Privilege Part Two

Waitrose running out of hummus, your Uber rating taking a knock, that day's Pilates class being full are all classic first world problems.  But a quandary I wrestle with eclipses them all, namely wondering how much privilege I should seek to bestow on my child.  Admittedly this is not a question of Bill Gates telling his children they won't be inheriting his billions because he wants them to make their own way.  Although, interestingly, that has not stopped him from ensuring they have received the best possible education and a reassurance that, while they won't be billionaires, they will have a safety net that the average child could only dream of.

If you are not privileged you don't think twice about doing absolutely everything in your power to provide your child the maximum possible privilege, as much of a head start as you can muster for them.  In truth many privileged people don't think much about this either.  But the fact is that once you're fortunate enough to provide for your child's basic needs you have to make decisions about their more evolved needs.  Education is unquestionably chief among them.  The education you provide your child in your home is, universally, a matter for you as its parent whether you live in Hull or Honolulu.  Conferring privilege upon them in that regard is entirely contingent on how much time, energy and interest you take in cultivating their interests and developing them as a human being.

Some people are so financially disadvantaged that simply providing for their child's basic needs allows them no time for this domestic development.  Some people are so financially advantaged that they outsource what should be domestic development to outsiders and to institutions.  Either scenario is liable to produce a person lacking the benefit of a parent or parents who have been able or willing really to focus on that child and who that child might be.

Every single one of us is born with talents.  Some of those talents are highly marketable, a natural affinity for coding by way of example, some confer a negligible financial advantage, such as being really good at whistling.  Talent is innate but skills are learnt.  The privileged are remarkably adept at ensuring that their children become skilled in a marketable way irrespective of their talent.  Top jobs go to the privileged because the skills they require have been drummed into their occupants from a tender age.  If talent is not nurtured it will never blossom, like the seeds sown on stony ground in the parable, equally if sufficient skills are taught to the untalented they will bear a fruit of sorts like tomatoes forced in English greenhouses.

The privileged understand all of this implicitly.  It is why they spend so much money ensuring their children pass the right exams at the right schools to get into the right universities so they are at the front of the queue for the right jobs.  This is all done whether the talent is there or not.  The counterpoint to all this is that an unprivileged child may be blessed with all the necessary talent but, denied cultivation of the necessary skills, they will pass no exams, go to no university and not even know about the jobs.  Take a moment to imagine, for example, what the world would have lost if Shakespeare had never learnt how to write or Mozart how to read music.

Wanting the best for your child is not wrong.  Being able to give the best to your child is not wrong in the same way that it is not wrong to win the lottery.  However we don't need to look far to see lives ruined by huge payouts.  What you do with your privilege is what counts.  And privilege is not necessarily the same as wealth.  It has always been an odd feature of the British class system that it was possible to be privileged and yet not actually very well off.  Increasingly, however, money does now mean privilege and its lack denotes its absence.  While charity does begin at home when you concentrate privilege solely in your child you inflict a small concomitant harm on society.

The Criminal Bar is, unquestionably, a profession that requires talent but it also requires many skills.  For a majority of barristers gaining access to the Bar entailed some connection to privilege.  A huge resource of raw talent alone is unlikely to propel an aspirant through all the countless hoops that precede entry to the Inns of Court.  This is where those of us who have benefitted from privilege, thereby enjoying the privilege to practise, owe it to other people's children to provide a helping hand.

The Bar Council runs a mentoring service for students in Year 12 & Year 13.  There is no good reason not to volunteer for it.  The student I mentor is so brimful of enthusiasm and he knows that he will have to make the connections that for some of us were provided on a plate.  It costs me nothing but a small amount of time to be a resource and a guide.  The Kalisher Trust has for many years provided concrete financial help to embryonic criminal barristers but also undertakes outreach work teaching children how to construct an argument, conquering their fears of public speaking.  These are the sort of soft skills that the privately educated sometimes don't even realise were inculcated in them and therefore look askance when promising youngsters don't present with the polish of privilege.  Kalisher is always in need of funds so if you're cash rich and time poor why don't you support its work: https://www.thekalishertrust.org/donate (and yes that is me modelling a fetching pair of pink trousers).

I remember balking the first time I heard the expression 'check your privilege'.  As time has gone by I have realised that anyone who has been the beneficiary of privilege needs to undergo their own truth and reconciliation exercise.  It's not enough merely to check privilege we need to fully survey and delineate it because unless we understand how we have been advantaged it's highly unlikely we will be motivated to advantage others.  

Ultimately it goes without saying that I want the best for my child but only so that he can give the best of himself.

This is the second part of a blag that I have published on both my legal blog  Counsel of Perfection and also my parenting blog  The Paternity Test because it touches on both my professional and personal interest.

Privilege Part One

The Bar Council is running a successful social media campaign at the moment titled #IAmTheBar. Barristers from across the country are recounting the adversity they overcame, the long roads they travelled, the deterrents they fended off to be called to the Bar.  The tales make for inspiring reading and hopefully the young and not so young seeing them are persuaded that not all barristers are people like, er, me.

