Writing as Social Disclosure: A Hundred Years Ago and Now

Abstract

1 It is a familiar truth that from the late eighteenth century onwards, one striking feature of social history is the extent to which voices that had hitherto gone unheard begin to be heard. In protests and riots, in early forms of trade union organization, in movements for the suffrage and for Catholic emancipation, in churches and in cooperative societies, even through participation in revolution, the deprived are heard and speak in a multiplicity of voices. The poor and the excluded are also, to a quite new extent, spoken about and written about by those concerned about the implications of their deprivation for the larger society and about what responses should be made to them and to what they are saying. So it was in Ireland, Scotland, England, and the USA, in Germany, France, and elsewhere. Each national culture has its own story, but here I shall be con-cerned only with the English-speaking story and indeed only with some few episodes in it. What I want to remark on is a notable contrast between the early twentieth century and the early twenty-fi rst century in the way in which poverty and deprivation are attended to and written about. Begin with the present. We now think about poverty, hunger, and homelessness in a number of ways: as reduced and reducible globally by economic growth, as one index among several of the success or failure of government policies, as providing occasion for philanthropy both on a large and a small scale. What we do not think about very much is how poverty and deprivation are recurrently generated and regenerated within and by advanced economies, how our economic system is such that those least able to afford to do so, including the children of the poor, are made to pay a signifi cant part of the costs that are the counterpart of the benefi ts that the more privileged receive, and how the gross inequalities of our economic system are a practical denial of our common humanity. The use of these last words may seem to many nowadays rhetorical overkill, if only because expressions such as 'common humanity' are for the most part no longer used in our culture with a shared determinate meaning, but only, if at all, for their emotive effect. When I say 'we', to whom do I refer? Ours is a culture of elites— political, fi nancial, media, academic—each drawing happily on resources provided by the others. It is the leading members of those elites who determine which topics provide the focus for our national conversations, whose opinions are treated seriously and whose with dismissive contempt or not at all, and which are the alternative courses of action between which governments choose. It is elites that supply what is taken to be the exper-tise to which the nonexpert should defer. When I say 'we', I am therefore inescapably, if unhappily, speaking as myself, like you, my reader, a mem-ber, even if an outlier, of those elites, someone often trying to edge into their conversations. But, if I have diffi culty in making my voice heard, this is nothing compared to the obstacles now encountered by the most deprived and excluded. Their voices are indeed heard from time to time in this or that local situation, often as a result of the admirable work of community and trade union organizers, but for the most part it is not just that their voices go unheard, but that they themselves have never had an opportunity to learn how to articulate effectively what it is most urgent for them to say. This is unsurprising, if one considers the facts of gross educational inequality in our metropolitan cultures. Those who most need an education in our society, if they are to under-stand their own condition and act effectively to remedy it, are those least likely to receive it. Deprivation in respect of money, housing, and access to health care is generally accompanied by educational deprivation, while those who do receive an excellent education are taught to think in certain