The First Post

Welcome to Flat Caps and Fatalism

In this first post, I thought I should explain the title; and, obliquely, who I am. ‘Obliquely’ because, for reasons I might discuss later, this newsletter will be anonymous.

The first bit of the title is simple. Flat caps are stereotypically associated with Yorkshire, and this is a blog from Yorkshire. That is not to say it will mainly be about Yorkshire. It will mainly be about political philosophy, broadly speaking. That, though, is why it’s important to be clear about where it’s coming from. Political theory is always shaped by the places it springs from, especially when it aspires to say something universal.

Yorkshire is the biggest county in England, and forms a big chunk of what people call ‘the North’. It’s where I’m from, it’s where I am, and it’s important to think about politics from here.

Yorkshire has cities, towns, and a lot of countryside. I grew up in an urban bit: an area mostly made of long terraces clustered around an old Victorian factory, which still employed a lot of people when I was young. The terraced houses are still there; but the factory is gone, turned into ‘luxury flats’. The bits of waste ground we played on as kids are houses too now, and so are the fields that you used to be able to see in the distance. A lot of the old place has gone, replaced by houses. Well, replaced by houses and drugs.

If I showed you the area in the 80’s and then showed you it now, the first thing that would strike you wouldn’t be the new houses. It would be all of the cars, often German luxury models, congesting the narrow terraced streets. This isn’t because the area has become gentrified. It hasn’t. The cars are there there because drugs money has soaked into the area like blood soaking into cotton; and where there are drugs, there are young men in flash cars. Cars and guns and extortion and fear: you might not see the other consequences quite as quickly, but everyone knows that they’re there.

When writing about this sort of place, commentators often talk about anger and rage, whether to acknowledge it or dismiss it. The anger is real; but treating it as the salient emotion is too shallow to be useful. If you want to understand the area, or others like it, then you must understand the sorrow of people mourning for something that had value and is gone. It is hard to keep your attention on that sorrow. Anger is a call to arms, a call to right wrongs; or, for the other side, to defend yourself from the senseless mob. Sorrow offers no solutions. It wants an ear to listen, not a voice to make demands.

Nowadays, I live in a rural part of Yorkshire, but the same sorrow stays close. James Rebanks, from another part of the North, talks about what has happened to farms up here. The villages, too, seem to face only bad options: as a dormitory for distant cities, as a twee postcard destination, or just plain desolation.

This may all look like sheer negativity, and that leads me to the second part of the newsletter’s title, ‘and fatalism’. Partly, I chose the word because it fit a certain gruff Yorkshire stereotype. Mostly, though it is there to provide a rough complement to ‘flat caps’. If ‘flat caps’ is where I am speaking from, then ‘fatalism’ is what I am saying.

I need to explain. ‘Fatalism’ is almost always used an insult, but it is an insult that can be reclaimed. The word is typically used in the following sort of way:

Andy: ‘X is a terrible problem, so we’re petitioning an MP to introduce a Private Members’ Bill to fix it’.

Bob: ‘Private Members’ Bills almost never become law’.

Andy: ‘Well, that’s just fatalism’.

In examples like this, ‘fatalism’ only works as an insult if you assume two things are true. First, you have to assume that the fatalist is wrong about what political action can realistically achieve; and, second, you have to assume that nothing other than political action can do good. Especially among the university-educated, those assumptions are now so common that they amount to the default attitude taken to all social problems. I reject them.

There are a wide variety of situations for which more political action, and especially passing more legislation, will not be helpful. In fact, the deep conviction, on both the political left and right, that something must be done and that law is the way to do it is a serious social problem. It has led to an epidemic of poorly drafted legislation passed with minimal consideration of either the underlying issues or of how each new law could be realistically implemented.

This plague of bad law is not the sort of problem that can be politically fixed. Our political class lacks the necessary administrative competence; and, anyway, the real problem is deeper. They are the sort of people who would unthinkingly use ‘fatalist’ as an insult, and so they are the sort of people who would inevitably overreach and compound the problem when attempting to correct it.

This does not mean that I think we should sink into despair. Political fatalism is not nihilism. It also rejects the idea that only political action can change the world for the better. Even if, as is often the case, any possible political action is only likely to make things worse, then you, as a human being, can still do good in the world. You can still attempt to look after your family or help a stranger in need. A return to the human scale is no terrible burden.