Last night, Bhajji and I were sitting in his house, waiting for Meera to be fed so that she could be brought downstairs, when, amidst a slew of shallow remarks we both were making about a bunch of things, he said that he was reconsidering buying the Ecovacs because his cleaner had messaged him earlier saying she was coming back into the business. So I offhandendly asked him why and when she'd stopped and he replied that she had been training to be a teacher, completed the course and started teaching in January, but then found the work so hectic for the pay that she decided to quit after a term to get back to cleaning. I had been broadly following news about terrible pay and the intense work hours of public school teachers in NSW since I applied to the M. Teach programme back in 2021 when, also, Rama told me about his flatmate Teagan's stressful work conditions, and I've always had this vague, socialist, slightly David Graebar-Bullshit Jobs-type attitude that there is something wrong about a society that pays and treats its teachers and nurses and muncipal workers worse than it does marketing professionals and consultants and investment bankers, and I probably would have responded with a disapproving tut-tuting and then moved on had I not, the previous night, read Joseph Walker's phenomenal response to Alan Kohler's QE on the Australian Housing Crisis. I cannot recommend it highly enough so please please read it but while I have you here, I will expound on the thread that I found most pertinent to that story.
One of the reasons, apparently, Australia's fertility rate is falling is because a large number of young people are unable to afford big houses, which are somewhat of a precondition for raising kids, owing to the inexporably rising property prices. Walker's words, "At the individual level, this is frustrating. At the societal level, it’s disastrous.", have stayed with me since and on hearing what Bhajji said, I couldn't stop myself from being vocally alarmed. If a qualified teacher is saying that it is better for her to be a cleaner, which is perfectly rational and fair on her part, then what are the repercussions of this decision, and similar decisions by other teachers, 15-20 years from now. If this was an isolated incident of a particular person feeling she doesn't fit into a role she thought she would, that'd be one thing. But having been reading news reports, seeing videos of teacher protests, I think this is more than one person. An entire community of people, many of whom I'm willing to wager are atleast to some extent passionate and idealistic about the profession, under such stress that it is causing many to leave in droves is a cause for notice in any area of work but it is disastrous when it comes to teachers. Or nurses and other caretakers. With all due respect, an exodus of IT consultants wouldn't have as big an impact on society as it would for teachers or nurses. And yet we've allowed ourselves to arrive at a system where we don't value monetarily those who are fundamental to turning our children into citizens, and caring for us when we're at our weakest. The answer that the market will take care of it is not just an abrogation of intelligence and judgement but also stupendously lazy because it does not account for the social cost of a generation of people- their suffering, the opportunity cost of what could have been, and the impact on the rest of society because of these diminished, for if the purpose of education is to enable a human to flower at their fullest potential, actors- who happen to bear the burden while the market corrects itself.
I can see that I am painting a very deterministic picture and not conceding the fact that individuals have agency, find innovative ways to uplevel themselves whenever society changes drastically. And thank goodness for that. And yet I think those of us who are in a position to atleast attempt to do more, the apathetic middle-class, are failing. In his latest episode on The Seen and the Unseen, Prof. Muralidharan at one point says that development will happen no matter what, that society will continue to evolve. Where those of us who want to do something can contribute, by using our talents and actions, is by accelerating that development so that instead of taking, say, 100 years it'll take 25. Because development means a real improvement in conditions of humans. That means we have to be willing to instead of doing what we've been told to, advertised to, exhorted to, admnonished to, goaded to, feared to, be willing to think, feel and do what we think is right. After years of arguing with myself, and others, into a corner about the basis for any claim of a virtuous act, I see myself going through a phase transition. Not just because the answer doesn't seem to lie entirely in theory but also because I was using that as a pretext to avoid action.
There is another, more important, more visceral consideration. Having been spending more and more time with Anaya and Meera, the future has ceased to be an abstract entity to be used to win an argument, and has become a more concrete reality in which I see them turn 10, 12, 15, going to school, playing in the park, worrying about what their peers think of them, partying, worrying about the climate, war, human suffering, and I feel a sense of shame growing within me on realising that I've done nothing to make their world slightly better. While it is not entirely ludicrous to think that we should shelter our children and give them the best of what we can, it also goes without saying that the larger world will have an impact, that many large-scale events and wider society and environment will decide how they think about their world, their actions, their children. And while it would be hubris, unjustified arrogance and, perhaps, overreach to think that I have the power or the knowledge to make a great impact, I'll be damned if I don't try.
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"Virtues are dispositions not only to act in particular ways, but also to feel in particular ways. To act virtuously is not, as Kant was later to think, to act against inclination; it is to act from inclination formed by the cultivation of the virtues." -Alasdair MacIntyre/ After Virtue
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