compassDIRECTION FOR THEDEMOCRATIC LEFT

Ideas in Place of Fear:reducing inequality and fermenting justice

January 2010by Danny Dorling

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“When you next look at a congestedstreet, with cars jostling to move afew metres forward, pedestriansdodging in between, cyclistsweaving dangerously around them,children walking past at the level ofexhaust pipes, no one gettinganywhere fast, and all those petrolengines continuously running, this isthe both symbolic but also very realcollective outcome of individualgreed encouraged to grow by themantra of personal freedom.”

PART OF THIS THINKPIECE IS TAKEN FROM THEINTRODUCTION OF Dorling, D. “Injustice: why socialinequality persists”, published by Policy Press in March 2010.

Compass publications are intended to create realdebate and discussion around the key issues facing thedemocratic left - however the views expressed in thispublication are not a statement of Compass policy.

Ideas in Place of Fear: reducing inequality and fermenting justice

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Ideas in Place of Fear: reducing inequality andfermenting justice

by Danny Dorling

‘progressive’ alliance requirespositive aims with a majority ofparticipants working in the samedirection, a serious debate about

concepts and practical suggestions.Electoral systems don’t determineattitudes and cultures, ideas do. Simplesteps in the right direction can have hugeeffects; ideas such as equalising pay-ratesfor full and part-time workers and givingpart-time workers same benefits as full-time. Across the UK a land value tax of7.3p a (typical) square meter would raise£175bn in 10 years. Multiply the land youor your landlord owns by that amount tosee if you could afford it. It would pay offmost of the bail-out. Those who owned somuch valuable land that they could notafford to pay could sell some. All theseideas were taken from just a fewcomments made to previous Compassthinkpieces (see acknowledgments). Wehave between us enough good ideas toput fear in its place, to reduce inequalityand so ferment justice. We need to betterunderstand why we don’t enact these.

Ideas that propagate injustice

Very few say they agree with injustice, orthat inequality is beneficial. In the world’srich countries injustice is caused less andless by having too few resources to sharearound fairly; it is increasingly maintainedby widespread adherence to beliefs thatactually propagate it. These beliefs areoften presented as natural, innocent andlong-standing, but they are mostly moderncreations – what appeared fair and normalyesterday will often be seen as unjusttomorrow. Changing what is understoodby injustice today means telling somepeople, usually those in high office, thatwhat they consider to be fair is in fact inmany ways unjust.

This thinkpiece is drawn from a bookwhich aims to help redefine injustice. Thiswill inevitably anger some people. Thosewho will find these claims of injustice mosttroublesome will include some of those inexalted positions, those people whobelieve others are less able thanthemselves, those currently consumingmost and those benefiting from thedespair of others. While no one will claimto be on the side of injustice, without thecontinued spread of beliefs in support ofinjustice it would not survive long in itspresent form. Now, even after economiccrash, we have enough resources for all.Much that was previously seen as anunfortunate fact of life today becomesunjust.

I suggest that the five tenets of injusticeare that: elitism is efficient, exclusion isnecessary, prejudice is natural, greed isgood and despair is inevitable. They arethe modern day incarnations of the oldsocial evils of ignorance, want, idleness,squalor and disease. These tenants aremost strongly adhered to by those on theright, but many weaker, although stillgreatly damaging forms, underlie muchthinking in the centre and left, amongparts of the green movement and arefound within other otherwise progressiveforces. At the same time many of theseforces are coming together to apposemost aspects of the five tenets. Because ofthis widespread and growing opposition tothe five key unjust beliefs, including thebelief that so many should now be ‘losers’,most advocating injustice are now verycareful with their words. Those whobelieve in these tenets remain the majorityin power across almost all rich countries.This is despite a great lurch leftwardsoccurring across the majority of richnations (an obvious majority when nationsare weighted by voters). As I write, withinthe last 12 months half a billion people inthe richest countries of the world havesuccessfully voted for more radicalgovernments than have been seen in ageneration. Elections in the United States,Japan, Greece, and Iceland have putpoliticians in power who were recentlythought unelectable by a majority. It would

be foolish to believe that furtherprogressive lurches are not possible.

