This is not simply a matter of our choices, but of our inherent limitations. What we might choose to do if we were omniscient is no guide at all to the painfully limited choices we may have when we are very far short of omniscience—and when negative “unintended consequences” have become so common as to become a cliché.
If and when “rehabilitation” gets beyond being a word and becomes a demonstrable fact that can be relied on in the future, then its benefits can be weighed against its costs, like anything else. These costs include the inevitable failures that go with any human endeavor, and the costs of such failures extend beyond economic resources to lives lost.
As for good luck, that too is part of the irrevocable past. But awareness of the role of luck might temper the arrogance of some who have been successful, and temper the resentments of others who have been unsuccessful, and who seek bogeymen to blame for their condition—bogeymen who can be readily supplied by politicians, “leaders,” activists and the media.
Since there is nothing easier to find than sins among human beings, individuals can always be found who have said and done bad things—and can thus be more or less automatically blamed for the bad outcomes of others. Beyond that, there is always the fundamental fallacy that outcomes would be equal or comparable in the absence of malign actions against the less fortunate.
Here as elsewhere, the only times over which we can reasonably hope to have any influence are the present and the future. The most we can do with the past is to learn from it.
Efforts can be made to reduce the number of people currently likely to have damaging childhoods, but the outcomes of such efforts depend not simply on how fervently we wish for better results, but on our knowledge, resources and wisdom—none of which is available in unlimited supply, and deficiencies in which can lead not merely to failure but even to counterproductive outcomes, extending to major social disasters.
At the societal level, the same severe and painful limitations apply when seeking to redress the wrongs of the past. Where the deaths of both the victims and the victimizers put them completely beyond our power, our frustration cannot justify making symbolic restitution among the living, when the costs of such attempts around the world have been written in blood across the pages of history.
After territorial irredentism has led nations to slaughter each other’s people over land that might have little or no value in itself, simply because it once belonged in a different political jurisdiction, at a time beyond any living person’s memory, what is to be expected from instilling the idea of social irredentism, growing out of historic wrongs done to other people?
Such wrongs abound in times and places around the world—inflicted on, and perpetrated by, people of every race, creed and color. But what can any society today hope to gain by having newborn babies in that society enter the world as heirs to prepackaged grievances against other babies born into that same society on the same day?
Individual “Solutions”
Many people, recognizing that those less fortunate may not have had the same opportunities as themselves, have tended to be less demanding about the standards being applied, especially as regards qualities not developed as well within the culture in which the less fortunate have grown up. A promising youngster, with many good qualities and strong potentialities, may not yet have acquired the habit of punctuality, for example. A generous inclination might be not to make a fuss over a chronic tendency of that youngster to arrive 10 or 15 minutes late.
Perhaps a case can be made for modifying the tone or manner in which such a person is penalized for tardiness. But that is very different from saying that a lack of punctuality can be ignored, or penalized less, than with someone from a more fortunate culture, who has been trained from an early age to be on time. Once again, that is part of the past that we can do nothing about, while the future consequences of what we do in the present are our real responsibility.
In view of the fact that the kinds of future endeavors to which a promising young person with many good qualities can aspire are likely to have multiple prerequisites, and that the absence of just one of those prerequisites can negate the presence of all the others, a decision to ignore a deficiency in one of those prerequisites may not be an act of kindness, in terms of its effects on that youngster’s future prospects.
The higher a promising young person goes occupationally, the more high-level people are likely to be encountered in the future—people for whom time is money, and who cannot be kept waiting repeatedly, without adverse consequences to that tardy young person’s future.
Similarly, loosening behavioral standards in general for a child who has grown up without any consistent structure of discipline, at home or in school, risks having whatever abilities or potentialities that child has be rendered futile in a sweeping range of future endeavors with multiple prerequisites that will be encountered in adulthood, if not before.
Being “understanding” or “non-judgmental” toward a young person from a culturally limited background may seem humane, but it can be the kiss of death, as far as that individual’s future is concerned. Something as simple as whether or not one speaks standard English can open or close doors of opportunity—again, especially in higher levels of achievement in many fields. Yet there are educators who see an emphasis on standard English as needless cultural narrowness, if not racism.
Linguistic scholar John McWhorter, for example, sprang to the defense of those in ghetto schools who want to use “black English” in teaching black youngsters. Professor McWhorter contrasted “the general American take on the matter” as one seeing blacks as using “a lot of slang and bad grammar”44 with the way linguistic scholars judge languages.
