Systems, not scapegoats

We should spend less time looking for scapegoats, and more time thinking about socio-economic failure.

It's easy to condemn anti-migrant protests on moral grounds. What such condemnation misses, however, is that there's also an intellectual error here - an excessive focus on individuals and insufficient attention to structural societal problems.

Let's start with why people are protesting outside migrants' hostels. One of the "legitimate concerns" for doing so would be that high immigration is a symptom of state failure, an inability to control our borders. I'm not sure about this explanation. If this were the case people would be protesting about the many other aspects of state failure such as the inability of the police to bring many criminals to timely trial or long NHS waiting lists. Which these protestors are not doing.

You might object that they are simply racists. Maybe. But why has this racism burst into the open recently?

I suspect part of the answer lies in something described by the great Richard Sennett back in 1970. When faced with uncertainty and dissonant experiences, he said, many people try to retreat into a "purified identity". Part of this effort, he wrote, consists in creating a mythical community:

The image of the community is purified of all that might convey a feeling of difference, let alone conflict, in who "we" are. In this way the myth of community solidarity is a purification ritual. (The Uses of Disorder, p36)

Some people feel the need to construct a mythical white Britich community to compensate for the lack of actual, real communities. Expelling migrants from one's area is a purification ritual.

But why are actually-existing communities so fragile that people feel the need to attack incomers? In The Fall of Public Man, Sennett proposed one idea:

The abandonment of belief in class solidarity in modern times for new kinds of collective images, based on ethnicity, or quartier, or region, is a sign of [a] narrowing of the fraternal bond. Fraternity has become empathy for a select group of people allied with rejection of all those not within the local circle. This rejection creates demand for autonomy from the outside world, for being left alone by it. (p266)

It's not just the decline of class-based politics that has unleashed this desire for other collective images. So too has economic decline. We know now that high street decline and pub closures have fuelled the rise of the far right, confirming Ben Friedman's 2006 work which showed a link betweem economic stagnation and the rise of intolerance.

One mechanism here is that such stagnation breeds a sense that the country is going to the dogs. Rather than blame the system, people try to blame other people for this - and immigrants are an obvious scapegoat.

There's another mechanism. The closure of pubs as well as that of Sure Start centres, libraries or youth clubs and the hollowing out of high streets remove the places where community life occurs, where we bump into acquaintances. This isolates people, some of whom spend their time instead being radicalized on the internet. And it leads others to construct an imaginary purified community for want of a healthy genuine one.

None of this is to deny that some people have always been racist. Rather, it is to try to explain why this racism is so manifest now when it was not a few years ago. The point is that, at the margin, economic decline and increased isolation have made some people more sympathetic to nationalism. That's embolded outright racists and weakened the peer-group restraints on them: the "don't be a twat" voices have declined.

Which is why I say there's a lack of systems thinking here on both sides. On the one side, we have those who are blaming migrants for what are in fact systemic problems in the economy and society; in this, of course, they have the support - sometimes tacit, sometimes not - of politicians who would much rather we discussed immigrants than the failure of capitalism. And on the other side we have those who are blaming the protestors whilst failing to appreciate that they've been radicalized, in part, by systemic forces within capitalism.

In saying this, I'm echoing Hayek. Social phenomena, he wrote, "are the product of the action of many men but are not the result of human design." (Law, Legislation and Liberty p37). He in turn was echoing Marx: "Men make their own history, but they do not make it as they please." Of course, the two disagreed upon how benign were social institutions and economic phenomena, but they agreed that they were emergent - the product of human action but not human design.

And indeed, added Marx, even those we think of as the powerful are in fact trapped by the system:

Capital is reckless of the health or length of life of the labourer, unless under compulsion from society…But looking at things as a whole, all this does not, indeed, depend on the good or ill will of the individual capitalist. Free competition brings out the inherent laws of capitalist production, in the shape of external coercive laws having power over every individual capitalist.

It's clear from this that Marx though that moral opprobrium should go to more to systems than to individuals.

Of course, we are not mere determinants of social forces: we do have agency. Some individuals are to blame, among them those in the 2010-15 government that gave us fiscal austerity and hence Brexit. But the blame cannot stop there. There are also systematic factors at work. For one thing, economic growth was slowing even before the 2008 crisis, in part because of what Ben Bernanke called a "dearth of investment opportunities". And for another, Cameron was elected by a political system that selects for things other than wisdom and a desire for human flourishing.

My beef is that conventional political commentary underplays these systemic factors, preferring to focus on individuals.

An example of what I mean is this interview with Nick Clegg, wherein he blames Farage for Brexit more than austerity.

One thing this ignores is that economic forces matter at the margin. If only one in 50 people had voted Remain rather than Leave in 2016, Brexit wouldn't have happened. Austerity had a strong enough effect to tip this balance. Another thing it ignores is why the political culture selected for Farage rather than ignored him as a marginal crank: remember that before 2015 only around 10% (pdf) of voters thought Europe was an important issue. It also ignores the fact that some of the other countries he mentions do conform to the Sennett-Friedman thesis. In Germany, for example, real GDP has stagnated since 2017. And in the US there was a strong correlation between votes for Donald Trump in 2016 and increased deaths from despair (which in turn might well be a symptom of individual isolation).

On top of all this, Clegg's comments leave us with a puzzle; is the rise of nationalism really uncorrelated with other socio-economic forces? What kind of social theory does this give us? If it's one in which social events are merely random, why would one want to become a politician?

It's not just the right and centre that are guilty of a lack of thinking about social forces. Whenever leftists complain about greedy bosses or bankers, they're making the same mistake. Everybody wants a pay rise, but some have the power to extract one and others less so. That's a matter of systemic factors, not individual dispositions.

If this mistake is just comical, there are bloodier consequences of it, as we saw in the killing of Brian Thompson and in countless other terrorist acts. The problem with these is that the slaying of individuals leaves social forces intact, as Trotsky argued:

Individual terror is inadmissible precisely because it belittles the role of the masses in their own consciousness, reconciles them to their powerlessness, and turns their eyes and hopes towards a great avenger and liberator who some day will come and accomplish his mission...The more ‘effective’ the terrorist acts, the greater their impact, the more they reduce the interest of the masses in self-organisation and self-education. But the smoke from the confusion clears away, the panic disappears, the successor of the murdered minister makes his appearance, life again settles into the old rut, the wheel of capitalist exploitation turns as before; only the police repression grows more savage and brazen.

Here, however, we come to a problem. As Hayek and Marx both saw, thinking about systems and emergence doesn't come naturally. We have instead an atavistic urge to blame the outgroup whether they be immigrants, jews, capitalists, "the elite" or whoever. And we all want to take the moral high ground - ignoring the fact that the narcissistic whinge "why can't other people be like ME?" does not advance our understanding of social events.

In fact, outside of universities, there are few agents trying to educate people on this point. Even the best journalism provides only a partial description of the world, because it focuses on salient events rather than slow-moving trends and on human interest stories rather than upon the impersonal mechanisms that are the essence of social science.

What this leaves us with is a discourse that prefers scapegoats to social explanations. If we view politics through the lens "this person is wrong and evil" we'll have a discourse that is shrill and conflictual. As Gaby Hinsliff writes:

Do you blame migrants and the politicians who let them in for Britain’s problems, or wealthy elites plus the politicians who let them get away with too much? It’s a depressing question for anyone seeking something more inspiring than a choice of scapegoats to hate.

If on the other hand we ask: what causes these views to become salient? why is this figure selected for public prominence? then we'll have a more cool-headed approach. And a more rational one. The problem is, though, that many people would prefer us to look for scapegoats rather than ask questions about capitalism.