She didn’t mention another of the UK’s most celebrated political theorists, John Locke. Perhaps she should have read more widely. Indeed, some seven years on, as the now-Chancellor finds herself scrambling to reboot her plan for Britain, it’s Locke’s work on the economy that should be front of mind.

Much more than an academic, Locke was active in the rough and tumble of British politics. It was in the course of his political jostling during the coinage crisis of the late 17th century that he made his most influential arguments on the political nature of money. He recognized that the value of a state’s currency is ultimately set by fiat, and thus within the political power of the sovereign. The sovereign, after all, could alter the worth of the nation’s currency at the drop of a hat — a particularly devastating scenario given the fragility of the money system, which relies on the confidence of the populace. Should the sovereign decide to start altering the value of the currency indiscriminately, that confidence would erode. The whole monetary system, in other words, would fall apart.

To prevent this, Locke suggested that the sovereign refrain from using their political power over money. Instead, to ensure stability, he proposed that the sovereign maintain a fixed value of the currency — not because of any inherent worth of the coinage, as measured by precious metals, but because Locke thought that maintaining a consistent valuation would suggest as much. His plan, as Stefan Eich has observed, “was a political strategy to depoliticize money’s appearance”, making it seem as if the sovereign lacked the power to alter the value of money at any moment and for any reason.

In recent decades most contemporary states have followed Locke’s example, if not fixing the value of their currency in gold, then depoliticizing it by putting it under the purview of an independent central bank. Then came Liz Truss, who in her campaign for the leadership of the Conservative Party began to question the independence of the Bank of England, and in the wake of her failed premiership blamed her fortunes on the Bank. The supposed neutrality of Britain’s monetary policy suddenly risked being exposed.

Labour subsequently attempted to put as much space between them and Truss’s questioning of economic policymaking practices as possible. Under the watchful eye of Reeves, the Government ran back into the arms of the BoE and the OBR, reinforcing its commitment to “sensible” economic policy, by which it meant depoliticized policy conducted by “sensible” experts. The storm, apparently, had passed.

But is the stasis we’re in any better? As the past fortnight’s U-turns have demonstrated, the Labour government finds itself hamstrung, unable to engage in transformative politics and susceptible to political challenge from the Right. We could be forgiven for asking: will that ever change? Or perhaps more importantly, would the storm really be worse?

Let’s start at the beginning. The conventional economic theory of money is rooted in a potted history of its use. That history goes roughly like this: before money, people bartered. They traded goods and services for each other. Bartering, however, proved inefficient, as each trade required a “double coincidence of wants” — I have to want exactly what you have, and you have to want exactly what I have. Money solves this problem. If everyone wants money, as a medium of exchange, there is no need to satisfy the “double coincidence”, as money ensures it is always satisfied.

There are (at least) two problems with this story. First, it is historically inaccurate. As far as economic historians and sociologists are concerned, there never was an exclusively barter economy. Money in the form of credit (and debt) has always existed. It was never the case that, as a table-maker, I would need to barter with each individual to get all the resources necessary to build tables; rather, it was more likely that the blacksmith had a ledger in which he recorded my debts each time I needed nails. Then someday, I might repay those with a table. Those ledgers, or more precisely the credit they recorded, was a form of money, a solution to the (never actually experienced) problem of the “double coincidence of wants”.

The second problem with the bartering story is the implication that money has no effect on production. Put simply, money makes trade easier. It does not change what resources exist, nor what technologies are available, nor how much labor is free. From this perspective, money has no influence on what could be produced in the economy. It simply makes trade, and therefore production, more efficient. And there’s nothing political about that. In economics this is known as monetary neutrality. Because money doesn’t go into building things or delivering services — there are no dollar coins in your coffee or notes used in the construction of your home — it is merely a veil on the economy; without it the same things could be produced and created, albeit less efficiently.

