 Myllwch yn cael ei ddweud i'r gdyfyddaethau rhoi i'ch dweud fy modol ffwrdd â'i ffordd i yw'r hant i yw gydlu i'ch g weld i'r Rhysgwyr Cymru, ac mae'r gwirionedd yn cael ei beth, ond yn y lleidwyd, dwi nhw'n quennau mewn gwirionedd. A rhoi oedd y gyddefnyddio'n cerddau yma o'r chwaraeon gysylltiadau'r hwnnw i'n cerddau'n hoffa ar y mynd. I'm going to talk about equality of opportunity. A characteristic of contemporary political thought and speech is the triumph of connotation over denotation. That is to say the feelings or emotions aroused by words have become more important to even much more important than any meaning by which they are tethered to the real world outside our minds or by their most obvious corollaries. It's beyond my scope today to suggest the reason why this should be so, but I think it will be readily granted that if I am right it is a development that cannot but hamper clear thought. Of course I recognise that this imprecision of language is a recurring problem in human history. It was millennia after all ago that Confucius suggested that the first necessary reform in an unhealthy polity was to call things by their proper names. Let's take the word equality. I do not think that many people in public life would dare to say that they were against equality, bearing in mind of course that most people would accept in its most formal and juridical sense, that they wouldn't dare to say that that is the only sense in which they prove it. This must mean that the word equality now has a connotation so strong that it is dangerous to dissociate yourself from it or disavow it as a go. A person who is in favour of equality is a good chap, a democrat, one of us, a friend of the people, whereas someone who is against it or not in favour of it is the opposite, a bad chap, an elitist, one of them, even an enemy of the people. But it is easy to demonstrate that equality cannot itself be desirable. For if equality were desirable in itself it would not matter whether it were produced by a betterment or a worsening of conditions. Since I am a doctor I will give you a medical example. Medical journals these days are obsessed by inequality, literally obsessed. It is an undoubted fact that within all societies rich people are much healthier than poor. Most of the medical journals argue almost ad nauseam for a closure of the health gap between the richest and the poorest people. In Britain, as in other countries, the richest decile of the population has an infant mortality, half that of the poorest decile. That is to say its infant mortality rate, the number of children per thousand live births who die in the first year of their lives, is three instead of six. When my father was born in London, in his borough, the infant mortality rate was 124. Let us suppose it were possible to reduce the infant mortality rate in both desiles by one, such that the infant mortality rates were now two and five respectively. This would represent an increase in inequality, a widening of the ratio of infant mortality in the two desiles from two to two point five. But it would surely be a very odd person who said that such a diminution in infant deaths was therefore undesirable because it increased social inequality. I think it would be a very odd person who would suggest that it would be desirable in the name of equality to bring up the infant mortality rate in the richest decile. But an improvement all round is actually presented as a deterioration, at least from the point of view of social justice. Now, I'm all in favour of pessimism, but let it at least be rational pessimism. Now, it might be argued that egalitarians no longer look so much at outcomes as at beginnings, in other words, not equality of outcome, but equality of opportunity within societies, if not between them. What modern politician would dare to say in public that he was opposed to equality of opportunity, or that he believed that the very idea was pernicious and actually harmful in its effects? In addition to all the difficulties that equality of outcomes of disorder atom has, a society of no opportunity would after all be a society of equality of opportunity. This opposed disorder atom has other difficulties of its own. It's a commonplace that people vary in their natural endowments, and it's just as well that this is so, because if everyone were Mozart, no one would be Mozart. Not only do people vary at birth in their genetic endowments, but they vary in their family, social and cultural backgrounds, and there is little doubt that some such backgrounds are more propitious for accomplishment and worldly success than others. I would hesitate to mention anything so obvious, but it is something that those who believe in equality of opportunity wish to shut their eyes to. If one was serious about equality of opportunity, one would be a totalitarian so far ago, as to make North Korea seem like a libertarian paradise. Only clones could be born and no parent could have any influence on the upbringing of his or her child for fear of introducing inequality of opportunity. Every child would receive exactly the same treatment, preferably from machines. A society of equality of opportunity would be one in which no parent could express in words or in action a preference for his own child, or procure advantages for him or her in case it should prejudice the chances of another child. I leave it to you to decide whether a society in which parents held no particular brief for their own children as against all the other children in their society, or perhaps even in the world, would be an attractive one. All of us Huxley's brave new world would be a starting and not an end point. It is clear then that equality of opportunity is very nearly the antithesis of opportunity, for opportunity implies the incalculable among other things, but for all practical purposes at least for the moment equality of opportunity is an impossible and even an inconceivable goal. But just because it is impossible and inconceivable does not mean that the idea is without its practical effects. Here let me say that almost any idea is unattainable because men are not perfect or perfectible and because all ideals are incomplete, human desiderata being various and contradictory. If I say that I value politeness, for example, I am not claiming that on