On Privilege

Every now and then somebody points out that, by comparison with the citizens of Haiti and many African countries, poor people living in the United States are “wealthy”, or “privileged.” “Lucky,” at any rate. In terms of the bare numbers, that’s mostly true. Poor people living in the US live longer. They eat more, and better. The chances of their children living to adulthood are greater. The chances of poor American women surviving childbirth are a lot better. They have easy access to clean drinking water. Mostly they have indoor plumbing, and electricity. Their per capita income is higher. They have more education, and are more likely to be literate.

Does that mean, as many of the people purveying this information seem to imply, that the poor people living in America should quit complaining and accept their lot?

For that matter, the struggling middle class in this country is privileged in relation to the poor who inhabit the same country. They are healthier, live longer, get more and better education, live in better housing, have more access to leisure activities. Does that mean that they should stop complaining about the high cost of college education and health care?

I think the answer to both sets of questions is no. While I have no great sympathy for people whose most serious worry is what the stock market is going to do to their investments, or what an untrained yard man is going to do to their rosebushes, I think there are different kinds of privilege.

I think there are privileges everybody should have, and privileges nobody should have. Those of us who have the former should be doing what we can to extend them to everybody else, but we shouldn’t feel guilty about having them ourselves. A decent diet, access to good health care, clean drinking water, a reliable income, a job that doesn’t endanger the worker’s life or health, good education, decent housing—these are privileges everybody should have.

But excess wealth—more than what it takes to provide those necessary privileges—is a privilege nobody should have. So are most of the things that excess wealth will buy. For an able-bodied healthy person, being waited on hand and foot is a privilege nobody should have. For any human being, the right to control the lives of people with less money is a privilege nobody should have.

What about the right to be free from the hassles of ordinary life? Well, on that issue, reasonable people can differ, I suppose. Should the Chief Justice of the US Supreme Court have to wait in line at the grocery store? Doesn’t he—or she—have more important things to do with that time? My personal answer would be no. It may actually be more important for the people whose decisions determine the lives of millions of their fellow citizens to share at least some of the hassles of the everyday lives of those citizens. Because in all likelihood, if the Chief Justice doesn’t know what that life is like, nobody is about to tell him. That’s the trouble with being important—if you don’t know what you need to know, most people will be afraid to tell you.

In fact, one of the major privileges nobody should have is the right to be ignorant of the circumstances of the lives of people different from oneself.