Quotes XXVII

Quotations about
EQUALITY AND COMMUNITY


EQUALITY AND FRATERNITY WERE THE TWO MORE REVOLUTIONARY OBJECTIVES OF 1789. SOMETIMES IT IS ENVISAGED THAT PEOPLE ARE NATURALLY EQUAL AND FRATERNAL. MORE COMMONLY, IT IS HELD THAT PEOPLE SHOULD BE TREATED AS EQUAL AND ENCOURAGED TO ACT FRATERNALLY. ALTHOUGH THERE IS A CERTAIN TENSION BETWEEN THESE OBJECTIVES, A COMMON POLITICAL AMBITION IS TO OFFER THEM TOGETHER, PERHAPS SO AS TO YIELD CRUCIAL INTERACTION EFFECTS. IN ANY CASE, QUESTIONS ARISE AS TO WHETHER THE ENVISAGED HAPPY STATE CAN INDEED BE REALIZED.


Questions about equality are unavoidable in the study of psychology today; and differential psychology has long provided a singular meeting point for them. The chief types of question are as follows.
1. Are people actually equal, i.e. similar, in most of the important ways that psychologists can identify? (Answering 'Yes' to this question clears a path to final equalization of how people are to be treated; but 'Yes' conventionally requires that one dispute if one cannot ignore the continuity and probably the biological basis of personality features and individual differences.)
2. Should people be 'equalized' or treated as equal in various ways whether with regard to opportunities or outcomes?
In their legal and political rights?
In expenditure on them by the State e.g. educationally?
In their eligibility for various kinds of employment?
In their final, 'outcome' levels of 'status' i.e. of power,
prestige, income and wealth?
(With regard to each of these 'should' questions, two types of consideration require attention: 'Would it be a good (or at least unremarkable) idea in principle?' and 'Would there be unacceptable side-effects in practice?' Protagonists of equality prefer to concentrate on the first question, while opponents prefer to debate the second-for answering 'No' to the 'good idea?' question seems superficially rather drastic. One notable complication for the egalitarian, however, is that answering 'Yes' to some of the 'good idea?' questions may seem to require giving a 'No' to others. If people are given equal rights in law and politics, for example, will they or their children not eventually come to differ in status, unless their original rights are watered down? Some people will use their rights and opportunities precisely to elicit different (superior, as they will hope) educational treatments for themselves or their children; and many people would see little point in having 'equal rights' or 'equal opportunities' if no differences in final outcome were allowed.)
3. Can people be effectively equalized whether by eugenics, by Head Start programmes, or by a Marxist 'vanguard elite' that imposes similarity of treatment for a generation or two on the bulk of its subject population?
(In this matter, the answer 'Yes' might seem empirically dubious pending advances in technique. Human individual differences have persisted despite many attempts to stamp them out, including the mass murder of Jews, homosexuals, intellectuals, the bourgeoisie and successful peasant farmers in several countries in the twentieth century. More prosaically, the authorities of pre-1990 Poland and East Germany were shocked to find continuing correlations between a father's occupation and his children's school success after a whole generation of equalization in housing and access to education; and they sometimes suppressed such embarrassing findings and silenced the researchers. Yet something may always turn up-perhaps involving vitamin supplementation, reduction of food additives, genetic engineering or religious revival.)
In fact, to their great credit, few ordinary subscribers to the value of 'equality' have ever thought their position through. Their immediate concern to champion selected underdogs-once 'the working class' but now more likely Blacks, homosexuals, women or the handicapped-is kindly. As such, it seems to prevent its champions asking whether, once some 'revolution' or other significant breakthrough makes all Orwell's animals at 'Animal Farm' 'equal', some animals will nevertheless remain 'more equal than others'.
Will the up-graded underdogs be content to stop short at achieving mere equality? Who dares even to contemplate the scenario? The inclination of many egalitarians if they thought about it would presumably be to stop short in their endeavours just when manual workers (or perhaps today's 'underclass') have caught up with the bourgeoisie, when Blacks have caught up with Whites, and when all people have old-style IQs and similar socio-economic potentials of somewhere around 100. At that point fraternity and 'community' would at last be possible; and, for the period beyond that happy day, could we of l'ancien régime be reasonably expected to prognosticate what social arrangements would be envisaged subsequently by such perfected souls?
Thus is debonair egalitarianism combined with the practical, short-term humanitarianism of helping the underdog. The operation looks pretty similar to that of noblesse oblige which long gave the noble providers of welfare a claim on the public purse. Here we come to the pork-barrel politics of the matter. In a democratic country, at least, history teaches that there will always be some cash for the person who proposes to tax everyone just a little so as to make quite a lot of apparent progress towards reducing some pressing problem of human need. (Such were the social-environmentalistic assumptions of the post-1945 years that the mere spending of money-on the salaries of welfare staff-was invariably assumed to be therapeutic.) To date, the supply of needs to be met has proved inexhaustible, as has also the supply of personnel who would like to draw State salaries to undertake the required welfare endeavours. Moreover, to date, few social programmes are funded on the basis that the State monies will be delivered only when the social problem is actually solved. (Nor is welfare endeavour funded by once-and-for-all investments: top-up sums can always be arranged.) This failure of nation-states to fund welfare endeavours in a practical way itself partly reflects egalitarian idealism: for, with such promiscuous financing, the quest for equality can continue under the cover of being a welfare effort until the nation-state that succours it falls prey to history under the weight of its own self-imposed guilt and payments of welfare Danegeld.
In such a climate, where any human superiority is denigrated as 'elitist', and where substantial State funds flow towards 'helping' the disadvantaged, it is natural for intelligent people to talk down their own achievements, for leaders to pretend to be followers, and for psychologists to be chary of mentioning enduring features of the human condition for fear of seeming to lack utopian piety. The Quotes illustrate most of these corollaries of egalitarian endeavour. More importantly, however, the Quotes deliberately link the pursuit of equality and the pursuit of officially fraternal ambitions: for 'equality' and 'community' often seem to require each other if either ambition is to achieve substantial expression. It is not only that welfare provides a way of achieving egalitarian ends by stealth. On sociobiological grounds, welfare-like other forms of altruism-will be more likely within a gene-sharing community, and thus (as also for other reasons, perhaps) more likely when people believe themselves not altogether dissimilar from people whose current ill fortune they feel moved to rectify. In its turn, such altruism will presumably stimulate that non-genetic, 'reciprocal altruism', affection and deference that will further strengthen the bonds of community. To be able to live accepting others as equals who respond to one's community's calls for order and reciprocal altruism is no mean achievement of political endeavour; and to combine the more attractive features of egalitarian socialism and fraternal nationalism is a popular aspiration.


(i) ARE people equal-i.e. similar, or similarly deserving?


"[Dr Francis Gall, the pioneer of phrenology] found that a great number of philosophers and physiologists asserted that all men are born with equal mental faculties."
George COMBE, 1853, The Constitution of Man.

"During the medieval age it was believed that God had a plan for each individual corresponding to a vocation or occupation consistent with a society of fixed social classes. After the French revolution, all individuals were considered to be created as equals, and thus to have the same opportunities for success in any selected domain."
K.A.ERICSSON et al., 1993, in Ciba Foundation Symposium 178, The Origins and Development of High Ability. Chichester : Wiley-Interscience.

"Equality in a democracy needs the recognition that cultures are equal, much as individual human beings are equal."
Editorial, The Observer, 22 iv 1990.

"...with the coming of Liberalism, there was a denial of the Christian God. And therefore equality and dignity could no longer be grounded in God's salvific plan. How then could they be grounded? Liberalism had to find a ground for equality and dignity within nature....{especially} as potential: an equality of the seeming worst with the best, an equality unverified only because of accidental circumstances, because of a lack of opportunity...."
Fr R.K.TACELLI, 1995, American Renaissance 6, i.





"Now, that there is such a difference between men in respect of their understandings, I think nobody who has had any conversation with his neighbours will question.... Which great difference in men's intellects, whether it rises from any defect in the organs of the body particularly adapted to thinking, or in the dullness or untractableness of those faculties for want of use, or, as some think, in the natural differences of men's souls themselves; or some or all of these together, it matters not here to examine. Only this is evident, that there is a difference of degrees in men's understandings, apprehensions, and reasonings, to so great a latitude that one may, without doing injury to mankind, affirm that there is a greater distance between some men and others in this respect, than between some men and some beasts."
J.LOCKE, 1689, Two Treatises of Government.
Cambridge University Press, 1960.

"I agree with you that there is a natural aristocracy among men. The grounds of this are virtue and talents. ..... For experience proves, that the moral and physical qualities of man, whether good or evil, are transmissible in a certain degree from father to son."
Thomas JEFFERSON, 1813, in a letter to John Adams, written at Monticello, 28 x.

"When one says that experience and reason testify that men are not equal, then one understands under 'equality' the equality of abilities or the equivalence of the bodily strength and mental capacities of men. It is quite obvious that in this sense men are not equal. No single reasonable man and no single socialist ever forgets this."
LENIN.

"Fascism affirms the immutable, beneficial, fruitful inequality of men."
Benito MUSSOLINI (1883-1945).

"....inequality is recreated anew in each generation, even among people who start life in essentially identical circumstances."
C.JENCKS, 1973, Inequality. Harmondsworth : Penguin.

"....there are grave dangers in basing policies such as affirmative action on the assumption that all differences arise from environmental causes and all individuals are of identical potential."
J.M.THODAY, 1981, Nature.

"....inequality is built permanently into the human gene structure."
Bernard LEVIN, 1985, The Times, 19 vii.

"....I suppose that the claim in [America's] Declaration of Independence that "all men are created equal" is the most extreme single untruth ever uttered in the entire history of human communication."
Bernard LEVIN, 1988, The Times, 8 ix.

