Selected Essays | George Scialabba on Michael Walzer

On this episode of Selected Essays, Jess and Zach talk to George Scialabba about Michael Walzer’s "In Defense of Equality," first published in Dissent in 1973.

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Jessica Swoboda  00:06

Hey everyone, welcome to Selected Essays, a podcast series from The Point magazine about essays you should read but probably haven't. Each episode, we'll be talking with writers about an essay that's influenced one of their own. My name is Jess Swoboda, and I'm here with my co-host Zach Fine.

Zach Fine  00:22

This week, we have George Scialabba on the show to discuss Michael Walzer's essay "In Defense of Equality," published in Dissent magazine in the fall of 1973. We also talked about George's essay, "What Were We Thinking? The intolerable inequalities we take for granted," published in Commonweal last year. George is an award-winning critic and essayist whose writing has appeared in the Nation, Bookforum, n+1, Dissent, and the Boston Review, among many other publications. He's a contributing editor at the Baffler and the author of numerous essay collections and a memoir entitled How to be Depressed.

Jessica Swoboda  00:58

We hope you'll enjoy this episode and subscribe wherever you get your podcasts. If you have questions, comments or anything else, send an email to selectedessays@thepointmag.com. We'd love to hear from you. And also be sure to subscribe to The Point, the magazine that brings you content like this podcast. You can find a 50% off discount code exclusive to listeners in the episode notes.

Zach Fine  01:33

Hey George, thanks so much for joining us.

George Scialabba  01:35

Glad to be here.

Zach Fine  01:37

Before we begin, can you tell us why you chose this essay?

George Scialabba  01:41

Well because, like me, it comes out of a deep unhappiness, to put it mildly, with the really scandalous degree of arbitrary economic inequality in the US, and the amount of the amount of suffering that it causes. Walzer is an academic and a political philosopher, and his essay is less polemical than mine. It's more theoretical, but it clearly comes from the same indignation, and I've always, you know, I admired it 50 years ago when I first came across it, and it's been one of my chief political philosophical lights ever since. 

Zach Fine  02:29

Can tell us a little bit more about Walzer and also about the historical moment from which the essay comes?

George Scialabba  02:35

Walzer graduated from Brandeis in 1956 and got a PhD from Harvard in 1961. He's taught at Harvard, and it's a very prestigious Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton. He's written more than two dozen books, of which, by far the best known is Just and Unjust Wars from 1977, but that book is far from his best. Spheres of Justice (1983), which was written in response to Robert Nozick's Anarchy, State and Utopia. They were actually good friends, and they were at Harvard at the same time, and they taught a course called "Capitalism and Socialism," which consisted of lectures arguing with each other. I wish I'd taken it or been been around for it anyway. Spheres of Justice is a brilliant, original work of political theory which defined justice not in the abstract, but as dependent on the intrinsic meanings of our goods and practices. Radical Principles, right from 1977, anticipated spheres of justice and contains "In Defense of Equality," which I'm going to discuss. Among his other books, my favorites are A Matched Pair: Interpretation and Social Criticism from 1987 and The Company of Critics (1988). The first makes a general case for connected rather than a priori social criticism. And the second illustrates these two approaches through cases, Sartre, Camus, Gramsci, Orwell, many others. I don't always agree with his judgments of those critics, but there, it's a very rich book that you can argue with. Walzer was also for many years the editor of the Democratic Socialist journal Dissent, which is amazingly for a little magazine still publishing. And that's where "In Defense of Equality" first appeared. It appeared in 1973 at the end of the golden age of American and European prosperity and social peace. The neoconservatives were just about to make their appearance on the scene. They had assembled under the big tent of public interest, Nathan Glaser, Daniel Bell and Kristol. They were sharpening their knives, and Kristol's one of Kristol's early essays was an attack on equality as a kind of false issue concocted by by envious intellectuals, which was his diagnosis for just about all social problems. And Kristol, by the way, was went on to be one of the inventors and main proponents of new class theory, which I think is probably, I mean, it's been absorbed into the DNA of the conservative movement, but it was new and very controversial. Then it blamed most contemporary social ills on the hubris and ambitions, illicit ambitions, of intellectuals. So the argument in Kristol's essay "Against Equality" was pretty simple. It's because talent is distributed along a bell curve and income is also distributed along the bell curve, meaning that, you know, there are few people without much of any on one end. There's most people with medium amount of both talent and income in the middle, and a few people with enormous amount of both over on the other end. Anyway, because there are these two bell curves, and, you know, they have the same shape, they're both bell curves. Inequality is therefore natural and right. It wasn't much more sophisticated than that. So Walzer's, you know, essays, I mean, it's more of a reply than the original Kristol essay deserves, and it leaves leaves Kristol behind fairly early on. But he pointed out that there are many talents, of which only one talent for making money determines access to most goods, and two, that's the wrong reason for having access to most goods. So what is the right reason? Well, the goods themselves tell us, according to Walzer, medical care is for the sick, and the reason for being in a position to give medical care, that is to be a doctor, is to be able to help the sick. An outsized income is not intrinsic to being a doctor. The satisfaction of healing is a business executive makes decisions that affect many workers and customers. The ability and desire to make such decisions well is the qualification for being in an executive position, and those decisions rightly made are the reward of being in that position. So what follows from this line of reasoning is what Walzer calls complex equality, not a simple, cookie cutter numerical equality, but a distribution that honors each good's and practice's intrinsic social meaning, rather than one which is completely or largely dominated by by the income curve. 

