa is beating Eastern Europe when it comes to political participation but is still on the backfoot in terms of putting in place formal democracy. The region has made very little progress and its rating has been flat, suggesting that it still has a long way to go to improve aspects such as pluralism, the functioning of government and civil liberties, amongst others. Mauritius tops the regional list and is also the only country in the region to be considered a full democracy. Latin America has been ahead of the curve in terms of dealing with populism, having seen off a wave of left-wing populist support over the last decade. Last year saw the region supporting centre-right, pro-market candidates stepping into office. However, Uruguay is the only country to make it into the list of ‘full democracies’, at number 19.18 Today, the prevailing world order is under attack from all sides. The rising nation states of India and China have no tradition of thinking in terms of power envisaged by the architects and practitioners of the Peace of Westphalia in the 17th century. Each nation state was then committed to respect the realities of its neighbours and to ensure that there was equilibrium of power.19 America and the EU have been vehicles for spreading the Western democratic liberal tradition that respects the value of the individual. One of the tests for entry into the European

138  The battles we fought Community – it has been much harder to leave until now – is the so-called Copenhagen criteria. States must pass the tests of being functioning democracies able to change their governments (i.e., maintain civilian rule of the military), ensure protection of minorities and human rights – another example of the way the contemporary agenda seeks to pay attention to people. Islamists reject this as secular, and that the West can no longer enforce its vision of the old world order which incorporated such liberal values is a considerable problem for international stability and both the legitimacy of governments and the power by which that is enforced. There is, as Henry Kissinger argues, a need for a new world order! Lynch contends that it was the goals of dignity and freedom that energised Arab publics and made them willing to challenge autocratic rulers.20 Empowerment of women also played a major role. Violent outcomes ensued – especially in Syria – but, for a while, the Arab Spring seemed symptomatic of global movements as people realised they need not put up with rotten governments.21

The politics of equal worth The equality agenda is closely linked to this. It is today’s single most important political principle. Diversity is now to be valued, not assimilated. There is a ‘right of recognition’, a basic right to be seen as a human being, a member of a political community.22 People matter. We have equal worth. In a mature democracy, it is recognised, at least in principle, that everyone – be they women, minorities, those with disability or with different sexuality to the mainstream, or the elderly –warrants an equal place in the sun and should not be discriminated against. In recent years, this has come to be labelled ‘identity politics’, generally as a pejorative term on the grounds that to label on account of one identity marker is too restrictive. One definition, black or white, cannot be the whole truth about that person. Identity politics was always an ambiguous way of advancing the cause of particular segments of the population except inasmuch as whole groups, relegated from the mainstream, could now stride to freedom. Rafts of legislation followed this principle since the 1960s. Equality became standard; discrimination to be dismantled. No matter whether a man loves a woman or another man, whatever someone’s skin colour or gender, they are equal before the law. Gender inequalities often intersect with those of race and class. Relationships of domination and submission are pervasive. Very commonly, in social patterns, power play takes centre stage. America was dedicated to the idea of moral equality. But what about sharing American pie with the people who baked it? And what about black people? It is hard to understand how Thomas Jefferson, a slave owner, could declare “that all men are created equal” as a philosophical justification for the break with England. “Few biographical tasks are more frustrating than trying to assemble a montage of quotations from Jefferson’s written work that make sense of his stance on slavery”.23 And what about women? Even before the high noon of the Enlightenment, questions were asked by female voices, ‘if all men are born free, how is that all women are born slaves?’.24

The battles we fought 139 The problem with the classic view of equality is that it was too abstract, taking little account of the very different lives people lived or the structures that worked against them. The challenge is how we give an account of social justice and equality in a way that respects people’s identity and culture. Everyone comes from somewhere. How you see the world depends on where you sit. For now, let us note that the very concept of equality is rooted in the equal worth of each person, but that equality could no longer be considered as an abstract concept independent of a life setting. The ethos of equality is pervasive in the West. But what does that depend on? Equality is now not so important in the political lexicon – ‘fairness’ does reasonable work in its place. The two concepts are not coterminous. Fairness does not necessarily imply social justice. Many critics argue that the ideology of equality and diversity has hardened into a dogma which excludes minority views of those who see it as a juggernaut. Nevertheless, at the heart of the trend in our world towards equality and embracing diversity is some notion of equal value. Social movements of our time have been built on the way some groups are given less worth, subject to inhuman and degrading treatment or not given basic respect. The ideals of movements are illuminating. It is intriguing historically to observe that the classic oppositional movements of the second half of the 20th century – Civil Rights, women’s liberation, ethnic, de-colonisation, disability, sexual orientation and ageing – represented enormous social changes that were advancing at broadly the same time. The new social movements, joined by environmentalism, were vociferous in their denunciation of discrimination. Commerce caught the prevailing mood, witness an advertisement for Vale Mining Corporation: “The world is changing. Today, balance and respect are just as essential as mining and its application when it comes to achieving progress. Sustainable development is the only viable option. That’s why we believe in, and that’s why we invest in, new technologies, environmental protection and the development of the communities where we operate”.25 A Convention adopted in 1979 by the UN defined discrimination against women. One hundred and sixty eight states have now signed, agreeing to stop such exploitation of women as sex-trafficking and give equal access to voting, education, health and employment. One Millennium Development Goal adopted by the UN is to promote gender equality and empower women.26 The strategy was to eliminate gender disparity in primary and secondary education by 2015. The issues have not gone away by international diktat. Across the world, from childhood, women are taught that they are inferior to men, often to blame for violence inflicted upon them. Domestic violence is the single greatest cause of harm in an advanced economy such as the UK. As wives or partners, they must hold the family together, at any cost.27 The passionate polemic, ‘Half the Sky’, signalled a fresh campaign against the exploitation and trafficking of women. Efforts made in countless projects and organisations to empower women and bequeath dignity should be celebrated.28 Empowering women is now seen as one of the best ways to break the cycle of poverty. Equality of treatment for all and equality of opportunity for girls is a nonnegotiable part of the contemporary landscape in most Western schools. Gender

140  The battles we fought equality for girls is a prerequisite in education, staff and indeed pupils are ready to challenge gender stereotypes and zero tolerance for all forms of homophobia and racism is now firmly on the map. Contemporary emphasis on empowerment of women plays strongly on the agenda of our times, signalling equal worth and freedom from exploitation and violence against women and girls. As with all advocacy, arguably the real heavy lifting is performed by equal worth and value. Women ‘ought not to be treated this way’.

The politics of dignity – human rights, human wrongs The third term that captures the agenda of the last generation is ‘human rights’. Behind the strong ethos of entitlements the term conveys, the core is surely that of dignity, of a human wholeness that should not be subject to invasive action or intervention. A sacred essence that translates into how we ‘deserve’ to be treated. At the back of the language of human rights discourse is the daring idea that everyone in a political community is also a member of a moral community. We have dignity. According to the Social Institute for Excellence, dignity and privacy means that “staff knock before entering. Dignity means being able to go to the loo and close the door; dignity means when you have a bath, not having fun poked at your body”.29 There has been rising concern about the lack of dignity being given to old people in hospitals. Cleanliness and staff attitudes are strong markers for patients to feel they are treated with privacy and dignity in hospital. Humans should be given dignity. They should not be violated. Not only was life sacred if that meant our bodily existence should be carefully nurtured but there was a sacred quality to the interior in the human psyche. The daughter of a former German diplomat sought to explain why her father, once very pro-Communist, radically changed his mind about Stalinism. “One night, he heard screams”!30 With these five words, she wrote, he saw through and swept away the myths of the 20th century. Some political systems and ideologies give value to humans. Others disregard the sanctity of life; life is cheap, people are of no value. Their lives don’t matter. It is a growing consensus in the West that good government should be about reinforcing human dignity. Yet historically, the sanctity of life was slow in coming. Behind the foundation of the Red Cross by Henry Dunant in the 19th century and caring for the wounded in war lay a moral sense of the value of each life.31 Political systems that respect life are usually those that respect the rule of law. There is a direct association between these. “We have to persuade the local inhabitants that Government people won’t harm them”, declared a NATO General endeavouring to win hearts and minds in the Afghan struggle.32 Arguably, that is the security of a tradition that respects a law-based system and ensures civilian control of the military. ‘Government people won’t harm them’, turn thuggish, lock up its opponents, sponsor cultures of violence or subject others to arbitrary arrest. In many countries, a ruthless disregard for human life has been the norm; the rule of law is not part of the order of things, the sanctity of life is not respected in civil practice.

The battles we fought 141 The agenda of not trashing the human is a key feature of our times. Human rights too represent a working assumption that humans have a high value. In Argentina’s dirty war, all who did not openly profess to be on the side of the military were regarded as supporting the enemy. General Saint-Jean, the Governor of the Province of Buenos Aires, declared in 1976, “first we will kill all the subversives; then we will kill their collaborators; then we will kill their sympathisers; then we will kill those who remain indifferent; and finally we will kill the timid”.33 The structure of hostility was imposed on a whole society. Guerrillas regarded those standing up for human rights with ambivalence; drawing attention to the force used by the Government but de-legitimising revolutionary violence they felt was more than justified.34 The great majority of the 10,000 to 30,000 people who ‘disappeared’ in the years of repression were regarded as dangerous ideologues and sympathisers despite never having brandished a weapon.35 Disappeared? Never heard from again? Not quite. “The dead and pieces of the dead turned up everywhere, everyday as taken-for-granted in a nightmare or horror movie”.36 An important motivation towards valuing individual dignity through the human rights agenda was the reaction against the de-humanisation of totalitarian regimes. Outrage against the Holocaust has been key to this development. There are to be sure many narratives operating in such a complex world-historical phenomenon as the Holocaust.37 The centrality of Auschwitz as the icon of evil prevents us seeing other aspects of mass murder. There were wider circles of perpetrators than the Nazis.38 Yet the Holocaust is a continuing and terrifying warning against de-valuing human life. As Primo Levi, an Italian writer who survived Auschwitz, said, “my name is 174517. We will carry the tattoy name is 174517. We will caro on our left arm until we die”. Or as Elie Wiesel lamented about the terrifying ­de-personalisation of the Final Solution: “Who are you? A number. Your name? Gone. Blown away. Into the sky. Look up there – the sky is black, black with names”.39 From the ashes of the millions, a new crime had to be labelled that set the bar much higher in an endeavour to prevent the trashing of human life. At the same time as human rights legislation spread across the world, the encounter with atrocity has shaped profoundly the development of international law. Nazi extermination, ethnic cleansing in the Balkans and tribal massacres in Rwanda have led to recognition and definition of crimes against humanity and genocide. Atrocity, desecration of the sanctity of life has led to the creation of new ad hoc courts from the International Military Tribunal that tried the Nazi leaders at Nuremberg to the new International Criminal Court.40 Nuremberg was criticised as being victors’ justice and hence partial. It did, however, light a long fuse. The sentencing of the Liberian dictator Charles Taylor in 2012 for crimes against humanity meant that even heads of state could not sleep easily in their beds.

142  The battles we fought After the Second World War and the scar of mass murder hung over the world, many countries said the need was urgent to set out an international agreement laying down basic human rights for people. In 1948, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) was adopted. As Article One enshrines, “all human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights. They are endowed with reason and conscience and should act towards one another in a spirit of brotherhood”. Signing the agreement, most countries in the world have agreed in principle to protect human rights. A large array of legislation and international agreements have grown up under this umbrella. Since 1948, various Conventions sought to ensure that rights laid down in the UDHR were applied to particular groups of people. The Convention on Asylum (1951), the Convention on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination (1969), the Convention against Torture (1984) and the Convention on the Rights of the Child (1989) are examples of what now constitutes international human rights law, aimed at making governments accountable. The latter was signed by the UK in 1991 and acts as a promise to young people under the age of 18 that they have a right to protection from cruelty and neglect and should not be exploited. The European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR) became part of domestic law in the UK in 2000 under the rubric of the Human Rights Act. Human rights discourse has gone on to become a major feature of our times; its success reaches to international law, national law, foreign policy and personal claims. Rights tend to be claimed when things are not ‘right’. As Dworkin defines the term, human rights are the rights we have because we are human. They are a matter of entitlement – someone has a right to something.41 Yet where we derive human rights from is a key question. Arguably, the value of humanity is the source; things are that should not be. This is fraught with philosophic difficulties. As Brown observes, “the idea that rights could be attached to individuals by virtue solely of a common humanity is particularly subject to penetrating criticism”.42 Historically, most advocates of human rights have made foundational appeals beyond which you cannot go – inherent human dignity in the UN Declaration or the concept of divine donation in the US Declaration of Independence – “endowed by the Creator with certain unalienable rights”. Inevitably, we accept certain axiomatic propositions that we are free to accept or reject or else moral and political arguments cannot get off the ground.43 It may be that the seemingly unstoppable momentum towards human rights is slowing. The idea of ‘human rights for all’ seems to many to be a European project, to be differentiated and fragmented into gay and lesbian rights, abortion and reproductive rights or reaction to domestic violence. How far the notion of freedom for all can be sustained, irrespective of political allegiance, remains to be seen. America has promoted a human rights ethos within China but politics may yet alter this.44 Attitudes towards the value of people and of life continue to be beset by xenophobic nationalism and pride. Nationalistic authoritarian regimes of any colour or persuasion display scant regard for valuing the human and, with it, any sanctity of life. Yet human rights are abused too in liberal democracies. In 2005, abuses of prisoners at the US prison in Abu Grahib shocked the world. Hooding, shackling,

The battles we fought 143 sleep deprivation, forced exercises, nakedness and other humiliations were all part of softening up detainees prior to investigation. Freeing Iraq from human rights abuse is what the invasion was supposed to have been about.45 It matters that there is a legal system that will give equal weight to the lives of all its citizens – including minorities. It matters that there is a system of post-mortems and due process involving a coroner if there are questions. And it matters if funerals take place in a system that allows the dead to be honoured. As one chaplain said of a body returning from the wars, we should treat him “as if he was the first and everyone was the only soldier who has died in Afghanistan”.46 To be sure this plays out the sacred life of the Western soldier. Yet it speaks of the affirmation in the West that Western lives count. Do any others? Liberal democracy, a system that in principle respects human rights and the rule of law, has always been somewhat selective in the eyes of its critics. Today, many are challenging liberal democracy in a fundamental way. They are more open to alternatives, to living under authoritarian or military rule.

