#356 / Stark Inequality, Or All-Out War?

The New York Times published two disturbing articles, side by side, in its "Business Day" section on Wednesday, December 7, 2016. 

One of the articles, by Patricia Cohen, carried this title: "Research Shows Slim Gains For the Bottom 50 Percent." The other article, by Eduardo Porter, said this: 

History - from Ancient Rome through the Gilded Age; from the Russian Revolution to the Great Compression of incomes across the West in the middle of the 20th century — suggests that reversing the trend toward greater concentrations of income, in the United States and across the world, might be, in fact, nearly impossible. 

That’s the bleak argument of Walter Scheidel, a professor of history at Stanford, whose new book, “The Great Leveler” (Princeton University Press), is due out next month. He goes so far as to state that “only all-out thermonuclear war might fundamentally reset the existing distribution of resources.” If history is anything to go by, he writes, “peaceful policy reform may well prove unequal to the growing challenges ahead.” 

Professor Scheidel does not offer a grand unified theory of inequality. But scouring through the historical record, he detects a pattern: From the Stone Age to the present, ever since humankind produced a surplus to hoard, economic development has almost always led to greater inequality. There is one big thing with the power to stop this dynamic, but it’s not pretty: violence. 

The big equalizing moments in history may not have always have the same cause, he writes, “but they shared one common root: massive and violent disruptions of the established order.”

Porter's article was titled, "History's Dilemma for Humanity: Stark Inequality or All-Out War." Here are two points in response. 

First, Scheidel explicitly introduces his predictions and his analysis by saying, "if history is anything to go by...." Well, let me suggest that history is NOT "anything to go by" when we are talking about the need for fundamental change. History tells us what has happened, not what will happen. The essence of human freedom is that we can, always, do something unexpected, something new, something that will begin a "whole new story," as Hannah Arendt puts it. 

This is not just a quibble (though I know it may seem like one). We tend to observe what has happened in our human world, and deduce that there are "laws" at work, which, like the laws of Nature, tell us what must and will happen. What usually happens, we think, must necessarily happen. That is a mistake. The laws of Nature are descriptive of the inevitable realities that prevail in the physical world. Human actions are not subject to the laws that govern physical objects.

In our human world, the world that we create (and that certainly includes a determination of who gets how much of the world's wealth), all options are possible. Nothing is "inevitably necessary" in the world we create. Admittedly, our past actions do have momentum, and significant momentum, and drive us forward in familiar tracks, but the blessing of human freedom is a gift that is always at hand. We can do unexpected and startling things, and by so doing disrupt the momentum of the past, so that the future will be different, and new. 

And here is a second point. A "historian" is necessarily an "observer." He or she looks at what has happened in the past, and what is happening now, and then reports. To an observer, the realities observed are always a given. There is no doubt that Scheidel is right about the history of inequality. The mistake is in thinking that the realities observed in the human world are like the realities of the Natural world, and that they are inevitable. Again, not so. We can "observe," but we can also "act," and when we act, we change the world. Our actions are unconstrained by any determinism, if we have both courage and will. 

Thermonuclear war does not seem like a desirable way to correct the economic inequalities that beset us in the United States, and that beset the entire world. So we do we give up? I'd say not!

Gandhi, I think, would not have been convinced by Scheidel's determinism, and Gandhi certainly would have rejected Scheidel's claim that massive violence is the only route to fundamental change!

And didn't Gandhi change the world? Wasn't what Gandhi did a part of history, too? And what about Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.? He, too, made history, and his unexpected actions, challenging the momentum of past injustice, transformed an apparently unchangeable reality.

What about you? What about me? Are we actors? Or observers?

Will we change the world? Or not?

What is it they say on that TV channel?

You decide!

Image Credits:

(1) - http://www.nytimes.com/2016/12/06/business/economy/a-bigger-economic-pie-but-a-smaller-slice-for-half-of-the-us.html

(2) - http://www.history.com/topics/mahatma-gandhi
(3) - http://www.alternet.org/activism/8-surprising-things-you-didnt-know-about-dr-martin-luther-king-jr