Beyond the sum of our fingers and toes, the primitive human brain gives up and labels the number “lots”. It is impossible for us to properly comprehend the exponential difference between, say, millions and billions, because “a million” just means “lots and lots”, and “a billion” just means “lots and lots, and lots more”. To us, a one in a hundred chance of winning the lottery – “unlikely” – is pretty much the same as a one in a hundred million chance of winning the lottery  – “very unlikely”. 

So, we are ill equipped to deal with the complexities of online communities whose citizens number in billions. 

The brain’s ingenious way of dealing with incomprehensible numbers is to break them down and store them inside symbols that can be made to relate to each other in systematic ways. Thus, we tell ourselves that “a billion” is “a thousand million” and “a million” is “a thousand thousand.” Actually, what “a thousand” means is pretty much beyond us, already, but this way of looking at big numbers seems much more manageable and reassuring.   

What we are essentially doing is imposing a generalised narrative – an unchanging formula by which we can predict how items will relate to each other – the story of the numbers – because we do not have the mental capacity to understand enormous pluralities as singular individuals. As long as the formula keeps working, we feel ok. If it starts to break down, however, we’re fucked. Imagine if you woke up this morning and 2+2 started equalling 5, then 3, then eleventy-one! 

If this happened we’d desperately search the data set for times when it still equalled 4. We’d try to discount the 5 and the 3 and the eleventy-one as anomalies, to find people who agreed with us, – to prove that the world still held together, was still predictable and controllable and that we weren’t insane and alone. This is, of course, confirmation bias.

We do the same thing with the frighteningly complex and unknowable phenomena that is other people: stubbornly wayward, refusing to see the world as we do or act as they should. We impose a generalised theory on them and dismiss contradictory evidence or testimony as anomalous, or pure contrariness or even falsehoods, on the part of our opponents. 

I used to think that the mind was like a lens – capable if ground and polished enough (i.e. with enough education and training), of perfectly perceiving and understanding the world it inhabited. In theory. 

Of course, I knew, in practice, most people’s perceptions were warped by flaws in the lens or smears and blemishes on its the surface, caused by their personal or cultural misconceptions. However, I thought it possible that the wisest, most clear-sighted among us might, collectively, capture a perfect picture or map or plan-diagram of the world in all its complexity and set it down in words, in books. Then other, wise people could focus on one aspect of science or psychology or philosophy and render it perfectly explicable to the layman. Thus, over time, the store of collective human knowledge might reach something close to complete understanding. The light of human reason could illuminate every last intricate piece of the universe. 

Hurrah!

Now I realise that we are very lowly organisms, crawling across the curved surface of a tiny planet under a blazing sun in an inconceivably vast and complex universe. All we have ever done is responded to stimuli, evolved some basic strategies to meet immediate challenges so that we can survive another diurnal round. The mind is not a window on the world. It is just a way of organising data. The world is just that organised data-bank in the brain. 

The existence of that data suggests that there is some sort of world, of reality, but any aspect of reality that doesn’t impinge directly on us or our survival may be entirely beyond our comprehension. Whole areas of the mathematical structure of the universe may be utterly beyond human conception, because we’ve never needed to evolve that level of knowledge. Self-teaching AI may easily outstrip us, seeing structures in the world that we do not even suspect, not even as ghostly shadows and hints, just as the camera on your phone can still produce an image of the room in what appears to be pitch blackness, because it can register a wider spectrum of electromagnetic waves than the human eye. 

And right at the limits of our understanding is dealing with numbers in the millions and billions, and probabilities and futures and predictive risk.

The very stuff of politics and social science. 

Meanwhile, death rates from Covid-19 are much higher among people of colour than among people defined as white. (almost 3 times higher among Males of African background^[1], in England and Wales.) However, it seems highly unlikely that doctors, nurses and paramedics are making openly racist decisions based on their patients’ skin colour. After all, many healthcare professionals come from ethnic minority backgrounds, themselves, and the astonishing myth that black people have a higher pain threshold seems (thankfully) to be a uniquely American phenomenon, possibly originating in attempts to justify slavery.