Acting humanely “We’re launching this on the basis of common humanity” – Bob Geldof (on the launch of the Commission for Africa Report, 11th March 2005). As the quote above epitomises, humanitarian impulses are another arena of our times where valuing the human has come to the fore. In a former era, the rallying cry was slavery. The Charter of the Royal Africa Company, which orchestrated the English slave trade, defined slaves as ‘commodities’. A series of codes constructed for English, Spanish and French colonies saw slaves as ‘chattels’ – literally, a thing, not a person. Later, Dissenters in the anti-slavery movement advocated abolition since every slave was “a man and brother”.47 At the peak of the Atlantic slave trade in the 18th century, Europeans shipped 90,000 Africans a year to the Americas in some 200 to 300 ships. From 1519, when figures are available, to 1867, over 11 million humans were forcibly taken across the Atlantic – about as many humans as are caught up in trafficking today.48 Two examples must suffice on the contemporary scene. The world was shocked in January 2010 by an earthquake that shattered a country already plagued by misfortune. Images of broken children, broken buildings and the loss of life killed the idea that compassion fatigue was dead. Epic catastrophe in Haiti was met with epic generosity.49 The emphasis throughout the appeal was acting humanely – in effect, valuing the human. An idealistic new humanitarian principle was established in 2005 when the largest-ever gathering of world leaders articulated that they have a general ‘responsibility to protect’ humans from genocide, ethnic cleansing, war crimes and crimes against humanity. If people are being oppressed by their rulers, states have a duty to intervene; “the desire to put an end to human rights abuses and the rule of terror is what motivates liberal interventionists”.50 In extreme circumstances, R2P, as it was called, could involve others stepping in. This was sharply criticised by some states who saw power games at work, implying right to intervene. And the new

144  The battles we fought principle faced immediate tests in Darfur where women who ventured out of the temporary camps to forage for wood were captured and gang-raped and children machine-gunned for entertainment. But it was the contested politics of Iraq that posed the greatest challenge to ‘the responsibility to protect’. To its critics, it was merely a cover for intervention by the Western powers.51 To its friends, “the responsibility to protect is the most important and imaginative doctrine to emerge on the international scene for decades”.52 An often reiterated staple of political debate was that intervention costs too much. Action by NATO in Libya in 2011 was acceptable because it was successful. Intervening in Syria at the time of brutal repression was a more dubious proposition while intervention in Afghanistan rapidly lost public support. Taliban reaction against NATO seemed to prove a fundamental point. After all, no one welcomes a foreign occupier. In the light of the original sin of the Iraq war, the voices of critics rose in great strength against the very notion of liberal interventionism. Had all we done merely fanned the flames of fanaticism, stoked the fires of antagonism and massively tested collateral damage? Nevertheless, it is the threat of genocide that has shaped many of the demands for humanitarian interventions. Here is one definition: “the threat or use of force across state borders by a state (or group of states) aimed at preventing or ending widespread and grave violations of the fundamental human rights of individuals other than its own citizens, without the permission of the state within whose territory force is applied”.53 There are questions about how far this should be pressed. Some saw interventions as a cloak for self-interest (particularly the economic interest of oil) or that states should refrain from interfering in each other’s affairs for the same reason that individuals have a duty to respect each other.54 “Somebody ought to intervene, but no specific state or society is morally bound to do so. And in many of these cases no one does”.55 The indignation evoked when lives are trashed provides an expression of the outrage that makes us human. Tyrannical and murderous regimes must not be allowed to return to their business as if Nuremberg had not happened. Through all the politics of genocide, the International Criminal Court played an emerging role. From its inception in 2002, it has laid bare the facts about some of the most dreadful events on the planet. It has often been endangered by definitions, for instance, over what constitutes aggression, especially massacring your own people. Yet a consensus has built up over the unacceptability of atrocious actions. It demonstrates that terrifying acts of extreme disregard of human life will meet a united front. A culture of international criminal justice and holding leaders to account is building, reflecting an ethos of valuing the human. The politics of outrage in the face of humanitarian disasters centres on the issue of ‘what should be?’ These aspects of contemporary life play strongly on the agenda of our times. “Human Rights are at once a utopian ideal and a realistic practice for implementing that ideal. They say in effect, ‘Treat a person like a human being and you’ll get a human being’. They also say ‘Here’s how you treat someone as a human being’”.56 They are a self-fulfilling prophecy.

The battles we fought 145

A more sensitive human culture? Consider the following quotes: “Staff knock before entering. Dignity means being able to go to the loo and close the door; dignity means when you have a bath, not having fun poked at your body”. – Social Institute for Excellence57 “I must confess that I don’t know exactly what that is, human dignity … I don’t know if the person who is beaten by the police loses human dignity. Yet I am certain that with the very first blow that descends on him, he loses something we will perhaps temporarily call ‘trust in the world’ … that the other person will respect me, that he will respect my physical and with it also, my metaphysical being. The boundaries of my body are also the boundaries of myself. My skin surface shields me against the external world. If I am to have trust, I must feel on it only what I want to feel. At the first blow, however, this trust in the world breaks down I must confess that I don’t know exactly what that is, human dignity … I d … It is like a rape, a sexual act without the consent of one of the partners”.58 “What evidence is there that there are equal, respectful partnerships in place?”59 “Nursery schools should be places where children learn and develop in an atmosphere of mutual respect and trust”.60 And, as heralded in the quote at the beginning of this chapter: “We should all be treated with respect, everyone should be included in the unit”. – spokesperson for the UK military61 In education and in management, personal attacks are frowned on (officially). Haim Ginott’s theories were very popular during the 1970s and are still influential today. His congruent communication has had a positive impact on many classrooms. According to Ginott, it would be better to say, “I am hearing a lot of talking that is disrupting the class”. By removing the ‘you’ statements and replacing them with ‘I’ statements you can address the situation without attacking or criticising the student. Ginott proposed that the teacher see him or herself as “the decisive element in the classroom … I can be a tool of torture or an instrument of inspiration. I can humiliate or humour, hurt or heal. In all my sets, it is my response that determines whether a crisis will be escalated or de-escalated – a child humanised or de-humanised”.62 The great issues of the day are to do with competing forms of value, especially how the value of the human is assumed and plays out in the social ecology. This is clear from the rise of the equality, respect and dignity agendas in the last generation. Contemporary life expresses some notion of the value and worth of human beings as a working assumption.

146  The battles we fought Top of the list in the UK Policing Pledge was an undertaking to “treat you with dignity and respect and provide you with fair access to their services”.63 Acting with dignity and acting ethically are two of the ways that contemporary life works with some notion of human value. The respect agenda has been of increasing importance in global society in the past few decades. Its ideal and practice have become pervasive in social institutions. The aim seems to be to draw red lines against a denial of the full humanity of individuals and groups. It is commonplace for statements to be seen in public places or on transport to the effect that staff and clients/patients alike deserve to be treated with respect. Abusive behaviour will not be tolerated. Of course, a belief in the inherent personhood of people does not guarantee that they are treated humanely or with respect. A final example. The European New Car Assessment Programme (Euro NCAP) is a safety performance assessment programme. A five-star system rates all cars made in Europe on the basis of results in a crash test. It is aimed at making cars safer. The website states its underlying purpose, however. That raison d’être is the 78,000 lives saved since Euro NCAP’s tough crash safety tests were launched in 1997.64 Health and safety regimes have that as their ethos. It is why they exist. The turmoil of contemporary life has generated insecurity on a scale that has shrunk the middle ground to a much thinner strip of land. In the politics of anger, many left-behind communities voiced a sense of disconnection from establishment figures ‘down south’ or ‘down east’. Those describing themselves as ‘working people’ (lower-income voters) often spoke of ‘no one ever knocking on our doors’. It was those feeling a sense of patriotism, for feeling concerned about open door immigration and for supporting Brexit. “The radical metropolitan left think they are scum. We in UKIP understand and share their concerns and will always treat them with respect”, said the leader of the United Kingdom Independence Party.65 Respect versus indignation – such are the battle-lines. The political classes had completely failed to discern the worries and aspirations of voters. Behind the highly contested politics is the very reaction against the forms of societal conditions we were considering in this chapter, forms and actions that engender: i Indifference against the need for recognition; being seen and heard; ii Indignity; iii Inequality (diminishing). The reason why these factors are important is that they are forms of erosion of value. Disvaluing, the search for recognition and not being set aside, occurs via these channels. The contrast pole is also important to conceptualise; the political significance of ‘we count, we matter’ is discerned through: i

Addressing indifference and disengagement by giving voice and allowing participation;

The battles we fought 147 ii

Addressing indignity by upholding honour plus the need to act humanely, ethically and against violation of the sacred life of persons (for example, human rights discourse); iii Addressing lack of respect for individuals and groups by protecting minorities, by promoting equality and through the respect and diversity agenda. No one should be left behind. These trends characterise the zeitgeist of our times. The demand for democracy, respect, human rights and dignity has risen on the contemporary landscape. It is about the failure of liberal interventionism that was the focus of fierce criticism underlying the crumbling of old certainties of the stable international order in 2016. No one had the appetite anymore to save the world! In his The Fourth Political Theory, the adviser to Vladimir Putin, Alexander Dugin, argued that political systems of the modern age have been the products of three distinct ideologies: liberal democracy, Marxism and Fascism. The last two are now historical relics but, until now, liberal democracy no longer operates as an ideology but as a taken for granted atmosphere of our times. Now, argued Dugin, we find ourselves on the brink of a post-political reality. This, he suggested, is signified by the return of cultural diversity against commercialisation, combined with traditional ethnic worldviews within a very new context. Liberalism has monopolised political discourse and drowned the world in a universal sameness, destroying everything that makes the various cultures and peoples unique.66 The world over, disaffection with the old order is striking. Unpredictability is the new norm. The Progressive politics fades. In its place comes sectarian politics based on community, religious or ethnic identity. So, is this the end of an Indian summer for liberal western values? The political climate could be heading towards a long, cold and dark winter. It might not be a new ice age coming for globalization, but it is clearly a deep permafrost that is gripping the liberal political world order we have known over the last two decades.67 The global order based on bureaucracies and institutions intended for co-operation was shaking and quaking to its roots. The nation state was back.

Notes   1 www.bbc.co.uk/radio4/todayprogramme, 12th October 2014.   2 Abrams, A. Mark Zuckerberg Shares Facebook’s Plan to Bring the Global Community Together, http://time.com/4674201/mark-zuckerberg-facebook-letter/, February 2017.  3 Andrew Chakhoyan, Director of Government Relations, VimpelCom, 3 Ways to Reboot Globalization, https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2017/02/3-ways-to-rebootglobalization/, 23rd February 2017.   4 Robinson, M. (2012) Everybody Matters. London: Hodder & Stoughton.   5 Power, S. (2010) Sergio. New York: Penguin, p. 531.   6 Fukuyama, F. (1992) The End of History and the Last Man. London: Hamish Hamilton. See also Andrew Potter, The Death of Reality, National Post, http://news.nationalpost. com/full-comment/andrew-potter-the-death-of-reality, 22nd July 2016.

148  The battles we fought   7 Dunn, J. (2005) Setting the People Free: The Story of Democracy. London: Atlantic Books, p. 19.   8 Zeldin, T. (1998) An Intimate History of Humanity. London: Vintage Books, p. 142.   9 Pritchard, D. (ed.) (2012) War, Democracy and Culture in Classical Athens. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 10 Holden, B. (1993) Understanding Liberal Democracy. Hemel Hempstead: Harvester Wheatsheaf. 11 Berlin, I. (1969) Four Essays on Liberty. London: Oxford University Press. 12 Bobbitt, P. (2002) The Shield of Achilles. New York: Knopf. 13 Ramo, J. C. (2009) The Age of the Unthinkable: Why the New World Constantly Surprises Us. London: Little Brown. 14 Why the Turbans Are at Odds, The Economist, 27th June 2009. 15 Feldman, N. (2008) The Fall and Rise of the Islamic State. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. 16 Freedom in the World 2010: Global Erosion of Freedom. Washington, DC: Freedom House. 17 Taylor, C. (1992) Multiculturalism and the Politics of Recognition. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. 18 Economist Intelligence Unit. Democracy Index 2016. http://www.eiu.com/public/topical_report.aspx?campaignid=DemocracyIndex2016 19 Kissinger, H. (2014) World Order. London: Allen Lane. 20 Lynch, M. (2012) The Arab Uprising: The Unfinished Revolutions of the New Middle East. New York: Public Affairs. 21 Dabashi, H. (2012) The Arab Spring: The End of Post-Colonialism. London: Zed Books. 22 Heyman, S. (2009) On the Criminalisation of Hate Speech. In I. Hare and J. Weinstein (eds.) Extreme Speech and Democracy. Oxford: Oxford University Press. 23 Wiencek, H. (2012) Master of the Mountain: Thomas Jefferson and His Slaves. New York: Farrar Straus Giroux. 24 Stone, L. (1977) The Family, Sex and Marriage in England, 1500–1800, quoting M. Astell, Reflections on Marriage, published in 1706. 25 http://www.vale.com/EN/aboutvale/mission, accessed September 2014. 26 www.un.org/millenniumgoals/bkgd.shtml 27 www.UNIFEM.org 28 Kristoff, N. D. & Wu Dunn, S. (2010) Half the Sky. London: Virago. 29 www.scie.org, May 2012. 30 Bailie, G. (1995) Violence Unveiled: Humanity at the Crossroads. New York: Crossroads Publishing Co. 31 Hutchinson, J. (1996) Champions of Charity: War and the Rise of the Red Cross. Boulder, CO and Oxford: Westview. 32 www.bbc.co.uk/radio4pm, 15th February 2010. 33 Simpson, J. & Bennett, J. (1985) The Disappeared and Mothers of the Plaza. New York: St Martin’s Press, p. 66. 34 Munck, R. (1987) Argentina: From Anarchism to Peronism: Workers, Unions and Politics, 1855–1985. London: Zed Books. 35 Pion-Berlin, D. (1989) The Ideology of State Terror: Economic Doctrine and Political Repression in Argentina and Peru. Boulder, CO: Lynne Riener. 36 Didion, J. (1982) Salvador. New York: Pocket Books, p. 9. 37 Bloxham, D. (2009) The Final Solution: A Genocide. Oxford: Oxford University Press. 38 Dean, M. (2008) Robbing the Jews: The Confiscation of Jewish Property in the Holocaust. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 39 Wiesel, E. (1989 ) Dialogues 1, ‘One Generation After’. In J. K. Roth & M. Berenbaum (eds.) Holocaust: Religious and Philosophical Implications. New York: Paragon House, p. xiii.

The battles we fought 149 40 Drumbi, M. (2008) Atrocity, Punishment and International Law. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 41 Dworkin, R. (1977) Taking Rights Seriously. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, pp. 188–190. 42 Brown. C. (1999) Universal Human Rights: A Critique. In T. Dunne & N. Wheeler (eds.) Human Rights in Global Politics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, p. 103. 43 Arckes, H. (1998) The Axioms of Public Policy. In D. F. Forte (ed.) Natural Law and Contemporary Public Policy. Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press. 44 Hopgood, S. (2013) The Endtimes of Human Rights. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. 45 Gourevitch, P. and Morris, E. (2008) Standard Operating Procedure. Harmondsworth: Penguin Press. 46 www.bbc.co.uk/radio4 World at One, 9th July 2009. 47 Hall, C. (1991) Missionary Positions. In L. Grossenberg and C. Nelson (eds.) Cultural Studies Now and in the Future. London: Routledge. 48 Donnan, E. (1969) Documents Illustrative of the History of the Slave Trade to America. New York: Octagon. Vol. II, p. 592. 49 Haiti’s Tragedy, Time Magazine, 8th February 2010. 50 Powell, J. (2010) The New Machiavelli: How to Wield Power in the Modern World. London: Vintage. 51 Bellamy, A. J. (2010). The Responsibility to Protect: Five Years On. Ethics and International Affairs, Vol. 24, No. 2: pp. 143–169. 52 Evans, G. (2004) The Responsibility to Protect: Rethinking Humanitarian Intervention, Proceedings of the Annual Meeting, reprinted in American Society of International Law, Vol. 98, pp. 78–89. 53 Teson, F. (1997) Humanitarian Intervention: An Inquiry into Law and Morality, 2nd Ed. Irvington-on-the-Hudson, NY: Transnational Publishers, p. 135. 54 Buchanan, A. (1999) The Internal Legitimacy of Humanitarian Intervention. Journal of Political Philosophy, Vol. 7, No. 1: pp. 71–87. 55 Walzer, M. (2000) Just and Unjust Wars: A Moral Argument with Historical Illustrations. 3rd Ed. New York: Basic Books. 56 Donnelly, J. (2003) Universal Human Rights in Theory and Practice. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, p. 15. 57 www.scie.org, May 2012. 58 Amery, J. (1989) Torture. In J. K. Roth & M. Berenbaum (eds.) Holocaust: Religious and Philosophical Implications. New York: Paragon House, p. 177. 59 Ledwith, M. & Springett, J. (2010) Participatory Practice: Community-Based Action for Transformative Change. Bristol: Policy Press, p. 14. 60 Response in UK Government Consultation on Early Years Education. Church of England. August 2014. 61 www.bbc.co.uk/radio4/todayprogramme, 12th October 2014. 62 Ginott, H. (1993) Teacher and Child: A Book for Parents and Teachers. NY: Scribner Paper Fiction. 63 HM Government, Tackling Anti-Social Behaviour, neighbourhood leaflet, 2010. 64 www.euroncap.com, accessed February 2017. 65 Paul Nuttall, Daily Telegraph, 13th February 2017, and Newsnight, BBC2, 13th February 2017. 66 Dugin, A. (2012) The Fourth Political Theory. Berwick: Arktos Media. 67 Anders Borg, chair, Global Financial System Initiative, World Economic Forum, 22nd January 2017. https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2017/01/davos-download-global-economic-warming/