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The idea that money is nothing more than a veil on the real economy goes back at least to Hume’s essay on the balance of trade, in which he argued against mercantilist trade policies. (This essay did not feature in Reeves’s pamphlet.) Free-trade policies, he suggested, are the most desirable, because what matters to a nation’s economy is not its stock of money but rather its stock of goods and services — or perhaps more accurately, its capacity to produce real goods and services. Consequently, it does not make sense to stockpile gold and other forms of money as the mercantilists advocate. Instead, Hume argued, nations should “preserve money nearly proportionable to the art and industry of each nation”. Like Milton Friedman after him, Hume suggested that the role of good monetary policy was to ensure the supply of money matches the real economy.

But what this fails to take account of is the temporal dimension of production. It may be true that, without money, all the same production could take place, in the sense that the economic fundamentals are unchanged. But without money, the same amount of production would not in fact take place. From a realistic point of view, the efficiency and convenience that money introduces into the economic system inevitably affects what can be produced, where, and how much, in a given period of time.

Nevertheless, the theory of monetary neutrality is widely accepted, as is its corollary: if money is neutral, then so is monetary policy. The claim is deceptively simple. On this view, monetary policy governs how much money is in the economy, or the price of money, by managing short-term interest rates. It does not, however, influence the relative prices of goods. Consider the following illustration. Suppose a loaf of bread costs $1 and a gallon of milk costs $5. Now, suppose there is a massive injection of new money into the economy and a loaf of bread now costs $10 and a gallon of milk $50. The relative prices remain the same, so the price increase should have no influence on production. Thus, claim monetary neutrality advocates, monetary policy has no influence on the real economy.

Monetary policymakers, in this view, are like the ball boys and girls at a tennis match. They determine when to throw the balls onto the court or when to inject new money into the economy. If they do their job well, they enable the tennis players to play to the best of their ability, not breaking their flow, and allowing them to produce their best possible game. However, they could make mistakes, releasing lots of balls onto the court, causing the players to trip or get confused, or failing to give the players balls when necessary, causing the game to stop and the players to be unable to play. Getting monetary policy right, just like being a good ball boy, means preventing money from being a source of disturbance. A good ball girl cannot make the players better than they are. Similarly, conventional monetary theory suggests good monetary policy cannot improve real productive possibility. More money does not mean more production, just as more balls do not mean better tennis.

However, it can’t be that monetary policy is completely neutral. After all, if monetary policy has no effect on actual economic production, if it were impotent in relation to the real economy, why would we care about monetary policymaking at all? It simply wouldn’t matter. It would be like gravity policy. The reason monetary policy is not like this is that the neutrality claimed for monetary policy has one crucial qualifier: it is thought to be neutral only in the long run.

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Hume recognized this in his essay. He argued that while money would not matter in the long run, in the short run an increase in money could cause a burst in economic activity. Back to the bread and milk. If the central bank were to inject money into the economy, all prices would not automatically adjust in tandem. Rather, it may be the case that the price of a loaf of bread would increase from $1 to $10 before milk went from $5 to $50, supposing it ever does. As such, in the interim, the change in relative prices (bread at $10, milk still at $5), could have a significant impact on the production and consumption of milk and bread. By claiming that monetary policy is neutral in the long run, but not the short run, the conventional view holds that by the time the economy reaches equilibrium, any effects downstream of monetary policy will be neutralized.

Which is all very well — except for the fact that money is not neutral, as we all know. Who has access to money — credit in particular — determines who gets to go to law school, buy a house, expand their business and so on. Conventional economic theorists would respond, well, yes of course this is true in the short run, but in the (theoretical) long run money makes no difference in the aggregate. But this is ridiculous. The person in real life with access to a loan to go to law school then becomes more likely to get a good mortgage because of their law degree. Their house then grows in value, which gives them more access to credit and income which they can invest, which allows them to make more money, and so on. This impacts not just the distribution of income in society but its aggregate productive capacity as well. The effects of short-run access to credit aren’t neutralized in the long run in which we actually live. Far from it.

And yet, despite this, the mainstream Left in both the UK and the US remains grounded in the monetary policy neutrality doctrine. Which brings us back to Reeves. She wants growth for Britain. Her supporters describe her as laser focused on it, her detractors as desperate for it. In any case, she has offered nothing transformational to secure it. Her theory of growth seems to be preventing the Tories from cutting taxes, discussing long-term planning reform (which could actually make a difference, but not anytime soon), and maybe someday building another runway at Heathrow to “make Britain the world’s best connected place to do business”. Oh, and not to do anything to piss off the City. Her theory of growth, in other words, is: let’s go back to the Nineties.

