Freud and the politics of cruelty

That story about the frog not noticing that the water it is sitting in is getting hotter and hotter, with fatal results? Probably not true.  But why let the facts get in the way of a cherished metaphor? There is a bigger point here: sometimes we don’t notice how things are changing because the change is happening bit by bit. That is one of the dangers of moral relativism. A gradual decline in standards can lead you to an ugly place.

When Lord Freud was revealed last week as having said that some disabled people were “not worth” the minimum wage, there was a remarkable reaction. Great ingenuity was displayed in an attempt to show that this apparently unpleasant remark had in fact been well-intentioned and was not really offensive at all. Freud hadn’t meant that disabled people were in any way worth less than their fellow citizens. It was just that employers couldn’t afford to pay them the minimum wage if their productivity was limited.

This was, at a stretch, an almost plausible explanation – if you were prepared to ignore the words of the apology that Lord Freud signed off and released to the media on Wednesday afternoon. He said: “All disabled people should be paid at least the minimum wage, without exception, and I accept that it is offensive to suggest anything else.” The apologists and the apologiser were hardly in perfect alignment. Well, it had been a busy day.

I first met David Freud over 20 years ago, when I was a know-nothing teenage scribbler and he was a rising star at the merchant bank SG Warburg. I have seen him speak a couple of times since. I do not for a moment think he is a vicious or a wicked person, even if his back catalogue of startlingly blunt and at times ill-judged remarks have made him something of hate figure for his critics .

I can accept that he was wrestling, in public and in crass language, with a sincere concern: the difficulty of finding worthwhile and rewarding work for quite severely disabled people. What was shocking was the casualness with which a phrase such as “not worth the minimum wage” could be used, and the vigour with which some people tried to dismiss criticism of that phrase.

Like the metaphorical frog in gently warming water, too many of us have become desensitised to the rhetoric of cruelty and contempt that has grown up around us in recent times. Industrious and law-abiding immigrants are smeared as a threat, and harmful to our economy. “Human rights” are belittled as an obstacle to the functioning of a successful society. Prison suicides have risen in the past year and a half to an average of more than six a month – a quarter of which have involved people on remand pre-trial – and justice minister Chris Grayling says there is no pattern to be seen here .

All around us harshness prevails. And some people don’t even notice. It is no use arid economists telling us that Lord Freud was referring to market rather then moral worth. A conflation of meaning has taken place. And a crude, reductive notion of human beings as purely economic entities has taken hold. It is a neat way of justifying gross income inequality, of course, for the winners in that game to award themselves moral as well as financial superiority. Their position at the top is the only validation they need.

In his paper “Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego” (1921), Lord Freud’s great grandfather, Sigmund, observed: “Cruelty and intolerance to those who do not belong to it are natural to every religion.” For religion we can also read gang, or club. If you are in with the in-crowd you may well do all you can to keep the out-crowd out. In the worst cases you will, perhaps without realising it, lose whatever empathy you may have once felt for those who are less fortunate than you are. You may justify acts of cruelty to yourself, labelling them as necessary, “tough decisions” – without pausing to reflect how tough the consequences will be for those on the receiving end of those decisions. You will, in short, lose something – perhaps a great deal – of your humanity.

Yes indeed: the Nasty Party is back. And it has some nasty supporters cheering it on.