12 From honour society to voice and choice society

“I am not an agenda!” – “I feel treated like dirt by the system”1 “Dawn will come and the girls will ask about her, ‘Where is she’? And the m ­ onster will answer: ‘We killed her’. A mark of shame was on our foreheads and we washed it off ”. – a female Iraqi perspective on honour crimes2 “The digital revolution’s hallmark is disintermediation, shrinking the space between individuals and organizations. If NGOs think it won’t impact their work, they’re kidding themselves”. – Michael J. Elliott, ONE Fund3

‘Can you tell me who I am?’ These are puzzling times. Revolution in communications and transport have shrunk the global village to a global living room accessed by a mouse. Cultural identity is profoundly threatened by this; everything is changing too quickly. The maelstrom of debate generated by Brexit, Trump and the rise of populism highlights the question of what people want. To understand the forces driving this growing mood requires deep listening and attention to underlying concerns. Amongst those who argued so passionately, what were people looking for? It behoves leaders and analysts to listen hard to frustrated, deeply disturbing voices that are maybe saying something that needs to be surfaced. Are these events signifiers of a new conceptualisation of the self that is emerging? We have been pondering a question. ‘Who is this ‘it’ to which I become an object?’ The argument in this book is that the puzzling politics of 2016 had been bubbling up for a long time. It was there in the Protest heard against de-personalisation in contemporary public services, in education, health care and policing. The extent to which society in the West is characterised by ‘voice and choice’ is seen with personalised consumer products such as entertainment, one-to-one

From honour society to voice and choice  151 patient care, affirming the dignity needs of the elderly or those with dementia or applying consumerism to health care. Personalised care is increasingly regarded as vital in the treatment of cancer. There is growing impatience with bureaucratic focus on hierarchies and procedures; a greater demand for excellent service and outcomes. Bureaucracies are strongly mistrusted. When those on the receiving end are objects of care, patients or pupils, something happens. A repeated theme is heard behind response to public services – that people are more important than things. This is not selling a product or a service. Personalisation is about an identity, a recognition of a humanity to be invoked. It is a refrain for our times. Is this because of rising expectations about accountability or a response that de-personalising influences are no longer acceptable in an era of empowered citizenry? Or is this the inevitable reaction against a fact of life, that in applying regulation, officials are only doing what officials do? At least corporate greyness was better than endemic corruption in many nations! What is this Protest? A lens is perhaps helpful here; a methodological stance that is available, best described as ‘listen to the music’.4 Societal leaders, baffled by the contradictions in popular reactions, could adopt an approach of tuning in to deeper themes playing under the surface. Human action is lived not just on the surface of things where angry shouts are all that can be heard but from underlying subject positions. Beneath external noise, what sort of themes can be discerned? The proposition advanced here is that through the quest for voice and choice in contemporary society runs a demand to be neither written off nor written out of the political calculations. Through the intensity of political debate there is the indignant cry of those insisting on more of a handle on the invisible forces which shape their lives, forces that seem to be distant. It is the sigh of those who feel powerless, pursuing some way of regaining control over the places that matter to them; their past, present and the future. When prospects have been clouded over and things that matter to people are threatened by the distant forces of change or economic disruption, they will make a strong bid to regain the initiative. We have seen this in the reactions to robots stealing their jobs, to Eurocrats or distant administrators having too much control or to multinationals, big business and banks having too much control. The reactions by citizens wanting more say in how central or local government is run or over their neighbourhoods is of a piece with the demand for those who pull the strings over the things that affect them daily to be nearer, less distant. Is the loud clamour that erupted into political space so very far from the demand to obtain voice and choice across the board against forces beyond their control by those who will not lie down and take it when threatened? The demand for recognition is central to these processes. It is the flip side of reaction against the indifference we have noted that citizen voters feel so keenly. The reason why this has such salience is surely that it is a key driver of the experience of devaluation that is endemic in contemporary life. Indifference is an emporium of the senses. It is fed by sight and hearing – being neither seen nor

152  From honour society to voice and choice heard. Indifference sits alongside the experiences of inequality (being belittled and diminished) as well as indignity we have noted as drivers of a more sensitive human culture in the last generation. The Protest is a spring-loaded reaction to it. Historians may well ponder why the full-throated reaction against exploitation, lack of democracy, inequality and lack of human rights was not enough for many. Indeed, those very reactions of progressive politics came to be either taken for granted perhaps or branded as the habitat of liberal elites, mired in relativism. It is a largely conservative stance we have been documenting in this book: the reaction against global, transnational players; against faceless bureaucrats, Eurocrats and robots; and against impersonal systems demonstrated by a rising tide of people power. The reason for this seems to be that forces of conservatism were much stronger on the concrete identities of belonging that were being disrupted. The tide had been coming in for a long time. The liberal order was perhaps seen as eclipsing identities to do with place, family and nation in which contemporary people persist in locating themselves. Boundaries and walls are nothing new; national self-determination goes back at least to the calling card of the Treaty of Versailles a hundred years ago. Nevertheless, the tendency to assert concrete identity has such resonance surely because it is existential. ‘Can you tell me who I am?’ is the epitome of the latest crisis of modernity that 2016 highlighted. It is a ‘core’ issue as people struggle to handle the fragmentary forces that are de-stabilising our societies. Rapid change is generating insecurity and rootlessness.5 Individuals and communities alike are trying to come to terms with the collapse of distance and resolve the tensions we have been exploring. Demands for recognition and identity are twins. The idea of people inhabiting a particular location in spacetime that defined them was a given of human culture until the 21st century dawned. Now it has been extended by a mode of existence that is both local and networked. Where and when human beings are is no longer the most important marker of their lives. They have a presence in cyberspace. The extension of ourselves into virtual space is enhanced by the ability of such tools as ‘selfies’ to provide more forms of the multiple identities we now take on. In the internet age, we pick ’n’ mix ourselves. The networked mode of existence differs from old forms of collective expression because it is also virtual. Virtuality is fast becoming a global human culture. This milieu is a multi-layered, highly complex picture; a picture not only touched by the camera but perhaps invented – and what is the difference anyway? Marshal McLuhan is famous for his concept that ‘the medium is the message’. The form of the medium embeds itself into the message it conveys. The medium itself should be the subject of study. Content had little effect. It was the vehicle for its transmission that counts.6 With formidable prescience, he also saw that the rise of electronic communication would have the potential to collapse space and transcend time. In the shift from religion to modernity, the secular effects of globalisation are well documented. A strong aspect of contested modernity is about individualism. Some ambiguity about this has already been noted. Individualised lives are in tension with communal bonds. The result, as we saw in Chapter 7, is fragmentation and social

From honour society to voice and choice  153 isolation, the alienation of people from each other. Amidst the daily concern to get on with their own lives, consumer thinking leads to the pursuit of people’s private satisfactions rather than looking out for neighbours as a sphere of moral responsibility. ‘Love your neighbour’ is somebody else’s responsibility. Privatisation of lives results in distance from fellow citizens. Civil society is contested territory for assertion of identity since the notion of ‘belonging’ has to be situated somewhere. Does it adhere to a local community and social identity or to the celebration of individual space as the primary location of identity?

Networked individuals However, the desire for private lives sits alongside another strong reality of contested modernity, that of networked individuals. The extension of new technologies is creating possibilities for new forms of interpersonal relationships, as well as a resurgence of grassroots community and political engagement. ‘Networked individuals’ look to combine with the like-minded in search of ‘facework’. In the digital economy, locations no longer matter and borders are irrelevant. What we have though is the rise of ‘network society’. Castells argued that networks constitute the new social morphology of our societies.7 Network society is a social structure based on networks, a society where the key social structures and activities are organised around electronically processed information networks. Networks have long since been old forms of social organisation. Social networks process and manage information based on digital technologies. The organisation of the components of a network (individuals, groups, organisations) is no longer tied to particular times and places. The scope of the network society is both global and local or ‘glocal’. Networks that enable a particular consciousness to rise from individuals and go peer-to-peer. Completely new forms of democratisation and interaction become possible.8 Networks allow Protest to be spread. The change to networks enables the transition from the personal to the collective. Consumer capitalism narrowed down the scope of meaningful interaction from the communal to the individual. Networked individuals extend the process back again and occupy new spaces. Courtesy of the internet, a new subjectivity is rising. However, to go from networked individuals to a sense of belonging to a form of community is a considerable jump. Identity tends to gather around individuals or forms of association that are not virtual. Direct experience still seems vital for most. Yet this is by no means a homogenous concept. Take, for example, the growing industry in sex robots. Their advocates argue that the benefit is an acceptable substitute for ‘the real thing’. Critics contend that these dolls create hyper-idealised representations of women as objectified receptive sexual products; the simulated experience distances its users from ‘real relationships’ in the same way that pornography does. Feminists are alarmed. “Sex robots will create another means through which women will be presented as objects to be used for sexual gratification and mistreatment”. The fear is that artificial love machines will desensitise humans to

154  From honour society to voice and choice intimacy and empathy, which can only be developed through experiencing human interaction and mutual consenting relationships.9 So what is real and what are artificial simulcras of the real? Where are the boundaries between the mechanical reproduction of experience and genuine human encounters? The Fourth Industrial Revolution, courtesy of the new infrastructure of the internet, is the first ever truly two-way media. Amidst its Janus-type quality of facing both ways simultaneously towards both human flourishing and destructiveness, the internet has brought many new voices to the fore. Instead of sitting back and being broadcasted at, we are now active participants and contributors. We place a priority on connection, on being part of the conversation, on participation. This offers potential for human flourishing that has never been seen in world history at the very same time as it threatens de-personalisation. Technology has challenged our traditional notions of time and space. Disintermediation and the transformation in computers and communications have made distance negligible. In an era when supply chains transcend both oceans and national boundaries, or when calls to customer services can be answered in the next continent, distance has died. Anyone can now sell their wares across a global market. In the interpersonal sphere, a key figure in this transformation is not a society of solitaries but the networked individual, using social media to voice discontents and organise collective action. The rise of the networked individual combines perhaps with a subjectivity that reacts against the de-personalisation that is the sigh of our times. Community structures have vastly changed since industrialisation and the processes of modernity disrupted traditional village societies. Collective action beckons from a participatory approach, action that is rooted in alliances based on compassion and empathy.10 This is fundamentally about the value of persons, about dignity and respect. Interventions and actions in this spirit will be rooted in reciprocal relations and empowering people. This is likely to be far better grasped by those affected than top-down official policies. The textbook case where individual protest cascaded into collective electronic action is Egypt in the events before and after the Arab Spring. Herrara analysed the role that social media played in the Egyptian revolution. Immense power struggles took place in virtual space.11 ‘We count, we matter’! ‘Don’t write us off’, the collective voices seemed to be saying.

There’s no place like phone Technological innovations increasingly affect how we engage with media, entertainment and information. They also affect how we connect and interact with one another and as a collective, where newer generations are leading the evolution. The broader cultural consequences are just beginning to be felt.12 “Your device is learning every day more about who you are and what is important to you. Your life is being downloaded”.13 In the authoritarian state of Vietnam, ordinary people are remarkably outspoken about social issues such as sub-standard hospitals. China is seeing the rise of civil society. Yet as with all these transformations, there is a problematic aspect.

From honour society to voice and choice  155 In China, accountability is also associated with confessing one’s crimes on TV in a public confessional. Academic opinion is divided over whether this is an expression of the shame culture common to East Asia or an expression of submission to an over-mighty state. We read of young Vietnamese outraged by Chinese claims to islands in the South China Sea. Those born since the country ditched its planned economy in the 1980s are growing more assertive on social media. Or social media pokes fun at leaders in Tanzania. In Kenya, anti-corruption campaigners began organising on Twitter. If arrested, soon the whole world knows of it. In countries where age is revered, new media allows younger people to make their voice heard even though the sharing, collaborative global economy is their native air.14 However we can wax lyrical about the liberating potential of the internet and the capacity of networked individuals to explore new forms of human interaction, the internet also inhabits the dark side of the moon in addition to its sunny face. The dark web is a space where evil smirks, where electronic denizens wait to pounce, where identity theft and cyber-bullying are rife and where trolls leer and sneer. Even routinised social media offers a space for harm and for the kind of abuse that is no longer tolerated in public discourse or on the TV. Anonymous hideaways allow for another side to the optimistic face presented to the sun. Is this a consequence of the demise of sin and evil? The ubiquitous platform for an internet network of selves is the smartphone. It is the smartphone, more than any other technology platform, that has driven continuous need for instant gratification. It is the smartphone generation that holds in its hands in one single device all the elements of mass media. From texting, music, video, the internet, social media, games, artificial intelligence – all this goes with the simple means of making and receiving telephone calls. It is ten years since the first iPhone was introduced in 2007. Yet Edison Research estimates that 207 million American teens and adults own a smartphone – that’s 76% of the non-child population.15 For many, smartphones are addictive. It gives a dopamine rush. Anecdotally, many schools and companies have restricted use of the mobile phone with the result that people start talking to each other. According to Pew Research, nearly half of American adults say they cannot live without their smartphones. It is not just about individual activity. A substantial majority of smartphone owners use their phone to follow along with news events near and far, and to share details of local happenings with others: •• •• ••

68% of smartphone owners use their phone at least occasionally to follow along with breaking news events, with 33% saying that they do this ‘frequently’. 67% use their phone to share pictures, videos, or commentary about events happening in their community, with 35% doing so ‘frequently’. 56% use their phone at least occasionally to learn about community events or activities, with 18% doing this ‘frequently’.16

According to qualitative data from the Deloitte sixth annual edition of the UK Mobile Consumer Survey analysing the current trends in the mobile industry,

156  From honour society to voice and choice almost half of 18- to 24-year-olds check their phone in the middle of the night.17 The Deloitte 2016 survey involves 53,000 respondents from 30 countries; hence the usage patterns can fairly be said to signpost a global consciousness. Increasingly, the smartphone is taking over from the PC as consumers’ general purpose digital tool. No other personal device has had the same commercial and societal impact as the smartphone, and no other device seems likely to. Massachusetts Institute of Technology Professor Sherry Turkle writes on the ‘subjective side’ of people’s relationships with technology, especially communications. She highlights the concern that smartphones have made it harder for people to form connections with each other or even to be at ease with themselves. In one study, participants were required to sit alone without their smartphone for 15 minutes. Some chose to give themselves an electric shock to escape the boredom.18 Such Pavlovian responses to social media notifications are becoming the new normal. It may be the reason for some software that allows users to lock themselves out of the worldwide web or turn off their screens for a while.19 Yet the way the technology impacts on the sense of self is complicated. The availability of high-definition music or films on the smartphone has not diminished the appetite for live music festivals. Research by the technology company Nielsen indicates that Americans spend more time listening to music live than in any other form. In addition to being hyper-connected and digitally driven, millennials are focused on personal experiences. And for many, those experiences happen away from home. Notably, millennials are very interested in travel. In fact, they travel more than any other generation, including baby boomers.20 Despite the growth of online shopping, two-thirds of brand decisions are made in-store. Live Nation, a concert promoter operating worldwide, reported its fifth year of growth in 2015.21 Clearly the need for live, non-synthetic experiences has not diminished in a smartphone age. The world stands at the dawn of the Fourth Industrial Revolution. It is a transition to a network economy that has become social; to networked individuals. In the emerging network economy, there are new forms of engagement and dynamism, everything is interconnected. Social relationships are changing and internet technology is at the heart of the transformation. Digital technologies are not isolating systems. They are being incorporated into people’s social lives. People are not hooked on gadgets – they are hooked on each other. In incorporating the internet and mobile phones into their lives, citizens have changed the ways they interact with each other. They have become increasingly networked as individuals, rather than embedded in groups. In the world of networked individuals, a person is the focus – not family, work unit, neighbourhood or social group.22 Millennials are also the group least likely to be swayed by political promises. They are far less likely than the baby boom generation (born between 1946 and the mid-1960s) or Generation X (born in the mid-1960s to the late 1970s) to trust others to tell the truth, according to Duffy of IPSOS Mori.23 They take ‘authenticity’ as a sign of virtue and trustworthiness, as illustrated by their enthusiasm for Justin Trudeau, Canada’s telegenic premier, or for Jeremy Corbyn, the radical UK Labour leader.

