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ofthisandthat Commentary |
Copyright © 2010 ofthisandthat.org.
All rights reserved.
All rights reserved.
January 29, 2013
Another Country
The way we are governed is inexplicable – until you understand the upbringing of the
elite.
By George Monbiot
Source: Monbiot.com
Those whom the gods love die young: are they trying to tell me something? Due to an
inexplicable discontinuity in space-time, on Sunday I turned 50. I have petitioned the
relevant authorities, but there’s nothing they can do.
So I will use the occasion to try to explain the alien world from which I came. To
understand how and why we are now governed as we are, you need to know
something of that strange place.
I was born into the third tier of the dominant class: those without land or capital, but
with salaries high enough to send their children to private schools. My preparatory
school, which I attended from the age of eight, was a hard place, still Victorian in tone.
We boarded, and saw our parents every few weeks. We were addressed only by our
surnames and caned for misdemeanours. Discipline was rigid, pastoral care almost
non-existent. But it was also strangely lost.
A few decades earlier, the role of such schools was clear: they broke boys’
attachment to their families and re-attached them to the instititions – the colonial
service, the government, the armed forces – through which the British ruling class
projected its power. Every year they released into the world a cadre of kamikazes,
young men fanatically devoted to their caste and culture.
By the time I was eight those institutions had either collapsed (in the case of colonial
service), fallen into other hands (government), or were no longer a primary means by
which British power was asserted (the armed forces). Such schools remained good at
breaking attachments, less good at creating them.
But the old forms and the old thinking persisted. The school chaplain used to recite a
prayer which began “let us now praise famous men”. Most of those he named were
heroes of colonial conquest or territorial wars. Some, such as Douglas Haig and
Herbert Kitchener, were by then widely regarded as war criminals. Our dormitories
were named after the same people. The history we were taught revolved around
topics such as Gordon of Khartoum, Stanley and Livingstone and the Black Hole of
Calcutta. In geography, the maps still showed much of the globe coloured red.
My second boarding school was a kinder, more liberal place. But we remained as
detached from the rest of society as Carthusian monks. The world, when we were
released into it, was unrecognisable. It bore no relationship to our learning or
experience. The result was cognitive dissonance: a highly uncomfortable state from
which human beings will do almost anything to escape. There were two principal
means. One – the more painful – was to question everything you held to be true. This
process took me years: in fact it has not ended. It was, at first, highly disruptive to my
peace of mind and sense of self.
The other, as US Republicans did during the Bush presidency, is to create your own
reality. If the world does not fit your worldview, you either shore up your worldview with
selectivity and denial, or (if you have power) you try to bend the world to fit the shape
it takes in your mind. Much of the effort of conservative columnists and editors and of
certain politicians and historians appears to be devoted to these tasks.
In the Origins of Totalitarianism, Hannah Arendt explains that the nobles of pre-
revolutionary France “did not regard themselves as representative of the nation, but
as a separate ruling caste which might have much more in common with a foreign
people of the same society and condition than with its compatriots.”(1) Last year the
former Republican staffer Mike Lofgren wrote something very similar about the
dominant classes of the US: “the rich elites of this country have far more in common
with their counterparts in London, Paris, and Tokyo than with their fellow American
citizens … the rich disconnect themselves from the civic life of the nation and from any
concern about its well being except as a place to extract loot. Our plutocracy now lives
like the British in colonial India: in the place and ruling it, but not of it.”(2)
Secession from the concerns and norms of the rest of society characterises any well-
established elite. Our own ruling caste, schooled separately, brought up to believe in
justifying fairytales, lives in a world of its own, from which it can project power without
understanding or even noticing the consequences. A removal from the life of the rest
of the nation is no barrier to the desire to dominate it. In fact it appears to be
associated with a powerful sense of entitlement.
So if you have wondered how the current government can blithely engage in the
wholesale transfer of wealth from the poor to the rich, how its front bench can rock
with laughter as it truncates the livelihoods of the poorest people of this country, why
it commits troops to ever more pointless post-colonial wars, here, I think, is part of the
answer. Many of those who govern us do not in their hearts belong here. They belong
to a different culture, a different world, which knows as little of its own acts as it knows
of those who suffer them.
www.monbiot.com
References:
1. Hannah Arendt, 1951. The Origins of Totalitarianism. Chapter 6. Originally
published by Schocken Books, Berlin.