"The ideology of equality has done some good. For example, it is not possible as a practical matter to be an identifiable racist or sexist and still hold public office. But most of its effects are bad. ....[it] censors and straitjackets everything from pedagogy to humor. The ideology of equality has stunted the range of moral dialogue to triviality. In daily life-conversations, the lessons taught in public schools, the kinds of screenplays or newspaper feature stories that people choose to write-the moral ascendancy of equality has made it difficult to use concepts such as virtue, excellence, beauty and-above all-truth."
R.J.HERRNSTEIN & C.MURRAY, 1994, The Bell Curve.
New York : Free Press.




Does factual equality matter?


"All men believe that justice means equality in some sense.... The question we must keep in mind is, equality or inequality in what sort of thing."
ARISTOTLE, Politics.

"When socialists speak of equality, they understand thereby social equality, the equality of social position, but not at all the quality of physical and mental abilities of individual persons."
LENIN.

"To rest the case for equal treatment of national or racial minorities on the assumption that they do not differ from other men is implicitly to admit that factual inequality would justify unequal treatment, and the proof that some differences do, in fact, exist would not be long in forthcoming. It is of the essence of the demand for equality before the law that people should be treated alike in spite of the fact that they are different."
F.A.HAYEK, 1960, The Constitution of Liberty.
University of Chicago Press.

"An ideology that tacitly appeals to biological equality as a condition for human emancipation corrupts the idea of freedom. Moreover, it encourages decent men to tremble at the prospect of 'inconvenient' findings that may emerge in future scientific research."
M.BRESSLER, 1968, 'Sociobiology, biology and ideology'.
In D.Glass, Genetics. New York : Rockefeller Univ. Press.

"We are not compelled to believe in biological uniformity in order to affirm human freedom and dignity."
E.O.WILSON, 1978, On Human Nature.
Cambridge, Mass. : Harvard University Press.

"Whatever the excesses some of Jensen's critics may have gone to, they have been correct in their intuition that any change in the way we view ability differences is a potential threat to the world-wide drive toward social equality. ....Intelligence and social equality are both too important to the survival of civilisation for us to persist much longer with models that require us to ignore one in order to conceive of the other."
C.BEREITER, 1987, in S. & Celia Modgil, Arthur Jensen: Consensus
and Controversy. Brighton : Falmer.

"....envy has often been avoided or mitigated if those who are superior performers in some respects demonstrate that they are inferior in others. Thus the late K.J.W.Craik, who was probably the most able psychologist Britain has yet produced, was forgiven his brilliance by lesser colleagues not only because he was always willing to help them, but also because he could never master the skill of driving a car, and was ready to play tennis even though he did so badly."
A.T.WELFORD, 1987, Ergonomics 30.





(ii) SHOULD people be equalized in opportunities and/or outcomes?


"....to criticize inequality and to desire equality is not, as is sometimes suggested, to cherish the romantic illusion that men are equal in character and intelligence. It is to hold that, while their natural endowments differ profoundly, it is the mark of a civilized society to aim at eliminating such inequalities as have their source not in individual differences, but in its own organization; and that individual energies, which are a source of social energy, are more likely to ripen and find expression if social inequalities are, as far as practicable, diminished."
R.H.TAWNEY, 1931, Equality. London : Unwin.

"Socialism is about the pursuit of equality and the protection of freedom in the knowledge that until we are truly equal we will not be truly free."
Tony CROSLAND (Labour Cabinet Minister), c. 1965.

"The essential feature of an egalitarian priority system is that it counts improvements to the welfare of the worse off as more urgent than improvements to the welfare of the better off...."
T.NAGEL, 1979, Mortal Questions. Cambridge University Press.

"Is it right that I should have been born into a poor family, not a rich one? There are no rights and wrongs in a poor man's life, only needs."
SAHEJU (a Harijan peasant farmer), quoted by V.Zorza & V.Sandal,
The Times, 17 ix 1988.

"Where do the rich get their money from? They get it from the poor!"
Tony BENN (Labour M.P.), 1989, BBC IV UK.

"....the assault on inequality cannot be left to tax and social security policies alone. Poverty and inequality also have to be tackled at their roots: the unequal distribution of pay and jobs."
Ruth LISTER, 1989, New Socialist, vi/vii.








"Virtually all Greeks, including quite explicitly their greatest philosophers, [held] it to be self-evident, not only that all human beings are not created equal, but also that they ought not to be treated as equals. For Plato, women were on average inferior to men in every sphere of activity; and "barbarians" (i.e. non-Greeks) were the natural enemies of Greeks, so that in fighting against them any brutality was permissible. For Aristotle, some humans are "slaves by nature" and are better off being owned by others; women are by nature inferior and subject to men; and both slaves and women are imperfect in their mental faculties. (In contrast, an earlier thinker, Antiphon, asserted that "by nature we are all alike in every respect and capable of being either barbarians of Greeks".)"
A.H.SOMMERSTEIN, 1990, Encounter 74, i/ii.

"When Rousseau sent Voltaire his "Discourse on Inequality," [Voltaire] was amused: "I have received your new book against the human race, and thank you for it. Never was such a cleverness used in the design of making us all stupid. One longs, in reading your book, to walk on all fours. But as I have lost the habit for more than sixty years, I feel unhappily the impossibility of resuming it.""
Gore VIDAL, 1995, Palimpsest. London : André Deutsch.

"Very well indeed did Rousseau know how deeply rooted in man's character is the impulse to inequality, and how diversely manifest in the entire social fabric is this impulse. [According to Rousseau] as only a supreme power can save man from original sin in the religious realm, only an equal power [i.e. the 'General Will'] can save man from society'[s inherent and pervasive inequality. ....By definition, the General Will [a power not the less absolute, total and penetrating for its declared roots in the people], in contrast with the Will of All, is the will that emerges when the members of the political community are able to give their allegiances and their thoughts completely to the community, when they have become liberated from the false consciousness that directs them to think and act as individuals or as representatives of partial interests in the social order. The General Will has nothing to do with a majority as such, least of all with the mere counting of votes."
R.NISBET, 1986, The Making of Modern Society. Brighton : Wheatsheaf.

"Rousseau's theoretical frankness, or harshness, about legislation [to enforce equality] put off succeeding generations of thinkers, who nonetheless wanted the results of that harshness, i.e. community. Or, more likely, Robespierre's practical harshness and the failure of his attempt at legislation scared off moderate observers. Changing human nature seems a brutal, nasty, tyrannical thing to do. So, instead, it began to be denied that there is such a thing as human nature."
Allan BLOOM, 1987, The Closing of the American Mind.
New York : Simon & Schuster.

"Subordination tends greatly to human happiness. Were we all upon an equality, we should have no other enjoyment that mere animal pleasure."
Doctor JOHNSON (quoted in Boswell's Life of Johnson for 20 vii 1763).

"Law givers or revolutionaries who promise equality and liberty at the same time are either utopian dreamers or charlatans."
GOETHE, quoted by M.Ivens & R.Dunstan, Bachman's Book of Freedom Quotations. London : Bachman & Turner, 1978.

"You cannot bring about prosperity by discouraging thrift.
You cannot strengthen the weak by weakening the strong.
You cannot help strong men be tearing down big men.
You cannot help the wage-earner by pulling down the wage-payer.
You cannot further the brotherhood of man by encouraging class hatred.
You cannot help the poor by destroying the rich.
You cannot establish sound security on borrowed money.
You cannot build character and courage by taking away man's initiative and independence.
You cannot help men permanently by doing for them what they could and
should do for themselves."
Abraham LINCOLN.

"The nations of our time cannot prevent the conditions of men from becoming equal; but it depends upon themselves whether the principle of equality is to lead them to servitude or freedom, to knowledge or to barbarism, to prosperity or to wretchedness."
Alexis de TOCQUEVILLE, quoted by M.Ivens & R.Dunstan, Bachman's
Book of Freedom Quotations. London : Bachman & Turner, 1978.

"Intelligence....is distributed in every society in a way which, when depicted on a graph, appears as a bell-shaped curve. That such a distribution characterizes all societies is not a new discovery by any means. Almost 100 years ago the philosopher Pareto wrote of just such an intelligence bell curve in his Les Systèmes Socialistes, a book intended to expose the dangerous illogic inherent in Marxism."
Fr James THORNTON, 1995, New American 11, i.

"For upwards of fifty years, the trend has been not just towards securing a greater measure of equality of opportunity, which is a basic object of liberal democracy, but equally towards a rigid, doctrinaire and unjustifiable belief in centralisation and control as the only method of achieving it. The partisans of this belief have interpenetrated much of the educational establishment [in Britain] the educational Press, the educational unions, the educational bureaucracy, and the schools, colleges and universities themselves....."
J.M.SCOTT, 1973, Dons and Students. London : Plume Press.

"Object to merit and distinction, and you're setting your face against quality, independence, originality, genius against all the richness and variety of life. When you hold back the successful, you penalize those who need help."
Margaret THATCHER, 1978. Cited by Penny Junor, 1983, Margaret
Thatcher. London : Sidgwick & Jackson.

"If the social wage {i.e. state-supplied benefits in cash and kind} bites into the individual wage, the individual wage earner will lose some of the freedom which he would otherwise have enjoyed. A society in which 50% of the gross domestic product is spent by the state my be healthier, better educated or more equal than a society in which the state spends only 30% of GDP. But it will also be less free, and it is humbug to deny the fact."
David MARQUAND (Labour M.P.), 1979,
Encounter, vii.

"One consequence of the widely held belief that environment determines intellectual differences and that all men are equal with respect to intellectual endowment has been the acceptance in many European universities of almost any applicant, regardless of ability or background. Most dramatic, perhaps, has been the effect in Italy, where thousands of ill-prepared and ill-equipped students throng the universities, make normal teaching impossible, and promote a detrimental, sub-academic atmosphere and level of instruction."
H.J.EYSENCK, 1981, in H.J.Eysenck & L.J.Kamin,
The Battle for the Mind. London : Pan.

