Chapters 3–7 each began with a statistic of injustice: a seventh of children being labelled today the equivalent of delinquents, a sixth of households excluded from social norms, a fifth of people finding it difficult or very difficult to get by in these times of prejudice; a quarter not having the essentials, when there is enough for all; a third now living in families where someone is suffering from mental ill health. The fraction that ends this series of statistics concerns people’s ability to choose alternative ways of living and how limited those choices are: half are disenfranchised. In the US almost half of all those old enough to vote either choose not to vote or are barred from voting (see Table 1, Chapter 1, page 3). The greatest indictment of unequal affluent societies is for their people to be, in effect, disenfranchised, to think they can make no difference, to feel that they are powerless. Apathy has risen as we all become distracted by trying to make a living, lulled into a false comfort through consuming to maintain modern living. In the space of about 100 years we’ve gone from fighting for the right for women to vote, to a situation where half of the population in the most unequal of affluent countries are not exercising their right to vote.
Although there has been coordinated action, and many advocates of inequality, there has been no great, well-orchestrated conspiracy of the rich, just a few schools of free market thought, a few think-tanks preaching hate, but no secret all-powerful committees. Suppose there was, in fact, a conspiracy of the rich, a grand plan coordinated to preserve inequality. Conspiracy theories are often suggested as attractive explanations, as suddenly everything can be made to fit, and they are often revealed long after events. However, these are almost all relatively simple conspiracies, the assassination of a leader, the covering up of evidence, a plan to ensure a friend’s election to be party leader through apparently legal but devious means. Grand conspiracies require a degree of organisation and secrecy that humans are not capable of.
There is no great conspiracy. This was first realised in the aftermath of the First World War, when it became clear that no one ‘… planned for this sort of an abattoir, for a mutual massacre four years long’.1 The ‘donkeys’ in charge, the generals, planned for a short, sharp, war. Similarly, there is no orchestrated conspiracy to prolong injustice. That would be easier to identify and defeat. Instead unjust thoughts have seeped into everyday thinking out of the practices that make profit. Ideologies of inequality have trickled down. Once only a few argued that hunger should be used as a weapon against the poor. Now many grumble when inconvenienced by a strike, talk of those requiring benefits as scroungers, hope to inherit money or to become famous.2
As the nature of the beast has changed, as the nature of injustice has evolved from the former five giant evils to the new five modern evils of elitism, exclusion, prejudice, greed and despair, injustice begins to propagate itself more strongly. Because they do not recognise the transformed injustice for what it is, too many people favour arguments that actually bolster contemporary injustices in rich nations. But humans are far from being simply the pliant recipients of the seeds of social change they sow. Hardly any foresaw what they would reap as side effects of affluence, but great numbers are now working in concert to try to counteract those effects. Many people now recognise that the nature of injustice has changed; that in Britain and the US, ‘Beveridge’s Five Giants – Disease, Idleness, Ignorance, Squalor and Want – are different now …’.3
This conclusion is deliberately short. Often books of this kind struggle in their conclusion to make suggestions as to what should be done. Some will say that it is easy to criticise but hard to find solutions. The central argument of this book is that it is beliefs, the beliefs which enough of us still hold, that today underlie most injustice in the world. To ask what you do after you dispel enough of those beliefs to overcome injustice is rather like asking how you run plantations after abolishing slavery, or run society after giving women the vote, or run factories without child labour. The answers have tended to be: not very differently than before in most ways, but vitally different in others. However, dispelling the untruths that underlie the injustices we currently live with will not suddenly usher in utopia. A world where far more genuinely disapprove of elitism will still have much elitism and something else will surely arise in place of what we currently assume is normal. We cannot know what it will be, just as no one could have been expected in the 1910s to have predicted the world a century on. But what we currently view as normal will soon appear as crude old-fashioned snobbery, as has happened before. No one in an affluent country now so obviously bows and scrapes, or otherwise tugs their forelock in the presence of their ‘betters’. What do you do today that will appear so quaint and yet so tragic in 2110?
