“EO will not be genuine when children with malnutrition are pitted against children of the elites. In fact, EO will not work as it is intended to be, so long as a country maintains the integrity and independence of the family. It is but natural for the parents to seek out the best for their offspring. Those who could afford the most would seek to ensure that their children are not only in the race, but also get to the finishing line successfully and trouble free.”____________________________
by Durand Appuhamy
(April 01, Colombo, Sri Lanka Guardian) Equality of opportunity (EO) has been a "cash cow" for many politicians, social theorists, businessmen and even some interfering foreign ambassadors. It is easy to project it as opening the doors to success and prosperity to all by providing the opportunity to develop and be paid for one’s talents. It certainly does not imply that we are all equal or equally valuable. In simple terms, EO means, that each of us should have equal rights and opportunities to develop his own innate talents, and should be paid equally for equal performance. This formula, therefore, does accept inequality among men, and the accentuation of that initial inequality in later life. It is, in fact, the enactment of an equal right and opportunity to become unequal by competing against others.
Given the wide range of potential talents, it is a physical impossibility to provide equal opportunity for all (18/20 million people) to develop their capabilities. Some individuals are naturally gifted at some dimension, and probably inept at others. Some are good at many things, others at few. What EO really means is that only those innate talents that are highly valued by the society, at a given time, should have equality of opportunity for development. Today, cricketing talent is highly valued and rewarded in our society. Therefore, all those who display such a talent should be given the opportunity to develop that talent. Similarly, tomorrow, when an extreme religious or socialist party takes over the government, they would then project their own socially valued talents.
Opportunities do not float about unattached. They belong to people. They are essentially of the people — the poor, the children, the women, handicapped, and aged people. All opportunities are goal directed to do or enjoy some benefit or activity. Thus "every opportunity is a relationship of a specific agent or a class of agents (whether explicit or implicit) to a specific goal or set of goals (whether explicit or implicit)" (Peter Westen). An opportunity is not a guarantee to achievement. It is, however, more than a possibility. At a minimum, EO requires that the specified agents have a chance to attain their goals, and that no insurmountable obstacles are explicitly placed in their way.
EO implies three basic requirements. First, that the opportunities under consideration have been measured by accepted and appropriate standards. Second, that they have been compared with one another. Third, the compared opportunities measure up to be identical. If these three characteristics are present, then we can conclude that the specified agents, who are given the opportunity, do possess a chance to attain a specified goal without the hindrance of any obstacles. Obviously this does not prevent any one of those agents having his private obstacles. It is these that cause many to drop out from universities and other professional courses. A hungry half trained talented athlete, competing with a consummately trained athlete is a case in point. They may be given the equal opportunity of starting from the same line, at the same time. But this will be of little help to the half trained athlete. This is why EO is not a guarantee for achievement.
EO accepts the social morals, economic system, political process and dominant institutions currently in operation, and supports the established pattern of values. It offers everyone a fair chance to find a place within that order, and by dint of effort to climb up the social ladder. Anyone who does not accept the current social, economic and political set-up would, therefore, find the current EO in operation, unacceptable. One critic of EO pointed out in reference to USA, that it "opens more opportunities for more and more people to contribute more and more energies towards a realization of a mass, bureaucratic, technological, privatized, materialistic, bored and thrill-seeking, consumption oriented society — a society of well-fed, congenial and sybaritic monkeys surrounded by pleasure toys" (John. H. Schaar).
Given that EO promotes the cultivation and development of desired and genuinely superior attributes, eventually, such a pursuit would end up in a society where the elites would be far superior to the rest. As Michael Young (in his The Rise of the Meritocracy) has pointed out, this gap in ability and achievement would be enormous between highest and the lowest social orders. Thus there is an inherent contradiction here. EO, in realty, magnifies the natural differences among men by policies based on ostensibly equalitarian rationale. To this extent it is anti democratic. It reduces man to a bundle of talents. It is individualistic and market oriented. It promotes contest and competition among citizens for scarce resources. The candidates in this race are also motivated by envy of the dominant elites, and a desire to join them forthwith, even if this means trampling over others.
