Despite being a “children’s book” (just refer back to one of
my many rants against anti-YA snobbery), The Wind Singer (by William Nicholson, part 1 of the Wind on Fire series) also paints a really
interesting political picture when viewed with a bit more life experience and
understanding.
The city of Aramanth is basically built upon the principles of
strivers vs. skivers, as propagated by our very own government. Their daily creed is: "I vow to strive harder, to reach higher, and in every way to seek to make tomorrow better than today."
The whole society rests on the myth of pulling yourself up by your bootstraps, of hard work and fair chances for everyone, with plenty of testing for the wrong thing and a healthy dose of class segregation.
It’s eerily similar to the world outside my window, and as
the book wonderfully demonstrates, is not a system which can work for any
length of time. Even the people who believe in the punishing structure of their
lives do not benefit from it – there is a horrifying lack of kindness in the
city, with a tendency to tell tales on your neighbours that borders on
Orwellian.
It also portrays quite nicely how difficult this kind of
policy is to shift – the basic principles are not something you can clearly
argue against, and the importance of order and this notion of deservedness is
one which embeds very deeply within people’s minds.
Unfortunately, we don’t have a wind singer to save us. The
discrimination isn’t quite as easy to spot – we don’t have colour-coded
districts and uniforms, nor an explicit whole-family ratings system. But we do
have very clear classifications of people – those who wear designer labels and
those who do not, business suits, hair dye and style, accent and leisure activities,
even food. Some people live in desirable (read: rich) neighbourhoods, and others
are in rough parts of town, just as they do in this book.
(Image: Channel 4)
We’re not as far away from Nicholson’s imagined world as we
could be, and that’s certainly scary. You can mask mistreatment of those less
lucky in life with tabloid sound-bites and the impression of strong morals.
There’s
nothing inherently wrong with the idea that people must work hard to maintain a
fair society – which is why certain political parties get away with it so
easily – but implementing this ideal on very strict lines, from a perspective
of power that has never known anything but privilege and prosperity, is
intensely problematic.
It means people with less, get less. It means no help for
anyone who needs it, just blame and division and guilt over being thought of as
a burden. Everyone needs to be carried sometimes, in some way, and I want to
live in a state that allows and even encourages that.
For some people, tomorrow will never be better than today.
That’s not because they are weak, or stupid or lazy. It’s because they were
born into a class system which pretends it doesn’t exist, and they ended up on
the bottom tier. Or it’s because circumstance has so much more influence on our
lives than positive thinking and hard graft can ever have. Sometimes it’s because
success by one person’s standards is not one-size-fits-all, and a different
version of “better” simply doesn’t count. And it’s definitely because we are a
social species who evolved to help each other out – when we don’t, is it any
wonder some of us don’t make it?
The whole idea of exams and status as the best way to separate
the sheep from the goats (whoever said they needed separating anyway?) is also
based on the notion that is it only things which can be measured in numbers and
frequencies and pounds to the economy that have real value. I reject this
completely. A society where people are kind, polite, supportive and free is so
much better than one where the Government can quotes reams of statistics to
prove their impact.
Both in the fictional Aramanth, and modern day Britain, I can
see why a system that only focuses on achieving is in place. It’s easy. Testing
and then dividing people up is a far clearer way of organising society. When
everyone has an “equal chance”, you can move quite swiftly to “we’re all in
this together” and many people will agree with you.
Viewing the world in black and white, deserving versus
non-deserving, is simple to understand and simple to enact. It takes a wider
worldview, one which accepts that society should be inclusive and not
exclusive, to promote a truly fair blueprint for how we should live.
In The Wind Singer, the people of Aramanth grow this way
after an evil named the Morah inhabits them. Out in real life we can’t point to
some external force, there’s only us: people who do good things and bad things.
What we choose to spend our energy doing, and what we choose to accept from our
leaders, is what makes the difference.