"Whether we need to differ from each other as much as we do in intelligence is undoubtedly the largest social-scientific and sociobiological problem for our insistently egalitarian age. Intellectual differences clearly provide the foundation of the modern hierarchies of status, power, wealth, influence and leadership. It must be doubted whether the feelings of respect and admiration that enable and enhance much of our social intercourse would be so commonly experienced among us if individual differences in g were greatly reduced by the selective application of Head Start programmes and intelligence-boosting drugs only to those people who would otherwise be of less than superior intelligence. On the other hand, pending advances in sociobiological understanding, there would seem to be no conclusive reason for a society to tolerate, let alone insist upon such differences once it possessed the power to control them."
C.R.BRAND, 1984, in J.Nicholson & Halla Beloff, Psychology
Survey 5. Leicester : British Psychological Society.

"A case of sorts, shaky and riddled with various absurdities which make it ultimately untenable, has been made out for the progressive taxation of incomes. But how is one to deal with good looks or great native intelligence which raise their possessors above the general condition, but in ways which escape the criteria of the Inland Revenue? Equality requires, in fact, constant and detailed official intervention in the most private affairs, in order for it to be instituted and maintained intervention which must, in turn, involve perpetual disturbance of existing relationships and expectations, and thus perpetual exacerbation of social tensions. Equality which aims at the creation of a more wholesome and peaceable society thus paradoxically leads to querulousness and contention."
E.KEDOURIE, 1984, The Crossman Confessions. London : Mansell.

"The notion that the incomes of the more prosperous have somehow been achieved at the expense of the less prosperous has had a long and disastrous history. In its consequences, it is perhaps the most pernicious of all economic misconceptions. The persecution of economically productive, but politically unpopular and ineffective minorities [e.g. the Chinese in Malaysia] in the Third World is perhaps the primary example today."
"In egalitarian discourse, the notion that the well-off have prospered at the expense of the poor is rarely far below the surface. This notion is useful or even necessary for the moral plausibility of politically organized redistribution. Without such an underpinning the case for redistributive taxation (which, in effect, is partial confiscation), or for other forms of expropriation, is not self-evident."
Lord BAUER, 1984, in D.Anderson, The Kindness that Kills: the
Churches' Simplistic Response to Complex Social Issues.
London : Society for the Propagation of Christian Knowledge.

"[Samuel P. Huntington, Harvard professor of government] speaks as if democracy, 'participation' and egalitarianism necessarily go together. This, of course, is the cant of the age, and one might have hoped it would not have been accepted. For democracy which concerns the source of government authority entails nothing about participation (which relates to the way in which government if carried on); and it does not imply that the members of a democratic polity are, or ought to be, equal."
E.KEDOURIE, 1984, The Crossman Confessions. London : Mansell.

"Every society suffers if the State seeks to restrain the most able in order to promote some egalitarian myth. The proof is manifest from Czechoslovakia to Guinea Conakry. That is why, all over the world, socialism is in retreat."
John GUMMER (Conservative M.P.), 1987, Sunday Telegraph, 19 iv.

"....a collateral aim of egalitarianism is often that of fostering a greater sense of 'community'; yet the happiest communities that we know our great teaching hospitals, our armed services, our universities are markedly hierarchical in their structure, involving an unusually wide spread of people of differing ability levels of intelligence and educational attainment."
C.R.BRAND, 1987, in S. & Celia Modgil, Arthur Jensen: Consensus
and Controversy. Brighton : Falmer.

"There is no necessary conceptual connection between a person's relative economic position and whether he has needs of any degree of urgency."
"A concern for economic equality, construed as desirable in itself, tends to divert a person's attention away from endeavouring to discover within his experience of himself and of his life what he himself really cares about and what will actually satisfy him, although this is the most basic and the most decisive task upon which an intelligent selection of economic goals depends. Exaggerating the moral importance of economic equality is harmful, in other words, because it is alienating. ....the doctrine of equality contributes to the moral disorientation and shallowness of our time."
Harry G. FRANKFURT, 1988, Philosophical Essays.
Cambridge University Press.

"....equality, like arsenic, has contradictory effects. In moderation a tonic, it becomes poisonous when indulged to excess. Equality is the basis of our law, and saturates our language and our manners to a degree far beyond any other civilisation. But to "equalise" the material things people enjoy must involve severing all connection between human conduct on the one hand and material things on the other. ....Only the dead weight of a massively despotic power could sustain such equality. ....The notorious problem of....egalitarian societies is that large numbers of their inhabitants want to bolt."
Kenneth MINOGUE, 1988, 'The preoccupation with equality'.
Encounter 71, xi.

"There are powerful arguments to suggest that....the pursuit of equality through the use of government coercion must destroy the framework of individual, and thus personal, liberty. For, as Robert Nozick has pointed out, individual differences [of talent, effort, taste, and so on] will, within such a framework, continuously (and spontaneously) produce new inequalities however we try to arrange the starting position of the individual citizens. Thus the socialist pursuit of equality must require an ever increasing interference with, and destruction of, personal liberty."
Larry BRISKMAN, 1988, Two Cheers for Ideology.
Edinburgh : Scottish Young Conservatives.

"All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others."
The one 'commandment' to be retained (with some modification)
throughout the course of 'the animals' revolution' in George
ORWELL's Animal Farm, 1946.

"Equality of opportunity is either a palpable fraud, or a very clumsy way of expressing a belief in freedom. Obviously my opportunities in life are going to depend upon my income, intelligence, character and abode. Even equality before the law is not in practice attainable."
Brian WALDEN, 1989, Sunday Times, 29 i.

"[The British Labour Party] wants [wealth] allocated "justly", which it interprets as meaning as near equally as possible. This is a quest which, in Britain, has always ended in failure because it rests upon a misunderstanding of the dynamics of inequality."
Brian WALDEN, 1990, Sunday Times, 15 iv.

"As Hayek has noted, the very concern to impose a pattern on distribution is illiberal, in that it can only distort the constantly changing patterns produced by free individual choices.... Egalitarian distributionism is, from a point of view that is genuinely liberal, perhaps one of the worst forms of distributionism. In practice, it often amounts to little more than the 'anti-social envy' that Mill presciently condemned among his contemporaries.... The real effect of egalitarianism in political life in western democracies....is to generate pernicious illusions about the potential benefits of redistribution from the rich, while doing nothing to enhance the opportunities of the disadvantaged, or to alleviate the lot of the needy....
....There is nothing in egalitarian morality that can in principle rule out the horribly dystopian society envisaged in L.P.Hartley's novel, Facial Justice, in which the beautiful and the ugly are subject to mandatory facial surgery with the aim of assimilating them to the average or mediocrity in personal appearance."
John GRAY, 1992, The Moral Foundations of Market Institutions.
London : Institute of Economic Affairs.

"It is important to understand that equality for the individual as in equal opportunity or equality before the law is a classic liberal ideal, while parity for a group is at best a political and at worst a profoundly reactionary notion. Equality stresses that any qualified human being may become an engineer, plumber, prime minister or jet pilot, regardless of gender, religion or race; while parity maintains that a proportionate number from each group must achieve such positions regardless of merit or utility. The belief in parity is based to some extent on a genuine error the view that any disparity in society has to be the result of discrimination as well as the cynical politician's view that when disparity makes some people restless it should be eliminated, even at the expense of freedom and fairness."
Barbara AMIEL, 1992, 'The secret agenda of gender'.
The Spectator, 17 x.

""All things being equal...." But things never are equal. The traumas of the Sixties persuaded that my generation's egalitarianism was a sentimental error.... After endless quarrels with authority, prankish disruptiveness, and impatience with management and procedure, I now see the hierarchical as both beautiful and necessary. Efficiency liberates; egalitarianism tangles, delays, blocks, deadens.... In history the human drive is toward monarchy. Western culture has produced the best system yet for organizing and taming those king-seeking energies: representative democracy, part of our pagan heritage. But our atavistic longings for hierarchy are satisfied by another pagan institution, Hollywood, with its charismatic, imperial stars."
Camille PAGLIA, 1992, Sex, Art, and American Culture.
New York : Random House (Vintage Books).

"....historically most culture have not felt it necessary to remove the last vestiges of poverty (if that were possible) before proceeding with cultural creation. Pericles persisted with the construction of the Parthenon despite poverty and other distress in Athens.... as in Upper Egypt or at Minos, the many had to be 'exploited' by the few.... In our present age, probably through the Christian religions rather than the political Athenian-Icelandic form of democracy, and in the absence of evolutionary ethics, it is frowned upon to push ahead with creations meaningful and possible (at first) only for a few. It is as if an army were compelled, by internal prejudices, to advance single file abreast, regardless of the tactical formation for success."
R.B.CATTELL, 1994, How Good Is Your Country?
Washington, DC : Institute for the Study of Man.

"....on at least three matters-IQ, heritability, and human nature-the rules we have lived under for some decades now are evasion, euphemism, and taboo. [Today's] earthquake has been caused by the simultaneous violation of all three. The problem is especially acute for liberals who have invested virtually their entire substance in three unusual beliefs: that almost everything important about human beings originates in the environment; that environmental factors may be manipulated at will by an intelligent and highly moral elite (composed of themselves); and that the ideal condition of human life would be a certain uniformity, which they call (equivocally) "equality." By the latter term, they do not mean equality under the law, or even equality of opportunity, but an administered equality of result. ....The most significant Herrnstein-Murray thesis [in The Bell Curve] is that the physical isolation and intellectual hubris of [America's cognitive elite] are distorting its vision, leading it into utopianism, and enfolding it in a world of unreality. This is the fundamental reason for the pessimism that Herrnstein and Murray reluctantly voice."
Michael NOVAK, 1994, 'Sins of the cognitive elite.'
National Review 46, 23, 5 xii.






(iii) CAN people be equalized?


"However unequal in strength and intelligence, men become equal by covenant and right."
J.-J.ROUSSEAU, 1762, The Social Contract.

