19. Ibid.
20. Ivan Illich, in his Tools for Conviviality (Harper and Row, 1973), 47, writes: “In a consumer society there are inevitably two kinds of slaves: the prisoners of addiction and the prisoners of envy.”
21. For an interesting discussion of the revenge component in justice, see David P. Barash and Judith Eve Lipton, “Why We Needed Bin Laden Dead: Revenge as a Biological Imperative,” Chronicle Review, May 5, 2011, 814–15.
22. The Autobiography of Michel de Montaigne (David R. Godine, 1999), 318.
23. If egalitarianism and other causes like environmentalism are substitutions for religion—a way of validating certain emotions—then we might expect to find other secular surrogates for guilt, envy, and indignation. Our tendencies to sin, repent, and generally indulge in self-cruelty can be seen cropping up in our obsessions about health and fitness, for example. Struggling with our weight (diet and relapse) has risen above the other deadly sins to take a dominant position in our secular self-persecution. But our resentful aggression still manages to find some occasional pathways to the external world. As successfully socialized citizens, we may not be able to punch the people we want to punch in real life, but we can turn some of our aggression outward at the reprobates of TV land. What a joyful hatred we can all feel at the Octomom, Lindsay Lohan, Charlie Sheen, and more importantly political nepotists who engage in cronyism. Television provides us with a parade of thoroughly cleansing moral outrages. And more of this kind of indignation, previously reserved for religious condemnation, can be seen everywhere on the screens and airwaves of the twenty-four-hour “news” cycle. Large segments of the news seem calculated to facilitate the catharsis of our built-up resentment. Daytime talk shows and reality shows seem similarly designed to elicit our righteous anger—which in the case of celebrity TV comes to rescue our painful sense of envy. This envy is caused by a procession of “bling” and celebrity lifestyle privilege. These emotions form the other side of the religious coin—in addition to the masochism of guilt, we can vent our aggression outwardly (like a crowd at a witch drowning) as long as it’s justified by piety or the defense of fairness.
24. See Jonathan Haidt and Craig Joseph, “The Moral Mind: How Five Sets of Innate Intuitions Guide the Development of Many Culture-Specific Virtues, and Perhaps Even Modules,” in The Innate Mind: Foundations and the Future, vol. 3, ed. P. Carruthers, S. Laurence, and S. Stich (Oxford University Press, 2008).
25. Jan-Willem van Prooijen, “Fairness Judgments: Genuine Morality or Disguised Egocentrism?,” Inquisitive Mind, no. 4, http://beta.in-mind.org/issue-4/fairness-judgments-genuine-morality-or-disguised-egocentrism.
26. In chapter 2, I introduced a bio-psychological idea called “homeostasis” that describes the well-functioning equilibrium of a system, in this case the brain. I described how family bonding restores pleasurable homeostatic chemistry in us, so we tend to seek it out. So, too, if you’ve been mistreated or even feel like you’ve been wronged, you get physiologically imbalanced with increased cortisone levels, hyper tension, lowered sex drive, and so on. Perhaps our drive for fair redistribution of goods is partly a veiled attempt to recalibrate our own discomfort levels, our own homeostasis.
27. See William A. Henry’s hilarious and insightful screed In Defensive of Elitism (Doubleday, 1994), chap. 8, for an analysis of the Clinton case, but also for a general articulation of the “merit-based” critique of egalitarianism.
28. James Poniewozik, “Six Thumbs—Up,” Time, May 9, 2011, 58.
29. See Joseph Tobin, Yeh Hsueh, and Mayumi Karasawa, Preschool in Three Different Cultures: Revisited (University of Chicago Press, 2009).
30. Steve Salerno, “Positively Misguided,” Skeptic 14, no. 4 (2009): 30–37.
Chapter Five
1. Christina Hoff Sommers, “Filial Morality,” Journal of Philosophy 83, no. 8 (1986): 439.
2. Translations of Xiao Jing are by Feng Xin-ming, 2008. See www.tsoidug.org.
3. Ibid., chap. 2.
4. “The ruler of the state does not dare to bully the wifeless and the widowed, so how can he bully the officers and people? Thus he gets the affection of all the families, with which he serves his ancestral lords.” Ibid., chap. 8.
