Why do non-dominant OBCs and Dalits support BJP

 

The parable of John Rawls

Janan Ganesh in The FT

In the latest Pixar film, Soul, every human life starts out as a blank slate in a cosmic holding pen. Not until clerks ascribe personalities and vocations does the corporeal world open. As all souls are at their mercy, there is fairness of a kind. There is also chilling caprice. And so Pixar cuts the stakes by ensuring that each endowment is benign. No one ends up with dire impairments or unmarketable talents in the “Great Before”. 

Kind as he was (a wry Isaiah Berlin, it is said, likened him to Christ), John Rawls would have deplored the cop-out. This year is the 50th anniversary of the most important tract of political thought in the last century or so. To tweak the old line about Plato, much subsequent work in the field amounts to footnotes to A Theory of Justice. Only some of this has to do with its conclusions. The method that yielded them was nearly as vivid. 

Rawls asked us to picture the world we should like to enter if we had no warning of our talents. Nor, either, of our looks, sex, parents or even tastes. Don this “veil of ignorance”, he said, and we would maximise the lot of the worst-off, lest that turned out to be us. As we brave our birth into the unknown, it is not the average outcome that troubles us. 

From there, he drew principles. A person’s liberties, which should go as far as is consistent with those of others, can’t be infringed. This is true even if the general welfare demands it. As for material things, inequality is only allowed insofar as it lifts the absolute level of the poorest. Some extra reward for the hyper-productive: yes. Flash-trading or Lionel Messi’s leaked contract: a vast no. Each of these rules puts a floor — civic and economic — under all humans. 

True, the phrase-making helped (“the perspective of eternity”). So did the timing: 1971 was the Keynesian Eden, before Opec grew less obliging. But it was the depth and novelty of Rawls’s thought that brought him reluctant stardom. 

Even those who denied that he had “won” allowed that he dominated. Utilitarians, once-ascendant in their stress on the general, said he made a God of the individual. The right, sure that they would act differently under the veil, asked if this shy scholar had ever met a gambler. But he was their reference point. And others’ too. A Theory might be the densest book to have sold an alleged 300,000 copies in the US alone. It triumphed. 

And it failed. Soon after it was published, the course of the west turned right. The position of the worst-off receded as a test of the good society. Robert Nozick, Rawls’s libertarian Harvard peer, seemed the more relevant theorist. It was a neoliberal world that saw both men out in 2002. 

An un-public intellectual, Rawls never let on whether he cared. Revisions to his theory, and their forewords, suggest a man under siege, but from academic quibbles not earthly events. For a reader, the joy of the book is in tracking a first-class mind as it husbands a thought from conception to expression. Presumably that, not averting Reaganism, was the author’s aim too. 

And still the arc of his life captures a familiar theme. It is the ubiquity of disappointment — even, or especially, among the highest achievers. Precisely because they are capable of so much, some measure of frustration is their destiny. I think of Tony Blair, thrice-elected and still, post-Brexit, somehow defeated. (Sunset Boulevard, so good on faded actors, should be about ex-politicians.) Or of friends who have made fortunes but sense, and mind, that no one esteems or much cares about business. 

The writer Blake Bailey tells an arresting story about Gore Vidal. The Sage of Amalfi was successful across all literary forms save poetry. He was rich enough to command one of the grandest residential views on Earth. If he hadn’t convinced Americans to ditch their empire or elect him to office, these were hardly disgraces. On that Tyrrhenian terrace, though, when a friend asked what more he could want, he said he wanted “200 million people” to “change their minds”. At some level, however mild his soul, so must have Rawls.

Why should I care - Lectures on Inequality

Lecture 1 - Why should I care about Inequality

Lecture 2 - How do we measure Inequality

Lecture 3 - What is happening to Inequality

Lecture 4 - What is happening now?

