Privilege is a feature of every animal society. The abuse of privilege is treacherous ground.
Owen Jones, that reliable bellwether of ‘woke’ left opinion spelled it out for us: “If the British establishment has one signature ethos” he wrote in The Guardian last week “ it is ‘One rule for us and another for everybody else’”. He was writing, of course, about the Dominic Cummings manhunt. Jones’s sentiments were echoed by dozens of Labour Members of Parliament, who all tweeted the same line: “There cannot be one rule for Boris Johnson’s most senior adviser and another for the rest of us.” It has become a new mantra designed to reap political advantage from the alleged misdemeanours of Mr Cummings. Which is fair enough – opposition parties are instinctively opportunistic – but staking out a position on the moral high ground is not without its dangers; not least of which is that the very charges you throw around come back to bite you.
The idea that we are always and everywhere subject to exactly the same rules is patently false – Robin Aitken
The truth is that abuse of “privilege” is treacherous ground. In the real world (not the world of political hyperbole) the idea that we are always and everywhere subject to exactly the same rules is patently false: nearly everyone enjoys privileges of one kind or another. Very often these are quite humble; back in the days when we had a mining industry the families of coal miners, and retired miners, were entitled to a stipulated amount of free coal each year. Many people might regard that as a trifling privilege but it was much-valued by those in receipt of it. Free coal might fall into the category of “earned” privilege to which an individual is properly entitled but the notion of privilege that is merited opens up many awkward questions for social justice warriors.
Many of the loudest voices now pillorying Cummings are themselves in receipt of substantial privileges. A journalist like Owen Jones for example is very privileged: he can get into places and events other people cannot, he constantly appears on television chat shows airing his views and in doing so enjoys one of the most important privileges of all – making his voice heard on behalf of his preferred campaigns. To lots of people, journalists are themselves the embodiment of privilege which is why many come to resent the bossy, preachy tone too many of them adopt.
Or take our MPs; the 650-odd people who sit on the green benches in the House of Commons are a very privileged group indeed. They are afforded all sorts of honours and entitlements by virtue of being the “tribunes of the people”. They are also no strangers to the abuse of privilege as the sorry saga of the expenses scandal demonstrated. The scores of MPs who in 2009 were exposed as having shamelessly milked Parliamentary expenses to buy second homes and line their pockets should not imagine that the general public has forgotten how they turned public service into self-service. The MPs now condemning Mr Cummings should be wary of the temptation to be too self-righteous: “check your privilege” as they say – a phrase worth parsing.
The feminist writer Hadley Freeman offered a useful definition: “ roughly speaking” she wrote “ it is a way of telling a person who is making a political point that they should remember they are speaking from a privileged position, because they are, for example, white, male, heterosexual, able-bodied or wealthy. It is, in other words, a sassy exhortation to acknowledge identity politics and intersectionality (the school of thought which says, for example, that different minorities experience oppression differently)”.
We might add to her list of minorities that of being Catholic – but I don’t suppose that her kind of “intersectionality” embraces us. Check your own privilege, Hadley.
What is self-evident when talking about privilege is that it is a feature of every human society. We are, by nature, social creatures, and the societies we create are, in their essential character, hierarchical. This is an inescapable feature of human existence; no human society we know about has ever been without hierarchy and in this we mirror the animal kingdom: bees in their hives, monkeys in their troops, lions in their prides – hierarchy (and thus privilege) are prominent features of them all. Revolutionaries always start by first taking aim at the powerful and privileged. The dismal pattern which emerges from each revolution merely emphasises the impossibility of creating a society without privilege.
Most people do not resent the privileges enjoyed by The Queen and her family; they see it as part of a natural order. – Robin Aitken
The French, Russian and the Chinese revolutions, all started as revolts against privilege and resulted in murder of millions of the un-privileged. In the Vendée the slaughter of Catholic peasants by republicans was akin to genocide; in Russia the luckless “kulaks” (i.e. peasants with a bit of land) were exterminated by the Communists and under Mao’s Cultural Revolution, millions perished for harbouring dissident thoughts. And in each instance in the wake of the revolution a new order, just as privileged, quickly arose. However hard we try, ridding ourselves of hierarchy and privilege is beyond us.
The truth is that human instinct demands a social order that confers privilege on some and revolutionaries who aim to abolish all distinction work against the grain of our human nature. For privilege to be acceptable, it has to be commensurate with rank and legitimately deployed. The British accommodation with royalty is a case in point; whilst a minority see the monarchy as the incarnation of inequality it remains abidingly popular with a large majority. Most people do not resent the privileges enjoyed by The Queen and her family; they see it as part of a natural order in which they are content to accept their own (inherently lower) status.
For Catholics, notions of hierarchy and privilege are familiar and, I think, come naturally. We are accustomed to the idea of rank, embodied in the papacy, and the privileges accorded to the clergy generally. This should not inure us to injustice inflicted on the poor and under-privileged, but we should beware of broad appeals to abolish all privilege under the banner of egalitarianism. All too easily these lead to the unjust vilification of groups and individuals followed by their persecution and even, in extreme circumstances, their destruction.
Robin Aitken was a BBC reporter for 25 years and is now a freelance writer and journalist; his latest book The Noble Liar (Biteback) appears in a new edition this month.
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