foreign
I guess the first thing to do is to Define what Cosmic Justice is as distinguished from whatever
other kind of Justice we may be familiar with uh traditional Justice I guess we can summarize at
least in the American tradition as applying the same rules and the same standards to everybody
Cosmic Justice is very different it means equalizing the prospects of everybody and those
two things are not only different in concept they're wholly incompatible with one another
if you apply the same rules and standards to everybody in baseball Mark McGuire is going
to hit 70 home runs and they're going to be other people who will spend an entire career
without hitting 70 home runs including people in the Hall of Fame like Luke Appling who twice
won the batting championship so if you want the one thing or the other you can go for it
but the one thing you cannot do is pursue the two things simultaneously or rather you cannot
successfully do that the Supreme Court has been pursuing the two things simultaneously but quite
a quite a while leading to a lot of five to four decisions uh and inconsistent decisions
the requirements for the two kinds of Justice are very different the requirement for treating
everyone the same is very simple it's mass produced the requirements for Cosmic Justice
must be handmade and tailored to each individual case it's much more complex and it requires a much
larger amount of government power some third party must intervene to determine whether the outcomes
are right whether the prospects are right the very same words have entirely different meanings within
these two Frameworks in fact as I mentioned the preface to the book what really set me off a few
years ago to finish it up was a discussion with one of my colleagues at Stanford University who
shall be anonymous in deference to the libel laws uh who talked about a Level Playing Field
and it became plainfully clear that what he called the Level Playing Field is what I would
have called a tilted playing field tilted so as to produce the results that he wanted when we
talk about a fair fight that means very different things in these two Within These two Frameworks
a fair fight by traditional standards means that both boxers observe the Marcus of Queensbury rules
and the fight is fair whether it ends up in a draw or one-sided beating from the other point
of view from the cosmic perspective it's fair only when the two fighters enter the ring with
the same prospects of winning John Rawls has uh sort of summarized and epitomized of these
two differences he distinguishes what he calls Fair equality of opportunity from merely formal
equality of opportunity uh traditional Justice or fairness by roles and standards means simply that
people are judged by the same rules but genuine equality of opportunity as he calls it cannot be
achieved by this uh by this method instead he says undeserved inequalities call for redress
and obviously someone must have power in order to do that or redress
now what's called what I call Cosmic justice has been called by some people's social justice
but I think they're unduly modest because they're trying to correct not only the inequities that
they see in society they're trying to owe to correct the oversights of God or the defects of
the cosmos when some people are born with physical or mental handicaps they want to counterbalance
that and of course that's not always caused by Society so that when moral says that undeserved
inequalities he includes all sorts of things and that opens up a very large area for others you
can find this perspective on uh justice the rosian perspective in many places from the street corner
Community activists right up to the chambers of the Supreme Court for example a few years ago a an
admissions director at Stanford University wrote a book in which she pointed out that during all her
years as an administrative director she had never required students to submit achievement tests
because some of those students she said true no fault of their own attended schools
where they could not have acquired the skills necessary to do well on such tests
so she's trying to redress the inequalities and therefore she would simply not require such tests
the educational testing service is currently engaging in a renorming of test scores to
take into account the social backgrounds and handicaps of the students so the school will then
again redress pre-existing inequalities rather than applying the same standards to everybody
whenever I hear the Notions of fairness and education I think back to my own education
and I think thank God my teachers were unfair to me when I was a kid growing up in Harlem
one of these teachers was a lady named Miss Simon
who belonged to what might be called The General Patton School of Education
uh I cannot even imagine that Mrs Simon gave a momentous thought to my self-esteem
every word that we misspelled in her class had to be written 50 times not in class but as part
of our homework and there was always plenty of other homework from her and other teachers
and so you misspelled four or five words and you had quite an evening ahead of you
very little chance of listening to the London Ranger now was this fair in rosian terms and
the answer is no like many of the children in Harlem at that time I came from a home where
nobody had gone beyond Elementary School I still remember what a big fuss was made
when I was promoted to the seventh grade because I'd go on further than anyone else
uh in later years when I graduated from Harvard there was no such fuss they expected me to
fairness was never an option there was nothing Miss Simon or anybody else could do about the
fact that we came from homes where we did not have books and magazines and we were
not as familiar with those words as people from other neighborhoods might have been
so that was never an option nothing that schools could have done would have changed
that it would have been an irresponsible self-indulgence for them to have pretended
to make things fair if there's anything worse than unfairness it is make-believe fairness
they could like the College Board apparently is trying to do pretended that we knew more
than we did and that would have made them feel good it would not have done much for us
instead they forced us to meet standards that were a little harder for us to meet than there were for
some other kids but far more necessary for us to meet because that was the only way out of poverty
many years later I happened to run into one of the other kids from Harlem who went to
that same school at the same time and by now he was a psychiatrist he owned a home in the Napa
