The fifth element

"Conservatives believe in exceptionalism because they do not believe in perfect equality. Conservatives realize that some people inevitably have superior abilities, intelligence, and talents, and they believe that those people have a fundamental right to use and profit from their natural gifts." Thus the wise words of earth_wizard, who would like it known that he isn't a conservative himself, he just plays one on teevee he's just read a lot of books about them.

That people have different abilities, intelligence and talents is an undeniable fact. That people have a fundamental right to use and profit from their natural gifts is a principle with which few would disagree. That this has anything to do with social equality is simply not true.

Let's look at the proof. I can write, compose music and draw reasonable if somewhat cartoony pictures. Has the government ever bothered to find this out? It has not. It does not know anything about my skills, intelligence or talents. Therefore, they make no difference to the way I am regarded under the law. And this is perfectly right and proper. So, exceptionalism is irrelevant as regards social status.

Suppose it wasn't? J T McIntosh wrote a novel (World Out Of Mind) about a society in which people's abilities were tested and the appropriate status awarded according to a system of colours and shapes, starting, I believe, with Purple Circle and ending at the top with White Star. I really should re-read it; it's been a while. I don't think he approved of that society, and I know I don't. I don't want to be socially superior to someone who can't write as well as me, any more than I want to be socially inferior to someone who's better at the long jump. Talents, abilities and skills are in many ways their own reward; if anything, if social status were to be made dependent on ability in any way, I would say lack of ability should be compensated rather than penalised...but I think it's far better to keep the two things entirely separate.

There is of course one field in which ability reliably confers greater status, and that is the field of making money. Increased wealth, which confers power by its nature, also makes you a person to be reckoned with among people with whom you will never have financial dealings. It raises you in the social hierarchy, allows you to acquire influence and make connections, and again your status increases. It is one of the very few gateways to political office. So, yes, in this one very narrow and rather shabby sense, it is possible to profit socially from one's natural gifts, if they happen to run in the direction of accumulating cash. If they don't, then for most of us that's just too bad.

But what about the educational process? What about the qualifications you can get, that enable you to secure better-paid jobs and become a respected member of the community?

Well, for a start, education has very little to do with one's natural abilities and (these days) much more to do with shoving one into a job-shaped hole. For another thing, better-paid jobs are getting scarcer and more specialised, and more and more entry-level jobs are being dumbed down so that bosses can pay school leavers minimum wage to do them, as the proliferation of call centres goes to show. For a third, the supposed upward mobility that a good education gives you only goes so far, and that's not very. It isn't the way things should be...but it's the way the world has gone.

I'd like to see talent and ability recognised, fostered, developed and rewarded, certainly...but that should come after, and be entirely separate from, the acknowledgment that everyone, whatever their differences may be, from the president or prime minister right down to the poorest homeless person's daughter, is regarded as completely equal under the law, with the same rights and the same responsibilities. That no matter how skilled, how talented, how rich or how well-connected you are, you are subject to the law and will be punished if you break it. That no matter how poor, how weak, how insignificant or how disabled you are, you are entitled to the law's protection and to whatever support may be available for you.

Exceptionalism has nothing to do with democracy. And so to bed, with one more to go.

Supplemental

nelladarren has pointed out that I missed the point in quite a lot of the previous post: it isn't that conservatives believe the government should reward exceptional people, but that they believe exceptional people should be allowed to rise to the level of their abilities and not expected to have to give of their substance to help people who aren't as exceptional. I can only plead exhaustion in my defence.

And this is where we deal with a point that has cropped up once or twice but hasn't yet been formally addressed; the complaint of conservatives that making virtue a legal requirement makes it less of a virtue, that *having* to help people takes away the option of *choosing* to help people.

To which I say a resounding So what?

The reality here is that people need help. The poor are with us always, the sick, the old, the abused, the ones who can't find or hold down jobs. The ones who have been left behind by the exceptional. Those who defend the right to choose to help are defending the right to choose not to help, on the grounds that when they choose to help (and the people who make this argument generally do) it is in some indefinable way better.

