Here’s another lengthy comment I submitted to the discussion thread for Cobb’s “The First 22 Rules” and that I thought was good enough to share here as a blog post.
I’m not a huge fan of Theodore Roosevelt for several reasons, but I find myself returning to his writings, especially his famous speeches “The Strenuous Life” and “National Duties” every year. Few have been born with bigger silver spoons than his. He certainly had the option, like Adrian Veidt (perhaps better known as “Ozymandias” by readers of Alan Moore’s and Dave Gibbons’s Watchmen), to live a life of aristocratic effeteness. But he didn’t. Instead, he chose a strenuous aristocratic life; he submitted himself to tests, and he toiled nobly. And, his writings persuaded me that he measured men, even those born with silver spoons, based on how well they used the resources they started with and how much better their nation was made by their ideas or deeds.
The second paragraph of his “The Strenuous Life” represents Roosevelt at his manliest and aristocratic best. I quote from it below.
You work yourselves and you bring up your sons to work. If you are rich and are worth your salt, you will teach your sons that though they may have leisure, it is not to be spent in idleness; for wisely used leisure merely means that those who possess it, being free from the necessity of working for their livelihood, are all the more bound to carry on some kind of non-remunerative work in science, in letters, in art, in exploration, in historical research—work of the type we most need in this country, the successful carrying out of which reflects most honor upon the nation. We do not admire the man of timid peace. We admire the man who embodies victorious effort; the man who never wrongs his neighbor, who is prompt to help a friend, but who has those virile qualities necessary to win in the stern strife of actual life. It is hard to fail, but it is worse never to have tried to succeed. In this life we get nothing save by effort. Freedom from effort in the present merely means that there has been stored up effort in the past. A man can be freed from the necessity of work only by the fact that he or his fathers before him have worked to good purpose. If the freedom thus purchased is used aright, and the man still does actual work, though of a different kind, whether as a writer or a general, whether in the field of politics or in the field of exploration and adventure, he shows he deserves his good fortune. But if he treats this period of freedom from the need of actual labor as a period, not of preparation, but of mere enjoyment, even though perhaps not of vicious enjoyment, he shows that he is simply a cumberer of the earth’s surface, and he surely unfits himself to hold his own with his fellows if the need to do so should again arise. A mere life of ease is not in the end a very satisfactory life, and, above all, it is a life which ultimately unfits those who follow it for serious work in the world.
—Theodore Roosevelt, “The Strenuous Life,” Speech to the Hamilton Club, Chicago, April 10, 1899
I’ve had these words swirling around in my head since 2003, which was the last year I had to work forty or more hours per week in order to take good economic care of myself and my family and the year I began to prepare my mind, via intellectual toil, for my life project. Now that I’m in law school, and I’ve begun to fine-tune the strategy that will guide my attempt to accomplish my life project—to help hundreds of lower-class U.S. Black men, women, and families earn U.S. middle-class lives through education and entrepreneurship—, a passage from Roosevelt’s “National Duties” has begun to swirl around in my head as well.
But it is not possible ever to insure prosperity merely by law. Something for good can be done by law, and a bad law can do an infinity of mischief; but, after all, the best law can only prevent wrong and injustice, and give to the thrifty, the far-seeing, and the hard-working a chance to exercise to best advantage their special and peculiar abilities. No hard-and-fast rule can be laid down as to where our legislation shall stop in interfering between man and man, between interest and interest. All that can be said is that it is highly undesirable, on the one hand, to weaken individual initiative, and, on the other hand, that in a constantly increasing number of cases we shall find it necessary in the future to shackle cunning as in the past we have shackled force. It is not only highly desirable but necessary that there should be legislation which shall carefully shield the interests of wage-workers, and which shall discriminate in favor of the honest and humane employer by removing the disadvantage under which he stands when compared with unscrupulous competitors who have no conscience and will do right only under fear of punishment.
—Theodore Roosevelt, “National Duties,” Speech at the Minnesota State Fair, St. Paul, September 2, 1901
The silver-spooned children of “old-money” aristocrats, of “new-money” parvenus, of politicians, corporate lieutenants, and entertainers who catered to and leeched off the aristocrats and parvenus in order to make their millions, of degreed white-collar technocrats who earned their wealth by renting out their highly-educated minds, and of blue-collar workers who selflessly saved enough money to give their children and grandchildren and great-grandchildren superior resources, would probably benefit more from reading and rereading Roosevelt’s speeches than from reading Charles Sykes’s 50 Rules. Roosevelt was an aristocrat, but he was a tested aristocrat. He was far from effete. I have a lot of respect for the man, even though I doubt his real opinions about the African American were very different from the benighted, racist, and culturally incompetent views held by most of the White aristocrats of his time (and ours). I believe he is an excellent example of what can be achieved by the most talented and hardest-working U.S. Euro-Americentric and capitalistic aristocrats when they are born with silver spoons and they use their spoons well.
