The Delicate Subject of Inequalify

By Thomas Griffith

More than any other nation, the U.S. is haunted by the idea of equality. True, the French once talked gloriously of egalite. But, having pulled back from their revolution, they feel no more committed to egalite than to fraternite. To the English, equality comes under the heading of abstract ideas. As Gladstone once remarked, "If there are two things on earth that John Bull hates, they are abstract propositions and the Pope." Matthew Arnold regarded inequality as the religion of England.

In America, so powerful is the democratic rhetoric of equality that few people ever risk saying a good word for inequality. They simply live by it. Though American politics proclaims a belief in equality. Americans sort themselves out by the differences in where they live and how they live. The inequality that Americans feel most comfortable with is, accordingly, economic. Inequality by professional specialization is also accepted, but any other kind is condemned. Assertion of social superiority, for example, is often considered snobbery, and intellectual superiority damned as elitist.

Money sorts out Americans, whether in good neighborhoods or bad, in first class or economy, in balcony seats or orchestra. Most of the time, economic inequality implies no final social judgments. If there is an implied link between money and merit, Americans are too shrewd to make the comparison absolute. Still, "My money is as good as his" is accepted American doctrine. Where it does not prevail, as in country-club memberships but even more in discriminatory housing, the contrary practice is usually covert, generally awkward, often shamefaced and sometimes illegal. Yet even though the phrase has the required democratic ring, it usually means asserting a common right to spend to achieve an unequal advantage.

Actually, the American way of life is characterized by a delicate interplay between inequality and equality. Inequality is the less talked about, but in fact the more fervently practiced. It is the great generator, inspiring the energy that spanned the American continent. It multiplies the wealth, sharpens the wits, creates the nervous dynamism that is called progress. The desire to excel is the adrenaline of competition. If winning does not matter, asked Adolph Rupp, former University of Kentucky basketball coach, why does anyone bother to keep score? Yes, but everyone knows the competitive excesses that inequality also encourages: the ruthless athlete who thinks that sportsmanship is for losers, the politician with the instinct for the jugular, the predatory businessman who exults in crushing rivals.

Equality's claims are just as insistent. They begin as early as the child's "It's my turn," the sense of injustice when brother's piece of cake is larger than his. Fairness, evenhandedness, seems a natural property of equality--first come, first served--and accounts for that deep-seated American prejudice against queue jumpers and insiders' advantages. Equality also speaks to the generous impulses: the readiness to help the other fellow and succor the needy, the unwillingness to seem superior to one's fellow man or lord it over him.

But equality's excesses are also well known: the way it encourages goofing off and not doing one's share, the attitude that emphasizes rights but never duties. Equality suspects excellence and becomes envious of it or hostile to it. "A man thinks to show himself my equal," complained Goethe, "by being grab--that is to say, coarse and rude; he does not show himself my equal, he shows himself grab." But if there are slobs in America (and who can deny that there are?), even the most raucous among them do not really believe in equality in everything. Joe Six-Pack in the bleachers, noisily insistent about what he has paid good money to see, tolerates no engagingly amateur performance on the field; he wants to see the best giving of their best, and in this area considers himself an expert judge.

In similar fashion, inequality pays tactful court to equality and makes concessions to its spirit. Often these concessions are made somewhat condescendingly, as in the advertiser's studiedly ungrammatical slogans or the politician's folksy manner adopted to disguise his law-school education. European businessmen often misunderstand the first-name informality of American offices. But while people may be called associates and not employees, while office mateyness and joshing between ranks may be encouraged, and while after-dinner speeches may proclaim everyone members of the team, there is rarely much confusion about who is boss. Though he may keep his office door open, an invisible barrier usually makes it imprudent to cross the threshold frivolously.

"All men are created equal." That resounding phrase, engraved on the brainpan of every American schoolchild, has an implied religious context--meaning equal in the sight of God. Thomas Jefferson meant the phrase politically, though at the time only a few landowners had the ballot; slaves and the propertyless did not. A somewhat uncomfortable slave owner all his life, Jefferson never proposed anything so radical as one man, one vote. But his eloquent phrase has survived in American politics as a challenge and an embarrassment, requiring a succession of subtle legal compromises, such as the separate-but-equal doctrine. With the nation's 200th birthday approaching, the courts have at last decided that legal equality in all its aspects means just what it says. With racially mixed juries, blacks now increasingly know full equality before the law (as even Angela Davis might admit, although she has not).

The British attitude has been considerably different.

"Equality before the law we all take as a matter of course," said Matthew Arnold. When people talk of equality, he pointed out, "we understand social equality." The England of Arnold's 19th century, far more than the one of today, believed the words of the hymn:

The rich man in his castle. The poor man at his gate. God made them high or lowly. And order'd their estate.

That was never good American doctrine, which despised frozen privileges, nobility, precedent and rank. In America, so the theory went, anyone could better his lot, whatever the circumstances of his birth. Equality, in the sense of everyone's sharing alike, inspired a few Utopians, but most Americans put their trust in a more movable notion: equality of opportunity. In its name, education has been more lavishly endowed and widely dispensed than in any other nation in history. Of course, as Philosopher John Rawls notes, "equality of opportunity means an equal chance to leave the less fortunate behind." The American egalitarian, having improved his lot, says proudly, "I earned what I've got."

