Reflections on Elizabeth Anderson
By Wade Lee Hudson
NOTE: Following is the text used in my January 12, 2020 “Democratic Equality and Democratic Dialog” PowerPoint presentation at the Humanists and Non-Theists committee of the San Francisco Unitarian church.
The article that had the biggest impact on me last year was “The Philosopher Redefining Equality” in The New Yorker. The subtitle reads: “Elizabeth Anderson thinks we’ve misunderstood the basis of a free and fair society.” That profile of Anderson begins: [play audio]
She ended up studying political and moral philosophy at Harvard under John Rawls and teaching at the University of Michigan, where she stayed, despite being heavily recruited by other universities.
In 1999 the esteemed journal Ethics published her path-breaking, widely reprinted article "What is the Point of Equality?" She’s also written three books, including Value in Ethics and Economics, which argues that some goods like love and respect should not be sold on the market or otherwise treated as commodities, and The Imperative of Integration, which examines how racial integration can lead to a more robust democracy. Her many podcast interviews include a great one with Vox.com founder Ezra Klein.
Last year Anderson received the no-strings-attached $625,000 MacArthur “Genius” award. Included in their announcement was this [play video].
Anderson’s primary concern is social equality — equality not just in politics and economics but also equality in social relations throughout society — how to treat each other as equals, without trying to dominate, or being willing to submit. She calls this democratic equality.
Except where indicated, the following language in this presentation is from her 1999 essay.
In seeking the construction of a community of equals, democratic equality integrates principles of distribution with the expressive demands of equal respect.
Inegalitarianism asserted the justice or necessity of basing social order on a hierarchy of human beings, ranked according to intrinsic worth. Inequality referred to relations between superior and inferior persons…. This is the core of inegalitarian ideologies of racism, sexism, nationalism, caste, class, and eugenics.
Egalitarian political movements, on the other hand, affirm everyone’s equal moral worth…, believe all competent adults are equally moral agents…, believe everyone equally has the power to develop and exercise moral responsibility..., as well as cooperate with others according to principles of justice, in efforts to establish a democratic community...and abolish oppression — that is, forms of social relationship by which some people dominate, exploit, marginalize, demean, and inflict violence upon others…. Democracy is here understood as collective self-determination ... in which people stand in relations of equality to one another.
In The Atlantic, George Packer wrote about his son’s public school:
The mix of races and classes gave him something even more precious: an unselfconscious belief that no one was better than anyone else, that he was everyone’s equal and everyone was his. In this way the school succeeded in its highest purpose.
According to Anderson:
What egalitarianism objects to are social hierarchies that unjustly put different people into superior and inferior positions…. People, not nature, are responsible for turning the natural diversity of human beings into oppressive hierarchies. The only just inequalities are those that promote everyone’s interests.
At the center of her philosophy, she insists that
society must identify certain goods to which all citizens must have effective access over the course of their whole lives. Democratic equality entitles all citizens to the goods they need to function as free and equal citizens, and to avoid oppression by others.… Goods [should] be distributed....so (people) can enjoy freedom as equals…. This view explains...how citizens can be obligated to [focus on] broader goals than the distribution of goods. It expresses respect for citizens by entitling them to claim goods on account of their equality rather than their inferiority to others. Finally, democratic equality offers a way to understand the diversity of human endowments as a common good.
Class inequality is not just about poverty… When bosses fire workers for their sexual orientation or political views, we observe abuses of power that aren’t just about money….
[Libertarianism] neglects the importance of having the means to do what one wants…. One cannot do these things if others make one an outcast….. The same point applies to a society in which property is so unequally distributed that some adults live in abject dependence on others, and so live at the mercy of others….
Feminists work to overcome the internal obstacles to choice — self-abnegation, lack of confidence, and low self-esteem — that women often face from internalizing norms of femininity….
The economy is “a system of cooperative, joint production.” Everyone's productive contribution [is] dependent on what everyone else is doing… The conception of society as a system of cooperation provides a safety net through which even the imprudent are never forced to fall…. As individuals are responsible to society, so too is society responsible to individuals….
Validating care for dependents is critical…. Democratic equality says that no one should be reduced to an inferior status because they fulfill obligations to care for others….
Some degree of income inequality can be acceptable. Once all citizens enjoy a decent set of freedoms, sufficient for functioning as an equal in society, income inequalities beyond that point do not seem so troubling in themselves.
The degree of acceptable income inequality would depend in part on how easy it was to convert income into status inequality.... The stronger the barriers against commodifying social status, political influence, and the like, the more acceptable are significant income inequalities….
Talent brings noneconomic advantages as well, such as the admiration of others. Democratic equality finds no injustice in this advantage, because one doesn't need to be admired to be able to function as an equal citizen….
In a New York Times interview, Anderson said, “We need to ensure that everyone has a fair chance to move up the economic ladder.” So she does not consider the tension between democratic equality and personal advancement to be totally irreconcilable.
