Facsimiles Of Life...

Will not help when things get genuinely rough.

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I can’t remember a time when I was unable to read. Before I went to school I already knew that c-a-t spelt “cat,” and since, like most of her contemporaries, my mother stayed at home when the children were young, I imagine it was she that taught me. Soon, though, I was at school, devouring everything printed that I could find. By today’s standards, the books were primitive, with their bright primary colours and simple illustrations without microchips or sound effects, but they were effective. In my grubby working-class area with indifferent schools, virtually everybody learned to read and write.

Yet what I recall most clearly from the books I read as a small child was the solid and almost tactile nature of the world they portrayed. Of course, that world was stylised, and probably a little out of date even in my early childhood. But it was a world that accorded with the solidity and connectedness of everyday life, even in its humblest manifestations. And of course such books, and later television and the cinema, necessarily exemplify a culture’s concepts of what is important, and how society functions. So this week I want to reflect a little on how these ideas have changed over the generations, and how we have arrived at the world we have today, where fame, importance and success are defined and exemplified very differently from how they were then. I will argue that these differences could be about to have severe consequences quite soon.

Children’s books of those days portrayed a very physical, tactile world. Almost nothing was abstracted, virtualised or dematerialised, and the link between everyday life and the work of individuals was very clear. Society functioned because people did practical things that could easily be observed. So every day the postman or -woman, the milkman and the paper-boy would come by. Every week, someone from the Council would come to collect the rent and mark it in a book with a pencil as received. (In cash, few people in the area had ever seen a cheque.) Every month or two, someone would come from the Gas Board or the Electricity Board to read the meter. In the winter, men with large sacks on their back would come to deliver the coal for the fire in the front room, which was the only room that was usually heated. The labour that went into all this was very evident: the postman would be up at four in the morning in all weathers, the coal would be dug out of the ground by men working in filthy, dangerous conditions, and the fish sold in the local fish-and-chip shop was caught by men from Hull and Grimsby spending two weeks at a time on the freezing waters of the North Sea. And all of this was faithfully set out in books, that also showed the butcher, the baker, the greengrocer and the ironmonger at work in their shops. It was just how life was, and these were the ordinary people who kept the world moving.

A little later, we learned about manufacturing, which still existed in those days. Cars, washing machines (new and exciting at the time) televisions (ditto) and radios and hi-fis were then made in Britain, if not always very well. Entire towns and cities were organised around manufacturing, as they were organised around coal and steel. As I began to read newspapers, I understood that the prosperity of the country depended on Making Things, and the news was full of imports and exports, and something called the Balance-of-Payments problem, which was thought important at the time, but is now no longer discussed. Currency exchange rates were fixed (though the Pound would occasionally come under speculative attack) as were most raw material prices, and much of the economy was in public hands, so there was relatively little to speculate on. The City was where the less-intelligent sons of the ruling class were sent to work, and the Stock Market was primarily about raising finance for investment, and buying shares to give you an income. Even when I was studying Economics later, our textbooks talked about factors of production, trade balances and prices. It was all very practical and down-to-earth, with scarcely an equation in sight.

The Wealthy, as such, had generally inherited their money, and owned land and shares. They looked down on those who had made money more recently, but popular culture itself also showed, if anything, a certain distrust for those who were merely Rich, especially through such schemes as property speculation, which was just taking off. Even senior managers in private companies were not exceptionally well paid in those days, and in general private-sector management had a bad reputation, as something you went into if you didn’t have the brains to be a doctor, a lawyer or a teacher. (Even now, in a very different world, you need a British passport application countersigned by someone of standing in the community: the founder of an Internet startup probably wouldn’t do.)

All these things were signals about what society at the time considered important. Even if the ruling class aspired to a life of Leisure, living off rents and dividends, and if it was considered shameful in the upper-middle class if a husband couldn’t support his wife and family from his own earnings, there was strong social pressure for otherwise inactive people of those classes to do something to justify their existence, often in the form of voluntary or charitable work. The middle class expected their children to get “good” jobs, with a degree of social prestige. Among my contemporaries at University, there were future lawyers, teachers, doctors, scientists and engineers, people going into the public service, into academia, publishing and perhaps advertising, and, like me, not quite sure what they wanted to do. But I don’t remember anyone who wanted to “make lots of money,” or just “become successful.” It was anyway assumed that a decent middle-class career would give you a reasonable standard of living, the opportunity to buy a house and the respect of your community. And for working-class boys, there were exciting jobs like firemen, merchant seamen, policemen and operators of complex and powerful machinery

