Let Them Inherit Debt
by Theodore Dalrymple (November 2009)
Recently I was in public discussion on the question of poverty in Britain and how to overcome it. The poverty is relative, of course, not real destitution; but there is nonetheless no doubt as to its squalor.
Among the panel on which I appeared was a very pleasant member of the Fabian Society, that is to say the society whose goal was to achieve socialism in Britain gradually and by reformist means (it was named after the Roman general, Quintus Fabius Maximus, who wore Hannibal down by attrition rather than by pitched battle).
One of the definitions of poverty most commonly used (and which smuggles in a definitional desirability of equality) is those who live on incomes that are less than 60 per cent of the median income. In a society of billionaires, therefore, a millionaire could be said to be living in poverty And it is clear on this definition that a society could be become much poorer as a whole, and yet have less poverty than it had before when it was richer.
But let this pass. One of the Fabian’s suggestions, to bring about a more equal society and thereby lessen poverty was to increase and extend inheritance tax. The money raised would be distributed in one way or another to the poor (minus deductions, of course, for the pay, perquisites and pensions of those who had to administer it, a proportion not likely to be small). For, as he said, it was unfair that some people, by accident of birth, should inherit wealth while others should inherit nothing.
It seemed to me obvious that, underlying and if you like impelling the proposal was our old and trusted psychological friend, the one who never lets you down, namely resentment. Why should some people, no better than I and sometimes much worse than I, be better off than I, merely by chance, that is to say by accident of birth? Why should some people be handed on a plate what I have to work all my life for, or indeed in some cases more than I can ever hope to earn and accumulate?
Nothing could be less fair.
It is unfair, but is it unjust? The argument certainly has the appeal of plausibility to all those whose station in life is not what they would like (which is quite possibly the majority of mankind).
There are many unfairnesses in life that we must learn to put up with, if we are to have any chance of happiness or even of tolerable contentment. For example, I should like to be taller, better-looking and more intelligent and gifted than I am. Every time I meet someone better-looking than I, taller than I, or more talented than I, which I do very regularly, I experience a brief spark of envy. What did they do to be as they are, my superiors? Why did providence, or chance, endow them with characteristics so much more attractive than my own? Needless to say, I never stop to think that, just possibly, some people might ask the same of me when they meet me.
But the differential endowments of nature are unfair, not unjust, because (at least as yet) no human intervention can prevent them. The inheritance of wealth is not like this: it is a human arrangement that could be abrogated if not easily, for political reasons, at least with some effort. And if injustice is unfairness brought about by human means, then inheritance of wealth is unjust. Ergo, inheritance of wealth ought to be forbidden because it is unjust, and we must always seek justice.
The question, then, is whether we should always seek justice to the exclusion of other desiderata. Is it true that justice always and everywhere trumps other considerations? I think the answer is no.
Let us widen the question of what we inherit. Although I have personally inherited very little in the way of money or material goods, I happen, quite by chance, to have been born into a comparatively rich country, relative to most of the world’s population. This has given me the opportunity to live at a much higher material standard of living than most of mankind born elsewhere (though the unwisdom of our government and the improvidence of its population is fast eroding these advantages). Am I required, ethically, to renounce the fruits of the advantages that I have inherited quite by chance, and live at the median standard of the whole of mankind? Or do ethical considerations of this kind stop at constituted borders – which would be indeed a strange thing?
Let us go a little further. By having been born where I was, I had a life expectancy that much exceeded that of the great majority of mankind throughout its history, and (to a lesser extent, of course) even that of my own parents. This unearned benefit accrued to me again by chance; and, if I wanted to feed my resentment, I could work myself into a fury by reflection that subsequent generations to mine, that from all appearances are even worse than mine in many respects, will live longer than I, again by virtue of having, by chance, been born after me. Could anything be less fair?
Now it is quite clear that the progressive increase in life expectancy is not a work of nature: it is the work of man. The greatest contribution to the increased life expectancy has been brought about by the improvement in living conditions, itself the result of technical and to a much smaller extent political progress; all of it the work of man. In addition, whole diseases have now been eliminated by medical progress. I myself, had I been born in the eighteenth century, would long ago have died in a state of hopeless dementia, easily and routinely prevented in the twentieth century by the simple expedient of taking two small tablets a day. But I contributed nothing to the scientific research that made this possible, which took place before my birth; I have inherited a benefit greater, in my case, than any amount of money could ever have been.
One could go on and on giving illustrations of a like nature: indeed, the illustrations, if they were to be exhaustive, would stretch out nearly to infinity. Even when I do something as banal and everyday as switching on a light, I receive an inherited benefit unknown to men throughout the great majority of human history.
