Brave New World

Brave New World

After watching England's football team (mercifully but deservedly) beat Tunisia in the last few minutes two nights ago I spent a very enjoyable hour on my balcony, calvados in hand and breathing in the scent of the jasmine all around me (see photo), and got to wondering about the rôle of the middle classes in a society. I'm not sure why that thought occurred, although I am very conscious of a battle that seems to me to be going on for supremacy between the extreme right and the middle ground in Europe (and elsewhere).

I immediately recalled something that a Ghanaian student had said to me at Bristol university in the early 1960s. At the time, the Ghanaian president Nkrumah was busy slaughtering the middle classes in his country in order to cement his power. She said, ruefully: “At least it shows we have a middle class”. Why was that important? Because at the time most of the rest of the post-colonial, recently independent countries were engaged in conflict between extreme right and left-wing contenders for power, promoted by external capitalist/communist influences. They didn't have a middle class.

So what is the significance of a middle class, in Napoleon's scornful terms Britain's “shopkeepers”? According to George Bernard Shaw it was the bastion of morality (of a sort). GBS said that only the middle classes valued morality; the rich didn't need it and the poor couldn't afford it. And the middle classes, the bourgeousie, were widely ridiculed in artistic circles for their presumed philistinism; they rejected art that was extreme in any sense, irrespective of its artistic value, and embraced what was unchallenging. In general, the middle classes got a poor Press, neither one thing nor the other, portrayed as having no aesthetic sensibilities and as having aspirations only to distinguish themselves from the lower classes and aspiring to (slavishly aping ) the upper classes. This was the stereotypical picture of the middle classes in a lot of Europe in the (post-war) 1950s.

Someone significant (shame on me, I can't remember who) once said that all important battles have to be fought continually; they are never truly resolved. That is most certainly true of democracy. And, I think, the role of the middle classes in democracy is now more important than ever. Philistines to art and the possibilities of how life might be lived (keep the aspidistra flying) they may be, though not necessarily, but they are the bastions that keep extremes of political greed and power at bay. They also, almost innocently, assumed the importance and general acceptance of standards: honesty, integrity, moderation (and, OK, often God and the Queen and so on but so what). And no one believes that they always adhered to these “principles” but they did assert the importance of them. I believe that that assertion (in practice or not) had great importance in itself.

What I think is happening in our brave new world is that this “innocence” persists in middle classes but has become increasingly different from reality and blinds them to that reality. You could believe (and did) in what you read in newspapers, heard on the radio or saw on TV. OK, there were slightly different slants/angles but you could generally accept the substance as true. You most certainly can't now. There was a pride in the journalistic profession that journalists checked facts and gave reasoned opinions on them; that is most certainly no longer true. The distinction, once the “credo” of The Times newspaper, between the facts and the opinion, has long gone. There was a belief that institutions such as the BBC was independent and would report accurately and fairly, overlooking (innocently) its dependence on the government for budget. Broadly, you believed what you heard and saw and that, generally, wasn't too far from reality. You believed that your local MP did have the interests of his/her constituency at heart, whatever the conflict of views. The assumed standards prevailed. Only a true innocent or ignoramus would believe that now.

What, in contrast, we have now is “nature red in tooth and claw”. The power struggles are naked; lies repeated ad nauseam can become accepted as fact. But persisting innocence makes the middle classes blind to them and, perhaps, to the power that the middle classes have in a democracy if wielded as a collectivity. I think we need the middle classes and their value of standards more than ever now but we also need the middle classes to lose their innocence and wake up to the new reality.