The Power of Language in the Airport

I am at the airport in Pune as I write this. I've been waiting for my plane to Delhi for a long time, because I arrived here three-and-a-half hours early. I've been keeping myself entertained by reading The God Delusion by Richard Dawkins (which is an excellent book) and listening to the funny announcements they make on the PA system.

Here's an example of what I'm talking about: “May I have your kind attention please. All guests travelling on Jet Airways flight 9W-364 to Delhi are requested to proceed to Gate 4 for boarding immediately.” There is nothing particularly interesting about this at first, apart from the announcer's accent. When you think about it, though, the choice of words is quite fascinating. Take for example the word “guest” and think of its connotations. This word is a nice word for someone you have invited over to your place. The word guest is also used in the “hospitality industry” (which is a very interesting term by itself). In any case, it implies some sort of hospitality, however superficial, or at the very least, some sort of “care” which usually lasts longer than three hours.

Does any of this happen when you are waiting for a plane, boarding a plane, flying on a plane, or leaving a plane? I would have to say no, and I think most people would agree with me. Then, the word “guest” is used completely out of context. Its use is probably intended to subconsciously make people feel better about the treatment they are receiving.

This is an example modern business practices in work. Although one might not find anything wrong with this, it is a disease. Its intent is to deceive people and as such it is dishonest because it misrepresents reality. “Passenger” would be a much more apt and honest word to use.

***

15 minutes after I wrote this, I heard the most awesome announcement, which I have faithfully written down here: “May I have you attention please. Indian Airways regrets to announce the delay of its flight IC-876 from Delhi because of Jet Airways aircraft on the runway.” This announcement also merits an analysis of modern business practices, with regard to the evasion of blame, but I have no time for that now because my flight has started boarding.

Why Meritocracies Are Evil

First, what is a meritocracy?

Our first stop, The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, does not have an article on the subject. However, nestled within the article on "Equality of Oppurtunity", we find a section called "Equality of Opportunity and Meritocracy". This is how a meritocracy is defined: "A meritocracy [...] is a society in which (a) equality of opportunity obtains and (b) rewards and remuneration gained by individuals are proportional to their individual desert." Desert, as far as I understand it, is a measure of how deserving one is. In a meritocracy, this desert is decided on the basis of one's merit, which would ideally be dependent on how hard one works. In my understanding, this is the defining characteristic of a meritocracy.

If we look around, we can see that the world is definitely leaning towards meritocracy. Some countries, like Singapore, unashamedly proclaim themselves as meritocracies. Others, like most Western European countries, attempt to find a middle position where some provision is made for those people who are merit-poor. Yet other countries, most of which are, unfortunately, dictatorships, reject the meritocracy altogether and propose some alternative basis on which one's worth is judged.

I have had a problem with meritocracies for a long time. I know what my problem is. It is that I believe that all human beings are equal, and that people should not only get equality of opportunity but also equality of distribution. This is at odds with the meritocratic way of thought. In order to disprove meritocracy (if only as a mental excercise) I must prove my belief. Unfortunately, I do not know how my view is philosophically defensible.

If we re-examine what a meritocracy is, it boils down to this: each person gets rewarded on the basis of merit, or how hard they work. This is the ideal meritocracy, for it disregards people's inequalities. If this was all there is to a meritocracy, it would be a much more indefensible position. There exists, however, the added factor of one's endowments. It makes no sense to speak of hard work without any mention of one's endowments. If the person with the highest IQ in the world and a person with average IQ were to work equally hard on something, there would obviously be a disparity in the results. This understanding of meritocracy must be further reconsidered because it does not take into account one's upbringing and other factors. In the above example, if the two people were working on a maths problem and the person with the highest IQ had never studied maths, there would once again be no question as to who would solve the problem faster (or at all). So, finally, as far as I see it, merit depends on (a) hard work, (b) one's endowments, such as IQ and (c) one's background.

The obvious problem with a meritocracy, then, is that it can never accurately judge people's merit in a way in which all people are considered equal. Therefore, it seems to be flawed, at least as long as one accepts that people should be equal at all.

Is Integrity an Absolute or Relative Value?

When I applied to MUWCI, I had to write 10 short essays. One of the essay questions was “Is integrity an absolute or relative value?” I answered that integrity is absolute. This is what I thought I believed. At the same time, I believed that nothing takes place if it is not observed. I didn't realise until today morning that these two beliefs are irreconcilable.