"The German people will be rewarded for the sacrifices of war with a carefree old age. In ten years Germany will be transformed beyond recognition. A nation of proletarians will have become a nation of rulers. In ten years time a German worker will look better than an English lord does today."
Robert Ley (Leader of Hitler's Labour Front), 1940.
Cited by M.Burleigh & W.Wippermann, The Racial State: Germany 1933-1945. Cambridge University Press, 1991.

"Already, I believe, the Soviet Union is feeling its way towards the restoration of many of those liberties which had to be curtailed [in earlier days of the Revolution}.... We shall find they are not merely putting back the liberties they have restricted, but establishing a new and higher kind of liberty, hitherto unknown in the world a liberty extending to every section of the people, and women equally with men."
G.D.H.COLE (British historian), 1937, Proceedings of the Second
National Congress of Peace and Friendship with the USSR.

"Louis Dumont, the great French Indologist, has argued that the refusal to accept immutable hierarchies is what sets modern man off most sharply from his traditional ancestors. Dumont has coined the phrase "homo hierarchicus" to describe the latter, while modern man can be described as "homo aequalis"."
P.L.BERGER, 1987, The Capitalist Revolution.
Aldershot, UK : Gower.

"It is the business of education in our social democracy to eliminate the influence of parents on the life chances of the young."
F.MUSGROVE, c. 1965, The Family, Education and Society.
London : Routledge & Kegan Paul.






"....[ideas of perfect equality] are really, at bottom, impracticable; and, were they not so, would be extremely pernicious to human society. Render possessions ever so equal, men's different degrees of art, care and industry will immediately break that equality. Or if you check these virtues, you reduce society to the most extreme indigence; and instead of preventing want and beggary in a few, render it unavoidable to the whole community."
David HUME, c. 1745,
Enquiries Concerning Human Understanding. Oxford, 1902 (2nd edn).

"No two men can be half an hour together, but one shall acquire an evident superiority over the other."
Doctor JOHNSON.

"Referring to a young and ardent socialist friend, the late Mr B.S.Bramwell remarked in 1944: "He thinks that boiling an egg under a socialist régime will be a quite different process from boiling one today." It is perhaps in such a spirit of high idealism that resentment may sometimes be felt at the suggestion that there exists such an entity as a social problem group. The problem family is half-believed to be the product of the capitalistic system. When this is displaced by a more advanced form of government, the problem family will disappear."
C.P.BLACKER, 1952, Eugenics: Galton and After. London : Duckworth.

"We regard education as a means of safeguarding the family from too great reliance upon the state rather than as a means for the state to take over the responsibilities of the family."
A.T.PEACOCK & J.WISEMAN, c. 1970, Education for Democrats.

"Today....in certain political groups, the term 'egalitarian' no longer refers to the liberal philosophy of equal justice and democratic organization, but to a Watsonian belief that with suitable conditioning all can be brought to the same intellectual level."
R.B.CATTELL, 1980.

"....the ideal of equality of educational opportunity should not be interpreted as uniformity of facilities, instrumental techniques, and educational aims for all children. Diversity rather than uniformity of approaches and aims would seem to be the key to making education rewarding for children of different patterns of ability."
A.R.JENSEN, 1969, 'How much can we boost IQ and scholastic
achievement?' Harvard Educational Review 39.

"We once hoped that instructional methods might be found whose outcomes correlated very little with general ability. This does not appear to be a viable hope. Outcomes from extended instruction almost always correlate with pre-tested ability unless a ceiling is artificially imposed."
L.J.CRONBACH & R.E.SNOW, 1977, Aptitudes and Instructional
Methods. New York : Irvington.

"Equality of opportunity means the achievers must be allowed to achieve."
Kenneth BAKER (British Secretary of State for Education), 1986,
reported in The Times, 18 vii.

"Whatever instructional method increases the mean level of (educational) performance also increases the variance, or individual differences. Educators now even have a name for it: the "Matthew Effect", from the familiar lines in the Gospel according to St Matthew (xii 12), "For whosoever hath, to him shall be given, and he shall have more abundance; but whosoever hath not, from him shall be taken away even that which he hath." This, essentially, is the dilemma of our egalitarian obsession in education."
A.R.JENSEN, 1986, reviewing T.M.Tomlinson & H.J.Walberg, Academic Work and Educational Excellence. Berkeley : McCutcheon.

"....improvements in the quality of education typically aim at helping students 'realize their potential', which very likely means increasing individual differences."
C.BEREITER, 1987, in S. & Celia Modgil, Arthur Jensen: Consensus
and Controversy. Brighton : Falmer.

"If all human beings in a population either are declared equal in their native strengths and rights, or else are persuaded to believe this, then the eventual realization of the hard truth of the matter that no amount of redistribution of wealth and status can ever obliterate inequality in one form or another must often take the form of covetousness mixed with resentment: that is, envy. ....The only remedy for the poisons created by egalitarianism in a society is emphatically not ever-greater dosages of political redistribution of wealth and status, for such dosages worsen the disease, producing fevers of avarice and envy. No, the sole remedy for this pathology is the introduction and diffusion of individual liberty as a sovereign value. Respect for individual liberty makes it possible for human beings to live in and be aware of differentiation a condition that, in biology, is recognized for what it is, the basis of progressive evolution, but which, in its social manifestation, receives no such recognition because of both the inequality intrinsic to all social differentiation and the ideology of equality that has spread so widely and so devastatingly in the twentieth century."
Robert NISBET, 1982, Prejudices: A Philosophical Dictionary.
Cambridge, Massachusetts : Harvard University Press.

"....Britain is a most unequal society. Currently income inequalities are certainly increasing and indications in other areas, while not always clear, show the remarkable stubbornness of inequality in Britain. This is a strong verdict for egalitarians and social reformers. The historical period that has witnessed the coming of the mass franchise, the rise of the Labour Party, the development of progressive taxation and the growth of the welfare state has not, in fact, made Britain a fairer society."
M.WICKS, 1987, 'The decade of inequality'. New Society 79.

"Socialists must challenge the view attributed to them by the Right that they want a levelling equality of outcomes at any price. Marx made it quite clear that such an absolute equality is unattainable and that people do have unequal skills and abilities."
Paul HIRST, 1987, 'Can socialism live?' New Statesman 113.

"I know of no other human aberration that has lasted so long and so tenaciously as the belief which is contradicted in the experience of every human being, that equality can be achieved...."
Bernard LEVIN, 1988, The Times, 8 ix.

"More than twenty years after they were abolished, formal ranks and gold braid are to be restored in China's armed forces. Deng Xiao Ping has repudiated the concept of a proletarian army."
BBC IV UK News, 2 vii 1988.

"Some human beings are more beautiful, or stronger, or faster, or more adept with a tennis racket or snooker cue, or more creative, or more intelligent than the majority. The free market pays them for their attributes. How on earth could it work otherwise than by assessing the demand for a particular talent and the price needed to secure it? If this is thought to be intolerable [as by critics of ex-Chancellor, Mr Nigel Lawson accepting a highly paid consultancy with Barclay's Bank] then we should abolish the free market and abide the consequences. Experience indicates that these will be unpleasant."
Brian WALDEN (broadcaster, journalist and one-time Scholar of the
Queen's College, Oxford), 1990, Sunday Times, 18 ii.

"Our system has generated a category of individuals supported by society and more interested in taking than in giving. This is the consequence of a policy of so-called egalitarianism which has....totally invaded Soviet society.... That society is divided into two parts-those who decide and distribute, and those who are commanded and who receive-constitutes one of the major brakes on the development of our society. Homo sovieticus....is both ballast and brake. One the one hand, he is opposed to reform; on the other, he constitutes the base of support for the existing system."
J.AFANASSIEV (a Soviet reformer), 1991, in M.Paquet,
Le Court Vingtième Siècle. La Tour d'Aigues.

"The ideology of equality has done some good. For example, it is not possible as a practical matter to be an identifiable racist or sexist and still hold public office. But most of its effects are bad. Given the power of contemporary news media to imprint a nation-wide image overnight, mainstream political figures have found that their allegiance to the rhetoric of equality must extend very far indeed, for a single careless remark can irretrievably damage or even end a public career. In everyday life, the ideology of equality censors and straitjackets everything from pedagogy to humor. The ideology of equality has stunted the range of moral dialogue to triviality. In daily life-conversations, the lessons taught in public schools, the kinds of screenplays or newspaper feature stories that people choose to write-the moral ascendancy of equality has made it difficult to use concepts such as virtue, excellence, beauty and-above all-truth."
Richard J. HERRNSTEIN & Charles MURRAY, 1994,
The Bell Curve. New York : The Free Press.

"Communism was not based on mass conversion, but was a faith of cadres or (in Lenin's terms) 'vanguards'. Even Mao's famous phrase about successful guerrillas moving among the peasantry like fish in water, implies the distinction between the active element (the fish) and the passive (the water). ....all ruling communist parties were, by choice and definition, minority elites."
Eric HOBSBAWM, 1994, Age of Extremes: the Short Twentieth Century, 1914-1991. London : Michael Joseph.


(iv) ARE people naturally fraternal and suited to communal life?


"For most of human history, most human cultures held that an individual human being is his collective identifications (as a member of his clan or tribe or caste, and so on); and that morality (say, dharma in the Hindu context) consists precisely in acting out the performance prescribed by these identifications."
P.L.BERGER, 1987, The Capitalist Revolution. Aldershot : Gower.

"The Church of England feels a proprietorial interest in the welfare state as one of the ways in which England could justify its claim to be a Christian country. It is more than collectivism: it is the ancien regime model of church-state fusion that the French call integrisme. ....It is this inheritance which Mrs Thatcher and her kind have dubbed the "nanny state". In so doing, they are repudiating not just the consensus policies of the 1960's but something more fundamental: the identity of the English nation as one unique and even mystical social, tribal, political and spiritual community."
Clifford LONGLEY, 1988, The Times, 11 iv.

