Schools try to level the hierarchy of favoritism. In the same way that parents are desperate to avoid sibling rivalry at home, schools insist on impartiality among the student body. Today’s U.S. school kids are discouraged from openly expressing favoritism. As I mentioned in chapter 1, kids are not allowed to bring valentine cards or treats to exchange, unless they bring enough for everyone. I was even told repeatedly by teachers that I could not bring half the class cookies and the other half cupcakes, because even though everyone was provided for, all the students should have the exact same treat.
Favoritism between friends or between teachers and students is assumed to disadvantage the others in the group, but if my previous argument is valid—that ingroup favoritism is not the same as outgroup discrimination—then favoritism in school need not hinder others. When resources (like instruction time and supplies) are scarce, then of course the distribution must be just, but many forms of favoritism are helpful to education. Favorite teachers motivate students; favorite students inspire teachers; favorite classmates help one another. Mentors who are allowed to choose their protégés are not just discriminating, but carefully judging whether their special knowledge or skills can be safely entrusted to this person. Favorite pupils in this scenario are not only privileged but burdened with greater responsibility. Perhaps the greatest obstacle to these more subtle, affectionate forms of education and edification is just the large numbers of people processed in modern institutions.
One of the major objections to favoritism in an institution like a school is that extra attention leaves some people on the outside of a privileged circle. Fairness is intoned in order to rescue the “outcast.” Obviously this pulls on the heartstrings, and I am not arguing that outsiders are acceptable collateral damage in the enactment of favoritism. But I am suggesting that everyone is a favorite to someone. Being an insider or outsider is relative, not absolute. The only harmful or sad thing is if a person is never preferred by anybody—an extremely rare scenario that cannot be fixed by eliminating favoritism, anyway. Most people have rich personal lives, complete with families and friends who see them as beloved favorites. Any ethical responsibility to celebrate their importance and significance falls to their families, friends, and tribes—not strangers, associates, or classmates. It is a strange assumption we make when we think that Sally’s friendship with Anna denies something to Maggie. What kids owe to one another is respect, not equal affections or equal treatment. Heretically, the same could be said of teachers and other institutional servants. Teachers should respect all their students, but beyond this they should be allowed their favorites.
Indeed, many parents are able to love all their children and also have favorites. The children may instinctively know who the favorite is, but if all the kids feel secure and loved, there is no significant resentment. We all know abuse cases, of course, where one child is spoiled and siblings are neglected. But that is just bad parenting, not a necessary consequence of favoritism.
Two kinds of equality are pursued under the title of egalitarianism. They are very different forms, but frequently mixed together—sometimes inadvertently and sometimes knowingly. Equality of opportunity is one form of egalitarianism, and equality of outcomes is another. The latter, equality of outcomes or shares, is often massaged into policies under the aegis of the former. While I am not opposed to equality of opportunity, I am opposed to rules and policies that attempt to create an equality of outcomes (especially when they violate merit and certain kinds of favoritism).
The confusion can be seen in the two elementary-school cases I’ve already mentioned. Trying to establish the equal opportunity of all kids for athletic activity, schools have mistakenly created an equal outcomes policy, in which all kids are given ribbons for “winning” the race. And trying to ensure an equal opportunity for kids to receive a gift or appreciation has twisted into an equal outcomes policy of mandatory valentines. In and of itself, these confusions are relatively harmless and the stakes are low. But as children are first inculcated with ideas and practices of fairness, these confusions stand as harbingers of things to come.
Instead of trying to square a circle, by transforming favoritism and meritocracy into fairness, we might try a more honest synthesis. A better way to integrate fairness and favoritism for kids is to show how opportunity and outcome are part of a process. Everyone should have equal opportunity to become your friend, but not everyone can be your friend (not everyone can end up as your friend). Anyone should be a candidate for friend status, but few will be admitted to the elite club. Why few? Because favorites (friends) can only be created by spending time together, sharing experiences, and immersing in each other’s lives—and time, sadly, is a finite resource.
Treating opportunity and outcome as a process also thwarts the unfounded equation of preference and prejudice. Just because you prefer your favorites does not make you prejudiced. In the case of friendships, for example, kids should be encouraged to fish their friendships from the widest and most diverse pond available (using color-blind, gender-blind, and class-blind criteria), but then the resulting favorites will be a much smaller pool. Being discriminatory in your friendships is only prejudiced if you’ve prejudged candidates (pre-judicare). Judging after experience (post-judice) is justified preference, not prejudice.
I forget who made the funny and insightful quip about good books: Since I don’t have enough time to read all the great books, I have no time for the merely good books. But something like this brutal truth applies to people too. Since I don’t have enough time and affection for my crew of favorite people, I don’t really have any time for strangers. I owe strangers courtesy, of course, but not much more.
5
The Circle of Favors
Global Perspectives
In 2005 I published a book about my adventures living in Cambodia. In this book I tried to show the spiritual altitudes of Khmer culture, the crushing poverty brought on by decades of political chaos, and the impressive character of the people. But it was not an overly sanguine, romanticized chronicle of Southeast Asia—in fact, I was careful to detail the dangerous side of a very corrupt country, where thugs flourish with impunity. Weapons are ubiquitous, as are drugs and prostitution, and I myself witnessed a brutal political assassination.
