But that's not what this
blog post is about - pretty much everyone knows what I said above, and everyone
worth their salt is all for kicking racism out of society.
No, the purpose of this
blog post is to say that when it comes to racism and discrimination, and indeed
other forms of supposed unfairness in society, progress doesn't just mean weeding
these things out of society, it also means not going so far the other way that we
become trepid little mice unable to cope with a world in which a lot of our discrimination
is good and necessary (a danger that is starting to materialise in many pockets
of society).
Take, for example, something
that happened a couple of months ago, when the BBC sought to target supposedly “under-represented”
parts of Britain with an internship that white people were not permitted to
apply for.
In order to “rectify the
imbalance of people who do not recruit black and Asian people”, only black,
Asian and non-white ethnic minorities could apply for the BBC internship, despite
it emerging later that the corporation is already scoring above what is
expected of them in that area of diversity.
The way things are going, there
is a real danger that the prejudice and unfair discrimination accusers will swing
things round 180 degrees and cry foul against people accused of discrimination
for not discriminating. Make sense? If not, here's what I mean.
If we carry on like this, I
can envisage a time when there is widespread paranoia that unfair discrimination
is occurring whenever there is, say, a TV drama show without a certain number
of Muslims and homosexuals, or a university without a certain number of black
graduates, or when a police force has more than a 50% proportion of white
officers, or when there is a Cabinet consisting of more of one sex than the
other.
With some degree of irony,
the unfair discrimination cards that we used to nobly play against genuine
injustices are starting to make appearances as faux-discrimination cards played
by discriminators against those accused of not discriminating enough.
The antidote to this shift
is to realise that most discrimination is actually perfectly fine, and actually
to be encouraged, because the majority of the time when we discriminate we do so
because we understand the trade off better than our accusers.
Don't get me wrong, where
there is still genuine unfair discrimination we should help weed it out. But genuine
unfair discrimination doesn't occur half as much as most people think - it is
simply the result of people making rational choices, like choosing a Cabinet or
a work force based on merit, not on sex or skin colour.
Rational discrimination
occurs everywhere, and for good reason. At school in wanting to date girls I
fancied, I was discriminating against girls I didn't fancy. But that's
perfectly okay. When I go to the pub I want to sit and talk with friends I
know, and discriminate against strangers by not joining them at their table. But
that's perfectly okay too.
Vegetarians want to discriminate
against burger bars by not eating in them; lesbians want to discriminate
against heterosexual men by not having sex with them; women usually want to discriminate
against employers that run garages by not working for them; economic think
tanks want to discriminate against not very bright people by having bright
people contribute to their research; and the Congolese social group in my city wants
to discriminate against non-Congolese people by only wanting fellow Congolese
people to attend - and all of those things are perfectly fine.
Not only are the majority
of our life's discriminations fine, but even at times when certain patterns
appear to be evident people should first check to see if there are other good
reasons for this before making accusations of 'unfair discrimination'.
Or in other words, they
should adhere to the wisdom of Chesterton's fence. That is, if you see a fence
somewhere that you think is doing no good, don't pull it down until you've first
understood why someone built it in the first place. Only when you're sure the
fence is serving no beneficial purpose should you pull it down.
The same is true of the
many cases where there aren't more of a certain type of person in those roles -
instead of assuming a system isn't working fairly, you have to instead consider
why it doesn't already work in the way you assume it should (something our
Prime Minister Theresa May failed
to learn when she was Home Secretary) .
Because the thing is,
quite often you'll many of those patterns are not
cases of unfair discrimination at all - they are simply a reflection of a
wide society made up of individual choices bootstrapped by rational assessments
of taste and merit.