"The Kalahari San are well known in anthropological circles for their economic and political egalitarianism. For example, the !Kung San, who experience extreme variability in the availability of food and water, have very strong social sanctions that reinforce sharing, discourage hoarding (calling someone "stingy" is a strong insult), and discourage displays of arrogance and authority. For example, "The proper behavior of a !Kung hunter who has made a big kill is to speak of it in passing and in a deprecating manner....; if an individual does not minimize or speak lightly of his own accomplishments, his friends will not hesitate to do it for him." (Cashdan, 1980)."
Leda COSMIDES & John TOOBY, 1992, in J.H.Barkow, L.Cosmides & J.Tooby, The Adapted Mind: Evolutionary Psychology and the Generation of Culture. New York : Oxford University Press.





"I don't work with collectives. I don't consult, I don't co-operate, I don't collaborate.... ....I don't think a man can hurt another, not in any important way. Neither hurt him nor help him."
'Howard Roark', a hero of Ayn RAND's The Fountainhead.
London : Cassell, 1947.


(v) SHOULD people be assisted towards greater communitarianism?


"[The French intellectuals, the Marquis de Sade and Francois Marie Fourier] both showed a strong interest in the [sexual] perversions; both fantasized a society of total sexual satisfaction and both argued against the family structure. [However] Sade's extreme individualism is contrasted to the friendly intentions of Fourier's "serial" system in which everyone, including the elderly and the rejected, would be assured of having their sexual needs met."
Elizabeth FALLAIZE, 1989, Times Higher Educational Supplement,
30 vi. (Reviewing A.Copley, Sexual Moralities in France, 1780-1980.)

"Free sexuality is an integral part of commune-society. The two-person relationship a sickness of the small-family individual does not exist. There is no possession of other humans, or sexual obligation in the commune. In a well-functioning commune there is no jealousy, since everyone has the possibility of sexual satisfaction. Private property and private possession of money are not compatible with the social and life-affirming principles of the commune. All material needs of group members are supplied from a common fund."
From the Aktion-Analytische (AA) Kommune Manifesto, Vienna, 1973.
Quoted by M.Farrar, Edinburgh Review 82, 1989.

"We must be kind....to everybody around us. We must accept and forgive there is so much to be forgiven in each one of us. If you learn to love everything, the humblest, the least, the meanest, then the meanest in you will be loved. Then we'll find the sense of universal equality, the great peace of brotherhood, a new world...., a beautiful new world...."
'Ellsworth Touhey', the villain of Ayn RAND's The Fountainhead.
London : Cassell, 1947.

"[The] plethora of novel ['positively discriminatory'] legislation [and the] rise of the welfare state [in the USA of the 1960's] had deeper significance than the overturning of the post-feudal, Lockeian settlement. More was implied than the widening of law to reach goals beyond the suppression of force and fraud. What was at the heart of the new order was an increased belief that man has great albeit not uncontrolled power over his circumstances; that the differences between men, between groups of men, between races of men, between colours of men , lie less in innate factors than in cultural patterns and opportunities which can be altered; and that, though much of men's motivation is selfish and in the sole interest of the first person singular, few of us escape an awareness that our selfish delight (our pleasure in our own powers and
potentialities) is vastly enhanced when we include within our plans and projects the enlargement of other men's capacities and performances." C.E.WYZANSKI, 1966, The New Meaning of Justice. London : Bantham Books.

"There is every reason to think that [Adam] Smith would regard Beveridge and Keynes as his intellectual heirs. Both would be dismayed at the [recent] turn away from high employment and welfare, common in all the large Western states, towards the state-supported free-booting and its incidental promotion of incivility."
Bernard NOSSITER, 1988, The Independent, 29 vi.

"The same answer holds right across the spectrum from the most muscular Leninist social engineering to the most gentle organizational designs for workers' co-operatives and communes. New social and organizational structures, and indeed the very work of emancipation, grow out of communicative interaction. They are co-operative achievements."
Michael PUSEY, 1988, Jurgen Habermas.
London : Ellis Harwood.

"The difficult task of summing up [a conference of European academics on the question 'Does the University still lead the way?'] was left to....the Groningen philosopher, Professor L.W.Nauta. Physically a tall man (the lectern had to be laboriously raised by insetting wooden blocks under its legs when it was his turn to speak), intellectually he did not shrink from his responsibility. ....Above all, Professor Nauta insisted, the university could nourish itself by linking its work more closely with the notion of citizenship, with the idea of a "common people", a theme which re-echoed a remark made by the conference's very first speaker, Professor E.H.Kossmann, now a Groningen and once a London historian. The university should not aim always at the top, but at the "middle sort". It should not be afraid of mediocrity, the aurea mediocritas so congenial to the eighteenth-century gentleman."
Peter SCOTT, 1989, Times Higher Educational Supplement, 30 vi.

"[Christianity encourages moves towards] a human community in which as much as possible is held in common."
Rev. John VINCENT (President of British Methodists), 1989, addressing the Methodist Conference in Leicester.






"The mode in which government can most surely demonstrate the sincerity by which intends the greatest good of its subjects is by doing the things which are made incumbent upon it by the helplessness of the public, in such a manner as shall tend not to increase and perpetuate but to correct that helplessness. ....Government aid....should be so given as to be as far as possible a course of education for the people in the art of accomplishing great objects by individual energy and voluntary co-operation."
John Stuart MILL, 1848.

"....love is reverence, and worship, and glory, and the upward glance. Not a bandage for dirty sores. But they don't know it. Those who speak of love most promiscuously are the ones who've never felt it. They make some sort of feeble stew out of sympathy, compassion, contempt and general indifference, and they call it love."
'Gail Wynand', a hero of Ayn RAND's The
Fountainhead. London : Cassell, 1947.

"Egalitarianism, far from strengthening the sense of fraternity, greatly diminishes it, leaving what was once a culture a mere mass of disconnected atoms. When family, community, parish, social class, school, and job cease to be evocative to supply incentive and to kindle confidence nothing else but the irrational, the antisocial, and the occult are left to turn to. Fatalism feeds on the carrion of the social organism."
Robert NISBET, 1982, Prejudices.
Cambridge, Mass. : Harvard University Press.

"[Sartre's] liking for 'the people' was generalized and theoretical."
W.HAYMAN, 1986, Writing Against: A Biography of Sartre.
London : Weidenfeld & Nicholson.

"The "new liberals" at the end of the nineteenth century united in announcing that people who were insecurely employed, underpaid, ill-fed, ill-housed, unhealthy and illiterate were no better than slaves; they might have the vote, and they might be reasonably secure against the violence and physical oppression of the powerfulness, but, socially, they were still disfranchised. What was wanted was not just the vote, but social and economic citizenship.
This was not a defence of the "nanny state". The new liberals had a high regard for individuality and private initiative, and no liking for the dragooned society that Bismarck was building in Prussia. They wanted an "unservile state" which took on only those welfare functions which would liberate the citizenry into citizenship."
Alan RYAN, 1988, The Times, 25 x.

"The idea that human happiness can be furthered by building a better society lies at the ideological basis of present-day welfare states. Yet, since antiquity, philosophers have questioned that assumption, claiming that happiness is relative therefore better living standards would not lessen dissatisfaction with life. Recently, several psychologists have [offered corroboration for] that view....empirically by presenting several remarkable examples (e.g. high satisfaction among the malformed)."
R.VEENHOVEN (Erasmus University, Rotterdam), 1988, to 24th
International Congress of Psychology, Sydney (S263).

"In the social field, the Commission [of the European Community] has long had under consideration an extremely extensive range of issues; currently it is involved in the preparation and promotion of over eighty measures. These include measures to eliminate poverty and improve standards of housing for the poorer sections of the community; to improve health and safety standards at work, and to extend the rights of workers through minimum wage requirements, job-enrichment schemes, protection of migrant, young, elderly, disabled and women workers; to bring about an improvement in communications, access to information and participation in management decision-making, and to extend the right to education and training. ....The Social Affairs Directorate of the Commission wishes to promote its own view of industrial relations based upon expanding the membership and the role and powe4r of the trade unions through the extension of collective bargaining and social dialogue between the "social partners" in all sectors of employment and at all levels in the Community.
The net effect of these programmes, if carried out, would be to set back many of the gains that have been made in British industrial relations during the past ten years. They would resurrect on a massive scale the discredited forms of corporatism of previous decades."
Professor Emeritus B.C.ROBERTS, 1989, Letter to The Times, 13 v.

"The [European] trend towards a 'new consensus' in the fields of privatization, public spending and the general role of government has inextricably been towards the conservative / free market approach. However, this has by no means taken place purely under governments of the Right. Such is the case, for example, in France, where President Mitterand's conversion to the benefits of private enterprise has meant a programme of deregulation and privatization on a scale of which the staunchest free-marketeer would be proud. This phenomenon has occurred in other southern European countries too, such as Spain under Philipe Gonzales since 1982 and in Italy where Craxi's coalition of Socialists and Christian Democrats broke up large state conglomerates and successfully sold companies like Alfa Romeo to the private sector."
Adam BREEZE, 1989, European Freedom Review 1, 3.

"[There is] a long-term tendency of democratic governments to expand state spending as a proportion of national income."
Robert MILLER, 1989, An End of Unemployment.
Hartfield, Sussex : Atlas Economic Research Foundation (UK).

"The opposition between a "possessive" society and a "sense of community" is [not absolute]. An individual house-owner, satisfied with the continuity of possession and occupied with the improvement of his or her environment and the care of a family, is the strongest foundation on which society can be based."
Anthony HARTLEY, 1990, 'The idea of community', Encounter 74, vi.