Says Harvard Sociologist Daniel Bell: "We know from many sociological studies that large disparities of income and status are accepted as fair if individuals feel that it is the will of God or justly earned, while small differences, if arbitrary, will often seem unfair. Orderlies in a hospital compare their income with that of a nurse, but not that of a doctor." Most Americans live by equality of category and are content to move with it--the going wage scale, the union member's seniority, the soldier's promotion in rank and the civil servant's slow rise to a rug, a water carafe and a secretary.

In recent years a jarring new dogma has challenged equality of opportunity. It argues for an assured equality of results. As Rawls writes in A Theory of Justice, "Since the inequalities of birth and natural endowment are undeserved, these inequalities are to be somehow compensated for. In order to treat all persons equally, to provide genuine equality of opportunity, society must give more attention to those with fewer native assets and to those born into the less favorable social position."

Sociologist Bell considers this "principle of redress," as Rawls calls it, to be "the central value problem" of contemporary society. How much redress? And at what cost to other groups in the society? Just how agonizing these questions can be is seen in the ongoing debate about quotas and compensatory efforts. Where liberals like Bell once opposed discrimination because of "its denial of a justly earned place to a person on the basis of an unjust group attitude," now a different proposition is being argued. Merely being disadvantaged--by being black or female or young or Indian or whatever--entitles you to a favored place that is representative of the numbers in your category. The 1972 Democratic Convention went askew on that proposition, and the party is still trying to recapture itself. Minorities who are playing catchup do need all the help they can get in opening up opportunities. But the more rigidly quotas are imposed in a minority's behalf, the more risk there is of transferring to other groups that invaluable but intangible advantage in the equality argument--the sense of being unfairly treated. Richard Nixon, George Wallace and Archie Bunker are scholars of the subject.

"I'm as good as the next fellow" is not always a realistic or even noble sentiment. Equality as similarity is a hopeless goal, as any plain girl realizes when she watches the progress of a pretty woman down a street. People are favored by nature, birth or fortune; they outdo others by talent, effort and luck. Many equality arguments turn on trying to redress the inequities of "them as has gits."

The new dogma of equality of results turns up some bizarre arguments. In his recent book More Equality, Herbert J. Gans, a Columbia University sociologist, draws up a scenario for "cultural equality" that would eliminate "invidious status and other distinctions between 'highbrow,' 'middlebrow' and 'lowbrow' levels of taste." "A culturally equal society," writes Gans approvingly, "would thus treat all ways of expressing oneself and acting as equal in value, status and moral worth." But why should a taste for Lawrence Welk instead of Pablo Casals, or Jacqueline Susann instead of James Joyce, be held of equal value, status and moral worth? "Because," answers Gans, "they express the differing aesthetic standards of people in different socioeconomic and educational circumstances." Out of that academic window goes all thought of standards, judgment and improved tastes. But what a patronizing way to enshrine equality! For example, the real claim of the blues to be taken seriously when set against contemporary classical music (so much of which is technically accomplished but derivative and sterile) turns on the vulgar vitality, beauty and originality of the music, and not on the "different socioeconomic and educational circumstances" of its performers or its audience.

The worst form of inequality, Aristotle argued, is to try to make unequal things equal. He held instead that "equals ought to have equality" and recalled the retort of the lions, in the fable of Antisthenes, when in the council of the beasts the hares began haranguing for equality for all. "Where," asked the lions, "are your claws and teeth?" Still, more than claws and teeth are presumed to be estimable in civilized society. This is why the undue emphasis on economic inequality in American life, which puts such a premium on acquisitiveness, is an erratic measure of individual worth.

It is not simply that thousands of Americans, as teachers, nurses or lab workers, find more gratification in their work than they might have found in opportunities that would have paid them better. Partly from envy, such people may even scorn the compromises, shortcuts or betrayals on which (at least in their view) other successful careers are built. But there is more to it than envy. Such essential qualities as character, honor, decency, intelligence, lovableness, dependability, common sense, humor and perception are randomly dispersed in the population and do not necessarily ascend on a parallel curve with a man's economic status. Nor do such qualities depend upon the amount of his schooling or "brains"; IQ tests do not measure character. This may be why William F. Buckley, that maverick among snobs, would rather be governed by the first 2,000 people in the Boston telephone book than a similar number of Harvard faculty members.

Academics may find such heresies anti-intellectual. But farmers, fishermen and carpenters are often self-sufficient men who occupy their own spaces, are good at what they are, and do not ask to be judged by what they are not. The stubborn American belief in equality does not depend on a false claim of similarity among men when their differences are real. Instead, it argues for a broader test in judging each person's qualities. By deploying his own range of qualities as best he can, each man frames his own dignity and asserts his right to look any other man squarely in the face.

Thomas Griffith

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