“Because, I’ll tell you what, if I’d been in that position, and I suspect many of your viewers have been in that position, that’s what any of us would have done.”
The “I” in question was Wes Streeting, the Health Secretary, and the position was that of the Chief Constable of the West Midlands who was, at the time of speaking, refusing to fall on the numerous swords being offered to him after his handling of the Maccabi Tel Aviv – Aston Villa match.
That the Health Secretary would claim he would have done the right thing should not surprise us. We may or may not live in the best of all possible worlds, but he clearly believes himself to be the best of all possible Streetings.
This is, however, merely the latest instance in which the Tigger of the Labour Party does not “speak for me”. For, I honestly cannot tell you what I would have done in the Chief Constable’s position. Perhaps I would have resigned. Probably I wouldn’t.
For while to people on TV, and people watching people on TV, the question existed in a sort of crystalline purity, unsullied by any practical concern, for the Chief Constable, it didn’t. At 52, he probably has a mortgage. How would he pay that if he resigned? He may be paying school fees. Does he want to mess up his children’s education because he (or more properly, an underling) made a mistake? Not being a disgraced former Chief Constable, I do not know this for sure, but I suspect that the job market for disgraced former Chief Constables is relatively thin. And there is the psychological factor – resign and you end your career on a down note. You will always be the Chief Constable who got it wrong. Cling on and you might be able to turn it around. Failure might not be an end, just the launchpad for greater success.
In his position, I suspect, I would have found these arguments sufficiently convincing to have tried to carry on, as he did. Or at least negotiate a decent pay-out.
Mr Streeting might interpret this as evidence that he is just a better person than me. He may well be right. But none of us can really tell. We may think, we may suspect, but neither rises to the level of knowledge. Until one is in a similar situation, one can never really know. Had a Conservative Health Secretary come into office promising to do a deal with the doctors and end the strikes, only to see them pocket the cash and go back on strike, the current occupant of the post would doubtless have called for him or her to resign. And yet, in exactly those circumstances, Mr Streeting has persisted.
This is not a hit job on the (in his own mind, at least) future Prime Minister. He is human. Faced with an abstract moral problem, we find it strangely easy to assume we would do the right thing. Faced with a concrete moral problem, we find it strangely easy to do the convenient thing. “The action is important, the context indifferent” wrote the Stoic Roman Emperor Marcus Aurelius. As a statement of an ideal, this has a lot going for it. As a description of reality, it is somewhat lacking. We are not machines single-mindedly pursuing virtue. We have, at any moment, a range of desires and we tend to consider possible actions in terms not of a theoretical ideal, but on how it will impact them.
Foremost of these desires is staying alive. France, for example, may have recast its Occupation years as a time of glorious Resistance, but in reality, about 2% of the population were actively involved. Even if we stretch the definition to include the simple act of reading a Resistance newspaper, we only get to about 10%. As an act of survival, this was a perfectly reasonable strategy. The Gestapo were not inclined to shrug off resistance activities as a harmless jape. 90,000 members were executed, about 40% of the total. In those circumstances, keeping calme and carrying on was the grimly rational thing to do. So over 90% of the population did it, the dictates of biology trumping those of morality.
Wars are extreme environments, probably the most extreme humans can experience. Fortunately, few of us know what it is like to live under an occupying power determined to retain control. But we are happy to assume we know how we would react under those circumstances and happy to assume we would react well. Our lives may have furnished us with plenty of evidence about the compromises we have made when the stakes were low, but we confidently assume that, faced with the highest possible stakes, we would behave differently. Maybe we would. But it’s probably not the sort of thing one would bet on.
Fortunately, the chances of us having to bet are low. Fate is unlikely to call our bluff. We know the truth of whatever we say will probably never be tested – Mr Streeting appears to have no desire to join the police (although, with a marginal constituency, he may yet be forced to do so). Thus, we do not treat them as statements whose truth is particularly important. If we did, we would take more time to get the real answer, not immediately default to what seems the “right” answer.
Doing so, however, would require us to think of all the times we have failed and use those to judge the likelihood of our succeeding. But our failures we generally bury deep, only excavating them when absolutely necessary and a hypothetical answer to a hypothetical question just does not cross the bar.
What could be an opportunity for narrative correction – editing out our failings, we think ourselves better than we are – becomes an opportunity for narrative reinforcement. Wanting to think of ourselves as good, such moral conundrums give us the opportunity to prove we are good. Giving the right answer to the question means we must be the right sort of people, no matter how much evidence to the contrary we may have acquired. It doesn’t matter about that time, nor that one, and it would be better not to think of that episode; I would resign after a policing scandal, so deep down, I’m alright actually. My heart is in the right place. We judge ourselves by our intentions and others by their actions, they say, not entirely correctly – we extend consideration of intentions to our nearest and dearest. What better insight could there be into our moral selves than a hypothetical answer to a hypothetical question, stripped of any prospect of contradictory action?
No man is an island and much as we want to think ourselves good, we want others to think so too. Even the most rugged individualist depends on others to survive, and people are more likely to co-operate with those they think trustworthy, those they believe will do the right thing, particularly if they do not know them well. When we confidently assert that we would make the right choice, we are telling people that they can trust us, that we will do the right thing and that, in Mr Streeting’s case, we can vote for him. Like a peacock’s feathers, our declarations are displays of moral fitness, albeit without the same link to the health of the underlying organism.
Signalling displays, however, quickly degenerate into arms races. If it turns out that peahens really get off on large, iridescent feathers (Don’t judge, we all get our kicks in different ways), peacocks who cannot grow them quickly become ugly, weird and mateless. Large displays of feathers may serve no practical purpose, may convey no information about a bird’s suitability as a mate (they probably get in the way when foraging, for example, and they give more space for parasites to thrive), but if that is what the peahens want, then all the peacocks must have them.
We decided earlier on that this was not going to be a hit piece on Mr Streeting. We will extend our charity and offer him some sympathy for, faced with the question about the Chief Constable, what else could he have said? “Actually, I reckon in his position, I’d be doing the same thing. I wouldn’t be talking to your viewers, I’d be lawyering up. Try and get as much cash as I could.” That probably wouldn’t have gone down well, even if he had believed it. “Health Secretary backs rotten cop” would have screamed the headlines. The opposition would, more in sorrow than anger, of course, have shaken their heads and pointed out that they would have done the right thing. Perhaps it was time for a resignation. Or an election. Given the circumstances, I too would, I am sure, have climbed on my moral high horse.
The Health Secretary is thus merely a high-profile example of a universal phenomenon. We all know what the “right” answer is, so we all have to give it. The costs of not giving it are just too high. Failure to do so would diminish us in our own minds and those of others. Our desire to think well of ourselves and for others to think well of us trumps any need to think accurately about ourselves; image and self-image are more important than self-knowledge. Stuck on a hamster wheel of our own creation, we can never get off, continually chasing the fantasy self which is just one more right answer, one more turn of the wheel away. Never any closer to what we want to be, ever further from knowing what we are.
Stewart Slater works in Finance. He is now also on Substack, where you are welcome to follow him.
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(Photograph: David Woolfall, CC BY 3.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0>, via Wikimedia Commons)
People earning over £52,000 p.a., and especially those in positions of authority or prestige, should not be given the option of deciding to step aside when they’ve done wrong and been publicly humiliated – they should (no ifs, no buts) be SACKED. Let’s face it they will quickly get another equally well paid job on the gravy train so we needed worry about their mortgages or little Tarquin and Jocasta’s private schooling etc.
Why can’t we get straight answers out of people like Streeting..?
Duh! he’s a politician and currently a socialist (but Nigel will welcome him if he asks nicely)