"....the concept of morality's producing the greatest good for the
greatest number is consistent only when the interests of the
individuals are very similar. This has probably frequently been the
case with small homogeneous groups in competition with other groups;
it is less obviously so when groups are large and heterogeneous."
Timothy GOLDSMITH (Andrew Mellon Professor of
Biology at Yale), 1991, The Biological Roots of Human Nature,
Oxford University Press.

"[In the seventeenth century] Dorchester became the most Puritan town in the West Country. It outdid all its rivals in its donations to Protestant causes in England and abroad, while energetically pursuing miscreants within its own walls and operating a sophisticated system of charity and poor relief.... By 1650, something like a complete system of welfare was in operation, with apothecaries able to claim back from town funds the money they had spent on dispensing free medicine to the poor.... However, the Church was not only cohesive but coercive, and the degree of obligation it imposed would not be tolerated today."
Sebastian FAULKS, 1992, Independent on Sunday, 24 v.
(Reviewing D.Underdown's Fire from Heaven.)

"The last word in social progress today is-in all societies governed by dogmatic 'revealed' religions (Christianity, Islam, Buddhism)-toward the welfare state. That is, the imposition of equality and the elimination of natural selection."
R.B.CATTELL, 1994, How Good Is Your Country?
Washington, DC : Institute for the Study of Man.

"....much of Political Correctness originated in idealistic impulses, in solicitousness toward the underdog, the victim. These sentiments are congenial to American cultural values and traditions. But the attachment to victimhood also feeds on the more diffuse adversarial radical social-critical impulses that find vindication in the existence of victim groups, and the more the better. New groups of victims continue to be found at a time when one would have thought that all varieties of victimhood have been discovered and claimed. "Middle agism" is new and likely to be a popular category: [According to Gulette (1995, Dissent)] "Age discrimination at mid-life....[which] affects more groups and classes than anyone has imagined....viciously curtails the American dream and embitters our image of the life course. It is an urgent issue."
Paul HOLLANDER, 1996, 'Reassessing the adversary culture.' Academic Questions 9.

"Today we are witnessing a serious moral crisis. The future has been sacrificed on the altar of the welfare state. The moral decay of nations can be read in their debt ratios. Most parents would be ashamed to leave their children an inheritance of debts. But this is exactly what governments in Western Europe and North America have been doing over the past two decades. The average government debt of the seven biggest industrial nations in the world has risen to 75 per cent of annual Gross Domestic Product, the sum of what a nation produces in one year. A public debt of 75 per cent of GDP means quite simply that every citizen will have to work for free for the state during nine months in order to allow the state to pay back the debts of the past."
Alexandra COLEN (Belgian MP), 1996, Right Now, No. 11
London WC1N 3XX : BCM Right.







(vi) CAN people be made more fraternal, communautaire, etc?


"Intellectuals do aspire to Enlightenment ideals progress, reason, scientific truth, humanistic values. But they also desire at least some of the traditional virtues that modernity has undermined collective solidarity, transcendence of individualism, and, last but not least, moral certainty and ultimate meaning. Marxism has plausibly offered this curious melange of modern and counter-modern appeals from its inception. It should not surprise that intellectuals have been particularly prone to go for it."
P.L.BERGER, 1987, The Capitalist Revolution. Aldershot : Gower.







"The most recent study of American communes [shows that], although the original ideology may vary widely, [there is unanimously] high regard for only one value: loving. ....Half of the communes [sampled] had disintegrated in little over two years, and almost half of those remaining were gone after four years."
R.FINE, 1985, The Meaning of Love in Human Experience.
New York : Wiley DePublisher.

"Although there is an insatiable appetite for films about lost tribes who live in harmony with their environment, nobody actually believes that they present a working model for ourselves."
Bill NICHOLSON (author of BBC drama 'Shadowlands'), 1986,
The Times, 27 ix.

"....if you help someone else and pay for it yourself, then that's compassion; but if you help someone else and force a third party to foot the bill, then the sincerity of your compassion is open to question. A free society can become a truly compassionate society if its members have the right sentiments, but neither the state nor any other body can produce compassion by coercion."
Rodney MOORE, c. 1986, Political Notes 14.
(Published by Libertarian Alliance, London)

"[Early socialists] were uplifted by tremendous hopes of ideal societies just round the corner. They delighted in thoughts of communes and Owenite towns; and later of model co-operatives, kibbutzim, public ownership, national investment boards, ideal council housing, 'waving cornfields and ballet in the evening'. All that has now vanished, with the discrediting alike of Soviet and Chinese communism on the one hand and of social democratic nationalisation on the other. No one now believes in these utopias, and communal experiments are at best a minority taste. So all that remains is the discontent with existing society, which has filled the vacuum left by the collapse of idealistic solutions and now dominates the minds of the middle-class Left almost to the exclusion of anything else. They have developed a positive taste for misery-mongering and expect the rest of us to share it."
Paul JOHNSON, 1986, The Spectator, 4 vii.

"Many say that people living in a Welfare State are less aggressive and less inventive. On the contrary, they are highly aggressive and most inventive but only in pursuit of their rights as guaranteed by the State."
Branko BOKUN, 1986, Humour Therapy. London : Vita Books.

"When government does hold the reins, the results belie all the claims made for Japanese business skills. Just before its break-up and privatization by the Nakasone administration, the Japan National Railways sported long-term debts of Y23,000,000,000,000 - more than the debts of Mexico and Argentina put together."
Peter TASKER, 1987, Inside Japan. London : Sidgwick & Jackson.

"From Stalin's Russia to Ethiopia, state socialism has been an eco-disaster."
Roy PORTER, 1989, Nature 340.
(Reviewing H.Hobhouse, Forces of Change.)

"One of the most striking aspects of Congolese domestic politics since 1963 is the divergence between ideological rhetoric and practice. Congolese leaders have constantly exhorted their countrymen to become selflessly devoted to the achievement of revolutionary goals, yet little seems to have been achieved. At a [Congolese Labour Party (Marxist-Leninist) Congress in 1974], Marien Ngouabi [who seized power in 1968, and was Congolese President till his assassination in 1977] raised the question 'Where lies the reason for the obvious separation between revolutionary theory and practice in our country?' He apportioned the blame equally among the masses, party cadres and government bureaucrats."
Mark V. KAUPPI, 1990, Problems of Communism 39, iii/iv.

"The basic, simple-minded thesis of the New (and Old) Left was always that Capitalism means War. The idea that other factors whether nationalistic or tribal arrogance, age-old predatory greed, or sheer human bloody-mindedness could be part of the causal equation, and could indeed prevail as powerfully in a post-Capitalist world, among socialist or communist powers, was too complicated and just too disagreeable to be registered."
Melvin J. LASKY, 1988, Encounter 71, xi.

"The Swedish system, introduced by social democrats in the 1930's, built on a need for trygghet, which, roughly translated, means a feeling of security, as if one were being held in one's mother's arms. Their Utopian vision was for the creation of a folk hemmet a people's home where workers would be highly taxed, but be guaranteed employment and universal welfare, such as free education and health care, pensions and holidays.
....With people now waiting years for operations and with schools short of books and qualified teachers, Swedes are wondering where all the money goes. On the streets of Stockholm, down-and-outs have appeared for the first time."
Richard ELLIS, 1990, Sunday Times, 25 ii.


(vii) The interdependence of social equality, communal welfare and national cohesion, order, discipline and xenophobia.


"Nationalism without Socialism-without a reorganization of society on the basis of a broader and more developed form of that common property which underlay the social structure of Ancient Erin-is only national recreancy."
James CONNOLLY (founder of the Irish Republican Socialist Party), 1897, in the Republican publication, Van Vocht.

"The state is a family, and I am your father."
STALIN, quoted by R.Sennett, 1980, Authority. New York : Knopf.

"[In Czechoslovakia, after 1948] we were organized in political and interest groups espousing Communist ideology from childhood on. Ideologically, group membership was valued above any other type of relationship, and the illusion was maintained that all persons were equal. Everyone was expected to identify with the socialistic ideal and work for it. In this insidious process of manipulation we were to lose our individuality and become submerged in the 'omnipotent group'. Opposition or deviation was punished by execution, imprisonment, or social ostracism and economic deprivation. ....Stalin was raised to the position of a semi-religious leader, all-knowing, a symbolic father of his people. He was often called "our light, our good father, our sun, our saviour".... Freud sees the ego as divided into ego and ego-ideal which encompasses self-observation, moral conscience and censorship (later this concept was developed in his theory of the superego). For many people, this differentiation within the ego is incomplete and poorly developed, which opens up a way for regression to childlike feelings and actions. This tendency is magnified in groups by way of emotional identification with others and by the tie to the leader, who becomes a symbolic father. ....In the primary group, the individual, according to Freud, gives up his ideal and substitutes for it the group ideal as embodied in the leader. The leader is idealized and members of the group have to be equal; they have to give up their rivalry in order to be loved equally by the leader. They are ruled by the leader, who is superior to them.
I found that the psychology of the totalitarian system reflected many of the regressive dynamics pointed out by Freud as typical for primary groups.... The Communist party leaders functioned as would-be semi-religious leaders, and also as would-be commanders in the army. Ideologically based groups proliferated and people were officially valued primarily as members of the group. Outsiders were ostracized and punished as heretics or traitors. Equalization was further promoted by state ownership of formerly private property, which enforced the illusion that all got the same share."
Olga MARLIN (Brooklyn Institute for Psychotherapy and
Psychoanalysis), 1991, in J.Offerman-Zuckerberg, Politics
and Psychology. New York : Plenum.

"In a country where the sole employer is the State, opposition means death by slow starvation. The old principle, 'Who does not work shall not eat', has been replaced by a new one, 'Who does not obey shall not eat'."
Leon TROTSKY, quoted by M.Ivens & R.Dunstan, Bachman's Book of
Freedom Quotations. London : Bachman & Turner, 1978.

"Merciless, irrational ambition has borrowed the language of brotherly love."
George SANTAYANA, My Host, the World.