Although most of those in power in richnations today may want to make theconditions of life a little less painful formany people, they do not believe thatthere is a cure to modern social ills, oreven that a few inequalities can be muchalleviated. Rather they believe that just afew children are sufficiently able to be fullyeducated and only a few of those are thenable to govern; the rest must be led. Theybelieve that the poor will always be withus no matter how rich we are. There isgrowing evidence that many in powerhave come to believe that most othersare naturally, perhaps genetically, inferior tothem. And many of this small groupbelieves that their friends’ and their owngreed is helping the rest of humanity asmuch as humanity can be helped; they areconvinced that to argue against such acounsel of despair is foolhardy. It is theirbeliefs that uphold injustice, and ourbeliefs if we agree with them.

In recent years there has been a rapidgrowth in the scientific evidence thatshows that the five tenets of injustice areunfounded beliefs. The evidence alsoshows how people who end up in powercome so easily to hold these beliefs, orindeed become converted to them, andhow their beliefs provide a falsejustification for those who benefit mostfrom injustice. It is very hard to seekpower, and especially to seek to lead apolitical party, if you yourself do notbelieve you are especially able, that byinference many others are not as able asyou and people like you and so povertyreally will always be with us. A prejudiceyou may be tempted to convince yourselfis natural and warranted. How can theworld work without a little greed (youmight think) and with all this realism somedespair is inevitable, others just don’t haveyour “get up and go”. We need to bettershare out power among our leaders andnot put them on pedestals so high thatonly the psychologically flawed couldhappily stand on them for any length oftime. Look at who have been the longest

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serving British political party leaders of thelast century. These have been a man andwoman, Tony and Margaret, whoserespective beliefs in their personalinfallibility has been unshakeable. That isnot healthy.

The beliefs that uphold injustice

Within affluent countries, especially themore economically unequal of affluentcountries an argument can be made thatsocial injustices are now being recreated,renewed and supported by five new setsof beliefs. Although they have old origins,they have taken new faces. These are allbeliefs which have been publiclycondemned as wrong and which mostindividuals claim not to support. I arguethat the acceptance of these beliefs by justa few, and the reluctance of many othersto confront those few, is crucial tomaintaining injustice in times and lands ofplenty. There are many good argumentsagainst upholding these beliefs. If injusticesare to be reduced for all, it is importantnot just to claim that you do not hold thebeliefs, but also to positively reject them.For those who are more conservative, forwhom the existence of injustice is actuallyat the heart of what they believe to becorrect, then simply saying you reject thelabels of these beliefs (elitism, exclusion,prejudice, greed and despair) will not besufficient to reduce injustice. If you thinkthese beliefs about each label are correct,then you must also believe that injustice isgood.

The beliefs that uphold injustice in itscontemporary form have been given manynames and categorised in many ways byvery many writers, but most of thecategorisations can be simplified to five:elitism is efficient, exclusion is necessary,prejudice is natural, greed is good anddespair is inevitable. Each belief alsocreates a distinct set of victims– thedelinquents, the debarred, the debtors, thediscarded and the depressed. Both thevictims and those who uphold thesebeliefs often find it hard to see possibilitiesbeyond their current situation; they are, ineffect, advocates for the continuation of

injustice, arguing that those who suffer willalways be with us in large numbers. Thelargest groups of all are thedisenfranchised – all those who come tobelieve so little can be done.

It is a sign of the duplicity of our timesthat institutions which often say they areagainst elitism do most to promote it; thatgovernments which say they aim toreduce social exclusion actually create it;that movements (arguing on migration orfor UK separatism or population curbs)which pretend not to be prejudiced oftenfoster hate; that academic disciplines (suchas economics and business studies) wherethe orthodoxy is to advocate greedcannot say so explicitly; and that manyexperts argue that the best that mostothers can hope for is a life of which theythemselves would despair. They do not saythis explicitly, but it is implied in theiraccusation of those who argue againstthem of being utopian.

While those with most power promoteelitism, exclusion, prejudice, greed anddespair, injustice will not be reduced;instead its promotion is described asinevitable and as ‘practical’ politics. It is onlyin the most unequal of rich nations thatthe powerful can explicitly say that theybelieve there is good in the inequalitiessustained by this injustice. Elsewhere in therich world most who favour injustice areusually more circumspect, but as theexamples given in the book thesearguments are taken from show, they havebeen effective in many countries wherelife chances are now less fair than theywere just a few decades ago. However, thesupporters of injustice are being opposedand exposed more and more strongly astime passes, and social movements aregathering momentum to challenge theirviews.