5. Yong Ho, “Cultural Insights,” in Beginner’s Chinese (Hippocrene Books, 2010), 48.
6. Xiao Jing, chap. 9
7. It may sound strange to refer to the “Chinese district” of Shanghai—like saying, “I lived in the American district of Chicago.” But Shanghai has been so cosmopolitan for so long (even once carved into French and British territories), that the Chinese ethnicity of my neighborhood is worth mention. I did not live in the renowned international melting pot of downtown Shanghai—the skyscraper-filled, Vegas-looking spectacle you see on TV. I lived in a Chinese neighborhood that just happened to be located on the far west side of the otherwise bustling Shanghai metropolis.
8. You might protest and claim that Chairman Mao gave the Chinese people an ideological taste of a leveled equal society, but in truth he only reversed the usual pyramid by temporarily putting the worker on top. And these days the revolution has evaporated in the midst of a new capitalist hierarchy. If Chairman Mao saw present-day Shanghai, he would start spinning in his Plexiglas case in Beijing.
9. There are lots of reasons why this nepotistic world of bias is problematic. For example, people get stuck in arranged marriages, or they spend their lives studying and then working in jobs their parents picked for them. I do not deny the abuses that sometimes infect nepotism. But the positive aspects of widespread tribalism are under-appreciated by many Westerners.
10. Meir Statman, “Local Ethics in a Global World,” Financial Analysts Journal 63, no. 3 (2007): 33.
11. See the preface of Amartya Sen’s magisterial study, The Idea of Justice (Harvard University Press, 2009).
12. I agree with this general point about the Buddha, and I explore the egalitarianism of Buddhism in three of my own books. See Why I Am a Buddhist (Hampton Roads, 2010), The Gods Drink Whiskey (2005), and Buddha: A Beginner’s Guide (Hampton Roads, 2008).
13. Despite being born in India, the Buddha’s unique intellectual revolution did not significantly impact the subsequent Indian psyche because Buddhism was reabsorbed into hierarchical Hinduism (e.g., Gotama was reinterpreted as an incarnation of Vishnu), and then the remaining vestiges of it were pushed out by the eventual rise of Islam.
14. See A. K. Ramanujan’s essay “Is There an Indian Way of Thinking?,” in India through Hindu Categories, ed. McKim Marriot (Sage, 1990). Ramanujan’s essay has greatly influenced my thinking in this section. I want to thank my colleague Joan Erdman for exposing me to Ramanujan’s important work.
15. Ibid.
16. Ramanujan explains, “Even space and time, the universal contexts, the Kantian imperatives, are in India not uniform and neutral, but have properties, varying specific densities, that affect those who dwell in them.” He goes on to remark, “Time too does not come in uniform units: certain hours of the day, certain days of the week, etc., are auspicious or inauspicious.” Ibid., 51.
17. See Alan Roland, In Search of Self in India and Japan (Princeton University Press, 1989), and his Cultural Pluralism and Psychoanalysis (Routledge, 1996).
18. Michael Paterniti, “The Man Who Sailed His House,” GQ, October 2011, 206.
19. Two objections to my praise of Asian favoritism might be raised here. One, which I’ll call the “weak objection,” is that we cannot disentangle the good aspects of Indian filial piety from the bad aspects—like caste prejudices. The weak objection says that favoritist cultures are heavily mixed amalgams of positive and negative cultural commitments and can’t be sifted, excavated, or adapted by our culture for useful strategies. The baggage of history makes such borrowing nigh impossible. To this weak objection, I hold out not just the optimism that cultures can learn from each other, but also the extensive historical record of such cultural borrowing, adaptation, and fusion. Yes, if we borrowed more Asian v
alues of filial piety in the West, we would surely change them in the translation and we would import some unwanted aspects too, but it’s exactly this kind of “values immigration” that accompanies, for example, every migration of religion to a new country (e.g., Christianity was extracted and transplanted repeatedly from one country to another, as was Islam, as was democracy, as was communism, as was Beatlemania). Secondly, the “strong objection” looks something like this: Asian values, and therefore Asian countries, are uniquely suited for autocratic control, subjugation of citizenry, and the inevitable compromise of human rights. It’s as hard to falsify this bold claim as it is to prove it, but I’m clearly not sympathetic. It rings to my ear more like Western hype than truth. Some have blamed the acquiescent nature of Buddhism, for example, on the rise of Maoist repression in China and the tyranny of Pol Pot in Cambodia. Such a strong objection toward my view would assert that Asian tribalism contributed to the disastrous social experiments, famines, and mass murders in twentieth-century Asia. I’m doubtful. It seems more likely to me that Confucian tribalism, for example, would have been an excellent buffer against the excesses of Maoist egalitarian ideology. Confucian filial tribalism was exactly the sort of bourgeois value system that could have protected families against the overreaching “science” of the state party. Asian tribalism failed to protect against autocracy because it was systematically and explicitly rooted out. Blaming the Asian social disasters of the late twentieth century on tribal favoritism is convenient for some Western ideologues, but not more true for that convenience.
