Rule Makers, Rule Breakers explores Gelfand’s research into differences between cultures. Specifically, she describes cultures that are (using terms invented by Finnish-American anthropologist Pertti Pelto) “tight” and “loose”. Tight cultures are conformist “rule makers” while loose ones are creative “rule breakers”. According to Gelfand, tight nations include India, Singapore, South Korea, Norway, Turkey, China and Portugal; loose nations include Spain, the United States, Australia, New Zealand, Greece, the Netherlands and Ukraine. (The UK sits somewhere towards the middle, and is slowly becoming looser.)

Life in tight nations can be strict compared to looser places, which have weaker social norms and a more permissive way of being. Gelfand contrasts tight Japan where “trains almost never arrive late” with loose Brazil where “clocks on city streets all read a different time, and arriving late for business meetings is more the rule than the exception. If Brazilians want to insist on timeliness, they will ask you to arrive “com pontualidade britânica” (“with British punctuality”). In notoriously tight Germany there are “mandated quiet hours” on certain days, during which lawn-mowing, loud music and washing machine use is forbidden. “After one Cologne resident complained about a yapping dog, a judge allowed the dog to bark for only 30 minutes a day in 10-minute intervals.”

What makes all this especially powerful is Gelfand’s understanding that we absorb the rules of our time and place, internalising them so that, to an extent, we become them. The halting but demonstrably true fact is that certain cultures produce, on average, certain kinds of human. We’re a tribal species and our brains are programmed to learn local norms, to follow them and to judge others by how closely or otherwise they conform to them. We need rules in order to live successfully in co-operative groups; they are our “cure for chaos”. And we love our rules. Gelfand quotes the Greek adventurer Herodotus who, in roughly 450 BC, observed our ethnocentric nature: “If one were to order all mankind to choose the best set of rules in the world, each group would, after due consideration, choose its own customs; each group regards its own as being by far the best.”

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It’s not that loose nations don’t have any rules at all, then, but that they take them marginally less seriously than the tight. And so sometimes dramatic differences arise between people of different cultures. Loose types, raised in a more laissez-faire environment, tend to possess less self-control than the tighties. “People in the United States, New Zealand, Greece and Venezuela weigh much more than people in tight countries like India, Japan, Pakistan and Singapore, even taking into account a country’s wealth and people’s average height,” writes Gelfand, adding that, in the US, “over 50% of dogs and cats are overweight or obese, including my own dog, Pepper”. Similarly, loose countries such as Spain, Estonia and New Zealand are some of the booziest in the world, while tight Singapore, India and China are among the most abstemious.

In cultures that have “little tolerance for deviance”, though, life can get rather hatey. Tight nations are often not welcoming of outsiders. China reportedly “ranks in the 90th percentile of countries with the most negative attitudes toward foreigners”, while in Japan “many landlords have a ‘no foreigners’ policy, and certain bathhouses, shops, restaurants and hotels deny entry to foreign customers”. Closer to home, surveys show that “almost 30% of Austrian citizens hold anti-Semitic attitudes”. Research by Gelfand and her team, involving more than 33,000 people in 19 countries, found loose nations to be the most tolerant, being “much more willing to live next to a wider range of people, including homosexuals, individuals from a different race or religion, foreign workers, unmarried couples and those who have AIDS”.

In an especially fascinating passage, Gelfand examines the causes of tightness. Her conclusion is straightforward: it’s a response to trouble. When the going gets tough, groups get tight. Each tight culture her team looked at “had (or has) to deal with a high degree of threat, whether from Mother Nature and her constant fury of disasters, diseases and food scarcity, or from human nature and the chaos caused by invasions and internal conflicts”. Take China: here is a nation that borders 14 countries, each of which it has fallen out with at some point. As well as experiencing “massive conflict throughout its history”, internally and externally, China has suffered terrible assaults by nature, having lost 25 times more lives to natural disasters, over the past 50 years, than the US. It also has relatively few natural resources, when compared with looser nations, and suffers from poor access to safe water and significant food deprivation. (It’s worth noting here that tight and loose differences can also be found across individual states of the US, with looseness found more in the north, and tightness down south.)

