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What ‘Plebs’ Really Means
27 September 2012
I was struck by a line towards the end of an article by Phillip Blond in the FT . Blond had been wondering – as, I find, many people have – why Andrew Mitchell had used the word ‘plebs’ when abusing the police outside 10 Downing Street, and had asked an ex-officer if it came from the MPs time in the army. The officer said this was inconceivable.
“If the remark came from Mr Mitchell’s background, he opined, it was that of banking, not soldiering.”
This was striking because it seemed to capture something very profound which I had been trying to define in my mind for some time but which, because it seemed to include everything, had evaded any kind of expression. Here goes.
The difference between banking and soldiering is that the former has blithely abandoned and extirpated its culture and traditions, the latter has worked assiduously to maintain and reinvent them. One aspect of the soldierly reinvention has been to find a way of democratising without destroying the authority of rank.( It has worked, judging by my own experience of soldiers.) This is why, I suspect, that officer was so sure that Mitchell would not have derived ‘plebs’ from his soldiering days. Banking experience was more likely because, in a world without culture, anything is permissible, including vulgar snobbery.
Blond discusses snobbery in his article and draws a distinction between the political style of Boris Johnson and the Cameron-Osborne types. The former, he argues, is much more popular because he evokes an older kind of toffery, one that is aware of the obligations required by privilege. Cam-Osism, in contrast, is a form of elitism based on entitlement – nothing has to be earned. He also suggests the same assumption lies behind Romney’s ghastly 47 per cent blunder. I don’t quite buy this because I don’t quite buy Boris, but there is something there.
Bankers did not just make themselves vile by abandoning their culture, they also made themselves incompetent. Lost in their culture-free abstractions, they all went bust
That something is buried in the word ‘culture’. As Nassim Nicholas Taleb was arguing passionately at dinner last night, a man without culture is not really capable of understanding anything. Bankers did not just make themselves vile by abandoning their culture, they also made themselves incompetent. Lost in their culture-free abstractions, they all went bust. Or, an entirely different example, you can see how people become ignorant when they ignore culture in the debate about IQ which James Flynn so brilliantly took apart.
Like bankers, technocrats, future-freaks, neo-liberals and neoconservatives tend to ignore culture or treat it as an inconvenience. This is – it should hardly need saying – to ignore accumulated wisdom, which is as hard a scientific fact as any other even when – or especially when - clothed in mythology, religion, mysticism, ritual or routine. Though, of course, it is not ultimately amenable to scientific investigation
Our culture – by which I mean primarily a mix of Judaism, Christianity, the Renaissance, the Enlightenment (add any further suitable categories) – is based on the idea that we are created equal. The idea of the immortal soul is just a way of saying that, ultimately, no fundamental qualitative distinctions can be made between human beings. This is, I think, one of the most effective, benign and moving ideas humanity has ever had and it is what makes the Sermon on the Mount so perfect and so utterly original.
Yet people do still offend against this great, good idea. I am still shocked to meet otherwise clever people who insist that the IQ difference between blacks and white is fully and finally established (read Flynn, it’s not true). This must, I assume, be because they want to believe. And, like most members of the professional middle class, I am still angered when snobbery is displayed by far less competent and far more stupid members of the upper class. Most of all, it is the cultureless elites who offend. Romney is certainly a member as are many members of this government. ‘Plebs’ paid Andrew Mitchell’s memberships dues. The ignorant bankers are a subset of a larger group of technocratic, machine-minded people who really do believe that those outside this group don’t matter except as ‘users’ who pay their salaries and whose demands can easily be fobbed off by call-trees and advertising.
Inequality is what now threatens to weaken or destroy liberal-democratic society. This has increased vertiginously because of the piratical behaviour of the culture-free elites of which Mitchell has declared himself a member. I have no idea how to get back from here except by reminding people of one thing said by Roger Scruton – we are all in the same boat – and another by Stephen Jay Gould – we only pass this way once. Put those two together and all else should follow.
For the rest of this meditation you wil have now to go out and buy the paperback of The Brain is Wider than the Sky.
7 Responses to “What ‘Plebs’ Really Means”
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27 September 2012 at 7:12 pm
The best sales-pitch I have read in years.
27 September 2012 at 7:37 pm
Great post. I feel better having read it. Thank you.
28 September 2012 at 2:42 am
Well said. I agree, but I think you place the blame too narrowly. The general culture is massively libertarian, socially on the Left and economically on the Right, and it discourages the sort of explicitly asserted collective identity which we need to reassert equality. We’ve all personalized the privileges of the permissive society and socialized the unsustainable fallout through the welfare state, not just the bankers.
Equality is a fundamentally spiritual notion, since the material process is naturally unequal thanks to differences in ability and aspiration etc. We inherit inequality from Nature as an immanent birthright, but we must earn equality the hard way, from our sense of a more transcendent truth.
28 September 2012 at 12:41 pm
Bankers hey? All culture free morons (mind you that is odd given the ridiculously high graduate hurdle rate to get in nowadays) … or is it more likely that the intellectuals will always find reasons to criticise the grubby business of actually making things, selling stuff, advertising, banking etc?
http://mises.org/etexts/mises/anticap/section1.asp
Michael Smith, government has rarely been more involved in the economy as a % than today. Hard to square that with the view we are now libertarians. Could the worldwide debt crisis be something to do with the largest borrowers of all who have overpromised to win each election to a rather short sighted populace? Ah liberal democracy… didnt Tocquevill (and Plato) warn us of this long ago… did we listen… erm.. no. Bread and circuses…wahoo..
28 September 2012 at 3:54 pm
Jonathan, with respect I don’t think you quite grasp the extent of criminality within banking. The damage they have done is unprecedented. As for the grubby business of making things, what on earth did they make? Rather, they bled manufacturing dry
28 September 2012 at 8:07 pm
Jonathan, I was typing in haste and I abbreviated my argument more than I should have done. I didn’t mean that the entire system is libertarian or that libertarianism is inherently bad.
What I meant was that we started out with a welfare state underpinned by strong collective values and then through the Sixties and the Eighties those values became much more libertarian to the point where there is now a massive disjunction between libertarian social and economic attitudes on the one hand, and the welfare state on the other, because it personalizes the privileges and collectivizes the responsibilities. People want to do as they please and have the state bail them out, which leads to the overpromising you mentioned.
Of course, you could argue that one solution would be to personalize responsibility as well, and reform or curb the welfare state, that would be one of the theoretical options. The others would be:
2) Rediscover collective values to ease the burden on the state, or
3) A mix of 1 and 2.
Basically we can have a permissive society or a welfare state, but not both. Whichever you choose there’s a bitch of a downside. The permissive society unleashes massive numbers of losers only controllable through brutality, as in the US, which we’re too sentimental to do. The welfare state requires tight conformity to common values and acceptance of the tendency to mediocrity inherent to egalitarian systems — make do and mend, get what you’re given, like it or lump it. It requires desire control, so people don’t start wanting more than it can provide, because then you get the tax and debt bloat that Jonathan mentioned. We clearly don’t have that desire control. The bankers are just the tip of a very deep iceberg.
8 October 2012 at 11:35 pm
Blimey, that’s good.