Fairness is our national creed. But fairness unfairly dominates our culture, and crowds out the virtues of favoritism. Contrary to the simple-minded equation of nepotism and corruption, I submit that our kith and kin form a circle of tribal beneficence that is equally ethical but incompatible with reigning egalitarianism. If we embraced our filial biases, we could better exercise some disappearing virtues like loyalty. And the proof that this could be extrapolated out to the wider social ethic is evidenced by thousands of years of Chinese morality, which is premised on the preferential sentiments of family piety (i.e. Confucianism).
Many people will counter-argue my pro-nepotism position by suggesting that we need fairness (and a lot of it) to counterbalance our natural tribal of favoritism. The excellent social theorist Barry Schwartz has challenged my view, with what I’ll call the “counter-weight argument.” He asks us to consider “the possibility that the only thing that keeps favoritism within reasonable bounds is precisely our commitment to fairness. In other words, favoritism comes ‘naturally,’ but fairness does not. Maybe it takes all of our will, rational justification, and ideological commitment to fairness to keep favoritism within bounds. Were people to subscribe to [Asma’s] view, perhaps the center would not hold, and we would slowly but inexorably give in to the worst of our ‘us vs. them’ tendencies.”
I take this objection very seriously. I want to promote the underdog idea that favoritism too has an ethical structure (i.e., it’s not just self-interest and corruption), but maybe I’m overplaying my hand. The heuristic idealism of fairness may be just the thing that constrains too much biased nepotism. This is a commonly held defense of fairness, but I think on closer scrutiny that it’s a misunderstanding.
In our culture, we frequently use “fairness” when we mean other things (e.g., tolerance, generosity, etc.), and we criticize “favoritism” when we mean to criticize other things (e.g., corruption, prejudice, etc.). For example, what’s really at stake in the suggestion that we need a counter-weight to our natural tribalism is that we need ideological reminders to motivate us to help strangers. We need a “good Samaritan” trigger that pulls us out of our default nepotism.
I agree with this, to some extent. But why are we so quick to call this fairness? And why would we need a concept like equality to motivate our good-Samaritan behaviors? Reaching out to strangers actually looks more like charity and compassion, which often get confusedly labeled as “fairness” but shouldn’t be.
If you plug in the word and --more importantly --the act of charity (where we ordinarily use “fairness”), we find that the sought-after moral upgrade is still achieved: The less fortunate become better off than before. People who are triggered to charitable acts share their good fortune with others. But it isn’t fairness that accomplishes this moral goal –it isn’t the pursuit of equality; it is kindness, good will, and dare I say a little bit of “favor” (in this case, for strangers).
In our current culture, the language of fairness is ubiquitous around this kind of charitable benevolence toward strangers. Sadly, there is not enough of this compassion in our contemporary culture, but it doesn’t improve matters to incorrectly call it fairness and expect egalitarian rules or utilitarian calculations to fix it. Our charity to strangers is not motivated by the idea that they are our equals, or that they have equal claim on us as our kith and kin have, or that they merit our goodwill by some excellent achievements, or that they have human rights, or that we’re restoring some imbalance in the social system. When we move beyond the civil courtesy that we owe to strangers and we donate to some cause or give to someone on the street or whatever, it is because we’re moved by sympathy. We are stirred to care about these particular sufferers. We identify with them emotionally. Love, not fairness, is the engine of philanthropy, and the counterbalance of too much kin favoritism is a more broadly cast affection. But, of course, there’s a limit to the breadth of one’s affection, for as Graham Greene reminds us: “one can’t love humanity, one can only love people.”
Just as compassion (not fairness) more truthfully captures our philanthropic urges, so too justice (not fairness) more accurately captures our concern for the disadvantaged. Most of our complex grievances about social justice get reduced down to cries for greater “fairness” because we lack a more nuanced moral vocabulary.