From honour society to voice and choice  157 Simmel shares the idealists’ view that we have no raw, non-filtered experience of reality. Reality, he thinks, “becomes amenable to cognition only by means of categories such as … ‘individual,’ or society’”.24 No longer can we inhabit safe certainties of inductive reasoning that the future will be like the past. The past but gives us the illusion of the future we want. In a world where we can get online and experience all that humanity has to offer through an electronic mouse, we suffer existential vertigo.

The social order of shopping and a patchwork quilt In the social order of shopping, we are caught up with the instant, the novel, the sensational. Prizes go to the extraordinary, the exciting. The science of popularity in an age of distraction is such that consumers opt for things they recognise over things they do not: the Star Wars franchise had a mix of characters and tropes from older films.25 Nevertheless, people enjoy thinking they have found something new. This search for ‘optimal newness’ has a transcendent dimension surely as people perhaps want to be beamed up above themselves to a pure land where the mundane does not rule. Against the persistent social forces that devalue and often trash people, the pursuit of value for ourselves is strong and getting stronger. If it is the case that this idea taps into a deeper theme of what it means to flourish as human beings, leaders can be educated to work with such trends. Knowing how to unlock value is essential to re-humanising social environments so as to nourish the human dimension. It is an exercise in the social imaginary, in empathy. The salience of ‘we count, we matter’ in a way that transcends the individual is about how human beings connect with each other. After all, the design of being human is that we are fundamentally relational. In what might be categorised as a move towards a more participatory worldview, does all this signify a decisive shift in the modus operandi of much Western society? To coin another neologism, a word for the combination of the active agents of citizens and consumers could perhaps be ‘concitizens’. As people come to think of themselves in new ways and citizen rights come increasingly to the fore, we have been charting the rise of voice and choice on the contemporary landscape. This means: a b

Concitizens want their voice to be heard. Concitizens want to exercise their choice.

If there is anything in these formulations that a rising sense of worth is a sign of the times, is this religious in its spirit? What is it that Protests? Is it the new religion? Have secularising influences brought us to the point where the individualism and relativism that seem to shape the contours of our landscape might actually point us upwards into a silver lining to the cloud? ‘Voice and choice’ as a conjoined marker of contemporary society raises important questions about our lives, our politics and our view of the world and

158  From honour society to voice and choice therefore religion. The range of options on all sides is both breath-taking and bewildering. It is a virtue to put oneself forward and first but how we reconcile that to disturbing disconnection is unresolved. A restlessly disposable view of life is not a hospitable place for strangers, pilgrims or those at home. In the social order of shopping, every opinion counts, every voice heard. The notion of ‘voice’ can be problematised. Many make their voices heard above the shouting. ‘Choice’ too is controversial. Those on zero hours contracts, for instance, may have little choice over the jobs they take. The rise of consumer society is nothing new; the rise of ‘voice and choice’ well documented in various ways. What this book adds to this literature is to suggest that a rising tide of contemporary Protest has as its core a strong sense of the assertion of the value of social participants. The rallying cry is the language of ‘don’t write us off – we count, we matter’. We are valuable, not to be ignored. Fukuyama elaborates on the sort of people we will become at the end of history. From Nietzsche, he borrows the term “the last men” – people who are tired of life, take no risks and seek only comfort and security. They are completely without individuality, creativity and ambition. There will be widespread nostalgia for a time when history existed. Potential for violence will be tempered by what he calls “perpetual caretaking of the museum of human history”. Daring, courage and imagination have been supplanted by consumerism.26 The contemporary mood can be constructed as a complicated bid for the assertion, not just of an identity that was being engulfed by the faceless, but by the value and worth of social actors. Is this an underlying theme beneath the strange times we are passing through? The late-modern subjectivity is a patchwork quilt. Consumer voice and choice is the dominant driver. The self is recast as a market mechanism, yet that generates its contrast pole.27 Such are the forces of centrifugal reaction. The title of this book marks out that the subjectivity of our times is characterised by ‘we count, we matter’. It is not just an individualised response. Unquestionably, societies are changing rapidly and changing in the direction of an assertion of a given form of collective identity that is at the same time both local and virtual. The new politics of ‘vocalism’ inhabits local or national defined identity about ‘us’ at the same time as an electronic public square characterised by like-minded virtual reality allies. The demand for voice and choice is in large measure the quest for recognition both of individuals and the unchosen social bonds by which humans in community exercise duties and practice allegiances. Perhaps this explains why many ‘expert’ commentators scratched their heads over why many citizens seemed prepared to vote against their own economic self-interest. They perceived that nothing and no one in power was acting in their interests, so what did it matter?

What’s the subject? The US blogger, Michael Shermer, observed in a wry Twitter comment, “nothing says anti-capitalism quite like taking a selfie with an iPhone at the G20 protests”.28

From honour society to voice and choice  159 The argument we are probing is that turbulence on the global scene has destabilised our thinking about contemporary forms of human subjectivity, our sense of self. In the shadows of a rising sense of protest and resistance against faceless, impersonal systems, the human subject is being reworked. Rational and technical modes of experiencing life by so many encounter resistance because of what it means to be human. The irreducibly personal perspective we are tracking stirs up the Protest. In Western society and increasingly through globalised influences of smart technology that is re-making culture, people are re-making their subjectivity. Individual experience with its projection of inner states on to consumer society is now the touchstone of life. Selves are multiple and fractured; split apart. De-personalisation transforms people into remote abstractions; mere conceptualisations fought over by professionals. But a reaction looms; a reaction born of a mode of being that finds its impetus in the value of social participants. ‘We count, we matter’! Identity, national or individual but definitely not international, comes to the fore as part of the dominant mood towards self-expression. “Be yourself”, quipped Oscar Wilde. “Everyone else is already taken”.29 A résumé of the journey is needed at this point. Although people have always been constituted through social experience, an emphasis on human subjectivity and inwardness has been fundamental to the orientation that constructed the modern consciousness. The very term ‘subject’ was thought of in the middle ages or early modern Europe as ‘a subject of the king’: acceptance of domination by authority. Since at least Shakespeare’s time, selves have inhabited the self more self-consciously as people began to think about their circumstances and reflect on their contradictions. As Jerrold Seigel shows in his magisterial survey, the idea of the self has a long running in social theory and Western philosophy since the 17th century. It is a highly slippery concept. Human beings are always in the business of making and re-making ourselves. How to achieve both consistency and coherence in the face of tensions and pressures that would split us asunder is the challenge of life. The domination of our sense of who we are in terms of inner life processes and ‘how I feel’ is barely a few centuries old.30 “I know that ‘I’ exist”, argued Descartes in the 17th century; “the question is ‘what is this ‘I’ that ‘I’ know?”31 Descartes reframed the mind-body dualism to assert that while the body is acted upon externally, it is the mind that is both subject and site of experience. “I am not this assemblage of limbs called the human body; I am not a thin and penetrating air spread through all these members”.32 In the hands of existential philosophers, the turn to inwardness, to the importance of subjective experience was an emphasis on ‘the individual’. Indeed, Kierkegaard wished such a label to be the epitaph on his tombstone. Gone was the notion that existence is constructed from the collective, the social or one’s family. The individual was paramount; the feeling, thinking, responsible subject who was entitled to ask such questions as ‘who am I?’ and ‘what should I do?’ What I really lack is to be clear in my mind what I am to do, not what I am to know, except in so far as a certain understanding must precede every action.

160  From honour society to voice and choice The thing is to understand myself, to see what God really wishes me to do; the thing is to find a truth which is true for me, to find the idea for which I can live and die.33 In the hands of Nietzsche and existentialist philosophers such as Husserl, subjectivity became key to the Western philosophical tradition.34 Threaded through his Also Sprach Zarathustra, Nietzsche’s will to power was expressed in the much vaunted ubermensch, famously lionised by George Bernard Shaw in Man and Superman. Power is not military force but the power of imagination, self-mastery and self-realising individuals who are so central to Nietzsche’s thought. The will to power is to do with motivation but it is a particular type of motivation rather than a universal principle. It motivates a great many human behaviours. It is a drive to feel powerful rather than the feeling of power itself. The concept of the will to power as vital to understanding human action should not be understood as mere aggression. It is perhaps closer to the weaker-sounding concept of ‘selfesteem’ that was to become popular in the West, especially the West of the USA! The most appropriate way of describing it is as a way of being energised by one’s own ideas, thinking of yourself as confident or capable or in your ideals. It stands in contrast to acting not just for pleasure and uncovers how people think about themselves, their notion of themselves.35 The self is never in fixed form; cast in cement. It is, as Nietzsche observes, ‘the changeling’. As Katsafanas shows, the relation of the self to its social and historical context poses a considerable challenge in Nietzsche’s thought to our understanding of freedom.36 Belief in the existence of a separate self – the doer behind the deed – deriving from the Christian notion of the individual soul that Nietzsche vehemently objected to, was not in fact licence for unbridled individualism that many associate with his philosophy. Well before Freud, often credited with discovering the human mind, for Nietzsche, internal life began with the implosion of external forces under the influence of repression. “The whole inner world, originally stretched thinly as though between two layers of skin, was expanded and extended itself and gained depth, breadth and height in proportion to the degree that the external discharge of man’s instincts was obstructed”.37 Wild, prowling humanity was thus captured; covering up our inner selves with moral self-righteousness. Somewhere in all these debates is the concept of autonomy and the extent to which the self-directed self relates to social interaction in the world. Freedom is bought with a price. Nevertheless, self-determination is as much a trajectory in modernity’s inner world as it was in its politics. The French sociologist Michel Foucault emphasised how subjectivity is produced by discursive practice – what the various discourses of the self might be doing and saying through an affirmation of the self.38 Discourses are powerful and this power creates identities. Subjectivity comes to be defined through, for example, a mad-sane dichotomy (we come to possess a psyche that is either acceptable or unacceptable.39 The psy-disciplines became increasingly vital in Western society; people’s inner states as explanatory theories of human action. They did not uncover a pre-existent psychology that they then study but rather helping to

From honour society to voice and choice  161 establish a particular vision of what a person is. They produced subjects of a particular type that needed then to be liberated (true also perhaps of the Church’s use of Confession). Subjectivity became crucial for contemporary social psychology, more so than older ideas of ‘personality’. It was not so much an emphasis on traits but individual awareness and concepts used to understand self and the world. Subjectivity was not a pre-existing entity. Questions of value are central to a focus on how the individual is produced as a subject. A new form of subjectivity has been emerging; a subjectivity rooted in voice and choice. The autonomous individual with his or her own right to choose and to be heard does not stand alone in a community of solitaries. He or she is constrained by social location. In the contemporary landscape, the dominant assumption is that we have agency over considerable areas of our lives. The familiar tropes of modernity to do with authenticity and self-actualisation, always being true to yourself as central concerns of our lives, are fragile in a world beset by risk and insecurity.40 Gender equality laws and universal suffrage are less important as battle grounds compared with individual moral adventures or consumer choice. The idea of processes being ‘global’ entails a new level of thinking. Whether there is global culture and what that would mean is problematic.41 Globalised society may be emerging to some extent due to technology but mainly due to the diversity and dynamism of cultures. Cultural homogeneity is not likely anytime soon. Processes of cultural integration or disintegration do not just occur between nation states. Social analysis has tended to be shaped by the nation state. Whether there is communication and exchange and flow of goods, people and information, knowledge and images at a global level is another matter. Clearly, there is no ‘world state’. Much of the conventional sociology was held in thrall by the nation state. Writers have argued that the rise of the nation state should be regarded as a special case. The proper frame of reference for social analysis should be broader. Wallerstein proposed the idea of ‘world systems theory’ to demonstrate that it is at the level of a global system that processes over a wider area only make sense.42 For Robertson, nation states do not merely interact but constitute ‘a world’, a global context with its own logic and processes. He preferred the term ‘globalisation’ to internationalisation. The world has become a distinct entity.43 Contemporary moves in the direction of global consciousness have been hailed since the dawning of the Age of Aquarius in the 1960s and 1970s. It was a utopian dream. What is more realistic is that concurrent with global moves of people, capital and trade, there has been a new emphasis in awareness of citizens who are better educated and more technologically savvy that they have expectations. Educated citizenry is less likely to put up with being ignored or written off. This goes hand in hand with the forces of reaction we have been charting throughout this book. Contemporary social movements have de-stabilised our understanding of the subject and subjectivity. “The subjects of our study”, write the authors of a fine study of contemporary subjectivity, “struggle with the possibilities and dangers

162  From honour society to voice and choice of economic globalisation, the threat of endless violence and insecurity, and the new infrastructures and forms of political domination and resistance that lie in the shadows of grand claims of democratisation and reform”.44 The exercise of choice is held among a range of options. Concitizens do not want to be told what to do. The corollary of this is that the question of authority is sharply under the spotlight. There is what could be described as a crisis of authority, of legitimacy of views and rulings from those who were thought to know. The degree to which knowledge is democratised is sharply contested; witness the reaction against ‘experts’ in the UK referendum or indeed statements coming down from on high – be they top-down plans that affect local communities or social engineers saying what everyone else should do. The crisis of authority becomes an issue in voice and choice society. We need, however, to ponder more closely the way that voice and choice is a step change from the way that societies used to work.

From honour society to voice and choice “If honour signifies respect for being the kind of person and doing the kinds of things the group values, shame signifies, in the first instance, being seen as less than valuable because one has behaved in ways that run contrary to the values of the group”.45 Honour/shame and sin/guilt are no longer the strong social regulatory principles they were. There is a new type of emphasis on the contemporary agenda, certainly in Western societies but perhaps in global trends also, that asserts ‘we count, we matter’ against the backcloth of vested interests that continue to cramp and suppress the value and worth of the human. Is this an emerging construct? Does it tap into something important about us, rooted in understanding of how humans flourish at their optimum? Certainly, this mood develops a new consciousness, a subjectivity rooted in a particular view of personhood and the self. The growth of secularity has led to voice and choice as being more important. A rising sense of social indignation pushes new forms. In Western-style democracies, subjects demand voice. Increasingly, they demand choice. This has become a mantra of our times. Is this something that constitutes a new development in the global zeitgeist? Traditionally, the dominant motif in the West was that of an honour society where honour must be maintained and shame avoided. What, however, is honour and shame? It is about loss of face. Shame versus guilt is played out in the difference between collectivist cultures compared with individualistic ones. Honour and shame cultures rely on external sanctions and pressure to enforce the social rules. Guilt cultures rely on internalised conviction of sin. Shame requires an audience. Guilt does not. It is internal. Guilt is remorse for behaviours, actions or thoughts and is usually separate from the person’s core. Collectivist cultures place a greater salience on shame, emphasising interdependent relationships and prioritising of group goals over personal ones. Shame taints family name and honour. In collectivist cultures, mental illness

From honour society to voice and choice  163 is stigmatising; it reflects poorly on family lineage and can influence beliefs about the suitability of someone to be linked with a family. The prime need is to ‘save face’. Saving face brings honour to oneself and one’s culture. Hiding true feelings is essential. It will not do to reveal what one is really thinking. Saving face results in the ability to preserve the public appearance of the patient and family for the sake of community. In honour-based society such as the feudal society that developed in England following the Norman Conquest, honour and loyalty to those above you was crucial to the obedience you owed them. Where there was an infringement of that respect and failure to yield obedience, especially when military or agricultural service was required, an offence had been caused. Consider the issue of furious husbands killing their wives for sleeping around. In many cultures, such a ‘crime of honour’ was not even punished by the courts in the past. The reason the husband behaves this way is not just insane jealousy. He believes his honour has been irretrievably damaged. It is a social question, not just an internal mental event. A sense of sin or personal guilt was not the point. The self is a cultural production. Westerners find it very difficult to appreciate a face-saving or honour culture. In the West, freedom of the individual, the right to self-expression, security, the adventure of love, efficiency and wealth creation are all prized. Natural though these values seem to be to those who live in societies of this kind, human individuality is one way of constructing the self. Other cultures function very differently. Differing roles for men and women, interaction between the individual and family (‘I’/‘we’), honour and shame and the place of hospitality constitute a different frame of reference. The way people derive their sense of worth is different. Men demonstrate socially constructed ideals and appoint themselves to defend culturally agreed feminine ideals. Honour means success in competing with other men, assertiveness, control or protection of family. It can have terrifying social consequences as in this female Iraqi perspective on honour crimes, as the quote at the start of this chapter references: “Dawn will come and the girls will ask about her, ‘Where is she’? And the monster will answer: ‘We killed her’. A mark of shame was on our foreheads and we washed it off ”.46 Many cultures are tight-knit communities where everyone knows everyone else and everything about them! In the Middle East and central Asia, a major objective is to accumulate honour and avoid anything that could deplete it. Honour can be eroded through shame. Shame brings disgrace down on one’s head and dishonours the family. It must be avoided at all costs. To prevent letting the side down, people will preserve appearances. Honour comes from age, from family connections and from hard work and success. In Islamic societies, honour is inseparable from religion. In mechanisms that correspond to older forms of honour in the West, it is ‘sharif’ and shame that control and discipline behaviour. “Honour … provides a nexus between the ideals of a society and their reproduction in the individual through his aspiration to personify them”.47 Yet it is not confined to Middle Eastern culture. Entire societies made maintaining honour a vital task, especially to adult males in the community. It is the

