Black Rednecks & White Liberals, page 32
Few things are more common or more painful than sharp contrasts between the prosperity of some racial or ethnic groups and the poverty of others in the same society.At one time, such things were accepted as either Divinely ordained or as being a consequence of innate racial characteristics. However, as both these explanations were discarded over time, a new notion arose—that these economic contrasts were consequences of injustices visited upon minorities by majorities.Yet that explanation is not without its own serious problems, as great as the problems of earlier explanations that did not stand the test of time.
One of the strongest arguments against the injustice explanation of intergroup differences is that, in many countries around the world, minorities with virtually no political power or other means of discriminating against the majority population have nevertheless been far more successful—economically, educationally, or otherwise—than those who constitute the bulk of the nation’s people. This has long been true of the Chinese in Malaysia, Indonesia, and the Philippines, Germans in Russia and Brazil, Jews in Eastern Europe and the United States, Lebanese in West Africa, Scots in North America and Australia, and the Japanese in Brazil, Canada, the United States, and Peru. Clearly, in these and other cases, the minority has simply outperformed the majority population, often in both the educational system and the economic system.
Even when it is clear that some groups have excelled without any power to suppress or oppress other groups, there is often still a rankling sense of the injustice of it all—that a child born into one group has so much greater prospects of success in life than a child of no greater innate ability born into another group. Sometimes this is blamed on a lack of “social justice,” though the causes of such differences extend well beyond things controlled by any society and which could therefore legitimately be called “social.” Each group trails the long shadow of its own history and culture, which influence its habits, priorities, and social patterns, which in turn affect its fate. If there is an injustice, it is an injustice which extends beyond the control of any existing government, institution, or society, because it involves the confluences of history, demography, culture, geography, and other factors, including luck. If there is an injustice, it is at this cosmic level in the vagaries of fate.
Lamenting the vagaries of fate may leave us with a galling sense of helpless frustration, which many escape by transforming the tragedy of the human condition into the specific sins of specific societies. This turns an insoluble problem of cosmic justice into an apparently more manageable issue of social justice. Since the sins of human beings are virtually inexhaustible, there is seldom a lack of examples of wrongdoing to which intergroup differences can be attributed, rightly or wrongly.Where the quest for injustice is over-riding, among the things it over-rides are logic and evidence. For example, various kinds of differences between white and aboriginal Australians were lumped together by a white Australian woman as examples of social injustice:The fact that I wake up each morning in a warm, safe, comfortable home, secure in the knowledge that the schools I send my children off to are organised to enhance their life chances and choices, and that good health, employment opportunities and respect are the norm not the goal in our lives has been made possible through the 208-year exploitation of land that belonged to indigenous Australians since the beginning of time.21
Here differences in life chances are attributed to the seizure of land by the transplanted Europeans who settled Australia. If this were meant seriously as an empirical proposition, rather than as an ideological indictment, then the most obvious question would be: Were there no differences in life chances between the Europeans and the aborigines before they met, when they were each living in their own respective homelands? Are differences today greater than they were then?
None of this provides a moral justification for the invasion of Australia, but it raises a question about the causal claim that differences in life chances today are due to expropriations of land in the past or exploitation of the indigenous people then or now.
Had no invasion of Australia ever occurred, and this white Australian woman had been born in the land of her ancestors—probably England—would she not have awakened each morning to better circumstances and prospects than aborigines in a distant and undisturbed Australia? Nor would she have been any more deserving of this windfall gain in England than in Australia.Yet her sense of guilt for her personal advantages and her ancestors’ sins is greater because she lives in Australia. More important, it leads her to a conclusion all too characteristic of the quest for cosmic justice—that the aborigines should not have to change in order to achieve equality of results with whites in Australia. Clearly, the aborigines would have had to change in order to achieve equality of economic results with Englishmen, had both remained alone in their respective homelands. Yet those with the vision of cosmic justice want both groups to have the same effects without having the same causes, when both are living in the same country.
Such reasoning is by no means peculiar to Australia, much less to this particular Australian. Very much the same kind of reasoning—or lack of reasoning—has been used by a well-known American professor of history:I was born into a middle-class family of WASP ancestry. My parents prized education and sent all of their children to college…. The cultural environment that encouraged white males to hope for careers at the top of the professional and business pyramid but discouraged, inhibited, or prohibited women and minorities from doing the same was a more powerful form of affirmative action than anything we have more recently experienced in the other direction.22
He and others like him were also “beneficiaries of a sort of demographic affirmative action,” since they were “born during the trough of the Depression-era birth rate,” so that they entered the job market just as “the baby-boom expansion in college enrollments” created a great demand for professors from the smaller preceding generation.23 What this professor chooses to call “demographic affirmative action” is an injustice only in some cosmic sense, rather than an injustice growing out of some chosen policy, like affirmative action. Since all things are the same except for the differences, and different except for the similarities, strained analogies like this may pass muster among those who are determined to ignore all differences internal to different groups of people.
