Once upon a time, so the story goes, there were plenty of cultural high status beliefs and practices. It would be unthinkable to express the view that the latest music hall craze was equal in value to Richard Strauss' latest opera - or at least, unthinkable to do so except to shock or as a joke. But nowadays, so the story continues, there are fewer such cultural 'unthinkables' and the upper middle classes can happily say that they don't 'get' modern art or music and debate the order of precedence among the Star Wars films instead. On the other hand, there are now more political 'unthinkables' than there were: the British aristocracy once single-handedly kept European politics supplied with communists, fascists, High Tories, liberals, socialists and whatever Winston Churchill was, but nowadays one would have to be an Auberon Waugh-esque provocateur to suggest, in polite society, that Brexit was a Good Thing.
That was my story - not a terribly original one, I thought - and my idea was to think about the "quantity theory" side of things, i.e. why there might be a fixed quantity of snobby ideas. The first thing that came to my mind was, of all things, that old Woody Allen film Everyone Says I Love You, as it has characters who combine cultural snobbery (they are the kind of sophisticated Americans who hang out in Paris and Venice) with political snobbery (the right-wing character is finally diagnosed as having a brain condition and reverts to sane liberal ideas once this is treated). An enjoyable film, I thought, but potentially a troubling data point.
Anyway, before exploring that idea in any detail I was taken to task by the ever-interesting Stephen Bush of the FT (whose thoughts had initially prompted my own). Perhaps I over-simplify, but I felt that he tested the premises of my theory on two fronts: first, in challenging what I mean by "high status beliefs" and, second, in asking whether categorising beliefs as "high status" is simply to pathologise disagreement. I think they are connected points and they lead to some interesting points on to what extent we should pay attention to where beliefs come from. Let me take each in turn, before returning to my "quantity theory" at the end.
That was my story - not a terribly original one, I thought - and my idea was to think about the "quantity theory" side of things, i.e. why there might be a fixed quantity of snobby ideas. The first thing that came to my mind was, of all things, that old Woody Allen film Everyone Says I Love You, as it has characters who combine cultural snobbery (they are the kind of sophisticated Americans who hang out in Paris and Venice) with political snobbery (the right-wing character is finally diagnosed as having a brain condition and reverts to sane liberal ideas once this is treated). An enjoyable film, I thought, but potentially a troubling data point.
Anyway, before exploring that idea in any detail I was taken to task by the ever-interesting Stephen Bush of the FT (whose thoughts had initially prompted my own). Perhaps I over-simplify, but I felt that he tested the premises of my theory on two fronts: first, in challenging what I mean by "high status beliefs" and, second, in asking whether categorising beliefs as "high status" is simply to pathologise disagreement. I think they are connected points and they lead to some interesting points on to what extent we should pay attention to where beliefs come from. Let me take each in turn, before returning to my "quantity theory" at the end.
On the first point, all I mean by "high status beliefs" is those beliefs which people who are in fact high status, judged by tolerably objective criteria, hold or express, and which they expect others of a similar status to hold or express. It's as simple as that. "Winter in the UK is generally colder than summer" is a high status belief, but "winter is preferable to summer" is not, because it's ok to have any of the seasons as one's favourite. (That said, my guess is that summer is the lowest status season ...)
That means that what I am calling high status beliefs are different from what has sometimes been called "luxury beliefs", i.e. what one might describe as "beliefs you can only afford to espouse because you are rich". Luxury beliefs are ones of the "prostitution and drugs should be decriminalised, criminals should be treated gently, divorce should be de-stigmatised and grammar schools should be abolished" kind, which is all very well when you know that your daughters will never be forced into prostitution, drugs paraphernalia will never be left on your staircase, you can afford to live in a crime-free gated community, your own marriage is rock-solid and your children go to independent schools. There may very well be beliefs of this kind, but many of the beliefs I would categorise as high status are not: one does not need to be well-off to afford to believe that the Earth is round, global warming is real or Brexit was a bad idea, for example.
Now, as with luxury beliefs, there is a certain incentive to hypocrisy that attaches to what I have been calling high status beliefs. Social encounters provide us with many small incentives to pretend to hold beliefs: the "up to a point, Lord Copper" to a boss, the "I love that film" to a potential romantic partner and the "such a kind present" to almost anyone. But high status beliefs present an ongoing incentive to hypocrisy to anyone who lives in a stratified society. I'm not saying that one can achieve high status by espousing these beliefs, but if you are (or want to be) a high status person then you will find things much easier - much less distressing to other high status persons - if you share these beliefs, or at least pretend to. If you plan on advancing in a sober profession then it might be best, all things considered, if you keep to yourself your belief that aliens have landed and walk among us, or that sometimes hanging is too good for 'em.
