Paul Bloom, The Atlantic
In his just-published book, On Inequality, the philosopher Harry Frankfurt argues that economic equality has no intrinsic value. This is a moral claim, but it’s also a psychological one: Frankfurt suggests that if people take the time to reflect, they’ll realize that inequality isn’t really what’s bothering them.
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It’s tempting
to see small-group behaviors as reflecting some natural preference for equal
treatment, but the anthropologist Christopher Boehm, who has extensively
studied these groups, tells a different story. He argues that these egalitarian structures emerge
because nobody wants to get screwed. Individuals in these societies end up roughly equal because
everyone is struggling to ensure that nobody gets too much power over him or
her. As I’ve discussed in my last book, Just Babies, there’s a sort of invisible-hand
egalitarianism at work in these groups. Boehm writes, “Individuals who
otherwise would be subordinated are clever enough to form a large and united
political coalition. ... Because the united subordinates are constantly putting
down the more assertive alpha types in their midst, egalitarianism is in effect
a bizarre type of political hierarchy: The weak combine forces to actively
dominate the strong.”
This analysis
helps us explain why such huge power differentials exist in the world right
now, where it’s far harder for the weak to team up to dominate the strong. As
Boehm tells it, in a small society, a wannabe dictator can be ignored or
ridiculed by everyone else, and if he doesn’t get the message, he can be beaten
up, expelled from the group, or killed. But this is a harder trick to pull in a
society of millions where interactions are no longer face-to-face and where the
powerful have guns and gulags.
What we see from studies of children and studies of small-scale
societies is an early-emerging desire for fairness, and a particularly strong
motivation not to get less than anyone else. But we don’t find a smidgen of evidence
that humans or any other species naturally value equality for its sake.
