Contempt & Privilege

These two words seem to hang over so much of modern day political and social discourse, and they also play a large part in my own life, so I thought I’d have a go at writing about them, both as separate concepts and in terms of their relationship. This will be more of a personal essay than polemic, though there’ll be an element of both. I am, and have always been, a person of both contempt and privilege. What do they gain me? What do they cost me?

In recent years, we have heard a lot about male privilege, white privilege, cis privilege, and plenty more. I am, ostensibly, a beneficiary of almost every imaginable privilege – white, male, British, southern, heterosexual, public-school educated, old enough to avoid tuition fees, young enough to avoid national service, physically able, intellectually capable, employed, married … perhaps we’ve moving away from the idea of traditional privilege at the end, but I think plenty of people who do not fit in to those categories will feel themselves heavily discriminated against.

In some ways, these privileges are absolute. Any attempt to mitigate should be seen as so much whining. Equally, if we assume that every individual that falls within those categories assumes them and uses them to triumph at every turn and in every circumstance, we lose sight of the nuances that take people’s lives in different directions and bring about changes of attitude.

The single area of my life which points most conclusively to a life of privilege is my place amongst the 7%, the true ruling class of Britain who attended private school. And not just any private school, but one of the most prestigious, St Paul’s, which lies only behind Eton College in terms of the number of people it educates who go on to positions of power and influence in Britain.

[Incidentally, I just want to mention a brilliant point my wife made to me recently, which speaks so clearly of the patriarchy. Eton, which overwhelmingly crushes St Paul’s and all other schools in terms of how many people from it go on to high office, has no female equivalent. St Paul’s does, so do lots of the other big public schools, there are plenty of prestigious girl’s public schools, but Eton, the seat of power, sits above it all, and it’s for boys. The odds are forever stacked]

So I’ll start there, where my privilege developed … and my contempt.

I was lucky to go to St Paul’s School. I didn’t always feel lucky, but I was lucky. Anyone who goes there has countless opportunities other people don't get. I was also lucky because throughout my 10 years there, my education was overwhelmingly subsidised by an assisted place. I’m the youngest of four children, and we were all put through public school by our mother through scholarships and assisted places.

In relative terms (and not even just in relative terms, though I don’t want to load that point) my family was not wealthy. I didn’t have everything my classmates had. My parents also divorced when I was 5 which is perfectly common now, but, actually, back then, in the 80s, it seemed pretty rare. I am pretty sure, at various times, I was the only boy in my class from a single-parent family.

I was fairly bright, especially when I was young. In fact, not to mince words, I was exceptionally bright when I was young. I say that not to look good (saying it makes me look like a dick!) but because it’s actually an important part of this story. Around the age of 6/7/8, I was the best at everything. I think I assumed I would go on being the best at everything.

Here’s where the contempt part comes in. Maybe I was born contemptuous, maybe something happened to make me that way. It can be a massive drag. When I say I’m contemptuous, I’d say the most common complaint I’ve had from people is that I act like I’m better than everyone else, that I’m judgemental and pompous and condescending, that I don’t respect other people’s opinions. It’s been said too often, by people that do like me and people that don’t like me, to disregard it (“well, in fact, you say I’m condescending, and I really appreciate your input, but you’re wrong and you’ve not thought it through …” etc).

Incidentally, alongside people thinking I’m contemptuous, the other lasting tropes in terms of my interactions with people is being treated like I’m a) miserable or b) have learning difficulties. Any way you look at it, I’m not getting the details of social interaction quite right!

I don’t know the whole truth of it. Maybe it’s just how I act, an accident of physiognomy and body language, maybe there’s plenty of truth in it. Maybe I never got over being good at things when I was little. Maybe, as we got older and I was caught and overtaken, due to a combination of people’s growing at a different rate, simply being around more people, my complacency, others’ hard work, more successes being achieved by personality and presentation, I stuck with the idea that, intrinsically, reduced to basics, I was the real clever one and if I set my mind to it, I could outgun them all again.

