LanDroid wrote:
“According to the caste system,” he said, as if informing me of the status of someone he once knew, “I belong to the second upper caste. The warrior-soldier caste.” I looked at this man who was not much taller than I, small-boned, narrow-shouldered, gentle of face, self-effacingly modest in bearing and wondered on what planet would this man be seen as a natural-born warrior? Here was living proof of the miscasting of caste.
Even if you accept a caste structure, the arbitrary nature of it means the vast majority will be in the wrong category, living under random restrictions or perhaps enjoying privileges they do not deserve.
I am having some trouble with that assertion. A really solid caste system is based on learning a trade over time. The caste is responsible, in the way that the apprentice system was responsible in Middle Ages Europe, for making sure the individual knew how to do their assigned work. We have had, for example in the building trades in the Northeast, similar systems of keeping the trade within the family. It's part exclusion and part practical arrangement. To interpret it entirely as a matter of exclusion is to view the system from the vantage point of the marginalized. This may be justified from a justice perspective, but it obscures the vulnerability of a system which once was not arbitrary, and whose economic purpose can no longer function.
To criticize the geologist as unfit for war is quite silly. When the warrior caste was a functional part of the social structure, the hours of practice with a sword and spear and shield and bow, not to mention possibly managing horses to run a chariot properly, would have given him a strong advantage over an untrained but athletic man. One can argue that the naturally gifted should have been the ones to be trained, but who is going to create that system? Families who can afford weapons and armor, who can train their sons in the ways of valor and mutual support and strategy, those are going to be the ones who decide who gets trained.
He told me about the upper-caste woman in an office where he once worked. She would get up from her desk and walk the length of the office, down the hall and around the corner, to ask a Dalit to get her water.
“The jug was there next to her desk,” he said. “The Dalit had to come to where she was sitting and pour it for her. It was beneath her dignity to get the water herself from the desk beside her. This is the sickness of caste.”
I love the story, but I also remember the arrogance of the Brahmin grad student in our department who would come into the grad student lounge and casually go through the wallet of a lower-caste student and remove the cash. Naturally we all hated him, and he never amounted to much as an economist, but it spoke volumes about what people in India had to put up with.
North Americans have trouble grokking the social expectations created by the practice of having servants. We do stuff for ourselves, or, as in the example of ironing shirts in grad school, it does not get done. Old World students were mildly put off by my wrinkled cotton shirts, since they were uniformly from families who would be ashamed to go out in shirts that were not ironed. Because that would mean you can't afford servants, and as one student explained to me many years later, even the servants have servants. For those who could afford an education in English, going out in clothes that had not been ironed would be unthinkably declasse.
LanDroid wrote:[*] If the dominant caste insists there is a meritocracy and equal rights, what does that say about awareness and truthfulness in that society?[/list]
I am trying to follow this question with some care. It is, I think, the decisive question of our time. I am in the middle of the education system, and I can certainly see that some students start out with strong advantages over others. But what is the alternative to meritocracy? If a person is not able to get the work done, how does it really matter that their parents were stressed out and made bad choices, and they never really had a chance?
Sandel, at Harvard, has a book out that proposes deconstructing meritocracy. I am in no hurry to read it (Sandel does not have Haidt's flair, for example) but I feel I must get to it. I want to know what alternative he proposes.
The received wisdom about affirmative action is that if the student is properly supported, they can make it in a challenging college despite a disadvantaged background. But the flip side is that without that support, it is cruel to admit someone to a program they are not ready for. We are not talking about truly gifted individuals like Tara Westover of "Educated" but rather about smart but unprepared people more like J.D. Vance of "Hillbilly Elegy." So maybe Sandel, and others skeptical of the meritocracy, simply want better support. I would agree with that. Compensatory education, we used to call it. But I am waiting for the plan.