One career seen as prestigious was science, for all that it seems hard to believe now. This was partly a response to the massive mobilisation of science during the War, and to the effects on the post-war world. It wasn’t that science was seen as creating a technological utopia: flying cars and so on were essentially as mythical as the Shield of Achilles, and served a similar purpose. Rather, applied science had done a great deal, and continued to do more, to make ordinary life safer, healthier and easier. Science meant antibiotics, DNA, radio telescopes, computers and of course space travel. (Although the 1960s are remembered today for the Apollo programme, at the time the Soviet space programme was more visible: I can still remember the shock I felt when my mother showed me the front page of a newspaper with the photograph of Yuri Gagarin.) And all of this was not really about weekends on the Moon, which remained a journalistic fantasy, but the sense that Science, under some kind of publicly accountable government control, would continue to make the lives of ordinary people better, as it already had.

The BBC screened serious science documentaries and popular science programmes, as well as Jacob Bronowski’s epic Ascent of Man. An actual scientist, David Attenborough, was put in charge of BBC 2 when it began: he was responsible, among other things, for Monty Python’s Flying Circus. Popular culture treated scientists with respect, if sometimes with a degree of amused condescension. (Scientists like the original Dr Who solved problems with their brains rather than their fists.) I was never particularly a fan of Enid Blyton, but her books of children’s adventures, depicting a generation of children with far more autonomy and freedom than would be acceptable today, had among their few adult characters a father who was some kind of research scientist, working on a project that must have been based on the idea of nuclear power. Meanwhile, popular TV programmes starring explorers like Hans Haas and Jacques Cousteau showed the unseen marvels of the bottom of the sea.

If all these were ordinary role models, then there were also famous people to emulate, and they were not as far from ordinary life then as they would be today. Sportsmen and women tended to be ordinary people, frequently amateurs, seldom earning huge amounts of money. The nearest serious football team to where I lived was West Ham, whose Captain, Bobby Moore, was also the Captain of the England team that won the 1966 World Cup. I didn’t follow football, but apparently you could see Moore doing his shopping at the local supermarket on a Saturday: like most professional sportsmen and women, footballers were paid a decent working wage, with a bonus for winning. The idea that a footballer could be paid millions a year, and would become just a mobile advertising stand, would have seemed incomprehensible then. Sports I did follow, like cricket and athletics, tended to be even worse paid, if they were paid at all. But their most prominent figures were household names nonetheless.

Then there were the truly exceptional individuals: test pilots, astronauts, mountaineers, explorers, deep-sea divers, people (like Attenborough himself) who disappeared into the jungles of Borneo and brought back pictures of animals no-one in Britain had ever seen. There were also genuine media Stars—normally female—who seemed to have come from another planet: the likes of Bardot, Loren, Monroe and others. There was a lower level of celebrities, also including male figures like Burton and Sinatra, who were written about by the media, if not in the obsessively prurient way we have become used too today.

But most entertainers were ordinary people, making a decent living from selling concert tickets and records. Even the Beatles, when they started, were “four lads from Liverpool,” and Beatlemania was a surprise to everyone, not least to them. But if they were escorted around for their own protection, they were not hermetically sealed away. They had no private jets, and were met at the bottom of the aircraft steps (as then was possible) by the Press, eager to take their photographs. They didn’t have an extensive road crew with 747 freighters and massive lorries either: in concert footage, you can see them setting up and shifting around their own equipment, as they had been doing since Hamburg. The Beatles were an act, not a merchandising opportunity: that only happened, and at enormous scale, after they broke up. But for most of their brief existence they were infinitely closer to ordinary people than most of today’s best-selling acts ever were. And behind the Beatles, there were any number of, mostly transient, four or five-piece groups inspired by the realisation that with three guitars, three chords and a drum kit, you could make a decent living for a year or two.

