We have some cultural practices like this in the West. One thinks of the highly supportive role of godparents, for example, in some families. But sponsorship in the developing world is a much bigger part of the ethical and social culture. Affection is the glue that binds the giver and the receiver in this model of charity. Emotions like care, not moral principles, motivate these personal ethical stories. Patronage is based on kin favoritism originally, but it has evolved into a broader social system that goes beyond blood. Nonetheless, “brotherhood” and other filial metaphors are frequently on the lips of Africans, when they talk about wider issues of politics. Like many Africans, it is through the lens of patrons and protégés that my Rwandan friend sees the bigger political drama.
He didn’t speak of fairness, the evils of nepotism, blind justice, or any of the egalitarian principles that we trumpet in the West. He wanted to know, instead, why some leaders would not share more of their wealth with their less fortunate “brothers.” The lack of care that Congo rulers had for their own people infuriated him, for example.
“How can the rulers in Congo grow rich on diamonds, but fail to build a single paved road in the whole country?” he asked me, in helpless outrage.
“The richer African countries,” he continued, “should be sponsors, and help their poor brothers in other African countries. They should not run off to ‘parties’—abandoning their own families.” Finally, looking out the window of his truck, he said, in exasperation but almost dreamily, “This was supposed to be our time.”
I close with this discussion to show how an alternative ethics of sponsorship (triggered and sustained by the care of favoritism) can inspire the microcosm of village life and the macrocosm of national politics in places like Africa and Asia. It would be a misinterpretation of my Rwanda example to see John’s wistfulness as a condemnation of patronage ethics. Africa is still too close, historically speaking, to its painful emergence from colonialism (and subsequent civil wars) to know if the favoritism model of benevolence will thrive and produce progress. The patronage model (and, of course, new economics) has certainly served China well. I am optimistic that John will get his dream one day, but it won’t be because Africans gave up patronage and accepted the grid of impartiality. You don’t root out corruption by breaking nepotism and tribalism. You root out kleptocracy by reeducating people who confuse materialism and wealth with happiness and success. You reduce corruption by reducing greed. That kind of reeducation is needed as much in the West as it is in the developing world.
6
“Your People Shall Be My People?”
The title of this chapter adds a question mark to the famous line from the book of Ruth from the Old Testament of the Bible. The new punctuation invites us to wonder about transcending tribe. How capacious can we make our tribes? Ruth is a Moabite woman who marries the Israelite Naomi’s son. Moabite people and Israelites are distant relations anyway, but the cultural differences are still large and the story invites us to consider the expansions of kin loyalty. When Naomi’s son dies, she releases Ruth from the obligation of staying with the family she married into, allowing here to return to her own biological family. But Ruth refuses to go and stays loyal to Naomi, saying, “Do not urge me to leave you… . For where you will go I will go, and where you lodge I will lodge. Your people shall be my people, and your God my God” (Ruth 1:16).
The story shows us a flexible devotion—one that can refasten onto a new tribe and extend all the preferential treatments. Ruth displays heroic loyalty to her new tribe and is rewarded later in life with prosperity and reputation (she is a great-grandmother of David). The story looks at first like a lesson in inclusivity, a lesson in unity across tribal divides. But closer examination complicates the moral. First, Ruth’s people and Naomi’s people are not that different. They share a common ancestor in Terah, the grandfather of Lot, who fled Sodom and Gomorrah (Genesis 19:37). Second, most Jewish interpretations of the story underscore the singular importance of Ruth’s conversion to Naomi’s God. Ruth attains favor by converting to Judaism. Her blood tribe is replaced or substituted with a religious tribe, Judaism. The story is certainly not one of universal liberal inclusion. Ruth flourishes because she joins the right clan, so to speak. The God of the Old Testament plays favorites—he clearly has a chosen people, and they in turn acknowledge and honor their favored status.
