Right versus Left

Heard Baronness Warsi on the radio over the weekend and she put very succinctly her view of the Right versus the Left. Basically, the Right gives aspirational people the opportunity to make themselves wealthy, while the Left just accepts inequality and the state seeks to alleviate it. (The other stuff she is involved with this week is du moment (new term) or of-the-moment and therefore trivial!). I'm not picking on Warsi it seems that she vocalises very well the attitudes of what seem to me to be pathological right wing. I shall explain...

In a nutshell Warsi's argument is that the strong should have the opportunity to succeed, and the weak must try harder. By this argument why do we have a legal system at all? Why not let the strong run rampant? This is undoubtedly the way the World is and the weak die by natural selection, but we are human beings and are supposed to be able to fashion our society according to our own rules. That is after all what Warsi does as a job (solicitor). If nature kept the account then why do we need solicitors? One may argue that by "social contract" the strong, seeing the cost of protecting their gains becoming greater than the gain of further rampage, have agreed to have law: but it is an expedient law whose purpose is lost when the strong lose. The weak are always out of the picture in arguments of this type. Maybe the should be and the weak ought to be hounded into harder action .. I need to explain.

Hypocrisy is not an issue in this blog - people are welcome to be hypocritical. What is a problem is when they are contradictory - it is different. A murder is absolutely right to say murder is wrong while doing a murder - but he then can't say that he was right without contradicting what he just said. Like in logical systems saying one thing one day and a different thing the next amounts to us either being undecided (in the normal sense) or if we try to maintain both positions saying nothing.

Kant in his "Metaphysics of Morals" argues for the Categorical Imperative. I disagree with Kant in it being an imperative - people do evil and nothing has stopped them yet. But when it comes to talking about evil it does apply. If we wish to proclaim as Warsi does some universal principle of social order such as "the right to be aspirational" then it must also mean that everyone has this right and can be aspirational.

Now suppose everyone did become aspirational and take to reskilling for the top jobs. There menial jobs would suddenly run out of applicants which would push the salaries up. Now would people really pay cleaners salaries of £50k? No what would happen (as happened in the company next door) is that staff would be expected to be cleaner and man an after-work cleaning rota. If we have to hoover our own floor we can be sure we will keep it cleaner too! (Basic Right-wing argument). So a lot of jobs would simply evaporate. But what of those we do rely upon like taxi drivers, clothes makers, builders, car mechanics, farmers, teachers, nurses, cooks, people on production lines, sewage workers... the value of these would rise as people moved into the top jobs. Unlike cleaning however we would simply have to pay the inflated costs which would make us all much poorer.

So we arrive eventually at a system where everyone has been aspirational and reskilled and a doctor or solicitor (like Warsi) is no longer a top job and gets a similar income to car mechanics and nurses. The cost of training would increases as teachers charged more which would lead to increases in the difference in wages since a nurse needs far longer and expensive training than a mechanic - but parity at whatever level our new aspirational society arrived at would be more equal than today.

I need to add here that working as a chartered (I assume) solicitor she will be a member of a nice cartel who manipulate the wages of solicitors to a value way above their market price. They argue it is to ensure a quality of service, but really it eliminates competition and ensures that people don't undercut the monopoly. If cleaners were to do this it would be considered fradulent. Unions which are the poors version of the chartered institutions are frowned upon by the Right, and have their powers eeked away under every Right government, even while the people voting against union power (like Warsi) enjoy the benefits of market monopoly. I'm assuming in our free market that the process of "chartering" is abolished and competition sets wages (as everywhere else) and the market decides who is a good practitioner (as everywhere else). No more dodgy-doctors being protected by the "old school".

Now is Warsi really advocating equality like this? Why did she become a solicitor rather than a car mechanic herself? Why did she accept the Baroness title rather than ask for a simple Lady title? We al know, and it is no secret, and I have argued at length in this blog, that "wealth" is relative and it doesn't work if everyone is the same. What is the motive for aspiration if you will simply join a tread mill of people running at full pace already?

To argue again in a simpler way consider this. Land surface area of England: 241590 KM^2. Population of England 50million. That works out at less than 1/2 Ha or 1.15 acres each. If everyone thought like Warsi then we would all inhabit land no larger than 1.17 acres. This includes unfortunately all the uplands and farmlands so the real figure of "garden" that we would like is much, much smaller. Say at the very least a half that, so about half an acre. So people who own more than 1/2 and acre (or 2 acres for a family of 4) do so because thankfully other people are not as aspirational as them. You cannot ask people to occpy more than 1/2 an acre each in this country it is impossible, and wanting to occupying more than half and acre must entail inequality. Warsi's "everyone can be aspirational" entails either everyone being poorer, or it entails inequality which contradicts her wish. A problem for the Right-wing here. It applies to the globe also where if the whole world was ripped up and used for resources each person can only ever hope to live at the U.K. standard of living - not the U.S. which uses twice the resources. But we would be also poorer because there would be no "natural" space left.

