Category: Politics

I learnt a new word the other day: ‘epistocracy’.  It means rule by experts.

It seems to me that -and I’m obviously painting with a very broad brush here- episocrats are already one of the two main ruling classes, the other being what I will call barons.

Barons derive their power from their position at the summits of pyramids of patronage.  Historically barons controlled large estates and functioned as military leaders. In some countries (Myanmar, North Korea) these days the barons are generals, but elsewhere they may be bankers, industrialists, owners of media empires.  If they are Russian, for some reason, we call them oligarchs.

Epistocrats derive their power from the utility and/or market value of their expertise.  They are journalists, civil servants, academics, doctors, lawyers, engineers, computer scientists, biomedical researchers, inventors, legislators.  They manage things, they create and propagate new knowledge (including ideological constructs that function as knowledge), they run the government, the media and the judiciary.  (And, coming from a family of doctors, lawyers and academics, I am very definitely a member of this class.)

For the purposes of argument, let’s call the rest of the population the Plebeians.   They’re the ones who don’t sit at the top, or even near the top, of patronage pyramids, and don’t have the particular kind of expertise that would place them in the epistocracy, whether because they don’t have the specialist education required (it typically takes many years of schooling to create an epistocrat), or because they lack the ability to make use of such an education.  (It’s a fact not often discussed, but we are not all born with the same intellectual faculties.)

While epistocrats know a lot and have been trained to think in complex ways, plebeians, without that training, probably rely more on heuristics such as religion, tradition,’common sense’, ‘what everyone thinks’, tribal loyalty of some kind, or reliance on trusted authority figures.  (Having said that, I need to qualify it immediately by stressing that (a) there is no reason to assume that such heuristics are necessarily always inferior as a guide to action than expert judgement, and (b) members of the epistocracy also rely a great deal on heuristics of these kinds, including tribal loyalty, ‘what everyone thinks’ and submission to authority,  perhaps much more than they realise.  But all that’s for another discussion.)

I’ve thought for a long time that sooner or later there would be a reaction against the epistocracy, not only because it is a relatively privileged class, but because the hegemony of the epistocratic world view threatens and undermines more traditional sources of meaning.  What first got me thinking about this was the rise of fundamentalist Islam in the 80s and 90s, but it always seemed to me only a matter of time before something similar happened in other parts of the world.  A successful uprising against the epistocracy formed the backdrop to my first novel, The Holy Machine, represented, admittedly somewhat simplistically, as a worldwide uprising of religious fundamentalisms of various kinds against science*.

But right now we are witnessing a real life revolt against the epistocracy in many parts of the planet.  That really is what ‘populism’ is, isn’t it?  A kind of politics that dismisses the intellectual frameworks within which politics have hitherto been practiced and appeals instead to those old heuristics such as religion, ‘common sense’, tribal loyalty.

To be accurate, what I am calling a revolt against the epistocracy is a revolt against a section of the epistocracy (for the revolt itself has epistocrats among its leaders.)  But historically, a large part of the epistocracy has allied itself politically, at least to some degree, with the plebeians -the two groups had common interests in their struggles against the barons- and considered itself to be politically on or towards the ‘left’.  For many epistocrats, I assume, such an alliance was more attractive than the alternative of being the intellectual handmaidens of the the barons.  (It certainly is to me.)  In my new novel America City, members of this left-leaning but  privileged class are referred to as delicados.

But nowadays, this section of the epistocracy, the epistocratic left, the delicados, is the group that is now characterised by populists as the Liberal Elite, and their claim to be on the side of the plebeians is being called into question.   I don’t know who wrote the following.  It came to me from an aggressively populist source on twitter (‘I hate lefties… Can’t stand political correctness… Brexit…. Make America Great Again…’ etc etc) and while there are many respects in which it is unfair and dishonest, it seems to me to illustrate pretty well the kinds of charges that are laid, with at least some degree of justice, against the liberal epistocracy in Britain:

It’s a massive generalisation obviously, but, as I’ve said before, I think the liberal epistocracy has somewhat lost interest in the plebeians , preferring to direct its social conscience elsewhere.   The tweets below, which I noticed and saved in the immediate aftermath of Britain’s vote to leave the European Union seemed to me at the time to be symptomatic.