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As I read Rule Makers, it occurred to me that you could apply the tight-loose paradigm not just to cultures, but to all human groups. I applied this to the book I was researching, The Status Game, in which I note that some political movements are tighter than others, as are some religions — even some corporate cultures. The tightest groups of all are cults: they’re extremely ethnocentric and demand absolute adherence to their rules with sometimes terrible punishments meted out to deviants. Cult members, like culture-members, tend to internalise their group’s rules. One former participant in the Heaven’s Gate cult wrote (the caps are his): “I WANTED TO BE IN [THE HEAVEN’S GATE] PROGRAM AND WANTED TO ABIDE BY ALL THEIR RULES. [Not conforming] would be tantamount to wanting to be a NASA astronaut but deciding this or that procedure didn’t need to be adhered to.” Another wrote: “We weren’t here to be programmed or brainwashed. We were here to beg to be brainwashed.”

It also occurred to me that it might be possible to view the culture wars through this lens. In The Status Game I note demographic research by More in Common that described a cohort called “Progressive Activists” as those “motivated by the pursuit of social justice” (you know who they mean). Progressive Activists make more contributions to social media than any other group, and are also the wealthiest and most highly educated group in the UK. And they have certainly tightened up over the last 14 or so years, becoming more conformist and less tolerant of those who don’t share their beliefs.

It’s significant, then, that this group has suffered a drop in perceived status: highly-educated millennials are more qualified but 20% less wealthy than Boomers were at the same age: the average millennial’s worth in 2016 was 41% less than those of a similar age in 1989. They’re finding it harder to secure jobs suited to their level of education, or get on the housing ladder, and are burdened with student debt, graduating with an average deficit of £40,000. Since 2008’s Global Financial Crisis, they’ve lived with the sense that the game of life is fixed against them; that there is major trouble afoot for their group.

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Meanwhile their enemies — Brexity-minded, anti-globalisation, anti-immigration nationalists — have also endured a period of trouble. During the era of globalisation, the white working-class communities of Britain have been significantly impacted by incoming populations of black, eastern European and Muslim workers. This group feels ignored and disrespected by highly-educated politicians and much of the media-class, who dismiss them as little more than aggressive, ignorant bigots. So, they tighten up. Of course they do: they’re human, and that’s what humans do.

My analysis here is speculative. While it may be impossible to prove that tightness, fuelled by declines in relative status, is at work in the culture wars, the evidence is there. It’s also a potentially worrying augur for the future. The ramifications of the Covid economy, the invasion of Ukraine and Brexit are descending. It’s possible that all this pressure will tighten us up on a national level, as it did in the Second World War, and we’ll all move closer together; the two sides of the culture war may focus less on their own local battles as their attention moves to recession, fuel bills and winter blackouts. But if these groups continue to look inwards, neither the wealthy, educated activists nor the angry, dismissed white poor will be loosening up their mindsets, or their prejudices, any time soon.

It’s partly sexual, of course: a woman aged 50, however stylish or attractive, is unlikely to get the same level of male attention as a woman in her 20s. For many, this is a blow to self-esteem, but the consequences aren’t confined to personal feeling. Youth and sexual attractiveness remain an undeniable form of currency in the world, and in certain professional settings they are disproportionately valued — even more in women than in men. We are all familiar with the long-preferred pairing of the grizzled male newsreader with the younger, highly-groomed female counterpart. Not that younger women aren’t competent. But the professional qualities that accrue with age as palpable advantages in men — knowledge, contacts, experience — count for less in women. Instead, ageing often renders them professionally “invisible”.

It’s not only a question of age. The broader erasure of women, both young and old — along with everything associated with them — has become something of a publishing phenomenon. Caroline Criado Perez kicked it off with her best-selling Invisible Women: Exploring Data Bias in a World Designed for Men, in which she used a wealth of research to illustrate how big “data gaps” around women and their needs has led to a world predominantly designed around a “default man”. Everything from car and seatbelt design to the inadequate floor-space allocated for women’s toilets lead to worse outcomes for women: we wait in a much longer queue for public lavatories and, if unlucky enough to be involved in a car crash, are 47% more likely to be seriously injured, and 17% more likely to die.

Following Criado Perez, and featuring a quote from her on the cover, is a new book by the London-based Swedish journalist Katrine Marçal: Mother of Invention: How Good Ideas Get Ignored In An Economy Built For Men (out tomorrow). It expands on the hot topic of women being ignored, but delves into its own territory: how technological innovation has traditionally been seen as a male pursuit, resulting in female inventors being written out of history and new proposals being downgraded.