17 Comments
Just wanted to say I found your commenting over at Cobb enlightening, and Teddy Roosevelt shall be going on my growing “to read” list.
Regards,
James
James:
Thanks for your comment.
From time to time, I’ll share some of my life experiences and perspectives on those experiences. I hope that doing this occasionally will help my fellow middle-class and upper-class bloggers and blog readers learn more about what we as a nation are forcing upon or allowing to happen to millions of talented African Americans who, due to no fault of their own, inherit under-class or lower-class circumstances in the U.S. So much untapped intellectual talent and human capital is here in our country, waiting for our investment. So much of it is in our urban ghettoes and in the minds and bodies of our African American children. To tap into it, and to benefit from it, we need only invest more wisely in our own citizens.
Those who are blessed with two parents, grandparents, a supportive community, and the other resources available to most members of our nation’s middle-class inherit the greatest gift our nation has to offer–a fair or near-fair opportunity to realize their intellectual and economic potentials. These are our nation’s freest citizens. However, those whom we force or allow to overcome unjust and unnecessary socioeconomic and social psychological gauntlets are our nation’s least free citizens. We are wealthy enough as a nation that we can afford to change their circumstances for the better; we can afford to treat them justly. Indeed, I suspect doing so would give us great returns on our investments.
But we don’t invest enough in our poorest children, as if we believed they were born with less intellectual talent and economic potential than our middle-class or upper-class citizens. As if we believed they don’t deserve an equal opportunity to compete against their equally talented and equally industrious middle-class and upper-class peers. We force or allow our poorest citizens to deal with their unjust circumstances. We leave them to their gauntlets, and we, quite unpatriotically, turn our backs on our own people, our own neighbors, when they need us most. We force or allow our poorest children to start off in a socioeconomic and social psychological cage of sorts, and we force or allow them to find a way to break free from it in order to win opportunities to live free U.S. lives. Moreover, too many of those far-from-free poor U.S. citizens are African Americans, bearing more than a fair share of the burden created by our nation’s unjust treatment of our poorest citizens.
I want our nation to do better by our poorest 20% African Americans. I, for one, will patriotically try to help our nation do better by helping at least a few hundred African Americans climb up to the middle-class through education and entrepreneurship. I will try to help our nation honor the noble promises she makes to ALL her citizens.
I find your goals and sentiments inspiring, and wish you the best of luck.
I agree with you regarding how we have turned our backs on the poorest, and you are right, African-Americans are over-represented in that sector. But I do think you have touched on something that is germinal to the overall debate, but which gets overlooked - there is just as much a class as a race issue to how people are locked out of the opportunities that are available.
(And I am far from Marxist in this…In fact, I generally class my viewpoint as socially conservative, economically classical liberal)
Having spent my teens in Atlanta, GA, my twenties in the US Navy, and my thirties in the UK, I am coming to the conclusion that much of what happens to the black underclass in America can find profound parallels within the white underclass here in the UK. Particularly since the introduction and expansion of the Welfare State.
With my limited knowledge of African American history, I am aware that there was a sort of post-war cultural burgeoning that was beginning to take hold within African American life (for instance, thinkers like James Baldwin arose alongside such happenings as the Harlem Renaissance). Do you think this burgeoning could have been retarded by the introduction of the Welfare State at just the point when African Americans were beginning to become politically enfranchised in the mid-60s?
In the UK, I see the Welfare State destroy within two generations what was once a proud, self-supporting working class with strong supporting institutions, such as Church, Family, and Education. The white underclass housing estates (the projects) here are just as much no-go areas for the forces of “connectivity” (to borrow from TPM Barnett) as are their African American parallels in American cities.
I acknowledge that many working class people end up as wasted talent. But sometimes, we need to get the underclass to aspire to “working” class, as well, on their way to middle class.
I posit no solutions, but just observation.
(For the record, I was an enlisted Navy brat whose parents qualified for food stamps, and who lived in the rougher parts of Norfolk, VA, when we weren’t living on overseas bases. Luckily, my parents ended up squarely lower middle class from very distinct working class backgrounds…When I said I was joining the Navy, my dad said “good…you’ll learn a trade.”)
Possibly, but I don’t think probably. I think the burgeoning would have taken a different form. The art, philosophies, and ideologies would have been different because the artists’ circumstances and experiences would have been different. Even so, the early 20th Century African American community had (and has) so much self-repairing and self-uplifting work to do, that I believe the U.S. could have helped the African American much more than it did during the early 20th Century, by investing ten times more than it did in our community infrastructures, our enterprises, and our educational systems, and yet the African American would still have had to deal with enough inequity and injustice to inspire us to produce great art and philosophy, to inspire us to respond with our early 20th Century cultural renaissance.