As with the childbirth mortality rates, I think it helps to remember that most people, including most people of colour, survive Covid-19. Across huge data sets (67,000,000 people in the U.K.) slight tendencies in population groups get gathered together and combined in smaller data subsets made up, by definition, of those who have, by ill luck, fallen foul of those slight tendencies. (150,000 deaths from, or with, Covid-19.) 

Several phenomena may make populations of colour slightly more susceptible than the total population. Many of these factors probably stem from the circumstances that led to minority groups arriving in Britain. Unlike America, British citizens of colour are not the descendants of slaves. They are often the children of economic migrants who came to this country to take less desirable jobs, and live in less desirable areas, because those were the ones available. These jobs tend to be in cities, so ethnic minority groups often live in more crowded districts, with (possibly) fewer GPs per head of population, doing more “front-facing”^[2] jobs. All of these factors (slightly) increase their chances of catching Covid-19. 

Meanwhile, the sort of opportunities made available to economic migrants may force them to cluster in poorer paid jobs and thus occupy cheaper more crowded housing, and multi-generational households. Relative poverty leads to relatively poorer health and diet, leading to underlying conditions that may make them more susceptible to Covid-19 complications. There have also been suggestions that lower levels of vitamin D in dark-skinned people living in less sunny countries, and the susceptibility of those with sickle-cell conditions to blood clots, may be contributing factors to Covid-19 mortality rates.

These are massive generalisations, of course: slight tendencies in whole populations. Millions of people of colour do not fit any of these characteristics. And, anyway, each of these factors only slightly increases a person’s chances of catching Covid-19 and/or suffering severe effects from the disease. They may combine to give a person a markedly higher risk. However, these statistics only make sense when looking at groups and at hypothetical futures. In the present, an individual person either catches Covid-19 or they don’t. People who catch it either die or they don’t. 

It’s only when you cream off, and study, the subset of those who have died, ignoring the vast majority who don’t catch it, or who do but survive, that an inequality becomes apparent. This group is highly unlucky by definition. Increased risk doesn’t guarantee a negative outcome, but in these cases it has. A factor that rarely, and slightly, increases vulnerability to Covid-19 suddenly gains horrible significance. Something that most people shrug off, or dodge, with such ease that they are unaware of it, is now a contributing factor in a death, and thus a racial disadvantage. But only if you die. 

So, if you analyse the figures by ethnicity, you will find a disproportionately higher number of minority deaths. This may still be a small number, just higher than you’d expect given the smaller size of the population.

However, the same would be true if you categorise deaths by income or by BMI or gender or whether sufferers have asthma. It is still a highly unlucky person who is killed by Covid-19. So, a person of colour contracting the disease can be reasonably confident that they won’t be carried off by it. This is exactly the same experience as their white brothers and sisters.

I think. 

A disproportionate number of deaths is a serious matter, and, again by definition, an example of inequality and thus injustice. It is imperative that, as a society, we seek out the causes, and redress the balance.

But anger, especially directed at individuals, is likely to be unjustified in its turn. No single person or even single group of people, have done this to you. That’s the point about systemic racism: it’s in the system, not in the gift of one decision maker.

Yet anger and blame are what we are being encouraged to indulge in. In a recent documentary, on BBC 1 (Why Is Covid Killing People Of Colour? 02/03/’21), one bereaved relative (of colour) says, in bewilderment, “It’s difficult to know who to blame…”

Of course, this is because no-one is directly to blame. But it’s clear that many people are going to try and find a target…

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^[1] According to the Office of National Statistics

^[2] Jobs where they come face to face with a lot of infected people: doctors, nurses, care-workers, waiting staff, etc.