Ultimately, even politicians were closer to ordinary people than they are now. Many of them were ordinary people, after all: trades union officers, journalists, local solicitors, tradesmen and women, former mayors of small towns mixed with the lawyers and the landowners, and most knew their constituencies well. The fortress-like security that now covers the lives of British politicians, whatever its subsequent security justification, didn’t exist then: famously, you could have your photograph taken outside No 10 Downing Street, next to the long-suffering policeman on duty, and shake hands with visiting political dignitaries.

Now then, you may react to this by saying either or both of (1) “nostalgia” or (2) “change is inevitable.” But I’m not writing a normative essay here. On the one hand, though, if there’s anything wrong with nostalgia for a time of full employment and great social mobility, I should like to know what it is, and on the other, societies necessarily change, but change can take good paths or bad directions. My real point here is a simple but very basic one. We get the kind of society we prepare for and we get the kind of citizens we form. The priorities we set are subsequently played back to us. As we sow, even do we reap. What we tell young people, deliberately or inadvertently, is what they play back to us later. Critically, this influence does not even have to be deliberately intended. So when Robert Baden-Powell returned from the Boer War and wrote several books about Scouting, he was surprised to discover enormous enthusiasm amongst both boys and girls for his programme of simple outdoor skills. The Scouts and Guides were essentially a creation of the children themselves, the adults following after. Today, well, I don’t know what the equivalent would be…

So to understand society today, we must understand what messages its citizens received when they were younger. To understand what society will be like tomorrow, we must understand the messages that are being passed today. The character of these messages, as you might anticipate from the earlier discussion, is increasingly abstract and theoretical, and increasingly removed from the experiences of everyday life. In many cases, the passers of these messages are talking about possible developments in the economy and society, things that haven’t happened yet, and might not, and in any case things that they themselves don’t necessarily understand. Moreover, the messages are increasingly confused, incoherent and contradictory, and very often part of some commercial campaign. On the other hand, some of the most powerful are completely inadvertent: the drug-trafficker driving an expensive car through their own former neighbourhood is sending a clear message about what success means, even if that’s not their conscious intention.

What I mean by “abstract” in this context, is that the messages about the present and the future that are passed to young people have no necessary contact with practical reality as they will ever experience it, and are without any serious attempt to pretend it has, beyond the rhetorical level. Indeed, pronouncements by governments and the new brand of “leaders” that has arisen, mostly from the tech world, are not only aimed at young people, but also at their parents, who vote, and who require a degree of assurance about their children’s future, or for that matter can be frightened and coerced into encouraging them and supporting them financially in a direction that may be profitable for others.

To give an idea of how much this has changed, consider that careers advice to my generation, useful or not, informed or not, welcome or not, was usually based on some kind of pragmatic everyday judgement. Look, my contemporaries were told, so-and-so has a good standard of living, a nice house and a nice car, and is liked and respected in the community. They do the legal work for house purchases, and there will always be houses. They are doctors or dentists and we will always need those. They are teachers and we’ll always need those. There will always be a need for people to work in banks. The increase in access to higher education in the 1960s and 1970s produced a whole generation of children encouraged into degree-qualified jobs like these, because their parents wanted them to have “a better life than we had.” (How quaint that sounds now.) And many people—I knew lots of them—were actually quite happy, getting qualifications, marrying, setting up in one of the Professions, and doing jobs that were actually socially useful: yes, even banking could be useful in those days.

Now such views were never universal of course, because nothing is. There were people who sincerely wanted to be rich by any means, and indeed people who had become wealthy through property and share speculation. But their influence was limited, because opportunities themselves were limited, partly by a much more egalitarian tax regime, and partly because of the structure of the economy itself. Such people often had the phrase “get rich quick” attached to them, and not in a complimentary sense. For the most part, if you wanted to become wealthy, you had to do something definite, with a tangible outcome. Richard Branson, for example, something of a popular hero of the era, started with a small record shop in Oxford Street (I went there) and expanded through providing a good and informed service in different areas, ultimately even getting into airline travel in the 1980s (Virgin Atlantic was excellent when I flew it regularly.) I don’t think anyone begrudged him his success and his wealth, at least not in those days.

