COLUMN RIGHT : When All Are Victims, We’re Equal at Last : America’s egalitarian premise mocks reality.

In the United States, it is positively dangerous to suggest that women are not destined to the same life as men, that not every sexual orientation is equally legitimate, that not every religion or culture is admirable, that not every ethnic group is talented in the same way as every other.

In the land of equal opportunities it is inevitable, nevertheless, that the facts will become known. For equal opportunities, when combined with unequal abilities, produce unequal outcomes. So offensive is this result to those with egalitarian principles, that they do not fail to attribute it to a hidden or structural bias.

If it were to be shown, for example, that Latinos do less well in school than Asians, then this would prove, to the egalitarian mind, that the opportunities enjoyed by Latinos are inferior. The remedy is to adjust the system until the outcome is equal. For the premise of equality has the status of a divine revelation; to question it is to stand accused of a religious error.

To rectify the structural bias of which “minorities” (a word that should not be taken literally, since all women can claim its protection) are the victims, people should be admitted to social privileges, the Sophists argue, in numbers required by the egalitarian dream. Any other policy not only runs counter to the spirit of the Constitution (the spirit of the Constitution having long since displaced the letter of it), but is even the sign of deep racism, sexism or whatever, to stand accused of which is to incur the highest social penalties.

According to UC Berkeley anthropologist Vincent Sarich, writing in the journal Academic Questions, figures collected in 1987 showed that among California high school graduates academically eligible to attend UC, 67.7% were white, 19.9% Asian, 6.9% Latino and 2.5% black. But students admitted by UC Berkeley were 55.7% white, 19.6% Asian, 8.8% Latino and 7.3% black--proof that the dice were loaded in favor of Latinos and blacks at the expense of whites. A candidate for a university place, although he is better qualified for admission than many who achieve it, may therefore be denied entrance simply because his skin is of the wrong color (namely, white).

Nobody doubts that race is a sensitive topic, and I dislike the habit of collecting statistics in which a person is categorized as white, Asian, Latino or black, for this implies that such facts are of special significance in deciding how he should be treated. Yet the plain fact is that, in America, the home of liberal individualism, people are no longer judged as individuals. They are first assigned to groups; if they are lucky enough to belong to some “disadvantaged” minority, who will dare to say that they are dumb or daft or dopey?

Of course, there is still hope, even for the whites among us, provided they are female or gay. But when it comes to the group to which the Founding Fathers belonged and which did the most to shape American society--the white male heterosexuals--so great are the advantages imputed to its members that they must now proceed through life with an immovable handicap, marked down at every winning post, despised and ridiculed whenever their achievements are discussed.

The solution, it seems to me, is to go one further along the road to madness: to invent more finely divided minorities, so that everybody can claim, at last, the great privilege of being disadvantaged. For example, I belong to the minority of conservatives, whose historical sufferings at the hands of liberal intellectuals entitle me to a massive claim on the public benefit.

Members of my group have been regularly excluded from schools and universities because of a quality that none of us--as hard as we might try--could manage to eradicate. For even in this age of enlightenment and progress, the pill has not been invented that will cause us to see the vast array of human difference as a sea of dull equality. Should not the disadvantage under which we have labored--being scoffed at by colleagues, harangued by students and marked down by promotion panels--be rectified at last, so that, while 2% of those eligible for academic posts are conservative, about 5% or 6% of us should in fact obtain them?

When justice is done to all the truly suffering minorities--to the musical, the artistic and the religious; to the decent, the deferential and the dignified; to the intelligent, the farsighted and the courageous--America might return to its true vocation, which is to create the conditions in which human excellence, from whichever race or sex it might originate, has the greatest chance to cast its light across the world.