Against Fairness
Page 16
My ongoing emphasis on small, local, tribal units means that “success” is measured on the kith-and-kin stage, not the geopolitical stage. If my people are sufficiently satisfied, safe, and happy (a difficult accomplishment), then my work/career ambitions might well wane, but so what? For the favoritist, the meaning of life—if I can use so grandiose a term—comes much closer to hand than the geopolitical or the cosmic drama. When many free-market proselytizers speak of meritocracy, they have a narrow concept of excellence in mind. They tend to equate excellence with economic success, and fail to factor in the broader pursuits of excellence—in artistic, spiritual, athletic domains.
Let’s take Sowell’s worst fear as realized. Let’s say that my job came to me from preferential treatment, and this fact leads me to do mediocre work. Okay. But I am more than my job. We are all more than our jobs. Worker productivity is not the best measure of human excellence, and the goal of social policy is not to protect entrepreneurial gumption at all costs. When Chinese garment workers immigrated to the little Italian town of Prato, in Tuscany, they radically increased the speed and volume of textile production in the region. They also ate and slept in their workplaces, where they often labored for eighteen hours a day. The Chinese did not share in the indigenous Italian tradition of “siesta culture”—taking off work for several hours in the afternoon to eat, rest, and enjoy family. Yes, Chinese productivity outstripped the local Italians, but something precious was lost. Profits went up, but humanity did not. Give me siesta life any day, not because I’m lazy but because life is more than work.
Some preferential policies give people access to education and work that would otherwise not happen. This is good for the minority individual and group because it improves their lives, and good for the majority group because it injects fresh insights, perspectives, traditions, and skills into the community, and raises the level of educated citizenry (and it also reduces crime).15 Using the broader notion of commonwealth health, then, we can see that “decreased productivity” (should it result) is not some intrinsic or inherent sin. It is only a strike against preferential policies if we start the evaluation with an overly narrow measure of human “success.”
The Finite Stretch
How far can we stretch our allegiance? Can we overcome factionalism and eventually become one giant tribe? Two of the leading liberal social theorists, Jeremy Rifkin and Peter Singer, think we can. I think they’re wrong.
Recall that we met Peter Singer, the utilitarian philosopher, in chapter 2, because his view that everyone possesses the same value and importance did not jibe very well with our intuitions about moral gravity. A brief return to his view is relevant in this section on tribal expansion, because he has been very influential in arguing for transcending tribalism.
In his book The Expanding Circle, Singer argues that social evolution required our ancestors to make group decisions in order to survive, but internal disputes were inevitable. After the rise of language-slinging big brains, group members solved their disputes by offering reasons—justifications that appealed to the interests of others. These rudimentary considerations of others’ interests scaffolded upward, over time, to create group-oriented interests above and beyond individual interests. With increased neocortical sophistication, humans can now, according to Singer, rationally broaden their ethical duty beyond the tribe to an equal and impartial concern for all human beings.
“If I have seen,” Singer writes, “that from an ethical point of view I am just one person among the many in my society, and my interests are no more important, from the point of view of the whole, than the similar interests of others within my society, I am ready to see that, from a still larger point of view, my society is just one among other societies, and the interests of members of my society are no more important, from that larger perspective, than the similar interests of members of other societies.” Like mathematics, which can continue its recursive operations infinitely upward, ethical reasoning can spiral out (should spiral out, according to Singer) to larger and larger sets of equal moral subjects. “Taking the impartial element in ethical reasoning to its logical conclusion means, first, accepting that we ought to have equal concern for all human beings.”16
All this sounds nice at first, but ultimately rings hollow. Singer seems to be suggesting that I arrive at perfect egalitarian ethics by first accepting perfect egalitarian metaphysics. But I, for one, do not accept it. Nor, I venture to guess, do many others. People are not equally entitled to my time, affection, resources, or moral duties—and only a naive imagination can make them appear so. It seems dubious to say that we should transcend tribe and be utilitarian because all people are equal, when the equal status of strangers and kin is an unproven and counterintuitive assumption. Singer voices the basic egalitarian starting place when he says, “If I have seen that from an ethical point of view I am just one person among the many in my society, and my interests are no more important … than the similar interests of others within my society.”17 But that is a very big “if.” I will even go so far as to say that no one, unless they are trying to impress someone in cocktail chatter, will wholly get on board with that “if.”
Singer’s abstract “ethical point of view” is not wrong so much as irrelevant. Yes, from space, orbiting the planet, all our interests look equal, but we’re not living there. I don’t look down from the top of the John Hancock building in Chicago, notice that everyone below looks like bugs, and then resolve to treat everyone like bugs ever after.
In addition, critics have persuasively gone after the principles and practices of such utilitarian ethics, particularly Singer’s idea that we should do everything within our power to help strangers meet their basic needs, even if it severely compromises our kin’s happiness.18 In the calculus, needs always trump enjoyments. Without any tribal allegiance of favorites, I owe everybody the same. So, if I am to be utterly impartial to all human beings, then I should reduce my own family’s life to a subsistence level, just above the poverty line, and distribute the surplus wealth to needy strangers.
