
In these dark times of Brexit, people such as James O’Brien and Femi Oluwole have been a much-needed source of optimism for me. They’ve been nothing short of heroic for people like myself for whom any form of Brexit will impose real and lasting difficulties. Whatsmore, during some of the most challenging moments of the past three years, when my frustration has reached boiling point, these people have been there to remind me not to blame the Leave voters for voting the way they did. I’ve needed their reminders to stay above the pettiness. Therefore, it was disappointing to see how they and others on the left reacted to Jacob Rees-Mogg’s comments on LBC yesterday.
I don’t like Rees-Mogg; not one bit. I’d love to see him lose his Parliamentary seat at the next election. I think he is the worst type of self-serving, duplicitous politician who’s prepared to do and say anything to further his own interests. He’s the sort of chap who believes the rules and conventions only apply to other people and will insist that everything he’s doing is entirely correct and proper while he’s trashing them. But, when I listened to the clip of Rees-Mogg on Nick Ferrari’s show, I didn’t hear what everybody else seems to have heard.
I read Malcolm Gladwell’s Outliers a few years ago. The book is famous for spreading the idea of the 10,000-hour rule. When I read it, something else struck me as far more significant. Using the examples of Christopher Langan and J Robert Oppenheimer, Gladwell explains how upper-class families cultivate a sense of entitlement in their children to prepare them for life. And in contrast, how working-class parents tend to leave the raising (educating) of their children to the state. The critical difference is that kids from wealthy families are taught to question and challenge authority figures (doctors, teachers, lawyers etc.) and make a case for what they want, whereas poor kids learn to defer to authority figures. Or as O’Brien might say, “the doffing of caps and tugging of forelocks”.
Take a hypothetical scenario of a doctor informing a patient they need an operation. It wouldn’t be unusual for the upper-class patient to question the doctor’s diagnosis and recommendations. The working-class patient, on the other hand, would likely assume the doctor must be correct and that it isn’t their place to challenge the expert opinion of the doctor. Both patients would consider their vastly different responses to the same diagnosis and expertise to be common-sense. And that’s the problem with common-sense.
Common-sense is shared only among the people who are like you — which means people who aren’t like you can have a very different idea of what constitutes common-sense. In the Brexit debate, both Remainers and Leavers claim to hold a common-sense position. Therefore, it is quite clear that what constitutes common-sense means different things to different people. It’s almost a meaningless term. If there’s one thing that seems to encapsulate what common-sense actually means, it’s something that feels expected or reasonable to people like us.
Rees-Mogg, commenting on the findings of the Grenfell report, acknowledged in his interview with Ferrari, that some of the victims of the Grenfell fire might have survived if they’d ignored the advice to stay put. What seems to have upset people is that Rees-Mogg claimed he would have ignored that expert advice and left the building and survived — a course of action he described as common-sense.
Whether he’d have been brave enough to navigate his way out of a burning building is debatable, but I wouldn’t hesitate to put money on him questioning the advice every day of the week. It’s almost in his DNA to do so. For Rees-Mogg it would be common-sense to question and even ignore the advice, just as it would be common-sense for the poor working-class people trapped in the tower to follow that same advice. There’s nothing unusual about two different interpretations of what constitutes common-sense.
Rees-Mogg didn’t say the victims lacked common sense and I saw no indication he was attempting to blame the victims. He certainly didn’t mock them. At the outset of the clip, he laid the blame firmly on the cladding and the stay-put policy. Listen carefully, and it’s clear Rees-Mogg wasn’t even talking about the victims — he was commenting on the advice to stay-put and how he thought he would’ve responded to it. He was talking about himself — as people like him often to do.
If you understand that for some people it’s not at all unusual to question authority and expertise, what Rees-Mogg actually said looks nothing like what people have inferred. What he said was insensitive and lacking foresight, but it wasn’t intentionally malicious. The sentiment Rees-Mogg expressed throughout the clip was of sadness and regret for the tragedy. In this context, his use of “common-sense” really does look more like a clumsy, thoughtless brain fart. Like the rest of us, even people with posh-accents say things they haven’t thoroughly thought through.
