Questions of Power (22): Iniquity and Inequality.

“Let none resemble another; let each resemble the highest! How can that happen? Let each be all complete in itself.” — Friedrich Schiller

The hierarchical order of feudal Europe was toppled by detonating the tiers of privilege — that is, the privilegium or “private law” — accorded to the different parts or stations of the Old Regime. Even if the fuse had been lit by the flares of far more radical egalitarian spirits — Cathars, Hussites, Levelers, indigenous Americans, a handful of really-hard-going lumières and commonwealthmen — I think of this primarily legal egalitarianism as the most lasting and universally agreed-upon notion of “equality” to come out of the birth-pangs of modern Europe. Other meanings had mixed success. This was probably because they embarrassed the forms of hierarchy still consistent with this bold, new, modern European society. When philosophers described an innate moral equality that accorded respect and reason to every individual, this was great news so long as it extended to gentlemen and not to women, workers, servants, paupers, or the vast majority of humanity of non-European descent. Likewise, any broader cultural or ideological recognition of equality (whether of people or peoples) guaranteed only an “equality among equals” if it wasn’t backed up with the corresponding power to demand that recognition. And anywhere that equality got in the way of the newly-gathering hierarchies of accumulation, it was shouted down by the demands of property, inverted as an injustice, and willfully confused for static or mathematical equality. To this day, even some of its defenders will backslide into static categories: that equality, while not “identicality,” is a rough “similarity” or a comparability of some common, god-given “qualities” or inalienable “possessions” — though usually tautological ones like human dignity or moral worth (again, aren’t we dignified or worthy only to the degree that we can feasibly demand equality?). The oft-heard rationale is that, on some fundamental level, we are samer than we are different, and herein lies the basis for social “unity.” As Bill Clinton proclaimed to the primer-inter-pares Yale graduating class: “My basic belief is the only way that you can make the most of the world that lies before you is to believe that, as interesting and fascinating and profoundly important as all of our diversities are, our common humanity matters more.”

Even if you think this math checks out (and I don’t), it suggests that egalitarianism will always depend on some degree of smoothing over or leveling down, a sapping of color, character, or capacities. It doesn’t help that so many 20th-century utopian projects visualized egalitarianism as uniformity, as grids, blocks, and products scrubbed of difference. “Champions of individual liberty” could then latch onto images of featureless grey apartment-barracks and human masses packaged in standard-issue tunic suits, and present them as proof that social equality can only be achieved through top-down normalization. Social inequality in the meaningful sense, though, is not about similarities and differences. It’s not a static relation. It’s a power differential, and not a differential between our individual capacities — between our talents, passions, and efforts — as some try to pretend. It’s the power differential between stifling, accreted forms of institutionalized power, under which our individual capacities actually dull and fall into disuse. The best egalitarian projects question not only the intensity of these differentials and the relative powers involved, but how they came to be and the results that are sure to follow — both their causes and effects within the greater social nexus of powers.

I’ll leave the question of causes for later and focus for now on the social and moral effects. The problem with stark inequalities is not merely that they’re “unfair,” or that they create unnecessary suffering in the form of poverty or deprivation (though you’d like to think this would be enough of a reason for any decent society). As I see it, the bigger problem with severe power imbalances is that they simultaneously create the two conditions in which social evils truly thrive: impunity among the overpowerful and desperation among the powerless. When it comes to heeding any moral scruples, norms, or constraints whatsoever, the powerful no longer must, and the powerless no longer can. Put this way, you have to play stupid not to see it. What could any “moral defense” of these asymmetries possibly mean? Impunity and desperation, each in their own way, raze the preconditions of ethics or morality, and atrophy the constitution of what on the individual level we think of as the “conscience.” Stark inequality produces bitter iniquity, nearly by deduction or definition. This flips Nietzsche’s Genealogy of Morals on its head. He was absolutely right-on about how moralities emerge from or in tandem with power relations, yet totally off the mark in an equally important respect: we have to say that stark power imbalances actually create “master” and “slave” immoralities. They define a broken social whole that can’t help but overproduce insufferable behavior in two complementary flavors, neither of them “good,” “noble,” “vital,” or “life-affirming.” So rather than invoking morals or ethics to defend or redefine egalitarianism, the move is to invoke egalitarianism to defend or redefine morals and ethics.

