Is Egalitarianism Dead?
Ryan, Alan
What follows is something I feel uncomfortable writing, to some degree uncomfortable even thinking. Growing up on R.H. Tawney's Equality, I have always believed that some form of...
...With the collapse of the Soviet Union, there plainly is a new world order...
...quite the reverse...
...Such conservatives gesture at the fact that universal compulsory education has done nothing to curb the masses' taste for literary and musical trash, that universal access to better food has done nothing to curb the masses' taste for the crudest gastronomic experiences, and so endlessly on...
...All efficiency says is, "Bet on brains not money...
...In politics this happens whenever administrative competence is at stake...
...it is the shift that makes socialism more morally and emotionally conservative than liberalism...
...Yet, Gingrich had to rein in the attempt to bash the Democratic majority in Congress with their check-bouncing misdeeds because he was being tarred with the same brush, while the nasty comparisons that the New York Times made between the salary that Iacocca draws from a struggling Chrysler corporation and the vastly more modest salaries that his successful Japanese competitors pay themselves have cut no ice with the public at large...
...Then, say such conservatives, the only "egalitarian" policy that anyone is likely to adopt will be that of simply eliminating from the syllabus whatever it is that the more talented are good at...
...but even here the search for efficiency is egalitarian only in passing, as it were—there's nothing in efficiency alone to encourage us to pick up slow learners or make allowances for emotional handicaps of one sort and another...
...There's much to be said against meritocracy as a final goal— The Rise of the Meritocracy is an elegant account of why —but seeing how far we are from approaching it, it is premature to turn our backs on it...
...I have never thought that there was a large constituency for this undertaking...
...They had no right to bounce checks, had no access to free overdraft facilities, and didn't see why members of Congress should have these things either...
...They would like a world where everything is arranged on rational lines...
...Just about every immigrant group over the past hundred years was written off as ineducable on first arrival...
...we want to spread the authority to decide on policy as widely as humanly possible, but we still want that policy to be implemented in an efficient manner...
...I can imagine being my next-door neighbor and teaching high school English and social studies...
...To understand it, and to understand at the same time why the welfare state is egalitarian and popular while "equality" as a goal is not, we must think about luck...
...Being born George III doesn't count as a reason to be given authority over other people...
...One is a generalized humanitarianism...
...A lot of education has less to do with preparing the next generation of workers than with inducting children into a shared culture...
...most of us hope to get more than we deserve (and, given our propensity for folly and miscalculation, to suffer rather less than we deserve, too...
...The more sophisticated complaint is that goals such as equalizing educational opportunity are illusory: we may today teach algebra to children whose parents can't do simple multiplication, but they will never be the intellectual equals of children who can tackle calculus at the age of ten...
...We might—as we finally are doing—look at the children of this country as human capital, and think it madly inefficient to allow the quality of education to be wholly dependent on local property taxes...
...The only situation in which equality would really be at sake is where two people with identical needs got very different treatment...
...In practice, of course, medical journals have long been full of controversies about how far people at the end of their lives should be able to go to get the care they want, whether or not it does much good, and the impact of its cost...
...If liberal egalitarianism says, "Don't reward according to birth but according to merit as displayed in FALL • 1992 • 475 performance on the job," what does socialist egalitarianism say...
...One thing that equality in the sight of God used to mean was that God, having created us, had no need to rank us as better and worse—any more than we need to think The Marriage of Figaro better or worse than Die Meistersinger...
...On the other hand, it is clear that the public has no commitment to equality as a social goal...
...To go further, we must appeal to other values...
...To all of that, ability in any job-related sense is mostly irrelevant...
...Not only do generalized income statistics make little impact, even particularized ones hardly register...
...To put it another way, "equality" —or the adjective "equal" —doesn't do much moral work in arguments about 472 • DISSENT political power, social policy, politics, industrial organization, or whatever else...
...We may find that whatever we do, job-related competence is unevenly distributed...
...That procedure would equalize every eighteen-year-old's chance of ending up at any particular place—at a high price...
...If lots of things ought to be shared out more equally than the marketplace will do it, that's not because the ideal is a condition in which all outcomes are identical—that would frustrate the gambling instinct and the pleasure people take in simply being smiled on by fate...
...so far as the second goes, we remain deeply attached to 474 • DISSENT individual desert...
...Most socialisms have been acutely conscious of human vulnerability...
...Dooley called "honest graft...
...The U.S...
...This is a place where egalitarianism has less to do with equality than with shifting emphasis...