Besides the impracticalities of such utopian redistribution, the problems here are also conceptual. I bought a fancy pair of shoes for my son. But in light of the one-tribe calculus of interests, I should probably give these shoes to someone who doesn’t have any. I do research and find a kid in Cambodia who needs shoes to walk to school every day. So, I take them off my son (replacing them with Walmart tennis shoes) and head off to the post office to send the shoes to the Cambodia kid. On the way, I see a newspaper story about five kids who are malnourished. Now, I can’t give Cambodia kid the shoes, because I should sell the shoes for money and use the money to get food for the five malnourished kids. On my way to sell the shoes, I remember that my son has an important job interview for a clean-water nonprofit NGO, and if he gets the job, he’ll be able to help save whole villages from contaminated water. But he won’t get the job if he shows up in Walmart tennis shoes. As I head back home, it dawns on me that for many people in the developing world, Walmart tennis shoes are truly luxurious when compared with burlap sack shoes, and since needs always trump luxuries I’ll need to sell the tennis shoes too; and on, and on, and on.
In addition to the dizzying and contradictory nature of these rapidly multiplying one-tribe “obligations,” it is important to notice something else. All this philanthropy itself starts to look like a luxury, a surplus of goodwill and energy. Many people can’t do a fraction of these good deeds for strangers, because they’re literally too busy and exhausted from taking care of their own small family. Many Americans live paycheck to paycheck and constantly hustle one gig after another so they can pay for groceries, lodging, and the rare cultural indulgence like piano lessons for their kid. Those people who do a lot of philanthropy can afford to do it. And I don’t mean just financially.
The “saints of the leisured class,” as I’ll call them, are drawn from the ranks of people who can pay their bills, send their kids to the best private schools, vaca
tion in exotic lands, stay out of debt, and shop at Whole Foods. But the other great surplus—far less conspicuous than finances—is care. Can you have a surplus of empathy?
This brings us to the other recent argument for transcending tribe, and it’s the idea that we can infinitely stretch our domain of care. Jeremy Rifkin voices a popular view, in his recent book The Empathic Civilization, that we can feel care and empathy for the whole human species if we just try hard enough.19 This neo-hippie view has the advantage over Singer’s metric view, in that it locates moral conviction in the heart rather than the rational head. But it fails for another reason.
I submit that care or empathy is a limited resource. But the neo-hippie view is that empathy is a limitless reserve. Rifkin sketches a progressive, ever-widening, evolution of empathy. First, we had blood-based tribalism, then religion-based tribalism, then nation-state tribalism, but now we are poised for an empathic embrace of all humanity—and even beyond species-centric bias to Buddha-like compassion for all creatures. He argues that empathy is the real “invisible hand” that will guide us out of our local and global crises.
Using a secular version of Gandhi’s non-attachment mixed with some old-fashioned apocalyptic fearmongering, Rifkin warns us that we must reach “biosphere consciousness and global empathy in time to avert planetary collapse.”20 The way to do this is to start feeling as if the entire human race is our extended family.
Now, in some abstract sense, I agree with the idea of an evolutionary shared descent that makes us all “family.” But feelings of care and empathy are very different from evolutionary taxonomy. As we saw extensively in chapter 2, empathy is a biological emotion that comes in degrees, because it has a specific physiological chemical process. Empathy is not a concept, but a natural biological event—an activity, a process. The feeling of care is triggered by a perception or internal awareness and soon swells, flooding the brain and body with subjective feelings and behaviors. Care is like sprint racing. It takes time—duration through time, energy, systemic warm-up and cooldown, practice, and a strange mixture of pleasure and pain (attraction and repulsion). Like sprinting, it’s not the kind of thing you can do all the time. You will literally break the system in short order, if you ramp up the care system every time you see someone in need. The nightly news would render you literally exhausted. The limbic system can’t handle the kind of constant stimulation that Rifkin and the neo-hippies expect of it. And that’s because they don’t understand the biology of empathy, and imagine instead that care is more like a thought—flitting effortlessly through the mind.
Even in the more flexible higher brain, care is a limited resource. Biologist Robin Dunbar argues that our big neocortex evolved in connection with our ability to manage increasingly bigger social tribes. Our ancestors had to keep careful track—not just of mom, dad, and siblings, but also who was a friend and foe, who was a peer, who was a cousin, who was a hothead, who was a soothing presence, who was a freeloader, who shared food, and so on. Dunbar argues that the number of people that humans can reasonably engage with is around 150.21 More than that and you start to get highly unstable, unsuccessful networks of people. One hundred fifty is the limit of stable social networks because our cognitive capacities max out above that number of variables.
Significant empirical research informs Dunbar’s number and confirms that most of us have around 150 acquaintances, with around ten to fifteen much closer friends, and three to five intimate friends. Moreover, Dunbar shows that the circle of friendship intimacy is quite fluid, changeable, and susceptible to decay, but kin relationships are radically more resistant to such decay. The strength of kin bonds is much stronger.