164  From honour society to voice and choice ultimate blow of humiliation to be seen as weak since having an addiction goes against Asian social norms. “Most classical shame events simply center on failing to meet a minimum standard for social acceptability”.48 In traditional Spanish villages, it was called honra and to be a ‘deshonrado’, ‘a dishonoured one’, represented a strong stigma of social gaze. In Greek villages, honour is ‘time’; in Hindu society, it was the concept of ‘Izzat’; in Muslim cultures, it is called ‘sharaf’. Dishonour flows from breaking the honour code and responding with insufficient vigour to an insult or an injury. In Ecuador and Mexico, abortion was illegal but infanticide was committed for reasons of family honour in the first eight days of life. In these cultures, honour must be upheld with violence.49 In many cultures of today and yesterday, shame and honour have been dominant principles. In, for example, Japan, the need to avoid shame and minimise embarrassment are strongly bound up with social regulation. The person who puts personal safety above the city’s wellbeing, fleeing from battle, loses the respect of society. His worth is impugned; he ‘loses face’; he is disgraced and viewed as a disgrace. In a second sense, however, shame can signify a positive character trait, namely a sensitivity to the opinion of the group such that one avoids those actions that bring disgrace. Out of shame of this kind, a woman refuses an adulterous invitation; a soldier refuses to flee from battle. It is harder to generate guilt in such societies. Sin and guilt and the notion of individual rather than collective responsibility have been the province of Western societies. This is changing. Honour and social shame still have salience in Western societies when it comes to paedophilia and marketing. The former dark practice is called out and its self-justifying advocates treated to public shaming. Their ranks were swollen by ‘greedy bankers’ (in the wake of the financial crash) or judges, those notorious ‘enemies of the people’ in the highly charged aftermath of the UK Referendum Campaign. At a far lower decibel level, the same principle holds for public or private advertising campaigns. Some marketing relies on shame; their campaigns becoming the super-egos of late modernity as they challenge bad breath, for instance. No one told the unsuspecting about B.O.! For the most part, however, ‘voice and choice’ is more true of the way we live now than the honour-shame principle that used to be a strong social driver when, in 1608, Lord Herbert of Cherbury reported that there was “scarce any man thought worth looking on that had not killed some other in a duel”.50 Cultural honour in the West meant defending your good name. It worked out differently between genders. For a man it meant a reputation for courage; for a woman it was about chastity.51 The emblematic figure of an English gentleman combined a resolute sense of fair play with class consciousness. The First World War destroyed the highly developed Victorian honour culture in the UK and the idea of the hero. ‘Your country needs you’ worked by Lord Kitchener pointing the finger directly at an audience, treated with public opprobrium against assumed cowardice if they did not sign up. It mattered not. As Wilfred Owen said, men die like cattle.

From honour society to voice and choice  165

Sin and guilt/right and wrong Shame and weakness were re-cast by psychoanalysis as personality problems, a sickness. In tracking the formation of a post-honour society in the West, James Bowman suggests that honour is rooted in the murky reflective instinct that if you get somebody, you must expect them to pay you back.52 Perhaps though it is rooted in the concept of social value: the means by which one is esteemed and the perverted sense that honour must be re-claimed and compensation extracted. Sin and guilt came to be much stronger drivers of life in the West. A sense of sin went hand in glove with a sense of ‘ought’. Moral duty was a strong imperative. It is perhaps one of the strongest markers of societal shift that ‘duty’ has completely gone out of fashion. Almost no one is buying shares in it anymore. That may be because duty has been replaced by the commodification of desire. Yet there remains a strong and perhaps rising ‘blame culture’. Someone must be called to account! Shame tends to be more public; guilt is a largely private affair. Consciousness of personal sin, of rights and wrongs, is a feature of a society where individual responsibility is stressed. It is no doubt related to the impact of Judaeo-Christian civilisation. “The word of the Lord came to me: ‘What do you mean by using this proverb concerning the land of Israel: The fathers eat sour grapes, and the children’s teeth are set on edge? As I live’ – this is the declaration of the Lord God – ‘you will no longer use this proverb in Israel. Look, every life belongs to Me. The life of the father is like the life of the son – both belong to Me. The person who sins is the one who will die. Therefore, house of Israel, I will judge each one of you according to his ways’”.53 This was in contrast to the group responsibility for someone’s actions whereby an entire family could fall under collective penalty. Allied with legal theory in the West whereby jurisprudence established the ‘mens rea’ of personal culpability, a sense of sin and individual blameworthiness has been a strong social driver. It was not just a case of particular individuals being held to account, a sin-based society was fundamental to a worldview, to a moral framework of accountability. Transgression incurred sanction because that was how things should be. Traditional societies were powered by honour-shame. This is still a major theme in many areas of the world. In honour-based societies, the need to avoid shame for oneself or one’s family remains a powerful motivation. In analysis of honour and shame cultures, it is often observed that contemporary Western societies function differently. With some exceptions, such as ‘naming and shaming’, the main construct, it is said, is guilt and responsibility. A guilty conscience requires repentance, recompense and restitution. Thus, for example, it is stressed in anthropological commentary that Western nations such as those of Northern Europe, North America, Australia and New Zealand have cultures that contain mostly guilt-based cultural characteristics, principally a belief in right versus wrong. This understanding is so deeply ingrained in Western culture that Westerners analyse almost everything from this perspective. Forms of entertainment are built upon

166  From honour society to voice and choice ‘good guys and bad guys’. Arguably the situation in the West has altered. In the main we are now a value society, powered by a polarity between sources of valuedevaluation; the drive to realise one and avoid the other is a major driver in postindustrial societies. We are much more influenced by the need to be valued and try to reject sources and streams of devaluation. The need to assert our value in the face of the erosion of our worth has come to replace both shame/honour and sin and guilt. Morally, it seems both positive yet troubling. When the assertion of selfies becomes central and that of the self – even the valuable self that goes to the heart of the human situation – what happens to social criticism? Will there not be such an emphasis on ‘feelings’ that there can be no call to arms? As the psychiatrist Karl Menninger lamented a generation ago, ‘whatever became of sin?’54 By slow but steady rejection, the concept of sin was eroded in Western society. Sin became almost a non-entity. Sin moved from being associated with duty or its deficit to co-habitation being the subject of frown by the 1970s. Then it was ironed out of existence or collapsed into penalties or allowances (it mattered not) in dieting. The shift resulted in a changed understanding of sin through the years, shifting the responsibility of sin from the individual to society. Actions and attitudes that destroy human beings – we tend to say it was due to the way perpetrators were raised, their mental illness or previous traumas. Or we say that the global environment – such as the destruction of the Arctic – is the planetary sphere of our moral concern rather than interpersonal actions. Sin was seen as a guilt-inducing, moralising attitude that emanated from institutions now exposed as fatally flawed. Any concept of wrong tended to focus on harm to others, harm to animals and harm to the environment. This leaves exposed a gaping hole. How on earth does society cope conceptually with radical evil that can seem to be not on earth?

The dilemmas of ‘voice and choice’ There is a strong resonance of contemporary Protest against not being heard, being on the receiving end of the impersonal and therefore being stripped of both face and name. It is an impetus towards bringing government nearer, making it more responsive, reacting against unaccountable institutions and making the individual voice count with organisations, connecting organisations and politicians more effectively to those for whom they are working. It is the impetus arising from consumer society based on the ambiguity of desire. The perception of not being listened to or seen (recognised) is a key driver in the impetus towards ‘voice and choice’. The concept of choice is problematic and very possibly a class-based demand rather than being socially neutral. It does, however, matter if you do not feel you are heard, that you are clearly one of the little people because your voice does not count and can safely be ignored. It matters because, as we have hypothesised, indifference is a driver of human devaluation. A shift from public to private truth arises from questions of truth generally being problematic in a pluralistic world. Faith is a private hobby for some. This is

From honour society to voice and choice  167 an intriguing question given the way that Christianity no longer dominates the thought forms of Western culture. Spiritual interest there may be aplenty but the church is no longer the place where people look for answers.55 As Durkheim foresaw with reference to social glue, most societies continue to display high levels of faith practice. Civic services hold community lament. There is a real question, however, about where right and wrong can be located in the new cultural stage scenery in which people play out their lives. When Western societies began to conceive of alternative ways of life, what you do with concepts of right and wrong was never resolved. Religious commitments are independent of doing good now but whether such ultimate grounding is the logic of moral action is another question entirely. What is the source of such values as voice, choice, respect, equal treatment and human dignity we noted in the last chapter would leave their advocates more than slightly confused. Historically, there is little doubt that Christianity has played a considerable role in shaping much of the values that powered Western societies.56 Notions of human dignity, compassion, strong families and equal worth were all shaped by a Bible-based culture. Mangalwadi argues that social, political and religious institutions that have sustained Western culture and inspired humanitarian work in India were Bible-shaped.57 In very different times, amidst the sigh and cry of those who have been let down by the system, what does it mean to assert that we live in a voice and choice society? Does this have anything to say to the angry voices who said, for example, that in pursuing more globalisation, we are forgetting about France as a spiritual entity, or any other national identity? Religion has been marginalised within the institutional systems of society. Even when it seems to be resurgent or when it is central to the glue of social integration, faith and religion is not fundamental to the systemic operations that make modern societies work. Casanova demonstrated that when conceived as differentiation and emancipation of the political, economic, cultural, administrative and legal spheres from religious norms and authority, this is the very essence of secularisation. When, however, the secularisation thesis is expressed in terms of decline of religious belief and practice that is far more suspect and probably only true of Europe. Grace Davie called this European exceptionalism.58 Religion is potent, declares Casanova, transcending the public space, political space and often economic space (such as charity work). It is anything but privatised.59 Undeniably, late modern people inhabit a milieu where many worldviews clamour for attention. There seems no privileged platform. Whatever the ‘postmodern’ signified, it summed up a mood in which everything is to be mistrusted (especially absolute claims), scientific progress so central to modernity’s confidence can no longer hold its head up and there is no sweeping framework or view of the world that can explain reality or prescribe social engineering to re-make it in our image. How can there when most claims and stances turn out, on closer inspection, to be power-play in disguise? Certainly, a high view of Western culture and scientific discovery is fraught with ambiguity. Progress does not look half so confident. Reason, once heralded as the key to open every door, is being eclipsed by non-rational argument favoured

168  From honour society to voice and choice by those who stress symbol but also emotional attachment to place and identity. In the eyes of many, modernity seemed to have failed; technological liberation is emancipating but also dystopian. Totalising schemes that were the subject of such immense passion in the 1930s are now regarded as deeply flawed. A uniformitarian approach that there is one single way of thinking and acting has fled; a loser to diversity. Whether a theology can be developed that is incompatible with voice and choice society is beyond our scope here. The intellectual climate has shifted but so has general culture. Social paternalism came and went. Secularity denotes not just questions of affiliation but the inevitable advance of marginalising God and religion; the world is better off without these ancient entanglements. Truth is now contextual; rationalism restricting. We should abandon attempts to define what is right and true. Twentieth-century advances such as the assembly line or electric power tools were built on converting time into money. Bewildering choice and plethora of voice society creates rootless beings (or is it a reflection of it?). Previous dreams such as that tantalised and beguiled such as Communism or drug-hazed dropping out were traded in for a future shaped by technology. In late modernity, concitizens are approaching the future in a less structured way. Weber saw modernity as eclipsing wonder. Amidst social disenchantment, where then is wonder? Where do we root ourselves if we live isolated, not durable lives? As Douglas Rushkoff wryly observed 20 years ago: Our children, ironically, have already made their move. They are leading us in our own evolution past linear thinking, duality, mechanism, hierarchy, metaphor, and God himself towards a dynamic, holistic, animistic, weightless and re-capitulated culture. Chaos is their natural environment.60

Post secularism? Since Peter Berger’s notion of the sacred canopy, it has become clear that human beings are poorly equipped to handle the social world they create.61 A yawning sense of spiritual homelessness became central to the Romantic movement that followed the rationality of the Enlightenment. We live in a world of fragmenting forces that disintegrate society. We witness the rise of religion but it is not the old-time religion, rather the rise of ‘no religion’ and the emergence of a new cultural majority stressing de-industrialised forms of spirituality and post-institutional forms of religion.62 A ‘fundamental illusion’ of modernity was that it left us with the solitary self. We met the solitary self in Chapter 7. Contemporary individuals do not just live on their island; they are the sole arbiter of truth and meaning. This is a dilemma of voice and choice society. Where does it leave us? Despite the received wisdom that people’s religious ties must continue to weaken, there are many public intellectuals highlighting the return of faith: the

From honour society to voice and choice  169 legacy of past centuries that had such shaping influence on Western culture. Data from the Pew Research Centre indicates that more than eight-in-ten people globally identify with a religious group.63 The sociologist Peter Berger, writing about the phenomenon of ‘desecularization’, claims that “the world today, with some exceptions … is as furiously religious as it ever was …” He has admitted to his own miscalculations about secularisation, concluding that existence of resurgent religiosity in the modernised world has proven otherwise.64 There are a few straws in the wind. Jurgen Habermas, for example, has long explored how “constitutional patriotism” might succeed in binding people together in community rather than the religious or national sentiments that used to characterise the past. Yet more recent writings drew attention to the inability of late modern societies in the West to generate their own values. It is the heritage of Judeo-Christian values that is the source of morality and ethics. Habermas argued that modernity is no longer about the inevitable march towards secularism. In a democracy, the secular mentality must be open to the religious influence of believing citizens. These are parallel lives. As this chapter was being written, the Canadian singer-songwriter Leonard Cohen died. He wrote in ‘The Future’, “Things are going to slide … There’ll be the breaking of the ancient western code, Your private life will suddenly explode”. A key figure in the breaking of the ancient Western code, Renee Descartes, left us with isolated individuals who prioritise their subjectivity over and above others. By contrast, in his writings, Zygmunt Bauman sought to awaken people to their moral responsibilities for others. Social structures expressed the interests of elites who employ ‘gardening skills’ to cultivate a well-regulated population. Modernity is the desire to eradicate uncertainty and impose order on nature and society. But there was a price to pay in this drive for order. Modernity breaks down, argued Bauman, because trying to structure the world through classification was fundamentally disenchanting. Inhabitants of our habitat by contrast hope for its re-enchantment, demonstrating allegiances by adopting symbolic tokens of belonging but retaining the ability to change their minds and lifestyle. This very freedom brings uncertainty and need for reassurance. How does this take place? Notoriously, modern liberals in the West have shown marked contempt for patriotism (as somewhat quaint), tribalism (as primitive) and nationalism (as downright dangerous). Placing the interests of one’s own nation above others is menacing not just to an internationalist outlook but to peace and harmony in the world. Inclusive nationalism is not the same as the trend towards protectionism and building walls. Yet how fragmentation into polarising identities can be harmonised with harmony will exercise collective minds for a long while. Pluralistic politics and engaging concitizens in shared national stories and ethical resources is getting harder. Bauman suggests the constituency of isolated strangers act like cultural tourists. The remedy is to encourage communication and creative action, not in the direction of individualism but when ‘I’ enacts care for the ‘Other’. Bauman wishes the postmodern habitat to be as humane a place as it can possibly be.

