IS EQUALITY A DREAM?
Young, Michael
The article below was first delivered as the Rita Hinden Memorial Lecture on November 18, 1972, at Bedford College, London, to honor the memory of a leading English socialist. Its author, who...
...The examples are all around...
...The grim image of society we are proposing is that of a marching column...
...Every person, no matter what his origins or endowments, wants to make the most of his life in his own way...
...There has never been a more urgent necessity than there is today for restatements of the socialist critique of society and, based on it, for programs of social reform and social revolution...
...They should get paid the same, but the government and the employers won't do it...
...Their characteristic fault, he thought, was that they are too ready to forget fundamental issues and to allow themselves to be bought off with an advance in wages, too willing to accept the moral premises of their masters, even when they dispute the economic conclusions which their masters draw for them, too distrustful of themselves and too much disposed to believe that the minority which has exercised authority in the past possesses a mana, a mysterious wisdom...
...They presumed, or pretended to presume, that she would later be putting up larger, more elaborate structures on top of them...
...More recently I visited a village in Mauritius called Carol, standing next to a great sugar estate owned by Lonrho, the British company that has made money in so many developing countries...
...And so am I, and so are you...
...Lagged equality—always partial, never including everybody—is the nearest approach there has yet been to equality...
...As one thing, even before the return of such a government, I would like to see every individual socialist who thinks of himself as one to start by covenanting 2 percent of his net income to charities like War on Want, Oxfam, Christian Aid, and Intermediate Technology, which are trying to do something by aid and by precept to reduce the gap between the rich and poor nations, or at any rate to stop it from getting wider...
...If this happened, the more pluralistic value system and greater equality would support each other mutually and cumulatively...
...For we are nearly all divided, by "all" meaning socialists and nonsocialists alike...
...Out of 500 inhabitants it was said that only one had a full-time job...
...But if the whole distribution of income were altered, from top to bottom, then even though there would still be a bottom 10 percent they would be sufficiently near the rest above them not necessarily to feel in relative poverty...
...The shareholders of Lonrho, living in Didsbury or Hampstead and letting the dividend warrants slip so smoothly and comfortingly into their bank accounts, are they not responsible for these, their fellowmen in Carol...
...IS EQUALITY A DREAM...
...If you believe that the most important thing about people is their membership in the human race, their common humanity as Rita Hinden kept saying throughout her life, then whether or not you have this belief because you are under the influence, acknowledged or unacknowledged, of the religion whose central tenet is that God became man, you must also believe in at any rate some form of equality...
...There would be more economic equality only when people relaxed a little about economic growth and showed their "faith in the possibility of a society in which a higher value will be set on human beings, and a lower value on money and economic power," b their faith in spiritual as against material values, their concern not just with economic achievement but with all the other standards by which people can judge themselves and be judged, all the other goals be sides economic advancement...
...Or the owner of the barbecue as he prepares for another evening party...
...By the manner in which capital and income are distributed we ensure that he that is lucky shall have added unto him still further luck...
...then such a structure could hardly survive...
...The first thing is to act on behalf of this cause as all the other pressure groups do...
...that would be nonsense...
...Notice the faraway look of the man squeezing into his wet suit to go sailing in the sea in the middle of winter, and you will see what I mean...
...If that was true of the time when Tawney wrote both Equality and The Acquisitive Society, how much more is it true today...
...Naturally, it all depends on how one looks at people, particularly whom one compares them with, and the conclusions one draws from doing so...
...The inequality would not of course be stable if those with more responsible jobs kept the whole growth in supply to themselves...
...ThE EDITORS To my mind Tawney's greatest virtue was, if I have interpreted him correctly, that he saw this was almost bound to be so, and that the tension between equality and inequality would therefore continue to exist, as long as people prized material production, and so the most productive people, as much as they have done and do...
...It is that there can be no justification for "A small class which wears several men's clothes, eats several men's dinners, occupies several families' houses, and lives several men's lives...
...But I believe there has been some 420 growth of pluralism...
...The antithesis of inequality would not be equality but difference...
...This may not be quite the pluralism Tawney had in mind—he might well have called it fragmentation—but it is a sort of pluralism all the same, and its growth has not, according to the drift of the argument I was developing, done what it should have done...
...The inequality results from honoring what is supposed in this sphere to be the great principle of modern society, distribution according to capacity— capacity, that is, to contribute to the collective economic effort...
...Which brings me to my final point...
...If the craftsman who produces a firstrate article were valued as highly as he was in the utopia described by Morris in News from Nowhere...
