Wishful Thinking

It would take a young person with a heart of stone to look on the world and its grievous inequalities — the undeserved wealth and unmerited hardships; the children born with more than three strikes against them — and not think the government should do something about it. But then over the next ten or twenty years, such a young person may learn, sadly and slowly, that some of what the state does to relieve injustice not only fails to make things better, but frequently makes them very much worse. In fact, it seems to be a rule that the vaster the reform the state attempts, the more specific the drive to make all things perfect, the more hellish will be the result.

Two recent books dovetail quite neatly to dissect and destroy the utopian fancy. Conservative economist and provocateur Thomas Sowell’s The Quest for Cosmic Justice takes the sweeping overview, while Heterophobia by Daphne Patai shows how this works in one special instance, the Orwellian realm of what she calls the sexual harassment industry.

Sowell starts by conceding the lure of utopian visions, which are eternal and everywhere: Who does not want a world that is better than this? Like most conservatives, he freely admits that some have too much and some have too little; that few of the rich “deserve” their good fortune; and that a man from a deprived and abusive background may show more merit in achieving a modest measure of success than a man from a rich, loving, and privileged family who goes on to a brilliant career. He would not mind, he says, seeing disparities leveled, merit rewarded, and the honest poor given more money and benefits, preferably at the expense of some robber baron’s arrogant brats. Then, why doesn’t he want a state that can make these things happen?

Two reasons spring to mind. First, no human agency can accurately determine the degrees of merit, much less assign them a worth in material benefits. And second, a government that could both rate people this way and assign goods accordingly would be not only far too intrusive for anyone’s safety, but also much too open to corruption and abuse. Yet in spite of these fatal drawbacks, people keep trying. As Sowell makes clear, the Left’s agenda from the late sixties onward has been utopian, our national politics a succession of bouts between the “cosmic” and “traditional” concepts of justice, between the utopian and realistic views of life.

The distinctions he draws are detailed and emphatic. Traditional justice lives in the world that exists, and tries to keep order in it. Cosmic justice attempts to transform it. Traditional justice treats all people alike, regardless of circumstance. Cosmic justice has different standards for different classes of people, trying to compensate for prior injustice, often years in the past. Traditional justice is equal pay for equal work, regardless of whether the work is done by whites or non-whites, women or men. Cosmic justice is “comparable worth” (often a ploy to boost earnings of women), which makes different jobs appear equal, depending on what someone thinks they are worth.

Traditional justice might encourage schools to expand their sports programs for women, a laudable enterprise. Cosmic justice is Title IX, which demands that expenses for men’s sports and women’s be rigorously equal, in spite of the huge gap in demand and interest. Traditional justice is the old civil rights laws, which mandate equal treatment for everyone. Cosmic justice is affirmative action, which mandates different rules for different classes of people, to make up for detriments that cannot be measured and tend to differ from person to person. (Sowell would be perfectly willing to recompense slaves at the expense of slaveholders and traders. Unfortunately, as he reminds us, these souls are long dead.) A quintessential example of cosmic justice in action is the Clinton administration’s awarding contracts to construction firms headed by minority owners on the basis of the number of minority contractors who would have been in business in the absence of prior patterns of segregation. A still further form of cosmic justice is jury nullification, in which a jury purposely lets off a guilty man solely because innocent men of his racial description were wrongly convicted in the past. In cosmic terms, this purports to bring about some weird sort of “balance.” In traditional terms, it is a new travesty, as one more guilty man goes free.

Prone to corruption and vagueness and overkill, cosmic justice can never be cosmic enough. A preference system geared to redress injustices caused by racial bias fails in its mission if it does not at the same time consider the disadvantages to innocent people caused by poverty, family breakdown, or social class. In cosmic terms, is the black child raised by intelligent people in a stable, loving two-parent household with ready access to books and museums more deserving of an academic preference than the white child raised in a slum by dysfunctional parents, who had to bring up his siblings himself?