In the United States, social inequalities, including racial inequality, seems so stark and so universal, the stakes so high, and thus the problem so urgent, that the way forward seems obvious. Any non-criminal campaign is probably worth a try! And racism is often manifested in the acts and words of individuals, so the immediate response is clear – the condemnation and/or prosecution of those people.

In Britain and Ireland, things are more complicated because, while some individuals are still saying and doing racist things, we’re often dealing with discrimination by statistic rather than voluntary act. Black women are four time more likely to die in childbirth than white women (1), Asian women twice as likely, but the risk is still very small – 217 women in total, out of 2,235,159 births (with a further 349 women dying within a year.)  between 2016 and 2018. So, dying in childbirth is not the common experience for either black or non-back women. Some commentators have speculated that black women are less likely to be listened to by doctors, but this is based on personal testimony and so is difficult to verify: many people, from all different ethnic backgrounds, feel that health care professionals can sometimes deal with them a little briskly and miss things: they are, after all, massively over-worked, under extreme time-pressure and are used to knowing better than their patients, who are likely to combine ignorance with hypochondria.  

The Guardian article also points out that “women living in the most deprived areas were three times more likely to die than those in more affluent areas” and “almost all of those who died during or after pregnancy had multiple issues such as mental or physical health problems, were victims of domestic abuse, or were living in a deprived area. More than half of those who died were overweight or obese. Cardiac disease represents the largest single cause of indirect maternal deaths.” So, perhaps the most significant single factor is the limited life choices made available to immigrants by a begrudging indigenous population keen not to disadvantage themselves. 

But if these factors increase susceptibility to childbirth mortality, they will affect anyone who suffers from them, irrespective of putative “race”. Race only appears causal if you organise your data-set by racial group. When organised into sub-sets based on weight or age or heart condition or income, they will be revealed as the culprits. This is significant, because you still have to be very unlucky to fall foul of the risk factors. It is only when you start working with incredibly large numbers that mortality is guaranteed and a bias becomes apparent. Which brings up the intriguing idea that if Britain was a smaller country, it wouldn’t appear to be systemically racist, because yearly statistics of mortality rates in pregnancy might not show any racial discrepancy. (You’d have to do macro-studies across several years to see the trend.)

“Systemic racism” becomes a useful term in this context. It allows us to understand these phenomena without having to resort to a sense of paranoid persecution or angry resentment. People haven’t taken against you personally, and you do not need to feel significantly more threatened than anyone else. Dying in childbirth is not the usual lived experience of women, of any racial group.

Unfortunately, the internet has ushered in an age where only personal experience, and our emotional  response to it, are seen as having any validity. Everyone now has a voice to express themselves, but truth is increasingly easily falsified and thus mistrusted and dismissed. We are explicitly told to be angry, because that is seen as a powerful motivator, despite causing further conflict, antagonism and schism, and thus possibly doing more harm than good. (Is there any evidence that anger gets more constructive results than kindness and concern?)

In other words, we are told to take it personally. And that’s so easy to do, because everyone in a minority group will experience racism from time to time, and, unfortunately, it only takes one racist scumbag to make you feel vulnerable and unwelcome. 

And then you start seeing it everywhere. 

1. “Black Women in the UK Four times more likely to die in Pregnancy or Childbirth” The Guardian, 15/01/21

Similarly, it is definitely racist, structurally or personally to assume international rugby star Maro Itoje is a shelf-stacker, when you see him in Tesco’s. (This happened to him, recently.). However, the insult relies on an acceptance of inequality – not just that black people are likely to be shelf-stackers, but also that international rugby players deserve respect, celebrity and money, whereas shelf-stackers are scum who should be ignored. Remove either of those assumptions and you remove the racism. 

So the solution to the problems of discrimination is to work for universal equality because we are all equally human and equally conscious. 