...If people can reasonably hope that the future will bring some absolute improvement for themselves and their children the inequality is a good deal more bearable, or was until rampant inflation replaced expectation with fear and uncertainty...
...that some people were as serfs, slaves, or women so low in the scale, not much above animals, that they could properly be owned, or if not owned, despised by all self-respecting males...
...The dormitory in which I tried to sleep was filled with men, mostly elderly, tossing and turning, crying out in their dreams for mothers or dead wives, their worldly wealth being boots and a bundle of clothes beside the bed or under their pillow...
...The benefits, if they be benefits, of industrialization have been to some extent spread...
...0 422 MICHAEL YOUNG...
...IS EQUALITY A DREAM...
...Their revolt has been against the privileges which society concedes to some and not to others...
...In our book [Family and Kinship In East London, Penguin, 1957], Peter Willmott and I have tried to develop this theme...
...The singular advantage of this dispensation would be that the prime purpose of the redistribution of wealth would plainly not be to promote human equality— since men are not the same except in their rights, which is a shabby, or at any rate a very limited, ideal in itself—but to make the most of human uniqueness...
...In some relatively simple mainly agricultural societies there might be an approach closer to some equality of condition, which is one reason why China, Cuba, and Tanzania have a certain contemporary glamour for some socialist minorities in the West...
...He and many others who came before and after him believed that private property is an institution for organized robbery of the poor by the rich, a system of oppression no less oppressive when its strength is derived from superior wealth than when it relies on a preponderance of physical force...
...Or consider the pleasure of the young girl as she takes home and plays the latest hit record...
...Two weeks ago on my way back from Mauritius I was, for a brief spell, in the Republic of South Africa on the continent whose people Rita Hinden championed over her whole life...
...At the one level, of policy, I think some of the things that should be done—if we ever have again a Labour government with the courage of the convictions of a Tawney or a Hinden—are already pretty clear...
...To keep that wider strategy up to date one Crosland is not enough, nor one Hinden nor one Tawney...
...I still think that pluralism is in a democracy a necessary condition of egalitarianism but evidently, as we now see, not a sufficient condition when taken on its own, not something which by itself will foster the cause of equality...
...Its author, who for a time was secretary of the Labour party's Research Department, is best known for his influential book, The Rise of the Meritocracy.—ED...
...Destroy the dominant consensus by enlarging the penumbra of criteria by which people are ranked, and 5 Equality, p. 46...
...At one moment a very large black man coming back swearing from the lavatory was silhouetted in the doorway, completely naked, almost as if he for one did not even have any clothes at all...
...Why, they have asked, should some enjoy a favored treatment simply because they happen to belong to a particular class or race or sex or social group...
...They were mostly living in tiny ramshackle huts—some of them, for single old people, not much bigger than a cupboard and not watertight either, in a tropical country where the rain falls in torrents...
...But the process is not without consolation...
...If one is against inequality one must also deny the legitimacy of this principle, and when I joined in this endless debate with the book, The Rise of the Meritocracy, I was trying to follow Tawney in denying not only the right of a son to step into a dead man's shoes and to inherit power and wealth from his father but also the right of a son or daughter to acquire riches just because of their supposed merit, since their merit stems so largely from the accident of being born into a particular social position with a particular genetic endowment...
...This was a trend and a danger that Rita Hinden was very aware of and wrote about many times in her editorials in Socialist Commentary...
...if the artist or anyone who tries to add to beauty in buildings or music or gardens were really appreciated well beyond a few coteries...
...4 He saw no sure way of altering this as long as 4 Equality (London: Allen & Unwin, 1964 edition), p. 41...
...For we know, as Titmuss has often pointed out, that there will always be a bottom 10 percent as long as there is any scaling of incomes at all...
...The basic argument is therefore very simple...
...By getting so much for himself out of the limited common pool, the man in the Maxi is equally robbing the immigrants who are trying to build a family in one room with a stove on the landing, the children in the slum school in Manchester, the widow be 416 hind the faded curtains, and, above all, because they are the poorest of all, the people in the Third World who, if they have no votes for the House under Big Ben, still are a charge on our conscience...
...Why then do we not do more...
...I would put next the imposition of a really tough tax on the recipients of all gifts and bequests—this because it is particularly indefensible that people should live, partly or wholly, on the labor of others without contributing anything for it either in effort or competence...
...The percentage of our GNP going in aid to developing countries should rise far above the miserable 0.38 percent it reached last year...
...It has not led to greater equality in the old conventional attributes of class...
...But if either of these were the yardstick there would not be anything like the degree of inequality there is...
...I do not suppose the proportion of zealots is any less than it ever was, but they are zealots not about changing the grand design of society so much as about a multitude of individual interests, either self-centered or altruistic...