I was surprised, then, to receive an e-mail from a couple living in the United States, who claimed to be so inspired by my book that they were selling everything they owned and moving their whole family to Cambodia to help the poor. “Are you sure you read my book, and not some other?” I asked. But they were determined. They had nursing experience and wanted to offer their services to those suffering on the other side of the planet. I was further astounded to learn that they would be bringing along their young daughters to what I saw as dangers and privations. I shook my head in disbelief, but I held my breath and hoped for the best.
They sold their home and possessions and took their big hearts—and their innocent kids—into a jungle village in Cambodia, where they spent all their money on medical supplies and began attending to the staggering numbers of needy strangers. It is to their eternal credit that they helped many people in the few months after setting up shop. In short order, however, they began to make noise about local corruption and the almost nightly stealing of their medical supplies, and they naively sought redress through local political channels. Their humanitarian innocence did not go unpunished. The wife was run off the road one night by a group of politico thugs, who gang-raped and beat her—leaving her for dead. Sadly, this is a common method used by corrupt officials and local racketeers to “send a message” to reformers. Somehow the family managed to get to the capital city, where they frantically e-mailed me and others, explaining their dire situation: no money, an injured and suicidal mother, traumatized kids, and so on. My colleagues and I managed to get them connected to an excellent nongovernmental organization (NGO) that probably saved their lives and got them back to the States. Happily, they all survived this heartbreaking ord
eal.
When a culture like ours combines the secular grid of impartiality with the saintly ideals of Good Samaritan selflessness, a unique form of philanthropy emerges. Charity takes this odd form in the developed West—and we’re so accustomed to it in the United States that we confuse our idiosyncratic humanitarian impulse with the good itself. I will refer to the uniquely Western philanthropists as the “world-savers,” because their goodwill extends so far beyond the usual tribal circles. This American couple who dragged their kids to Cambodia to heal the strangers were “world-savers.” They may be guilty of something philosopher Christina Hoff Sommers calls the “Jellyby fallacy”—named after Mrs. Jellyby in Dickens’s Bleak House, a “telescopic philanthropist” who cares more for a faraway African tribe than her own family.1 One is struck by the parallels with certain Hollywood celebrities who have adopted a veritable United Nations of children from around the world, championed every noble humanitarian cause, but somehow can’t find compassion enough to reconcile with their own estranged parents or siblings. These strange fallacies of misplaced loyalty are not attempts at fairness per se, but aberrant mutations born of the fairness impulse (seeking to de-privilege kin and redistribute benefits to strangers).
Is it any wonder that Westerners are susceptible to the Jellyby fallacy, when Christianity tells us: “God so loved the world that he sacrificed his only son for us”? It may be pious and mystically beautiful to sacrifice your son for others, but it’s also transcendently bad parenting.
The “world-savers” are very familiar to us in the States, and they contrast strongly with the “favoritists.” The East and the West share common notions of saintly altruism, but the East never adopted the grid of impartiality. Consequently, the East is more clannish, more favoritist, in their ethical convictions. In the fall of 2010, for example, Bill Gates and Warren Buffet made a trip to Beijing to promote the idea of philanthropy. China’s rocketing economy has created around 900,000 new millionaires (U.S. dollar equivalent) in recent years, but Chinese culture has never really promoted or understood the idea of spreading wealth to strangers. To an uneducated American, this looks retrograde and callous, but it really just reveals the value-system difference that I’ve been exploring. Chinese culture puts things like loyalty and filial piety far above values like fairness and egalitarianism. American billionaires Gates and Buffet were met with some trepidation and skepticism in Beijing, because Chinese notions of charity strongly privilege family over strangers—they are favoritists, not world-savers.
Chinese Favoritism
The “East” is of course a diverse region, made up of many different cultures, ethnicities, and political frameworks. But two very deep root systems tunnel under all that diversity: (1) Confucianism in the Far East (in China, Korea, Japan, and Vietnam), and (2) Indian cosmology, especially caste systems (in India, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, Burma, Laos, Thailand, and Cambodia). Obviously Arab culture has its own deep filial tribalism—for example, one recalls the Arab adage “My brother and me against my cousin; me, my brother, and my cousin against the stranger.” But for my purposes here, I want to focus on Chinese and then Indian culture because they so clearly contrast with our own culture of fairness.
Kongzi, or Confucius, gave us our nice example—back in chapter 1—of the son who virtuously shelters the thieving father. We should look now at the filial piety system that produces this brand of favoritism virtue. Filial piety, or xiao, is deep respect for parents and ancestors, and when Chinese people talk of xiao, they’re usually referring to the obligations, duties, and sacrifices that children (especially the elder son) must fulfill toward aging parents. But the concept of filial piety is also bigger and includes the many duties that family members have toward one another—parents, children, siblings, uncles, nephews, nieces, grandparents. A person who puts himself above the interests of his family is not dutiful, and a person who puts non-relations above the interests of his family is quite possibly insane.
It is hard for Westerners to appreciate xiao, or parent duty, in the same way as the Chinese, because for us parents are just “one case” or “example” of the people who fall under our general rules of ethical duty. We think of ethics as grid-like: a good person does not lie, he doesn’t lie to his neighbor, and he doesn’t lie to his parents. It is “lying” or “truth telling” that must be applied to various social interactions. The rule dominates, and persons are just variables under the rule. For Chinese people, it is different. Ethical duties don’t apply to parents; ethical duties themselves come from parent-child bonds. The book of filial piety Xiao Jing (c. 400 BCE) is attributed to Kongzi, and when Confucianism was adopted as the state philosophy (during the Han Dynasty), the book was required reading for all imperial and civil officials (until 1911). Chapter 1 of Xiao Jing states, “Xiao is the foundation of virtue, and is what all teaching grows out of.”2 Unlike many other cultures, Chinese ethics is not divine or supernatural. It is based on the secular idealism of family relationships.
“He who loves his parents,” Xiao Jing explains, “does not dare to do evil unto others; he who respects his parents does not dare to be arrogant to others. Love and respect are exerted to the utmost in serving the parents, and this virtue and teaching is extended to the people.”3 Loyalty and respect flow upward, downward, and around again. A father shows respect and affection to his wife and children, who in turn serve the father (with work, affection, and resources) that he then uses to better serve his parents. A micro-circle of beneficence is created in the nuclear family that radiates out toward the social macrocosm. And rulers, or those in power, are also expected to live by this circle of respect, loyalty, and affection.4 Xiao inside the family is the incubator for love, respect, and loyalty outside the family. Xiao teaches us how to serve others.
Fig. 15. Kongzi (Confucius) (551–479 BC) contoured the East Asian mind with positive favoritism and built ethics on a secular platform of benevolent bias. Drawing by Stephen Asma.
The high importance of family in Chinese sociopolitical culture can be seen in the etymology of their word for “nation”: guojia—a combination of guo (state) and jia (family). The tribalism of family loyalty provides an informal social security system, including help for unemployed, sick, or disabled kin and resources for education—and blood-related children will often be transferred to the most prosperous uncle’s family to be raised (Chinese frequently “adopt” kin in this way, but rarely adopt strangers in the way that Westerners do).
The obligation to parents is so foundational that it is even required by Chinese law. The Chinese constitution requires children to care for their elderly parents. “It is inconceivable and incomprehensible to the Chinese to see how people in the West, particularly those well-to-do, put their aged parents in nursing homes. To them, it is simply an unforgivable sin.”5
Shortly after I returned from China, I was on an author’s panel at a book fair in Chicago. One of the panelists had written a book on the challenges of caring for elderly parents in contemporary America, and she assured the anxious audience that “taking care of your elderly parents is a choice, not an obligation. You don’t have to do it.” I could not then, nor can I now, imagine a more antithetical sentiment to Chinese ethics.
Today xiao continues to define the Asian worldview well beyond the borders of China. Preferential treatment, or biased partiality, is not just “tolerated” in Asian ethics—it is required. Favoritism is the groundwork of Confucian culture. The model of the good person is not the saintly world-saver, but the devoted family member. As for the Jellyby fallacy, Xiao Jing clearly states, “He who does not love his parents but loves others, we call that perverse virtue. For he who does not respect his parents but respects others, we call that perverse courtesy.”6
The practice of filial piety extends out beyond the family and becomes a related form of social lubricant called guanxi. I introduced this idea in chapter 1, but here we see it in a fuller context. Often translated as “social connection” or “close relationship,”
if I have good guanxi, then I have strong and influential social connections. I can get things done, because I know the right people and they look out for me. It is crucial to build up good guanxi in life, because you will always need a circle of favorites.
This system of guanxi favoritism runs counter to the bureaucracies of modernity. The modern Western grid of fairness is partly produced by and protected by bureaucracy—impartial rules and regulations that ignore persons. Guanxi, by contrast, is explicitly personal. The system of favoritism works if you live in a “face culture.”
Face Culture
I have spent a lot of time traveling in China and even lived in the Chinese district of Shanghai in 2007.7 There were very few waiguoren (or foreigners) in my neighborhood—I sometimes heard myself referred to as a gweilo—which means “white ghost” and is an informal but rather inoffensive way of calling me a foreigner.
Downtown Shanghai is crawling with gweilo, and my presence never registered a second look when I walked down the city streets, but out in the hinterland of my neighborhood, I could attract a small crowd of slack-jawed spectators. And if I was walking with my three-year-old son (half-gweilo, half-Chinese), people would regularly stop, point, crane their necks, and even get in bicycle accidents in order to examine his little exotic face. Happily, all this hyper-attention was positive. In my experience, the Chinese are not xenophobic, but very xeno-curious.
My son, whose mother is Chinese, was a constant source of excitement. And Chinese folks on the street (especially older folks) would analyze his face in detail—usually pointing out his large eyes and other such physiognomic nuances. It freaked him out a little to have people so intensely interested in him (even touching his face and breaching every Western norm of personal space), but eventually he got used to it.
Against Fairness Page 11
