Equity is the quality of fairness and impartiality. It can be demanded only in certain defined circumstances, not of human life in general. Only a moment’s reflection is necessary to prove that this is so. It isn’t fair that some people are born handsome and others are born ugly, or intelligent and unintelligent, or gifted and ungifted, in good homes or in bad.
Not until everyone is a clone and brought up in precisely the same circumstances will life be fair—and then, it will be horrible. But exam papers can be marked, and sports refereed, fairly.
One might have thought that equity in the choice of scholarly work to publish in learned journals consisted solely of assessment of its scholarly worth; no other criterion should count. That’s one of the reasons why submissions to assessors are often anonymized, for it’s true that human beings have biases that may resist their efforts to put them aside. People differ, of course, in their capacity or willingness to be dispassionate.
The more exact the science, no doubt, the more easily truth will out, and the quicker will any bias be exposed. But even in less-exact fields of knowledge, quality is discernible. You might disagree with Edward Gibbon’s outlook and conclusions, for example, but you could hardly claim that his “Decline and Fall” was without merit; likewise, Leo Tolstoy’s philosophy of history might appear mistaken to you, but you would not therefore assert that his “War and Peace” was no good as a novel.
In present circumstances, however, equity in publication in learned journals has come to mean not the choice of what to publish according to scholarly merit, but according to the racial origins or other demographic characteristics of authors. The proportion of published authors of each racial or demographic group should, according to the “equity” fanatics, mirror that of their proportion in the general population, as if, in a state of fairness, all groups would be represented equally in everything.
Needless to say, the choice of which races or demographic groups are to be promoted by equity in this sense is itself arbitrary, or at least a matter of political choice. Moreover, if equity in scholarly publication means the choice of what to publish according to scholarly worth, equity in the demographic sense must result in inequity in the sense of scholarship.
Equity in the sense that it’s now commonly used, therefore, actually means inequity in the only sense that has any value. You can’t have underrepresentation without overrepresentation; they’re like horse and carriage in the song in the musical “High Society.” And in the field of scholarship, this can only mean the suppression of the good at the expense of the promotion of the less good, or even the bad.
The argument employed by the “equity” fanatics has a long and very undistinguished history. It was the argument employed by the Nazis—who, however, didn’t invent it. The argument was as follows: Jews in Germany were overrepresented in medicine, law, academia and scholarship, politics, science, banking, and large-scale commerce. The only possible explanation for this “inequity” was that they were the beneficiaries of a conspiracy, either by them or by some shadowy organization, the evidence for which was of a kind similar to that for structural racism in America today. It couldn’t be that the Jews in Germany at the time had certain qualities that propelled them into social prominence.
I presume we all know what this argument in Germany led to.
As for diversity, it means for JAMA not diversity of opinion (perish the thought that any should appear on these matters in the pages of JAMA, the only meaning that diversity should have in this context!), but diversity of race and sexual orientation of editors and authors. Give sadomasochistic and foot fetishist scientists their chance at last! For too long, they have remained in the shadows.
Future generations, if there are any, will wonder how a set of such obviously gimcrack ideas could have taken over the minds of highly intelligent people in so short a time. Any student of German history will have wondered something similar, how the most technically advanced nation in the world, with an immense culture, could have surrendered itself in so short a time and so completely to the ideas of (at best) semi-educated bar-room demagogues. The surrender wasn’t just among ignoramuses; the Nazi share of the vote was higher among university students than among the general population. More than half of those attending the Wannsee Conference, at which the Final Solution was decided, had doctorates. Nazi academics were only too willing to take over high positions in universities.
We’re currently seeing a faintly reminiscent process in the whole of the Western world. There’s nothing comparable to the brutality of the Nazis occurring, and this is a huge difference, of course. Nevertheless, it’s alarming that a way of thinking should now be in common between the Nazis and the Journal of the American Medical Association. History doesn’t repeat itself, it has been said, but it rhymes.
