Money too has its limits!

Unlike many of us, Michael Sandel is worried about our having drifted from having a market economy to being a market society.  The drift is indeed discerning as people sucked into market economy are rarely conscious of the reasons for their behavior. Simply put, beyond a point market stops short of being freedom of choice and instead creates conditions which exert a kind of coercion on consumers! No wonder, therefore, people rely more on markets and less on morals in making a judgement. Else, why would we pay children to get good grades or pay people to donate organs or pay for lobbyists to favor decisions?

Our reluctance to engage in moral and spiritual argument, together with our embrace of markets, has apparently led markets into the spheres of life where they don’t belong. From prison cell upgrade in the US to hiring services of surrogate mothers in India and from the right to shoot an endangered black rhino in South Africa to renting out space on your forehead in New Zealand, each for a price, illustrate the manner in which even criminal justice, family life, environmental protection and personal privacy have been corrupted.

Without taking a moral high ground, the author argues that markets tend to crowd out morals and that there is serious case for us to rethink the role and reach of markets in our social practices, human relationships and everyday lives. In addition to raising moral and ethical issues, the question that marketisation of society widens the already existing divide between people of means and those without is equally crucial.

As market continues to explore new avenues for its expansion, the onus will be on us to analyze that putting a price tag on which things will undermine their function and relationship in society. Neither can friendship be bought nor are children sold, despite both being lucrative from a market perspective. Such transactions, even if feasible and acceptable, violate the moral ground of human relationships and neither is good for democracy.

What money can’t buy is all about moral and ethical question of what can be bought and sold in the market. However, it lets the reader ponder over the last question: Do we want a society where everything is up for sale?...Link

What Money Can’t Buy
by Michael Sandel
Allen Lane, UK
244 pages, UK£ 20.

Consistent inconsistencies

‘Why everyone else is a hypocrite’, with else prominently popping up, indicts the reader as the veritable point of reference. No offence therein because being ignorant, wrong, irrational and hypocritical can make one feel better off than being knowledgeable, correct, reasonable and consistent. No wonder, there are any number of people around us who died famous, wealthy, and wrong.

Teasing and amusing at the same time, ‘Why everyone else is a hypocrite’ is about mutually inconsistent contradictions in human brains. Using principles of evolutionary psychology, Robert Kurzban has cleverly confirmed the Greek definition of hypocrite as someone who ‘pretends to be better than he really is, virtuous without really being so.’ And there are reasons for people to have double take on matters because they desire to have the best of both worlds.

Mind is wired to generate behavioral inconsistencies. Explaining the functioning of modular mind through evolution, Kurzban reveals that the mind generates contradictory beliefs, vacillating behaviors and inflated egos at the same time. Our modular minds didn't evolve for consistency, but for patchwork multitasking such that at any given time we should think of ourselves not as ‘I’ but as ‘we’ – a set of interacting systems that are in constant conflict.

This might be one reason that politicians appear to be such hypocrites. In reality, however, politicians may not actually be much more hypocritical than the rest of us. It is just that the rest of us skate by without anyone noticing. Politicians, on the other hand, have to offer genuine sounding rationalization to wriggle out of it. For them, the ultimate rationalization is the phrase, ‘I just couldn't help myself.’

Loaded with humorous anecdotes, this book is an attempt to explain why we act the way we act, and, perhaps partly in our defense, to show that if we are wrong a lot, well, being right isn't everything. Explaining varied implications of our consistent minds, Robert Kurzban reveals why it is perfectly natural to believe that everyone else (including you yourself) is a hypocrite and will continue to be so whether or not anyone likes it....Link

Why everyone else is a hypocrite
by Robert Kurzban
Princeton University Press, New Jersey
274 pages, US $ 17.34

Smothering diversity

It may seem naive and simplistic but pluralism in classroom, as represented by cultural and economic background of the pupils, may have been compromised the day a uniform dress code was introduced for school children. While uniform dress reflects decor and discipline, lost within it are distinct identities that have further been smothered by a universalised teaching curriculum. To impart a uniform system of education across wide cultural diversity, the system eroded plurality by homogenising cultures and communities in the first place. It is only during recent years that question on a system of education that converts innocent pupils into mindless clones has been raised.

While the indigenous model rejected the colonial, the colonial was uni-dimensional and had ended up eliminating the indigenous. In both instances, it was the baby that got thrown with the bathwater. Far from liberating and transforming the underprivileged, it placed unrealistic heavy burden of education on children. Rather than equipping underprivileged children with skills and sensitization them towards their marginal status, the system of education sought to marginalize them further. Poor learning achievements, low retention, high dropout rates and indifferent attitudes of the parents and communities for the school have been reflective of the net impact.

In search for the answers to such questions, the editors of the volume have sought a way out of it by placing emphasis on ‘social inclusion and pluralism as the core principles of the pedagogic conceptual framework, practices and processes’. This however may be easier said than done. The basic trouble is that it may not always be easy to achieve the core values of social inclusion and pluralism simultaneously. But the book prisms the inner world of education through a wider lens on the world of education in offering solution-based approaches drawn from both the developed and the developing world.

The book has not only been able to diagnose the problem but suggest a solution-based approach as well. Though it appreciates the complexity of the problem at hand, the book remains optimistic in its approach because by only being positive about it can some distance in addressing the problem would get covered....Link

School Education, Pluralism & Marginality
by Christine Sleeter, Shashi Bhushan Upadhyay, Arvind Mishra & Sanjay Kumar (Eds)
Orient BlackSwan, Delhi
500 pages, Rs. 850