The Toxic Culture of the Economics Profession

 

"India is a Retreating Image in China's Rear-View Mirror" Shyam Saran

 

‘Something is in the air’: Ben Okri on the fight against racism

Ben Okri in The FT

‘Our lives begin to end the day we become silent about the things that matter’ — Martin Luther King Jr 

My first conscious experience of race was when I was six years old. My father had come to collect me from school. As we made our way across the snow-covered fields in Peckham, south London, in the winter of 1965-66, I felt something crack my head. Then I heard the voices of boys shouting the N-word, making animal noises and throwing packed snowballs with stones in them. 

We fought back as best as we could, father and son, but in the end had to run. When we got home we were bloodied. 

“Why were they throwing stones at us?” I asked. 

Dad struggled for words. 

“It’s because we are black,” he said. 

 At the time, what he said made no sense to me. With time, other things said didn’t make sense either. “You will never amount to anything.” “There’s no future for you.” 

I think the 12 weeks of lockdown have purified our sense of justice. They have given us time to think. I was on a short walk the other day and found myself wondering how it must be for a child to feel that the world thinks evilly of them for reasons that don’t make sense. Imagine the additional effects of being insulted, picked on, ganged up against, constantly harassed by the police, wrongly accused, mocked on TV, excluded — in short, the whole catalogue of injustices that people of colour withstand daily?

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If anyone wants an explanation for the scale of protests following the killing of George Floyd, they need look no further than the buried accumulation of racial prejudices endured for years, for lifetimes, by black people. 

A people endure and endure and then one day an event becomes a living symbol of what is being done to them, a symbol that they are perceived as less than human. How long are people meant to suffer before they cry out? 

Racism is the perception that one race is superior to another, that the colour of their skin determines their place in the human hierarchy. Pernicious and pervasive, it is supported by a matrix of power and history. For racism to be real, there has to be power. It has to be a hard and incontestable power. It is this that gives racism its vicious quality. For every George Floyd and Sandra Bland in America, there is a Stephen Lawrence, a Julian Cole, a Nuno Cardoso in Britain. 

The real question is whether racism is inherently human. Every people, in the depth of their hearts, think themselves superior to others. They think themselves the centre of the world until another people overpower them. If a people have power over other people long enough, they think themselves intrinsically superior. Soon their mythology will reflect this. Racism is merely the mythology of power seeded into the culture of a people. But racism can also be a compensatory mythology. 

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Racism does not reflect reality. It only reflects the current reality of power relations. If the western economy were to collapse today and all the financial and military power move eastward, the mythology of race would move eastward too. Mythology is often the storytelling of those who have gained power. Strip people of their power and the justification of their racism vanishes. Watch a people acquire power, and the justification of their racism emerges. 

Racism is destructive. Racism is really war declared. It is war threatened at every moment. If you remove all the social niceties, this is what racism says: “Your life means nothing to me; my life is more important than yours.” A logical conclusion of racism is genocide. 

It is amazing to me that people don’t see that it is a few short steps from polite, concealed, social racism to Derek Chauvin of the Minneapolis Police Department applying a knee to the throat of George Floyd, also of Minneapolis, for eight and a half minutes. 

But a mentality that secretly thinks one race not quite of the same level of humanity, with a bit of power, and a sense of immunity, soon finds that very mentality justifying such state-sanctioned killing. If you doubt this, have a read through the nastier chapters of apartheid or colonial history and see the things that well-educated people who thought of themselves as perfectly civilised sanctioned in the name of race. 

The aspect that causes the greatest difficulty is how a person can reconcile their sense of personal decency with the possibility of harbouring, perhaps unknown to themselves, racist tendencies. I know many good decent people who do things to their friends of colour which, if said or done to them, would fill them with outrage. Let’s call these racism blind spots. 

The forms that racism takes are legion. They can be as seemingly innocuous as being given the tables near the toilet in a restaurant, or the most isolated places at dinner settings, or the silent insinuation of having someone clutch their handbag tighter when they see you. It could be as vicious as being set upon by the police, or having someone call the cops on you when you go birdwatching in a park. It could be as indeterminate as being the first person suspected if a mobile phone goes missing in a friend’s house that you are visiting, or taking an hour to get a taxi in the 1990s, while seeing them stop a short distance away for someone of a “less threatening” hue. It could be the terrible case of John Bunn, who was wrongly convicted of murder and spent 17 years in prison. 

