I have reflected before on my personal background. Briefly, I was born to parents whose middle-class lives had been disrupted by the WW2. My father had been in line for promotion to the board of a company specialising in German shipping. After a brief period in Hamburg helping wrap up what little was left of the business after the war he trained as a teacher. War-trained teachers had a lesser status than other teachers and his subsequent career – in a secondary modern school – was largely one of consolidation. We moved to Worthing when I was around 18 months and spent a brief time in rather rundown rented accommodation before moving into a council house in Colebrook Close in East Worthing. Colebrook Close was home to a heterogeneous mix of classes, a gathering place for those recovering from the war. My parents felt out of place, I discovered later, but I was perfectly content and enjoyed a happy decade there. So life was materially quite tough – my father worked through his ‘holidays’ in a nursery on the South Downs – while my mother was obliged by the (middle-class) norms of the day to commit to a home-based life.
Why am I resurrecting all this? It’s because I’ve been rethinking levels of appreciation of the salience of class, gender and ethnicity (now recast once again as race). As a reasonably well-read sociologist and teacher I’ve long assumed that I have a fundamental grasp of all this; and for all that I happen to have focused in my writings on class, I have never doubted the importance of social divisions around gender or race. Moreover I have recognised the distinction between sociological evidential knowledge and experiential knowledge: it is one thing to know that ‘being black’ exposes a person to ‘structural racism’, and quite another to experience it.
Thinking for the moment about ageing, another source of social division, I can recall not really understanding why my parents, then in their 70s, found looking after our daughters such hard work. Now, in my 70s myself, I understand much better: it’s no longer a task that is just pleasurable, though it is that, but one that, like it or not, elevates stress levels. While parents do a lot on automatic, grandparents, hyper-concerned with ‘health and safety’ as well as entertainment, tend to retain an energy-tapping focus. In other words, I now ‘get’ what previously I didn’t: I’ve learned from experience.
I’ve not been working class, a woman or black. Instead I’m a retired babyboomer who arrived at a senior university position before turning himself into a peripatetic teacher and writer who roams between cafes and bars with his laptop. There’s stuff I know and stuff I maybe cannot know.
What are the limits of Weber’s verstehen? How far can empathy and sensitivity take you? To what extent is what sociologists used to call ‘role-taking’ an effective aid to understanding? There is, I think, a renewed urgency to responding to these questions.
While I always knew (here I go again) that academia was overwhelmingly middle-class, male and white, it now seems to me that: (1) for all the tick-box talk of diversity, it might be becoming more not less exclusionary, and (2) the ongoing ‘neoliberalisation’ of universities and kindred institutions, now underwritten by an augmented Tory state authoritarianism, is largely precluding remedial action. Postmodernism may have been a passing academic fad, but the postmodern culture, characterised by a relativisation of truth and falsity, good and bad, moral and immoral, isn’t; and as Habermas observed, this is all part of ‘the new conservatism’.
But all this invites further comment on what next, and what role, if any, people like me might have (had). I have a few preliminary and tentative suggestions (that I wish I could backdate to a time when I might have exercised more personal influence):
- Talk less, listen more (tricky for us academics because we tend to think we know what we’re talking about, especially within our own field of ‘knowledgeable expertise’).
- Look outwards more, inwards less (engage actively with the worlds outside of our own institutions in particular and academia in general)
- Question more, accommodate less (cultivate a more reflexive and critical attitude to institutionalised criteria governing Bourdieu’s academic ‘fields’, and of success, now often reduced to crude metrics).
- Protest more, acquiesce less (challenge and stand up to senior management and status quo authorities and organise collectively for reformative change)
- Represent less, facilitate more (don’t speak on behalf of others but cultivate opportunities for them to speak)
- Support more, compete less (a return to old-fashioned norms of collegiality, but norms revised to allow for and challenge structural classism, sexism and racism)
All this is easy for me to say now I’m out of the front line of course, and I appreciate that in my 70’s I’m something of a late starter. No excuses. But I have become increasingly aware since leaving the pressure cooker that there are multiple promising – anti-classist, anti-sexist and anti-racist – initiatives underway inside and outside of academia. They need and deserve sponsorship, which can take many different forms from encouragement to funding.