In short, civilisation itself requires the gradual accretion of unearned benefits. No matter how great or intelligent or gifted a man may be, he builds upon what he has inherited; he is never entirely self-made, as if he started out life in a little personal Garden of Eden, and had himself to eat of the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge. One of the mightiest minds in the history of mankind, that of Sir Isaac Newton, put it succinctly: If I have seen further, it is only by standing on the shoulders of giants. Mozart himself, another astonishing genius, did not start from nothing: he inherited a tradition, and worked on it. Maybe, as is sometimes said, he took dictation from God; but to do so he had to learn how to take dictation.
But, might the Fabian reply, civilisation is the inheritance of all mankind, and therefore there is no unfairness in its inheritance. Alas, this will not do, because it is an unavoidable characteristic of civilisation that it is inherited unequally, even within a single society. One child may be born into a family of the highest cultivation and intellectual attainment, another, of equal ability, into a family of swinish degradation. The latter may reach high levels of civilisation, but if he does it will be after incomparably greater labour than the former had to employ to reach them.
Only the most radical and horrifying social engineering could eliminate these differences. Indeed, a world in which there were no such differences would have to resemble very strongly that depicted in Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World. Such a world would be perfectly just, in the sense that it removed all unfairness brought about by human action and activity, but it would also be perfectly horrifying.
The desire to give one’s children an easier and better path through life than one has had oneself is also not to be deprecated. Of course, in a sense the attempt is based on an illusion: a better path through life is not a matter merely, or even principally, of material wealth. Nevertheless, few of us would prefer to live among ugliness rather than beauty, in squalor rather than cleanliness, with bad food rather than good, with difficult access to culture rather than easy, and so forth. And, while we might want all these things for the whole of mankind, we want them more for our own children than for the children of others. A world in which no parent was especially concerned with the well-being of his own children would be a truly dehumanised world, a world in which every mother would be a Mrs. Jellyby, who neglected her own children while concerning herself with the natives of Borrioboola-Gha (on the left bank of the Niger).
The African project [she said] employs my whole time. It involves me in correspondence with public bodies and private individuals anxious for the welfare of their species. It involves the devotion of all my energies, such as they are; but that is nothing so long as it succeeds; and I am more confident of success every day.
Meanwhile, her hair remains unbrushed because ‘she was too much occupied with her African duties to brush it;’ she does not notice that her own children fall down the stairs because ‘her eyes had a curious habit of seeming to look a long way off, as if they could see nothing nearer than Africa.’
What Dickens portrays in his deeply and irresistibly comic fashion would actually be horrible if put into practice on a universal, or even on a large, scale, but that is what the project exemplified by the wish to suppress inheritance as unjust would logically entail. However, it has not pleased our creator – whether God or the evolutionary process – to give us the capacity to feel for the whole of humanity equally. Our emotional responses, our genuine concerns, are not indefinitely expandable; and the requirements of perfect justice make us not more, but less, human.
As usual, Shakespeare has something to say on this, at least by implication. When the players come to Elsinore, Hamlet asks Polonius to treat them well. Polonius replies, ‘My lord, I will use them according to their desert,’ to which Hamlet replies, ‘God’s bodkin, man, much better. Use every man after his desert, and who shall ‘scape whipping?’
In other words, assuming justice to be the allocation of result by desert alone, we should all be in a pretty pickle if there were justice in the world, a fate from which (in fact) only the inheritance of mercifully unjust privileges can save us.
Behind the proposal to abolish inheritance – for if one takes the proposal seriously, why should anyone have the right to inherit anything? – lies a desire for the tabula rasa, the blank slate, on which, to quote Mao Tse-Tung’s famous, or infamous, words, the most beautiful characters can be drawn. To start again, to start anew, to make the world a new Garden of Eden, is the goal.
But why is that goal so attractive to so many, at least in the modern world, and particularly among intellectuals? I think the answer is egotism and self-importance. Having lost his religious faith in a being much greater than himself, modern man finds the existential limitations imposed upon him by nature to be meaningless, arbitrary and offensive.
Not Man, but each individual man, becomes the measure of all things. He cannot stand anything that he has not himself fashioned, and so the world must be made anew, over and over again, with no generation ever admitting its debt to the previous one, or thinking seriously about the succeeding one.
The strange thing about the proposal to abolish inheritance is that it usually goes along with an attachment to deficit financing: spend now, pay later, and for many years, or even centuries, to come. We may not leave our children our houses, but it is perfectly all right to leave them our debts, a curious morality to say the least.
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