Fig. 18. The biblical story of Ruth is a meditation on loyalty and the bounds of filial allegiance. Here Ruth pledges her devotion to her motherin-law, Naomi. Drawing by Stephen Asma, based on medieval representations.
Being Jewish, even today, is a tribal issue. To be a Jew is to be a member of an ethno-religious group, usually by birth but also by conversion. Of course, the relationship between ethnic and religious identity is fuzzy in Judaism. Allegiance to Jewish law is crucial for some notions of identity, but being born of a Jewish mother is automatic membership according to other criteria.1 A debate simmered in the twentieth century as to whether modern Diaspora Jews are blood-related back to the time of the biblical exodus, or whether different groups are descended from converted non-blood-related populations. Recent genetic analysis seems to favor the blood-relation hypothesis because DNA of diverse Jewish groups shows striking continuity and common descent.2 But the point for us is not “Who is a Jew?” in the ontological sense, but “What are your loyalty values if you see yourself as Jewish?” Or if you view yourself as black? Or as Irish? Or lesbian? Or Democrat?
Do many Jewish people privilege their tribe over the interests of non-Jews? Of course they do, and why shouldn’t they? Tribal favoritism is even more justified when your tribe is under siege, as in the case of centuries of Diaspora anti-Semitism. Lip service to universal brotherhood is all fine and good, but not when it’s accompanied by pogroms and persecutions.
Fig. 19. Judaism sees the Jews as the chosen people (or the treasured people) of Yahweh. Religious solidarity and ethnocentrism are common forms or favoritism down through the ages. Here Moses accepts the Ten Commandments. Drawing by Stephen Asma, based on Marc Chagall’s Moses (1966).
This chapter will investigate the complex relationship between favoritism within ingroups and larger social contexts. Are there limits to our kin circles and our favoritism circles, or can we expand them indefinitely until we all become one tribe?
Minorities, Majorities, and Favoritism
The reader will have noticed that I’ve said very little so far about gender and race. It’s not because I forgot. In fact, it’s striking that I’ve been able to cover so much territory in a book about fairness and not get to gender and race until now. This has been by design. If I had started in that familiar place, we would never have traversed the other expansive territories of bias and favoritism. The bigger philosophical conversation cannot unfold if we begin with the usual hot-button issues.
Since fairness is the paradigm language that Americans use to talk about civil rights equality and the women’s movement, any doubts about fairness are automatically perceived as backward and prejudiced. This is because emotions, understandably, mix up the issues. By now, however, the reader appreciates how justice and the good are much bigger realities than simple fairness, so it is possible to critique fairness while preserving liberal social justice. This is not just a logical point.
There is a kind of secret history of the civil rights and feminist movements that doesn’t fit with the official egalitarian version. Feelings of tribal favoritism (ingroup affiliation of minority groups) played as much a role as any principle of equality in demanding a place at the table (where other tribes were already feeding). Political empowerment movements are effective because a tribe (in this case racial or gender specific) gets powerful enough to no longer be ignored. My view of American history is that progress always comes by this contest of groups, not by some implementation of abstract egalitarian principles. The dubious official history that we’re taught about rights movements is that minority groups recognized the hypocrisy in majority group condu
ct and policy, and demanded that they align their aberrant behaviors with their formal grid of egalitarianism. Don’t just talk the talk of egalitarian fairness, walk the walk. As a neat revision of historical progress, this version plays well—placing oppressed minorities in the position of moral heroes and the majority is cast as hypocritical villains.
The cultural take-away from this dubious history has been interesting. Liberals often interpret this to mean that minority groups, subalterns, and oppressed people are more egalitarian—more authentically fair—than the corrupted majority.3 Minorities, it is suggested, have held the majority’s feet to the flames of equality, finally forcing them to live by their own principles. This naive story is perfectly fine as part of our idealistic national myth, but it only helps to obscure the realities of human favoritism by whitewashing them with a pious narrative about the triumph of fairness.
