The end of this blog

Hi all,

I've realised that the blog format isn't the best for discussing my humanitarian concerns.  Thus, I have started a new website at http://iantheweatherman.weebly.com/ in which I discuss those sort of issues and also discuss some relatively light-hearted stuff like music recommendations and sports predictions.

Ian

Working hours

Instead of just blogging about humanitarian concerns I have opted to put them onto a website:
http://freedomandresponsibility.weebly.com/
...and I also have a site devoted to more light-hearted stuff focused on lists, including recommendations on music and sporting predictions:
http://tws27stuff.weebly.com/

My latest humanitarian piece that I haven't yet explored in the blog is on working hours and productivity.
http://freedomandresponsibility.weebly.com/working-hours.html

I think a lot of our problems with long working hours stem from a mentality of "doing" rather than "producing" (since there is always work that can be done, but not all work is productive) and a belief that dedication to a cause is measured by how much we self-sacrifice for it, rather than by how strongly we contribute to the cause.  Therefore, people can be seen as dedicated for "working" for 60 hours per week, but only doing 30 hours' worth of productive work, which is bad for both employee (having to work excessive hours) and employer (not getting anywhere near as much productive work as expected given the hour count).

I am an advocate of flexibility, but believe that it should work in both directions- people should be expected to work longer at times when the workload is heavier than average, but also be permitted to take that time off at times when the workload is below-average.  I hear too many reports of employees being expected to work 45+ hours per week on a frequent basis due to under-staffing, and of them being forbidden from working less than the standard 37 even when they have built up a lot of "flexi-time" and having a shortage of productive work.  Employers may need to be regulated by higher authorities in order to address this problem.  Of course, workers can abuse the system too, e.g. by "working" 35-40 hours per week but only actually getting 25-30 hours' of productive work done, thus effectively wasting 10 hours' worth of their employers' money.  There are ways that employers can expose these people, though, such as through performance-related pay.

The idea of my proposals is to reduce the inefficiency in the system so that people are able to be productive without having to work longer hours than are necessary to achieve X amount of productivity.  Therefore we may be able to give people a fair amount of time for leisure, social activities, child-rearing etc., and still get enough work in to be able to sustain a thriving economy.

Common barriers to striving for a fair/just world

Here I will go into three issues that represent barriers towards creating a fairer/more just society.

1.  Rewarding people according to how much they self-sacrifice, rather than how much they benefit others.

This is nothing new- it has been around since the days of humans and animals being sacrificed for the "benefit" of some greater power, typically a god or goddess.  What it means is that people are rewarded primarily for making their own lives worse, rather than for helping to make others' lives better.

For example, in industry it is normal for employees to be rewarded and judged primarily according to how much of their time they set aside for work, rather than the quality, quantity and value of their output, even in jobs where, above a certain point, there is no need to have regimented "office hours".  Mothers are more likely to be highly-regarded for making heavy sacrifices to their careers, interests and friendships for the sake of putting family/children first, than for putting a lot of effort into making their children happy.  When we have conflicting priorities A and B, and B is more important than A, we are often more highly-regarded if we sacrifice A, than if we find an effective method of fully addressing both A and B.

Sometimes self-sacrifice can be correlated with making others' lives happier, but the emphasis is wrong- the healthiest approach is to emphasise rewarding people for the extent of their positive contributions towards others.

2.  Aiming for equality of outcome rather than equality of opportunity

Yes, it can be annoying when certain people seem to get more than they deserve, but I would argue that, if it isn't at anyone else's expense, it's not necessarily a bad thing, for although it results in inequalities, it adds to the collective well-being of society.  It is people getting less than they deserve that is by far the bigger problem.

It is hard, and sometimes impossible, to achieve equality of outcome without bringing everybody down to the lowest common denominator ("If some can't have it, why should anybody?").  In particular, different people have different strengths and weaknesses, so it is not possible to make everybody a "winner" in any one subject area.  The most effective way to get as near as we can to a society of "winners" is rather to help give everybody the opportunity to make the most of their individual strengths.

One example of such a failed "equality of outcome" policy was New Labour's drive in the UK to get everybody into university, which has resulted in a significant devaluing of university degrees (as university used to be primarily the domain of people who are strong at academic subjects, and we had to introduce vocational-oriented degrees to enable the less academically proficient to get into university).  The government has then struggled to find funds for the spiralling numbers of university students, resulting in tuition fees rising to £9,000 per year.  Far from making it "fair", this policy has ended up grossly unfair on the people who struggle with being burdened with large debts, and the strong academics who were always destined to get into university but now have to deal with much larger student debts and a devaluing of their degrees because of a failed government policy.

