Tag: justice

A sense of justice

What does it take to get people truly engaged in a common purpose, joined with others in pursuit of a common cause?

I suppose there are numerous answers to this question — fear of impending danger (global warming), a sense of empathy at the suffering of others (Katrina, the Indonesian tsunami), a rational desire to gain a collective benefit, resentment of other people or groups, anger at the actions of the state or its officials. But the question on my mind right now is about the role of the sense of justice in people’s readiness to act collectively or politically.

I asked a group of students today to talk about their perceptions of “major social problems” in the United States today. This wasn’t part of a class, and it wasn’t a group of students who knew each other well. It was a very diverse group of young people from Detroit and the suburbs. But in spite of the fact that there wasn’t an organized setting of the problem, we had a good discussion that brought out some of the most fundamental issues of justice in our country today. They talked in very personal terms about poverty, inequality of opportunity, racism, hunger, lack of access to health care, and personal uncertainty about their futures. One young woman said to me, “There are hungry people on this campus — and there are caring people on the campus who help by making sure that food at campus events isn’t wasted.” These students tended to agree with each other that the worst sources of injustice are those that involve enduring inequalities of opportunities across generations.

I mention this conversation for several reasons. First, it illustrates the point that these young people have very developed intuitions about fairness and justice, and they have had very concrete experiences that inform their judgments. They have a sense of justice, and they have a strong ability to recognize and evaluate some of the unfair workings of our basic social institutions. It’s not a theoretical issue to them.

Second, there is a very palpable sense of a desire to do something about the social problems they see around them — to be engaged, to find organizations that make a difference. We talk a lot on our campus about the value of “student engagement” — these students want to be engaged, and sometimes the frustration is that there aren’t opportunities for engagement that can really promise to make a difference.

Third, there was in this discussion a very strong illustration of the value of “diversity” in American communities and on American university campuses. I mean this in two ways — first, the valuable contributions brought by the different life experiences of different people in the room. The perspectives and experiences that African-American students brought into this discussion was very different from that of their white suburban fellow students. But equally, the perspective that a returning woman student brought — her own story of going from a white middle-class life to a struggling life of near-poverty — added tremendously to the discussion. (This is a dimension of age diversity that you don’t often find on many university campuses.)

Moreover, every student in the room plainly recognized the value of a diverse discussion of these topics. The group was willing to talk honestly about their different experiences in white, black, and brown communities — and to value the fact that they were able to do so. There was a strong shared sense of the reality and importance of mutual respect, and an openness to learning from each other’s experiences.

So what does this show? In my eyes, it demonstrates two important facts. First, many young people have well-defined ideas about justice, fairness, and denied opportunities, and they care about these issues. They can figure out some of the ways in which some of our basic institutions assign benefits, burdens, and opportunities in very different ways to different groups — and they are offended. And second, this “knowledge” of injustice also has a motivational effect. They want to be mobilized around a project that can have some success in addressing some of these unjust inequalities. Their engagement can take many forms — excitement about a political candidate who is speaking of these issues, involvement in a tutoring program in an inner-city school, participation in a student organization that is campaigning for more scholarships for poor people.

So this experience with a dozen students at a public university in the midwest goes against the grain of those who talk about the current youth generation as being apolitical, disengaged, and unmoved by injustice.  Isn’t there something in this story that lays a basis for some hope about the feasibility of a more activist politics in the America of the future?

“Too much” inequality? Yes!

How much inequality is too much? The range of income and wealth inequalities in the US has increased sharply in the past 20 years. The share of income flowing to the top 10% and 1% has increased significantly. And the level of income for the bottom 40% has slightly declined during these years. But to say whether that’s a bad thing, we need first to think clearly about what inequality means for our society — for the quality of life for people at the bottom end, for the strands of community that knit a society together, and for the idea that every member of society is equally worthy of respect and consideration. And we need to think about the mechanisms through which these inequalities are created in our economy — and through which these inequalities have increased so sharply.

First, the effects. It appears also to be a fact that the symptoms of poverty are more extensive today than they were twenty years ago. The demands on food banks have increased; homelessness appears to be more extensive in many major cities; and of course the problem of lack of access to health insurance and affordable health care appears to be even more pressing. So it would appear that the increase in income inequality in the past 20 years has had a depressing effect on the lives of the least-well-off in our society. At least the economic processes that have improved the incomes to the rich and the super-rich have not also improved the incomes of the middle-income groups and the poor. So the philosophers’ argument — inequalities are not inherently bad if the bottom end is pretty well off — doesn’t apply to today’s circumstances.

Second, there is some evidence that the social distance between the very-well-off and the not-well-off has increased, with fewer points of contact between social groups. This is sometimes described as the “disappearance of the middle class.” The substantial transformation of the American economy that has occurred in manufacturing and the auto industry is emblematic: the jobs that created the possibility of a blue-collar, middle class life in Michigan, Ohio, and Illinois are disappearing, and the next generation of manufacturing jobs are creating incomes that are perhaps only 60% of the levels of the previous generation. So rising inequality is manifest, in part, in the loss of well-paying jobs in the middle — producing a greater degree of social separation.

This brings us to respect and equality. It isn’t too much of a stretch to infer that in a society increasingly separating into “affluent” and “poor”, the idea of basic democratic equality — that everyone is in the same boat; that everyone has an equally worthy life; that we all depend on each other; and that everyone is equally worthy of respect — has less and less social reality. These widely separated groups have less and less lived experience that reinforces these ideas of connection and equality among all citizens.

So there are ample reasons for judging that the rising material inequality in America is a very bad thing. It is bad because of the consequences it has for people on the lower end of the spectrum; it is bad for the corrosive effects it has on basic democratic values of fundamental human equality; and ultimately it has to be bad for the civic values that undergird a peaceful and harmonious society. How much inequality can a community absorb before it begins to pull apart into mutually antagonistic groups? How many more gated communities will this society need if we continue to fail to achieve the kind of material fairness that allows every citizen to look the other in the eye and say, I respect you and I know that all our benefits depend upon our mutual contributions to society?

If our economy continues to separate our society into rich and poor — if our largest cities continue to intensify the inequalities of access, opportunity, and quality of life between the urban poor and the suburban affluent — then surely we have some seismic social conflicts brewing.