The Ruin of Culture

This is an 'author's cut' of the third section of 'Defund Culture', which appeared in the Spring 2022 issue of the journal Radical Philosophy. The first section, titled 'The Culture War and the Attack on the Arts', is available here. The second, 'Culture Must Be Defunded' is here.)

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At this point my argument becomes more provocative still. For the changes I’m pointing to go further than giving more people from a wider range of backgrounds the kind of opportunities that might enable them to contribute to art and culture. This is why none of my work in this area is simply about social mobility or widening access. In all the debate around mobility and access, not enough attention is given to the damage that is done to the nation’s culture by a situation in which 39% of the UK’s leading people are privately educated, with a quarter graduating from Oxford or Cambridge University.

Many writers have come to appreciate how such a state of affairs harms society in political and psychological terms. In Sad Little Men, Richard Beard refers to the work of the psychoanalyst Joy Schaverien and her 2015 volume Boarding School Syndrome. Schaverien describes a condition:

now sufficiently recognised to merit therapy groups and an emergent academic literature in the British Journal of Psychotherapy. The symptoms are wide-ranging but include, engrained from an early age, emotional detachment and dissociation, cynicism, exceptionalism, defensive arrogance, offensive arrogance, cliquism, compartmentalisation, guilt, grief, denial, strategic emotional misdirection and stiff-lipped stoicism.

In this environment, Beard continues, pupils survived by drastically modifying their behaviour and emotions:

Abandoned, alone, England’s future leaders needed to fit in whatever the cost….

Terrified of crying for help, of complaining or sneaking, we developed a gangster loyalty to self-contained cliques, scared to death of being cast out, of being cast out again, as we had been from home.

Beard proceeds to argue that, in its impact on his generation of boarding-school boys, evidence of this condition can be seen in the Government’s handling of Brexit and the Covid pandemic.

The author and musician Musa Okwonga makes a similar case in One of Them, his memoir about his time as a schoolboy at Eton (also the alma mater of David Cameron, Boris Johnson and current Chancellor of the Exchequer Kwasi Kwarteng):

A few years before I arrived at my school, it was attended by a cluster of people who now hold political office in Britain: a group who has driven through some of the most socially regressive policies in recent memory, and whose leader, the current prime minister, is best known for his arrogance and dishonesty. …  I ask myself whether this was my school’s ethos: to win at all costs; to be reckless, at best, and brutal, at worst. I look at its motto again – ‘May Eton Flourish’ – and I think, yes, many of our politicians have flourished, but to the vast detriment of others. Maybe we were raised to be the bad guys?

It's worth remembering this question in light of the fact that, of the fifteen UK prime ministers since 1945, five of them went to Eton. (A total of fourteen prime ministers attended Cambridge University, six of them Trinity College, and a whopping twenty-eight attended Oxford University. One Oxford college alone, Christ Church, educated thirteen of them.) Later in the same book Okwonga writes:

Almost every schoolfriend whom I have seen express a political view on social media has been Conservative. And why wouldn’t they be? This world works for them just as it is. It provides them with living standards and a basic level of comfort that are unimaginable to most people. Why the hell would they want to change that? Both of my boarding schools were overwhelmingly right-wing environments …. This was the world from which these politicians emerged – from which we all emerged – and it proves that you don’t have to be cruel in your daily life to enact policies with cruel effects. You merely have to absorb the mantra, fed to you forever by such surroundings.

Less appreciated in all the discussion of the harm caused by absorbing this mantra is how the flourishing of the public school and Oxbridge-educated in all walks of life – arts, drama, music, business, politics, the law, the media, journalism – ruins England’s culture, too. What has happened to all the recklessness, harshness, superiority, cruelty, arrogance, cynicism, exceptionalism and cliquism there? Are we to believe it just evaporates when it comes to the creative arts? Can it really be that it is played out politically and psychologically but not culturally?