I interpret all this as compelling evidence that care is a limited resource, something that cannot stretch indefinitely to cover the massive domain of strangers and non-human animals. Of course, when we see the suffering of strangers in the street or on television, the heartstrings vibrate naturally. We can have contagion-like feelings of sympathy when we see other beings suffering, but that is a long way from the kinds of active preferential devotions that we marshal for members of our respective tribes. I referred to tribes as “affective communities” back in chapter 2, and here again we’re reminded of the unique emotional connection between our preferred, favorite people. There’s an upper limit to our tribal emotional expansion, and that limit is a good deal lower than the “biosphere.”
Feeling the Stones with Your Feet
One of the deepest assumptions in these utopian visions—be they utilitarian grids or cosmic empathy theories—is that some recipe exists for giving all competing groups what they want. When all our factional value differences are eventually organized according to some mysterious recipe, then human conflict will come to an end. From their own perspectives, communism, totalitarianism, scientism, religion, and every other idealism have made this basic assumption. Like a huge root system, feeding Western culture, the old Platonic idea that perfect harmony is out there somewhere continues to inform our thinking about values. It’s buried deep in the assumptions of the Enlightenment project, which strove to reconcile cultural clashes by the light of reason.
Many Westerners assume that if there is a deep value divide and conflict between cultures like Islam and Christianity, still one day (in this life or the next) the conflicts will be mended, the harmony restored, the value tensions resolved. A similar optimism informs our view of conflicts between perspectives like pro-life or pro-choice, or between people like Israelis and Palestinians. Tribes, we hope, will lay aside their weapons and embrace each other, lions will lie down with lambs, and all “outcasts” will become “favorites.”
I’m optimistic about improving conflict resolution, but not hopeful about the ultimate harmony of human values and interests. Some values and modes of life rule out other modes of life. Being a wandering Romantic artist is not compatible with being a settled family man; being a devoted nun is not compatible with being an erotic escort; being a good brother is not always compatible with being a good public servant; being a servant of Allah is not always compatible with sexual liberalism; retribution is not compatible with forgiveness; being meek is not particularly compatible with being proud.
Favoritism and egalitarianism, taken together, make a very dissonant chord. But we need to get accustomed to their discordant sound. I think the British philosopher Isaiah Berlin (1909–1997) was correct when he noticed that many of our deepest values are incompatible with one another. Berlin lost faith in the idealism of “values harmony” when he read Machiavelli and realized that the pagan values, extolled by the Italian philosopher, were indeed good but still incompatible with Christian values.22 Two competing goods (virtue systems) were forever at odds. Pride, strength, justice, and honor (classical or pagan virtues) are contradicted by humility, meekness, forgiveness, and submission. This fundamental discordance of two obviously good virtue systems led Berlin to give up Enlightenment optimism and embrace the irreconcilability of some deep values. Following the Romantic philosophers, Berlin argued that every culture possesses its own “center of gravity”—a deep value system—and we should not look to pave over these differences with imperialistic notions of universal good.23 Instead, Berlin called for “value pluralism”—acceptance that there are many deep cultural values that are all equally correct, but that some are incompatible with each other.
My own view of favoritism and fairness is influenced by Berlin’s approach. The loyalty of favoritism bumps straight into the disinterested impartiality of fairness, and you have to choose between them. You cannot have your cake and eat it too. I can choose radical egalitarianism and try to live like Gandhi, or I can choose radical favoritism and try to live like Tony Soprano. But I can’t do both at the same time.
Since I have been suggesting that neither of these value choices is intrinsically superior, the natural questions are these: Are these differing values merely relative? Are we left with an arbitrary relativism of tribalism versus egalitarianism? I don’
t think so.
Just because we cannot find an eternal measure of justice that finally resolves the disagreement between favoritism and fairness does not mean that we are powerless to judge between them. The solution is context. The ethical life is not the bureaucratic application of fixed rules to real-life dilemmas, nor is it a mystical intuition of transcendental Truths. By analogy: Where is a song, before it is first sung? Berlin asks this question and replies: “Nowhere is the answer—one creates the song by singing it, by composing it. So, too, life is created by those who live it, step by step. This is an aesthetic interpretation of morality and of life, not an application of eternal models. Creation is all.”24
Fig. 21. Sir Isaiah Berlin (1909–1997), the political philosopher who argued for “value pluralism.” Berlin exercised a cosmopolitan toleration and appreciation for different value systems, but also pointed out the inevitable clash of some of these. Drawing by Stephen Asma.
But we are not composing the ethical life in some unconstrained self-serving manner—a charge often leveled by the bureaucratic moralists. Rather, we can make reasonable judgments at the personal and political level by combining historical and cultural understanding with basic objective facts about human biology.25 Combining historical, cultural, and biological knowledge informs our deep conviction that concentration camps are bad. Full stop. But other ethical disagreements are less clear. For these, we will have to take it “step by step.”
“Mozhe shitou guo he” is a Chinese idiom that Deng Xiaoping used to describe how China should move forward.26 Without any obvious road map, historical precedent, or abstract idealism, China was to move into the future slowly and carefully—like when you ford a river by feeling each of the stones with your feet (Mozhe shitou guo he).