Minority groups are not less biased, nepotistic, partial, or “favoritist” than the majority. On the contrary, they are splendidly more so. It is demonstrably absurd to think of minority groups as pockets of egalitarian fairness, struggling to chastise the nepotistic majority into like-minded morality.
Anyone whose family are recent immigrants to the United States is familiar with the traditions of positive nepotism. My hometown of Chicago is built on ethnic neighborhoods, centers for the communication of talent, money, labor, and opportunity between the old world and the new. Whether it’s Chinese people following the First Transcontinental Railway to Chicago in the late nineteenth century, Back-of-the-Yards Polish, or contemporary Mexicans in Pilsen; the city is not so much a melting pot as a bento box of tribal groups. And of course the whole country, not just Chicago, is built on this unique influx of diverse ethnicity. But if your people and your family came to the States ages ago, you may feel little or no tribal affiliation (in the ethnic sense). If your parents or grandparents are still speaking a mother tongue, however, then chances are you feel the sway of clan quite keenly.
Strict egalitarianism teaches us to ignore ethnicity, race, and gender, and of course in some domains—like equality before the law—this ideal is exactly right. Unfortunately, overemphasis on fairness has led us to think that all domains of life must be color-blind in order for them to be ethical. The immigrant, however, teaches us a different lesson—the lesson of virtuous preferential treatment.
Immigrant populations in the United States can be great examples of generosity, loyalty, devotion, and the pursuit of excellence. But this ethical treasure is uniquely bounded inside the circle of ethnic favorites, not spread indiscriminately to the mainstream. We don’t have to go all the way to China or India, as we did in chapter 5, to see the cultures of ethical favoritism in action. Immigrant Italians, Mexicans, Jews, Chinese, Africans, and so on practice favoritism in very successful ways—ways that are not simply dismissible as necessary survival techniques (though they certainly do help with survival in a foreign land).
Successful immigrant networking systems are rooted in blood tribalism, expanding out from nuclear to extended family, then out to village, then out to ethnicity. Wealth, even modest wealth, is concentrated and transferred between family members who are separated by miles, even oceans. Family helps family, and ethnic group members help group members.
Work is one of the main areas where tribal networking pays off, and pockets of preferential hiring flourish under the radar of official business. Workers who share a common heritage will help each other secure employment, and managers will often preferentially hire workers of a similar heritage. It is impolite in our official culture to point out the obvious ethnic affiliations that fill many of our workplaces, but only willful ignorance can hide the facts. I worked in an office where an African American woman became manager, and within a year the complexion of the staff was transformed. Almost every new hire, from clerks to custodians was black. And I’ve witnessed the same workplace transformation along the lines of sexual orientation. As usual, I am not against such preferential hiring per se, unless the practice is immoderate and excessive.
In Chicago, Mexican immigration is strong, and the bonds between hometown compatriots create networks of mutual assistance and support. I asked Jacqueline HerreraGiron, an immigration lawyer in Lake County, Illinois, to explain some positive forms of favoritism in immigrant populations.
“Many of the Mexicans that you find in Chicago,” HerreraGiron told me, “come from a specific region of Mexico—the state of Michoacán. There is a strong bond that ties the newer immigrant population with the older homeland. In many cases, grandparents may remain in the old country, and parents, siblings, cousins, and friends can all be separated geographically. But of course immigrants send money back to the family in Mexico.”
It’s as if a niche from Mexico buds off and creates a new niche in Chicago, with strong transnational, translocal connectivity. HerreraGiron, who is from El Salvador and whose husband is from Guatemala, explains that many U.S. immigrant populations thrive because wisdom and wealth is shared in tight networked systems that cross national borders. HerreraGiron works north of Chicago in Waukegan, Illinois, where the Mexican population originates almost entirely from a little Mexican town in Michoacán called La Luz. Every January 12, Waukegan immigrants return to La Luz, where the tiny plaza explodes with a dollar-fueled celebration. Families, dressed in their finest, reunite, and resources are shared generously among kin and friends.
