Even without the polling that the group commissioned I suspect that most people would agree that this sounds about right. Perhaps inevitably the Together group highlighted activities like the weekly lockdown “clap-for-carers” as an example of a newly revived community spirit in the UK which is now disappearing.

Of course you have to get these things in proportion — the British public could not stand on their doorsteps applauding the NHS forever. But amid the lament for the disappearance of a unified spirit it seems that few people are willing to consider the range of things that might be causing a return of societal divisions, in particular an unwillingness to recognise that much division in our time is not natural, but pushed and encouraged from on high. Consider just one prominent — if so far unremarked upon — example.

During the height of lockdown I had to make a trip to the centre of London — urgent and essential, I promise that I am not giving any material for a Cummings-esque witch-hunt. I was walking through a completely deserted Piccadilly Circus in the middle of the day, where almost no cars or buses ran by, enjoying that unique luxury of being able to walk the streets, and down them, without being bothered by any other living being.

Many people have remarked on how apocalyptic central London looked at the time, and what made it even more like some end-times movie was the fact that the vast screens that dominate the north-east corner of this world-famous junction were beaming out to the deserted city an image of Her Majesty the Queen. This vision was accompanied by a phrase from her recent address to the nation: “We will meet again”. Despite the dystopian nature of the city there was something reassuring in this, something clearly intended to reassure the nation and to remind it that it still had some reserves to draw upon.

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Last week I walked once more through this same piece of London. This time there were many more people milling about; not many people, and naturally no tourists. I would say the density at the height of the week was similar to what it would have been on a very early morning in pre-Covid times. But what struck me most was how the images being projected had changed; where there had been just The Queen, now front and centre was a very ominous sight indeed.

It consisted of a set of black-and-white images that were rotating slowly. The first to catch my eye was a close-up of some protestors with “Black Lives Matter” banners. All were masked, but at the front of the image was a masked man holding a child on his shoulders and the child holding a hand-painted sign which reads: ‘You F*cked with the last generation.’

It was a horrible sight, not just for the threatening iconography, but for the profanity — even with the asterisk — blazing out over Piccadilly circus. Other images slowly rotated on the main screen. Another close-up, this time of a solitary, masked, Black Lives Matter protestor. Then another of a white woman holding up another crudely hand-painted sign. “White people we’ve got work to do!” it read.

Next came a quote attributed to the civil rights activist John Lewis: “If not us, then who? If not now, then when?” I would be amazed if even one in a hundred British people had any idea who this John Lewis is. Say the name in the UK and most here will obviously guess you are talking about the department store. And if you asked about the phrase “If not now, then when”, then an equally small proportion might recognise it as a misquote of a title of a great book by Primo Levi.

In fact the quote is indeed from the recently-deceased US Congressman, who was widely respected for his work in the Civil Rights era, but wholly unknown in Britain. So what was this saying from a recently deceased American activist about life in America doing here in Britain? And what was it demanding that the citizens of London should do? What is this urgent demand to act?

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Slowly the images rotated again: crowds of people doing the black power salute; a photograph of a black man wrapped in chains with a manacle around his neck and a gas mask covering most of his face; crowds of frightened people, shouting, screaming, yelling, crying; then a quote from Langston Hughes: “I swear to the Lord, I still can’t see, why democracy means, everybody but me.”

Again the question: who is doing this? And what is this claim — indeed insistence — that some people are completely cut off from democracy? The UK has had equal votes for everyone throughout all of our lifetimes. Parliament, the media and all other professions are filled with people of different racial backgrounds; many of the great offices of state in Britain are occupied by the children of immigrants to Britain. There is no opposition to this. So what is this demand for urgency? This radical insistence that we must pick ourselves up and fight?

The collage, apparently called “The Feelings of Injustice”, is a “photographic observation of diverse voices, faces and emotions united by pleas to end systemic racism”. Whether or not its ends “systemic” racism, an American idea recently imported wholesale, it certainly does not help strengthen the idea that there is a “we” the Queen talked of.

While groups like ‘Together” lament the evaporation of a community spirit in Britain, they fail to identify what’s causing this social evaporation. Perhaps it could be that the hugely divisive rhetoric of a movement that berates people for their skin colour, and is supported by everything from art galleries to the Premier League, does not cause people to feel hugely “Together”.

