D
DesEsseintes
Guest
'Act only according to that maxim whereby you can, at the same time, will that it should become a universal law', wrote Immanuel Kant in Groundwork of the Metaphysic of Morals. This seems reasonable, on the face of it - a way of avoiding having to reason moral behaviour from first principles every time we are faced with an ethical dilemma. We should only behave in a way that we could accept being the universal way all should behave, always.
But this maxim seems to have been adopted, without any fanfare or fuss, by Western governments, and their entangled secondary and tertiary arms. Not only must every person be treated the same, regardless of individual skill or circumstance, but in case after case, across every branch of society, rules are invented and enforced to diminish the quiddity of every situation, and the individuality of each of us.
Example 1: Filling out a long (13 page) application form for a teaching job. This job, it is important to note, is specifically to bring creativity and originality to a school which, its last inspection noted, was almost entirely lacking. The job specification even uses that dreadful phrase, 'thinking outside the box', as a prerequisite in guiding colleagues to the sunlit uplands of spontaneity and flexibility. Judge, then, of my weary unsurprise, to find that the form is the only acceptable mode of application; that CVs are not accepted as additional information; that one may not even continue, irony of ironies, outside the boxes provided.
But what one must do, without fail, is provide an unbroken sequence of work from the moment one has left university. No room to explain peculiar circumstances. No room to explain a beloved godmother's bequest which made room for a novel, or the child who was conceived almost in tandem with the novel and needed looking after. Nowhere to explain the tit for tat diplomatic visa wars between India and England which left us, briefly, homeless and jobless and without passports. Because teaching applications must be a universal, Kantian law, inflexibly fair to all and thereby fair to none.
Example 2: The friend of mine who, for the first time in his life, needed a small loan for a few months - a matter of £500. He was between jobs and had just moved house. He had the contract of his new job, starting within two months, which would pay after tax more than six times that amount. His house had over £100,000 in equity, and he had proudly never had a credit card, store card or overdraft, let alone a loan, in his life. Fifty years ago, such a man would have had an individual chat with the bank manager who, on hearing his particular circumstances, would practically have written a cheque drawn on his own savings. But now - and again, note the irony - he was refused, by a spotty oik who could barely enunciate the words dictated to him by the computer which made the decision on his behalf and ostensibly in his name. Because of my friend's 'lack of credit history'. In other words, precisely because he was unusually careful with money, he was deemed to be too risky to be trusted with money.
A counter-example: At the time I mentioned above, without a job and technically homeless, my wife and I were at the end of our resources. Our passports were being held by the Passport Office so, because of the high security demanded by teaching jobs, most would not accept us. We had only temporary work, so letting agencies would not touch us. At last, we were interviewing for two positions at connected schools, and had booked a B and B for that night. We had no idea where we would be sleeping the following night. The wonderful landlady, at breakfast the next day, mentioned a friend of hers who let a house as a holiday let. Knowing by now that we had the jobs, were due to start the following week, but with nowhere to sleep, we went to the woman in desperation. Not only did she accept us - she knocked £500 per month off the price because we agreed to stay long term and, even more impressively, when we explained we did not have the deposit cash on us but would happily head to the nearest cash machine, she told us that it was late and that she quite trusted us. She would come back the following evening. We had signed no contract - she had never seen us before - and the house was full of valuable Bang and Olufsen equipment as well as some jewellery. But that simple human trust, without recourse to signatures and proof of identity or any of the bureaucratic trappings we are so used to now - almost brought tears to my eyes, after months of paperwork and officialdom.
That sort of trusting attitude used to be far more common. In fact, in Britain at least (I don't know if the term travels) we had the word 'jobsworth', short for the phrase 'more than my job's worth', to describe precisely the sort of unprofessional lackwit who, distrusting his own judgement, would fall back on the cold letter of the law even in cases where it manifestly did not apply. One hears this word more and more rarely, not because such an attitude is no longer seen but, as Giles Fraser puts in his excellent article which inspired this, because such mindless bureaucratic aggression is now the very air we breathe.
Why has this happened? Those on the right, with some justification, will say it is an inevitable outcome of the left's obsession with equality. That egalitarian outcomes need measuring and enforcing, and that when we leave room for spontaneity, instinctive kindness, flexibility and rule-bending, we may jeopardize those unfortunates who do not benefit from such humane treatment. Certainly that is the case with teaching applications - they used to be happy with a CV and covering letter, which gave plenty of room for originality and personal circumstance. But that method was seen as discriminatory against those who were less than articulate - who could not smooth over awkward gaps in their experience. Leaving aside the point that articulacy and indeed a modicum of intelligence and eloquence might be desirable attributes of an English teacher, this approach levels the playing field by deadening it. The 'tall poppy syndrome' in action.
However, it can equally be attacked from the left. De-professionalisation in so many areas of public life, for reasons of cost - the creeping entryism of zero hours labour, contracted-out workers and temporary staff - means that the discrimination of those who worked in the profession for decades, and learned to tell between genuine misfortune and a sob story, was lost. When you replace a proud, 40 something, pinstriped bank manager with a toothbrush moustache and a draconian attitude to facial hair and shoe polishing, with a 17 year old apprentice and a plastic wallet of appropriate responses, all nuance is gone. All ability to be a professional, in short, and to make our own human judgements.
I do not know what is to be done. I know only that I long to be treated as an individual. I long for the abolition of pre-scripted telephone conversations and 'press button 3' and form-filling. I long for the days when we presumed innocence, and when a gentleman's word was his bond and required no further assurance.
