Can we be honest?

We walk, live and breathe amidst the clamour for a new politics – for a root and branch clear-out of the political system and the political class that populates it. Yet whilst it is true that we need new political blood, and that both the MPs’ allowances system and the constitutional set-up need reform, the lurch to the anti-politics of mass anger, vengeance and fatalism asks for much more than this. But for what, exactly, does it ask? The answer is that it doesn’t really know, it simply morphs from this to that form of indignation, like a storm rolling across a turbulent ocean.

We walk, live and breathe amidst the clamour for a new politics – for a root and branch clear-out of the political system and the political class that populates it. Yet whilst it is true that we need new political blood, and that both the MPs’ allowances system and the constitutional set-up need reform, the lurch to the anti-politics of mass anger, vengeance and fatalism asks for much more than this. But for what, exactly, does it ask? The answer is that it doesn’t really know, it simply morphs from this to that form of indignation, like a storm rolling across a turbulent ocean.

But there is a ridiculous delusion at the heart of this hysteria: that somehow it is the political class – and the bankers, don’t forget the bankers! – that have wronged society. Nothing to do with the people. They didn’t vote for them, take out their hundred percent mortgages, speculate on properties financed by the low interest rates they set. Oh no, nobody did any of that, and if they did, it’s all somebody else’s fault.

For a while there was a sense that we were all responsible. George Osborne announced a new austerity, David Cameron the importance of responsible communities. Labour played catch-up, John Cruddas thinking hard about how the Left should respond to the financial crisis. Some kind of collective recognition of what a new politics would look like seemed to be at hand: one where communities came before individuals, where change started at home, where our own selfishness and materialism were acknowledged and rejected. But then the mania set in, and now we’re not at fault at all.

There is a psychological explanation of this mass delusion. Psychologists talk about ‘fundamental attribution error’. This is where we attribute mistakes made by others to their personalities rather than the situations they are acting in, but where we only attribute positive achievements to ourselves, while attributing our mistakes to the situation. This leads to an unholy alliance of arrogant self-aggrandisement, ‘not my fault guv’’ buck-passing, and hypocritical blame-mongering.

This explanation works reasonably well, but what does it really say – that we’re all just a bit rubbish? I think there’s a deeper explanation to the mass rage. This explanation has two parts, a story and a reality.

The story is based on what Michael Oakeshott called ‘rationalism in politics’ – the idea that western enlightened democracies are inexorably moving toward economic and social perfection: a society capable of uniformly making the right choices through rational deliberation. The latest version of this story came in the form of a triumphant neo-liberalism.

The reality is that most of the time we are not rational deliberators. The pandemics of anger, disgust, and fear, all manipulated by various media, testify to our largely irrational natures: we copy one another, we get swept along by the herd, we vent our emotions in mass swathes.

But the story and reality are connected. It is because we implicitly feel that our societies should be moving towards perfection that we are so angry they are not. And because we don’t think we need to do anything much to bring about inevitable progress, we shirk responsibility in a collective fit of indignation. White Van Man’s anger over immigration and Europe is at bottom due to disappointment: his was to be a gilded journey to Jerusalem, but he’s stuck somewhere on the M1 instead.

MPs expenses are a side-show. The truth is our political system is broken due to a lack of honesty about what politics can achieve, and how it can achieve it. We must recognise that the good society only comes to those who work at it, bit by bit, mistake by mistake. And that we as citizens are required to contribute as well. The Victorians' great surge of municipal development was based on lofty ideals, but they also put the hours in. They would’ve laughed off our callow belief that society can be perfected without doing much ourselves. Theirs was social change brought not just through government bills but the associative bonds of grass-roots activity. Passive consumerism and political spin have kept us from this truth about what social improvement really requires.

A good dose of honesty about the myth of inexorable progress and perfectibility would do us the world of good. Then our irrationalities, our herd mentality, could be put to work in our favour – a mood of humility would bed down and we could face up to our problems together. The first thing politicians can do in this direction is be honest about the reach of politics. For their lack of honesty here is what we are really angry about. But like all the most vehement anger, it’s in part a projection of anger with ourselves - deep down we know we are not being honest either.