A procession from Eton to Oxford to the Inns of Court misses only a stint in the Guards and a safe seat to avoid giving me the institutional royal flush.  I am the Bar people expect because I am the Bar as it always was.  In fact, as the Bar Council's campaign correctly demonstrates, today barristers are a much more diverse bunch than people and the media give the profession credit for (at least on the publicly funded side).  This is thanks to a short-lived purple patch when Legal Aid was rightly widely available and rightly properly funded.  As the tide has gone out faster than the sea at Weston-super-Mare many commentators have predicted a raising of the drawbridge and a return to the privileged Bar of old.

In one important respect they are wrong.  And they are wrong because of the way in which privilege operates.  This blog is not about the funding of legal aid, I have written about it until I am blue in the face, and the Secret Barrister continues to do so to much more public and beneficial effect than I ever have.

We hear a lot from the privileged.  One of the biggest benefits of privilege is that it gives you the biggest stage.  You don't have to fight to be heard and you assume, by your privilege, that when you speak people will listen.  One topic that the privileged rarely talk about, however, is privilege.  When they do it is often, absurdly, to insist that they don't have it; like a child covered in spots claiming not have chicken pox.  You will no doubt remember the extraordinary claim that Benedict Cumberbatch had been 'held back' by his Harrow education.

I obviously can't speak for Harrovians but the thing about having been to Eton is that you just can't, with a straight face, deny your privilege.  It's like a marquess claiming to be middle class.  That isn't to say that some don't try.  If you live on privilege island you will only meet privileged people and that is a very comfortable place to live, it's surprisingly easy to pretend that there isn't the rest of the world out there.  For the moment you acknowledge your privilege you have to acknowledge the absence of privilege and that provokes some uncomfortable realisations.  Like how you got a bloody great big head start in life.  Like how maybe it wasn't just hard work and brains that got you into Oxbridge.  Like how maybe you weren't the best man (or woman) for the job: just the most advantaged.

And on the subject of women you don't get to be privileged only by going to Eton.  You just have to be a man, or white, or heterosexual, or live in Western Europe, or have a roof over your head.  Every single one of us has some privilege over the next worse off person and there are many, many worse off people.  However, because the conveyor belt of social mobility is only supposed to go in one direction, many of the privileged don't want to know about, still less care for, those less fortunate than them.  You might be in the 1% but unless you're in the 0.1% you're still a worker, still struggling, keeping it real because you only have a Range Rover not a Lear jet.

Have a think about who does the complaining when tiny incremental changes are suggested to reduce the number of trampolines given to privately educated men trying to reach the top jobs.  Quotas for women are unfair, say the men who have enjoyed a 100% quota, quite literally for centuries.  I don't know why they're complaining because they seem to have forgotten the first rule of Privilege Club which is that, like the Hotel California, you can check out any time you like but you can never leave. Privilege is not like your house keys or your passport; it's not something you can lose.  Where it is like your passport (at least until next March) is it enables you to go anywhere and do anything without the hassle of getting a visa, of obtaining permission.

I don't see privilege like an island I see it like a wall.  On the privileged side the sun is alway shining, there is always enough to eat, everybody knows everybody and absolutely nobody wants to be on the other side of the wall, many pretend there is no other side.  On the unprivileged side the weather is very changeable, sometimes there is food sometimes not, there are many strangers some of them hostile, most want very much to be on the other side of the wall and are abundantly aware of how extraordinarily difficult it is to scale.  Think The Wall in Game of Thrones and double it.

On the top of the wall there's an 'I'm Alright's Watch' keeping an eye on the masses but preserving privilege for the few.  From time to time they might dispense the occasional scholarship pour encourager les autres but like a bouncer at Studio 54, ensuring that only the right sort are let in.  Noblesse may sometimes oblige but never forget the divine ordination of the privileged child's favourite hymn: 

The rich man in his castle,

The poor man at his gate,

God made them high and lowly, 

And ordered their estate.

As a privileged person working in criminal law I ascend to the top of my side of the wall (there's a lift) and see what life is like for the unprivileged.  At the end of the day I go home and when I'm being my better self I reflect on my good fortune and wonder at how I can pass some of that privilege on.  When I'm being my worst self I worry about how I'm going to adhere to the second rule of Privilege Club, which is how I'm going to pass some of that privilege on - to my child.

And that rule is why commentators on the social mix of the Bar are mistaken.  Privilege begets privilege or it is repudiated.  It bears its unfair fruit when one generation passes on the leg up to the next generation.  If legal aid won't pay the school fees (and it won't) the privileged won't touch publicly funded work with a bargepole.  It does rather beg the question where the barristers of the future will come from if the unprivileged can't afford to get over the wall and the privileged are scared they might fall off it.

Next week in Part Two - What to do with your privilege? (hint: pass it on).

I am publishing this on both my legal blog Counsel of Perfection and also my parenting blog The Paternity Test because it touches on both my professional and personal interest.

A time to be born

No, no, no, not now, not now, now, Now, NOW! - never.  They say surfing is all about timing and in a sense so too is child bearing, with one important distinction; if you have a kid you’re in for the ride ready or not.

