Motus Mentis

I note two related items in the media today: one is this story, about introducing a new “adversity score” to the Scholastic Aptitude Test, and the other is this essay, by Heather Mac Donald, about the poor performance of “diversity hires” in elite law-firms. The link between them, is, of course, an unfortunate truth, previously understood by all, but now forgotten (or, more accurately, forbidden).

Of all the stubborn facts of the actually existing world, the one that most vexes egalitarian idealists, in every age, is the variety of human abilities and outcomes. This is unsurprising, if one correctly understands radical egalitarianism as an activist proxy for the Second Law. Entropy seeks always to make things level — and so, in time, mountains crumble to fill in valleys, cathedrals fall to rubble, and towering geniuses die and return to dust. To quote one observer who long ago returned to dust himself: castles made of sand fall into the sea, eventually.

The radical leveling of the American Founding — which enshrined as sacred governing principles the wholly disruptive ideas that no person has natural sovereignty over another, and that every human being has an inalienable natural right to live in liberty and to pursue happiness — didn’t, it now seems, go nearly far enough. Because it grounded its principles in Nature — to be specific, in the “Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God” — the Founders made the fundamental error of acknowledging, and accepting, one of Nature’s self-evident truths: that human beings, despite the equality of their natural rights, are nevertheless manifestly, and irremediably, unequal in their individual characters, faculties, and talents. Some people are, just by their very nature, stronger, swifter, smarter, taller, more beautiful, more industrious, braver, kinder, thriftier, and even happier than others — and if there is to be Liberty, then these natural inequalities will assert themselves, always.

Some years ago I quoted Will Durant:

Since Nature (here meaning total reality and its processes) has not read very carefully the American Declaration of Independence or the the French Revolutionary Declaration of the Rights of Man, we are all born unfree and unequal; subject to our physical and psychological heredity, and to the customs and traditions of our group; diversely endowed in health and strength, in mental capacities and qualities of character. Nature loves difference as the necessary material of selection and evolution; identical twins differ in hundreds of ways, and no two peas are alike.

Inequality is not only natural and inborn, it grows with the complexity of civilization. Hereditary inequalities breed social and artificial inequalities; every invention or discovery is made or seized by the exceptional individual, and makes the strong stronger, the weak relatively weaker, than before. Economic development specializes functions, differentiates abilities, and makes men unequally valuable to their group. If we knew our fellow men thoroughly we could select thirty per cent of them whose combined ability would equal that of all the rest. Life and history do precisely that, with a sublime injustice reminiscent of Calvin’s God.

Nature smiles at the union of freedom and equality in our utopias. For freedom and equality are sworn and everlasting enemies, and when one prevails the other dies. Leave men free, and their natural inequalities will multiply almost geometrically, as in England and America in the nineteenth century under laissez-faire. To check the growth of inequality, liberty must be sacrificed, as in Russia after 1917. Even when repressed, inequality grows; only the man who is below the average in economic ability desires equality; those who are conscious of superior ability desire freedom; and in the end superior ability has its way. Utopias of equality are biologically doomed, and the best that the amiable philosopher can hope for is an approximate equality of legal justice and educational opportunity. A society in which all potential abilities are allowed to develop and function will have a survival advantage in the competition of groups. This competition becomes more severe as the destruction of distance intensifies the confrontation of states.

To make matters worse, because natural assets are significantly (though not exclusively) heritable, then the freer and more classless the society, the more these innate inequalities will increase overall as the gifted seek each other out as mates. Those from humble origins who have the natural gifts to do so will almost always move up and out, “boiling off” the best genes from what, over time, becomes an increasingly inspissated and dysfunctional underclass.

This is not to say that there are not still, for many unfortunate children, environmental impediments to success: there can be little doubt that poor nutrition, broken homes, illiterate parents, fear of violence, and other hardships can thwart and stifle even the truly gifted, and we should try to recognize and foster talent in every corner of society. But the assumption that all people are by definition exactly equal in innate ability, and that therefore all variation in outcome is necessarily due to remediable social oppression, is obviously, certainly false, and if we seek to inflate ability by bureaucratic artifice — whether in standardized testing, or college admissions, or by diversity-hiring quotas — we are just pushing the problem along the pipe. Eventually, there will be a collision with reality: the poorly engineered bridge collapses, the badly written brief loses millions for the client, and so on.

It is easy to see, though, why such inequalities are troubling. Throughout history accelerating inequality has been at the root of violent revolutions. The process repeats itself again and again: if the entropic force of resentment is held in check, the overclass grows farther and farther apart from the underclass, while its numbers decline by low birthrates; meanwhile the underclass grows more and more numerous, and more and more resentful. Inevitably, one of two things happens: either a charismatic figure comes along around whom all of this resentment can coalesce, and the guillotines come out; or the overclass, weak and soft and besotted by luxury, succumbs to hungry invaders whom the underclass has no inclination to resist.

How, then, to balance order against chaos, liberty against equality? In the long run, perhaps the result is the same, no matter what: you can have your entropy “as you go”, rusting and leveling everything day by day — or you can get it all at once.