Search the word “discrimination” online and you’re served these headlines: “Council votes 7-1 to ban discrimination …,” “Jim Calhoun named in sex discrimination …,” “Elizabeth Warren, pregnancy discrimination …” There are many more.
It is axiomatic that we hate discrimination today, or are supposed to. In arguments, you’ve probably had your antagonist turn on you, saying, “That’s discrimination!” This tedious accusation is delivered as though it were the sharpest of debating points, the ne plus ultra of political dispute after which no further discussion or disagreement is possible.
Discrimination is seen, in and of itself, as improper. So much so that people often don’t say what sort of discrimination is being alleged — be it racial, sexual, gender, class, or any of the other minute categories into which we have balkanized this once admirably united country.
Use and abuse of the word “discrimination” exposes the near-hysterical deference we pay to egalitarian nostrums. The reason discrimination is widely regarded as evil is that it involves judgment — remember the complaint, “You’re being judgmental”? — and judgment recognizes that people, ideas, cultures, etcetera are unequal. If you judge between things, you discriminate, and you must be elitist or infected by some other unfashionable ism.
The truth, however, is that judgment is a God-given faculty that we should prize highly and exercise whenever possible. We once understood this and referred admiringly to a person’s “discriminating taste,” or with horror to “indiscriminate bombing.” It was taken as wise and moral to discriminate between deserving cases and undeserving ones.
One hopes discrimination soon makes a triumphant return. When hearing the old saw that women earn only 74 cents for every dollar paid to men, we should discriminate in favor of truth and against egalitarian propaganda, noting that woman take more years out of the workforce, more leisure time while in the workforce, and prefer tasks prescribed in jobs that pay less; in other words, it’s a matter of choice, not prejudice. When lower life outcomes of African Americans are attributed indiscriminately to systemic racism, we should exercise our faculty of judgment and weigh the effects of many social pathologies that have nothing to do with hostile white attitudes. And so on.
Modern leftism, with its overweening demand for equality, requires us to suspend judgment, accept falsehoods, and avoid discrimination. But such high-handed imperatives should be rejected. As Dorothy Parker is apocryphally credited with saying of a bad book, the Left’s instructions should not be tossed aside lightly but thrown with great force.
Having hurled aside bad ideas and bad books, turn your attention to this week’s great Washington Examiner magazine. Tyler Grant’s cover story depicts the trade war between Presidents Trump and Xi as a mano-a-mano battle in which two men who expect to be obeyed dispense with the help of their minions. Fred Barnes exposes the Supreme Court’s liberal voting bloc. And you also shouldn’t miss excellent articles on Rep. Devin Nunes, Kurt Volker, and the world’s most beautiful woman.