3.  "Nice guys finish last"

As I hope I've established above, a "fair" society (or the nearest we can get) should have winners and losers- in an ideal world, we should all get the opportunity to make the most of our strengths, with the winners being those who make best use of their strengths, and the losers being those who don't bother.

But in the real world, the "winners" are often the people who know how to bend rules to their advantage and bully others into submission without infringing on any higher authorities' rules, while the "losers" are the ones that they trample on. 

I've often read that in relationships, "nice guys finish last" in the sense that women tend to want "nice guys" as platonic friends rather than as boyfriends, which makes it harder for "nice guys" to find partners.  I think there may be some truth in this, but I associate the concept more with the sort of "nice guy" who respects women's desire to be friends with him, and then pays for it when a gang of bullies destroy his reputation by circulating rumours that he secretly wants to have sex with them and the masses believe the rumours.  

This is something that needs addressing because it encourages people to try to become "winners" by bullying people rather than being nice to them.

Political implications

I suggest that many "socialist" ideologies fall down because they encourage a significant element of point 2, while many "capitalist" ideologies allow the problem outlined in point 3 to persist without opposition, while point 1 is a recurring problem across most political ideologies.  Food for thought perhaps.

Thoughts on justice, fairness and equality

Some thoughts on "fairness"

"Unfairness" generally refers to the sense of people getting more or less than they deserve.  And indeed, life isn't fair, and a certain amount of unfairness is unavoidable, e.g. some events have a large element of unavoidable random chance, which will result in more favourable outcomes for some than for others.  Sometimes, "fairness" can also be a complex issue, where depending on how one perceives justice, trying to be "fair" in one way can end up being "unfair" in other ways.

But we have a common problem where many people use "Life isn't fair" as an excuse to justify being awful to each other.  Or, being awful to each other with the aim of "teaching" them to realise that life isn't fair.  Or, justifying keeping unjust rules and double standards in place- if the rules are unfair, tough, life isn't fair.  The mentality is, "Life will never be fair, so therefore it isn't worth trying to make it any better than it already is."  There is a mentality that "looking on the bright side of life" is about trivializing injustices, not letting them get to you, and being thankful for the good things that you have, but the downside of that way of thinking is that we become reluctant to support positive change, preferring to make do with less.

No, the fact that life is unfair should be a wake-up call.  There are always going to be unavoidable situations where we get less than we deserve, so why add to the problem by actively creating avoidable ones, and hiding behind "Life isn't fair" to justify keeping them in place?  We don't need to create injustices of our own to teach people that life is unfair- there are enough unavoidable injustices in life to refer to as examples of why we have to accept that life is unfair.  Positive thinking should be about striving to make life as "fair" as we can reasonably make it, creating as many positives as we can to offset the inevitable challenges that life is going to throw at us, and focusing on those positives.

The key part of my manifesto on justice is the following argument:

People should generally be rewarded according to the extent to which they contribute positively to society, the effort that they put in, and the extent of their positive intentions.

Not only does this ensure that people who make positive contributions are rewarded the most, it also provides people with a strong incentive to contribute positively, because if you do, chances are, it will pay off and you will get positive recognition and rewards for it.

The tradition of the wife taking the husband's last name

Patriarchal origins of the tradition

The tradition of the wife taking the husband's last name upon marriage stems mainly from long-standing patriarchal family values, where families' surnames reflected the male head of the family, and men were encouraged to marry and reproduce in order to carry the family name forward through the generations.  Girls were considered the property of their fathers until they got married, and then when they got married, they became the property of their husbands, and so took their last names to reflect this.

Legitimate reasons for following the tradition

I regard the patriarchal arguments to be somewhat dubious arguments for preserving and following this tradition and I hope that most readers will agree.  However, the wife taking the husband's last name is one of many legitimate ways of resolving the "family name" problem, where groups of close relatives (especially the traditional nuclear family) become known by a family name and have to choose what the family name is.  A wife can consider taking her husband's last name as a positive way of reflecting the fact that she is now part of a new nuclear family, and she may prefer his last name to her birth name.  Or, we can just say, if it's traditional, it's one of many legitimate options, and all parties are happy with it, why not?

Legitimate alternatives

However, note "one of many legitimate ways".  The husband can take the wife's name, they can agree to use a hyphenated/combined family name, or take on a different family name altogether which is not associated with the birth names of the husband or wife.  Another option is for the husband and wife to both keep their birth names and remain socially known by their birth names, but also have a family name which may be named after the husband, wife, both, or neither- this procedure is commonly used by homosexual couples and cohabiting unmarried heterosexual partners for example.

