Wednesday, October 30, 2024
Monday, October 28, 2024
Sunday, October 27, 2024
Saturday, October 26, 2024
Tuesday, October 22, 2024
Monday, October 21, 2024
An Answer to Inequity (by Theodore
Dalrymple)
Whenever I hear the word equity, my heart sinks, though I
won’t go as far as to say that I reach for my Browning. My irritation on
hearing the word is recent, however: I don’t think I would have reacted the
same way forty years ago, when it was rarely used outside the context of the law.
Woke ideology has given equity—the quality of fairness or impartiality—a
bad name, because in wokespeak equity as traditionally understood is deemed
inequitable. For example, to be color-blind (as far as individuals of different
human races is concerned) is to be equitable in the old sense, but inequitable
in the new sense because such equity does not necessarily lead to equality of
outcome, in fact it is pretty certain not to do so.
According to wokespeak, equity is that which leads to equality of outcome
between both groups and individuals, and therefore compels unfairness in its
treatment of both groups and individuals. As Orwell put it in Nineteen
Eight-Four, freedom is slavery.
“Woke ideology has
given equity—the quality of fairness or impartiality—a bad name.”
The fundamental error in all this was pointed out by Thomas Sowell, who
thought that modern liberals, and a fortiori those who were
woke, were in search of cosmic justice, that is to say a situation in which the
universe, the world, and the whole of human life could and should be made
perfectly fair. The English novelist L.P. Hartley lampooned this idea in 1960
in his novel Facial Justice, in which people who, through no merit
of their own, were particularly good-looking were forced to go through surgery
to make them only average-looking; and thus the prejudice in favor of the
good-looking would be overcome. Unfortunately, lampoons have a quality of
prophecy about them these days.
The demand for equality of outcome is, at heart, a revolt against the
very notion of justice, since justice as normally conceived implies desert. But
according to woke ideology, there is no such thing as desert, since everyone is
the product of his genes over which he has no control and his circumstances
over which he equally has no control. Hence justice can only be the equal
repartition of the goods of this world, without reference to individual
abilities or efforts.
Let us take a startling recent example of what the woke would no doubt
call inequity: It appeared in the Archives of Internal Medicine. A
study of firearm injuries suffered by minors in the St. Louis, Missouri,
region, of which there were 1,340 cases in ten years, found that those who had
been injured once were at high risk of being injured again shortly afterward, 6
percent in one year and 14 percent in five years. This, of course, is
inequitable in itself: Surely the risk should be spread evenly throughout the
population?
But the greatest inequity was in the sex and race of the injured. 84
percent were male, 12 percent were white, and 87 percent were black. Of those
who suffered a second firearm injury, 98 percent were black.
The policy implications from the point of view of equity are obvious.
Since it is far easier to get people to behave worse than to get them to behave
better, the gross underrepresentation of females in the statistics suggests
that everything possible should be done to encourage more firearm injuries
among female minors, to bring them up to scratch, as it were, with male minor
firearm injuries. And it does indeed seem to be that some slight efforts in
this direction are being made: For example, the ratio of films in which young
women carry Kalashnikovs to those who carry handbags has risen very quickly of
late. This can only be applauded by those for whom firearm injury equity is
important, but more must be done.
The racial disparity must also be addressed. It would surely be wrong,
even if it were possible, to reduce firearm injuries among black minors; for
that would, or at least might, imply that there was something not quite right
about the way they, or their parents and neighbors, were living, and this would
wound their self-esteem.
The better and more practicable approach would be to increase the rate
of firearm injuries among white minors, if necessary by the handout of guns
with little precautionary information to such minors. Moral education, to the
effect that retribution or armed robbery is normal, might also be helpful.
The fact that the disparity is even greater among those who suffer more
than one firearm injury must also be addressed, by for example discouraging the
parents of the minors who have been shot once from taking precautions against a
second episode. Perhaps a system of rewards for those injured more than once
could be instituted, along the lines of the heroines-of-motherhood awards in
communist countries for mothers who had more than five children.
For those who would say that firearm injuries are bad in themselves, I
would reply that first, they are the consequence of self-expression, which is
vitally important, especially for the downtrodden, and second, that attempts at
reduction must be very cautious, lest they widen disparities further. For
example, if you could reduce the number of firearm injuries suffered by black
minors by twenty and those of white minors by ten, which superficial thinkers
or conservatives might thoughtlessly welcome, the disparity between blacks and
whites, already wide, would widen yet further, and thus would inequity
increase.
Years ago, I heard a British minister say that she was determined to
eliminate all the disparities between men and women—she
repeated all. I asked whether she meant that men should live longer
or women shorter lives. At this point, a civil servant jumped out from the background
to defend her minister from the need to think for herself and not merely in
clichés, as was her wont. “That,” said the civil servant, “is not a serious
question,” though in fact it went straight to the heart of the matter.
But in this vale of tears, it seems, going straight to the heart of the
matter is both unwelcome and unimportant. The mouthing of sentiments without
examination of their presuppositions, their implications, their corollaries,
and their consequences is all that is necessary to obtain a reputation for
wisdom and goodness.
Theodore Dalrymple’s latest book is Ramses: A Memoir,
published by New English Review.
An Answer to
Inequity - Taki's Magazine
Thursday, October 17, 2024
The Envoy (by Jane Hirshfield)
One day in that room, a small rat.
Two days later, a snake.
Who, seeing me enter,
whipped the long stripe of his
body under the bed,
then curled like a docile house-pet.
I don’t know how either came or left.
Later, the flashlight found nothing.
For a year I watched
as something—terror? happiness? grief?—
entered and then left my body.
Not knowing how it came in,
Not knowing how it went out.
It hung where words could not reach it.
It slept where light could not go.
Its scent was neither snake nor rat,
neither sensualist nor ascetic.
There are openings in our lives
of which we know nothing.
Through them
the belled herds travel at will,
long-legged and thirsty, covered with foreign dust.
Saturday, October 12, 2024
𝗜 𝗦𝗮𝘄 𝗛𝗲𝗿 𝗗𝗮𝗻𝗰𝗶𝗻𝗴 (by
Marge Piercy)
Nothing moves in a straight line,
But in arcs, epicycles, spirals and
gyres.
Nothing living grows in cubes, cones,
or rhomboids,
But we take a little here and we give
a little there,
And the wind blows right through us,
And blows the apples off the tree,
and hangs a red kite suddenly there,
And a fox comes to bite the apples
curiously,
And we change.
Or we die
And then change.
It is many as raindrops.
It is one as rain.
And we eat it, and it eats us.
And fullness is never,
And now.
Thursday, October 10, 2024
Monday, October 7, 2024
Sunday, October 6, 2024
Friday, October 4, 2024
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