 I do sometimes wonder if other people regularly and clearly see something beyond my own consciousness and understanding which translates what I imagine to be most innocuous comment into “if you knew how good I was at my times tables when I was six, you’d treat me with more respect, you fucking peasant!”

Suffice to say, a privilege I’ve always lacked is the ability to make friends and influence people with ease. You learn to make the best of it and to make what virtue of it you can. But often I’ve looked on groups of people, just getting on with people, smiling on cue, chatting about inane shit, with envy. Of course, mine is not a rare condition. Nearly everyone would admit to some form of social anxiety at some point in their life. Not everyone covers it by acting as if they're better than all that, but plenty do.

However it’s cost me, I look at my contempt now and I find value in it. I trust it in a way, I think, that a lot of people don’t trust theirs when they feel it. Sometimes it seems to me that there is both too much passionate fury and too much equivocation, where a bit of dry contempt would do much better.

Silly as it sounds, it is my experience of privilege that enables me to trust my contempt. The first people I disdained, the first people I looked down on, were the young elite, the young, rich, intelligent men who would go on to positions of power.

If you’re going to disdain, at very least disdain sideways, preferably upwards. That’s what I learnt. My ghastly condescending attitude, my superiority complex, in those early years, it was directed at people who were as male as me, richer than me, as smart or smarter than me, better than me at many things, would go on to be more successful than me.

I don’t think I’m a snob. I don’t even think I’m quite a misanthrope. Contempt is not mutually exclusive with either a sense of pathos or a sense of social justice. Indeed, both of those can sometimes feed contempt more than anything else.

I’m not going to pretend I was a warrior for social justice at my school, that, back then, my contempt was fighting the good fight. But I did know a few things my schoolmates didn’t. I remember (this was when we were 17/18, so youth was no real excuse) having a conversation with a boy who said he would vote Conservative because people get what they deserve in life, that his parents had worked hard for what they had, and that they weren’t rich, they just did ok for themselves. I asked him what he thought the average wage for an adult in the UK was (this was 1996) – he said £90 or 100,000. I felt contempt.

As I got older at school, and a little less “ashamed” of not coming from a rich family and of having an assisted place (weird, it’s now something of a point of pride, but not something I wanted to let on for many years at school), I also began to notice and confirm others from poorer backgrounds who had help with their fees – there were more than you’d think, and often they shared a similar character type – a cussed awkwardness, a certain edgy smart discomfort with what was around. Most of them worked damn hard . I am still somewhat ashamed that I did not always, that at times I wasted the opportunity given me.

So, I guess I am, after all, saying privilege can be relative, and that, in my own life being, at various points, a twist on outright privilege, my being an outsider of sorts in the relative homogeneity of a West London boys’ public school, I trust and have always trusted my contempt.

In some ways, sure, I’m “liberal metropolitan elite” (a term which should only ever be used with disdainful irony), I’m the lucky few, but equally, I’ve flitted up and down the scale of what that means, and I very often find myself looking up. It also helps that, despite the state of near-iconic perfection I reached when I was 6 years and 4 months old, I have failed and fucked up many, many times in my life, I am terrible at many, many things, and yet my contempt stays with me. So I trust it.

Disdaining upwards or sideways is usually easy – rich, selfish people, entitled people who don’t understand how lucky they are, there are plenty of them to go round. There are plenty of Toby Youngs and Boris Johnsons to disdain. That’s not to say I’m above twinges of depressing ingrained snobberies and prejudices. But there’s no grace, no truth, in disdaining downwards. There are no uglier words than “chav” and “pleb”.

This “metropolitan liberal elite” stuff, it’s designed to make people doubt their contempt, even when contempt is the best and truest possible response. It’s the tack that Trump uses to divide and conquer. In America, it's clearer and clearer that it’s a blatant lie and only a blatant lie – Trump voters are not the worst off, they’re the whitest off. Whatever a couple of journalists going to a couple of towns in Pennsylvania may tell you, all studies have discredited the notion that the driving factor was not white identity (amongst various other unpleasantnesses …)

Brexit is trickier. The “working class revolt” thing has some credence here. On balance, poorer people voted for Brexit – I’ve seen a few statistical studies (not that I’ve really understood them) drawing different conclusions, but there is something unpleasant in the blanket “stupid little Brexiters” line.