Jessica Swoboda  07:39

George, can we turn to the opening paragraph of this essay, please? And can you read that aloud for us?

George Scialabba  07:45

"At the very center of conservative thought lies the idea that the present division of wealth and power corresponds to some deeper reality of human life. Conservatives don't want to say merely that the present division is what it ought to be for that would invite a search for some distributive principle, as if it were possible to make a distribution. They want to say that whatever the division of wealth and power is, it naturally is, and that all efforts to change it temporarily successful in proportion to their bloodlines, must be futile in the end, we are then invited, as an Irving Crystal's recent commentary article, to reflect upon the perversity of those who would make the attempt. Like a certain sort of leftist thought, conservative argument seems quickly to shape itself around the rhetoric of motives, rather than of reasons. Crystal is especially adept at that rhetoric and strangely unconcerned about the reductionism it involved. He aims to expose egalitarianism as the ideology of envious and resentful intellectuals. No one else cares about it, he says, except the new class of college educated professional, most importantly, professional men and women who hate their bourgeois past and present and long for a world of their own making."

Jessica Swoboda  09:06

Thank you. So why begin this essay by outlining the arguments he's pushing against? Why does Walzer do that?

George Scialabba  09:15

Well, because that's what gave him the push. That's what got him onto the page, but also, I suspect, because he had an inkling that Irving Kristol and commentary and this whole school of thought, neoconservatism, was going to be regrettably influential, and it was not too soon to begin pushing back against it. 

Zach Fine  09:35

Can you tell us a little bit more about the tyranny of the bell curve? What's Walzer's argument against it? 

George Scialabba  09:41

Well, that begins his second section with the lovely sentence, "what egalitarianism requires is that many bells should ring." So there is a bell curve for maybe not for general intelligence, because that's highly contested, but there is a bell curve for most abilities, for vocabulary, for mathematical ability, for the ability to frame a legal argument. I mean, a bell curve is a natural distribution which, well, which is just given. I mean, it's natural. The question is, what they mean? I mean, Kristol's notion is that there is one bell curve for ability and one bell curve for income, and they correspond, and therefore everything is just as it ought to be. But Walzer's point is that the bell curve for making money, and there is one, some people are better at it than others. There's no reason why it should be among all of the many, many bell curves, bell curve of need for medical care, need for education, need for housing. There's no reason why that one bell curve should dominate, should control access to all these goods. What should money control? Well, it should control the superfluous goods. I mean, no one is entitled to a sailboat, that's his example. So if you want to buy a sailboat, you need money, and we better have some ability to make money, some talent for making money. And there's nothing objectionable about you know, people making money to satisfy modest comforts and appetites. The problem is that if you allow people to make an enormous amount of money, there's no way, given the nature of money, which is just a medium of exchange, that you can keep them from trespassing into other spheres of distribution, from buying, you know, more medical care, while other people don't have enough. Buying fancy lawyers so they can, you know, outwit and out maneuver their tenants who can only afford public defenders or or influencing politics. Above all, that's the paradigm case of not allowing people to have too much money. 