If we get rid of our creed of fairness, the counter-weight argument goes, then we will be in worse shape. But we have much older virtue traditions of justice, generosity, magnanimity, and compassion, that have atrophied during the rise of instrumental modernity and these can more ably inspire the needed good-Samaritan values.
I’m not suggesting a conservative return to religious values here. Instead, I am isolating the emotional engine that lives underneath both secular and sacred forms of charity and ethics generally. Nepotistic virtues like loyalty are emotion driven, but good-Samaritan virtue toward strangers is also emotionally driven. It is the affective connection or concern –that thrives in tribalism, but also stimulates philanthropy beyond immediate circles.
Cosmopolitan thinkers voice a version of the counter-weight argument when they call us to adopt a different set of public values than the more biased domain of private values. From Immanuel Kant’s autonomous agent to contemporary notions of a public “thin self,” the liberal cosmopolitan view has decontextualized people in order to protect against bias and favoritism.
My view, however, is hard to square with this cosmopolitan view of universal decontextualized agents. Like the communitarian philosophers (e.g., Charles Taylor, Alasdair MacIntyre, and Michael Sandel), I reject the disembodied approach of egalitarianism, but I’m offering something new here too. The communitarians all stress the community of “tradition” in opposition to egalitarianism. They think community comes from being Catholic, or Jewish, or French Canadian, or some other linguistic, or ideological tribe. But my view is that true communities are “affective communities” –emotional bonds precede cultural/historical/linguistic traditions, though they certainly feed into each other. This unappreciated point reveals the true bond underlying cultural tradition, and also reveals the flexibility and changeable nature of favoritism and tribalism. If being Catholic or Jewish failed to give us affective community, then we would undoubtedly keep searching. Being Catholic or Jewish or a Democrat, for example, is not an end in itself, but a means to an emotional end. And this shows that we don’t understand our own liberal tradition very well, if we think we’ve evolved beyond tribalism.
Stephen T. Asma is a Fellow of the Research Group in Mind, Science and Culture at Columbia College Chicago, and author of the new book Against Fairness (University of Chicago Press). (parts of this article appeared previously in the Fortnightly Review UK)
Karl Marx famously called religion the “opiate of the masses,” but the new best seller by Dr. Eben Alexander, Proof of Heaven, is more like cotton-candy than anything adults might use to anesthetize their pains. The childish Shirley Temple beverage that Dr. Alexander offers up is so treacle sweet, it’s hard to understand its appeal. But then we have Sigmund Freud and William James to help us make sense of things.
Dr. Alexander is a neurosurgeon, who experienced a case of bacterial meningitis in 2008 that left him in a coma for a week. According to his book, his neocortex was utterly compromised by the E. coli, and basically shut down. While his neocortex was off, he experienced a mystical voyage – floating through puffy clouds and gentle breezes of gnostic insight, and careening through vibrating luminous explosions. He also rode on butterfly wings, and exchanged telepathic comforts with a high-cheek-boned beauty, who assured him: “You are loved and cherished, dearly, forever. You have nothing to fear. There is nothing you can do wrong.” Oh, and he also hung out for awhile with a brilliant mystical orb in a “giant cosmic womb.”
Sounds great, really. I had a similarly beautiful trip on LSD at a Grateful Dead show in the 1980s. But there are some problems with Alexander’s story. First, his brain science is flawed. Alexander claims that he couldn’t be consciously imagining all this or dreaming it because his neocortex was shut down and “everybody knows” there’s no consciousness beneath the cortex. It must have been my soul leaving my body and really going to heaven because “According to current medical understanding of the brain and mind, there is absolutely no way that I could have experienced even a dim and limited consciousness during my time in the coma, much less the hyper-vivid and completely coherent odyssey I underwent.”
