Social justice must be one of the most pernicious beliefs of our time. Truly, an intellectual trojan horse that has led to significant deprivation through its premises and conclusions. The whole paradigm is simply riddled with errors.
Many progressives find the idea abhorrent that certain groups--be they racial, national, ethnic, cultural, whatever--can have performance deficits relative to other groups. Accordingly, we have what can be called the "discrimination hypothesis"; or the idea that any disparity in economic outcomes for certain groups
must be the result of discrimination or even economic oppression. The idea that performance is therefore an individual phenomenon wherein group discrepancies can be explained away by discrimination thus gives rise to cultural relativism.
The idea that no culture is
really better than any other; that they're all just equally valid perspectives. Not only does this disregard the fact that the Chinese have historically been objectively better in matters of technology and government--and the Southern Europeans in philosophy and art--but it just seems unbelievable except on the basis of pure dogma. The idea that economic disparities are mainly the result of discrimination--or the unjust agency of some other group--simply doesn't stand the test of time.
People often blame the poor position of many blacks in America to the legacy of slavery, despite the fact that black unemployment was
lower than that of whites from
1890 through 1930; only since the expansion of the welfare state in the 1960s--and many rises in the minimum wage--have blacks had endemic unemployment and single-parent, unmarried families. Indeed, the history of Jews in Eastern Europe, the Lebanese in West Africa, the Chinese in Southeast Asia and the Indians of Fiji (all minorities and beneficiaries of economic disparities) casts wide aspersions on the idea that those who do better are the oppressors, and the rest are the oppressed or victims of discrimination.
People often ask why Africa is so poor, and immediately assume the legacies of imperialism and colonialism are to blame despite the fact that the wheel hadn't even been invented in some parts of Africa by the 1880s. The idea that Africa
must be a victim is in line with the sort of social justice thinking we see, and yet it discards much more succinct hypotheses focusing around ideas like geography. While the waterways of Europe--like the canals in Great Britain--provide navigable paths, rivers like the Zaire in Africa are practically useless due to cascades and volatile rain patterns. It was
useless for the transportation of goods, and thus could never facilitate any kind of economic development.
And we see how geography bleeds into culture and persists over time. The Scottish lowlanders have historically been economically more successful than the Scottish highlanders, even when they were removed from Scotland and placed in
America and
Australia (pp. 762, 764, 765-9).
Even if we remove the geographical and related cultural considerations, we still run into demographic problems. In an economy increasingly placing emphasis on information and experience, it's no surprise that Jews do better than Puerto Ricans by having a median age which is a decade ahead. Furthermore, there are even differences
within families. The National Merit Scholarship separated IQ finalists into first-born and later-born children, with over half of them
being first born, even in five-child families. The difference in IQ between children is so substantial as to translate into significant economic differences, with no discernible features when compared with disparities between non-relatives.
We're left wondering how the discrimination hypothesis can account for
any of these incredibly consequential trends effecting the performance of certain groups and their cultures. Or how they can even begin to be remedied. When it comes to proposals like income redistribution, such terms are couched in sanctimonious moralism and shallow analysis; it was the eminent Fabian, George Bernard Shaw, who described socialism as "a proposal to divide up the income of a country in a new way". And not only is this misleading in that it implies we have distribution A and must simply move to distribution B, but it's highly intellectually dishonest for somebody to claim to know how much somebody or a service is
really worth. If a man pays one dollar for a cup of coffee, and the barista accepts it, then the distributionists must assume one of them is objectively incorrect by foregoing more worth for the reciprocation--a patently ridiculous thing to try and claim.
As mentioned earlier, cultural relativism features heavily in trying to handwave inequalities away. To simply
define inequalities out of existence and then blame shortcomings on discrimination. The relativists assert that every culture deserves "equal respect" and in some cases to be preserved, to the point where ebonics is considered a legitimate branch of linguistics instead of an aberration to the English language.
The irony, of course, is that such cultural entrenchment advocated by the relativists and their social justice acolytes usually leads to more poverty. Hispanics who learn English earn a lot more money than those who don't, and we see the success in the willingness to develop culturally in Japan; no country was more painfully aware of how behind the curve they were than Japan in the 1800s. Can you imagine where the Japanese would be now if they had been told that their shortcomings were the result of discrimination, and been shoved into a special little box by the adherents of identity politics.
And, on a very fundamental level, what cuts to the heart of it all is
envy. A subtle, malicious form of envy. This idea that the economy is zero-sum, and that the prosperous must be in their position at the less prosperous's expense, and that the rich must accordingly be brought down for the sake of social justice. Studies of poor and primitive societies have found one, all-pervasive cultural more behind such poverty:
the fear of inducing envy in neighbours and family through success (chapter 4).
We've seen this attitude of slighting the fortunate simply for the sake of it all throughout history. Following Romania's acquisition of territory after the defeat of the Central Powers, which included culturally German and Hungarian universities, the government made it a top priority to remove ethnically German and Hungarian students from such universities. All despite the fact that the Romanian population at the time were 75pc illiterate, and thus the Germans nor Hungarians were denying them the prospect of higher education.
Again, in the 1960s following Nigeria's independence. Many professionals, entrepreneurs and bureaucrats in northern Nigeria were from southern tribes, and thus northern political leaders made it a goal to remove them from their posts even if that meant accepting the services of European expatriates or having poorer services nonetheless.
And we see it today in this ridiculous "soak the rich" attitude arguing for excessive rates of taxation on the puerile notion that nobody deserves so much money. And this sort of pandering bullshit has even entered into academia with John Rawls'
A Theory of Justice, which declares that any initiative to improve society cannot be accepted unless it improves the worst-off also. . . Even if it doesn't make them any worse off than they already are.
Which also highlights the facile nature of proclamations in the name of "social justice", about how the rich oppress the poor and keep them down. It requires a non-factual, static economy to make sense. Not only are definition of poverty inadequate, as 66pc of the "impoverished" have air conditioning, over half own a car or truck and hundreds of thousands have homes valued at more than
$150,000, but inhabitance of the poorest quintile is transient at best. Just 3pc of Americans remain in the bottom quintile for as long as eight years.
And, again, this idea that the rich are some kind of aristorcratic
oppressors is egregiously facile. A 1996 study found that 80pc of millionaires are
first-generation affluent--exactly the same as in
1892. Not to mention, just 3.5pc of the population has a stable net worth of over $1 million dollars.
And indeed, when it comes to the functioning of society, egregious inefficiencies can be introduced when those making decisions are infected by similar attitudes of envy as cultural relativism and social justice promote in tandem.
A former Ivy-league admissions officer, for example, encouraged applicants to "deemphasise" their privileged backgrounds just in case they "rub the admissions people the wrong way" (pp. 117-118).
And we see the same in education, when the mentally retarded are "mainstreamed" into normal classrooms simply on the basis that they can't help their disadvantages, with no regard for the trade-off of sometimes substantial costs and imperceptible benefits. It works in reverse too, as a fourth-grader who scored higher than the average high school graduate on his SAT for maths was denied access to higher-level material by the principle on the grounds that it would be "
a violation to social justice".
It is exactly through these mechanisms of assigning cultural, geographic or demographic faults to the agency of some sort of "oppressor class" that cultural relativists, adherents to identity politics and proponents of social justice cause the problem of social entrenchment and a regression from the potential of improvement. It's a disgusting idea, and I hope it dies quickly.
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