As we speak, lawsuits are being brought to settle this question, but it is obvious that a system of “justice” weighted only for race is not “inclusive” enough. True cosmic justice would take into account the nuanced ethnic composition of this country. This is not a fixed, but a fluid, society, in which types defy classification. There are a few large majority groupings, such as “white” and “Christian,” but when one breaks these down into sects and nationalities, everyone turns out to be a member of some kind of minority, surrounded and out-numbered by ancestral enemies, with persecution in his past. There are few settled classes of villains and victims, but successions and layers of immigrants, most of whom were badly treated by people who got here before them, and most of whom, as they assimilated, joined the others in mistreating those who came after. Thus, a really complete form of justice, that tried to make up for the damage done by segregation and slavery, would also offer compensation (smaller, of course, but carefully calibrated) for the infamous NINA (No Irish Need Apply) signs of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century and for the prejudice that kept Italians and Jews out of the best schools and companies, denied them housing in the better neighborhoods, and otherwise impaired their material prospects. Our mongrelized gene pool would not make this easier. Someone like Senator John Kerry, descended from both Irish Catholic immigrants and the WASP Brahmins who made their lives miserable, would end up paying reparations to himself.

But true cosmic justice would not stop even here. Sowell calls “wind-falls” such things as looks, brains, charm, health, emotional balance, the people one happens to live with, and the advantages one’s parents are able and willing to give. In cosmic terms, these assets too are unfair and must therefore be balanced. But this gets tricky, as good and bad luck can accrue to the same person. John Kennedy was born gifted, good looking, and outlandishly charming, to privileged parents who were eager to pull strings and spend millions to further his prospects. He was also in perpetual pain and plagued with numerous life-threatening illnesses; he was of draft age in the worst war in history and nearly died in the service; he grew up with a retarded sister; and he lost his last child weeks before he was shot to death at forty-six. Was he unfairly favored, or unfairly burdened? Well, yes. What is cosmic justice to make of such a story? How would one adjust Kennedy’s blend of good and bad fortune to achieve it? How would perfect fairness “balance” his fortunes and make his fate cosmically “just”?

“Feminism has always had grandiose ideas about improving the human lot,” writes Daphne Patai. A feminist and longtime college teacher of utopian writings, she has watched in something like horror as the movement has taken harassment law — originally, a much needed measure — in the direction of not one, but two utopian visions. First, harassment law became the tool that the anti-male wing of the feminist movement used to suppress, censor, and eventually criminalize innocent expressions of heterosexual interest (hence the book’s title). And second, harassment law turned a legitimate right — the right to be free of coercion or undue pressure from powerful people — into an extreme and novel one, the right to be free, at all times, in all places, from any signal one might consider annoying.

For that first point, Patai cites the strand of feminist thinking that views heterosexuality as an artificial construct maliciously foisted on women for purposes of social control; sees all men as potential predators; and views any small sign of male sexual interest as step one in a rising continuum of increasing aggression, ending in rape and murder. “It is the nature of feminism, as of all other social movements, to propose ever more expansive definitions of problems over which it seeks to arouse public out-rage,” Patai informs us. “One does not draw public attention to an issue by declaring it to be only peripheral to most people’s lives.” Hence, the attempt to criminalize small matters of everyday life. Aided by laws that are purposely cloudy, and by accusations that rest on what someone perceives to have happened, harassment charges have provided a bonanza for the growing army of experts and counselors who live to plant feelings of grievance, while feminist radicals have found in these codes a singular opening to push their bizarre view of life upon the world. Thus, Patai says, “lawsuits about matters that would have seemed ludicrous a few years ago have now become commonplace. . . . A professor’s encouraging words . . . can be retroactively interpreted as ‘grooming’ for sexual demands at a later time . . . a metaphor that happens to strike some student the wrong way can be claimed to have created a hostile environment . . . An offhand remark or misperceived gesture can threaten an entire career.”

It is typical of cosmic justice that its laws are indefinite, so no one knows in advance what will be deemed criminal. As Sowell complains, “An employer cannot avoid a charge of racial discrimination merely by treating all employees and all job applicants alike. . . . ‘Disparate impact’ statistics will help determine after the fact whether the employer’s conduct is judged to be discriminatory.” Likewise, no one is sure now what may later be seen as harassment and thus cause for a lawsuit or firing. The result is a climate Patai describes as one of “freezing fear,” a fear of flirtation and courtship in some schools and offices. It goes without saying that this is not a climate most women would see as utopian, but the feminists who drive this draconian project seem to see it as ideal.

