Category Archives: Society

Arts, Culture, Human Rights, Politics, Society

Book banning in the US is inspiring educational censorship elsewhere

CENSORSHIP

BOOK BANNING is spreading at an alarming rate in school districts across the United States. PEN America recently documented more than 2,500 books that have been banned stemming across 32 different states during the 2021-22 academic year.

These bans are not isolated incidents, but part of a coordinated assault on public education that’s taking aim at the teaching of race, gender, LGBTQ+ identities and US history.

Demands to ban books in American schools is not new. But book banning now has erupted into a national movement. Coordinated and highly organised activist groups have transformed school board meetings into political battlegrounds, threatening educators and undermining the freedom to learn.

These efforts to censor books are an affront to the core principles of free expression and open inquiry that US democracy swears by. Equally worrying, however, is the fact that these patterns of attacks on public education in the US appears to be inspiring similar efforts in other countries, even though such censorship campaigns haven’t had as much success there yet.

In the UK, officials are raising the spectre of critical race theory in schools – an issue that was not previously a topic of debate or concern – to try and stop the teaching of histories that explore systemic racism. That’s part of what authors have described as a mood ‘shift’ in the UK – a budding ‘culture war’ that is leading to the censorship and removal of books from school shelves. Books being removed are often children’s books that look at institutional racism, diversity and LGBTQ+ identities.

Echoes of US-based group tactics are also manifesting in Canada, with parental groups asking school boards to ban certain books – again with LGBTQ+ content – and seeking to change curricular topics that they see as being part of the teaching of critical race theory.

The book banning movement has also gained the attention of politicians. Australia’s Senate voted against the inclusion of critical race theory in the country’s school curriculum in 2021.

Of course, educational censorship laws and book bans, particularly aimed at silencing certain peoples, religions, or viewpoints, are tactics that have long been used by governments.

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Asia, Justice, Philosophy, Politics, Society

(Philosophy) Justice

REDISTRIBUTIVE JUSTICE

WHAT does justice demand? The basic idea is that people should “get what they deserve,” whether in a court of law (criminals and victims), in broader society (the rich and the poor), or on the global stage (neo-colonial powers and the countries they’ve exploited). But what exactly do people deserve? And what principles can we use to ensure that justice is served, and in a way we might all find reasonable?

Anglo-American philosophy has long been dominated by debates about distributive justice: deciding which principles should determine how goods, opportunities, resources, rights, and freedoms are shared out between the members of a society, or even between different societies.

In A Theory of Justice (1971), John Rawls imagined which principles of justice people would agree to if they were unaware of their position in society and other crucial facts about themselves. He theorised that they would prioritise equality and liberty and would only accept inequalities if they were required to create the greatest benefit to the least well-off in society (the “difference principle”). His colleague Robert Nozick responded in Anarchy, State and Utopia (1974) by suggesting that if people freely did what they wanted with their talents or other resources, this would produce inequalities that would not necessarily benefit the worst-off, but that would be justifiable given the required respect for people’s individual freedoms.

The American political theorist Iris Marion Young argued that the distributive justice paradigm fails to capture important features of public appeals to justice made by women, people of colour, indigenous peoples, and gay and lesbian civil rights movements. These groups are often excluded from political practices of collective evaluation and decision-making about institutional organisation and public policy, and so lack political representation or power. These exclusions constitute injustices, which Young insisted require philosophical analysis. She defined injustice in terms of “five faces” of oppression: exploitation, marginalisation, powerlessness, cultural imperialism, and violence. Justice, through the eradication of its opposite, injustice, can only be achieved via a “politics of recognition” – acknowledging different groups’ experiences and political needs.

Justice in the legal-judicial sense is often understood as corrective or retributive – correcting criminals for their wrongdoing via means of retribution such as fines or imprisonment. The American activist and scholar Angela Davis argues wholesale against prison as a means to justice. She believes that in an age of mass incarceration, the abolishment of prisons is a central requirement for the achievement of justice in a democratic society. There are others, too, who advocate the principle of “restorative judgement” where criminals face their victims to understand the pain and hurt caused. Research suggests that when such an approach is used recidivism and rates of reoffending are dramatically reduced.

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Economic, Government, Politics, Society

Reducing income inequality

INCOME DISPARITIES

Intro: Most people agree that income inequality is too extreme and that it needs to be reduced. But by how much?

INEQUALITY remains a major political issue in the world today. Most people agree that inequality is too extreme and needs to be reduced.

In the UK, the income ratio between the richest 0.01 per cent and minimum-wage workers has reached around 150 to one. Within the FTSE 100 firms, pay ratios between CEOs and lower paid workers hover at about 100 to one. Similar inequalities prevail in many other countries, while in the United States the figures are much worse, with pay ratios and disparities sometimes reaching into the thousands.

There is nothing natural or inevitable about extreme inequality. It is the predictable result of an economic system that distributes income based on who owns the means of production and who has the most market power, rather than according to any common-sense principle of labour contribution, human needs or justice.

Inequality corrodes society and poisons democracy, but it is also ecologically dangerous. The wealthiest in society consume an extraordinary amount of energy, resulting in high emissions and making decarbonisation more difficult to achieve. Recent research by Joel Millward-Hopkins published in Nature Communications shows that if we want to ensure decent lives for everyone on the planet, and by decarbonising quickly enough to feasibly achieve the Paris Agreement goals on the climate, we will need to dramatically reduce the purchasing power of the rich, while distributing resources more equitably.

But how much should inequality be reduced? What is an appropriate level of inequality? Millward-Hopkins’ research shows that if we are to ensure that everyone has access to resources necessary for a decent living, then a distribution where the richest consume at most around six times that level would be compatible with achieving climate stability. This may sound radical, but this distribution is very close to what people around the world say is a “fair” level of inequality. In some countries – such as Argentina, Norway and Turkey – people say they want inequality to be even lower, with ratios less than four to one.

People want to live in a society that is fair. This is apparent when we look at public sector pay scales, the closest thing we have to a democratically determined distribution. In major British institutions like the National Health Service (NHS) and within the universities, where unions representing members have a say over pay scales, the gaps between the highest and lowest salary bands rarely exceed five to one. If we correct for career-stage, the gaps are much smaller: the starting salary for a doctor or a lecturer is only about twice as high as that of a cleaner.  

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