Human beings are not superhuman. Elitism, exclusion, prejudice, greed and despair will not end just by being recognised more clearly as unjust, just as slavery did not end when formally abolished, women were not emancipated simply by being allowed to vote and the child abuse of dangerous labour did not end with the Factory Acts. It is, however, in our minds that injustice continues most strongly, in what we think is permissible, in how we think we exist, in whether we think we can use others in ways we would not wish to be used ourselves.
All the five faces of social inequality that currently contribute to injustice are clearly and closely linked. Elitism suggests that educational divisions are natural. Educational divisions are reflected both in those children who are excluded from life choices for being seen as not having enough qualifications, and in those able to exclude themselves, often by opting into private education. Elitism is the incubation chamber within which prejudice is fostered. Elitism provides a defence for greed. It increases anxiety and despair as endless examinations are taken, as people are ranked, ordered and sorted. It perpetuates an enforced and inefficient hierarchy in our societies.
Just as elitism is integral to all the other forms of injustice, so is exclusion. The exclusion that rises with elitism makes the poor appear different, exacerbates inequalities between ethnic groups and, literally, causes racial differences. Rising greed could not be satisfied without the exclusion of so many, and so many would not be excluded now were it not for greed. But the consequences spread up through even to those who appear most successfully greedy. Rates of despair might be highest for those who are most excluded but even the wealthy in rich countries are now showing many more signs of despair, as are their children. Growing despair has become symptomatic of our more unequal affluent societies as a whole. The prejudice that rises with exclusion allows the greedy to try to justify their greed and makes others think they deserve a little more than most. The ostracism that such prejudice engenders further raises depression and anxiety in those made to look different. And as elitism incubates exclusion, exclusion exacerbates prejudice, prejudice fosters greed and greed - because wealth is simultaneously no ultimate reward and makes many without wealth feel more worthless - causes despair. In turn, despair prevents us from effectively tackling injustice.
Removing one symptom of the disease of inequality is no cure, but recognising inequality as the disease behind injustice, and seeing how all the forms of injustice which it creates, and which continuously recreate it, are intertwined is the first step that is so often advocated in the search for a solution. Each route to that solution only differs in how the twine is wrapped around different descriptions of the object we are trying to describe. Think of injustice in these ways and you can begin to distinguish between suggestions that will increase it and those that will be more likely to promote fairness and equality. The status quo is not improved ‘by introducing an inequality that renders one or more persons better off and no one [apparently] worse off’.4 The awarding of more elite qualifications to an already well-titled minority reduces the social standing of the majority. Allowing those with more to have yet more raises social norms and reduces people on the margins of those norms to poverty through exclusion. To imagine that others are, apparently, no worse off when you introduce inequality requires a prejudicial view of others, to see them as ‘not like you’. This argument legitimises greed.
In 2009 the US government introduced policies to tackle injustices, the first designed to be effective for 30 years. With some great changes taking places in the US, Britain may appear more clearly as a backwater of social progress; this is certainly the case where social security is concerned, and where human rights are rapidly being curtailed, but there are exceptions in other areas. For instance, the work to move away from elitism is under way. Even the 2007 Children’s Plan, the British government’s official guidance for schools in England (published before the economic crash made change so obviously imperative) suggested that schools should aim for children to understand others, value diversity, apply and defend human rights. It suggested that schools should help ensure that their staff were skilled in ensuring participation for all and should work towards the elimination of inequality. There should be ‘… no barriers to access and participation in learning and to wider activities, and no variation between outcomes for different groups; and … [children should] have real and positive relationships with people from different backgrounds, and feel part of a community, at a local, national and international level’.5
Less bound by elitism, the Welsh administration had earlier decreed that: ‘For young children – when they play – it is their work’.6 The Welsh government’s advice to schools is that they should encourage more play, as learning is about play and imagination. In Wales it is now officially recognised that children can be stretched rather than being seen as having a fixed potential; the Welsh government says that if children play just within their capabilities, they then feel their capabilities extend as a result. In Scotland the educational curriculum is similarly being redesigned not to be based on learning for children to become factory fodder, or competition careerists, but learning to ensure the development of ‘… wisdom, justice, compassion and integrity’.7 All this for Britain is very new, and for England much of it is yet to come, but it may be a tipping point in the long-term trend of what people are willing to tolerate for their children’s futures. As one young father from Northern Ireland in 2008 commented, on living through troubled times, ‘… when you’ve got kids you don’t want them to live what you’ve lived’.8 Times can change abruptly, as often for the better as for the worse.
