The ability for governments to collect data through the information system is so easy that what is being collected should concern citizens. Global News reported this week that the Canadian government will be asking financial institutions to collect and provide data from some 500,000 Canadians without their knowledge. According to Global: “the national statistical agency plans to collect ‘individual-level financial transactions data’ and sensitive information, like social insurance numbers (SIN), from Canadian financial institutions to develop a ‘new institutional personal information bank.’”What is really irksome is that this information was collected secretly and with no public consultation whatsoever. Privacy, to my mind, is a non-negotiable item.
I also ran across this item, which I think dovetails with the previous one: A question of class: how do social inequality metrics work in cultural organisations?
Oh, you bet! Jordan Peterson proposed a while ago that there should be a "red line" to evaluate when the extreme left has gone too far. There is certainly one for the right: as soon as you espouse racist or sexist ideas, you are adjudged to be beyond the pale. But what on the left is going too far? He proposed that demanding equity or some form of equality of outcome is the benchmark for an extreme left that has gone too far. I think he is correct on this.At the London Film Festival last week, the British Film Institute (BFI) announced it was going to start measuring ‘class and socio-economic background in their funding and staffing’. This move reflects the growing attention given to inequalities in the arts: academic evidence increasingly shows that cultural professions are unequal across ethnicity, gender, age, disability and class.How we measure class and social mobility to reveal inequality is a thorny issue, however. Labour Leader Jeremy Corbyn’s recent appeal for the BBC to publish information on the social origins of its workforce received some backlash. One columnist objected to the proposal, suggesting that people’s ‘backgrounds would be audited’ and that they would feel ‘judged’.
There is a superficially plausible argument that goes like this:
- Poverty and want are real problems in society
- Some people have enormous wealth while others struggle
- This is fundamentally unjust
- Therefore we have to structure society so that people have more equal outcomes
There is just enough truth in this to give fodder to social engineers. But when you delve below the surface a number of other problems arise. First of all, the problems of wealth and poverty are global, not merely local. Some countries are wealthy while others are poor. Why is this? The reasons are manifold. Some countries have natural resources that they exploit successfully. Others with no natural resources have enormous human capital that produces wealth. Other countries have both natural resources and human capital but remain impoverished through corruption and failure to administer justice.
The problem with the socialist solution (and when the argument is given in the form above, it is always so the solution will be socialism) is that it begins by robbing the citizenry of both moral agency and freedom. You have no responsibility for your poverty (or wealth), it is instead a product of shadowy forces of evil and oppression. In order to identify who is virtuous and who is evil we have to carefully observe and monitor everyone. Then we will pass laws fixing the inequality. Oh, and whenever this is done the society collapses into a hellhole of crime, disease and hunger. See Venezuela, Cambodia, China under Mao, Russia under Stalin and so on.
The way to resist the early stages of this disease is to insist on the maximum personal privacy and freedom. The road to hell starts with the supposed innocent collection of personal information. It's downhill from there.
One composer who suffered under the totalitarian oppression of socialism (in an extreme form) was Dmitri Shostakovich. In Taruskin's discussion of his Symphony No. 5, described by the powers that be in the Soviet Union at the time as a "work of philosophical depth and emotional force," he notes that it is a "richly coded utterance, but one whose meaning can never be wholly encompassed or definitively phrased." He points out that in Russia in 1937, under the terror of Stalin, "this last was a saving, not to say a lifesaving grace." The work could be read in various ways and this double meaning is why the music could be both reassuring to the commissars and emotionally moving to the ordinary people who cried at the premiere.
In a socialist society ordinary people preserve a measure of privacy and freedom by lying to the authorities, even, or especially, artists.
With regards to fair access to these elite institutions, I like the (London) Spectator's approach: no CVs (or résumés, as I believe you say in North America), no background detail, just aptitude tests. Such a system will produce unequal results, but no one can call it unfair. It maximises privacy, as it forbids the potential employer from knowing almost anything about your background.
ReplyDeleteI seem to have to fill out forms rather frequently, even for the most mundane online sign-ups, that request I tell them my race, ethnicity, gender, 'sexuality' etc. They always say it's anonymous; they always say it will have no bearing. Who believes this?
I do, however, think inequality of wealth is a profound problem at the moment (my economic views lean left, I guess). But I'm suspicious of the general left-wing response, exemplified by your second item, which focuses disproportionately on big cities (mostly London), and therefore ignores much geographical inequality. If one were being cynical, one would say they emphasise gender and racial inequality because it enables even the most privileged lefty to claim some sort of abstract solidarity with a genuinely suffering minimum-wage zero-hour warehouse worker in an increasingly decrepit part of England.
Yep, that's how I got into university: a professor dragged me into a practice room, played some isolated notes on a piano and asked me to sing them back, played some intervals and asked me to sing them back and then I think he played a chord and asked me if it was major or minor. That was it!
ReplyDeleteThere are a lot of people out there who will automatically call any system that produces unequal results unfair. They talk about "disparate impact."
I think that most places have a great deal to do simply to produce something approaching equality of opportunity, especially for, as you say, warehouse workers in increasingly decrepit parts of England.
Goodness, that's astonishing. Was this commonplace or were you an exception? I have heard that universities had much looser entry requirements decades ago (at least in the UK, and I presume Canada and the US) -- though I never suspected that loose.
ReplyDeleteThis was in 1971, it was a fairly new music department in a young university and they were looking for students. But honestly, it takes very little time to determine if someone has musical aptitude if you know what to look for. Ten or so years later I was teaching in the same university.
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