Politics of Hopelessness

I started posting other people's twitter threads in part because twitter was (is) threatening to self-destruct, but also because there are some incredible gems that could disappear into the ether even if twitter remains. It's not set up to easily find that one post you read weeks ago - ever again. But it's curious to me how many people prefer to read things in little bite-sized chunks. I sometimes copy/paste long threads into a doc just to read them without being jarringly broken up into bits mid-sentence. Perhaps I'm old and stodgy like that and have just grown too accustomed to paragraphs. Anyway, check this one out, and I bring in Chomsky and his ilk at the end.

This is a fantastic thread by Dr. Henry Madison, professor of... history? anthropology? political science? The name's too popular to be able to find his credentials or location for certain, but his analysis feels spot on.

"POW camps in the Korean war explain a lot about the total capitulation to Covid today. Nearly 40% of US prisoners died, the highest death rate in US military history. But the camps were only weakly fortified, prisoners had adequate food and water and were usually not tortured. 

In fact prisoners were often rewarded with sweets and cigarettes. Nobody tried to escape, despite the absence of barbed wire or often even armed guards. But prisoners would often sit in their huts with a blanket over their heads, and just die. After liberation, very few prisoners even wanted to do the basic act of calling family at home. And there was little camaraderie amongst survivors. The overwhelming culture of the camps and in survivors was one of hopelessness. 

That hopelessness was deliberately engineered. 

Michael Sandel's Tyranny of Merit: What's Become of the Common Good?

This excellent read, The Tyranny of Merit, by Harvard philosophy professor Michael Sandel, actually shifted some of my thinking, and I love a good lightbulb moment provoked by a book! I found the book sometimes a little outside my reach in places enough to need to read a few chapters numerous times, but I think I've got the gist of it all.  

In a nutshell, some of us hope that judging people based on their merit makes for a more fair and just system, and the education system can be used as a sorting machine. The promotion of merit and of the sorting tools we use to determine who deserves to rise to the top are seen as part of an open system of global thinking. Rejecting that position, then, it is believed, is clearly aligned with closed-minded thinking, BUT this is all a ruse brought to you by neoliberal politics. It's born of the illusion that we can create a level playing field of equal opportunity, which is a commonly touted argument. Less common, however, is Sandel's captivating argument around what it means to deserve anything and his claim that, even if we could have perfect equality of opportunity, a meritocracy brings with it some nasty side effects: "It would generate hubris and anxiety among the winners and humiliation and resentment among the losers--attitudes at odds with human flourishing and corrosive to the common good" (120). He ends with some plausible but difficult alternatives to our current way of thinking--in education, work, and through contributive justice--which require an entire overhaul of thinking reminiscent of Charles Taylor's notion of social imaginaries: we have to change our beliefs before we'll ever be able to change our behaviours.

MERITOCRACY CAN'T BE REALIZED 

We can't get a fully realized meritocracy. The term was first coined just in 1958 in a dystopian novel; it wasn't originally meant to be seen as a solution or a term of praise. Then in the 80s, Reagan created the belief that "market mechanisms are the primary instruments for achieving the public good" (21) and deregulated banks and businesses under the belief that, "Provided they operate within a fair system of equal opportunity, markets give people what they deserve" (62). Since, in theory, everyone can compete equally (the rhetoric of rising), government helped out by lowering taxes to remove barriers to success, which then provoked a dramatic rise in tuition fees. We tolerate inequalities because of the American Dream that suggests we can't win without some losers beneath us: Everything we do is fair and just provided people worthy have equal opportunities to access higher education; however, governing elites have the "responsibility for creating the conditions that have eroded the dignity of work and left many feeing disrespected and disempowered. . . . upheavals we are witnessing are a political response to a political failure of historic proportions" (19). We're starting to see the light. 

Michael Sandel's Tyranny of Merit

I haven't yet read his newest book,(ETA - read it and discussed here) but Michael Sandel is everywhere these days promoting his new book. An excerpt from a Guardian interview:

Sandel charts the rise of what he sees as a corrosive leftwing individualism: “The solution to problems of globalisation and inequality – and we heard this on both sides of the Atlantic – was that those who work hard and play by the rules should be able to rise as far as their effort and talents will take them. This is what I call in the book the ‘rhetoric of rising’. It became an article of faith, a seemingly uncontroversial trope. We will make a truly level playing field, it was said by the centre-left, so that everyone has an equal chance. And if we do, and so far as we do, then those who rise by dint of effort, talent, hard work will deserve their place, will have earned it.” The recommended way to “rise” has been to get a higher education. . . . 

Sandel has two fundamental objections to this approach. First, and most obvious, the fabled “level playing field” remains a chimera. Although he says more and more of his own Harvard students are now convinced that their success is a result of their own effort, two-thirds of them come from the top fifth of the income scale. . . . "Americans born to poor parents tend to stay poor as adults.” . . . [Secondy,] even a perfect meritocracy would be a bad thing. “The book tries to show that there is a dark side, a demoralising side to that,” he says. “The implication is that those who do not rise will have no one to blame but themselves.” Centre-left elites abandoned old class loyalties and took on a new role as moralising life-coaches, dedicated to helping working-class individuals shape up to a world in which they were on their own. “On globalisation,” says Sandel, “these parties said the choice was no longer between left and right, but between ‘open’ and ‘closed’. Open meant free flow of capital, goods and people across borders.” Not only was this state of affairs seen as irreversible, it was also presented as laudable. “To object in any way to that was to be closed-minded, prejudiced and hostile to cosmopolitan identities.” . . .