by Daniel Bell
Imagine a hundred yard dash in which one of the two runners has his legs shackled together. He has progressed 10 yards, while the unshackled runner has gone 50 yards. At that point the judges decide that the race is unfair. How do they rectify the situation? Do they merely remove the shackles and allow the race to proceed? Then they could say that “equal opportunity” now prevailed. But one of the runners would still be forty yards ahead of the other. Would it not be the better part of justice to allow the previously shackled runner to make up the forty yard gap; or to start the race all over again? That would be affirmative action towards equality.70
The change in attitude, however, began with the realization that schooling had little effect in raising the achievement or reducing the disparate standing of black children relative to white. In 1966, Professor James Coleman of Johns Hopkins University, carrying out a mandate of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, concluded a massive survey of 4,000 schools and 600,000 students. The Office of Education, which sponsored the research, and Coleman himself, had expected to find gross inequality of educational resources between black and white schools and to use this finding as an argument for large-scale federal spending to redress the balance. But the report—Equality of Educational Opportunity—found that there was little difference between black and white schools in such things as physical facilities, formal curricula, and other measurable criteria. It also found that a significant gap in the achievement scores between black and white children was already present in the first grade, and that despite the rough comparability of black and white schools, the gap between the two groups of children had widened by the end of elementary school. The only consistent variable explaining the differences in scores within each racial or ethnic group was the educational and economic attainment of the parents. As Coleman wrote:
First, within each racial group, the strong relation of family economic and educational background to achievement does not diminish over the period of the school, and may even increase over the elementary years. Second, most of the variation in student achievement lies within the same school, very little of it is between schools. The implication of these last two results is clear: family background differences account for much more variation in achievement than do school differences.
But there was no consistent variable to explain the difference between racial groups, not even measured family background—which is why some persons have fallen back on genetic explanations.
The Coleman findings dismayed the educational bureaucracy, and at first, received little attention. Issued in July 1966, the document was scarcely reported in The New York Times or the news weeklies. But as the explosive findings gradually became known, the Coleman Report became the center of the most extensive discussion of social policy in the history of American sociological debate, and the source of vehement public recrimination on such questions as compulsory integration, school bussing, and the like.71
Much of the controversy over the Coleman Report dealt with integration: some interpreted it, as did Coleman himself, in part, as a mandate to mix lower-class black schoolchildren with middle-class white to provide stronger peer-group pressures for achievement; black-power advocates saw it as justification for black control of black schools in order to strenghten the black child’s control over his own destiny; and still others felt that additional money spent on schools was a waste since schools were ineffective in reducing the achievement gaps between the races or between social classes.
But in the long run the more important aspect of the report was not its findings but its major thesis, which was the redefinition of equality of opportunity.72 Coleman had been charged, by explicit congressional directive, to determine the extent of inequality in the educational resources available to black and white children, the assumption being that social policy had to equalize the “inputs” into the educational process. But what Coleman took as his criterion was achievement, or results. In effect, he redefined equality of opportunity from equal access to equally well-endowed schools (inputs) to equal performance on standardized achievement tests {equality of outcomes). As he put it in the title of his Public Interest essay, the focus had to shift from “equal schools to equal students.”
Coleman was saying that the public schools—or the process of education itself—were not the social equalizers American society imagined them to be. Children achieved more or less in relation to family background and social class, and these were the variables that would have to be changed. Equality would not be attained until an average public school in Harlem produced as many high achievers as one in Scarsdale.
The argument has been pushed one step further by Christopher Jencks. If the focus was on the “equal student,” then the problem was not even the distinction between Harlem and Scarsdale. In reanalyzing the Coleman data, Jencks found that students who performed best on achievement tests “were often enrolled in the same schools as the students who performed worst,” and this, he declared, was potentially the most revolutionary revelation in the report. “In the short run it remains true that our most pressing political problem is the achievement gap between Harlem and Scarsdale. But in the long run it seems that our primary problem is not the disparity between Harlem and Scarsdale but the disparity between the top and bottom of the class in both Harlem and Scarsdale.”
One can carry this still another step to the disparity among children of the same family. And as Jencks argues, in fact, “There is nearly as much economic inequality among brothers raised in the same homes as in the general population. This means that inequality is recreated anew in each generation, even among people who start life in essentially identical circumstances.” For Jencks, inequality is not inherited. There is no single consistent variable which explains who gets ahead and why. It is as much luck as anything else.
The logic of this argument is developed by Jencks in his book Inequality. Not only can one not equalize opportunity, but even if one could, equalizing opportunity does not appreciably reduce the inequality in results. He concludes quite bluntly: “Instead of trying to reduce people’s capacity to gain a competitive advantage on one another, we will have to change the rules of the game so as to reduce the rewards of competitive success and the costs of failure. Instead of trying to make everybody equally lucky or equally good at his job, we will have to devise ‘insurance’ systems which neutralize the effects of luck, and income sharing systems which break the link between vocational success and living standards.” 73 The aim of social policy, thus, has to be equality of result—by sharing and redistributive policies—rather than equality of opportunity.