Because belief in the five tenets ofinjustice is so widespread among people inpower, these beliefs are then propagatedthrough what they control. For instance,many of those who fund and manageeducational institutions encourageteachers to present these beliefs as truths:

that some children are remarkablyespecially able and others are destined forservitude. The beliefs are also propagatedby governments whose departments forsocial security increasingly label the pooras wanting, feckless, immoral and criminal,not as ‘decent’ people. The beliefs aresupported by the media, where storieswhich imply that other people are lessdeserving than us are common, wheregreat city businessmen and a fewbusinesswomen are lauded as superheroesand where immigrants looking to work fora crumb of the City’s bonuses are seen asscroungers. The working class is offered“X-factor” and the middle class “Dragons’Den”. Both are fatuous dreams. The beliefsare supported by a politics whose mantrais that without greed there would be nogrowth, and without growth we would allbe doomed. These beliefs are supportedby industries, whose spokespeople say wemust continue to consume more andmore and which now manufacturepharmaceutical treatments to cope withthe consequent despair on a mass scale –within rich countries and worldwide,mental distress and despair is the largestgrowth industry for pharmaceuticalcompanies and frontline medicalpractitioners. So in various ways academia,government, the media, politics andindustry are each key in promoting elitism,exclusion, prejudice, greed and despair.

The five faces of social inequality

The argument being made here isconcerned mainly with injustice in affluentcountries, but it touches on wider debates.If you had to choose one word tocharacterise the nature of human societyas it is currently arranged worldwide,there is no better word than ‘injustice’.Across all walks of life, between continentsand over the decades, injustice has beenconstantly prevalent.

At the pinnacle of the current process ofhuman ranking is the awarding of eliteprizes, Nobel Prizes, allocatedoverwhelmingly to just a few men from atiny handful of the richest of countries; thehistory of these prizes can be studied

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both to illustrate the growth of elitism andthe remarkable scope there is for rapidchange. In normal times (1901-2008) just1 in 20 Nobel Prizes are awarded towomen. In 2009, one in three of all theprizes were, including the first ever prizefor a woman in economics. The leastremarkable and most predictable award in2009 was that to the American President.There was no gradual built up to this shiftaway from men, including away from whitemen in the allocation of prizes which wasanother facet of the 2009 allocation. Theworld had changed. There had been aneconomic crash and long held beliefs ofsuperiority in many walks of life werechanging. The origins of the ideas thatcurrently constitute the core beliefs ofinjustice can be traced back to when welast lived in times as unequal as today,during the last ‘gilded age’, which began atthe end of the American Civil War in1865 and ended in 1914 in Europe, and inthe late 1920s in the United States.

Prizes such as those of Alfred Nobel cameabout when they did, along with the firstintelligence (IQ) tests, because it was onlyat that point that there were spoils greatenough to be shared out in rich countries,and those who had gained most neededto justify their positions in newly createdhierarchies. Nobel prizes were firstawarded in 1901 in the midst of that firstgilded age of great wealth concentration,when it was unimaginable that therewould not be some ‘natural’ elite. Over acentury later the educational statistics theyproduce suggest that some internationalbodies such as the Organisation forEconomic Co-operation andDevelopment (OECD) still continue thetradition of trying to defend elitism asnatural, but bodies such as the OECD arenow far more coy about their intent thanthose in the 1890s who first used socialstatistics to suggest that paupers mainlybred more paupers. That coyness suggeststhat in recent years some progress againstrising elitism has been made because theelitist know now to hide their core beliefsabout the distribution of human ability inobscure technical notes, presumably in afailed attempt to avoid criticism. Although

elitist views still underlie the beliefs ofmany in power, they have also now beeninstitutionalised in the form of bodies suchas the OECD. Those destined to bepaupers today are labelled children ‘limitedin their ability’ – a staggering seventh of allchildren born in the richest of countriesare labelled thus today. Almost seventyyears ago in the UK, William Beveridgenamed ‘ignorance’ as one of his five socialevils; but as ignorance was overcomeacross the rich world, widespread elitismtook its place, and children who wouldhave appeared of normal ability in the1940s are called limited today.