The logic here is very fallacious and neuroscientists like Antonio Damasio and Jaak Panksepp have shown that consciousness in some form goes all the way down through the limbic system and into the brain stem itself. There are even human beings who are born, sadly, without a neocortex – and while they are cognitively impaired, they are very much conscious (with rich emotional lives). Moreover, every night when we all go to sleep, significant parts of the neocortex shut down and the limbic system and reptile brain take over. So, even normal dream life is comprised of high subcortical activity (e.g., amygdala, hippocampus, etc.) and low cortical activity. In short, the basic premise of Alexander’s argument doesn’t make sense, but since he has an MD after his name people are willing to accept his dubious claims as authoritative.
The real problem with Proof of Heaven, however, is that it sells us a juvenile fantasy – a sugary pap. And we relax all our critical thinking skills because we yearn desperately to believe it. Everyone, even the most hardened skeptic, wants to hear someone say “You are loved and cherished, dearly, forever. You have nothing to fear. There is nothing you can do wrong.” Freud pointed out that all human beings conduct their juvenile lives according to the Pleasure Principle – an ego-driven selfish pattern of hedonism. But then we grow up. We become socialized. We slowly transform our pursuits from pleasure to the Reality Principle because we get a “reality check,” informing us that we’re not the center of the universe and life is tinged with suffering, disappointment, mixed emotions, and the constraining desires of other people. But the inner-child and his taste for perfect bliss and cotton-candy remains buried deep in the psyche and he loves to reawaken whenever uterine bliss, butterfly rides and magical orbs are on offer. Immortality is the ultimate cotton-candy and we’ll probably never lose a taste for it. But that yearning doesn’t prove heaven exists, and it doesn’t prove Dr. Alexander went on holiday there.
The cynical way to read Dr. Alexander is that he figured out a genius way to get rich, but I suspect he’s actually sincere. He comes from a Christian background, and he probably believes what he’s saying. William James, however, pointed out how easy it is to over-interpret our strange experiences. I don’t doubt that Alexander had a mystical experience – such strange, oceanic sensations of oneness with all things are more common than you’d think. But the feature that Alexander is so excited by – the detailed specificity of his odyssey – is exactly the thing that raises skeptical worries. Having some kind of pure awareness of the “absolute” (whatever that is) is possible, but this same ineffable absolute is supposed to be beyond the words, concepts, and even images of language and ordinary consciousness. Alexander’s odyssey, on the contrary, has the story-like detail of a George Lucas or Disney film. This, together with his own Christian background, leads me to suspect that his strange experience is a highly “constructed” dream – woven together subconsciously both during and after his coma. This interpretation is made more credible by the fact that we all do some form of this constructing as we move each morning from dream sleep to waking life.
Now which is more reasonable to believe: Dr. Alexander had a really cool dream and wrote a book about it, or Dr. Alexander travelled to heaven and brought back the souvenirs to prove it?
The very symbol of American ethics—Lady Justice—wears a blindfold as she weighs the law on her impartial scale. We’ve all embraced the model of unbiased fairness to describe the best way forward –it has penetrated the social psyche of America. But so many of our social ills have nothing to do with fairness and cannot be fixed by applying the fairness tonic.
In this election season, Obama and Romney have been falling over themselves to assert their “fairness cred.” And each side of the partisan debate uses the word differently –conservatives, like Romney, mean “merit-based rewards” when they speak of fairness (the spoils should go to the winners), but liberals, like Obama, use fairness lingo to mean “equality” of outcomes (like equal benefits, goods, and wealth).
The whole idea of fairness is unhelpful in contemporary politics. Is it more “fair” to privilege people of color in affirmative action scenarios, or is it more fair to treat everyone in a color-blind unbiased fashion? The concept of fairness won’t help resolve this, but politicians on either side of the aisle could make real progress if they jettisoned the fairness lingo and replaced it with the pursuit of social health.
Politics is more like medicine, not like math or physics. Justice, like health, is advanced through practical reason, not theoretical reason. And our body-politic needs some medical attention.