Welfare should be executed wisely and should have the intellectual and economic flourishing of a nation’s citizens as its end goal. Welfare should also help a nation develop or sustain healthy institutions that would promote the intellectual and economic flourishing of a nation’s citizens. Many scholars and intelligentsia involved in the reparations debate agree that the best reparations investments would target institutions rather than individuals. The investments would attempt to provide the descendants of chattel slaves and the descendants of African Americans who endured racist and oppressive social systems for centuries, the opportunities to learn how to fish and fair opportunities to go fishing, rather than the opportunities to get a one-time windfall of free fish.
I personally believe that no U.S. citizen, not even a child born into one of our wealthiest families, deserves a free-ride on the rest of our backs. Every citizen should earn his or her keep, his or her socioeconomic status and social position. And, his or her social rewards (wealth, power, and prestige) should be based on his or her inborn talents, industriousness, and prudence. And, I believe every U.S. citizen, even the poorest citizen, deserves an equal or near-equal opportunity to compete against his similarly talented and industrious peers despite his inherited socioeconomic circumstances. If he’s born to one of our poorest families, we, as nation, should wisely invest in giving him fair or near-fair opportunities to develop his intellectual and economic potentials fully until he becomes a legal adult. After, he’ll have become a legal adult, if we will have invested wisely, he should be able to compete fairly and meritocratically against the children who joined our nation the same year he did.
“I personally believe that no U.S. citizen, not even a child born into one of our wealthiest families, deserves a free-ride on the rest of our backs. Every citizen should earn his or her keep, his or her socioeconomic status and social position.”
You’ll get no argument from me there, but how do we get there? It sounds almost as utopian a concept as Marxism. I’ll admit, I don’t like it, but I have come to accept it a bit more as I age. I also see a more stratified society here in the UK than most would prefer to acknowledge, which proscribes how high, with few exceptions, anyone can rise. (Although sports and entertainment hold the same aspirational mystique for the white working class here as it does for the African-American working class in the US.)
I see the US’s system as more pliant and flexible, and superior, no matter what colour you are. You are just as much allowed to slide down as you are to slide up (although you are less likely to slide down if you are at the top.) That’s why, for the sake of my talented middle-class daughter, we are going to move back to the States. If you do have talent or a bright spark, you are more likely to find people willing to give you a leg up in the US (and I admit this is more likely if you are white, no argument there, either; but I will also put forward that you yourself are not unique in the African American scene).
And once I have raised my daughter, I hope to be able to help people up, too, in my own way, whatever that is.
I’ll sign up to anything that equalises opportunity for people, though. But just what form does that take?
We definitely don’t wait on politicians, the government, the legal system, or the power elite. Few of them are interested in equal opportunity. Each one of us who realizes that the unjust social system is inferior to what we could and should have could attempt to help us all move closer. We don’t need anything huge to happen. We just need tens of millions of enlightened and patriotic middle-class and upper-class people making small contributions, helping their fellow citizens. I have no plans to attempt to personally help thousands or millions. I don’t want to lead nations. I don’t want to see my talking head all over the media, give speeches to huge crowds, or win prestigious awards for my service to my fellow man. I want to do my part more quietly. So, I’ll just try to help a few hundred African Americans. I’ll work with them one-on-one and face-to-face. That will be my small contribution to helping us move toward Utopia, and help them move out of dystopia.
Unfortunately, the distance between the social system we have now and the one billions of good people believe would be the ideal social system discourages too many good middle-class and upper-class people from even attempting to do small things. All members of the middle-class and upper-class can do small things. We can all help our neighbors. We can all help a handful of people get the opportunities they deserve. Perhaps more of us could start there. We could watch a little less television, buy a little less crap we don’t need, and waste a little less time. We could use our middle-class and upper-class wealth, power, and prestige to make some of the investments that too many of our fellow citizens aren’t ready or enlightened enough to make. Our investments needn’t be huge investments in order to make a difference. And we needn’t worry about what others are doing. People like me can help dozens or hundreds of poor African Americans climb to the middle-class during our lifetimes. I will do what I can. I hope others will do what they can.
This is true. I’m not unique in any way. Indeed, I know people who inherited worse circumstances than I did and climbed higher, and in less time. However, my Horatio Alger story is a very rare one. And, that’s the point. It’s too rare. Indeed, the percentage of folks who start in the bottom 20% and climb to where I am now or will have climbed in another decade or two, is very, very low. I believe it is uneconomically low. I believe it signals economic inefficiency, as well as social injustice. Now, I’m not advocating that my nation should change our social systems so drastically and quickly that the percentage of people who would rise from the bottom 20% to the top 20% in a single lifetime would equal the percentage of people who would rise from the top 40% to the top 20% in a single lifetime. I’m not that quixotic. Even so, I believe my fellow citizens deserve equal opportunity. There are some I believe need more help than others. And, there are some I believe I can help more than most others can help them. Those are the citizens I’ll attempt to help climb higher or faster by helping them to get equal or near-equal opportunities to realize their intellectual and economic potentials. I will try to do something to close our U.S. social climbing success gap during my lifetime. I’ll try to help a few hundred poor African Americans climb higher or faster than they would have if had I never made the attempt or had I sat back and waited for someone else to take the lead.