It is true that our giant public corporations and private companies do demand competent experts to organize them efficiently and to run them profitably. EO enables the best to emerge from the mass of the average citizenry with managerial skills for this purpose. In this way everybody benefits. The ordinary citizens and workers are led by men of merit, whose expertise and skills have been tested and certified. And the elites are legitimately promoted to places of authority and enjoy rewards commensurate with their abilities and contributions. The incipient downside of this trend would be the growing vested interest of the hierarchy, protecting and advancing their private powers, and oligarchical control over the government of the people. We see this trend in the case of politicians, their siblings and their cronies. There should be proper safeguards against this arrogation of power.
It is also true that most of us have talents that are average, mediocre or rudimentary. Given EO to develop them, we would be able to progress only up to our average limits. This could lead to frustration. Herein also lies the sinister side of EO. One must, in the first place, possess talents to develop them subsequently. Therefore children ought to be born with talents in the first place. One can see here the pressure put on genetic science to produce human beings to order, with the requisite socially desirable talents. That this will happen in the future is anybody’s guess.
Many of our citizens qualify under UN’s 1995 definition of absolute poverty as lack of food, safe drinking water, sanitation facilities, healthcare, shelter and education. Therefore these urgent needs should be addressed first before meagre resources are diverted to promoting excellence. EO will not be genuine when children with malnutrition are pitted against children of the elites. In fact, EO will not work as it is intended to be, so long as a country maintains the integrity and independence of the family. It is but natural for the parents to seek out the best for their offspring. Those who could afford the most would seek to ensure that their children are not only in the race, but also get to the finishing line successfully and trouble free. In order for EO to work properly, our society should have a wide range of avenues of positions open to all citizens. Those activities and positions should be properly delimited and organized. Then the criteria governing the selection process need to be transparently sorted out and strictly adhered to and rigidly applied. And finally, the modality of the connection of those positions to money, power and status should be patently clear to the candidates and the public. Unfortunately, given the abuse of political patronage, a properly functioning EO is remote in our country. It will be a sham and a deception of the people.
Nevertheless, EO has many advantages. It promotes efficiency, as capable individuals will be performing tasks for which they have been tested competent. The society as a whole would veer towards achieving the goal of "from each according to his ability". It leads to personal development. It encourages individuals to believe that they can improve their life chances significantly by developing some portion of their abilities. It provides reason for personal satisfaction derived from doing a task as well as one is trained to do. The rewards are not merely monetary, there will be prestige, power and status.
Amartya Sen (Choice, Welfare and Measurement) singles out capabilities. He would evaluate the distribution of resources in terms of contribution to individual capabilities to function in various ways deemed to be objectively important or valuable. Thus, for example, education should be evaluated in terms of the contribution it makes to one’s knowledge and cognitive skills. With this approach, one will be faced with the difficulties of compiling capability scores and then an overall index.
It is impossible to eliminate inequality in society. Even if all of us were suddenly made equal socially and economically, the cleverest among us would soon forge ahead leaving the rest behind. In this imperfect world, therefore, it is better to strive for excellence in the control and governance of man, while ensuring that the average and the sub-average, are not penalized thereby. This requires a need-based democratic formulation of EO, without its cut-throat competition and the rat-race. Such an EO would engender a situation where no member of the community would be denied the basic conditions necessary for the fullest possible participation in community life. To attain this objective, public action should be taken and public resources should be expended. As it is so easy to exploit the vulnerable in our society, and be carried away by one’s ambitions, it is worthwhile to keep in mind what Robert Nozick has pointed out (in his Anarchy, State and Utopia); " life is not a race with a starting line, a finish line, a clearly designated judge, and a complex of attributes to be measured. Rather, there are only individuals, agreeing to give and receive from each other". Even if it is impossible to say what a man is, yet his equality of being and belonging does matter to the individual and to society.
- Sri Lanka Guardian
Post a Comment