each and every occasion in my life I am myself polite. Moreover, a world in which every human interaction were polite one would be a very insipid world. Nevertheless, it remains true that I do value politeness. But worthy or unattainable ideals that are real are calls to self-control and self-cultivation. If I truly value freedom of thought, for example, I must learn to tolerate the expression of thoughts that I detest or despise. This is an achievement rather than something that can be taken as natural. Indeed, the opposite would be far more natural. Let us examine briefly the psychological consequences of equality of opportunity as an ideal. A friend of mine, a Russian who emigrated first to the United States and then moved to England, told me that in the parties in the United States he would always introduce himself by name and then say, I hate my parents, don't you? And he said that he never met anybody who said no. Actually, I honour my mother and my father. At the least, this little experiment showed that resentment is a very common and easily aroused emotion. The status of victim is one that is now almost universally claimed, and a man who claims to have gone through life like a hot knife through butter is not highly regarded or widely admired. In fact, resentment is one of the very few emotions that will never let you down or can disappoint. Really, the only one that I can think of is righteous indignation. But righteous indignation can be quite long-lasting. It's seldom lifelong and has to find new objects to be indignant about. Resentment, unlike righteous indignation, does not need to change its focus and can be fixated early and can last, and often does last, until the deathbed. Now, the connection between equality of opportunity and resentment is obvious. There are very few of us who could or would claim that his upbringing or experience in life was so optimal that he had nothing to envy anyone else in the world for. Surely, everyone knows someone else who, in one respect or other, had opportunities that he did not have, and this threw no fault of his own. In other words, we all have grounds for resentment. There is always someone more fortunate than we. As I said, resentment can, and indeed often does, last a lifetime, and this is because it has certain sour satisfactions. Among these is the satisfaction of being morally superior to the world, while remaining, objectively speaking, in a grossly subordinate, inferior or undesirable position. Resentment satisfactorily explains all one's own failures and failings. I would have been a success in some respect or other if only I had the same opportunities as someone else, and here you need only to fill in the name or the person who was more fortunately placed than you to succeed in arousing your own zen. Well, resentment is, of course, a universal human emotion. It's a permanent possibility for all of us, and it takes an effort to control it. Is there anyone in this audience who has never felt resentment? Can you put up your hand? I resent that. Well, you're very rare. I think I would say that the person to whom resentment is unknown is almost as rare as the person who has never felt pain. People who don't feel pain don't live very long incidentally. Unfortunately, resentful, though very near universal, at least potentially so, is not only a useless but a harmful emotion, for it encourages him who feels it to dwell not on what he can do, that is to say, on his opportunities, but on what he cannot do, that is to say, his lack of opportunities. From the moment of one's birth, there are many things that one is destined not to become. How easy, and I should say how pleasurable it is to blame others for this fact, while vegetating in a super-ministrone of self-pity. When I used to propose to my patients some, what seemed to me fairly simple and practical solution to their problem, which might be an existential one, they would say, quick as a flash, it's all right for you to speak, you've got a good job. And if I asked how did I get a good job, without so much as a moment's reflection, they didn't have to think about it, they said, you're born in the right place. So first one is born with a silver spoon in one's mouth and 24 years later, more or less, one starts practicing medicine. And of course the idea of opportunity encourages people, and the lack of equality, the obvious lack of equality of opportunity encourages people to suppose that anyone who is doing well has done well, must ex officio, as it were, have been in receipt of greater and therefore illicit privileges. And secondly, that anyone who does not receive these privileges is destined to a hopeless situation. And here I'm not talking about logic really, I'm talking about psychology of it. Here let me read a famous letter by the writer Anton Chekhov, who, as it happens, was a doctor, who was in age 25, and this is a letter to his publisher, Air Suvorum, Writer's story about a young man, the son of a self, a former shopminder, porrester, schoolboy, student, who was brought up to fawn upon rank, to kiss priests' hands and to worship others' thoughts, thankful for every morsel of bread, often whipped, going to his lessons without galoshes, who fought tortured animals and loved dining out with rich relations, played the hypocrites before God and man through no necessity but from a sheer awareness of his own insignificance. Write how this young man squeezes the slave out of him drop by drop, and then wakes up one fine morning to discover that in his veins flows not the blood of a slave but of a real human being. Well such a realisation may of course never happen, and indeed often never does happen, because responsibility for one's own faith is not an easy path to trade. And in this letter, Chekhov, who actually led the life he describes as a child, gives many potential rationalisations for a life of indolence, despair, resource to drink etc, which was the life that two of his brothers actually did lead. I hope it will be clear therefore why a fixation on equality of opportunity, at least in situations where there are no formal legal obstacles to people's self advancement or redevelopment, is disastrous. And why, if it becomes sufficiently general, it is bad for the whole of society too and not just for individuals. But you might ask if