Make us equal, lord, but not just yet

In the last decade of the seventeenth century, a pioneering demographer named Gregory King produced an estimate of the national income of England, together with a table estimating the distribution of the nation’s wealth among the bands of its social hierarchy.  He divided all of English society into 26 ranks—the vast majority of the population falling into the bottom five.  The top six ranks represented the better sort—titled nobles, landowners and gentlemen who did not labor for an income.  The next fifteen comprised the respectable middle ranks, while the bottom five held the poorer sort—labourers, seamen and common soldiers, as well as poor cottagers, out-servants, paupers and vagrants.  According to King’s analysis, less than half of the English population earned more than it spent, while the rest diminished the wealth of the kingdom.  The labouring poor and the idle poor got by only with the help of subsidies or relief from their betters.  King’s account was innovative, yet a fairly accurate reflection of the elite social prejudices of his day.  We moderns are struck by the suggestion that those increasing the wealth of the kingdom—merely by receiving more in income than they spent in consumption—featured the great landowners collecting rents from the lands they were born to and the idle rich living from profits of distant trading ventures, not to mention lazy churchmen and heiresses (Jane Austin’s sort of people), while those diminishing the wealth of the kingdom included the numberless physical laborers who kept the idle rich in lace and tea-cakes.  That’s not how the moralists of the time saw things—the increasers contributed to the local poor rate while the diminishers (those liable to being seasonally unemployed) took more in poor relief than they contributed in funding.  The latter needed reminding that they should be grateful for being kept from starvation by the generosity of their betters.  There is more than a whiff of entitlement as well as moral worthiness behind King’s census.  Those with greater incomes (however gained) improved the prosperity of the kingdom, while those with means insufficient to keep body and soul together harmed the economy and the vitality of the kingdom.

We still see such attitudes in our contemporary world.  In September 2012, Mitt Romney was caught on microphone telling Republican fundraisers that forty-seven percent of Americans would vote for his presidential opponent no matter what because they were obstinately dependent on government handouts despite paying nothing in income taxes.  He failed to mention that most of those were not tax-dodgers but merely received incomes too low to reach the tax threshold.  (And he failed to mention that the states with the greatest proportions of such low-income households tended to vote Republican.)  But he stood by his comments, as did many of his supporters (about a quarter of Americans polled).  Such conservative Republicans attached moral value to their fiscal distinctions.  The best of citizens, they believed, did not ask for help from the government but took care of their own families through hard work.  Welfare recipients were predominantly lazy, feeling entitled to their unearned government supports.  The conservatives seemed to assume that the wealthy are fundamentally producers of value and that the poor are drags on national prosperity—thus working hard does not quite correspond to physical labor but to one’s ability to bring in income.  Yet most Americans polled did not agree with Romney, at least not with his hot-mic confession.  They probably entertained conflicted feelings about Romney’s characterization—not caring for moochers and welfare cheats to be sure, but not quite willing to believe that poverty and personal misfortune are morally deserved.  They had succeeded in separating inherent worth from income and wealth.

In the greater sweep of human civilization, we moderns are out of step in failing to assume that the underprivileged are morally unworthy simply for being born into low status and poverty.  We are unusual in attempting to set aside the ancient prejudice that status and wealth are reflections of one’s inherent (thus unearned) moral character.  But we are still in the process of unburdening ourselves of such views, and have yet to work out the implications of separating moral judgments from external marks of wealth and status.  We will need to continue doing this if we wish to have a better-functioning civil society.  Civil improvement is now bound to the fundamental health of our democracy.

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The most indispensable premise of a well-functioning democracy is the equality of its members, called citizens.  Who exactly are these citizens deserving of political equality?  And perhaps of other kinds.  We are—all of us.  This may seem a truism, yet we lose sight of it every day.  If we want a better society, we cannot afford to take it so easily for granted.  It is less obvious than it seems.  Our modern practice and understanding of democracy is quite recent, arising only in the last few moments of humanity’s five-thousand-year experiment with civilization.  Civilization has made possible a great many things of inestimable value—cities, trade, education, literature, property, wealth, consumer variety, health care, long lives.  It has also made possible the most extreme forms of inequality.  We have only recently overturned a few of these—monarchical regimes, religious monopolies, noble privileges in law, colonial exploitation, racism, judicial torture, gender chauvinism, slavery—but we have seen the endurance of other, more intractable, forms of inequality.  Many of our victories over ancient, institutionalized inequalities have proved less persistent than we had hoped.  Racism, sexism, colonial exploitation, religious bigotry—all happily in the past?  Equality turns out to be fleeting and fragile.  We have seen a resurgence of authoritarian figures who dress their hateful and bullying rhetoric in the appearance of democracy, attracting popular audiences with promises of easy victories over foreign invaders and internal conspirators.  These populists will howl in favor of protecting the favored few, making vague declarations of national greatness, but at the unspoken cost of a more broadly-enjoyed kind of equality and prosperity.  And despite their blamecasting, they will end up doing nothing about entrenched elites.  As equality takes a few steps back, democracy becomes less effective and less meaningful.

