What do John Rawls and John Steinbeck have in common? And no, it’s not their name.
It seems counter-intuitive, but with every profound social injustice, comes an artistic pièce de résistance to re-instore the slender hope that is left. And how do you know which ones are onto something? Well, they get censored. Be it Billie Holiday’s Strange Fruit, or John Steinbeck’s Grapes of Wrath, they underline what American philosopher John Rawls will later explore in his Theory of Justice. Amidst today’s touted meritocratic climate, criticisms of the unfair nature of our societies are often dismissed as being rooted in bitterness rather than scrutiny. John Rawls addresses this through a voice of equanimity, denouncing the flawed infrastructure of a system that, if left alone, will perpetuate the tale-as-old-as-time injustice. But what do Rawls and John Ford’s movie adaptation of Steinbeck’s play The Grapes of Wrath have in common? More than we think. Indeed, the story of the Dust Bowl farmer Joad family during America’s Great Depression – can be considered a cinematic illustration of Rawls's Theory of Justice.
From statistics to anecdotal experiences, it is unmistakably apparent that there are disparities of poverty, striking inequalities in quality of life, education, etc. on any scale. However, statistical evidence and UNICEF posters seem to have little impact on the lives of the better-off, as if we did not actually believe the world is an unjust place. Rawls, therefore, proposed a failproof thought experiment named ‘the veil of Ignorance’ to prove the world is de facto unfair (Rawls, 1971). He invites us to imagine ourselves in an intelligent and conscious state before our birth, and to ask ourselves “If we knew nothing about where we’d end up, what sort of society would we feel safe to enter?” (The School of Life, 2015). One quickly realises the risk of living in the utmost precarious states of our society may not be worth being born. And such squalid states do not change with time, as is the one the Joad family experiences: lack of food, shelter, guidance, constant abandonments, and deaths, all while being awfully treated in their journey to a better life after the bank had taken their land. They describe themselves as “jus’ pain covered with skin” (The Grapes of Wrath, 1940). Indeed, it would be understandable to abstain from existing if those were the conditions, leaving the status quo’s – be it the privileged - conscious and conspicuous negligence of these conditions that is questioned.
Considering these disparities then to be a truism, why is nobody doing anything about it? For the Joad family, it is the myth of the Californian promised land, for America, it is the greyer-than-silver lining of the American Dream, and for Rawls, it is the parasitic ecosystem that meritocracy has built, in which the ones in the unfortunate side of life have simply ‘not worked hard enough’. Michael Sandel furthers this describing it as not only “not a remedy for inequality” but a “justification of inequality.” (Sandel, 2021). It is no coincidence Steinbeck’s play was initially banned and burned for its themes and for being “a pack of lies''. (www.arts.gov, n.d.). What is more, to recognise the ‘Rags to Riches’ archetype is anomalous rather than the norm, is to admit those who benefit from the system must reform it, a realisation better off undiscovered for them. To paraphrase Sandel, Steinbeck precises: “Repression works only to strengthen and knit the repressed. The great owners ignored the three cries of history” (Steinbeck, 2008). This ‘man’s inhumanity to man’, is a recurrent theme in Grapes of Wrath (www.sparknotes.com, n.d.). In one scene, migrant farmers arrive in California lands to settle, but the California landowners had previous unfortunate experiences with farmers, so to avoid repeating this danger, they treat the migrants as animals: heaped up in filth, denigrated, and given unlivable wages (rakuten.tv, n.d.). The subtle but poignant line drawn between the privileged and the poor shows Rawls’ allusion to avarice as the source of the suffering of others, responsible for today’s impermeable system. Essentially, the fruits the system grants its beneficiaries are satisfying enough to keep them from actuating on its dismantlement.
Still, there is an argument for the passiveness of those at the top: why should they spend their hard-earned money on strangers? Contemporary Australian philosopher Peter Singer addresses this by highlighting that if we were to encounter a child drowning, we would not hesitate to save them: life is more important than the clothes we will get wet. Extrapolating this scenario to real life, “it makes no moral difference whether the person I can help is a neighbour’s child ten yards from me or a Bengali whose name I shall never know, ten thousand miles away” (Singer, 2016). Singer remarks neglecting the suffering of others simply because they are strangers out of sight is failing as a moral agent. Helping those in need is not charity but an obligation, it should not be praised but expected. America’s treatment of the Joad family is a projection of what Singer alludes to, a family left behind by man-made institutions that have become more important than the men themselves: “The bank is something more than men, I tell you. It’s a monster. Men made it, but they can’t control it.” (The Grapes of Wrath, 1940). In contrast to Singer, Rawls was a fervent advocate of individual freedom to do as one chooses with their private property, so Singer’s attribution of responsibility to the privileged may overlap with an authoritarian discourse. Nonetheless, they propose a moral alternative to the hitherto embraced Utilitarianism and its “greatest pleasure for the greatest number” maxim that is by definition negligent of the pleasure of the equally valuable lives of the minority – that is – the Dust Bowl farmers during America’s Great Depression. Thus, because the lives of others are just as equal regardless of the arbitrary divisions that suppose between a majority and a minority, those at the top of the system have in fact a moral obligation to help ensure the necessary living standards for those who lack it, not because it is selfless, but because “we ought to be preventing as much suffering as we can without sacrificing something else of comparable moral importance.” (Singer, 2016). It is following this moral principle that the world can potentially become a society in which anyone behind the veil of ignorance will feel safe to enter.
In conclusion, we remember artistic masterpieces that denounce social injustices like The Grapes of Wrath as bold and heroic, but the problematic system that gives reason for their creation is what philosophers like John Rawls, Michael Sandel, and Peter Singer dedicated their work to deconstruct and solve. The Joad family is a metaphor for the millions of people in the world that are left behind in poverty and danger, for the sake of maintaining the superfluous comfort of others. From the elitist penumbra of meritocracy to the negligence of suffering due to distance or unacquaintance, there are traceable reasons for the perpetuation of injustice. Only by accepting and changing this can what Steinbeck and Ford denounced in their art can fully become history, and not a matter that remains as prevalent today as it did then.