As we have seen, it’s the people (the ‘bad guys’?) from the two top socio-economic classes, who have been through this privileged part of the education system, who then go on to take a disproportionately prominent role in forming England’s culture, usually in their own best interests. It’s this demographic that largely makes the rules as to what counts as culture, and gatekeeps who is good enough to join the ranks of those that get to produce, publish and disseminate it. To be judged as proper and credible an instance of creative culture must often be filtered through this anti-intellectual, upper and middle class, straight, white point of view. Yet England’s culture is all too rarely understood in these terms. Just as being male, able-bodied, cis and heterosexual is unmarked, so this homogenous, limited, somewhat boring culture is unmarked. It’s regarded – by those in publishing, the media, journalism and so forth – simply as what culture is. (Hence, we get situations such as that described by Pamela Jikiemi, head of film, television and radio at Rada, where drama schools ‘are very much held in a chokehold by the white establishment … When you’re white you get actor training, when you’re Black you get training to be white’.) On the spectrum of good to bad, those who have been to public school and Oxbridge are generally considered (largely by those who have been through this elite education system themselves) as being self-evidently better at creating, presenting and communicating it. Better because they know how to pursue the right sort of projects and ask the right sort of questions and adopt the right sort of ‘polished’ tone. They thus have their contributions ranked higher in the cultural hierarchy. There is little sense that English society and its structure functions to impose a particular set of values and concerns onto much of its arts and culture. Nor that it belongs to those who have been to public school and Oxbridge. And that this is the reason these upper- and middle-class white people are held as being better at creating it: because this culture and its rules work well for them. (Hardly surprising really, since it’s this demographic that largely make and police the rules.) Meanwhile those outside this group (those whose parents are not in the two top socio-economic classes, and who do not go to a fee paying school, and are not accepted to Oxbridge), are set up to struggle: both to learn these rules; and to be successful in operating within them even when they do. Consequently, the creative projects they pursue and the questions they ask and the tones they adopt are far more likely to be regarded as improper, objectionable, not marketable or credible,  at best inferior.

The argument I’m making may seem reasonably familiar, especially to some of those who are not privileged, straight and white. Even so, it has implications that habitually go unrecognised. Because, as I’ve begun to show, to address this situation it’s not merely a matter of devising a fairer means of distributing places at private schools and Oxbridge: say, by using a system of quotas, vouchers or even a lottery to be more inclusive of diversity. Nor can the issue be resolved by actions such as those pointed to by Zadie Smith. In ‘Contempt as a Virus’, the postscript to Intimations, a book of six essays written during the pandemic, Smith writes of disdain of Black people as a virus that affects the left in the US as much as the right. Such contempt mistakes the symptoms for the cause, she says, quoting James Baldwin, and produces a mentality that:

looks over the fence and sees a plague people: plagued by poverty, first and foremost. If this child, formed by poverty, sits in a class with my child, who was formed by privilege, my child will suffer – my child will catch their virus. … And it's a naive American who at this point thinks that integration – if it were ever to actually occur – would not create some losses on either side. … But I am talking in hypothesis: the truth is that not enough carriers of this virus have ever been willing to risk the potential loss of any aspect of their social capital to find out what kind of America might lie on the other side of segregation. They are very happy to ‘blackout’ their social media for a day, to read all-black books, and ‘educate’ themselves about black issues – as long as this education does not occur in the form of actual black children attending their schools.

The answer is not just to provide more Black children in the US or UK with opportunities to attend the same schools and universities as their white counterparts, extremely important though that is. As I’ve indicated, we need to go further than that. Further even than ‘normalising the marginalised’ by giving greater numbers of female-presenting, working-class, Black, Global Majority, LGBTQIAP+, neuroatypical and differently abled people, as well as those at the intersections of these identities, a chance to tell their stories.

