The Emperor is Naked...so now what?
What liberals like Ian Hislop get wrong about political education
The Emperor’s New Clothes is part of a long tradition of human storytelling about truth. It’s the Hans Christian Anderson version of Plato’s Cave, The Matrix’s ‘redpill’, or the glasses that let you see true reality in They Live. In short, the story concerns a ruler who is sold an incredibly fashionable outfit by a couple of tricksters, an outfit that turns out to be nothing at all. The Emperor (or King in some versions) ventures out of the palace ‘wearing’ these clothes. He is naked, but the townspeople, through submissive fealty, don’t dare point this out. In the end, a young, unsocialised boy shatters the illusion for everyone, pointing and laughing at the naked, and now very embarrassed, Emperor.
It’s a story that resonates throughout the centuries. Go on any YouTube video relating to it and you’ll see everyone chipping in as to what they believe is the modern metaphor for the naked Emperor. Whether we’re calling out politicians who tell us that social services are as strong as they ever were, or the bandwagoning of fans onto that pop band that seemed to come out of nowhere, we’ve all wanted to be that kid, pointing the finger and declaring “the Emperor is naked!”
The story came up in a recent podcast discussion between between American broadcaster satirist Jon Stewart and British TV personality and Private Eye editor Ian Hislop with the discussion mostly centering on the dismal state of politics and media on both sides of the Atlantic. At one point, Stewart invokes the Emperor’s New Clothes, with himself, a long-term political broadcaster, in the finger pointing role. But there’s a twist:
”what you never thought is…that you would call it out and everyone would just continue the farce naked…’The Emperor has no clothes’ and [the crowd] would go ‘yeah…but…’”i
Stewart here is making an incisive observation of the current socio-politics. We know that our politicians are liars. We know they are thieves. We know the Emperor is naked. But through apathy or powerless, we choose not, or cannot, do anything about it.
However, at this point, Hislop interjects and adds that half the crowd would say “he’s not naked”, making a quite different point about ignorance, conspiracy, and false news. Stewart agrees and the original point is lost. It’s not to say that Hislop is wholly wrong to say that bad politics often comes from misinformation, but he misses the more pertinent point: that truth alone does not matter if it’s not moored to something more tangible. Are the people ignorant or are they flecked with nihilism owing to a lack of meaningful ways to change the system? Stewart is pointing out the latter, while Hislop argues the former.
In many ways Hislop is the perfect ‘radical centrist’. As editor of Private Eye, he’s helped uncover much of the corruption in British politics, but he’s also very much part of the establishment himself having spent decades as a panelist on the BBC’s Have I Got News For You. Hislop’s very good at describing the abysmal state of UK politics, but he can be quite vague in putting forward what he would do differently at a fundamental level. He is a defender of the status quo insofar as he believes that the problem is not with the architecture of the state, but the fools elected to manage it. Give the people better information then we may have better managers. The problem with this reasoning is that is doesn’t truly grasp what knowledge is.
Beyond an atomistic theory of knowledge
Imagine a field full of empty glass jars. Now imagine taking a jug of orange juice and running around filling up each jar. This is the liberal idea of education. Yet people are not empty-headed containers waiting to be filled. The success of any one ideology is not only a matter of how prevalent it is, but to the extent it engages with the real lives of those it encounters. Over 40 years ago, Sociologist Stuart Hall observed the seismic shift in politics as Margaret Thatcher swept to power in the UK elections, which along with Ronald Reagan in the United States, heralded the neoliberal era, a structural and social shift to individualism and the gradual rollback of state services.
”…this is no rhetorical device or trick…it’s success and effectivity does not lie in its capacity to dupe unsuspecting folk but in the way it addresses real problems, real and lived experiences, real contradictions”- Stuart Hallii
Hall’s point here is that the political right wing did not just create outright falsehoods when they appealed to the working classes, instead, the ‘proposal’ was based on the lived experiences of those people. This isn’t to say that the right have a better understanding of knowledge in society. The reason that politically the right tend to succeed is that, in capitalist and hierarchical societies, our shared social meanings, political agendas, and framing of issues are mostly set by the right, giving them something of a starting advantage. Consider for instance how union strikes are typically framed in media as a matter of public disruption, as though union members themselves aren’t members of the public too.