It is not the Nineties. The growth of the Nineties wasn’t built on production, but rather on selling off what Britain had, and now it’s gone. That won’t work again. Growth, like politics, is about the future. Reeves is focused on the past. The Nineties were the age in which Britain embraced monetary neutrality, exemplified by the 1997 decision to make the Bank of England independent. Reeves would do well not to make Locke’s mistake, again. Today, states all over the world have followed Locke in depoliticizing money on the basis that, over the long run, monetary policy will have no effect on the real economy. And as many are now discovering, there are two issues with this. First, as we’ve seen, it’s not true. And second, to act as if it is neuters our political capacity.

There is almost nothing more fundamental to a state than its power to create money. We cannot just create money out of nowhere whenever we want for whatever reason and assume there will be no negative consequences. We can, however, just create money, and we have done that a lot in recent decades, to support war, to bail out ailing financial institutions, and to survive pandemics. Even in the face of this, we — and particularly the current British government — seem to have failed to grasp the obvious implication: creating money is a political choice and thus, in a democratic society, when and how the state creates money, and on what basis, should be a democratic decision.

The Italian political theorist Giorgio Agamben points out that, in fact, the “state of exception” has almost become the rule rather than the exception in the Western liberal democracies over the last century. The language of war is invoked to pursue ordinary domestic politics. Over the past 60 years in the United States, we have had the war on poverty, the war on drugs, the war on terror, the war on Covid, the war on disinformation, and the war on domestic extremism.

A variation on this theme is the utility of moral panics ­— spiritual warfare —  for pursuing top-down projects of social transformation, typically by administrative fiat. The principle of equality under the law, which would seem to be indispensable to a liberal society, must make way for a system of privileges for protected classes, corresponding to a moral typology of citizens along the axis of victim and oppressor. Victim dramas serve as a permanent moral emergency, justifying an ever-deeper penetration of society by bureaucratic authority in both the public and private sectors.

Once this pattern of government by emergency snaps into focus, one experiences a Gestalt shift. The self-image of the liberal West — as based on the rule of law and representative government — is in need of revision. Our society’s response to Covid brought this anachronism to mass awareness.

The pandemic brought liberalism’s deeper contradictions into plain view. On the one hand, it accelerated what had previously been a slow-motion desertion of liberal principles of government. On the other hand, Covid culture has brought to the surface the usually subterranean core of the liberal project, which is not merely political but anthropological: to remake man. That project can come to fruition, it seems, only with a highly illiberal form of government, paradoxically enough. If we can understand this, it might explain why our embrace of illiberal politics has met with so little resistance. It seems the anthropological project is a more powerful commitment for us than allegiance to the forms and procedures of liberal government.

***

Our regime is founded on two rival pictures of the human subject. The Lockean one regards us as rational, self-governing creatures. It locates reason in a common human endowment — common sense, more or less — and underwrites a basically democratic or majoritarian form of politics. There are no secrets to governing. The second, rival picture insists we are irrationally proud, and in need of being governed. This Hobbesian picture is more hortatory than the first; it needs us to think of ourselves as vulnerable, so the state can play the role of saving us. It underwrites a technocratic, progressive form of politics.

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How science has been corrupted

By Matthew Crawford

The Lockean assumption has been quietly put to bed over the last 30 years, and we have fully embraced the Hobbesian alternative.

The Nineties saw the rise of new currents in the social sciences that emphasise the cognitive incompetence of human beings, deposing the “rational actor” model of human behaviour. This gave us nudge theory , a way to alter people’s behaviour without having to persuade them of anything. It would be hard to overstate the degree to which this approach has been institutionalised, on both sides of the Atlantic. The innovation achieved here is in the way government conceives its subjects: not as citizens whose considered consent must be secured, but as particles to be steered through a science of behaviour management that relies on our pre-reflective cognitive biases.

