Lebanonisation | Theodore Dalrymple writes:

The happy future the woke are fashioning for us

Dalrymple writes that when Joe Biden, then a candidate for the US presidency, promised to elevate a black woman to the country’s supreme court if and when a vacancy occurred,

he struck not only at the ideal of the rule of law, but at the possibility of rationality. He was far from the first to do this: anyone who advocates racial quotas in the distribution of public (or any other) offices does so. But still, his pronouncement was unusually foolish, cynical, or shameless.

To allocate public offices by race, or any other demographic feature,

is to promote the Lebanonisation of a country and to imply that it commands no loyalty deeper than that of the groups of which it is composed.

Dalrymple reminds us that in Lebanon,

the president, according to an agreement signed in 1943, is always a Maronite Christian, the prime minister a Sunni Muslim, and the speaker of the parliament a Shia Muslim. The degree to which the demographic-carving up of government has brought about social peace is by now well known.

Human beings, he notes,

are divisible by an almost infinite number of variables, only a very tiny number of which could possibly be taken into account in trying to make the nine judges of the US supreme court in some sense representative of the population as a whole. No one, I suppose, would object that there is no member of the court who is in the lowest decile, or even quintile, of the population as far as intelligence or level of education is concerned, or that the grossly overweight are underrepresented on it. The judges ought to be selected because they are the best persons for the job, not because they are diabetic, of average height, vegetarian, etc.

Persons chosen because they fulfil some demographic requirement

will never be (or ought never to be) quite certain of their deserts. Were their appointments an injustice towards people better qualified than themselves? A gnawing doubt will accompany them, or ought to do so, for the rest of their careers, however successful they may be.

Dalrymple says that the demographic feature that is chosen as the criterion of appointment, given that there are an infinite number of criteria that could have been used,

cannot fail to be very revealing of the state of society, and also a cause of resentment, which is the most powerful, lasting, and dangerous of political emotions. To favour group A is to disfavour group B: there is no getting around it.

Moreover,

group A as a whole may not rejoice that one of its members has been elevated to a high position unless convinced that he has been so by merit alone. Anything else smacks of condescension at best, and an implicit belief in the inferiority of group A at worst, a belief that no person of that group could rise to such a position by his own unaided efforts.

Meanwhile,

groups C, D, and E will feel unjustifiably left out of the allocation of posts by demographic criteria, and their resentment, too, will be stirred. They will start agitating for redress, and if they receive it, groups F, G, and H will take up the baton of agitation. The possibility of trust in institutions will be destroyed.

There are yet worse implications.

Why should a judge be chosen according to demographic criteria? The assumption, among those who favour such a method of choosing judges, is that he will add a layer of understanding to the proceedings by virtue, say, of the colour of his skin. But this is to deny the very possibility of justice, which assumes that men and women are able to put aside their prejudices in court and come to a just (or at least legally correct) decision according to reason, evidence, and argument. This ability does not inhere in any particular bodily feature (except the brain, if one accepts that the brain is the seat of thought). In practice, courts often fall far short of this ideal. But this ideal of justice must remain the ideal, for otherwise (to quote Shakespeare), ‘Hark what discord follows!’

Dalrymple asserts: