Within the social sciences, there is an increasing amount of work being carried out looking at the ‘new elites’. The term ‘new elites’ (plural) is most clearly attributed to the work of the American historian and social critic Christopher Lasch. Others talk about the professional-managerial class, a category that in part builds upon the idea of The Managerial Revolution that was discussed by James Burnham as long ago as 1940. Interestingly, if you go back and read George Orwell’s 1984, first published in 1949, you find that his description and critique of the Party, especially in his appendix, is in large part a critique of what could now more clearly be called the modern (or perhaps the post-modern) new elites. Orwell, strangely, appears to be even more relevant today than when he was writing.
For Lasch, writing in one of his final books, society faced The Revolt of the Elites. Brilliantly titled, he describes a new body of people who were destroying their own values and their own society, hence the subtitle: And the Betrayal of Democracy. The plural term ‘elites’ was, as with all of his precise categories, chosen with purpose. This was not a coherent ‘establishment’ or a ‘class’, but rather, a much looser amalgam of largely professional people who now dominated and managed our institutions. The idea of this plurality of elites was an important insight. This was a relatively large minority of people who came without a clear ideology or organisation, which helps explain the certain difficulty in trying to pin down what and who we are dealing with today. The added difficulty in defining this group of people, as George Walden noted in his own book The New Elites: a Career in the Masses, is that they see themselves, and to some extent are (in the old-fashioned sense of the term), anti-elitist.
Part of this body of work on the elites includes another American, Alvin Gouldner, and his 1979 work, The Future of Intellectuals and the Rise of the New Class. Here, like perhaps with Orwell’s appendix called ‘The Principles of Newspeak’, we find a discussion about how the ‘new class’ have their own language. Indeed, Orwell saw language and the new type of language used by Gouldner’s technical intelligentsia as being of some significance.
It struck me at the time of reading Gouldner how much emphasis he gave to the matter of language, but I remained a little unclear about what this meant or how important it was. Now, I think there are two aspects to this. The first relates to the technical jargon and academic language that is specific and different to ‘ordinary’ language. The second, I think, is the fact that the new elites see language and its correct use, as far more important than previously; language has, in many respects, become a thing in itself.
Since Gouldner’s work, what is of note is less the specificity of technical language in and of itself, but the way in which this, and more generally, ‘correct’ language and categories have expanded into everyday life.
To put this another way, if the language of the new class remained within their bounded environments, in their workplaces and areas of expertise, then their significance and impact would be relatively limited. However, part of the problem is that the idea of expertise has expanded outwards so that almost every aspect of our lives is now touched by it and by the terms and categories developed by the new class, or more precisely, the new elites.
The idea of experts now includes all sorts of people, like parenting ‘experts’, for example, while many caring jobs, from social work to nursing and beyond, are increasingly credentialed, meaning that training and the language used to categorise people and behaviour now incorporates much of the new correct language. Helped by the decline of bosses v. workers as an organising framework for workplaces, and the subsequent rise of HR as the basis for managing almost all of our working lives, the expansion of correct language has become limitless.
Moreover, the significance of language for our expert ‘class’, one could even say the fetishisation of it, has become ever more important. As a result, there has emerged a new type of ‘awareness’ of words themselves, something that is foisted upon employees, students, clients and so on across the UK. The rise and use of the ‘N-word’ is a case in point.
I experienced this awareness-raising myself about 25 years ago after a run-in with the head of social work in North Lanarkshire, resulting in me being sent to an anti-racist ‘training camp’. The run-in had nothing at all to do with racism, but that didn’t seem to matter. Ironically, as with many of these initiatives, it was run by a worker whose previous job had become redundant and who didn’t appear to know anything much about racism or anti-racism. Apart from me and one other colleague who questioned his confused ideas, everyone else simply ticked the box and learned the script. They were made ‘aware’, or at least they were made aware of this thing, awareness.
More recently, I completed my bi-annual unconscious bias training: another online, relatively incoherent form of training, helped by a series of videos with a test at the end that a four-year-old could ‘pass’.
Looking back at my days as a youth and community worker in Coatbridge and Airdrie, I can remember noticing the change in the staff, from older Christian and socialist workers who had something of a mission, to the younger, seemingly more professional workers who were largely there for the money and the endless chance to raise the ‘self-esteem’ of local punters who were largely just looking for work or for better services from the council.
For some of the older workers who had joined the council and taken up various forms of care work, we also found a change in the way men behaved, with a number of men, ex steel and electronics workers, for example, who were now trying their best to learn and adopt the new way to speak to their ‘clients’ with ‘active listening’, ‘empathy’, and ‘positivity’.
This type of chameleon performance can be witnessed in most workplaces today. You see it, for example, at police conferences, where you have the ‘real’ elites, often the academics and the ambitious young staff members who have a zeal for the correct way of thinking and being. And you have the older cops, often senior officers who follow along behind the zealots, desperately trying to parrot the latest language that they wear as a new, if ill-fitting, coat of armour.
To summarise, we have a new group of people who run society: the new elites. They have developed a new way of speaking that is based on expertise. Some of them are zealots, and many are nodding dogs who have learned the script. But what being an expert means has expanded, helped by the massive expansion of ‘caring’ jobs, credentialization, and the endless training administered by HR. In this way, the wider public, as workers or clients or customers or parents, have likewise been influenced by the expertisation of everyday life and the awareness of ‘being aware’. As a result, the language and the implicit expectations of the new correct speaking (and feeling) elites is filtering through into all of our lives.
If you want to get a feel for the language of the new elites, AI is a great starting point, as it not only gives you the correct facts, but often does so with an awareness that our correct thinking class instinctively embody. Ask it whether there is a ‘rape culture’ in the UK, for example, and it’s like receiving a lecture from a victim feminist. Yes, it tells us, there is evidence of a rape culture, of abuse being ‘normalised’ with ‘victim blaming’ and the ‘trivialisation of sexual assault’. It even gives evidence of a report highlighting “rape culture in UK schools”. At times, AI also ends with a moral message, and a word about the importance of being ‘aware’.
I start with this summary of the new elites and their fetishisation of language, not because this is the focus of this article, but because it helps to explain, in part, what the French political scientist Olivier Roy calls The Crisis of Culture, which is what I want to look at.
For Roy, the idea of a crisis of culture is not that Western culture is being taken over by a different one, but rather, the very meaning and even the existence of culture is being undermined; society is facing not an alien take-over of one culture by another, but rather it is facing ‘deculturation’.
Helped by recent developments, like globalisation, the internet, and mass migration, the wider trends of a more profound form of hyper-individualism, he argues, has grown out of the 1960s cultural ‘revolution’. Now we face an undermining of our two forms of culture, the old, high (or elite) culture, and the anthropological everyday culture. It is the latter of these two that I am interested in here.
While being highly abstract in places, Roy’s work is most insightful when he talks about the rise of a relentless normativity. By this he means the expertisation, the legalisation, and the contractualisation of relationships, whereby new norms are imposed, incorporated, or adopted for more and more areas of life. Gone are the spontaneous, common, and instinctive ways of doing things and interacting with each other. Now, in its place, we have the rise of what he calls “codes”: a life managed and administrated through codes of conduct and correct ways of thinking, being, behaving, and talking.
In part, what Roy is describing is what the British based sociologist Frank Furedi called a “new etiquette of safety”, in his classic 1997 book Culture of Fear: Risk-taking and the Morality of Low Expectation. The idea of a new etiquette is important because it helps to explain how politically correct ideas develop through the managing of our behaviour, and our interactions with one another, i.e., how it becomes, every day and everywhere, a new etiquette.
As the process of deculturation advances, traditions and moral norms become problematised and deconstructed. Indeed, almost any old norm can come to be seen as oppressive: a ridged enforcement of values and duties that limit the freedom of the hyper-individual. The ‘liberation’ of transgenderism is just one example of this process.
The development and adoption of this new way of being, Roy notes, helps to explain why our grandchildren have become so detached from the cultural references of their elders.
From having a general and collective sense of what is right and wrong (a culture), we now, Roy believes, have a new system of regulations, proscriptions, and bureaucratic procedures. The irony, he points out, is that with our ever-growing levels of and desire for personal freedom, we have the ever-expanding codification of social practices that shrinks inner spaces, intimacy, privacy, and even the unconscious. He is essentially describing a world where the HR woman from work is metaphorically everywhere, hanging over our every move and transforming our relationships. In the process, by undermining (and bureaucratising) any grounded, nuanced, and more human ways of being, we destroy the lived freedom of communities and undermine our capacity, as genuinely free individuals, to create and recreate our own culture and society.
