How I Became a Free Radical

John Carroll’s memoir in the May issue of Quadrant has stimulated me to write about my experience travelling politically in the diametrically opposite direction from him. He and I were at Cambridge at almost the same time, my last year being his first. I was then on the committee of the Cambridge University Conservative Association and a Europhile, co-founding the Confederation of European Student Associations in 1966. Now that I am in the middle of my third age, I travel ever further to the political Left. I started by fancying myself as Disraeli light: I am ending as Gladstone heavy. John is a professor of sociology: I am a professor of accounting. John resonates with Burke: I resonate with Zizek.

John had two formative political experiences. The first in Papua New Guinea in 1963 made him a Hobbesian, believing in the need to regulate behaviour and setting him against the noble-savage conceit of Rousseau. The second was the student sit-ins and demonstrations of May 1968, which he saw as spoilt rich kids identifying with an imaginary working class. He writes that his fellow students listened to the same Bob Dylan track again and again repeated like a mantra which seemed like a kind of world-denying self-annihilation. I have shared his view both of Hobbes and of Rousseau ever since my schooldays but have an entirely different view of what occurred in 1968, and there is one mantra of Dylan’s that both of us might feel comfortable to endorse, namely:

Darkness at the break of noon,
Shadows eating the silvery spoon
Eclipses both the sun and moon;
To understand you know too soon
There is no sense in trying.

If anyone interested in elucidating how we extrude meaning from our lives, or inject meaning into them, does not find that verse a piece of high culture deserving of the guardianship of us members of the academic elite, I should have to ask them to step outside.

“Man is born free but everywhere he is in chains” has always struck me as one of the stupidest “dogmagrams” ever pitched. The idea that man’s natural nature was noble, uncorrupted or free seems to me to be refuted almost everywhere, almost all the time. Lord of the Flies was much nearer the mark. It seemed to me that Hobbes was right about the life of a natural man being nasty, brutish and short, and that without good regulation, fairly enforced, there was no prospect of anything deserving to be called civilisation. Once, however, after an Economics tutorial of especial dryness and rigor, a fellow student, who was from India, said he thought Hobbes meant to say the life of natural man was “nasty, British and short”, as if Hobbes had been prophetically anti-colonialist. As if. Rather the reverse, unfortunately.

The mid-1960s were not only about sexual liberation following the birth control pill becoming available, or about endless discussion of whether the Beatles rated higher or lower than the Rolling Stones, or about the reinvention of the London fop in the cult of the Carnaby Street mod. There was also the backwash from the kitchen-sink dramas and films of the late 1950s and very early 1960s. While the film version of Look Back in Anger set up Richard Burton’s Jimmy Porter as the anti-hero many of us aspired to, Laurence Harvey’s Joe Lampton in Room at the Top made it OK for boys with no class to be ambitious. In England in the 1960s being ambitious was OK—not being greedy; that came two decades later—just being ambitious. Then there were films where ambition was both satirised and also made to seem easy, if you had a little bit of luck. Alan Bates in Nothing but the Best and Robert Morse in How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying both have their heroes get the board seat, get the girl and get the executive lifestyle by learning to charm, by seizing opportunities and by acting like who they wanted to be rather than proclaiming who they really were.

There were also self-help success books. I got into Cambridge with the help of one such book called The S Man (where S stood for success) written by one Marc Caine. The book trains the reader to spot opportunity fast and to adjust his sales pitch in response to the listener’s body-language cues. In those days, Oxford and Cambridge bypassed A-level results in favour of their own entrance exams, but you had to attend a pair of interviews, one for your college and one for your discipline. I applied The S Man techniques in both interviews, well enough for my mediocre performance in the entrance exams to be disregarded.

In my first term up at Cambridge, another contributor to the May issue of Quadrant, Christie Davies, was President of the Union. I was not the only one dazzled by the speed and cleverness of his wit. He was equally sharp with right, left and centre speakers; kind to novices, cutting to long-winded narcissists and not fazed by visiting luminaries no matter their fame, infamy, beauty or creepiness. He was much too gifted for a grey grot like me to aspire to emulate him as a speaker. I assumed he would have his own television program within five years of graduation and would win the most glittering prize of all our graduands. Napoleon said at the grave of Frederick the Great, “If he were still alive, we would not be here.” I can envision Stephen Fry, to take just one example, saying of the young Christie Davies: “If he had chosen our path, we would be out of work.” His effect on me, however, and rather unfortunately, in the mod mid-1960s, was to embed in me still deeper the belief that a fast, smooth and clever tongue was more valuable than quiet but good work. I dare say that Christie believed the exact opposite, and that is why today Fry chairs QI instead of him.

