How social justice advocates have attempted to redefine justice and fairness
There are two types of people: those who have a pragmatic view of the human condition and those who believe in utopia. The latter need a reality check: some people will always prosper more than others.
Social justice is all the rage today. It drives discussions of everything from tax policy to welfare state spending, what’s taught to children in schools. Proponents of the voice referendum here, I’m told, are acting in the name of social justice. In recent years the progressive left has been ascendant in American politics, and advocates have pushed for social justice in the name of addressing this inequality. What I’d like to do, however, is to challenge the premise of this discussion by drawing from the writings of Thomas Sowell.
Sowell is an economist by training, specialising in the history of economic thought and ideas. But he’s also a sociologist, a political philosopher and a social theorist. He taught economics at several universities in the 1960s and ’70s, including Cornell and the University of California, Los Angeles. In 1980 he joined the Hoover Institution at Stanford University, where he remains today.
Among his many books, Sowell says his favourite is A Conflict of Visions. It’s about the history of ideas, tries to explain what drives our ideological disputes about freedom and equality and justice. He traces these disagreements back at least two centuries to thinkers such as British journalist William Godwin and philosophers such as Immanuel Kant and Jean-Jacques Rousseau, down through John Rawls and the social justice advocates alive today. The conflicting or contrasting visions he describes in the book are the constrained, or the tragic, view of human nature and the unconstrained or more utopian view.
People with a more constrained view of the human condition see mankind as hopelessly flawed. They see inherent limits to human betterment. We might want to end poverty or war or racism, but that’s probably not going to happen, people with this view reason. Therefore our focus should be on putting in place institutions and processes that help us deal with problems that society is probably never going to solve entirely.
On the other side, you have this unconstrained or utopian view of human nature that basically rejects the idea that there are limits to what humans can achieve. This is the belief that nothing is unattainable and no trade-offs are necessary. Everything is available to all who want it. Through the proper amount of reason and willpower, we can not only manage problems like inequality and discrimination but solve them.
In A Conflict of Visions, Sowell argues that depending on which view you embrace, there are a host of public policies you’re likely to support or oppose. The book explains why two people, similarly well-informed, similarly well-meaning, will reach opposite conclusions on a whole range of issues: taxes, rent control, school choice, military spending, judicial activism, and so forth.
When Kant said: “From the crooked timber of humanity, no truly straight thing can ever be made”, he was exhibiting this constrained view. When Rousseau said: “Man is born free, but everywhere in chains”, he was voicing the unconstrained view.
When Oliver Wendell Holmes, US Supreme Court justice in the early 1900s, said his job as a judge was to make sure the game was played according to the rules, whether he liked them or not, it was the constrained view. But when Earl Warren, Supreme Court justice in the 1950s and ’60s said his job as a judge was to do what he thought was right regardless of the law, it was an unconstrained view.
A Conflict of Visions is part of an informal trilogy by Sowell on the history of ideas. The third book in that trilogy is The Quest for Cosmic Justice, the main source of the remarks in this article. Cosmic justice, as Sowell is using the phrase, is a form of social justice and social justice advocacy that springs from that unconstrained view of human nature where there are no limits to human betterment and no trade-offs in addressing inequality. But first I want to stress that social justice and traditional justice are two very different things. Social justice advocates have attempted to redefine what is commonly understood when we talk about justice and fairness.
Traditional justice is about ensuring an impartial process, not about guaranteeing certain results. A defendant in a criminal case has received justice if the trial is conducted under fair rules with an impartial judge and jury, regardless of whether the outcome is guilty or not guilty. A basketball game is considered fair if everyone plays by the same rules regardless of who wins. Social justice is closer to the opposite of this. Results and standards can be set aside in the hopes of achieving certain results.
Think about a university admissions process that has one set of criteria for black applicants and a different set for whites. What matters most to the social justice advocate is the outcome, not the process. In fact, to the social justice advocate, the process should be rigged if necessary to get a desired result, such as more racial balance on campus, even if that means discriminating against certain groups to get that outcome. This is not simply a question of semantics.
The social justice advocates bring an almost utopian mindset to these issues of social and economic equality. Their presumption is that equal outcomes or something approximating equal outcomes is the norm in society, and that where we don’t find it something nefarious must be going on.
This is not to say that we shouldn’t be bothered by inequality. We should be, and most of us are, but the goal is to understand why it persists. And the reason inequality continues is because it is the norm. It’s not the exception. Disparities, gaps, inequities are not always strange or sinister. They are natural and widespread. They exist in all kinds of human endeavours all around the world, down through history. Yes, discrimination and exploitation also exist, and they can worsen inequality, but they hardly explain disparate outcomes that exist even among groups of the same race and ethnicity.