The New Yorker article quoted Derrick Darby, a black professor in Anderson’s department at Michigan:
“Liz has a view that you pull people up from the projects and send them on their ways into the élite,” he says. As someone who’d made that journey, he thought she underweighted the constraints — the unfreedom — involved in being “the only damn black person in so many rooms.” At one point, Anderson visited Darby’s class. “We spoke about our experiences,” he recalls, “and why it led us to focus our work as we did”: childhood for him and parenting for her. They both ended up in tears.
Anderson:
Under democratic equality, citizens refrain from making intrusive, moralizing judgments about how people ought to have used the opportunities open to them or about how capable they were of exercising personal responsibility…. Even convicted criminals...retain their status as equal human beings.
You have a moral worth that no one can disregard. We recognize this (equal moral) worth in your… right to our aid in an emergency.
You are free to refuse this aid once we offer it. But this freedom does not absolve you of the obligation to come to the aid of others when their health needs are urgent. Since this is an obligation we all owe to our fellow citizens, everyone shall be taxed for this good, which we shall provide to everyone. This is part of your rightful claim as an equal citizen.
Anderson’s notions are rooted in the American tradition. The Declaration of Independence reads: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal….” And America is more democratic than most countries. But our society is far from perfect. One justification for denying our foundational rights is the myth of equal opportunity. Anderson writes:
Recent egalitarian writing has come to be dominated by the view that the fundamental aim of equality is to compensate people for undeserved bad luck — born with poor native endowments, bad parents, and disagreeable personalities, suffering from accidents and illness, and so forth….
A powerful critique of this reliance on compensation was voiced at the 2015 Aspen Institute Action Forum. One of its fellows, Anand Giridharadas, provoked great controversy with his report on his experience there. Here’s the core of his commentary about what he calls The Aspen Consensus. [play video.]
That talk led to the publication of his award winning, best seller, Winners Take All: The Elite Charade of Changing the World.
Anderson argues that the reliance on compensation “reproduces a Poor Law regime that moralistically excludes many citizens from aid and offers only stigmatizing aid to others, on grounds of their innate inferiority.”
She says this notion relies on the "starting-gate theory." According to this concept:
What really matters is that people enjoy fair shares at the start of life.... This perspective does not much concern itself with the suffering that results after the race starts, because it either blames victims for their misfortune — or it merely aims to alleviate undeserved suffering rather than prevent it.
The starting-gate theory guarantees a minimally decent life only before one has made any adult choices. This is small comfort to the person who led a cautious and prudent life, but still fell victim to extremely bad...luck….
Moreover, the starting-gate theory offers aid that is deeply disrespectful of those to whom the aid is directed. [It provides aid to the needy] only at the cost of paternalism [which] makes the basis for citizens' claims on one another the fact that some are inferior to others in the worth of their lives, talents, and personal qualities.
[It expresses] contemptuous pity for those the state stamps as sadly inferior…. [It] stigmatizes the unfortunate…. [It] makes demeaning and intrusive judgments of people's capacities to exercise responsibility, and it effectively dictates...the appropriate uses of their freedom. It is hard to see how citizens could be expected to accept such reasoning and still retain their self-respect….
Pity is incompatible with respecting the dignity of others. [It does not] express equal respect for all citizens…. Pity...is aroused by a comparison.... Its characteristic judgment is not ‘she is badly off’ but ‘she is worse off than me.’ ...Pity is condescending.
[On the other hand,] compassion..aims to relieve suffering, not to equalize it…. Furthermore, compassion seeks to relieve suffering wherever it exists, without passing moral judgment on those who suffer….
The disabled do not ask that they be compensated for the disability itself. Rather, they ask that the social disadvantages others impose on them for having the disability be removed…. They resent being cast as poster children for the abled to pity, because they do not want to have to cast their claims as appeals to the condescending benevolence of kindly patrons….
As I see it, the assumptions of moral superiority and the urge to dominate are seen throughout society. In A Streetcar Named Desire, Stanley proclaims, “Remember what Huey Long said —- ’Every man is a King!’ And I am the king around here, so don’t forget it!”
Authoritarianism is also seen with America’s leaders, Republican and Democratic, who define global leadership as the ability to control, manipulate, be the major player — that is, the ability to dominate rather than mediate — whether with hard power or soft power. The urge to dominate is also seen with progressive activists who define political leadership as the ability to mobilize followers to do what the leader wants.
As Packer wrote:
Equality is too important to be left to an ideology that rejects universal values…. At times the new progressivism, for all its up-to-the-minuteness, carries a whiff of the 17th century, with heresy hunts and denunciations of sin and displays of self-mortification. The atmosphere of mental constriction in progressive milieus, the self-censorship and fear of public shaming, the intolerance of dissent — these are qualities of an illiberal politics…. Identity alone should neither uphold nor invalidate an idea….
Grassroots political movements and Democratic Party activists rarely explicitly affirm social equality. Rather, they limit themselves to economic inequality and blatant social injustice. At the six Democratic Party debates in 2019, not once did any of the candidates talk about universal social equality and none addressed the importance of respecting everyone as equals — even though Republicans correctly charge Democrats with elitism.
