In Praise of “Inferior”

I write in praise of “inferior.” I want to defend it and protect it from all enemies, foreign and domestic. And I want more than that. I want to deepen and expand the idea—to proliferate it until the word rings sweetly in every mouth, on every occasion, everywhere: “inferior to this,” “inferior to that,” and, yes, “inferior to them.”

I nail my theses to the church door in defiance of the popes and cardinals of contemporary culture. They, who ought to uphold this distinction, chafe under its weight, pretend it has no meaning, and incite the multitudes against those who dare to raise it in public.

“Inferior” sits awkwardly with the democrat. Even in the age of Trump, and after the dismantling of DEI, the word sticks in the throat of anyone committed to equality. More importantly, for members of the ruling class, it risks giving the game away. To speak of the inferior is to imply the superior—and “superior” carries the taint of privilege and entitlement. Better, then, to avoid the terrain altogether: to don a keffiyeh, strike an inclusive pose, and evade invidious comparisons and uncomfortable questions about human worth. And didn’t Jesus say, “Judge not, that ye be not judged”?

Yet we cannot avoid judging or being judged. Even to say that we shouldn’t is itself a judgment. My praise of the inferior begins, then, with this simple observation: it is inescapable.

At every turn, we face choices. Some are mundane: black shirt or white? Others are moral and life-defining: remain faithful to my wife, or pursue the alluring colleague? Still others are political, commercial, geographic, health-related, and even cosmic. Their range is limited only by the imagination. Taken together, these choices amount to what we call a human life. Far more than any racial or sexual givens, they determine who and what we are.

Now suppose no standards existed for choosing. Every moment would be wide open: pick this or that—it doesn’t matter. How could I hope to become myself under such conditions? In that unbounded space, identity would splinter. Behavior would turn indecisive and erratic; I might take a year to choose a shirt. That resembles patients with frontal-lobe damage. More likely, I would follow impulse toward destructive, even suicidal action, as in borderline personality disorder.

The absence of standards opens a trapdoor into the void. We grasp at any distinction, cling to any boundary, to avoid the fall. So I invoke the principle of the inferior. On some scale of values I find persuasive, I rank one object (the white shirt) below another (the black shirt). That is all “inferior” means: below, under—purely relative to some point on the map. I choose the black shirt over the white.

But choosing is not automatic; it is not an algorithm. The sense of the inferior arises from feeling and reason. I know it because I recoil from it; I loathe being below. Conversely, I am drawn to what is higher and better. Those impulses guide my behavior, and I feel compelled to account for them, if only to myself. I give reasons for my choices. Even “it’s a matter of taste” is a reason, one open to debate and contradiction.

Where does the scale of values come from? More on that in a moment. The short answer is that it varies with the situation. In poor or desperate places, most choices are driven by necessity; the scale measures life and death. In affluent, secure environments, choices turn on interpretations of the prevailing culture—its fashions and tastes—and the scale measures social standing. For all our romantic notions of selfhood, we do not invent our values. We discover them, and ourselves, from a preexisting menu, in the act of choosing.

My praise of the inferior collides head-on with one of the reigning orthodoxies of the day: the cult of difference, or diversity.

At its extreme, this faith renders harsh judgments about “white privilege,” especially against white males; inquisitors hurl anathemas that can destroy reputations and careers. More influential, however, is its passive form, now canonical across domains as varied as federal hiring and Hollywood storytelling. It treats judgment as a mortal sin and elevates inclusiveness as the cardinal virtue. All origins, beliefs, and conditions are said to be equal. All cultures are of identical worth, all body types indistinguishable. Differences are not to be weighed but embraced. Nothing human, in principle, can be higher or lower.

In a few short steps, we are removed from the bracing landscape of choice to a flat featureless plain, on the rim of the void. There, the beatific vision is of a world in which all individuals “feel valued for their unique qualities.” It takes the form of lengthy litanies of human difference: “We embrace and encourage our employees’ differences in age, color, disability, ethnicity, family or marital status, gender identity or expression, language, national origin, physical and mental ability, political affiliation, race, religion, sexual orientation, socio-economic status, veteran status, and other characteristics.” One can almost hear, in this recitation, the monophonic tones of Gregorian chant.