20. Interestingly, Plato makes a similar argument in the Republic (bk. V) for the superiority of communal families over nuclear families. And the American Oneida Community tried to put communal families into practice in nineteenth-century New York.
21. See Aristotle’s discussion of “Temperance” in Nicomachean Ethics, ed. Lesley Brown, trans. David Ross (Oxford University Press, 2009), bk. III, chap. 12.
22. Obviously, political structures are not the same as family structures, and power generalizations from one domain cannot easily transfer to another. But we also can’t make neat divisions of “public” and “private” values, and just hope for them to conveniently pass each other in the night. I think political scientist Samuel P. Huntington—famous for his “clash of civilizations” thesis—was wrong about a lot of things, but he, too, grasped the relevance and interconnection of family dynamics to political dynamics. He thought it was unlikely for Confucian cultures to become democracies. See Huntington, The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order (Touchstone, 1996), chap. 9. Democracies, he argues, require individualism, and the Confucian family-based subjugation of individuality to group interests renders democracy impossible. Political scientist Francis Fukuyama has counter-argued this incompatibility view and claims that there are ways for Confucian values and democratic values to find common ground. See Fukuyama, “Confucianism and Democracy,” Journal of Democracy 6, no. 2 (1995): 20–33.
23. The real reason for placing power-sharing checks on autocrats is not because they cannot lead benevolently, but because “bad eggs” (unethical rulers) can’t be withdrawn (can’t be gotten rid of) without some representational mechanisms.
24. I want to avoid a problem that philosophers sometimes make. It is not enough to point out the “logical possibility” of disentangling centralized power and corruption. One must empirically study the history of such power distributions and evaluate them in the arena of human tendencies, not just logical possibilities. Egalitarians will point to the “real world” to trump the claims of logical possibility. And yet real-world analysis does not clearly support the Western assumption that democracy reduces corruption. Using data from NGO Transparency International and the World Bank, social scientist Kang Xiaoguang analyzed the relationship between democracy, economic development, corruption index, and poverty index for eighteen countries. Xiaoguang, “Confucianization: A Future in the Tradition,” Social Research: An International Quarterly of the Social Sciences 73, no. 1 (Spring 2006). The data reveals that there is no statistical evidence for the claim that democracy reduces corruption (nor does democracy correlate well with economic growth). More surprising for egalitarians might be the fact that the Gini coefficient (the degree of economic inequality) does not correlate with political democracy. Economic disparity between rich and poor is approximately the same, for example, in the United States and China, according to 2009 Gini calculations. More centralized governments—like one-party China, parliamentary republics as in Europe, or even parliamentary monarchies like Thailand—do not automatically produce more corruption or inequality than egalitarian democracies.
25. American nepotism in the workplace is carefully examined in Bridgette Kaye Harder, “On Nepotism: An Examination of Kinship, Merit and Perceptions of Fairness” (MA thesis, DePaul University, 2006), 2. Harder’s survey of the research (or more accurately, lack of research) on nepotism is fascinating, as is her discussion of the complex ties between perceptions of fairness and workplace organizational justice. My discussion in this section is indebted to her helpful research. Also see Karen L. Vinton, “Nepotism: An Interdisciplinary Model,” Family Business Review 11, no. 4 (1998): 297–303.
26. See D. R. Laker and M. L. Williams, “Nepotism’s Effect on Employee Satisfaction and Organizational Commitment: An Empirical Study,” International Journal of Human Resources Development and Management 3, no. 3 (2003): 191–202.
