People Don't Actually Want Equality

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.

**

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.

A Quiet Kind of Fascism

For all their patriotism, Americans rarely think about how their national identities relate to their personal ones. This indifference is particular to the psychology of white Americans and has a history unique to the US. In recent years, however, this national identity has become more difficult to ignore. Americans can no longer travel in foreign countries without noticing the strange weight we carry with us. In these years after the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and the many wars that followed, it has become more difficult to gallivant across the world absorbing its wisdom and resources for one’s own personal use. Americans abroad now do not have the same swagger, the easy, enormous smiles. You no longer want to speak so loud. There is always the vague risk of breaking something.

**
We were all patriotic, but I can’t even conceive of what else we could have been, because our entire experience was domestic, interior, American. We went to church on Sundays, until church time was usurped by soccer games. I don’t remember a strong sense of civic engagement. Instead I had the feeling that people could take things from you if you didn’t stay vigilant. Our goals remained local: homecoming queen, state champs, a scholarship to Trenton State, barbecues in the backyard. The lone Asian kid in our class studied hard and went to Berkeley; the Indian went to Yale. Black people never came to Wall. The world was white, Christian; the world was us.

We did not study world maps, because international geography, as a subject, had been phased out of many state curriculums long before. There was no sense of the US being one country on a planet of many countries. Even the Soviet Union seemed something more like the Death Star – flying overhead, ready to laser us to smithereens – than a country with people in it.

**
In 2007, after I had worked for six years as a journalist in New York, I won a writing fellowship that would send me to Turkey for two years. I had applied for it on a whim. No part of me expected to win the thing. Even as my friends wished me congratulations, I detected a look of concern on their faces, as if I was crazy to leave all this, as if 29 was a little too late to be finding myself. I had never even been to Turkey before.

In the weeks before my departure, I spent hours explaining Turkey’s international relevance to my bored loved ones, no doubt deploying the cliche that Istanbul was the bridge between east and west. I told everyone that I chose Turkey because I wanted to learn about the Islamic world. The secret reason I wanted to go was that Baldwin had lived in Istanbul in the 1960s, on and off, for almost a decade. I had seen a documentary about Baldwin that said he felt more comfortable as a black, gay man in Istanbul than in Paris or New York.

When I heard that, it made so little sense to me, sitting in my Brooklyn apartment, that a space opened in the universe. I couldn’t believe that New York could be more illiberal than a place such as Turkey, because I couldn’t conceive of how prejudiced New York and Paris had been in that era; and because I thought that as you went east, life degraded into the past, the opposite of progress. The idea of Baldwin in Turkey somehow placed America’s race problem, and America itself, in a mysterious and tantalising international context. I took a chance that Istanbul might be the place where the secret workings of history would be revealed.

**

American exceptionalism did not only define the US as a special nation among lesser nations; it also demanded that all Americans believe they, too, were somehow superior to others. How could I, as an American, understand a foreign people, when unconsciously I did not extend the most basic faith to other people that I extended to myself? This was a limitation that was beyond racism, beyond prejudice and beyond ignorance. This was a kind of nationalism so insidious that I had not known to call it nationalism; this was a self-delusion so complete that I could not see where it began and ended, could not root it out, could not destroy it.

**
A friend had told me that Emre was one of the most brilliant people he had ever met. As the evening passed, I was gaining a lot from his analysis of Turkish politics, especially when I asked him whether he voted for Erdoğan’s Justice and Development party (AKP), and he spat back, outraged, “Did you vote for George W Bush?” Until that point I had not realised the two might be equivalent.

Then, three beers in, Emre mentioned that the US had planned the September 11 attacks. I had heard this before. Conspiracy theories were common in Turkey; for example, when the military claimed that the PKK, the Kurdish militant group, had attacked a police station, some Turks believed the military itself had done it; they believed it even in cases where Turkish civilians had died. In other words, the idea was that rightwing forces, such as the military, bombed neutral targets, or even rightwing targets, so they could then blame it on the leftwing groups, such as the PKK. To Turks, bombing one’s own country seemed like a real possibility.

“Come on, you don’t believe that,” I said.

“Why not?” he snapped. “I do.”

“But it’s a conspiracy theory.”

He laughed. “Americans always dismiss these things as conspiracy theories. It’s the rest of the world who have had to deal with your conspiracies.”

I ignored him. “I guess I have faith in American journalism,” I said. “Someone else would have figured this out if it were true.”

