On Classism and Inequality

Posted by Keith Tidman

In various forms, and to many degrees, classism, meaning prejudice against people belonging to a particular social class, and social inequality are pervasive, pernicious, and persistent. And they are unbreakably bound: classism and inequality engage one another in a symbiotic, mutually reinforcing relationship. The two phenomena are therefore best explored together.

The casualties of classism, predominantly poorer, less educated, working-class people, not uncommonly internalise the discrimination, resenting and yet accepting censure at the same time. The victims may find it difficult to dismiss the opprobrium as unjust — they might, in resignation, wrongly see it as fitting to their station in life. The 19th-century German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche attempted to rationalise why, dismissively stating that: 

 “The order of castes is merely the ratification of an order of nature.”

At the same time, class has appeared hard-wired across generations within families. For many, there are no or few available strategies to exit the cycle they’re caught up in. Measures of influence, power, wealth, job status, and knowledge — along with verdicts about decency, heritage, behaviours, habits, and who deserves what — are the filters through which stereotypes and biases pass. Identity, labels, entitlement, and rationalisation are among the tools instigators use to perpetuate classism. Their claim to merited privilege becomes the normative standard. That standard, however, can run into the immorality of social and economic inequality that’s arbitrary, often non-merit based, and stems from self-indulgence.

Appropriately, the 18th-century Scottish social philosopher Adam Smith pushed back against Nietzsche’s dismissiveness, laconically offering the optimistic, affirmative view that:

 “... the  difference of natural talents in different men is, in reality, much less than we are aware of.” 

A notion that all people, of all classes, can build on. 

Yet classism and inequality aren’t figments; they are real social constructs that bear concretely on citizens’ lives. Certain groups, believing their economic and sociopolitical advantages endow them with higher class rankings, enjoy yet another consequential privilege: they get to pull the levers on how government, the law, institutions, entitlements, and cultural foundations are designed and operate, and whom those levers favor. This instrumentalist perspective serves as a means to acquire additional benefits. The privileged are adept at influencing the running of nations and leveraging the hand they get to play. They project their influence on society in ways that primarily attend to self-interests, with modest resources to be shared among the rest.

The effect of those residual resources doesn’t make inequalities right, or more bearable or fixable; the effect is duplicitous. In a paradoxical way, the privileged exert a powerful, dominant grip, while dexterously advancing their interests. The exercise of power often happens veiled — though it needn’t always do so, as out-in-the-open brazenness is no barrier to political manipulation. An offshoot among the privileged is increased self-determination and sovereignty over choice — their own and their nation’s. Distrust of the financially oiled powerbrokers — among those who feel disenfranchised and denied fairness and opportunity — emboldens disunity and strident polarisation. Sometimes the outcome is the rise of extreme factions on both the left and right of politics, clashing over matters of both policy and heart-felt beliefs.

The underprivileged classes see that, in an increasingly and perhaps irresistibly and irreversibly globalised world, there’s merely a larger platform on which those already holding capital, and the levers of influence that accompany it, extend their gains all the more. The so-called common good isn’t always seen as an enlarging, sharable pot — where zero-sum resources go only so far and are seen to be acquired at the expense of other groups. The less-advantaged members of society might question whether equality and merit really matter, as opposed to an unfair 'legacy' grip on claims to influence, wealth, and power. 

Liberal economics promises the opportunity to rise among the ranks, though serving as more an aspirational, albeit elusive, brass ring. Identity — such as race, ethnicity, gender, national origin, language, and history — is integral. Identity serves as a means to decide how to share access to rights, choice, fairness, justice, goods, safety, and well-being — and ultimately recognition and legitimacy in the marketplace of ideas — according to the governing arrangement. Yet inequality endangers these benefits.

As an ideal, the observation by the 18th-century French philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau is still highly relevant to the debate — duplicated around much of the world — over class, inequality, the public good, sociopolitical advantage, and nations’ responsibility to rectify egregious imbalances:

“It is therefore one of the most important functions of government to prevent extreme inequality of fortunes; not by taking away wealth from its possessors, but by depriving all men of means to accumulate it; not by building hospitals for the poor, but by securing the citizens from becoming poor.”

Yet, the reality — whether in liberal democracies or in patriarchal autocracies, and most systems of governance and social philosophies in-between — has seldom worked out that way. Classism and inequality continue to march conspicuously in unison and without remedy, their rhythms bound irremediably together, each still used to justify and harden the shape of the other.

