21 November 2013, The Tablet

The Butler


Cinema

 
It’s a short task to number the films about ordinary black people and civil rights – from well-meaning narratives from a white perspective that play in mainstream cinemas (a group that includes To Kill a Mockingbird,  and more recently The Help) to more authentic films of black experience like Nothing But a Man or Killer of Sheep which rarely play outside festivals. Then there are a handful of biopics of extraordinary individuals like Malcolm X or the forthcoming Mandela: Long Walk to Freedom. But extraordinary is the key word there. The Butler then, just by existing, is a ­triumph. It places centre stage that most peripheral of players, a domestic servant: Cecil Gaines, a black man born on a plantation in 1926, goes on to be a member of the White House staff under ei
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User Comments (8)

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Comment by: Boyers
Posted: 12/05/2016 21:27:38
I think he's just shot himself in the foot (or was it the head)?
His latest rant that the EU is fundamentally evil because it promotes inequality sounds to me like the perfect description of the Tory Party. As every single survey has shown, the poor get poorer and the rich remain protected under Conservative policy. IDS was responsible for the lunatic policy of the "bedroom tax" which is about as stupid as "government" ever gets.
Is it possible to be a Tory and a Christian?
I think not.
Comment by: Maryk
Posted: 24/03/2016 09:39:50
I don't think many disabled people or those hit by the bedroom tax or unjust sanctions will either lament his departure or respect his reasons. He was warned so often of the consequences lof what he was doing but he wouldn't listen.
Comment by: philip
Posted: 23/03/2016 11:02:52
or, to put it another way...It is quite possible that IDS would have had Hayek's full approval for everything he did except the use of the term "social justice" to describe it. Hayek would have reasonably asked "why is this programme just and that one unjust - what are the objective criteria of justice that allow us to make a judgement?". Of course, the use of words is important - that is why Hayek did not want to see the adoption of the term "justice" to describe redistribution. But we should split the two debates - the important intellectual debate about exactly what "social justice" should mean (which we should, indeed, talk about more in an intellectually curious way) and the other debate about what interventions Hayek believed in. He was not an anarchist and he did not believe the poor should be left on the streets. Indeed, his ideas about redistribution go quite far.
Comment by: philip
Posted: 23/03/2016 10:47:38
Clifford - I don't quite see why you can't separate out the two issues. As I say below, there is no reading of the Constitution of Liberty or Law Legislation and Liberty that can take one to the view that Hayek did not believe in redistribution (or for that matter quite a few other forms of intervention in the market). Now you (and for that matter, the Church - though only relatively recently) might like to call such redistribution "social justice". Hayek's objection was not to the action, but to that description of income redistribution. I am writing something at the moment in which I say (and others have said this too) that Hayek was actually wrong about the Church's original understanding of social justice. Until the 1930s, the Church used the term "social justice" to mean justice in economic and social relationships (eg an employer treating their employees justly, or the state not somehow excluding people from running a business by unjust discrimination). This does have real meaning and it is a pity that Hayek did not run with that properly. So, to sum up: (a) I think there is real meaning in the term "social justice" (b) I don't think it is a good term to describe large scale mechanisms of income redistribution (c) Hayek did believe in income redistribution etc but did not wish to describe them as "social justice" (d) Nevertheless, I think Hayek could have done us a favour by exploring the concept more (good article we published by Rhonheimer on that).
Comment by: philip
Posted: 22/03/2016 11:28:17
I think Clifford misunderstands Hayek's critique of social justice. He was not especially criticising anything in which IDS believed or anything at the heart of Catholic social teaching. Hayek's antipathy to the term arose because he believed that it is not possible to specify a distribution of incomes that could be described definitively as "just". Justice is characterised by objectivity (as in "justice is blind"). We can say with some certainty that an outcome of a criminal process is more or less just than another outcome, but there will be wide disagreement over the principles by which the distribution of incomes should be determined. It is therefore not possible in Hayek's view to describe outcomes as just or unjust. This is why it is a "mirage": we can talk about it in the abstract without every stumbling across it in reality. I sympathise with this view, but it is an argument about semantics. Indeed, until the 20th century, the Church did not use the word "justice" to describe the distribution of incomes (more to describe social relationships). In both Constitution of Liberty (257) and Law, Legislation and Liberty (book 3, page 55) Hayek talks about redistribution to ensure a minimum standard of living dependent upon the average income of the country (well beyond what Rerum novarum ever suggested) and he makes clear that he is not that that he is not that concerned if this minimum level is quite high as long as the means by which it is financed is just.