**
The deep state – a system of mafia-like paramilitary organisations operating outside of the law, sometimes at the behest of the official military – was a whole other story. Turks explained that the deep state had been formed during the cold war as a way of countering communism, and then mutated into a force for destroying all threats to the Turkish state. The power that some Turks attributed to this entity sometimes strained credulity. But the point was that Turks had been living for years with the idea that some secret force controlled the fate of their nation.

In fact, elements of the deep state were rumoured to have had ties to the CIA during the cold war, and though that too smacked of a conspiracy theory, this was the reality that Turkish people lived in. The sheer number of international interventions the US launched in those decades is astonishing, especially those during years when American power was considered comparatively innocent. There were the successful assassinations: Patrice Lumumba, prime minister of the Democratic Republic of Congo, in 1961; General Rafael Trujillo of the Dominican Republic, also in 1961; Ngo Dinh Diem, president of South Vietnam, in 1963. There were the unsuccessful assassinations: Castro, Castro, and Castro. There were the much hoped-for assassinations: Nasser, Nasser, Nasser. And, of course, US-sponsored, -supported or -staged regime changes: Iran, Guatemala, Iraq, Congo, Syria, Dominican Republic, South Vietnam, Indonesia, Brazil, Chile, Bolivia, Uruguay and Argentina. The Americans trained or supported secret police forces everywhere from Cambodia to Colombia, the Philippines to Peru, Iran to Vietnam. Many Turks believed that the US at least encouraged the 1971 and 1980 military coups in Turkey, though I could find little about these events in any conventional histories anywhere.

But what I could see was that the effects of such meddling were comparable to those of September 11 – just as huge, life-changing and disruptive to the country and to people’s lives. Perhaps Emre did not believe that September 11 was a straightforward affair of evidence and proof because his experience – his reality – taught him that very rarely were any of these surreally monumental events easily explainable. I did not think Emre’s theory about the attacks was plausible. But I began to wonder whether there was much difference between a foreigner’s paranoia that the Americans planned September 11 and the Americans’ paranoia that the whole world should pay for September 11 with an endless global war on terror.

**
The next time a Turk told me she believed the US had bombed itself on September 11 (I heard this with some regularity; this time it was from a young student at Istanbul’s Boğaziçi University), I repeated my claim about believing in the integrity of American journalism. She replied, a bit sheepishly, “Well, right, we can’t trust our journalism. We can’t take that for granted.”

The words “take that for granted” gave me pause. Having lived in Turkey for more than a year, witnessing how nationalistic propaganda had inspired people’s views of the world and of themselves, I wondered from where the belief in our objectivity and rigour in journalism came. Why would Americans be objective and everyone else subjective?

I thought that because Turkey had poorly functioning institutions – they didn’t have a reliable justice system, as compared to an American system I believed to be functional – it often felt as if there was no truth. Turks were always sceptical of official histories, and blithely dismissive of the government’s line. But was it rather that the Turks, with their beautiful scepticism, were actually just less nationalistic than me?

American exceptionalism had declared my country unique in the world, the one truly free and modern country, and instead of ever considering that that exceptionalism was no different from any other country’s nationalistic propaganda, I had internalised this belief. Wasn’t that indeed what successful propaganda was supposed to do? I had not questioned the institution of American journalism outside of the standards it set for itself – which, after all, was the only way I would discern its flaws and prejudices; instead, I accepted those standards as the best standards any country could possibly have.

**
By the end of my first year abroad, I read US newspapers differently. I could see how alienating they were to foreigners, the way articles spoke always from a position of American power, treating foreign countries as if they were America’s misbehaving children. I listened to my compatriots with critical ears: the way our discussion of foreign policy had become infused since September 11 with these officious, official words, bureaucratic corporate military language: collateral damage, imminent threat, freedom, freedom, freedom.

Even so, I was conscious that if I had long ago succumbed to the pathology of American nationalism, I wouldn’t know it – even if I understood the history of injustice in America, even if I was furious about the invasion of Iraq. I was a white American. I still had this fundamental faith in my country in a way that suddenly, in comparison to the Turks, made me feel immature and naive.

I came to notice that a community of activists and intellectuals in Turkey – the liberal ones – were indeed questioning what “Turkishness” meant in new ways. Many of them had been brainwashed in their schools about their own history; about Atatürk, Turkey’s first president; about the supposed evil of the Armenians and the Kurds and the Arabs; about the fragility of their borders and the rapaciousness of all outsiders; and about the historic and eternal goodness of the Turkish republic.

