I love this opening paragraph from George Monbiot in The Guardian today:
It is hard to believe today, but the prevailing ethos among the educated elite was once public service. As the historian Tony Judt documented in Ill Fares the Land, the foremost ambition among graduates in the 1950s and 60s was, through government or the liberal professions, to serve their country. Their approach might have been patrician and often blinkered, but their intentions were mostly public and civic, not private and pecuniary.
Great book from Tony Judt.
The sentiment is correct.
George's writing is good.
I have enormous sympathy with what he says in the rest of the article.
And he's right: it all went wrong due to economist promoted greed, at cost to us all.
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I wonder what went wrong in the seventies?…
No doubt the ground was ready, post war, for economists to take over.
The “Trente Glorieuses” as the French called it, produced mass consumers, and with them, politicians prepared to follow, rather than lead, this new era we now live in.
@ Marie Thomas : “I wonder what went wrong in the seventies?”
Hayek, Friedman, Sergio de Castro, Reagan, Thatcher …. et après eux le déluge!
I know, my question was rhetorical and sarcastic, only it doesn’t come though…
I remember de Gaulle being driven away in shame, after the ‘events’ of May 68.
I wasn’t sure what went on, just that school stopped in May and didn’t start again till October that year, no petrol, no trains, but long hols!
I remember Gisgard d’Estaing and Chirac, claiming de Gaulle as their master.
I remember de-industrialisation in Lorraine and the North, followed by mass unemployment, people constantly on the streets demanding rights and jobs, Giscard telling them modernism would make their lives so much better but they might have to ‘get on their bikes’, aged 55 with homes and kids that clearly weren’t important…
I remember also more and more youngsters getting uni places with no prospects of graduate jobs, students studying Sociology and psychology because that what you did then when you didn’t know what to do, dropping out of uni, joining the queues of the unemployed, or demonstrations in some town or other, joining a Party, usually the Maoists, Trotskists, or other radicals, just to have a group to belong to, because everything else was just being dismantled.
And Giscard having dinners ‘chez l’habitant’, being televised at peak time: look, he’s one of us!…
The use of mass media started then. Demystifying our Leaders. All of them, at once.
Not a bad thing. But humans seem to need them, unfortunately.
Yes, I remember the seventies in France. A turning point.
We’re there again now, Social Media has changed everything. Again. And Macron replaced Giscard.
Decline in religion along with its values and no concept of useful being to replace it lies at the core of the British decline as well as much of the Western world. This decline was inevitable with scientific discoveries particularly in the biological field and areas related to increased psychological understanding of human nature. Now a new model is just starting to emerge which attempts to bridge or reconcile transcendental and empirical views of life, theist with deist if you like.
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1998/04/the-biological-basis-of-morality/377087/
https://www.psychalive.org/societal-defenses-death-anxiety/
https://dissidentvoice.org/2007/10/neuroscience-and-moral-politics-chomskys-intellectual-progeny/
Schofield. Thanks for the link to Dissident Voice. New to me – interesting and wide-ranging.
I was a member of the scientific and medical network for a few years. They think the materialist understanding of consciousness is insufficient to explain the world. Many of them are distinguished in various fields. I have long thought that because of the evidence. We may be moving to a new understanding of spirituality and, we certainly are moving away from formal religious structures -which has good points and some less so.
I wasn’t born in the 50s, 60 or even 70s but this sounds like baseless nostalgia to me.
Class struggle and exploitation are documented in these decades with the state and the *liberal* professions at the forefront.
I was alive
This is not nonsense
It most certainly isn’t nonsense, Stu. I was at University in the 1960s – we all wanted to serve society, since society had helped us by paying our university fees and given us maintenance grants. We felt we must pay back by taking work that would help the less well-off – whether in this country or elsewhere.
And many of us did. Me, for example – I spent three years in Kenya, teaching. But alas! the New Labour crowd – and I knew one of them at University – took up Margaret Thatcher’s mantras, and fees and grants became loans payable at interest.
Our strong feelings of service were betrayed – I for one can never forgive Tony Blair and his cronies, and don’t believe a word they say.
Class struggle has always been present, but their were two things peculiar about the 20th Century that fundamentally skewed the struggle briefly in favour of the Working Class & not the Elite.
The rise of Socialism / Communism & the Atrocities of the Two World Wars that lead to the Post War Consensus & the Single only time in History when the Elite have been in fear of the People, as the fear receded so did the Equality that arose from / was tolerated due to that fear.