Moral sense and ethical agency depend on weighing the consequences of our actions: on how they figure into the wider stream of causes and effects, and more generally, how we understand social causation altogether. For instance, the rude readjustment of Hannah Arendt’s Eichmann in Jerusalem — of “the banality of evil” — lies in its account of the social causation of great evils, of how they arise through summing millions of instances of inaction, thoughtlessness, cowardice, rigidity, and deferrals to authority, and in the case of someone as pathetic as Adolf Eichmann, couldn’t be explained by any diabolical source singled out for final reckoning. On the stand at least, Eichmann readily agreed: the annihilation of European Jews was “one of the greatest crimes in the history of Humanity.” So instead of a satisfying confrontation with evil or a refutation of an immoral value system, what the public got was an unwelcome glimpse into the underlying social metaphysics of evil and immoral action. “Their case rested on the assumption that the defendant, like all ‘normal persons,’ must have been aware of the criminal nature of his acts, and Eichmann was indeed normal insofar as he was ‘no exception within the Nazi regime.’ However, under the conditions of the Third Reich only ‘exceptions’ could be expected to react ‘normally.’ This simple truth of the matter created a dilemma for the judges which they could neither resolve nor escape.”

Arendt wouldn’t see it this way, but down to the details of Eichmann’s chief logistical role in the mass transportation of Jews to the extermination camps, it’s almost a direct repudiation of the widely-memed “trolley problem” conception of ethics, in which the lone individual employs universalizable, power-blind principles or rationalities in order to derive the most moral choice within any given dilemma. Eichmann himself protested that much of his earlier efforts to shuffle and resettle Jews elsewhere were, in fact, precisely this kind of moral reasoning — that he was trying to save as many lives as possible given the circumstances of the “Jewish problem.” During the police examination, he revealed that, actually, “he had lived his whole life according to Kant’s moral precepts, and especially according to a Kantian definition of duty.” Along with nearly everyone present, Arendt was astonished to hear this coming out of a man of such “modest mental gifts,” but was still quick to correct Eichmann on his distorted reading of the Critique of Practical Reason. But let’s say Eichmann had gotten his Kant right. Let’s say he was an internationally-renowned Kant scholar. Germany surely had more of those than any other place in the world — and a lot of good that did. And why would it do any good? What would either force or permit someone in such grim trolley-problem situations to call or act upon their autonomous moral reasoning, even if they could or wanted to in cooler circumstances? Even as a thought experiment, I’d like to think that the real moral sticking-points for any trolley problem would be things like: why are there people strapped to the train tracks? Who or what is forcing some poor slob to choose between killing five sickly adults and two newborns? How did this happen and why can’t they refuse or get out of it? How did power configurations, in their conjunction of cause and possibility, get so botched to ever create this dilemma in the first place? I mean, I get the usefulness of dilemmas. In a dilemma, we’re powerless to alter our choices, and our choices are nearly equally terrible in outcome. It’s meant to test our bare ethics in a controlled experiment. However, how is moral choice anything but false without real possibilities to choose from or causal powers to change anything? What good is ethics if divorced from the powers that are shaping our choices, reasoning, and possible outcomes?

In the same regard, when it comes to inequality, we have to ask how our sense of causation warps under the pressures of grotesque power-asymmetries. What do consequences mean to the desperate or the immune? Both sides experience a sort of kink or tear in the causal nexus. The desperate, for their part, don’t have the luxury to consider wider consequences. The future must be sacrificed to present need. And the more power-imbalances press upon necessities like shelter, safety, or general subsistence, the more necessary (and hence less autonomous) our desperate reactions become. The possibilities for moral choice are pruned down to a nub. But it isn’t absolute: there will always be heroics and exceptional actors, some extra-good individuals or groups here and there, able to retain their relative moral autonomy in the grip of pain, panic, hunger, poverty, addiction, or danger. On the level of the social whole, though, it stands to reason that the majority of people will never be better than average. On average, they’ll only be as good and decent as the worlds they inhabit. We’ll call this the “Principle of Moral Mediocrity.” Preach, punish, and police all you want: the social percentages of malignant reaction and evil effects will remain the same. They’re predictable by-products of a brutally lop-sided distribution of power… which is why it’s so hilarious and shammy that our attempts at social reform are overwhelmingly directed at those with the least power to change anything, when what needs re-forming is the form of the social whole. Even shammier though is that, once these reforms inevitably fail, apologists submit this failure as proof that social inequality is an ineluctable fact of modern life. That’s the brilliance of these reforms. As with so much of charity, philanthropy, humanitarian aid, effective altruism, any largesse-like transfer of goods or aisance made only to keep the laboring classes productive, they affect changes without affecting the production of change. They empirically reduce differences while entrenching differentials of power.

