When Mao meets Oakeshott...
is the title of another interestine essay in the LRB (this time online) reviewing Ferdinand Mount's new book, "Mind the Gap: The New Class Divide in Britain", which (according to the reviewer). IT's here.an analysis of the ways the working class has been consistently denigrated, disempowered, and 'subjected to a sustained programme of social contempt and institutional erosion which has persisted through many different governments and several political fashions'. This has caused a 'kind of cultural impoverishment', accompanied by a 'hollowing out' of what Mount unflinchingly calls 'lower-class' life, leading to 'the sense that the worst-off in this country live impoverished lives, more so than the worst-off on the Continent or in the United States'.
In other words, as the reviewer (John Lanchester) ashamedly says, it's about "chavs", or what Mount calls, "Downers". He notes that it's an issue that is difficult to talk about without sounding insufferably snobbish (and rude and mean, I would think), but says that Mount, although being easy to disagree with, does at least present an interesting case.
The first stage in Mount's argument is to trace how 'the masses' were invented, or reified, as a consequence of the industrial revolution. Early modern England had a complex, highly stratified social structure. Mount quotes a 1688 classification of lords, baronets, knights, esquires, gentlemen, 'persons in greater and less offices and places, merchants and traders, lawyers, clergymen and freeholders, farmers, persons in liberal arts and scientists, shopkeepers and tradesmen, artisans and handicrafters, and naval and military officers . . . common seamen, labouring people and servants, cottagers and paupers, common soldiers and finally "Vagrants", as Gipsies, Thieves, Beggars etc'. All these groups had overlapping, conflicting and co-operating interests. But the Industrial Revolution, as interpreted by Marx with 'his ferocious rhetoric, his thundering certainties and his air of scientific infallibility' made it much simpler to divide society into two groups: Us and Them, the Proletariat and the Bourgeoisie, ineluctably at war
This formed:
Once class simplification was set up, however, something very close to class war did take place. Mount sees this process as being driven by middle-class dislike of the proles. He draws extensively on John Carey's The Intellectuals and the Masses to evince a widespread contempt for the working classes on the part of their betters: Huxley, Shaw, Wells, Lawrence, Woolf, the usual suspects - 'the extraordinary thing remains that so many of the finest talents of their generation should have found the mere existence of millions of their fellow countrymen loathsome to the point of being intolerable.'
This told Mount makes the controversial argument that the bourgouise then declared war on the working-class with, "'a national system of education, a state system of welfare, public housing schemes and, later on, a state system of hospitals, a comprehensive system of National Insurance and much else besides".
Yikes! That sounds like current Conservative Party policy, admittedly, but I'm not sure they came up with the idea.
The state, he claims, by taking away the working classes' means of providing for themselves, and especially by creating catastrophic Downer ghettos in housing estates, has created a culture of dependency which, together with other cultural forces (increased ease of divorce, increased prevalence and stupidity of the mass media), has caused the famous 'hollowing out'.
Mount has specific suggestions about what to do: basically, school vouchers and a massive building programme to get the Downers out of their housing estates. But that in itself won't be enough, as Mount acknowledges in one of his engaging Mao-meets-Oakeshott moments: 'Only a wholehearted, even reckless opening up of genuine, substantial power to the bottom classes is likely to improve either their self-esteem or the view which the managing classes take of them - which is what makes the managing classes so reluctant to effect any such transfer.'
Anyway it's an interesting argument, and a spirited review, though Lanchester gets terrible muddled about poverty towards the end and I think perhaps a bit too impressed by what, if you think about it for a few minutes, can be pretty silly and offensive stuff* (how exactly has the NHS led to a culture of dependency unique to Britain?). But I'm sure it'll appeal (in parts) to our conservative friends.
* I haven't read the book, so make that usual blog proviso, 'he probably doesn't know what he's talking about'.
posted by Matthew @ 10/15/2004 01:13:00 PM
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