By the latter criterion, he depicts “black English” as being as much of a coherent language as French, Arabic or Chinese, all of which have colloquial versions different from their formal versions.45 As for why many Americans look at “black English” in the negative way they do, McWhorter says: “Certainly, racism is part of the answer,”46 even if “the racist element in all this vitriol” is not the whole story.47
Professor McWhorter sided with those educators who said that “black English” can be used in schools “as an aid to imparting Standard English to black kids.” Like variations on other languages, he depicts “black English” as something that people speak “in addition to” standard English, and it functions as a lingua franca, according to the sub-title of his book.48
This picture of youngsters in the ghetto as simply being bilingual differs painfully from the reality of their abysmal scores on tests of English. Far from being a lingua franca facilitating intergroup communication, as John McWhorter depicts it, “black English” is a barrier to communication with hundreds of millions of Americans, as well as a barrier to communication with half a billion people around the world who speak English.
It is a devastating constriction of the future opportunities available to black youngsters themselves. Where are the books on mathematics, science, engineering, medicine and innumerable other subjects that are written in “black English”? Professor McWhorter’s defiant posture of defending fellow blacks and their way of talking49 contrasts painfully with the social reality of sacrificing the futures of whole generations of young blacks.
Language issues are not peculiar to blacks or to the United States. Such issues have polarized societies around the world, sometimes to the point of riots and terrorism, as in India, or even a decades-long civil war, as in Sri Lanka.
Because languages in Western Europe developed written versions centuries earlier than the languages of Eastern Europe, the range of written material in the Slavic languages was far more limited, in centuries past, than the range of written material in Western European languages. Thus a Czech child in the Habsburg Empire during the early nineteenth century could be taught in his own native language only in elementary school. It was 1848 before there were high schools teaching in the Czech language.50
Prior to that time, a
Czech youngster had to learn German, in order to become educated above the elementary school level, and thus be able to aspire to a wider range of occupational opportunities as an adult. None of this had anything to do with the linguistic characteristics of either the German language or the Czech language, and everything to do with the inherent constraints of the time, when the prerequisite written knowledge for some professions was available in German but not yet in Czech.
Ironically, a Japanese-owned multinational company has decreed that English will be the sole language of the enterprise, wherever the company’s branches are located around the world.51 In other words, they recognize that English is the lingua franca of international commerce, as it is the language of international airline pilots communicating with airports around the world.
In Singapore, with an overwhelmingly Asian population, not only are all school children required to learn English, the language of instruction in other subjects is conducted in English.52 In such cases, the choice of language is based on practical considerations for the welfare of people, rather than on symbolic or ideological issues.
Practical issues about social and economic realities, seldom have anything to do with the kinds of things that preoccupy academic linguists. Group spokesmen, activists or “leaders” may be preoccupied with languages as badges of cultural identity, but cultures exist to serve human beings. Human beings do not exist to preserve cultures, or to preserve a socially isolated constituency for the benefit of “leaders.”
Government “Solutions”
“Solutions” can be a society’s biggest problem—and especially governmental “solutions”—because government is essentially a categorical institution in an incremental world. When many desirable things compete for a share of inherently limited resources, individuals making decisions for themselves can make incremental trade-offs, giving up a certain amount of X to get a certain amount of Y—and at some point putting a stop to that particular trade-off, when they feel a need to conserve their dwindling supply of X and are approaching a more adequate supply of Y.
Government decisions, however, tend to be categorical: Things are either legal or illegal, and people are either eligible or ineligible for benefits provided by government.
Billionaires are legally eligible for government subsidies in agriculture, even if there is not enough money to provide adequate medical care in government hospitals for military veterans. Government employees are eligible for pensions that pay far more generously than comparable workers receive in the private sector, even when there is not enough money to repair and maintain the safety of crumbling infrastructure.
Categorical decision-making also means that words can carry more weight than realities. “Poverty” means whatever government statisticians say it means, so that a scholar who had spent years studying economic conditions in Latin America could say, “the poverty line in the United States is the upper-middle class in Mexico.”53 But another scholar, taking words more literally, could lament that America’s poor were “having difficulty keeping food on the table.”54 How people with difficulty keeping food on the table can be overweight, even more often than other Americans,55 is a mystery he did not explain. Words trumped realities.
More important than the assessments of intellectuals are the institutional characteristics of government. As a categorical institution, government can deal with things that we categorically do not want, such as murder, or which we categorically do want, such as protection from military attacks by foreign countries. But decisions and actions requiring more finely detailed knowledge for making nuanced incremental adjustments, are often better handled by decision-making processes with more intimate knowledge and involvement—and especially more compelling feedback from the actual consequences of the decisions made.