Because diversity partakes of the sacred, arguments turn on who you are, not what you say. For the same reason, personal identity is reduced to a display of differences, like a peacock fanning out its tail: “I am queer, trans, Chinese American, middle class, and able-bodied.”

The social function of this assault on choice and identity is debatable. What began as a humanitarian impulse has become a mechanism of institutional stereotyping and control. “I am queer, trans, Chinese American” serves as a quick-draw argument killer. My own view is that abolishing the inferior leaves those in charge comfortably justified in their dealings with inferiors, who can all be dismissed as “unique.”

The dogma of neutral, or passive, diversity rests on a fallacy. It begins with a sweeping judgment—that all human differences are equal and equally good—and then blocks all further judgment. But how can we know that all differences are good? The initial claim presents itself as a priori, yet experience plainly contradicts it. In the Middle East today, many have died over small differences. And to say that “the persecution of difference is wrong” is itself to condemn a certain kind of difference, a judgment that must rest on some standard. The a priori claim collapses under its own contradictions. To defend diversity, we must reenter the realm of feeling and reason—that is, of choice, of true identity, and of the inescapable recurrence of the inferior.

In all this, I follow the philosopher Charles Taylor, who affirms: “Mere difference can’t itself be the ground of equal value.” A sound defense of equality, he argues, must “override” differences and look to “some properties, common or complementary, which are of value.” Likewise, affirming diversity requires more than a belief in diversity: “we have to share also some standards of value on which the identities concerned check out as equal.” By any such standard, some identities will be judged inferior to others. So we must choose.

But many, I suspect, are fearful: and this fear of choosing goes far to explain our present predicament. On basic questions of respect for life, the sexual bond, and truth-telling, we seem to have lost our bearings. We judge not yet somehow rant incessantly. Inside our comfortable skins, we feel perpetually offended and irritated. We crave answers, direction: a reformation of manners and morals. I praise the inferior because it alone can lead us there. And the first, most important step is to apply the principle to ourselves.

The reformation of the world begins with self-judgment. I must wrestle my identity free of cant and stereotype and ground it in what Martin Luther King called the content of my character.

It is not enough to say, “I am queer, trans, Chinese-American.” These are crude labels, thin of human meaning. Nor does it add much to declare, “I stand with others against white supremacy and cisheteropatriarchy.” These are war chants dressed up as personal morality. Parading one’s virtues, in any case, is a low trait, the mark of the hypocrite and the Pharisee.

In judging myself, I confront what is inferior in me and recoil from it. Yet none of us can measure our true worth. I can only live in the hope that those around me might say: he is honest; he is kind to the helpless; when the powerful struck, he stood his ground. Such judgments point to generally discoverable moral truths. We have always possessed Taylor’s shared “standards of value”—we have always loved the higher and shunned the lower, even when pretending otherwise.

From the reformation of character follows the public affirmation of the conditions to which good character should aspire. I would do so humbly, guided by truth as I perceive it. Fit is better than fat, for obvious reasons. Together is better than alone, and together for life better still. Strong is better than weak. Let me name the one and pursue the other, knowing that we are flawed vessels, hostage to fortune, and bound often to fall short. Still, all of us can inch toward our highest selves.

Wielding the force of the inferior, we can begin to reform public and social life around the standards we affirm. In doing so, we must accept that not all societies are equal. The Aztecs of Montezuma, for example, were inferior to the Athenians of Pericles: from the latter came democracy, science, and theater; from the former, chihuahuas and chili peppers. Beyond history, the same judgment holds today. Life in many countries is inferior to life in the United States. I know this because 95 languages were represented at my daughter’s high school graduation.

In the final phase of this moral reformation, I would weigh our elites in the balance. Their function is to embody our aspirations—to be the best of us. By that standard, every generation since has fallen short of the “Greatest Generation,” and the present cohort has sunk below even the worst in living memory. From politicians and business leaders to academics; from writers to athletes and artists—how many can we hold up as models for our children, in life or in work?

They will be swept away. Or, in honesty: we can sweep them away, along with their works and pretensions. The moral collapse of the old guard is already evident, even in image-obsessed capitals like Washington and Hollywood. Whether they are finally ushered out of history—and who or what replaces them—will depend largely on our choices.

“Inferior,” I say, is the lever that can move the world. But it is up to us to supply the force.

Photo: gremlin / E+ via Getty Images