What do we value?
Great advice from a communist
[Image: Why are doctors worth more than criminal barristers? Is saving lives more valuable than defending the innocent? Is defending the innocent more valuable than educating our children?]
If there is one overriding message from my body of work it is this. We are all shards of the Divine. We all have something original to contribute. And peace will only come when we are willing to open our eyes to the alternative perspective that only the other can provide. The modern philosophy of echo chambers - which has as its motto that only those from our own ideology are the good guys - is a dangerous heresy. It must be torn up, shredded and put far out of sight of our children.
I follow my own advice. To paraphrase the Jewish text The Ethics of the Fathers I learn from every person. And one of the people from whom I’ve learnt the most was John Caldwell, a communist teacher who worked with me in a Harlow secondary school. We may have come from different political camps, but we enjoyed sharing our breaks together and speaking about the issues that matter. All in a respectful manner and with a listening ear.
There are three pieces of advice I particularly recall:
A teacher who is good at behaviour management isn’t strict, but firm. They are consistent and follow through with what they have promised, be that a punishment or a reward.
“Everything is politics”. That is a direct quote from John. And one with which I fully concur. One breaktime, our fellow colleagues were busy dividing up the world into categories, with politics being a limited classification that one could safely ignore. John pointed out their error. Education, health, the family, the price of maintaining a car - and all else besides - is politics. Every issue that one could imagine is affected by those who are in power and their decisions. To say “I am not interested in politics” is to say “I am not interested in anything”. It is to ignore your responsibilities to society. it is to surrender your influence to others who will do precisely what suits them and their interests. If I am not for myself, who will be for me?
But it is his third piece of advice that impacted me the most and upon which I concentrate today:
“Teachers are not focused on making money. That’s true. It doesn’t mean that we should be paid badly”.
A story comes to mind. I once had an interview in the recruitment industry. There was an assessment day in which the participants were required to undertake various team building, telephone and presentation exercises. We also had an interview with a panel of three of the senior staff. And the feedback I got was extraordinary. In their reckoning: I had the best interview on the day. I was the best telephone user on the day. And I was the best presenter “they had ever seen”. So the result was obvious: I didn’t get the position! Why not? Although from a skills perspective, I had destroyed the competition, they didn’t see me as “motivated by money” which apparently is essential to feel at home in a recruitment team.
An interesting observation. They were right. I am not primarily motivated by money. But as John Caldwell said, “That doesn’t mean (I) should be paid badly”.
There is an odd viewpoint abroad to which John alluded. In our capitalist society, those who place money as their god are valued and rewarded monetarily, whereas those who wish to better the world in some non-monetary way are paid very little indeed. But just because we - teachers, writers, nurses, criminal barristers (of which I am in three of the categories) - don’t think about money as our ultimate goal, we still want to be handsomely rewarded. Society needs to think what it sees as important. The consumer needs to pay for what it values. And to the extent that certain professions are paid terribly, it reflects poorly on our fellow citizens. And before we say that teachers and nurses are public servants (and criminal/family lawyers are effectively so as much of their earnings come from legal aid), let me remind you that doctors are public servants too. Yet apparently doctors are so much more important than the rest of us that we regularly dish out to them north of 100,000 pounds a year from the taxpayers’ pocket. And as many a scandal demonstrates, doctors do not exist at a higher level of sainthood than others whose wages are paid for by the State.
But let me leave public sector professions aside for one moment as that is a question of government priorities. And let me turn to writers, thinkers and philosophers which is a question of consumer priorities. A consumer can directly choose to show that writers have value by paying them for their services. No-one expects a meal at a restaurant for free or a transportation service for free, yet apparently writing services should be given as a gratuity from the love of the author’s heart. Why? Is it that writers don’t provide a consumer need? Is it that eating out and nightclubs and cars and holidays are required by the people, but ideas presented with energy and verve are not?
I reject this. We desperately need new ideas. New thinking. Be it on Middle Eastern peace or on economic growth or on the role of universities or on the concept of free speech, new approaches need to be dreamt up and disseminated throughout society. There is no greater need than this! If we don’t explore these new ideas, we are all going to end up paying economically in the long term. And people in the Middle East are going to continue paying with their lives. How much more money are we going to waste on defence spending and public relations departments because we didn’t dare to try a different way?
Where John and I disagree is the role of capitalism in all this. From my perspective, a capitalist society reflects us and our choices. It is perfectly capable of reflecting a better us and better choices. But for that to happen we - the consumer - needs to change and be given a new vision of the good life. When the consumer chooses a restaurant over a good read; when the customer chooses to pay for overpriced stationary instead of groundbreaking ideas expertly scribed; one has to ask “What do we value?”
So friends, I ask that question directly to you. You are all consumers. Everyday you make choices to buy “essential things”. So if you believe that new thinking for a better world is essential, if you need a writer to make the case for an alternative reality, if you are fed up with the UN and the ICJ and need proposals for another way forward, if you are concerned about the future of the Middle East, if you are angered by the attacks on our democracies or if you just believe in free speech and unrestricted socratic debate, then please show that you value the writer with a paid subscription. Last night I paid more in the supermarket than I am asking you to pay me annually through Substack. And freedom tastes so much better than lentils.
Please set up a paid subscription and change how our society values ideas.