This is one front in a larger development: an intensifying distrust of human judgment when it operates in the wild, unsupervised. Sometimes this takes the purely bureaucratic form of insisting on metrics of performance and imposing uniform procedures on professionals. “Evidence-based medicine” circumscribes the discretion of doctors; standardised tests and curricula do the same for teachers. At other times, this same impulse takes a technological form, with algorithms substituting for individual judgment on the grounds that human rationality is the weak link in the system. For example, it is stipulated that human beings are terrible drivers and must be replaced in a new regime of autonomous vehicles. The effect, consistently, is to remove agency from skilled practitioners on the grounds of incompetence, and devolve power upward toward a separate layer of information managers that grows ever thicker. It also removes responsibility from identifiable human beings who can be held to account for their decisions. Such mystification insulates various forms of power, both governmental and commercial, from popular pressures.

Needless to say, this sits ill with the Enlightenment idea that governing authority is grounded in our shared rationality, accessible in principle to every citizen and capable of articulation. Technocratic progressivism in fact requires the disqualification of experience and common sense as a guide to reality, and installs in their place a priestly form of authority, closer to the Enlightenment’s caricature of medieval society than to its own self-image.

It also requires a certain human type which, fittingly enough, looks like a caricature of the medieval personality: a credulous, fearful person. This brings us to the Hobbesian anthropological program.

How are we to understand the dramatically different responses of our society to the Spanish flu of a century ago and to Covid today? There is an inverse relationship between the severity of these pandemics and the severity of measures to control them. Clearly, Covid acquired some of its emergency energy from the ambient political crisis dating from 2016, which put the establishment on a war footing. But it also slotted nicely into the more general politics of emergency that is the unacknowledged core of technocratic progressivism, and is further advanced today than it was in 1918. 

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In 2020, a fearful public acquiesced to an extraordinary extension of expert jurisdiction over every domain of life, and a corresponding transfer of sovereignty from representative bodies to unelected agencies located in the executive branch of government. Notoriously, polling indicated that perception of the risks of Covid outstripped the reality by one to two orders of magnitude, but with a sharp demarcation: the hundredfold distortion was among self-identified liberal Democrats, that is, those whose yard signs exhorted us to “believe in science”.

In a technocratic regime, whoever controls what Science Says controls the state. What Science Says is then subject to political contest, and subject to capture by whoever funds it. Which turns out to be the state itself. Here is an epistemic self-licking ice cream cone that bristles at outside interference. Many factual ambiguities and rival hypotheses about the pandemic, typical of the scientific process, were resolved not by rational debate but by intimidation, with heavy use of the term “disinformation” and attendant enforcement by social media companies acting as franchisees of the state. In this there seems to have been a consistent bias toward scientific interpretations that induced fear, even at the cost of omitting relevant context.

If all of this strikes you as illiberal, it should. Yet in another sense, the central role of fear in politics has an impeccable liberal pedigree in the thought of Thomas Hobbes. This brings us to the deeper, anthropological project of liberalism.

First, in what sense is Hobbes a liberal? He is certainly no advocate of limited government, and the regime he imagines is basically monarchical. It is liberal in the sense that it is founded on consent. But it turns out this consent depends on a re-education program that reaches quite deep, and is never finished. 

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The new public health despotism

By Matthew Crawford

Hobbes offers a fable of human origins, the state of nature, according to which we are originally in a condition of acute vulnerability. Even after the rise of political society, civil war is always a threat, and is the problem that his politics is meant to solve. The problem comes down to the fact that we are prone to pride, or vainglory; we are ornery. This is based on a false consciousness in which we place too high a value on ourselves; we then feel slighted and insulted when others fail to recognise us. Such aristocratic brittleness leads to faction and civil strife. The good news is that it can be overcome through a shift in perspective, if we (and especially the proud) come to identify with the weak rather than think ourselves strong. We are all potential victims, and this is the self-awareness that grounds political authority in consent. Out of fear, we consent to a social compact in which we all submit to Leviathan, whom Hobbes calls “King of the proud”.

