Vibes

At school I studied, if that is the word, Sociology. 

 We had a text book. Themes and Perspectives in Sociology by Michale Haralambos. I believe proper graduate level sociologists look on it with some horror. They think it reduces complex research and nuanced theoretical debates into bite-sized bullet points that can be swallowed and spewed up over exam papers. I remember reading an exasperated examiners' report on an A level paper: it said that no matter what question about the Sociology of Education candidates were asked, a large number of them would reproduce Haralambos's chapter about the underperformance of working class school-children from memory. 

Sociology has a reputation for being a "Mickey Mouse" college subject that guarantees a life-time of unemployment. It has now largely been replaced by Media Studies in the conservative demonology. I didn't take it beyond A level: my degrees are in the much more practical English Literature and Medieval Studies.

But in retrospective, O and A Level Haralambos had a good deal to be said for them. It asked questions that it might not have occurred to us to ask: questions where the answers seemed so obvious that we might not otherwise have noticed that they were questions. "Why do humans live in families?" "Why do communities punish wrong-doers, and how do they decide what counts as wrong?" That was the "themes" part. And unlike everything else on the 1980s Comprehensive School arts syllabus, Mr Haralambus encouraged students to entertain the possibility that there was more than one possible answer. That was what he meant by "perspectives". A French Functionalist would say that Society works like a machine; and we can see various ways in which families and prisons keep that machine running smoothly. No, say the German Marxists, Society is a struggle between rich people and poor people (I have never been able confidently to spell bourgeoisie) and families and prisons are techniques for keeping the poor poor and the rich rich. There were also phenomenologists, who, I think, said that "why" questions didn't matter and it was sufficient to just study families and school and prisons in the way that botanists studied weeds; and symbolic interactionists who.... Truthfully, I have never known what symbolic interactionists do. This was all doubtless very simplistic and I am sure that a lot of the time we repeated what the book said without actually understanding it. I seem to recall that Teacher thought that I was being a bit of a girly swot when I actually ordered some Durkhiem and some Wilmott and Young from the library and found out what they actually said. 

English teachers and History teachers also asked us questions of course, important questions like why Hamlet delayed and the identity of Godot and what caused the English Civil War. But they told you the correct answer (purgatory, death and the king, if I remember correctly) and marked you down if you didn't agree with it. We were rather discouraged from seeing actors doing Shakespeare in the theatre in case the Producer confused us by incorporating wrong answers into his production. I was told very clearly that I was not allowed to think that Fanny Price was a sanctimonious prig; because Jane Austen didn't intend me to think that Fanny Price was a sanctimonious prig; and an honest attempt to explain why I disliked the character and found it hard to engage with the book was dismissed as 'waffle.

Note: Fanny Price is in fact a sanctimonious prig.

I expect this is why Sociology -- and in fact Media studies -- are so often mocked by small and capital C conservatives. If you are editor of the Daily Mail or Sky News, you don't want young people asking questions about how media functions and what effects it has on the people who consume it. If you are Minister for Education, you definitely don't want young people asking "What would a Marxist say schools are for? How would that differ from a Phenomenological Symbolgist." Whoever you are, you don't want young people thinking that there are different, equally valid, perspectives on the big questions.

At any rate, that's what a Marxist would say. I suppose a Functionalist would say that it is good for society to have harmless scapegoats and essays in the Times about sociology being a waste of time are the modern equivalent of burning the devil in effigy.

At university, it turned out that there were themes and perspectives in English Literature as well; only there it was called Critical Theory. Critical Theory is another thing small c conservatives think is a bit of waste of time.

In practice, Sociology was one of those those subjects that music teachers and PE teachers gravitated towards, not because they cared about it but because they needed a second string in their academic bow. Geography was the other one. Many of us still believe that it is impossibly to read a map unless you are wearing an Adidas tracksuit with a whistle round you neck. Lazy and disengaged teachers often encouraged students to Express Themselves about General Issues, during the lesson, meaning that those of us who were quite articulate and quite literate ran away with the idea that we were Good at sociology. If you read books outside school, it wasn't too hard to improvise a good essay on whether gender was nature or nurture without actually having read the required chapter of the Big Blue Book.