Racism is one of the greatest wastes of human resources. It would be useful to have a cost analysis of what is lost to nations from the effects of systemic racism, the loss of manpower that could be put to work in the great enterprise of civilisation. 

All people who endure racial prejudice just want the normal rights of human beings. They want to get jobs, have nice working experiences, enjoy friendships, fall in love, raise their kids, and make their orderly procession through life just like everyone else. 

I think it is essential that every child be educated about race. An understanding of justice ought to be a basic part of their education. Our children carry forth the assumptions we make about the world. If we leave the moral education of our children to the schools, then they simply absorb the dominant views. A sense of justice can only really come from the home. The trouble is that so many parents have no idea of the injustices into which they are raising their children. People are not born hating, Nelson Mandela once said, they must learn. The parents needed to be educated first but weren’t. 

Children can be better educated on race, most importantly by being taught history more fully. They must be taught about the slave trade and that it was an evil. They should be taught about the empire and colonialism, but they must also learn about the legitimate voices against its cruelties and how people fought for their independence. They should be taught about the civil rights movement and apartheid. Every child should know that people are equal before God and their fellow human beings. It can only make them stronger and more in tune with the future, because they stand in truth with justice and their times. Every child should be raised with the fundamental assumption that all races, all colours, are valid and equal. This single thing alone would make the world a truly extraordinary place, rich with the possibilities of our commingled genius. 

The effect of racism on education is devastating. Not long ago, I visited a prison for a BBC programme. All of the black prisoners I spoke to fell out of the educational system because of how it made them feel. 

The issue of race is more than a moral problem. It is an existential one. The reason the issue of race keeps coming back is because people cannot face the truth about what they have done to one another. They cannot face the truth about the secret thinking that is behind the strangeness of their racial actions, or about the real reason why the ideology of race came into existence in the first place. 

The modern idea of race began with Europeans coming to Africa in search of gold. When the trade degenerated from gold to human beings, it was the ideology of racial hierarchy that was used to justify that monstrosity. 

The idea of race is not just black and white. A species of racism is there in the Bible, and in most sacred texts. It is there among the ancient Egyptians. It is there in the ancient Greeks towards the Persians, and with the Persians towards the Greeks. A casual reading of Caesar’s “Commentaries” shows that the Romans believed the British tribes to be a race of barbarians. 

Maybe all mythologies of origin are by implication racist. Tribalism is the microcosm of racism. It may well be that humans are inclined by nature to their own kind but over the course of years people learnt by trade, by the fact that no one can have all the blessings or resources, that it is better to have dealings with other peoples. They discovered in the process that the other is not so very different from them, or that their difference is not apocalyptic. Without this overcoming of prejudice to some degree, civilisation could never have happened. 

It seems that the idea of tribal or racial superiority belongs very much to the primitive stage of human development. Because, ultimately, thinking yourself superior to others is bad for business and fatal for progress. It causes possibilities to diminish around you. Those who respect others do better trade with others, and win their friendship and support. All the high-minded ideas of Rome’s superior destiny could not keep it from being torn apart by the concerted effort of the Goths. 

We have really misapplied the idea of civilisation. We think civilisation is Plato, the Acropolis and the classics. To my mind, civilisation is the unleashing of the noble impulses of the human spirit for the greater good of the human race and the beautification of the earth. The real civilisation begins when people realise that being human is one of the greatest miracles of the universe. 

Racial thinking is a toxic pathology, and at the heart of it there is a kind of madness. It is the madness of a denial of a reality which the inward mind knows to be true. The house of racial thinking is a divided, unstable house. It is unsustainable. And like the Berlin Wall, it will fall. Keep in mind the image of Chauvin with his knee on George Floyd’s neck. This is a police officer who should be protecting the citizens but who is in effect being an executioner. “It is the job of thinking people not to be on the side of the executioners,” wrote Camus. 

This is a clamorous age of freedom. The young, the old, women, LGBT people, the differently abled, all demand their full human rights. 

Something is in the air. In the past, the big clashes were around visible, measurable events: the Berlin Wall, apartheid. There is some of that going on now, the tearing down of the statues of the Bristol slave trader, the removal of the statues of King Leopold II in Belgium. Maybe these protests are about an idea that is long overdue, an idea that will tear through our societies and reinstate the place of true justice in all aspects of our lives. 

Maybe the human race is growing up at last, refusing the horrible shackles of racism, rejecting all of its injustices. Maybe the time of that primitive idea of racial superiority is finally over. Black people and white people are joining forces in their monumental protests to rip this evil from our societies, our institutions, our hearts. 

