Slouching Towards Gomorrah (14 page)

Rawls and his admirers would probably not think that a valid objection since the object of his enterprise can be seen as devising criteria by which existing societies can be compared and judged. It is necessary, therefore, to address the principle on those terms,
and on those terms it clearly fails. What reason is there to think that justice requires such a principle? There is none. A social or economic inequality will almost certainly have no effect on the “least advantaged.” The millionaires wealth does not cause the paupers poverty. The millionaire’s investments may make it possible for the pauper to find a job, though he will be less benefitted by those investments than is the millionaire, so that Rawls’ requirement is not met. The intellectuals or the socialites social status does not cause the social status that anyone else possesses. Why in either case is it just to condemn the inequality? Rawls’ condition could only be met by bringing everyone down to the economic and social condition of the least advantaged. It is difficult to imagine any reason for that other than envy or the flaunting of moral superiority. The envy and display of moral, superiority, however, is not that of the pauper or the sewer worker; it is that of the modern liberal.
^22
†
24

The condition Rawls demands is pernicious because it condemns all actual societies, including that of the United States, by setting a requirement that can never be satisfied. This legitimates, from a left-liberal perspective, a ground for perpetual attacks upon and hostility towards the hierarchies and lines of authority of this society as it is, or even as it could possibly become. Whatever Rawls’ own intentions may be, such demands for extreme equality are typically weapons in the hands of the liberal-left, which is why Rawls’ work is acclaimed in academia.

Rawls has the burden of proof backward. A free society produces inequalities of all sorts. No vital society can exist without
inequalities. Yet when a demand is made for greater equality than freedom produces, the defender of rewards according to achievement is thrown on the defensive and expected to justify the inequality. It would be more sensible to demand that the proponent of greater equality show that that would produce a greater general benefit than does freedom to achieve.

It is obvious that a society attempting to implement Rawls’ principles would have to submit to despotism. Radical egalitarianism cannot be implemented by individuals, families, or any group other than government. As government taxes more and subsidizes more, a greater portion of society’s wealth passes through its hands. Individuals and families have less income to dispose of as they see fit, which is why Jouvenel said that “redistribution is in effect far less a redistribution of free income from the richer to the poorer, as we imagined, than a redistribution of power from the individual to the State.”
²⁵
The same thing is true of redistributions of jobs, educational opportunities, access to credit, etc., through government action. All of this requires centralization, larger government, and a vastly increased apparatus of bureaucratic coercion.

Wood and Manchester are right. Equality is “the single most powerful and radical ideological force in all of American history” and egalitarianism became our “triumphant passion” in this century. This is having, and will continue to have, very unpleasant consequences. As the late political scientist Aaron Wildavsky wrote: “[R]ising egalitarianism will lower our standard of living, decrease our health, debase public discourse, lower the quality of public officials, weaken democracy, make people more suspicious of one another, and (if it be possible) worse. Worse is the constant denigration of American life…our polity, economy, and society…with no viable alternative to take its place.”
²⁶
We will see the truth of those propositions throughout this book.

Once more, none of this is new. Tocqueville sounded the warning well over a century ago: the principle of equality prepares men for government that “covers the surface of society with a network of small complicated rules, minute and uniform, through which the most original minds and the most energetic characters cannot penetrate, to rise above the crowd. The will of man is not shattered, but softened, bent, and guided…. Such a power … stupefies a people, till each nation is reduced to nothing better
than a flock of timid and industrious animals, of which the government is the shepherd.”
²⁷
This “servitude of the regular, quiet, and gentle kind”
²⁸
he saw was not at all incompatible with the sovereignty of the people; it is just that the ability to elect representatives from time to time becomes less and less important. “The evils that extreme equality may produce are slowly disclosed; they creep gradually into the social frame; they are seen only at intervals; and at the moment at which they become most violent, habit already causes them to be no longer felt.”
²⁹

Power in the “new despotism” will be gentle because government will try to protect its citizens from every occasion for suffering, physical or moral. Democratic man, thinking that others are like himself, identifies with anyone who suffers.
³⁰
This compassion born of the passion for equality leads to the power of claiming victim status. We have become what Charles J. Sykes called a nation of victims.
³¹
The list of victim groups…minorities, women, homosexuals, the disabled, the obese, the young, the old…is virtually endless, including at one time everybody but ordinary white males. Now, however, there is even a men’s movement claiming victim status. Putative victims stress their pain as a way of demanding special treatment from others, and they often get it. If there is power in claiming to feel pain as a victim, there is also power to be gained by the politician who assures us that “I feel your pain.”

