There is no unique and definitive rank-ordering of the innumerable advantages and disadvantages that individuals and groups may have simultaneously. Thus A can be envying B because of the latter’s advantages while B is envying A because the former’s advantages.
Even in the simplest case, where both parties perceive A to have net advantages over B, redress is by no means always possible, quite aside from whether it is likely, or likely to be acquiesced in, by A. As a study of envy put it:
The more one seeks to deprive the envious man of his ostensible reason for envy by giving him presents and doing him good turns, the more one demonstrates one’s superiority and stresses how little the gifts will be missed. Were one to strip oneself of every possession, such a demonstration of goodness would still humiliate him so that his envy would be transferred from one’s possessions to one’s character. And if one were to raise him to one’s own level, this artificially established equality would not make him in the least happy. He would again envy, firstly the benefactor’s character, and secondly the recollection retained by the benefactor during this period of his erstwhile material superiority.25
The difficulties of satisfying envy under even these very simple and extreme conditions increase exponentially when there is no unambiguous way to say that A is better off than B in whatever dimension each values. Many parents, for example, are familiar with the situation in which each child thinks that a sibling is being treated better by the parents and therefore each has envy and resentment of the other or others. Nor can an objective third party, if one could be found, necessarily be able to declare which person has the net advantage when one is more fortunate according to one array of characteristics and possessions and the other is more fortunate according to another array of characteristics and possessions. Moreover, even in cases in which a third party regards A as clearly better off than B, it does not follow that either A or B will value and weigh the particular advantages and disadvantages the same way as this third party, much less the same as each other.
The crucial question is not whether reducing or eliminating envy is a desirable goal, any more than the question is whether cosmic justice is desirable. In both cases, the question is: What is the cost of promoting this goal? Insofar as reducing envy is attempted by purely intellectual means, such as showing how illogical or counterproductive envy can be, the costs are small and the results are likely to be correspondingly small. A more common and more costly way of attempting to deal with envy is by seeking political support for policies to reduce the disparities that promote it. However, in a democratic society, this effort must take the form of a public decrying of these disparities, as a prelude to seeking policies to reduce them. That means that this approach promotes envy in hopes of ultimately reducing it. One cost of this envious preoccupation that has already become a shocking sign of our times is the killing of children by other children over the possession of designer clothes, prestige trinkets, or other emblems of inequality. Envy is not cheap and its costs are not limited to material things.
FREEDOM VERSUS EQUALITY
Virtually no one seriously questions the principle of equal regard for human beings as human beings. No mother loves her baby any less because she knows that he does not have the capability of an adult. We may all agree on equality before the law and religious people can agree that we are all equal in the sight of God. It is the fatal step from equal regard to equal performance—or presumptively equal performance in the absence of social barriers—that opens the door to disaster.
We cannot all be equal as ballet dancers if some come from a cultural background where ballet dancing is highly prized and others come from a background where the very thought of becoming a ballet dancer is unlikely to occur to anyone. Leaving out all questions of ability, we still cannot be equal performers if we are not equally interested in the same kinds of performances. Women cannot be expected to have the same incomes as men if women’s desires to have babies and care for them constrain their choices of careers and their continuity in a given career. Among the evidences that this is so is the fact that women who never married and who worked continuously since high school were earning more than men of the same description more than 20 years ago, before “gender equity” became a major legal issue.
One of the ways in which the dogma of equal performance is a threat to freedom is in its need to find villains and sinister machinations to explain why the real world is so different from the world of its vision. Courts of law condemn people for discrimination because the even or random distribution of people found in theory cannot be found in fact. The very thought of condemning the theory—or even testing it by evidence—seems unthinkable. If there are fewer women than men in engineering schools, then this is automatically assumed to be evidence that engineering schools discriminate against women. If this or that racial or ethnic group is “under-represented” here or there, this is considered virtual proof of racism.
Paranoia and freedom are an unlikely and unstable combination. If paranoia prevails, the right to be considered innocent until proven guilty cannot survive—and it does not survive in contemporary anti-discrimination laws, not to mention laws and policies on sexual harassment or child abuse. Similar paranoia in the anti-trust laws antedated current concerns about group discrimination by decades, and likewise destroyed the presumption of innocence, in very much the same way: Uneven statistics created a “rebuttable presumption” which often turned out in practice to be nearly impossible to rebut, regardless of what the truth might be.
A whole universe of the mind has already been created to explain inequality, as if equality were so natural and inevitable that its absence could only be explained by pervasive and sinister efforts against it. Thus all standards of behavior and performance are suspect as mere shams designed to ensure the continued advantages of the haves over the have-nots. Even efforts to help the less fortunate to acquire the behavioral prerequisites of productivity are often condemned as cultural imperialism, while the failure of the less fortunate to reap the rewards of productivity is also condemned as the fault of “society.”
