Horner's Corner

From ‘The Shepherd’s Calendar                                                                                                                                                                                                                                      It’s a good time to reflect on my theory.

It’s time to reflect on my theory.

Here it is: there are two key transitional months, which stand as opposites to each other. One is September: it begins in Summer  and ends in Autumn. It has a dying fall.

The other is March, which starts in late Winter and ends in early Spring. The clocks go forwards; the days get longer. Just as January was the Monday of the year, mercifully short February flashed by in Winter’s final throes, March is the threshold to the really good days..SPRING April…May..SUMMER..

Not really a theory is it.

It’s not all that original either, but it cheers me up, anyway.

[..........] thou warnest well:
For Winters wrath beginnes to quell,
And pleasant spring appeareth.
The grasse now ginnes to be refresht,
The Swallow peepes out of her nest,
And clowdie Welkin cleareth.

(from The Shepherd’s Calendar)

When Winter’s ahead,

What can you read in November

That you read in April

When Winter’s dead?

I hear the thrush, and I see

Him alone at the end of the lane

Near the bare poplar’s tip,

Singing continuously.

Is it more that you know

Than that, even as in April,

So in November,

Winter is gone that must go?

Or is all your lore

Not to call November November,

And April April,

And Winter Winter – no more?

But I know the months all,

And their sweet names, April,

May and June and October,

As you call and call

I must remember

What died into April

And consider what will be born

Of a fair November;

And April I love for what

It was born of, and November

For what it will die in,

What they are and what they are not,

While you love what is kind,

What you can sing in

And love and forget in

All that’s ahead and behind.

Edward Thomas

Pragmatism is an important contribution to philosophy, with its roots in the work of three American thinkers of the late 19th/early 20th century: C.S. Peirce, William James and John Dewey. Set against the long history of western philoso­phy, this makes it a relatively recent phenomenon, although like most things that seem new in philosophy, it has many continuities with what went before. Recent it may be, but it already constitutes a kind of tradition, with competing camps, radicals, apostates and reformers. Two leading contemporary figures in that tradition are Richard Rorty and Hilary Putnam, philosophers who, as we shall see, have major disagreements on many issues. Because pragmatists themselves disagree on all sorts of things, it is impossible to give a straight, neutral account of ‘what pragmatists all believe’. So in what follows I shall start with what I think would get a good deal of assent, and then move to consider some of the work of Rorty and Putnam.

Read the rest of the article here.

(Near Tooting Common)

I

While rain, with eve in partnership,
Descended darkly, drip, drip, drip,
Beyond the last lone lamp I passed
Walking slowly, whispering sadly,
Two linked loiterers, wan, downcast:
Some heavy thought constrained each face,
And blinded them to time and place.

II

The pair seemed lovers, yet absorbed
In mental scenes no longer orbed
By love’s young rays. Each countenance
As it slowly, as it sadly
Caught the lamplight’s yellow glance
Held in suspense a misery
At things which had been or might be.

III

When I retrod that watery way
Some hours beyond the droop of day,
Still I found pacing there the twain
Just as slowly, just as sadly,
Heedless of the night and rain.
One could but wonder who they were
And what wild woe detained them there.

IV

Though thirty years of blur and blot
Have slid since I beheld that spot,
And saw in curious converse there
Moving slowly, moving sadly
That mysterious tragic pair,
Its olden look may linger on -
All but the couple; they have gone.

V

Whither? Who knows, indeed . . . And yet
To me, when nights are weird and wet,
Without those comrades there at tryst
Creeping slowly, creeping sadly,
That lone lane does not exist.
There they seem brooding on their pain,
And will, while such a lane remain.

Thomas Hardy

Reblogged from Chaospet

Reblogged from Chaospet

Reblogged from Chaospet

Chris Horner

I wrote this when New Labour was promoting this concept. It’s still relevant.

‘The class war is over. But the struggle for true equality has only just begun’ –Tony Blair

What would a fair society look like? ‘New Labour’ thought it had the answer: “meritocracy”. This is the vision of a society in which the highest rewards go to those who deserve them, unhindered by the barriers of inherited wealth, class and privilege. It will be achieved by ‘equality of opportunity’, an equal start for all, regardless of class, race or creed. In this way the energetic, ambitious and talented reach the top, whatever their origins. This view of a just society has a powerful appeal in an unequal society like that of the UK, where class, gender, and race still limit the life chances of many. Unfortunately, the goal of a meritocracy is in itself deeply problematic, and equality of opportunity, at least as understood by Blair and Co., is likely to make society even less fair than it is already. That’s why anyone who cares about genuine social justice should oppose both.

THE BIG RACE

Equality of opportunity is an attractive idea. Some inequalities between people are unrelated to anything they might have done: gender, race, being born to poor parents and so on. These kinds of differences ought to be compensated for, as people shouldn’t suffer because of brute bad luck, a roll of the genetic dice. But for New Labour it is as if people’s circumstances were like the opening of a race. Just as we would expect a race to be arranged so that each runner has an equal start, so the state ought to take steps to ensure that people are given equal opportunities to get on in life. Thus the state should intervene to ensure that accidents of birth (race, gender, poverty) do not act as obstacles to success in the race of life. But that’s just at the start: life, like a race, will still produce winners – and losers. The fastest win the prizes.

It’s here we hit our first problem. Equal opportunities alone cannot achieve the goal of a meritocratic society. Imagine two caterers, each earning £10,000, and two clever and industrious lawyers, earning £100,000 each. If both couples marry and have children the difference in their combined incomes will be huge. With their £200,000 the lawyers will be able to buy their child the best start in life, including expensive schooling. Their child, regardless of merit, has an enormous relative advantage, one that it will pass on to its children in turn. In a society dominated by market values ‘equal opportunities’ is doomed to reproduce inequality, irrespective of merit.