The most terrible result of elitism is that itcan be used to justify the exclusion of somany people from normal social activity. Itwas in the most affluent of countries acentury ago that the supposed scientifictheories defending inequality began to bedrawn up. The modern origins of exclusioncan be traced to an academic paper of1895 when data was first presented thatshowed the geographical distribution ofEnglish and Welsh paupers in a way thatwas designed to suggest that pauperisationwas some kind of natural phenomenon.The timing of this was no coincidence –this was the first time under a marketsystem that such an abundance of wealthhad emerged. It then became necessary totry to update feudal justifications for theunequal distribution of that wealth and toexplain why so many should have to livewith so little.

The new justifications became dominantbeliefs between the 1890s and the 1930s,but were then rejected for a generationbefore gaining ground again as socialexclusion rose from the late 1960sonwards, alongside the great growth inpersonal debt when the old social evil thatBeveridge described as ‘want’ was cutdown in size. The cycles through whichpeople fell into exclusion due to havingtoo little were first established as wecurrently see them in the 1960s. Beforethen, to be truly rich was to be landed. Tobe poor was, for many, normal. Today, onein six of all households in rich countriesare again excluded from social norms due

to poverty and are poor in at least twoways of counting poverty. What nowmakes those households poor are theeffects of the riches of others.

Elitism and exclusion have further causesand corollaries, and chief among these isprejudice. As elitism and inequality rise,and as more people become sociallyexcluded, or are able to excludethemselves by dint of their wealth, thoseat the top more often look down onothers with ever greater disdain and fear,as evidenced by growing social and spatialsegregation in Britain. Those at the bottomare also less likely to trust others andmore likely to become fearful in a societythat so clearly values them so little. Racismrises in just these kinds of circumstances,and a wider form of racism, a middle classracism, a new social Darwinism, quietlyspreads. Over time, inequalities in wealthand health, and the widespreadacceptance of bigoted views, all shrankfrom their height in the 1920s, to reachminima in the early 1970s, before rising upagain in that fateful decade of oil shock,inflation and “overseas intervention” (war).

Just as one in seven children have beenmarked as ‘limited’ by elitist labels and onein six families as ‘poor’ by the economiccircumstances of exclusion, as a result ofnew prejudices over how it is acceptableto treat others (which have overtaken theold social evil of idleness in importanceand effect), an even higher proportion ofone in five households in rich countrieswere only just managing to get by withgreat difficulty, even before the financialcrash of 2008. Our inability in the mostunequal of rich nations to undertake landreform or even tax land value and otherwealth provides the material mechanismthrough which prejudice is transmittedbetween generations, how it is maintainedby inherited wealth and the deep socialpolarisation that results. Of the 25 richescountries in the world, the UK is the fifthmost unequal in terms of incomedistribution, even more unequal thanIsrael. That is why social polarisation inBritain is so great. Countries like Japan andKorea became more equal through having

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land reform thrust upon them by theUnited States. Countries like Norway andthe Netherlands used taxation to reduceinequality. Two thirds of the world’s richestbillion people live longer, mentally happier,better educated, better rewarded livesthan we in Britain. They do these things infamilies that stick together more often andwhere crime is far less of both a realityand a fear. They do this despite mostlybeing poorer on arithmetic average thanare people in UK. We created the NHS,universal secondary education for all, andbegan the greatest housing program inour history when we were bankruptfollowing the Second World War. It is notmoney but the will to change our livesthat is missing.

The rise of elitism, exclusion and prejudicewere all precursors to the age of greed,ushered in during the 1980s, seen as good,and not questioned seriously until 2008.At least a quarter of households are nowdisregarded in what is considered accessto normal infrastructure, whether it besimply the ability to own and drive a caror to be able to access the internet.In the US not to have a car these days isnot to live as a ‘normal’ human being. InBritain almost half the children of loneparents live in families which have noaccess to a car. Many people who need acar because they have young children orfind it hard to walk or no longer live nearshops, have no car. Many of the carjourneys made are non-essential and themajority of cars contain only one person,the driver. Some 7% of single personhouseholds own two or more cars! If welived in a more equitable society, wewould realise that there are enough carscurrently owned for all those who need acar to have one. More equitable affluentsocieties are also better able to build andmaintain public transport, and even thetrains run on time far more often. Peoplewho are not insulted by their pay or thejob they are asked to do are far better attheir jobs.

Mass car driving is the simplest example ofwhat happens when greed begins to bevalued in its own right. When you next

look at a congested street, with carsjostling to move a few metres forward,pedestrians dodging in between, cyclistsweaving dangerously around them,children walking past at the level ofexhaust pipes, no one getting anywherefast, and all those petrol enginescontinuously running, this is the bothsymbolic but also very real collectiveoutcome of individual greed encouragedto grow by the mantra of personalfreedom.

