Inequality hurts, equality heals! In their book The Spirit Level (Allen Lane) my brother Richard Wilkinson and his partner Kate Pickett demonstrate the damage done by economic inequality and the benefits to most people of greater equality. These thoughts of mine are not a substitute for research, but the sort of searching-about that sometimes precedes research, or action. I’m trying to pick up where they leave off: if what The Spirit Level says is true (and it is!) then what’s stopping us, where might we find the will and ways to change?
A will to change?
The poor may be inclined to equality, but they lack belief in themselves and the possibility of a fairer world. How to build belief and realise potential power?
To move corporations and governments to redistribute, there must be a more general belief in and will to equality, a shifting concensus. We have to look beyond platonic argument, statistics and the promise of longterm gains for those with most to lose. Even simple economic solutions require change on non-economic fronts: to maximise mutual sympathy and social solidarity; to minimise individual and sectional selfishness; to embolden the poor and soften the rich; to replace dependence on money differentials with other bases for social standing and self-esteem
Monetised inequality
Money – wealth and income – is the main driver and measure of inequality under capitalism. Or, to put it differently, capitalism is monetised inequality. Money is the main handle on contemporary inequalities; redistribution of wealth and income is the most obvious means of redress…
BUT human inequalities did not begin and wont end with capitalism and the money economy. Inequality has taken many forms as swords were beaten into ploughshares, crowns into coins… stocks and shares. Capitalism, like the old feudal order, is not geared to equality. Money will not redistribute itself. We cannot assume that capitalism is fated to self-destruct, nor can we rely on science and sweet reason to motivate governments and minorities with most to lose.
Structural change
Differentials vary widely within and between capitalist economies, leaving room for improvement and convergence on best practice. But capitalism breeds and feeds on inequality of income and wealth; sooner or later, a move to greater equality will require structural change, a systemic commitment to sharing, co-operation and the public good as against private profit and sectional advantage. The need for structural change does not begin or end with capitalist finance and industry: it applies also, and immediately, to the way we organise education, health and other public services. How long can we tolerate a two-tier division between public and private provision?
Obstacles to change
The rich, or relatively rich – have-mores with most to lose – include most of the decision-makers and opinion-formers. As the Spirit Level shows, many of them may also stand to gain from greater equality BUT a bird in the hand is worth two in the bush: the prospect of measurable short term loss – reduced income or higher tax - is likely to outweigh the prospect of less quantifiable future benefits.
This conservative bias MIGHT not preclude a more equitable government from closing gaps. Higher benefits, wage regulation or progressive tax might be ‘sold’ as cost-effective: the costs to be offset by savings on health, law and order etc. BUT note recent flutter in the dovecot when tax was raised to 50% on incomes over £150,000 (although this is about six times the national average, which is already more than most of us can reasonably expect!)
Awaking desire and belief
The poor have always hankered for greater equality, the rich have half-believed in it – before the law, perhaps, or in the eyes of God, anywhere but the bank-balance or Land Registry. For the poor – the have-less majority – the task is to translate desire into belief and practical determination. For the rich, to find the combination of stick and carrot that will melt or frighten them into shelling out.
(Bankers’ bonus payments were publicised in the wake of their credit crunch debacle, but though they were named and shamed most did not waive or repay their bonuses. MPs too were named and shamed for greedy claims, and soon began volunteering to repay: not because they were shamed, but because their shaming was a threat to their jobs and salaries: constituency parties have the power to deselect and voters not to.)
And the carrots? If not wealth, we’ll need to offer other grounds for self-esteem and source of happiness. How to offer a foretaste of something better, while ironing out inequalities in the existing system and piloting alternatives?
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What if we’re wrong?