Jessica Swoboda  11:59

Yeah, at the end of the second paragraph, Walzer says, quote, "I think all these assertions are false. I shall try to respond to them in a serious way." And I was struck by this idea of in a serious way. And I'm wondering, what does "in a serious way" mean to him? What is his method, his argumentative approach and style in this essay, and is it a valuable way to approach the subject? 

George Scialabba  12:22

Well, I think he means, you know, Kristol is one of the reasons he's so entertaining to those who can stand him, is that he's very good at making fun. And in this case, he, in this his essay, he makes a superficially plausible case that liberals are just failed rich people, and that they think they deserve to be rich because they're smart and they're not, so they make up a theory to explain why nobody should be rich. So this kind of ad hominem argument is, you know, it's a staple of at least Kristol's and other neoconservatives, to lesser extent, argument and Walzer, I mean, he gets in a few digs here and there, at at Crystal and others, but, you know, he has, he has a better argument, so he doesn't need to do that. And I think he's just declaring that, you know, he's not going to meet Kristol on his own ground of, you know, motive and ad hominem disparagement.

Zach Fine  13:22

I wanted to return to the question of money and money's influence that you were talking a little bit about a minute ago. One of the crucial suggestions in the Walzer essay is that to stop the influence of money, you can't just neutralize its influence or abolish the power of money outside of its sphere, to use walzers phrase, but you have to redistribute it. Can you explain how Walzer makes that rhetorical move from stopping the influence of money to redistribution? How does he get to redistribution?

George Scialabba  13:53

Well, as I mentioned, money is the medium of exchange. It can't it's not an intrinsic thing. It's something that can be exchanged for anything. So there's no way of keeping people with lots of money, too much money, from using it for anything. And if you have a society in which all the essential goods of life are supplied in reasonable amounts, universally, and if you have strict limits on campaign contributions and the ways money can can influence politics. You can, you can very much reduce the harm of vastly unequal distribution of income, but you can't completely eliminate it. There are always going to be ways that people with a lot of income can buy scarce things that the society can't afford or doesn't want to supply to everyone. You can't even, even with strict political regulation. I mean, even before we the Supreme Court opened the tax to money in politics, there were ways, you know, PACs or just financing, a popular one recently is financing chairs in economics and social science at various universities. I mean, ordinary people can't do that. However strongly they feel about economic theories or social scientific theories, you need lots of money to do that, and it does generate a certain amount of influence. So anyway, you you know you want people to have some extra money to buy not necessary things, because that's part of the pleasure and congeniality of life. But his premise is that there's no way to keep people with inordinate amounts of money like our 1% have from securing unequal social power.

Jessica Swoboda  15:45

Now seems like a good time to turn to the passage you selected to read. Can we go to there now?

George Scialabba  15:52

This is from section five, and this too is in part, a response to Irving Kristol's essay. The neoconservatives were very much exercised about quotas. The issue was only just rearing its head back then, along with affirmative action in 1973 but Kristol was all over it and was dead set against it. And this seems to me a wise response. Walzer is also against quotas, but not for the same reason as Kristol, because Walzer is interested in racial justice, and Kristol was not. So anyway. "The positions for which quotas are being urged are in America today key entry points to the good life. They open the way that is to a life marked above all, by a profusion of goods, material and moral possessions, conveniences, prestige and deference. Many of these goods are not in any plausible sense, appropriate rewards for the work that is being done. They are merely the rewards that upper classes throughout history have been able to seize and hold for their members. Quotas, as they are currently being used, are a way of redistributing these rewards by redistributing the social places to which they conventionally pertain. It is a bad way, because one really wants doctors and even civil servants to have certain sorts of qualifications. To the people on the receiving end of medical and bureaucratic services, race and class are a great deal less important than knowledge, competence, courtesy and so on. I don't want to say that race and class are entirely unimportant. It would be wrong to us underestimate the distortions introduced by an inegalitarian society into these sorts of human relations. But if the right reason for receiving medical care is being sick, then the right reason for giving medical care is being able to help the sick. And so medical schools should pay attention first of all, and almost exclusively, to the potential helpfulness of their applicants. But they may be able to do that only if the usual connections between place and reward are decisively broken. Here is another example of the doctrine of right reasons. If men and women wanted to be doctors primarily because they wanted to be helpful, then they would have no reason to object when judgments were made about their potential helpfulness. But so long as there are extrinsic reasons for wanting to be a doctor, there will be pressure to choose doctors that is to make medical school places available for reasons that are similarly extrinsic. So long as the goods that medical schools distribute include more than certificates of competence include, to be precise, certificates of earning power. Quotas are not entirely implausible. I don't see that being black is a worse reason for owning the sailboat than being a doctor. They are equally bad reasons." 