Values no longer grow organically out of people and communities and countries but are imposed by the disconnected elites, using ‘codes’. We no longer pass down our wisdom or folk knowledge and socialise the young, partly because we, like our children, have learned their new, correct way to behave. We have lost our cultural bearings.
Listen to the voice of the Scottish Youth Parliament and you are listening to the purified voice of the new elites, where every awareness box is ticked with a virtuous sense of purpose through a language that any working-class pensioner would find as alien as a foreign language. And of course, this ‘parliament’ of young people is largely made up not of political individuals, but of identities.
This language being educated is a language that often protects and prevents. It flatters and manages the new identities, the fragments that are the constant go-to guys of an elite and elitist group who are forever on hand to protect the vulnerable. Here we find the more disconnected new elites, not standing as representatives of society, but standing above and beyond it, looking down upon it, and managing our ‘rights’.
As part of this protection and prevention process, we must learn to recognise these fragmented identities, in large part because they lack a grounding and depth that can give them a stable and coherent social, moral, and cultural foundation. Refusing to recognise the fragmented identity in question comes to be understood as yet another form of abuse. Policing and managing this process, these peoples (rather than the people) gives the new elites a sense of meaning and purpose.
Without a common culture, everything must be managed. Without a sense of self grounded in society, the fragile individual’s desire for ‘freedom’ comes with ever more explicit codes and forms of regulation.
Ironically, if somewhat predictably, the growth of expertise actually undermines professions and professionalism. As Philip K. Howard, the legal critic and author of The Death of Common Sense: How Law Is Suffocating America has observed in relation to the ever-expanding terrain of law as rules, codes and legal mechanism expand to manage relationships, the space for judgement, for professionals to use their expertise to assess and make decisions, is fundamentally undermined. Zero tolerance policies flourish and come to represent, in reality, zero discretion, with no capacity to think and use your common or professional sense to decide upon matters. As a result, the human capacity for negotiation, thought, and nuance is replaced by the soul-sapping response of ‘professionals’ saying that ‘we have a procedure’ or ‘we are simply following the policy’, and so ‘best practice’ replaces living, breathing professionalism.
An added irony, Roy notes, is that in a world of authenticity, the authentic self is suffocated by the explicit codes he has come to rely upon. As Sartre might have put it, relationships are codified in a way that validates bad faith actors. We feel and convince ourselves that we are acting in a professional and correct way, but it saps the souls of those who dish this out almost as much as those on the receiving end of this dehumanising relationship.
As the contractualisation of everyday life develops, even the most intimate areas of life are subsumed by codes. No surprise, then, to find that students at St. Andrews University, and no doubt in many other educational institutions, face the joyful experience of compulsory consent classes. Instinct and the risks involved with being and acting freely cannot be accommodated in a world without a shared culture.
Private relations are reduced to a set of rules, while an authoritarian impulse kicks in for anyone who has different instincts or inclinations, whose counter discourse might, for example, reject the new trained and correct form of masculinity being educated to them. For Roy, the feminist narrative that has increasingly made-up part of the new elites’ outlook and sensibility since the 1970s aims to demasculinize the perception of sexuality and so create a new culture of sexuality. Here, the traditional behaviour between men and women is characterised as being based on clichés and prejudices and there is a demand that we reject and stamp out the very idea of ‘virility’.
As a result, the new training and education, even at an unconscious level, targets the anthropological or everyday culture as a problem, indeed as the problem, and is packaged through the language of prevention and protection as a new type of sexual ‘freedom’. How, they ask, can we create a more contractual type of dating without it feeling contractual? How, as our Scottish MSPs keep asking, can we ‘change the culture’?