These two tweeters’ concern for their East European cleaners is of course perfectly understandable.  These are people they know personally and are fond of, nothing wrong with that, and of course there is no justification for such people to be bullied in the streets.  But the wail of ‘THIS HAS GOT TO STOP’ struck me as terribly revealing.  It isn’t directed at anyone.  It isn’t in the second person.  It doesn’t even refer to the offenders in the third person, but rather to the xenophobia itself as if it was some kind of alien force that has appeared from nowhere.

Yet there had been widespread unease about the scale of immigration for some time.  For instance, the Migration Observatory at Oxford University [2011] found that ‘the preference for reducing migration is a majority view among virtually all segments of British society’, including ethnic minority groups, although its prevalence was highest among white British people, poorer people, less educated people and older people.  Another for instance, and a fact that no one seemes to remember: In the last Euro-elections in 2014, UKIP won more seats in the European Parliament than any other British party.

I suggest that liberal epistocrats (myself included) behaved as if all of this could be ignored because it wasn’t to our liking and we assumed that people like us had sufficient power to make it go away.  And now we’re finding out that wasn’t so.  A revolution is going on, not against the barons, but against us.

And it seems to me that, like many a threatened ruling class before it, many liberal epistocrats are failing to grasp the new situation, failing to see the political adjustments they need to make.  Instead of recognising that their alliance with the plebeians is important and in urgent need of renewal -important to us, I mean, as well as to the plebeians- I see many liberal epistocrats turning on the plebeians with contempt and anger.  Brexit voters are called ‘thick’.  Trump voters are called ‘deplorable’.  Both groups are dismissed as racist and sexist by people whose anti-sexist and anti-racist creditentials may indeed be shining, but whose own classism is increasingly apparent**. (The word ‘thick’ is particularly revealing, if you think about it.  If it’s not okay to mock someone for being disabled, how is it okay to show contempt for someone for not being educated or not being bright?)

In the wake of the Brexit vote, voices could be heard among the epistocratic classes saying that this was simply the wrong result and that parliament should ignore it.  (The referendum was ‘only consultative’, apparently, though no one ever seemed to mention this until the vote was counted!)  I have come across liberal Americans saying that those who voted for Trump are so vile and unforgivable that they don’t even want to try and win them back.  (Good luck on winning without any of them!)  And there are even voices these days that say that ignorant and uneducated people should be deprived of a vote.  I see, for instance, that a book by an American academic came out in 2016 (I have to admit I’ve not read it) which argued that democracy should be replaced by epistocracy in its literal sense: nations should be governed not by the representives of the people as a whole but, like Plato’s Republic. by the knowledgeable.

Well, there’s always been a strand among liberal and leftwing folk that thinks ordinary people must be told what to do for their own good.   Lenin, for instance, introduced the idea of a ‘vanguard party’ of professional revolutionaries who would exercise the dictatorship of the proletariat on the proletariat’s behalf. 

Of course, he thus created a new ruling class that (via Stalin, purges, famines and the gulag) transformed itself at length into the capitalist oligarchy we know today, having long since jettisoned any trace of the ideology which the vanguard party was formed to serve.

I think myself that’s the sort of thing that tends to happen when any group of people decide they can’t share power and that the world should  be ruled exclusively by people like themselves.  Either that, or they are crushed completely.

*My novel Marcher, and the short stories from which it evolved, also explored this theme.