The relative equality of Japan has more to do with the survival of older fraternal traditions than with the capitalist structure and dynamic those traditions restrain. But could that sort of counter-current go further, transforming structures from within? Could capitalism survive the erosion of differentials, with difference of wealth and income becoming largely symbolic (like the split seconds between winners and also-rans on the race course)? Could other measures of status, power and success come to replace big gaps in property and earnings: barristers have traditionally taken a wage-cut to become judges; occasional bankers and entrepreneurs turn from private greed to public good: might this not happen more generally within existing hierarchies and practices? Might not an enlightened Market reward the goodness of a company’s product and social practice as much as its prices and profits? We need to ask these questions, if only to understand our enemy.
A surface office culture of first names and shared canteens may indicate a deeper wish. It wasn’t for nothing that Christian monarchs washed paupers’ feet, and Officers still serve Christmas dinners to Men… But what are straws in the wind without wind?
Another dream
The Labour Movement - Labour Party and Trade Unions – was to have mobilised the power of the poor and the better nature of the rich to reappropriate the wealth of land and industry. A newly conscious working class, with nothing to sell but its labour, was to take over the means of production and mastery of their own lives. The ruling class would be subsumed, the state wither away.
Social democracy did not, in that vision, stop short at the threshold of employment. Majority rule would be extended to where it mattered most: the direction of the business and industry that shape our lives and world. Long before Marxism, the ideal of commonwealth combined the economic with the social and political elements of community. Common humanity and common sense!
Nor did democracy in that vision lie primarily in election of representatives. More important was the power and freedom of groups and individuals to decide and act together in their own interests. Representative democracy would come into play where direct democracy fell short…
Facts of life
Somewhere between dream and ‘correct analysis’ lie facts of life. It is a fact that many men and women from different classes and cultures have agreed that things could and should be different, have shared a presumption of equality. Not just between friends, but between enemies:
‘If you prick us do we not bleed, if you tickle us do we not laugh…?’ Shylock may have been bent on revenge, but behind his pound of flesh is the simple symmetry of an eye for an eye. Our eye for symmetry is matched by a capacity for sympathy. Our individual mindsets are shaped and cross-cut by incoming signals and reflex responses. We are built to feel for each other and respond. In primates and other mammals, body-language works between us before we know it. The ‘limbic resonance’ in our middle brain is picked up on brainscans, and our responses can be observed in sympathetic reflex, from infectious yawning to the involuntary clenching of fist and raising of hand-to-mouth.. In the neo-cortex, the more specifically human bit of the brain, can be located a process of projection. Practical experiment indicates a corresponding ability to put ourselves in place of others, exchanging points of view.*
On that basis, through language, cross-referencing and generalisation we arrive at shared overviews, the best being those which correspond to the most varied viewpoints.
The processes of empathy, projection and overview stem from a common physiology, our evolution as a species in a shared world. Our genetic capacity for empathy and projection, interaction and co-operation is developed and extended through experience and practice, our families and a common culture developed as we live, work and play together (games have a special importance for human and some other mammals.)
Across divisions of class, occupation and gender, a shared animal life-cycle underpins a measure of common understanding: our lives describe a familiar arc from impotent infancy through capable prime, sage middle age and back into dependency. While men’s productive labour has become separate and specialised, women’s reproductive labour is more widely shared, the basis for a mutual sympathy denied to men.
The nearest we can get to objectivity, a balanced view, is not through detachment but the widest possible sympathy, which depends in turn on a range of shared experience, freedom to move and communicate, time to reflect.
*Thomas Lewis et al in A General Theory of Love
Biggest not best. A part or apart…
Fitness, as in the survival of the fittest, is not a matter of size, strength or even intelligence. Fitness means fitting in, adaptability.
Distinction, in the sense of dominating or standing out, may not be healthy. The tallest trees don’t stand alone or head-and-shoulders above the rest: they grow in woods, depend on their peers for support and protection from wind and frost; competition focuses their growth and draws them up. Ivy thrives because it does not overshadow or starve the trees on which it hangs.
Biological models do not apply directly to social development but patterns of thought derived from one sphere shape assumptions and attitudes in another. Our thinking is both anthropomorphic and a reflection of the world that informs it.
Why do we attach so much importance to the distinction between ourselves and other animals, to our own individual distinction and status in society rather than the qualities we can share and enjoy most widely?
