William Buckley’s words were sophisticated, maybe too much so for the audience he was speaking to, and certainly we would not recognise the style now as something we could relate to. Such assuredness and confidence oozing out of each elongated sentence, performance notes in the execution of every critical word, pauses timed and positioned with the expertise of Jacobi reading Cicero on stage, seeding the audience with the intellectual equivalent of the modern sound bite without at all being deceitful in the way the newer version omits the important marginal information. Forget Kirk, the man is a fuckin amateur in a comparison with this conservative mouthpiece.

I truly believed that he believed in what he was offering. Buckley was the interlocutor of James Baldwin on this occasion. Baldwin’s style might also elude our understanding now too, we don’t talk in this manner any longer. Baldwin was the essence of his own argument, the exemplar. Descended from African slaves, raised in the USA, a homosexual man that was everything that everybody he encountered was at least somewhat prejudiced towards in his time, even if they didn’t understand that position they had come to absorb it. Nobody thinks they are unreasonable, even the unreasonable, even the dogmatist thinks they reasoned their way toward a perspective they inherited from their parents.

Important are the central conjectures, the crux of each one of our titan’s arguments. I’m going to leave Baldwin’s aside for another post and concentrate on what Buckley was saying, attempting to boil it down to a single central point, a speculation on an answer to the question they were both asked to provide something compelling toward in that famous debate.

Buckley, according to my interpretation, was saying that the horse was led to the water, yet it had refused to drink. What this means, and we all know the phrase, is that no intervention can help a person or group if they are not willing to help themselves. He gave the example of the number of actual medical professionals that were negros, in comparison to the number of negros who could have been such, as highlighting the presence of opportunities not taken. If we accept this as a truth, and use it to form a perspective on a group of people, the negros in question, then we must by implication accept that inequality is not the real issue, attitude is. His assertion that the disparity witnessed is of their own choosing is an argument not unfamiliar to us today. We also must accept, if we accept Buckley’s argument, that there is no validity to the complaints of the negros, they are the starving people that will not eat the abundant and available food that surrounds them.

I remember making this very same point when the college I worked at had 30 female students on the hairdressing course and 30 male students on the plumbing course one year, with no gender diversity at all on display. How an observer might say that the institution had then obviously not done enough to promote diversity. This argument is flawed however, firstly the college had made efforts toward diversity, of course it had, second you can’t make choices for other people because they will follow their own best strategy as they see it, and thirdly it is an unreasonable measure because we already know that men and women are different and they gravitate toward differing goals. None of this will please the observer, who may have a piece of paper that says it should not be this way. Reality sometimes gets in the way of the best laid plans when it comes to a classroom version of how the world should be configured. We need to keep this in mind when examining what Buckley is saying, because there must be more to it than this simple postulate.

I do not find Buckley’s position to be a knock-down (you know the sort that end the argument), but I think he makes a valid point that needs to be considered. When we look at opportunity we may highlight the negative liberties only, meaning that there are no rules or barriers holding a person or group back from becoming something. This does not in any way address the lack of positive liberties that enable people to achieve.

We could say that everyone gets an education for free here in the UK, so everyone can be educated, but that would be to foist the idea that all educational establishments are of the same quality. Let’s, for the sake of teasing this out, accept that the standard of education was the same across all schools, that still leaves us with a major problem in terms of what one school can offer over another, the clients it has, the students and their background. I know from my experience of having a stepson at a private school that this early networking has a dramatic effect on the question of where next to go for the school leaver. Relationships formed here may open doors in the future, making our earlier postulate (Buckley’s) on equality, or availability, of opportunity look a little less uniformly applicable.

That’s not the only consideration of course, where you are from, and the expectations of your peer group often play a part. If your dad is a plasterer and you have got that local girl pregnant early you may be looking at a council flat as the next goal in your portfolio and becoming a plasterer because the path is easiest that way. There’s gangs in every deprived area in every city in the world, retarding the possibilities of young people realising, or even desiring, the path toward a better life through education and a well paid job. We are all under more pressures than Buckley realises, we were not all raised in families where there were no barriers and the world was our oyster. I know from personal experience why I aimed much lower in life than the target I could have hit, given my personal potential at a young age, but that revelation is not for this post. Save to say that I am not in the position I could be in the stratum, and it’s nothing to do with any lack of opportunity, it’s my, some would say bad, choices.

Another aspect to Buckley’s perspective, one that we have to try to understand from the point of view of a person who has never been on the downside of inequality (Buckley was the son of a Lawyer, so upper middle class). We could ask how the view is when looking down? Wealthy, or at least well-off, people hold a perspective regarding themselves that they are the deserving recipients of the fruits of their own labours, we mostly all do this though when we gain something, it may be a necessary psychological mechanism to do with ego. No person wishes to attribute their gains to luck, they want to validate their acts and choices, this is part of feeling in control. There is, however, a negative implication to believing this, that it holds in it an equally necessary prescription against all those that do not reach their mooted potential as being as a result of their acts and choices.

One cannot exist without the other, but when we fail we like to admonish ourselves by citing that matters were not within our control. Put those together and we can reasonably arrive at a set of beliefs that excuse us when we need it but blame others when we need that too. This is not a useful way to think when thinking about other people, sympathising with them, understanding them and the limited array of life choices, experiences, and opportunities they may have.

Paul S Wilson