Kvaal Kvetches

James Kvaal kvetches — actually, he just adds to the chorus of kvetches — that despite a

systemic bias toward the privileged students, it is the efforts to restore balance to campuses — like affirmative action and extra help for disadvantaged minorities — that ignite controversy.

Funny how some people, after all these years of liberal instruction, continue to believe that there’s just something basically unfair about rewarding some people and punishing others because of their race.

If you look over to the right you’ll see a listing of almost never used “Categories,” one of which is “IUNS.” That stands for “Invidious Ubiquitous Non-Sequitur,” by which I meant the invidious, ubiquitous argument that all discrimination is fungible, that if one kind is O.K. any kind is O.K. I wrote about that so much for a while that I gave that fallacy its own category; if you click on it, most of those old posts will come up.

In an early one I listed two fallacies at the heart of this misunderstanding:

For some reason, every time this point is made — and it is made in virtually every defense of racial preferences — it is always made with a sort of breathless sense of discovery, as though the author had just come up with an unanswerable “gotcha!” that will drive the final nail into the coffin of racist or redneck or Republican (but, from a liberal point of view, I repeat myself) objections to affirmative action.

Here are the two fallacies on which that argument depends:

1. The Merit Fallacy

I’m sorely tempted to call this one The Meretricious Fallacy (Meretricious: “tawrdrily and falsely attractive”; “superficially significant” — Merriam-Webster Collegiate Online). Anyway, this is an argument that no one who accepts the legitimacy of criteria based on anything other than merit can make a principled criticism of racial preferences. It is a fallacy because it wrongly assumes that the only criticism of racial preferences is that they offend the merit principle. That is not true. They also offend, and more fundamentally, the principle that no person should be rewarded or punished based on race or religion. For example, merit is totally irrelevant to the illegitimacy of an admissions office in a public institution giving preferences to Presbyterians. (And preferences to Jews or Catholics or wiccans would have been equally illegitimate, even if the rationale were to compensate for past discrimination.)

2. The Fallacy of Fungible Discriminations

This is the argument that all discrimination is alike; if you can discriminate for one reason, you can discriminate for any reason. Thus if it’s acceptable to give preferences based on athletic or musical ability or the alumni status of parents, it’s also legitimate to give preferences based on race or religion. Preferences, in short, are preferences; if one is O.K., all are O.K.

In some respects No. 2 is simply the other side of the coin of No. 1. The Merit Fallacy says that if you accept any exception to merit you have no principled basis to criticize any discrimination, and The Fallacy of Fungible Discriminations says all discriminations are on the same moral plane. But they are not. Because of our history, and the core values that have emerged from it, race and religion are in a special, protected category. We allow, even require, the state to impose benefits and burdens on us based on a whole host of criteria — but not race or religion, which are or should be off limits to government control. As I wrote two days ago making this same point against the same fallacies, no Constitutional prohibition bars discrimination for or against tight ends or tuba players. That hardly means, as defenders of racial preferences must maintain, that discrimination based on race or religion is also acceptable.

Kvaal concludes his kvetch by attempting to take the high moral ground:

American [sic] has stood for the ideal that money and fame are based upon talent and hard work, not family name. Education – particularly our system of higher education, the envy of the world – is the engine of that opportunity. Seats at our best colleges should be awarded fairly.

This statement asserts that merit, i.e., “talent and hard work,” should be rewarded, not “family name.” Indeed, it even says that “seats at our best colleges” that are not awarded on the basis of merit are not “awarded fairly.”

Of course Kvaal is a fair-weather friend of merit. He doesn’t want merit to play second fiddle to family name, but he has no problem putting it aside to award racial preferences. But on those occasions where merit is defended, it is placed on a higher pedestal than I, or many critics of racial preference, would put it. I think it is perfectly legitimate (whether wise or not is another matter) to sacrifice merit to other considerations. As I wrote in the old post cited above:

Because of our history, and the core values that have emerged from it, race and religion are in a special, protected category. We allow, even require, the state to impose benefits and burdens on us based on a whole host of criteria — but not race or religion, which are or should be off limits to government control…. [N]o Constitutional prohibition bars discrimination for or against tight ends or tuba players [or, on occasion, valuing their skills more than high SAT scores]. That hardly means, as defenders of racial preferences must maintain, that discrimination based on race or religion is also acceptable.

UPDATE

Since Kvaal’s kvetch is based on Daniel Golden’s new book on the admission of privileged students to elite universities, you may want to see Chris Shea’s comments on that book in the Boston Globe, which I discussed here, and additional comments of his I also cited in the UPDATE to that post.

That post (and Shea’s comments) dealt with a new book by Walter Benn Michaels. In his most recent comment, Shea points out that Michaels argues that

we shouldn’t care about unfairness to individuals in the admissions process until the unfairness between groups is resolved — until the poor and working class have a shot at a good K-12 education.

This is as good an example as one can find of subordinating individuals to their “group” and the resultant degradation and descent of American liberalism. That descent has now reached a low point where liberals are not embarrassed to assert that “we shouldn’t care about unfairness to individuals…,” at least not in the here and now. (These are the same people who, curiously, suddenly elevate individual rights over the rights of a much larger group whenever national security issues are involved, while many conservatives, now playing musical chairs, suddenly become less concerned with individual rights.)

Returning to the subject at hand, this bizarre notion — racial discrimination is justified until the vestiges of racial, and other, discrimination have been eliminated — always reminds me of Stalin’s famous comment when his means were criticized, “You can’t make an omelet without breaking eggs,” and George Orwell’s devastating riposte, “Yes, but where is the omelet?”

UPDATE II[10 Sept.]

See the more recent post, above, on Preferences For The Wealthy.