Equality is a civil aspiration easily overlooked—in truth, it does not appeal to our inherited human nature.  We do not readily accept that others—especially those we call strangers—are equally worthy of consideration as ourselves.  We as individuals want to be special, to be worthy of superlatives, to belong to exclusive clubs.  We want to enjoy or exhibit excellence or greatness, which by definition cannot belong to the majority.  We all wish to be successful, prosperous, by which we usually mean wealthy—a description that necessarily cannot belong to the many.  We want the very best for our children.  We insist on it, accept no compromises—nothing less than the very best for them!  Yet all these familiar ambitions are in fundamental conflict with the pursuit of equality.  We compete for education, for jobs, for health care, for resources, for breeding opportunities, above all for status.  Competition may be good for the material enhancement of society, but it does not encourage us to value equality.

As civilized and educated human beings, living under the rule of law, we’re still unsure of our feelings toward equality.  We’re pretty sure we don’t like unfairness.  We cry for justice when it is manifestly absent—we call this inhumane.  We deride cheaters and free-riders.  We’re outraged at stories of rank corruption and hypocrisy.  We scorn overly-prosperous officials and are quite sure we don’t like greedy fat-cats who run the rapacious corporations that steer markets to their advantage, pollute the environment, trample helpless workers.  We certainly don’t care for those who have not earned their way, who were arrogantly born to unreachable privilege—especially if they’re not us.  (We may make exceptions for a few charming celebrities.)  But at the same time we tend to tolerate the instances of unfairness that work in our favor—our rent-controlled apartments, our union-protected privileges, our tax exemptions, our jobs-for-life, our neighborhood zoning laws, our trade protections, our generous retirement packages untrimmed to the realities of modern life expectancies.  We will fight any legislator who tries to take these things away from us.  Besides, equality seems such an abstract notion, far removed from our daily problems, whereas the practical benefits of inequality are immediate and tangible privileges we don’t wish to lose.  We would be aggrieved, angry, if someone tried to take our familiar comforts away.  Equality wins in the abstract future, almost never in the grubby present.  For every practical advantage, however unfair to most others, there is always some individual or interest group who gains by it and will not give it up without a fight.

We have observational evidence that people don’t really want a horizontally-structured society.  We have even better evidence that people have trouble imagining conceptions of equality much beyond their familiar communities.  (Just think about how reluctant most voters are to welcome in immigrants.)  There is no shortage of anecdotal evidence that many folk revel in petty inequalities—as victims or victors.  Most primate societies have long-standing dominance rituals, in which higher status members publicly subject low-status members (of their own society) to harassment, contempt and humiliating tasks.  The Jim Crow inequalities that prevailed in America from the late 1870s to the mid 1960s—and not just in the South—were as popular among low-ranking whites as among wealthy elites (who may once have owned slaves).  These laws and practices lifted up a few low-rankers by automatically endowing a large number of others with even lower status, and provided cover for public displays of superiority.  These are the sorts of behavior in which majorities of citizens willingly participate.

So perhaps we expect too much?  A social condition approaching equality has almost never been found among civilized societies in the last five thousand years, and perhaps may never be.  We might be forced to conclude that democracy—which assumes the fundamental equality of citizens—must learn to coexist with significant displays of inequality among its members.  But even if such an outcome is unavoidable (though not necessary), it does not mean that democracy must agree to tolerate any form or degree of inequality.  Consider wealth.  As a smaller proportion of citizens monopolize greater quantities of available resources (which they loudly call their rightful property), equality of citizenship will necessarily lose some of its meaning.  The few (and ever fewer) will control the resources necessary for the survival of the entire community.  The rest will become employees, dependents, followers, sycophants, servants of their will.  The poorer or disadvantaged will either have to resist this trend or give up their voice.  Equality of citizenship is therefore unlikely to survive without equality of other kinds.

The problem appears to be that the majority of people, most of the time, do not bother to care about inequality in general or abstract terms, especially when they already occupy—or hope soon to occupy—positions of advantage.  Yet human beings do care a great deal about inequality when it affects them.  They care about their relative standing (one aspect of which is wealth), especially with regard to others immediately in view.  They are obsessed with how they’re doing in comparison to others around them, their nearest neighbors.  It seems that human beings are extremely sensitive to personal inequities, yet reluctant to address the wider societal manifestations of inequality.

There is nothing very simple or straightforward about inequality.  It hides in plain sight, and proves to be extremely persistent, even as other social attitudes change.  If we have trouble understanding it and have little idea how we might address it, why should we bother?

It’s not hard for most people to agree that equality—at least fairness—is a good thing.  They might even agree that extreme departures from fairness are dangerous and destabilizing to a free and democratic society.  Yet they have trouble feeling urgency, or being persuaded that inequality is a problem worth worrying about right now, when there are other more pressing concerns.  Grocery prices.  Health issues.  Failing schools.  But these are problems of inequality too.  Still, we have no clear idea what can be done about them.  Feelings of helplessness make denial easier.  Denial derails the process of clear and steady thinking.  Then fear gets in the way.

So let’s break it down a bit, take some of the mystery away.