In an essay some weeks ago at Persuasion magazine entitled "Don't Just Let Radicals Dictate Your Opinions", professor of philosophy Matt Lutz listed three intellectual foundations for a more vibrant center-left political presence in America: "liberalism is the first principle"; "inequalities are problems to be solved"; and "absolutes are unwise".
The first and third of these strike me as pretty reasonable, but the second one set me to thinking about the enormous range of inequalities in human society. Lutz mentions only inequalities in wealth, status, and opportunity, but there's so much more: inequalities in power, talents, intelligence, strength, health, education, location, looks, personality traits, upbringing, family, friendships, personal networks, life experiences, and dozens more factors that can influence one's happiness or misery, flourishing or languishing, good fortune or bad fortune.
It's unclear how as a society we'd address some of these inequalities, or even whether we should. Consider a simple example: my dentist has higher status and in all likelihood greater wealth than the hygienists who work for her. Yet there are good reasons for this state of affairs: as both a doctor and a small business owner, she has received more years of training, taken on more risk, accepted more professional responsibilities and their attendant worries, etc.
The resulting inequalities in wealth and status are "entrenched" (as Lutz puts it) and are familiar from diverse fields of endeavor: doctors rise above nurses and orderlies, chefs rise above waiters and busboys, general contractors rise above framers and drywallers, conductors rise above tympanists and second violinists, and so on.
However, because apparently most Americans aren't worked up about the fact their dentist has greater status and wealth than their dental hygienist, "entrenchment" doesn't seem to be the most relevant consideration. Thus when thinking about which differences require societal attention, we might do better to look into undeserved inequalities. Yet talents, intelligence, personality traits, family, location, and other traits are undeserved, too - and few people other than the late Harvard philosophy professor John Rawls can imagine trying to solve for all of those by placing everyone back into the "original position". A more productive approach, and one more consistent with the American tradition, might be to solve for inherently unjust inequalities, especially inequalities of opportunity (e.g., all young people should have access to decent schools). It's here where folks on the center-left could offer a platform with broad appeal.
A further consideration is this: a second-order effect of trying to make society more perfect is that inevitably the experts who are tasked with solving these problems will accrue more power, higher status, and greater wealth. As humanity discovered in the 20th century, removing some inequalities will create others - or as George Orwell put it in Animal Farm, "some are more equal than others", a phenomenon which Milovan Djilas analyzed in his book The New Class.
Even further, I wonder if the more personal or less significant inequalities are perhaps not problems to be solved but differences to be celebrated (e.g., isn't it wonderful that some people have more athletic or musical or scientific talent than others?). I also wonder whether the less tractable inequalities might be things that reformers will have to put off solving until we attain some more perfect state of society in the future (maybe the far future, or maybe never - for how could we even start to correct inequalities in things like friendships and personality traits?).
A different (I don't say opposing) perspective, consistent with what Thomas Sowell calls "the constrained vision" and what older thinkers called the tragic sense of life, is that human society cannot be perfected and that it's a fool's errand to seek such perfection. On this view, which seems to undergird much of the center-right, many of the inequalities we encounter are not problems to be solved but realities to be accepted or even tragedies to be lamented.
As always, the truth - if indeed, working together, we can come closer to it over time - likely lies somewhere in the middle.
(Cross-posted at Beautiful Wisdom.)
FOR FURTHER EXPLORATION