Let me explain what I mean by my second point. If you take a look at history, you can see that unless someone is present to record an event, it is not part of history; looking back over things, then, this event never took place. Similarly, if I cheated on a test and therefore I got maximum grades on it, as far as anyone knows, I didn't cheat on it. If these two examples can be accepted, then this third example is analogous: if I murdered someone and no-one got to find out about it or my hand in it, then it never happened.

Obviously, this “if you didn't know about it, it didn't happen” approach considers integrity to be a completely relative value. In fact, it almost disregards integrity altogether and living your life in this way would become an act of running away from rules – not only juridical rules but also moral ones – and bending them to suit you. I feel like we do this a lot, and we justify it by arguing that if the people your actions would affect don't find out about your actions, then it doesn't matter. This is the same justification that a criminal uses to get away with murder.

I believe integrity is definitely an absolute value, and I think most of us do believe this. In many situations, not telling the truth about having done something wrong amounts to lying. I think I still have to resolve this in my deeds, even though it is clear in my mind.

Saturday Night in Pune

Smoke swirled up through the lights and into the night. We were part of the crowd. Snatches of conversation wafted past. We were trying to protect ourselves from the drizzle by standing against a wall. It wasn't working. We got soaked and at some point we stopped caring, as long as our cigarettes didn't get wet, we would wait.

Many people got in ahead of us, even though we had been waiting longer. Our friends were sitting inside in the warmth, enjoying their beers. They had forgotten us. Why did they get in before us? Because they are white.

This is the first unfortunate reality: that this is a racist country. The guy at the door favours white people. Everyone favours white people. Many people might disagree, and at some level they are right to disagree: this country takes immense advantage of foreigners. Foreigners are swindled and cheated, not only by shopkeepers on the street, but also by the government, which charges 750 rupees for a foreigner to enter the Taj Mahal and only 10 rupees for an Indian. But as I saw on Saturday night and on countless other occasions, the converse is also true. Foreigners get into nightclubs and bars far more easily and cheaply than Indians.

The second unfortunate reality is that this is an incredibly nepotistic and corrupt country. Connections are everything in India. I don't know how things work elsewhere, but in India if you know the right people, you can get anywhere you want and do anything you want. And knowing the right people is almost always a measure of how much money you have, your class-background, or, if you are a girl, your physical appearance.

The question of physical appearance also creeps into the issue of why the white people got into the bar first. Indian men are depraved. They think white women are better looking than Indian women, and they think they are easy sex. This is not a problem with Indian women. This is a problem with Indian society and education. India is very conservative. Sex is taboo and therefore sex is in short supply. Because of this, women are objectified. This is why an Indian man gets kicks out of going to the beach in Goa and ogling at bikini-clad foreign women. And I am not speaking of rural India here, but of the middle-class, educated, urban India that I know very well.

I have made a number of generalisations, but I believe they hold true for a large cross-section of this country's middle class and I think this is a pity and that it must change if we are to have any semblance of equality.

We did finally get into the bar, but only because I behaved like the kind of spoilt connection-wielding Indian boy that I hate. I spoke into the ear of the guy at the door and asked him if we could go in nicely albeit firmly, in the tone of someone who is used to getting what he wants by hook or crook. That's all it takes: the image of power, or, if I was a girl, sexuality.

A Philosophical Book Review: "My Revolutions" by Hari Kunzru

My Revolutions is one of the best books I've read recently. Not only is it incredibly thrilling and interesting and at times funny, it raises a whole lot of philosophical questions, as any book should. It is the story of a middle-aged man who in his youth was involved in an extremist left-wing political party. The story alternates between scenes from his youth in 60's England to his present-day life, in which he has reinvented himself completely and is another person altogether.

The scenes from his youth depict a bunch of 20-something Marxists. Their struggle is against capitalism in general, and they rail against everything from the Vietnam War to the telephone exchange. Their activities become more and more violent, and although they start off handing out leaflets on the street, by the end of it, they are hatching plans plans to murder people.

What interests me the most was that none of these revolutionaries knows what they are working towards. This is also one of the central points around which the plot revolves. It seems that their Marxist revolution is not so much a battle of ideologies as a battle against authority-- for the most part these people are rebels without causes. Some of their actions sound almost funny, like robbing a supermarket and distributing the food to poor families in the neighbourhood, but the seriousness with which they are described is quite scary. They plan to liberate England, but they have no plans for what a liberated England will look like. This is even addressed in the book, and there is no answer. Apparently it is a question that doesn't need to be answered.