Unsurprisingly, growing despair is the resultfor those living in the most elite of affluentsocieties, where inequalities are allowedand encouraged to rise untrammelled,where more and more are excluded orlive partly in fear of being ostracised,where prejudice towards the ‘lowerorders’ begins again to become normaland where greed is commonly referred toimplicitly (if not often explicitly) as good.

In Britain it was in the 1990s when thefastest rise in recorded despair occurred.This rise was not just in the growing useof prescription medicines to get throughthe day, but in the growth of feelings thatthere must be more to life. The YoungFoundation’s report “Mapping Britain’sNeeds” showed figures for adultsworsening in the 1990s and again morerecently. Even children were hit with afeeling of despair, with the fastest increasesin adolescent depression being recordedin North America and Britain in the1990s, a rise found not to be due tochanging diagnostic practice. The despairwas often very private, with privateconsumption of medicine, alcohol andother drugs, a private despair at debts orfeelings of failure.

In Britain private despair reached suchlevels that by 2006 it was being reportedthat a third of families had at least onefamily member who was suffering fromdepression or a chronic anxiety disorder.But it was also public, as shown by thepublication of so many books criticisingmodern trends, the rise of the greenmovement and of new forms of socialprotest. Across Europe the majority of

best-selling books on subjects such aseconomics were not business manuals butalternative treatises on the woes ofcapitalism. By 2004 anti-globalisation bookswere almost the only books on businessor economics that sold well in Europe.

In the 2000s we stumbled into a crisis thatno one now denies was of our ownmaking. Given this, how it is possible to beoptimistic in the face of rising socialinjustices and the financial crash? Foroptimism concentrate on what is nowdifferent in the circumstances that are notof our making, on what we now know andon just how many more people are nowinvolved in the arguments about whathappens next. Out of the many things thatare different, the increase in education isthe most important, with a majority ofyoung people in the world being literate,and near majorities in more equitable richcountries now attending university.Compared to the end of the last gildedage it is now much harder to see who orwhat there is left to exploit, and howmuch harder it will be to fool so manybetter informed people this time round.

Arguments against injustice used to berare treatises. A single essay against slaverywritten in 1785 could be held up high as ashining example of such work twocenturies later, but it has largely only beenwithin living memory that we have startedto learn that it was not the essays ofaristocrats that made differences in thepast; it was the fact that theircontributions were far more oftenrecorded and preserved. Slaves also madeslavery uneconomic by not adaptingwillingly to slavery; they worked slowly,they revolted, they died young. Similarly, itis only within the last century that thelives of the ‘great men’ and odd woman ofscience, politics and business (men whoare still so often put on pedestals) havebeen re-examined and found not toproduce biographies of awe. Theirfallibilities, failings and most importantlytheir luck, are all being revealed morefrequently. In each case they areremembered for an achievement that wasalways just about to be made because of

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the circumstances or the actions of othersaround them, now mostly forgotten. Thebelief that human advancement isachieved by a few great peoplethemselves standing on the shoulders ofgiants is misplaced. There are nosuperhuman people, and to say so isunjust.

Acknowledgements

Sources for all the statistics and argumentsmade here are given in: Dorling, D.“Injustice: why social inequality persists”,published by Policy Press in March 2010,apart from reference to the YoungFoundation report which was published inDecember 2009 and the contributionslisted below. Everything said here wasthought of by someone else first. Forinstance, I am grateful to those compasswatchers who posted comments to MarkPerryman’s Thinkpiece of July 2009 “We’reall in this together - Towards the politicalpractice of a Plural Left”, in particular JonTeunon and Salfordgal (London).Annabelle Lever’s comments on BillKerry’s “Taking Equality Out of the LeftGhetto” and David Chester’s Land ValueTax suggestions of June 2009 in responseto Colin Crouch’s “After privatisedKeynesianism” have all been used toconstruct just the first paragraph of thisthinkpiece. Every comment is worthmaking. All changes how we think. A newgeneration of men and women isbeginning to realise how it is both unjustand unrealistic to claim more than anextremely small impact as their personalcontribution. But even the smallest impactis worthwhile. True social justice will bothcreate and require much greater equalitythan is as yet widely accepted

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