The experience of the loss of a sense of belonging is an important factor in the rejection of Labour, and more broadly in the reaction against liberal politics and economics. A collective feeling of dispossession and political disenfranchisement contributed toward the UK’s exit from the EU, the electoral realignment in British politics in 2019, and Labour’s fourth consecutive and worst defeat since the 1930s.

And yet despite the extraordinary political impact of this collective sense of loss, and despite its contribution to Labour’s political crisis, little has been said about what it means. The problem is not simply ‘out there’ and amenable to a few policy interventions. It is a product of our political system and the problem lies within the heart of the Labour Party.

This short essay follows an earlier one on Labour’s interests and values, and offers a brief analysis of the politics of grief. It draws on the ideas of Peter Marris in his book Change and Loss, written under the auspices of the Institute of Community Studies and published in 1974. Marris was a sociologist who wanted to understand the place of loss and bereavement in social change. In doing so he salvaged the importance of conservatism in rethinking the meaning of change and the practices of political reform and coalition building.

Culture and meaning

Marris’ first task is to explain the centrality of culture and its continuity in a meaningful human life. A culture provides the stability of interpretations by which individuals predict patterns of events. We assimilate new experiences by placing them in the context of a familiar, reliable construction of reality.  This construction of reality rests not only on the regularity of events themselves, but on the continuity of their meaning. The anthropologist Ruth Benedict in Patterns of Culture (1968) affirms this view. “Society” she writes, “is never an entity separable from the individuals who compose it. No individual can arrive even at the threshold of his potentialities without a culture in which he participates.”

Human beings have a deep-seated impetus to defend the validity of what we have learned through our families and cultural inheritance, for without it we would be helpless. Benedict describes the collapse of a culture as the “loss of something that had value equal to that of life itself.” Life continues but the symbols and practices that gave it meaning are gone. There no longer exists the means to represent what has happened and both the past and a sense of future are lost.

The conservative impulse is the valuing of home (oikos) and a culture. It is the human response to unintelligible events that do not fit the familiar habits of feeling, principles of conduct, attachments, purposes, and conceptions of the culture each of us has grown up in. In this sense we are all profoundly conservative, and feel threatened if our basic assumptions and emotional attachments are challenged.

Change and loss

Since the 1980s politics has been dominated by a liberal consensus - the right has controlled the economy, the left has controlled the institutions of culture and learning. As wealth and opportunity became increasingly concentrated at the top there has been a growing separation of elites from the rest of society.

The estrangement of government from the governed, and the cultural and educational exclusivity of the political class has eroded popular trust in the democratic process and undermined reciprocity in society. The mainstream politics of the liberal consensus had no conception that the rapidity and scale of social and economic changes brought in their wake deep, collective feelings of loss and bereavement. These found no political representation within the democratic process.

The loss of a sense of belonging is associated with older, Leave voters, of the so-called ‘left behind’ areas. They have been the object of intense media and political commentary and anthropological study. And yet the experience of loss and cultural disorientation applies also to the younger generations of the higher educated, middle classes mourning for an idea of the future which gave their lives meaning and which has since been lost.

Amongst large segments of the electorate the disintegration of attachments and a meaningful environment has led to an irretrievable loss of the familiar and a sense of bereavement. Detached from the social relationships and inherited values that once helped them interpret events, they could no longer make sense of their world, and nor could the political class.

A utilitarian outlook dominates mainstream political culture and blunts its sensitivity to the implications of social changes. Political exhortations to equality, progress, sustainability, and social justice seldom specify what they mean. This abstraction of principle permits a tolerant, pluralistic conception of society. It describes the boundaries of human nature and permitted behaviour in terms of the most general principles of rationality and humanity. But it is incomprehensible if translated into the lives and relationships of individuals. As Marris argues, it mistakes the principles which sustain the openness of society for those which sustain the lives of its members.

In a society of grief, the continuity between past and present has broken down and the unfamiliar eclipses the familiar. Unable to interpret events, suspicious of the institutions of cultural interpretation and knowledge making, and feeling judged by the class which controls them, individuals embark on a search for meaning and purpose in a nihilistic world in which ‘nothing is true anymore, but instead everything is permitted’.