So what's my problem with the tradition?

In short, it is the way that society enforces it.  There are many women out there who would rather not take their husband's surnames upon marriage, but feel obliged to because "that's just the way it's done".  It is an example of where creative thought and individuality is suppressed on the basis that "rules are rules"- married couples are pressured into doing things in a narrow, traditional way, rather than in the way that works best for them.

Also, although we don't like to admit it, for many of us the patriarchal origins of the tradition still linger in our subconscious.  The wife taking her husband's surname is seen as a mark of respect for his authority and the fact that she is now married to him, so if she doesn't take his name, it can be perceived that she isn't fully honouring her marriage.  Men who do not mandate that their wives take their surnames, and especially those who take their wives' surnames, can be labelled with all the usual macho, homophobic slurs- queer, gay, cissy, etc- and told that they need to stop "trying to be too politically correct", "toughen up", and "just accept that traditions should be followed because they should be followed".

I would never argue that the tradition should be outlawed, for as I established earlier, it is one of many legitimate ways of resolving the "family name" problem, and as far as I'm concerned, if it has widespread legitimate uses, its legitimate uses should not be banned.  What we need to do, as a society, is be more questioning of why we expect everybody to follow it, especially as many of the reasons are, in reality, dubious.  There is no need for traditions to be imposed on everybody- there are many examples of traditions where groups of people happily follow them, but also happily tolerate others who choose to do things in a different but equally legitimate way.  The tradition of the wife taking the husband's surname should be applied on that sort of basis.

Traditional family values

The modern-day concept of "traditional family values" in the UK and America is based mainly on an idealised perception of the traditional family structure of the 1950s.

Some aspects of so-called "family values" are certainly beneficial to society.  According to the Wikipedia article on family values, in a 1998 Harris survey, two common "values" were perceived to be, "loving, taking care of, and supporting each other", and, "knowing right from wrong and having good values".  We could certainly do with more of those two values in our society.

But many people also associate "family values" with an idealised perception of the traditional family structure that dominated in the UK and USA in the 1950s.  Children were mainly brought up in traditional nuclear families where the father was the breadwinner and the mother stayed at home and raised the children, and there is a common myth that this family structure encouraged those sort of loving and caring "family values", and that the breakdown of that family structure is mainly responsible for the recent "loss" of those values.

But in reality, the majority of evidence suggests that those values were also deficient in the 1950s.  Instead of either embracing modern-day trends or trying to bring society back to how it was in the 1950s, we would be better off looking for ways of encouraging new modern trends that do a better job of encouraging these values than either present-day trends or the cultural norms of the 1950s.

History behind the 1950s family values

I have done a fair amount of research into this- you can find more detailed summaries of the history elsewhere, but I will outline what I see as being the most important points.

• The nuclear family has always been an important part of child-rearing, but in many past periods, children were often brought up within less narrowly-defined "family" structures, where extended family members, close friends who were treated as part of the family, servants and others contributed.  In the Victorian era, the narrowly-defined nuclear family consisting of a married couple and their children became more dominant.
• In World War II, there was a temporary breakdown in this structure, for many men served in the war and women were required to take up work in their native countries.
• After the war, there was a strong social backlash, and people were heavily encouraged to return back to traditional family/gender roles and heavily stigmatised if they did not.

Common misconceptions about the 1950s family values

"The 1950s family arrangement encouraged people to love and care for each other."

My experiences overwhelmingly suggest that it only encouraged people to apply these values to people that they considered to be "family", i.e. related to within a few generations.  People who were not considered family members were often not entitled to the same amount of respect (an issue that recurs in my articles on friendships, but was worse in the 1950s than it is today).  In addition you were only "loved and cared for" if you conformed to a narrow way of doing and thinking.  If you were left-handed, black, homosexual, a single person in your 40s, or a mother with a high-flying career, forget it.

I am all up for people loving and caring for each other, but it should be an all-inclusive thing, not something that is reserved only for limited groups of people and comes at the vast expense of others. 

"The 1950s family arrangement encouraged people to know right from wrong and have good values."

In the 1950s, most people generally "conformed" a lot more than they do today and were more likely to obey and accept authority without question.  This meant that people were less likely to disobey good rules, but it also meant that they were more likely to accept bad rules without question on the basis, "Because authority X said so", which, for example, made it easier to justify persecuting vulnerable/minority groups purely because they were considered different.