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The division now returning to our society is almost entirely top-down; it is something we are being informed that we should feel and instructed to participate in, epitomised in that sinister rotation of images beaming out over London’s most famous junction. During lockdown we had an image of unity in the figure of The Queen; then a media company took over those same screens to start beaming out images which project not just an idea of disunity, but one that is wholly unsuited, indeed utterly alien, to the country they are being beamed into.

It is as though a television channel has been switched, the programme changed, not by some genuine, nascent, swell of change in attitude, but by often well-funded media organisations deciding to push a new narrative: a narrative of struggle against oppression, a narrative of violence and rage. But most of all a narrative of disunity and dissent.

view comments]]> https://unherd.com/2020/07/is-it-any-wonder-were-so-divided/?edition=us?appcommentsnew https://unherd.com/2020/07/is-it-any-wonder-were-so-divided/?edition=us/feed/ 43184 https://unherd.com/2020/05/what-if-people-arent-innately-good/?edition=us https://unherd.com/2020/05/what-if-people-arent-innately-good/?edition=us#comments https://unherd.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/05/GettyImages-1210834110-e1589212237418.jpg?w=597 https://unherd.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/01/gavin-haynes-1.jpg?w=96 Gavin Haynes is a journalist and former editor-at-large at Vice.

Every Thursday at precisely 8pm I perform a sacred ritual.

It is ‘The Ace Of Spades’, by Motörhead, and, played at maximum volume inside a sealed bedroom, it can just about drown out the tinkling of wooden spoons on saucepans at the windows.    

When it comes to the Health Service pot-bashers, I’m torn. On the one hand, there is something creepy about the party line we’re being squeezed into. Praising Our Beautiful NHS seems a mania: an all-too-convenient distraction from deeper, messier questions. On the other, I recognise the instinct. We all want to help. Many seem to have been waiting their whole lives to know what they would have done during the Blitz. Now we have our answer: 750,000 NHS volunteers inside a week, ungrumbling financial hara-kiri by small businesses, and fistfuls of notes shoved down the negligée of Captain Tom. We’re amazing. But in our heightened state, we’re also at the whim of various madnesses of any number of crowds.

It is this paradox that Rutger Bregman stumbles into in his new book, Human Kind: A Hopeful History. It’s not clear he makes it out alive.

“We are basically nice”, is Bregman’s big idea. Just this weekend, Bregman went viral on the Guardian website with a story from Human Kind about a real life Lord Of The Flies, arguing that the book was more a product of William Golding’s own abberant, alcoholic psychology than any model for human nature.  When six real boys became stranded near Tonga, he points out, they made a pledge never to quarrel, and shared out their scant water supplies equally, initially at a cup a day.

As ideas go, Bregman’s is a whopper. After all, “What is fundamental human nature?” is the bedrock of all politics — you don’t need Jonathan Haidt to tell you that much of how we each dispense justice in the world goes back to a deeper view of who we are, which nests in our childhoods and even our genes. It’s certainly nice to find someone who is willing to have a go at a question this big. Academia has a tendency only to offer us  A+ answers to C+ questions. Human Kind addresses an A++ question, but even at 400 pages, it can only really gesture towards answers; Bregman is like a man with a pen knife cutting chunks off a blue whale. 

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Far from being rapacious apes, Bregman says, humans have been bred to be the most pro-social species. He introduces what he calls Homo Puppy — the idea that it was the most sociable — those who could count on their neighbours — not the most aggressive who ended up winning the evolutionary race. We’ve been told we’re like chimpanzees — violent and territorial. But in fact we’re more like bonobos — co-operative, mild, fans of delicious free love. He cites the work of Dmitri Belyaev’s Soviet scientists who turned snarly wild silver foxes into cuddly domestic tail-waggers in thirty generations. We are those foxes.

As his thesis advances, we learn that Rousseau had it spot on, Hobbes was a dismal cynic. Even the Holocaust can’t hold back Bregman. He points to research suggesting that Germans in the Second World War fought hard for the love of their comrades, their own band of brothers. He quotes a German serviceman, who quipped: “Nazism begins 25 miles behind the front lines”. So long as the shock troops pounding mortar shells into Warsaw flower markets weren’t particularly keen on the whole Reich thingy, his theory checks out. Like a humanist Gok Wan, a Queer Eye for an entire species, Bregman would like to take the soul of man and say: Hey. Look at yourself in the mirror. You’re beautiful! Now go out there and slay, queen.

