Respecting resistance

We are living through a time that seems to glorify in nastiness. The political and social environment appears to have lost any connection to what would once have been considered good manners. It is only necessary to look at “debates” on social media or to turn on the television to realise that the terms of engagement seem to have no commitment to decency. Whilst I am observing this particularly in Britain, I am sure the same is true elsewhere.

Public discourse has, in a word, become coarser. Language which would once have been considered only suitable in the roughest public houses is now commonplace. Young people are growing up in a society seemingly unhindered by old fashioned notions of courtesy, compassion or empathy.

Whilst it is easy to blame the rise of the far right for the decline in the public discourse, this too easily let’s the liberal elite off the hook. The Brexit debate has certainly been toxic but it is not only one side who engage in highly charged, and politically incorrect, rhetoric. The side that sees itself as genteel, polite and reasonable is not averse to haranguing those who disagree with them often resulting in personal insults. 

In my PhD thesis (yes it’s as big a surprise to me that I actually got one!) I theorised that all human societies were predicated on what I called ‘the moral infrastructure’. Despite the best efforts of my examiners I never fully explained what I meant by that term. An infrastructure of morality sounds impressive (it impressed my examiners at least as it was supposed to do), but what does it mean and how do we access it?

Given what I have said about the coarsening of public debate it might be thought that far from a “moral infrastructure” what underpins human society is rather an “infrastructure of toxicity”. Such an infrastructure would certainly explain why, after seeming to push discriminatory practices into the recesses of society, they have now returned stronger than ever. Racism, sexism, anti-Semitism, Islamophobia are as strong, if not stronger, than at any time in the past thirty years. 

But, and this is the rub, so is intolerance of intolerance. Whilst the war has not been won (yet), the battles are becoming fewer. It is difficult to justify this in an environment where hard right nutters are given so much airtime, but the truth is that nobody any longer really cares if a person is gay, being female is no de facto impediment to being a boss (or Prime Minister), where most people are aware of racism even if the practice of racial abuse refuses to lie down and die.

I’m aware in making these claims that many people will point to the everyday experiences of women, blacks, Muslims and gays to disprove my thesis. I accept that the war is not won and that in order to do so there are still plenty of battles to be fought. However, there are lulls in the ongoing conflict and the combatants are, in truth, a minority of the population. Most people are relatively tolerant of difference and mostly people from different walks of life treat people decently when they encounter them. 

What is happening here is incredibly complex. There are certainly individuals who are malignant and toxic, but there are many more who simply get on with their own lives.

I believe that what underlies our communities is a moral infrastructure, and that this infrastructure can be summed up in one word: respect. 

It is not only that we all treat others with respect (because sometimes we don’t); it is that we ourselves want to be treated with respect. Very often when people complain against discriminatory practices it is the notion of respect that they invoke. It appears that we can take many affronts but to feel that our peers do not accord us due respect is to be treated as less than human. 

It happens, of course. All forms of discrimination are examples where one individual (or more usually a group of individuals) fail to show respect to a person because of an arbitrary characteristic, be it gender, ethnicity, skin colour or sexual orientation. By treating somebody in a discriminatory manner we are failing to respect them as a human being with all that entails and as an equal member of the community. 

The current regime at the DWP is one which fails to respect claimants and treats them as potentially criminal or infantilises them by using arbitrary punishments for perceived misdemeanours. There is plenty wrong with the current DWP regime, not least that its high handedness is literally driving people to suicide. But fundamentally what is lacking is any sense of empathy between assessors and claimants. It is empathy, the ability to see a situation from the other’s point of view, that leads directly to respect. Once we accept that the person on the receiving end of our treatment is just like us, with feelings, sensitivities and emotional responses, then it demands that we treat them as an equal. With the respect we expect for ourselves.

I am not sure if organisations which routinely and systematically oppress people recruit people without empathy, or whether those individuals simply come to regard their ‘clients’ as lesser. Where you and I see a desperate human being they, perhaps, see just a “welfare scrounger”, somebody who is, by definition, less than human and thus not deserving of the respect they demand for themselves.

I am not saying that every frontline member of DWP staff is asocial, I’m sure many of them are trapped into jobs they would rather were organised differently. But, organisational culture being what it is the trickle down from senior management is what sets the tone for the organisation. If the demand is to reduce the number of people on benefits, or reduce the amount of money spent the decision will have been taken by people who do not come into direct contact with those directly affected by that decision. That distance allows real lives to be reduced to a column on a spreadsheet. The staff much lower down the line, particularly frontline staff will be held in check by a system of rewards and punishments. The ultimate punishment, of course, being the loss of your livelihood.

The breakdown in respect is a sure sign of a culture falling into a moral black hole. It’s not as if we haven’t seen this before in Nazi Germany and in slave owning societies. A belief that the powerful (also the rich) are superior in all ways to those they consider not just their social inferiors but often their species inferiors.

It is impossible to maintain a society based on massive disparities of wealth and opportunity without some form of authoritarian rule. But, that ‘moral infrastructure’ I spoke of earlier does not disappear because the rich choose to ignore it. Rather, those deemed sub-humans begin to organise and resist. They begin to demand a voice, to demand a better life and to demand to be treated as human.

It is that resistance that authoritarian rulers desperately try to crush, but in which they inevitably fail. The human spirit is indomitable. No matter how we try to hold down that tendency to say “I am somebody” it will not be quelled. It finds its finest voice on picket lines and demonstrations where rather than one lone voice crying in the wind a collective roar can be heard.

Even now, in what appears to be the triumph of authoritarian rule in so many countries resistance grows. From schoolchildren marching to save our planet, to strikers in France now in their 30^th day of a mass strike, to those opposing yet another disastrous Middle East War, resistance grows. The slogans may not be the same, but they are fuelled by the same impetus. What every one of us who takes to the streets, to the picket lines, to the barricades, or to a meeting is saying is “my voice matters, I am a human being and I deserve the respect which goes with that status. I deserve an opportunity to live my life free of terror, of poverty and to enjoy a life worth living.” 

The rich and the powerful, and their cronies will also resist. They have powerful tools at their disposal: mass media, judiciary, army, police, and an apathetic populace. But, the demand for respect is also powerful and it is not going away any time soon. To demand respect is to resist. And the only way in which we can build an environment of mutual respect is to tear down the hierarchies that maintain privilege and condescension. That, in my view, is what socialism is all about.