Since the 1950s we have progressively moved away from blind obedience of authority, and there are some areas where I feel there is considerable room to progress further.  For instance, customs like the wife taking her husband's surname upon marriage, and businesses working 9 till 5, Monday to Friday, are frequently imposed on people on the basis, "Because society says so", despite being unnecessarily limiting in many cases.   However, there are other areas where we have gone too far, i.e. people feel more able to disobey most rules, including rules that prohibit particular behaviours for good reasons.  What we need is an increased sense of rules being based on wider moral considerations, and respect for those considerations, rather than an acceptance that "rules are rules".

"The 1950s family arrangement, where fathers were the breadwinners, and mothers stayed at home and looked after the children, encouraged children to be cared and looked after properly."

This works as long as the family is affluent enough to get by easily on just one income, both parents are happy to conform to these roles, and the family gets on well.  

But if the family is not affluent enough then it can be tough to feed the family, and fathers may end up pressurised into working long hours, meaning that they end up stressed and over-worked and don't get to spend much time with their children.  Mothers who want to have some independence can end up unhappy due to feeling trapped in domestic roles.  I often come across a view that parents should be prepared to sacrifice everything for their children, but the "100% sacrifice" model can result in unhappy parents, which detracts from the chances of their children being brought up in a loving, caring environment, and can result in sacrifices being made that hurt others, such as friends being dumped because they aren't considered part of the family and "family/children come first".

Today's problem is that the rise in working mothers has not been accompanied by measures to make it easier for fathers to spend less time at work and more time with the children, so we are left with a model where many households have both parents in full-time work.  Rather than promoting the 1950s family structure, we should be looking at a shift towards more flexible working hours, and more scope for parents to work shorter hours (say, 25-30 hours/week rather than 35-40) so that they can job/child-share, both having fulfilling careers but enabling at least one parent to be available for the children for most of the time.

"Traditional marriages should be encouraged and cohabiting discouraged.  Statistically, married people are happier on average than unmarried people."

I would argue that people in a long-term committed partnership are likely to be happier, on average, than people who are not, because they are guaranteed to have at least one emotionally-fulfilling and stable relationship in their lives.  The association with marriage stems from the fact that people in long-term committed partnerships are, statistically, more likely to get married.

The real problem is that too many people "take on" too much in their sexual partnerships before they are fully committed and know that they are really right for each other, resulting in repeated damaging break-ups, which is particularly problematic when couples have children before they are strongly committed.  Marriage is one way of trying to enforce commitment, but unlike in biblical times, when it was about a physical and emotional commitment, today it is a primarily legal commitment- couples sign legal documents and are discouraged from breaking up because of the legal repercussions of divorce.  I am uneasy about this, plus the marginalisation of unmarried couples who are more committed to each other than most married couples.  If we were to change the definition of marriage to something more similar to the biblical version, I might agree with encouraging more couples to get married.  But as our definitions currently stand, I suggest that it is "long-term commitment" rather than "marriage" that we really need to be encouraging.

"But maybe we can bring back the traditional 1950s family structure without bringing back the negatives associated with enforcement of it?"

My feeling is that this would be very difficult, if not impossible.  For example, how do we encourage women to stay at home and raise children without marginalising working mothers, and triggering knock-on effects that result in increased enforcement of conformity to traditional gender roles, and increased marginalisation of "sensitive" men, independent/career-minded women and homosexuals?   I cannot see a way out of that problem.  Too many people think idealistically about one parent always being there for the children, think of the most obvious way to get to that scenario, and don't think of the negative knock-on effects that it would most likely cause.

I will go back to the two sets of so-called "family values" that came up at the start of the article:  "loving, taking care of, and supporting each other", and, "knowing right from wrong and having good values".  That's what we need to be striving for, and I don't see how bringing us back to a more 1950s style society would help to bring us any closer to it.

Friendships in the "Western world"- Part 2- Cultural barriers facing friendships

The main cultural barriers facing friendships

There are various cultural barriers in the modern Western world that encourage people to pursue short-term acquaintances rather than long-term close friends, and to restrict close friendships to people who are related to within a few generations ("family"), thus restricting the range of people that we can potentially be close friends with.  I sense that these issues are stronger in the USA than here in the UK, but the same issues crop up to some extent in most "Western" type cultures.

Here is a list of some of the specific issues.

Many people subconsciously perceive bonds between friends to be disposable unless they are considered "family", i.e. related to within a few generations.