This leads us right into other questions, though, about the overpowerful themselves. On a more abstract level, we understand that as a bracket or echelon, they may be committed to compounding differentials, even at the cost of great human suffering or sometimes jeopardizing their own goals, legacy, or self-preservation. What de Jouvenel perceived about the State — that “the struggle to magnify itself is of Power’s essence” — would apply to any form of overconcentrated power. But what about on the moral level, or in terms of the individual conscience? What explains the callousness or heedlessness of the overpowerful? Here, psychopathology only diagnoses the results — that certain actors are motivated by “greed,” or that “power causes a form of brain damage,” bludgeoning empathy or comically convincing moguls that it’s wiser to build bunkers in the Swiss mountainside rather than alter the course of world destruction. This doesn’t explain their relation to moral choice. What’s the underlying social metaphysics in their case? For them, the causal nexus isn’t foreshortened by a relative necessitation, as it is for the doomed, but it seems to me that they’re even more consistent — often gleeful — in their iniquity. When this isn’t folklorically explained as the upper echelons simply being overpopulated by the wicked — by species of metaphorical-reptilians or rings of pedophiles, that can only be identified through sinister genealogies, Epstein’s flight-logs, or roman salutes at presidential inaugurations — it’s chalked up to something nearly as mysterious, something which has cursed social and political organization for as long as we can remember: this inexplicable phenomenon, “corruption.”

Corruption is something that we’ve simply observed time and time again, in our heroes, leadership, watchdog institutions, and even in our mechanisms of democratic representation, where as soon as we promote the very good and virtuous among us to positions of power they cease being either very good, or virtuous, or “one of us.” After too many historical disappointments to count, the lessons have coalesced into the maxim that “power naturally corrupts” and, even more unquestionably, that “absolute power corrupts absolutely.” It’s sound advice, but doesn’t explain why power corrupts. Is it just, as we tend to imagine, the human conscience succumbing to some kind of power-madness or supernatural possession? It certainly appears that way — and always will if we insist on thinking of moral autonomy as hermetic, or of the conscience as something working outside or against rather than integrally within the broader nexus of powers. Corruption mystifies us insofar as we only track the changes within the individual or entity itself, which is a bit like blaming our flowerbeds for turning black when the Sun goes down. The metaphysics of corruption narrates the change as a form of metamorphosis, initiated by an exposure to “external influences.” The antidote usually prescribed is some kind of quarantine: keep our leaders away from the wrong crowd, fortify the walls of our institutions, banish the forces of hatred that turn our heroes to the dark side. Grimes pleafully tweets out to Elon: “I love you but please turn off ur phone or give me a call. I cannot support hate. Please stop this. I know this isn’t your heart.” This may work for a while, as a mechanism, in that it staves off collusions that might end in even greater concentrations of power. However, without bucking up and addressing the worrisome power differentials working on these people, entities or institutions, it’s only a matter of time until the safeguards fail and the walls are eventually breached.

In moral terms, though, it also completely flies in the face of how we describe the conscience of the overpowerful: that they are disconnected, aloof, insular, lacking in empathy or understanding for the rest of the world. It seems strange then to think that we might cure corruption by even greater isolation from the “external influences” that give form to conscience, that force the recognition of others — of their existence, their worth, their suffering, their capacities, or their equality with those lording over them. At the same time, you would no longer think of it as a “conscience” if it were merely a product of those external influences, wholly determined by context and robbed of its moral autonomy to act conscientiously. This forces us to consider that the conscience (and all moral autonomy as such) depends neither on union nor isolation, but on the configuration of relative powers — whether over self-determination or the choice between all those competing “external influences,” good, bad, or simply informative. Under the sea-level pressures of more egalitarian differentials, moral autonomy thrives in a balanced exchange with the surrounding nexus of powers. Under the geothermal pressures of focused institutional power, or in the stratospheric vacuum of plutocratic distance, it soon loses its integrity. The actual wisdom behind the infographics about not “appealing to the conscience of your oppressors” is what it understands about the underlying relationship between oppression and conscientiousness. Not to say that it never works. There will always be flukes or exceptions — usually from spikes in the much-less-calculable forms of ideological or cultural power (check out Ashoka’s change of heart after his bloody conquest of Kalinga) — but applying the “Principle of Moral Mediocrity,” we’d be fools to rely on them.