The values Anderson analyzes — domination and assumptions of superiority — have been interwoven into our social system, including our individual psyches.
Our primary problem is the System, which consists of our institutions, our culture, and ourselves as individuals, who reinforce the System with our daily actions. The System encourages everyone to climb social ladders and look down on and dominate those below — and submit to and resent those above. The natural drive to improve has been distorted and inflamed into a hyper-competitive, hyper-individualism. The urge to dominate in one arena reinforces the urge to dominate in every arena. Society inculcates submission systematically, whether it be to parents, teachers, gurus, ministers, therapists, bosses, doctors, police, elected Saviors, husbands, or some other authority figure. The System is self-perpetuating. No one group controls it. Everyone reinforces it. No one is innocent.
The System is based on a materialistic worldview rooted in hierarchical domination. Underlying the focus on money and political power is the quest for status and social power. Money is a way to keep score.
Transforming the System with compassionate polarization need not involve demonizing, scapegoating, and irrational anger that mirrors and reproduces materialism and the urge to dominate. As we push for concrete reforms that move toward systemic transformation, we can remain open to at least momentary reconciliation in the never-ending process of evolutionary revolution, as did Gandhi and King.
Some hopeful signs are on the horizon. In New Power: How Power Works in Our Hyperconnected World -- and How to Make It Work for You, Jeremy Heimans and Henry Timms make a strong case for dynamics that are “open, participatory, and peer driven.” Occupy Wall Street, Black Lives Matter, the #MeToo movement, March For Our Lives. climate activists and others have reflected this new approach — as do certain developments in the business world, such as the support for “distributed leadership.” Another positive sign is an increasing use of nonviolence by grassroots movements throughout the world.
In “Why We Will Need Walt Whitman in 2020,” Ed Simon affirms:
Whitman’s open embrace of the democratic ideal, his declaration that “every atom as belonging to me as good belongs to you,” no matter where you were born…. In democracy there is the reconciliation of opposites, the elevation of the vernacular, the transcendence of the individual through the equality of humanity.
This growing commitment to democratic equality is shaky. To make real progress, we need massive, unified, sustained grassroots movements grounded in compassion whose members support each other in their personal and spiritual development, especially with regard to unconscious racism, other forms of bias, and the tendency to dominate or submit.
But lack of respect, the inability to relate to others as equals, failure to understand others, holier-than-thou political correctness, and selfish power trips fragment movements before they mature. Personal, social, and cultural transformation needs to be integrated with political and economic transformation. How to cultivate this transformation is unclear. I suggest one approach in the essay “Democratic Equality and Democratic Dialog,” which opens with: “Equality is the goal; dialog, the method. These two forms of democracy are interwoven. When we engage in democratic dialog and form democratic relationships, we democratize society.”
The essay includes several potential methods for cultivating democratic equality, including randomly selected Citizen Assemblies. Another option is the “Open Topic Dialog,” with which the Humanists and Non-Theists committee at the First Unitarian Church is experimenting. Also, beginning Wednesday, January 15, at 1 pm the Aquatic Park Senior Center will convene weekly Open Topic Dialogs. In their newsletter, they describe these dialogs as “a safe, respectful space” where you can “speak from the heart, and express what’s on your mind.”
Several colleagues from multiple countries and I are conducting video conference calls to discuss these issues. The agenda for the next one, Tuesday, January 21st is to explore how we might help design one or more democratic dialog methods that might spread widely and quickly without extensive training or highly skilled facilitation.
The dream is the growth of an international network of small groups that would enrich the soil for grassroots movements. This dream may well be unrealistic. But it seems to be worth the effort.
The basic idea behind the Open Topic Dialog is to practice being democratic — practice becoming better listeners, being respectful, and nurturing leadership by sharing facilitation with an open, horizontal, self-perpetuating, easy-to-learn mechanism.
The Buddhists say, Neither selfishness nor self-sacrifice. The Christians say, Love your neighbor as you love yourself . The tension between self-love and love of others will never be fully, permanently reconciled. But we can constantly struggle to stay balanced, which requires self-awareness.
James Baldwin said: [play video].
“The price is enormous. And people are not yet willing to pay.” Establishing democratic equality will not be easy. It will require intellectual and cultural work to undo the dominant ideology that legitimizes domination. And it will require personal and spiritual work to undo the emotional reactivity that serves to divide and conquer.
That work is painful. It requires vulnerability. It requires speaking truth to power, with friends as well as opponents. It requires questioning when to be loyal, and when to be disloyal. Sometimes we submit. Sometimes we resist. No ideology and no authority figure can tell us when to do one or the other. We can only rely on our conscience, and our conscience is not reliable.
George Eliot wrote, “The growing good of the world is partly dependent on unhistoric acts; ...that things are not so ill with you and me as they might have been, is half owing to the number who lived faithfully a hidden life, and rest in unvisited tombs.”
We may only be able to plant seeds, but at least we can plant seeds. The work is ours, but not the fruits thereof. That’s how I see it. I look forward to learning more about how you see it.
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