If I form close bonds with a branch of extended family, they will always be seen as my "family" because of the recognised blood ties, so if I move to a different part of the country, I do not face a social expectation to leave them behind.  But if I form similarly close bonds with a group of friends from Institution A, and then move over to Institution B, many people perceive those bonds to no longer be relevant to the present, because we no longer go to an institution together and we aren't considered "family".  Thus, a social expectation develops on me to leave those friends in the past and "move on".

The perception that "friendships are disposable but families are forever" is self-reinforcing.

The more widespread this perception is, the harder it is to find reliable, trustworthy friends outside of one's recognised "family" because there is a greater risk of them deciding, after a while, "You're not in my family so you're disposable", a problem that does not affect "family" relationships because, as the saying goes, "family is forever".  So, in cultures where this double standard is the norm, people learn through experience that you can trust "family" more than "friends".

Marriages and children tend to bring families together and prise friends apart.

One reason for this is the cultural perception that couples and children need to spend "family time" together, where they are expected to include people who are related to within a few generations, and exclude people who are not.

Another is the fact that when people have to juggle jobs, raising children and keeping their spouses happy, they generally have less time to spend on other relationships.  Since some relationships have to be sacrificed as a result of this, and it is relatively socially unacceptable to dispose of people who are related to within a few generations, because "they're your family so you can't just drop them", close friends are at risk of being dropped because they are not considered "family".

Close friendships, especially those involving men, are at risk of being stigmatised due to fear that they might become sexual.

While close friendships are typically of a "platonic" spiritual, affectionate, non-sexual nature, they are capable of generating a limited amount of unconscious intimate/physical attraction, which due to human hormones, can occasionally trigger involuntary sexual arousal.  This happens in most close relationships, including "family" ones, and is usually harmless and does not imply that the relationship is likely to turn sexual.

But in the Victorian era, tied in with a rampant paranoia over homosexuality, a myth evolved that the above issue was abnormal and implied a desire for sex, so men became afraid to become close to male friends for fear that if it triggered any involuntary sexual arousal, it probably meant that they were homosexual.  Shows of affection between male friends also became stigmatised as a sign of homosexuality because of the way that affection is seen as "sensitive" and inconsistent with the male gender role.  While this problem has declined in same-sex friendships since the 1950s due to the growing acceptance of homosexuality, sexual anxiety remains as strong as ever, highlighted by the fact that men's friendships with children are currently similarly stigmatised due to the modern-day paranoia over child sexual abuse.  

In societies where the genders are heavily segregated, male-female friendships typically suffer from the same problem, due to a perception that no "real" man would value a woman as a friend unless he secretly wanted to have sex with her, and the fear of adultery.  This problem has not completely gone away in the UK but, due to the dwindling enforcement of traditional gender roles, is far less than it was in the 1950s, and so male-female friendships are relatively common nowadays.  However, I do fear that if the media was to generate paranoia over male-on-female sexual abuse then male-female friendships would end up stigmatised again.

These problems typically exempt "family" because of a popular myth that taboos on incest make erotic desire impossible between known relatives.  As the unintended elements of erotic desire are primarily down to human hormones, this simply doesn't follow, while deliberate erotic desire, of the sort that can lead to sex abuse, can and does happen between parents/children and siblings.  But the myth has persisted for centuries in various cultures purely because not enough people question it.

Traditional gender roles are limiting

Traditionally, modern-day Western friendships between men involve only limited emotional bonding, due to anxiety over the possibility of the friendship turning sexual, so it can be hard for men to find male friends who will provide them with much emotional fulfilment.  Meanwhile, due to the perception that various hobbies and competitive activities are "unfeminine" and something that females "grow out of", women can find it hard to find female friends who will be interested in sharing those sort of interests.  As a result, men's friendships are limited emotionally and women's are limited socially.

This is partly why some find male-female friendships very rewarding, as people can feel more comfortable behaving inconsistently with their gender roles with opposite-sex friends than with same-sex friends.  However, this can result in their friendships being regarded with suspicion by bystanders.  This problem is declining as enforcement of traditional sex roles continues to decline, but there is still a fair way to go, and we need to keep making progress.

Solutions

As well as the solution that I identified in part 1 (respecting relationships according to how close/dependent they are, rather than blood/partnership ties to within a few generations) we need to clear up a few of these myths about sexual arousal in non-sexual relationships, as they generate unnecessary fears over the possibility of a non-sexual friendship turning sexual, which is a particularly big problem for men's friendships.  And, friendships will also be helped significantly by a continued reduction in segregation into traditional sex roles.