Marçal has a knack for pulling out sharp insights and illustrative stories. She tells the tale of Bertha Benz, who — without informing her husband Karl — manoeuvred the early automobile, or “horseless carriage,” he had built out of the factory — and took it on a trip to a town 90km away. Along the way she used a hatpin to clear a fuel pipe blockage and a garter to insulate an exposed ignition wire; and invented the world’s first brake linings by getting a shoemaker to cover the troublesome brake blocks with leather. But then, Bertha had a personal interest in proving that the “horseless carriage” worked: she had invested her entire dowry in the enterprise.

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What repeatedly emerges in Mother of Invention is the complex collaboration, often between traditionally ‘male’ and ‘female’ skills, that permits technological innovation to happen. Expert seamstresses, for instance, worked with NASA to make the soft, 21-layer space suits that Buzz Aldrin and Neil Armstrong wore for the first moon-landing. ILC, the company that made the suits, understood “that sewing was a technology, and that soft things can perform hard functions.” Yet while an emergent technology may rely on women as a work force, once it becomes successfully established, a new narrative often emerges — one in which the work becomes higher status, better paid, and increasingly designated as “instinctively” suited to men.

The first “computers”, Marçal writes, were women: banks of relatively low-paid female employees who sat for hours at a time doing calculation work. By the 1900s, the industry was female-dominated: the University of Pennsylvania alone employed more than 200 women as “computers”. In the war years, women made up 75% of the workforce at Bletchley Park, where they worked on cracking the Enigma code. Indeed, when the engineers there built the “world’s first electronic, programmable computer,” it was operated by female volunteers from the Women’s Royal Naval Service: in essence the first programmers.

At some point in the 1960s, however, the tide turned. As computers became increasingly central to industries and government, a campaign drive was launched to recruit “promising young men from the right social class.” The women who knew how to program were now “tasked with training up the young men to effectively become their own bosses.” With little prospect of promotion, women began to leave computing in droves, and a wealth of experience was lost.

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It was not the first sea-change in sex and status within an industry — the historical shift in “secretaries” from male to predominantly female was another — and Marçal also makes an interesting point about what might be waiting in the future. The growing sophistication of AI and the looming “second machine age”, she says, could redistribute work status in a fundamental way. Robots — like Deep Blue, the computer that beat Garry Kasparov at chess — are good at “thinking” but bad at anything that requires complex physical movement, emotional intelligence or unpredictable situations. Work such as caring for children and the elderly, or cleaning houses, is therefore the least likely to be replaceable by a robot. Could it be that so-called “soft skills” will rise in prestige, and see male competition for entry?

Nothing can happen without this work. Those in jobs which offer the highest prestige, top earnings and longest hours are dependent on a raft of others: a compliant (usually female) partner who is willing to either perform or outsource a greater proportion of the domestic burden; a nanny, to help with the children; a carer, to look after elderly parents; a secretary, to manage appointments; restaurant staff, to make work-related entertaining possible, and so it goes on. Yet these essential jobs — disproportionately done by women — are relatively low-status.

The disparity of professional status between men and women, and why it might exist, is the central concern of Mary Ann Sieghart’s new book The Authority Gap (out 1st July). It opens with an uncomfortable moment between Mary McAleese, then President of the Republic of Ireland, and Pope John Paul II. As McAleese was on the point of introduction to the pontiff, he walked past her to introduce himself instead to her husband, and asked him, “Would you not prefer to be President of Ireland rather than married to the President of Ireland?’ The “joke” went down understandably badly with President McAleese (it can’t have felt great for her husband either). It’s an example, Sieghart argues, of the way in which women are “underestimated, talked over, ignored, patronized and generally not taken as seriously as a man”.

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She collates an impressive bank of research to drive home the point, with some interesting social experiments: when social scientists sent out applications for a lab manager position to male and female science professors at top universities, identical save for the “randomly assigned” male or female names at the top, the professors — including the women — rated the “male” applicant as significantly more competent and hireable than the “female” one. Students taking an online course rated their instructor more highly if they thought they were being taught by a man. And identical CVs with a man’s name at the top were more likely to lead to a job offer.