170  From honour society to voice and choice His strategy is to challenge its inhabitants to live up to the highest standards of the Enlightenment.65 But does this include religion? Beckford considers that Bauman has left a small space for religion amidst the decline of certainty, objectivity and authority that characterises the postmodern turn.66 With conflicting authorities, multiplying choices and declining principles, ethical questions grow even as the social production of ethical resources shrinks. The ethical paradox of the postmodern condition is that it restores to agents the fullness of moral choice and responsibility, while simultaneously depriving them of the comfort of the universal guidance that modern self-confidence promised. Ethical tasks of individuals grow while the socially produced resources to fulfill them shrink. Moral responsibility comes together with the loneliness of moral choice.67

Universal values? We are perhaps in a post-liberal future. Philosophers of conservativism discern a cure that is needed for sick societies against liberal capture. At heart, political issues are theological and spiritual.68 How should faith communities respond to a world that continues to push faith to the margins? There is a range of responses on the contemporary landscape.69 How this zeitgeist relates to the changing fortunes of hope is a question that awaits further work. It is important though to take a brief glance in the postscript at the way that contested modernities embed contested authority claims (what is believed to be right and wrong). For now, amongst the many contradictions of these contested modernities and multiple identities, there is an obvious gap. The lacuna is how we create a space for universal values. The societal trends in the West towards giving voice, equal treatment and according dignity that we charted in the previous chapter sit uneasily with rejecting toleration and assertions of tribal identity. Modernity has witnessed the development of the ethic of humanity, a powerful countervailing tendency to differentiation. The search has been for the unifying or the unitary, for the same, for the transcendent in the Kantian sense of the universal. Kantian ethics has sought a categorical imperative, seeing laws as laws for everyone. The notion of human rights has become widespread. Modernity has seen the idea of humanity, an acknowledgement that in some sense, all people are the same and that cultural differences are external and relatively unimportant. Most distinctive in liberal Romantic thought was a normative emphasis on underlying unity allowing for individuation and diversity to survive as distinctions without being divisive. The quest was for the unitary or the whole which lies ‘within’ or ‘behind’ differences. The safeguarding and respect agenda is now immensely strong in countries like the UK. It is rooted in the notion that, however vulnerable they seem to be as children or adults, they are self-determining individuals who can exercise

From honour society to voice and choice  171 personal choice. ‘You matter’, the official stance seems to be. ‘You count; let your voice be heard’. The basis of this assumption is a considerable question that is both metaphysical and practical. Do prisoners or refugees matter to anyone? Do the elderly matter? And who are the ‘we’? Does it matter if swathes of the population say they feel completely ignored, not heard? What does that do to people? In an African conference of the World Economic Forum in Durban in April 2017, Chairman Professor Klaus Schwab struck an interesting note. The essence of leadership today, he argued, rests in three values: respect for human leadership and diversity, to serve communities you belong to above self-interest and to be a trustee for future generations. There are truths about individual rights and freedoms that will last, Schwab observed.70 A vision of human diversity drives the contemporary agenda. In the 1990s, this was extended with the analysis of post-colonialism where to speak in terms of some kind of universal terms about humanity as a whole was almost sacrilege. But now, signs of revived articulation of humanism as a post-secular creed have returned and the in-some-ways-surprising return of species level morality and politics is back. The search for where differentiation takes us is to do with the relation between human rights and the right to cultural difference, “one of the greatest antinomies of our time”.71 One perspective on this is that of Cornelius Castoriadis, who argues that “we Westerners claim we are one culture amongst others … but we have in addition invented values we claim as universal”.72 Citing the hypothetical case of having a colleague who wants his daughter to have circumcision, he concludes that Westerners cannot give up the values they have invented which they believe to be valid for all people, regardless of their cultural background. The conflict between universalism and particularism in the domain of human rights stems from the fact that such rights not only guarantee the rights of the individual, they also open a space for collective, group rights. The fact that the notion of universal values was a product of European culture does not mean that it can only be interpreted by a historical approach or that its validity can be restricted to that culture. As Martha Nussbaum argues, we cannot account for the existence of human rights by saying it emerged at a specific time in European history, witness the near universal appeal of Shakespeare. A search for universals opens a space for questioning the very society from which they emerged. “The moment universals such as equality and human rights were established, they lost their foundation by transforming their own history”.73 The shallow celebrity culture, the instrumentality and reductionism of contemporary bureaucratic operations reveal the essential emptiness of the habitat of the last man against which there has been such a reaction and retreat into identities as reservoirs of human value and worth. Zeldin posed a sharp question about the dilemmas involved here: The question is where humanity’s daily meal of respect is going to come from. Official resources of respect have crumbled, leaving people to scurry back to old beliefs, and to nibble at new ideologies. The great religions grew

172  From honour society to voice and choice out of a search for a meaning in life. The present-day movement for human rights, women’s equality and the sanctity of the environment springs from the same sort of yearnings which the great religions tried to satisfy between twenty five and thirteen centuries ago. Respect cannot be achieved by the same methods as power.74

Notes   1 Reported to the author in client interviews, 2007–2008.  2 al-Khayyat, S. (1990) Honour and Shame: Women in Modern Iraq. London: Saqi Books, p. 35.   3 World Economic Forum. The Future Role of Civil Society. www3.weforum.org/docs/ WEF_FutureRoleCivilSociety_Report_2013.pdf, January 2013.   4 See author’s Smart Leadership, Wise Leadership: Environments of Value in a Digital Future, Chapter 11, London: Routledge.   5 Frosh, S. (1991) Identity Crisis: Modernity, Psychoanalysis and the Self. Basingstoke: Macmillan.  6 McLuhan, M. (1964) Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man. New York: McGraw Hill.   7 Castells, M. (2000) The Rise of the Network Society: The Information Age: Economy, Society and Culture. Chichester: John Wiley & Sons.   8 Johnson, S. (2012) Future Perfect: The Case for Progress in a Networked Age. New York: Riverhead Books.   9 So What Is Real and What Is Simulated? Sex Robots Are SEXIST: Feminist Says ‘Brutal’ Love Machines Will Turn Men into Misogynist Monsters, http://www.mirror. co.uk/tech/sex-robots-sexist-feminist-says, 15th February 2016. 10 Ledwith, M. & Asgill, P. (2007) Feminist, Anti-Racist Community Work: Critical Alliance – Local to Global. In L. Dominelli (ed.) Revitalising Communities in a Globalising World. Aldershot: Ashgate, pp. 107–122. 11 Herrara, L. (2014) Revolution in an Age of Social Media. London: Verso. 12 World Economic Forum. Shaping the Future Implications of Digital Media for Society. https://www.weforum.org/projects/human-implications-of-digital-media, January 2017. 13 Manuel Rivera, Chief Executive Officer, Grupo Expansion. Big Data: How Much Is Too Much? World Economic Forum. https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2017/02/bigdata-how-much-is-too-much/, 28th February 2017. 14 Patrick Willer, SAP Community Network. What Can We Learn from Millennials? World Economic Forum. https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2015/06/what-can-welearn-from-millennials/, 26th June 2015. 15 http://www.edisonresearch.com/2014-smartphone-ownership-demographics/, accessed February 2017. 16 Smith, A. (2015) U.S. Smartphone Use in 2015, Pew Research Center report. http:// www.pewinternet.org/2015/04/01/us-smartphone-use-in-2015/ 17 Lee, P. Deloitte Mobile Consumer Survey 2016: https://www2.deloitte.com/uk/en/ pages/technology-media-and-telecommunications/articles/mobile-consumer-survey. html, accessed February 2017. 18 Turkle, S. (2015) Reclaiming Conversation: The Power of Talk in a Digital Age. New York: Penguin Press. 19 The Economist, Mass Entertainment Special Report, 11th February 2017. 20 http://www.nielsen.com/uk/en.html, accessed February 2017. 21 http://www.livenationentertainment.com/, accessed February 2017. 22 Raine, L. & Wellman, B. (2014) Networked: The New Social Operating System. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

From honour society to voice and choice  173 23 Duffy, R. (2013) Trust in Other People and Institutions. IPSOS Mori. http://www.ipsosmori-generations.com/Trust, December 2013. 24 Simmel, G. (1967) Fundamental Problems of Sociology, The Sociology of Georg Simmel. Trans. and Ed. K. H. Wolff. New York: The Free Press; The Metropolis and Mental Life, The Sociology of Georg Simmel. Trans. and Ed. K. H. Wolff. New York: The Free Press, pp 8–9. 25 Thompson, D. (2017) The Science of Popularity in an Age of Distraction. London: Penguin Press. 26 Fukuyama, F. (2012) The End of History and the Last Man. London: Penguin. 27 Scheper-Hughes, N. (2003) Rotten Trade: Millennial Capitalism, Human Values and Global Justice in Organs Trafficking. Journal of Human Rights, Vol. 2, No. 2, pp. 197–226. 28 https://twitter.com/michaelshermer/status/883761752516706304?langen. @michael shermer, 8th July 2017. 29 Quoted in Travis Bradberry, 10 Habits of Utterly Authentic People, World Economic Forum newsletter, 2nd September 2016. 30 Good, B. (1994) Medicine, Rationality and Experience. Cambridge: Cambridge Uni­ versity Press. 31 Descartes, R. (1996) Meditations on First Philosophy. Cambridge: Cambridge Uni­ versity Press. 32 Descartes, R. (1969) Discourse on Method and their Meditations. Harmondsworth: Penguin. 33 Kierkegaard, S. (1958) Journals. London: Fontana, p. 44, 1st August 1835. 34 Husserl, E. (1991) Cartesian Meditations. Dordrecht: Kluwer. 35 Cate, C. (2003) Friedrich Nietzsche: A Biography. London: Pimlico. 36 Katsafanas, P. (2015) The Nietzschean Self: Moral Psychology, Agency, and the Unconscious. Oxford: Oxford University Press. 37 Nietzsche, F. (1996) The Genealogy of Morals. New York: Cambridge University Press, p. 57. 38 Foucault, M. (1979) The History of Sexuality. Vol 1, An Introduction. Harmondsworth: Penguin. 39 Foucault. M. (1967) Madness and Civilisation: A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason. London: Tavistock. 40 Ghosh, A. (2016) The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. 41 Skelton, T. & Allen, T. (eds.) (1999) Culture and Global Change. London: Routledge. 42 Wallerstein, I. M. (2004) World-Systems Analysis: An Introduction. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. 43 Robertson, R. (1990) Mapping the Global Condition: Globalisation as the Central Concept. In M. Featherstone (ed.) Global Culture: Nationalisation, Globalisation and Modernity. London: Sage, p. 15. 44 Biehl, J., Good, B., & Kleinman, A. (2007) Subjectivity. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. 45 deSilva, D. A. (2000) Honor, Patronage, Kinship and Purity: Unlocking New Testament Culture. Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, p. 25. 46 al-Khayyat, S. (1990) Honour and Shame: Women in Modern Iraq. London: Saqi Books, p. 35. 47 Pit-Rivers, J. (1977) The Fate of Shechem or the Politics of Sex: Essays in the Anthropology of the Mediterranean. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, p. 1. 48 http://www-psych.stanford.edu/~tsailab/PDF/yw07sce.pdf, accessed January 2017. 49 Peristiany, J. G. (ed.) (1965) Honour and Shame: The Values of Mediterranean Society. London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson. 50 De Botton, A. (2005) Status Anxiety. London: Penguin, p.115. 51 Bowman, J. (2006) Honour: A History. New York: Encounter Books.

174  From honour society to voice and choice 52 Bowman, J. (2006) Honour: A History. New York: Encounter Books. 53 Ezekiel, 18: 1–3 and 30, The Bible. 54 Menninger, K. (1988) Whatever Became of Sin? New York: Bantam Books. 55 Drane, J. (2000) Cultural Change and Biblical Faith. Carlisle: Paternoster, p. viii. 56 Spencer, N. (2016) The Evolution of the West. London: SPCK Publishing. 57 Mangalwadi, V. (2011) The Book That Made Your World. Nashville, TN: Thomas Nelson. 58 Davie, G. (2002) Europe: The Exceptional Case. Parameters of Faith in the Modern World. London: Darton, Longman & Todd Ltd. 59 Casanova, J. (1994) Public Religions in the Modern World. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. 60 Rushkoff, D. (1997) Children of Chaos. London: Harper Collins, p. 269. 61 Berger, P. (1990) Sacred Canopy: Elements of a Sociological Theory of Religion. New York: Anchor Books. 62 Woodhead, L. (2016) The Rise of ‘No Religion’ in Britain: The Emergence of a New Cultural Majority, British Academy Lecture, Journal of the British Academy, Vol. 4, pp. 245–261. www.britac.ac.uk/sites/default/files/11 Woodhead 1825.pdf 63 http://www.pewresearch.org/, accessed June 2016. 64 Berger, P. (1999) The Desecularization of the World: Resurgent Religion and World Politics. Grand Rapids, MI: Ethics and Policy Center. 65 Smith, D. (1999) Bauman, Prophet of Postmodernity. Cambridge: Polity Press, p. 187. 66 Beckford, J. (1999) Postmodernity, High Modernity, New Modernity. In K. Flanagan & P. Jupp (eds.) Postmodernity, Sociology and Religion. London: Macmillan. 67 Bauman, Z. (1992) Intimations of Postmodernity. London: Routledge, p. xxii. 68 Scruton, R. (2017) On Human Nature. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. 69 Smith, J. K. A. (2004) Introducing Radical Orthodoxy: Mapping a Post-Secular Theology. Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic. 70 #WEFAfrica 17: The Essence of Leadership, World Economic Forum, http://www. iol.co.za/business-report/wef/wefafrica17-the-essence-of-leadership-8953651, 4th May 2017. 71 Salecli, R. (1998) Perversions of Love and Hate. London: Verso, p. 90. 72 Castoriadis, C. (1991) Philosophy, Politics, Autonomy: Essays in Political Philosophy. Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 37–38. 73 Salecli, R. (1998) Perversions of Love and Hate. London: Verso, p. 90. 74 Zeldin, T. (1998) An Intimate History of Humanity. London: Vintage Books, p. 143.

Postscript Lord of the lies: the image system and a theory of emotional cognition

The anxiety that Brexit–Trump seemed to evoke was manifestations of deeper pathology and unease that many Americans and Europeans had about their lives. Why was it that at least 20% of electorates in France, the Netherlands and Italy were prepared to vote for extreme political parties? Resentment against elites combined with reaction against immigration were driving forces in the Protest.1 Open borders were rapidly falling out of favour. As UK Prime Minister Theresa May said in the Conservative Party conference in October 2016 after the UK referendum, being a citizen of the world means that you are a citizen of nowhere. The argument of this book is that, on the one hand, the planet is shrinking. Distance is being compressed. Yet there are strong forces that command others to ‘keep your distance’. The impetus to connect and throw open the borders of life and communication is paralleled by rising insecurity that will only allow connection on guarded terms. As Michael J. Elliott of the ONE Fund observed, and as alluded to at the beginning of this Postscript, “the digital revolution’s hallmark is disintermediation, shrinking the space between individuals and organizations. If NGOs think it won’t impact their work, they’re kidding themselves”.2 What is needed is a unified theory about the way that human devaluation drives social processes, including the contemporary reaction against the de-personalisation and being locked outside the system that we have been charting. On the face of it, much of the Protest to do with citizens exercising voice and choice is shaped by the social order of shopping. But look deeper. The internal psychological landscape within people is one aspect of this, the Protest against being treated with: i

Indifference – the need to be heard, to be taken seriously, to be involved and given attention. ii Indignity – at the interplay of indignation and dignity lies the assertion of a valuable self. ‘I am worthwhile’. iii Inequality (diminishing) – the reflex against reduction or being humiliated that calls for appropriate respect for a valuable self and affirmation. In the economy, humans are inevitably treated with utilitarian, pragmatic considerations. Purely economic rationale has colonised more and more areas of life.

