Snubbery

Thirty-one years ago, the Gnome had words to say about snobbery.

[An] argument critics used was that it was better to change people's beliefs and inner attitudes.

"My answer is that this is the work of priests and psychiatrists. And even priests and psychiatrists are not 100 per cent successful in changing what goes on in people's heads," he said.

As far as schools were concerned, he added, behaviour could be controlled. He named the College of Jade and Gold as an example of a school taking effective action to stop snobbery.

Its principal, [redacted], had correctly said social snobbery in schools is the flaunting of wealth. And this must be stopped.

Elaborating on these points during the question-and-answer session, the Gnome said that what goes on in a man's head is between him and God. But what the school could do was to change the students' behaviour.

He was quick to add though: "The culprits are the parents, not the children."

Changing the World

Whatever you do, you change the world. The greater your potential to do so, the more you must change it. The more you can change it, the better it is that you change it for the better. And so it goes.

I don't know exactly when it became a Marvel Comics catchphrase (i.e. 'with great power comes great responsibility'), but it's convenient shorthand to put it that way. The principle, however, is somewhat well-established in law: if you have greater resources, privileges, and powers, you also have a greater duty of care in many cases.

In this case, it must be a greater duty of care with regard to the world around us. But here is where it gets interesting. If the universe was created by a God of unbounded powers, the responsibility must also be unbounded. He can't just delegate authority to humans, because He would still be responsible by virtue of being a higher authority with perfect foresight.

The question is then, to what extent is His responsibility voided by humans deciding to do things that they ought not do? Are we considered competent or incompetent? Does God's responsibility extend to maintaining the universe in a state acceptable to its tenants?

Ah well. It seems that power might be an expensive burden. But torque is cheap.

I'd Rather Be A Publican

I've written before on the topic of faux nouveau Republicanism, the fake new idea of a grand old ideal. Then, in sudden serendipitous insight, I saw the link between two institutions of the ancient Pax Britannia.

In Chesterton's The Flying Inn, he pulls a similar trick to one he had played elsewhere and presents us with the conundrum of a tavern where there isn't one. This gets around the morbid stricture of compulsory abstinence inflicted by the villainous authorities.

Fast-forward to the very recent past, and we get The Economist's 16 Dec 2010 take on a similar problem. Except, of course, that the former was inflicted by authority without accountability, and this latter is inflicted by authority without identity.

The right to social gathering, lubricated by good food and drink, is an essential human right when taken in the context of what it means to be a human in a human society. If anybody discriminates against you because of your reasonable assertion of this right, that body deserves to be cast out of the civilised society you share.

It follows then that the gift and capacity of hosting such social gatherings, and providing the necessary and appropriate lubrication, must be a noble capability indeed. Given the choice of being a false new Republican or a true old Publican, I know where I must stand.

Elitism Fails

In my previous post I pointed out how egalitarianism fails. Because all humans are different, giving humans equal rights on the basis of a presumed 'core humanity' is actually a distortion of logical contracts, since you are then dispensing something in an inequitable fashion. If all people regardless of virtue, performance, skill, or potential are to be treated the same way and have the same rights, you are looking at something which is exactly identical to the core tenets of some religions — salvation is by a single act and the afterlife is available to all who believe. Except, of course, that this problem is compounded by trying to do it in the all-to-obviously-inequitable material world.

But if all humans are not equal except in some specious idealistic sense, then logically some humans may be 'game-winners'; that is, given all the scenarios that they are exposed to, they have the qualities to achieve a 'win' condition in each of them. There may be no such humans, but there will certainly be humans who are game-winners in some situations. Conversely, there may be some humans who are 'game-losers' in every situation, and certainly, some who are game-losers in at least one situation. In fact, some game-winners for some situations might be game-losers in different situations.

This means that for each simple situation, there will be an elite of those more likely to win. For complex situations, there will be an elite of those more likely to win in all the possible sub-scenarios within the complex situation.

So elites automatically form, and therefore, we have to say elitism must exist — at least in the sense that we recognize that elites are winners and by that fact worthy of being recognized as such. In human societies, if those winners also happen to make us winners (e.g. a very successful hunter in a hunter-gatherer society), then we give them bonuses such as status and power (or huge salaries), medals and awards, stuff like that.

But elitism fails us at one remove, and that is if we unwittingly allow transference of elite privilege — we automatically allow a kind of halo effect to give unwarranted prestige to those associated with the true elite human by kinship, network, clan, or other relationship that is not relevant. There would then be people in the elite group who have not done anything for the community in which they have been raised to the elite.

The only way to compensate for this failure is if they are, after being raised to the elite, able to make others winners using the status or acquired privileges that they now have. So, for example, a poor man who marries into a rich family and is given rich-family associations and privileges could use any influence he has thus attained or accrued to benefit the poor. A son of a rich merchant, landholder, or industrialist, having inherited power and wealth not through his own doing could then use that inheritance to benefit others.

Given the human situation, all these advantages actually come from having people 'below you' in elite status (i.e. the various 'scorecharts' that determine how elite you are). Therefore there is conceivably a moral obligation for elite status to be justified if you didn't earn that status yourself, because your status depends on other people. In the old days, they called this noblesse oblige, the obligation of nobility.

In the modern age of egalitarianism, the use of that term is often shrouded in sarcasm and even an air of impropriety. But there are indeed modern nobles, dispensing state-level power and patronage sometimes because of unearned status. Consider the case of a member of Parliament or equivalent representative in a parliamentary democracy or equivalent state. Supposing he runs for office and is returned unopposed. Then he now has elite status without having done anything for anybody. He now has a moral obligation to do things for people.

This is especially true if such a person ends up with far greater access to 'elite bonuses' such as communication with higher powers, material resources, information and suchlike. Every bit of those trappings of the elite status should carry with it a concomitant and commensurate responsibility towards those in general who don't have such things.

So does elitism fail? Well, there is a tendency for humans to be very happy with privileges and not so happy with sharing them around or making use of them for other people. That is why altruism should be more widely appreciated, since it is at the very least a sign of the realisation that elites need a community to be elite in.