Liberalism begins with the politics of emergency, then. Leviathan is supposed to end this state of emergency; that is the whole point of it. But the emergency must be renewed, over and over again, if Leviathan is to thrive. This requires renewal of the consciousness-raising program as well, cultivating the vulnerable self. This is the self that is implicit in the cult of safetyism that children are brought up in. It is also the guy you see riding his bicycle double-masked.

A therapeutic para-state of social workers and psychiatrists arose early in the 20th century and was well described by Christopher Lasch. It has long required fragile selves, more as clients than as citizens. With the rise of the biosecurity state, this demand has taken on a new dimension.

***

I should say where I am coming from. I live in the Bay Area, the deepest blue region in the country. I may be responding to different social facts from the ones readers are observing where they live. Right now, in the spring of 2022, I would estimate that a quarter of people walking around Berkeley are masked outdoors. I would like to understand this. Whatever they are doing, it is not “following the science”.

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The danger of safetyism

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Let us acknowledge that many of our hygiene maximalists are acting, not out of fear for themselves, but in the name of the common good, and this is attractive. Indeed, maybe deep-blue Covid culture was prompted by dissatisfaction with liberal individualism. We have unsatisfied longings for belonging; for anything that could pull us out of the liberal mindset of rights and recall us to duties. The pandemic provided an opportunity to rise above the selfish concerns of the bourgeois and discover a public-spiritedness in oneself. Zero Covid is a heroic battle, to join which requires a literal effacement of the individual. As in any war, those who have answered the call recognise one another, not by their faces but by their uniform, the N95.

This is inspiring but it is also a little creepy, at least for those of us leery of mass movements. There is a cult-like quality to public spaces in the Bay Area. One may efface oneself, not out of fear, but out of identification with the Vulnerable One who is currently elevated, the immunocompromised. How many of these are there, really? It doesn’t matter. Note that in this Hobbesian dynamic, the politics of emergency is intimately tied to victimology. 

Perhaps this helps us understand how, in the summer of 2020, the health emergency of Covid and the moral emergency of white supremacism seemed to merge into a single thing. Social distancing guidelines had to be adjusted to accommodate mass protests, as these too served to advance the generic crisis. You don’t need a conspiracy of hostile elites to explain this. It is sufficient to have a shared political morality that sacralises the victim, issuing in moral demands that are categorical, even if contradictory. (Here I am indebted to Mark Shiffman’s current work on “the role of the victimological imagination in legitimating the modern state,” forthcoming in the journal New Polity.)

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There is another way in which Covid has exaggerated tendencies native to liberalism. Social distancing might be regarded as a heightened version of the late-liberal social condition, in which intermediary institutions that situate the individual in associations with others have badly eroded, as Robert Putnam documented in his book Bowling Alone. Hannah Arendt found social atomisation to be among the conditions that give rise to totalitarian movements. In the absence of a shared world, we latch on to ersatz sources of solidarity, and the Party offers just this. Disconnected individuals coalesce into a mass, which is very different from a community. Her analysis suggests liberal individualism has latent in it a tendency to totalitarianism, as a kind of overcorrection. This is one way to make sense of the cultish vibe of hygiene maximalists — as spiritual soldiers of the nascent hygiene state.

Lockdowns kicked our social atomisation to a level we’ve never seen before. Loneliness profoundly damages our ability to orient in the world and distinguish what is real from what is in one’s head, as the work of Ian Marcus Corbin shows. With little shared material existence to provide an intersubjective anchor, we found what solace we could in disembodied interaction on social media. Screen time rose dramatically for all demographics. But such interaction tends toward the feedback loops and brittleness of merely verbally constituted tribes who have no skin in the game because they lack the shared, pragmatic interests of those who inhabit a real world together.

The good invoked by our hygiene maximalists was that of health. But not health considered broadly, which would require an accounting of the health costs of lockdowns. There is a lively empirical debate about this in the back channels of the Internet, as well as about the efficacy of lockdowns in controlling the course of the pandemic, quite apart from any rise in non-Covid mortality they may have caused.

