자료: Guardian, http://www.guardian.co.uk/society/2002/jun/17/socialexclusion.comment
Richard Sennett
guardian.co.uk, Monday 17 June 2002 10.57 BST
Lost in last week's hoo-ha about funeral etiquette was the real news: the prime minister finally told us what he believes. In a speech on welfare reform given on June 11 Tony Blair set out with conviction and eloquence his two social goals for this parliament: to promote upward social mobility and to treat compassionately those left behind. Unfortunately, opportunity and compassion make an unhappy marriage - as the American welfare system shows.
Since Franklin Delano Roosevelt's New Deal, government in America has sought to provide education and work for the ablest poor people. The passion to reward merit persisted even during the dry Reagan years. This strategy largely worked: there are few talented young people who cannot find a good job or a bursary and the welfare state helped build a black petit bourgeoisie.
But this "creaming" strategy has only increased the gap between the haves and the have-nots. The people whom the sociologist Christopher Jencks calls the "unexceptional disadvantaged" have seen their standards of living decline in the past 40 years. Emphasising social mobility has weakened compassionate care for those left behind.
In a country where, as F Scott Fitzgerald said, there are no second chances, competitive Americans have little time for losers. It's just tough luck that 43 million people now lack health insurance. But compassion is as much a troubling partner in this marriage as opportunity.
The philosopher Hannah Arendt once proclaimed that "compassion breeds inequality". Middle-class women in 19th-century Britain and America who visited the poor undoubtedly felt sympathy for those condemned to the slums, but their visits often aroused resentment. "Helping those who cannot help themselves" continues to carry an undertow of condescension: the needy have nothing to give back. Thus the anthropologist Mary Douglas observes about traditional Christian charity: "Compassion wounds."
In his speech, the prime minister seemed aware that something is amiss with old-fashioned forms of help. He spoke of the need for self-respect and self-belief among equals. But the only way he could think to fulfil this need was by turning to the "enterprise culture" which promotes "meritocracy" - that is, the self-respect which comes from doing better than others.
The enterprise culture of modern Britain has produced a curious class structure. Fat cats have become fatter relative to the rest of the population. On the positive side, grinding poverty is diminishing, especially among new immigrants - those spoilers of David Blunkett's imagination who are proving enterprising and hard-working. It is the lower-middle bulge of society whose incomes are stagnating, and who feel most the effects of decaying welfare services. They should be the real targets of welfare reform, but they are also most likely to resent being treated with condescension. This has been Blair's dilemma in politics: he wants to connect with just that section of the population that believes he is out of touch. For them, compassion condescends, meritocracy excludes.
There is a way out of this dilemma, but it requires New Labour to look critically at itself. A cleaner welfare state would concentrate on providing a universal safety net and would forget about social mobility. The job of the state is to make sure that everyone has enough to eat, can get medical care when they need it, can get to work without risk. Climbing the greasy pole of success should be left to individuals.
A number of experiments are afoot in providing welfare of this sort. The American jurist Bruce Ackermann has long advocated providing capital accounts to young people, a fund of cash they can spend as they see fit. Here, the chancellor has started a programme to do just that. The LSE policy analyst Julian Le Grand is trying to figure out how to strengthen the safety net provided by the health service. More radically, Claus Offe and other northern European social reformers are seeking ways to pay for basic income support for all by cutting down on social workers, psychiatric counsellors, and others serving in the brigades of professional compassion.
Much of New Labour is uneasy about these experiments because concentrating on the universal safety net seems to arouse the spectres of old Labour and socialism. But radicals like Offe answer that what they in fact want to end is the nanny state. If an 18-year-old spends his savings account on higher education, fine; if he loses it at Ladbrokes, that's his look-out. This riposte isn't quite hard-hearted. Critics of existing welfare regimes throughout the western world point to the enormous bureaucracies that have arisen to monitor and control how welfare clients use their benefits. The brigades of professional compassion are dwarfed by this army of accountants, who do real damage to the self-respect of both users and service providers.
New Labour wants to promote an enterprise culture but it does not want to let go of control - auditing is in its blood. The US is an example of letting go come what may and, while many New Labourites approve of American enterprise, they don't like, for good reason, its consequences for ordinary people.
The particular reproach I'd make to the prime minister's speech lies in his belief that the state has an interest in the social mobility of its citizens. It seems eminently just to me that government generates the funds to provide for a university education, if that's what a young person wants. But if she chooses Oxbridge - which will provide a leg-up in later life - she should pay for it. The same logic applies to any inequality: the state should not contribute to it. Government should not support private medical care or pensions, as has been proposed, nor privilege one kind of business over another, as it currently does.
Inequality is inherent in capitalism; there is no third way out of this brutal fact. To abet inequality through preaching meritocracy and practising creaming seems to me the fatal flaw in the prime minister's vision for this government.
I feel somewhat uneasy about making this argument just now. The media frenzy over Tony Blair's etiquette at funerals is not incidental to the fact that the prime minister has given the defining speech of his political career. Blair's Christian compassion is genuine, and it makes journalists squirm. Even the tigerish Jeremy Paxman became discomfited by it in a recent television interview. It's easier to reduce Blair to the spin-obsessed, red-eyed monster of the old Tory political adverts.
What Blair's speech revealed is a Christian embracing enterprise capitalism - always a difficult partnership. Odd as it may seem, Tony Blair struck me as a heroic figure in wrestling with his angel and his devil. Whether, as Hannah Arendt believed, Christian compassion itself tends toward inequality is debatable; whether capitalism tends toward inequality is not. The answer the prime minister has come to through his struggles is fatally flawed. Promoting social mobility is no practical recipe for fixing the welfare state.
( ... ... )
글
댓글 없음:
댓글 쓰기