Learning to discriminate
Over the last century, few words have endured as bad a rap as “discrimination”.
The lexicographical sages and Guardians of (at least cispondian) Angloglosis who compile the Oxford Dictionary, ever mindful of the capricious tides of common usage, and acknowledging the evolution of language by discretely capitulating to the most endemic examples of abusage, retain as their first definition: “The action or an act of discriminating or distinguishing; the fact or condition of being discriminated or distinguished; a distinction made”. [1]
Those same sages correctly relegate the connotation
you quite probably (and almost forgivably in an age where it is seldom used in
any other context) read into the headline of this piece to its rightful
status as a humble (b)
spec: “The practice or an instance of discriminating against people on grounds
of race, colour, sex, social status, age, etc.; an unjust or prejudicial
distinction.” [2]
It suits the Thought Police – if you think they disappeared with
the likes of Hitler, Stalin, Pot, Botha, or more recently, Hussein
or Gaddafi, you need to get out of your cave (or just ask Lukachenko) – that we
subscribe en masse to selective illiteracy. It makes us so much easier to
manipulate.
You see, as a liberal-thinking human being, I don’t need a
government, a law or a preacher to tell me that making “unjust or prejudicial
distinction”…”against people on grounds of race, colour, sex, social status,
age, etc.” is wrong. Just like I don't need a government to make heroin illegal (and thereby only increase its price exponentially) to stop me injecting it into my veins, but that's another story...
Modern DNA research has proved abundantly (in spite of the theories of the likes of Dr Mengele) that it is as patently absurd to judge a person’s worth based on their skin colour as it would be to do so based on their eye or hair colour.
So if you thought the agenda of this post would be (another) call for or against
(b), I’m sorry to disappoint you.
Any advertising guru will tell you, it’s always the most
simplistic slogans that catch in the public consciousness. And there’s no
easier way to dodge a complicated issue than to over-simplify it ("Yes We Can!"). So as the
mantra of “non-discrimination” struck up all over the world during the 20th
Century, so the public, at least in the “free” world, was indoctrinated "not to discriminate".
The substantial upside is, for example, there are
few places in Western Europe where my Jewish background would count against me
if applying for a job (although I don’t check www.vacancies.va very often). But every
silver lining quite possibly hides a cloud.
Over the past few decades (at least in the West), “non-discrimination”
has been enshrined in Constitutions, entrenched in law and become such a
bastion of “liberal” regimes that anyone making a derogatory remark would be
isolated socially long before having to answer for it (as he well might) in a
criminal court.
The problem is that if we over-simplify the concept, without
making the distinction between “discrimination” and “discrimination (b)”, we
fail to discriminate at all, and that is very easy and dangerous habit to get
into.
So having had “Thou Shalt Not Discriminate” hurled at us by
everyone from pinko liberals to African nationalists and Nicaraguan freedom
fighters, we do just that. We listen to them like good sheep and we don’t
discriminate.
But we must (re)learn to:
Because we have forgotten
how to discriminate when a government, employer or other authority figure
feeds us a line of bullshit that an otherwise blind and deaf man would
recognise to be bullshit.
Because we now hesitate
to discriminate when we identify a gifted child, with many of the world’s
potentially great minds being flung into the melee of institutionalised
mediocrity to be sacrificed on the altars of "egalitarianism" and "anti-elitism" (lest they become troublemakers?).
Conversely, eschewing any kind of true meritocracy – ‘cause
that makes the best workers and thinkers (read troublemakers) – rise to the top (see above),
we are then afraid to discriminate
when someone is patently incompetent (especially if they happen to be a member
of some or other perceived “minority”), lest we hurt their feelings, leaving
able people out of work thus impoverishing the efforts of the entire society
(and diminishing the self-worth of competent members of said minority).
It is our duty
to discriminate when we see abuse of power, whether it’s a corrupt
politician, an employer who underpays or exploits his staff, or just the neighbourhood or office bully.
Classroom platitudes such as “he tried his best” and “10/10
for effort” belong ... in the classroom, or in sheltered employment for the mentally handicapped. As a society, we owe it to ourselves to discriminate by only issuing firearm permits, driving licences,
high school diplomas, University degrees, police badges etc. to suitably trained people who have reached a level of proven proficiency, not simply to those who "tried their best".
At our peril, we fail
to discriminate between news, hype, rumour and propaganda. Non-sequiturs (new & improved) pass unnoticed while the chilling
phrases: “It must be true, I saw it on the Internet/TV/read it in the
newspaper,” are still uttered every day by people who live in democratic
countries that have had a de jure “free press” for centuries and therefore have no excuse.
As consumers, if we don’t
discriminate between good and bad service or superior and inferior products,
those with or without preservatives or that do or don’t use child labour, polute the environment or
cause animal suffering, then we deserve exactly what we get: second-rate carcinogen-crammed sweatshop-produced
products sold by recalcitrant people who give even less of a f*ck than their
supine customers do. Or is the retail establishment of the "free world" determined to follow the shturmovshchina business model of the Soviet GUM chain? It will if we let it. Although when it does, we'll inevitably find someone/something else to blame.
We really need to discriminate more! – AMB
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[1] Ref: Shorter Oxford English Dictionary Sixth Edition
[2] idem
