Many people I encounter these days remark on the evacuation of the middle-ground in political views. Polarisation is the order of the day, and those who have seen themselves near the centre, whether leaning left or right, have found themselves wondering where everyone went, and why their own moderation is sometimes perceived as extremism from one side or the other. I explore this sense of disorientation in an autobiographical mode, to capture the sense of it ‘creeping up’ on us, while we weren’t looking. That leads me to some reflections on what we mean by such terms as left and right, radical and conservative, and liberal, which used to, or so it seemed, do an adequate job of locating us in the political landscape.
Continue reading “Confessions of a conservative liberal”Glory Days: where the left went wrong
‘Glory Days’ is more than just a great song by Bruce Springsteen. The image is of aging men remembering the great days and achievements of their youth, and living in the past, and not facing the routine mediocrity into which their lives have settled. I think this image can give us some insight into the failures of the US Democratic Party in the recent Presidential election, in which Kamala Harris was defeated by Donald Trump.
The great moment of the US left and the Democratic Party was the civil rights movement of the 1950s-1960s, in which there were great steps forward, both legal and cultural, in regard to racial discrimination. And progress against racial discrimination had ramifying effects on discriminations around sex and sexual preference. The work is of course incomplete, but huge strides have been made in the last 70 years or so.
Continue reading “Glory Days: where the left went wrong”The Moral Muscle
I co-teach a course called Sociology of Freedom with a colleague. Lecturing about freedom of speech and academic freedom, I have tried to introduce the idea that speech can be regulated either ‘morally’, through the informal sanctions of expressions of approval and disapproval, or ‘legally’ through enforceable policies, rules, regulations, and laws. ‘Hate crime’ laws, as in the recently enacted Hate Crime and Public Order (Scotland) Act, are a paradigmatic case of adding ‘legal’ on top of ‘moral’ sanctions. And, I would say, risks supplanting the moral with the legal.
Continue reading “The Moral Muscle”Rebalancing Consensus and Conflict
When I was a student in the 1980s and 1990s, it was conventional to characterise the social sciences, especially sociology, anthropology and political science, as divided into two wings, those emphasising ‘consensus’ and those emphasising ‘conflict’. This framing goes back to the 1960s, and was well established as I was becoming an academic. The prime example of the consensus approach was the functionalism of figures such as Talcott Parsons and A. R. Radcliffe-Brown, a view that emphasised how society was formed through shared beliefs, values, and symbols, which were seen as having beneficial powers of social integration. Conflict approaches were associated strands of theorising that were critical of patterns of social domination, as in Marxism’s critique of the capitalist class system, or feminism’s critique of patriarchal social structures. Functionalism has largely fallen by the wayside, and most current social science is more informed by conflict theories.
Continue reading “Rebalancing Consensus and Conflict”A Crisis of Faith?
It has become common in some circles to refer to the complex of ideas and beliefs generally labelled as ‘woke’, as a kind of religion, or at least vey like a religion (see, e.g., John McWhorter’s Woke Racism: How a New Religion Has Betrayed Black America, 2021, Portfolio/Penguin). The term ‘woke’ has become for some a pejorative label, but it commonly suggests programmatic demands for social justice and beliefs about the key role of group identities in the political process. While these ideas can be debated, it is as much the form of their expression as the ideological content that attracts the comparison to religion. It is the conviction of rightness, the sense being validated by higher moral forces (being ‘on the side of history’), and the tendency to view people as either believers or non-believers in need of correction, that invokes the comparisons.
Continue reading “A Crisis of Faith?”On Two Systems of Knowledge
Humans rely on two distinct systems of knowledge, that are both parts of our evolutionary heritage. The one concerns our perception and processing of the reality around us, our physical environment. We need to accurately map the opportunities and risks, and judge our capacity to operate in that environment, locating food sources, avoiding predators, judging distances, and countless other calculations we have to make each day. In the modern world the typical calculations—avoiding traffic, finding internet access—are different, but the basic engagement with an external world remains the same.
The other system of knowledge concerns our knowledge about each other, and how we regard each other. We are fundamentally social beings, with a long period of infant and childhood dependency, that teaches us to be reliant on, and reliable to, others. Human language and symbolisation provides the communicative infrastructure through which we build our social relationships. Moreover, we survive collectively, as members of groups, that are capable of highly complex and yet flexible forms of social organisation, which further realise the goals of the first knowledge system, increasing our collective adaptability to environments exponentially. But in this second knowledge system, information and signals about the trustworthiness and loyalty to the group of its members, are often as if not more important than the knowledge it produces about external reality.
Continue reading “On Two Systems of Knowledge”On the Boundaries of Academic and Administrative Practice
In an earlier blog I raised questions about the idea of ‘decolonisation’ in academia, arguing that ‘western thought’ is a kind of ‘tradition’ with an internal integrity and logic that needs to be respected, even while it evolves and modifies. Here I add to that argument, focussing on decolonising the curriculum as a practical agenda within the academy, rather than as an intellectual project.
In my university there is a project to support colleagues who want to decolonise their teaching and research, but are unsure how to do that. This project comes under the mantle of a wider Equality, Diversity and Inclusion agenda, and so is conceptually linked to that agenda. EDI is concerned with, among other things, fairness in employment, promotion, and other institutional opportunities. It is about how the institution exercises oversight in regard to its general practices, not about matters intellectual merit. The latter is the business we attend to as academics, engaged in civil argument and debate.
