On the Pursuit of Equality

I'm writing this post while sitting in the Main Reading Room of the Jefferson Building at the Library of Congress. If you haven't been, Google it. It's probably the most glorious indoor space in the entire country.

The trouble with beginning a blog is that one must balance the divergent goals of writing something narrow enough that more remains to be written in future posts, but broad enough that it will make sense given the audience's unfamiliarity with his way of thinking. I've decided to stray toward the broad end of the spectrum; I hope you'll forgive me.

Alexander Berger and I are engaged in a long-standing debate as to whether the United States ought to seek to alleviate poverty on an international level. I'm sure I will discuss that debate and its slew of nuances in future posts, but the musings expounded in this particular post concern a more basic matter: why one (the state or any non-state actor) would seek to alleviate poverty anywhere, at all. To put it differently, why the pursuit of equality between individuals is a worthy goal. Early on in our discussion, Alexander and I realized that we had both accepted that premise intuitively; as a result, it's something I've not yet had the opportunity to discuss.

"Alleviating poverty" sounds good and Christian; "pursuing equality" may sound like socialism-lite to acolytes of the latest right-wing hysteria phenomenon (and a handful of more thoughtful people). The basic difference for me is that "pursuing equality" is intrinsically bidirectional; that is to say, the pursuit of equality between individuals will almost always necessitate the movement of both to some hybrid state. "Alleviating poverty," meanwhile, connotes itself with the promotion of economic gains for some people (those deemed "impoverished") without necessarily implying the economic losses of others.

Of course, different societies define "impoverished" differently, and "poverty" exists everywhere, though the term implies a different level of underdevelopment in different communities. In a way, these distinctions vindicate Jesus' famous prophecy in Mark 14:7 ("The poor you will always have with you"; included in Matthew's Gospel at Matthew 26:11): the poor remain with us because inequality persists. As one might expect, a person living just below the poverty line in the United States finds herself with many more possessions and opportunities than the average citizen of a very poor country, like the Democratic Republic of the Congo.

Why, then, should we work to alleviate poverty at all? If we don't aim to create a society in which everyone's possessions are identical (even most Communists don't advocate redistribution to that extent), then wealth disparities will necessarily arise. When they do, some people will be labeled "rich" and some "poor," and poverty will survive. The mission is impossible.

(Note that accepting the last paragraph would also equate the rhetoric of "alleviating poverty" with that of "pursuing equality," which solves the semantic quandary I had noted earlier).

My initial response (and the only one I'll have time to include in this post, which is entirely my fault for having chosen to stray toward the broad end of the aforementioned spectrum) relates to the notion of responsibility. Most Americans (including myself) don't believe in the pursuit of complete equality (instead, many of us choose to celebrate our differences), but we do support the equality of opportunities between individuals. It's righteously seen as bigoted to believe that women or African-Americans don't deserve civil liberties like the right to vote, and in fifty years (twenty, if one's really optimistic), it will be righteously seen as bigoted to believe that homosexual couples don't deserve the same benefits of "marriage" or "civil unions" (select the terminology of your choice for now, I promise to have a post on this later and very soon) as heterosexual couples.

My response suggests that money works the same way.

Another future post will examine the relationship between wealth and happiness, but I'll stick with the obvious part here: as much as individuals like me try to separate money and personal fulfillment, there are certain opportunities that wealthy individuals can seize and impoverished individuals cannot. Some of these are obviously important (a college education), others are singularly insignificant over the long term but enormously important when considered as a group (going to see a movie in a theater on Friday night; purchasing a membership at the local gym; the Chipotle burrito I'm going to purchase and devour when the Library closes in thirty-four minutes).

To the average American, it would be ludicrous to deprive me of the burrito I'm going to eat because the homeless person who sits outside Chipotle hasn't experienced its succulent goodness in the last eighteen months (for those keeping score at home, Chipotle is a Colorado company founded just two blocks away from the University of Denver campus). Some might rationalize their position by guessing that I had worked to earn the money with which to purchase my burrito while the homeless individual had either not done so or had already squandered the fruits of their labors. Others would simply say that it's wrong to deprive me of my property.

I could spend the next three hours writing material to counter the first view. The second is far more persuasive - but might I note the following?:

I've done nothing to merit my burrito. I've worked several jobs through which I've accumulated a modest savings, but not nearly enough to financially support myself and the things that I do. I'm a college student, which means that someone is paying close to $40,000 every year just to cover the cost of my classes. In my case, that money comes from a foundation that issues very generous scholarships, and my parents don't absorb any of the costs.

My friends know about my scholarship, so when I've had this discussion with them, they (and by "they" I mean Kirsten Cangilla, in this particular case) will be quick to point out that I worked hard in high school to earn my scholarship, and thus my situation is a result of my perseverance rather than my privilege. And while I did work hard in high school, my situation is a result of my privilege.

Consider not only the family I was born into (my father, though not from a particularly wealthy family, makes a six-figure salary as an engineer, thus allowing my mother to be extra-supportive of my sister and me as we grew up), but also the random genetic gifts I was given (I'm smart), the good luck that has followed me over the course of my life (I've never been extremely sick or grievously injured), and the people I've just happened to be around (who are amazing and have contributed enormously to my personal development).

My relative wealth comes from sheer fortune (no pun intended), not from any disproportionately large amount of effort I've exerted to deserve it.  Since my good fortune has left me with a higher degree of opportunity than the average individual, I have a responsibility to share what I have in order to preserve the benefits of a society in which equality of opportunity exists (and I've already established that the pursuit of equality of opportunity, as opposed to the equality of possessions, is the egalitarian principle in American society).

This reasoning obviously has implications outside of its relevance to me as an individual, as you'll partially see expounded in later posts. As I implied before, however, the simple responsibility of the more fortunate to assist the less fortunate isn't the only answer to the question of why equality ought be pursued. My debate with Alexander, for instance, has played out on an entirely different level.

Welcome

Oh Lord, are there really people starving still?
Look out beyond the walls of Babylon
How long can their needs go unfilled?

So begins Jackson Browne's 1976 album "The Pretender," an intensely intimate work about the death of Browne's wife, Phyllis. Even as he sets out to grieve a loss of impossible personal magnitude, Browne observes that the suffering within the Babylon he inhabits is only a minute pang in comparison with the starvation that exists outside of it.

It's a sentiment I've often felt: my troubles, though they might sometimes appear insurmountable, are in fact inconsequential. I remain locked tight within Babylon, be that an allegory for my family, my country, or my own head.

This blog, should it survive, is about escaping Babylon and addressing those who starve still.

This isn't my first foray into "new media." I began a Twitter feed earlier this year, and I quickly found that I couldn't maintain it. This blog will likely meet the same end. It seems worth pursuing, however, because I've found similar fora useful for the organization of my thoughts (you can peruse my collection of musings at cross-x.com, if you'd like).

The topics discussed here will be dictated by current events and the thoughts that ferment within my own brain. Should this publication mature beyond the age of a few posts, I will certainly discuss the issues of greatest importance to my identity and of greatest interest to me. Those include:

• My Catholicism, and what social role it prescribes;
• Latin America, and what may happen to it;
• My ambiguous Hispanic heritage, and whether it matters;
• Development, what it means, and whether it ought be pursued;
• Representative democracy, and whether it is sufficient as a form of governance;
• Neoliberalism, and how deep its failures run;
• My personal inadequacy to write on any of the previous three subjects, and whether this blog is useful to anyone other than me;
• Colorado, and its unequivocal beauty.

Enjoy, and please comment. I'm thrilled that you've read even this much.