This book touched me because in a sense I can relate to this sense of rebellion. It is something that all stereotypical young people have. Except I feel that today we don't live in such an idealistic world. Today, more than ever, I think that people have come to accept that capitalism is an end in itself. And in fact this is not so much an acceptance as an active desire to make money for money's sake. For me this is very sad, and I sometimes feel I was born a few decades too late, but then I realise that even then people didn't know what they fighting, and so it was not really a fight worth fighting. The final conclusion that the book comes to seems almost completely unrelated to the main content matter of the book, which is revolution. It is that ultimately, love is all you need.

Why I Should Be A Rockstar

This is not about what a great musician I am. The level of my musicianship has nothing to do with the philosophy behind why I should be a rockstar. The reason I should be a rockstar is because it is one of the only ways to come out "on top" without having to go through the educational system.

An important question to ask is why certain types of people are accorded more respect and importance than others in society. Broadly, I think these people can be divided into two types: those who go through the educational system and, because they are harder-working or genetically endowed with more IQ, manage to make it; and those who do not have to suffer the educational system and all the inequalities it promotes and still make it. Of these two categories, the second is far more respected by the general public than the first: many more people aspire to be sports stars or musicians or actors than to be politicians or CEOs. I think this is because, innately, everyone knows that the system promotes inequalities and that, in every case, there is someone who is smarter or more hard-working than you, who, by following the educational system, will inevitably do better in life than you will.

It would be naive to assume that being a rockstar would help one escape these inequalities. One's success as a rockstar would, for a large part, depend on how creative one is and how good a musician one is. The world of rockstars and sportspeople is based on its own, alternative, set of inequalities. However, these inequalities are preferable to the inequalities that the educational system is based on, if only because they provide alternatives to the traits that the "mainstream" world values.

The educational system is forced upon everyone. Regardless of one's aptitude for mathematics, one must study mathematics, at least till the beginning of high school. This is not only unfair because it is imposed on a student, but also because it highlights only one set of inequalities and not others. It would be far more just, albeit very optimistic, to allow each person to do what they want and to let them succeed in it. Each person should be able to carve out their own niche and do what they are good at.

My thoughts on this matter are not every developed at all. I found it quite an odd coincidence that we had to read the Chomsky article for class just as I was thinking all these things that he touches upon. Anyway, I've decided that my niche is rockstardom.

Why We Shouldn't Study

I had a sort of a revelation two weeks ago. As with almost all somewhat meaningful revelations I've had, it turned out a lot of people have already had this revelation a long time ago. I've researched what other people have thought about it a bit, but what I'm writing here is strictly stuff I've thought of all by myself.

Basically, I realised that education is much more than meets the eye. I realised that there exists a hidden agenda, that society has an ulterior motive. My earlier view was that we go to school to learn, to be educated. I wasn't naive enough to believe that we are educated for our own benefit. I could see that society is a self-propagating thing, and for this it requires us to be educated. However, I hadn't understood the reason why we are rewarded for working harder. This is something that lies at the very foundation of the meritocratic world we live in. We have touched upon this in class while discussing equality, the concept of libertarian equality in particular. Anyway, my point is that our educational system is just a huge machine that is designed to separate people into different social strata depending on how well they do. This separation is done on the basis of how hard someone works and their natural endowment of grey cells.

This system does not exist everywhere, but as the world becomes more and more developed it will spread. When people no longer need to worry about subsistence, then they will become a part of the global educational conspiracy. The fact that I was born into a middle-class family means that from birth I was consigned to one day being a part of this system. This global educational conspiracy feeds directly into all parts of society. The criminals in society are dropouts. The factory workers are those who did not make it as far as university. The executives working in the corporations are those who made it to the top. It is a machine that will always benefit those who are born with higher than average intelligence and, to a lesser extent, those who are born rich. It works on the basis that we are born unequal.

My gut feeling would be to fight this system, even though I am so deeply embroiled in it. Since the system is based on grades, the smartest way to do this, in my opinion, would be to abolish grading. We might achieve this by not studying. That would be one method, but it would not be the method I'd choose. Along with pretty much everyone who's reading this, I'm going to have to slog my way through the system, and hopefully I'll beat it by coming out on top. Or I could become a rockstar. Yes, I think I'll do that.