Rehabilitating Joad

Posted by Thomas Scarborough

“Poor Joad,” said the journalist John Guest, summing up the life of the late British philosopher on the BBC. The hapless C.E.M. Joad, who gained immense popularity on radio and TV, fell finally into disrepute and obscurity.

The Times of London, in its obituary, seemed to seal his final fate: “He had no interesting contribution to make as a philosopher.” Today, the dictionaries of philosophy would seem to confirm it. It is a rare dictionary in which we find his name.

Personally, I think that Joad was badly overlooked – perhaps because his very popularity detracted from his reputation as a serious thinker. Popularity was indeed, in a sense, what he wanted – not merely for popularity’s sake, but because his interest was to reach the “common man”.

Cyril Edwin Mitchinson Joad had two great and timely insights, writing at a time where philosophy was parting ways with ethics through the creeping effects of Hume's fact-value distinction, and above all, through logical positivism. The recession of religion provided fertile ground for the same.

Firstly, he recognised that the problem of the time was the loss of ethics. Above all, he saw that philosophy had lost ethics, and would be impotent until it reclaimed it. In The Plight of Civilisation *, written in 1941, Joad set out the problem like this:

“To an age governed by the stomach-and-pocket view of life and accustomed to demand of every activity proffered for its approval that it shall deliver the goods, understanding seems no doubt an inadequate object of pursuit. Yet something is, it is obvious, grievously wrong with our civilisation, and it is high time we set about the business of trying to understand what it is. Science has won for us powers fit for the gods, yet we bring to their use the mentality of schoolboys or savages.”

In his verdict, society was “grievously wrong”.  In spite of “powers fit for the gods”, men and women had lost their moral compass. Many people agreed with him then, and many surely still would today. Because, in every major area where it matters, it seems that we are in serious crisis: personal, political, social, and environmental.

With this in mind, Joad developed a unique approach to ethics – but it seems to have all but disappeared today. I needed to search far on the Internet to find what I had once read in books. Eventually, I found some of his texts in the Delhi University Library, but they were fragmented through erratic optical character recognition.

A widespread view of moral epistemology is that morality cannot be rationally grounded. Not only is it impossible to proceed from an “is” to an “ought” as Hume originally said. If we ask after the reasons why we do things – and the reasons which lie behind those reasons – ultimately we find that there is nothing there at all.

Not so, said Joad. Rather than finding nothing, we find everything. Joad innovatively turned the argument on its head. I read this first in his Guide To The Philosophy Of Morals And Politics of 1938 – however it runs through various of his works. Supposing, he said, that I take quinine for a fever:

“Quinine helps, in other words, to reduce fever; but why reduce fever? Because fever is a disease. But why not be diseased? Because health is better than disease. Why is health better than disease? At this point we may refuse to answer; we just see, we may say, that health is better than disease, and that is all there is to say about it. But in saying ‘we just see’ health to be better than disease, we are absolving ourselves from the necessity of saying why we see it to be so.”

It is at this point, he writes, that “we cease to give reasons and fall back upon the assertion ‘we just see’.” That is, when we ask after our motives, we may keep on pushing back the question, yet inevitably we reach a point where we throw up our hands and laugh. But now, he says, we are passing a judgment of “absolute, ultimate, and unique value.”

Yet we do not discover a void. Rather we discover the true axioms of ethics. On condition, that is, that we sift ultimate from penultimate axioms – over which Joad himself took great care.

This view seems to me to be unique. It seems to me to meld reason and value, scepticism and realism. It differs from ethical intuitionism, empiricism, rationalism, pragmatism, and various other views – and for its perspicacity would seem to make Joad deserving of a place on the philosophical map. I believe that he identified and addressed the most profound philosophical issues of his and our day, and did so originally and creditably.

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* Correction: this quote is taken from Philosophy For Our Times. The author mistakenly cited the section heading, and not the title of the book.

For further reading:
Return to Philosophy (1935)
Guide to the Philosophy of Morals and Politics (1938)

Disabling Self-Service

Posted by Sifiso Mkhonto

The idea that gaining power, maintaining power, maximizing power, and wielding power are central to restructuring the functions of a democratic society is a dangerous one to swallow. It does not cure the disease of oppressive and unjust government, but endorses it. With this in mind, I survey both the ideal and the reality of political power.

The ideal of political power is deliberately misconstrued. It is not the ability to control people, but the ability to instill in them the practice of altruism. By altruism I refer to the person who is motivated by the power of putting the needs of others ahead of their own happiness—I shall call this their moral purpose. Ironically, as they do, people seek to differentiate themselves from others—thus the same moral purpose is uncommon to all, and selfishness becomes common.

