The Quest for Cosmic Justice Read online

  Often members of poorer racial, ethnic, or other social groups can acquire the needed human capital more easily from more fortunate members of their own respective groups than from others. However, the ideology of envy can also make their own more successful members suspect as “traitors”—and therefore also ineligible as either role models or direct sources of advice, skills, or other human capital. What such an ideology does essentially is paint the less fortunate into their own little corner, isolated from potential sources of greater prosperity. To the more fortunate, resistance or rebuffs to their attempts to help the less fortunate may be no more than a passing annoyance but, to the less fortunate themselves, this failure to acquire available human capital can be fatal to their own prospects.

  Whole societies may remain mired in needless poverty, not only because envious visions have created a bogus explanation for their poverty that distracts them from readily available means of becoming more prosperous, but also because envy and fear of envy within these societies inhibit individual striving and innovation. Studies of many poor and primitive societies around the world repeatedly show the paralyzing effects of a pervasive fear of provoking envy among neighbors and relatives.19 Long before Marxian or other “exploitation” theories arose, primitive peoples implicitly conceived of the world as a zero-sum game, in which the good fortune of some was the cause of the ill-fortune of others, whether in economic terms or in terms of health, love, or other benefits.

  The cooperation and mutual trust necessary for many kinds of beneficial joint undertakings are more difficult to achieve within this cultural universe, however much such things may be taken for granted in more fortunate societies. Merely transferring capital or technology from these more fortunate societies is seldom sufficient to overcome the cultural handicaps of an envy-stricken society, especially when traditional beliefs are buttressed by more sophisticated modern versions of the envy vision spread by the Third World intelligentsia, often seconded by the intelligentsia in more fortunate countries.

  The Dog in the Manger

  The ultimate in envy is the dog in the manger. In one of Aesop’s fables, a horse wants to eat some straw in his manger but a dog is lying on the straw. Although the dog does not eat straw, he refuses to move so that the horse can eat it, simply because he begrudges the horse the pleasure of eating the straw. The fact that this story has survived for thousands of years suggests that such attitudes are not unknown among human beings.

  After the First World War, Romania acquired territory from the defeated Central Powers and these territories included universities that were culturally German or culturally Hungarian. At that point, roughly three-quarters of all Romanians were still illiterate, so the Germans and Hungarians at these universities were not keeping most Romanians from getting a higher education. Nevertheless, the government made it a priority to force Germans and Hungarians out of these universities. Moreover, when ethnically Hungarian students in Romania began going to universities in Hungary, the Romanian government forbad them to do so.

  Such dog-in-the-manger attitudes are not peculiar to a particular country, race, or civilization. When Nigeria acquired its independence in 1960, many of the civil servants, professionals, and entrepreneurs in northern Nigeria were from tribes in southern Nigeria. One of the top priorities of the political leaders in the north was to force these southerners out of these occupations. Because of huge disparities in education, skill levels, and entrepreneurship, between the two regions of the country, there was no realistic hope of replacing southerners with northerners in any timely fashion. But northern political leaders were prepared to hire European expatriates in the interim, or to suffer a decline in the services formerly provided by the southerners, rather than suffer the blow to their egos of being so dramatically outperformed by their fellow Africans.

  Similar attitudes existed halfway around the world in Malaysia, where discriminatory policies against the more educated, skilled, and entrepreneurial Chinese minority led many of them to leave the country. It was much the same story in the South Pacific, where the Fiji government’s discrimination against the more educated, skilled, and entrepreneurial minority from India caused many of the Indians to emigrate.

  Dog-in-the-manger attitudes are not confined to situations where there are ethnic differences. Tax policies are often shaped by a desire to “soak the rich,” whether or not such policies are beneficial to the overall economy or even to the government’s tax receipts. One of the most bitterly resented policies of the Reagan administration were tax-rate reductions referred to as “tax cuts for the rich,” even though (1) tax rates in general were cut, (2) the government’s tax receipts rose after the rates were cut and incomes rose, and (3) the upper-income brackets not only paid more total taxes than before, but even a higher percentage of all taxes. What was intolerable to critics was that “the rich” were able to pay these greater sums in taxes as a smaller percentage of their rising incomes. Estate taxes are an even clearer example of dog-in-the-manger attitudes, since they are a trivial proportion of total taxes collected by the government and it is questionable whether these taxes exceed the collection and compliance costs. But they serve the political purpose of striking a blow against inherited wealth.