...For they suggest both that the symbolic, emotive aspects of racial and ethnic distrust will—as we all know already—make it that much harder to achieve a closing of the economic gap between the races, and that even if that closing picks up again, it won't dissolve other hatreds and antipathies at all fast...
...The point is negative...
...deserved misfortune has no claim on assistance...
...In the same way, Bernard Williams once suggested that the demand for "equal access" to medical care was a way of saying that the possession of money is irrelevant to whether you need medical treatment, while being ill is not merely relevant but the only thing relevant...
...It may be because few people read serious newspapers, never see the numbers, and don't generalize from their own experience...
...It is a bit of a letdown—much more unsettled and a lot less predictable than we hoped the post—cold war world would be—but its existence is hardly in doubt...
...Most of us cheerfully sacrifice efficiency at the margin in order to pull the less able or the more handicapped on board...
...For several this was another reason (on top of the substantial financial reasons) to resign this year and pocket unspent campaign funds...
...Some commentators thought this was a reflection of their traditional and deferential attitudes—old money in land was fine, new money in industry was not...
...The general hostility to any proposal that smacks of simple leveling goes very deep...
...It says nothing about what we ought to do if brains seem to be lacking...
...Reflection on the way we mix ambitions for prosperity, integration, access to a shared culture, and so on indicates not so much that principled egalitarianism has recently died as that it was never alive...
...Voters who finally understood what had been going on weren't appeased...
...They really do believe that there is greater equality in such spheres, and that the results are disappointing...
...That is an abuse of power, and at the first whiff of arrogance the electorate gets correspondingly irate...
...birth is "irrelevant" to the job...
...That would be an unwelcome conclusion to the terminally ill...
...it has more emotional appeal than logical structure, and for that reason is both widely popular and philosophically underexplored...
...Political authority may not be bought or inherited but must rest on popular consent...
...Select your employees for relevant reasons" leaves us with the real question—relevant to what...
...The differences come elsewhere...
...This is not to say that there are no good arguments for particular equalizing measures—constitutional government, progressive taxation, school desegregation, curbs on managerial absolutism, opening higher education to new groups, social policies to make illness and old age less of a burden, and so endlessly on...
...It isn't much good just pointing out that a lot of people get more than they deserve...
...Suppose my partner and I are looking for a bookkeeper...
...indeed, nobody is entitled who hasn't been chosen by those he or she governs...
...I'm not equally able to pay, but I am equally able to benefit...
...Indeed, in the face of the astonishing increase in the inequality of the distribution of wealth and income in the past decade and concomitant increases in the unequal distribution of health care and good or bad health themselves, of vulnerability to crime, inequality of life expectancy, of education and the prospects for one's children, this may seem a very peculiar moment to wonder whether socialists need to talk about equality, for asking whether it was really equality we talked about in the first place...
...There are excellent arguments for all of these things...
...FALL • 1992 • 473 they are arguments about the proper goals of all sorts of activities and institutions...
...none of this much advances the question of whether socialism is interestingly egalitarian...
...In the United States particularly, but to an increasing extent in Europe, racial and ethnic divisions complicate all this, too...
...Public education is needed because otherwise good schools are confined to the children of the rich, non-accommodated to the educational needs of children and the economic needs of the society...
...Once the point is made, its implications are obvious...
...The history of the United States has been one of constantly discovering that people who have been dismissed as congenitally inept are nothing of the sort...
...There must be some positive principle behind our choice of all the things we want to shut out...
...It isn't illegal, everyone who can do it does it, and the cost is spread so thinly across the "victims" —consumers who pay more for their cars, pensioners whose pension funds get lower returns, the workers whose pay pool is correspondingly shrunk—that nobody in particular feels hurt...
...They simply don't respond to appeals to equality...
...This half answers one set of questions, but not the questions I want to raise...
...Our ordinary notions of efficiency and ability are likely to be narrow, to be out of date, and to lead us into dismissing what we have simply not yet thought about properly...
...But there are reasons for asking...
...Tawney's Equality, I have always believed that some form of egalitarianism—it may be hard to say just what form—is simply definitive of socialism...
...People's attitudes to luck are asymmetrical...
...It is a waste of university education to give it to the children of rich alumni...
...It's the kind of example that shows how far most people are from strict egalitarianism...
...In early childhood, efficiency is usually a rather closer ally of egalitarianism...
...The imaginative distance between us is a reflection of the way they make their money by doing things I know I can't conceivably do...
...it's irrelevant self-aggrandizement...