equality of opportunity is an intellectually frivolous idea, as I believe it to be, or ideal, one that is impossible of achievement and yet which has a potential disastrous effect upon many people's psyche. And through that effect on the psyche, if you like, of the whole of society itself, why has it become an almost unassailable goal that no politician in the western world would dare deny? After all, the objections to it are not so very difficult to see or work out, I mean I can see them. Indeed one might say that they are rather obvious. The answer I think is to be found in the use to which such an idea or ideal can be put. I'm not suggesting that there is any central plot or conspiracy, although of course I'd like to. Only that there is a coincidence of interests and that it is a universal characteristic or at least a potential characteristic that people are able by means of rationalisations to align their ideas and their ideals on the one hand with their personal interests on the other. And I'm not here making a Marxist epistemological point. I'm not saying that logically it must be so, only that as a matter of psychological and sociological fact, it often is so and it is in my belief so in this case. Let us try for a moment a little thought experiment. Let us suppose that one wanted for whatever reason to erect or create a society in which a bureaucratic government arrogated itself ever more power to regulate and control a population. But to do so without the more obvious accoutrements of tyranny. Indeed to do so with the consent and even at the request of the population itself. The espousal of what kind of ideal would be propitious to the erection or creation of such a society. I trust it would be obvious by now that equality of opportunity is precisely such an ideal. The very impossibility of it. The very fact that it is a mirage that recedes as one tries to approach it as it shimmers in the distance is an advantage, not a disadvantage. For the failure to attain the goal justifies ever greater and more vigorous attempts to reach it. Moreover it is clear that the nature of the goal itself justifies interference in the lives of the citizens down to the very last detail. For there is literally nothing that anyone can do in the bosom of his own family or indeed in other places that does not affect the life chances of children or of people's other children all around him. And the greater the failure of each successive politico bureaucratic interference, the greater the locus standby for yet further interference. This is a world in which nothing succeeds like failure. The beauty of the system is that with each failure resentment in the population grows or is at least maintained. As we have seen the resentful person sees himself not as an agent but as a passive victim of circumstance. And a victim of circumstance demands that the circumstance should be changed. He cannot do this himself. He has to demand that someone else does it for him. And since that someone else can hardly be individual for all individuals who want to change the circumstances are in the same boat as he, a powerful organisation must do it for him. That organisation of course can only be a powerful political bureaucracy that supposedly acts in the defence of the interests of the humble and humiliated. Well I don't know what such bureaucracies do in other countries but I know in mind the humble and humiliated and the humble who nevertheless because of their resentment at the absence of equality of opportunity continue to look to it for their salvation. It hasn't gone far enough. They look to their oppressors for relief of their own oppression. And so we spend billions, nowadays I suppose we need to say trillions if we want to be taken seriously on that salvation. But that salvation never comes. It is in a way a rather beautiful scheme as near to a perpetual motion machine as anyone has yet invented. The laws of thermodynamics it seems do not apply in politics. It might be asked what if anything can be done about this or indeed if anything should be done about it. After all it seems that the dominated and those who dominate them share the same interests that is to say to keep the whole machine in motion. But there are two problems. First the perpetual motion machine is not really perpetual at least in the economic sphere that might be in the psychological one. And secondly their resentment as I said has its satisfaction. A resentful existence is not really a happy one and indeed is one that is liable to outbreaks of irrational rage and brutality. Well that perhaps disposes of the question of whether anything ought to be done but it does not answer the question of whether anything can be done. Nothing can be necessary that is not possible and if as I say resentment springs eternal in the human breast can it be expunged. Well there is no final victory against it any more than there is an end to history. The cardinal vices among which envy which is not a million miles from resentment is one are cardinal not only because they are important but because they are permanent features or temptations of human existence. No one believes for example at least I take it and no one believes that the folly of speculative greed now having been exposed it will never happen again. And if you can believe that you could believe anything. Well if I'm right and it is mine forged manacles that encumber a lot of mankind and imprison them particularly in our societies though we designate ourselves as free then argument and changing minds and changing conceptions is very important. We should not insofar as it is in our power allow our political and cultural elites to peddle unchallenged the idea of equality of opportunity as if it were in the same category as mother love something that is beautiful and warm and reassuring and nothing that no decent or perhaps even sane person could very well oppose and that by definition can have no harmful consequences. Well this work will be long and arduous any victory will soon be followed by defeat just as in current circumstances any attempt to reduce government deficits will soon be followed by equal and opposite attempts to increase them. But that is life human life ladies and gentlemen two steps forward one step back or is it the other way round. Thank you very much.