But this is only stage 1 of the problem. Is it really that the poor lack aspiration? It might be that they are are disabled. Warsi can hardly expect the disabled to compete with her on equal terms. Disability is a diverse thing. Is someone with an IQ of 80 disabled compared with someone like Warsi who probably has an IQ of 100 or more? Can they be expected to do as well in solicitor exams? What of people who have friends in high place who can recommend them or help their career progress, like Warsi. I only pick on Warsi because she represents the illusions of the Right wing very well to me. What of people from broken backgrounds who have self-esteem problems, psychological problems, who have never experienced security or love (a problem in the poor as much as the rich). What of people who are not interested in pursuing the money careers. Artists for example who in many cases actually avoid commercialism (as well as those who embrace it, ironically?). What of charities, and people who work without salaries? How does all this actual complexity fit within Warsi's "aspirational" view?

And then their is my own view that Warsi presupposes the value of creating jobs, when at the same time she will be amassing a nice load of capital so that she can live of the interest, and inherit a decent load of capital from her father also. She is not relying entirely upon her profession for her livelihood and it is this more than anything in this society which marks her in a different bracket from the poor. She is a Capitalist. Now I ask why do people who sing the praises of aspiration and employment, seek to amass capital and income from capital? The two seem a contradiction to me. It is because we actually like to be free from work, so we amass capital so that we can pay other people to work for us. A famous story concerns a poor beggar. He is offered a job manning a stall in the local market. The stall owner finds him asleep and tries to encourage him. If you work hard you can get lots of money, buy a farm, pay people to work on the farm and then you can sleep all day. To which the man replies, why go through all that when I can sleep now. There is of course a big difference between the man asleep under the stall and the man asleep in the farm - the second has security, while the first can't really protect himself from "rampany aspirationalists" like Warsi.

So it is blatant in my opinion that human beings enjoy being "better off" than other human beings - this is the essence of wealth. We are all (even the poor in this country) better off than hunter-gatherers during the ice-ages. Food is abundant, cheap because of oil etc etc. Yet some people with food, clothes, a house, car, TV, mobile phone internet connection still complain about being poor. It is all relative. The idea of creating wealth for everyone is an oxymoron, and a self defeating argument.

Another failure of "wealth" creation is commercialism. Aspirational people who wish to "better" themselves in the Right-Wing view aim to make money. The idea that they might actually make "themselves" better by improving their thoughts and actions doesn't seem to get any mention. To make money we produce the goods which sell well, but as is often commented in wild food books the cultivated versions are bland in comparison with the wild varieties - one size simply doesn't fit all! Richard Maybe offers the explanation that to reach the widest audience the foods are toned down so that no-one has a particular strong opinion about them. From my own investigations of wild foods it is true that some you love (Fat Hen in my case) and some you hate (many of the recommended mushroom species) - being stronger in flavour opinions are more divided and so these never make commercial crops. Exactly the same applies to the arts with many artists pursuing a non-commercial approach so that you either hate them or love them. Pop music offers us a view of what a commercial art scene is like, and while it offers some gems it is also generally dull and lacking diversity. The same might apply to "good" crafts also since the masses are more likely to shop at Ikea and Tesco than buy expensive hand crafted items. People then who aspire to produce original artworks or crafts are ironically not well supported by Warsi's aspirational Right-Wing economics. Once again, as Melvyn Bragg has pointed out, the Left-Wing and the welfare system more than anything else lie behind English innovation and originality in the arts and crafts.

Now there is another view which I can't believe Warsi doesn't allude to, and which makes the Right wing in my view pathological. When we vote do we vote in our own interests or do we vote in the interests of the community? A extreme case which seems a powerful illustration here is do I a white anglo-saxon male vote for a racist-sexist politics or a politics that protects the interests of other people. Arguably I would do better if women and people from other countries weren't here as there would be more housing (bringing the price down), more jobs (putting the value of labour up) and less social disharmony. On the other hand I wouldn't want to live in a community where people were discriminated against it would create a lot of ill feeling and it is hard to actually justify. It is a "free" country however as I should be able to vote in "my" interests. This is where democracy gets into difficulties and has the Godel axiom of Human-Rights. Fact is we should be prepared to vote against our own interests in the interests of the community - this is the essence of being a moral human being. We sacrifice a lot in life for our families, it is only natural we sacrifice for our community and brotherhood as well. The right-wing again have a contradiction because in time of war they expect people to sacrifice even their own lives to protect the community, so why not at other times also?