Cyclical equality
A traditional tribal society may set sharp differentials between sexes and age-groups. Men’s and women’s roles are separate and correspond to a clear division of labour; but within each gender hierarchy, rights and responsibilities accrue with age, with rites of passage to mark transitions. Given a stable population in a stable environment, the lessons of experience hold good from one generation to the next and age confers authority. Most people, men and women, can hope to rise through the ranks from impotent infancy through productive/reproductive maturity to respected old age. Early subordination is compensated by later authority. The undeniable physiological differences between men and women combine with rigid demarcation of productive and reproductive functions to reduce the stress of inequality between men and women.
A choice of metaphors*
Thinking derives via metaphor from long experience in a concrete world. Conceptual understanding of the world is rooted in old interactions with nature and each other, preserved in language abstracted more or less unconsciously from familiar observations and routines.
Balance is important because we stand on two legs, and the word/metaphor re-emerges in justice, trade and finance, in scales and balance sheets. Manual labour, manufacture and management are all about how we handle things and each other. Evidence is weighed in court, to decide what this or that is worth, we weigh things up up among ourselves. What’s a life worth living, dying, killing for? We suffer highs and lows, psychological and meteorological. Investors seek high profits and low risks.
But what in the world – a spherical planet afloat in elastic space – do we mean by all this ‘high’ and ‘low’, up and down? Shouldn’t it be ‘in’ and ‘out,’ or roundabout? Was there ever a level playing field except in games? What do career ladders lean against? Each other? Odd that these metaphorical structures, convergent commanding heights can bring the great and good to actually touch, people much like ourselves, so close to each other, so far above our heads that they can whisper in each other’s ears.
Mental constructs arise from and return to physical reality and relationships. Their roots may be hardwired in our brains. But evolution is not monolithic, nor our brains short of alternative models and circuits: we’re not trapped in top-down pyramids.
* George Lakoff ‘Moral Politics’ etc
Competition and co-operation
Competition and co-operation are not mutually exclusive opposites but dynamic partners. The concept of equality involves comparison, measuring or balancing one AGAINST another. In games, as in life – though not quite a matter of life and death - we match, test and learn from each other. In play and in work, we learn to give and take, serve and return, win and lose. We may not always be equal, but we share a need for each other, in practice and for pleasure.
Some more equal than others
Disturbingly, some people – even peoples – prove more capable, more often, in more settings than others. Equality is an aspiration for the rest of us, a safety-net for high-fliers with the furthest to fall. If they survive their prime, they’ll grow old and need a hand. Meanwhile, if we’re lucky – given the choice and freedom to move around - we may recover on the swings what we lose on the roundabouts.
Barriers to empathy and mutual recognition
The more we can share and interact, compete and co-operate, recognise and communicate, the better our chance of mutual understanding: a combination of mutual recognition and informed fellow feeling. Our capacity for empathy and projection can only be properly developed if we can reach and see into each other’s lives in everyday day practice and exchange.
But, with divisions of income and wealth go divisions of occupation and class, environment, social status and real power. We are not just divided but ordered, segregated between richer and poorer, employers and employed, deciders and decided-for, those who can easily buy what they want and those who have to sell themselves. With segregation by income and class go other sorts of segregation: by age, race, gender and ability – not just discrimination against disability, but selection by ‘intelligence,’ the division of mental from manual skills.
The wider, more rigid and self-perpetuating the divisions, the less the social and practical basis for empathy and projection, the less free we are and the less able to feel for and recognise each other for what we are.
We don’t completely lose the capacity for empathy, the longing to bridge the gaps, but it’s a long shot. Separate but equal, apartheid, was always a delusion. Rich whites may applaud Zulu dances, rub noses with Maoris or swim with dolphins. Public schoolboys, and now girls go slumming. Aristos, actors and gangsters cosy up in clubs> But exotic fascination is no defence against mutual ignorance: noble savage turns to nigger-run-amok, good ole boys reveal themselves in lynchmob hoods; with phrases like collateral damage, deadpan officers contort the facts of death..