Maybe we do need a bit of a pick-me-up. There are things we forget, and things we’ve mis-remembered. Bregman is at his best when exposing some shoddy psych experiments that have left a watermark on public policy.

As he points out, new evidence shows that the Stanford Prison Experiment — in which the randomly-selected ‘guards’ in a mock jail transformed into brutal sadists — was more an early stab at experiential theatre than anything with scientific rigour. The 1957 Robbers Cave trials — in which groups of small boys were split into tribes and began to attack each other — flunked its first reproduction test when the new boys had singsongs instead. And the 1964 murder of Kitty Genovese that gave us the entire notion of ‘the bystander effect’ has since crumbled into little more than shoddy reporting from the New York Times.

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After our basic goodness — even if we grass on our neighbours — is firmly established by Bregman, it is perhaps deflating for the reader to realise that much of what comes next is basically ‘90s management theory — the sort of stuff Tom Peters was writing about as far back as In Search Of Excellence (1982). Trust the people. Cut the middle managers. Democratise. Decentralise. Devolve. Or “Management by objectives,” as Peter Drucker had it.

Bregman focuses on a charmingly iconoclastic Dutch healthcare provider, Buurtzog, who run 14,000 nurses with only 50 administrators by grouping them into self-organising teams with their own budgets. He mentions a radical school, Agora, that allows its children to bugger around all the live-long day, with no curriculum and great results. And the new generation of Norwegian prisons, which treat inmates with more courtesy than most Premier Inns.

These are examples of real success, of the soul of man singing in the right cirumstances. But are they examples of the soul of man being good? For instance, if there is a lesson in Buurtzog’s de-centralisation, it might also be that middle-management rent-seekers are the barnacles who must be eternally scraped off the boat of any organisation. Is that a hopeful history? Or a cynical view? Depends on how full your glass is. Or whether you’re hoping to do some rent-seeking later. 

To sell socialism with a side-serve of freedom is definitely a step up on its pre-1989 marketing strategy. As Bregman gladly points out, people have a deep aversion to being micro-managed. It’s the same sexy freewheeling world that Aaron Bastani describes in Fully Automated Luxury Communism. But none of this wave of new young Left thinkers have gotten close to untangling the contradictions of a messy, hyper-open society. This is why it often seems as though the ideal Novara Media prison would be ping-pong for rapists and The Hole for hate speech.

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Bregman, whose last book argued strongly for Open Borders, of course explains Brexit as being a result of whites who have no non-white neighbours voting Leave because they had  limited contact with ‘the other’. The happy conclusion he proposes is that we all need contact therapy to get closer to his view of society. Likewise, Bregman is glad that Britain has left the EU, precisely because it allows for swifter integration of the remaining bloc. So, is a superstate of technocrats also about ‘trusting people’? Or is it about trusting the right people? Perhaps all animals are good — but some animals are more good than others?

What he gets right is that modern economies — with their abstruse GDP calculations, endless atomisations, their Gradgrindian welfare grants and ghastly Nudge Units — have weaponised our moral instincts against us, and thereby ground down the soft bonds that used to keep us all in a more fluid relationship with each other and society. In other words, he finds himself on the exact same terrain as Charles Murray did in Coming Apart (2012), which charted how that kind of neighbourly community-centred social capital has declined in America since the 1950s — though as Murray is  an arch-conservative, it is perhaps not a lift either would wish to get stuck in

The diffence between Bregman and Murray’s views comes down to something even more fundamental. Both see an optimism in the self-organising community. But Bregman doesn’t see that this has any limits. In his world, you could parachute any 300 people together, and they’d start to co-operate just as well. The idea that social capital is something that often accrues over long periods of time is lost to his particular idealised state of nature. Deep in his dream of Rousseau, he seems to feel it all went tits up the moment we lost the hunter-gatherer band. Once we had the tribe with its chief, then the settled village — once our leaders had tributes paid and manufactured gods to keep their political economy rolling — well then things were really down the pisser, and we were forever turfed out of Eden.