I went to most Union debates and heard virtually all the great speakers who visited there, including in no deliberate order James Baldwin, William Buckley, Denis Healey, Shirley Williams, J.K. Galbraith, Lord Denning, Barbara Castle and—to me, best of all—the secretary of the Scientific and Managerial Staffs union, Clive Jenkins. It seemed to me the British Left had the better speakers but the British Right (under Heath) had the more practical policies. Butskellism was still alive and well. Both main political parties plausibly spoke for most of the population in many respects and the class-war aspect of politics did not occupy the UK’s political or media foreground until the 1970s. Being a one-nation Tory seemed feasible in the 1960s, and equality of opportunity rather than of reward was an attractive piece of framing then that did not seem like a cop-out.

Once, the committee members of the Conservative Association were invited to have tea with the Master of Trinity College, who was Lord Butler, a major conservative figure at the time. Each of us was asked about our ambitions. I said I would like to emulate Disraeli if I could and rise to be a political leader. He smiled, reflected and then posed the question, “But of which party?” This turned out to be a rhetorical question, as he had already passed on to the next in line, and I had to wait till my first visit to the House of Commons to understand why he had asked me that.

Nothing daunted, I graduated, joined a big City accounting firm and went along to the Bow Group meetings when Geoffrey Howe led that group. I liked my contemporaries in the Bow Group and felt a definite sense of belonging, for just as at Cambridge, around half were products of grammar schools rather than public schools and the Bow group was the left end of the party, then more salient than the Monday Club at the extreme right end.

On my twenty-third birthday I paid my first visit to the House of Commons. The sitting was full, with Heath’s Conservatives on one side and Harold Wilson’s Labour people on the other. Looking at the Tories, I was reminded of the words of 1930s Conservative Prime Minister, Stanley Baldwin, speaking of the newly elected Tories of the 1918 sitting (as quoted by J.M. Keynes in The Economic Consequences of the Peace). He described them as “A lot of hard faced men who look as if they had done well out of the war,” and, half a century later, they still did. The Labour bunch looked quite representative of at least the male half of the wider society. Still, I thought, so long as the Tories are led by a sensible visionary like Edward Heath, I can disregard not feeling much kinship with people, and focus instead on the policies themselves—just as young Disraeli had done 120 years before.

The communitarianism of the hippies in and after 1967’s “summer of love” was not appealing. As a Hobbesian, I assumed any communitarian experiment would end up dominated by the strongest or most unscrupulous person and his cronies, and that it was impossible for the communitarian ideal to be realised, just as it was for the communist one. Historically every successful revolution ended up as a tyranny. Why? Because people were not as keen on being equal as they were on being special. It was not just a case of some being more equal than others, as in Animal Farm and under every communist regime. It was more a case of men being animals hard-wired for the zero-sum game of the urban jungle rather than for the collegial and comfortable life of the common room and the club. Civilisation, in short, was a privilege into which you could be born, or just occasionally be invited; but was not normal, not usual, and not widely distributed.

My general assumption that all left-wing idealism was a pipe dream at best and an evil confidence trick by exploitative fake gurus at worst was seriously challenged in May 1968 by the events in France, which I saw quite differently from John Carroll. First when I saw Tariq Ali and Daniel Cohn-Bendit defending the students and the sit-ins on British television, I was struck by their quiet and well-reasoned sincerity and sartorial casualness, the combination of which suggested that there existed an effective mode of presentation that aligned with substance, rather than wrapped it up and pitched it with advertising tricks. Then I read what the French Situationists were actually saying, in Debord’s Society of the Spectacle and Vaneigem’s Revolution of Everyday Life. Between the superficial “essuality” of the S Man and the practical, quietly effective work of the organisation men was Vaneigem’s notion of detournement—a playful but unsubtle single act of subversion that deflated the pompous or deconstructed the hypocritical or picked out the truth behind the half-truths. My own favourite example of detournement was Mel Brooks’s Springtime for Hitler, albeit a piece of culture rather than politics. Detournement is more than satire. It permanently changes the way we see a situation, hopefully in a more radical and more enlightened way. It unties knots of fear and it does not kill.

The second great insight of the Situationists was Debord’s conversion of Marx’s superstructure into the notion of the Spectacle. Real everyday life now is lived largely through watching the lives and acts of others. Television, internet, sports stadia and mega-concerts: these are what Baudrillard, himself a Situationist in the late 1960s, called hyper-reality—more real to us than our own lives. Vicarious life is more real than the life we actually lead, because the Spectacle has its huge screens, its insistent musical soundtrack, and its familiar and comforting cast of characters in long-running soap operas. The Spectacle lives out the French Revolution’s early hope that “Ça ira” (“it will be OK”) or the Beatles’ reply to the red revolutionaries of the late 1960s—“Don’cha know it’s gonna be all right”. In the Spectacle it’s always gonna be all right. Who benefits from the illusions and delusions of the Spectacle? Well, we nearly all do, because we’re addicted to its entertaining fare; but there’s no business like show business—and there’s nothing as valuable as a smash hit song except a work of art by a painter of—great talent, no doubt—but of even greater patronage and of rare good luck.