It may seem parochial to say so, but I think that the dystopic reign of Margaret Thatcher had a lot to do with our current western decline. In many ways she was a typical product of the era: a greengrocer’s daughter who went on to study science and worked in food technology. But then she went through what was to become a typical moment of financial revelation: I am clever, I want to be rich. So she retrained as a lawyer, went into politics, and became the darling of a certain type of voter and parliamentarian who wanted to be rich as well, and without this tedious business of studying stuff and acquiring experience and qualifications. She profited from, and contributed to, the takeover of the Tory Party by a new generation of estate-agents and second-hand car salesmen, whose wealth was based not on the traditional family and land, still less on education and training, but on an eye for the quick opportunity, and the use of a glib tongue. Her accidental coming to power unleashed a period of financial deregulation in Britain (imitated elsewhere) and coincided with wider international pressures to deregulate currencies and raw material prices.

In theory, this was all about optimisation of investment and putting resources where they would be most useful. But outside a few financial journalists, nobody really believed this. It was really just an opportunity to manipulate money, sometimes blatantly so. For example, British Gas was sold off, but the price investors paid for shares was deliberately kept low, so they would be able to sell their shares at a profit, and the more they bought (or borrowed the money to buy) the more money they would make. The money raised from the sale was then recycled back to those who had bought the shares, as tax cuts. At the time, even some politicians of the Right thought this was scandalous, but it soon became the accepted norm. (Apparently, the story that one of the first decisions of the newly privatised management of British Gas was to cancel the traditional pensioners’ Christmas party is actually true.)

Moral judgements aside, a new paradigm of acceptable behaviour was in the process of being created and disseminated. Newspapers were full of stories telling their readers how to become rich without doing any actual work. After all, why have a boring job when you could borrow the money to buy several houses, and re-sell them a year later for a tidy profit, taking account of the vertiginous rise in house prices at the time? Banking itself started its long descent into a specialised manifestation of the Casino industry, and “finance,” which had originally meant finding money to enable actual projects to happen, became a term meaning the extraction of profit from manipulating money, or expectations or rumours about money. In Martin Amis’s 1981 novel Money (sic) one of the characters is mocked for having a job “buying and selling money.” A decade or more later, and that would have seemed too elementary to be worth mentioning, in a world of derivatives, and derivatives of derivatives of derivatives, when people were getting rich (at least theoretically) in ways that hardly anyone could understand, and which were in many cases probably illegal.

So of course people went into finance to make themselves rich, because they responded to the signals they were sent, both about finance and about acceptable ways of becoming wealthy. After all, if you had a degree in Economics, what was the point in becoming a teacher or a lecturer, when you could make a fortune in finance? Come to that, even many professional economists quickly understood that the investing pubic was mostly stupid, and would pay them huge amounts of money as consultants. People with PhDs in mathematics who might have gone into Astronomy went into Wall Street or its analogues instead. And it soon became clear that the way to become really, really rich was to break away and set up your own hedge fund, taking account of the fact that human gullibility seems to be without limit. So ambitious students who had wanted to be lawyers, because that’s where the money had been, turned to finance, because that’s where the money seemed to be now. Some made it, some didn’t, some were victims of sundry financial crashes, some wound up at thirty years-old burnt out and cocained to death, most, it appears, actively hated their jobs. But the media environment in which they lived became more and more supportive, as glossy supplements told the newly-rich what to spend their money on, in the little leisure time they apparently had, and this encouraged yet further recruits. None of this had anything to do with finance in the traditional sense, or even “work” as it was once understood, and ironically the previous, limited social utility of Banks largely disappeared, as they closed branches and retreated into call-centres at the other end of the world. Banking and finance, helped of course by the Internet, became almost entirely virtual, insubstantial activities.

This happened at roughly the same time as the Great Offshoring: the destruction of manufacturing industry and the arrival of the belief that everything you wanted could be ordered from abroad frictionlessly, and paid for … well, by all these highly-paid and more important jobs that were going to be kept in western countries. So people were discouraged from going into industry, and technical training and engineering education were run down. And these high-value, high-wage jobs that were left after the dross had been exported to countries with little non-white people, would be what, precisely? Well, those who were painting the future in such glowing colours never actually said, mostly because they had no real idea themselves. But it turned out that junior management jobs held by people who’d been persuaded to read Business Studies instead of History or Mathematics, quickly became cheaper to outsource to the place where the production was taking place. And with remorseless logic, senior management posts, financial posts and even technical design posts followed relatively quickly. It turned out that making arbitrary distinctions between what could be sent abroad and what couldn’t was not actually possible. This caused some surprise. At the time of Covid it caused utter consternation. Then it was technical support posts and call-centres and, well, you know the rest. Progressively, therefore, western societies became more and more distanced from the actual production and even support of those things on which everyday life depended, and any sense of a geographical or even causal link with everyday life was lost. Meanwhile, ironically, someone who had done a traditional training as a gas engineer would have more work than he could handle.