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He doesn’t mention Dunbar’s Number — the idea that the quantity of people whose moral debits and credits I can keep track of caps at around 150, a tribe’s worth. Small groups work best precisely because we’re all flesh-covered moral calculators, audibly tutting at defectors. What he observes as spontaneous goodness only works because, if the group is coherent enough, if the game is long-term enough, then somewhere underneath, everyone knows the score, and punishment only needs to be implied, not stated.  

This is exactly why being socially-minded is not the same as being good. Shame works. And starting the shaming — being at the top of a temporary shaming hierarchy — is its own kind of social capital. It’s why clapping for the NHS might be a fine example of our innate goodness. Or it might equally be an example of another famous psychology experiment — the Ascht conformity experiments.  

The Ascht experiments measured the vast capacity of ordinary people to take their beliefs about reality from those around them — even in the face of bald, bang-to-rights physical evidence to the contrary. A literal 2 + 2 = 5 phenomenon that links social disasters from Covington to Salem to, yes, that loving band of brothers, the Nazis. Homo Puppy or otherwise, we may just as well have been selected precisely not to disagree with each other. It’s why divergence, stating the uncomfortable or nuanced, has become such a prickly act in a hyper-networked world, and why groupthink has become more and more paralysing to our progress.  

Even with his big brown eyes and his soft wet tongue, Homo Puppy could still smother us all.

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Many will indeed sympathise with Bridget Dolan QC, whose home-office door declared: “That thing you think you can see inside this room is not your mother”. Rather, she is an overworked barrister, who will emerge only in a medical emergency. “For the avoidance of doubt,” the notice continued, “hunger is not a medical emergency.”

Coronavirus has collapsed a split we have been cultivating since the beginning of the industrial era, between the ‘productive’ and ‘domestic’ spheres, which reached its pinnacle in the 1950s ideal of a ‘breadwinner’ father and non-working housewife.

Shielded from the tiresome obligation to earn money, or even (thanks to modern domestic appliances) perform much physical work at all, this idealised maternal figure was supposed to spend her time smilingly caring for well-fed children in a leisured, peaceful and materially prosperous private home.

This ideal seemed to represent a delightful sanctuary from the ugliness of the wider world — at least to the men who could enter and leave it at will. But the ‘unproductive’ private housewife role both sentimentalised women’s work while also relegating it to second-class status. The work of mothering and care was magical, wonderful, irreplaceable and yet also too precious and emotional to cope with the weighty (and, somehow, also more important and serious) male worlds of business and politics.

Many of the women caught in this paradox found it intolerably restrictive. “Is this all?” asked Betty Friedan in The Feminine Mystique (1963), the book credited with kick-starting second-wave feminism as a mass movement. Instead of a cramped domestic life of cooking, cleaning and caring, the “Women’s Libbers” of my mother’s generation demanded the opportunity to fulfil themselves. That meant demanding more of what men had: public life, career success, recognition and independence.

To a great extent they succeeded. Today in the UK, there are no occupations closed to women — not even serving as front-line soldiers. Great fanfare accompanied the news last year that a woman had passed army infantry training for the first time ever. But barring the occasional article in industry publications, we do not read many pieces about men smashing the glass floor and pioneering a greater balance of the sexes in traditionally female occupations such as nursery work.

Nor has there been a mass campaign by men in the developed world to demand a greater share of cooking and housework duties. On the contrary, a 2018 US study showed that even among men who say they believe the sexes should be equal at work, around a quarter still think women should do most of the housework. It will come as no surprise, then, that even before the coronavirus struck, British women were doing on average 60% more housework than their male partners.

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But we can hardly look shocked that men are not falling over themselves to fill social roles that most of us — including women — still view as inferior. For despite some 70 years of feminism, the hierarchy of status between the domestic and ‘productive’ spheres is largely unchanged from the 1950s, a fact which became rapidly apparent to me in my stint as a stay-at-home mum.

In a social setting, someone would ask: “What do you do?”, and I’d reply: “I’m a mum”. Then whoever I was speaking to would shortly make their excuses and find someone more interesting to talk to. What male in his right mind would embrace a social role seen by both men and women as the preserve of dull nobodies?