Valley and property out there in fact now he's uh retired living overseas with servants while
yours truly is still trying to make a living but as we reminisced about things that had happened
in the old days and what had happened in between one of the things he mentioned was that over the
years his various secretaries had commented on the fact that he seldom misspelled a word
I told him that my secretaries had made that very same observation and that if they knew Miss Simon
there would be no mystery as to why we did not misspell words now it so happens I became a high
school dropout but what I was taught before I dropped out was enough for me to score higher
on the verbal s.a.t than the average Harvard student which may have had something to do with
my being admitted to Harvard and in the era before affirmative action was even thought of
what if the teachers had all those of that era had been imbued with the present-day conception
of fairness where would my school made an IB today on welfare in prison perhaps in a
halfway house if we were lucky and would that not have been an injustice to take individuals
capable of independent self-supporting and self-direct being self-directed women and men
with pride in their own achievements and turn them into dependence clients supplicants mascots
now the primary purpose of mascots is to ministers to symbolize something that makes
other people feel good the actual fate of the mascot himself is seldom a major consideration
the argument here is not against Real Justice or real equality both of these things are desirable
in themselves the only argument is that some versions of these things are simply impossible
and that trying the impossible has costs and real dangers as well after all the people who
man the communist movement around the world before the Soviet Union was established didn't
devote themselves to this cause for the sake of creating gulags and secret police
and territorial aggrandizement they did it because they were seeking social justice
but what actually happened shows some of the costs and some of the dangers of that
most ordinary Americans still have the traditional conception of Justice and that means the people
who have this Cosmic notion of Justice must misrepresent what is happening as being a
violation of traditional Justice and therefore they must for example misrepresent test results
as being either arbitrary barriers to advancement or deliberate efforts to perpetuate inequalities
as Joseph Trumpeter once said the first thing a man will do for his ideals is lie
the next thing he will do and this is my addendum is character assassination
those people who disagree with those with the vision of cosmic Justice must be stopped in
their view by all means necessary and that of course includes character assassination
they must be bought to use a verb of our time
now the people who are the victims of this atmosphere of character assassination are not
simply those we're targeted the whole society is a victim because you're not going to be
able to attract into the public Arena people who value their privacy who value protecting
their families from humiliations uh if in fact this agreements become simply grounds for smears
in a sense the people who are caught up in the vision of cosmic Justice are also victims
because once having demonized other people they really cannot go back to square one and re-examine
the evidence and find out whether what they've been advocating has been producing the results
they want while producing totally different results and so they're locked into the vision
they have too much of a stake in it to ever think think about doing something different
I have a chapter in the book called The Tyranny of visions
about how people how the vision becomes more real to people than any empirical reality
a classic example was one described by Paul Johnson Lennon and Johnson pointed out that Lenin
although he spoke of himself as a representative of the proletariat had in fact never set foot in a
working class neighborhood and any of the Cities he'd ever been in inside or outside of Russia
he had never talked with the workers and had no idea what they believed about anything
he also after becoming the ruler of Russia never set foot in Soviet Central Asia which
is an area larger than all of Western Europe and in which all these doctrinaire schemes
from Moscow were imposed for nearly three quarters of a century with devastating results
what he was devoted to was the vision not flesh and blood people
a flesh and blood people were a complication on the road to realize in the vision and as
it turned out if he had to kill a few million of those that was just so much too bad and of
course we've seen Hitler Mao and others with the same approach now fortunately we have thus far in
this country had much more milder versions of this but you can see also this notion of looking for
visions and the abstractions that go with those Visions rather than with flesh and blood people
the vision of cosmic Justice is very beneficial to the people who hold it even if it's not beneficial
to Those whom it's intended to benefit and I think that's one of the reasons that their
people are so reluctant to give it up because they feel wonderful I'm sure that if we had
the kinds of teachers that we have today and they had lowered the standards to all of us as we were
coming through the school and we all ended up going out into the world for doomed of failure
those teachers would have felt wonderful about themselves because they say hey we're not leaning
on these poor kids we're taking into account that they come from backgrounds that are deprived
I mean particularly in education this is devastating because it's been shown again
and again that in one generation people can do remarkable things with a decent education
uh Jaime escalanti did this out in California where the Hispanic kids who scored so high on
the calculus test that the educational testing service could not believe it
uh so an awful lot can be done language is same thing the whole notion that you have to
have bilingualism well it's known from a lot of research that the child's brain is better
able to assimilate languages in those first half dozen years than they will ever be able to do in
later life the brain itself metamorphosis and uh if you if you don't learn a foreign language
until you're 30 you're never going to speak it as well as if you learned it when you were five
and so all these things can be done uh but they're not going to be done as long as third parties
think that the purpose of the educational system is to make them feel good about themselves [Music]
thank you
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