One of the many delusions promoted by elites at that time was that computers and computer software were the way of the future, and it was in those areas that the good jobs would be retained, while the dross was exported. A political class which was generally completely ignorant of such things decided that teaching children to code in BASIC was going to relaunch the economies of whole countries. Yet these were the days (and they lasted well into the 90s) when just getting a computer to actually work, let alone talk to a printer, required hours of messing around, and the resources did not exist to teach such skills widely. Moreover, with the arrival first of the Macintosh computer, and then of various painful iterations of Windows, and followed by the unanticipated advent of the Internet, it turned out that a nation of BASIC programmers was not, in fact, needed. The “computer skills” which were going to save whole nations degenerated ultimately into the ability to do simple tasks in Office, and calling the system help desk when you had a problem. What resulted was not computer-literate nations, but mere facsimiles of them.

It was at this point that we began to see the messages passed to young people less as promises than as threats: it wasn’t necessarily the case that you would become rich if you did something, but it was very likely you’d be thrown on the scrap heap if you didn’t. So the massive expansion in university-level education a generation or so ago generated a new argument: without an expensive university education, you would never find a decent job. Now until this point, university education had conformed to one of two types. It was vocational (science, law, medicine, even theology) and was the first step in a professional qualification, or it was a general degree, often in the humanities, which gave you the intellectual basis and training for a more general type of work. (Famously, the British government sector recruited people with the most extraordinary range of degrees, and on the whole it worked well.) But the new obsession with university education (which to be honest resembled a protection racket as much as an academic enterprise) was dangerous for two reasons. First, it brought into university many who would have been happier elsewhere, and second, it changed the objective from having the benefits of the intellectual training at a university, to just leaving a degree course with a piece of paper. Once more, the shadow took the place of the substance, the spectacle was sold to the young in place of the reality. Students pretended to have acquired university-level skills, and society pretended to believe them.

The practical implications of this were obvious and not long in arriving. Recruiters asked for university degrees not because that level of education was needed for the job, necessarily, but just as a way of reducing the number of applicants to a manageable number. Universities expanded student numbers (and in some countries income) without a proportionate increase in teaching staff, or even necessarily facilities. They also had to accommodate less academic students, who in earlier times would have taken other paths, at the same time as western universities moved increasingly away from final examinations and more and more towards continuous assessment, which was much more demanding for both students and teachers. Above all, the requirement became to get as many graduates out of the door clutching certificates as possible, since it was these pieces of paper, not the intellectual content of the course, that mattered. This meant a move towards less rigorous subjects, an increasing opportunity for students to construct a degree from bits and pieces that appealed to them, and most of all a fixation with getting students through degrees by making allowances and by tweaking the results.

It’s hard to argue that this has benefited anyone: certainly not the students, who have found that a nondescript degree may get them into the queue for a job, but has taught them nothing of any lasting intellectual value. No wonder some countries are having second thoughts. Meanwhile, in many of those same countries there is a desperate shortage of trained technicians.

This could have been, and in some cases was, predicted from what had happened in schools in most western countries. The argument that Education is essentially a good thing is hard to dispute, but its simple-minded exaltation as a government priority from the 1990s onwards coincided with the abandonment of the traditional concept of education as imparting life-skills and preparing citizens, in favour of “child-centred” education, which made school students (and in practice their parents) customers of the system, requiring satisfaction. The same worship of credentials, of the form and not the content, was visible in many countries, as innovations to the curriculum and teaching methods, and purely formal increases in pass-rates, were given priority over actual learning. France has always had a national education system with national exams, so it’s easy to track standards objectively across the decades. In both the prestigious Baccalauréat, and the Brevet taken at 16, standards have been progressively lowered to enable success-rates to be maintained or improved, for political reasons. This is now starting to be a real problem: around one in four French 16-year old school-leavers now lacks the basic skills in literacy and numeracy for all but the most stunningly mundane of jobs. (Even a pizza-deliverer needs to be able to read addresses.)

