Evil, bankers and anthropology

An anthropologist friend of mine almost took up a job with a giant consultancy firm in Germany a few weeks ago, saved only by his own lefty instincts. No doubt it was a close shave. But an anthropological study, although of a rather unacademic variety, into bankers was begun this week by Joris Luyendijk.

His findings so far are interesting rather than revelatory but he does warn us of the importance of distinguishing between different groups within the banking sector. It is this humanising of people usually referred to only in groups which presents a real challenge to those of us who read the news and form opinions about society. How easy it is to generalise and condemn, or to see nothing but triumph and success in the faces of our enemies. The reality is, of course, more complicated. There are different types of bankers, different jobs in the banking sector, and as many different types of people as there are people.

Often the activities that we wish to condemn - short term profiteering, incompetant investment, encouraging debt onto those who can't afford it - are committed by institutions or enforced by an office culture that runs roughshod over employees more human instincts. The individual is lost in this equation or is party to the offence rather than the author of it. Should we judge and, if so, whom should we judge? It is very, very easy to see the speck in a banker's eye before we remove the log in our own. Similarly it is easier to condemn en masse than to pick apart the moral failures of a large institution and find its source. Who can doubt that some of the most descpicable and stupid actions, with the most widely and profoundly pernicious consequences, of any in recent decades have been committed by the arrogance, idiocy and blindness of banking institutions and some of their workers? The question is how do we, as individuals, respond to this?

Why the powerful must be corrupt - and what to do about it

I am naturally hostile to any conception of politics or society that rests on an 'us and them' mentality, essentially because I doubt it to be true. There is usually so much middle gournd, such a long ladder between top and bottom, that to divide it at some point and cast the the ends as naturally opposed seems arbitrary. We all have more in common than we have differences - the fundamentals of our physiology are not illusory in this respect, even as wealth or geography create appalling inequalities we all find ourselves in essentially the same predicament as human beings.

Even the division between owner and worker seems more slippery than ever before in the age of digital communications and pension funds; my bank was one of the ones which went under spectacularly, had to be propped up by the government and is now paying its employees astonishingly well, I just feel happy if my interest rate stays about inflation. But the revelations of recent weeks about links between News International, the Metropolitan Police and the government reveal a degree of interpenetration that would surely surprise even the most jaded observer. Each provided funds, personnel and information to the other; restricting it from other institutions and neglecting their prime motivation. The structural imperatives of democracy, elections, the maintainance of law and order and the pursuit of readers and profit formed themselves quite naturally into a closed circuit running to its own logic which even the most heinous of actions against principal figures in the chain could not break (I think here particularly of how Rebecca Brooks ill treated Gordon Brown over the death of his son).

In this it seems overwhelmingly not only that a 'rogue reporter' is to blame, nor even a few 'evil' newspaper proprieters, but rather a huge number of people willed into a kind of automatic amorality by the unavoidable implications of capitalism and a tall hierarchy of power. Power, I think, does corrupt; not because the people who hold it are turned bad, drunk on their own superiority, although this does happen often enough, but because they are forced to act in certain ways to maintain their position. They have the capacity to resist, but not the power to resist and hold their position. Their fault was in choosing ambition and survival over integrity. It is a challenge given to almost all of us on a regular basis - admit to an unfashionable belief, quit an immoral job or call out a loved family member. We get stuck behaving how we are meant to behave, not how we ought to behave.

Should we expect our politicians to give up principles in favour of pragmatism, in a Machiavellian manner which the Tory party has always been proud of, or to fight for what is right in the sure knowledge that to do so will force them out of the system and deliberately undermine it? The latter is surely preferable but I suspect that the best alternative might be to remove the hierarchy of command and the narrow class of power-holders altogether. If the struture doesn't work, ditch it. Is it possible to give unto Caesar what is Caesar's and to God what is God's or must the former, ultimately, ruin the latter; or the latter ruin the former? Let's instead abandon a situation where one or the other must take place - let's get rid of Caesar and let SPQR back in on the act of government.