If equality of result is to be the main object of social policy—and it is the heart of the populist reaction against meritocracy—it will demand an entirely new political agenda for the social systems of advanced industrial countries. But no such political demand can ultimately succeed—unless it imposed itself by brute force—without being rooted in some powerful ethical system, and for this reason the concept of equality of result has become the Archimedean point of a major new effort to provide a philosophical foundation—a conception of justice as fairness—for a communal society.
In the nature of human consciousness, a scheme of moral equity is the necessary basis for any social order; for legitimacy to exist, power must be justified. In the end, it is moral ideas—the conception of what is desirable—that shapes history through human aspirations. Western liberal society was “designed” by Locke, Adam Smith, and Bentham on the premise of individual freedoms and the satisfaction of private utilities; these were the axioms whose consequences were to be realized through the market and later through the democratic political system. But that doctrine is crumbling, and the political system is now being geared to the realization not of individual ends but of group and communal needs. Socialism has had political appeal for a century now not so much because of its moral depiction of what the future society would be like, but because of material disparities within disadvantaged classes, the hatred of bourgeois soc
iety by many intellectuals, and the eschatological vision of a “cunning” of history. But the normative ethic was only implicit; it was never spelled out and justified.74 The claim for “equality of result” is a socialist ethic (as equality of opportunity is the liberal ethic), and as a moral basis for society it can finally succeed in obtaining men’s allegiance not by material reward but by philosophical justification. An effort in politics has to be confirmed in philosophy. And an attempt to provide that confirmation is now underway.
III
ROUSSEAU AND THE VANITY OF MEN
The starting point for the renewed discussion of inequality— as for so much of modern politics—is Rousseau. In his Discourse On the Origin and Foundations of Inequality Among Men (the “Second Discourse”) Rousseau sought to show that civil society ineluctably generates inequality.
For Rousseau, the state of nature was a psychological construct that showed what men would be like without society. In nature and in society, there are two kinds of dependence. As he wrote in Emile, there are “dependence on things, which is the work of nature; and dependence on men, which is the work of society. Dependence on things, being non-moral, does no injury to liberty and begets no vices; dependence on men, being out of order, gives rise to every kind of vice, and through this master and slave become mutually depraved.” 75 The movement from nature to society is a change in the character of dependence.
For Rousseau, there are also two kinds of inequality: One is natural or physical (such as age, health, strength); the other moral or political inequality is based on convention and established by the consent of men.76 Inevitably, however, as society developed, the first led to the second:
Each one began to look at the others and to want to be looked at himself, and public esteem had a value. The one who sang or danced the best, the handsomest, the strongest, the most adroit or the most eloquent became the most highly considered; and this was the first step toward inequality and, at the same time, toward vice.
Since mind, beauty, strength, skill, merit, and talent established the rank and fate of men, it was necessary to have these qualities, or to dissemble:
... for one’s advantage, it was necessary to appear to be other than what one in fact was. To be and to seem to be became two altogether different things; and from this distinction came conspicuous ostentation, deceptive cunning, and all the vices that follow from them.... Finally, consuming ambition, the fervor to raise one’s relative fortune less out of true need than in order to place oneself above others, inspires in all men a base inclination to harm each other, a secret jealousy all the more dangerous because, in order to strike its blow in greater safety, it often assumes the mask of benevolence....
Vanity, thus, was one source of inequality. The other was material differences rooted in property. Property in and of itself is good and productive. Labor gives a person the right to the soil, and continuous possession is transformed into property, thus establishing “the first rules of justice.” Things in this state “could have remained equal if talents had been equal... but this proposition was soon broken; the stronger did more work; the clever turned his to better advantage; the more ingenious found ways to shorten his labor.” And so one man had more than another.
Thus, does natural inequality imperceptibly manifest itself along with contrived inequality; and thus do the differences among men, developed by those circumstances, become more perceptible, more permanent in their effects, and begin to have a proportionate influence over the fate of individuals.... Thus, as the most powerful or most miserable made of their force or their needs a sort of right to the goods of others, equivalent to them to the right of property, the destruction of equality was followed by the most frightful disorder....
Inequalities of various kinds become formalized, “but in general, wealth, nobility or rank, power and personal merit [are] the principal distinctions by which one is measured in society.” Of these four types of inequality,
as personal qualities are the origin of all the others, wealth is the last to which they are reduced in the end because, being the most immediately useful to well-being and the easiest to communicate, it is easily used to buy all the rest: an observation which can permit a rather exact judgement of the extent to which each people is removed from its primitive institution, and of the distance it has traveled toward the extreme limit of corruption.
