The difference being...

Some objectors have suggested, for instance, that the TC be kept and other religious symbols be given to different individuals, all representing the highest national award. But such a position places the notion of community above that of citizenship. This is, by extension, a rejection of the notion of democracy itself. In his book, Justice as Fairness, the late political philosopher John Rawls wrote: “It is a serious error not to distinguish between the idea of a democratic political society and the idea of community. Of course, a democratic society is hospitable to many communities within, and indeed tries to be a social world within which diversity can flourish in amity and concord; but it is not a community, nor can it be in view of the fact of reasonable pluralism.”

Rawls is best known for his concept of the “veil of ignorance.” Suppose you are about to be born into the world. But you do not know what your natural endowments (strength, health, intelligence) will be; nor your sex, race, ethnicity, or class. What kind of society would you want to be born in? Not, I bet, Trinidad and Tobago as it is now constituted.

Rawls argued that “given the fact of reasonable pluralism, a well-ordered society in which all its members accept the same comprehensive doctrine is impossible.” A comprehensive doctrine is one that applies to all subjects and covers all values. All religions are comprehensive doctrines, as are political ideologies such as Communism and Afrocentrism. Rawls’s argument demonstrates why theocracies and totalitarian systems can never create and, (never mind what the true believers and the Cuba cheerleaders say,) have never created societies which are free, fair, prosperous, and content. Since a plural society will always have groups with different absolute ideas about how society should be organized, there will always be conflict when any group tries to impose its beliefs on others.

Rawls held that society must be organized by the guiding idea of "a fair system of cooperation between free and equal persons". This does not mean that a well-ordered society requires people to have equal status in terms other than citizenship. Such a system, even if desirable, is not possible. Any society complex enough to have politics will inevitably have hierarchies. Rawls suggested that, in a well-ordered society, social and economic inequalities had to satisfy two conditions: (1) they had to be attached to offices and positions open to all under conditions of fair equality of opportunity; and (2) they had to be to the greatest benefit of the least-advantaged members of society. A good example of this is the free market: a system which guarantees economic inequality, but which has also proven the best device for reducing poverty.

Indeed, a perfect meritocracy will inevitably create inequality, since under a system of equal opportunity the different abilities of individuals will ensure that some people achieve higher status than others. And history, which tells us what is workable and what is not in human societies, suggests that meritocracy, even when it creates inequality, is the best way of achieving order. There are, however, individuals on both sides of the racial divide who think that a fair social order has to be created by favouring those groups, such as Afro-Trini youths or Indo-Trini civil servants, who are supposedly disadvantaged by bias. But that way lies havoc.

The American economist and historian Thomas Sowell has examined five countries which adopted affirmative action policies. In the United States, Malaysia, Nigeria, India, and Sri Lanka, he found the same pattern. “Preferences and quotas are not merely zero-sum games," he writes in Affirmative Action Around the World. “There are costs to society as a whole, borne to some extent by all the various groups in it.

These include whatever losses of efficiency may follow from putting less qualified people in particular jobs or admitting them to universities for which they do not qualify and from which they are unlikely to graduate. More serious costs include increased intergroup hostility, as well as the violence and deaths to which this often leads.” Sowell also discovered that disparities in income and wealth between different ethnic groups did not create greater strife. "Among the countries studied here, all the evidence points in the opposite direction.”

So the removal of the TC can be a step towards a true meritocracy. But the gains can easily be reversed if the authorities buy into education quotas, ethnic criteria for institutions, preferential housing, make-work schemes, and other bogus ways of reducing inequity in the society.

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