>Me, I'm a thoroughgoing elitist and inegalitarian. I
>don't think that cornering a market in skill, etc.
>should give anyone the right to monopolize all the
>good things in life, much less to pass it on to one's
>undeserving children. But I think that accomplishment
>deserves honor, contribution deserves material reward,
>inequality can be based on desert as well as need, and
>lots of other bourgeois ideology. But I never said i
>wasn't a bourgeois liberal.
>
If you're great at something: dance, math, writing, skipping rope,
drawing....that IS your reward.
As for honor: you will be honored by those who are able to really appreciate what you do: other dancers, artists, writers, etc. You will have the respect of people you respect.
So, you have a skill/talent/gift and you have the respect of people whose respect matters. Why do you need anything on top of that? That's a serious question.
It seems to me that the way this "reward/honor" thing plays out in class society is that by rewarding/honoring a very, very few people who actually deserve it (at the end of their lives usually when it is actually no help at all), you are implying that all the people at the top actually deserve to be there because of some special merit or skill. A sort of virtue by association. George Bush gets to give Ella Fitzgerald a presidential medal...and that makes both of them look deserving.
But it's just crap. Did Mozart need an award? You think you need something more than the capacity to compose Marriage of Figaro? What he really needed was simply the means to live to work his miracles, that's all. And he didn't even get that.
>Still, I think this is the issue Joanna is raising,
>have I got you right?
>
Absolutely.
Joanna