I believe, for now, the best form it could take would be enlightened individual effort. It will take enlightened individuals putting ourselves in social positions that would enable us to help a few dozen or few hundred other people get equal or near-equal opportunities to develop their intellectual and economic potentials, and then using our upper-middle-class, upper-class, or over-class wealth, power, and prestige levels to help the citizens who need our help most so they could live the free lives we enjoy.
E.C.
I was reading your post on Cobb and figured I’d jump over here about it (your comment #2 here).
Disproportionate numbers aside, do you perceive a disadvantage in the way our nation attempts to help the lower 20% of our nation’s black children as opposed to the lower 20% of any other racial group? I ask this because I do not see any such difference and I relate somewhat to Moose’s oversimplified comments. Why should the “nation” be compelled to focus any more effort on the poorest African Americans when your metaphorical cage is a disadvantage for all poor people? I understand that there is an argument to be made for the persistence of the “one drop rule” and the historical disparity between blacks and whites, but isn’t there always going to be a disadvantaged group whether it’s racial, religious, or political? Isn’t that YOUR cage to break free from?
You say we don’t invest enough in our poorest children, but by what means should we invest in them? I advocate making sure there are as many open doors of opportunity as possible for them to freely walk through when they have the power and wisdom to do so. This means that we encourage the upper middle class and higher to continue to create small and large business as fertile grounds of opportunity. It means we stress the value in the sweat necessary to achieve our goals. It also means that we break through the self pity and defeatist attitude that is so pervasive among the PARENTS of our poorest children.
Ahh…but there’s the problem!
The welfare that you advocate isn’t for the children. It’s for the parents with the HOPE that it benefits the children. The well intentioned argument to help the children through welfare is, unfortunately, exactly the “free ride” you would like to see avoided. So, now you have a free ride to people who will only occassionally break from their perceived victimization (welfare in its current state practically pays people to be victims). What incentive or example is there to our nation’s poorest children to believe they are worth anything outside “the system”.
You seem to recognize this, though, by advocating individual efforts to help the poor. I’m much more inclined to support such efforts, but welfare is counterproductive to it- it bleeds the resources from individuals into an endlessly ineffectual bureaucratic mess. One must be advocated significantly more than the other and only one of them won’t tax itself to death.
Roger:
Yes, because I suspect our nation’s poorest 20% African American children are more concentrated geographically than the 20% poorest children in all or almost all other racial groups. I’ve read some social science that could back up my suspicion, but I’d need more free time than I have now to dig it up. I suspect this geographic concentration when combined with the poverty levels of their households has a negative influence on the clout wielded by their political representatives. Political representatives that represent the districts with the strongest economic productivity levels tend to wield the most influence. And, the political representatives that represent the districts with the weakest economic productivity levels tend to wield the least influence. So, I suspect that if it is indeed the case that our poorest 20% African Americans are more likely to be concentrated geographically in economically weak political districts than other racial groups, and their political representatives are more likely to wield less power than the political representatives of other political districts, then the 20% poorest African Americans are more disadvantaged, on average, than the 20% poorest members of other racial groups, at least with respect to the influence their political representatives wield. And I suspect this lower-than-average level of influence only makes it more difficult for their political representatives to recruit the needed federal and state resources to their political districts, in the forms of institutional investments, infrastructure investments, incentives for businesses that would bring more good jobs to the political districts, social programs, policy adjustments, and laws.
I also perceive social psychological, cultural capital-related, and social capital-related disadvantages that negatively affect African Americans more than other racial groups, but my arguments for those disadvantages would not be as persuasive as the argument for the political capital disadvantage.
I suspect there will always be disadvantaged groups in a society as acquisitive and individualistic as ours. But I’m less concerned about whether there will always be disadvantaged groups than I am about how the disadvantage will be spread around. If one group is forced to bear much more of the disadvantage than other groups, then 1) the society probably should make an effort to decrease the overall disadvantage for all groups as much as would be just and economical or 2) the society probably should adjust its resources in order to distribute the disadvantage more evenly among the groups so that no one group is forced to bear much more of the disadvantage than another for no good reason.