“It is different in the United States,” I once said, not entirely realising what I was saying until the words came out. I had never been called upon to explain this. “We are told it is the greatest country on earth. The thing is, we will never reconsider that narrative the way you are doing just now, because to us, that isn’t propaganda, that is truth. And to us, that isn’t nationalism, it’s patriotism. And the thing is, we will never question any of it because at the same time, all we are being told is how free-thinking we are, that we are free. So we don’t know there is anything wrong in believing our country is the greatest on earth. The whole thing sort of convinces you that a collective consciousness in the world came to that very conclusion.”

“Wow,” a friend once replied. “How strange. That is a very quiet kind of fascism, isn’t it?”

It was a quiet kind of fascism that would mean I would always see Turkey as beneath the country I came from, and also that would mean I believed my uniquely benevolent country to have uniquely benevolent intentions towards the peoples of the world.

Suzy Hansen, Guardian
 

Gömülü Şamdan

“Hadi sor çocuğum! İstediğin kadar cesurca sor, ben yanıt vereceğim. Bir insan için bilmemek sormaktan daha kötüdür. Çok soran insan çok şeyi anlayabilir ancak. Yalnızca çok şeyi anlayan biri adil bir insan olabilir.”

**
“Çocuk hâlâ susuyordu. Haham Eliezer, Temiz ve Berrak, çocuğun donuk suskunluğunda bir isyan sezdi. Bu yüzden çocuğa doğru eğilip sordu: “Beni anladın mı?”

Çocuğun ensesi hâlâ kaskatıydı. “Hayır,” dedi inatla. “Anlamıyorum. Çünkü madem… madem bu şamdan bizim için böylesine değerli ve kutsal… elimizden alınmasına neden göz yumuyoruz?”
Yaşlı adam iç geçirdi. “Bu soruyu sormakta haklısın, çocuğum. Elimizden alınmasına neden göz yumuyoruz? Neden savunmaya geçmiyoruz? Ancak bu dünyada adaletin haklıdan değil, güçlüden yana olduğunu daha sonra anlayacaksın. Yeryüzünde şiddet, iradesini zorla kabul ettirir ve dindarlığın dünyevi gücü yoktur. Tanrı bize hakkımızı yumruklarımızla almayı değil, adaletsizliğe katlanmayı öğretti yalnızca.”

Mü’minlerin Cezaları

Büyük davalar, büyük mahkemelerde görülür. Onların hazırlık safhaları çok zaman alır ve karara bağlanmaları da ciddî yargılamayı gerektirir. Buna karşılık, küçük davalar, basit anlaşmazlıklar, küçük mahkemelerde ve fazla sürmeyen yargılamalar neticesinde karara bağlanır.

Bunun gibi, bazı günahlar vardır ki Allah (c.c.), onların karşılığını Âhiret’e bırakmayarak dünyada verir. Mü’minlerin başlarına gelen bazı felâketler ve musibetler, bu günahların neticesidir. Dolayısıyla, mü’min de olsa insan çok günah işleyen bir varlık olduğu için Cenab-ı Allah, müminleri onlara olan hususî merhametinden dolayı günahları karşılığında dünyada cezalandırır ve bu sebeple mü’minlerin hayatı zor geçer. Onlar, imanları ölçüsünde musibetlere maruz kalırlar. Cenab-ı Allah’a yakınlıkları ölçüsünde davranışlarına daha çok dikkat etmeleri gerektiği için, imanları ve Allah’a yakınlıkları ölçüsünde itaba ve cezaya uğrarlar ve yaptıkları hatalar, işledikleri günahlar, genellikle karşılığını gecikmeden dünyada görür. Mü’minlerin yaptıkları hataların karşılığını dünyada hemen görmelerinin bir diğer sebebi de, İslâm’ı yaşamada ve İslâm’a hizmette hatalar bir nev’i zulüm yerine geçer; dolayısıyla “zulüm devam etmez,” karşılığı hemen verilir ve böylece mü’minler, günahlarından temizlenirler. Küfür ise, şirk gibi en büyük zulüm olmakla birlikte, davranıştan ziyade itikada baktığı için, “Zulüm devam etmez, küfür devam eder.” kaidesinde de ifade olunduğu gibi, karşılığı daha çok Âhiret’e bırakılır.

Sözler

O zararlı böcekler ise dünyevi musibetlerdir; fakat mü'min için gaflet uykusuna dalmaya engel olan tatlı birer ilahi ikaz ve Rahmani iltifat hükmündedir.