I know, I know. Tl;dr. But I really think this is one of the markers of our age - this flattening of all experience into a binary, box-filling, reductionist paperwork-fetishism - and I would love to hear any ideas, from anywhere on the political spectrum, which might help us regain our individuality, and once more have the right to be treated as a unique human individual.
But this maxim seems to have been adopted, without any fanfare or fuss, by Western governments, and their entangled secondary and tertiary arms. Not only must every person be treated the same, regardless of individual skill or circumstance, but in case after case, across every branch of society, rules are invented and enforced to diminish the quiddity of every situation, and the individuality of each of us.
Example 1: Filling out a long (13 page) application form for a teaching job. This job, it is important to note, is specifically to bring creativity and originality to a school which, its last inspection noted, was almost entirely lacking. The job specification even uses that dreadful phrase, 'thinking outside the box', as a prerequisite in guiding colleagues to the sunlit uplands of spontaneity and flexibility. Judge, then, of my weary unsurprise, to find that the form is the only acceptable mode of application; that CVs are not accepted as additional information; that one may not even continue, irony of ironies, outside the boxes provided.
But what one must do, without fail, is provide an unbroken sequence of work from the moment one has left university. No room to explain peculiar circumstances. No room to explain a beloved godmother's bequest which made room for a novel, or the child who was conceived almost in tandem with the novel and needed looking after. Nowhere to explain the tit for tat diplomatic visa wars between India and England which left us, briefly, homeless and jobless and without passports. Because teaching applications must be a universal, Kantian law, inflexibly fair to all and thereby fair to none.
Example 2: The friend of mine who, for the first time in his life, needed a small loan for a few months - a matter of £500. He was between jobs and had just moved house. He had the contract of his new job, starting within two months, which would pay after tax more than six times that amount. His house had over £100,000 in equity, and he had proudly never had a credit card, store card or overdraft, let alone a loan, in his life. Fifty years ago, such a man would have had an individual chat with the bank manager who, on hearing his particular circumstances, would practically have written a cheque drawn on his own savings. But now - and again, note the irony - he was refused, by a spotty oik who could barely enunciate the words dictated to him by the computer which made the decision on his behalf and ostensibly in his name. Because of my friend's 'lack of credit history'. In other words, precisely because he was unusually careful with money, he was deemed to be too risky to be trusted with money.
A counter-example: At the time I mentioned above, without a job and technically homeless, my wife and I were at the end of our resources. Our passports were being held by the Passport Office so, because of the high security demanded by teaching jobs, most would not accept us. We had only temporary work, so letting agencies would not touch us. At last, we were interviewing for two positions at connected schools, and had booked a B and B for that night. We had no idea where we would be sleeping the following night. The wonderful landlady, at breakfast the next day, mentioned a friend of hers who let a house as a holiday let. Knowing by now that we had the jobs, were due to start the following week, but with nowhere to sleep, we went to the woman in desperation. Not only did she accept us - she knocked £500 per month off the price because we agreed to stay long term and, even more impressively, when we explained we did not have the deposit cash on us but would happily head to the nearest cash machine, she told us that it was late and that she quite trusted us. She would come back the following evening. We had signed no contract - she had never seen us before - and the house was full of valuable Bang and Olufsen equipment as well as some jewellery. But that simple human trust, without recourse to signatures and proof of identity or any of the bureaucratic trappings we are so used to now - almost brought tears to my eyes, after months of paperwork and officialdom.
That sort of trusting attitude used to be far more common. In fact, in Britain at least (I don't know if the term travels) we had the word 'jobsworth', short for the phrase 'more than my job's worth', to describe precisely the sort of unprofessional lackwit who, distrusting his own judgement, would fall back on the cold letter of the law even in cases where it manifestly did not apply. One hears this word more and more rarely, not because such an attitude is no longer seen but, as Giles Fraser puts in his excellent article which inspired this, because such mindless bureaucratic aggression is now the very air we breathe.
Why has this happened? Those on the right, with some justification, will say it is an inevitable outcome of the left's obsession with equality. That egalitarian outcomes need measuring and enforcing, and that when we leave room for spontaneity, instinctive kindness, flexibility and rule-bending, we may jeopardize those unfortunates who do not benefit from such humane treatment. Certainly that is the case with teaching applications - they used to be happy with a CV and covering letter, which gave plenty of room for originality and personal circumstance. But that method was seen as discriminatory against those who were less than articulate - who could not smooth over awkward gaps in their experience. Leaving aside the point that articulacy and indeed a modicum of intelligence and eloquence might be desirable attributes of an English teacher, this approach levels the playing field by deadening it. The 'tall poppy syndrome' in action.
However, it can equally be attacked from the left. De-professionalisation in so many areas of public life, for reasons of cost - the creeping entryism of zero hours labour, contracted-out workers and temporary staff - means that the discrimination of those who worked in the profession for decades, and learned to tell between genuine misfortune and a sob story, was lost. When you replace a proud, 40 something, pinstriped bank manager with a toothbrush moustache and a draconian attitude to facial hair and shoe polishing, with a 17 year old apprentice and a plastic wallet of appropriate responses, all nuance is gone. All ability to be a professional, in short, and to make our own human judgements.
I do not know what is to be done. I know only that I long to be treated as an individual. I long for the abolition of pre-scripted telephone conversations and 'press button 3' and form-filling. I long for the days when we presumed innocence, and when a gentleman's word was his bond and required no further assurance.
I know, I know. Tl;dr. But I really think this is one of the markers of our age - this flattening of all experience into a binary, box-filling, reductionist paperwork-fetishism - and I would love to hear any ideas, from anywhere on the political spectrum, which might help us regain our individuality, and once more have the right to be treated as a unique human individual.