My point here isn’t to litigate these factual questions, which are contested. But I do want to register the lack of curiosity about them in officialdom, and note that among those who identify as liberals, there seems to be little interest in such an accounting, though it would seem to be crucial. The real attachment seems to be, not to actual health, but to a source of collective meaning that floats free of the empirical: the Covid emergency itself.

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It has been said that, in its formalism and insistence on neutral procedures, liberalism has an “empty centre”, denuded of substantive commitments. But political life abhors a vacuum, and the center doesn’t remain empty. The good that was latched onto as a source of collective meaning during the pandemic was that of minimising deaths attributable to a single cause, never mind the wider field of harms done by the lockdowns outside this tunnel vision.

This collective purpose was of a peculiar, negative sort. It required us to deny positive, substantive goods that make life worthwhile, in particular those of human connection. Young children remained isolated or masked through two years of crucial social development; dying grandparents were denied the company of loved ones. The effect was a kind of enforced nihilism. We had to be actively detached, by police power if necessary, from sources of meaning that might call into question the bureaucratic fixation on a few narrow metrics. In our acquiescence in this, we can discern the influence of Thomas Hobbes in forming our spiritual horizon.

***

Hobbes wanted an education that emphasises that human nature (especially that of the “noble”) is selfish and base. Why? Because any appeal to a higher good threatens to return us to the horrors of civil strife and must be debunked. In his political metaphysics, a summum bonum to be aimed at is replaced with a summum malum (death) to be fled from. Lowering the sights of political life in this way helps tame the pride that leads to conflict. Men will submit to Leviathan only if they inhabit a moral universe that has been emptied of transcendent referents.

Hobbes’s metaphysical program of denying the objectivity of good serves his psychological program to undercut pride: any claim one makes on one’s own behalf to be acting for the good is really just vainglorious self-assertion. It may not feel that way to you, but that is because you continue to make the metaphysical error of thinking that your intimations of moral truth refer to something real.

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Platonic psychology offers a useful point of reference for grasping the transformation Hobbes aimed at. Thumos, often translated as spiritedness, is the part of the soul prone to taking offence, and to making claims for one’s own dignity. That is because, more broadly, thumos asserts the value of things, creating the field for moral choice. If all goes well, it does this in dialectic with logos, the reasoning part of the soul. Working together in a well-ordered soul, they don’t merely assert, they are alert to the value of things.

The idea that emotion should have any positive epistemic role to play in grasping reality is foreign to modern thought. Pride can only be a source of partiality; to be “judgmental” is to be prejudicial. The ancient perspective offers a critical challenge, answering that reason without spirited evaluation fails to apprehend things in their true colours, because the lifeworld of human beings is shot through with value and cannot be adequately described in “neutral” terms that are value-free.

If it is not to be mere wilful assertion, thumos must be trained into a schedule of the noble and base, the praiseworthy and shameful. The content of this will always be inflected by the character of the regime. It surely tilted differently in Spain under Ferdinand and Isabella from in the camp of Genghis Khan, yet both provided moral ecologies that were recognisably human, and mutually intelligible.

What happens when the regime is one in which this spirited, evaluative activity is short-circuited altogether, subordinating the (various) distinctions that make for (competing visions of) the good life to mere biological life, bare existence? That is, “health” as conceived by “public health”? This is aggression against our nature as evaluative beings. It would seem to be the consummation of a project that puts the flight from death, rather than attraction to the good, at the center of our political metaphysics.

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Bereft of the possibility of a discoverable ethical reality to provide a transcendent anchor for its intuitions, thumos becomes frustrated and disordered. Indeed, it may manifest as political rage and interpersonal brittleness — the very tendencies that Hobbes meant to suppress, and seem to be once again prominent.

Or thumos simply dies. This would be one way to understand the explosion in clinical depression, especially impressive over the course of the pandemic. An older term used for melancholy in psychiatry is athumia – a failure of thumos. To be athumos is to be disheartened; lose heart; suffer a want of heart.

That seems to be where we are, collectively: rage and depression.

