The great conexit from public life

Maybe I should retrain as an equality, diversity and inclusion officer

‘Well, we have lived to see the end of civilisation in England. I was once a gentleman myself. When I was an undergraduate at Cambridge, the Master of a college was a fabulous being, who lived in a Lodge of breath-taking beauty and incalculable antiquity, tended by housemaids, footmen and a butler. There he consumed vintage port, wrote abstruse treatises if the spirit moved him, and lived the life of an impressive, cultivated gentleman. Such posts were among the few and noble rewards rightly offered to scholarship by the civilisation when then existed. When I last stayed in Cambridge, I lunched with two Masters of colleges. Both of them had to help with the washing-up after luncheon.’

This was T.H. White’s great lament about how decline had set in. According to the bleakly reactionary novelist, Cambridge dons now had to do their own washing up, and so England was doomed. 

He may have been correct in a sense, since the declining status of academics is one explanation for an issue that agitates many people, and by many people I mean me — the progressive drift Left of British institutions.

This process was illustrated most starkly by the case of the Wellcome Trust, but across British civil society there are few bodies which have managed to buck O’Sullivan’s law — the rule by which ‘all organisations that are not actually right-wing will over time become left-wing.’

One explanation for this trend was recently provided by Janan Ganesh, who pondered why conservatives don’t try to take back control of the institutions, his conclusion being ‘the impossibility of chasing money and fighting the culture wars’. If you’re an ambitious conservative, you’re not going to become an academic or comedian when you could earn 20 or 50 times as much in finance.

‘Barring the introduction of universal conscription into arts organisations,’ he writes, ‘academic faculties, publishing houses, official bureaucracies, quangos and public broadcasters, these entities will more often than not tilt left.’ Even woke capital is being driven by Human Resources, he argues, one of the less well-paid areas of finance.

‘It is crassly Marxist to say so, I know, but at every turn there really is a material explanation for cultural outcomes.’

There is nothing wrong with a bit of Marxism, since the great man was onto something in linking economic interests and politics. Material reasons almost certainly have accelerated the conservative exodus from the arts, mostly due to property prices. Housing costs in the most desirable cities have made it far harder to afford both a career and a family, something conservatives are more likely to regard as especially important.

In Oxford, for example, the average home is 16 times the average salary, the second least affordable place in Britain. While there are some Russell Group towns with more liveable housing-to-earning ratios, Cambridge and London are also well beyond the reach of most academics. More generally, though, the pay gap between finance and everything else has seen Britain’s most talented people leave areas like government and journalism.

But it’s also the case that well-paying industries have also emptied of conservatives, just at different speeds — and the cause has more to do with status and social pressure than money.

Most people are not that interested in politics, and the apolitical tend to be closer to conservatives than liberals, because conservatism is our factory setting. Conservatives tend to care less about politics (except for a small core of often highly-educated ideologues), which is why they’re far less likely to go on protests, to get their children involved in politics, or to feel that politics brings ‘meaning’ to their lives.

Progressives, in contrast, are ‘believers’, held together by a set of ideas about the world, and a desire to change it; those ideas are coherent in themselves, even if I think they are false and illogical — and that educated, intelligent people can believe some obviously untrue things.

A group of passionate believers who comprise 5% of the population will succeed in winning many concessions, but a group of passionate believers who comprise 15 or 20% will get their way on almost everything, unless there is a strong and organised pushback.

Once those believers become dominant within an institution, conservatives will start to feel uncomfortable and leave, or avoid joining. So although economics plays some role in the changing nature of academia, political-cultural pressure is surely a major factor.

Academics tend to lean Left because the personality traits most associated with liberalism — novelty-seeking and openness — also direct people towards certain fields. On top of this, academics are relatively poor members of the elite, high in prestige but lower in income, and so naturally favour more redistribution, or want a society that prizes money less and intellectualism  more.

But in both the US and Britain the huge shift in academic politics cannot only be explained by these factors. An average ratio of about 4.5 Democrat-voting academics to every one Republican in the 1980s developed into one of between 10.4 and 12.7 in the late 2010s. In the leading American psychology departments, a political ratio steady at 2:1 from the 1930s to 1950s increased to around 4:1 between 1970 and 1990, and by 2015 was 14 to 1. In some university departments the political ratio is as high as 132 to 1. 

As Ganesh says, Right-wingers are happy with inequality of outcomes; I accept that there are certain professions which attract fewer or more women, or certain ethnic groups, or conservatives, or white people. Complex societies allow for niches and diversification, but there comes a point when the imbalance becomes glaring enough to require other explanations — including social pressure.

One study found that a third of conservative academics feel there is a hostile climate on campus, an idea backed up by one in three liberal academics in another poll. George Yancey, then professor of sociology at the University of North Texas, researching bias in academic hiring practices, found that a quarter of academic philosophers were unwilling to hire a Republican.

The polite term for this process is ‘social homophily’, which means wanting to work with people similar to you, since most people enjoy being around people like them — and the strange parallel with other forms of discrimination has been noted. Yale psychologist Paul Bloom wrote that ‘The same people who are exquisitely sensitive to discrimination in other areas are often violently antagonistic when it comes to political ideology, bringing up clichéd arguments that they wouldn’t accept in other domains: “They aren’t smart enough.” “They don’t want to be in the field.”’ But then this parallel is not so odd, since liberals are in some ways the whitest of white people, the most into typically white interests.