There has now been created a world in which the success of others is a grievance, rather than an example. Irrational as such ideological indulgences may be, they are virtually inevitable when equality becomes the social touchstone, for equality can be achieved only by either divorcing performance from reward or by producing equal performances. Since the latter is all but impossible, if only because everyone is not equally interested in the same kinds of performances, the passion for equality leads toward a divorce of performance and reward—which is to say a divorce of incentive and behavior, and even a divorce of cause and effect in our minds.
There is only so much divergence between prevailing theories and intractable reality that a society can survive. Yet theories of equality are unlikely to be re-examined—or examined the first time—when they provide a foundation for the heady feeling of being morally superior to a benighted “society.” The demonizing of those who do not share the prevailing social assumptions and ideological passions among the intelligentsia has made discussion all but impossible on a growing range of issues. For example, those who believe in systemic processes—the marketplace, traditional values, constitutional law—designed to convey the desires and preferences of the many, rather than the special visions of the few, are suspected, accused, or defined as spokesmen for economic privilege, out to thwart the political achievement of equality.
Such bogeyman visions of the social universe are utterly heedless of such facts as the widespread belief in the intrinsic equality of people among the leading figures in the traditions commonly identified as “conservative.”26 Despite their own clear and unequivocal statements, those opposed to grand schemes of politically imposed equality have been widely depicted as being opposed to equality itself and as being apologists for privilege. That the proponents of such grand schemes are so little constrained by facts, or by any need to check facts, and so willing to people
the world of their mind with demons is one symptom of a larger recklessness, with larger dangers for the whole society.
What is crucial here is not simply that the apostles of politically imposed equality wish to see a certain kind of world, but that they are heedless of what their efforts are doing to the real world around them. Indeed, their presumptions of moral superiority, and the moral exhibitionism that so often accompanies such presumptions, make reconsideration in the light of evidence a particularly painful process, correspondingly less likely to be engaged in. Economic inefficiencies and the crippling of the educational system by the passion for equal rewards without equal results are just some of the costs of this approach. Poisonous relations between the races and the sexes, or between those who simply happen to disagree philosophically, are other high costs of this crusade. Internal dissensions and demoralization have played a crucial role in the decline and fall of other civilizations, and there is no reason to expect this one to be immune.
III
The Tyranny of Visions
Lenin surrounded himself with official publications, and worksof history and economics. He made no effort to inform himselfdirectly of the views and conditions of the masses ... He nevervisited a factory or set foot on a farm. He had no interest in theway in which wealth was created. He was never to be seen inthe working-class quarters of any town in which he resided.
—PAUL JOHNSON
V. I. Lenin represented one of the purest examples of a man who operated on the basis of a vision and its categories, which superseded the world of flesh-and-blood human beings or the realities within which they lived out their lives. Only tactically or strategically did the nature of the world beyond the vision matter, as a means to the end of fulfilling that vision.
Lenin, Hitler, and Mao were the pre-eminent twentieth-century examples of leaders who sought to adjust people to visions, even when that entailed the deaths of millions of human beings. Lenin’s preoccupation with visions was demonstrated not only by his failure to enter the world of the working class, in whose name he spoke, but also by his failure to ever set foot in Soviet Central Asia—a vast area larger than Western Europe, and one in which the doctrinaire and devastating schemes of Lenin and his successors would be imposed by force for nearly three-quarters of a century.
Visions are not inherently dogmatic. Einstein’s vision of the universe was at least as revolutionary in science as Lenin’s was in politics. Yet Einstein insisted from the outset that his theory of relativity must be checked against observable facts before it could be accepted—and so it was, by scientists around the world, including those scientists who were initially skeptical, but who became convinced by the evidence of their own experiments.
The more sweeping the vision—the more it seems to explain and the more its explanation is emotionally satisfying—the more reason there for its devotees to safeguard it against the vagaries of facts. Cosmic visions are more likely to be cherished in this way, whether these are visions which explain society and history by racial superiority (as with Hitler) or by class struggle (Marx, Lenin) or by some other grand simplicity that is cosmic in its scope. Visions of cosmic justice are just one variety of cosmic visions. Hitler’s cosmic vision was quite different from anything conceived by John Rawls.
Cosmic visions of society are not just visions about society. They are visions about those people who hold these visions and the role of such people in society, whether these people are deemed to leaders of a master race, the vanguard of the proletariat, saviors of the planet, or to have some other similarly self-flattering role as an anointed visionary group “making a difference” in the unfolding of history. Heady cosmic visions which give this sense of being one of the anointed visionaries can hold tyrannical sway in disregard or defiance of facts. This becomes painfully apparent, whether we look at visions of war and peace or at social visions.
VISIONS OF WAR AND PEACE
There are two diametrically opposed theories of how best to prevent war. One is that of military deterrence, involving acquiring both weapons and allies, and based on arousing the public to the dangers from aggressor nations. The other theory is that disarmament agreements and mutual peace pacts among potential enemies, along with a de-escalation of hostile rhetoric, is the way to prevent war.