In the meantime, it may be necessary to put positive measures in place that give extra opportunities to marginalised groups, to ensure a more balanced and equitable society and erode the social assumptions that cement hegemonic power. (If people never meet black lawyers they won’t associate black people with the law professions, etc.) However, we mustn’t fall into the trap of thinking that the marginalised group that we are supporting are somehow more valuable than members of the majority who we are not. 

Social activists seem to be prone to this. They can be very dismissive of “the beige majority”, “the normies”, “the cis-gendered”, as lacking their moral enlightenment and clarity of vision. The majority have been wallowing in the sty of their ignorant and unconscious privilege, while the minority group have been elevated, morally and spiritually, by suffering. 

This is understandable: conservative people can be exasperatingly stubborn and narrow-minded. However, to generalise in this way, is to indulge in exactly the sort of thinking used by the dominant forces in our society. To make unfair generalisations about a group of people (defined by you) and then make groundless assumptions about an individual based on their membership of this group is the very essence of discrimination. Personalisation is persecution, even if the assumption is positive. 

The aim of any sort of positive discrimination is to make itself, eventually, obsolete. It is a temporary measure, a crude rebalancing, because it is at odds with our core principles of valuing every sentient human equally. 

And we shouldn’t assume the majority can’t understand our experiences. Empathy is a very powerful capacity of the human brain/mind. When I became severely anorexic, I completely lost this capacity. A whole depth of perception, a whole dimension was denied to me. My mental life was immensely impoverished by this, and immensely enriched when I recovered it. And your “White Privileged” majority all have this amazing capacity. Maybe they do understand.

So we must not start condemning people en masse. It’s true that white people (for example) have traditionally, on average, had advantages that people of colour have traditionally, on aggregate not enjoyed, especially in the United States. However, no two people’s experiences are identical.  We must not start claiming grievances we have not personally suffered, because we feel we share the sufferers’ racial profile. If we do that we are using racialized thinking, and encouraging and justifying bigotry. We are suggesting racial differences, whether biological or socially constructed, are fundamental, and that we are racially incompatible.  

This is White Supremacist talk. We are driving wedges between people, acting as recruiters for the far right, encouraging their silly counter-protests, teaching “ignorant men most violent ways”

Because, what should matter is present needs, and equality and respect for all individuals in the present. Historical wrongs don’t entitle you to a sense of grievance. Even if your ancestors were slaves and his ancestors were slavers, you don’t get to inherit a moral superiority, because that justifies a world of unearned entitlement, and that is the sort of world where slavers thrive.

You have to earn your own moral superiority, by striving to treat everyone, whatever their background, with equal kindness and respect. 

For the same reason, we should be wary of discriminating against individuals in the present, because their (putatively) racial forebears had advantages in the past. It’s tempting to do, because the results of this previous injustice may still be apparent in statistics today – the number of black women novelists, or Oxbridge graduates, say, may still be very low. 

But if the injustice no longer afflicts you, personally, and no longer benefits the individual you are confronting, (perhaps you have an Oxford degree and/or a publishing contract^[1]; perhaps they achieved theirs on personal merit), then, surely, you are using assumptions about their perceived race to dismiss them. You are attempting to gain, or maintain, an advantage for yourself and your own clan, even if it is just the privilege of moral superiority.

This is the motivation of all discrimination by all privileged elites: to try to keep the good stuff for themselves. By reproducing such behaviours, you justify all previous discrimination, because the grounds for objection to their historical monopolies is that they were unfair to people as individuals. You are removing the moral principle from your argument, so that all you are left with is grievance and anger and protests that demonstrate not consensus, but raw power. 

A social activist, quoted in the Guardian, recently, claimed that the protests of the last year had made a lot of progress, because they generated fear. 

That conjures up frightening prospects. 

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^[1] the two often correlate

To return to brass tacks – we each inhabit a planet of 7.8 billion singular, unique and isolated consciousnesses, each afflicted by terrible loneliness. We yearn, above all else, for communion and community (presumably because intuitive co-operation gave early humans distinct advantages), yet we are incapable of direct access to a single other mind.