Why We Should Blog

Everyone has heard of the Great Firewall of China. If you were in MUWCI last year, maybe you went to the Chinese students' presentation on it. They told us about how restrictive it is and how it functions. This was very interesting. Apparently the Great Firewall is not so incredibly effective because of the advanced technology that it uses but because of the fear that it creates in the Chinese population, a "Big Brother factor". In fact it is quite easy to get through, and this post is about circumventing the Great Firewall.

The Great Firewall is one of the Chinese government's most effective methods of insulating their country. In the Internet age, it is probably the only way to even attempt to brainwash the whole population of a country. It allows the government to filter what it wants its citizens to know about the outside world. The converse is also true, for it ensures that the outside does not communicate with the Chinese people, either.

The Internet is supposed to be a free domain, outside the jurisdiction of any one body. It is supposed to be uncensored and accessible to all. The Great Firewall is against the philosophy on which the Internet is based. And this is for a good reason, for the Internet is one of the most powerful tools activists have today. It is incredibly useful for "the Multitude" that Michael talked about in his super-cool Global Affairs session (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multitude). Separatists and anti-government activists used to have secret meetings in sewers or some other such dark, dingy places. Now they meet in the vast, unwatched underbelly of the Internet. If the Chinese government didn't block access to the Internet, it would be in deep trouble. Historically, the only reason most totalitarian regimes lasted as long as they did was because of propaganda and a tight control of channels of communication.

There are a brave few who do regularly subvert the Chinese government's total control and bypass the Great Firewall. They risk a lot by doing so, but they hope the importance of what they are doing merits the risks they take. Primarily, these people are bloggers. By putting their blogs out on the Internet, they expose the injustice of the Chinese government to the whole world. Not that this helps a great deal with the situation in China. The outside world has virtually no say on what goes on in China, especially in this economic crisis in which China is basically supporting the world. This is a very sad situation, for it either means that the vast majority of people and governments do not care about the basic rights of others, or that they are content to let others suffer as long as they do not have to experience the same suffering. Blogging is a way out of this, however, for it creates the possibility of free speech within China. This possibility is all it takes. I believe that as long as there is the slightest possibility, it is only a matter of time for people to seize it. And once that happens, there is no way the Chinese government can keep subjugating over a billion Chinese people.

Perhaps the title of my post is a bit of a misnomer. This post had nothing to do with why we should blog. The reason we should blog is because Mark tells us we should. The reason people in China should blog is much more intense and scary and important. I'm not really sure how philosophical this post was, either. Hopefully it will engender introspection (no I'm not kidding) and after all, introspection is basically what we do in philosophy (not really). This was not very funny either. It was a serious post. If it was interesting, you might want to go and read some of the blogs coming out of Tibet here: http://www.highpeakspureearth.com/. Personally, I think it's very interesting; I'm doing my EE on it.

Paul McCartney and the Dalai Lama

My non-vegetarianism is an issue I've been considering quite carefully for a while. I met a very persuasive vegetarian last year. She didn't try to impose her vegetarianism on me, but she did point out how hypocritical a lot of carnivores, myself included, can be.

I eat meat, but until last year I had never intentionally killed a living thing. This was most probably because of my Tibetan Buddhist upbringing. Tibetan people don't kill mosquitoes yet they are probably the most carnivorous people I've encountered. A traditional meal from eastern Tibet might consist of a huge hunk of meat (usually yak in Tibet; in exile we substitute mutton or lamb) boiled with only salt. This is served with soya sauce and placed on the centre of the table. All the diners get a knife and they cut off hunks of meat and devour it because it tastes so good. To me, this is very strange behaviour. Many people (and I speak not only of Tibetans here) get very squeamish when it comes to slaughtering animals but they still eat meat with no qualms at all.

Of course, one must consider that often people have few choices about the food they eat, usually because of tradition. Because it's what's always been done. If you have eaten meat since your childhood, it becomes very hard to stop as you get older. I know a story about this: a few years ago, the Dalai Lama got a letter from Paul McCartney, asking why he eats meat if he is a Buddhist monk who theoretically values animal life as important as human life. The Dalai Lama's reply was that he tried becoming vegetarian once and he fell very sick, so his Tibetan doctors advised him to eat meat regularly. I don't know if this is true, but it is funny. Another reason why people might have to eat meat is because there is no other food available (this was the case in Tibet before the Chinese introduced modern agricultural practices).

There is a third reason you might eat meat: because it tastes so good. This is why I eat meat. I have realised that Buddhism, at least in this case, takes a ridiculous stand. I even kill mosquitoes now. All that remains for me to do is to kill an animal and eat it to prove my non-vegetarianism to myself.