It is possible to reasonably treat people preferentially, if the larger social organism is benefitted. This is not the same as simply enacting policies for the majority. A doctor’s goal is whole body health, but he doesn’t treat the whole body equally –he ministers to medical problems individually –doing immunotherapy here, radiation therapy there, hormonal adjustments, setting broken bones, dialysis, transfusions, and so on. It is essential to treat different organs with uneven and unfair attention and care. That careful discrimination is what brings health to the overall organism and, by analogy, the nation.
Obama’s closing speech in the October 16th Presidential debate expresses the strange doublethink that we all do regarding fairness: “Everybody should play by the same rules,” he said. This is an abstract principle that many politicians want to lay across all Americans. But if my medical analogy holds, that won’t work because different parts of the body need different kinds of attention. A good doctor does not diagnose simply by applying universal rules to particular cases, nor does she treat all bodies alike. Clinical knowledge is acquired by taking a fine-grained case history.
However, then Obama subtly shifted his closing remarks toward this more medical metaphor --to the story about his Grandfather’s G.I. Bill, claiming “That wasn’t a handout. That advanced the whole country.” Now, I think he’s quite right in the second comment. And he’s right in the sense that differential and even preferential treatment to some communities (e.g., former soldiers, certain minorities, people with disabilities, poor, etc) will improve the health of the whole social organism. We don’t need to add rhetorical verbiage about fairness and equality here, because justice can be achieved better when we attend to the uneven complexities of our social world. The point is this: there is bad preferential treatment (e.g., tax loopholes for the 1%) and there is good preferential treatment (e.g., G.I. Bills, etc), but “preferential” itself is not a sin, and “fairness” is not always a solution.
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From the school yard to the workplace, there’s no charge more damning than “You’re being unfair!” Born out of democracy and raised in open markets, fairness has become our de facto modern creed. The very symbol of American ethics—Lady Justice—wears a blindfold as she weighs the law on her impartial scale. In our zealous pursuit of fairness, we have banished our urges to like one person more than another, one thing over another, hiding them away as dirty secrets of our humanity. In Against Fairness, polymath philosopher Stephen T. Asma drags them triumphantly back into the light. Through playful, witty, but always serious arguments and examples, he vindicates our unspoken and undeniable instinct to favor, making the case that we would all be better off if we showed our unfair tendencies a little more kindness—indeed, if we favored favoritism.
Conscious of the egalitarian feathers his argument is sure to ruffle, Asma makes his point by synthesizing a startling array of scientific findings, historical philosophies, cultural practices, analytic arguments, and a variety of personal and literary narratives to give a remarkably nuanced and thorough understanding of how fairness and favoritism fit within our moral architecture. Examining everything from the survival-enhancing biochemistry that makes our mothers love us to the motivating properties of our “affective community,” he not only shows how we favor but the reasons we should. Drawing on thinkers from Confucius to Tocqueville to Nietzsche, he reveals how we have confused fairness with more noble traits, like compassion and open-mindedness. He dismantles a number of seemingly egalitarian pursuits, from classwide Valentine’s Day cards to civil rights, to reveal the envy that lies at their hearts, going on to prove that we can still be kind to strangers, have no prejudice, and fight for equal opportunity at the same time we reserve the best of what we can offer for those dearest to us.
Fed up with the blue-ribbons-for-all absurdity of "fairness" today, and wary of the psychological paralysis it creates, Asma resets our moral compass with favoritism as its lodestar, providing a strikingly new and remarkably positive way to think through all our actions, big and small.
Stephen T. Asma, Ph.D., is Professor of Philosophy in the Department of Humanities, History, and Social Sciences at Columbia College Chicago, where he currently holds the title of Distinguished Scholar. Asma is the author of several books: Against Fairness, Why I Am a Buddhist, On Monsters: An Unnatural History of Our Worst Fears, Stuffed Animals and Pickled Heads: The Culture and Evolution of Natural History Museums, Following Form and Function and Buddha for Beginners.