I don’t see it this way. I see it as a cage that my nation should make sure I never have to break free from, because my nation should eliminate cages altogether (See Original Position). If cages must exist, then I believe my nation should attempt to give me all the resources it can afford to give me so that I could break free from the cage, before I would begin to suffer significantly from the negative affects of being in the cage for more than a decade, by doing little more than working as hard as my average middle-class peer (See minimax). I believe no U.S. citizen can live a free U.S. life unless he or she has reasonable opportunities to realize his or her intellectual and economic potentials in our society. “Reasonable” is, in my mind, a lower standard than “fair” or “equal,” but I don’t believe our nation even provides reasonable opportunities to all or most of our poorest 20% African American children yet. Those who are not provided with the resources the average U.S. child would need in order to realize his or her intellectual and economic potentials are not given reasonable, fair, or equal opportunities to live free U.S. lives, in my opinion. Sure their bodies might roam freely unless or until they would be put in our prisons, but they would roam without the benefits of quality education, quality healthcare, or quality social psychological environments. I believe our country is more than wealthy enough to give every child a fair opportunity, so I also believe our country is more than wealthy enough to give every child a reasonable opportunity.
I believe John Roemer provides one of the best answers to this question that I’ve read in his Equality of Opportunity. The Wikipedia article on Roemer sums it up abstractly: “he argues that society must take the action necessary to ensure that an individual’s economic (or welfare) prospects are independent of attributes such as race, gender and the economic class to which one is born.” Roemer provides detailed mathematical models in the book that could be used by law- and policy-makers.
I agree with you on all these. But I believe this is not enough. In fact, I believe that unless most of us are convinced that the children born into our poorest 20% households should not have the same opportunities to realize their intellectual and economic potentials as the children born into our middle-class households, then we probably have been underinvesting in our poorest 20% since we began to provide socialized public education and other publicly-funded welfare programs for our citizens.
I disagree. I believe we are smart enough so that we could invest directly in our poorest children without funding welfare programs that would give their parents undeserved “free-rides.” Give me an example of a social program that you believe can only help a poor child by giving the child’s parent an undeserved free-ride, and I’ll probably be able to show you a way to get the same benefit to the child without giving an undeserved free-ride to the child’s parent. Personally, I am convinced the free-ride problem can be avoided in our efforts to get our poorest children the resources they would need during their first eighteen years in order to realize their intellectual and economic potentials.
E.C.
“I also perceive social psychological, cultural capital-related, and social capital-related disadvantages that negatively affect African Americans more than other racial groups, but my arguments for those disadvantages would not be as persuasive as the argument for the political capital disadvantage.”
I could not agree more about the persuasiveness of the political capital disadvantage argument. Of all the things you pointed out, it’s the only one that can’t be at least partly associated with the activities of black society- that is, internal perpetuation of the problem. I can also see how it could contribute significantly to reversing the other problems internally and externally.
I have to read your links regarding what I see as your cage, but my initial impression of of your response is that of socialism. The fairest distribution of disadvantages is incidental of maximized opportunity and proportionate to the individual effort to take advantage of it. Trying to encourage the fair distribution of disadvantage through government is hand-in-hand with trying to create the fair distribution of wealth. It appears to be even a communist concept.
I agree with your outline of “reasonable”, but I guess I need to know what it is that the nation isn’t doing to reasonably help the lowest 20% African American children while offering it to other racial groups, though the political capital disadvantage argument is compelling.
As for welfare, it’s currently too much for too many with many more hands trying to reach into the pot (this includes nationalized healthcare). I’m not so sure we can invest directly in our children and not have the same cycle of corruption that has rotted other social programs like Social Security and Welfare itself.
I come from the viewpoint that federal governmment should be strictly Constitutionally structured, which means it is bloated beyond recognition today. If there are to be social programs they should be managed by the states and the feds need to stop digging in the pockets of Americans to buy the next “cure”.
If you subscribe to the idea of Institutionalized Racism that has been discussed on Cobb, then you may see that the best way to fight the disparities you note is to squash the institution (federal government) by cutting its grotesque flood of money and redirecting it locally (maximizing opportunity)- not by funding more federal programs.
Then again, you haven’t yet said federal programs, but it appears to be the direction you’re going.
I’d support socialistic programs, such as publicly subsidized education and publicly subsidized healthcare, up to and only up to the point where such programs would maximize economic efficiency and the speed of scientific and technological development for a society. I believe in order to maximize economic efficiency, as well as the rate of scientific and technological development, a society would strive to make sure it didn’t sustain social systems that would favor one ethnic group over another, one family lineage over another, or one social network over another based on things their inborn talents, work ethics, and prudence levels couldn’t influence, such as their phenotypical traits, their genders, or the socioeconomic circumstances they had inherited. Once a society, one that could afford to become a meritocracy without reducing the percentage of millionaires and six-figure earners to unacceptably low levels, had engineered social systems using socialist programs that would efficiently prevent or limit the underuse and underdevelopment of its citizens’ intellectual and economical potentials, then I would consider that society an economically efficient meritocracy that had designed a system that would efficiently promote a shared system of ethical beliefs, whatever that shared system of ethical beliefs might be. The near-unbounded pursuit of wealth, power, or prestige for their own sakes, for instance, might be the shared system of ethical beliefs in the U.S.
