Mary Douglas Quotes
Real equality is immensely difficult to achieve, it needs continual revision and monitoring of distributions. And it does not provide buffers between members, so they are continually colliding or frustrating each other.
Jackson was a great champion of equality and equal rights, but for whites only. He had no problem with Negro Slavery and had a major bias against Indians. He was the only U. S President to refuse to obey a decision of the Supreme Court when he forced the removal of the Cherokee Indians from their lands and forced them to the Oklahoma Territory.
What makes this quotation particularly interesting is that The American Enterprise Institute is a highly conservative “think tank” and Brooks himself, a leading conservative. Usually, conservatives are chided by the rest of the political spectrum for ignoring issues of fairness. In this case, an influential conservative not only admits this, but his article argues that it is desirable not to consider fairness in political decision making. Since conservative parties generally represent the more affluent members of a society, fairness arguments rarely help that constituency and are typically avoided by conservatives. However, few admit that. Here is an exception.
Rodriquez was an indigenous Indian who came to power with the startling victory of Evo Morales, also an Indian in a country where the Indians comprise the majority of the population but have had virtually no political power and been discriminated against by Bolivian governments since the country became independent of Spain. Many whites feared the new elective revolution fearing that the Indian’s in government would turn the tables and do exactly what they had done in distributing the nation’s limited wealth—namely direct it primarily to the whites and elites to the relative exclusion of the Indians. Rodriguez claimed that the intention of their administration was otherwise.
While Hoover was generally correct, he was also of the opinion that providing equal opportunity was all that the government needed to do. His lack of attention to other economic variables and potential problems made him totally unprepared for the Great Depression which would occur the following year and his narrow view of the role of government provided no relief or improvement as those of his successor FDR did.
Referring to the Public School System:
Dame Mary Douglas, DBE FBA was a British anthropologist, known for her writings on human culture and symbolism, whose area of speciality was social anthropology. Douglas was considered a follower of Émile Durkheim and a proponent of structuralist analysis, with a strong interest in comparative religion.