The Cambridge debates were the beginning of the fight back of the Elites, Friedman and the Chile experiment the first battle, Thatcher & Reagan populism the beginning of the end.
It was a brief period of time, before a return to the norm, of rulers & the rentier class!
Mick Reilly says:
“… Post War Consensus & the Single only time in History when the Elite have been in fear of the People,…”
Not sure about that, Mick. I think in Britain there were serious fears about the spread of communism following the Russian revolution perhaps peaking with the 1926 general strike. (?) Given the losses from the big-house, landed families’ young officer class in WW1 the upper classes were perhaps justifiably anxious at that time.
It’s difficult to tell if the US elite were ever similarly afraid or whether the communist threat was only ever a propaganda story to keep the congenitally stupid on-side and justify military expenditure.
It wasn’t class struggle. It was a deliberate and carefully orchestrated plan to subvert democracy and the teaching of economics and stealthily ‘financialise’ both society and government.
The story is well told in these two books:
‘Dark Money’ by Jane Mayer and ‘Democracy in chains’ by Nancy MacLean.
I especially recommend the latter
Link to the article:
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/oct/18/governments-no-longer-trusted-climate-change-citizens-revolt
It has long struck me that those who despise ‘service to the public, are saying a lot about themselves. They are almost by definition only interested in being ‘self serving’.
That said, there are those in the business world who do have a sense of public service, to their staff, their customers and the wider world but they have become rarer. Im old enough to remember when even some of those large banks who have fallen into disgrace could be described in those terms, though not any more.
Undoing the damage done by the extreme neoliberal form of capitalism that we’ve had inflicted on us for the last 30-40 years is going to be a major task. However, that does not mean ignoring where real progress has been made. People who actually lived and remember the 1950s and 60’s would rather not go back there. The ‘sick man of Europe’ days.
It’s not nostalgia, but it would take a great deal of research to prove it either way. Nor is it anything to do with religion. All I can offer is limited but I hope germane personal experience. As a grammar school entrant at Oxford in the late 60s most of my contemporaries – even those from public schools – were looking to some form of public service after graduation. Their careers included hospital and local authority administration, medicine, civil engineering (both private and public), the civil service and teaching. Even some of the lawyers ended up teaching or working for law centres. All of these professions then offered reasonable pay, a degree of autonomy, a career structure, and a chance to lessen the malign effects of inequality that many of our parents had suffered. The progressive pulse, which had flourished after the War, was still strong.
When I returned to my college in the early1980s, a history don lamented that few of his students now wanted to teach – they were all after big money in the city. I can’t pin down when the change occurred – some historians identify 1981 as the key year, but I suspect it was earlier, possibly the mid70s. I live in hope that it is beginning to return.
The City wasn’t so attractive then.
True Carol – and Aditya Chakrabortty’s recent Guardian article on Finance is excellent, including on how the City has sucked good people away from other sectors, as well as its other failings.
The money would have been good even then, but nothing like today. The big difference I was highlighting was that there was some sense of service or responsibility – like those old Captain Mainwaring bank managers. They were all chucked out, literally, in the 90s as money making became the only criteria.
And for those whose memories don’t stretch back that far, the 70s included multiple recessions, 3 day week, interest rates in the mid-teens (work out what that means for mortgage repayments), serious inflation, gazumping (look it up), not to mention the continuing Cold War. Not a fun time to be trying to get into the world of work or buy a home.
We have a different pile of crap to deal with now but any nostalgia for the 70s, let alone the 50s is deeply misplaced. Even if both major parties seem to want to take us back there.
Meanwhile the unions at the time were to a degree the architects of their own downfall, and contributed to Thatcher being voted into power with all the damage that caused. Progressive they were not.
In making comparisons to the past we need to be careful to distinguish between the absolute level and the rate of improvement. Although the absolute incomes levels of the 70s were lower, the rate of improvement (despite all the turmoil and including for inflation) of both income and productivity were significantly higher than now. As Kalecki taught us, a switch from serving the median voter to self serving is bad economics and hence bad politcs too.
Carol Wilcox says:
“The City wasn’t so attractive then”
I think it was much more closely shrouded in mystery, and those who were making ‘loadsa money’ were far too well mannered to mention it. One simply didn’t talk about such things, it was considered vulgar in the extreme.
Vulgarity nowadays seems to be the height of fashion.
“There are two separate languages now – the language of economics and the language of ecology, and they do not converge. The language of economics is attractive, and remains so, because it is politically appealing. It offers promises. It is precise, authoritative, aesthetically pleasing. Policy-makers apply the models, and if they don’t work there is a tendency to conclude that it is reality that is playing tricks. The assumption is not that the models are wrong but that they must be applied with greater rigour.”