27. The infamous “Hutu 10 Commandments” propaganda article was published in the anti-Tutsi newspaper Kangura in 1990. It lists a frightening set of hateful rules that fueled the eventual genocide, including the warning to never trust a Tutsi woman (do not marry across tribal lines) and the command: “The Hutu should stop having mercy on the Tutsi.”
28. See my On Monsters: An Unnatural History of Our Worst Fears (Oxford University Press, 2009), chap. 14, for a fuller discussion of the demonizing ideologies that accompany xenophobia between diverse groups.
29. See Jared Diamond’s compelling analysis of the Rwandan genocide in Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed (Penguin, 2005), part 4.
30. Ibid.
31. Frank Snowden shows, in Before Color Prejudice: The Ancient View of Blacks (Harvard University Press, 1991), that previous eras carved up ingroups, but not along color lines. Us-and-them group dynamics in the ancient Mediterranean tended to carve up along language and cultural lines, not skin color or race.
Chapter Six
1. Interestingly, I may or may not be Jewish. My mother was adopted and has little information about her birth parents, except the last name of her biological mother—which looks like a Jewish surname. If the single criterion “born of a Jewish mother” applies, then I might qualify.
2. See Nicholas Wade, “Y Chromosome Bears Witness to Story of Jewish Diaspora,” New York Times, May 9, 2000.
3. In 1992 education professor Alvin Wolf surveyed American history textbooks between the 1940s and the 1980s. As one might expect, minority representation was notably poor and unbalanced from the 1940s to the early 1970s. Starting in the 1970s, however, the tides turned somewhat and minority representation expanded considerably, but also took on the expression of moral high ground. In an attempt to make up for earlier unfairness, a kind of “textual affirmative action” emerged in history textbooks. Wolf cites scholars N. Glazer and R. Ueda in suggesting that many textbooks of the 1970s and 1980s had begun to romanticize minorities in American history. “Along the same line, after reviewing excerpts from a few books on how Mexicans were poorly treated in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, Glazer and Ueda write: ‘Once again one wonders whether a crude dualism—in this case pernicious Anglos and exploited Mexicans—gives the right balance to history.’ That white people have been villains and minorities have been victims is part of America’s history, unfortunately. But some books may be bending too far, Glazer and Ueda caution, in reducing history to exploiters and exploited, an oversimplified view that sho
uld be avoided. These commentators call for balance and completeness in history books. Their concerns raise cautions for educators, authors, publishers, and adoptions committees.” See Wolf’s interesting survey “Minorities in U.S. History Textbooks, 1945–1985,” Clearing House 65, no. 5 (May/June 1992): 291.
4. See Scott Shaffer, “When a Gay Judge Rules on Gay Rights,” Morning Edition, KQED Public Broadcasting, June 13, 2011, http://www.kqed.org/news/story/2011/06/13/57300/when_a_gay_judge_rules_on_gay_rights?category=u.s.
5. The Johnson quote is taken from an excellent article by William M. Chace, “Affirmative Inaction,” American Scholar (Winter 2011): 20. I’m indebted to Chace throughout my discussion of affirmative action, for his clear and nuanced assessment of the policy.
6. I am indebted to my friend Glenn Curran, Esq., for walking me through the legal evolution of affirmative action, and for our many general discussions of law and philosophy.
7. Chace, “Affirmative Inaction,” 26.
8. There may be very good arguments for maintaining preferential treatment for African Americans specifically—and I think there are good arguments—but they will probably need definitive detachment from current affirmative action. Since African Americans continue to be underrepresented in today’s universities—despite an all-time-high representation of non-white students—some policies should probably return to the language and logic of reparation (rather than just equal opportunity). If not reparation (which is harder to justify as we get further away from historical mistreatment), then perhaps a new criteria of “low-income” status would obliquely raise educational opportunities for African Americans and Latinos (and avoid the wide-net problem of color diversity).
9. Richard Kahlenberg, “Is Affirmative Action Headed Back to the Supreme Court?,” Chronicle of Higher Education, June 21, 2011.
10. In schools we have a microcosm tension between two competing national values: egalitarian community and meritocratic excellence. As I mentioned in the first chapter, these two values are often characterized in the rhetoric of fairness—even though they often cancel each other out. Affirmative action wades into this messy swamp of American values and inevitably confuses our national intuitions further.
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