Exclusion series: When exclusion is acceptable

Is excluding other people ever acceptable? It is, in fact. There are plenty of circumstances where no one bats an eye at being excluded, where no one feels aggrieved.

Have you ever been to a concert and felt aggrieved that you had to sit in the audience while the musicians had the privilege of being on stage, receiving adulation and getting paid for their work? Have you ever been to a football or baseball game and felt it was deeply unfair that you were a spectator and had not been allowed to play on the field? Did you feel it was unfair that they were getting paid millions every year to play while you had to pay to get in? I’m going to guess that the answer to the above questions, for most people, is “no.”

On the other hand, have you ever been excluded without understanding why? Perhaps you didn’t get invited to a party, were rejected by a college, or failed to make the short-list for a job.

More pernicious, have you ever been excluded for reasons that seemed irrational and unjust? It might have been on the basis of skin color, gender, beliefs or any number of other seemingly arbitrary characteristics that help humanity divide itself into tribes, leading to a good deal of enmity and grievance. For those who espouse a liberal social order, at least, this is screaming social injustice and a completely unacceptable form of exclusion.

The many forms of exclusion

Obviously, exclusion comes in many forms. I will posit that “acceptable exclusion” occurs when those excluded basically accept the premise – that the rationale is clear, fair and the determination is arrived at transparently. Its opposite, unacceptable exclusion fails to meet those standards, and is generally referred to as social exclusion.

We recognize and value the exclusiveness around sports and musical achievements, the basis of which is, generally speaking, meritocracy.  We don’t want our sports teams to be recruited on the basis of, say, skin color, or socio-economic background. We want selection of team members to be based on skill. Sports are also segregated by gender, and this is generally accepted as well. Genetic differences in strength between men and women create what would be an unfair playing field if they were to compete against each other.

There are many forms of broadly acceptable exclusion. They relate to various criteria, as the following selection of examples suggests:

• skill — while sports and music are the most obvious areas where exclusion is based on exclusivity, so are many jobs, since applicants must meet certain qualifications. With jobs, however, there is a lot more subjectivity around what is fair;
• affordability — if you aren’t talented enough to perform, you can still attend a sports event or concert, but most of the time attendance is also exclusive, to the extent that people have to pay to watch;
• dress — fancy restaurants with dress codes aim to maintain a sense of decorum and exclusivity, but even your average fast food chain requires customers to wear a shirt and shoes;
• age — adults are not allowed to attend elementary school;
• privacy — we lock our houses to keep strangers out;
• eligibility based on means — the poor who qualify for assistance.

Exclusion and social norms

Social norms determine what is acceptable and what isn’t. They are context specific. Differing social norms means that some form of exclusion are widely acceptable (as per the above examples), while other forms are not.

Social norms change over time, of course.  Up until the 1960s, in much of the United States it was deemed acceptable, by parts of the white citizenry, to exclude blacks from equal treatment, and they were excluded from schools, restaurants, swimming pools, water fountains, bathrooms, clubs, sports teams, and more.

Nowadays, in the U.S. and in many liberally-oriented countries, it is not only unacceptable but illegal to be excluded on the basis of race, religion, gender, sexual orientation, etc. Preventing gay people from having the same right to marry as heterosexuals was yet another form of exclusion. In 1988, only 12 percent of Americans supported same-sex marriage; three decades later over two thirds did, in the wake of its legalization.

This is not, however, a happy story about how society at home or around the world is becoming ever more inclusive. Here’s an extreme example of how exclusion affects people. Recently, a young Iranian woman, Sahar Khodayari, self-immolated after being sentenced to 24 years in prison for illegally attending a football match. She tried to sneak in to see her favorite team, Esteghlal, play, dressed as a man. The police discovered her true identity. Rather than go to jail, she protested her sentence by lighting herself on fire in front of the courthouse, bringing worldwide attention, and condemnation, to Iran’s policy of only allowing males to attend football (American soccer) games.

Economic exclusion

What about economic exclusion, sometimes known as poverty? Is it acceptable to be deprived of basic needs to live a dignified life? Is it fair? Here what is acceptable becomes tricky and less clear. 

One can argue that in our capitalist society, it is acceptable insofar as ability to pay for something is the price of access. If you can’t afford a nice house, a car, or nice clothing, that’s seen as an individual thing. But when large segments of society are not able to enjoy even basic services or standard conveniences of modern life, things become complicated. In industrial societies today, many young people struggle to afford decent housing or education. Many low-income households struggle to eat nutritional food, even if they are not deprived of calories. In general lacking access to the basics of life makes a lot of other things harder — like buying a suit to go to attend a job interview.

Exclusion and the state

In response to social pressure, governments often try to increase access to services — water, electricity, markets (via roads), or social payments. People who deem they have been unfairly denied certain basic needs will take to the streets. The Arab Spring is exhibit “A”. More recently, France was disrupted by the gilets jaunes (“yellow vests), the French movement that erupted in October 2018 in response to planned fuel tax hikes, and morphed into protests for economic justice. A lot of people felt that the system was rigged against them, that they were being kept out.

In the U.S., economic exclusion has become an ideological issue. To grossly oversimplify, among conservatives, it has historically been considered an individual matter. If you couldn’t climb up the economic ladder, pull yourself up by your bootstraps, that was your fault. You weren’t working hard enough.

Liberals mostly consider the system to be at fault. It isn’t fair that you were born into poverty or suffered misfortune — such as catastrophic medical bills — and your station in life is not (just) about how hard you studied or worked. The massive effort and money middle class parents spend on ensuring their children get the best possible education and acquire the skills is testament to the costs involved in succeeding in today’s society.

The more that economic exclusion comes to be seen as unacceptable, the more pressure governments will be under to expand access to those at the bottom. That requires lifting the barriers to the on-ramps, and letting more and more people onto the highway to prosperity.

However, since such investments require careful planning and huge investments in infrastructure and human capital, we can expect many politicians to avoid the issue. Instead, they will focus on the cheaper and easier option of fomenting popular support by harping on threats to identity and cultural issues, the usual populist and nationalist tactics. Populism and nationalism work, in the short-term at least, because they foster a powerful sense of inclusion, often achieved by excluding and denigrating others.

Conservatism and exclusion

To answer the question I started with, yes, exclusion is socially acceptable when it is based on a clear rationale and transparency. But that may just be the liberal perspective. In many countries, social norms among conservatives relating to exclusion are increasingly discriminatory.

Thus, for the voters who put leaders in power — such as the U.S.’s Donald Trump, Brazil’s Jaime Bolsonaro, Hungary’s Viktor Orban, the UK’s Boris Johnson (elected by Tory party members, anyway), Israel’s Netanyahu — exclusion based on identity is now perfectly acceptable.  After all, among the party loyal, trashing the “other” creates a wonderful sense of belonging. Even better, to create a sense of happy security, is the putting up of walls and gates, or pulling up the drawbridge, à la Brexit.

What, if anything, can dilute this growing penchant for exclusion? Can broad-based economic growth contribute to leveling the playing field? Do we need new laws or policies? The fact that most economists are expecting a global recession to kick in in the not-too-distant future should be worrying.

If, in times of relative prosperity demonizing the other works so well, just wait until national economies hit the skids. That’s when we may see the cracks in society turn into unbridgeable cleavages.