How many times have you heard someone on the Right talk glibly about ‘equality of opportunity’? And how many times do you think they have stopped to consider what that phrase actually implies?
Superficially, it’s a handy riposte whenever the Left start talking about equality, allowing Conservative politicians to reject the progressive fixation on equality of outcome without sounding like old-school reactionaries who believe everyone has their proper place in the Great Chain of Being.
Equality of outcome is not only impossible to deliver in practice but would be miserable even if it could be: a relentlessly standardised world of queues for identikit (and inferior) state-provided flats, phones and every sort of service, where an individual’s talents and drive count for nothing.
Equality of opportunity, on the other hand, suggests a much rosier and more meritocratic picture, in which everyone is given a fair go and then allowed to rise as high as their ability will take them. Crucially, it seems to be commonly assumed that this version is compatible with a liberal society and a small (or at least, smaller) state.
But this is a complete fiction that does not withstand more than the most cursory scrutiny. In fact, once one approaches the concept in an intellectually serious way, it isn’t even obvious that equality of opportunity is even a more liberal concept than equality of outcome.
If this seems counter-intuitive to you, consider the horrified reaction of Conservative politicians to the suggestion by Adam Swift, an academic at the University of Warwick that parents reading to their children are ‘unfairly disadvantaging other people’s children’. Per the National Review:
In an interview with ABC Radio last week, philosopher and professor Adam Swift said that since ‘bedtime stories activities…. do indeed foster and produce… [desired] familial relationship goods,’ he wouldn’t want to ban them, but that parents who ‘engage in bedtime-stories activities’ should definitely at least feel kinda bad about it sometimes.
The professor’s cost-benefit calculations on providing for one’s children seem to fall on a sort of curve. Reading a bedtime story is, he concludes, probably fine; sending your child to private school is totally unacceptable, of course. Then we get to this doozy:
At one point, Swift even flirted with the idea of ‘simply abolishing the family’ as a way of ‘solving the social justice problem’ because ‘there would be a more level playing field’ if we did, but ultimately concluded that ‘it is in the child’s interest to be parented’ and that ‘parenting a child makes for what we call a distinctive and special contribution to the flourishing and well-being of adults’.
Abolishing the family is the ultimate totalitarian objective, an assault on the last, smallest and strongest unit of society that stands between an atomised individual and the state. It is hard to imagine anyone on the Right, whatever the specific flavour of their philosophy, having any time for such a notion.
But here’s the thing: Swift’s logic stacks up. He believes much more coherently in ‘equality of opportunity’, and has thought much harder about what it really means, than any of the politicians who have trotted out the phrase in the normal course of democratic politics.
If any government were actually serious about delivering it, the effort would require a programme of social engineering on a vast and, yes, totalitarian scale. Every possible factor that gives one child a head-start over another would need to be accounted for and flattened. As I wrote a few years ago:
Such an effort would involve the state trying to impose uniformity on both school and home life, and mediating the resources invested in children across a huge spectrum to control for inequalities of wealth. Food, exercise, and screen time could all be centrally prescribed too. And that’s just sticking to the ‘nurture’ questions.
An obvious ‘nurture’ factor I left out then was geography. Economic activity is not (and cannot be) evenly distributed; nor are the best schools, and there will always be ‘the best schools’. How do you resolve that? Universal boarding would go some way towards it, but that’s not very ‘levelling up’.
Meanwhile the ‘nature’ side of a child’s development opens up vast and problematic frontiers of its own. How exactly do you deliver ‘equality of opportunity’ between two children of markedly different intelligence or ability? What about the ‘pretty privilege’ enjoyed by those with faster metabolisms or stronger impulse control?
The great utility of equality of outcome to progressives is that it is undeliverable, and thus will always be grounds for more and yet more interventions in people’s lives. The trap into which many on the Right have fallen is that equality of opportunity is equally undeliverable – and the scale of interventions it demands are, if anything, more extreme.
After all, a state which confines itself to delivering merely equality of outcome can actually afford to take a fairly laissez-faire approach to its citizens in many respects; it doesn’t matter how you’re living if you receive the same universal goods and services after waiting in the same line.
Even if we could deliver equality of opportunity, would we really want to? It may well be meritocratic, even if it isn’t liberal. But it is too often forgotten that when Michael Young coined the term in his 1958 book ‘The Rise of the Meritocracy’, he did not mean it kindly.
Young’s fear was that a society where the Haves believed they had earned everything they had would be a society where they felt no obligations to anyone else. He meant their less fortunate peers, but in an equal opportunity world, where the state resets every child’s circumstances to Year Zero, it would be impossible to work selflessly even where we are most inclined to do so: to give our families a better start than we had.
Accepting that equality of opportunity is a will o’ the wisp does not mean the Right cannot concern itself with opportunity per se. But if we are not to be drawn into the progressive mire like unwary fellow travellers, we need to recognise the peril and update our thinking.
We already have the framework to do so. Right-wing thought tends to easily distinguish between absolute poverty, which should be tackled, and relative poverty, a left-wing construction that simply dresses equality of outcome in borrowed feathers and (as it can be ameliorated simply by destroying wealth) often has precious little to do with actual human wellbeing. As I put it before:
Liberals should treat the former as they do the latter: commit to tackling absolute poverty of opportunity, accepting that the tidemark of ‘absolute’ will rise and fall with the fortunes of society, while treating relative poverty of opportunity as the bottomless well of justification for authoritarianism that it is.
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