Category: Status

Equal respect versus tolerance

~ Andrew Norton ~ 26 Comments

One of the central ideas of modern leftism is that all human beings are entitled to equal concern and respect. This is why most leftists oppose racism, sexism, ethnocentrism and homophobia.

…leftists don’t automatically see difference as a matter of status. Some groups of people recognise one set of virtues while others recognise another. Leftists want to see a society where everyone can pursue their own ideals of excellence without being judged or looked down on. This is a vision they share with many libertarians.(emphasis added)

– Don Arthur at Club Troppo.

The sentence I bolded is not, in my view, 100% right. It is an area in which leftists and libertarians will often have shared social practices, but important if sometimes subtle differences in their underlying philosophy.

Libertarianism (or classical liberalism) does not require equal respect, or even any respect, of other people’s ‘ideals of excellence’. What it requires is tolerance, the virtue of putting up with the things that you don’t like. It isn’t so much equal respect as equal indifference.

For a liberal, equal respect demands too much and more than is necessary. For passionate religious believers (and liberal ideas of toleration began with the problems they cause) it is very hard to hold other faiths in ‘equal respect’ without calling into question their own beliefs. But all it requires to tolerate them is to hold off from intimidation and violence.

Indeed, the shift from liberal tolerance to leftist acceptance, the logical result of equal concern and respect, takes us back to where we started before the idea of tolerance took hold. Tolerance challenged the idea that everyone must fit in with a common set of norms, and replaced it with the idea that everyone must abstain from certain behaviours.

The practical differences between these two views came out in the reaction to the decision to allow The Peel hotel to exclude women and straight men. Continue reading “Equal respect versus tolerance” →

Status, left and right

~ Andrew Norton ~ 50 Comments

Though leftism is diverse, a common thread is a concern with equality. This makes it in part an ideology of status, with political programmes that seek to eliminate status differences or moderate their impact. This is one reason leftists remain concerned with income inequality long after absolute poverty has been eliminated, try to obstruct institutions that reproduce status differences (eg private schools), and favour anti-discrimination and affirmative action laws for groups that have historically had low status.

Almost everyone is status-conscious to some extent, but levels of concern with it vary a lot. Politically, I suspect that people with relatively high levels of status concerns are disproportionately attracted to leftism and to hierarchical conservatism (in Australia, conservatism tends to be populist, but in countries with more aristocratic traditions status-oriented individuals could go left or right). On this theory, those with relatively low levels of status concern would be disproportionately on the liberal/libertarian right, in which individual freedom is prized – who cares what other people think, I am going to do what I want, either alone or with like-minded people.
Continue reading “Status, left and right” →

The 1967 Constitutional referendum

~ Andrew Norton ~ 8 Comments

Today is the fortieth anniversary of the biggest ever yes vote in an Australian Constitutional referendum. But what exactly were people voting for? One interesting argument of two recent books, a revised edition of The 1967 Referendum: Race, Power and the Australian Constitution by Bain Attwood and Andrew Markus, and Divided Nation? Indigenous Affairs and the Imagined Public by Murray Goot and Tim Rowse, is that confusion was as common then as it is now.

In the 1960s, many people argued that Constitutional change was necessary to give Aboriginal Australians citizenship, and that’s the interpretation still being put on it today. On ABC TV’s Insiders this morning we were told:

As hard as it is to believe in retrospect, just four decades ago, Aborigines were not counted as citizens.

Hard to believe, indeed, as all Aborigines had been citizens since 1948, and many (the ‘half-castes’) much earlier. Yet the citizenship claim was also made in the opening few minutes of tonight’s SBS documentary Vote Yes for Aborigines (though contradicted later in the programme). The common belief that Aborigines were given the vote in the referendum isn’t right either, and even the idea that they weren’t counted in the census isn’t strictly correct – the Bureau of Statistics did count them, but the number was ignored for certain purposes.
Continue reading “The 1967 Constitutional referendum” →

Inequality and happiness

~ Andrew Norton ~ 8 Comments

The evidence on higher levels of happiness in Nordic countries has been long and persistent. Could it have something to do with them having less social inequality (less envy and resentment) and more ethnic cohesion (although that is changing)?

– Fred Argy commenting on my Happy Danes post.

As Will Wilkinson’s excellent recent paper on happiness research notes, it’s hard to find consistent results on the well-being consequences of income inequality. As Will argues, one reason for the mixed findings is that the effects of various factors on happiness are ‘culturally and ideologically mediated’. So the impact of income inequality will depend on how intrinsically important equality is seen to be, how justified the differences that are perceived to exist are seen to be, and how people perceive their own prospects. If people in Nordic countries value equality highly, and that is what their society produces, that might help explain why they do well in happiness and life satisfaction surveys.

This does not, however, mean that their model can be easily transposed elsewhere. Other countries with fairly low income inequality like Germany consistently do quite poorly in surveys of happiness and life satisfaction. A 2003 paper by Rafael Di Tella and Robert MacCulloch (can’t find a link) showed income inequality and happiness inequality trends over the period 1975 to 1995 and found that while income inequality rose in the US and Britain happiness inequality was stable or falling.
Continue reading “Inequality and happiness” →