Well. If you believe in God, if you are a Christian, then that argument may have some merit. God, as we understand Him, would look more kindly on the person who chose to feed the hungry, clothe the naked, and so on, than He doubtless would on someone who did it because he or she had to. So, if you are concerned about your place in heaven among the elect, then yes, I can see your problem. Pity about that. If you don't believe in God, of course, then all you are saying is that helping people because you have to is less fun for you, doesn't give you that righteous glow. And again I say, Pity about that.

Because the need is real, and constant. "Virtue" is an abstraction. If you want to feel virtuous, you can always choose to give *more* than you're required to. Volunteer for something. Grab a blanket and stand a post. Help someone who isn't covered. If you are required to go one mile, go two. But if you want to feel virtuous about doing *anything at all*, then sorry, doesn't work that way.

Exceptional people have a right to profit from their gifts. I believe they also have a duty to share those profits with those who desperately need help. Leaving it to individual discretion is a nice idea, but it just doesn't get the results. One prominent businessman over here has left the bank he drove to ruin clutching a pension fund amounting to over eight and a quarter million pounds. I assume that makes him an exceptional person in some way or other. Now he might choose to give a portion of that to support the people who have been ruined by this financial crisis, but I'd bet money, if I had any, that he won't. This is where we liberals show *our* suspicion of human nature, a suspicion which history largely bears out. The multitude in need of help can't afford to depend on those few individuals whose exceptionality runs to compassion and generosity. There simply aren't enough of them to counterbalance the ones whose exceptionality consists of grabbing all the money in sight and sitting on it. If it takes a law to make them cough up, then a law is what we need; and the more people who can be made to pay, the less money is needed from each.

Real hardship trumps virtuous feelings every time. (Funny, a week ago I'd have called that a "pragmatic" view.) Government, properly organised and funded, can be the best possible provider of help to people who need it, because it doesn't have to make a profit from doing it, and because, backed by law, it can take more from those who have more to give, and less from those who have less to give. If the ones who have more have got it by being exceptional--by having talents, abilities and skills (which were once referred to as "virtues") above the norm, and by exercising those talents and so on--well, good for them. They have their reward.

So, I disagree with the conservative line again, and remain proud to be a liberal.

One more river to cross

The sixth and last principle earth_wizard observes in conservatism goes thuswise: "Finally, conservatives believe in individualism. As Barry Goldwater explains, 'Every man, for his individual good and for the good of his society, is responsible for his own development. The choices that govern his life are choices he must make: they cannot be made by any other human being, or by a collectivity of human beings.'"

And for a single human being on a desert island, that works perfectly well. I imagine it would work quite well in a libertarian society as well, where nobody has to care about what anyone else does as long as they can't get through the barbed wire.

In practice, in the real world, the choices that govern our lives are hedged about and limited by the choices of every other person whose life impacts on ours. If someone else has the job I want, I cannot choose to take it. If somebody else nabs my parking space, I cannot choose to occupy it. If someone tries to occupy my parking space at the same time as me, I cannot choose to drive home, because I no longer have a functioning vehicle.

Within the bounds of the choices we are allowed, yes, by all means we must choose, and so it should be. And then we have another layer of choice above that, a meta-choice if you will; to choose as if we were the only people who mattered, or to choose with reference to the wishes and needs of others. Some may choose to see the latter path as "allowing our choices to be made by other human beings"; others may see it as "being kind."

The former path is the broad, straight road to success and wealth. The latter is more difficult, and may in some cases lead to resentment. Some people see others trampling over all in their way and attaining the good life as a result, and they become bitter because their own basically benevolent nature, or possibly their upbringing, does not allow them to do the same. They may let off steam by talking up the selfish path as though they agreed with it; but they give themselves away, because the people who practice selfishness seldom talk about it, but prefer to hide behind phrases such as "freedom of choice," "market forces" and "dealing in hard facts."

These are the decisions that individuals make. They have nothing to do with the way a society should be run.