In 2003, Dr. Asma was Visiting Professor at the Buddhist Institute in Phnom Penh, Kingdom of Cambodia. There he taught "Buddhist Philosophy" as part of its graduate program in Buddhist Studies. His book The Gods Drink Whiskey: Stumbling Toward Enlightenmentin the Land of the Tattered Buddha (HarperOne, 2005) explores the Theravada Buddhism of the region. He has also traveled and studied in Thailand, Laos, Vietnam, Hong Kong, and Mainland China, eventually living in Shanghai, China in 2005.
In 2009, Dr. Asma became a Fellow of the LAS Research Group in Mind, Science and Culture at Columbia College Chicago. He is currently researching the connections between affective neuroscience and philosophy of mind.
Stephen Asma writes in The New York Times series “The Stone” (devoted to discussions of philosophy) on January 5, 2013, that people who believe that all people should be treated equally are adhering to a myth. His column is a much-abbreviated version of his book, Against Fairness, published by the prestigious University of Chicago Press in November 2012. In the book description at the publisher’s website one can find this:
Through playful, witty, but always serious arguments and examples, [Asma] vindicates our unspoken and undeniable instinct to favor, making the case that we would all be better off if we showed our unfair tendencies a little more kindness—indeed, if we favored favoritism.
We would all be better off if we showed more favoritism for our family members, our friends, and those who we know versus those who are strangers to us. Who would have thought that we can all feel good about this? Per Asma we ought to indulge this tendency even more and should not feel guilty about things like nepotism and reserving our empathy for those nearer to us and closer to us.
In his NYT piece Asma states: “It seems dubious to say that we should transcend tribe and be utilitarian[i] because all people are equal, when the equal status of strangers and kin is an unproven and counterintuitive assumption.”
Did he just say what I thought he said?
Let’s consider Asma’s language and argument more carefully here. (I have not read his book so my comments are based upon his NYT article and on the material available about his book at the publisher’s website.) What makes treating everybody in humanity equally “counterintuitive?” Is it counterintuitive because Stephen Asma has never considered that his kith and kin are an accident – that he was not born to African, Indian, or Eskimo parents, that he is a privileged male in America in 2013?
What makes something intuitive in the first place: the fact that you are accustomed to thinking and feeling a certain way? If so, would not slave owners of the American South or Roman Empire find counterintuitive the outlandish idea that there ought not to be slave owners and slaves?
The ahistoricity and anti-historicity of Asma’s perspective is astounding. Yet he is celebrated for his refreshing logic, granted a forum at the NYT, which appeared as one of the top ten read articles on their website as of January 9. Meghan Clyne, in the Wall Street Journal, wrote of Asma’s book: “Mr. Asma offers a rightly critical diagnosis of our obsession with egalitarianism.” 89.8 FM KPCC’s Larry Mantle declared, “Asma’s philosophical take on reevaluating what is considered to be ‘fair’ addresses the topic of fairness in a refreshing way, eschewing the culture of rewarding everyone for favoritism.”
That someone who writes for the Wall Street Journal should deride egalitarianism comes as no surprise. That gadfly Larry Mantle should breathlessly praise Asma also comes as no surprise.
What is surprising is how what is so sophomoric about Asma’s argument seems to have escaped these celebrated pundits. If what you say fits into things that people who are materially well-off want to believe, if what you are saying gives them a refreshing way to justify their privilege, then they might very well greet what you have to say with pleasure and laud you for your remarkably innovative thinking. Comfort the comfortable and afflict the afflicted by ignoring them. Of course those who we are not related to and don’t know are not of equal status!
By Asma’s logic not only should and would slavery never have been overthrown and defeated but treating women as mere chattel and minorities as second-class or worse citizens to be lynched and burned would still be with us. Because for those changes to occur required that a significant number of members of the oppressor class join in common cause with those who were oppressed, based among other things on empathy, an emotion that Asma considers too limited by its nature to extend out to all of humanity. Charity begins at home. No need to bother with those far away.