...If they are, then one can make some concessions to inequality, but not many...
...Some time ago I spent several nights in hostels for the homeless in London...
...This always needs to be done at those two levels, and the failure of people in the Labour movement to put body into the dream was perhaps partly responsible for the tragic failure of the last Labour government (which I would put along with Munich from my point of view as one of the two greatest political setbacks in this country in my lifetime) to do more than tinker with the problems of social justice...
...Unless there is a drastic reduction in inequality, poverty cannot be -abolished...
...First published 1931...
...The article below was first delivered as the Rita Hinden Memorial Lecture on November 18, 1972, at Bedford College, London, to honor the memory of a leading English socialist...
...Tawney deplored the tendency of workingclass people to be too easily satisfied...
...2 There may not be a crime behind every fortune but every fortune is a crime when things are seen in this light...
...The merit of the gamblers, if they have any, is not their own but that of their parents and grandparents, and so on, back into time immemorial...
...But is his way of looking at society any less valid than when Morris uttered those words nearly a hundred years ago at a meeting of the Socialist League a mile from here...
...If one believes that, as I do, then the central pillar of the unequal society is knocked down, its legitimacy removed...
...The invalid or the mental patient needs more than the healthy, the man with many children more than the bachelor...
...IS EQUALITY A DREAM...
...Most of the black people alongside me work just as hard as I do...
...The last rank keeps its distance from 418 MICHAEL YOUNG the first, and the distance between them does not seem to have lessened much for a long time...
...As soon as possible a starred tax system should be introduced allowing people to instruct Inland Revenue to deduct, tax-free, a certain amount extra from their income above ordinary taxes and to pay it to charities whose concern is with overseas aid...
...Though it would no doubt be better for a socialist state to arrange on a general basis for a more equitable sharing 3 John Rawls, A Theory of Justice (London and New York: Oxford University Press, 1972...
...if all the other qualities which have little or nothing to do with economics— human warmth and the capacity for fellowship, sensitivity to the environment of which man is part, generosity to others, and above all the sense of being alive and open to the world around—if such qualities were valued as highly as, or more highly than, the kind of achievement which enters into the class structure...
...A friend of mine camping this summer in France was asked with curiosity by her neighboring campers whether the small English tents she was erecting were the undertents...
...The pluralism has occurred within the existing class structure instead of as an attack on it...
...One of the things that strikes me about our modern society is not that people lack passionate belief but that their passions are engaged on behalf of such miniature causes, at least compared with the old ones...
...And these steps should all belong to a comprehensive attempt to change the class structure of the country, and even to help modify that of the world...
...His claim to do so, without causing injury to others, deserves the same respect as the next man's...
...As I've already said there has not been much perceptible reduction in inequality...
...Or the camper fussing over his gear and chatting endlessly and sometimes snobbishly with his fellows about sites and makes of equipment...
...The acceptance of differentials in wages, prestige, and power, especially when related to competence, goes very deep and although it may change it obviously won't do so quickly...
...That would be a recipe for a permanent revolutionary situation even if its actual outbreak was suppressed by terror...
...It's all wrong, I say, and I mean it...
...The resistance to egalitarianism would be reduced simply because people would not care so much about their possessions and the kind of achievement by themselves and others -which added to possessions...
...The tolerant society would also be the socialist society...
...At the bottom, in the underclass, there has not apparently been much improvement in its relative position since the war, but there certainly has as the result of the welfare state, since Morris gave his lecture...
...If there were distribution to each according to his needs (and it is difficult to argue against that) some would get more than others...
...In other words the kernel of the argument, or at any rate one of them, is that there should be much more of a pluralistic value system and much less of a monolithic one...
...it is possible to do something, even individ ually, in the meantime...
...Privilege for some is as surely poverty for others as it ever was...
...But Tawney recognized, as we all must, that lecture and prod as we may, this is not of course how the rich view the matter, nor even a lot of others who would not call themselves rich, nor even most of us socialists when we leave behind our harsh Sunday talk for the upholstered armchairs and gins and tonic of weekdays...
...There is a kind of egalitarian tendency but it works only with a time lag...
...Most strikingly of all, the trade union movement seems to have become progressively more fragmented, with a great deal of vitality at the periphery and very little at the center...
...I will start with William Morris...
...few had luxuries like beds or blankets for the cold nights, or plates or spoons for their meals when they had anything to eat...
...2 The Acquisitive Society (London: Bell, 1948 edition), p. 41...
...And please also be sure to enclose a stamped, self-addressed envelope...
...Consider these examples...
