The Playing Fields of Eton

 

Johnson at Eton, front and center as usual, in one of a number of pictures where he seems to be trying on a Mussolini face. Photo via The London Economic.

This fine Guardian piece by the novelist Richard Beard, talking about how upper-class boarding school nourishes and shapes the psychopathy of the Tory ruling class in UK, as typified by Old Etonians like David Cameron and Boris Johnson, is harrowing (see what I did there?):

One of the first things we learned – or felt – at prep school was a deep, emotional austerity, starting from the moment the parents drove away. That first night, and on other nights to come, the little men in ties and jackets reverted to the little children they really were – in name-taped pyjamas with a single soft toy (also name-taped), blubbing themselves to sleep and wetting their beds.

I remember the feeling of desolate homesickness: abruptly, several times a year, our attachments to home and family were broken. We lost everything – parents, pets, toys, younger siblings – and we could cry if we liked but no one would help us. So that later in life, when we saw other people cry, we felt no great need to go to their aid. The sad and the weak were wrong to show their distress, and we learned to despise the children who blubbed for their mummies. The cure was to stop crying and forget that life beyond the dormitories and classrooms existed. Concentrate instead on the games pitches and the dining hall and the headmaster’s study. By force of will we made ourselves complicit in a collective narrowing of vision.

Feels like it's all there, doesn't it? The way these boys had their emotions amputated and cauterized, so to speak; the resulting dearth of empathy and contempt for those who fail to hide their vulnerability; and the reordering of priorities in which winning (at rugby or cricket) for your side is all-important, the only emotion you're allowed to feel, and what's happening to all the Common People out there is of no importance at all. With real-world consequences for the dude himself, as well as the rest of the world:

David Cameron admits that about Brexit he “did not fully anticipate the strength of feeling that would be unleashed both during the referendum and afterwards”. Of course he didn’t. Strong feelings were involved, and also the common people. He was floundering in a pair of blind spots, to emotion and the British public. He gorged on a double helping of ignorance undisturbed since his schooldays.

And yet there's something missing from the story; in the first place, the fact that not everybody comes out of public school like that; Beard's example is Eric Blair (whose development may have been affected by his knowledge that he was a scholarship boy), who became George Orwell after St. Cyprian and Eton, but you might as well cite Beard himself (a strong enough rugby player at school that he later spent time playing professionally, in the French league).

Then, it's not clear how to relate this to our own Tory psychopaths on this side of the Atlantic. Trump, for instance, was clearly a psychopath before they packed him off to military school—that's why he had to go (in my mind, it's all tied up with the incident in which, like Heracles, he beat up his music teacher, but I'm not sure that's right). And we have plenty who didn't go to private school at all. The British "public school" is really a very special institution, but the phenomenon of the psychopathic political leader isn't unique to Britain.

Seems to me the story isn't really about how Eton makes psychopaths, but how it rewards them, in an ecological setup where they thrive and dominate. The boy who already hates his parents and is glad to be separated from them, the prepared hypocrite who knows how to supply the pieties—the Flashman or Malfoy figure who already values winning over "how you play the game" (the fact that Tom Brown or Harry Potter is victorious in the books is proof that the books are fiction)—is the one who has the adaptive traits that lead him to the higher rungs in such a place. We can probably find similar ecological features in environments like Fred Trump's family in the 1950s, or the Princeton debate team when Ted Cruz was on it. Strict evangelical families and their enforcement of gender stereotype, strict evangelical schools and the lecture-recitation teaching style (where the student doesn't work out a good answer but memorizes the only permissible answer imposed by the power structure) have such things as well.

What Eton especially provides, I think, is a kind of veneer that actually hides the psychopathy, through the school's extravagant rewards-and-punishments system and the premium it puts on clubbability, on not being visibly pushy or showing strong convictions, on saying the right things simply because it's conventional, the relaxed and confident and not overly serious demeanor that marks the true gentleman, overlaid on the personality of a homicidal narcissist, the boyish charm of Boris Johnson as he's lying his vile head off.