After I left the City to take a real industrial job in Potters Bar, just outside London, I learnt that as soon as I accepted the offer, the boss had fired the previous occupant of the post. That made me very receptive to an advert I saw the same week by Clive Jenkins’s union which was headlined “The Board and I have decided we don’t like the colour of your eyes”. It went on succinctly to pitch the insurance advantages of union membership. I joined; and for nearly two years managed to be both a Bow Group Tory and an active member of a militant but effective trade union, to the amusement of my friends in the former and to the bewilderment of my new colleagues in the latter.

On the annual audit of a client in Stilton, where the cheese comes from, I met a Young Conservative from Cheshire. We went to Bow Group meetings together, shared his flat when one of his flatmates moved out and went to very enjoyable parties at the Shrewsbury teachers’ college where his sister was enrolled. In his flat he had hung on the lounge wall a large picture of the Greek military dictator Papadopoulos and we parted company over the coup against Chile’s Salvador Allende, which he regarded as overdue but I saw as fascist.

As details slowly emerged of Latin America’s disappeared, torture and Dirty Wars, I moved away from the Conservatives, too many of whom thought tough dictatorships were better than elected communists. When the 1982 Falklands War saw Thatcher judging Pinochet’s support for her little war as far more important than his government by torture, my last connections with Conservatism were at an end.

I joined Amnesty International and became active in its letter-writing campaigns. In Hong Kong, during the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre, I wrote to the vice-chancellors of all the universities in Australia asking them to take in qualified students whose lives were now in danger. Most did. This experience decided me to resettle in Australia after my time was up in Hong Kong. That was one of my better decisions in life.

My first job in Australia was as Business Dean in one of Melbourne’s newer universities. After a year I was asked to run the university’s entire HR and Industrial Relations as acting Deputy Vice-Chancellor. All my fellow deans said this was a poisoned chalice, since the union branch was the most militant in the whole of Australian higher education and the Vice-Chancellor was one of the most hostile to the union movement. Early on in negotiations with the union, I attended a campus meeting where a speech was given by one of the staff reps who happened also to be an economist in my faculty. He said:

I don’t know about you, but I’ve always thought full employment was the proper goal of economic policy, that the right to work is a real right, and that a dollar of extra dividend to wealthy shareholders is not at all the same as a dollar extra on a wage just above the poverty line.

I wriggled in my seat. What he was saying was what I had somewhere always felt, long before I learnt Economics at Cambridge from Keynes’s own people: Meade, Kahn, Robinson, Marris. What a cleansing contrast to Thatcher’s “There’s no such thing as society” and its consequence, Gekko’s “Greed is good”, a mantra of the 1980s I hated even more than John hated the “mantrification” of songs by Bob Dylan.

For many sociologists, a paper is not complete unless there is something from Max Weber included. John has honoured that tradition. He could, however, have mentioned Weber’s high-impact insight into applied ethics, because it sheds so much light on actual political behaviour. Weber said we all carry round two sets of ethics. One is the ethics of conviction, which is what we think everyone should do or not do. The other is the ethics of responsibility, which is what we actually do in our own lives. We achieve integrity when we fuse the two. We display decoupling—hypocrisy—when we keep them apart; as most of us do, on the basis that we need to put responsibility above conviction in order to keep a roof over our family’s head. The Left is more attracted to conviction, the Right to responsibility. Responsibility is fed by fear; conviction by both the courage and the arrogance of one’s own conviction. Responsibility makes us serfs at worst; conviction makes us martyrs. I find, as I age, life is less about day-to-day survival and comfort, and more about what is worth—if not dying for—at least worth serious inconvenience. This has the effect of injecting rather more meaning into my life, a concern I share with John.

