speech and respect - College of Social Sciences and International ...

Taking Sides
I. The Evasions of Neutrality
Liberal political theory is enthralled by the chimera of neutrality,
hoping to avoid the responsibility of political choice by finding a
principled basis for the exercise of power. But the search is doomed
to fail and entails high costs. The "haves" come out ahead not only
in the pursuit of justice, the contest for power, and the competition
for wealth, but also in the struggle for respect. 1 Authority that is
willfully blind to real inequality perpetuates and magnifies it. The
explosive growth of homelessness has rendered Anatole France's
century-old aphorism even more timely: "The law, in its majestic
equality, forbids the rich as well as the poor to sleep under bridges,
to beg in the streets, and to steal bread." 2 Defending the denial of
political asylum against a charge of racism, British Home Secretary
Kenneth Baker offered an unwitting paraphrase: "Our policy is
colour blind. It applies to people wheresoever they come from,
whether it is Africa, Asia, or Eastern Europe." 3 It clearly was
irrelevant that North Americans and West Europeans were not
clamouring at the gates. Baker's boss displayed greater candour.
Opposing changes in the inheritance tax, John Major declared: "I
want to see wealth cascading down the generations. We do not see
each generation starting out anew, with the past cut off and the
future ignored." For the same reason he supported educational
inequality. 4
Daily experience reveals the myriad ways in which formal equality
creates substantive inequality. Gender-blind allocation of toilets
in theatres produces much longer queues during the interval outside
the women's than the men's. When the Law Lords invalidated the
Fares Fair campaign and London Regional Transport terminated the
"Just a Ticket" scheme women suffered more than men because they
were more likely to travel by bus than underground and much less
likely to drive. 5 Programmes intended to overcome class differences
may inadvertently exaggerate race and gender. When medical
condition is held constant among elderly Americans, whites receive
4—7 times as many heart bypasses as blacks and black women
almost 50 per cent more than black men. 6 Among poor Americans
with kidney disease, whites are significantly more likely to obtain
transplants. 7
Liberal theory rationalises the persistence of inequality under
conditions of political freedom as the outcome of individual
"choice." 8 But the state is not the only constraint on freedom, or
even the greatest, as the fall of communism vividly illustrates. In
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