For many of us fortunate enough to be among the affluent of this world, we carry a certain burden of conscience. A conscience that compels us to volunteer for community services, make regular charitable donations, even go off to remote and deprived parts of the world to lend a hand, and do what we can. This is part of being human, and those who make great sacrifices for the sake of others deserve great respect.
What I wish to spotlight here is not those well-meaning efforts, however, but a strand of Western society and its discourse, replicated all over the world, which claims to be, more than anyone else, the true friend of the poor. It monopolises the ‘social justice’ rhetoric, and probably most of us associate with it at one time or other. Yes, this is the liberal-left, without whose political and cultural leadership we would all descend back into selfish savagery, like cavemen… so it goes.
We see this in the widely held view, for instance, that Labour represents poor people and Tories represent the (tax-evading) rich. It also manifests in well-established institutions, be it welfare benefits, minimum wages, foreign aid, labour laws, high tax-and-spend government, and so on. These are often popular things, as we’ve tended to vote for them time and again. They makes us feel good, satisfy our conscience, and for those leading the charge, they are a source of political moralising. For others such as myself, often at the receiving end of that moralising, it is hard to present a rational argument in opposition to many of these populist, and actually quite destructive policies (I shall explain why) without losing the emotional argument from the off. Those on the political left are said to be the good guys and if one doesn’t agree with their ideas and sing the same hymns, then one must be selfish, uncaring or even culturally un-progressed.
To turn all of this on its head now, I shall talk about why the liberal-left, and with it much of our collective thinking on social justice, is itself little more than self-interest and elitist indulgence. Note that what follows is only a quick sketch, since this is just a blog not an essay. Undoubtedly, I haven’t explained my ideas and premises to the full.
Exhibit A is welfare dependency. It is one thing helping the most vulnerable, but quite another for large segments of the population to be living on government support. For millions, welfare is a lifestyle and a frame of mind inherited from generation to generation, rather than seen as a transition back to something better. The obvious results are ghettos and run-down council estates, while less obviously, depression of the psyche and stupefying of the intellect. The sons and daughters of council tenants, by sheer normality, aspire to their own council homes and find little else in the way of inspiration. The key thing to notice here is that the poor stay poor and dependent on the wealthy middle class – thus social structures stay as they are. I contrast this with the other model of society where enterprising people are rewarded with wealth and power such that existing social structures are constantly challenged by newcomers, upstart seekers of their fortune. Here, people are active, assume responsibility, and they do stuff. This is the model we had built over many centuries and which gave us the Industrial Revolution in the first place. This is how the modern world came about… and it happened well before the welfare state came about. My latter points probably aren’t self-evident and unfortunately they require more background explanation than I have space for here. Perhaps it is for another blog post if there is popular demand.
Exhibit B is foreign aid. In recent years, credible voices have emerged questioning the value of aid (Dambisi Moyo, Sorious Samura, Paul Collier, William Easterly), since little of it actually reaches the people it is intended for, and where it does it makes them permanently dependent on support, it inflates the cost of delivering that aid, it kills off domestic markets and prices, much of it is siphoned off by corrupt government officials and politicians and thereby ends up strengthening the very corrupt institutions that cripple the country in the first place. Decades of development aid have had little discernible impact on development, according to research. Yet collectively we are averse to noticing this problem. One would think that the purpose of development aid is, well… development, yet an entire global industry of aid agencies and NGOs, as well as their patrons (that’s us), seems little interested in evaluating the outcomes of their effort. So I can only conclude that the outcomes – development or poverty alleviation – isn’t what really matters to us as a society, only that donating money, filling up clothes banks, and running NGOs, makes us feel good and upright. Once again, it appears the reason for doing it is our own sensibilities, and not really the interests of the poor.