I believe I would agree with you on this. My assent would depend on your definition for ‘fairest’.
I disagree. There is no necessary connection between the two, in my opinion. The position I advocate for is phenotypical trait-impartial, gender-impartial, and socioeconomic status-impartial competitions for our society’s social roles that would be played out on leveled playing fields that we as a society would make sure stayed level. I guess we could define ‘fair’ in a way that would lead us to conclude that such a meritocracy as I’ve described would attempt to distribute wealth equally, and therefore quasi-communistically. However, if our definition of ‘fairly’ would equate with ‘equally’ then I wouldn’t use ‘fairly’ in my arguments. If our definition of ‘fairly’ were based on John Rawls’s conception of Justice as Fairness starting from his original position scenario, then I would probably use our definitions for ‘fair’ and ‘fairly’ in my arguments.
Essentially, 1) I believe people should get what their talents, work ethics, and prudence would earn for them in competitions that would take place on leveled playing fields. 2) I believe we should do as much as would be economical to make sure our wealthiest, most powerful, and most prestigious citizens don’t edge out their a) more talented, harder-working, or more prudent citizens or b) what would have been their more talented, harder-working, or more prudent citizens had all or almost all their fellow citizens been given opportunities to compete against them on leveled playing fields, primarily because our wealthiest, most powerful, or most prestigious citizens had been given, during their first eighteen to forty years, a set of social advantages and privileges that they did not have to earn based on their inborn talents, their work ethics, or their prudence. 3) I believe societies that don’t work towards this type of meritocratic model end up enabling too many citizens who aren’t their most talented, who aren’t their hardest-working, and who aren’t their most prudent to fill the social roles that give their citizens the most wealth, power, or prestige. And, 4) I believe societies that sustain unmeritocractic social systems such as these are more likely to be unnecessarily economically inefficient than not and are more likely to voluntarily slow the evolution of their scientific and technological development than not.
Since I assume our precedent-setting interpretations of U.S. Constitution should not favor citizens based on their phenotypical traits, their genders, or their wealth, power, or prestige levels, it has been easy for me to be persuaded during my U.S. Constitutional Law course this semester that the U.S. probably doesn’t do as much as we could or should to promote the system of ethics laid out in our own U.S. Constitution. We, of course, could debate that if you’d like, but I’d prefer to just exchange a short bibliography of our favorite Constitutional Law or Legal Philosophy scholars instead. The Derrick Bell Reader would be included in my short bibliography.
I do believe our nation suffers from the unmeritocratic and uneconomical affects and effects of Institutionalized Racism and/or Institutionalized Cultural, Gender, Kin, and Phenotypical Favoritism. However, I don’t believe the amount of money that we hand over to our government is our problem. The problem is how the people who get to control the money we hand over are selected. If we did a better job of selecting the wealthiest, most powerful, and most prestigious people in our society, then I believe we would be able to count on our government to use our pooled resources in order to make our shared economic system far more efficient. More of our best and brightest would have leadership roles in our government. Unfortunately, the U.S. has selected an unmeritocratic phenotypical trait-partial, gender-partial, and socioeconomic status-partial social system that allows too many of our mediocre citizens to fill too many of our wealthiest, most powerful, and most prestigious social roles. In return for this unmeritocratic system we’ve created and sustain for ourselves, one which I believe still unmeritocratically favors the cultural and genetic descendants of the people who profited most from the economic benefits gained through legalized or socially accepted African and African American chattel slavery, anti-African American terrorism, anti-African American social psychological environments, and African American political and economic disenfranchisement during our country’s first and second centuries, we get more institutional inefficiency and incompetence across the board than we would if we were a meritocracy that leveled our citizens’ playing fields and rewarded them with wealth, power, and prestige based on their inborn talents, their work ethics, and their prudence.
“Fairest” to me is simply that all opportunity is objectively available. As long as the strictly enforced criteria qualifiying a person for a given oportunity is achievable by anyone, then anyone has a fair shot at it. Conversely, if a person hasn’t the capability or hasn’t demonstrated the necessary drive to meet those standards, then he must seek other opportunities that are more appropriate to his efforts and achievements.
I can’t argue so much with with the idea of a meritocracy. It’s just such an idealistic notion that I don’t see it as achievable- particularly with the power of so few people with so much money as the federal government.
I wouldn’t debate you on Constitutional ethics. I don’t doubt that there is much to be discussed, but I won’t pretend to be that learned. I’m just a small fish poking around in your fishbowl.