There is also some evidence that people become more liberal simply because the atmosphere is overwhelmingly left-coded, subtly changing their views due to peer pressure. Most people are naturally conformist — a society composed of iconoclasts and independent thinkers would be hell — and that is why progressivism has started to dominate even very well-paid industries, the type of places which should be becoming more conservative if the exodus from elsewhere is due to money.

This is why ‘Goldman Sachs Is Making A Revolutionary Pitch For Workplace Equality’. Or why Morgan Stanley developed something called a ‘multicultural innovation lab’. It’s why every single bank website in Britain is now overtly political . It’s why even Dow Chemical — of Agent Orange fame — is, for use of a better word, woke, while the boss of Centrica – owner of British Gas –  was photographed for a Times interview wearing a hoodie with the slogan ‘why be racist, sexist, homophobic or transphobic when you could be quiet?’

These organisations aren’t ‘Left-wing’, as it’s traditionally known; they’re motivated by an interest in making lots of money. But at the same time, if companies are making such overt political statements one might expect that dissenting employees will feel intimidated about expressing their opinions.

It is true that radicalisation of big business appears to be driven by middle managers, rather than bosses. This may be because they anticipate it will help their careers, or it is a generational shift; I suspect the latter, which is why I’m pessimistic about woke capital ever stopping, even if it’s not very popular with the public.

It takes a certain amount of courage and disagreeability to fight against the overwhelming tide of politics. But there is also the fact that a lot of it is written into the law, in particular the Equality Act (2010), which embeds progressive norms into workplaces across the land, and makes already left-leaning industries even harder for conservatives. In the US, woke law is even more embedded.

Most conservatives don’t believe in equality or diversity, at least as they’re currently understood; we don’t think equality of outcomes between groups is desirable or achievable, and we don’t believe ethnic diversity makes a community somehow more ‘moral’, nor does it improve the performance of a company, despite corporate leaders repeatedly saying so. (What does help productivity and performance is freedom in hiring across borders, which will have the incidental outcome of increasing diversity.) 

Because of this, employing entire departments promoting equality and diversity is going to make a job less attractive to a conservative, just as having a company chaplain would make work less fun for a non-believer. Why are there so few atheists in my team, I ponder, as I watch the office priest walking around saying prayers, while the bosses talk to the company lawyer about the potential cost of being brought to court for blasphemy.

But then what are conservatives supposed to do about this? Vote for some sort of ‘conservative’ party?

You might not be able to live like a don on an academic’s salary, but you could always become a Chief Equity, Diversity and Inclusion Office for the Wellcome Trust and scrape by on £211,000 a year. On that salary you could probably afford someone to do your dishes.

Most EDI employees aren’t anywhere near as well-paid, but the biggest driver of O’Sullivan’s law is status, not income. If people are being paid huge six-figure sums to enforce a belief, then that sends a strong signal that this is the ruling ideology, and if you’re ambitious, you better sign up. Unsurprisingly, therefore, the more high-status an institution regards itself, the more universally progressive it will become, whether salaries are going up or down.

In fact, even organisations which are explicitly Right-wing can still become Left-wing: the Church of England, the very spiritual home of the old establishment, which buttresses the monarchy, patriarchy and Tory party, has a solidly conservative churchgoing base but an overwhelmingly liberal hierarchy and seminaries which are hostile to conservatism. It might seem odd that Church leaders are currently debating God’s pronouns or whatever it is this week, but it’s entirely logical if you view the Church of England as the spiritual wing of the establishment.

That is why many of the major institutions now most enthusiastically progressive were once the most conservative; think of everything from the Scouts to the National Trust, the major public schools (minus Harrow and one or two others which have held out). The more establishment-adjacent an institution, the more ‘woke’; Oxford University has more pride flags than almost anywhere I’ve visited recently.

Oxford and Cambridge are pillars of the English establishment; created by churchmen in the 12^th century as part of the Catholic Church’s reforms — the original metropolitan liberal elite. In a later era they would become institutionally Anglican, with Dissenters, Catholics and Jews barred from receiving degrees. The reason they’re progressive now is that progressivism is the established belief, and has started to behave like one, with innovations like diversity oaths acting like the Test Acts.

The problem for the Right is that ambitious and successful people increasingly adopt liberal or progressive positions publicly, and also avoid association with conservatism; the sheer dearth of talent in the Conservative Party is an indication of this trend, as is the eagerness of exiting Tory MPs to openly sneer at conservative beliefs — think of Sajid Javid’s ‘so what?’ tweet. 

Whether or not people’s public politics are sincere or not doesn’t really matter — if you’re a culture warrior of either side, you most of all want the ambitious, effective and apolitical batting for your team, even if it’s insincere. Especially if it’s insincere.

Most people are not hugely political and will tend to sway with the prevailing cultural norm. If you’re a career-minded and competent person who wishes to rise up in the world, you’re going to publicly espouse liberal or even progressive (woke) beliefs. And if enough people espouse an opinion, pressured by social norms and even the law, then that opinion will start to dominate — across institutions and then across wider society, among both the well and badly paid.