The reality of political power, in most nations, is that politicians are self-serving—not because of pressure from a corrupt populace within, or corrupt governments without, but by their own, false moral purpose. Tragically, the world over, as political power promotes the practice of selfishness—and thereby favours the selfish—it becomes a vehicle to deliver the product of despondency, as many in society are cast aside by the selfishness of others. While there are some who have a more altruistic view of power, they tend to be the exception rather than the rule.

The reality of political power attracts corruption as a flame attracts moths. This bears evidence to the famous words of Niccolò Machiavelli, ‘Politics have no relation to morals’. Yet not only does political power instill in people the practice of selfishness. Political power is itself selfish, to a point that the moral purpose of many politicians has resulted in patronage and corruption as the norm. A preeminent example is the South African ‘State’ which is deemed to have been captured for the benefit of a wealthy family for the personal enrichment of all involved.

In such an unbalanced society, is it possible then to overcome a self-serving tendency—as people, and as politicians? Yes, it is, through a different moral purpose, and through excellence. The moral purpose I speak of is, in philosophical terms, moral realism and moral motivation—a moral purpose which is grounded in the nature of things. The excellence I speak of is service to the people with no exceptions to venality and patronage. In other words, we have a wellspring of virtue within us, but we may permit it to be poisoned by external influence.

People easily fall to the weakness of taking care of themselves before the other, yet through altruism, which is the ideal of political power, that tendency can change. One can disable the intent to self-serve—which is the tendency to take care of oneself first—and one can change those false values instilled in society by politicians, which only serve the interest of those who identify with that political ideology. Certainly, it would be a miracle for the whole world to reach this point, yet many people believe that the miracle is possible—if not through philosophy, then through their religious conviction, which deeply believes not in human nature, but in the unseen.

If morality and excellence had triumphed in the ‘State’ of my birth country, South Africa, the State would not have been ‘captured’. We would have had leaders with integrity—leaders who could reflect on the nature of human community and government, and the relations between the collective and the individual, and could cast off the habits of exploitation and colonialism. It is hard to be in power and to act with a different moral purpose to that of selfishness, but it is possible.

What is needed is that politicians act only from benevolence and a sense of obligation. The reason to overcome the tendency to self-serve is simple. Doing what is right for the right reasons brings positive progress in society. The definition of political power, I said, is deliberately misconstrued. It is not the ability to control people. It is the ability to instill in them the practice of altruism. I now conclude that the reality of political power which is self-serving, when it is transformed and renewed, becomes the ability to instill right values in society, through the right values it holds itself.

Picture Post #34: Watching the Tide

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'Because things don’t appear to be the known thing; they aren’t what they seemed to be neither will they become what they might appear to become.'


Posted by Tessa den Uyl and Martin Cohen

Photo credit: students of  A Mundzuku Ka Hina, communications workshop. Mozambique

From the plastic on the lower right corner, moving to the left, arise a man and woman, both with one hand touching their face and each with one arm posing on their leg, the diagonal movement flows into the blankets behind them out of the picture. This ‘line’ creates a certain ‘zone’ in which we seem to stand in front of a threshold.

Our eyes may enter ‘the gate’ ‘guarded’ between the two seated persons and the boy standing on the right, to look into a ‘dark’ space where people gather in a circle and diagonally expand to the left into another lateral diagonal line. The composition is as if we are introduced carefully in a gathering, ‘a zone’ we cannot truly enter, we glance at something that is far from us, almost secret.

The picture invites us to regard it from a distant point of view where, at first sight, a kind of picnic, a déjeuner sur l’herbe, slowly changes into something that is far more remote. And yet, this is how some people survive, these rubbish dumps are their home and their daily reality -- along with intoxication and poverty and helplessness as the other side of the coin.

And yet, there is something inspiring about the picture in the posture of the two person’s in the foreground and the boy: the impression is that of creating a ‘gate’ in which the ambiguity of contraries, that in ancient times was certainly seen as an essential element in speaking truth, yields to a logic of the inevitable raising problems that come with more recent social, industrial and political conditions, one in which words have to search for an adaption between truth and oblivion.

Thus as with many such terrible events that happen in the world, we hear about them, we see images, but it is not our skin. The observer, the spectator has a very protected stance

Last week in il Bairro di Hulene, which is the neighborhood of shanty homes raised around the lixeira (dump), seventeen people died under a mass of refuse that detached itself and slid down from the dump pile. Six houses and seven shacks were destroyed including a small ‘press’ that was there to crush the plastic and cans.