**Two points here.  (1) Given that attitudes now recognised as sexist and racist were mainstream a generation or two ago, it’s always going to be the case that the least educated part of the population will seem sexist and racist compared to the most educated part.  This is actually quite convenient for members of better educated elites who would like to have both the moral high ground and the benefits of their privileged position.  (2) It is perhaps not surprising that relatively well-to-do, educated elites might prefer to foreground social divisions like gender, race, sexual orientation, ability/disability, which cut across social classes, and pay less attention to social class itself.   I recently heard the Vice-Chancellor of Oxford University being questioned on the radio about her enormous salary.  A harsh edge came into her voice and she barked back (from memory), ‘I hope the BBC isn’t suggesting that I don’t deserve the same salary as my male predecessor’.  More comfortable to identify as a member of a disadvantaged gender, than as a member of a privileged class.

Trump actually winning now seems rather likely, but even if he loses, the very fact that so many support him may be a sign that the checks and balances of the American political system have now been weakened so badly (and some would say deliberately) that it is only a matter of time before they cave in and crumble.

Sooner or later, empires do fall.  When you live in one, its power seems so solid, its essential logic so unassailable, that it easy to imagine that it will go on for ever in the same familar way as it’s done all your life.  But the algorithm is never perfect.  Sooner or later, it either comes up against some external fact which its design didn’t anticipate, or is snarled up from within by its own unintended consequences.

The particular genius of Anglo-Saxon institutions, people sometimes say, is that they are both solid and flexible, allowing them to adjust to changing times without coming tumbling down.  It’s pretty impressive that the US constitution has lasted since 1789, or that the British constitution has evolved more or less peacefully since the Glorious Revolution in 1688, but their survival has always depended on their legitimacy being generally accepted, even by people who, in other respects, disagree profoundly with one another.  When I go out to vote, here in the UK, I’m always struck by the sight of the representatives of the various rival parties chatting amicably to one another outside the polling station, and even helping each other by telling each other the names of voters so they can tick them off on their lists.   There are plenty of countries where members of rival parties are killing each other, torturing each other, locking each other up, countries where the loser in an election will promptly declare a foul, and  begin a civil war.   But those people chatting and joking outside my polling station demonstate to me that, whatever their political differences,  they are still all players of a peaceful and orderly game whose rules they all accept.

But when something approaching half of the population believes that the whole system is rigged, and when serious contenders for office begin to argue not just that their opponents’ views are wrong or harmful, but that their opponents themselves are criminal, evil, illegitimate or traitorous then it seems to me that the game may nearly be up.

As I mentioned before, I voted ‘remain’ in the UK’s recent referendum, but I am growing very tired of what now I think of as the Brexit Eeyores: the weary, ‘I know better’ voices predicting economic calamity, lamenting that a vote was ever held on a matter that ordinary people couldn’t be expected to understand, and dismissing ‘leave’ voters as some combination of ignorant, uneducated, racist, or gullible.  I am sometimes reminded of white Rhodesians  telling each other how they always knew the country would go to the dogs if the Africans were given the vote.

One can argue about the merits or otherwise of referendums, but if we were only allowed to vote on matters of which we possessed expert knowledge, then most of us wouldn’t be permitted to vote at all.  General elections usually hinge on economic policy and the management of public services, after all, both of which are highly complex and technical matters.  The fact is that, in a democracy, those who possess expertise have to persuade the rest of us that they understand what our concerns are, and have a plan that will help to address them.  You can’t just say, ‘we know better than you do what’s good for you, so do as you’re told.’

The key thing here is that, even though all the established political parties, almost all economists, and the great majority of business leaders, supported the ‘remain’ cause, the majority of the electorate decided to ignore them.  That’s quite a consensus to go against!  Why did it happen?  Presumably it is because that wide range of eminent people failed to convince 17,000,000 voters that their concerns were being heard or being addressed.  Dismissing those seventeen million voters as thick, or racist or gullible dupes will not help them with that feeling of not being heard.  And if that feeling isn’t addressed, we really are in for some difficult times.