"There can be no doubt that Socialism is inseparably interwoven with totalitarianism and the abject worship of the State. ....A free Parliament look at that a free Parliament is odious to the Socialist doctrinaire."
Winston CHURCHILL, 1945.

"The 'common good' of a collective a race, a class, a state was the claim and justification of every tyranny ever established over men. ....Actors change, but the course of the tragedy remains the same. A humanitarian who starts with declarations of love for mankind ends with a sea of blood. It goes on and will go on so long as men believe that an action is good if it is unselfish. That permits the altruist to act and forces his victims to bear it. The leaders of collectivist movements ask nothing for themselves. But observe the results."
'Howard Roark' in Ayn RAND's The Fountainhead.
London : Cassell, 1947.

"A government that is big enough to give you all you want is big enough to take it away."
Barry GOLDWATER (U.S. Presidential candidate, 1964), quoted by
M.Ivens & R.Dunstan, Bachman's Book of Freedom Quotations.
London : Bachman & Turner, 1978.

"Chinese patriotism is a potent and often stirring force; but, being so emotional, it can leave its adherents terribly vulnerable to political manipulation. Mao Tse Tung appealed to the patriotism of overseas Chinese, and tens of thousands of 'compatriots' returned from South-East Asia to help build a New China. Once the Cultural Revolution got going {in the late-1960's}, the erstwhile patriots became class enemies, tainted by their bourgeois foreign roots. And so they were robbed of their money, tortured, or killed."
Ian BURUMA, 1989, The Spectator, 17 vi.

"Communism believed that you can compel people to love one another and that is a prescription for GULAG. We might find it appalling that free societies of the Western type are based on greed as the main human motivation, but this is still better than compulsory love, for that can only end in a society of prisoners and prison warders.
Leszek KOLAKOWSKI, 1980. Quoted by G.Urban, Encounter 56, 1981.

"[I] learned to distrust utopianism, not because one does not long for the world where the wolf will lie down with the lamb, but because one distrusts the means that will be used to build it."
Alan PATON, 1981, Towards the Mountain. Oxford University Press.

"The visitor to the 'socialist' countries comes away with the overwhelming impression of having travelled backwards in time. The smell of coal fires, the sight of trams and steam trains, the decaying, uncared-for buildings, the empty shops, the queues of people in drab, imperfect clothing, the sense of an overbearing public
concern with gathers people up and robs them of initiative: all this returns the visitor to a distant experience, a confused memory of ration books and Pathe newsreels."
Roger SCRUTON, 1983, The Times, 10 v.

"In a notable maiden speech in the House of Lords, the outstanding international economist, Lord [Peter] Bauer proclaimed that the 'fundamental issue' of the welfare state was moral rather than economic, not least because it spreads dependency by reducing adults to the status of children who are left with pocket money rather than being trusted with responsibility for managing their own incomes."
Ralph HARRIS, 1984, in D.Anderson, The Kindness that Kills.
London : Society for the Propagation of Christian Knowledge.

"....it is historically true that those who have been most determined to pursue strong external policies, militarily and diplomatically, have often been most concerned to secure social cohesion at home."
Geoffrey SMITH, 1986, The Times, 18 ix.

"....though authoritarians commonly appear to lack sympathy for quite a wide variety of minority groups, they nevertheless possess quite an idyllic conception of how pleasing (and even of how equal) society would be if only it were composed of people of their own type."
C.R.BRAND 1986, in S. & Celia Modgil, Hans Eysenck:
Consensus and Controversy. Brighton : Falmer.

"Man is said to be a "social animal", and each individual is merely the reflector of the cultural resources of his society. It sounds charming; but ideas like this often have surprising consequences. One consequence of this doctrine is that anyone who wants to leave such a society is obviously taking with him the skills and sensibilities with which the society has equipped him. Emigration, in other words, is theft. And this has long been official Soviet doctrine."
Kenneth MINOGUE, 1988, Encounter 71, xi.

"One by one, [the illusions of Eldridge Cleaver, the exiled American 'Black Panther', collapsed]. In Castro's Cuba, he found a racism as bad as that he had complained about in the United States; even worse, since back home he at least had the freedom to complain. He began to feel that perhaps bourgeois liberties were not a farce, but the very real basis for extending democratic rights. The "Left-Fascist" dictatorships of North Africa disillusioned him completely.... [Returning to the USA, agreeing to face trial, his new book, Soul on Fire, 1978] referred to his latter-day sense of burning mission. He reconsidered the importance of constitutional liberties, recognised the collective inhumanity of totalitarian forms of government, and made a return to religious values the basis of personal morality in a free society."
Melvin J. LASKY, c.1990, Encounter 71, xi.

"People in the English-speaking countries and in northern Europe took it for granted that socialism was about equality and social justice. But this is exactly the brand of 'reformist' democratic socialism that Bolshevism had rejected and defeated. Eastern socialism was about community and solidarity. Its aim was never to achieve social justice (this was always dismissed by communists as sentimental petit-bourgeois nonsense) but to obliterate diversity, pluralism and individualism. The notion of the 'classless' society', inherited from French utopian socialists via Marx, can be translated as the unity of the race everywhere in eastern Europe and the Third World. If you look at the dominant but by no means completely victorious political ideologies current in eastern Europe, you can see that they are still about community and solidarity, expressed most frequently by a sense of outraged ethnic dignity."
G.M.TAMAS, 1992, The Spectator, 1 viii.

"Anti-Social Policy provides a unique examination of the forms of state intervention into poverty and deviance by exploring the ways in which 'welfare' has been employed to advance disciplinary modes of social control. Drawing on a history of state interventions into the problem of poverty, Peter Squires charts the emergence of a disciplinary 'welfare state' and the punitive and coercive forms of social policy frequently deployed by ideologies of 'welfare'."
Publisher's announcement for P.Squires, Anti-Social Policy: Welfare, Ideology and the Disciplinary State. Brighton : Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1990.

"Idealists in politics are addicted to mad comparisons. When the Stalinist dictatorships of Eastern Europe were at their height during the period after the Second World War, they were held up by many as a model of the path that we [in the West] should follow. This role then passed to China at a time when its own rulers subsequently admitted millions of its citizens were being murdered by its government. When one of the most repressively Stalinist regimes in the world was that of North Vietnam, the name of its dictator became a rallying cry for much of the Left in the West, who used to march through the streets of our cities chanting "Ho! Ho! Ho Chi Minh!" Many of these same people held Fidel Castro up as a romantic hero throughout the period of his devastation of Cuba, when the economy lay in ruins and the prisons were bulging with his critics."
Bryan MAGEE, 1990, Weekend Guardian, 5/6 v.

"....The modern Leviathan essentially presents itself as having a legitimate claim on virtually all public activity within its realm, including religion.... With the modern state's arrogation of authority over all dimensions of life, including religion, either directly or indirectly, it is not surprising that popular expectations of the state have risen correspondingly. In the late modern era, states' failure to live up to popular expectations often engenders a renewal of nationalism or ethnic sentiment...."
J.WARHOLA, 1991, International Journal of Politics, Culture & Society 5.

"In certain respects-such as in the thinking which led to the sale of council houses to their tenants-Mrs Thatcher's debt to the Sixties was obvious....Sixties liberalism permeated Thatcherism....Mrs Thatcher stood for the individual against the state-what could be more in tune with the Sixties?....Well, things look very different now. There is a swell of opinion running against individualism....Labour talks of enforceable contracts between parents and schools, with parents (presumably) held accountable.... .....If the Sixties are really at last coming to an end, then lace curtains are back. Communitarianism means being aware of the neighbours. This has its good side: concern. It has its bad side: concern. If we are willing to take responsibility for our neighbours when they are or seem to be in need, they will also take responsibility for us when they don't approve of what we are doing. If individualism can turn callous and selfish, then communitarianism can be censorious and bullying. There is no tyranny so nasty for those on the receiving end as the tyranny of the majority."
Allan MASSIE, 1996, 'Is Sixties' liberalism finally on the way out?'
The Scotsman, 30 x 1996.





(viii) Can capitalism provide sufficiently for human dignity and well-being?


"The great advantage of the market is that it is able to use the strength of self-interest to offset the weakness and partiality of benevolence, so that those who are unknown, unattractive or unimportant will have their wants served."
Adam SMITH, quoted in M.Ivens & R.Dunstan, Bachman's Book of
Freedom Quotations. London : Bachman & Turner, 1978.

"[Adam] Smith's political economy was a war against privilege and monopoly, as all honest political economy is, whether it be privilege on the part of the landlords or masters, peasants or workmen."
Professor James E. Thorold ROGERS, 1869,
Historical Gleanings. London : Macmillan.

"....the laws of society are of such a nature that minor evils will rectify themselves; ....there is in society, as in every other part of creation, that beautiful self-adjusting principle which will keep everything in equilibrium; and....as the interference of man in external nature destroys that equilibrium, and produces greater evils than those to be remedied, so the attempt to regulate all the actions of a people by legislation will entail little else but misery and confusion."
Herbert SPENCER, 1842, Nonconformist, 15 vi.

"The successful entrepreneur....is led by the invisible hand of the market to bring the succour of modern conveniences to the poorest homes he does not even know."
F.A.HAYEK, c. 1947, Law, Legislation and Liberty.
London : Routledge & Kegan Paul.

"....the market economy has been responsible for the transformation of the Western world from widespread poverty and degradation to an unprecedented spreading of prosperity. Similarly, in the contemporary world, the market economies of the West have been able to create wealth more efficiently and have secured for the poorest of their people a far higher level of per capita consumption than have the state-owned and state-planned economies of the socialist block. In the Third World today, the remarkable success of market-oriented economies such as Taiwan, South Korea, and Singapore in East Asia, and, to a lesser but significant extent, the Ivory Coast, Kenya and Malawi in Africa, in harnessing the inventiveness and entrepreneurial resources of their peoples is in marked contrast to the disappointing economic performance of countries that have relied on state planning and regulation, such as India,
Tanzania and Mozambique." Brian GRIFFITHS, 1984, in D.Anderson, The Kindness that Kills. London : Society for the Propagation of Christian Knowledge.

