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Sarkozy opts for preferences
What about the political alternative to the odious traitor/dhimmi de Villepin—the tough Interior Minister, Sarkozy, the one who called the youths “scum”? According to a mindless editorial in today’s Washington Post concerning the causes of the riots,
Mr. Sarkozy recently suggested that France abandon the pretense that all of its citizens—including an estimated 5 million Muslims—are treated equally, and adopt affirmative-action policies. He has also promoted the idea of a peaceful and tolerant “French Islam” to compete with imported ideologies of extremism.This is the “strong” alternative to de Villepin, calling for affirmative action for the Muslims! It’s the same old story that I’ve analyzed many times. If you assume that different groups are the same, then you will expect that under equal procedural rules the groups will end up with more or less the same outcomes. But if the groups are in fact not really the same but are very different, then treating them with procedural equality must result in substantive inequality. That would be fine in a classical liberal setting, where people don’t expect substantive equality. But if your expectation and moral demand all along have been that the groups would end up substantively equal, then the group inequality is unacceptable. And that is the case with modern individual rights liberalism, which in a schizoid manner claims to be concerned only about the older liberal value of procedural equality of all citizens under the law, but actually looks at procedural equality as the means to obtain substantive equality. If the substantive equality is not reached, liberals, who believe everyone is basically the same, are left with no choice but to conclude that procedural equality was lacking all along, that there was invidious discrimination built into the system. They therefore abandon equal rights and start treating the respective groups by different rules, so as to equalize their outcomes. Thus, over and over, individual rights liberalism morphs into group preferences liberalism, with its immoral double standards. If you live in a society that believes in a rough equality of all its citizens, then, as Steve Sailer has put it, there is only one way to avoid ethnic group preferences: don’t introduce into your society ethnically diverse groups of very different average IQ. This discussion is merely a gloss on Rousseau’s Second Discourse on Inequality with its inverted moral reasoning. Since equality is the true natural state of men, Rousseau argued, any absence of equality in the civilized state proves civilization guilty. The origin of anti-Americanism.
(A reader has provided an interesting follow-up to this.) Email entry |