Roger:
Based on your Comment #11, I believe your conception of ‘fair’ is close to but not quite the same as mine. You might believe that if all members of a society, who would be born with the necessary talents and would work hard enough, could possibly fill any of its social roles, even if the unnecessary social hurdles the most disadvantaged members would face during their attempts to fill their most desired social roles would make it near impossible (or as close to impossible as we could get before we would actually get to impossible) for them to fill those social roles by working just as hard and being as just smart as more advantaged members who had inherited middle-class or upper-class resources, then the social roles in such a society would be “objectively available” to all its members. And, you seem to believe that all that is needed to achieve fairness is that all the social roles be objectively available or possibly attainable by everyone in a society who would be born with enough talent and the capacity to work hard enough to fill those roles regardless of the socioeconomic circumstances they inherited. If that is a good account of your conception of ‘fair’, then I would not use ‘fair’ the way you use it.
In order for a society, one that had the ability to become a fair society in an economically efficient manner, to achieve the standard of fair society I have in mind, it would have to be a social system in which it would be more likely than not that Citizen B, who would inherit the society’s least favored phenotypical traits, least favored gender, and lowest 20% wealth level, would have at least as good of a shot at filling her most desired social role as Citizen A, who would inherit the society’s most favored phenotypical traits, most favored gender, and middle-class wealth level, if Citizen B were born just as talented as Citizen A, worked just as hard as Citizen A, and was just as prudent as Citizen A.
Idealistic indeed. I believe no nation of millions could be perfectly meritocractic in an imperfect world. Mine is only a model of an ideal society that I believe we should work towards. Thomas More’s conception of Utopia is idealistic (if not satirical) and unattainable. Plato’s conception of the ideal Republic is idealistic and unattainable. And, Aristotle’s conception of the ideal republic in his Politics is idealistic and unattainable. Our finest philosophers, sociologists, and political scientists can imagine how the ideal nation-state would operate, what type of ethical beliefs it would promote, and how it would define and promote justice, but such a nation-state might only be possible if we lived in an ideal world, filled with ideal people, i.e. Heaven on earth. I suspect that ain’t gonna happen anytime soon.
Even so, if we are going to bother trying to improve our nation, rather than merely living lives devoted to little more than the pursuit of wealth, power, and prestige for their own sakes, then we probably should strive to make our nation more like an ideal nation. Our models of ideal nations can serve as our beacons, even if they are beacons we know we’ll never reach. The becoming of the ideal nation needn’t be the criterion by which we would determine our success or failure. We need to be realistic and pragmatic always. The constant striving to become an ideal nation probably should be the goals of men and women who would want to live in and pass on to their heirs a more meritocratic nation, one that would be fairer, more just, and more economically efficient than the nation they had inherited.
I’m reading this conversation and enjoying it. I want to remind people that true capitalism is a myth and you have to have so socialist policies to make true capitalism work.
For example, the Internet is tax free - that is socialism. If it weren’t, most of us wouldn’t be on the internet discussing how socialism is so bad and evil right now…
“…would have at least as good of a shot at filling her most desired social role as Citizen A…”
Sometimes a person’s ultimate social role doesn’t fit the person’s most desired social role. I am not a model and the rest of the nation is likely thankful for that.
How does competition play out in your meritocratic society?
ExEd:
Socialism certainly has to play a limited and HIGHLY selective role in any thriving and responsible society. Our current social system, however, is neither responsible nor thriving. As a matter of fact, I believe it is one of the biggest economic threats to our nation.
I know what you’re saying about the internet, but it isn’t the same as socialism. Socialism is mandated, the internet is largely unregulated yet still hugely successful. I would argue that the internet is a better reflection of pure capitalism, including the evils of predatory practices.
No argument from me on this. However, I’m not arguing against this standpoint. I could agree with you completely and still hold the position I described in Comment #12.
“In order for a society, one that had the ability to become a fair society in an economically efficient manner, to achieve the standard of fair society I have in mind, it would have to be a social system in which it would be more likely than not that Citizen B, who would inherit the society’s least favored phenotypical traits, least favored gender, and lowest 20% wealth level, would have at least as good of a shot at filling her most desired social role as Citizen A, who would inherit the society’s most favored phenotypical traits, most favored gender, and middle-class wealth level, if Citizen B were born just as talented as Citizen A, worked just as hard as Citizen A, and was just as prudent as Citizen A.”
Below is a hypothetical. It’s abstract, but I probably can’t get much more concrete than this without doing a lot of work and citing a bunch of social science literature.
Citizen A, a middle-class White male, is born with all the resources he would need in order to achieve his intellectual and economic potentials readily available to him. All he would need to do would be to work harder in school than most-middle class White males, use his readily available resources wisely, and take good advantage of his social and academic opportunities.