"Income distribution is a function of modern economic growth, and is affected to only a limited degree by the institutional arrangements and policies of a society. Capitalism, then, does not come out very well in the perspective of [the value placed on equality]. But neither does socialism, or any presently existent or plausibly imagined form of societal organization. Those for whom equality is a paramount value would thus be well advised to cease blaming or defending either of the two major contemporary systems [viz. capitalism and socialism] for the existing state of affairs. Their concern would logically lead to an overall critique of modernity and to the practical question as to how modernization could be reversed or at least modified." P.L.BERGER, 1987, The Capitalist Revolution. Aldershot : Gower.

"....twenty-six years after General Ne Win imposed socialism on his unfortunate people [in Burma], a nation that was once the world's largest exporter of rice now has to import it."
Martin IVENS, 1988, Sunday Telegraph, 11 ix.

"The record for nationalized industries even with the limited moves towards industrial democracy in the 1970's does not suggest that that form of common ownership can ever provide acceptable forms of democratic participation. It is time to move on."
Oonagh MacDONALD, 1988, New Socialist, x/xi.

"The [various economic] systems of distribution are not all equal in their power to stimulate the production of goods and services. Those which allow inequality of outcome [in wages, etc.] seem to cause such an enlargement of the cake that, even unequally shared, the lowest on the inequality ladder are higher than they could be under a strict equal-shares system."
V.SEREBRIAKOFF, 1988, A Guide to Intelligence and Personality
Testing. Carnforth, Lancashire : Parthenon.

"Controversy is raging....over whether or not millionaires should be allowed to join the Communist Party [of China]. ....Nine years ago Mr Liu Zigui, aged 34, took his savings and all the money he could borrow and obtained on contract an old truck from a local work unit. ....Now his private transport business is apparently flourishing [having assets of £870,000, 49 vehicles, and a staff of 240]. ....hundreds of party members have written....in support of Mr Liu's application. One wrote in praise of the "vanguard role of the millionaire who leads his villagers to fight for common prosperity"."
Catherine SAMPSON, 1988, The Times, 17 ix.

"In Africa, at least, all the socialist economies did badly [after independence]. (Many economies which were not avowedly socialist also did badly, but for much the same reasons as the socialist countries.)
The few economies that did relatively well [Malawi, Ivory Coast and Kenya] gave much more freedom to market forces. ....There is now....a much greater consensus in both East and West and indeed in North and South that the informational and allocative efficiency of markets and the price system is an essential ingredient of economic and social progress."
Leo KATZEN, 1989, 'Africa's man-made crisis'. Encounter 72, v.

"Now even "revolutionary" Burkina Faso (formerly Upper Volta) has embarked on a course of "rectification", restoring to the private sector the disastrous state farms that had ruined agricultural production, as they do everywhere."
Jean-Francois REVEL, 1989, Encounter 73.

"....the remarkable post-war growth of the advanced capitalist countries has thrown the failure of the centralised economies into sharp relief."
Martin JACQUES (Editor of Marxism Today), 1989,
Sunday Times (News Focus), 11 vi.

"[Socialism] is an empty word now an equality of paupers."
Tatyana Tolstaya (grand-daughter of Tolstoy), 1989,
interviewed by A.Wilson, The Observer (Review), 21 v.

"For one family in four in Britain today, government welfare payments provide the main source of income."
Programme presenter, BBC IV UK, 15 viii 1995, 0905hrs.


"The market delivers rough justice. The welfare state takes the roughness out of the justice."
George WILL, 1984, Public Opinion 7.

"....the argument about minimising the role of the state in large areas of national life [in the UK] has most definitely not been won. While everyone is happy (in private if not in public) when his taxes are reduced, everyone complains at cuts in spending. The idea that people should take over responsibility for their own lives wherever possible is still considered reprehensible."
Editorial, 1988, The Spectator, 10 ix.

"When it comes to the matter of whether capitalism is "winning", trust the evidence of your senses. Look at the miserable shacks in the compamentos on the edge of Santiago. Or at the Favela Rocinha, sprawling up a hillside not 200 yards from the high-rise residential fortress of Rio de Janeiro's middle class. Or at the bodies bundled in niches on New York's streets and lodged amid the bushes under the Los Angeles freeways. This is victory?"
Alexander COCKBURN, 1989, 'Scenes from the inferno'.
New Statesman & Society, 12 v.


"The critics of capitalism are right when they reject policies that accept hunger today while promising affluence tomorrow.... The critics of socialism are right when they reject policies that accept terror today on the promise of a humane order tomorrow."
Peter BERGER, 1974, Pyramids of Sacrifice: Political Ethics and
Social Change. London : Allen Lane.

"To make the market economy into the cornerstone of politics is indeed to simplify human existence beyond recognition. But to ignore its true merit as the most widespread and immediate experience of human peace [via multiple agreement between strangers] is to take a step in a dangerous direction."
Roger SCRUTON, 1983, The Times, 26 iv.

"Socialists have been able to persuade themselves and many others that a free economy based on profit embodies and encourages self-interest, which they see as selfish and bad, whereas they claim Socialism is based on, and nurtures, altruism and selflessness. This is baseless nonsense in theory and practice.... For man is a social creature, born into family, clan, community, nation, brought up in mutual dependence. The founders of our religion made this a cornerstone of morality. The admonitions 'Love thy neighbour as thyself' and 'Do as you would be done by' express this. They do not denigrate self, or elevate love of others above it. On the contrary, they see concern for self and responsibility for self as something to be expected, and ask only that this be extended to others."
Margaret THATCHER, cited by Penny Junor, Margaret Thatcher.
London : Sidgwick & Jackson, 1984.

"[Kjell-Oloff Feldt, Sweden's Social Democratic Finance Minister in the 1980's, argued in 1989 that] 'the market economy's capacity for flexibility, expansion and therefore economic growth has played a much bigger role in the abolition of poverty and the end of the "exploitation of the working class" than any political interference in the market's redistributive system'. 'What shall we do with capitalism?' Mr Feldt answered that the Party should try to define it as compatible with socialist goals. ....He remains as committed as his Party opponents to the maintenance of full employment and the protection of the old, the sick and the needy. Yet he also understands [the Party's need for] a wide popular appeal, an appeal that must stretch far beyond the shrinking manual working class and those who work in the public services."
Robert TAYLOR, 1989, 'Market socialism'. New Socialist, vi/vii.

"Market socialism is the way to go. The inability of central planning to cope with the information requirements of modern economies has been graphically demonstrated in Eastern Europe. Indeed, anarchy is a better description of some centrally-planned economies than of market ones. Used appropriately, markets can be more efficient, more democratic, more free, and even more egalitarian than command systems."
Julian LE GRAND, 1989, New Socialist, vi/vii.





Epilogue


"Where is Socialism today? Only in Cuba or in Africa are there still to be heard the echoes of those declamatory dogmas that once echoed round the world. Even the milder versions of Western Europe are on the way out. There is nothing particularly socialist about President Mitterand and his administration [in France]. In Austria a socialist Chancellor is supervising non-socialist policies. In Sweden, the socialist model which was once held up for admiration has collapsed."
Anthony HARTLEY, 1990, Encounter 74, v.

"....the feasibility of modern life has been grounded from the start on the assumption that the social world can be moulded by design.... The first crisis was associated with the collapse of the sanguine and (for us, baptised as we have been by world war and totalitarian fire) naive liberal project, and the slow yet terminal agony of the liberal utopia. Today we are in crisis again; once more we doubt that the social world can be understood, let alone kneaded into better shape; this time, though, mindful of the great reshaping experiments of a Stalin or a Hitler, we also doubt whether attempts to remake the world by design would yield anything able to redeem the disaster that must surely follow."
Zygmunt BAUMAN, 1995,
Times Higher Educational Supplement, 1175, 12 v.

"The coming of Christianity plunged logic and classical philosophy into centuries of near-oblivion and clashed with the established and ancient European belief in the inequality of men. Spreading first among the slaves and the lowest classes of the Roman empire, Christianity came to teach that all men were [as "children of God"] equal in the eyes a universal Creator.... Faith in the church's interpretation of supposedly prophetic revelation became more important than scientific or philosophical enquiry, and to question the church's view of reality came to be perceived as sinful. As Max Weber expressed it, Christianity carried the anti-intellectualism of the Middle Eastern prophets to its extreme. It represented a
"non-intellectual's proclamation directed to non-intellectuals ('Economy and Society', Volume 1, University of California Press 1978, p. 631).... The "divine right" [of kings] to rule with the church's approval was a very different concept from the "divine" powers that were associated with descent from a long line of proven achievers. Consequently the idea of genetic disparity came to be subtly disparaged by the church; and the success of the church in this respect was such that under Christian tutelage those who tilled the fields began to ask the rhetorical question: When Adam delved and Eve span, who was then the Gentleman?.... ....Pre-Christian Europe had believed that its best and brightest were superior beings descended from the gods; but the Christian ethic portrayed all peoples, nations and races as equal before God. The lower their level of achievement, the more deserving they were of sympathy and assistance. ....Beginning as a Judaic heresy influenced by the communistic ideals of the Essenes, early Christianity attracted converts by attacking the idea of pride of birth and human inequality, and portraying all peoples of all races as equally low before God. ....Today the doctrine of egalitarianism dominates the Western nations with a quasi-religious mystique rooted in the notion of biological uniformity, but the resultant spirit of universal altruism is primarily restricted to the culture of the Western world."
Roger PEARSON, 1996, Humanity and Heredity: Race, Eugenics and Modern Science. Washington : Scott-Townsend.

FINIS
{Compiled by C.R.Brand, Department of Psychology, University of Edinburgh.}

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