Exhibit C you will likely find the most controversial one – climate change. I’m not saying there is no such thing as climate change. But certainly there is no such thing as pure science, since interpretation and political filters determine what emerges as public discourse. To illustrate, suppose that we hand over all of the scientific data to say China and India… will they react to climate change in the same way we did? Emphatically, NO. Most of their people are still overwhelmingly poor, so economic growth is their priority. The corollary being that we in the West can fall in love with the environment, and many of us can speak of zero economic growth with a straight face, and of cutting back, because we can afford to (seemingly). What’s more, climate initiatives have made it harder, more expensive, for slum dwellers and destitute people in less developed countries to obtain electricity for instance. Some of our hallowed middle classes are even concerned about ‘food miles’ – that our food imports rack up a monstrous carbon footprint in transit – so they would have us stop imports and grow our own tomatoes and oranges. The idea of self-sufficiency has become fashionable again. But they appear unconcerned with the fact that this would cost us more, use up more resources, and indeed have a higher carbon footprint as studies have shown. Incredibly, they are also quite happy to obliterate the livelihoods of peasant farmers and pickers in Africa, for the sake of their environmental sensibilities.
Exhibit D is the anti-GM crops movement and the broader organic movement, both environment related. Consider that there is no evidence of harm from GM products, and that on the basis of a superstitious fear – that we don’t know what will happen in the future if GMs proliferate (as if we were ever able to predict the future anyway) – we’ve effectively prohibited poor African nations from taking advantage of this technology to raise their crop yields. [See The Rational Optimist, by Matt Ridley]. More broadly, we yet again oppose technology and innovation. Note that technology tends to benefit the poor more than the rich (factories and mass production, telecommunications, motorised transport, air travel, electricity, washing machines, the internet, i-phones/Apple, twitter, etc etc). As for organic potatoes, it is fine for those who can afford it. It’s nothing more than saying we would like superior (organic) products and we’re willing to pay for it. But if we haughtily present it as social and cultural progress, then it becomes altogether more dangerous. Humans have been altering plants and animals since we first learnt to domesticate them, and over the subsequent thousands of years all of these plants and animals have changed beyond recognition from their original form (their wild ancestors). We did this to make food supplies more certain, and more available, for progressively more of us. The fact is that our rational modifications are what supplies potatoes and chicken at incredibly cheap prices – benefitting you know who – the poor.
Exhibit E is anti-capitalism and anti-economic growth, whereby we proudly oppose big business, for instance, supposedly in solidarity with the common man. Small is beautiful, save the local grocers, and so on. We seem to be unaware that large companies employ the vast majority of people, paying their wages and paying the taxes to fund our welfare state (the alternative being mass unemployment and all that goes with it). Or that a progressively expanding scale of enterprise is what delivered the Industrial Revolution in the first place, or that free economic competition is the only way existing economic powers and social structures face challenge, or indeed that we the ordinary people actually own these large companies – they are not separate entities. They are large precisely because being listed on stock markets they’ve raised capital from a nationwide pool of investors. Through our direct investment or via pension funds and insurance funds, it is we who own them. Once again, the mechanism that empowers ordinary people and upstart entrepreneurs, and which challenges the status quo through economic dynamism and competition, is something that our liberal elites would put a stop to. It means that whoever is the biggest don around at the time of the liberal-left revolution stays the biggest don forever after, since no more innovation and growth is allowed. How convenient. Interesting also that the same liberal elite tend to think that money and wealth isn’t important. ‘Let’s focus on other more meaningful aspects of human development’, they say. This is truly the indulgence of the rich.
By now the major themes should be obvious. (1) Present social structures shouldn’t be disrupted – meaning that the middle class folk of today don’t wish to be overtaken by any future generations of upstart hard workers. This is ensured by welfare dependency, anti-technology, anti-growth, and anti-capitalism. (2) Self-interest of the rich pretending to be an enlightened friend of the poor and saviour of humanity in general. Indeed, all this is in keeping with the historical pattern, from classical antiquity to the feudal Middle Ages. Aristotle and his fellow Greek philosophers are well known for their snobbery towards traders and merchants. Throughout the Middle Ages too, the landed aristocracy looked down upon merchants (the ordinary people trying to get by and get on) to the point of the latter’s activities being the stuff of social stigma. Reviled Jewish moneylenders were an extreme case but they weren’t the only social outcasts. Today then, it is the English middle class and some of their cousins elsewhere in the Western world who define good and bad for the rest of us. As always, the elite are powerful opinion shapers, for they have convinced voters in deprived regions of Britain as well as leaders of the less developed world that they are with them, when they are really for themselves, as is eternally human nature. Call it my instinctive cynicism.
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