Anguish, Merit, and Level Enterprise

The unique tensity of social justice and public policy lies somewhere between the art of generating opportunities, and the restraint not to ordain its outcomes. Designing opportunity involves creating ‘fair chance’ conditions where everyone can succeed based on merits, skills, dexterities and energies. Guaranteeing a specific outcome, however, runs contrary to the principles of a meritocracy by undermining the difficult requirements of aspiration and incentive. A free society like America has traditionally valued merit-based success rooted in opportunities that are just and equitable. A culture of opportunity cannot be hoisted and celebrated while simultaneously promising its participants their conclusion. They are contradictory. One is grounded in the just distribution of what is earned. The other rejects just distribution that is rooted in merit and replaces it with politically rationed outcomes.

For virtuous rituals of civic conviviality to become habitual, we must prioritize equal treatment over and above equalization. In their article, New Perspectives on Distributive Justice: Deep Disagreements, Pluralism, and the Problem of Consensus, Manuel Knoll, Nurdane Simsek, and Stephen Snyder analyze Dagmar Herwig’s contemporary systematic study on justice and describe two subtle but opposing modalities of justice, “equal treatment” and “equalization” (2018). Equality comes from the Middle French word equalité, which descended from the Latin aequand alitas, with meanings that are essentially duplicated across time and rooted in concepts of sameness, status, and shape. The present use of equality has become a contranym, a word that is its own contradiction. For some, the word equality means opportunity, for another political segment equality has come to mean sameness of outcome. This means that any disparity in result, such as test scores or financial earnings, automatically reveals a systemic cancer. While true in some cases, it is not true in all cases.  

Herwig’s first model, equal treatment, represents an upward invitation to enjoy the Constitutional promises of America. When progressive Civil Rights lawyer, Ben Crump, addressed the mourners assembled for the George Floyd Memorial Service at North Central University in Minneapolis, he delivered a statement that rang true for all Americans, liberal, progressive, and conservative. “America was founded as a great beacon of hope for the entire world. All we want is for America to be America for all Americans” (Crump, 2020). This is the basis of Herwig’s first model of equal treatment. Herwig’s second model of equalization represents a departure from the important deliberations of excellence and reward. For equal treatment to succeed, the systems of American self-evidence must be faithfully examined and then reexamined to ensure they are representing a nation of just merit and level enterprise.

For ethnic vitality and level enterprise to organically animate the American landscape, a hidden academic theory must be understood, then rejected. Introduced in 1935 by anthropologist Gregory Bateson, schismogenesis became an accepted model for defining how people often assess the unfamiliar other, or stranger. In his book, Steps to an Ecology of Mind, Bateson defines schismogenesis as a “creation of division” (1935).  The idiom comes from two Greek words σχίσμα “schism”, and γένεσις “genesis”, or “beginning.” Schismogenesis describes how human beings often begin a relationship by establishing a mental difference between themselves and the ‘other’. They begin (genesis) with difference (schism). This is far different than recognizing a unique contrast or worth, and ventures into the critical practice of establishing the ontological separation at the point of origin.

Bateson argues that human beings define themselves against other human beings through instincts of schismogenesis. This represents a psychological impulse that places self-differentiation ahead of everything else during the formative moments of human connection. Bateson believed that schismogenesis was autochthonous, in the soil. Bateson believed that people interpret life through a lens of dissimilarity and then attempt to define all of life in frames of opposites. Schismogenesis is a feedback loop that continually identifies micro-differences with each iteration amplified by the last iteration and forever escalating: “I have nothing in common with those people” (1935). Bateson was not attempting to fix the world with ideas of schismogenesis, he in turn was trying to describe a world filled with social habits of division in attempt to help human beings adjust and advance.

Here is where the real American impasse begins. We no longer feel responsibility for making our enemies whole. We need them to remain abhorrent to prove and justify their classification. Conviviality is about virtue and making people feel hopeful. Once a nation of neighbors, we have fast become a loose collection of nihilistic neighborhoods. Pure religion is the only hope for our dispirited and debate-filled nation. We must eat from the 'better tree' as a society or suffer the repetitive consequences of Eve. Just like the Garden of Eden, there are two adjacent trees prominently standing central in every decision. The first tree offers flourishing and meritocracy. The second tree offers shadows and sorrows. Anguish belongs to the second tree, reconciliation to the first. If America will faithfully eat from the righteous tree, the Tree of Life, and abandon her hesitations toward those bearing beautiful distinctions, then our nascent grace for goodness, our natality, will once again multiply for generations to come.