...But it does point toward what I think is true: that it is the socialist conception of the good society that gives content to talk about abandoning "irrelevant" grounds of distinction...
...In principle, they would produce a hierarchy, even though it is a hierarchy of merit...
...The first is the need for more collective provision to defend the vulnerable— which will be egalitarian in the usual sense (that is, reducing the pretax income gap) because the vulnerable will get more expensive provision than they could pay for themselves...
...In this context, "merit not money" is egalitarian...
...less clever poor students would get no boost from efficiency alone...
...intrinsically they are deaf to considerations of compensation, to humanitarian claims or solidaristic ones...
...It must be true that some of the passive acceptance of gross inequality is due to ignorance of its extent, and some of the active acceptance the result of self-centered fear...
...Intellectually and politically, we are far from being able to deliver, but it wouldn't hurt to say more loudly what we need...
...Its slogan was egalitarian in that it implied "equal opportunities for equal abilities," but it was not committed to giving equal opportunities in spite of unequal abilities...
...It is also pretty odd...
...Tawney's aim was a society in which anyone might tell anyone else to go to hell but nobody felt inclined to do so, where differences of income, power, authority, educational attainment, or whatever had no implications for prestige or deference...
...The answer to these oddities must depend on what values people use to assess the justice and injustice of the way wealth, income, and the various goods and bads of everyday life are distributed...
...Arguments like these are not arguments about equality...
...There are some elderly (and unsatisfactory) versions of this point...
...To invoke equality is a matter of appealing to relevant grounds for distributing whatever goods and evils are at issue...
...As to why collective provision is needed, social democratic mixed motivation is fine...
...In Britain particularly, the Labour party is unabashedly egalitarian, but its supporters chronically aren't...
...The public was thoroughly confused about what had happened, what damage might have been done, and who might have suffered from it...
...What is more plausible is to harp on two familiar things...
...The poor but ill ought to get the same medical attention as the rich and ill...
...It may be because an insecure middle class suffers from a desperate "fear of falling" and flinches from contemplating the situation of anyone worse situated than itself...
...It is the shift that makes socialism hospitable to ideas such as solidarity and makes liberalism less so...
...One device is to suggest that its positive content is explained by "relevance...
...Relevance" invites an argument about the purpose of whatever it is we are arguing about: if the goal of medicine is not only to cure existing ailments but to secure a healthy, long-lived, and productive population, we ought not to distribute its benefits only according to how ill people are but according to how much future good we are going to do—and that might lead us to spend less on the terminally ill and more on well-baby clinics, say...
...I don't live anywhere near Michael Jordan or Magic Johnson and don't compare my salary to theirs...
...they don't wish to scrutinize the good fortune of the winners—being born Michael Jordan is much like winning the lottery...
...The American spoils system is in that respect more egalitarian than most European selection procedures, and all the worse for it...
...This isn't true only of system builders like Plato: John Rawls explains his Theory of Justice as an attempt to show how the purpose of just social institutions is to counter the "arbitrary" inequalities of nature...
...Why, to go back to my earlier example, do people get so enraged at politicians giving themselves check-cashing privileges, but accept without flinching the robber baron behavior of the lacoccas and Stempels...
...It is not a small shift...
...It is the shift that reflects the fact that however much socialists share the liberals' concern for human rights, constitutional government, and democratic accountability, they start from a social, solidaristic vision of the world and not from the liberals' catalogue of individual rights...
...for one thing, the crudest humanitarianism suggests that the rather recent assurance to ordinary people of an adequate diet of unadulterated food—something that two-thirds of the world still longs for—is an achievement that simply swamps any rational anxiety about matters of taste...
...To insist that every child has something to contribute is not a factual prediction about the world of the classroom but a moral demand—we should see all children as contributors not burdens, we should adjust our sights and find ways of making them members of whatever projects we have in mind...
...They can't start by assuring us that they don't think of themselves as intrinsically "better" than us and then behave like an aristocracy...
...A national health service is needed because otherwise medical attention is supplied on the basis of ability to pay not on the basis of ill health on the one hand and the possibilities of promoting a healthier society on the other...
...but it's no use for the left to just point that out...
...Thus, "equal opportunity" means something other than equal opportunity: perhaps something like, "Don't select persons for employment and students for education according to the color of their skin, their sex, their parents' income, their relationship to yourself...
...people qualified by intellectual ability and willingness to make an effort would make more use of it, do more good with it...