***

Her kim fani hayatı esas maksat yaparsa, görünüşte bir cennet içinde olsa da manen cehennemdedir. Kim de bakî hayata ciddi bir şekilde yönelirse, iki cihan saadetine erişir. Dünya hayatı ne kadar fena ve sıkıntılı da olsa, onu cennetin bekleme salonu saydığı için hoş görür, tahammül eder, sabir içinde şükreder.

***

Demek ki, tesbih, tekbir ve hamd, namazın çekirdekleri hükmündedir. O yüzden bu üç şey, namazm bütün hareket ve zikirlerinde bulunur. Bu sebeple de namazdan sonra onun mânâsını kuvvetlendirmek için şu mübarek kelimeler, otuz üçer defa tekrar edilir. Namazın

mânâsı, işte şu özlü ifadelerle perçinlenir.

***

Hem o celâl ve izzete uygun bir ceza yeri olacaktır. Çünkü çoğu kez,zalim izzetiyle, mazlum zilletiyle kalıyor, bu dünyadan öyle göçüp gidiyorlar. Demek, hesap büyük bir mahkemeye bırakılıyor, erteleniyor, yoksa görülmeyecek değil.

***

Sen güneşin ışığına gözünü kapayan bir yolcuya benziyorsun. O yolcu, kafasının içindeki hayale bakar da vehmi, bir yıldız böceği gibikafa fenerinin ışığıyla dehşetli yolunu aydınlatmak ister.

***

Ecel ve kabir, insanı beklediği gibi, cennet ve cehennem de bekliyor ve onun yolunu gözlüyor.

***

Zerre ile gezegen O Zât'ın emri karşısında eşittir.

Adalet Üzerine Tefekkür

Adalet, her hak sahibine kabiliyeti nispetinde hakkını, muhtaç olduğu organ

ve duyguları vermek, ölçü ve denge ile iş görmek, bir de mazlumun hakkını

zalimden alıvermek demektir.

Gerçekten Allah, adaletinin ve Adl isminin tecellisi ile kâinatta her şeyi ölçülü

ve dengeli yaratmış, mahlûkatın muhtaç olduğu organ ve cihazları

vermiştir. Su içinde yaşayan balıklara oksijen ayrıştıracak cihazlar, karanlık

deniz diplerindeki bazı yaratıklarına da projektörler ihsan etmiştir.

Dünyanın dönme hareketi, Dünya üzerinde yaşayanlara göre dengelidir.

Ekseni etrafında saatte 1600 km hızla dönmektedir. Bu hız on misli fazla

olsa gündüzler on misli uzun olur, Güneş’in harareti bütün bitkileri yakardı.

On misli yavaş olsa bu sefer her şey soğuk ve uzun gecelerde donardı. Veya

Güneş Dünya’ya şu andaki mesafeden daha uzak ve veya daha yakın olsaydı

yine benzer problemler olurdu.

Sinekler devamlı üreme imkânı bulsalardı hâlimiz nice olurdu? Çünkü bir

çift kara sinek Nisan’dan Ağustos ayına kadar 191.000.000.000.000.000.

000 adet çoğalıyor. Eğer Cenab-ı Hak, vücut ağırlığının yedi katı her gün

sinek yiyerek beslenen örümcek gibi hayvanlar yaratmasaydı, bir çift kara

sinek bu hızla bir senede Dünya’nın etrafını iki metre kalınlıkta kaplayabilirdi.

Ama onları iklim şartları ve onları yiyen canlılarla dengeye getiriyor.

Yoksa yeryüzünde nefes bile alamazdık...

Bundan seneler önce, Avustralya kıtasına bir başka ülkeden kaktüs bitkisi

getirilmişti. Kaktüsten tarlalar ve bahçeler arasında çit olarak istifade edilecekti.

Ama Avustralya’da yaşayan böcekler arasında bu kaktüslerin hiç

düşmanı yoktu. Onun için kaktüsler hiçbir engel görmeden kısa bir zamanda

İngiltere kadar bir alanı kapladılar ve çiftlikleri mahvettiler. Köyleri

ve şehirleri hicrete zorladılar. Sonunda böcekleri inceleyen araştırmacı

bilginler sadece kaktüs ile karın doyuran bir cins böceği keşfettiler. Ayrıca

bu küçük böceği hiçbir Avustralya böceği de yemiyordu. İşte böyle bir

denge unsuru ile kaktüsler hizaya geldi. Kaktüsler yok olunca, gıdasız

kalan böcekler de azaldı. Şimdi hem kaktüs, hem de böcek dengeli biçimde

varlıklarını sürdürüyorlar.