The pendulum of public opinion was swinging in the US even before President Obama was elected. That was why he was elected. The US has historically been a place of remarkable bigotry and intolerance, which was partly why Barack Obama’s selection as a candidate was initially such a shock. For instance, in 1987 a majority of adults in the US believed that schools should be able to sack teachers if it was discovered that they were homosexual, and more than two thirds agreed with (or did not strongly dispute) the idea that women should return to their traditional roles. By 2007 only a quarter still held the former view and a narrow majority completely disagreed with the latter.9 However, public surveys also show how far US public opinion still has to go. There was a great swing back towards believing again that government should ensure that all were fed and also sheltered in 2007, but these are only the most basic of human rights. That same survey that revealed rapidly changing attitudes to women’s roles reported as a great success the fact that growing numbers of people in the US knew that inequality was rising. This is slow progress but is welcome in a country where a Texan politician recently said: ‘Where did this idea come from that everybody deserves free education? Free medical care? Free whatever? It comes from Moscow. From Russia. It comes straight out of the pit of hell’.10
It is not entirely the fault of the kind of Texans who talk of hell when they hear of equality that some still think in this way. Such thinking began long before Texas was overrun by European immigrants, immigrants with the profit motives of protestant ethics. The thinking got its first strong foothold around 400 years ago, on the other side of the Atlantic, in old Amsterdam. In 1631 a young man named René Descartes noticed that all around him people had stopped thinking about much more than earning money. He said: ‘In this great city where I am living, with no man apart from myself not being involved in trade, everyone is so intent on his profits that I could spend my whole life without being seen by anyone’.11 In the same year that Descartes died, 1650, a Dutch prince, William of Orange, was born, who, in 1688, invaded England. Despite the fact that he was then a king (not a revolutionary) and because he ended up on the side of history’s victors, the event became recorded as a ‘glorious revolution’ rather than as the beginnings of a new mind-set of mercantile and militaristic misery. Within a dozen years he had increased the national debt of England from £1 million to £15 million and set in place the idea that a nation-state should permanently borrow in order to fight wars and expand trade. He ordered massacres of Catholics in Ireland where he is remembered as King Billy. And the killing cost: national debt rose and rose, to £78 million by 1750 and £244 million by 1790. ‘The trend was remarkable and indeed exceptional, by European standards…. What did the government do with all the new resources, tax and loan money at its disposal? It conducted wars.’12 These were wars with Spain, Austria, France and lastly with North America, which the British lost. As a result, the mantle of ‘defender of the free world’ began to move across the Atlantic. In 1791 Thomas Paine wrote that, for the English government, ‘… taxes were not raised to carry on wars, but … wars were raised to carry on taxes’.13 He could have added, ‘… and debts rose’. And he could have been writing about what his own country was to become.
The Texan politician’s idea of fraternity and cooperation as hell was first fermented in the commercial imperatives that had swept Amsterdam by 1631, it was further brewed up in the militarist megalomania of England rampant in the eighteenth century, and the gilded greed of the US that was apparent to Mark Twain, who coined the phrase ‘the gilded age’ in the 1870s. All these in one way or another involved debt dressed up as wealth, debt dispensed in order to gain wealth. However, just as the definition of a language has become ‘a dialect with an army and navy’, a national debt is only ‘a debt’ if your military power is not sufficient for you to rename it as ‘a deficit’. Depending on how you count money (and it is a slippery business), the US current account was in surplus until 1977, in deficit but balanced by overseas ‘investments’ until 2002, and after that the US became truly a debtor nation in any sense of accounting. In 2004 the writer, Richard Du Boff, who pointed this out, like many others at the time, warned that all this could result in a dollar rout, which ‘… could cause skittish investors to dump US stocks and bonds, sending Wall Street into a dive’.14 In the event much more than a rout took place. And that Texan legislator’s political party, the Republicans, were routed from office. What replaced them was a little different from the Democrats of old, not just because of the President’s skin colour, or what that revealed about how people in the US could now vote.
