Simone Weil on Equality

One of the fundamental human needs Simone Weil identifies in The Need for Roots is equality. As she puts it:

Equality is a vital need of the human soul. It consists in a recognition, at once public, general, effective and genuinely expressed in institutions and customs, that the same amount of respect and consideration is due to every human being because this respect is due to the human being as such and is not a matter of degree.

In other words--all human persons qua human persons deserve to be treated with respect, that respect is not contingent on social rank, and that respect must be manifested through public recognition. All seems straightforward enough.

Weil goes on to distinguish her understanding of equality from the leading liberal account: Equality of opportunity, or meritocracy. The problem with meritocracy is not that it is impossible to deliver as an ideal. The problem is the moral perversity of the ideal itself! A true meritocratic society would distribute social rewards as a function of moral desert or effort or talent. But this implies that those at the bottom deserve their social inferiority, or at the very least are social inferiors in virtue of their incompetence:

For a man who occupies an inferior position and suffers from it to know that his position is a result of his incapacity and that everybody is aware of the fact is not any consolation, but an additional motive of bitterness. 

Weil's basic critique of meritocracy is quite familiar. It was probably given its best statement in John Schaar's phenomenal critique of the equality of opportunity, and the theme is found in the Michael Young book that gave us the word. But the worry is much older than that! It runs through Augustinian critiques of moral desert. Consider this example from the neo-Augustinian Pierre Nicole, who notes that IF we justify social inequality on the basis of moral desert, we are going to produce immense social discontent:

If one became Great only by desert, the height of the great would be a continual noise in our ears, that they were prefer'd to the prejudice of others, whom we fancy more deserving than they ... But thus joyning Greatness with Birth, the pride of inferiours is allaid, and Greatness itself becomes a far less eye-sore. There is no shame to give place to another, when one may say, 'Tis his Birth I yield to. This reason convinces the mind without wounding it with spight or jealousie. ... Another advantage that accrues from this establishment is, That Princes may be had without pride, and Grandees found that are humble. For it gives no occasion of pride to continue in the rank where God's Providence has plac'd us, provided we use it to the ends he prescribes.

The second problem with equality of opportunity as an ideal is that it destroys social stability. The meritocratic utopia is a permanently churning society, with rich falling and poor rising constantly. What many liberals take as an ideal strikes Weil as a reductio: "that sort of equality, if allowed full play by itself, can make social life fluid to the point of decomposing it."

I think this egalitarian vision of a radically dynamic society--which struck Plato and perhaps Marx as the definition of democratic freedom--is distinctively American. Of particular importance is its insistence not simply on upward social mobility, but on the mathematically necessary downward mobility. (My old boss Richard Reeves' hobbyhorse).

Here's one example from Jacksonian America:

Money and property, we know, among us, are constantly changing hands. A man has only to work on, and wait patiently, and with industry and enterprise, he is sure to get both. The wheel of American fortune is perpetually and steadily turning, and those at bottom today, will be moving up tomorrow, and will ere long be at the top. The rich man of this year, may be poor the next, and the wealthy family of this generation, is likely to dissipate its fortune in the next. Scarcely ever does it remain in the same line to the third generation. ... All property, among us, tends to the hands of those who work and wait for it. They are as sure to get it, as the sun is to rise and set.

And another example:

A very important and striking feature in our political and social system, which indeed is the result of our institutions and laws, is, that there is no aristocracy amongst us--not even an aristocracy of wealth. An aristocracy cannot exist without peculiar and exclusive privileges and rights, recognized, sanctioned, and upheld by law. There cannot be, in this country, even a confederacy or combination among the rich men to acquire peculiar privileges. They have none to defend. ... They are not like the hereditary nobles of Europe, whose names are enrolled in a heraldic college, set apart from the rest of mankind, designated by titles, marked by badges of honor, bound together by intermarriages, by a commuity of interests and of feelings, a distinct order in the state; nothing of all this, and they are as mutable besides as the motes that float in the summer air. Death is every busily at work in dismembering all overgrown fortunes.

... If a line could be drawn between the two classes, at any given moment, and then five years pass away, I doubt whether the smaller portion could be recognized as the same. Hundreds on hundreds would be found to have changed places. And to speak of a clan of men thus constituted as an aristocracy, is as sound and sensible a philosophy as to point to the insects of summer as the emblems of eternity. 

There's a nice contrast between the American meritocratic faith and Nicole's argument for the superiority of hereditary aristocracy.

But anyway--Simone Weil rejects the ideal of equality of opportunity. She offers two positive suggestions for manifesting the genuine need for equal respect. The first is that punishments ought to be given out in proportion to rank:

an employer who is incapable or guilty of an offence against his workmen ought to be made to suffer far more, both in the spirit and in the flesh, than a workman who is incapable or guilty of an offense against his employer. ... the exercise of important public functions should carry with it serious personal risks.

This seems eminently sensible to me.

Weil's next suggestion is less plausible. She argues that much of the difficulty in inequality comes from inequalities of degree. If we can force ourselves to understand social differences not as ranked inequalities along some scale, but simply as fundamental differences, then perhaps we might be able to experience social differentiation without inequality. Separate but equal, in other words:

Equality is all the greater in proportion as human conditions are regarded as being, not more nor less than one another, but simply as other. Let us look on the professions of miner and minister simply as two different vocations, like those of poet and mathematician. And let the material hardships attaching to the miner's condition be counted in honour of those who undergo them. 

There is certainly something true here. Weil is right to insist that a modern capitalist economy in which money forms the only social bond makes it impossible to think in terms of differences of kind, but always in terms of differences in monetary rank. But her proposal strikes me as wildly psychologically naive. It will not do to tell ourselves that these differences just represent different social roles, but not ranks of inequality. I think that's clear with Weil's next example:

In wartime, if an army is filled with the right spirit, a soldier is proud and happy to be under fire instead of at headquarters; a general is proud and happy to think that the sucessful outcome of the battle depends on his forethought; and at the same time the soldier admires the general and the general the soldier. Such a balance constitutes an equality.

Yes, there might be some important way of LEGITIMIZING the obvious inequality between general and soldier. Perhaps a reciprocal appreciation of the distinctive role each plays might contribute to a fuller sense of the web of mutual dependence in which we find ourselves. Perhaps too that appreciation might render legitimate and even positively valuable the reality of social inequality. But it's too much to suggest that we have done away with inequality as such. The soldier is obviously inferior to the general.

Weil makes this same mistake in her brief discussion of the human soul's need for hierarchy. She says obedience and a "certain devotion towards superiors" are necessary. Weil loves obedience. Later in the book she claims that the soldier whose bravery comes from an internal constitution or the pursuit of glory "is very inferior in human quality to that of the soldier who obeys the orders of his superiors." Only direct revelation from God is more praiseworthy than following orders.

Yet she insists that this obedience is a devotion to the superior as a SYMBOL of the transcendent chain of being. I don't think the human mind is capable of such abstractions. We obey our superiors as HUMAN BEINGS, either in virtue of their office or their person (usually some combination of the two). With some philosophic distance we might recognize that the master I obey is not naturally superior to me, but that seems besides the point. Authority is not simply a symbolic nod to the structure of the universe, it is an ineradicable social reality.