[Robin McAlpine Blog] You can’t understand what will happen without lowering your eyes

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You can't understand what will happen without lowering your eyes

I read The Herald’s article at the weekend about whether or not Scotland would ever become independent. Neil McKay gathered a perfectly reasonable group of academics and other commentators to explore whether they believed Scotland was on a path to independence in the short, medium or long term. I have no real disagreement with anything in what was said and written.

I do however have a fairly substantial concern about what was not in it – and this is an issue which goes an awful long way beyond independence. Because what was almost entirely missing from this lengthy piece was anyone who isn’t either a politician elected to one of about 200 positions in Scotland or incredibly wealthy (i.e. ‘markets’ or ‘business interests’).

So let me give you a little take on what the world would look like backwards if the analysis offered by these commentators was accurate. First of all there would be no French or Russian revolutions. Woman wouldn’t be allowed to vote. The British Empire would be intact. There would be a wall through the middle of Berlin. Racial segregation would still dominate the US.

Women would wear long skirts, modest petticoats and only have sex after marriage and men would wear hats. Children would be seen and not heard. We’d all go to church every weekend, chickens would live in cages and rock and roll wouldn’t exist. Because in not a single one of these instances could you have derived what would actually happen by listening to politicians of the time.

It is a terrible flaw of the modern world that the fragmentation of social institutions resulting from neoliberalism and globalisation has resulted in those who document our society no longer taking much interest in the society they document, only a tiny sliver of the elite. Sure, this was always the case to a degree, but there were other parts of society that did merit study.

Or rather, it’s not that they merited study – lots of things merit study that don’t get it – it’s that it was easy to study. Since everything raised in the weekend’s article was basically political-sociological, let me give you a hint at the transition in social science in academia. Until this century, a key strand of sociology was industrial sociology, the sociology of how we work and how we experience the economy.

It was made possible by the fact that there was a more monolithic work culture, big single-site factories where ‘work’ took place and strong, well-organised trade unions which meant gaining access to democratic structures inside those workplaces was comparatively easy. As the ‘era of factories’ in the western world ground to a halt and as trade unions were diminished through hostile legislation, so did a lot of the study.

Almost every other factor about Scotland and it’s people which is not made out of elite decision-making is largely ignored

What replaced it was a new area of study – the fetishisation of the individual. It is ironic that sociology (the science of collective society) became so obsessed with fragmented personal matters (particularly identity factors like race, gender and sexuality). Rather than studying the individual through the lens of society, we started to study society through the lens of individual preoccupations.

It is how we made the shift from the era when (for example) racism was primarily conceived of as a structural issue of social power systems to being viewed as a cumulation of multiple individual acts which are taken to be a product not so much of conflicting power structures but of historical semiotic signifiers.

Let me unpack that a touch for those who don’t immediately recognise and understand this shift (or the jargon…). For most of the history of both political and sociological study the dominant theories were rooted in what is known as ‘structuralism’. This said that, first and foremost, there are structures of power, wealth and coercion which exist in society and these are the primary drivers of outcomes.

Of course there are lots and lots of individual actions, but sociology in particular was created specifically because, like an anecdote, picking an individual action can show anything you want it to. If you want to have a degree of confidence that what you are seeing is meaningful you need to look at the larger scale.

It is no coincidence that sociology was in effect born when a French philosopher showed statistically that suicide was actually a social act, not a purely individual one. If suicide was completely personal there would be no clear pattern to when and how they happen – but there is. That proves something deeper and structural is involved.

What arrived by the 1990s was poststructuralism. This is what I studied, but only after a solid grounding in structuralism. There is much in poststructuralism which is valuable because it makes clear that big structural analyses can’t explain everything. Almost all of the original poststructuralist social theorists began with ‘now there are these big structures in society, but to understand them better it helps to break them down…’.

It wasn’t a rejection of the idea that societies are complex and based on power relationships, it was a perspective on them. Unfortunately that perspective has led the social sciences up a blind alley. They look at the top (how politicians and political parties operate in a closed political system) and the bottom (how individuals react to the outcomes of these decisions), ignoring the middle.

Yet there is so much in the middle, so many powerful social constructions. It’s just that they’re not neatly organised in the way that industrial trade unions or the churches or other big third sector organisations used to be. So now there is little (organised) to look at but politicians in conversation with politicians.

What this means is that for the group of commentators who were asked the questions in this article, the result is defined as ‘what decision-makers do’, not ‘the interaction between decision-makers and a complex society’. Which means that literally almost every other factor about Scotland and it’s people which is not made out of elite decision-making is largely ignored.

It’s like a swimmer watching a small black triangle going round and round them in the water and them trying to work out what strategy the black triangle is following. It’s a process of not sticking your head under the water and shouting ‘fuck! it’s a shark!’. So then the swimmer gets bitten and immediately finds themselves sitting in a hospital bed wondering what it is about these sheets that are causing so much pain in the left leg.

It is an echo of the recent past, trying to work out why the recent past didn’t take us to the place that the recent past was supposed to take us

Very simply put, for all the performative politics of huffing and puffing from Sturgeon on a ‘second referendum’, politics didn’t and wasn’t going to deliver it alone (if at all). The idea that politics alone was sufficient is utterly daft for anyone with a grasp of history. Yet that is how we look at things in contemporary debate.

It’s not ‘Starmer being bad’ which is the sum total of why people are questioning the British State, it’s their treatment at work, their experiences as consumers, their feelings about culture and the tone and attitude of how Britain is carrying itself internationally. That will be affected by how civic campaigns organise and channel that mood, how the media will report it, how the lobbyists will spin it.

The problem with the article at the weekend is the problem with modern political journalism and it is the problem with contemporary academia. It is just easier to act as a commentator on a small political court and its machinations and failures than on a big, messy, complex interplay of social factors right across our society.

Or to put it another way, this article told us nothing about the future and only a little about now. It is an echo of the recent past, trying to work out why the recent past didn’t take us to the place that the recent past was supposed to take us. It removed all agency from everything in society which is not the holder of overwhelming political or financial power.

That is not how societies work. What was said in that article was all perfectly reasonable in its own self-contained way – but I can promise you it is a very poor indicator to what is coming next in Scottish and UK democracy. It is fondling an elephant’s tail and reporting confidently that it is a small snake. It is reducing complexity to simplicity. And it is wrong.

We exist in an era where no politician of any stripe seems able to get anything done. There are lots of reasons for this, but one crucial one is that we got stupid about what a society is and how it works. We bought into the ‘end of history’ stuff and swallowed the ‘all big internal conflicts are gone and now it’s just a case of efficient management of the status quo’ bollocks.

So I 100 per cent agree that whenever Scottish independence arrives it will have had very, very little to do with John Swinney. However the corollary of that is not true; the vanishingly small contribution John Swinney is making to independence doesn’t mean it won’t happen.

You pick your issue and you’ll find the same thing; there is a political class and a commentator class and they’re chasing each other round the room while other things happen. The future is found in those other things – while no-one who reaches the pages of newspapers is looking.

Source: You can't understand what will happen without lowering your eyes