Zach Fine  18:57

I want to go back to the very beginning. He talks about, he's pushing back on Kristol's use of motives, and here using helpfulness as a way of assessing merit, or who should be going to medical schools or quotas. I was wondering, how you understand that? How would we assess somebody's willingness to be helpful or eagerness to be helpful? 

George Scialabba  19:18

I guess willingness is harder. You can't see willingness, but you can, eagerness you can judge. I mean, if somebody's, for example, done some kind of medical volunteer work, and it doesn't actually have to be a judgment that's made entirely about someone before they arrive at medical school. If someone arrives at medical school, and, you know, there's an awful lot of clinical practice, even in the four years of medical school, if someone is a slacker or is just clumsy and just doesn't know how to deal with people and makes them feel uncomfortable and has no conception of courtesy, then that person's helpfulness is, you know, is impaired. I don't know exactly how to make that judgment, but I have a sense that it's upon. Possible judgment for people in charge of medical education to make.

Zach Fine  20:04

And just zooming out from, you know, the specific example of helpfulness, Walzer's argument here is what precisely? That we that we shift the way that we assign value and quotas? What is helpfulness as a category, generally thinking across other professions? 

George Scialabba  20:20

Well, it means that in this case, that it's hard to know, because there are a lot of extrinsic reasons for going to medical school. Money, prestige above all, and the benefits that money and prestige get you. A nice house and a nice neighborhood, invitation to the country club. But if, if those extrinsic rewards weren't part of being a doctor, then, well, then people who wanted those things wouldn't want to be doctors, you would get only people who wanted to help the sick being doctors. And he does say that, you know, there are some extrinsic well rewards beyond helping the sick, for example, that are that are not extrinsic, for example, the gratitude of patients and the respect of colleagues. Same thing for doc, for lawyers. So those, those satisfactions are intrinsic to the activity, to the practice. Who has power and prestige and the unequal advantage life chances they buy. You know, better education for your children, those are extrinsic to it. An inegalitarian society wouldn't foster them.

Jessica Swoboda  21:31

George, as I was reading this passage again after you sent it to us last night, I couldn't help thinking of some contemporary parallels to what, to quotas. So I was thinking of things like affirmative action or DEI initiatives, things like that. And so what I was wondering is in what ways can his position on or discussions of quotas help us think through contemporary debates on these adjacent topics, or if they can at all? 

George Scialabba  21:57

Well, I think it actually is very I should have said that, that's why I chose it, that I think it is very germane. I mean, the reasons that it matters to members of underrepresented groups is that being a member of an underrepresented group entails a poverty of resources and income and opportunity. If it didn't, if it were an egalitarian society, then the only people who would want to be professors or you know or doctors or lawyers would be people who, you know, had a passion for subject matter or for that particular form of helpfulness, and people who didn't have the capacity or the as far as could be determined, the right desires, wouldn't be disadvantaged by being told because they couldn't be admitted to law school or medical school or, I remember once, I mean, I actually quoted this in an essay. Jonathan Kozol had an anecdote about a conversation he had with a poor black woman, and he was explaining to her the controversy in New York City, there was once a terrible controversy about community control of schools and whether the principles of schools in black neighborhoods should be black. And the woman said to him, I don't give a damn whether my son's principal is black. All I want is that school be heated in the winter and that he have textbooks. I think the point is that if one distributed resources and life chances more equally across this society as a whole, the diversity movement would simply melt away, and I think that would be good.