The last line of
Democracy in America
reads: “The nations of our time cannot prevent the conditions of men from becoming equal, but it depends upon themselves whether the principle of equality is to lead them to servitude or freedom, to knowledge or barbarism, to prosperity or wretchedness.”
³²

5

I
n tracing the progression of liberty and equality to their present corrupt states of moral anarchy and despotic egalitarianism, the influence of the “intellectual” class must be noticed. Intellectual is in quotes to indicate that most of that class is not involved with serious mental work. Its members are generally critical of, if not actively hostile to, bourgeois society and culture. They are, moreover, susceptible to Utopian fantasies. As Friedrich Hayek, a Nobel laureate in economics, observed: “The mood of [the West’s] intellectual leaders has long been characterized by disillusionment with its principles, disparagement of its achievements, and exclusive concern with the creation of ‘better worlds.’”
¹

The economist Joseph Schumpeter defined the class of intellectuals and saw qualities in them that may explain both their hostility and their fantasizing:

Schumpeter’s acidic view of intellectuals is understandable enough: he was on the Harvard faculty. Intellectuals in Schumpeter’s sense are often referred to as the “chattering class,” people who spend their time, and usually make their livings, by producing or distributing, at wholesale or retail, ideas and symbols. They need not be, and often are not, very good at dealing with ideas. They may not even be very intelligent or sensible.

The intellectual class, then, is composed of people whose mindset is very like that of the student radicals of the Sixties: hostility to this culture and society coupled with millenarian dreams. Those students, like Schumpeter’s intellectuals, had no direct responsibility for practical affairs, no first-hand knowledge of the worlds workings, and hence were free to demand that reality be something other than what it was or could be. People so constituted are, in today’s circumstances, necessarily of the Left.

Intellectuals may be intellectually negligible, but they are an important cultural force nonetheless. Because they wield the power of language and symbols, their values and ideas are broadcast by the press, movies, television, universities, primary and secondary schools, books and magazines, philanthropies, foundations, and many churches. Thus, intellectuals are influential out of all proportion to their numbers. Worse, it may well be that their leftist political and cultural attitudes are permanent, beyond the reach of rational argument.

That somber thought is suggested by Max Weber’s analysis of the psychology of intellectuals, an analysis that fits well with what we observe in the intellectuals who drive modern liberalism:

The inner need for pervasive meaning was satisfied through most of history in Western civilization by religion. But as religious faith began a retreat, beginning in the eighteenth century and proceeding apace in the nineteenth and twentieth, the intellectuals need for meaning did not decline but remained urgent. Now, however, meaning must be found in a secular belief system. It is difficult to think of anything that would fit this specification for most intellectuals other than politics. For a few, meaning might be found in devotion to a field like scientific inquiry, but for the vast majority of intellectuals, for whom no such levels of achievement are possible, politics must be the answer. To be a civil religion, however, this politics cannot be the politics of mundane clashes of material interests and compromises; it must be a politics of ideology.

In our time that means left-wing politics, which offers a comprehensive world view and a promise of ultimate salvation in a Utopia that conventional politics cannot offer. The religious impulse underlying left radicalism has often been noted. Weber remarked that when certain types of German intellectualism turned against religion, there occurred “the rise of the economic, eschatological faith of socialism.”
⁴
Not only communism but fascism and Naziism were faith systems of the Left, offering transcendental meaning to their adherents.

It requires extraordinary circumstances for fascism or communism to come to power openly as a mass movement, but, even in relatively stable societies, devotion by any significant number of people to radical politics can be enormously damaging. It is well to recall Peter Berger’s comparison of the New Left of the Sixties with the European fascists. Modern liberalism, the descendant and spiritual heir of the New Left, is what fascism looks like when it has captured significant institutions, most notably the universities, but has no possibility of becoming a mass movement or of gaining power over government or the broader society through force or the threat of force. Power must then be sought in increments and by indirection. There are, of course, shades of modern liberalism, just as there were of fascism. The more extreme varieties are likely to be found these days on campuses or in public interest
ORGANIZATIONS
,
but there are many more people who vaguely share many of the assumptions of modern liberalism and thereby lend it a power the extremists could not muster on their own.