Prejudice and Contempt

Yanis Varoufakis, in 'Talking to My Daughter About the Economy', asks why the Australians, when the British invaders came to pillage their resources, destroy their culture, and murder their people, did not retaliate by invading Britain. Why did they not build an ocean-going fleet, load it with soldiers, arms and ammunition, sail it up the Thames, and lay waste to Sussex, Suffolk and the rest of the Home Counties? The answer, of course, is that the Australians were many marbles short of the technology that would enable them to do this. So that means that it was all right for the Brits to do what they did, doesn't it?

As a second example of something similar, I recently had a conversation with a Scottish opponent of independence who had run for the hills after the close shave of the 2014 referendum, emigrated to Maine in the USA, and set up her own business designing and marketing household utensils. Ninety-five percent (or some similar and improbably high figure) of Scottish households, she informed me solemnly, paid no taxes, had no wage-earner, and were irremediably lazy pig-troughing scum living off the state and the taxes that she paid, a parasitic population that she had no wish to identify with or be any part of. So it was all right for her to think that, wasn't it?

And as third in this set of three examples, in 1985, Mr. James Kahakua applied for a position as a weather-forecast reader at the Honolulu Weather Forecast Office; this was an in-house sideways transfer, because his current job was being phased out. Mr. Kahakua's own speech was Hawai'ian Creole, a variety of Hawai'ian English that was looked down upon by all right-thinking Hawai'ian gentry in the same way as Drumchapel Glaswegian is despised by the Scottish middle and upper classes; that had not however prevented him from successfully carrying out his current job for a number of years with no complaint from the management. But because of his disparaged accent he didn't get the job (which went to a speaker from New Jersey); his years of successful performance counted for nothing, and on appeal the judge told him to get his accent sorted: "There is no race [racial - Ed.] or physiological reason why Kahakua could not have used standard English pronunciations," he pontificated. So it was OK to shunt Mr. Kahakua out, then.

We can take a number of lessons out of these three examples. The first is the assumption that because I, or you, can do these things, anybody can. Britain, Russia, Japan can all build ocean-going ships and deploy armies, so why couldn't the Australians? Norman Tebbitt can get on his bike and find a job, so why can't five million Scots? And the judge in Mr. Kahakua's case could speak with a perfectly good standard accent, so why couldn't Mr. Kahakua? These assumptions are all obvious tosh - if they were true, nobody would have different aptitudes or skills from anybody else - but the assumption remains - that if I can do something, so can anybody else.

The second lesson is that IT'S THEIR OWN FAULT: it's the Australians' own fault that they didn't develop ocean-going ships and a standing army, the Scots' own fault that they didn't get out of their front doors and find work, Mr. Kahakua's own fault that he didn't get his accent sorted. The fact that, because of accidents of geography or culture, none of these groups had any opportunity for doing any of these things is neither here or there: IT'S STILL THEIR OWN FAULT.

To flesh this out, the peoples of the northern temperate zone live on some 30,000km of continuous grassland stretching from Kerry to Kamchatka. So when, spurred on by recurring cycles of feast and famine, they worked out how to grow their own crops, this gave them food surpluses, and food surpluses led them to invent money, writing, debt, government, bureaucracy, hierarchies, technology, and the military-industrial complex that enabled them to obliterate anyone whose resources they coveted. The Australians, by contrast, were in a desert no more than 3,600km across (though fertile at the edges), where they lived off whatever the land offered, with no incentive to develop food surpluses (though limited agriculture was practised). Their environment therefore gave them no opportunity for technological development. But in spite of all that, their failure to develop technology was still their fault, ad this was because of THE BLOCK. Likewise the people of Scotland, with no opportunity to find work because there isn't any, can be still be blamed for failing to find it because of THE BLOCK. And Mr. Kahakua, who belongs to that 25percent or so of people whose aptitude and personal linguistic history leaves them categorically unable to alter their accent, finds that it's still his fault (as the judge told him) because of THE BLOCK.

What is THE BLOCK? THE BLOCK is the decision - unconscious, but real - not to see things we don't like. The Australians' non-possession of battleships and machine-guns was clearly not their fault, but that's a highly inconvenient truth: it turns the British invaders into monsters of thuggery, rape and pillage who ought not to be walking the planet. Far better not to be able to see it. Similarly, the Scots' inability to find work arises from three hundred years of English mismanagement and theft of resources, which it's far better te be unable to see. And Mr. Kahakua's judge must have known that many people can't change their accent, but acknowledging that fact would muddy the case and confuse his verdict: far better not to be able to see it.

The Block happens to everybody, all the time. Have you ever looked for something that you knew was in a particular room, swept your eye across all surfaces, and it wasn't there? And then, because you knew it must be there, you went and looked again, and there it was sitting on the table in plain sight? That's the Block. Have you ever shown somebody a conclusive piece of evidence for a view they disagree with, and they swivel a bit or change the subject, cutting the ground from under your feet, but making no change in their position? That's the Block. The most startling demonstration of the Block that I've ever seen was in a documentary showing a dedicated teacher attempting to teach a dyslexic lady to read, using the Initial Teaching Alphabet. For session after session she understood nothing; she was entirely unresponsive; she met every explanation with blank looks. He got wooden replicas of the letters which could be strung together meaningfully, and she said they told her nothing, she threw them on the floor. The sessions became one interminable brawl in which they spent all the time screaming and shouting at one another. Until one day she came in and said, "I think I've got it", and put together half-a-dozen accurate words, and she could read! That was the Block defeated - by simply battering constantly at the same unyielding door.

Readers of this blog need to know about The Block because, sitting as it does at the heart of prejudice, it features frequently in political discussions with people who hold views that differ from ours. The Block gives them a way of being right, even when they know they're wrong. In a similar vein, you should shiver with fear whenever you hear the phrase 'identity politics': "we believe what we believe because that's who we are". 'Identity politics' isn't politics at all: it's prejudice and intransigence masquerading as debate. And behind it lies contempt for the views and interests of opponents, a bitter resolution not to engage, and the death of all political progress.

Let's get back to earth now, and consider what all this might mean for the independence debate:

-- The first implication is that we need to deploy quiet, fact-based, reasoned arguments for independence: it's the steady restatement of the obvious and the difficult-to-disagree-with that wins debates, not rhetoric and bluster. The current debate does not match this blueprint.

-- The second implication concerns the education system that we expect to create in an independent Scotland. Given that there are in fact measurable differences of ability between individuals, we need an educational system that is accountable for the way in which it handles those differences. I don't see such a system on the horizon at the moment.

-- The third implication relates to the language that we expect to speak. Differences of linguistic ability are a serious influence on the life-chances of the individual, and there are some nation-states which exploit these differences, elevating the favoured few into positions of power and influence, and squeezing the remaining population into oblivion. The name of this appalling and well-attested phenomenon is 'diglossia', and Scotland is well on the way to falling into it.

I will deal with these implications in subsequent posts.