  The dog in the manger was elevated to the level of academic philosophy in John Rawls’ A Theory of Justice, where policies that make society in general better off were to be rejected if they did not also make the poorest members of the society better off.20 In other words, no matter how much any given policy might make vast millions of people better off, any small fraction of people at the bottom were in effect to have a veto over that policy. Even if those at the bottom were not made any worse off, no one else could be allowed to become better off without their participation. This is a particularly striking principle where there are low unemployment rates and many avenues of upward mobility, where those who do not choose to take advantage of these opportunities are to have their interests become pre-emptive as against the interests of the great majority of people who do.

  These examples are merely particular illustrations of a more general set of attitudes which exalt envy and seldom count the cost of doing so. These costs include crimes of envy, where the purpose is neither to acquire someone else’s possessions nor to avenge any loss of one’s own, but simply to lash out against the “unfair” good fortune of another.21 Such dog-in-the-manger crimes are often considered senseless or irrational but they are logical corollaries of the quest for cosmic justice.

  Even those intellectuals who often attribute collective guilt for individual actions in other contexts—blaming American society for the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, for example—seldom apportion any part of the blame for crimes of envy to those like themselves who promote it.

  Decision-Makers

  Society as a whole can lose opportunities when people in various decision-making capacities have their decisions biased by envy. For example, a former admissions official at an Ivy League college warned prospective applicants not to say or do things that would reveal their educational or economic privileges, as that would tend to bias admissions officials against them. For example, she advised:

  The best thing you can do if you come from a privileged background is deemphasize it as best you can. For example, if you and your family took a ten-thousand-dollar vacation to Africa to go on Safari, it would probably be best not to write about it on your application.... It may rub admissions people the wrong way, since most do not have the money and resources to take such an exotic trip.22

  Since the whole reason for having admissions committees in the first place is to select those applicants best able to make use of costly educational opportunities, envy here serves to undermine that goal when the decision-makers’ biases are aroused against students who would otherwise be considered on their qualifications. Nor is this something confined to college admissions committees.

  Similar reasoning has promoted educational policies which seek to create mor
e equal outcomes for “special education” students with mental, physical, or psychological handicaps—again, with little or no regard for the financial costs of this to the taxpayers or the educational costs to other children in whose classrooms they are to be “mainstreamed,” often with little regard to the disruptive effects of their special needs. These financial costs can be several times what it costs to educate the average student, while the educational results for a severely mentally retarded student may be imperceptible. The educational cost can also include a substantial part of a teacher’s time being devoted to one or a few students, to the neglect of the majority. Yet, clearly, it is an injustice, from a cosmic perspective, that the minds and psyches of some are unable to cope with what ordinary students handle routinely. But just as some students suffer handicaps through no fault of their own, so can other children suffer from mainstreaming policies, likewise through no fault of their own.

  It is also cosmically unjust that some students are born innately so unusually bright and/or have had such unusually favorable environments that they are capable of far higher levels of intellectual achievement than other children their age. One such student was able, in the fourth grade, to score higher than the average high school graduate on the mathematics portion of the Scholastic Aptitude Test. Yet the suggestion that he be given higher levels of mathematics to study than his classmates was rejected by the school principal, and this youngster was assigned the same fourth-grade mathematics as others, on grounds that it would be “a violation of social justice” if he were given higher levels of mathematics instruction.23

  Nor was this principal unique. A member of a national commission on teaching mathematics opposed teaching computational skills because that means “anointing the few” who master these skills readily and “casting out the many” who do not, and urged that we throw off “the discriminatory shackles of computational algorithms.”24 More broadly, ability-grouping in different classes or in different schools is bitterly opposed by most public school officials on similar grounds. In short, both the mentally gifted and the mentally retarded are to be “mainstreamed” as part of the quest for cosmic justice—with little or no regard to the costs of this for the students, the taxpayers, or the society into which they are to go as adults.

  Disregard of effects on third parties are also common on such issues as taxes, price controls, and law enforcement. Tax issues are not simply about whether one class pays more than another, but are also about the repercussions of particular kinds of taxes on economic development and national employment, which affect everyone. Price controls on food have often led to widespread hunger and malnutrition, as suppliers reduced their production and sales of food when this became unprofitable. Undermining law enforcement because of its perceived unfairness to the poor led to skyrocketing crime rates which hurt the poor worst of all.

  Envy may cause many issues to be seen in terms transferring benefits from A to B. But policies conceived of this way as transfers do not simply transfer. They change behavior in general and in fundamental ways. For example, price controls almost invariably lead to declines in the quantity and quality of what is supplied, to hoarding, and to black markets—whether the price that is being controlled is that of food, housing, gasoline, medical service, or other goods and services.

  The point here is not simply that particular laws and policies have been counterproductive. The more fundamental point is that the whole invidious conception of policy-making spawned by envy is often deadly in its general effects on the society as a whole.