Lecture 5 - The Bigger picture

Grammar schools are unfair. Principled parents must refuse to encourage them

Louise Tickle in The Guardian


 
‘A gentle challenge will often prompt the mantra that’s endlessly parroted to justify a parent’s principles turning to dust in the lead-up to the 11-plus exam. ‘You have to do the best by your child, don’t you?’’ Photograph: Rex/Shutterstock
  

When my son was six months old, I agreed to move to Gloucestershire. It’s lovely here in the Stroud Valleys – or it is until your child reaches the second half of primary school, and everyday chats about school stuff with friends suddenly start to veer off into shamefaced mumbles about tutoring, and how if Charlie or Clara want to take the 11-plus with their mates, “then who are we to stop them?”

You’re their parents, who make a heap of choices about your children’s lives based on your political beliefs, is my answer. So why crumble now?

As an education journalist who is opposed to selection – because it disproportionately benefits an already vastly advantaged middle-class minority, and actively harms the educational prospects of other, often poorer children – I find negotiating these conversations with people I know painfully fraught. I have not yet found a polite way to tell a friend who allows their child to take the 11-plus that, while I cling to the idea that they are not at heart a shit, they are doing an exceedingly shitty thing.

A gentle challenge will often prompt the mantra that’s endlessly parroted to justify a parent’s principles turning to dust in the lead-up to the 11-plus exam. “You have to do the best by your child, don’t you?” is intoned with a phlegmatic sigh, lips pressed together in wry acknowledgment that the situation isn’t ideal, but life’s a bitch, and one’s own child’s interests – obviously– trump every other consideration. The listener’s agreement is automatically assumed.

No, I increasingly want to yell. Given that their offspring, and pretty much all their friends, are among the luckiest children in the history of humankind, choosing to construct a more divided society via our taxpayer-funded education system that disadvantages other kids – some with unimaginably difficult home lives that make it harder for them to do well at school – is not something I think should be encouraged. But it appears to be viewed as aberrant or just plain weird by many middle-class parents not to grab every possible personal advantage and hug it tight to the family bosom, while still maintaining they want the best for all.

We’re animals. I get it. We’re programmed to chase advantage for our young, even to the detriment of other people’s children. And so while it’s particularly pernicious that some parents pay for months, sometimes years, of tutoring to get their child through an exam that they might well otherwise fail, I know it’s because they are desperate to secure for their child any extra benefit going in a country that is becoming ever more unequal.

But inside, I seethe. Often I do so silently, because with so many parents actively pursuing the advantages that selection confers, confronting them has become deeply socially uncomfortable.It’s incongruent with many people’s view of themselves as good folk who believe in fairness and equality. And facing this paradox head-on in conversation has, in my experience, become something of a taboo: how do you call out friends and stay friends, when you’re accusing them of hurting other people’s children? I try, but the discomfort it prompts is palpable, and defensiveness is rife. The fact that researchers have concluded that there is “no benefit to attending a grammar school for high-attaining pupils” makes the unedifying scrabble even more sad.

It’s the system that stinks, of course, and it has to be fought at the policy level, not by individuals at the school gates. Parents mustn’t set themselves against each other. While that is true, it doesn’t let parents off the hook. It may be possible – I guess – to be opposed to selection in principle even while sending your children to a grammar school. Yet in practice parents cannot challenge a system with any authority when they have cut the ground from beneath their own feet. When prominent people such as Shami Chakrabarti express concerns about selectionand then admit they opt out and write a fat cheque when it comes to their own kids, asking ordinary parents to stand up and be counted becomes tricky. Within the education sector too, people give up their power by acquiescing with a system they think is wrong: I know a headteacher who believes passionately in comprehensive education, whose child attends the local grammar: it is now impossible for that head to speak out without being called a hypocrite. We all make compromises in life, but this one comes at a high price paid by children who aren’t “selected” and who have no power and no say.

No unfair system was ever overturned by people carrying on using it for their own selfish ends while spouting their dismay. If the government sees parents urgently ushering their children into the 11-plus queue, then there is no debate left to win. Arguments against selection are fatally compromised when the very people one might normally expect to challenge unfairness, and who have the political heft to do it – articulate, middle-class parents – wave Charlie and Clara off to the local grammar every morning and, perfectly understandably, then feel too embarrassed to raise their voices.

