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.
