Interpreting The Parable Of The Prodigal Son In The Midst Of Mooting Merit v Diversity

 

Here is my interpretation of the parable of the prodigal son inspired by my answering a friend who sees the parable as informing the issue of merit against diversity, the latter accomplished by racial hands up.

The exchange was provoked by these words from Heather Mac Donald:

“Racial preferences have been almost impossible to dislodge because their human costs are usually hidden. College admissions officers don’t inform rejected student applicants that they were turned down to make room for diversity admits. An HR office does not tell job seekers or the company’s own employees that they were not hired or promoted because they would add nothing to the company’s diversity metrics. The rejected applicants may suspect that they didn’t get a desired position because of a racial preference, but they can rarely be 100 percent sure.

The offstage nature of these tradeoffs allows preference proponents to deny that diversity decisions entail a zero-sum calculus. In 2019, a U.S. district court judge upheld Harvard’s racial-admissions preferences after a lengthy trial. In her opinion, Judge Allison Burroughs insisted that race is only a positive factor, and never a negative factor, in Harvard’s admissions process. Such a claim is specious. 

The only reason that institutions implement racial preferences in the first place is that there are not enough qualified applicants among non-Asian minorities to achieve a racially proportionate student body or workforce under a meritocratic selection system. Hiring a diversity candidate under a preference regime almost always means not hiring a more qualified non-diverse candidate. The former’s gain is inevitably the latter’s loss.”

Me: (his comments apparent in the points I answer)

The older son wasn’t necessarily more “capable” if that’s measured by talent. There is nothing in the parable about which son was more talented. It’s just that one did what he was supposed to and the other was a blatant wastrel. And the parable doesn’t say the older son got nothing or nowhere. It says he got all that his father could give him. Its theme isn’t unequal treatment even though the older son may have thought so. It’s redemption, the generosity of grace and forgiveness and the depth of filial love. In fact, the parable as I read it makes no mention of the elder son’s final reaction to his father’s explanation for the celebration of the prodigal’s return:  

“It was meet that we should make merry, and be glad: for this thy brother was dead, and is alive again; and was lost, and is found.”

The parable’s analogue to what HMD asserts about diversity trumping merit is off kilter and betrays a misunderstanding of the story.

Whether both sides, I assume they’re the racially admitted and the more meritorious rejected, can be convinced about the rightness of diversity trumping merit is beside any point. SCOTUS, as I noted, is likely to settle the issue.