THE MIRAGE OF MERIT

‘Merit’ can be understood in different ways: as courage, self-sacrifice, industriousness and so on. But the market is not going to reward just any kind of merit: it selects only those with the ‘right’ kinds of abilities: ‘market merits’. Bus drivers, nurses and office cleaners aren’t necessarily less valuable to society than solicitors and advertisers, but they will be much less well rewarded. So will those, mainly women, who spend their time and energy bringing up children or supporting the elderly. “Market merit” turns out to comprise a narrow range of human characteristics, some of them, like ambitiousness, not always morally admirable. Ambitious people are often ego driven and self-centred. Contrast that type with the nurse or the unpaid carer.

Yet surely we can reward people for their ability? One is talented at playing the violin; another has financial acumen and entrepreneurial flair. We want to factor out the irrelevant things (heredity, upbringing) letting talent bloom and be rewarded. But how? People don’t choose their abilities. Take Nigel Kennedy’s talent with the violin. He didn’t choose to have that any more than he chose the colour of his eyes. Of course, we might want to distinguish between what he was born with and what he chose to do with it. We might say: Kennedy worked hard to develop his talent, and it’s his energy and determination that deserve praise and reward. But the difficulty here is how to know where one thing ends and another starts. Perhaps Kennedy’s determination to practice the violin was also a product of his upbringing or genes. If so then he was no more responsible for it than he was for his talent or the colour of his eyes. All this goes to show how difficult it is to pick out what, exactly, we mean by merit and desert. That takes us to the heart of the question: the nature of just rewards.

JUSTICE FOR ALL?

Justice is about the business of costs and benefits, rewards and burdens – what one ought to do, what it would be fair to expect. The following principle, which goes back to Aristotle, is a common starting point: individuals ought to be treated in the same way unless there is a relevant difference between them. So if two people are to be given a slice of cake, each of them ought to get a piece the same size. But suppose one of them is already well fed while the other is malnourished; then one of them needs it more, and so would benefit more from a larger helping. Justice sometimes involves treating people differently, on account of their different circumstances and needs. And this takes us back to merit. For the meritocrat is introducing another ‘relevant difference’ as justification for unequal shares: the principle of deservingness. But what we have also seen is that (1) New Labour’s preferred method for rewarding desert is likely to entrench undeserved privilege; (2) ‘merit’ in this context has a highly restricted meaning and (3) the concept of desert itself is a highly problematic one.

The defenders of the current system of reward seem to be on stronger ground when they cite efficiency rather than merit as their justification. They argue that the free market delivers greater overall prosperity through an unequal distribution of rewards. So perhaps this is the best of all possible systems. But even this can be questioned. First, it is not immediately obvious that if this were the most efficient system, it is the one we ought to have: ‘efficient’ doesn’t mean ‘right’. Second, it may not be true that this is the most effective approach to harnessing talent in the pursuit of prosperity, as inequality tends to bury talent and human worth. Lastly, it’s clear that the often staggering rewards that some receive aren’t genuinely tied to performance. To take one example: in 2001 Britain’s top executives received an average 28% pay increase (six times the national average) although profits fell by 11.5 %. The link between even ‘market merit’ and reward is a shaky one. In practice, the best way to ensure a good income is still to get oneself born into the family of a high earner. If New Labour really wants a fairer Britain it must go beyond the rhetoric of ‘meritocracy’ and start tackling structural inequalities. Or ‘class’, as we used to call it.

Originally published in Think 2004

Fat chance. But here’s a small way towards helping you to value what you have got, and avoiding going all toxic about what you haven’t: counterfactualising downwards.

Counterfactual: the way things might have been. As in: counterfactual history (e.g. if Hitler had invaded Britain, if Margaret Thatcher had stepped in front of a bus in 1978 etc).

When we imagine how our lives could have been better (that job, that salary, if only he/she had fancied me, why don’t I have a better car -or why do the bad guys not step under buses? etc..) we are counterfactualising upwards .

But when we think how much worse things could have been we go the other way. And let’s face it, for most of us in the developed world things could have been much worse. For a start, just being in the developed world makes most of us part of the global super rich anyway. But think closer to home: haven’t you been lucky? This is not an invitation to smugness: a lot is joyfulness and gratitude, you miserable so-and-so? luck, isn’t it? Go on, be honest. 

So counterfactualise downwards, friends. Believe me, it’s good for mental health.

Of course, the pitfall to avoid now is sour grapes (‘Since I’m not going to get it, I never wanted that nice thing, anyway..), but that’s another story, and maybe another post.

I recently went to see Twelfth Night. Big deal: Shakespeare’s on in London somewhere every week. I had a ticket as a birthday present, but after a long day at work I just wasn’t much in the mood. Let it wash over you and pretend to be into it I said to myself. Fact was, it wasn’t possible to do that. By Act 1 Scene 2 I was up and paying attention; by the interval my head was spinning

with the images, themes and the language. When it was over I was too awake to sleep when I got back.  It helped that the production was great (Derek Jacobi as Malvolio was particularly memorable). But here’s the good thought: when we see/hear/visit a ‘classic’ it can feel like paying one’s respects to a monument. When the classic comes and twists your melon despite a deep desire for sleep midweek after a long day at work you know the Bard of Avon is as good as they say, if you had any doubt.  I’ve been Shakespeare crazy, all over again, ever since..