Almost all the left-leaning Remainer people I follow on Twitter immediately fell into the same trap. They inferred that Rees-Mogg believes the victims are stupid and only have themselves to blame and that he thinks he’s smarter than the experts at the fire service. Then, to compound the outrage, some contrived nasty and nefarious motives and intentions for what they perceive as an unprovoked attack on the innocent victims of the Grenfell fire. What I saw on Twitter was a rush of commentators and politicians eagerly falling over themselves to wag their fingers of moral superiority at someone they purport to be claiming intellectual superiority.
The whole situation put a spotlight on something that has bothered me for a long time. There appears to be a deep-rooted intolerance on the left that other people find, well, intolerable. Not just in the authoritarian leadership of the main political party, but more broadly in an eagerness to permanently label somebody — usually an opponent or rival — as morally unacceptable. That label then becomes a stick to beat them with whenever we don’t want to engage with them. In modern parlance, they’re “cancelled” — the new form of ex-communication or exile to Siberia. And that’s highly problematic because it doesn’t provide a space for people to redeem themselves. We have no business claiming the moral high-ground if we refuse to accept a sincere apology when somebody has misspoken or acted thoughtlessly.
Once someone’s been cancelled, there’s almost no way back, and that’s frightening to a lot of ordinary people. Very frightening. There’s a reason people hate political correctness; and it’s not because they secretly desire to be a racist, sexist or a homophobe; it’s that they don’t want to end up in Rees-Moggs position accidentally. And it’s almost always an accident — a momentary lapse in judgement, rather than anything malicious or intentionally offensive. You only have to read Jon Ronson’s So You’ve Been Publically Shamed to grasp how easy it is to make a life-changing mistake in our digital age and the severity of the repercussions. People armed with their virtual pitchforks are just itching to drive you off the internet, harass your friends, family and employer, and hound you out of your current and any future jobs.
The Tories have done many awful things since 2010. Still, the one thing they have going for them is they won’t jump on your head like it’s a watermelon if you accidentally use the wrong pronoun, tell an inappropriate joke, or thoughtlessly say something objectionable. People don’t fear Jeremy Corbyn because they’re afraid he’ll increase the number of doctors, nurses and teachers, or create better living standards and working conditions. They fear he’ll usher in an era of even greater intolerance for human imperfection and making mistakes. It’s already pretty unbearable. Nothing about the way the left has handled this Rees-Mogg situation will reassure them their fears are unfounded. If you think the rise of populism and the alt or far-right is down to economics or austerity, you haven’t been paying attention.
The minute-long clip I watched ends with Rees-Mogg stating that he didn’t think the Grenfell tragedy was anything to do with race or class. I think he’s wrong and it’s quite a blunder for someone who’s worldview emanates from a sense of class privilege. Rees-Mogg doesn’t recognise that race and class attitudes to authority/expertise can vary wildly — hence his thoughtless common-sense remark, which is the same mistake people make when attacking Rees-Mogg for those comments. Neither side can see the difference in the other’s general worldview. What I saw playing out yesterday was a massive lost-in-translation exchange between people of opposing class and tribal groups. Both sides were speaking English, but neither were hearing each other.
Growing up with Asperger’s Syndrome has made me hyper-aware of the failings of human communication. I’ve gotten into trouble more times than I care to remember because I’ve said or done something that’s been misinterpreted or misunderstood. What seems reasonable to me is often incomprehensible to others. That’s why I’m acutely aware that we must give people the benefit of the doubt and clarify what they intended to communicate before using their words against them.
I must acknowledge that as an Aspie, I tend to interpret words literally and not read between the lines so much. In a lot of social interactions, this is a huge disadvantage, but in some cases, it is helpful because I don’t assume there’s a hidden agenda in everything people say.
As a victim of violent childhood bullying, I also get a visceral reaction whenever I see people pilling on, even when the target is someone as unsympathetic as Rees-Mogg. That said, I want to make clear I’m not attempting to justify Rees-Mogg’s words. I’m merely diagnosing yesterday’s events from my own uniquely Aspie perspective and with a different understanding of class attitudes towards authority advice and expertise.
It’s important to understand there’s a world of difference between feeling entitled to question and challenge what authority figures tell us, and arrogantly assuming that we know better than the experts. I believe all of us should try to cultivate the self-confidence to challenge authority and expertise while remaining mindful as to our true level of competence. It’s an essential life-skill.