Equality and freedom
The wider the divisions of income and wealth, the steeper the ladders and wider the gaps between the rungs, the less freedom of movement and exchange between the occupations and lifestyles that the hierarchy separates. What’s obstructed is not just the capacity for empathy, mutual recognition and solidarity, but essential human freedom of movement and self-fulfilment, the possibility of getting beyond our given ladders, circles, fields and ruts. No blue-sky thinking from within the box!
How relative turns absolute
What we want, what we deem adequate - once minimal biological needs are met – depends on prevailing norms, so poverty is usually defined as less than 60% percentage of average wage.
Working on an isolated Manchester overspill estate in the early 1970s I was struck by the way relative translated into absolute poverty. Internally displaced persons spent on ‘luxuries’ and let ‘necessities’ slide. People came to Partington to escape homelessness or overcrowding, or because they had no job or family to hold them back. Transported from a more or less familiar old inner city to a maze of looping roads and empty grass, strangers took refuge in several sorts of brand-new council house, dog-packs beating tracks between the rubble and the grass. No gas meters, family and friends, second-hand shops…or jobs. But expensive central heating and free deliveries of HP furniture andTVs. Debts, rows, the need for drink or smoke more urgent than the will to cook or decent food. (I drank, smoked and rowed myself, but with more alternatives; job, wife and child, workmates and a van). Out of the remains of Tenants and Claimants groups came a People’s Rights Office. Where we learnt the worst of cut-offs, repossessions, fights and walk-outs, chip-pan fires, cot-deaths.
What’s changed, except for the worse? What better case or starting point for more equality?
Transparency
To expose the difference, to name and shame: following publication of Spirit Level, Dick Taverne introduced bill in Lords to make public company front their annual reports with an indication of the gap between top and bottom pay, the ratio of top salaries to wages of lowest-paid employees.
Equality worth fighting for?
Will information and reason do the trick? A combination of argument, naming and shaming, mutual understanding, altruism and enlightened self-interest?
Or will there have to be, a more direct confrontation between those with most to gain and those with most to lose? Are those who break the windows of banks and bankers’ houses to be condemned or applauded? Factory occupations? Wilful damage to 4x4s? Do we outlaw all violence, or distinguish between persons and property, between physical confrontation and killing people? Is the power of ‘reasonable force’ to be reserved to police (and unreasonable force to soldiers overseas) ?
As a community worker and adult educator, I found that aggression – in this case emotional - was an important element in mobilising ‘deprived’ groups in their own interest. Aggression, recognised, worked-through and laced with humour proved effective when it came to negotiations.
With our ‘Commonword’ writers’ workshop and publishing group in Manchester, the emergence of good new writing in a working class seemed also to involve an aggressive stand against some class conventions of prevailing Literature.
Expression, action and aggression are linked. Every outgoing and opening is also an assault, a challenge, displacement of what was before. Aggression, even violence, is not something to be suppressed and avoided at all costs. A fight that is not a fight-to-the-death is not the end of the story: peace is made, conflict tempered in negotiation, hard feelings softened and rewoven in mutual understanding.
What sort of stick will it take to shift a rich minority with much to lose? How can the poor majority unite in recognition of their rights, make themselves felt and undeniable? In assisting this process, we begin to recognise each other and ourselves, not just what sets us at odds but what we have in common and the pleasure of each other’s company.
Best of enemies?
Jeremy Paxman on TV interviewed war veterans about their experiences from the Falklands, Iraq and Afghanistan. In this company, including a woman reservist, Paxman was unusually polite. He asked one para, what he thought of the Taliban and the man said simply ‘They’re good..’ ‘What do you mean, good?’ said Paxman, taken aback. ‘They were good fighters... and they believed in what they were fighting for.’