Citizen B, a lower-class African American female, is not born having readily available to her all the resources she would need in order to achieve her full intellectual and economic potentials by working just as hard as Citizen A. Without additional help from her fellow citizens, Citizen B, in order to have as good a shot as Citizen A at filling the same type of social role Citizen A wants to fill, would need to work much harder (let’s say 50% to 75% harder) than Citizen A. Remember, both Citizen A and Citizen B were equally talented and had equal intellectual and economic potentials at birth.
If we wanted to level the playing field for Citizen A and Citizen B, then we probably would pay to provide enough readily available resources to Citizen B so that she probably wouldn’t have to work any harder than Citizen A in order to fill the same type of social role Citizen A would fill. We could add to Citizen B’s readily available resources by investing more money in her educational programs (teacher salaries, school infrastructure, school discretionary funds, school computers, after-school programs, etc.), her school supplies and textbooks, her social networks (pay well-trained and well-educated mentors or advisors to advise her), her healthcare, her psychotherapy (if she would need it), her community center’s programs and facilities, her safe transportation to and from school, and other things that she would benefit directly from in her efforts to realize as much of her intellectual and economic potentials per unit of effort as Citizen A.
What of the white parents of that middle class child who were themselves born to a lower income family, but put tremendous effort into their success with the intention to give their own child a better opportunity? Are their efforts being considered fairly?
Shouldn’t those benefits you advocate also be distributed based on merit rather than a blanket assumption of disadvantage?
There probably isn’t a clear answer to any of this. Your concept could work with a well regulated system, but it is contrary to the way humans are built. We are predators and as such we will always seek to leverage an advantage over our fellow humans- consciously or not. Am I just pessimistic?
Roger:
I believe the most meritocratic system the U.S. could economically adopt would be very fair to all competitors, and it would reward citizens’ inborn talents, hard work, and prudence as they would be demonstrated on leveled playing fields. Indeed, I believe it would be fair to lower-class Whites.
I also believe, however, that one’s phenotypical traits would predetermine one’s relative advantage to equally talented, hard-working, and prudent competitors, even on playing fields the U.S. would do its best to level, if one culture—a system of ideas, symbols, and rituals—or a small set of cultures would still be highly favored over others for unmeritocratic reasons. And, to the extent that phenotypical traits serve as symbols for cultures, phenotypical traits would help predetermine, to some degree, the amount of unearned cultural capital a competitor would inherit at birth (see The U.S. Culture Game).
I suspect a culturally and socioeconomically impartial meritocracy might be contrary to the way the culture we’ve adopted, which is based on Ancient Greece, Ancient Rome, and Early Europe, is built. Humans are built just fine, and human nature doesn’t require us to adopt the form of subtle and benighted barbarism that very wealthy yet unmeritocratic societies execute. So, I’m more inclined to attribute the social ills that result from unmeritocratic social systems to the politically, economically, and militarily dominant culture of a society than to the hard-wiring of our species.
That sentiment sounds like a culture—system of ideas, symbols, and rituals—at work to me. Man’s acquisitive predator mode comes in handy before certain levels of opulence-producing science and technology are achieved. However, at some point, due to the great opulence that would have been achieved as a result of science and technology, the acquisitive predator mode should be tossed aside and replaced with an economically efficient meritocratic mode. I believe some of the world’s most politically, economically, and militarily powerful nations have held on to the acquisitive predator mode at least a century too long. Unfortunately, the cultures that promote the acquisitive predator mode are hard to modify or replace once they have enabled a small percentage of people to accumulate unmeritocratic and oligarchic influence over most of a very powerful nation’s wealth, power, and prestige.
I don’t think so. The most fundamental symbols, ideas, and rituals that make up the world’s most politically, economically, and militarily dominant societies are very powerful forces. They are so powerful that even when civilized people are able to figure out just how much of their consciousnesses are controlled by the unjust attributes of their societies’ dominant cultures, they are often still reluctant to consider that their societies’ dominant cultures might not be the very best cultures for their societies to use during the 21st Century.
Very persuasive arguments could be made that would assert the unmeritocratic cultures that have brought the world’s most politically, economically, and militarily powerful societies to this point, despite the diabolical crimes those cultures led them to commit against humanity during the past few centuries (or millennia), enabled us to accumulate scientific and technological knowledge faster than other, more merciful, charitable, and respectful, cultures would have. However, I don’t believe arguments that would assert we should hold on to the most merciless, selfish, disrespectful, and unmeritocratic elements of those cultures during the 21st Century and beyond, especially now that so many of us enjoy such kingly levels of opulence at the expenses of our fellow citizens and the world’s politically, economically, and militarily weakest nations, should be considered persuasive by learned and prudent people.