Despite vast differences in income and wealth between Europeans and Africans in their respective homelands, much smaller differences between the descendants of Europeans and the descendants of Africans in the United States are widely attributed to the sins of the former against the latter. Had both groups migrated voluntarily to America and both been treated fairly, there would still have been no reason whatever to expect their economic levels to be the same, especially since people who did migrate voluntarily from different parts of Europe had income and wealth differences that were at one time greater than those between black and white Americans today.
None of this denies that there were in fact sins committed by whites against blacks in the United States or by the British against the aborigines in Australia. Those sins are not in dispute. The point here is that statistical disparities are not evidence of either the existence or the magnitude of those sins, for which there is ample other evidence. Such disparities are all too common around the world—with and without discrimination, with and without invasion, with and without slavery. This does not mean that these disparities are all due to individual merit. Inherited cultural advantages and disadvantages are windfall gains and windfall losses. More fundamentally, merit is a moral category and confusing morality with causation is a fatal weakness in trying to understand history.
Huge, unmerited, and unintentional differences in life chances have been common among Europeans in Europe. As an insightful scholar has aptly pointed out, “a European child will have a very different life depending on whether that baby was born east or west of a line that starts at the Baltic and stretches southward along Poland’s eastern border, down Slovakia’s western border and along the middle of Hungary, then continues down through the middle of Bosnia to the Adriatic Sea.”24
There are historic, geographic, social and other reasons for the large economic and other disparities between the life chances of people living in Eastern and Western Europe.25 These differences existed at least as far back as the Roman Empire and, as late as 2003, the average per capita income in most Eastern European countries was less than half that of the Western European countries. 26 Neither in Europe nor elsewhere do all the innumerable influences on people’s fate balance out to produce the equality of outcome that is taken as a baseline from which to measure social injustices that are used to explain inequalities of results. Nor have the various causal factors involved implied any such moral notion as “blaming the victim.”
Morality is not causation and confusing the two does not advance either understanding or social improvement.
In a sense, it is healthy that more prosperous individuals or societies recognize that their prosperity is not all due to what they themselves have done in their own lifetimes, but is in fact the fruit of the efforts and contributions made by many other people before they were born. However, gratitude for whatever has made their prosperity possible has for many been replaced by guilt for having been more fortunate than others. Thus their forebears are seen not as having bequeathed a valuable heritage but as having perpetrated great injustices.
THE WEST IN HISTORY
Some who assume the posture of citizens of the world view the survival of their own particular society as a matter of no great moment, viewing it as simply a matter of choosing among alternative political and social arrangements. But history shows that more than transformation is involved. A society or a civilization may be destroyed and its successor improvised from the ruins—not just the physical ruins, but from anarchy as the ruins of law and order and ignorance as the ruins of systems of education and other instruments of cultural transmission. After the decline and fall of the Roman Empire, it was centuries—some estimate a millennium —before the standard of living in Western Europe rose again to the level it had reached in Roman times.The survival of a society or a civilization is not just a question of a preference for one particular set of political or social arrangements over another. It is easy to discuss alternative arrangements around a seminar table, as if transformations were no problem, but the painful alternatives amid the ruins can be very different.
Europeans lived for centuries with the presence of ruins more magnificent than anything they were capable of creating or even restoring. It is hardly surprising that they looked back at the ancients with awe, long before they developed the modern Western tendency to look forward to greater accomplishments in the future than those of the past or the present. Another modern Western tendency, at least among the intelligentsia, is to be anti-Western—to apply double standards that ignore or excuse behavior in non-Western societies that would be excoriated in the West or to picture the sins of the human race as if they were peculiarities of “our society.” Specific examples include the history of conquest, slavery, and war.
Conquest
While European imperialism has been dominant in the past 500 years, in the preceding centuries Europe was itself subjected to foreign conquests. It was invaded from Asia by the Mongols, to whom the Russians paid tribute. It was invaded from the Middle East by the Ottoman Empire, whose armies reached the gates of Vienna in the sixteenth century. Europe was invaded from North Africa and the whole Iberian peninsula was subjugated for centuries by the Moors.There was nothing peculiarly European about either conquering or being conquered—or about changing from one of these roles to the other in the course of history.The year in which the last of the North African conquerors was driven out of Spain—1492—was the same year that marked the beginning of Europeans’ creation of worldwide empires.