On the other hand, we are designed to generalise and be suspicious of newness and difference. This, again, was probably a survival trait in earlier times (“who’s this huge hairy creature with all the teeth? He’s new around here. I must introduce myself…”)

This tension remains unresolved in the human psyche and leads to tribalism, prejudice and discrimination^[1]. We huddle into our own little groups, from which we derive social identity and a sense of belonging, often defining our tribe by its difference, even opposition, to others, who we characterise according to our needs. Ostracism from our group would bring great suffering, so we are all anxious to toe the line and keep to the rules. 

How can we escape the prejudice and antipathy, the persecutions, even genocides, that result from these fundamental aspects of the human brain? How can we guarantee that our tribe won’t fall apart from factionalism, or fall prey to more powerful tribes, or that we won’t be banished from our tribes for being too different?

We must all agree that a self of the same substance, an equal flame of sentience and feeling, resides in each of us. And we must recognise and salute that common humanity with equal respect. In other words, we must all, explicitly, consciously, agree to treat everyone, each individual, equally. Only by promising to do well by others can we trust them to do well by us. You can’t stop a street fight by shouting “Ok! Everybody put down your weapons! Unless, of course you feel you have a genuine grievance. In which case, please, keep stabbing.” Everybody needs to stop hurting everybody else. Right now. No matter how badly they’ve been hurt in the past.

The law must be impartial. It must apply equally to all. 

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^[1] And who’s to say animals aren’t similarly troubled, as I’ve said before? Perhaps conflicting impulses are at war within their breasts and, while they act upon the dominant, they are still wordlessly anguished. Perhaps the fox is horrified by what he’s been driven to do to your chickens. Adult pet rabbits suffer from loneliness, apparently, yet if introduced to other adults, they will fight. To live is to feel anguish.

And, while we’re on the subject, we really need to start interrogating our metaphors. Discussing complaints that men’s fiction is overlooked, Sam Byers asks, “Is this about the dominant culture reasserting itself when it feels under threat?” (1)Of course, I understand that he is trying to avoid making personal accusations, but what does this personification of culture actually mean? How could a “dominant culture” genuinely feel under threat? How could it, really, make the decision to reassert itself? It isn’t a real, thinking creature. 

The purpose of similes and metaphors is to smuggle associations into a discourse that the speaker hopes will reinforce their points.(2) In this case Mr Byers wants us to see men who feel neglected as the reverse: the privileged trying to protect their privilege. That’s quite a leap, if you think about it. 

And the looser the connection between your metaphor and the reality it’s supposed to be rooted in, the more likely it is that the whole argument will go off the rails, become a strange rarefied disagreement over competing narratives. Which is fine until you try to implement the ideas you’ve thus come up with, or set the internet dogs on your opponents. (“Cry Havoc! And let slip the dogs of war.”)

Is it sensible to make decisions about what we ought to do or not to do based on such a simplistic fairy story of despotic dragons reasserting themselves when they feel under threat, and righteous dragon-slayers mercilessly destroying the faceless minions of the patriarchal beast? Is it fair to condemn people for failing to conform to a narrative that is disconnected from reality, anyway? Typical of a novelist, I suppose!

But I have a serious point, here, that applies equally to social theorists, whose theses often have a metaphoric quality: imposing a fanciful story on the facts, discarding any you find inconvenient, will not bring you to truth and justice. And our primary commitment must be to Truth and Justice. Yes, they are elusive, but that means we must strive all the harder to reach them, because they do exist. You must not cling to your favourite narrative because it all fits together neatly, or is versatile and can be applied to pretty much everything (Marxism!) and you understand it, and it exonerates you. If the story doesn’t fit the facts, if you need to ignore or deny or alter facts to make it work, then your narrative is not the truth. 

