Isn’t it a problem when minorities are under-represented at selective colleges? That depends on what is causing the under-representation. Consider the example from the National Basketball Association. African Americans represent 12 percent of the population, yet more than 75 percent of professional NBA players are black. Is this a problem? Why aren’t people demanding to see more Jews and Koreans on the courts? The reason is that people recognize that merit is producing the disparate outcome. If teams pick the best passers, dribblers, and shooters, then it doesn’t really matter that one group is over-represented and other groups are under-represented because merit, not discrimination, determines the result. Similarly, if a larger percentage of white and Asian American students are getting into Berkeley on merit, that is a result we should be willing to live with.
Why not raise the floor for under-represented groups? Because college admissions is a zero-sum game. Every seat that is given to a black or Hispanic student with weaker qualifications must be taken away from an Asian American or white student with stronger qualifications. In short, there is no way to raise the floor without lowering the ceiling. It’s an algebraic impossibility. Therefore, much as we’d like to see more black and Hispanic faces at top schools, this result should not be achieved by unjustly rejecting better-qualified Asian Americans and whites.
Can’t you support any form of affirmative action? In my previous work I have written in favor of affirmative action based not on race but on socioeconomic status. If a student who comes from a disadvantaged background and goes to a lousy school nevertheless scores in the 90th percentile on the SAT, he or she may have more college potential than another student who comes from a privileged background and scores in the 95th percentile. So colleges can and should take socioeconomic circumstances into account. Remember, too, that more blacks and Hispanics would be eligible for socioeconomic affirmative action, since blacks and Hispanics disproportionately come from the ranks of the poor.
How does affirmative action hurt blacks? African Americans face two serious problems in America today. The first is “rumors of inferiority.” Many people don’t like Koreans or Pakistanis, but hardly anyone considers these people inferior. With blacks, however, there remains a widespread suspicion that they might be intellectually inferior. Far from dispelling this suspicion, affirmative action strengthens it. Affirmative action conveys the message to society that “this group is incapable of making it on its own merits.” Racial preferences are a sort of Special Olympics for African Americans. Such preferences devalue black achievement, and they intensify doubts about black capacity.
The second problem facing African Americans is cultural breakdown: high crime rates, broken families, illegitimacy, and so on. These cultural problems are in my view the main reasons blacks do poorly on many measures of academic achievement and economic performance. The way to improve black performance is to address this cultural breakdown. Racial preferences are a distraction from this challenge. They create the illusion that blacks are performing poorly due to racism. By rigging the race in favor of blacks, affirmative action policies prevent African Americans, and society in general, from doing the hard and necessary work of building African American cultural skills so that blacks can compete effectively with whites and other groups.
If affirmative action hurts blacks, why do blacks support it? The reason is that affirmative action provides short-term gains. Imagine the situation of a liberal who approaches me and says, “Dinesh, you are a victim of hundreds of years of British imperialism. I am going to pay you $3,000 a month to compensate for this historical crime.” Now imagine that the liberal’s offer is challenged by a conservative who says to me, “Dinesh, don’t take the money. You don’t really need it. You have had a good education and can compete on your own merits. Also, the subsidy may prove to be a disincentive for you to become self-reliant.” I would thank the conservative for his troubles and take the liberal’s money!
What about the success stories of affirmative action? They do exist. I recently spoke at Deerfield Academy, where a black student said to me, “I didn’t have the academic credentials to get into Deerfield. I was admitted on a special program for minority students. But now I have an A-grade average. I am vice president of my class. I am on the track team. Am I not a success story of affirmative action?” I told him, “Yes, you are. But here you are at one of the best prep schools in the country. Do you want another preference to get into Princeton? And another one to get into Yale Law School? And another one to get a job? And another one to get a promotion? And another one to get a government contract? That’s not right, my friend. You have been given a break and you have taken advantage of it; now you should be willing to compete on your own merits, and may the force be with you.”
12
The Feminist Mistake
Dear Chris,
You say in your letter that you are more worried about the feminists than about the black activists. I am not, for the reason given several years ago by, of all people, Gerald Ford. Ford said there would never be a war between the sexes because there is too much fraternizing with the enemy. Gender conflict simply does not pose the same dangers of social balkanization that are produced by racial conflict. Let me try, nevertheless, to meet your request and give you an account of what’s wrong with modern feminism.
The feminists at elite universities are, by and large, an angry bunch. This seems odd, because they are paid very well and are living very well. These feminists communicate their anger in very nice lounges over expensive meals and fancy cocktails. Their “martini rage” is directed against such things as “institutional discrimination.” Why aren’t more women teaching math and physics? Why aren’t more female thinkers being assigned in the philosophy and literature departments? Why do women earn seventy cents for each dollar earned by men?