The experience of trans people strengthens her case. The trans men cited in the book found that their authority went up after transitioning, along with their pay: as men, people generally accorded them more respect and approval. The trans women had the opposite experience: post-transition, many were shocked suddenly to find themselves being talked over, queried and assumed to be incompetent. They had been used to different treatment.

Women in the very top jobs report that they are insulated from such negative behaviour by the authority that comes with the role itself. The book does succeed in demonstrating, however, that — below a certain professional level — many men and women have difficulty accepting female authority. Yet there are also men who are very supportive of female colleagues, and I did often find myself questioning whether it is valuable for professional women to nurse outrage over mildly insensitive comments, rather than simply ridicule or ignore them. The amplification of silly remarks, so that others might share performatively in the horror, has become fashionable. The author describes a dinner in which the older male banker beside her asks what she does, and she duly lists six impressive elements of her “portfolio career,” from sitting on the council of the Tate Modern to writing a political column. Perhaps stunned by this deluge of achievement, the banker replied, “Wow, you’re a busy little girl!” A bit patronising, yes. But the outraged Sieghart describes it as “probably the most egregious example of being (literally) belittled that I can recall” and ends up complaining about it on Twitter.

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Status is inextricably linked to respect, pay and promotion, meaning the absence of it has material and psychological effects. It makes sense to want it. But there is a distinction between the professional authority that derives from seeking to do a job properly, and the egotistical authority that craves a particular reverence from those around you. The former is more admirable, but the latter is what often drives ambitious employees to ask for pay rises, apply for the top job, and treat not just the work itself but their own position with the greatest seriousness. Some people get to the top of hierarchies because it is the most effective way to have control over their work, others because they enjoy dominance over others. Although a dollop of ego is often a professional necessity, philosophically there is something faintly ludicrous about regarding a status achieved at work as a just reflection of one’s essential worth.

There’s sometimes a whiff of this tendency in “fifty of the world’s most powerful, successful and authoritative women,” whom Sieghart interviews for the book (invariably mentioning their startling intelligence). Frances Morris, the Director of Tate Modern, laments how, “As director of Tate Modern, I can spend all day as a powerful, articulate person who’s taken seriously, and I can leave this building and I am nobody. Because as a woman in the world out there, I’m not taken seriously.”

But isn’t that simply life? At home we have to unload the dishwasher and pay the bills. At parties we make conversation with people who have no idea what we do. We are all our context, to some extent. And the drug of workplace importance has a limited efficacy for men too: a month after retirement a male CEO will no doubt find himself in the garden centre, a silver-haired man in a baseball cap staring at a pair of garden shears, wondering where all the phone calls went. And if women are sometimes held back by bias, then strong social expectations of what a man should be, including successful and dominant in the workplace, also take their toll on the male psyche — something which may be reflected in the higher rate of male suicide.

The testimony in The Authority Gap is often interesting, and many of the social syndromes it identifies are recognisable. But it is mainly focused on the nuances of female status in the upper echelons of politics, business and the media. It eloquently describes the frustration of a higher-status woman being mistaken for a lower-status one, for example. Helle Thorning-Schmidt, the former Danish PM, was confused with a secretary when she was an MEP. Dawn Butler, a black Labour MP, was told by a fellow MP, in a comment compounded by racial bias: “This lift really isn’t for cleaners.”

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That focus only takes us part-way. One step forward will indeed come when men stop making uninformed assumptions about the roles that women around them play. But the next step will come — as Marçal’s book suggests — when the gulf in status between MPs and the secretaries and cleaners who make their jobs possible itself starts to narrow.

But it’s just as possible to step backwards as forwards. These books, which emphasise the historical precariousness of female power, have been published at a time when a rapacious market is more alert than ever to the cash-generating properties of female bodies. A number of US states have already legalised commercial surrogacy, for example, while a multi-billion pound porn industry churns out increasingly violent sexual images which have consequences in real-life behaviour: impoverished women especially are seen as holes to be drilled and wombs to be filled.

At the same time a belligerent “progressive” agenda is performing its own reduction in the name of “inclusion”, pressing for resonant words such as  “woman” and “mother” to be removed from institutional language that emphasises functionality: “people who give birth” or “menstruators”. Should women choose to express the view that their biological sex is meaningful and immutable, they are publicly shamed and threatened online with rape and other violence, while men who make similar points are generally left alone. A number of organisations have been startlingly eager to join in the punitive enforcing of “acceptable speech” for women.