So what should it mean to us when we come to know that a belief is a high-status one? Let's dive straight into a controversial example.
X says that Y is a woman. We take a look at Y and Y looks like a man. So we ask, "why does X say that Y is a woman?" There are various answers that rely on the genealogy of the X's belief. One answer might be that X is suffering from some mental or physical impairment that renders his judgments of people's sex to be highly unreliable; or X might be blind and have been misinformed about Y by a malicious third party. Once we receive an explanation of that kind then we will place little or no weight on X's report and trust our own judgment. But we might instead receive an answer that X has been told the truth by a make-up artist who has spent hours cunningly applying prosthetics, a bald wig, a false nose and so on in order to allow Y to pass as a man for a TV prank programme. If we receive that information then we would place little or no weight on our own initial assessment of Y and defer to X's superior knowledge.
So far, so good: I think we all agree that it can be sensible to place at least some weight on the genealogy of beliefs. Deluded victims of fraudsters can be right, and well-informed confidantes can be wrong, but that's not the way to bet. But what about if we find out that "Y is a woman" is a high-status belief? Is that more like finding out that X is deluded, or more like finding out that X has secret information from a skilled make-up artist?
In my view, it is more like the latter case. In general, high status beliefs are more likely to be correct. High status beliefs include beliefs on factual matters that are commonly shared by low status people (e.g., that 10 is larger than 7), but when people differ on these kinds of question then the better informed and better educated are more likely to right. High status beliefs also include ones that are matters of complex academic enquiry on which most people are reliant on authoritative sources (e.g., that DNA has a double helix shape or that the Battle of Lepanto was in 1751): again, go with the authorities to which high status people defer.
Moreover, high status beliefs also include opinions on matters of what we lawyers sometimes refer to as multi-factorial analysis, i.e. questions of judgment along multiple dimensions, and here too high status is a pointer to reliability. Asking what a "good" car or wine is, for example, is a question that can be answered in all sorts of ways depending on the purpose one has in mind, but high status beliefs will give you a pretty good steer as to what the highest quality cars or wines are, particularly if you are not price-sensitive. Questions of this kind often come up: what's the "best" kind of school? What is the "nicest" part of town? What's the "best" investment? Looking to the views of highly successful people on these kinds of question is not a bad heuristic.
I can't see any reason not to apply a similar approach to disputed questions of politics and morals. It is of course much harder to be right about such questions (whatever "right" means in this context), but that's no reason to discount the advantages of education and good connections.
That means that we should be more inclined to give the benefit of the doubt to a particular belief upon learning that it is high status. Why has he spent so much money on this piece of rubbish? "It's by a friend and he's trying to support his friend's artistic career" is one answer - but not one that persuades us to re-evaluate our first aesthetic judgment. "All the critics think it's wonderful" is another answer - and one that should cause us to have another look. It's the same with "transwomen are women": the fact that a number of philosophers seriously advance this kind of thinking should give us, at the very least, some pause for thought before dismissing the notion out of hand.
On the other hand, finding out that a belief is high status can help us in another way. In my X and Y example above, we had an initial view on whether Y was a man based on a quick look, and my suggestion was that we should hesitate to accept our first impression given that the belief that Y is a woman is a high status one. But let us instead imagine what we would think if we had thoroughly investigated the situation and come to the ultimate view that Y was indeed a man, and we then came to know that X thought that Y was a woman: in that case, learning that "Y is a woman" is a high status belief provides an explanation for why X believes it even though it is wrong. That is not pathologising disagreement, merely explaining it.
That, pretty much, is the story of the Emperor's New Clothes: too many people applied what I have described as "not a bad heuristic" and deferred to a high status beliefs, whereas we, the readers, are able to explain away their mistake by reference to the same fact.
But the Emperor's New Clothes, a children's story about a fraud, is not a good model for thinking about moral and political disagreements. We are much more likely to be the person who has had a quick glance at Y and needs more information than we are to be the little boy who can be certain that the Emperor is naked. So, for example, at first glance, it might seem odd to suppose that the best thing for a child's education would be to take him away from his parents and hand him over to live with strangers for most of the year, yet boarding schools are high status institutions and there's plenty to say that they can provide good educations. Or, at a more mundane level, think of all those people who kept going with wine or olives simply on the assurance that all those high status people can't be making it up - and eventually found themselves enjoying the taste.
