if one confused word can gum up social
policies the legal system and
innumerable institutions throughout
society that word is equality
it is one of those vague pieties in
which we indulge ourselves without any
serious thought as to what it means or
what the actual consequences of pursuing
it may be
anyone who questions or opposes equality
is almost certain to be regarded as
someone who believes in inequality in
inferiority and superiority
but all of these concepts suffer from
the same problem
for equality inferiority or superiority
to have any meaning what is being
compared must first be commensurable
a symphony is not equal to an automobile
nor is it inferior or superior they are
simply not commensurable
much of the emotional struggle to make
women equal to men suffers from the same
problem
so long as women have babies and men do
not the many ramifications of that
difference cannot be ignored and nothing
can make them commensurable
however unisex one's language may be
women are seldom very good men and men
cannot be women at all
we may regard the happiness and
well-being of women as equally important
as the happiness and well-being of men
and probably most people do despite
shrill cries to the contrary but that is
a statement about our value system not
about some empirical reality of women
and men
with many other groups as well the
fundamental difference between equal
treatment and equal performance is
repeatedly confused
in performance terms virtually no one is
equal to anyone the same individual is
not even equal to himself on different
days
much of the moral heart burnings social
engineering and legal entanglements of
our times comes from the simple fact
that statistics for different groups are
different in different occupations
institutions or income levels
it is too often assumed automatically
that only different treatment before the
fact can explain different results after
the fact
this dogma is so deeply embedded that it
seems almost utopian to attempt a
rational discussion of it yet it was
wholly arbitrary to have expected
performance equality in the first place
and compounded pig-headedness to want to
punish someone because it didn't happen
but there is a whole class of people who
believe that when the world doesn't
conform to their theory that shows that
something is wrong with the world
let us go back to the fact that women
have babies a fact of no small
importance to those of us parochial
enough to be concerned about the
survival of the human species
not only do women have babies they
realize in advance that they are likely
to have babies and those who are not yet
liberated arrange their lives with that
prospect in mind
occupations which require continuous
employment to maintain ever-changing
skills tend to attract fewer women than
occupations you can leave to have
children and return to later
you can take a few years off to see your
children through the preschool years and
then return to become a good librarian
teacher or editor
but take a few years off from computer
engineering and you will return to find
that you are not in kansas anymore toto
some years ago an economist investigated
the rates of obsolescence of a wide
range of occupations
a physicist lost half the value of his
original knowledge in about five years
while it would take a historian more
than 30 years to fall that far behind
although the economist did not point
this out whether through oversight or
prudence the occupations with high rates
of obsolescence were often male
dominated while the occupations that are
heavily female tended to have slow rates
of obsolescence
although differences in choices and
performances are ignored or dismissed in
politically correct quarters such
differences obviously affect differences
in outcomes not only as between men and
women but among racial ethnic and other
groups as well
since it is truly utopian to expect to
have a rational discussion of
interracial differences in these times
we can look at two branches of the same
race northern europeans and southern
europeans
for the past few centuries northern
europeans have been far more advanced
industrially and technologically than
southern europeans not only in europe
itself but also when they immigrate to
european offshoot societies in the
western hemisphere or australia
but for a thousand years or so before
that southern europeans were far more
advanced than northern europeans
in short performances vary not only from
individual to individual but also from
group to group and from one era to
another
seldom are performances equal at any
given moment
in performance terms japan was decidedly
inferior to the west in industrial
technology a century ago
no one was more painfully aware of this
than the japanese themselves
that is what spurred them on to the
efforts which have enabled them to
overtake the west in many fields today
they understood that this was not a
problem that could be solved by lofty
talk or arbitrary presuppositions
you