Ok, this is self-evident, but I fear our loyalty to truth and justice is genuinely waning. I picked up Emma Dabiri’s What White People Can Do Next (Penguin, 2021) in my local bookshop yesterday, and flicking through it, came immediately on a sentence about Ireland being “a former colony of the British Empire…” Now, this may seem a small thing to you, but I’m from Ireland, too, and studied Irish history at school, and have read extensively on the subject since, and I’m pretty sure Ireland was never a colony. Yes, Irish people were persecuted and discriminated against, yes, good loyal Elizabethan protestants were settled on Irish land in attempt to pacify it, but I think it was always an integrated part of the United Kingdom, up until independence. 

I’m doubting myself, now, because Emma Dabiri is described on Wikipedia as an author and academic, who teaches at SOAS, and Owen Jones says her book is “So full of scholarship.” And she’s published by Penguin. 

But if I’m right, then at least one part of Ms Dabiri’s thesis relies on error, yet is being endorsed by powerful establishment players. Am I wrong? Or has Emma Dabiri made a simple mistake about the history of Irish Independence, a subject hotly contested for centuries? Or is everybody winking at a falsehood because it fits the popular narratives of the day?

1. “Where Are All The Young Male Novelists”, again – The Observer New Review 16/05/21

2. My favourite is making analogies that associate my (putatively) left wing opponents with the Nazis! Fun! I’ve just realised that makes me sound like an American Neo-con. Oh dear. I’m not. Honestly! I’m a socialist! But I feel they are betraying the cause, forgetting that socialism is about nurturing everyone. 

A good example of the oppressed promoting the principle of oppression appears in The Observer New Review, in an article entitled “Where are All the Young Male Novelists?” (16/05/21) It seems that fiction publishing is dominated by women, at the moment. This seems unsurprising, given that women read far more fiction than men. There is a focus on subjects and writers that women identify with.

There may be some active discrimination against male writers in a publishing industry that is 64% female, most of whom will have been born into a far less equal society than we now experience. The article mentions Lucy Popescu saying “It’s lovely to see women dominating the shortlist [of the Authors’ Club’s Best First Novel Award]”, and one (woman) publisher reports that some people in the industry say “I don’t read men.”

However, the article also quotes Darran Anderson saying “Working class male writers, largely kept out of writing for decades by a middle class male literary establishment, are now expected to answer for a past that isn’t ours.”

Outraged at the injustice of discrimination by gender, Mr Anderson hasn’t come to the conclusion that discrimination is wrong, but just that the wrong people are being targeted, which is a bit like saying the holocaust was wrong because “the Jews are good people”: he has no problem with people being dismissed and denied opportunities, just as long as he has decided they are part of a group that he dislikes. 

Yet the people he defines as “middle class male” writers haven’t inherited the publishing contracts of the previous generations. In fact, their similarities to the literary giants of the 90s makes their point of view and concerns more stale and hackneyed and thus less likely to be read. The past, and its advantages, isn’t theirs either, but it’s ok for them to answer for it, apparently. 

Discrimination is an offence against individuals: denying them the rights allowed to others, denying them their own identities, by attributing to them the characteristics and the behaviours, and thus the crimes, of a type defined by others. If you condemn prejudice and discrimination, you must, by definition, protect all individuals from them, regardless of their background. If you claim it is your group’s turn to receive the benefits of privilege, you are accepting the principle of inequality and thus justifying your previous disadvantage. You are accepting system- and society-wide hypocrisy and nepotistic corruption. 

And while we’re on the subject, Why “Young Male Writers”? Why not “New”? Are older aspirant writers, like me, so beneath contempt, that our very absence isn’t even noted? Why do you need to be under 35 to be eligible for the Sunday Times Young Writer of the Year award? Isn’t that discrimination? Again, Why not “Sunday Times New Writer of the Year award?”

Ah well! The odds are so stacked up against new writers that there’s no point in grumbling about any one aspect of that disadvantage. Even if you are a member of a feted elite, you still need to compete with 7 billion+ other voices AND have something worth saying AND learn to say it well. Fat Chance!