When second-wave feminism first erupted, it included calls to recognise the value of domestic labour via “wages for housework”. At the time, the hope was that as women revolved out of the home, men would revolve in, creating a lovely egalitarian society in which everything was divided.

It hasn’t worked out that way. Instead, in subsequent decades, the feminist campaign to take women seriously has been whittled down into a vague aspiration for more female CEOs and prime ministers, while the lower status of care stays stubbornly unchanged.

Alternately sentimentalised and patronised, today caring is widely perceived as a second-tier occupation for those who cannot or will not aim higher. Matt Hancock has now splashily pledged to recruit more care workers, get more PPE into care homes and send care workers a nice green badge that will enable them to access free coffees and other discounts. It is trumpeted as ‘Victory for our heroic carers’. Call me cynical, but a cutesy badge is hardly going to do much to redress the widespread perception of caring as low status.

Women’s liberation has, so far, turned out to be mostly for the middle and upper classes: we went from half the human population performing caring roles, regardless of class, to a large proportion of the middle and upper classes outsourcing care to poorer women, migrants and other groups perceived as lower status.

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Lockdown is mercilessly exposing our collective delusions. As professional double-earner families are stripped of the ability to buy in domestic services or even lean on extended family, it has revealed the fragility of upper-middle-class professional ‘liberation’ from domesticity. It has also illustrated the patchiness of modern men’s willingness to “lean in” to caring duties in the family as women have leaned into the workplace.

And it has laid bare the uncomfortably mixed feelings we have about those workers who have taken on the caring obligations formerly seen as “women’s work”. Plenty have pointed out the irony of MPs clapping for NHS nurses barely two years after voting against giving them a pay rise — but it’s not just Tory MPs that treats caring roles the way the 1950s treated housewives. It’s the entire professional class, regardless of sex.

It’s worth asking, then, why this devaluation of care is so persistent. How have we gone from alternately sentimentalising and stifling housewives to alternately sentimentalising and underpaying care home workers and nurses? The answer, I suspect, is that we don’t want to hear what carers have to tell us about our own fragility.

Today, mainstream culture places the greatest value on freedom and self-reliance. As Destiny’s Child put it in their hit “Independent Women”, a song lauded as a modern feminist anthem for women casting off the shackles of dependency on men: “The rock I’m rockin’, I bought it/’Cause I depend on me.”

It’s a view with some centuries of history: in The Social Contract (1762) Jean-Jaques Rousseau, grandfather of much of the modern liberal mindset, described freedom as humanity’s natural state and the ultimate goal of good government. Dependency, meanwhile, was degrading: in Emile, published the same year, he wrote that it “engenders all the vices”. Far better, as Destiny’s Child advises, to “Depend on no-one else to give you what you want”.

But if dependency is degrading, how are we to account for the helplessness we all experience at the beginning of life, and usually at its end? I suspect that this is at the root of our complicated love-hate relationship with care. After all, however proudly we assert our independence as adults, at some point in our past we were helpless in the arms of our mothers or carers. And the likelihood is that as we age or become ill, we will be helpless again, at the hands of nurses or care workers.

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No one likes being told that their most cherished ideals are built on sand. So we ignore what our need for care workers implies about our own fragility, #ClapForCarers every Thursday, and underpay them every other day of the week. Or we mouth platitudes about how marvellous mothers are, while making every effort to avoid having to talk to them at parties.

The liberation of middle-class women from domestic life did not result in the disappearance of caring work but its displacement onto less wealthy women. It was a revolution for those women capable of becoming QCs, not those women who become the nannies who care for the children of QCs while they work. The husbands of those QCs were thus able to continue their professional lives along lines largely unchanged since Betty Friedan’s day, undisturbed by any notable increase in domestic obligations.

Now coronavirus has provided a brutal lesson in where the buck stops. The government  rules on eligibility for furlough cover people whose caring obligations leave them unable to carry on working under lockdown. Meanwhile, schools and childcare are kept open for those whose jobs designate them as “key workers”. These roles — including carers, nurses and nursery workers — are overwhelmingly working class.

This in turn highlights what we probably secretly knew anyway: that however we undervalue and underpay caring work, ultimately in a zero-sum conflict between higher-status work and caring for loved ones it is the latter which counts. We should reflect on this, next time we have a national debate about the pay scales of nurses relative to their managers.