President Obama’s proposals for the 2010 federal budget were released in March 2009. The proposals appeared designed to reverse the growing levels of economic inequality in the US. This was seen as a significant development given that inequality had been rapidly increasing in the US for 30 years, mostly as a deliberate result of government policy. Commentators initially said it was difficult to predict exactly what the effect of the hundreds of proposed budget measures would be, but they included approximately US$100 billion a year in tax increases for the rich and US$50 billion a year in net tax cuts for those less wealthy. The New York Times predicted that these changes would result in an increase in the take-home pay of the median household of roughly US$800 a year and tax increases on the ‘top 1%’ of US$100,000 a year.15 Some of the budget policy proposals which appeared to be aimed directly at helping the poor included: US$20 billion to increase food stamp benefits for desperate families, US$15 billion to increase pensions and benefits for nearly 60 million retired Americans and Americans with disabilities, the increasing of weekly unemployment benefits by US$25, and the expansion of the child tax credit programme.
The introduction to the 2009 US budget proposals was entitled ‘Inheriting a legacy of misplaced priorities’ and was widely welcomed as a remarkable document by recent historical standards. It stated that: ‘By 2004, the wealthiest 10 percent of households held 70 percent of total wealth and the combined net worth of the top 1 percent of families was larger than that of the bottom 90 percent’.16 Figures in the report also showed how the top 1% of earners had increased their share of the total income from 10% in 1980 to 22% by 2006, and how the cost of health insurance had increased by 58% since 2000, while average wages had only increased by 3%. By spring 2009 it had become clear to those in power that business as usual would no longer suffice.17 By spring 2010 it was becoming clearer that curtailing business as usual, its lobbyists, the dissent and the protest at reform that its billions of spare dollars paid for, was going to be far from easy.
Contrast the US budget proposals of 2009 with the criticism made by more maverick (although as it turns out, largely correct) academics writing just seven years earlier on how global problems were being faced up to: ‘All these and other problems of global or more local magnitude are … the icebergs threatening the Titanic that contemporary world society has become. The icebergs are financial (currency speculation and over-valued stocks [over-valued until fairly recently]), nuclear, ecological (global warming), and social (billions of people with no prospects for gainful employment or decent living standards). There is no captain and the officers (the world’s politicians) mill around disclaiming authority and denying responsibility’.18 Responsibility is, of course, still denied, but what was impossible one year became possible the next as what was solid economic certainty in 2007 melted into the air of social reality of 2009 and recrystallised in a new political battle when the consequences for the rich became clear in 2010.
In the British budget of spring 2009 taxes were raised so the rich would, if they earned over a certain limit, again pay half their surplus gains as tax. The House of Lords proposed an amendment that all companies should, by law, publish the ratio of the wages of their highest paid director or executive to the wages of the lowest paid tenth of their workforce.19 And a minister, Harriet Harman, introduced the new Equality Bill to Parliament, stating that it was now the British government’s understanding that inequality hurt everyone (although she was not very clear over which kinds of inequality she meant20). In the spring of 2010, inequality, bankers’ bonuses and greed all featured strongly in pre-election debate.
Greater equality is easily possible; we have had it so recently before, even in the US. In 1951 the communist-hating, soon-to-be consumer society, nuclear-powered US taxed the rich at 51.6% of their earnings. It has been estimated that returning to that tax rate for just the richest percentile of a percentile of North Americans would raise US$200 billion a year, three times all that the US government spent on education and the environment combined in 2008, or more than half of the (early) 2008 federal budget deficit.21 However, that deficit is now hugely greater, having exploded in just 24 months, and the super-rich are not as opulent as they were. Their investment earnings have certainly suffered. Nevertheless, President Obama’s tax proposals are to net roughly half that sum. It is well worth remembering that Barack Obama won the nomination of the Democratic Party in 2008 largely due to millions of small campaign donations from ordinary voters making him a credible candidate. Only after that did the corporate money also start rolling in to his campaign coffers.