Thus, “from the extreme inequality of conditions and fortunes ... come scores of prejudices equally contrary to reason, happiness and virtue.” This is what one finds “in discovering and following ... the forgotten and lost routes that must have led man from the natural state to the civil state....” 77
Since man cannot live in the state of nature, the problem is how to reduce the dependence of man upon man and yet make him a social person, instead of a natural person. Rousseau’s answer, of course, is the social contract, the tie by which men forswear both natural liberty and conventional liberty to gain moral liberty. One renounces one’s self—one’s vanity and the desire to dominate others—by becoming a member of the community; and the community itself is a single personality, a whole of which each citizen is a part.
These clauses [of the social contract], rightly understood, are reducible to one only, viz. the total alienation to the whole community of each associate with all his rights; for, in the first place since each gives himself up entirely, the conditions are equal for all; and the conditions being equal for all, no one has any interest in making them burdensome to others.
The prace of equality, thus, is that “an individual can no longer claim anything”; he has no individual rights, “`is person and his whole power” are dissolved into the general will.78 Equality is possible only in community through the eclipse of the self. Thus, Rousseau pursued one logic of the meaning of equality.79
MILL AND THE LOGIC OF REPRESENTATION
For Rousseau, who sees social nature as ruled by passion and vice, equality is not an end in itself but a means of achieving civic virtue and making virtuous men; in his hierarchy of purposes, he retains the classical view of the goals of society. For a second, more diffuse kind of political thought, the purpose of equality is social peace, and its guiding principle is utility.
Democracy is by nature contentious because men constantly covet what other men have. Not all societies invite invidious comparisons. The peasant did not compare his lot with the lord; he had his allotted place in the scheme of things and accepted it fatalistically. Democracy, with its normative commitment to equality, inevitably provides an evaluative yardstick for measuring discrepancies in status, wealth, and power. Where one is barred from modifying these discrepancies, the result is often—in Nietzsche’s term—ressentiment, or envy, anger, and hatred toward those at the top. As Max Scheler has noted: Ressentiment must therefore be strongest in a society like ours, where approximately equal rights (political and otherwise) or formal social equality, publicly recognized, go hand in hand with wide factual differences in power, property and education.... Quite independently of the characters and experiences of individuals, a potent charge of ressentiment is here accumulated by the very structure of society.80
Since ressentiment is the chief psychological fuel of disruption and conflict, the problem for the society is how to reduce it. And since inequality is not random but patterned—the discrepancies are grouped—all groups have to be included in the society and enabled to use the polatical system as a means of redressing other forms of inequality. Thus, the chief instrument of social peace is representation.
The rationale for this system was laid down by John Stuart Mill in his Representative Government. “The interest of the excluded is always in danger of being overlooked,” he wrote.81 The group he had in mind, at the time, was the working class. Although the other classes no longer “deliberately” sought to sacrifice the interests of the working class to themselves, the very fact that the workers were excluded meant that questions were never regarded from their viewpoint. Mill went so far as to argue that
representative government can only exist when there is proportional representation, and one chapter of his book, entitled “Representation of Minorities,” explores the Hare system for this kind of election, “a scheme which has the almost unparalleled merit of carrying out a great principle of government in a manner approaching to ideal perfection as regards the special object in view....” What is good about that principle of government is that “it secures a representation, in proportion to numbers, of every division of the electoral body: not two great parties alone, with perhaps a few large sectional minorities in particular places, but every minority in the whole nation, consisting of a sufficiently large number to be, on principles of equal justice, entitled to a representative.” 82
The logic of minority representation is the quota. Any polity, to obey the dictates of equal justice, would have to insist that its representative body be made up of social units equal in proportion to the diverse composition of its membership. The Democratic Party, in its new rules for the 1972 convention, did exactly this in stipulating that all state parties had to take “affirmative steps” to make their delegations representative of their respective state populations in terms of minority groups, women, and young people (those from 18 to 30).83
But this raises two serious problems. First, how does one define a legitimate “interest,” or social unit, or minority corporate group? In the early years of the Republic, it was argued that the states were the legitimate units of representation, and the Constitution, before it was amended, gave state legislatures the duty of electing each state’s two senators. In the 1930s and after, the legitimate units seemed to be the “functional groups”—business, farmers, and workers. In the sixties and seventies, the units came to be biologically defined (sex, color, age) and culturally defined (ethnic, religious) groups. Yet if one sits in a representative body on the basis of age, sex, ethnic group, religion, or occupation, is that single corporate identity to be the overriding attribute which guarantees one’s place? 84 It is an elementary sociological fact that a person has not a single identity but a multiple number of roles. Does a black women under thirty have three votes rather than one? Or must she choose a single attribute to be quotaed for?