“There isn’t any need for a civilized man to bear anything that’s seriously unpleasant,” Patai quotes Aldous Huxley in his anti-utopian novel Brave New World. This is a purely utopian concept, and it is the assumption the harassment industry has now reached. Harassment law means, Patai says, “the right to be free from feeling uncomfortable,” and she tracks the descent from legal offenses (assault; threats used to extort sex from women) down to “that nebulous and endlessly negotiable category of unwelcome looks, comments, gestures, and even opinions . . . into which virtually all workplace and academic interactions can be made to fit.”

This is a wholly new level of social compulsion, a plea for protection not from specific illegal actss, but from life itself: “from the messiness and possible unpleasantness of everyday human interactions, from disappointment and bitterness . . . from unsuccessful sexual encounters; from work environments filled with the tensions of people still capable of having private selves.” Who would not want to be granted such safeguards?

Patai herself. She has, as she writes, been subject to acts now defined as harassment: She was pursued over years by a male boss, a male professor, and one female student; there were gropes on the subway; rude words and put-downs from male students and colleagues; obscene words said on the street. She disliked these events and would have wished to avoid them, except that the price is too high. She too, she admits, has made “unwanted advances.” She and her friends trailed male professors on campus, made up reasons to go to their offices and to direct the conversation to personal topics.

She too has said things that offended others, sent men invitations they might not have wanted, been angry and hurt when turned down. These memories checked her utopian visions: A state big enough to protect her from others would have spied on and restricted her. The psychic cost of living in a police state would outweigh the annoyance of the odd pass or insult, which, as she says, is not all that common. Utopian dreams are not worth the cost of repression. “It seems to me that except for egregious offenses . . . the petty annoyance of occasional misplaced sexual attention or sexist put-downs has to be tolerated. Why? Because the type of vigilance necessary to inhibit it would create a social climate so unpleasant, and ultimately so repressive, that the cure would be worse than the disease.”

Balancing the cure and the ailment remains the big problem. “Unlike God at the dawn of Creation, we cannot simply say ‘Let there be Justice,'” asserts Thomas Sowell. “We cannot simply say ‘Do something’ whenever we are morally indignant, while disdaining to consider the costs entailed.” Patai would have liked to be spared some insults and attentions, but finds a police state more unattractive still. This is not the only case of a remedy worse than the problem. Attempts to cure income disparities through heavy taxation often impair the economy. Attempts to end privilege often transfer it to those charged with eradicating it, while somehow leaving less of everything to go around.

The people who designed Title IX think women should be more like men (and want to be wrestlers) and created a program to reflect this delusion. In real life, it has led to the nationwide axing of sports teams for men and the end of many scholarships for poor and minority students. Quotas and busing and set-asides have revived racism where it was dying and created it where it had never existed. And the greatest example of utopian backlash has been the near-destruction of the urban public school system, as middle class parents fled to the suburbs and private schools to avoid having their children bused into the slums. Cosmic big thinkers called these people bigots, and maybe some of them were. But most were simply acting like parents, fleeing misguided utopian projects that were too far removed from this world.

People, of course, can sometimes do good, and they ought to keep trying. The problem arises when they go too far, moving from a quest for traditional justice into cosmic overkill; trying not to improve the world, but to remake it completely, overnight. Harassment law was fine when it attacked real abuses, not the odd wink or comment. Affirmative action was fine when it was out-reach and training, without compelling quotas and preferences. Busing was fine when it meant voluntary transfers of students out of bad schools and terrible neighborhoods. It became a disaster — and a political deathtrap — when it became the forced transfer of middle-class children to slums.

The Greeks understood where over-reaching leads, a lesson these authors are trying to teach us. Cosmic justice is the province of God, who alone understands it. Mortal men must make do with this earth.

A frequent contributor to THE WEEKLY STANDARD, Noemie Emery is a writer living in Alexandria, Virginia.