It was a long time ago, and memory is not always entirely charitable. They literally pulled my old school down a few years ago. 

I am thinking of the occasion when the sociology teacher thought it would be a wheeze to invite a local police officer to address the class on the subject of Crime and Deviancy. I don't know whether the officer in question was a Functionalist or a Phenomenologist; but it is safe to say that he wasn't a Marxist. For all I know it could have been a member of the local Am Dram society, doing a stereotyped caricature of an English Copper for satiric effect. He began by saying that as a policeman he was not allowed to express, or even have, any political or religious opinions, before explaining that there was no crime whatsoever on the Isle of Man or Saudi Arabia because they still chopped the hands of thieves. (Right up to 9/11, the theory that Johnny Muslim and his good old fashioned discipline had got it just about right was very common among people who didn't have political beliefs.) Pausing only to do a bog-standard "never did me any harm" routine, he explained that there weren't any murders in the 1950s when they had had hanging and there wouldn't be any murders today if hanging were brought back. This was in Margaret Thatcher's golden days.

Now, I wasn't having this. We had Done Punishment and Deterrence in the previous lesson. The text book included a graph of the number of murders in possibly Australia. Possibly Australia had abolished hanging for a while, and then brought it back, and then abolished it again; and it was clear from graph that the presence of absence of a hangman had no correlation to the murder rate.  

PC Plod wasn't having me not having it.

Oh, I'm not interested in statistics, he said, you can prove anything you like with statistics.

It may have been Winston Churchill who made the joke about there being three kinds of untruth: lies, damn lies, and statistics. Checks notes: Actually it was Mark Twain, who was quoting Disralli, who may have been quoting the Duke of Wellington. Let's assume it was Oscar Wilde to be on the safe side. A proper mathematician had written a best selling book called "How to Lie With Statistics": I suspect a lot of people who hadn't read it had heard the title. 

"You can prove anything you like with statistics" could be taken as the prime dogma of the populist right. You may have a gut feeling that vaccination doesn't really do any good. You may once have known a heavy smoker who lived to a ripe old age. You may be pretty sure that there have been more traffic jams in London since Tony Blair invited all the Muslims to live there. If your belief system doesn't allow you to count up the number of smokers who get sick; or look at police records to find out if the roads get snarled up more often than they did in the racially homogenous days, then you haven't go anything apart from gut feeling and anecdote to go on. So anything which challenges you gut is suspect.

We're freer and better off since Brexit because I feel freer and better off. And since I am a fan of Brexit, I was likely to feel freer and better off or at least say that I did, regardless of what the facts on the ground happen to be. You tell me the standard of living has actually gone down? Oh, you can prove anything you like with facts.

Populism is ultimately the worship of vibes. 

It is perfectly true that if you generate a sufficiently large quantity of data and spend a sufficient time staring at it, you are going to be able to find some trends and some correlations which back up your side of the argument. I think it was Winston Churchill who said that his opponents used facts as a drunk man uses a lamp-post: not for illumination, but for support. (Wrong again: It was Andrew Lang, the fellow with the multicoloured fairy books. But we can go with Oscar Wilde.)

I am not talking about seeing the result of the chariot race in the entrails of a chicken; or doing computer searches of billion-character Biblical acrostics, But it is highly unlikely absolutely everything is completely terrible and appalling, even after fourteen years of Conservative government; and equally unlikely that everything is uniformly wonderful, even a whole fortnight into the glorious new Centrist utopia. It's the job of Kier Starmer's spinners to find some numbers which make the Tories look bad, and the job of Rishi Sunak's spinner to find some numbers which make them look good.  

So: that is my prediction for 2029. Regardless of what happens in the real world, Kier Starmer will be able to quote figures that prove that Things Have Only Got Better under his premiership. Wages will have gone up, inflation will have come down, health service waiting lists will be lower, children will be better educated, summers will be longer, women will be braver, soldiers will be more beautiful. And we can also be sure that Priti Patel (I assume it will be Priti Patel I prefer to assume the worst and be pleasantly surprised by the marginally less bad) will be able to quote figures proving that 2024-2029 have been an economic and social catastrophe: that ordinary decent people can't afford to put food on the table; that scarcely anyone coming out of tertiary education can read or write, much less do simple arithmetic and that in many towns old people dare not leave their houses for fear of the mobs of cannibal immigrants eating human flesh because they can't afford baked beans, that...