In Palestine, I was struck by the writings of an early Zionist called Jabotinsky who argued for implacable action against Palestinian Arabs, because they, like the Jews, would keep fighting for their land as long as there was any hope…
The Algerian war was ended by General de Gaulle in what he called the ‘paix des braves.’ (Piaf’s ‘Je ne regrette rien’ was a theme tune for both FLN officers and French OAS).
(Class traitors: honourable profession! There has always been a small minority moved by compassion, discomfort, misadventure or objective reasoning to join the mob. They bring with them some weapons from the enemy, and an olive branch, the promise of more inclusive humanity to come.)
Common enemy: something to unite against
In the Second World War, civilian health in Britain improved and the mortality gap between rich and poor narrowed. Rationing boosted the diet of the poorest, morale was generally high, and the division and stress of social inequality were offset by patriotic solidarity. Does such unity require a dramatic enemy, and evil something and/or somebody to unite against?
Past radical strategies have often combined the two: monarchy and the king, feudalism and aristocrats, capitalism and the ruling class, bosses in bowler hats. If our focus is to be on inequality, who now best embodies this? Bankers, bosses, professionals, the wealthiest or highest-earning 10%...or 20% Anyone with more than us?
Or might it be possible to aim off, to find our unity – and will to equality – in face of some other common threat, for instance climate change? Or a combination of the two. Combatting climate change and inequality are closely linked: climate change, like wartime austerity, requires a general tightening-of-belts and sharing of resources: if only to keep the poor majority on side.
Objectively, the threat of climate change may be more real than the wartime risk to civilians of getting hit by bombs, but it’s not something we hear overhead like bombers at night, and – as with the threats of inequality – the enemy doesn’t come in recognisable uniform. If inequality or climate change do have a human face, it’s probably our own.
Simple redistribution
Simple the will were there, we could narrow differentials of wealth and earnings by:- progressive taxation on income, capital gains and inheritancestatutory minimum (and maximum?) earnings
- compulsion on employers to publish pay and expenses as well as shareholdings and dividends
- linking of pensions and benefits to average income (as distinct from ‘cost of living’)
incentives to employers to narrow pay differentials - tax incentives and encouragement for mutual,co-operative and community enterprise
Structural change - abolition or opening up of private sector services, particularly in health and education, which offer priority or privilege for cash
- extension of social democracy to capitalist companies, the right of workers to vote and be represented in policy-making, appointments and remuneration
- social contracts for companies and corporate bodies, including commitments to employees, customers, community, environment and the quality of goods and services they provide (including quality of media information!)
- removal of distinctions and barriers between mental and manual disciplines in employment, education and training
- a statutory year or two of community service/training (including art, sport and games) for young people between secondary and higher education, school and employment - to broaden experience, break down barriers and open up possibilities before lifetime choices are made.
- citizen’s contracts for individuals, a formal coming of age, making rights and responsibilities explicit. On a par with commitments of mutual care and loyalty laid out in marriage vows and citizenship ceremonies for immigrants
- an Equality Party might not come amiss, now Labour’s lost the plot (I might not join it, unless it were the other sort of party: Humanite, the French CP paper, used to run a street festival, with whisky and vodka to speed the ending of the Cold War. A big tent, perhaps?
Could the Equality Trust become or initiate a coalition of the poor and their representatives, unions, NGOs and other committed bodies?
PRECEPTS AND PRESCRIPTIONS
United we stand, divided we fall
Aesop(620-560 BC); picked up in US civil war Liberty Song by John Dickinson 1768 and later by patriots and trade unions around the world
Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.
Various ancient Greeks and Luke 6:31, picked up in Charles Kingsley’s Waterbabies
Love thy neighbour as thyself:
Thou shalt not avenge, nor bear any grudge against the children of thy people, but thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself…. Leviticus 19:18
But the stranger that dwelleth with you shall be unto you as one born among you, and thou shalt love him as thyself; for ye were strangers in the land of Egypt.
Leviticus 19:34
Jesus replied: “ ‘Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind.’ This is the first and greatest commandment. And the second is like it: ‘Love your neighbour as yourself.’ St Matthew 22:39.