In his essay Men without Chests, CS Lewis found spiritlessness to be the consequence of an education that insists that all perception of moral worth is merely subjective. The philosopher Talbot Brewer says we all have an “evaluative outlook” on the world. If there is nothing real out there to look upon, our evaluative capacity makes no reference to anything located beyond the self. In that case, it is hard to see how one can make a distinction between evaluation and self-assertion: imposing one’s “values” on the world. As liberals, we are not supposed to do that. Hobbes’s metaphysics and his psychology are internally consistent, then. Within the horizon he constructed for us, the only possibilities are to be an asshole or be depressed.

The million-dollar question is this: would it be possible to reclaim the blessings of Lockean, political liberalism and back off from the aggressive metaphysical debunking of Hobbesian, anthropological liberalism? Or is it a package deal?

The notion that humans are born with an inbuilt collection of social and moral presets, that represent the optimum “natural” way of being human, is deeply influential in our culture. But is it really possible to establish, objectively and scientifically, the best way to ensure a child is raised according to “nature”?

In Some Thoughts Concerning Education (1693) the philosopher John Locke argued that rather than (as medieval wisdom had it) being born sinful, infants were in fact tabula rasa — a blank slate. He believed it was the duty of parents to ensure children developed in ways that habituated them to their environment, for example by regularly bathing their feet in cold water so they would not find wet boots unbearable as adults.

Some seven decades later, in 1762, Jean-Jacques Rousseau went considerably further. Children, he said, are not tabula rasa but bearers of divine virtue that is only corrupted by contact with culture. In Emile, or On Education he argued that “God makes all things good; man meddles with them and they become evil”. The purpose of child-rearing and education is thus to do as little damage to natural human goodness as possible.

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How motherhood put an end to my liberalism

By Mary Harrington

Are humans blank pages upon which parents should try and write the best possible version of a social being? Or does the introduction of culture corrupt a higher, purer, innate nature? This debate still rages today, across spheres as varied as education and criminal justice, but the most intimate battleground for the ongoing contest between Locke and Rousseau is the so-called “mummy wars”.

On the side of Locke, for example, you see sleep experts such as Richard Ferber or routine advocates such as Gina Ford, who advocate parental authority, structure and boundary-setting to train a child’s habits along lines that will ensure development as flourishing members of their community. On the side of Rousseau, you see William Sears and Sarah Ockwell-Smith, advocates of “gentle” or “attachment” parenting, that “allows the natural, biological attachment-promoting behaviors of the infant and the intuitive, biological, caregiving qualities of the mother to come together”.

This has arisen in tandem with a whole ecosystem of scientific research oriented toward establishing in some definitive way which parenting methods produce the best “outcomes”. As Ellie Lee argues in the 2014 anthology Parenting Culture Studies, since the twentieth century there has been a turn away from the validation of “a mother’s instincts, virtue and affection” toward parenting as a “scientific enterprise”.

It should be noted at this point that the polite euphemism “parenting”, in practice, almost always means “mothering”. I have written previously in these pages about the asymmetric physiological burden of child-rearing; and the main asymmetry, once a child has been gestated and delivered safely, is of course breastfeeding.

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Science is unequivocal about the benefits of breastfeeding. But fathers cannot breastfeed, a non-negotiable biological given that throws down the gauntlet to modern ideals of equal parenting. This poses difficult questions for modern families. Is it best to breastfeed even if it conflicts with mothers’ desire — or need — to work? Is it more feminist and “natural” to embrace the unique biological role of a woman’s body in breastfeeding, or to bottle-feed in the interests of equal parenting?

Even public policy gives mixed messages. Should mothers stay close to their babies or hand them over and go back to work? The NHS promotes breastfeeding via poster campaigns even as breastfeeding services remain under-funded. Meanwhile, family policy across all the main parties focuses on subsidising childcare, and the rising cost of living makes stay at home mothering unaffordable for many on lower incomes.

Positioned as it is on the fault-lines between choice and necessity, biology and culture, breastfeeding also creates an ideal battleground for the conflict between Locke and Rousseau over the best way to raise a child. Should we impose a structure on when babies feed, or encourage breastfeeding on demand?