İşte bu gerçekler, her an, kâinatı nazar-ı teftişinden geçirip, her şeyi dengeleyip

düzenleyen bir Yaradan’ın varlığını gözler önüne sermektedir.

Hâlbuki, en büyük ölçü ve dengenin, yaratılanlar içinde en güzel ve üstün

varlık olan insanlar arasında olması gerekirken, zalim izzet içinde mazlum

ve mağdurlar zillet içinde yaşayıp haklarını almadan bu dünyadan ayrılıyorlar.

Böyle bir şeyin, bütün fenlerin ispat ettiği adalet hakikatine karşı âhiretsiz

tahakkuk etmesi mümkün değildir. Yani öyle mahşer bir günü gelecek

ki, mazlum, zalimden hakkını alacak; ömrü boyunca iyilik yapmış ama hep

mağdur ve zor şartlar içinde yaşamış olanlar karşılıklarını bulacaklardır.

Kur’an-ı Kerim ve Açıklamalı Meali [Ali Ünal] 87: Kamer Sûresi’nden

•  Adalet, mutlak manâda iyidir ve insan hayatı için elzemdir. Bu bakımdan, zulümde ısrar eden pek çok halkın helâk edilmesi onların hakkı idi ve dolayısıyla zalimleri helâk etmek, Cenab–ı Allah’ın insanlara bir lütfudur, nimetidir.

•  (Kafirler) Gözleri korku içinde ve önde, çekirgelerin birden etrafı kaplaması gibi dehşet içinde mezarlarından çıkacaklar. (Kamer 7)

•  Hz. Nuh’un gemisi, en azından bu sûrenin indiği dönemde halâ yerinde idi.İmam Buharî, İbn Cerir et-Taberî, İbn Ebî Hatem ve Abdürrazzak, Katâde’den Hz. Ömer döneminde Irak’ı fetheden Müslümanların Gemi’yi Cudi Dağı üzerinde gördüklerini rivayet etmektedirler. Âyetten insanların kendisini bulup da ibret almaları için Gemi’nin halâ var olmaya devam ettiğine bir işaret de çıkarılabilir.

•  Ve onların yaptıkları her şey defterlerde kayıtlıdır. (Kamer 52)

The Ox-Bow Incident

Donald Martin: Why do ya keep asking me all these questions? You don't believe anything I tell you.  
Major Tetley: There's truth in lies too, if you can get enough of them.

---

[Gil Carter reading Martin's letter]

Gil Carter: "My dear Wife, Mr. Davies will tell you what's happening here tonight. He's a good man and has done everything he can for me. I suppose there are some other good men here, too, only they don't seem to realise what they're doing. They're the ones I feel sorry for. 'Cause it'll be over for me in a little while, but they'll have to go on remembering for the rest of their lives. A man just naturally can't take the law into his own hands and hang people without hurtin' everybody in the world, 'cause then he's just not breaking one law but all laws. Law is a lot more than words you put in a book, or judges or lawyers or sheriffs you hire to carry it out. It's everything people ever have found out about justice and what's right and wrong. It's the very conscience of humanity. There can't be any such thing as civilization unless people have a conscience, because if people touch God anywhere, where is it except through their conscience? And what is anybody's conscience except a little piece of the conscience of all men that ever lived? I guess that's all I've got to say except kiss the babies for me and God bless you. Your husband, Donald."

“Kem âlât ile kemâlat olmaz”

Adalet mekanizmasının işleyişi için söylenen ve Victor Hugo’ya atfedilen erdemli bir söz vardır: “Yargılamanın adil olması yetmez, adil görünmelidir de…”

Hem de bizzat mahkumun nazarında adil görünmelidir adalet. Siyaset için de, uluslararası ilişkiler için de, çocuk pedagojisi için de geçerli bir kuraldır bu: Haklı olman yetmez, senin haklılığından sureta zarar gören taraflar da dahil olmak üzere herkesin nezdinde haklı görünmeyi başarabilmelisin.

Haklı görünmenin temel koşulu, amaçlar kadar araçların da meşru olmasıdır. Eskilerin “Kem âlât ile kemâlat olmaz” dedikleri mesele…

Kerim Balcı-Zaman-13 Ey 13