Almost every time that there is a victory for humanity against greed it has been the result of millions of small actions mostly undertaken by people not in government. Examples include: votes for women, Indian independence, civil rights in America, or that earlier freedom won just to be able to say that the earth goes around the sun.22 People can choose between falling into line, becoming both creatures and victims of markets, or they can resist and look back for other ways, other arguments, different thinking. When they have resisted in the past, resistance has always been most effective when exercised by those taught that they were the most powerless. But we quickly forget this. We need to be constantly reminded. It is often said that: ‘The struggle of people against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting’.23 Thinking that you have to do all the thinking anew and alone is the wrong place to start. To remember times before your times, times before you were born, you need stories, stories that tell you it need not be like this because it has not always been like this.
In 2008 adults in the US remembered that they had power in their vote, and were repeatedly reminded of this by a grassroots political campaign. As a result more (of those who were allowed to vote) exercised their vote than at any time since that pivotal 1968 election which Richard Nixon won, partly with George Wallace’s help, and partly on a racist ticket. That was the last election that changed the trend but, like me, you probably don’t remember it. In the US it is only necessary to go back to the early 1960s, before many civil rights were won, to see terrible inequality, of a kind that has been eradicated.
In countries such as Britain people last lived lives as unequal as today, as measured by wage inequality, in 1854, when Charles Dickens was writing Hard Times. Wage inequalities after those hard times fell, but then rose in the gilded age, peaking in 1906 before falling for 70 years, then rising in just 10 years to be as great again in 1986. They rose again to unprecedented levels by 1996.24 By 2003 British researchers were writing in their careful prose that wage inequalities ‘are higher than at any point since the Second World War and probably since representative statistics were first collected at the end of the nineteenth century…’.25 People in Britain thought little of this in 2003; they were told it did not matter that great inequalities had become portrayed as natural. Key members of the government said they were ‘seriously relaxed’ about the situation; inequality was not an issue for them.26 Religious leaders concerned themselves with the plight of the poor, not the size of the inequality gap. The British had forgotten that for most of their recent history they had not lived like this.
Despair grew, greed spiralled, prejudice seeped in, more were excluded, the elite preached that there was no alternative, and they preached that their experts were so very able, that the ‘little people’ were so safe in their hands, and that greed, greed of all things, really was good. Even when the economic crash came they said recovery would come soon and things would soon be back to normal. Many are still saying that as I type these words in the autumn of 2009 (and check them in the spring of 2010). In some ways we have been here before.
In 1929 the stock market rallied several times. In the early 1930s unemployment rates in the US exceeded 14 million before the statisticians who did the counting were sacked. In Britain there were real falls in prices, which occurred again in 2009. The government cut wages across the public sector by 10% in the 1930s. Although we began to become more equal in wealth during those years inequalities in health peaked as the poorest died young in greatest numbers in that same 1930s decade.27 In many other newly rich countries, but especially Germany, it was far worse. W.H. Auden’s poem ‘1 September 1939’ ends:
I and the public know
What all schoolchildren learn
Those to whom evil is done
Do evil in return.