John writes with approval of love of country, and many on the Right castigate the Left for want of patriotism. However, it seems clear to me that if there were no such thing as society, then love of country would be simple tribalism which in turn would encourage simple racism. The ethics philosopher Kohlberg held that an individual’s ethical development goes through stages: from fear of punishment at stage 1, through carrot and stick at stage 2, peer group pressure at stage 3, to internalisation of the demands of society/community/law at stage 4 (beyond which few people evolve to his somewhat problematic stages 5 and 6). At stage 3 reside all group loyalties, including loyalty to country as tribe, race and sports team. At stage 4, a notion of the public interest, of the spirit of the law of the land and of rights emanating from just being human is found. Love of country at stage 4 is an all-inclusive, whole of society, respect for the public interest, Keynesian, macro, kind of sentiment. Love of country at stage 3 is jingoist, racist, privatising, micro and exclusionary. People who believe there is no such thing as society are at stage 3. Insufficient care for the ethics of conviction and excessive application of the ethics of responsibility facilitate stagnation at stage 3. Some icons of the Right, such as Ayn Rand, argue that any attempt to justify a policy by reference to the public interest is per se a confidence trick. For them stage 4 is a phantom and real virtue is stage 3. The Bahasa languages, Malay and Indonesian have two words for “we” or “us”, kami and kita. One means we including you, the other means we excluding you. How much more clearly might we think of nationalism, patriotism and the notion of country if we could bifurcate the word country in a similar way!

When Thatcher declared there is no such thing as society, she set back at least one generation of English speakers to the eighteenth century when conservative icons Pitt, Burke and Wellington tolerated no wets. It is a straight line from this destruction of respect for the idea of the public interest to the indifference of the US occupation army in Baghdad after the Gulf War to the looting of the Baghdad museum. After all if there is no such thing as society, then there is no such thing as a common heritage of humanity, just the jungle, just greed—both OK so long as my family benefits—the stunted morality of the press baron, some would say. From outrage at these consequences of conservative neo-gliberalism, I never again entertained any notion of affiliating with the Right or with those parts of the Centre that facilitated the Right. And never, ever, would I follow, or swallow, the “Third Way” of Keating, Blair and Clinton, who deregulated the greedy banksters more enthusiastically than the traditional Right had done. Third way really meant the discourse of stage 4 ethics veiling the substance of stage 3, but it needs a rock star philosopher like Zizek to wake us up to that.

Granovetter coined the term “embedding” to indicate the primacy of the economy over society in right-wing discourse, powered from, but not exclusive to, free marketeers of the Chicago School and followers of the Thatcher–Reagan counter-revolution in political economy. Zizek holds, in In Defence of Lost Causes, that it is the specifically liberal blackmail to assert that every emancipatory project leads to a new catastrophe. Fukuyama’s reaction to the fall of Soviet communism from 1989 was to assert that history is dead, having settled the final conflict between capitalism and communism in favour of the former. This neo-gliberalism is an ironic mirror of the Soviet practice of jailing its political dissidents in insane asylums for questioning the self-evident effectiveness and progressiveness of its version of communism. We do not jail our dissidents unless they facilitate major leaks of state secrets. We simply disempower them. Frederick the Great of Prussia said: “My people can say what they want: I will do what I want.” This is the gliberal plutocracy’s husbanding of its legacy from the so-called enlightened despotism of Frederick and his fellow pre-industrial monarchs. Zizek says the Left has not got the moral courage to challenge the gliberal hegemony.

First as Tragedy, Then as Farce is Zizek’s response to the Global Financial Crisis. He says we should rehabilitate and redeploy the universal idea of egalitarian justice and the notion of alienation. This requires a leap of faith, because such rehabilitation cannot be grasped, far less be acted on, from within the gliberal consensus, or as he sees it, the liberal blackmail. There are, he continues, four new antagonisms to capitalism that make a new post-Marxist communism feasible as well as worthwhile: the ecological crisis; the internet challenge to the privatising of intellectual space; the patenting of genetic modifications to biological processes so as to appropriate public natural assets, as by Monsanto with seeds or Nestlé with water; and the replacement of the old proletariat by not only the precariat reserve army of the casual underemployed but also by the rising tides of people excluded from the comforts of modern capitalism as a result of being born into slums, favelas, persecuted minorities, war zones—the dispossessed in general. I find this perspective of the world we live in now refreshing, insightful and persuasive.

Whenever and wherever the Occupy people march against the 1 per cent, they are not “spoilt rich kids” identifying with a fictitious working class, but a vast array of all types of people identifying with nobody. They have, however, had more than enough of the world created by the spoilt middle-class adults who repealed the welfare state, privatised the commons and immiserated country after country with their dogmatic adherence to free-market Milton Friedmanism. They have had enough of gliberalism.

Finally, let me quote Stanislaw Jerzy Lec’s question in Unkempt Thoughts which was not then the cliché it has since become: “Is it progress when a cannibal uses a knife and fork?” This seemed to me the essential critique of technical evolution unmatched by social evolution, and I still think so.

This pommy became a fellow travelling commy, a political free radical, as he grew more and more convinced that gliberal capitalism encourages technical progress and reverses social progress; while some kind of development of an accountable communism would make progress on both fronts. The birth of integrated accounting reports to replace traditional ones has taken off in the last two years. The public interest is regaining territory from the cannibals.