By not feeling guilty about our tendency to favor those who are closer to us, he says that we could then expend more energy on other virtues. Those that he specifically names are “loyalty, generosity and gratitude.” In discussing each of these virtues in turn, he speaks of them entirely in the context of lavishing more empathy on those who are already close to us. For example, he states that nepotism gets a bad rap as being associated with corruption when it should really be seen as affection for those closest to us.
Holding people as inferior based on their tribe, gender, race, national origin, creed, or religious beliefs are no longer legal. How could that be if, as Asma tells us, the idea that people should be treated equally is an unproven, counterintuitive notion?
Asma further claims that the equality of human beings is “unproven.” It’s interesting that he feels no need to show that it is unproven and merely has to assert it, as if asserting it is a sufficiently rigorous argument. In his article he says that it is obvious that people favor their family over their friends, their friends over their acquaintances, and acquaintances over strangers.
But to say that most people behave this way, which is true, isn’t the same thing as saying that any other way is unproven and impossible. If that were so, of course, then ending segregation by race and gender would not have happened. People who joined in and sacrificed, including their own lives, in the pursuit of racial equality – whites, for instance, who adopted the crazy idea that people of color should be treated de jure and de facto as their equals, must not subscribe to the intuitions of Mr. Asma. And what a pity that they devoted their lives and some of them lost their lives to pursue such unproven, counterintuitive ideas!
What we have here in this New York Times guest columnist is a defense of narrowness and philistinism. It fits perfectly the perspective and logic of the 1%: “This is mine, these are my family and friends, and screw all of the rest of you. I don’t care if you are the 99%. I’m part of the 1% and it’s only logical and intuitive that I should not care one whit about the rest of humanity or the fate of the planet and all of its creatures and plants. As long as I can live and travel in luxury, I’m happy. Why are you squawking?”
Brian Bethune, reviewing Asma’s book at Maclean’s says, “Asma realizes, with a sigh, ‘that I will be seen as some conservative Ayn Randian and my book read as a social-Darwinist screed,’ merely for telling his son that it’s not possible for everyone in a race to win it.”
But there is a big difference between those who think everyone should get a blue ribbon so everyone’s a winner – Asma’s ostensible and easy target for refuting – and recognizing that treating one’s own over and above everyone else is a strategy that is ruining the earth and human relations, endangering our very fates. Asma relates a story in his NYT piece:
Say I bought a fancy pair of shoes for my son. In light of the one-tribe calculus of interests, I should probably give these shoes to someone who doesn’t have any. I do research and find a child in a poor part of Chicago who needs shoes to walk to school every day. So, I take them off my son (replacing them with Walmart tennis shoes) and head off to the impoverished Westside. On the way, I see a newspaper story about five children who are malnourished in Cambodia. Now I can’t give the shoeless Chicago child the shoes, because I should sell the shoes for money and use the money to get food for the five malnourished kids. On my way to sell the shoes, I remember that my son has an important job interview for a clean-water nonprofit organization and if he gets the job, he’ll be able to help save whole villages from contaminated water. But he won’t get the job if he shows up in Walmart tennis shoes. As I head back home, it dawns on me that for many people in the developing world, Walmart tennis shoes are truly luxurious when compared with burlap sack shoes, and since needs always trump luxuries I’ll need to sell the tennis shoes too; and on, and on, and on.
This is a too easily defeated foe for him to pick on: of course we can always find someone more needy than someone else. Of course this chain of reasoning becomes impossible to implement fully and soon therefore absurd and unworkable if you try to carry it out to its logical conclusion.
Who says, however, that we must calculate precisely who is more needy and give that person what we have to give? Inequities exist in manifest ways between the privileged and the oppressed and unless you are blinded by that privilege because you yourself enjoy some or a lot of it, pretending that they’re of no concern or arguing forcefully that we are better off ignoring them does not make those inequities disappear. It doesn’t make them any less real.
