The Professions Under Pressure
Sta,—It is a pleasure to try to help Mr J. R. Scott in his 'confused and uncertain state of mind,' and for- tunately the specific question he asks me (Letters, September 23) is easy to answer. He wonders 'how society is apparently something other than the sum of the individuals who make it up'; he is quite right to wonder, because it isn't. This was precisely the point I was trying to make. You can't have a duty to something that doesn't exist.
Yet it is a dangerous myth, for it obscures reality and the need for individual responsibility and action. 'Social security' sounds better than State adminis- trators dispensing the taxpayers' money; the 'social conscience' gives a comforting feeling of general be- nevolence which is less obtrusive than the efforts of individuals laboriously seeking to persuade an apathetic majority of the need for specific legislative reforms; 'social needs' are less disquieting than actual people in trouble, who need to be thought of and helped as people; it is nice to feel that someone else has a 'duty to society,' for then he can be told what to do and not be paid very much for doing it.
The word 'society' is also used in other contexts. There used to be something called 'society' which was a self-appointed elite that purported to establish and enforce (at least on its own members) a code of morality or convention. The new all-embracing (classless?) 'society,' the super-family, has taken over the claims and pretensions of the elite without even the rudimentary ethical basis of its code. Its conven- tions are no more than a kind of statistical average
of actual behaviour, arrived at by market research and sedulously propagated as the 'norm' by sellers of standardised consumer goods. It is a dangerous myth, because the pressure to conform might actually make it come true. The only 'duty' to it that anyone should recognise is to tell it to go away. It is also as well to realise that when someone purports to speak on its behalf he is generally trying to impose a majority —or sometimes an average—standard on a minority; the proposition should be considered on its merits, without recognising the bogus authority claimed.
However, most of Mr Scott's confusion arises from the fact that he hasn't (in the words of my article) 'any clear idea of the nature of a profession.' Nor, of course, has Mrs Whitehouse, who has confused Mr Scott by talking about 'professionals' when she means 'experts' (or sometimes 'administrators,' or sometimes even 'artists'). There are very few mem- bers of the professions about which I was writing in the BBC; those who are there stand in a profes- sional relationship not to the public but to the BBC, which pays them a salary. It is the BBC adminis- trators who are responsible to the public; but ad- ministration is not a profession.
I do hope that all this is now quite clear? What it boils down to is that Mr Scott has been trying to make a synthesis of two entirely unrelated proposi- tions. He can now stop worrying about 'society' and, if he wishes, concentrate on considering Mrs White- house's proposals on their merits. These have nothing whatever to do with the professions, but involve— as I understand them—two questions: do TV pro- grammes have a deleterious effect on those who watch them? and if so, who should do what about it and how? Since Mr Scott's perfectly reasonable pnswers to these questions seem to be respectively no, nobody, nothing and nohow, that would seem to be that. I can't imagine why he dragged me into it.
ANGUS MAUDE
House of Commons, London, SW I
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