But hopefully contempt holds strong. Not contempt for the people fucked over and spat out by society over and over again who saw a glimpse of vain hope, but specifically in the decision they and millions of significantly less fucked-over people took and how they came to take it, of the people who pushed for that decision, who dissembled to win the decision, the false perceptions of what is failing society that drove that decision.

Time for a slightly shit analogy but one that’s stuck with me – when I was failing, desperate and bereft, in my attempt to be a primary school teacher 13 years ago, the brilliant teacher I was shadowing at the school in Peckham I’d been assigned, which had been the worst in the borough but was gradually climbing thanks to a superb head and several committed staff, gave a boy who’d been stealing little bits and bobs the firmest, most fearful telling off.

Afterwards, we started talking about him, and she told me both his parents were heroin addicts who’d died, he was brought up in poverty by his grandmother who was now ill. I asked if she softened her disciplinary line in cases like that. No, never,  she said, I’d be doing him a disservice if I did. She was right. I’ve no idea what’s going on with that boy now, but he was well served by that teacher. She was kind and loved by that class; but she expected the same standard of behaviour from all of them, she expected them to think for themselves and to try to make the right decisions.

Look, this isn’t some call for hard-line education, I’m a soft hippy when it comes to things like that, but she did not patronise him, make out that what he was doing wasn’t as bad because he’d had a tough life. People who voted for Brexit made a shitty call, for themselves, their neighbours, their children, for everyone. You can be more sympathetic with the reason some people did, but it was still a shitty call.

Apologists say there are lots of different reasons people voted for Brexit and some people did it for good reasons. But, here’s a test – was the decision of anyone, one single person who voted for Brexit, all these things? A) Kind b) Open-minded c) Cautious d) Hopeful e) Considered f) Fact-based and economically sound.

Really? I do not see how they could have been, not all of things, or even more than half of them, even amongst the most thoughtful Brexiters. Whereas I think a large number of people who voted to Remain will have passed all those tests. I mean, mine wasn’t, I’m not going to lie. I voted Remain because I am, at heart, a woolly internationalist who doesn’t believe in borders and thinks we should all live in eternal peace on our yellow submarine. I’m an idiot masquerading as a clever person. I think the brief intermissions where I can clearly see my own blustering idiocy may be the only thing that redeem my contempt.

Or perhaps I voted Remain because, despite everything I’m saying, I’m as conservative as anyone else. Because, as with most people of privilege, the system and the status quo has worked for me. I’ve been able to do the subjects I wanted, play the sports I wanted, say the idiot things I’ve wanted, I’ve been able to fail repeatedly but still get another shot, I’ve been able to be lazy, so lazy, when I was young and not be chastised for it. Few things stick in the craw more than wealthy people of my generation having a go at benefit scroungers. Everyone should be allowed some time mucking around and doing nothing useful when they’re young. An arts degree at university, long summer holidays not working … that was my privilege, as it was for many others. But it’s benefit scroungers who are lazy, apparently.

And I’ve been able to feel guilty and furtive about my posh education, to complain about it and claim I may well have been better off without it, but, then, at a few appropriate junctures, I’m as happy to play the old school tie game as anyone else. That’s the definition of privilege, right there.

I’ve been very lucky … now, a lot of that luck isn’t down to privilege, it’s down to … well, luck, but nevertheless one can say those circumstances have protected me against some pieces of bad luck that befall others.

People like me still dominate all the conversations. Even now. I would hope only that a viewpoint, an attitude, humane, contemptuous or both, is not defined by that essentially narrow experience. Where I feel contempt, I need to ask whether those I feel contempt for are those trying to lay siege to the status quo or those trying to protect their position in it. I also need to question whether my own thinking is any more logical, any more rounded, than what I feel contempt for.

There's a place for contempt - truly, I think some people try too hard to find balance and mutual understanding in certain places. Equally, for me, it's something I truly can't escape, just like the privileges I was born into.