Cynic - The Paradox of Adversity

A good guest post over at Ta-Nahesi Coates’ blog:

Listen to the fabulously successful discuss their lives, and you’re almost certain to hear them attribute their eventual successes to the challenges that they first faced and overcame. Hardscrabble childhoods, menial jobs, discrimination, disabilities, doubt - these are the cliches of American autobiography. And few would trade away their triumphs in exchange for an easier path through life.

But take a look at their children. They don’t pick out failing schools for them to attend or arrange for them to spend their summers in difficult, dangerous, low-paying work. So if adversity paved the way to their own success, why don’t they replicate that adversity to give their offspring a similar advantage?

This reminds me of the furor over the “Wise Latina” comment of Sotomayor. If you read her actual speech, the point wasn’t that all Latinas/os are smarter than all Gringos. It’s that certain kinds of experience can be enriching if you can make it through them. I think that there’s a strong epistemological argument to be made for the importance of diversity of all kinds: sexual, racial, religious, and class based. Says Sotomayor:

Let us not forget that wise men like Oliver Wendell Holmes and Justice Cardozo voted on cases which upheld both sex and race discrimination in our society. Until 1972, no Supreme Court case ever upheld the claim of a woman in a gender discrimination case. I, like Professor Carter, believe that we should not be so myopic as to believe that others of different experiences or backgrounds are incapable of understanding the values and needs of people from a different group. Many are so capable. As Judge Cedarbaum pointed out to me, nine white men on the Supreme Court in the past have done so on many occasions and on many issues including Brown.

However, to understand takes time and effort, something that not all people are willing to give.

Ross Douthat has also been writing a fair amount lately about the lack of diversity among elites:

This [the disadvantaging of lower class whites relative to other whites] was particularly pronounced among the private colleges in the study. For minority applicants, the lower a family’s socioeconomic position, the more likely the student was to be admitted. For whites, though, it was the reverse. An upper-middle-class white applicant was three times more likely to be admitted than a lower-class white with similar qualifications.

…

This provides statistical confirmation for what alumni of highly selective universities already know. The most underrepresented groups on elite campuses often aren’t racial minorities; they’re working-class whites (and white Christians in particular) from conservative states and regions. Inevitably, the same underrepresentation persists in the elite professional ranks these campuses feed into: in law and philanthropy, finance and academia, the media and the arts.

This breeds paranoia, among elite and non-elites alike. Among the white working class, increasingly the most reliable Republican constituency, alienation from the American meritocracy fuels the kind of racially tinged conspiracy theories that Beck and others have exploited — that Barack Obama is a foreign-born Marxist hand-picked by a shadowy liberal cabal, that a Wall Street-Washington axis wants to flood the country with third world immigrants, and so forth.

Among the highly educated and liberal, meanwhile, the lack of contact with rural, working-class America generates all sorts of wild anxieties about what’s being plotted in the heartland. In the Bush years, liberals fretted about a looming evangelical theocracy. In the age of the Tea Parties, they see crypto-Klansmen and budding Timothy McVeighs everywhere they look.

Anyway, moral of the story #1: most of the time you don’t want to come up hard, because coming up hard is hard. But if you can come up hard, it will give you a perspective that is valuable in life. Therefore, we should try to structure society so as to promote the viewpoints of those in a position to have learned the hard way.

Moral of the story #2: If you alienate certain segments of the population—even segments that are otherwise well off—it creates paranoia and conspiracy mindedness, so avoid doing so.

I recognize that there is a tension between #1 and #2, but I think it is possible to thread the needle.