A Darkening Present?
On 24 June 2016, at about 3.40 in the morning , there could no longer be any doubt. Britain had voted to leave the European Union . Or, at least, that was true of England and Wales. It was not the case in Scotland or Northern Ireland . A friend and I wept. We were not alone. Of the ‘48 per centers’ who had voted to retain our relationship with the rest of the Union, we were but two who fell prey that early morning to feelings of disgust, fear and betrayal. ‘How could they have been so stupid?’ ‘How can we stay in this bloody country with these xenophobic idiots?’ Our region had voted to leave in significant numbers. The thought of staying in the neighbourhood that weekend was intolerable. ‘Let’s take a couple of days away, let’s just book into a hotel in H—, and have a change of scene.’
But first there were the hugs and embraces with others, and the phone calls. ‘Can you believe it?’ ‘I know , I know; what now?’ ‘There’s a petition for another referendum ,’ ‘Yes, but if we’d won, we’d be saying “accept it,”’ ‘Ok, but it’s different, we were all lied to,’ ‘Yeah, and we saw through it.’ H—proved both diversion and source of deepening rage. At a music festival on the Saturday afternoon, the drummer suddenly stopped playing and announced to the crowd that he was Muslim. The crowd cheered. Afterwards, I went and thanked him. But for what? For stating who he was? For feeling that he had to state who he was? He looked at me. ‘Coming to the gig today, someone told me to get off home. … I’ve lived here for years.’
At breakfast the next morning, we overheard a conversation between a man in his 30s and two of the hotel staff: one a local man in his late teens, the other a young woman from Poland. ‘I am so, so sorry,’ said the man, looking over in our direction. ‘It’s the older ones who have wrecked your lives, I can’t tell you how much they sicken me.’ He walked past us on his way out. I called the local teenager over to our table. ‘I don’t know who that man is, but I’d like to speak to him. We might be “old”, but we are as disgusted as he is.’ ‘Oh, don’t worry, he’s just very upset.’ ‘We’re all upset! We’re all quite desperate, we’re all sorry!’
There was comedy as well. Whilst waiting in the hotel foyer to settle the bill, we were suddenly in the middle of a film set. A German news crew had arrived to interview ‘key’ townspeople after the vote. A very large man was sitting on the balcony and patting a bulldog. He was the focus of the crew’s attention. ‘Why him?’, I asked, ‘Who is he?’ ‘He’s the Chair of our local UKIP 1 group.’ ‘Complete with bulldog?’ ‘Ah, yes,’ the hotel manager laughed, ‘But it’s a French bulldog!’
Tragedy tinged with farce? Well, that depends on your point of view. 2 The preceding account of my reactions to the result of the UK referendum of 23 June 2016 includes the anger, the sadness and the sense of deep despair that I felt during that first ‘post-Brexit ’ weekend. It also includes examples of my feelings of superiority over the ‘bloody idiots’ who believed the ‘lies’. It includes the comfort to be derived from knowing that most of the people close to me felt the same way and that I could merge my voice within the louder clamour of righteous rage and indignation. It includes my fury at being mistakenly targeted as ‘one of them’. It includes mention of the fact that I was able to go away for the weekend, that I had sufficient economic and social capital to seek alternative shores and different horizons. In other words, the preceding paragraphs offer illustration of a type of ‘Remain’ voter: University-educated, professional ‘middle class ’. My age, over 60, broke one particular pattern: the ‘Leavers’ tended to be older. But for the rest, I conformed to type. What is not included in this account is much reflection, or much wisdom .
Social and cultural psychologist, Jonathan Haidt , argues in The Righteous Mind. Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion (2012) that David Hume was right in positing an emotional basis to our reasoning processes and moral conclusions, and he contrasts Hume’s propositions with those adhering to the rationalist delusion, among whom he includes Plato and Kant . ‘I call it a delusion because when a group of people make something sacred , the members of the cult lose the ability to think clearly about it’ (2012, p. 34). Haidt suggests the metaphor of the elephant and its rider to illustrate his claim about human nature that, whilst the rider/reason thinks she is in control, her role is actually post hoc rationaliser to explain the movements of the emotionally and intuitively driven elephant. And from this, he postulates (2012, p. 55) ‘the social intuitionist model of moral judgement which has four main links: 1) Intuitive judgement; 2) Post hoc reasoning; 3) Reasoned persuasion; 4) Social persuasion’. Haidt emphasises the point that he is not advocating a simplistic understanding of emotion which drives our moral choices, but rather that ‘intuitions (including emotional responses) are a kind of cognition. They’re just not a kind of reasoning’ (p. 56). The conclusions arising from this are worth quoting at length for what they have to offer the disillusioned ‘Remain’ voter struggling to understand what went so badly ‘wrong’ on 23 June:
The social intuitionist model offers an explanation of why moral and political arguments are so frustrating: because moral reasons are the tail wagged by the intuitive dog. A dog’s tail wags to communicate. You can’t make a dog happy by forcibly wagging its tail. And you can’t change people’s minds by utterly refuting their arguments. […] [I]f you want to change people’s minds, you’ve got to talk to their elephants. You’ve got to use links 3 and 4 of the social intuitionist model to elicit new intuitions , not new ration ales. (Haidt 2012, p. 57, original emphasis)
Drawing upon neuroscience , philosophy and psychology , and upon thousands of cross-disciplinary studies, experiments and interviews both within the United States and internationally, Haidt concludes that there are six foundations to what he terms our moral matrix , and that each operates on a spectrum: ‘care/harm; liberty/oppression; fairness/cheating; loyalty/betrayal; authority/subversion; sanctity/degradation’. He is not a moral relativist. He argues that these categories pertain across the globe, although with different emphases.
Haidt also suggests that it is those with the more conservative mindset who are more likely to operate across the six elements of his moral matrix , whereas those of a more liberal leaning will generally concentrate on the first two or three, and pay little attention to the rest. Thus, the liberals will be primarily concerned with improving care and reducing harm, with increasing liberty and reducing oppression. The conservatives tend to include questions of loyalty (e.g., to the nation), respect towards those in authority and the need to protect the sanctity of certain beliefs and institutions against external threats and (perceived) moral dissolution. Both pay attention to the spectrum concerning ‘fairness and cheating’, but the conservatives are more likely to reframe their interest in what is fair, in terms of ‘proportionality’ rather than in promoting equal shares for all. In other words, as Haidt argues, and rather counterintuitively for many, it is the conservatives who have a far greater moral range from which to pitch their arguments, and, thence, from which to form emotional , and intuitive , bonds with their listeners.
It was the early morning news of 9 November 2016 that finally confirmed to me what I had been struggling to accept in the ‘watches of the night’. The United States of America had belied its own name and had voted for Donald Trump to become the next US president. One of the first to congratulate him was the head of France ’s far-right National Front, Marine Le Pen , who viewed his victory as a boost to her own presidential aspirations in early summer 2017. Norbert Hofer , leader of Austria’s far-right Freedom Party, was also encouraged by the result, as were the Alternative for Germany Party, the Dutch Freedom Party and the nationalistic Hungarian leader, Viktor Orbán. In the febrile days following Trump’s triumph, the media played and replayed scenarios ranging from the apocalyptic to the placatory, the latter view based on assumptions that ‘common-sense would prevail,’ and ‘The Donald’ would be contained and constrained by the saner minds on Capitol Hill . I am finishing this book at the beginning of 2017, in Trump’s first weeks as President. To say I am fearful is an understatement; to continue with a book about ‘wisdom ’ perhaps sheer folly; and yet—and yet? ‘We need to huddle togeth...