Magna Carta 1215
XXIX. No Freeman shall be taken or imprisoned, or be disseised of his Freehold, or Liberties, or free Customs, or be outlawed, or exiled, or any other wise destroyed; nor will We not pass upon him, nor condemn him, but by lawful judgment of his Peers, or by the Law of the Land. We will sell to no man, we will not deny or defer to any man either Justice or Right.
When Adam delved and Eve span, who was then the gentleman?
John Ball, c1381
Ball, an unruly priest, declared that ‘from the beginning all men by nature were created alike’ He called on his followers to ‘cast off the yoke of bondage, and recover liberty’ (killing great lords of the realm, slaying lawyers, justices and jurors). On trial for his part in the Peasants’ Revolt, he was given his say, then hanged, drawn and quartered.
No man is an island,
Entire of itself.
Each is a piece of the continent,
A part of the main.
If a clod be washed away by the sea,
Europe is the less…
Each man's death diminishes me,
For I am involved in mankind.
Therefore, send not to know
For whom the bell tolls,
It tolls for thee. John Donne, Meditation, 1624
In the beginning of Time, the great Creator Reason, made the Earth to be a Common Treasury... but not one word was spoken in the beginning, That one branch of mankind should rule over another.
Gerrard Winstanley and others in The Levellers Standard 1649
Church of England Marriage Vows 1662
I,
take thee
to my wedded wife/husband,
to have and to hold from this day forward,
for better for worse,
for richer for poorer,
in sickness and in health,
till death us do part,
according to God's holy ordinance;
and thereto I plight thee my troth.
*This obvious inequality is now mostly omitted. A Church report in 2006 said ‘obey’ might now be outdated and could be used by men to justify violence.
US Declaration of Independence
We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness
Thomas Jefferson 1776
Liberté, égalité, fraternité French national motto, from revolutionary slogan 1789
All for one, and one for all! ‘Un pour tous, tous pour un’
Alexandre Dumas, Three Musketeers 1844; unofficial motto of Swiss Republic
Hypocrite lecteur, mon semblable, mon frère! (hypocrit reader, my double, my brother!)
Charles Baudelaire, Fleurs du Mal 1857
From each according to his ability, to each according to his need
popularised by Karl Marx in 1875 Critique of Gotha Programme
The less you are, the less you express your life, the more you have…and everything which you are unable to do, your money can do for you.
Karl Marx again, from ‘Marx’s Concept of Man’ by Erich Fromm)
One man, one vote?
Corsica was the first European state to include women, from 1755 until 1769. In UK, women under 30 got the vote in 1928, and still have it today.
Four Freedoms
1. Freedom of speech and expression
2. Freedom of religion
3. Freedom from want
4. Freedom from fear
Franklin D. Roosevelt 1941
Universal Declaration of Human Rights 1948
…recognition of the inherent dignity and of the equal and inalienable rights of all members of the human family is the foundation of freedom, justice and peace in the world (Preamble)
Everyone has the right to a standard of living adequate* for the health and well-being of himself and of his family… (Article 25)
*what’s ‘adequate’ must be relative, as is ‘want’ in freedom-from-want.
UK Equality Bill 2009
Its introduction stated: ‘The Government is committed to creating a fair society with fair chances for everyone. For society to be fair people must have the chance to live their lives freely and fulfil their potential. To achieve this we need to tackle inequality and root out discrimination.
Equality not only has benefits for individuals but for society and the economy too. A more equal workforce is a stronger workforce. A more equal society is one more at ease with itself.
To help us create the equal and fair society we all want to see we will introduce an
important new package of measures at the heart of which is a new Equality Bill’
‘Fair society with fair chances’? The draft bill pulled together anti-discrimination law on age, gender, race and disability. It seemed to overlook the elephant in the room, the widening gap between rich and poor (although the poorest happen to include a disproportionate number of women, blacks, disabled etc). Now an addition to the bill will ‘require Ministers of the Crown and others...to have regard to the desirability of reducing socio-economic inequalities.’
