Cultural Theory and the Public Benefit Requirement

English: Fettes College One of the private sch...




Eating less meat?

In Ghent, Belgium, every Thursday is officially Veggie Day







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Discriminate for a better, fairer world!

Sydney auxiliary Bishop Julian Porteous on the virtue of discrimination.

Fourcultures has written on this line of thought before –  only discriminate: four versions of justice

A Hierarchical world view laments the good old days when discrimination was  a virtue not a vice, since discrimination, so it is argued, is the very important act of judging between right and wrong. The problem not acknowledged by the bishop is that there is a difference between holding views on contentious moral issues (perfectly reasonable) and being paid by the government to promote these contentious views in schools and elsewhere (less reasonable).

A previous post noted that the Egalitarian world view tends to see discrimination as the thin end of the wedge, since the kinds of moral clarity and purpose proposed by Heirarchies have subjugated and oppressed people for centuries. Take the Bishop’s words, for example. He has a negative opinion of:

the view that all people, all ideologies and all behaviours have equal merit and, therefore, an equal right to exist. When there is no such thing as basic right and wrong, then any judgement of another becomes negative discrimination.

Egalitarian interpretation of this line would point out that the alternative to all people having “an equal right to exist” would be some people having less right to exist. Just who these people are who have less right to exist, the bishop should make clear, so that they can be told they have less right to exist.

There is something to be said for the recommendation that if you want to hold the moral high ground, if you want to discriminate on the basis of some kind of superior understanding of the Good, you should do so with your own money and not with the tax revenue of people who disagree with you – but the bishop isn’t saying it. Indeed, the bishop shouldn’t say it since it is clearly in the interests of his organisation to use other people’s money for precisely as long as the government will let them get away with it.

Oh for the good old days when we all knew the difference between right and wrong.

Guernica by Picasso (1937) Source: Wikipedia

On the Death of Colin Ward

The Child in the City, Anarchy in Action and Welcome Thinner City are three of the most influential books for the shape of my adult life. I’m mourning the death of writer and activist, ‘giant of social commentary’, Colin Ward.

Ward’s claim in Anarchy in Action (1973) that the international postal system was a perfect example of anarchist organisation helped me to see the meaning of Wright’s ‘sociological imagination’. Rather than looking for a political party with a headquarters and a manifesto, I began to see self-organising social systems everywhere, spontaneous egalitarianism, an immanent. if distinctly patchy, utopia.

Welcome Thinner City (1989) was for a time my Bible for understanding urban politics and policy at the end of the Thatcher period. Looking back it almost single-handedly made sense of what I did then and caused me to do what I do now.

The Child in the City (1978)  helped me to see how urban policy can be shaped for the benefit of the people who actually have to live with it. ‘making the city more accessible, more negotiable and more useful to the child’ remains one of the most important things we can attempt.