176  Postscript Yet there does seem to be a collective sense of human worth that is not rooted purely in financial value or work performance. In the realm of politics, the zeitgeist in the Western democracies at least is that of ‘make your voice known, make it count’. Democracy needs to be taken hold of; it is not about a four- or five-yearly exercise at the polling booth. Voters want to see authentic new faces, not tired old wooden faces. Yet something is going on. Significant trends have been re-shaping the world, and especially the West. In the global zeitgeist, there is a strong mood that it is the people who should control governments, not the other way around. The chance to sort out the existing political order and reject permanence reflected a deeper current of our becoming a ‘value’ society, where a high value is considered the norm against which we assess what we have come to expect and need from society.

Compression of truth and the death of reality Politicians are obliged to adapt or die; to acknowledge the real concerns of voters but still have robust debates about vision and the direction of travel. What is clear is that human beings do not behave as economic man. Politics becomes unstable because it is about people wanting to be included, to be taken seriously, and to be valued. Henceforth it will be incumbent on political leaders to pay far more attention to the cry of political abandonment, the growing sense of being denied a voice and the way that ideals have come increasingly to be defined in terms of one’s identity. Amidst the demand for respect and to be listened to, corrosive forces are also at play. One is anger. Many voters felt let down and left behind, while the elites who are in charge have thrived. They are scornful of the self-serving technocrats who said that the euro would improve their lives and that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction. Popular trust in expert opinion and established institutions has tumbled across Western democracies. The human subject faces a bewildering array of what is termed ‘post-truth’. Post-truth politics damns complexity as the sleight of hand that experts use to fox people. The fragmentation of news sources has created an atomised world replete with social media as the voice of the people, in theory at least! In sharp Protest against those who have always deceived them, it is the establishment that found itself locked out the door for a while. The political upheavals showed that leaders had not been listening well, that it was time to speak with the people, not just for them. It was not just that the people were left behind, it was what they had left behind. Political nostalgia is a strong current. Courtesy of the internet – and this is true of all media, not just social – the crisis of politics is a crisis of all political language and public discourse. Complexity, generosity, uncertainty and humility are crushed into an increasingly thin common ground. Our rhetoric is surely diminished.3 The current political insurgency sits curiously in that context. Reaction against perceived oppression of the spirit in de-personalised life has led, perhaps logically, to making outsiders a glorious word; insiders a dirty word. The nature of media consumption has changed. From the days of the Nixon- Kennedy debates in the 1960 presidential election, politics has played out on TV. Postmodern consumers

Postscript 177 tend to watch politics. It is an issue of representation though on the contemporary scene, representation is a moving target. Authenticity (however fabricated) is key to success but so too is competence. Both seem to be needed for media narratives to work in favour of leaders. To pretend that voters will only be swayed by policies has passed its sell-by-date. If voters reject the projected personality of the leader, they reject the party political programme, now intrinsic to the platform. How people view the world is constantly shaped by the constant feed of imagery and propaganda readily available through social media. Governments and campaigns all over the world manipulate social media for their own ends. Targeted and customised ad campaigns are the accompaniment to the trend towards personalisation we have documented in this book. We are witnessing digital foot-soldiers who smear opponents, spread misinformation and post fake texts (‘alternative facts’). It is the invasion of the troll armies. Legions of stooges are paid to post news articles or publish misleading posts. Manipulating social media has become the business of government as much as collecting taxes. Allegations abounded that many of Donald Trump’s most fervent supporters were not themselves American but Russian, paid by their Government to help him win. The internet and social media were turned out of paradise long ago.4 Post-material identities based on ethnicity, disability, gender, age or sexuality make strong spurs for collective action, more important sometimes than class. Such identities do not just lie on the surface. They go into the fabric and fibre of people; online, it is they themselves on the line. Hence social media is opening up fresh space for vitriol based on those identities. As a British MP wrote: I receive racist and sexist abuse online on a daily basis. I have had rape threats, death threats, and am referred to routinely as a bitch and/or nigger, and am sent horrible images on Twitter. The death threats include an EDL-affiliated account with the tag ‘burn Diane Abbott’. And accompanying it all, a crescendo of blatantly racist and sexist abuse online … mainstream media coverage increasingly feeds off a misogynist online culture. This is an issue for all women in the public space, and it is particularly an issue for those of us who would like to see more young women involved in political activity and debate in the wider society.5 Diane Abbott went on to observe that, in her 30 years, she had never complained about abuse. Now she was speaking out because the politics of personal destruction is silencing minorities. Online culture has also had a marked effect on mainstream media, because facts are blurred so often online. Journalists for some ‘respectable’ newspapers can be dismissive when it is pointed out that they have printed something false and for which they have no evidence. Social media generates de-personalisation as well as de-centring any notion of truth. Commenting on an internet discussion thread, it is easier to say things in anonymous spaces that would never be said ‘to my face’. This is all a far cry from the promise that the internet would set us free. It was not meant to be like this. Egypt’s Twitter and Facebook activism signified how

178  Postscript the networked society would spread democracy and bring us together as never before. Morozov argues very cogently that this is itself fake news.6 It is an illusion. As in China, the internet is helping authoritarian regimes to stifle dissent and to track activists. It also helps keep people pacified. This brings us to the central power in the distance between signs and the world (as Baudrillard saw it). I refer to the ‘image system’.

The image system What these considerations raise is that the death of distance and its dilemmas has resulted in alienation not just from each other but from truth. The dominant power in our culture is that of the ‘image system’. Whoever makes images that tell the story wields enormous power. As we saw with the trend towards putting the consumer at the heart of the economy (with all the attendant ‘voice and choice’ we have been probing), marketing does not just urge us to buy a product. It is selling us a worldview. Playing on our sense of overlapping identities, we are taken in and shaped – but only to the extent that emotional responses can be elicited. Otherwise the image system does not work. It feeds on emotional cognition. This is where we have come to in our quest for identities; a sense of who we are, shaped subconsciously by the image system. It need not be a single picture; the image system can be a series of powerful images suggesting a particular narrative. Central to the project of late modernity was that to appeal to consumers, the producers enlisted the help of advertisers – the persuaders.7 Playing with images, the persuaders became the chief motors in society. Politics reacted to events rather than initiate them. The media reported what was going on in society whilst educators described trends. But it was advertisers and designers, working for producers, who were drivers and initiators. Their speciality lay in creating de-contextualised images. At the heart of image making was television with electronic bricolage, rapid cutting of scenes, sequences and non-linear narrative.8 The instant was both king and queen. What used to be called ‘reality’ is increasingly blurred. In the strange times of 2016, bystanders recorded the killing of Alton Sterling by Baton Rouge, Louisiana, police; Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan used FaceTime to rally his supporters into the streets during the attempted coup and the curious success of Pokemon Go witnessed addicted consumers looking to corner a virtual Pokemon. De-personalisation has not just been about commercial pressures shaping industrial production in order to crank out output; ever more restless output. It has also been about cultural products. The industrial revolution enabled the age of mechanical reproduction, to which even art was not immune once photography and cinema arrived on the scene. As Adorno theorised, the culture industry commodified and standardised art and, in so doing, risked suffocating individuality.9 With the production of culture came the disappearance of the individual subject “along with its formal consequence, the increasing unavailability of the personal style in deference to the universal practice of pastiche.”10 Now, much more than in

Postscript 179 the 1930s, we are in the era of models, simulcra, images developed by consumer advertising. The rise and rise of social media means we are a society driven by efficiency and obsession with the image system. It feeds the sense of alienation from ourselves. The way that special effects and ‘para-reality’ have become an extra layer laid over, or instead of, reality is now commonplace. The fragmentation of newsfeed has created an atomised world of content, claims and pastiche. Much has moved on since Baudrillard’s 1981 book Simulacra and Simulation saw the crisis of capitalism through the lens of hyper-reality. Reality is created or simulated from models, generated from ideas. There can be too much reality. Everything is on the surface, without mystery; ‘more real than reality’ – too perfect and schematised to be true. Baudrillard uses the concepts of the simulacra – the copy without an original – and simulation. These terms he saw as being key to an understanding of the postmodern condition inasmuch as they address the concept of mass reproduction and reproducibility that characterises the contemporary electronic media culture.11 Baudrillard’s analysis was remarkably prescient. In his dazzling array of political semiotics, he demonstrated that the meaning value of the signs that signify real things around us has moved towards divorce between the signifier and what is being signified. The relationship between language and meaning had led him to the stance that there is no intrinsic meaning in the words we use; only in relation to other words that a given community chooses to use. How could there be such an entity as ‘reality’ if all we have is simulated reality? Famously, he moved from ‘The Gulf War Will Not Take Place’ to ‘The Gulf War: Is It Really Taking Place?’ to ‘The Gulf War Did Not Take Place’! This provocative sequence of essays argued that we are swamped with information but lack a meaning context to decide how media presentations are interpreted. More information and less meaning is the stock in trade of the image system in industrial society.12 Baudrillard did not align himself with the use made by the producers of the Matrix film trilogy; despite the hero, Neo, storing a computer disk of the book Simulacra and Simulation he reveres on his bookshelf. Nevertheless, the essence of both his writings and the film set is that we live in a technologically driven reality from which we need liberating! This is, however, problematic. If all reality is interpretation, on what basis would Baudrillard object to the use made of his social theory by the Wachowski brothers? This climate in inimical to previous notions of truth and authority. Truth plays second fiddle in a public square where invective and false claims embrace. Post-truth politics and fake news (cultural markers of 2016) were enhanced by a sharing media where rumour and falsehood swirl quickly. As Winston Churchill remarked, lies get half way around the world before truth has time to put its boots on. Despite fact-checking (that is only built into regulatory regimes with fragility), who knows what is true anymore in the absence of an external authority that legitimises truth claims and sets a framework for human action? The truth has powerful allies. The very internet that feeds fake news can expose politicians who make contradictory promises or lie about involvement in a cause. To that extent,

180  Postscript there is a peer-reviewed self-correcting mechanism. As Andrew Potter, Director of the McGill Institute for the Study of Canada, remarked, “when lies make the political system dysfunctional, its poor results can feed the alienation and lack of trust in institutions that make the post-truth play possible in the first place”.13 There is a marked ‘echo-chamber effect’ where information spread on social media reinforces previously held beliefs. Our understanding of the world is confirmed. The phrase coined for this has taken hold; we live in our own ‘filter bubble’ where information is put through the sieve of our pre-conceptions. No organisation operating in the public space can afford not to operate in the virtual space. As the Czech social anthropologist Ernest Gellner remarked, even those who are deeply opposed to modernity – such as Islamic fundamentalist groups – have a highly ambiguous attitude to technology to mobilise and recruit their followers.14 Oxygen of electronic publicity via artful social media is just too tempting. Islamic State existed both in the Levant and in cyberspace. Certainly, post-truth politics has many fathers. Dictators have long sought to deflect blame for their feudal power and control. In Syria, Russia and Turkey, autocrats use the techniques of post-truth to silence dissent. Yet central to democratic advance has been the questioning of institutions and received wisdom. An undue deference to balance creates a situation where one side of a news story is given the same weight and reportage as another – irrespective of the weight of truth claims. What does it matter when there is no legitimating authority and one opinion is as good as another? The blurring of the lines between fact and fiction, between ideological opinion and empirical truth is not new. A leading German politician once urged the propaganda technique known as ‘the big lie’. Tell an untruth and do it on such a scale that few people would believe that anyone could have the impudence to distort the truth so infamously. His name was Adolf Hitler!15 Yet the concept of networked individuals enabled by technology is hugely contested for another reason. When it comes to debate in the public square, the accent falls on being highly intolerant of anyone who holds a different opinion. Social media does not seem to be a forum for the give and take of debate. Perhaps because of its anonymity, social media lends itself to being ‘shouty’; rarely informative and an exercise in political pantomime. The very facelessness of the anonymised ‘shouter’ gives permission for unprecedented abuse. Networked individuals result in public shaming. The purpose of truth claims is not to convince by reference to the now distrusted elites but to reinforce prejudices. Welcome to the world of fake news! It is perhaps only a few steps away from the requirement that concitizens chose their own frame of reference. Truth is what you make of it, nothing more. In cultural terms, the death of distance and the compression of space-time hastened by the 21st century is the long shadow cast by Einstein’s brilliant work at the dawn of the 20th century. There is only space-time, he showed; every observer has their own frame of reference. The problem with the ‘filter bubble’ many late modern people inhabit is that users get far less exposure to conflicting viewpoints.16 As Eli Pariser argued, users

Postscript 181 become locked in their own information bubble. It is curious that intellectual isolation is contemporaneous with social isolation. What seems clear is that contemporary people filter their information about the world through a grid. ’Twas ever thus and it is after all the working assumption of communication theory. It is perhaps a consequence of voice and choice society where a bewildering array of newsfeed on offer means that you might want to stick to a source that you think you can trust (Fox News, for example) but which reinforces prejudicial opinion. The surprising dimension, however, is that the tendency to map new data on to an existing understanding of the world and assess it accordingly goes hand in hand with a tremendous advance in education in the last generation. Whatever happened to multiple perspectives? Education was supposed to give people the tools and the vocabulary to be more discerning, to give them options for understanding the world and to see through different eyes. It could be that the project of global modernisers to create a new breed of cultured subjects that are secular and enlightened has now failed on the rocks of belonging. Nevertheless, the intolerance does not sit comfortably with compression of the world into a narrower perspective!

Compression into a single story Public mistrust of politicians is deeply rooted, well known and based on problems which have repeated and accumulated over decades. A poll taken before the UK referendum showed two-thirds of Leave supporters ‘much more likely to trust ordinary people’s common sense than the experts’. However, most notably, and what the poll does not comment upon, is the difference in general levels of trust between the two camps. Leave supporters are less likely to trust any group with the top percentage of trust being 27% compared with 68% for Remainers.17 Deploying the phalanx of experts backfired. Most economically disaffected voters who were tempted by Brexit were already resigned to believing that their future would be worse than the past. The idea that the elite is prospering and everyone else is suffering is as misleading as the notion that London or capital cities generally are thriving while the provinces are dystopian. It all depends on the narrative. Many people are living in precarious situations; searching for identity and meaning in a world that disrupts modernity’s promise. Against that background, the quest is to see a familiar face, a face of someone they know and recognise with trust, someone like ‘me’ – not ‘them’; not a faceless force out there but someone who speaks their kind of language. The impersonal accentuates the importance of the personal. This is why American presidents such as Lincoln and Roosevelt succeeded. Abraham Lincoln cultivated a leadership style of anecdotes and homespun wisdom.18 Franklin Roosevelt cultivated a fireside chat on the radio through which ‘ordinary people’ felt he was ‘one of us’, drawing close to the concerns of citizens despite being a patrician.19 Elites do not speak the same language as the masses and are disconnected from their everyday lives and problems. Chimamanda Adichie is a Nigerian writer who warns of the dangers of ‘the single story’. Adichie tells of how she had been constructed by her American

182  Postscript roommate out of a single story: “she had felt sorry for me even before she saw me. Her default position towards me as an African was a kind of patronising, well-meaning pity. My roommate had a single story of Africa, a single story of catastrophe. In this single story there was no possibility of Africans being similar to her in any way … no possibility of a connection as human equals”. Yet Adichie also admits that she has not just been a victim, but has herself bought into the single story.20 When visiting Mexico for the first time, she was surprised and then “ashamed” to realise that Mexicans were not the “abject immigrants” that the US media had depicted. The single story, Adichie argues, is easy to create: you “show a people as one thing, as only one thing, over and over again, and that is what they become”. And she holds that power and stories are interlinked: “power is the ability not just to tell the story of another person but to make it the definitive story of that person”. An extreme example on an international level might be that of North Korea. What to do about a nuclear state deemed as ‘rogue’ because it does not play by international rules is a “big, big problem” (to quote President Trump), at the time of writing. It is all so baffling until one remembers that the national identity of North Korea is a siege mentality constructed on the Korean war of 1950–1953. A cult of personality went with both long-standing feudal monarchy and Japanesestyle colonialism. North Korea turned inward and went on its own path rather than embrace an open society. The world is compelled to sit up and pay attention. They do not have much – but they have a weapon! Similarly, the drive by Iran to obtain nuclear weapons can hardly be divorced from Persian pride. The drive in Russian foreign policy in the Putin era is to reclaim the story of Soviet supremacy, when it was a force to be reckoned with. The narrative played and played with all its emotional resonance. What counts is significance, the drive on an international arena to assert that ‘we count, we matter’! The well of discontent is played out through story. In a politics of authenticity, rational argument is no longer currency of public debate. Emotional reactions count for more. Voters often say they want politicians who will talk more directly and not engage in complicated arguments in a totally different register. They want more say in the things that affect their lives. Brexit and Trump and the rise of people movements were based on a ‘gut feel’. Many voters who had felt left behind wanted someone they could have a beer with, an authentic person ‘who speaks like me’. A new divide has been set up between passion versus rationality. Facts don’t matter anymore. Raw emotion counts more. “It’s a romantic, idealistic impulse”, observed a former Irish Sinn Féin member, talking about why Brexit had re-energised his long-held dreams of a united, 32-county Ireland. “My grandparents had all those history books celebrating the ideal of a whole Ireland”. Of such are views of the world born and sustained. Fused with passion, the narratives they are lodged in are virtually unstoppable. Narrative checking could become as much part of the political culture of our times as ‘fact-checking’. Political beliefs or views of the world play out through narrative – witness the reflexive anti-imperialist and often intrinsically