2. Mike Lofgren, 27th August 2012. Revolt of the Rich. The American Conservative.
http://www.theamericanconservative.com/articles/revolt-of-the-rich/
Another Country
The way we are governed is inexplicable – until you understand the upbringing of the
elite.
By George Monbiot
Source: Monbiot.com
Those whom the gods love die young: are they trying to tell me something? Due to an
inexplicable discontinuity in space-time, on Sunday I turned 50. I have petitioned the
relevant authorities, but there’s nothing they can do.
So I will use the occasion to try to explain the alien world from which I came. To
understand how and why we are now governed as we are, you need to know
something of that strange place.
I was born into the third tier of the dominant class: those without land or capital, but
with salaries high enough to send their children to private schools. My preparatory
school, which I attended from the age of eight, was a hard place, still Victorian in tone.
We boarded, and saw our parents every few weeks. We were addressed only by our
surnames and caned for misdemeanours. Discipline was rigid, pastoral care almost
non-existent. But it was also strangely lost.
A few decades earlier, the role of such schools was clear: they broke boys’
attachment to their families and re-attached them to the instititions – the colonial
service, the government, the armed forces – through which the British ruling class
projected its power. Every year they released into the world a cadre of kamikazes,
young men fanatically devoted to their caste and culture.
By the time I was eight those institutions had either collapsed (in the case of colonial
service), fallen into other hands (government), or were no longer a primary means by
which British power was asserted (the armed forces). Such schools remained good at
breaking attachments, less good at creating them.
But the old forms and the old thinking persisted. The school chaplain used to recite a
prayer which began “let us now praise famous men”. Most of those he named were
heroes of colonial conquest or territorial wars. Some, such as Douglas Haig and
Herbert Kitchener, were by then widely regarded as war criminals. Our dormitories
were named after the same people. The history we were taught revolved around
topics such as Gordon of Khartoum, Stanley and Livingstone and the Black Hole of
Calcutta. In geography, the maps still showed much of the globe coloured red.
My second boarding school was a kinder, more liberal place. But we remained as
detached from the rest of society as Carthusian monks. The world, when we were
released into it, was unrecognisable. It bore no relationship to our learning or
experience. The result was cognitive dissonance: a highly uncomfortable state from
which human beings will do almost anything to escape. There were two principal
means. One – the more painful – was to question everything you held to be true. This
process took me years: in fact it has not ended. It was, at first, highly disruptive to my
peace of mind and sense of self.
The other, as US Republicans did during the Bush presidency, is to create your own
reality. If the world does not fit your worldview, you either shore up your worldview with
selectivity and denial, or (if you have power) you try to bend the world to fit the shape
it takes in your mind. Much of the effort of conservative columnists and editors and of
certain politicians and historians appears to be devoted to these tasks.
In the Origins of Totalitarianism, Hannah Arendt explains that the nobles of pre-
revolutionary France “did not regard themselves as representative of the nation, but
as a separate ruling caste which might have much more in common with a foreign
people of the same society and condition than with its compatriots.”(1) Last year the
former Republican staffer Mike Lofgren wrote something very similar about the
dominant classes of the US: “the rich elites of this country have far more in common
with their counterparts in London, Paris, and Tokyo than with their fellow American
citizens … the rich disconnect themselves from the civic life of the nation and from any
concern about its well being except as a place to extract loot. Our plutocracy now lives
like the British in colonial India: in the place and ruling it, but not of it.”(2)
Secession from the concerns and norms of the rest of society characterises any well-
established elite. Our own ruling caste, schooled separately, brought up to believe in
justifying fairytales, lives in a world of its own, from which it can project power without
understanding or even noticing the consequences. A removal from the life of the rest
of the nation is no barrier to the desire to dominate it. In fact it appears to be
associated with a powerful sense of entitlement.
So if you have wondered how the current government can blithely engage in the
wholesale transfer of wealth from the poor to the rich, how its front bench can rock
with laughter as it truncates the livelihoods of the poorest people of this country, why
it commits troops to ever more pointless post-colonial wars, here, I think, is part of the
answer. Many of those who govern us do not in their hearts belong here. They belong
to a different culture, a different world, which knows as little of its own acts as it knows
of those who suffer them.
www.monbiot.com
References:
1. Hannah Arendt, 1951. The Origins of Totalitarianism. Chapter 6. Originally
published by Schocken Books, Berlin.
2. Mike Lofgren, 27th August 2012. Revolt of the Rich. The American Conservative.
http://www.theamericanconservative.com/articles/revolt-of-the-rich/