The Breakfast Table

All Men Are Not Created Equal

Dear Michael,

I hope it went well at your class, and we’ll get on to nuclear proliferation, but only after I answer the two questions you put to me. The first suggested that manners, as practiced in cyber world, are universal, imposing on me the burden of justifying conventional practices other than by pleading tradition. OK. I suppose one way to confront the point full-frontally is to say simply that in fact everybody isn’t equal except in the small symbolic respect that everyone appears equal in a phone directory and a voting booth. But teachers and pupils aren’t equal, nor are colonels and privates. In not only minor but major symbolic respects, they are equal before the law and before the eyes of God, but why do I have to bear the burden of proving lapidary distinctions?

You ask how do I do it? I have a rule, which is that no undergraduate calls me Bill. That’s not only because I think this right, but because as you get older, you beware most keenly self-serving biological cosmetics, in this situation the older man who affects to be one of the boys. My second rule is to ask to be called Bill by those who have graduated from college and attained a certain age. But my subsecond rule is to ask them once, and then again, but not a third time. The reason for it is that there is hardly any point in imposing a psychological burden while attempting to relieve a social burden. If the 22-year-old is uncomfortable calling me by my first name, I won’t order him to do so. At dinner with my retired headmaster, then age 80, my wife was asked to call him Ed. Her reply was perfect: “Are you crazy?” The headmaster in question would have been as easy to call by his first name as Endicott Peabody, who had been headmaster to my own headmaster. I deeply respect, indeed love, a renowned philosopher and former professor of mine, who if he makes it another few months will be 100. He asked me a few years ago to call him Paul; I did, and do, but wince.

So, do I think the Supreme Court made a correct pass at affirmative action in the field you describe? Yes. My views on the general subject you have probably been exposed to in all those years of wretched muteness when you presided over Firing Line debates and couldn’t give your own views. Mine are conveniently compressed as follows: I think it is right (and I am making an extra-utilitarian point) to do affirmative action in the private sector. Yes Harvard, no University of California …What have I forgotten? To promise you I won’t return to manners and morals. What do I get in return? Since Slate is free?

X,
B