The most unequal of rich countries were those most willing to go to war abroad 64 years after 1939. More equitable nations more often find it easier to refuse to join, or make only paltry contributions to any supposed ‘coalition of the willing’. It is when injustice is promoted at home to maintain inequality within a country that it also becomes easier to contemplate perpetrating wrongs abroad. At home they sought to plaster over the wounds caused by inequality by building more prisons, hiring more police and prescribing more drugs. But by 2007 it was becoming widely recognised that rich countries could not simply try to pay to ease the symptoms of extreme inequality, and that realisation was at a time when they thought they had the money to do this. Time and again articles were written explaining that: ‘Extreme social inequality is associated with higher levels of mental ill health, drugs use, crime and family breakdown. Even high levels of public service investment, alone, cannot cope with the strain that places on our social fabric’.28
The latest era of growing inequalities is coming to an end. It is something that cannot go on forever, so it won’t. But it will not end without the millions of tiny acts required to no longer tolerate the greed, prejudice, exclusion and elitism that foster inequality and despair. Above all else these acts will require teaching and understanding, not forgetting once again what is fundamental about being human: ‘The human condition is fundamentally social - every aspect of human function and behaviour is rooted in social life. The modern preoccupation with individuality - individual expression, individual achievement and individual freedom - is really just a fantasy, a form of self-delusion…’.29 Accept this, behave differently, and even the most apocalyptic of writers will agree that every act of defiance, no matter how small, makes a difference, whatever ‘… we do or desist from doing will make a difference…’.30 We can never know precisely what difference, and have no reason to expect our influence to be disproportionately large, nor should we expect it to be especially small. It is equally vital to recognise that none of us are superhuman; we cannot expect others to do great deeds and lead us to promised lands (at least not with any reliability). We are slowly, collectively, recognising this, learning not to forget that although we can learn without limits, our minds were not made to live as we now live: ‘The world is indeed a strange and mysterious place, but not because of any hidden causal order or deeper purpose. The mystery is largely in the operations of the human mind, a strange organ capable of creating its own vision of reality with little regard to how the world really is’.31
In our minds we can despair or celebrate history. At some times we can see absolute immiseration as food prices soar and barbarism takes place in wars on terrorism that repeat older histories of persecution. At other times a celebratory story of human history can be told where injustices have been progressively defeated, the power of kings overcome, principles of equality in law secured, slavery abolished, voting franchises extended, free education introduced, health services or health insurance nationalised, minimum incomes guaranteed (for unemployment, sickness, old age or childcare). Legislation is won to:
… protect the rights of employees and tenants, and … to prevent racial discrimination. It includes the decline of forms of class deference. The abolition of capital and corporal punishment is also part of it. So too is the growing agitation for greater equality of opportunity – regardless of race, class, gender, sexual orientation, and religion. We see it also in the increasing attention paid by lobby groups, social research and government statistical agencies to poverty and inequality over the last 50 years; and most recently we see it in the attempt to create a culture of mutual respect for each other.32
And we see it in a redistributive budget in the US that could not have been imagined a year earlier. We see it in the contempt in which many of those who have taken most are now held, but we can also see the danger of a return to business and misery as usual. ‘The tradition of all dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brains of the living.’33 We see our history, our future, our nightmares and our dreams first in our fickle imaginations. That is where we first make our present. How we come to live is not predetermined.
Geographically all it takes is a little imagination, a little ‘wishful thinking’, to see that a collection of movements will achieve the change we wish to see in the world; these are movements that need only exist in our imaginations in order to work, to have faith. These are movements to ‘… make our own world from below [where we] are the people we have been waiting for’.34 These are the opposite of movements towards world government: too many of those have been proposed ‘… in which the best stocks could rule the earth’.35 These are, instead, movements where it is proclaimed that ‘… the future will be amazing, and after that the whole world will become a better place. If we cannot make that happen, then no one can’.36 And these are movements about which people who advocate them repeatedly tell us that: ‘It can happen - so long as everyone does not leave it for somebody else to do …’.37
All the endings have already been written, all the enthusiasm and eulogies have been penned, posies of men’s and women’s flowers have been offered, future students are exhorted to work with joy, humour or at least irony, and with an expansive love, to keep honest, humble, honourable, and ‘… on the side of the proverbial angels’.38 And all these writers end in one way or another, similarly saying, although rarely with as much humility as this:
Having come to the end of this book, the reader now knows what I know. It is up to the reader, then, to decide whether there is any validity and utility to what is presented here and then to decide what, if anything, to do about the developments and problems discussed. While I would like to see the reader choose a particular course of action, I do not think that other choices are indications that those making them are judgmental dopes.39
And slowly, collectively, with one step back for every two taken forward, we ‘dopes’ inch onwards to progress; we gradually undo the mistakes of the past and recognise new forms of injustice arising out of what we once thought were solutions. We collect together posies, all tied a little differently, and we realise that, although none of us is superhuman, neither are any of us without significance. Everything it takes to defeat injustice lies in the mind. So what matters most is how we think.