In just a few years, with little official acknowledgment, the treatment of women in society has transformed into something chilling, surreal and often poisonous. And I can’t help thinking that, as things stand, these thoughtful, data-driven and necessary books about nuance and bias are a little like talking about redesigning a forest park in the middle of a wildfire. In the current cultural climate, many women are, quite rationally, now deciding that to be an invisible woman is the safest option they have.

It should be stressed that cancel culture is not the exclusive preserve of the woke Left. Performative offence-taking is something that can be engaged in by persons of just about any ideological persuasion.

However, if you see a reasoned complaint about cancel culture, then it’s probably coming from a conservative or libertarian point of view. On the other side of the ‘culture war’, liberals have rather less to say about this matter.

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By Michael Tracey

Which is odd, because in many ways they have more to lose. While conservatives are already alienated from modernity, and libertarians dream of a future that hasn’t happened yet, liberals are living in the world that they built. Our cultural infrastructure may have roots in pre-modernity, but today most of it is run by liberals — and has been for decades. It’s not called liberal democracy for nothing.

As radicals exploit the crisis-filled moment to continue their march through the institutions, it is liberal values that are under attack — like free speech, fairness, equality and reason.

So why aren’t the partisans of the Enlightenment rallying against the statue topplers — and the other manifestations of cancel culture? The liberal grandees of the commentariat seem remarkably unalarmed by recent events. Some of them, like Matthew Parris, in a recent piece for The Spectator, emphasise the upside.

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At this point I should point to some honourable exceptions. For instance, impeccably liberal writers like Janice Turner of The Times who speak out against the “tiny, intolerant minority” that “is dictating public policy which the vast majority of us abhor”:

“Where will the righteous anger train stop next? When will we know that ‘progress’ is finally achieved? When every member of every public body utters the required line? When every associate of JK Rowling is shamed? When every corporation is scared into compliance?”

Turner isn’t the only one. There are others, including some who aren’t just liberal but firmly on the Left, who have taken a stand. However, they often pay a price for doing so — becoming othered and isolated from the bien pensant mainstream. The feminists smeared as ‘TERFs’, for instance. Or the defenders of academic freedom associated with Quillette magazine. Or the Remain supporters, like Caroline Flint, who resisted the undemocratic attempt to overturn the referendum result.

Though these all continue to believe the things that placed them firmly in the non-conservative camp, they’ve become defined by their dissent. That’s not because liberalism and wokeness are the same thing (they aren’t), but because liberals who expose the differences find that their fellow liberals refuse to stand with them. It’s not that such solidarity would require full agreement, just a defence of the right to disagree.

So why the passivity? It maybe that mainstream liberals perceive the woke threat to be an exaggeration — perhaps an outright invention of the populist Right. If the calling-out of bigotry does occasionally tip over into cancel culture then any excess is the work of irrelevant fringe. And, anyway, where’s the harm? Will democracy be irreparably damaged if the likes of Katie Hopkins are kicked off Twitter?

Except that cancel culture goes so much further than any of that. This issue is about what is happening within mainstream institutions — and what is being done to people with mainstream views.

Look at what happened to James Bennet, who was, until recently, a well-regarded comment editor at the New York Times. He was forced out after internal ructions a few weeks ago. The controversy was over the paper’s publication of  an op-ed by Tom Cotton, a Republican Senator. It happened at the height of the unrest in several American cities — and Cotton argued for “an overwhelming show of force” to restore order. It was a hawkish piece, but one that drew a distinction between a “majority who seek to protest peacefully” and “bands of miscreants.” Nevertheless, that was too much viewpoint diversity for the paper’s activist-employees — and Bennet had to go.

It’s not only editors who need to watch their step. Columnists too are in danger. In March, Suzanne Moore of The Guardian wrote in defence of Selina Todd, an Oxford professor who was de-platformed for wrongthink on trans issues. Moore soon found herself facing an intense campaign of criticism. This included a condemnatory letter whose signatories included several of her own Guardian colleagues. Buzzfeed News reported on a further letter, this one apparently signed by hundreds of Guardian staff. Unlike James Bennet, this insider pile-on did not force Moore out. Still one doesn’t have to achieve a full cancellation to make others think twice before defying the party line.