The outcome is the growth of a hyper-reality of fake news, conspiracy theories and pseudo-sciences which delegitimise conventional sources of truth-telling. Democratic politics polarises around an intensification of absolutist and messianic ideologies. Both left and right contribute to a heightening of unreality and real-life conflict as they attempt to enforce their interpretations and truth claims on a meaningless world.

During this period of liberal consensus the Labour party has become politically dominated by the higher educated professional classes whose progressive values tend to be ideologically hostile to the conservative disposition. For Labour, reform is the answer to social injustices. Those who oppose social change are considered backward looking or reactionary.

But the rationalism of the Left ignores the ambiguities of change. If change is disruptive, individuals do not just assimilate it because it makes good sense. The continuity of their attachments and understanding of the world still have to be restored. What these understandings and attachments now mean needs to be tested in terms which can be derived from what they used to mean. Change brings loss, and loss must be grieved for if change is to become assimilated into people’s lives.

Conflict and grief

Popular support for democratic politics depends upon its ability to articulate the process of grieving and this involves allowing conflict, not supressing it. Marris explains this paradoxical view. The more nakedly people are exposed to the anxieties of change, the more uncompromisingly they will try to erect barriers about their precarious sense of self. They may seek to invent a tribe – a collective identification – where none has existed, and project their internal conflict upon society in these terms. He argues that this process of externalising ambivalence is a crucial aspect of the management of change.

Conflict is a very powerful organising principle of behaviour. It simplifies and clarifies immediate purposes. So when reforms create confusions in relationships they are likely to be more manageable when they allow a structure of oppositions to evolve. Tensions can be relieved by constructing the boundaries of a conflict. The internal conflict of grief becomes more manageable, when it is projected as a social drama to which people can relate their behaviour.

The need for a resolution to conflict is fundamental to both mourning and democratic politics. In contrast, the liberal consensus of the last two decades suppressed both the politics and expression of loss for fear of conflict. The consequence was the bursting out of all the internal contradictions in the rise of populism, the social movements of hyper-reality, and an illiberal liberal politics. Impeded by its utilitarian culture, Labour has been unable to comprehend the conservatism which resists its offers of reform.

A democratic politics of the common good.

On the basis of his argument, Marris identifies a number of principles for democratic politics. Those involved in negotiating reform or a coalition must first be confident that no resolution will overwhelm their right to be themselves. If groups are intrinsically insecure and still unsure of their integrity and purpose, any alliance may seem threatening. Negotiation is always likely to threaten the internal coherence of one side or the other, provoking a reaction towards the reasserting of difference. Reform or coalition building has to evolve through a politics of identity formation into a politics of interests.

Success means generating enough confidence in these collective identities to move people from defensive self-assertion to negotiation. The ambivalence of loss needs to be transformed into a conflict of interests. Mourning is the process which enables those overwhelmed by the confusion of change to take their bearings, lead toward the resolution of loss and develop a strategy for reconstruction.

At the end of his book Marris summarises these principles:

“First the process of reform must always expect and even encourage conflict. Whenever people are confronted with change, they need the opportunity to react, to articulate their ambivalent feelings and work out their own sense of it.

“Second the process must respect the autonomy of different kinds of experience so that groups of people can organise without the intrusion of alien conceptions.

“Third there must be time and patience, because the conflicts involve not only the accommodation of diverse interests, but the realisation of an essential continuity in the structure of meaning.”

The conservative disposition is necessary for the collective process of mourning toward a democratic reconciliation and renewal. But for those who have lost their sense of belonging there is a strong appeal for politics as an irreconcilable opposition of races and classes. The form of ultimate reconciliation to which conflict will lead is rejected in favour of a permanent radicalism. 

Marris is clear about those who choose this path. They not only deny the experience of loss and grief. They also deny the importance of the meaning others have struggled to make in their lives. To define the lives of others in one’s own terms, implies that their existence does not matter, except as it reflects your own. It is this narcissism on both the left and the right which prevents meaningful change by idealising a politics of conflict without compromise or reconciliation.