Nothing could more clearly demonstrate the lack of interest of elites in actual education, as opposed to its facsimile. For that matter, few hagiographic portraits of wealthy technology heroes these days fail to point out that they had an undistinguished education and dropped out of university. Education is for the riff-raff who will never make the one percent. Real success these days is about persuading people to invest in a company with no business and no prospects, so that they can sell their interests to even bigger fools later.

From what I see, from what I hear from people I trust, and from the increasing sounds of despair coming from inside the system, I think the education systems of the West are breaking down. But this is not surprising, because students are simply following the cues they have been given. They now understand that learning, as such, does not matter any more. What matters is to pass out with the right piece of paper. So why attend lectures? Why read books? Why do any more than the absolute minimum? On the other hand, why not cheat? Why not plagiarise? Why not, these days, have AI write all of your essays for you? It has been made clear to you since you were at school that knowledge, as such, is not important. What matters, Wizard of Oz-style, is just the facsimile. And so we are entering into a period of crisis where notional university graduates find themselves with the right piece of paper, but without the actual skills needed to get a job. But blaming them alone is too simple. Likewise, cheating and plagiarism among academics—rare until the last generation—is a simple question of responding to incentives: the more papers you publish and the more they are cited, the more your career benefits. There isn’t time to worry about the students, or actual valuable research.

For several generations now, western society has indulged the delusion—call it Rousseauist perhaps—that providing overt incentives, guidance and models to young people is wrong, and that they should be left to “follow their passion,” and “express themselves.” It’s fair to say that the origin of these ideas was political: they took, and still take, no account of how children actually develop. But if you were ever an adolescent, you know that it is a time of restless searching for role models and principles and ideologies to live your life by, and you try on different ideas and styles of life as you try on clothes or change your preferences in music. But modern society has not only declined to give young people models to follow, it has deliberately ignored, undermined and destroyed traditional models of the past. Yet this has not led to young people being “liberated,” and “being themselves,” but rather to an unmet thirst for some models, any models, to follow, and to the appearance of a series of actors, some with commercial motives, some with ideological ones, who are more than happy to tell young people what to think, how to behave, and what to buy. We cannot blame young people if they follow guidance that we do not like, when we ourselves offer them nothing positive, but only exalt their theoretical freedom whilst imposing content-free normative indoctrination that just makes them miserable. So to condemn teenagers in poor areas of major cities for adopting role-models drawn from drug-gang leaders, and ethics drawn from Influencers and the lyrics of rap artists, may be understandable, but it misses the point. Where else are they going to turn?

We now offer young people only a facsimile of life, in which they are not valued as people but only as consumers. Ironically, when so much has been abstracted into smartphones, all that remains of the immediate and the tangible for many young people is crime, poverty, violence, drugs and gangs. And it isn’t only the children of the poor. The children of the middle class increasingly live a virtual life, sheltered from immediate experience and even genuine personal relationships by terrified parents and nervous institutions.

Now situations like this can, in theory, last for a long time, and when they decay, they can in theory decay gradually. But I don’t think anyone would describe what is happening around us now as “gradual.” The combination of Ukraine, Iran, climate change and the infectious virus du jour will lead to consequences that will develop anything but gradually. I’ve written before about how ill-prepared western elites are for the consequences of these things, but it will be clear, I think, that the process of virtualisation and abstraction that I have been describing adds a whole extra layer of difficulty and complication.

It was already clear in their reactions to Ukraine that the western ruling class had completely forgotten that money cannot buy what is not available. “Rearmament” cannot be done virtually: it requires actual raw materials, actual factories and actual workforces, all of which have long been abstracted away. The accompanying delusion, that total GDP including the finance sector is some sort of weapon against nations that have retained manufacturing industry and hold raw materials would be tragic if it were not so funny. And even now, the media and the ruling class are reacting to the shortages and supply-chain ruptures of the Iran crisis at one remove, through computer screens, as though abstract financial movements were all that mattered. We are so far distant from the days when coal was dug from the ground and used to make the iron and steel to make real things, that I think our current generation of leaders simply can’t grasp intellectually what is likely to happen. And having carefully destroyed real economies, real social relations and institutions and replaced everything with facsimiles, they have also ensured that an angry population, perhaps cold and hungry, is going to demand furiously that they do something. Really, this time.