The point, however, is that this is not part of a conversation or a debate, nor is it developed through the to and fro of everyday life. This is not a discussion, Roy notes, but a prescription, helped by “repeating the mantra of tolerance”. No surprise, then, to find that the various awareness campaigns that help carry the correct sensibility into schools, universities, and workplaces (and beyond) need to be repeated. Unlike education, which can be acquired from one lecture on awareness raising, the flashing signs at football matches instructing fans to “Say no to racism” must be repeated again and again. I have seemingly had my unconscious bias topped up by my recent training, but will apparently need it again in two years’ time and, one assumes, two years after that.
Roy’s thesis came to mind in a recent seminar discussion with my second-year students. We were discussing the idea of the ‘mollycoddled’ younger generation when a young woman observed that a nursery near Dundee had a policy that banned staff using negative terms like ‘bad’. It struck me that if you unpick this new approach, you could identify many aspects of the crisis of culture. Many of the things that help to create and recreate a living culture were being undermined by this one fairly insignificant policy. What was being undermined here was authority, autonomy, and judgement.
For generations, arguably throughout modern and even pre-modern history, it has been simple common sense that when a child does something wrong, we tell them, and we would often, instinctively, use the term ‘bad’. Here, we, as either parents or professionals working with children, or adults in the community, assert a simple norm, through disapproval. In so doing we make a judgement, and we assert our authority over the child, not as a form of ‘power’, but as part of the common-sense attempt to socialise children, based in large part upon our understanding of the role of adults and the relationship and separation we have with children.
Through the new therapeutic language and sensibility, however, this form of judgement is understood to be ‘inappropriate’. The child, now represented through the prism of vulnerability, must be protected from negative judgements or even the slightest assertion of adult authority. Underpinning this approach, I would argue, we see the very idea of adult authority, that was once embedded in our culture, being further problematised and undermined.
It’s such a minor thing in many respects; it is only a word, and not a particularly harsh one at that. But someone somewhere has thought about the significance of this word and this approach, and has written a policy about it. It is then trained to staff, who must learn to reject both their common sense and their professional experience. They learn to walk the walk, and to become ‘experts’ who now know better than the parents of the children, and indeed know better than all past generations, how to speak to children. In a sense, while turning nursery workers into a new type of expertise, the workers themselves are losing their own autonomy, their personality, their past and professional experiences, and their more spontaneous and grounded sense of judgement.
For some staff members, this will no doubt appear to be a bit silly and meaningless. But helped by their correct thinking betters, those staff members and especially the senior (and more elite-minded or pompous) staff members, the new ‘code’ of behaviour becomes the ‘norm’. What is essentially a zero-tolerance policy towards criticising children’s behaviour is institutionalised, and who knows what will happen to staff who deviate from this approach. But at least they will no doubt have their bullying and harassment codebook on hand to deal with such deviance.
Of course, it is difficult to know how this will affect the children, and it is more the extent to which this non-judgemental (or at least less judgemental) and ‘caring’ approach has become the norm throughout our education system that is worth considering.
In terms of the common norms of society, perhaps it is the potential impact that this proscribed ‘approach’ has on parents and even grandparents that is more significant and worth thinking about. Why? Because it is likely that this new way of talking to and relating to children comes to be known to parents. It may rub off on them, and it is likely that some parents will feel the need to reconsider the way they relate to and deal with and even talk to their children. For others, it is likely that they will sense a certain judgement, if not of their children, but of them, if staff members come to hear about certain ‘incorrect’ practices.
This ‘changing of the culture’, in large part, is also the significance of the outright ban on smacking in Scotland, where even the lightest tap on the hand has been criminalised. This awareness-raising law is unlikely to lead to many arrests, but it will, over time, ensure that the expert form of correct parenting is taught to us all.
In this regard, it is of note that for those like John Finnie MSP who pushed the smacking ban, it was done so with a certain moral gusto, by a man who smacked his own children, but had now learned to think correctly. It was also done with the knowledge that most people in Scotland opposed the new law, but that was the point, because the newly enlightened Finnie and his fellow elites were explicit about the fact that what they were doing was changing the culture of Scotland.
Finally, I can’t leave this piece without returning to the issue of rape culture in our schools, something that my AI awareness advisor pointed out to me. In case you missed it, this relates to a piece of ‘research’ carried out by Everyone’s Invited. What amounts to a kind of #MeToo for children report argues that rape culture exists in all of our schools. The work has been carried out by what I would describe as a victim feminist, and every phrase or term is loaded from this perspective.