In which case, the real birth of modern moral civilisation began on May 25 2020, when, for eight minutes and 46 seconds, George Floyd said 16 times over that he could not breathe.

Is vegetarianism and veganism about animal welfare or moral superiority?

Leslie Cannold for the Ethics Centre in The Guardian

‘There is more than one way to fulfil our obligations to eliminate the unnecessary suffering of animals.’ Photograph: Wong Maye-E/AP




The western obsession with rights makes it difficult to see their limitations. We speak about rights as if they were the only moral value with meaning, ignoring other important moral values like responsibilities or duties. In fact, responsibilities are the counterparts to rights – you can’t have one without the other.

Philosopher Carl Cohen writes that, “If animals have any rights, they must have the right not to be killed to advance the interest of others.” Another way of putting this is that those who assert the rights of animals are in effect asserting – first and foremost – a right to life for all animals.

But for an animal to realise its right to life, farmers, hunters and researchers must collectively accept a duty not to kill them. Similarly, citizens, consumers and patients must refuse to eat, wear or use food, clothes and medicine that require an animal to die.

As I’ll be arguing in the IQ2 debate “Animal rights should trump human interests” in Sydney on Tuesday night, the assertion of an animal right to life is non-sensical. It would require us – just as one example – to stop animals from hunting one another, just like we stop humans from killing one another. But more importantly, it is unnecessary to achieve what is required to improve the lot of animals.

Even Peter Singer, one of the intellectual fathers of the animal rights movement, doesn’t believe animals have a right to life. In his seminal text Animal Liberation he says we must refuse to contribute to – and act to stop – the unnecessary suffering of animals.

But he does not contend that animals have a right to life or that they suffer by having their life taken from them.

Instead, what he claims is that intensively farmed animals suffer because of the cruel and tortuous ways they are made to live and are slaughtered. We have a duty to do what we can to stop this by boycotting businesses that treat animals cruelly.

Having done that, we have a choice. We can go without wearing make-up and without eating or wearing animal flesh that required the torture of animals, or we can source and buy cruelty-free cosmetics and eat and wear ethically-farmed and slaughtered animal products.

In other words, while it might have been true that when Animal Liberation was written in the 1970s, the result of a boycott was a vegetarian or vegan lifestyle, this is no longer the case. Today, there is more than one way to fulfil our obligations to eliminate the unnecessary suffering of animals.

Indeed, given clear, cross-cultural evidence that only around 1.5% of people are willing to try or stick with a vegan or vegetarian lifestyle – figures that have not changed over time – the promotion of an ethically carnivorous life is likely to be a far more effective way to reduce the suffering of animals.

To me, this is so obvious that I have to ask why in 2016 animal rights groups continue to advance vegetarian and veganism as the only legitimate way to end animal suffering. A 2014 study funded by Voiceless, found that 70% of Australians agreed that “human beings have an obligation to avoid harming all animals”. This sort of sentiment had led “substantial proportions” to buy “free range” meat and dairy and cruelty-free products. Despite this, the Humane Research Council – authors of the study – advised animal rights advocates that while they ought capitalise on “widespread support for incremental improvements” they must also continue to press people to “abstain from animal products entirely.”

Why not press people who have chosen to make a difference through buying cruelty-free products to buy more of them more often? Or to buy them exclusively? Is it possible that vegetarianism and veganism continues to be promoted as the sole way of meeting our obligations to animals not because it is, but because it makes the promoters feel morally superior?

If it were, it wouldn’t be the first time the eco-left stymied mass behaviour change with unpalatable prescriptions delivered in self-righteous tones.

Analysis has revealed that mass communications around climate change provoked feelings of powerlessness rather than a desire to act in many people. Often the wrong moral note was struck, too. Environmental activist and philosopher Sarah Bachelard wrote at the time, “There can be a tone of self-righteousness ... a kind of shrill moral indignation ... We know that we are on the side of the angels, and in our own way we can fail to do justice to the complex reality of most human action and motivation. We get something out of ‘being right’ ... (and) satisfaction from making those who do not agree with us wrong.”

The truth is that an ethically carnivorous life is possible so long as we ensure the animals we consume have lived and died without unnecessary suffering.

Do animal rights trump human interests? Not if the animal right we are talking about is a right to life, and the human interest at stake is health. But I join with most people in believing we do have an obligation to stop animal cruelty and to fulfill this duty through the choices we make about what we eat, wear and do every day.