In this light it was refreshing to read  a study, published in January, that stepped outside the usual parameters of the “mummy wars” — that is, the question of absolute benefit to the baby of a given parenting practice — to look at the social meaning of breastfeeding.

The study explored the different relationships of mothers to breastfeeding in developing and developed economies, as well as across time, to conclude that as well as being a means of feeding a baby, breastfeeding also has sociocultural meaning among mothers themselves, functioning as a site for competition and status-seeking.

In poorer societies where formula milk is expensive and clean water hard to come by, the study showed that breastfeeding is perceived a low-status means of feeding your child. In contrast, in developed societies with ready access to clean water but where staying at home with a baby is unaffordable for many, breastfeeding uptake is far higher among middle and upper class women as it serves to signal wealth.

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Who gains from the great university scam?

By Mary Harrington

Breastfeeding, then, is laden with complex meanings that vary across cultural and economic contexts. And here we can see what the “mummy wars” repeatedly miss out, in their hyperfocus on the authority of science: the dimension of social meaning.

Viewed through the social lens, it becomes clear that supposedly scientific debates about optimum mothering are heavily class-inflected. Consider the two principal UK parenting forums: Mumsnet and Netmums. Spend more than a few minutes browsing the discussions there and it is clear (as articulated in this thread) that the culture of Mumsnet skews middle- to upper-middle-class in its aesthetic and register. Netmums, on the other hand, skews more lower-middle or working-class.

Explore further, and it becomes apparent that Netmums is for Locke, while Mumsnet is more Rousseau. Even mentioning Gina Ford on Mumsnet will get you called “brave”. Indeed, so passionate is the consensus against routine and structure in babycare on among Mumsnetters, that in 2007 Ford herself threatened legal action against the website if its forum members did not stop insulting her. On the more working-class Netmums, by contrast, Gina Ford gets a relatively warm write-up.

Thus a suspicion begins to emerge that notionally scientific parenting questions are in truth vehicles for class and cultural debates. In addition, the middle and upper classes skew toward a liberal, “instinct”-oriented “natural” Rousseauesque philosophy of motherhood, while lower and middle-class mothers are more drawn to a structured, authority-based model. Are there broader political parallels to be drawn?

It is tempting to extrapolate from the class-inflected contest between Rousseau and Locke across Mumsnet and Netmums, and the “open” vs “closed” (or alternatively “Anywhere” and “Somewhere”) tussles evident throughout contemporary politics. To put it another way, Mumsnetters are raising Anywheres, while Netmums are raising Somewheres.

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Does any of this matter? Well, a young mother from a poor background who feels guilted and judged by the middle-class mummies she meets at Sure Start for putting her baby into a routine from birth, so granny can care for her while she works shifts, might well think so.

“There is no such thing as an infant,” wrote paediatrician and psychoanalyst Donald Winnicott in 1960, “only a nursing couple”. That is to say, very young children are so absolutely dependent on a caregiver that it makes no sense to speak about a baby in the abstract. It follows from this that it makes no sense to conceive of a baby’s wellbeing as distinct from the wellbeing of its mother. And in that light, whatever the science says, sometimes breast may not be best.

Just as newborns cannot meaningfully be abstracted from their caregivers, nor can humans (perhaps especially babies) meaningfully be abstracted from their social and cultural relations. It is not known what happened to the Inchkeith babies, but a 13^th century version of the same experiment, by the ghoulish Empereror Frederick II, resulted not in the emergence of natural language after all. Rather, the poor infants whom Frederick commanded to be raised with food but no other interaction simply died, presumably of lack of love.

Rather than being a corrupting influence on the intrinsic goodness of infant humans, culture and relationship are as essential to the nourishment of babies as milk and regular sleep. With this in mind, we should stop using science as an ideological stick with which to beat mothers into compliance with Locke, Rousseau or whoever. Maybe instead we could accept that childrearing is an intricate dialogue between biological necessity and cultural meaning.

Rather than treating feeding or nap-time as a proxy for ideological arm-wrestling over the nature of human beings, we can leave families to suit their parenting to their circumstances and – perhaps – even trust that in most cases mother really does know best.