Alexandre Kojeve, the great Hegelian philosopher, used to say that all the Sturm und Drang of the intellectual world ultimately spills over to the political world. The emergence of affirmative action as a major issue in current American politics vindicates him: the recent political brouhaha over it was preceded in the last decade or so by a series of celebrated books on the subject, such as Dinesh D'Souza's "Illiberal Education," Arthur Schlesinger, Jr.'s "The Disuniting of America," and Shelby Steele's "The Content of Our Character."
Unfortunately, the debate itself has been lopsided. Liberals who had traditionally been affirmative action's staunchest supporters are dispirited and cannot mount an intellectually coherent defense for it. As a kind of coup de grace, many influential Black thinkers themselves have defected to the "end quotas" camp.
One possible barricade against the anti-affirmative action tide, however, has been underemployed, perhaps unemployed, by those who care about racial justice in America. Ironically, this is the conservative defense of affirmative action. This defense not only reveals the fallacy of the anti-affirmative faction's logic, but calls for a "perpetual" quota system to supplant the current notion of "temporary" affirmative action.
The present crisis of affirmative action is occasioned by the weakness of its original rationale. This rationale was encapsulated in Lyndon Johnson's famous statement: "You do not take a person--who for years has been hobbled by chains--liberate him, bring him to the starting line of a race and then say, 'You are free to compete with all others,' and still believe you have been completely fair." The implicit assumption here is that once affirmative action has done its job and sufficiently strengthened the Negro's joints to the level of his white competitors, it can fade away. At such juncture we can simply rely on the "level playing field."
This flawed logic has invited dunderheads like Jesse Helms to ask the question: "Isn't 30 years enough?" Have there not been enough corrective measures to uplift Blacks so that they can compete on their own?
But this train of thought completely misses the point. It assumes that the only problem facing Blacks is past racism and the disadvantages it wrought on them. It assumes that we now have a color blind society which views all men as individuals. In so doing it underestimates the naturalness and ineradicability of racism.
Racism is natural because psychologically men need roots, or what Nietzsche called "horizons," by which to orient themselves. And this horizon, as Rousseau said, must be closed and exclusive because the extension of human sentiments is limited.
Men must reflexively love and be passionately attached to their families and their peoples in order to preserve them. Only if they think their own things are superior can they develop this love and attachment.
These imperatives lead men to identify themselves with and prefer particular peoples or groups, and in this sense most men are ethnocentric. For most people then the concept of the individual is an abstraction, and they do not judge others as individuals apart from their corporate identity.
In light of man's natural propensity to prefer one's own group to another, the rationale for abolishing affirmative action is shown to be misguided. The color blind society that both liberal supporters and critics of affirmative action talk about is a fiction. If explicit discrimination against Blacks is no longer extant, cases of covert discrimination still abound. And unlike overt discrimination, covert discrimination is extremely difficult to prove and combat. The only reasonable solution to this problem therefore is to set quotas for minorities so that they are guaranteed their share of society's goods.
Obviously this solution has flaws and has led to some egregious abuses in the past. But what is the alternative? Cornel West is probably right in saying that the demise of affirmative action will take us right back to pre-1960s racial arrangement.
All this, of course, is incomprehensible and alien to liberals. Philosophical liberalism initially based itself on the idea of the universal Man, instead of man in the context of societies, cultures, or nations. Moreover, liberalism at bottom upholds the fundamental rationality and even goodness of man: there are no inherent defects in man that cannot be resolved with time and Enlightenment.
Philosophical conservatism, one that originates from Edmund Burke, on the other hand would be fully able to support the analysis of affirmative action I have outlined. Burke, as well as his conservative contemporaries like Chateaubriand and de Maistre, always emphasized the reality and primacy of cultures over the abstract universalism of their liberal counterparts. Further, he never believed in the goodness of man, but merely in the power of good political institutions to control man's natural wickedness.
If Burke were alive now, I am convinced that he would stand with me: While working toward a color blind society is noble, to count on its arrival is utopian foolishness.