John Ruskin said "Government and co-operation are the laws of life; anarchy and competition are the laws of death." Society (if we contradict Margaret Thatcher and assume that there is such a thing), if it is to work at all, must be founded on co-operation; on individuals, remaining individuals, but working together to build something that works. Co-operation, if it is to work at all, can only be based on equality, on the recognition that we all have equal rights, responsibilities, choices and duties; co-operation between unequals leads to condescension and resentment on the side of the "haves," and humiliation and resentment on the side of the "have-nots," and resentment is corrosive to co-operation.

It is, of course, possible for a society to be inimical to individualism, to seek to stamp it out and force conformity on everyone. This has happened in both liberal and conservative societies, and wherever it happens it is wrong. (One thinks of thousands of mass-produced tee-shirts, all bearing the slogan "Stand out from the crowd.") Within the bounds of society, as long as nobody is harmed, everyone has a right to be their own person and make their own choices. Most conservatives would agree with that, I think.

But what is "harm"? How serious does harm have to be before it is acknowledged? And perhaps more importantly, are we talking about mere harm to another individual, or harm to every single member of society?

Some who sail (possibly falsely) under conservative colours claim that every single member of society is harmed if someone marries someone else of the same sex, or if a woman claims the right to not be pregnant. Their belief in individualism stops short of these choices. Some of them claim that not to be blindly supportive of the society in which they live makes one an enemy of that society. Their belief in individualism stops even shorter.

I say that (for instance) every single member of society is harmed if one individual possesses an amount of money sufficient to support a hundred or a thousand such individuals, and does so on the backs of several hundred or several thousand who do not each have enough to support themselves. I say that every single member of society is harmed if the education available to someone on a minimum wage is not as good as the education available to someone who can afford to pay for the best. I say that every single member of society is harmed if people on low incomes cannot obtain medical care when they need it. I say that every single member of society is harmed if one child lives in poverty for the want of the cost of one bomb or one gun used in an unnecessary and unjust war. These are the ways in which the choices of a few individuals limit, restrict, reduce to nothing the choices available to the majority. And my belief in individualism stops right there. These are the very evils that democracy is supposed to combat, the evils that came with aristocracy and monarchy and class distinction; and we have perpetuated them and allowed them to thrive, not on the harmlessly fictitious basis that one bloodline is better than another, but on the far more toxic truism that "whoever has the gold makes the rules."

Society pays for the things that everyone needs, and funds them from contributions made by everybody. The less is contributed, the less society can pay for. The more is contributed, the closer we can get, not to freedom of choice, but to equality of choice; so that the choice is not between a good school and a bad school, but between two good schools; so that the choice is not between the right treatment and a quack nostrum, but between two right treatments; so that the choice is not to take a lousy job or starve, but to take a good job or survive.

On the question of needs: batyatoon said "I can't explain why I feel that it is the government's job to keep people from starving to death but it is emphatically not the government's job to keep people from cheating on their spouses." Well, I can imagine all too readily a society in which those priorities were exactly reversed, and adulterers were stoned to death while beggars and lepers died in the streets. And apart from a vague feeling that starving to death is in some ways a rather more serious matter than finding out your spouse has been cheating on you, and that marriage is (in my view) a man-made institution whereas life is whatever life is (life, I'm told), I don't have a good answer to that one either.

But, apart from that, I've hit six for six, maybe not out of the park but at least far enough away from the fielders to let me get back to the home wicket. I am feeling a pleasant sense of accomplishment, and a reinvigoration of my liberal ideals. And now for something to eat, and another snarky phone call to EverCRAPest, because the necessary time for concrete to dry has multiplied itself by three and a half over the weekend, so someone is lying.

A bientôt, dear flist.

(no subject)

From djelibeybi_meg:

When you see this, quote from Shakespeare in your journal.

For I have neither wit, nor words, nor worth,
Action, nor utterance, nor power of speech,
To stir men's blood; I only speak right on;
I tell you that which you yourselves do know.

--Mark Antony, Julius Caesar, Act 3 scene 2