But this is where it gets strange. Because the provenance of decolonising the curriculum comes from within the field of academic debates and theories that seek to explain society. It has roots in postcolonial studies, critical race theory, and the analysis of ‘orientalism’ associated with Edward Said. These are all legitimate bodies of thought which one can subscribe to or argue with, in the arena of academic debate. The purpose of the university is to allow such contending views to engage with and test one another. However, the question arises, how do such ideas travel from being objects of contestation within that intellectual arena, to being matters of programmatic administrative policy?
Continue reading “On the Boundaries of Academic and Administrative Practice”The Domestication of Competition
My new book (title above) is now out with Cambridge University Press. See:
I reproduce the description from that webpage:
Book description
Competition is deeply built into the structures of modern life. It can improve policies, products and services, but is also seen as a divisive burden that pits people against one another. This book seeks to go beyond such caricatures by advancing a new thesis about how competition came to shape our society. Jonathan Hearn argues that competition was ‘domesticated’, harnessed and institutionalised across a range of institutional spheres in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Responding to crises in traditional forms of authority (hereditary, religious), the formalisation of competition in the economy, politics, and diverse new forms of knowledge creation provided a new mode for legitimating distributions of power in the emerging liberal societies. This insightful study aims to improve our ability to think critically about competition, by better understanding its integral role, for good and ill, in how liberal forms of society work.
Reviews
‘Only a scholar from social anthropology could have written this book! It locates and analyses the cultural code on which our societies depend, that of competition. It does so with skill and nuance, stressing the role played by regulation and law in ensuring social progress. This is a wholly original, path-breaking book, challenging assumptions about competition found on both the left and the right, and likely to cause a stir in many disciplines.’ — John Hall – McGill University
‘The principle and practice of competition is central for social life in modernity. It underpins the dominant political system (liberal democracy), the hegemonic economic system (capitalism) and it also permeates the cultural sphere (from fashion trends to university life). In this innovative and wide-ranging book Hearn offer a comprehensive historical sociology of this phenomenon. He explores how competition has historically been domesticated and how this process operates in the contemporary contexts. This is an excellent contribution that will influence future debates across social sciences and humanities.’ — Siniša Malešević – University College Dublin and CNAM, Paris
‘Jonathan Hearn notes that ‘competition’ is often used as a boo-word – something always to regret or despise. Against this simplistic view, Hearn shows that competition, in both nature and society, has complex forms and functions. It can be damaging, but it is often a means to spur cooperation or mutual advantage. It is not confined to markets, as competitions in sport attest. This a fascinating, rich and timely book that will transform thinking on this topic.’ — Geoffrey Hodgson – Loughborough University
Conservatism, tradition, and ‘the canon’
Increasingly in these disorienting times labels of left and right, liberal and conservative, don’t seem to mean what they used to. I see myself as fairly tradition social democrat, supporting liberal democracy from a ‘left’ vantage point, and believing in a need for a balance between public and private power in society. But when encountering polarised criticisms from the left and the right I find myself more ‘centrist’ than I once would have thought. And I find myself rethinking the basis on which I stand where I do.
Originally trained as an anthropologist, it has always struck me as ironic that ‘left’ anthropology fails to recognise the Burkean conservatism that is often implied by its views. A typical and justifiable argument has often been made that attempts to impose ‘western’ models of production, e.g. in farming, have disrupted well-established ways of doing things that have maintained ecological and economic balances. The deleterious and disruptive effects of alien ways of doing things on all kinds of traditional practices and has been criticised. On the one hand this is an objection to the presumption that ‘the West knows best’. But at the same time it is an affirmation of situated traditional knowledge that has been built up over time, and been tested by long and hard experience. This is the idea that provided the basis of Edmund Burke’s famous critique of the French Revolution, and his warning against the presumptions of rationalist revolutionaries convinced they had the knowledge to redesign society in a fell swoop. It is a general principle, articulated by Burke as an internal critique in regard to the western tradition of thought, and not one that only applies to encounters between the ‘West and the rest’.
Continue reading “Conservatism, tradition, and ‘the canon’”On Respect
We talk a lot about ‘dignity and respect’ these days, and large organisations usually have ‘dignity and respect’ policies that seek to regulate conduct among staff in regard to things such as harassment and bullying. For instance, the University of Edinburgh Dignity and Respect Policy states:
Integrity, collegiality and inclusivity are central to the University’s values. In accordance with these values the University is committed to providing an environment in which all members of the University community treat each other with dignity and respect, and where bullying, harassment and discrimination are known to be unacceptable.
One question that arises is—what’s the difference between these two terms, as they are so often run together? Are they not almost synonyms? Here is one way of answering this. ‘Dignity’ indicates a basic worth we attribute to all human beings, as human beings (hence we often refer to ‘human dignity’). In this regard, as individuals, we are all equal, of value, and deserving of a baseline of humane treatment. ‘Respect’ on the other hand indicates recognition of achievements. It has to be earned. This can be in a specific practice, e.g. as an athlete, a musician, a manager, a business person. But it can also be in regard to personal character, a sign of recognition of someone’s integrity, honesty, fair-dealing, good judgment, and so on.
Continue reading “On Respect”
Uneasy Essays 