Books - Michael Sandel, Key Workers, Gender Reveal, Kardashian Culture

 Michael Sandel is a philosopher and professor at Harvard University Law School. His latest book is The Tyranny of Merit which argues that the liberal left's uncritical pursuit of meritocracy has left the working-classes humiliated and betrayed. He would like a politics centred on dignity and the common good.

...The Covid-19 pandemic, and in particular the new appreciation of the value of supposedly unskilled, low paid work, offers a starting point for renewal. 

Admiration
Walter Langley (1852-1922)
Photo Credit: Victoria Art Gallery [CC BY-NC-ND]

"This is a moment to begin a debate about the dignity of work; about the rewards of work both in terms of pay but also in terms of esteem. We now realise how deeply dependent we are, not just on doctors and nurses, but delivery workers, grocery store clerks, warehouse workers, lorry drivers, home healthcare providers and childcare workers, many of them in the gig economy. We call them key workers and yet these are oftentimes not the best paid or the most honoured workers."

There must be a radical re-evaluation of how contributions to the common good are judged and rewarded. The money to be earned in the City or on Wall Street, for example, is out of all proportion with the contribution of speculative finance to the real economy. A financial transactions tax would allow funds to be channelled  more equably. But for Sandel, the word "honour" is as important as the question of pay. There needs to be a redistribution of esteem as well as money, and more of it needs to go to the millions doing work that does not require a college degree.

"We need to rethink the role of universities as arbiters of opportunity," he says, "which is something we have come to take for granted. Credentialism has become the last acceptable prejudice. It would be a serious mistake to leave the issue of investment in vocational training and apprenticeships to the right. Greater investment is important not only to support the ability of people without an advanced degree to make a living. The public recognition it conveys can help shift attitudes towards a better appreciation of the contribution to the common good made by people who haven't been to university."

...For inspiration, he says, they could do worse than turn to one of his intellectual heroes, the English Christian socialist R H Tawney.

"Tawney argued that equality of opportunity was at best a partial ideal. His alternative was not an oppressive equality of results. It was a broad, democratic, 'equality of condition' that enables citizens of all walks of life to hold their heads up high and to consider themselves participants in a common venture. My book comes out of that tradition."

(Interview by Julian Coman, The Observer, 2020)

So  the respect and admiration we have for key workers and their contribution to 'the common good' should be manifested in the wages they receive. That is going to be impossible if the recent pay freeze of public sector pay comes into effect. Sandel's financial transaction tax could, if implemented, help enormously. But it's a huge 'if'. 

Why is it that in Germany, for example, apprenticeships are seen as of equal status as those attending university? Young school leavers who aren't university bound enter a three year apprenticeship programme. Half the time is spent on on the job training whilst the other half is spent in special trade schools.

One day later.

Key Workers

Driving a Hard Bargain
Erskine Nichol (1825-1904)
Photo Credit: Aberdeen Art Gallery and Museums [CC BY-NC]

The head of the TUC has denounced a possible freezing of the minimum wage as "totally wrong", as the Treasury reportedly considers backtracking on a planned pay rise for the lowest-paid workers.

...Frances O'Grady, the general secretary of the Trades Union Congress, said:

"Many key workers who have got us through this crisis - including care workers and supermarket staff - are on the minimum wage. It would be totally wrong to freeze their pay.

"The government must not renege upon its commitment to raise the minimum wage. Millions of low-paid workers are struggling to make ends meet. That's not right during a pandemic - or at any time." 

...The government pledged that the national living wage would rise to £10.50 an hour by 2024 and to extend its remit, with the basic entitlement starting at age 23 rather than 25. But the policy was set with a clause pinning it to economic growth, meaning the government could opt to pause its plan during the recession. 

...A spokesman for the manufacturer's organisation Make UK said firms would back moves to keep the national living wage down.

"Any measure which can reduce the cost pressure on business will be supported by those companies facing a battle to stay afloat and protect jobs at all levels," he said.

(Gwyn Topham, The Guardian, 2020)

The realities of life. It has also been announced that there is to be no increase in most public sector wages next year.

Meritocracy Dogma

Sixteen years ago a mournful professor of English took my family on a tour of Havana. He was erudite and insightful. He was also too poor to survive on his salary of $20 a month which is why he moonlighted as a guide.

...Cuba took the view that academics' work was intrinsically privileged and interesting. They did not need the incentive of higher pay. A country where the state set everyone's wages gave doctors twice as much as intellectuals, he said, since their skills were in demand at home and worldwide, but the highest pay of all was reserved for tough, manual jobs like those of street repairmen.

Why? The professor thought it was obvious. Those jobs were exhausting and unpleasant, requiring long hours, often working in intense heat. People needed rewards to do such jobs.

Cuba's value system came as a shock to me because it ran counter to the system of meritocracy which has come to dominate much of western society in the past 40 years. We don't give high pay or automatic respect to those who work with their hands. We increasingly reserve well-paid jobs and the status that goes with them not necessarily for academics but for those who can pass academic courses, and the more elite those are the better.