The answer to these questions is obvious, yet one is not supposed to say it. Let me give the answer obliquely by turning to a writer whom feminists greatly admire. In her book A Room of One’s Own, Virginia Woolf raised a provocative question: Why is there no female Shakespeare? What if Shakespeare had had a sister, Woolf speculates, would she have become a writer and won the same fame as her brother William? Woolf answers that there is no female Shakespeare because women have historically not been given rooms of their own—that is to say, the opportunities and resources and leisure—in which to write.
Woolf may have provided a satisfactory explanation for the absence of a female Shakespeare, but underlying this explanation is a hard truth: There is no female Shakespeare! This means that literature courses, if they are based on merit, are going to be heavily weighted toward male authors. And what is true of literature is even more true of philosophy and science.
What about the earnings discrepancy? The seventy cents figure that feminists have publicized is accurate enough, but it carries the presumption that women are earning 70 percent of what men earn for doing the same job. In fact, this is not true. Where is the evidence that the U.S. government or U.S. companies systematically pay men more than women to perform identical jobs? It does not exist. The statistic means that on average women earn less than men. But should we be surprised that female executive assistants make less money than male executives? Reasons for the male-female earnings difference could be that women choose different fields than men, that women sometimes drop out of the workforce to raise children, and so on.
But there is another factor that could help to explain why, at the most advanced levels of academic and economic performance, men tend to do better than women. This factor is intelligence. I am not suggesting that men have higher IQs than women. On the contrary: Countless studies have shown that men and women have the same average IQ of 100. Upon closer examination, however, we see that IQ is distributed differently among women than among men.
Male and female IQ can be plotted on a bell curve. The mean score for the two groups is the same, but the bell curves look different. The female bell curve is taller and narrower; the male
bell curve is shorter and flatter. This means that female performance tends to congregate around the mean, whereas among men, there are many more geniuses—and many more dummies. I believe this finding is confirmed by experience. Men tend to win the literature prizes and the Westinghouse Science Awards, but men are also over-represented among the truly dumb. When I walk into a social gathering, I am pretty sure that the most exceptional person there is going to be a man and that the biggest idiot there is also going to be a man.
Another indication of male over-representation at the lower end of the bell curve can be seen in crime rates. A large body of research shows that criminals are, in general, very dumb people. Not surprisingly, the vast majority of criminals are men. Incidentally, John Gotti, the Mafia don, was tested at school and had an IQ of 109. How, then, did he become the most powerful figure in the Mafia? Because an IQ of 109 puts him in the genius category for the criminal class!
All this brings me to the feminist mistake. Women and men once had separate domains. The female domain was the private world of home and family, and the male domain was the public world of work and politics. Each world had its own value, and the two could not be rightly compared; indeed, in some respects the female world could be considered more consequential. As one male wag said to his wife, “You decide what we eat for dinner, which church we attend, and where we go for vacation, and what our children should study, and I decide whether we are for Mr. Dewey or Mr. Truman.”
Then something happened that pushed women into the male sphere, and career women aspired to compete effectively with men for the most lucrative rewards of the male sphere. According to feminists, the large-scale movement of women into the workforce was the consequence of the great feminist revolution that stormed the barricades of the patriarchy and won a glorious victory, although the battle is ongoing. This is a lovely fairy tale, but when exactly did the battle occur? How many people were killed? Why did the entrenched patriarchy put up so little resistance?
Let us put aside buncombe and talk a little sense. Technology, not feminism, paved the way for mass female entry into the workforce. The vacuum cleaner, the forklift, and the birth-control pill had far more to do with this than all the writings of Betty Friedan and all the press releases put out by the National Organization for Women. Think about this: Until a few decades ago, housework was a full-time occupation. Cooking alone took several hours. The vacuum cleaner, the microwave oven, and the dishwasher changed that. Until recently, work outside the home was harsh and physically demanding. Forklifts and other machinery have reduced the need for human muscle. Finally, before the invention of the pill, women could not effectively control their reproduction and therefore, for most women, the question of having a full-time career simply did not arise.
So technology made it possible for women to work. This was perhaps inevitable, but what was not inevitable was the shift of values that went with the change. The feminist error was to embrace the value of the workplace as greater than the value of the home. Feminism has endorsed the public sphere as inherently more constitutive of women’s worth than the private sphere. Feminists have established as their criterion of success and self-worth an equal representation with men at the top of the career ladder. The consequence of this feminist scale of values is a terrible and unjust devaluation of women who work at home. This has been recognized. Less noticed has been the other equally unfair outcome: Women are now competing with men in a domain where, at the very top level, they are likely to lose.
13
Who Are the Postmodernists?