What shocked me about the research was not so much what it said, i.e. that children embody a rape culture, but the fact that often sensible commentators and publications printed the findings without a hint of concern about what they were doing. The Telegraph, for example, printed these findings in March of this year, noting that almost half of schoolchildren under seven are showing signs of misogynistic behaviour, and that these harmful gender norms are ingrained from as early as nursery.
Tragically, what we are actually witnessing here is not the rise of rapey kids, but a world that increasingly appears to have lost the capacity to distinguish between adults and children. All the correct codes, the language, and the demand for more re-education of norms is present, and they are present as we talk about children as young as three or four years old. Adult categories, indeed academic adult categories, about gender roles and misogyny are placed into the mouths of infants in a way that only a decade ago I think would have been unimaginable.
Surely, we don’t need to be Piaget or some expert in child development to understand that a feminist activist talking about misogynistic three-year-olds reflects the perversion of her imagination rather than something, anything, about kids just out of nappies. That this is then printed and reprinted and discussed without a sense of incredulity is a very worrying sign of the extent to which we have lost both our common sense and our understanding of the distinction between adulthood and childhood. But this is what happens when we start to lose our culture, when anxiety-ridden codes and correct ways of being are prescribed for us by the disconnected new elites.
A parent in the north of Scotland recently told me that Orkney Rape and Sexual Assault Services went into her son’s school to give them a talk about misogyny. Part of the talk included explaining to the teenagers that calling a girl a ‘slut’ is an example of ‘sexual violence’.
As language becomes ever more problematised and fetishised by our elites and as it filters down through our media and institutions, it would appear that we may need to build many more prisons, or at least many more holding centres for ‘sexually violent’ misogynistic children!
In the end, what appears to be a caring approach that allows greater personal freedom results in the most dehumanising and authoritarian outlooks to flourish. This is something of an inevitability because the norms being constructed by the elites are disconnected from us and from our culture. They are in essence an assault upon culture, upon common sense, and upon the authority needed to socialise the young. That is why we end up with the idea of a rape culture increasingly becoming a new normal way to think about the world. Here, our very culture is sullied in the most obscene and unreal way: we as a society and a people, to our very core, are normalising raping women! Or as my AI friend tells me, “Understanding and addressing rape culture is crucial for creating a safer and more respectful society”.
Be aware. Big Sister has spoken.
Having said all of this, it is worth pointing out that there is a distinction between the zealots, the new elites and their messengers, who embrace this deculturation, and the majority of ordinary people, the deplorables.
Describing the cultural split in modern Britain, David Goodhart usefully called the new elites “the Anywheres”. Disconnected from family, community, nation and any sense of collective meaning or morality, this group of isolated therapeutic individuals are the true hyper-individuals, the feeble Eloi; the futuristic and fragile bourgeoisie described in H. G. Wells’ The Time Machine.
It is their lack of belief, their lack of a culture, that makes them so nervous. Where they see judgement, ‘you slag’, they don’t question this with calm or reason, but are filled with horror. It is not the slang nature of the word they despise, but rather any form of judgement, anything that goes against the pleasure-seeking nature of the modern and ‘vulnerable’ individual. Likewise, one suspects the horror about misogyny (the modern panic of our time) has less to do with the reality of relationships or the rape consciousness of infants, but reflects a deep-seated horror about the potential strength and capacity of especially working-class men and boys, the muscular masses who still do not think or feel in the same way as the ‘feminised’ elites.
Language is fetishised by our elites. Where we see crude or judgemental terms, they see violence. Where we see the common sense ‘telling off’ of a child, they see harm. Where we see infants saying and doing silly things, they see the adult abusers of the past, present, and future. Indeed, language itself appears to have more power and to create more fear than actual violence, and people are increasingly locked up, arrested, or intimidated by the police, not for doing something, but for saying something. One senses that today’s absolute horror about words reflects not the real harm they do, but the threat they pose to the feeble elites and the awareness script that they instinctively know lacks any quality or depth.
Try as they might, the administrative and technocratic elites cannot create a new culture. Whether or not we are able to create our own will, I suspect, depend upon us, and upon the ‘deplorables’ having a place and space to make their voices truly heard.