So once we have a logic of people thinking in terms of their community and not just themselves, "putting other people first" which is the essence of English Gentlemanly culture as my mother always reminds me then our aspirations are no longer for personal gain but for the gain of other people. Now here I will agree with Warsi - the aspiration to promote the welfare of others is the essence of a healthy and happy society. The very existence of "charity" shows how our economic system has no place for this type of thinking - the economic system we have fails us at the very centre of our relationship with ourselves. For the Right-wing that relationship is with our physical bodies, for the Left-Wing it is in our relationship with our community. When Thatcher said that there was no society - she meant there was no class system - but really it was taken to mean we have no relationship with our community.

Yet again a page from Right-Wing thinking shows this up as a flaw. "Economy of Scale" is a well understood feature of economic systems - this is one way the industrial revolution created so much stuff. Yet when it comes to social conception the Right believe it is better to fragment aspirations to people looking after themselves. Clearly social funds and organisation on the community and national level is more productive than on the individual level. The military - favourite of the Right-Wing - is an excellent example of this. Why doesn't it work for everything else as well? An example of where concepts on a social level demand sacrifice on the individual level is in population growth. It is an established economic fact that population growth leads to increasing poverty, and population reduction leads to increasing wealth (relative obviously). In China the single greatest act that has created wealth is the single-child policy (not the adoption of capitalist economics). Had the population been allowed to double the Chinese would be in famine with hundreds of millions dying. In a Western society there would have been no way to stop the march to destruction, while the vision of the state (for all its other failures) has literally saved the Chinese people. Some would say the current ecological crisis is a similar process - a march to destruction - which there is no way of understanding or approaching in the individualistic consciousness (altho some people are trying a grass-roots approach to ecology it is hopelessly efficient because the state here - deliberately or by accident - has evaporated people-power with its breakdown of society into individuals).

This feature of Big Economics is most impressively illustrated by the U.S. Moon Landings and the British/French government collaboration on Concorde. The latter built in the late 1960s is still an impressive feat today providing a passanger service to New York from London at twice the speed of sound - something we associate more with top fighter jets. Such projects as these are impossible for the private sector. The private sector is equipped only for the types of gadgets and services that our market place is dominated by - mobile phones, TVs, computers etc. The emergent properties of national scale planning are too large a conception for the inward looking mindset of the Right-Wing, and in any case Big Economics provides such overwhelming power that it belittles and marginalises the petty thinking of the capitalists and property holders who wish to take satisfaction in their finite estates and trivial achievements. As the naked monks of India pointed out the Alexander the Great a man can only ever occupy the spot on which he stands - the rest is entirely illusions of grandeur. Those who get satisfaction from such illusions of grandeur really are the most trivial of beasts.

So it seems to summarise encouraging aspiration on the social level is the way forward. But that is the Left-Wing view and not the Right-Wing view! Central government funding projects for the masses is the most ethical and cost effective way for us to relate to ourselves. The pathology of individualism on the other hand limits peoples goals and aspirations to just themselves or their immediate kin and is simply the quagmire which ultimately wastes human hope and aspiration.

QED Warsi.

p.s. I wanted to add a bit on "selfishness" as a concept and R.Dawkins use of it with regard to genes. It is clear that Dawkins in a Right-Wing thinker because the very thought to describe genes as selfish is Right-Wing. He never meant that they were actually selfish (they are just chemicals) but they behave as though they are he argues. But do they? Selfishness is a behaviour strategy of humans, where we approach situations with a "win" goal for ourself and without regard for our opponent who may "win" or "lose" we don't care. Such a strategy one could argue has a genetic component - and with strong adaptationalists they would argue a 100% genetic cause. Now if we attribute the concept of "selfishness" to a particular genetic sequence, say AGG, then we can't attribute it to other genetic sequences (such as the sequence for the behaviour where we only seek a "win" for our opponent say TTA). There is a category mistake here (to use Ryle's term), a confusing of use/mention and it violates the SRH too.

Now maybe TTA is a gene that does very well (whose bearer helps its opponent even at its own cost) and so it spreads in the population, while AGG (whose bearer only helps himself) declines and may go extinct... so assuming they occupy the same locus on the same chromosome TTA has outcompeted AGG and won a meta race, while AGG who seeks to "win" for itself in encounters has lost the meta race -- won the battle but lost the war so to speak. In this sense TTA can be seen to be seeking to win for itself, but on a meta level where within the game it was playing a strategy to win for others. But really this is a mistaken view. Calling TTA selfish because it won is as ridiculous as calling AGG unselfish because it lost. And this as ridiculous as saying a clock that does work is selfish while one that doesn't work is unselfish!

Now the link between "working" and "existence" in dynamic systems like evolution is very philosophically interesting but it is not a bit like Dawkins Right-Wing flavoured nonsense.