“Many immigrants pool resources,” HerreraGiron explained, “to buy the eldest sibling a house. Then, once that is achieved, they start to pool wealth to buy the next sibling a house, and so on. But this kind of help extends, in lesser forms, to compatriots too. There are, for example, ‘Home Town Federations’—social groups that do fund-raising and send money back to Mexico. These are made up of family, friends, and neighbors.
“In La Luz,” HerreraGiron continued, “there was no running water or electricity until the Waukegan Home Town Federation channeled money down to modernize the city. Now these federations—that exist all over the U.S.—are actually evolving into political groups that have growing political influence in both countries.”
None of this success—spread out over two nations—would be possible if it wasn’t for a network of nepotistic favoritism in everything from transportation, to marriage, to employment, to politics. There is tremendous generosity, diligence, perseverance, and ethical selflessness in these networks, but they are insider systems. They don’t extend to strangers. And these allegiances frequently follow ethnic lines as well as family lines. When I explained to HerreraGiron that Chinese people rarely give money or resources to strangers (always privileging family instead), she agreed that this was the value system in her own El Salvadoran family. “The idea of giving money to strangers seems foreign to me,” she confessed, “but maybe this is because I’m [a] first-generation immigrant. Survival often means a strong network of family resources.”
What is the relationship of minorities and majorities in the real world of favoritism? Ethnic and gender solidarity is not always to the disadvantage of others, but sometimes it is, and we need to think about a workable system of social justice beyond the utopian thought experiments of disinterested egalitarianism.
In California a federal judge struck down a ban on gay marriage in 2010. In 2011 it was discovered that the judge was actually in a longterm same-sex relationship himself, and so the opponents of gay marriage cried foul, arguing that the judge, Vaughn Walker, was biased and partial, because his ruling in favor of gay marriage might advantage his own situation. Opponents of gay marriage argued that there was a conflict-of-interest bias.
Defenders of Vaughn Walker and gay marriage made the only kind of rhetorical response available in official circles. “There is absolutely not one scintilla of evidence that … who [Walker] is biased him against the proponents [of the ban],” said Kate Kendell, executive director of the National Center for Lesbian Rights.4 The defense of Judge Walker followed the usual egalitarian lines of idealism: Walker was
totally unbiased; heterosexuals can be impartial about gays, and gays can be impartial about heteros; white judges can be impartial about blacks, and blacks can be impartial about whites; men can be impartial about women, and women about men; and so on. Defenders of Walker suggested that he was like a blindfolded Lord Justice—able to divest from all his own interests and then adjudicate from the abstract Rawlsian space of utter neutrality.
I see no reason to join this sanctimonious choir of idealism. My argument has made space for another view, besides nemocentric fairness. In this case, I am in praise of both Walker’s biased judgment and the liberal cause at stake—the inclusion of gays in the institution of marriage. But there is no need to deny the former to attain the latter.
If we really believed in the impartial neutrality of judges (and human beings generally), then we wouldn’t work to increase the ethnic and gender diversity of judges. I have no problem thinking the gay judge was biased, but I would argue that this was a good thing. His affiliation with gays makes him sensitive to subtle jurisprudence issues that heterosexual judges may miss; it makes him a defender of a “tribe” that has been unjustly treated; it helps him educate his constituency; it helps him (should such cases arise) direct medical research to diseases like HIV/AIDS; it helps him empower his community.
Many women were drawn to Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign, for example, because she was a woman and would explicitly and implicitly put women’s issues into a preferential position—a position that they have not previously enjoyed. I support this example of tribal favoritism and feel no need to dress it up with haughty appeals to impartial universal fairness. In the case of the gay judge and the female president, we see traditional liberal social causes served by illiberal tribal realities. And while this might be ironic, it’s not really irrational or unethical.
Against Fairness Page 14