Further reading

Why doesn't porn ever get cancelled?

By Sarah Ditum

Not that one has to be a public figure to be targeted. Earlier this month, the Washington Post decided to run a major story (getting on for 3,000 words of it) about a fancy dress party that happened two years ago. This was deemed newsworthy because a party guest had covered her face in black make-up. According to the article, the costume was intended as a satire on people thinking that wearing blackface is OK. The guest quickly regretted her decision and apologised for it. Nevertheless she was subsequently tracked down, named and ended up losing her job. Justin Trudeau is still in his though.

Another recent example is the bizarre story of how David Shor, a political data analyst whose work has contributed to Democrat election campaigns, got cancelled. His offence? Tweeting about research by a black academic showing how, in 1968, peaceful protests increased the Democratic vote while riots reduced it. For this, he was accused by members of his professional peer group of ‘anti-blackness’ and other affronts. His employers, a progressive data analytics company, fired him — though for reasons why are disputed. You can read more about this Kafkaesque tale here and here.

Meanwhile, on this side of the pond, we’ve had the Booker Prize Foundation’s cancellation of its honorary vice-president Baroness Nicholson, (see Janice Turner’s article for more). And also Graham Linehan, of Father Ted fame, getting banned from Twitter (trans transgressions, again).

So, no, it’s not just right-wingers who get cancelled. If they do or say the wrong thing — or merely do or say it in the wrong way — progressives can also find themselves in trouble. Indeed, on the principle of pour encourager les autres, liberals make the ideal cancellees.

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Perhaps that’s the real reason why liberals are reluctant to speak-up — they’re afraid they’ll be next. As Winston Churchill said about appeasers, “each one hopes that if he feeds the crocodile enough, the crocodile will eat him last”.

What can liberals do to defend liberal values while standing clear of the snapping jaws? Well, one thing they could do is to name their ‘woke breaking point’ — to state publicly how much woke is too much. Think about it in terms of statues. It’s one thing to object to a monument to a slave trader (I’d certainly hate to have one in my town), but how much further would you want either the illegal topplings or the official removals to go? Where do you say ‘thus far and no further’? Should Churchill be safe? Gandhi too? I’ll admit this is fast becoming a clichéd question, but it does demand an answer — especially from those who fancy themselves cultural arbiters.

Further reading

The disturbing history of statue-smashing

By Sean Thomas

For commentators who believe that the woke threat has been exaggerated there is surely no risk. Either they are right and their lines in the sand will never be breached — or they are wrong, in which case they’d surely want to defend their liberal values. If you use your position of influence to say that the crocodile doesn’t exist (or only eats bad people) then you shouldn’t be afraid to have some skin in the game. If the mob does come for the monuments that you said wouldn’t be toppled, or the writers that you said wouldn’t be sacked, then you should be honour-bound to take a stand.

What is dishonourable (for a self-professed liberal) is to make excuses, or stay conveniently silent, no matter how many times that liberties are encroached upon, or history erased, or language twisted out of shape, or the blatantly irrational imposed as incontestable truth.

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Note that liberals don’t have to choose the same breaking points as their reactionary opponents. They can heartily approve of getting slave traders out of the public square or banning racist trolls from social media sites. Indeed, this isn’t only about wokeness and anti-wokeness — because not all the threats to free speech are about overtly woke issues.

For instance, in April, the CEO of YouTube announced that content contradicting the World Health Organisation advice on Covid-19 would be banned from the site. One can certainly see the wisdom in denying snake-oil salesmen a platform to peddle their wares. But equally one should see the danger of shutting down sensible debate on scientific questions that have yet to be settled. For instance, take a look at this UnHerd interview with Professor Karol Sikora. Can any true liberal be comfortable with the fact that this entirely reasonable discussion of an important issue was taken down by YouTube for “violating guidelines”? Or that the limits of allowable debate in major forums are now defined by the official line of a UN quango (which, by the way, goes against its own previously published guidance — e.g. by U-turning on the use of face coverings)?

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If a spirit of intolerance and paranoia takes hold of our most important institutions — whether in academia, the media, politics or the arts — then that, ultimately, is a threat to everyone. If you can’t find it within you to defend the rights of those you disagree with, then at least think of yourself.