some of the Grates of neoliberalism
Rousseau was wrong, humans are not born free. In fact this statement is pretty well meaningless, since our birth is dependent on the activity of those who conceived us, as well as those who helped our passage into the light of day, or the light of a home or hospital room. As to our parents, their genes and those of their relatives will determine our height and our general physiognomy, which our culture will deem to be attractive, hideous or somewhere in between. That culture and its subcultures will also determine the language we first speak, the food we are given, and the home, be it a mansion or a tent, we find ourselves living in. Our gender too will be determined, in a somewhat mysterious way.
The first few years of our life will be hugely determinative. We might be coddled, we might be thoughtfully raised according to the Montessori method, or we might be neglected or abused. We ourselves will have no say regarding those options. We know that those first few years will be hugely impactful for the rest of our lives. The Dunedin longitudinal study of personality types (among many other things), which I’ve written about previously, identifies five – Undercontrolled, Inhibited, Confident, Reserved, and Well-adjusted – which are generally recognised from the age of three, and are ‘observed to be relatively stable throughout life’. The study has been ongoing since the 1970s. As Aristotle is reputed to have said, ‘Give me the child at seven and I will show you the man’. This presumably also includes female men. Whether Aristotle meant that he could mould the child into whatever he wanted, or that the child already had the features of the man, is slightly unclear, but there’s plenty of evidence to suggest the latter is true.
So where then does individual freedom, so highly valued by so many, come in? What do we make of the libertarianism touted by certain politicians, philosophers and economists? And what, exactly, is ‘neoliberalism’?
I’ll look at the last question first. Neoliberalism is associated with some late 20th century economic theorists, such as Ludwig von Mises, Friedrich Hayek and Milton Friedman, though it harks back to Adam Smith and his Wealth of Nations. It isn’t particularly new, or innovative, and it largely ignores the vast constraints (and advantages), mental, physical, cultural, familial, financial and so on, that we are subject to from the very beginnings of our lives. Here’s how Wikipedia jargonises it:
Neoliberalism is often associated with a set of economic liberalization policies, including privatization, deregulation, depoliticisation, consumer choice, labor market flexibilization, economic globalization, free trade, monetarism, austerity, and reductions in government spending.
People with a university education – that’s to say, a minority of people – might be able to understand some of these terms. Those who understand none of them have my sympathy, as they will most certainly be neoliberalism’s victims.
A little anecdote from my primary school days. I was one of the smarter students, naturally, and I remember the teacher asking another pupil to spell a not particularly difficult word. I remember the pupil’s name, Andrew Binney, and I’ve often wondered what became of him. Andrew tried, and his efforts caused titters around the room. But you could see he was really trying. The teacher persisted, not in a bullying way, but patiently, offering clues, and the scene went on for an excruciating amount of time, it seemed to me, because it was clear that Andrew just didn’t know. Eventually he too started to titter, and the teacher gave up on him. It wasn’t dyslexia – Andrew was just as clueless in arithmetic, etc. He wasn’t free to be as smart as the other pupils. I would go further and say that nobody is free to be smarter than they are, though many smart people might strive to be smarter than they are, by reading, studying, hobnobbing with other smart people and so on. But that’s what it is to be smart.
Neoliberalism is a lot like libertarianism, and there’s a question about how ‘neo’ it is. The idea seems to be to reduce government influence in all spheres where it might be expected to have an influence – education, healthcare, housing – just about anything to do with human welfare. All of these things should be ‘marketed’, taken care of by the market. And what does this mean exactly? What are markets, and perhaps more importantly, who owns them? Think of the various items and systems we need to sustain a viable modern human life. Homes, schools, food, electricity, communication systems, infrastructure, clean air and water, hospitals and healthcare systems. Most if not all of us have been born into these systems, barely aware of their life-sustaining existence. They are the necessities of a successful, even viable, life in our modern world. They constitute our modern society.
But neoliberals contest this. Take this 1987 quote from a doyenne of neoliberalism:
I think we have gone through a period when too many children and people have been given to understand ‘I have a problem, it is the government’s job to cope with it!’ or ‘I have a problem, I will go and get a grant to cope with it!’, ‘I am homeless, the government must house me!’ And so they are casting their problems on society, and who is society? There’s no such thing! There are individual men and women and there are families, and no government can do anything except through people and people look to themselves first.
Margaret Thatcher, 1987 interview, quoted in The Invisible Doctrine, George Monbiot & Peter Hutchison, 2024, p 62
This is classic neoliberalism. It’s also classically inane. The late British PM would have us believe that she obtained her language, her upper-crust accent, the clothes she wore, the homes she lived in, the food she consumed, the education she obtained, the transport she availed herself of, and any or all of the jobs she worked at, from either herself or her family. This is obviously nonsense. To take just language – if this is solely provided by our families, there would be no possibility of different families speaking the same language. Language is entirely a socio-cultural phenomenon, that we all plug into, first at home, then in our immediate environment, then at school. As to any homes she lived in, her family didn’t build them, they didn’t act as architects, stone-cutters and bricklayers, as well as carpenters, plumbers. electricians and so forth – they plugged in to the wider society to provide these things. Cities, with their roads, bridges, vehicles, public transport systems, parks, entertainment centres, are clearly not the products of individuals and their families, they’re the result of planning on a large social scale. And I could go on, and on and on. I know I’m belabouring the point, but it’s astonishing how many people just don’t get it. How can they be captured by this imbecilic ideology? Qui bono?
The answer is fairly obvious. Success in the developed world is largely measured by wealth, and that means accumulating as much of it as possible. A business person is described as ‘successful’ entirely in terms of that accumulation.
I asked earlier who owns the markets. With the current fashion for limited, non-interventionist government, even on the left – and this has been the case, in the WEIRD world, since at least the late 70s – they have been owned by private enterprises, with profit as their motive. To maximise those profits, people and resources need to be manipulated and massaged to the maximum.
This is the world that Andrew Binney, and others like him, have grown up in. I can’t imagine him standing much of a chance in such a world. We need to do better than this – we owe it to our society, in all its variety.
References
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neoliberalism
https://dunedinstudy.otago.ac.nz
George Monbiot & Peter Hutchison, The invisible doctrine: the secret history of neoliberalism, 2024