Conquest, like slavery, existed on every inhabited continent and involved all the races of mankind as both conquerors and subjugated peoples. Slavery and conquest existed in the Western Hemisphere before the first white man set foot on the shores of the Americas. The Zulus were conquering other African peoples when the British arrived in Southern Africa and conquered them all. Europeans also displaced other conquerors in Asia and among the Polynesians. What was different about European imperialism was how widely scattered its empires were, which was possible only because of revolutions in naval technology and a pre-existing base of wealth available to finance overseas expansion. But, morally, what the Europeans did was the same as what non-Europeans had been doing for thousands of years. This is not a moral justification for either. But it is an argument against the selective localization of evil.
Against that background, it is possible to see what a gross distortion of history it is for schools to be asking American school children such questions as how they would feel if they were the indigenous American Indians being forced from their land by the westward movement of invaders from Europe. These children, with no historical background, and coming from a society which condemns conquest, cannot possibly re-create the attitudes and beliefs which prevailed among either the Indians or the Europeans of earlier centuries.
While today’s American children would of course think it wrong to take other people’s lands by force, the American Indians had no such conception and took one another’s lands by force long before they ever laid eyes on a white man. Indeed, Indians often joined with the European invaders to attack other Indians, in order to share in the spoils or to exact revenge for these other Indians’ prior spoliation of them, including the taking of their lands and the enslavement of their people. When Cortés marched against the Aztec capital of Tenochtitlán, he led an army of 900 Spaniards and thousands of Indians.
No doubt those Indians forced off their lands in the United States or Brazil were bitter at being on the losing end of so many battles, but that is wholly different from a belief that battles were not the way to settle such things. No one wants to be conquered or enslaved. But that is wholly different from not wanting to be a conqueror or enslaver, or thinking that either or both are morally wrong. This is not a question of moral relativism or situational ethics. We may today condemn all conquests at all periods of history but that is wholly different from imagining that such feelings were those of Indians in centuries past. Clearly, such “how would you feel” questions are put to American children—and adults—to advance a contemporary vision and a contemporary agenda, rather than to provide a realistic understanding of history. It is a betrayal of the trust of those who send their children to school to be educated, not manipulated.
Studying Western imperialism in isolation from other, non-Western, imperialism—such as that of Genghis Khan or the Ottoman Turks—makes all the injustices, oppressions, and horrors incident to imperialism itself seem like depravities peculiar to the West. The tendentiousness of such a view of history stands out particularly when efforts are made to depict the United States as especially guilty of sins common to the human race around the world. One such history, after mentioning the Americans’ “wresting the island remnants of Spain’s empire in the Pacific and Caribbean” during the Spanish-America war, declared that “Russians were not comparably aggressive overseas.”27 This was said, not by a street-corner demagogue but by an academic scholar at a prestigious university.
Russians in reality conquered vastly more area than the United States ever did and continued to conquer after the United States began to withdraw from its few colonies. The difference was not in how “aggressive” Americans were but in the fact that the United States had a powerful navy and the Russians did not, so that the Russian empire expanded through land conquests of contiguous territory.The word “overseas” allows the author an escape hatch but the word “aggressive” describes an attitude, not a capability.
The prevalence of European imperialism in general since the sixteenth century is likewise due to special capabilities rather than special attitudes. Whatever their attitudes may have been in the Middle Ages, Europeans lacked the military and economic capabilities required to become imperial powers on the world stage, just as most non-European countries have lacked that capability since then. The history of which peoples, nations, or civilizations have conquered or enslaved which other peoples, nations, or civilizations has been largely a history of who has been in a position to do so.
Western Cultural Values
The misuse of history to condemn evils common around the world as if they were peculiarities of the West has serious practical implications. Two wrongs do not make a right but undermining the society which has the smaller evil only makes it more vulnerable to the greater evils in other societies and in international terrorist networks.
Far more is involved than questions of objectivity or honesty, important as such questions are. Without understanding the features of one’s own society that have provided a prosperity, a freedom, and a security rare to non-existent over much of the rest of the world, one risks losing by default all these things for oneself and posterity.American society is one whose underlying bases are always under attack by both internal opportunists and external enemies. Those who have no conception of the Constitution of the United States, except as an object for nit-picking, cannot be expected to defend its integrity against the inevitable encroachments of political opportunists and judicial power-seekers. Those who have no conception of the unique heritage of Western civilization have no idea of what losing that heritage would mean—to them and to generations yet unborn—and why it must be defended against passing fads at home and lethal threats from abroad.
