On Facial Justice and Eliminating Anti-Ugliness

As a follow up to my post on economist Daniel Hamermesh call in NYT for disability laws for ugly people, Lew Rockwell reminds me that, as per usual, Murray Rothbard was way ahead of all of us in his understanding of where interventionist/egalitarian thinking was going. In the 1991 introduction to his 1970 piece Freedom, Inequality, Privitism and the Division of Labor, Rothbard wrote, under the title, New Areas of Inequality and "Oppression", of the move toward  "group-egalitarianism" and the attack  on superiority:

In his book on Envy, Helmut Schoeck analyzed a chilling dystopian novel by the British writer, L.P. Hartley. In his work, Facial Justice, published in 1960, Hartley, extrapolating from the attitudes he saw in British life after World War II, opens by noting that after the Third World War, "Justice had made great strides." Economic Justice, Social Justice and other forms of justice had been achieved, but there were still areas of life to conquer. In particular, Facial Justice had not yet been attained, since pretty girls had an unfair advantage over ugly ones...

This sort of egalitarian emphasis on noneconomic inequalities has proliferated and intensified in the decades since these men penned their seemingly exaggerated Orwellian dystopias. In academic and literary circles "political correctness" is now enforced with an increasingly iron hand; and the key to being politically correct is never, ever, in any area, to make judgments of difference or superiority...

 "Oppression" is also supposed to consist, not only of discriminating in some way against the unattractive, but even in noticing the difference....

"Oppression" is of course broadly defined so as to indict the very existence of possible superiority – and therefore an occasion for envy – in any realm. The dominant literary theory of deconstructionism fiercely argues that there can be no standards to judge one literary "text" superior to another. At a recent conference, when one political science professor referred correctly to Czeslaw Milosz's book The Captive Mind as a "classic," another female professor declared that the very word classic "makes me feel oppressed." The clear implication is that any reference to someone else's superior product may engender resentment and envy in the rank and file, and that catering to these "feelings of oppression" must be the central focus of scholarship and criticism...

Indeed, one radical change since the writing of this essay has been the rapid and accelerating transformation of old-fashioned egalitarianism, which wanted to make every individual equal, into group-egalitarianism on behalf of groups that are officially designated as "oppressed." In employment, positions, and status generally, oppressed groups are supposed to be guaranteed their quotal share of the well-paid or prestigious positions.

Rothbard's full introduction is here, which includes a discussion of his great satiric call for a short liberation movement to end short oppression.