– Prof Manfred Max-Neef (The Barefoot Economist)
This statement made in about 1985.
Great thinker
Sounds just like a faith-based system, unscientific.
So much for the name given to economics studies : Economic Sciences.
Max-Neef is right of course.
But which type of economics? Has everyone forgotten E. j. Mishan and Welfare Economics?
I agree that there was indeed a time when ‘serving’ was seen as ‘selfless’. That ‘serving’ was a good enough and that one was made richer just be contributing positively to others. There was a sense that this was for the collective good – for the nation.
I also agree that greed is the route cause but I am also interested in how this was enabled. To me and no doubt others it is all about capture. People who are meant to be the game keepers are being turned into poachers. They are being bought by Finance. People’s consent to do outrageous things is being bought (and therefore consent is manufactured).
1) CEO’s are being incentivised (excessive pay and share options) to hollow out and destroy their companies by the finance sector to deliver more returns faster to their investors.
2) Accountants are encouraged to lie about the true health of company accounts with fat, ‘no questions asked fees’ and the promise of return business.
3) Ratings agencies are encouraged to mis-report the investment grading of company assets because of fat fees and the promise of return business from those who need rating.
God help the accountants and ratings agencies if they tell the truth! Explain your principles to your own investors and be damned.
4) Politicians who lead projects to privatise the commons and public goods can expect to have well-paid positions in the new ‘markets’ they create as ‘advisors’ or providers (the MP’s who are now BTL landlords of ex-council housing stock for example).
I have to say however that Finance’s strategy works. It works because they are collectivising (albeit in key but limited segments of the economic and financial infrastructure) the benefits of short term greed. They have made the trough slightly larger to get buy-in. I say again – the strategy is working. I think it tells us something critical about human nature that progressives need to learn fast.
On one of Richard’s posts I commented angrily about tax rises. I went in hard I know but I am pretty secure about the point I am trying to make. Then I read this is yesterday’s Guardian:
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/oct/17/universal-credit-left-behind-far-right-austerity
So – let us consider what has been happening to people who see them selves rightly or wrongly as tax or NI payers. I say rightly or wrongly because as we know the narrative of taxation and the the printing of money in the public realm is truly fucked up with lies and myths. But let us step into that incoherent world for a moment in true Atticus Finch fashion (To Kill a Mocking Bird yes?) and try to see it in the public’s shoes. I contend that tax payers are seeing less for their tax and NI – not more. And if that is the case, is it a good idea to increase their taxes, given that they are encouraged to (and do) see tax in a bad light?
Here are some good reasons not to be fond of taxes when you are told that your taxes pay for these services:
1. The NHS is being underfunded. Some services are now being charged for or just withdrawn – I have first hand experience of this from dental services to children’s support to services for the elderly and my local A&E.
2. Privatised companies (ex-public sector) are not delivering better prices through competition. Shareholders are collecting rent through these services and are having a ball. Yet you are subsidising some of them with your taxes. You are spending your time on their badly made websites or telephone lines trying to get a good service.
3. Personal debt is reaching critical levels – as has been pointed out here rather than the Government borrowing to spend it is ordinary citizens who are doing it and it is unsustainable given the drop (collapse) of full time secure work and wage levels and high housing costs. Those credit payments leave you short and shorter still when the tax is coming out of your wages from your pay packet or VAT on services or goods.
4. Public sector (non NHS) services are under strain everywhere because of austerity – from police services to bin collections, street cleaning and highway maintenance. Bus services are losing funding and are being lost.
5. Social housing has not only been under provided for but is now the housing of last resort as defined by Governments who want ‘market led’ solutions. Social housing is hard to access.
6. People who have paid their taxes and NI all their lives and who fall on hard times have to exhaust their savings and assets before they qualify for social security. The State well and truly pauperises you before it wants to help. The rate in which social security is withdrawn for money earned from work is too high, too rapid to be meaningfully helpful. The ‘nudge’ of Universal Credit is actually a hefty kick into a low wage, low skill, low satisfaction economy.
But still, the public pay their taxes as they perceive that the services they receive turn to shite. As the finance sector incentivises people to do the wrong thing, our Government incentivise the public to wrongly see tax as a worthless, undesirable millstone around their necks by deliberately under funding the services they tell the public are supported by their taxes!! Thereby resulting in resentment and the consent to reduce taxation more – especially beneficial for the higher earners or HNWI’s who prefer private medicine and going to work in helicopters – but not to the more average person.
