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.

Leadership in (Philosophical) Crisis

Posted by Thomas Scarborough

Leadership today is in acute crisis. According to psychologist Harry Levinson in the Harvard Business Review, the signs of trouble began around 1980 in the USA. This coincides with the rise of a theory of leadership called transformational leadership, which is trusted and applied by countless leaders. Does the problem lie in the theory?

Bloomsbury columnist Max Nisen, in Business Insider, describes leadership burnout today as a ‘huge problem’. 96% of senior leaders feel ‘somewhat burned out’, while a third describe the problem as ‘extreme’. Psychologist Kevin Fleming writes: ‘The numbers are absolutely staggering.’ The problem has been exported, too – at least, there has been a lag before it has reached other shores.

There are costs and collateral damage to match. According to Forbes, businesses in the USA lose nearly $40 billion every year through absenteeism among professionals, executives, and managers – far in excess of any other occupations. Mental stress and fatigue affect not only the leader, but the company.

Several years ago, I submitted a proposal to a major seminary, to investigate the problem in a 150-page postgraduate thesis.

The damage to leaders was approximately known. It was known, too, that most put their trust in transformational leadership theory. But statistics which might reflect on the causes of the trouble were virtually non-existent. There were not so much as credible definitions of transformational leadership – and without definitions there is nowhere to begin. Existing definitions seemed more like slogans for the movement.

I chose to use a semantic critique – and this proved to be a powerful tool. I applied it to about five-thousand pages of leadership texts. My first task, then, was to identify the core concepts of the texts. From these, I isolated and developed a fresh definition of transformational leadership (which may go by various names, including connective leadership, servant leadership, and ternary leadership).

Then I listed ‘oppositions’ of the core concepts. Oppositions are something like ‘opposites’. They help us, among other things, to find subtexts. Did the authors' writing cohere, or did their texts reveal subtexts – namely, oppositions which subverted what they said?

It might seem an absurd idea – to look for evidence that authors contradict their own selves. However, it proved to be very fruitful. I was later awarded a distinction for the research, which was a testimony to the power of the method.

Out of five or six core concepts of transformational leadership theory, ‘influence’ is arguably the highest on the list. Leadership consultant John Maxwell epitomises this with the mantra: ‘Leadership is influence, nothing more, nothing less.’ This is too simplistic, yet it captures the core of it. Other concepts are subsidiary to influence, among them character, persuasiveness, and strategy.

The core question was whether there were ‘oppositions’ which showed that influence was rejected, defeated, weakened, and so on. Indeed there were. To sustain one’s leadership influence, one needed (quote) ‘more than sacrifice and suffering’, ‘courage of the highest order’, and a ‘Herculean effort’, among other things. Hercules, needless to say, was a demigod. There were ‘countless discouraged leaders’, and ‘low expectation and hope’. One author wrote, ‘Lord have mercy!’

The leadership authors seemed to have a perverse drive to tell the truth, even if it was only in a single line. Those single lines torpedoed whole chapters of text. The subtext, although one finds it only in snippets, reveals that all told, the core concepts do not work. Every transformational leadership text, without exception, fundamentally subverted itself.

On the surface of it ‘influence’, with its attendant concepts, would seem to be a felicitous approach to leadership. In reality it is not. It can only seem felicitous as long as one admires it in isolation. Oppositions of resistance, discouragement, acquiescence, failure, and many more, lie in wait at every corner, and slowly destroy the leader.

This is not a small finding. One is dealing with the dominant theory of leadership in the West.

But the purpose here is not merely to summarise a situation. It is to drive deeper, philosophically. The very fact that there are oppositions in the leadership texts gives the problem away. We are not thinking holistically today. We are thinking one-sidedly, or dichotomously. We have developed a one-sided leadership metaphysic, while a powerful subtext has been largely expunged from the texts.

It surely has to do with the times. We have been trained to think in partial ways. We no longer think expansively. In physics, wrote the philosophers Wilhelm Kamlah and Paul Lorenzen, we investigate processes ‘by progressively screening things out.’ While one might justifiably think this way in physics, we now find it all over. It reaches all our concepts, including leadership. We are in bondage to dichotomies today, writes psychologist Ellyn Kaschak, in Psychology Today.

Some put the troubles of leadership down to work load, inadequate coping skills, a lack of preventative mechanisms, an increasing rate of change, and so on. Under my own leadership, in an assignment, a Canadian intern Peter Nighswander put it like this: symptomatic treatment of leadership burnout is not without use, yet it seems that we need to be ‘questioning the system that is producing these results ’.

The alternative to a one-sided or dichotomous view is obviously a holistic one. Many proposed solutions point to the need, not merely for holism, but for deeply holistic thinking.

The scattered solutions, when one surveys them together today, are both broad and complementary. Proposals for a more participative leadership promise to reconcile the leader with the led. Proposals for more adequate recuperation promise to reconcile the leader-as-leader with the leader-as-person. Calculations of total losses to business promise to reconcile the fate of the company with the fate of its leaders. A reduction of stresses external to the workplace promise to heal not only the leader but society.

All such proposals may be characterised as the introduction of a more holistic thinking. This is the philosophy of it. We need to develop a holistic picture, then apply it. We cannot afford any more to lean on one-sided or dichotomous concepts based on a misplaced trust in the text.