The Chances of Success

Tim Adams, writing in last Sunday's Observer, made a fascinating argument about the rise in gambling in Britain under New Labour. Last year, as a nation, we put £50 billion into slot machines, on horses and lucky numbers and the rest - a sevenfold increase over the past five years. While charting the government decisions which have fed this and the naive liberalism and weakness before corporate lobbyists underlying them, Adams suggests a deeper, parallel trend is at work.

Since the end of the Thatcher era, he argues, financial success in all areas of life has come to appear increasingly arbitrary, a matter of extreme fortune rather than reward for hard work:

During the extraordinary 1992 election campaign, Major made a speech from his soapbox entitled 'My Vision for the Future' in which he burbled about how he wanted to see a Britain in which 'wealth cascaded down the generations'. At the time the choice of the word 'cascade' seemed vaguely absurd; wealth had rarely cascaded, Las Vegas-style, in Britain, it had mostly dripped or slowly puddled. In retrospect, though, Major was correct in his choice of language.

In the years that followed, cash did appear to flow in sudden flash floods or not at all. If there was one dominant theme of the Nineties, it was that money could arrive with no warning, apparently at random, in the form of share windfalls, or to fat cats, or property speculators, or footballers, or employees of Goldman Sachs. This combined with plummeting faith in politicians and institutions helped to create a sense that wealth and power were distributed almost by chance. In the month that Camelot won their franchise to run the National Lottery, the news was dominated by the financial collapse of Lloyd's of London; the lottery, with its sudden cascade of outrageous fortune, seemed to typify the national mood; it also served to bring gambling into the mainstream of culture.

It's easy to pile up examples and sound like you've proved something. But there is certainly a perception that ability combined with steady, hard work - never a guarantee of success - is a less reliable route than used to be the case.

What interests me is the way this trend - if it is a trend - goes hand in hand with an intensification of the rhetoric of meritocracy. As ordinary social mobility (rather than extraordinary overnight success) has fallen, politicians on all sides have claimed to be bringing about 'equality of opportunity' (with its implication that you've no one to blame for your failure but yourself) and 'standing up for hard working families'.

Finally, after years of reporting on the regeneration of Sheffield, what resonated most powerfully with me in Adams' article was the digression about 'the oxymoronic leisure industry':

Whenever I hear that phrase I am reminded of a conversation I had a couple of years ago with the city fathers of Liverpool, who were talking excitedly about their plans for the 2008 city of culture. They spoke a good deal of the booming 'leisure sector' in the city; eventually I came to realise that what they meant by this was drinking. I remember sitting in one of those packed drinking dens late one night with a notebook thinking blearily I had cracked the mystery of Labour's economic policy: create as many students as possible, encourage them to live in blighted city centres, surround them with cheap drink and all-night licensing hours, allow them heavy debt, and let the consequently rampant 'leisure industry', in league with property developers, rebuild your cities.

Succeeding and Belonging

Last summer, I had a below-the-line exchange with Pat Kane on Comment Is Free which brought into focus a set of questions about success and belonging. More recently, this theme seems to have taken over my reading and thinking - in part because it bears on my work at The School of Everything, but also because it connects many of the stories I have reported on over the last few years. It's time I started to write up some of that thinking, on here and elsewhere, so I'm going to start by revisiting that original discussion.

Pat had written an article about the way adults misrepresent children, in which he challenged George Monbiot for selective quotation of a survey that suggested 16% of young people "believed they would become famous, probably by appearing on a show like Big Brother". What Monbiot didn't mention was that the young people questioned also aspired to imitate figures like Richard Branson, JK Rowling and even Tony Blair. Commentators, as Pat rightly pointed out, are often too quick to caricature young people.

Even so, I suggested that there was a deeper and more important issue raised by the survey:

Modern societies are proudly (if inefficiently) meritocratic - there is a great emphasis on finding meaning in personal competitive success. But the same societies tend also to have reduced chances of 'success', in its socially recognised forms. Richard Sennett, in 'The Fall of Public Man', described the emergence of the virtuoso concert pianist in the world of classical music during the nineteenth century, and the parallel reduction in the overall number of pianists able to make a living from their skill, as giant concert halls were built and people only wanted to see star names. John Berger has written eloquently of the new gulf in quality between great artists and hack painters in the early modern period - it takes an unprecedented vision, tenacity and resilience to stay faithful to one's vocation in a society where commodification and alienation are built into the economic fabric of life.

So while it may be more encouraging that children aspire to follow Branson or Attenborough than to appear on Big Brother, is it any more likely that such aspirations will be fulfilled? And is there a problem with a relentlessly meritocratic education system that drills into young people the message that their lives will meaningful in accordance to their outward, competitive success?

One way of challenging the supremacy of success as a source of meaning would be to rehabilitate the value of belonging - of knowing one's place, not in the demoralising sense of one's position in a league table, but in the inspiring sense of valuing the specific, the local, that which slips through the net of use- and exchange-value. Such talk is easily heard as reactionary and Prince Charlesish - but the extrication of the radical sense of belonging from its reactionary twin is an important challenge in a time when so many of the assumptions of modern society are already in question.

I think I still agree with most of that - and I know that it's a subject I can't leave alone.