Is our social DNA changing?

The book profiling “character” in older generations had me musing these past few days about what, if anything, could be said about trends in contemporary behaviour and social values.

There’s always something we can fault the latest generation with – for example the “attention deficit” which modern IT gadgets seem to develop…and how this might affect future “characters”…

More critically, surveys such as the World Values and Eurobarometer indicate a large and significant trend since the early 1970s toward more individualistic, selfish and less trusting societies….

Daniel Bell had warned us as far back as 1976 in his Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism  that the spirit of 68 was difficult to reconcile with business requirements but could never have anticipated the contempt with which businesses subsequently chose to treat their employees – with wholescale layoffs and casualization of the workforce.

Richard Sennett is a philosophical sociologist who has followed these developments for almost 40 years, starting with his “The Hidden Injuries of Class” (1972), a study of class consciousness among working-class families in Boston; then “The Corrosion of Character” (1998) which explored how new forms of work were changing our communal and personal experience.

 “Respect in a world of inequality” probed the relation of work and reforms of the welfare system; and “The Culture of the New Capitalism” (2006) provides an overview of these changes

Francis Fukuyama is a prolific, elegant and much misunderstood writer whose The Great Disruption – human nature and the reconstitution of social order (1999) is an important bit of evidence of the deep concerns at that time of where we were heading.

All of these, of course, were based more or less exclusively on analyses of the United States of America and it is important to look more widely if we are to understand this important question of how the DNA of the human race might be changing….

Reckless Opportunists – elites at the end of the establishment by Aeron Davis (2018) is a small book which ruthlessly exposes the almost criminal damage which a new breed of elites have inflicted on a once proud nation,

It is the result of twenty years of intense research, over 350 interviews with the heads of corporations, senior civil servants, journalists, politicians and public relations firms. In response to Brexit, Aeron Davis wrote this slim but telling volume in less than three months. It is, in effect, a short anthropology of how the United Kingdom’s elite became clueless at governing.

Davis’s report is thus a frontline account of the way the political, industrial, financial and media elites are disabled by their own culture and methods from acting in the collective interests of the country.

“No one seems to trust anything or anyone else’. Davis observes that

‘self-interest and competition has left politicians willing to destroy their parties, civil servants their departments, chief executives their companies, and journalists their publications’.

He then sets out to explain how the new elites undermine the institutions they head.

The reporting of quarterly returns by fund managers prevents long-term investment.

Within this world, leaders have to sell themselves continuously and rely on specialists in corporate affairs to attract investors. Communications  teams spend 70 per cent of their time ‘keeping stuff out of the papers’. One result is the fading of rooted expertise and the rise of short-term consultants. This shift, echoed in politics and government, is leading to a massive loss of institutional memory essential to self-belief. It is not just bosses that come and go at speed. In 2009, Davis wanted to find out more about weapons of mass destruction decisions in Iraq, only to find there was only one person still in the department with the relevant knowledge. Of twenty-five permanent secretaries at the time, eleven had been in the post less than two years.

The parallel, insecure worlds of government and commerce, are run on ‘selfdeception’, much of it embedded in the selfserving systems of ‘communication’. ‘Greater transparency’, Davis claims, only leads ‘to more mystification’. Finance directors manipulate the rate of return to serve the public listings of the share price, and when successful,move on before the consequences are realised. Many financial journalists are in effect ‘embedded’, writing to other specialists and reinforcing a small world that believes almost religiously in the free market.

How does it maintain itself? It works through numbers. ‘Econocracy’, not democracy is the name of the game, as targets are imposed on those below while being evaded by those at the top, who are anyway hired hands: CEOs with one- or two-year contracts.

Guy Standing developed the theory of the ‘precariat’ to describe the working classes of our time. Davis shows that those at the top, while they may be doing nicely in terms of incomes, face precarious employment.

Embracing economic models that work until they fail, constantly shifting, being fired, replaced or moving on, they live in constant fear of the chop. These assertions sound like a caricature, but are set out with compelling,

Davis’s gripping account reveals a country and an economy led by rootless lemmings taking the wider public with them over the cliff edge. Lemming-like behaviour is reinforced by accountants who provide steady support without taking responsibility. The government spends £800 million on outside consultations, while civil servants retire to circulate through its fee system, as their experience and contacts are hoovered up by the private sector.

Rootlessness is magnified by the sale of so many sectors of the UK economy to overseas investors: 54 per cent of company shares traded in 2014 were foreign owned and 98 per cent of FTSE 100 companies ‘have subsidiaries or joint ventures registered in overseas tax havens’.

After twenty years of interrogating the managers and politicians of the UK, Davis finds their leadership to be ‘solitary, rich, nasty, brutish and short’. Leadership could and should, he feels, be ‘connected, modestly paid, nice, civilised and long’. But it is not. He provides a two-page list of reforms that might help.