Finding Bliss in a Paradise of Equity

Imagine the following thought experiment:

You are kidnapped by aliens. As they whisk you away in their flying saucer and clamp your arms into cyber-controlled neuro-operated handcuffs, they tell you that you will be taken to a new home on one of two different planets somewhere in the galaxy. Fortunately, you get to choose which planet you will spend the rest of your life on.

Also fortunately (or maybe not) both of these planets are nearly replicas of Earth in almost every way. They each have the same cultures, languages, ecosystems, and commodities found on Earth. However, there are differences:

Planet Stufftopia is far more economically-advanced than Earth. According to your alien captors, if you choose Stufftopia you will have twice as many of all the good things you want on Earth, (e.g. houses, computers, clothes, cars, books, etc.), and the quality of these items will be twice what it is on Earth. However, all the other beings on Stufftopia (who are exactly the same as earthly humans) will have 10x as many of these good things and 10x the quality. In other words, your material well-being will be doubled, but you will be one of the poorer Stufftopians.

On your other option—planet Moretopia—the situation is almost completely reversed. Moretopia is just like Earth, only far behind in development (imagine, perhaps, Earth in the year 1900). If you choose Moretopia, you will not have a computer or cell-phone, and the commodities and experiences available to you will be greatly inferior to what you have on Earth. However, you will have access to 10x as many of the available goods, services and forms of wealth as the lower-class Moretopians.

Which planet will you choose?

I have asked numerous college students this question over several years. Their answers are not unanimous, but a strong trend is visible: Out of a class of 30 students, usually at least 25 choose Moretopia.

From an economic perspective, this preference is odd. Cultural critics and economists preach that humans are materialistic—greedy for things. Hence, experts aver that capitalism is the best of all economic systems because it generates massive quantities of stuff, and this extra stuff will eventually satisfy us and make us happy.

But this experiment suggests that we don’t want stuff for its own sake. Rather, we want more stuff, where more means more than other people. We do not want things, but rather unequal distributions of things.

Jesus highlighted this strange proclivity in his parable of the workers in the vineyard (Matthew 20:1-16). The story features a boss who hires workers early in the morning after negotiating a fair wage with them—a denarius for a day’s work. Then, he periodically drafts further workers throughout the day, without telling them how much they will be paid.

At the end of the day, the workers line up to receive their wages, beginning with the last group hired in the afternoon, who had only worked one hour. Much to their delight, they receive a denarius for their short time on the clock. However, there is a twist:

When those hired first came, they thought that they would receive more; but each of them also received a denarius. When they received it, they grumbled at the landowner, saying, ‘These last men have worked only one hour, and you have made them equal to us who have borne the burden and the scorching heat of the day.’ But he answered and said to one of them, ‘Friend, I am doing you no wrong; did you not agree with me for a denarius? Take what is yours and go, but I wish to give to this last man the same as to you. Is it not lawful for me to do what I wish with what is my own? Or is your eye envious because I am generous?’ So the last shall be first, and the first last.” (Matt. 20:10-16).

I have asked my students for their honest reactions to the boss’s response, and many have expressed that it seems unfair—they would side with the workers hired earlier. Why?

At a foundational level, my students’ agreement with the workers is about incentives: In line with the “Stufftopia vs. Moretopia” experiment, they believe that the reason for working is not to earn useful or even pleasurable things, but to get more than others. To many it still feels frustrating to live under a system of totalized equity—an “economy of grace” as Kathryn Tanner has called it. Our minds recoil at equity regimes because they destroy our baseline framework of value, which is predicated on the urge to rise above others.

This negative reaction is nowhere more visible than in the grousing conniptions triggered by DEI (Diversity, Equity and Inclusion) policies in the minds of some pundits and commentators. A quick perusal of many anti-DEI op-eds reveals that they bear little antipathy to diversity or inclusion (at least not openly); their real ire is directed at equity, which they define as the type of scenario in Jesus’ parable. Equality of opportunity, not equality of outcome! is their strident mantra.

Many of the critics of DEI are Christians. Presumably, they would say that they agree with the parable of Jesus, but only in the context of life in heaven. Equity will cease to matter in paradise, when all will live in tranquility with no competitive striving.

But there is a problem with this response. Our characters are trained by our practices, both religious and economic. As great thinkers such as Aquinas recognized, a character must be formed and protected from distortions produced by faulty habitual thoughts. If my vision of paradise includes features I would find abhorrent in the present world, what makes me think I would want to enter that paradise? If hate equity here, why would I love it there?

The legendary Catholic poet Dante addresses this question in his epic work, the Divine Comedy. At first, his authorial vision seems to reject equity in paradise by depicting each soul rejoicing in the beatific vision at different levels—there is a hierarchy. However, as Dante learns in canto III in dialogue with Piccarda, this hierarchy does not alter the soul’s felicity. Dante asks:

But tell me please: do you who are happy here

Have any wish to rise to higher station,

To see more, or to make yourselves more dear?[i]

 

Piccarda replies:

Brother, the power of love, which is our bliss,

Calms all our will. What we desire, we have.

There is in us no other thirst than this.

In line with the parable of the workers, Dante’s vision challenges us to examine the source of our bliss. Does a paradise without comparative pleasure sound boring? Could I be happy without a chance to have more than others? Honestly asking oneself these questions can yield brutal and uncomfortable results.

The good news is that there are portals of grace in the present world that can help us learn to find this bliss. I have personally seen this joy in brilliant students excited to pursue careers in public education, environmental policy, or social work, knowing that they will be scantily paid, and that they could certainly make more money elsewhere. My own father is an engineer who was offered lucrative money working in the weapons industry but turned it down to spend several decades designing wheelchairs and communication tools for disabled university students.

Perhaps the greatest example of Dante’s bliss appeared in the scientist Jonas Salk, who invented the polio vaccine. Famously, Salk refused to patent his invention—thereby forfeiting the equivalent of 7 billion dollars.[ii] When asked about his refusal to patent it, he responded that it belongs to all humanity. “Could you patent the sun?” he retorted.[iii]

Salk might seem like an outlier because of his status as a global hero, but his nonchalance is available to everyone, summoning all of us to imagine the kind of economic system in which we could find true happiness. Today we live in a world of growing inequality, wherein the difference between the rich and poor grows ever more chasmic. Reversing this trend will require us first to ask ourselves where we find our bliss. Is it in Dante’s power of love, or the fleeting pleasure of having more?