After the 2020 antiracist uprisings in many places around the world the journalist Reni Eddo-Lodge became the first Black Briton ever to top both the non-fiction paperback and overall UK book charts, while novelist Bernardine Evaristo became the first woman of colour to top that for paperback fiction. In the text of her Goldsmiths Prize Lecture that same year, Evaristo emphasizes ‘novels need to be generated by and speak to a variety of demographics’. And, of course, it is extremely important to ‘talk about who is writing the novel and what they are choosing to write about’ as Evaristo says, and to start including those whose histories have long been invalidated and excluded: ‘areas such as women’s fiction, world literature or the lesbian novel’, and writers such as Jacqueline Roy, Nicola Williams and Judith Bryan who have been  republished in Evaristo’s Black Britain: Writing Back series for Penguin. I’m aware all this is situated in a particular cultural context. But – and this is a critical aspect of the issue that too often goes unrecognised – there remains a risk that England’s safe, anti-intellectual, privileged, white culture will continue to dominate. As I put it in A Stubborn Fury, paraphrasing Eddo-Lodge, this culture will still thrive. There’ll just be more women, northerners and people of colour involved in creating and disseminating it. As indeed is gradually coming to be the case in some sectors.

A survey of diversity in the publishing industry released in 2021 found that more than ‘half of executive leadership and senior management roles are held by women (52% and 55% respectively)’. Women take up 92% of publicity, 88% of rights, 83% of marketing and communications and 78% of editorial roles.[i] (Both Sharmaine Lovegrove, founder of Hachette imprint Dialogue Books, and Kishani Widyaratna, editorial director of 4th Estate, make the point that these tend to be ‘“white, middle-class, cis-gendered, heteronormative women”’.) When it comes to who is producing the books these women are publishing, the majority are by female-identifying authors. ‘629 of the 1,000 bestselling fiction titles from 2020 were written by women (27 were co-authored by men and women and three were by non-binary writers, leaving 341 by men). Within the “general and literary fiction” category, 75% were by female authors…’.

This does not necessarily mean cis-gendered, heteronormative male authors are finding it more difficult to get published than they did in the past, despite a number of claims that have been made to this effect in articles with headlines such as ‘Men “Suffer Sexism In Publishing Industry” as White Middle-Class Women Elbow Them Out’. As several commentators have acknowledged, it could be that fewer men aspire to write literary fiction. After all, being a novelist doesn’t have quite the same cultural cache it did when the likes of D.H. Lawrence, George Orwell and Graham Green were in their pomp. Not so many men are perhaps growing up with an ambition to be the Albert Camus, Jack Kerouac or J.G. Ballard of their generation. There’s also little chance of making large amounts of money from literary fiction these days. Only a very small number of novelists do so, even enough to make writing a full-time job. Most need to have part-time jobs or other sources of income. Many male authors are therefore more interested in other genres such as fantasy and horror, or in nonfiction: history, biography, commentary, self-help and so on.

Whatever the reason, men no longer have the dominant literary status they once did. Great white males such as Martin Amis and Will Self from the 1980s and 1990s, and even David Mitchell and Tom McCarthy from the 2000s and 2010s, are out of fashion. Right now it’s Ali Smith and Bernardine Evaristo – the latter soon to be president of the Royal Society of Literature – who are feted culturally as producing some of the most exciting new fiction. (And that’s without even mentioning Sally Rooney in Ireland.) Indeed, whereas previously it was white men who ruled the literary prize scene in Britain, over a fifth of the authors shortlisted in 2020 were Black. That’s a significant shift for an industry in which no Black writers were shortlisted at all for four of the years between 1996 and 2009 (these being 1996, 2001, 2002 and 2009 respectively).

I want to offer two quick points by way of further qualification. First, this change in who is being published and selected for literary prizes is a recent thing. It could easily turn out to be a blip, a set of temporary exceptions that prove the continuing rule of the old order. Second, as other observers have remarked, whether this means that female-presenting and Black and Global Majority writers are now being given the same status and authority as their white male counterparts – say, to comment on the larger political issues of the day rather than those of a more intimate nature – is open to question. It’s hard to think of a woman or person of colour who could be said to have supplanted Tom McCarthy as England’s leading avant-garde novelist, for example.

Still, what we can say is that there seems to be the beginnings of a change in who is writing and publishing. What we can’t say is that there is a change in how they are doing so.