Jessica Swoboda  23:48

So you selected your essay "What Were we Thinking?," which was published in Commonweal in January 2023, to pair with "In Defense of Equality." Can you tell us a little bit about your essay, and in what ways "In Defense of Equality" influenced it. 

George Scialabba  24:04

Well, as I mentioned that I think this essay has an origin somewhat similar to Walzers that is a shocked indignation at the radical and arbitrary inequality that deforms contemporary American society and destroys so many American's life chances. So in a way, the fundamental question both essays address is, what does it mean to deserve something? Walzer's answers emphasizes that it can mean different things depending on the good, the good or the practice in question. In some cases, need is the right answer, like food, shelter, housing, education, medical care. In other cases, political office, an academic appointment, directing a research lab, running a company, ability and persuasiveness are the right answers. In still other cases, Iove and marriage, personal charm or sheer luck are the right reasons. In strictly superfluous goods, like sailboats or massages or porcelain inlaid chopsticks, money is the right answer. Everyone should be able to earn money, but not enough to warp the distribution of all the other goods, the more important ones. I take a slightly different tack. I try to attack the libertarian understanding of dessert and merit. In some ways, I have the same antagonist as Walzer. That is Robert Nozick. His book Anarchy, State, and Utopia is still influential, unfortunately, and while Walzer's Spheres of Justice do so much better is only known to a few. Anyway, the free market principle is to each according to what she produces. I argue that there is no rigorous way to distinguish what anyone produces from what everyone else produces, that all production is social production, and that merit presupposes choice, free will, responsibility, not in a practical, everyday sense, but in the more metaphysical sense that we are the sole authors of our own actions. So that's why I think they're they're related.

Jessica Swoboda  26:24

You have this line in your essay that I was really struck by, and it's "all production is social production." And can you say a bit more about that? What does it mean to say that all production is social production, and why is it so important to see production in this way? 

George Scialabba  26:40

Well, if you look at where, I don't know where Zach's cap came from, it started in, I don't know Guatemala, or wherever the cotton was grown. And some people grew it. Some people harvested it. Some people probably different people. Some people packed it, shipped it to the factory. Other people assembled it and shipped it to the US day. Other people distributed it, merchandised it, sold it, and it finally wound up on Zach's head. So who produced Zach's hat? Well, dozens, if not hundreds, of people. Supposedly, the market, you know, gave each and every one of them exactly what they deserve. Well, you know, by now, hardly anyone believes that some people may have worked 10 times as hard. I forgot to mention that caps are not a small business. Probably there are ten companies who make millions of caps each and, you know, book 10s of millions of dollars of profit each year, and have shareholders who make a nice little pile from from their hats. So the market without the without the Guatemalan people, there would be no hat. Without shareholders, well, you can't say that the shareholders are just parasites, but the point is, the difficulty of isolating any one contribution and calculating its value is is not just impossible. In fact, it's impossible in principle. That's a kind of horizontal example. The example I give in the in the essay is a vertical example that is a CEO thinks up a strategy which turns a company around and makes 10s, hundreds of millions of dollars, and is rewarded with a very large chunk of that 10s of millions of dollars. Well, where did that decision come from? It came from the CEO. But where did the CEO come from? She came from a family. Well, where did that family come from? It came from a much larger, extended family, and what enabled each of those generations to acquire the skills and the character to pass on to the next generation. Well, obviously all of their teachers and friends and ministers and I mean the point is, actions are like reality itself, simply infinitely complex, and to isolate them in the way that pre market theory does you have to begin to suspect after a certain point, is solely because, because those people who have the political and legal authority to say what's just like the resulting distribution.

Zach Fine  29:51

You have this really succinct formulation in the essay where you say, "political democracy requires economic democracy." Can you tell us what you mean there by economic democracy and how it relates to the idea of social production. 