Dear Chris,
I am not sure that it was the wisest idea to share my letter on feminism with the chairwoman of the Women’s Studies department. Isn’t this the woman who looks like Janet Reno, wears ridiculous hats, and comes to class with a big dog? She sounds quite terrifying. Now if I am found in a back alley mauled by a bloodhound or stabbed in the back with a hatpin, you will know where to direct the authorities.
You note that much of the humanities program—including the Women’s Studies department—is made up of “postmodernists.” Who, you ask, are the postmodernists? The postmodernists are the Truly Profound Ones. By way of illustration, let me offer this passage by literary theorist Geoffrey Hartman. “Because of the equivocal nature of language, even identities or homophones sound on: the sound of Sa is knotted with that of ca, as if the text were signaling its intention to bring Hegel, Saussure, and Freud together. Ca corresponds to the Freudian Id (‘Es’); and it may be that our only ‘savior absolu’ is that of a ca structured like the Sa-significant: a bacchic or Lacanian ‘primal process’ where only signifier-signifying signifiers exist.”
This has all the hallmarks of postmodern thought. It is pompous, verbose, and incoherent. To a certain type of intellectually insecure person, postmodernism and its intellectual cousin, deconstructionism, can appear profound: “Gee, that sounds very complicated. These people must be incredibly brilliant.” Tens of thousands of graduate students have been fooled in this way by people such as Hartman and the master of postmodernism, Jacques Derrida. Serious thinkers see through Derrida in an instant. Michel Foucault reportedly said of Derrida, “He’s the kind of philosopher who gives bull-shit a bad name.”
It would be a mistake, however, to dismiss all postmodern thought in this way. Philosopher Richard Rorty and literary critic Stanley Fish are both lucid writers, and they put forward substantial claims. Their fundamental claim is that there is no such thing as objective truth. Even science, Rorty and Fish assert, does not describe “the world out there”; rather, it is a Western cultural construction that has no more claim to reality than anyone else’s cultural construction. In an article in the New York Times, Fish even suggested that the rules of science are just as arbitrary as the rules of baseball.
Postmodern theory suffers from the weakness that the postmodernists themselves don’t believe it, as their actions show. When Richard Rorty needs a medical checkup, he doesn’t go to a witch doctor; he checks into the medical center at the University of Virginia. When Stanley Fish and I debate on campus, we do not travel there in an oxcart; we go by plane. “Show me a relativist at 30,000 feet,” Richard Dawkins writes, “and I’ll show you a hypocrite.” Airplanes fly, Dawkins points out, because a lot of Western mathematicians and engineers “have got their sums right.”
In other words, science works because the universe operates according to certain regularities or laws, and science is devoted to discovering those laws. Of course, scientists do not claim knowledge of final or objective truths, but they do insist that the Newtonian account of the universe is superior to the Ptolemaic account, and that the Newtonian account has itself been surpassed by that of Albert Einstein. Even though scientific hypotheses may be culturally conditioned, it is only when they have survived criticism and testing that they are held to be valid and true.
Too embarrassed to challenge the authority of science, some liberal scholars concede that facts are known, but they insist that values are relative. These scholars are, strictly speaking, logical positivists rather than postmodernists, and their view appears much more reasonable. After all, we can verify facts but values would seem to be the product of individual and cultural preferences.
The Greeks, however, thought otherwise. The ancient Greeks held that there was a moral order in the universe that was no less real or true than the laws governing the motions of the planets. Moreover, the Greeks believed that this moral order was accessible to human reason, much like the laws of nature. On what basis do liberal scholars reject the Greek view? They point to the existence of widespread moral diversity. People in America disagree about morality, and different cultures have different views of morality. Thus the prevalence of moral disagreement is offered as evidence that there is no moral truth.
But the liberal view is not convincing. So what if people disagree about values? People also disagree about facts. If the Gallup organization conducted a survey of the world’s people and the world’s various culture
s, it is quite possible that most people and most groups would emphatically reject Einstein’s proposition that E=mc2. This disagreement would hardly refute Einstein; it would prove only that the majority of the world’s people are wrong. So, too, the presence of moral disagreement proves nothing about whether moral truths exist. Socrates argued that, if anything, disagreements invite investigation so that we can determine which moral opinions are true and which are false.
In my view, the great intellectual challenge facing conservatives is to make the case for morality at a time when many in the West have ceased to believe in an external moral order. The decline of belief in such an order is the most important political development of the past two centuries. Indeed, this decline has created the “crisis of the West.” This crisis is not simply one of the “death of God.” Rather, as Friedrich Nietzsche predicted, if religion withers away, so does morality. The reason is that religion is the primary source of morality, and therefore morality cannot long survive the decay of religion.
Letters to a Young Conservative Page 8
