In his response to my post last week on affirmative action, Florindo Volpacchio emphasizes that the goal of affirmative action is “to recognize the social pathology of discrimination and inequality that privileged race and sexual identity to begin with.” It is certainly important to remember this history and its effects on present conditions, and Volpacchio rightly points out past injustices, including slavery and segregation. Yet those injustices are also clearly in the past. There are no longer any legally enforced forms of segregation and discrimination against Blacks, and the United States can be proud of the progress that has been made. But while Volpacchio seeks to judge affirmative action based on its symbolic intent, its practical effects cannot be ignored, especially as they perpetuate the type of discrimination based on race that they are meant to oppose. Since the history of racial injustice involved the categorization and differential treatment of people based on their race, the resistance to this history must reject such differential treatment and affirm the principle of equality before the law. Yet affirmative action re-establishes racial discrimination as a valid policy for college admissions and hiring. Though this policy favors Blacks today, this can only be done at the cost of disfavoring others, to the point where it disfavors Asian Americans in comparison to both Blacks and Whites. As Thomas Sowell has demonstrated through his careful and extensive research, the track record of worldwide attempts to engineer equality through a set of reverse discriminatory practices is in fact dismal, leading consistently to a skewing of benefits to the wealthier members of the groups they are meant to assist as well as to growing identity-based polarization and even civil war.
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After decades of contention, most observers agree that affirmative action in the form of racial preferences in college admissions will be declared unconstitutional by the U.S. Supreme Court. There are indeed few arguments left to support it. A supermajority of Americans opposes it, with 74 percent of Americans, including 58 percent of Blacks, indicating in the most recent Pew Research poll that race or ethnicity should not be a factor in college admissions. Racial preferences do not help the disadvantaged. As even a supporter of affirmative action writes: “Seventy-one percent of Harvard’s Black and Hispanic students come from wealthy backgrounds. A tiny fraction attended underperforming public high schools. First- and second-generation African immigrants, despite constituting only about 10 percent of the U.S. Black population, make up about 41 percent of all Black students in the Ivy League, and Black immigrants are wealthier and better educated than many native-born Black Americans.” As these statistics indicate, the racial categories do not correlate with disadvantaged status. They are even more problematic as a proxy for diversity. It is not clear why some markers of identity such as race and ethnicity should be considered significant for viewpoint diversity while others, such as religion, should not. Politically, university faculty have become much less diverse in terms of party affiliation over the last several decades of affirmative action policy, with a documented 11.5 to 1 ratio of Democrats to Republicans at leading universities in 2016. Moreover, because the defense of affirmative action has become a marker of anti-racism, the university support for the policy has suppressed opposing viewpoints by branding them as racist or sexist and not worthy of discussion, thus further reducing viewpoint diversity by encouraging pervasive self-censorship. Elham Manea teaches Political Science at the University of Zurich. Her forthcoming book The Perils of Nonviolent Islamism will be published by Telos Press in the spring and can be pre-ordered today in our store. The following talk was delivered as a keynote speech in German at the Convention of the Schader Foundation in Darmstadt (online) on November 6, 2020. It is becoming difficult lately to turn on the news. And I do not just mean the American presidential elections. The year 2020 was and still is a hard one. COVID-19 has dominated our lives with its limitations. But it has also welded people together in every corner of the world in the fight against a persistent and ultimately deadly virus. This struggle, this common challenge, has united us and yet divided us. We are still irritated by the lockdowns, afraid of their economic repercussions, and divided in our ideological fronts. Times like these are worrying and provide fertile ground for conspiracy theorists and right-wing and left-wing extremist groups. In times like these, our societies can all too easily become polarized, and we run the risk of being trapped in a discourse of division, trapped in identity boxes. “Us” versus “Them.” As an occasional feature on TELOSscope, we highlight a past Telos article whose critical insights continue to illuminate our thinking and challenge our assumptions. Today, Maja Sidzinska looks at James Kalb’s “Understanding Conservatism and Tradition,” from Telos 124 (Summer 2002). |
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Let’s start with the punch-line: James Kalb informs us, in his article “Understanding Conservatism and Tradition,” that “the modern emphasis is too much on technology, on breaking things down to their simplest parts and reconstructing them in accord with human will. The problem with applying that approach to human life as a whole is that one can make sense of one’s actions only by reference to standards and realities one does not create” (164). In Kalb’s view, tradition creates these standards and realities, and is irreplaceable in this role. He compares the role of tradition to the roles of bureaucracy and markets, and he holds these three operative approaches as constitutive of politics, public policy, and life more generally. 