...If distribution were according to effort, which has at least something to commend it, the man who worked, say, longer hours than another would also get more by way of reward...
...First published 1921...
...Another example...
...Someone I met by chance was a tough Afrikaaner, a fitter in an engineering factory near Johannesburg...
...and action should be taken on the other proposals that Roy Jenkins made in his recent speeches on the same subject...
...To Our Contributors • When sending manuscripts, please make sure that you do not send your only copy...
...There in that other building were other men, none of them in cloth caps like Keir Hardie wore when he was first elected MP (or, I noticed, the deputy foreign minister of China who has just visited London), and most of those other men had ten times, a hundred times, some a thousand or ten thousand times more property than the old man lying near me...
...The people in the rear cannot, without breaking rank and rushing ahead, reach where the van is but, since the whole column is moving forward, they can hope to reach where the van was...
...The hostel building could have had the same Dickensian appearance when Morris gave his talk as it does now...
...On the other hand we nearly all, in some part of our minds, also take almost as axiomatic (despite the counteraxiom I have paraded a few minutes ago) the other principle I mentioned, that, however, originat ing, greater efficiency, capacity, competence, responsibility, performance, achievement, in short a greater contribution to the sum of goods and services—put it how you will, it amounts to the same thing—deserves a greater reward...
...many different hierarchies, or no hierarchies at all, will be substituted for the single hierarchy that rules an acquisitive society...
...I am in the course of this lecture going to refer to a few of the socialists I most admire— Morris, Tawney, Titmuss, Rita Hinden herself...
...the overarching values of society remained the same, as long, that is, as the singleminded concentration on the pursuit of riches persisted...
...Every one of them I would guess is many times richer than the lady in the cupboard, and some are millions of times more so...
...But lavishing his wealth on his car and himself, he is depriving them of the better conditions that money could buy for them, if there were more of it for the Health Service and other forms of public expenditure...
...The people in the middle therefore have some interest in the people at the top—managers, civil servants, doctors, other professions—being competent rather than incompetent, and if more money for them means that they even might be more competent than otherwise perhaps the price is worth paying...
...He spoke, ironically, about the need to "cultivate the new stoicism of affluence" and might have remarked on the need to do the same with the hypocrisies of affluence...
...On this then I take my stand as a socialist," he said, "that there cannot be equality and justice in a society, if private property is allowed in it...
...but with industrialization, acquisitiveness itself has been fed by the increased supply of consumer goods, and if economic goals ride so high then clearly the people who contribute more to the supply as judged by the mechanism of the market are more "valuable...
...And so am I. So are most of us in this hall...
...How is the support to be won for such a new rootandbranch attack on the existing social establishment, especially if the more pluralistic society is not so strong an ally as we thought it might be...
...But if the common humanity of mankind is a dream it is one that is and should be constantly redreamed and then filled out in the light of day, on the one hand with policies and on the other with critiques that are apt for their time...
...The man in the Austin Maxi drives past a queue of mothers and children and of sad old people waiting their turn to get out of the cold and into a dirty, crowded poor-law style of a doctor's consulting room...
...He may not notice them as he impassively thinks of his next appointment...
...It has often been said that our present age has witnessed the end of ideology, and especially of the socialist and communist religions or ideologies which succeeded Christianity and some other religions in a direct line of descent...
...And we can still succeed...
...This means strengthening existing organizations of and for the poor and disadvantaged, like the Child Poverty Action Group, Shelter, the Disablement Income Group and Age Concern, the community groups in the Educational Priority Areas, the squatters groups...
...This reversal of values is perhaps the great est gain for the lucky part of mankind whom the lottery of birth has slotted into countries which have combined industrialization with democracy...
...the maximum effort should be made to persuade our partners in the Common Market to allow imports in from the developing countries without hindrance...
...How is it that to socialists the rea soning seems irrefutable in theory and yet is constantly refuted in practice, even by our selves...
...Through its windows, so near that it seemed almost as if one could lean out and touch it, could be seen the tower of Big Ben, standing with the light on at the top showing that the House was in session...
...A society which enshrines that rule is no more just than a Casino...
...3 I imagine I would have made more of the point in the Meritocracy book if the research studies had then been published which have since shown how much more important is the influence on academic achievement of the home than that of the school...
...This to some extent justifies their greater power, status, income, wealth, in their own eyes and even in the eyes of others, some others at least...
...This new orthodoxy has gained a victory over the older view that God could not have been so blind as to lodge a real soul in a woman or a humble man, let alone a black...
...And then the more equality there was in worldly wealth, the less it would be worth striving for riches, and the more energies would be left over for the cultivation of other accomplishments and just for living more fully...