Most dangerously, the right’s headstart in received wisdom is the basis of much anti-migrant and anti-refugee hostility and violence. The narrative that the British working class are immiserated because of migrants are taking their share of the wealth that has trickled down is nonsense. But decades of ‘common sense’ wisdom such as economies as household budgets and welfare as a limited resource, mean that right wing narratives about migrants taking jobs and wealth take hold much more easier among a class looking for answers as to why their livelihoods are in decline.
Ideas in the Marrow of Society
In 2015, writer JD Taylor took a bike trip through the British isles, his account, Island Story, is a poignant anthropology of the British working class in the age of austerity. In his conversations with people in pubs and acquaintances met through networks of friends, Taylor observed that the individualism running through the country is not mere imagination, but something that had come to be embedded within its very institutions and structures. He meets Stephen in Glasgow who comments that, “egoism is coded into this new world, built into the shapes of its malls and gated apartments, in the parameters of its apps, the features of its leisure, and the keywords of tabloid terror-tattle”.iii
Taylor recognised how this new world order was creating a festering reactionary culture: “like the dispossessed of any land, they hate most those they judge below them…political disorientation leads to reaction too, particularly among the English, who lack coherent political program outside of an obsession with landed property; ‘In a vacuum, xenophobia festers.”.
The same year that Taylor published his book, a public referendum on the UK leaving the European Union was won by small margin by the ‘Brexiteers’. The result was a shock to the liberal establishment, who had united across party lines to campaign against it. Discourse around a ‘second referendum’ dominated the following three years, with the idea that those who had voted ‘wrong’ could be educated into voting the right way the next time.
They never did and the world of Brexit that commentators like Ian Hislop now live in is one whose origin they cannot really understand. Why did people ‘vote against their interests’? Hall and Taylor had both pointed to the underlying material conditions of the British working class and how the structures of everyday life and livelihood did not just scaffold ideology, but had ideology baked in to their very being. Yet liberals such as Hislop have been unable to recognise this link between lived conditions and ideology, instead seeing abstract truth as history’s torchbearer.
The UK left’ is not immune to this thinking. ‘political education’ courses on the left almost always amount to great lists of books or lineups of speakers. Certainly not bad things, but it’s rare that left educational events truly seek out and profit from the intellect and creativity of the rank and file. In politics, the post-2019 rightward shift of the Labour Party was a clear demonstration of how “winning the argument” means little in the face of an obstinate and powerful leadership who could simply choose to ignore conference motions and local party democracy.
Push things too hard in the other direction though, and assign the material world as history’s driver, and you end up with economic determinism. In his critique of Stalinism, E.P. Thompson argued that Marxist notions of economy (base) and culture (superstructure) were not concrete ‘things’, but metaphors to help us understand the actual reality, that of people, ‘who act, experience, think and act again.’iv Thompson’s humanism did not deny the existence of systems of shared meaning beyond the control of any one person, yet he rejected the idea of individuals as passive autonoma that received signals from the productive forces of an ‘upstream’ economy.
New Codes
So what does a way of thinking that puts neither abstract ideas nor material objects but humans in the torchbearer role look like? Paulo Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed has come closer than most in identifying that those who educate best treat the process not as one of crude transfer from one mind to another, but a process of reconciliation and understanding. Freire did not deny the objective world nor the idea of false consciousness, but he realised that liberation from ignorance could only come from a humanist education that sought to inextricably connect understanding to action.v In other words, there’s no point teaching people that things are bad if there isn’t a program for them to transform the bad into good.
And this is what Stewart seemed to be hinted at in his retelling of the Emperor’s New Clothes. Apathy is not a lack of knowledge, it’s a lack of ability to do anything about it. To take one clear example, public support for re-nationalization of services has a clear popular support among British voters. Yet at current, there is no way for them to express this support at the ballot box. Rather than lament an alleged general state of ignorance, it is time to for media commentators and political activists alike to realise that education is only effective when connected to real-world organisation. For those who wish to change the world through education, let us think about liberating knowledge as not something we distribute but something we create in the very process of liberation itself.
-Ewan
Thanks for reading
References:
i Stewart, J. Satire in the Age of Trump. The Problem with Jon Stewart Podcast.
ii Hall, S. (1979) The Great Moving Right Show. Marxism Today. pp.14-20
iii Taylor, J.D. (2016) Island Story. Repeater.
iv Thompson, E.P. (1957) Socialist Humanism. Marxist Internet Archive
v Freire, P (1972) Pedagogy of the Oppressed.