It’s not a question about individuals. It’s often not wholly a question about people, even. Power-asymmetries are not merely between two people, two groups, two nations, two identities — between two points within the whole. These are asymmetries in the broader shapes of the world. Cruel immorality or cynical amorality describe these huge shapes every bit as much as they do any agent, any organ, or anything positioned within. In the junctures of highly overconcentrated power, even things — objects, laws, abstractions, institutions, the most mechanical and least human of operations and processes — will themselves act immorally or amorally, and dutifully reproduce the same social ills and evils, as if animated by malice. The stars will seem to be aligned against us. This undermines that school of thought which Elizabeth Anderson has named “luck egalitarianism,” which she defines through a quotation from one of its lecturers, Richard Arneson: “The concern of distributive justice is to compensate individuals for misfortune. Some people are blessed with good luck, some are cursed with bad luck, and it is the responsibility of society — all of us regarded collectively-to alter the distribution of goods and evils that arises from the jumble of lotteries that constitutes human life as we know it . .. Distributive justice stipulates that the lucky should transfer some or all of their gains due to luck to the unlucky.” As a defender of “democratic equality,” Elizabeth Anderson rebuts “The proper negative aim of egalitarian justice is not to eliminate the impact of brute luck from human affairs, but to end oppression, which by definition is socially imposed.” It think it cuts even deeper than this. Under the conditions of galling inequality, it becomes increasingly impossible to discern whether the effects and evils are the result of natural misfortune or social oppression. The entire idea of “brute luck” becomes untenable.

I’m writing this a few weeks after the fires in Los Angeles that destroyed the Altadena and the Pacific Palisades. Altadena was my home for a few years, and until it was consumed by the Eaton fire, was also the home of my best friend and his family, where I spent the recent summer. In the midst of all the smoking embers and shattered lives, there was rightfully a need to find a culprit, in order to place responsibility. The question was often: how much of this was a human failing and how much of it was a natural disaster? The unstated assumption here was that natural disasters, as acts of God, are amoral and so exculpate human responsibility. I think this is mostly true when considering individual cases, such as defendants on trial for calamities that they were helpless to prevent. I’d even say that it’s mostly true that nature unto itself is amoral, in that it’s at least a little weird or category-mistaken to condemn something like the homicidal brutality of the animal kingdom. It’s another matter altogether though when we’re talking about the ever-widening interface between earth and society, or the entanglements of nature and culture, in which natural disasters can become deeply moral phenomena (think of all the moral thought that spun out of the Black Death or the Lisbon Earthquake). However “natural” they may be, their disastrousness is usually in large part social.

This came into sharp relief in the news surrounding the Los Angeles fires. Nearly any contributing factor you could name — climate change, land management, insurance industries, municipal malfeasance, the housing and homelessness crisis — were recognizably crises of social inequality and domination, and perfect kindling even if you didn’t want to agree they were “causes.” It was certainly in some people’s interests that we didn’t recognize the social element of these disasters, but in all their hollering and attempts at distraction, they ended up proving it anyway. Characteristically eager to avoid social questions and pin the blame on the downtrodden, the local news was on the scene, interviewing concerned citizens who were quick to scapegoat the “homeless encampments” hidden in the city’s wooded areas. This was a smooth-brained strategy. Let’s say it was true. What would Los Angeles do if it found out that some lone homeless arsonist had either accidentally or maliciously set the city ablaze? Burn them at the stake in front of city hall? Have fun. It won’t accomplish anything. The only solution would be to house them. The imperatives of current housing markets and policy will only drive more people into homelessness. Urban evictions will only force them to seek peace further into the brush of the natural perimeters. And the city and the police can only brutalize the homeless but so much until you’d expect one of them to dream of revenge and light the world on fire, just to let everyone see how it feels. It’s not for nothing that people keep mentioning the pyromaniac “painted faces” in Octavia Butler’s Parable of the Sower. Yet it wouldn’t be all that irrational an act. That is, you can blame them but could you really blame them? The fires would be the Great Equalizer, at last, tearing through the tinderbox of Californian inegalitarianism. So even if this story is a total lie, it’s a lie that tells a larger truth: inequality is everybody’s problem.