That is why I have said quite passionately that the general public does not need tax rises. It does not need more of something it has a poor opinion of – or to be more precise a poor opinion of something based on so much misinformation.
What any progressive should do if they get the chance is do what the wily and cunning financiers do – manufacture the consent by ensuring that those who are involved know and feel that they get something back from their ‘collusion’. This is the human nature bit – when we invest energy, time, love and money in something these days we expect a return of some sort.
The only way to do this is to restore generosity to the system (just like the financiers are generous to the accountants, ratings agencies etc,) as well as co-opting more tax paying people into it – not just the destitute. As things are now all the social security system does is to contribute to the glaring disparity of wealth – a system there to assess and judge is the result – it is not a system that is there to help (in England at least although they seem to be changing benefit delivery in Bonnie Scotland in a way which is truly admirable).
In conclusion, the age of service may have gone and in its place is a ‘something for something’ culture. This may be good or it may be bad. I would remind progressives that it will be whatever progressives make it but first of all we have to accept it and capture whatever human condition exists for the common good.
Wonderful stuff @PSR.
Entirely agree with what I think you’re saying is that giving a universal (say child) benefit to people who are rich includes them in a societal embrace. The rich should not be allowed to ignore that they are indeed part of society.
In fact I wonder whether being a tax exile isn’t in fact a lot, lot easier than being a monetary benefit exile (especially when we know that the small amount of money involved is likely to be inconsequential since we spend first and tax afterwards).
Giving ‘welfare’ benefits to all nationals should be a part of a national togetherness.
And perhaps if you get no ‘welfare’ benefits you automatically get no tax concessions?
It might, at least, concentrate minds.
Thank you Peter. I’m very grateful because it feels that I am not always expressing myself correctly or I am talking complete crap.
My observations are based on what I see in our voting system – a rejection of the Left and others who wish to genuinely help society and which locks people into a merry go round of misery.
It is OK to get frustrated but we cannot write these ‘progressive rejectionists’ as I call them off.
We have to reach out continuously. By all means intellectually beat up the neo-lib politicians, academics, economists and the media because they deserve it – but not the source of democracy and change – the people and their vote.
PSR
I admit I don’t often comment on your posts
They speak for themselves
Richard
Agree with every word of that PSR. Very well put
Ah, the ambition to serve is alive and kicking. Clegg joins Facebook as Head of Global affairs and communications. No salary mentioned, but once you’ve got a taste for the gravy…
So, from demanding tax reform to working for Facebook….
“Parenago’s discontinuity” should google up some new material on scientists’ thinking on consciousness being spread way from human brains. Always noticed my heavy thinking is something I’m barely aware of in consciousness. I doubt any claims to be selfless or disinterested – these are standard cons of legalese and judges. Stone age people find our societies have some advantage in terms of privacy – matched by chronic loneliness unknown in their collective worlds. I plump for decent wages after ww2 not a middle-class service attitude – how quickly this evaporated if it existed is a good question as academics take sinecures from students’ pledges to repay in the future. We’ve been had that any of this has been democracy.
Yes Archytas – we’ve been had.
But what do we do next and how do we do it?
We don’t do it by looking down our noses at those we say we wish to help. I warn you and all of you as a friend.
Although I want to see Richard reach his 90th birthday, I’d like to think that by that time we will be talking about how to maintain the changes we have brought about – not talking (still!) about how to start them!!
Me too PSR
Within range of the smell of steam….
Well said Pilgrim – we should be looking to change the future. It worries me that much of the intellectual critique around now can be seen in ancient Indian and Greek literature. It didn’t work then and is not mainstreamed in our current practice. I would devolve our London parliament to the constituencies, force electronic debate to give us record and allow real time contribution and evaluation, have MPs with teams to represent us locally with proportionality built-in to a deliberative system. “Service” would be aq built-in feature not some virtue individuals could feign. Our current Parliament can’t even sort harassment, bullying and expenses corruption – and intends to refurbish buildings to obselete standards after expensive refurbishment. The arrogant ignorance and incompetence are almost immeasurable.
It must be worth imagining this new democracy
“Above all, democracy is a cultural journey–not an end stage–headed towards widely dispersed power and away from concentrated control.” I liked this quote from Frances Moore Lappé in her recent article on democracy : ‘What Is Democracy, Anyway? Let’s Talk’ – (https://www.commondreams.org/views/2018/10/18/what-democracy-anyway-lets-talk).