The reality is that different groups often have different cultures, behaviours, attitudes and habits, which is why people don’t tend to advance at the same rate, not within countries and not between countries, not historically and not currently. Nor is there any guarantee that a group that has advanced will stay advanced.
In the previous era, China was the most advanced society on the planet. Later, it would be the Middle East, then Europe, then America. The ancient Greeks and Romans were far more advanced than their British and Scandinavian contemporaries. A few generations ago, Japan was poorer than any country in Western Europe. Today, Japan is wealthier than any country in Western Europe.
Again, these disparities exist not only between countries but within countries. People in isolated mountainous regions tend to lag behind people from the lowlands. People who live on coasts have tended to be more advanced than people who live inland. It doesn’t matter whether these are people of the same race or different races. The bottom line is that disparities are commonplace. Yet we continue to have a debate about inequality that treats these differences as weird or other-worldly.
Scholars who have studied societies through history have never found this evenness in group advancement that social justice advocates tell us is normal and that would exist in society if it weren’t for racism or discrimination or exploitation. Progressives expect to see equal representation among groups in test scores and graduation rates and occupations and criminal behaviour and income levels and on and on, but they can’t point to a single society where this has ever happened. It’s utopian.
Whatever the reasons behind these economic disparities, they’ve been common throughout history. Today, Japan is twice as rich as Canada. India’s GDP is three times that of Switzerland’s. Sub-Sahara Africa’s GDP is less than a 10th of Europe’s. Some have suggested this inequality exists because some countries were able to take advantage of the industrial revolution while others could not. One problem with that explanation is that inequalities among nations did not begin with the industrial revolution or colonialism or slavery. Some say Africa is poor because the West plundered it, but Africa was poor before the colonists arrived. It was poor while they were there and it was poor after they left.
In America there have been calls for slavery reparations in the name of social justice to address income inequality. Proponents say slave labour made America rich. It’s true some individual slave owners prospered due to slave labour, but that’s different from concluding the entire country was made better off economically. Slavery in America was concentrated in the south, yet the south was the poorest region in the country, during slavery and afterwards.
The same can be said of Brazil. Those regions of Brazil that had slavery were poorer, during slavery and afterwards, than those regions that had few if any slaves. And despite importing far more slaves than America, Brazil never became as prosperous as America.
It’s important to remember that people don’t behave randomly. They behave with a purpose in mind. They don’t immigrate randomly and choose jobs or neighbourhoods to live in randomly or raise their children randomly. Behaviour patterns differ. They differ between groups, whether you break it down by race, sex, religion or in other ways. The way children are raised also differs greatly from one income level to another, which can also perpetuate inequality.
One study showed that families where the parents are professionals, doctors, lawyers, engineers, their children hear about 2100 words an hour at home on average. Children whose parents are working class, auto mechanic, factory worker, hear about 1200 words an hour, and the child from a poor family on welfare hears about 600 words an hour on average at home. Over time a 10-year-old from a family on welfare will not have heard as many words at home as a three-year-old child of professionals. Think about how that statistic alone can affect life outcomes for a child, how it could impact learning and job prospects.
You can’t blame racism or prejudice for this sort of thing, and nothing the government can do will give this welfare child the same life chances as the child of professional parents.
In the US we’re having a heated debate over critical race theory, which is just a fancy argument for racial favouritism. These ideas were once relegated to college seminars. Now they’re entering our workplaces through mandatory diversity training, and entering our primary schools through The New York Times’ 1619 Project, an effort led by a black journalist named Nikole Hannah-Jones that attempts to rewrite history and put the institution of slavery at the centre of America’s founding.
But what makes America unique is not slavery, it’s emancipation. It’s how fast we went from slavery to a Martin Luther King to a black president. The socio-economic progress of black Americans in only a few generations is something historians have described as unmatched in history. That’s what makes America unique.
These facts about slavery are well known among serious historians. But where are these historians right now? The nation’s top scholars ought to be falling over one another denouncing this stuff. Why have so many been so quiet? The reason is because they’ll be called racist, and sexist; it might damage their academic careers; they could be de-platformed. It’s the sort of intellectual cowardice that makes Sowell’s work and life unique. Sowell has spent a career putting truth above popularity, and I think we need 100 more just like him.
Jason Riley is a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute, a member of The Wall Street Journal editorial board and a columnist with that title. This is an edited extract of a paper, Questioning Orthodoxies, he delivered at the Centre for Independent Studies on Thursday.
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