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A Curse For Procrustes
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20864 |
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BOOK WORLD
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5 / 2000 |
2,301 Words |
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Herb Greer
Herb Greer is an American writer and playwright who lives in
Britain and on the Continent. |
THE QUEST FOR COSMIC JUSTICE
Thomas Sowell
New York: Free Press, 1999
224 pp., $25.00
Not many people these days know about Procrustes. He was an Athenian bandit who lived on a mountain path in ancient Greece; it was his habit to waylay travelers and fit them to an iron bed kept in his cave. If they were too short, he would tear them limb from limb to stretch their bodies to size. If they were too tall, he would chop off their heads and feet to make them match the size of the bed.
Procrustes met his end when Theseus passed that way, took exception to the bandit's hobby, and, as the tale says, served him as he served his victims. But Procrustes did not perish for all time. Today he survives in another form: the American, British, and European liberal who is determined to create a sort of symmetrical equality in all human affairs, by force if necessary, whatever the cost.
In fact, equality is not the only goal of today's Procrusteans. They harbor a peculiar vision, whose enforcement has approximately the same function as Procrustes' iron bed. We see this most obviously in an obsession with proportional "representation" of various groups in this or that profession, field of endeavor, or administration. In the United Kingdom it has taken the form of certain types of punitive taxation; some of these are now abandoned because of their ruinous effect on the economy, but their verbal scaffolding survives in complaints about "obscene" managerial salaries and the
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