I pretended above that "Y is a woman" is an example of a controversial high status belief, inviting us to think of the current fuss about trans issues. But, let's be honest, swallowing the whole business of gender theory, lock, stock and barrel, is not really a set of high status beliefs in this country. It might have some sway online or in university politics, but it does not have the widespread acceptance that, say, "healthcare should be free at the point of use" has. The high status approach on trans issues is to follow JK Rowling (a demonstrably high status person): be nice, but don't be crazy.
That leads me to a tentative development of my tentative theory. I have written before on the fact that the 19th century had rather more impressive cultural achievements than we have seen recently. I took the 1860s, at random, as an example and pointed out the likes of Bruch's violin concerto and War and Peace. But while the civilised peoples of the world were living on this high plateau of cultural achievement, in political affairs they were entertaining some frankly bonkers ideas. The 1860s saw the US fighting a civil war about slavery, while at much the same time serfs were finally being emancipated in Russia. Europe had a number of models for running a country, including being run by a religious leader (the Papal States), absolute monarchies, liberal quasi-democracies, Prussia and the Ottoman Empire. Japan had only just been bullied into opening up by America. Even relatively sane places were not immune to craziness: England had only just nationalised the private company that had been running an empire in India, and Paris had its commune not long after the decade ended. Meanwhile, the political avant garde was busily coming up with cool new ideas like communism and socialism, with fascism still to come.
It took until the twentieth century for the right model to be found for governing countries with the kinds of populations and technologies first seen in the nineteenth century: the liberal-democratic nation-state with a largely capitalist economic system, a moderately extensive role for the state and the settled intent of having peaceful relations with its immediate neighbours, complete with a free press, independent judiciary, neutral administrative state, alternation of power between professional political parties, civilian police force, tolerance of religious diversity, etc etc. Each element of that package had to be invented, often rather painfully, but we got there in the end. And now that package is what high status people believe to be the right way to organise political affairs: you don't get such people seriously wondering whether an absolute monarchy might suit the people of Norway, or whether Spain should be a militaristic empire with designs on Portugal, or whether Ireland should become a communist dictatorship.
But while the experts in politics and economics were solving the problem of how to run a modern industrial economy with mass literacy and popular media - thus proving that there is real expertise in that field - their equivalents in the world of culture went off-piste and started to push atonal music and conceptual art onto the concert- and gallery-going classes. Given those facts, it's no wonder that high status people ceased to insist on a consensus on cultural matters and instead opted for one on political matters. High status people, like all of us, rely on experts to do the hard work of finding out the things that they ought to believe, but in the twentieth century, while the cultural experts were coasting off their nineteenth century successes, the political experts made a much better showing of having real expertise and went up in status as a result.
What we are living in now in the world of political ideas might be thought of as akin to the cultural developments of the twentieth century: the leading thinkers, basking in the reflected glory of recent successes, are now pushing crazy new ideas, fixing things that ain't broke, and high status people are starting to doubt the wisdom of following the avant garde any longer. Just as high status people stopped listening to the latest 'classical' music and carried on instead with other genres that had tunes, they are starting to stop listening to the latest political fads from the academy (e.g., transgenderism) and turning instead to ideas from other sources that make sense. There is surely an uncanny parallel in the fact that those other musical genres started out being called 'popular' music, while the other political ideas are currently called 'populist'.
Brexit is perhaps the best British example. There can no doubt but that being anti-Brexit is the high status position. I found the arguments against Brexit to be reasonably strong, but nowhere near as strong as those in favour of universal adult suffrage. But some people found the result of the Brexit referendum to be a decent argument against letting all adults vote. And we see views on these kinds of issues splintering further as time goes on. It is possible that Brexit will be the last hotly-disputed political issue on which high status people had but one view: if so, perhaps Brexit will be to politics what Benjamin Britten was to music.
If I'm right then my theory is not really a quantity theory at all. It's more that, during the twentieth century, cultural critics over-reached themselves while political thinkers had more concrete achievements, and the best-educated and best-informed people reacted accordingly. That's how it went, and it could change again. Perhaps global warming will trigger an elite consensus on what the best season is, or perhaps the elite consensus that aliens have not arrived will dissolve ...
But what about Woody Allen? Here I am tempted to make a point about how Americans are different - more deferential to the academy on both cultural and political issues than we have ever been in the UK - or simply to say that Woody Allen is simply an old man who attempts straddles two ages. But perhaps Woody Allen is best viewed as an illustration of my central point. His film Manhattan might be seen as a kind of elegy to the last art forms that received high status consensus in the US: Gershwin's music, black and white films, New York's classic architecture. But now political and moral thinking predominates, and the film has become a rather problematic story. To be honest, I can live with that: follow the high status beliefs again turns out to be a decent heuristic.
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