One of the least edifying aspects of the last election campaign were the gladiatorial debates and vox pops in which the Opposition pointed to a health service on the point of collapse and the government said that it was even more on the point of collapse in Scotland where the Opposition were in charge and the government said that the Opposition were in charge in Wales where things were even worse. One side could quote figures that said that waiting lists were coming down and the other side said that they were only coming down because they had gone up so much and the first side said that they were going up more slowly than they would be if the other lot were in power. Most of us mortals don't have the time or the effort to work out if either side is in the right. Probably the truth is that things are quite bad; not as bad as they could be; and better in some places than others. 

 Which is why a certain number of people will always vote for the big orange fellow who doesn't know much about figures but is quite sure it's the immigrants fault. 

It doesn't matter what Kier Starmer achieves: what matters is what people perceive him  to have achieved. 

This is not quite such a cynical remark as it may seem at first glance. If you are a political wonk, then your facts and figures matter a good deal: and if you work in a niche area then an incremental boost to your niche is very important indeed.

 Barak Obama said that nice thing about working at a state or city level was that relatively small actions could make relatively big changes to the lives of specific groups of people. A small change in the rate of tax on tractor fuel can be the difference between staying in business and going bankrupt to a few thousand farmers. 

I get why Labour Wonks go on and on about the fact that, yes, Tony Blair got us involved in a, yes,  futile war, but on the positive side, he put a lot of, yes,  money into nursery schools. And I am not being cynical. (Well, in fact, I am being cynical, but at least I admit it.) If you've actually seen and lived the positives of SureStart then it must have hurt a great deal when people like me said we were withholding our vote over a dodgy dossier and two hundred thousand dead civilians. And it must be really painful to hear the Left use terms like Tory Lite and say that both sides are as bad as the other one. 

Both sides are not as bad as each other. 

I am not rich; but I am definitely not poor. I can't truthfully say I have noticed that prices in the supermarket have gone up. I have noticed that since Brexit and the Pandemic, empty shelves are much more common. Not even the big shops can be relied on to have all the things I want every time I go shopping. I absolutely admit that "since Brexit there are no tinned anchovies to be had at Lidl, not even for reading money" is so much a first world problem that it barely registers as a problem. I have noticed my fuel bill going up. I have definitely noticed that certain Little Luxuries can be indulged in slightly less often. Pre-Pandemic I used to say "I probably shouldn't spend a fiver on my lunch every day, but it's nice and convenient". Post-Pandmeic I find myself saying "Ten quid for a nice coffee and a bowl of soup, I am not quite sure I can run to that." But honestly, in the economic down-turn is mostly something which has happened to other people. (I paid off my mortgage when I came into some money, so Liz Truss didn't directly harm me. There is a wobbly line on the website of my financial adviser, and it seems to be going steadily upwards, although there was a dramatic dip in September 2022. The fact that I have a wobby line to consult may make you challenge my "I am not rich" assertion.)

In the 1970s, we felt that if we called for an ambulance, one would probably come; and if we turned up at a railway station; there would probably be a train;  even if the guard would be officious, the food would be disgusting; and Hattie Jaques would ask me impertinent questions about my bowel movements. I now feel that if I had a heart attack I would be put on a three week waiting list for an ambulance; which would be diverted via Wivelsfield due to leaves on the line, and by the time I got to my destination I would be inconveniently dead.

Five years is quite a long time; if in five years we have a sense that we can trust the health service and the public services again; we will probably think that Starmer is doing an okay job and give him another chance. If he has to go through the numberwang cycle, then the Emperor has already won. 

You can't prove anything you like with statistics. You can only prove the things which the statistic prove. But the difference between a world where Kier Starmer steps down from the Premiership in 2040 and one in which Nigel Farage enters Downing Street in 2029 will ultimately come down to Starmer's ability to generated good vibes. 

This is also true of the nice American lady who is trying to beat Donald Trump. 

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