Meritocracy is a myth

James Bloodworth in The Independent

What do you want to be when you grow up? I remember a careers advisor asking me just that question shortly before my sixteenth birthday. Like most of my peers I had very little idea as to what I wanted to do with my life when the seemingly endless horizon of school came to an end. Drink beer, smoke cigarettes and chase girls was about the sum of it.

Looking back, though, the question was a strange one. We insist on asking children what they want to do with their lives when most of the time it’s set in stone when they pull on their first school uniform. If they are born poor they will almost certainly stay poor; if their parents have money then it’s likely that they will too. The more unequal a society is the truer this statement becomes. 

Yes we insist on telling children that they can be ‘whatever they want to be’, knowing full well that crushing disappointment lies further in their future. Every nation relies to some extent on fairy tales. In Britain we cling to the idea that you can be or do anything in life so long as you put your mind to it. In the process we hand our politicians the one thing they can use to justify the obscene privileges at the top and the revolting squalor at the bottom: the indomitable myth of meritocracy.

Meritocracy is what’s politely called a dead duck. A child from a ‘modest’ background can only go from rags to riches in the sense that a human being can take off if they flap their arms around wildly enough. A disadvantaged child will nearly always and everywhere become a disadvantaged adult, and if you ignore the right-wing rhetoric and look at the data you might be a little less keen on hearing the 'M' word in future.

The children of wealthier parents are more likely to go to the best schools (houses in desirable catchment areas cost on average 42 per cent more), eat the best food, have access to ‘high culture’ and have a quiet place to do homework when they get home from school. As a result, poor but bright children get overtaken by their less intelligent classmates from wealthier backgrounds in the very first years of schooling, according to a 2007 study. 

As children become teenagers these inequalities are entrenched further. Around 10 per cent of young people at the bottom rung of the social ladder go to university compared with over 80 per cent of those from professional or managerial backgrounds. A student from a private school is 55 times more likely to go to Oxford or Cambridge University than a state school student on free school meals. And as universities minister David Willetts likes to point out, graduates will earn around £100,000 more over a lifetime than non-graduates.

Thomas Piketty’s ground-breaking book Capital in the 21st Century looks at how wealth concentrates when the returns on capital are higher than economic growth. Or in plain English, how it’s easier for a person who already has lots of money to make more of it. But it isn’t only wealth that concentrates; opportunity does too. Or as Picketty’s predecessor Karl Marx put it, “men make their own history, but they do not make it as they please; they make it…under circumstances…given and transmitted from the past”.

Take a look at political life in Britain today and the truth of that statement becomes self-evident. When Margaret Thatcher came to power in 1979 around 40 per cent of Labour MPs had done some form of manual or clerical work before they entered parliament. By 2010 that figure had plummeted to just 9 per cent. The shape of the labour market undoubtedly accounts for some of the change, but the extent to which parliament is rapidly becoming the talking shop of the middle classes is evident in other ways too. An astonishing 91 per cent of the 2010 intake of MPs were university graduates and 35 per cent were privately-educated. This is a rise on previous elections and, in the case of the latter, compares to just 7 per cent of the school age population as a whole.

If nothing else, the fact that a tweed-suited former stockbroker can pose as just an ordinary bloke when contrasted with other politicians should set the alarm bells ringing. The ossification of politics is made worse by a media which increasingly resembles the establishment talking to itself.

The unpalatable truth that no politician will dare acknowledge is this: meritocracy can only exist if the rich have a little less and the poor a little more. Countless studies show that social mobility improves in more equal societies. Norway has the greatest level of social mobility, followed by Denmark, Sweden and Finland. Britain and the US are the most unequal western societies on earth in terms of income distribution and, surprise surprise, have much lower rates of social mobility than their more equal Scandinavian counterparts.

Despite the well-intentioned rhetoric of Ed Miliband, we are not ‘one nation’, and the first step in creating a genuine meritocracy would be an admission that the interests of the banker are not the same as those of the nurse or the refuse collector. While huge inequalities exist there can be no serious talk of social mobility or meritocracy, and careers advisors up and down the country will have to keep on lying to our children.