...We almost all take it for granted that education may be looked at from the social angle as a resource for producing the next generation of economically effective young people, and from the individual perspective as a resource for giving us the chance to match our tastes and talents to available occupations...
...Appoint on merit and not on party loyalty" would have done the former Soviet Union a lot of good, just as "Pay your CEO according to merit, not according to the prestige rankings prevalent at his country club" would do Chrysler some good too...
...If I make $40,000 a year, live next door to a school teacher, see that she gets longer vacations than I do and has greater job security, I resent her advantages and object to her earning another $10,000, especially when the connection between her pay and my taxes is as direct as it is in the United States...
...But it often is not...
...Even where we are thinking of education as training, there's much to be said for skepticism about our methods of distinguishing the more and less able...
...If socialists aren't egalitarians, what on earth might they be...
...Being born the grandson of George II is, as Tom Paine kept on reminding his contemporaries, not much of a qualification for governing...
...The egalitarian thrust of the welfare state has been, and is, absolutely necessary...
...An argument of the same kind is sometimes produced for political influence, too...
...Clever rich alumni offspring would qualify along with clever poor students...
...One difference lies in the balance between an emphasis on need and an emphasis on desert...
...And that need hardly wait for the socialist millenium...
...That only defers the question of how people are brought into the comparison...
...If congressmen get elected by insisting that they're just plain folks eager to go to Washington to do a job of work, nobody minds their having large postage bills and a lot of secretarial help with constituency business, but God help them if they gad about in limos for no good reason and grant themselves little luxuries that don't help them do the job better...
...So far as the first aim goes, efficiency is the obvious goal...
...The more remote the imaginative target, the less likely resentment is to set in...
...And it's not because they are peculiarly selfish or desperately concerned for their own survival...
...So, greater political equality is a mistake, and anyway, there is less room for political equality than egalitarians suppose...
...Programs that give benefits to able-bodied non-working people who are not in transitory unemployment are much less popular—the fact that they are small beer compared to the rest of the welfare state's expenditures doesn't appease critics...
...Successful communities are ones where the sense of reciprocal obligation reinforces itself through the daily experience of using and contributing to the arrangements for mutual defense, but for most of history such communities have sprung up by accident...
...Or rather we must appreciate the contrast between how most people feel about luck and how political thinkers feel about it...
...It explains why people accept the existence of great inequality—but the answer isn't very satisfying...
...What, he might ask, is a business for if not to maximize its profits, to see it expand and prosper as a well-run undertaking...
...Equality divorced from one or both of these is charmless...
...The Declaration of Independence's view that we are born free and equal doesn't mean that we are really born free and equal—we are literally born absolutely vulnerable and dependent...
...The French Revolution's ideal of la carriere ouverte aux talents was an ideal of equal opportunity in the sense we've seen already...
...The liberal principle that reward ought to reflect contribution—the principle that Marx thought of as setting the limits of the "narrow horizon of bourgeois right" and providing the justice appropriate to the "lower stage" of socialism—is a meritocratic principle that we have to apply in any society where efficiency is still important...
...Egalitarianism depends on the thought that class is the crucial element and that operating on the hierarchy of income and wealth is the be-all and end-all of policy...
...The suggestion is that leaders tend to emerge no matter what—some people are all but genetically programmed to grasp power and organize others—but that the search for equality can pervert the process, too...
...they aren't demands that anything in particular should literally be distributed equally but complaints against existing ways of distributing it...
...It was a commonplace of academic political theory twenty years ago that demands for "equality" are really negative...
...The question is whether these attitudes have any bearing on socialist egalitarianism...
...There has been no egalitarian pressure at all...
...But efficiency and anti-waste alone are not generally egalitarian...
...when voters get enraged by politicians setting up little privileges for themselves, part of the rage is because the privileges have nothing to do with the successful functioning of the legislature...
...The idea that "equal opportunity" is only to be defined negatively can't be right, however...
...If appeals to "equality" are often appeals to other ideas such as nonwastefulness, efficiency, a generalized humanitarianism, or, more specifically, to particular goals for particular social activities, such as the practice of medicine or education, it gets easier to see how people might not be egalitarians in general but have egalitarian passions in particular cases...
...they had a simple complaint...
...Arguments for efficiency are highly persuasive...
...old-age pensions, unemployment insurance, and disability insurance are equally popular...
...So we give everyone one vote each, but select civil servants on merit...
...This contrast between what looks like an egalitarian resentment of the privileges of legislators and an unbothered acceptance of pay differentials out of line with those of every other country suggests that principled egalitarianism is not one of the public's most urgent interests...