...Those who can't or don't want to acquire them are being cut off from opportunity, high incomes and positions of authority. Not only are their jobs less highly valued but they as individuals are seeing power and respect seep away from them. It is a recipe for dismay that builds to indignation and then fury.

...The pretence that everyone has an equal chance of success is used to justify the immense wealth that goes to those who win on these terms...The richest 1 per cent in the US now earn more than the bottom half of the population.

...Wealth and success are conflated with worth. The question of how people are to live worthwhile, honoured, decent lives when they don't fit this definition of merit is ignored. The only solutions they are offered are education and escape.

...the pandemic was the revelation of how wrong-headed society's values were. We all felt, not as a theory but as a visceral reality, profoundly grateful to and dependent on supermarket staff, postmen and women, delivery drivers, care workers and everyone else keeping essential services alive.

...What we value and reward is a choice. Politicians must make schools less relentlessly academic, more creative and technical. They need to prioritise the policies that would make lower-paid work less of a struggle by penalising zero-hours employers and company outsourcing, raising the minimum wage, improving childcare...

(Jenni Russell, The Times, 2020)

Was the pandemic "the revelation of how wrong-headed society's values were"?  I don't think so. Haven't we known about the key workers for years and have constantly failed to remunerate some of them properly?   

Gender Reveal Parties

In California thousands of people were evacuated from their homes when fires destroyed nearly 10,000 acres. The fire was started by fireworks at a gender-reveal party in San Bernardino County.

A Christening Party
Francois Antoine de Bruycker (1816-1882)
Photo Credit: Atkinson Art Gallery Collection [CC BY-NC-SA]

Some cynics despise gender-reveal parties, believing them to be greedy ego-fests in which couples effectively squeal: "Our genitals worked! Give us more presents!" And I agree with those cynics with every fibre of my being.

...You might hope that this disaster would herald the death of this me-me-me American import, which feels increasingly like an ancient throwback (some couples quip that in the middle of their reveal box will be a glass of water because their foetus is gender "fluid". It took me a while to get that joke, but then I am quite old). 

...Here's my prediction: no chance. Because nothing stops people claiming their right to make a meal out of what has hitherto been a lovely private moment with no need for a gazebo. Even death itself. Last year a 56-year old woman in Iowa died after she was hit by debris from an exploding coloured powder device at a gender-reveal party. The parties are still going strong.

...On a positive note I will say this: these parties have spawned some decent sick jokes. Such as: "I went to a gender-reveal party. It wasn't what I expected. The host told me to pull my pants back up and get the hell out."

(Carol Midgley, The Times, 2020)

Kardashian Culture

Study of 'Oblivion Conquering Fame'
Edward Burne-Jones (1833-1898)
Photo Credit: Birmingham Museums Trust 
Public Domain 

...On Tuesday, Kim Kardashian-West announced on social media that, after 14 years, the forthcoming  20th season of the show would be its last.

My friends and I have pored over these strangers with amazement, horror and concern, as they prompted conversations about addiction, transgender issues, cultural appropriation, mental illness and fertility that we might never otherwise have had. But their inflating fame suffocated the series to the point of redundancy, months behind the headlines.

We viewers became voyeurs, complicit in a toxic culture that has transformed our understanding of womanhood, success, beauty and self-worth. The Kardashians harnessed social media so expertly that they built a digital society in which everything about one's life can - and so must - be broadcast, transformed and commodified, fast.

It will take more than the cancelling of a series for us to recalibrate: its end is long overdue, but the damage cannot be undone.

(Sarah Carson, The i, 2020)

If I want information about addiction, mental illness, fertility etc I'll find it from someone who knows what they are talking about, namely medical experts. Famous people are usually famous because they have expertise or talent in, for example, acting, singing, a sport, etc. Listen to them when they are talking about their area of expertise. They know about this. Once they veer onto other ideas then treat them much more critically. The Kardashians are famous for what exactly? 

If everything about one's life "can and must be broadcast, transformed and commodified fast" have nothing to do with it.

*The Kardashians are often used as a shorthand for all that's wrong with modern celebrity culture, invariably by people who never watched the often funny, always surreal show. They've been blamed for the rise of selfies, butt implants and Botox. (The family are coy about what changes they've made to their physical appearance, but it is shocking to compare photos of them now and before 2007).

In an era when the fashionable pose for female celebrities is to encourage "body positivity", the Kardashians promote appetite suppressing lollipops and "waist trainers", and none of it dents their popularity. They are not "woke", and arguments over whether they are self-empowered feminist icons or a "bunch of talentless narcissistic brain-dead bimbos" entirely miss the point. They are capitalism in human form, utterly meaningless except for the meaning onlookers place on them...

(Hadley Freeman, The Guardian, 2020)

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