  Authority and Differentiation

  One of the most thoughtless and dangerous consequences of pursuing the mirage of equality and its accompanying envy has been a pervasive reaction against all forms of authority or even social differentiation. By authority is meant here the ability to get others to do things without either forcing them or convincing them. The classic example would be a physician who gives a patient a prescription to take, based on chemical, biological, and medical principles with which the patient is wholly unfamiliar. The patient simply relies on the physician’s authority. Much of what children do is likewise based on their parents’ authority. They learn the alphabet because their parents want them to, not because the children themselves understand the enormous ramifications of learning those particular 26 symbols in an arbitrarily specified order.

  The mere sorting of people by such common titles as “mister” and “miss,” and the differentiation of people by having adults address children one way and children address adults another, are all repugnant to many who pursue the mirage of equality. The practice of putting everyone—friends and strangers, young and old—on a first-name basis is one of the symptoms of this mindset. Much more serious are the systematic undermining of parental authority which can be found in public school textbooks and other materials which depict all sorts of moral and intellectual issues as things which each person must decide for himself or herself, not according to what has been taught by parents or by an always suspect “society.”

  It would be hard to imagine a more reckless gamble than encouraging youngsters with less than a decade of experience in the most elementary aspects of life to substitute that narrowly circumscribed experience, and their own undeveloped reasoning processes, for principles distilled from the experiences of millions of adults over generations of time. The child’s own personal safety is often at stake in his willingness to respond to the imperative tone of a parent, in situations where there is no time to explain—or where the child does not yet have a sufficient background of experience to understand an explanation.

  The verbal differentiation which reminds everyone of his own role—calling people “mother” and “father,” instead of by their first names—or differentiation in dress, manner, or otherwise are all methods of establishing a social hierarchy that serves social purposes. But those to whom equality is an over-riding moral imperative see in all this only personal privilege and oppression. Yet authority may serve those who do not have it more than it does those who do. The parent who understands the underlying reasons for the things told to a child is benefitted less by authority than the child who does not understand those realities—and who needs to observe the cautions and apply the rules nevertheless. The specialized knowledge of the scientist, the physician, or the military commander is likewise used primarily to guide the actions of others who lack that knowledge and who would be much worse off to operate in ignorance. Authority is one of the ways of using the knowledge of some for the benefit of others.

  Like everything human, authority is imperfect and subject to abuse, so it cannot be unlimited—and it is not. But to invoke the blanket slogan “Question Authority” is to raise the question: By what authority do you tell us to question authority? For authority to exist, there must have been some process by which particular people came to be regarded as more reliable guides than others. But there is no comparable process by which others come to be qualified to proclaim the dogma “Question Authority.” Why should our skepticism be focussed on those who have already been through some testing and weeding-out process, and our trust be given to those who have not?

  Authority is only one form of social differentiation. Even among people on the same social plane, various forms of address indicate differing levels of familiarity or intimacy, or differing levels of levity or seriousness as of a given moment. All of these things imply that social context matters, which is to say, that we cannot interact atomistically and ad hoc, without great costs and even dangers. Thus the same person may be “Mr. Smith,” “Harry,” “Daddy,” “Lieutenant Smith,” “Lefty,” or “honey” in different contexts. Reminders of where we stand in relationship to different people are nothing more than admissions that we cannot play everything in life by ear without risking getting very badly out of harmony with others. All are made worse off without these verbal aids, and those most vulnerable are put at the greatest risk when the mirage of equality banishes such differentiation.

  One
of the most important social differentiations has now become passé and disdained—the distinction between the respectable poor and the disreputable poor. At one time, those who were poor could nevertheless take pride in their independence and self-sufficiency, even though they were at an economic and social level below that of the middle class. The respectable poor had the norms of society at large on their side, and the bad example of the disreputable poor as warnings to be used when they raised their children to be respectable people. Indeed, the children of the disreputable poor knew that their respectable neighbors were more highly regarded, thus providing incentives for some of these children to try to rise out of their position at the bottom of the social scale.

  The welfare state, however, has made many of the respectable, self-supporting poor look like chumps, as the government has lavished innumerable programs on those who violate all rules and refuse to take responsibility for themselves. Now the incentives are reversed, tempting some of the respectable poor to take advantage of benefits available to those who are able to live without work, without saving for the future, and without even having to pay for a roof over their heads.

  The Insatiability of Envy

  Envy is insatiable in at least two different senses:

  No conceivable redistribution of income, wealth, or other benefits will satisfy everyone, so there is no logical or political stopping-point in the process. Therefore the question is not which particular distribution is better or best, but whether the benefits of setting in motion a never-ending quest offers more potential for good or ill.