...I can't imagine being Michael Jordan—or Michael Jackson or Harrison Ford—and probably can't readily imagine being Stempel or Iacocca either...
...If I don't make the comparison, I shan't ask why they do so much better than I, and shan't resent the fact that they do...
...It means that nobody is born entitled to hold political power...
...And here the interesting fact is that if people often demand egalitarian policies, it's not because they value equality...
...Social democracy has often recommended itself to a liberal electorate by claiming that social democracy is a matter of taking liberal goals seriously and actually trying to achieve them...
...It says only that people raise the question of the justice of inequality when the target of their doubts is brought into the comparison in an appropriate way...
...Those of us who used to think that racial and ethnic conflict could be massaged away by full employment and antidiscrimination legislation are surely feeling a bit abashed these days...
...Philosophers mostly hate luck...
...But many arguments invoke values that are sometimes egalitarian but more often are anything but—and this is most true when they are arguments against wastefulness and in favor of efficiency...
...It can't be that they can more readily put themselves in the shoes of Newt Gingrich than Lee Iacocca—both are flamboyant, selfadvertising characters who constantly invite the public to identify with them...
...There's nothing wrong with these arguments, only with a society that doesn't take them seriously...
...One rests on the sociologists' idea that FALL • 1992 • 471 we compare our position to that of a "reference group" that is physically or imaginatively or morally close at hand, and not with one that is more distant...
...What is involved in that thought...
...The news that Lee Iacocca made $3 million in 1991, while the Chrysler Corporation lost $965 million, and Robert C. Stempel something over $2 million while General Motors lost $4.5 billion makes little impact on the general population...
...And even our simple likings and dislikings are not much under our control...
...Undeserved misfortune is what people believe we should be helped with...
...I don't deny that the electorate displays feelings of an "egalitarian" kind...
...But it is not a thrust toward "equality...
...The more the rank and file insist on not being led, the worse the leadership they will get, even though they will not themselves acquire any more power...
...In cases like this, we are still working with the social democratic grain...
...I think that the fact that you're my cousin is overwhelmingly relevant—what is a business for if not to advance your friends and relations?—while my partner thinks it is overwhelmingly less relevant than the fact that you are unqualified to keep the books and use a computer...
...The idea of "relevance" picks up something...
...In all countries where national health insurance has been created, the electorate is devoted to it...
...But the humanitarian impulse simply says that individuals can contribute something other than unskilled labor to the future economy...
...Some perfectly nice person might draw the right card and be the duke...
...The case may be debatable where education, political influence, or general culture are concerned, partly because it is almost impossible to agree on definitions...
...The conflict is sharpest in education, where efficiency is a most uneasy partner of the egalitarianism of humanity and social solidarity...
...I think they do, though indirectly...
...So, we have moved toward a perverse egalitarianism, and to the degree that it has succeeded, disappointment is the only proper response...
...Nor are my (perhaps idiosyncratic) doubts about egalitarianism the same as everyone's doubts about the "new world order...
...Another implication is that appeals to "equality" often turn up when it's a matter of pointing out that a person who is short of one qualifying attribute is well qualified on another, and one that we are trying to get accepted as the main or only standard to be used...
...only someone mean, grasping, and oppressive could make money the way your boss did...
...But talk of relevance, just like pointing out the negative impact of arguments about equality, merely defers the real argument...
...The same argument has been used for a century in education...
...The politically correct enthusiasm for denying that any children are less able or more handicapped has been widely mocked, but there is a point to it...
...Is there not something deeply peculiar about the way people admire the astonishing salaries paid to football, basketball, and baseball stars, but are maddened by proposals to put teachers' salaries up from, let us say, $40,000 to $50,000...
...But the shift itself is of the greatest importance...
...To the extent that colleges and universities could see behind the effects of elementary and secondary schooling to the students' basic ability, they would no doubt pick up a lot more talented but untaught students...
...All the same, I doubt whether the bulk of the electorate would respond with outrage if they had at their fingertips all the numbers that all the economists, sociologists, and investigative journalists in America know...
...To see how far that is from a pure search for equality, we need only imagine the uproar if it was suggested that every eighteen-year-old be assigned to a college by random selection...
...The other familiar truth we need to reassert is that there is an infinity of dimensions on which we don't need to think in terms of better and worse at all...
...it is the shift that makes socialism less individualist than liberalism...