Given how prone all human beings are to mistakes, in all kinds of institutions, one of the most important characteristics of any decision-making process is its ability to recognize and correct its own mistakes. Businesses that do not recognize their own mistakes, and change course in time, can face bankruptcy, even when they have been very successful in the past. Individuals suffering the painful consequences of their own bad decisions have often been forced to change course in order to avoid impending catastrophe, and in many cases have ended up with greater personal fulfillment and insight going forward.
Various governmental institutions, however, have major built-in barriers to changing course in response to feedback. For an elected official to admit to having made a mistaken decision, from which millions of voters are suffering, is to face the prospect of the end of a whole career in disgrace. Courts of law are bound by legal precedents, which cannot be reversed willy-nilly without disrupting the effectiveness of the whole framework of law.
Housing “Solutions”
Once government housing programs have been created to help “low-income” families, then any family that meets a government agency’s arbitrary definition of “low-income” can receive benefits paid for with the taxpayers’ money. In 2017, for example, families of four people each, with a family income of $100,000, were classified as “low-income” families in San Francisco,56 where housing costs are unusually high.
Why a family’s decision to live in expensive San Francisco should be subsidized by the taxpayers—including taxpayers with family incomes under $100,000—is a question that does not even arise in this context, where words with arbitrary meanings and categorical consequences guide government decisions.*
The sorting and unsorting of neighborhoods by ethnicity or income is an example of something which can be done either by government programs or by private market processes, such as those which changed Harlem from a white, middle-class area of Manhattan into a black, working-class area in the early twentieth century. But these different processes operate under different incentives and constraints, leading to very different end results.
A demographic study of Harlem, as it existed in 1937, showed that the black population had expanded outward from its earlier beginnings at 135th Street and Seventh Avenue, in more or less concentric circles, each circle differing in the proportion of blacks in that circle’s total population, and differing also in the social composition of those particular black people from one circle to another.57 In short, these settlements were not random. People had sorted themselves out, as other people do in countries around the world.
In this study of Harlem, much as in his earlier doctoral dissertation on the black community in Chicago, Professor E. Franklin Frazier found substantial differences in the socioeconomic circumstances in the different concentric circles radiating out from the initial black settlement in Harlem, as the total population of blacks in Harlem increased greatly during the mass migrations from the South.
Blacks were 99 percent of the population in the innermost circle in 1930 and 88 percent of the population in the next circle, but only 6 percent in the outermost fifth circle. Within the black population, Professor Frazier pointed out the “tendency on the part of family groups to move toward the periphery of the community.” The proportion of children under the age of five in the population ranged from just under 4 percent in the innermost circle to just over 12 percent in the outermost circle. The proportion of families on welfare in the innermost zone was two and half times the proportion in the outermost zone.58
What this meant, both in New York and Chicago, was that those blacks who were most acculturated to the social norms of the larger society led the expansion of the black community into adjoining white communities. There was resistance, even so, but the expansion did continue. By contrast, government programs in later years, aimed at racially and socioeconomically unsorting neighborhoods, have moved blacks from crime-ridden public housing projects into middle-class neighborhoods—both black and white middle-class neighborhoods—and have encountered bitter opposition from pre-existing residents in both cases.
It is not obvious how we can even define a “solution” in a situation where people in three diffe
rent groups are each seeking to have a better life, when their ways of life clash, unless one arbitrarily assumes that some group’s desires automatically override any other group’s desires. In short, there are no real “solutions” in such situations, and the best we can reasonably hope for is a viable trade-off.
What actually happens often are especially bitter complaints by middle-class blacks who have sacrificed economically, sometimes for years, in order to be able to afford to move their families away from the kinds of dysfunctional and dangerous ghetto neighbors whom the government now chooses to place in their midst in their new surroundings. But protests from pre-existing residents are often ignored, and those protesting depicted as unworthy people obstructing progress. The alternative is to admit to having imposed a mistaken policy with dire consequences, which could be politically fatal to the promoters of such policies.
Educational “Solutions”
A categorical institution like government cannot be expected to make the best incremental trade-offs. History suggests that government cannot do so, especially when operating within the confines of a social vision based on assumptions of sameness, or at least comparability, among people, when there is no such sameness or comparability even within an underclass minority community in the United States, much less between an underclass minority community and middle-class communities of either minority or majority population.
What can be seen from history, however, is that when people sort themselves out, instead of having the government do so, they seem to get better results—not without strife, but with less strife than in later times when government “solutions” abounded, and so did racial polarization.
Discrimination and Disparities Page 14