...Tolstoy thought at one time that he could not get rid of his property without demeaning those to whom it was given, because it would always be to them a sort of charity...
...He surprised me by saying—"This government of ours does not know what it is doing...
...If, when looking at the man in the doctor's-office queue, you compare him with the car-driver and say, yes, they are different but not in one overriding respect, that they are both persons who should have the same equal rights in the economic as they do in the political sphere...
...As it is and has been, there has, with economic growth, been some fairly steady filtering down of some of the benefits of industrialization to the mass of people in the middle through the oc.;upational system...
...Each extension of pluralism would make it easier to advance equality in the distribution of power, wealth, and status...
...On the one hand we all of us accept that the rest of humanity, or at any rate that elect part of it which is native to this island, and especially to London and the Southeast, is made up of people like ourselves...
...They are robbing her...
...The case for equality, as it is presented, nowadays is usually a little more muted than that...
...This is the sense in which all men are equal and Jack is as good as his master...
...But they will all be more effective if their efforts are seen as part of that wider strategy which engaged the people whom I mentioned at the beginning of this lecture...
...As she put it, when writing with Allan Flanders in 1956: It is not the differences which nature has ordained or fate decreed, against which socialists have protested...
...But as the column advances, the last rank does eventually reach and pass the point that the first rank had passed some time before...
...For a class structure which embodies a hierarchy is only viable when there is a consensus imposed by society and accepted by a majority about what values matter most...
...It is, as I say, a question of whom you compare with whom, and how...
...if the parents who managed to rear reasonably happy children were thought of as having done something of much more importance than any managing director or advertising agent...
...Go for pluralism and far more people will be able to develop their own particular talents and qualities to the full and be prized for doing so...
...Having touched, however cursorily, on some of the chief arguments, I should now say a little more about what I think has actually happened in applying or not applying these ideas, say since The Acquisitive Society was first written...
...It is an equality that rests, simply and surely, on their common humanity.' 1 Twentieth Century Socialism (London: Penguin, 1956), p. 24...
...This is what Rawls has recently argued in his book on justice...
...Or the dedicated skier as he waits his turn to sweep down the piste...
...A whole variety of governmental measures designed to achieve the same end is also needed...
...As things have worked out I think there has been a kind of paradox, or what might have seemed like that to Tawney...
...One of them was a Salvatiotl Army hostel in Great Peter Street, Westminster...
...If the sense of human fraternity cannot be extinguished in South Africa it cannot be extinguished anywhere...
...MICHAEL YOUNG And Tawney's conclusion from this sort of argument is to be equally recommended to the naked black man and Sir Keith Joseph...
...That may unfortunately be true of socialism, but it is not in my view true of ideologies generally...
...You will see from this, and from the general tenor of my argument, that I do not think people who accept, in the sense I have been trying to get across, that property is robbery should hold on to their property, or to the incomes they derive from it...
...Many of them are, it is true, related to the acquisitive society which has made it possible to indulge them...
...The one is the other: the wealthy can hold on to their property because they can and do summon the physical force of the state to their aid...
...If one regards him as having the same and therefore as well justified a claim upon society as the secretary of state for social services or any other MP, then, given the shortage of resources, it fol lows that the secretary of state just by having so much more than the median amount of property and income, and quite irrespective of his policies for the social services, is robbing the man in the next bed...
...The monoculture of capitalism is above all unjust because it condemns to inferiority all those who cannot shine according to one set of values...
...That may apply to individual charity but not to gifts made to War on Want or Shelter or other collective charities, or even to gifts to the Exchequer...
...Equality of respect means difference in treatment...
...To answer the question in the title of the lecture —yes I do think that equality is a dream, one that is not for a long time, if ever, likely to be wholly fulfilled in practice in an industrial society...
...Now as I come toward the end I must try and pull the threads together...
...But even more striking than the cultivation not of the stoicism but of the aesthetic, epicurean, and other delights of affluence is the devout enthusiasm aroused for an array of new cults, or old cults made contemporary, like Yoga and the mysticism of the Orient, football, vegetarianism, Women's Liberation, astrology, the prevention of cruelty to animals, the use of psychedelic drugs, being MICHAEL YOUNG against fluoride in the water or vaccination or the eating of sugar, and the whole complex business of participation in a thousand miniature local crusades...
...We do not worship ancestors but we still in a roundabout way worship ancestry...
...If energies and organization are devoted to a multitude of fringe activities, however fascinating, even though they may be laudable in themselves, there may hardly be any to spare for the more general issues of justice in society...
Vol. 20 • September 1973 • No. 4