George Scialabba  30:05

Well, political democracy is, is not at all just pulling a lever every two or four years. That's that's what it is in the contemporary United States. That's why those of us on the left really don't think it's proper to call America a democracy and, you know, define our aim as making America a democracy. It also involves holding our representatives accountable once we've elected them, which means going back and forth with them. You know, now, a congressman goes to Washington and, you know, maybe comes back to the district a few times for parades or some symbolic thing. Well, that's that's not democracy. Democracy is she goes to or she goes to Washington, and in the district there's an education committee, there's a Climate Committee. Each of these committees will develop positions, and they'll develop them by meeting each other and reading things on the net and in libraries and so on. And then they'll meet as committees and grill the congressperson on what he or she thinks and is going to to do to implement their views. Now, all this takes time. I'm sure that you know, our fellow Americans, even though, even our MAGA fellow Americans, you know, are capable of hammering out sophisticated positions on, you know, education and climate and insurance and and keeping our keeping their political representatives on their toes, except that the economic life of Americans doesn't leave them much energy or leisure or money to indulge in in politics, which is why, you know, which is why a very political fact is that American productivity has roughly doubled in the last 40 years. But the American work day has not only not decreased by half, which technically it should have, but has increased. So where has all that productivity gone? I hate to sound so predictable, but it's gone mainly to the investor class, to the top 10%. If we had a democracy, we would now be working four hours a day, or maybe six hours a day. You know, there'd be more energy to do politics. So that's what I mean by political equality. Equality rests on economic equality, quite apart from the fact that, you know, campaign contributions, that is sheer obgenity. That doesn't take any intelligence. All it takes is, I don't know. All it takes is supreme court justice. I understand that money is not speech. No, wait a minute, the Supreme Court decided that money was speech. 

Zach Fine  33:10

One thing that Jess and I were curious about reading the essay was we both like the framework you have of projecting us forward into the 23rd century, and then looking back at our own century, and what questions will be asked of us. At the very end of the essay, you seem hopeful that the right kinds of questions are going to be asked and 200 years from now. So you ask, you know, you assume the 23rd century will ask, "why did you base dessert on performance, which can't be measured as, in any case, a function of one's own endowments? You know, so I'm wondering what, what makes you hopeful about the the inevitability of that question being asked?

George Scialabba  33:48

Well, partly, essays like Walzers's and books like Edward Bellamy's Looking Backward. You know, I you, you kindle to morally beautiful formulations, and they just they become your touchstones. And so I just can't bear to think that the wisdom in this essay, Walzer's this essay, and in Bellamy's beautiful book will simply disappear and never be fulfilled. Can I read just a paragraph from Bellamy actually?

Jessica Swoboda  34:23

Of course. 

George Scialabba  34:24

So the plot of the novel is that a 19th century Bostonian, Julian West wakes up in the first year of the 20th century from a long sleep. That is too ridiculous to explain. He wakes up in the house of Dr Leet, who is a solid citizen of this new society and this brave new world. "Dr Leet explains to Julian among the whole range of their policies, but one of them is that in a new world, the helpless and disabled receive exactly the same income as everyone else The idea of charity on such a scale, said, would have made our most enthusiastic philanthropist gasp. If you had a sick brother at home with blood Dr Leet home, unable to work, would you feed him on less dainty food and lodge and clothe him more poorly than yourself? More likely you would give him the best of everything. Nor would you think of calling it charity. Would not the very word in that connection fill you with indignation. Of course, Julian answered, but the cases are not parallel. There is a sense no doubt in which all men are brothers, but that general sort of brotherhood is not to be compared, except for rhetorical purposes, to the Brotherhood of Blood. There speaks to 19th century side, Dr Leet. Ah, Mr. West, if I were to give you in one sentence the key to what may seem the mysteries of our civilization as compared with yours, I should say that it is the fact that the solidarity of the race and the brotherhood of man, which to you were but fine phrases are to our thinking and feeling ties as real and vital as physical fraternity." So that's my lodestar.

Jessica Swoboda  36:07

Well, George, thank you so much for joining us on this episode of Selected Essays. It's been really great to talk with you about "In Defense of Equality" and your essay as well.

George Scialabba  36:15

Thank you for having me.

Zach Fine  36:16

Thank you, George.

Jessica Swoboda  36:19

Thanks everyone for joining us for this episode of selected essays. We'd like to thank John Trevaskis for editing the podcast, and Meg Duffy of Hand Habits for contributing the original music. As always, subscribe wherever you get your podcasts, and please subscribe to The Point. There's a discount code for listeners in the show notes. If you have questions, comments or anything else, send an email to selectedessays@thepointmag.com. We'd love to hear from you. Until next time, listeners.