Postscript 183 anti-Western stance of those on the far left of politics. Those regimes who stood up to the domination by oil interests, etc., were heroes who could do no wrong.21 Myths of national righteousness and a pure nation establish defining boundaries through story. Narratives of nostalgia were probably fundamental to the strength of the Brexit vote amongst the elderly. Central to the programme of the Danish philosopher Soren Kierkegaard was that religion is a matter of subjectivity. The more profound understanding of life is subjective; nothing to do with the rational side of human knowing. When there is an emotional attachment of some sort to a ‘fact’, the facticity of the fact becomes more solid and more durable. Data that elicits an emotional response is more likely to remain and be the basis of knowing. This should affect our contemporary epistemology. Arguably, education theory needs to catch up with the way that emotion cannot be separated from acts of knowing. Children become good at subjects where there is some emotional aspect; where there has been affect as an attachment to what they know and the emerging field of knowledge in which it is embedded. The view of the world adopted by social participants cannot be divorced from some degree of emotional state associated with it. This surely is why opinion, such as about politics, is laced with emotion, often at a visceral level. It is not an act of cognition purely as a rational act. The way that global liberalism and political nationalism have been fighting it out is through representation, through story. “The EU will ruin us”, complained a French voter in the run up to the presidential election.22 Such was the narrative people had bought into and were reproducing. Their emotion had been played upon by the image makers (often right-wing media) who reinforced their view of the world and played to their understanding of how things are, were and should be. A theory of emotional cognition is long overdue. For in the hands of liberal, centrist politicians, rational argument looks weak. Attachment to whatever conjures up powerful images is far more visceral than carefully calibrated argument that appeals to the head only. Feelings behind the thoughts were far more authentic. Arguments for Brexit that spoke to an emotionally laden national story trumped alternatives. After all, the UK had not been conquered. Dunkirk symbolised both a hasty, unplanned withdrawal from Europe and patriotic defiance. A proud, independent nation had not been overrun in the Second World War. An island story was a different narrative to that of European nations who had come together after the carnage to rebuild. Emotional experiences were completely different. Unless a more powerful narrative could have been evoked, the Remain side never stood a chance. It was a primeval fight between passions and rational reasonaableness, between knives and the pen. Through social media we are all involved. Furious force and voice of public views makes it far harder to ignore popular reactions. The risk was that by playing to the gallery and setting groups against each other in polarised contrast, populist politicians were dividing people; recognising the anger and playing into it rather than channelling it positively. Whoever thought that the death of distance, the opening of networks and the narrowing of the world would lead to a narrowing of minds? The past is a narrowing constraint. Yet millions want to live there.

184  Postscript The news is not all bad. Chimamanda Adichie also speaks of the positive possibilities of social narrative. Story can be used to empower, to widen. As the image system knows only too well with its appeal to mimetic desire, we dream in story, we respond to advertisers that tell a Gold Blend story or a Coca-Cola user a story. But story can be used to show there can be different endings to the script that is handed out to us. Distance has become an existential question on the contemporary scene because it threatens identities. The powerful need to belong is linked to shared language. Interestingly, in the phenomenon known as code-switching, those who are bilingual go back and forth between their languages rapidly and, often, unconsciously. Different languages also embody different worldviews, different ways of organising the world around us. As a Lancaster University study found, Swedish and English speakers mark the duration of events by referring to physical distances such as a short break, a long wedding, etc. The passage of time is experienced as distance travelled. By contrast, Greek and Spanish speakers tend to mark time by referring to physical quantities, such as a small break or a big wedding. Bilinguals utilise both ways of marking time, depending on the language they are using. This alters how they experience the passage of time.23 With the collapse of distance and compression of time, a post-liberal future might mean that the capacity to move between different worldviews could be at premium. Or new narratives are needed.

Puncturing of human pretensions? “The trouble with my generation is that we all think we’re geniuses. Making something isn’t good enough and neither is selling something or teaching something or even just doing something. We have to be something. It’s our unalienable right as citizens of the 21st century”. – Nick Hornby, A Long Way Down24 Amidst a splintered world, ‘a world in pieces’,25 the framing of the contemporary notion of self is highly complex, as Nick Hornby demonstrates. When citizen consumers define life by ‘this is how it is for me’, there is less sense of institutional religion as a defined purchase on ultimate issues. Yet the sense of the ultimate is a sort of dome within which human life unfolds. In particular, human pretensions have been punctured by growing realisation of the vastness of the cosmos, the continuing fascination for sci-fi and the early 21st-century astronomical sport of planet hunting. As I write these words, it has just been announced that seven earth-like planets have been identified a mere 26 trillion miles from us!26 The reaction of some commentators in discussing the perennial question of whether we are alone in the cosmos was, ‘there must be some meaning behind it all! It is so gigantically vast!’ Yet it is surely just here that the notion of the self is problematic. The philosophical project of the philosopher Raymond Tallis focuses on the richness and mystery of human experience. He sees that as an antidote to

Postscript 185 religious belief but also to neuro-scientific reductionism to mathematical models. The richness and mystery of human existence is linked directly with our location in what he calls “tensed time” but also our ability to envisage other possibilities through new stories. The over-quantification of human experience, Tallis suggests, removes the most crucial aspect of lived time from our perspective; our sense of past, present and future. Human beings are, he argues, originators of an entire extra-natural reality.27 Friedrich Nietzsche wrote in ‘The Madman’, “to have lost God means madness and when mankind discovers that it has lost God, universal madness will break out … We have destroyed our own faith in God. There remains only the void. We are falling. Our dignity is gone. Our values are lost. Who is to say what is up and what is down? It has become colder and night is closing in” – the madman.28 The question remains. What is it about us that ‘we count, we matter’ becomes a crucial question? Is this where the fragile assertion of ‘we count, we matter’ takes us? Do ‘we count’? Are we so insignificant as not to matter at all? Is there any way that vastness of cosmic distance can be squared with the impulse to close the distance in global lives?

Notes   1 Hauerwas, S. (2016) Who is My Neighbour? www.stmartins-in-the-field.org.podcasts, February 2017.   2 World Economic Forum. The Future Role of Civil Society. www3.weforum.org/docs/ WEF_FutureRoleCivilSociety_Report_2013.pdf, January 2013.   3 Thompson, M. (2016) Enough Said: What’s Gone Wrong with the Language of Politics? Oxford: Bodley Head.   4 Troll Invasion, The Guardian, 7th November 2016.   5 Abbott, D. I Fought Racism and Misogyny to Become an MP. The Fight Is Getting Harder. The Guardian. https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2017/feb/14/racism-misogyny-politics-online-abuse-minorities, 14th February 2017.   6 Morozov, E. (2011) The Net Delusion: How Not to Liberate the World. London: Allen Lane.   7 Packard, V. (2007) The Hidden Persuaders. New York: Ig Publishing.  8 Newcombe, H. (1988) One Night of Prime Time. In J. Carey (ed.) Media, Myth, Narrative. London and Newbury Park: Sage.   9 Adorno, T. (1991) The Culture Industry. London: Routledge. 10 Jameson, F. (1991) Post-Modernism: The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism. London: Verso Press. 11 Baudrillard, J. (1984) Simulacra and Simulation (The Body in Theory: Histories of Cultural Materialism). 1st Ed., Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press. 12 Poster, M. (ed.) (2001) Jean Baudrillard: Selected Writings. Cambridge: Polity, pp. 231–253. 13 Potter, A. The Death of Reality, National Post, http://news.nationalpost.com/full-comment/andrew-potter-the-death-of-reality, 22nd July 2016. 14 Gellner, E. (1987) Culture, Identity and Politics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 15 Chapter 10 of Mein Kampf by Adolf Hitler. 16 Pariser, E. (2012) The Filter Bubble: What the Internet Is Hiding from You. London: Penguin.

186  Postscript 17 Wales Institute of Social and Economic Research, Data and Methods (Wiserd), accessed August 2016. 18 Goodwin, D. K. (2009) Team of Rivals: The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln. London: Penguin. 19 Manchester, W. (1975) The Glory and the Dream: A Narrative History of America 1932–1972. New York: Bantam. 20 Adichie, C. The Danger of a Single Story, http://pambazuka.org/en/category/features/62188, accessed April 2017. 21 Cohen, N. (2007) What’s Left? How the Left Lost Its Way. London: Fourth Estate. 22 An interview, www.bbc.co.uk/radio4/WorldatOne, 13th April 2017. 23 Language Shapes How the Brain Perceives Time, http://www.lancaster.ac.uk/news/articles/2017/language-shapes-how-the-brain-perceives-time/, 27th April 2017, an article on research by Bylund, E. & Athanasopoulos, P. reported in Journal of Experimental Psychology: General. 24 Hornby, N. (2006) A Long Way Down. London: Penguin, p. 23. 25 Geertz, C. (2000) Available Light: Anthropological Reflections on Philosophical Topics. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, p. 221. 26 Gillon, M. et al. (2017) Seven Temperate Terrestrial Planets Around the Nearby Ultracool Dwarf Star Trappist-1. Nature, Vol. 542, pp. 456–460. https://www.nature. com/nature/journal/v542/n7642/full/nature21360.html, 22nd February 2017. 27 Tallis, R. (2016) The Mystery of Being Human: God, Freedom and the NHS. London: Notting Hill Editions. 28 Kaufmann, W. (1974) Nietzsche: Philosopher, Psychologist, Antichrist. 4th Ed. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, p. 97.

Index

anti-establishment 18, 19, 40, 41 austerity vi, 18, 24, 65, 93, 122, 123, 127 blue-collar workers 15, 16, 82 Brexit i, vi, 4, 14, 15, 17–19, 45, 51, 52, 53, 60, 80, 81, 99, 100, 146, 150, 175, 181, 182, 183 Cameron, David 3, 17, 66, 126 choice v, viii, 3, 4, 6, 7, 11, 23, 24, 32, 66, 77, 84, 88, 101, 106, 110, 112, 114, 116, 118–20, 123–25, 127, 129, 150, 151, 157, 158, 161, 162, 164, 166–8, 170, 175, 178, 181 Christian 15, 160, 165, 169 Christianity 36, 167 Clinton, Bill 51, 123 Clinton, Hillary 5, 14–16, 44, 45, 82, 100 community 38, 39, 41–3, 66, 70, 71, 89, 90, 92–4, 103, 104, 110, 117, 118, 122, 128, 131, 133, 135, 138, 140, 147, 153 concitizens 157, 162, 168, 169, 180 consumerism vi, 110, 150, 158 Corbyn, Jeremy 5, 14, 18, 67, 156 customisation 66 democracy 7, 10, 12, 20, 28, 41, 45–7, 52, 66, 78, 79, 81, 83, 106, 111, 118, 131, 133–8, 143, 147, 152, 169, 176, 178 de-personalisation viii, 3, 7, 31, 60, 62–4, 66, 68, 70–2, 84, 116, 119, 120, 127, 128, 141, 150, 154, 159, 175, 177, 178 dignity v, 3, 68–70, 117, 121, 125, 126, 133–6, 138–42, 145–7, 150, 152, 154, 167, 170, 175 distance vi, vii, viii, 3, 4–6, 9, 10, 16, 23–6, 30, 39, 40, 51–4, 58, 60–2, 66, 70, 82, 84, 85, 88, 93, 95, 99–105,

116–18, 125, 127, 128, 152–4, 175, 178, 180, 183–5 empathy 154, 157 environment/environments 6, 10, 13, 26, 27, 40, 67, 72, 85, 95, 109, 127, 139, 157, 166, 168, 172 equality vi, 25, 44, 125, 134, 136, 138–40, 145, 147, 161, 171, 172 ethnic/ethnicity 2, 9, 13, 38, 48, 52, 53, 57, 92, 104, 118, 121, 134, 139, 141, 143, 147, 177 Facebook 4, 5, 6, 9, 33, 41, 106, 108, 113, 114, 127, 128, 133, 177 faceless i, viii, 3, 4, 7, 9, 10, 12, 13, 18, 37, 61, 64, 70, 72, 84, 85, 101, 116, 152, 158, 159, 180, 182 faces of moderation vii fascism 46, 47, 134, 135, 147 feminism 7, 48, 60 First World War 4 Fourth Industrial Revolution 31, 32, 154 fundamentalism vi, 13 global forces 1, 4, 20, 25, 40, 102, 106 globalisation i, 4, 16, 18, 24, 25, 26, 27, 28, 29, 30, 32, 34, 37, 39, 43, 51, 52, 54, 56, 58, 60, 61, 64, 65, 72, 78, 84, 85, 93, 99, 104, 106, 107, 111, 152, 161, 162, 167 immigrants v, 11, 2, 4, 16, 11, 15, 40, 41, 47, 48, 52, 53, 99, 104, 182 immigration i, 2, 3, 13, 14, 16, 18, 29, 36, 38, 41, 51, 52, 53, 54, 56, 58, 61, 66, 76, 79, 81, 88, 100, 102, 146, 175 industrialisation vi, 43, 63, 82, 154 inequality 15, 19, 24, 28, 52, 54, 78, 146, 152, 175

188  Index internationalism 36, 58 Joseph Rowntree Report 15

prestige 16, 123 primacy 16 privilege/privileges 16, 52, 112, 113, 119, 167

Kaufmann 45, 52, 80 leader 47, 52, 54, 55, 57, 67, 76, 78, 81, 109, 116, 119, 126, 127, 129, 130, 135, 137, 141, 143, 150, 155, 157 Le Pen, Marine 1, 9, 17, 18, 55, 57, 76, 99 Macron, Emmanuel 2, 9, 17, 58, 81, 99 marginal/marginalisation/marginalised 17, 55, 100, 102, 104, 128, 167, 168 Merkel, Angela 53, 79 millennials 9, 78, 82, 156 mobility 16, 24, 27, 37, 38, 82 national identity 2, 4, 5, 9, 37, 38, 99, 167, 182 nationalism vii, 4, 9, 10, 12, 16, 22, 28, 36, 54, 55, 56, 57, 60, 80, 104, 142, 168, 183 personalisation ix, 33, 66, 70, 114, 118, 120, 151, 117 populism 1

respect v, 3, 13, 45, 68, 69, 117, 121, 125, 126, 133, 135–7, 139, 140, 144–7, 154, 156–62, 167, 170–2, 175–7, 180 secularism vi, 168, 169 Snapchat 114 social media 4 Trump, Donald i, 1, 4, 5, 9, 10, 12, 13, 14, 16, 30, 41, 43, 44–8, 51–3, 56, 57, 60, 70, 76, 79, 81, 82, 84, 85, 99, 100, 150, 175, 177, 182, 183 Twitter 158, 177, 33, 41, 81, 106, 155 voice 114, 116, 118, 119, 123, 124, 125, 127, 135, 136, 138, 144, 146, 150, 151, 154, 155, 157, 158, 162, 164, 166–8, 170, 175, 176, 178, 181, 183 worth 157, 163 YouTube 114