Will Rogers gave perhaps the most succinct account of the deterrence theory:
We better start doing something about our defenses. We are not going to be lucky enough to fight some Central American country forever. Build all we can, and take care of nothing but our own business, and we will never have to use it. Our world heavyweight champion hasn’t been insulted since he won the title.1
Believers in this theory acquire no sense of moral superiority, even in their own eyes, though they obviously regard their method of preserving peace as more effective in practice. However, believers in the opposite theory—disarmament—not only regard their own method of preserving peace as more effective, their sense of moral superiority is apparent when they declare themselves to be “anti-war,” part of “the peace movement,” and use other terms which strongly suggest that the difference between themselves and those with opposite views are due to their being devoted to peace, while others are either warlike or not as committed to peace as themselves, if not venal mouthpieces for military industries.
As liberal editor Oswald Garrison Villard put it in the 1930s, opposition to disarmament was a matter of “militarism, backed by all the rich and privileged, by every opponent of a new and better world.”2 Historian Charles A. Beard was one of many who depicted rearmament as a ploy of the military industries, reflecting “the interests of cupidity” among “armor-plate manufacturers,” or “munition-makers” and the like.3 Bertrand Russell said in 1936 “a sinister interest helps to manufacture warlike feeling as well as munitions.”4 John Dewey likewise spoke of “the arms and munitions by which the merchants of death wax fat and bloated.”5
In other words, as far as the disarmament advocates were concerned, there was not even an honest disagreement as to the best way to preserve peace. During the later Cold War era, Bertrand Russell returned to the same themes, referring to those who supported nuclear deterrence policies as people who “belong to the murderers’ club.” He described British Prime Minister Harold Macmillan and American President John F. Kennedy as “the wickedest people that ever lived in the history of man” and as “fifty times more wicked than Hitler” because he saw their promotion of nuclear deterrence as “organizing the massacre of the whole of mankind.”6
While this air of moral superiority has been a consistent element in the disarmament approach to preserving peace, it has not played any such role among those with the military deterrence approach. The greatest apostle of the military deterrence approach during the 1930s, Winston Churchill, said later in a eulogy to the man whose foreign policy he had so often criticized then as dangerously mistaken, Neville Chamberlain:
The only guide to a man is his conscience; the only shield to his memory is the rectitude and sincerity of his actions. It is very imprudent to walk through life without this shield, because we are so often mocked by the failure of our hopes and the upsetting of our calculations; but with this shield, whatever the fates may play, we march always in the ranks of honour.7
This asymmetry in presumptions of moral superiority is centuries old and by no means confined to different theories of preventing war. On issue after issue, the morally self-anointed visionaries have for centuries argued as if no honest disagreement were possible, as if those who opposed them were not merely in error but in sin.8 This has long been a hallmark of those with a cosmic vision of the world and of themselves as saviors of the world, whether they are saving it from war, overpopulation, capitalism, genetic degradation, environmental destruction, or whatever the crisis du jour might be.
Given this exalted vision of their role by the anointed visionaries, those who disagree with them must be correspondingly degraded or demonized. On issues of war and peace, oppo
nents who prefer deterrence to disarmament are often depicted as intellectually deficient, lacking in imagination, or blinded by habit. John Dewey, for example, depicted those who disagreed with the 1920s movement for an international renunciation of war, such as led eventually to the Kellogg-Briand treaty of 1928, as people exhibiting “the stupidity of habit-bound minds.”9 In other words, it was not even possible for others to have weighed the probabilities of this untried approach differently. According to Dewey, only “mental inertia”10 could explain why some people were not willing to gamble their national security on international renunciations of war. Their reasons, Dewey said, “are psychological rather than practical or logical”11 or else the arguments against the renunciation of war “comes from those who believe in the war system.”12
Differences on issues of war and peace are associated with fundamentally different visions of the world, which produce different beliefs about a whole constellation of social and political issues.13 For example, a believer in the welfare state or in socialism is less likely to prefer the theory of military deterrence than is a believer in laissez-faire economics, judicial restraint, and other aspects of the opposite vision.
John Dewey, for example, was opposed to “laissez-faire” economics and to a “punitive” approach to the criminal, which enables us to ignore “our part in creating him.”14 Bertrand Russell supported the idea of “social justice between nations and between individuals,” which would require that “all ultimate ownership and control of land and raw materials must be in the hands of the international authority,” for “private property, in regard to raw materials, involves gross injustice and a powerful incentive to war.”15 Like many others on the political left, he advocated schools in which there is “as little discipline as is compatible with the acquisition of knowledge, and no corporal punishment whatever.”16 In short, pacifism is part of a coherent vision that extends well beyond issues of war and peace, while deterrence is part of a very different vision that is also coherent in its larger sweep.
The Quest for Cosmic Justice Page 9