As I say, I’m not an expert but here is one of the best analyses I’ve read recently of what’s going on behind the Brexit vote here and the rise of the likes of Donald Trump.

I was interested in this article asking whether meritocracy in the UK is a sham.  I live in Cambridge and for a time I used go and write in the Cambridge University Library (I was eligible for a library card at the time as a member of staff of Cambridge’s other, marginally less famous, university: Anglia Ruskin).  I got into the habit of working in the cafe there  -I find a background hum of voices more conducive to writing than absolute silence- and I can tell you that I could go all day without seeing a single black face, or hearing a single regional accent.  There’d  be some foreigners, but  the British people in there, students and academics, were almost all white and almost all spoke with the  distinctive accent, somehow both languid and gushing, of the English private school system.   (I myself was no exception btw: I too am white, I too went to private school.)  That tells you quite a lot, I think, about the extent to which we live in a meritocracy!

What we do live in, though, is a society which sees being a meritocracy as a desireable goal, a society which, when it talks about equality, talks about equality of opportunity, about removing the obstacles that prevent gifted people from poor backgrounds from achieving their potential.  There’s not a lot of talk about people whose talents are not exceptional, people who are not especially bright, people who are of average or below average ability, even though this group, by definition, includes more than half of the population.

Equality of opportunity is desireable, but it’s not sufficient, a point made in the article by the former Labour leader, Ed Milliband (someone who I never thought I’d look back on with some degree of nostalgia!).   A meritocracy, per se, would not necessarily be good society.  In fact, thinking about it now, I’d go as far as to say that, if I was designing a society in which the power of an elite was to be permenantly entrenched, I’d make it a meritocracy, and give it an excellent universal educational system, designed to ensure that anyone with above average ability, from whatever background, could be identified from an early age and channelled to a position in society commensurate with those abilities.  That way the elite could be constantly strengthened, because it would continously co-opt the most able and continuously deprive therest of the population of those who would otherwise have been their natural leaders.

Or am I being unfair?  I suppose that what would moderate such a society, and make it more humane, would be that the elite would contain many people who had memories of, and family connections with, the rest of society, whereas the more stratified system we have now means that many  people (including some of those I overheard in the University library) may never really have known anyone from outside of their own class.

Politics is a rough business everywhere but, from this side of the Atlantic, the tone of political discourse in the US can sometimes look particularly ugly.  One of the worst examples I’ve ever seen, was the suggestion by Senator Rand Paul that a right to free health care is equivalent to a belief in slavery.  The quote in question was the following:

 With regard to the idea of whether you have a right to health care, you have realize what that implies. It’s not an abstraction. I’m a physician. That means you have a right to come to my house and conscript me. It means you believe in slavery. It means that you’re going to enslave not only me, but the janitor at my hospital, the person who cleans my office, the assistants who work in my office, the nurses.

Basically, once you imply a belief in a right to someone’s services — do you have a right to plumbing? Do you have a right to water? Do you have right to food? — you’re basically saying you believe in slavery.

I’m a physician in your community and you say you have a right to health care. You have a right to beat down my door with the police, escort me away and force me to take care of you? That’s ultimately what the right to free health care would be.

(If you think this must be some crude spoof, by the way, here is a clip of him saying it.)

By way of information to US readers, we have a free National Health Service here in the UK, meaning that everyone has a right to healthcare, and my mother and my maternal grandfather both worked for it as doctors.  They were not forced to be doctors, and they were not forced as doctors to work for the state. They were paid well enough to lead prosperous middle class lifestyle.  They were free to resign whenever they wanted.  They could go and work for private healthcare agencies, if they prefered, or for themselves.   There’s absolutely no sense at all in which their condition could be described as slavery, or indeed as different in any fundamental way to the condition of anyone else who works for an organisation of any kind.  When you think what slavery actually means (and the Senator represents the former slave state of Kentucky, so he should know), the very comparison is obscene.