There is a difference between telling everyone they are winners and giving everyone a trophy (a practice that certainly has become unfortunately prevalent in the U.S.), and seeking to bridge the gaps that yawn between people based on whether or not they’re in an imperialist country or part of the third world, whether they’re a racial superordinate group or a subordinated, brutalized group, whether they’re a male of privilege and sense of entitlement who thinks that he can rape and kill females with impunity or they’re a female who is subject to this savagery from male supremacists.
Asma, as do so many others, conflates the meaning of egalitarianism with the notion that everyone is actually equally endowed. Asma appears to disagree. As do I: I think it is obvious that every one of us is unequal in numerous areas – some of us are better musicians, athletes, stronger, better artists, engineers, cooks, spatial reasoners, and so on. But this is very different from the idea that some are more worthy than others. Compare the following from my book Globalization and the Demolition of Society to Asma:
In any population of people, it is true, there are going to be those who are better at specific things than others. Having incompetents handling critical matters such as medicine, or people in charge of disaster prevention and relief who know nothing about emergency management, violates most people’s expectations of a good society. Not everyone can become a physician, and only qualified individuals should take key posts. But this obviously sensible policy differs from excluding the working class, oppressed minorities, and/or women from learning about the grander vistas that humanity has achieved. To understand how the political system really works, to be exposed to the best in art and science, to be introduced to humanity’s key philosophical questions, the varying answers to those questions historically, and to be steeped in history and its lessons and so on in this fashion should be the norm for virtually everyone in a society, regardless of what they end up doing as an occupation. Specialized skills and area specific knowledge are not the same as these kinds of lessons. It does not take exceptional intelligence or talents to benefit greatly from that manner of education.
So why exclude people from these arenas? The only reason can be that the existing division of labor and hierarchy of prestige demean and diminish many people in comparison to their capabilities and the regard they deserve as human beings. Were this not the case then there would be no necessity to conceal so many arenas of knowledge from people. The problem here, in other words, lies with the stratification of society and the differential material and non-material rewards attached to the different strata. The shortcomings here do not lie mainly with the people; the populace’s ability to understand exceeds the capacity of a highly stratified society to accommodate them and their fullest roles. (Globalization and the Demolition of Society, pp. 311-312)
Asma’s writing, moreover, is an example of the kind of reasoning that people who support Obama’s use of drones to kill others abroad engage in. Time Magazine’s Joe Klein, for example, aggressively asserts that it’s not American babies who are being killed, it’s non-American babies being killed, and so it’s quite all right, indeed, it’s better than all right, it’s morally defensible and just. It reflects a none-too subtle message in the film Zero Dark Thirty: torture is ugly, but sometimes it’s necessary to protect Americans by treating non-Americans as of lower status and torturing them. Americans are our kith and kin, after all. And the equal status of all humans is counterintuitive and unproven, right?
Not only is it morally indefensible for those who engage in these kind of sophisticated rationales for brutal inequities; it is also factually wrong. A central theme of my book Globalization and the Demolition of Society makes that very point from multiple angles. For Asma is wrong that the inter-connectedness of people is unproven. We could not have a society without this inter-connectedness. Consider, to begin with, Mr. Asma’s notion about it being somehow natural and proper that people treat strangers as less worthy and deserving than those who are near to them by blood or by other forms of proximity such as a shared neighborhood or nation: this narrow view is the same as those who continue to deny global warming as a threat and unfolding catastrophe or who, while accepting the reality of global warming, still refuse to do anything about it. The Republican Party is an example of the former and Obama an example of the latter. We are, according to Asma, apparently condemned to watch as the planet proceeds pell-mell into catastrophe. If we can’t see beyond our own immediate horizons, then the idea of acting on behalf of the entire planet is counterintuitive and unproven.
Dennis Loo is Professor of Sociology at California State Polytechnic University, Pomona. He is a Harvard honors graduate in Government and received his Ph.D. from the University of California, Santa Cruz. He is the author of “Globalization and the Demolition of Society” and Co-Editor/Author of “Impeach the President: the Case Against Bush and Cheney”. Website: Dr. Dennis Loo