The modern world has a lot to answer for and I truly believe one of its biggest mixed blessings is choice.  100 types of breakfast cereal to 1,000 men on Tinder.  How can you ever be satisfied with the choice you have made when there are countless alternative options mocking your maladroit selection.  How even are you supposed to make a decision at all.

Agency is anxiety when you lack confidence and sometimes what you’re really looking for is a set of instructions.  Nowhere is agency more illusory than when it comes to starting a family.  Making an intended baby requires two very important things that we have some agency over and one essential thing over which we have none.

We need to find somebody to have a baby with and we have to decide to have a baby.  We also need luck.  I had my child at 36.  That is 6 years later than I had always insouciantly assumed from youth that I would.   As my 30s have progressed I have noted a dismaying depletion in my physical energy.  The vigor I enjoyed at 30 will almost certainly be replaced with Viagra at 40.

I sometimes wonder what it would have been like to have a child at 18 (definitely the first No).  Technically an adult but still full of the presumptuous certainty of adolescence.  I could have matched that child shot for shot on the tennis court, they would be in the midst of university, months away from flying the nest.  But what meagre nest could I have provided.  Would university even have been a possibility.

I also look at friends (men, for biology will enforce this inequality for some time to come) who have had children in their 50s and wonder how they scoop a screaming toddler from the floor when even rising from an armchair elicits a heavy sigh.

Musing on timing I suppose I am left with an equivocal thought.  If you can love your child, which ultimately is all it really needs, there will be times when no time will seem the right time but also any time can be the right time if you so choose.

Memories are Made of This

It is, all things considered, a complete mercy that nature does not allow you to remember your earliest moments in life.  I am sure it's not by chance that conscious memory seems to kick in at about the time you can make a good fist of dressing yourself, attend to your bodily functions and have a decent stab at fixing your first dry Martini.

We all know someone who claims, completely fraudulently, to remember being in the cradle or the face of the surgeon greeting them following the emergency caesarian.  More common are those that have a load of improbably precocious memories all of them triggered by baby photos.  My earliest memory is of being carried precariously on my father's shoulders as he descended the stairs in our first house.  This was also my first experience of motion sickness and the outcome was definitely not one for the family album.

It's no bad thing the regular bouts of screaming that punctuate even the happiest babyhood exist in memory limbo.  The downside is that while you will never forget your baby's gurgling joy they will never know it.  As a new parent you are marked very deeply in a wholly conscious way by your child's earliest experiences.  They by contrast soak up all those experiences like a sponge.  The outward appearance of them does not betray what they have absorbed and it is only when they are wrung out that you see what has been poured into them.

I have written before about baby milestones and how tedious all the conventional ones are of measurement, movement and utterance.  There is one milestone that no parent can ever know, still less record, and that is their child's first memory.  If I was a scientist I would devote my life's research to discovering what it is that triggers a child's ability to remember, for the first time, a particular moment in time.

Of course because we can't predict it we are forced constantly to be on our best behaviour.  You might be a model of parenting kindliness for 99 days from you child's 3rd birthday and on the 100th your exhausted patience slips and for the rest of your child's life their earliest recollection is of a sharp rebuke.

Memory is a mystery and a constant reminder of how much there is still to know about what makes us what we are.

To understand all is to forgive all - Being a better child

One of the first things you realise when you become a parent is how much you have to think about parenting. Unless you are a supremely indifferent parent, in every sense, you will worry, ruminate and dwell upon every single thing, little or large, from breathing to sleeping from schooling to breeding.

I thought very much about this recently when I saw Debra Granik’s ‘Leave No Trace’, a magnificent meditation on escaping from society.  This is not a film review but this work, about someone who can’t or won’t just settle down, is so sensitively handled.  Father and daughter live off grid in Oregon despite official interference could have been a bungled succession of clichés.  But like all the best directors Granik shows she does not tell.  And what she shows is the forest not as a forbidding place full of menace but of restoration and healing.  It is, of course, also a place to hide.

At the heart of the film is a father’s relationship with his daughter.  Neither mute nor weighed down with words theirs is a bond formed of teamwork living life as basically as the West will allow.  The father, a combat veteran, leaves one wondering not how combat prompts some to give up on other people but why it doesn’t cause everyone to do so.

The most moving part of the film comes right at the end and is what has triggered this short post.  Go to any bookshop and there are shelves of books promising skills and expertise in parenting.  The book has never been written however, so far as I am aware, about how to be a child.  Few people, if any, worry about whether they could be better at childing.

It’s true, if you are a decent human being, that you might worry about whether your parent is well or lonely. But that thing that constantly preoccupies parents, namely whether their child is being formed right is not often thought about by children.

Your parents were shaped before you were born; by good things and bad and in the same way that the world after us is unimaginable it is extremely difficult to see the forces that acted upon our parents.

Where Leave No Trace packs its greatest punch is in showing a daughter seeing her father’s wounds, acknowledging them and, with great maturity, firmly refusing to accept them as her own.  There is always a reason our parents are the way they are and if we don’t want to be the same way we must find that reason.  It is sometimes said that good parenting is about careful listening.  I would suggest that good childing is about careful watching.