You might say that US politics is not my business.  But actually it is because the US is a global superpower, and what happens in the US matters everywhere, and perhaps especially in the UK, where there is a common cultural heritage, and no language barrier to filter us from its blast. However I freely admit I know very little about the personalities involved, and almost nothing about Senator Paul.  So here are a couple of questions.

Is Senator Paul an extremely stupid man, so lacking in curiosity that he hasn’t bothered to look into the many free health services around the world, and so lacking in imagination that he can’t figure out for himself how such a service might work without breaking down doctors’ doors?

Or is he cynical and mendacious man, who in order to serve his own political ends, tries to besmirch something that, whatever its snags, is basically benign (a community agreeing to club together to provide healthcare for everyone) by equating it with something that is evil and foul?

Echoing in the back of my mind are the slogans of George Orwell’s Oceania: WAR IS PEACE.  FREEDOM IS SLAVERY.  IGNORANCE IS STRENGTH.  Not an exact parallel of course, but what Orwell was warning about was the misuse of language to destroy our capacity to think.

One thing that strikes me about the results of the UK election is the arbitary relationship between the number of seats won by each party, and their proportion of the popular vote. The Scottish National Party is now the 3rd largest party in the UK parliament, with 56 seats, but it did this on the basis of 1.5 million votes, while the Lib Dems, with 2.4 million votes, only got 8 seats. Even more bizarrely, the largest Northern Ireland party, the DUP, also won 8 seats, but did so with only 184,000 votes (the same number of seats as the Lib Dems, but less than a tenth of their votes).  Meanwhile the Green Party, with eight times as many votes as the DUP, came out of the process with only one seat.

Suffering a brief attack of geekery, I’ve just done the sums (see table below).  If seats were awarded proportionally, the Greens would have won 25 seats, the SNP  31, and the Lib Dems 52.  The most spectacular difference, though, would have been that UKIP, with 12.6% of the popular vote, would have won 82 parliamentary seats, as opposed to the single seat which it actually won*.

I can’t say that I’m personally sorry that this particular outfit has not got those 82 seats.  But, all the same, I can’t help thinking that the lack of relationship between votes cast and MPs elected is one of the causes of cynicism about the democratic process.

What we have at the moment is a system which rewards parties that have concentrated powerbases in particular geographical areas (like the DUP and the SNP, but also Labour and Conservatives, with their heartlands respectively in the big industrial cities and the leafy suburbs and shires).  But it punishes parties whose support is more widely and thinly distributed across the country, and so grossly misrepresents the relative strength of opinion in the country in general, to the point where whole swathes of electors are rendered virtually invisible.

The fact that the SNP won all but three seats in Scotland, for instance, gives the impression that the whole of Scotland is fervently nationalist, though in fact the SNP only won half the Scottish votes, leaving the unionist half of Scotland almost completely unrepresented.  (And who would have thought, from the coverage of the result that the disgraced and humiliated Lib Dems actually won 900,000 more UK votes than the proud and triumphant SNP?)

A proportional system would still, just, have yielded a right-of-centre majority, based on the popular vote in this election, with Conservatives, UKIP, DUP and UUP between them winning 329 seats, but it would have been a smaller and much more precarious majority than the one the Conservatives won on their own under the first-past-the-post system.  There are lots of downsides of PR, but surely the benefit would be that there would be less triumphalism, fewer spurious claims to have the backing of “the people”, and a more transparent process of negotation between parties that represent the enormous diversity of views that actually exist?

*Of course, these figures assume that everyone would still vote for the same party under a PR system.  In fact, supporters of smaller parties often decide to vote tactically for parties they think likely to win.  My guess is that under a PR system, the Green Party would actually have won quite a lot more than 25 seats, because a lot of potential Green voters voted Labour this time round.  No doubt this would be true of UKIP sympathisers too, many of whom probably voted Conservative for similar reasons.