...But in order to stop these natural and arbitrary inequalities poisoning our social life, what we mostly need is to keep our critical faculties in repair...
...If you think of the way an ordinary working-class crowd spends its money on horse racing and football pools, it seems quite clear that arbitrary good fortune is not generally resented, and that so far from wishing to correct all the arbitrary inequalities of nature, people left to themselves set out to create new ones by gambling...
...But that would be it...
...One is that appeals to equality have cut little ice with electorates in the United States, Britain, France, Germany, and Italy over the past few years...
...they can here and now contribute to the school as a small, current society...
...Though some conservatives say different, it is anything but true that we have created an egalitarian world and find ourselves disappointed with it...
...Here's an area where one kind of equality is readily within reach...
...if this was deliberate, it would be unfair—and unfairness is much the most powerful complaint against most sorts of inequality...
...collective provision can be, and when uncorruptly delivered, is, both efficient and good for social about "values" is at its worst here because conservatives won't think about the social conditions needed to build up mutual trust and moral respect...
...This can't be because "a rising tide lifts all boats," and the worst off among us compare their current prosperity with their former poverty and rejoice: the real incomes of the poor have dropped over the past decade...
...On the other hand, the view that society ought collectively to insure its members against bad luck is equally popular...
...Handing out care on the basis of ability to pay is less an offense against equality than against the principle that need ought to determine provision...
...FALL • 1992 • 477...
...Michael Young's essay on The Rise of the Meritocracy pointed all this out ages ago—and even if Young was ahead of events in thinking that the meritocracy was rising rapidly, he was right about the principle...
...If it's hospice care for the terminally ill, the fact that I am as close to death as you is an argument for giving me the same treatment, although you can pay and I cannot...
...Socialist egalitarianism must go beyond it and abolish the whole idea of the social race...
...The sight of poverty, ill health, homelessness, and the rest doesn't so much induce compassion fatigue as the simple sentiment, "Thank God it's not me...
...Consciously to recreate them demands a holistic approach to town planning, social service administration, policing, education, and a lot more...
...This is why it marks the limits of liberal egalitarianism —competitors in the social race are to start level, so the race will reward them according to their merits...
...George Will expresses some fastidious anxiety whether capitalism will lose its moral credibility if the captains of industry are seen to be looting the vessels they are in charge of, but his fears seem premature...
...It is a waste of hospice care to give it to a rich neurotic who thinks he is dying but actually isn't...
...Equality as a goal for medical care then comes out as the slogan, "Hand out medical care according to illness, and not according to wealth, parentage, friendship with the doctor...
...This thought is meant to apply across the spectrum...
...But where income and wealth are concerned, the recent record is unequivocal...
...A lot of the time, much the same...
...Faculty effort would produce more intelligent twenty-two-year-olds if concentrated on the apt and ambitious and not on the idle offspring of well-to-do former students...
...That's quite a different context from any doubts about equality...
...House bank scandal" offers a nice example...
...More plausibly, it's a reflection of the fact that being the Duke of Westminster is the result of a genetic lottery, while you have seen how your boss got his money and don't much like it...
...The public at large seems to take it for granted that voting yourself a massive and largely undeserved salary is what Mr...
...The recent horrors of Sarajevo and Dubrovnik are as ill a portent for American race relations as the rioting in Los Angeles after the acquittal of Rodney King's assailants...
...Here, too, "equally ill" doesn't rely on equality to do the moral work...
...There are some familiar explanations...
...What "equality" mostly does is gesture at lurking background ideas that really to the work...
...In Britain, this used to produce the peculiar result that working-class respondents to surveys on such matters said they objected to the hard-earned 476 • DISSENT inherited wealth of the traditional landed gentry...
...Members of Congress found it an uphill struggle to persuade voters that there had been no theft of the taxpayers' money, no criminal action, not even a failed bank in the strict sense...
...The recrudescence of ancient ethnic hatreds in Europe and in the remains of the former Soviet Union, along with the religious and racial tensions that poison French and German politics, suggest all too plausibly that what we wanted was not so much equality as integration, what the anthropologists would have described as "commensality" —the willingness to eat together, with all that that implies about the absence of taboos and fears of ritual impurity—and that that is just what we aren't getting...
...It's almost as open and shut a case when it comes to comparing the lives of illiterate farm 470 • DISSENT laborers with the lives of a literate industrial work force...
...But that's a hard case to argue...
...we shall surely find that success as a pop singer, film actor, basketball player, and much else are very oddly distributed...
Vol. 39 • September 1992 • No. 4
