‘It may be expedient but it is not just that some should have less in order that others may prosper.’
– John Rawls
My regular exploration of niche sections of the internet recently brought an interesting little expression to my attention.
The expression is ‘Floreamus Una’ – roughly translated as ‘Let us bloom together’ or ‘Let us flourish together’.
I am not a Latin speaker, and I am sure those more familiar with the language could say more about its etymology than I could. But I decided to look into the construction of the phrase nonetheless. To my understanding: ‘floreamus’ is a variation of the term ‘flōreō’, denoting either the blooming of flora or the more general notion of something prospering as it is, in a form that takes a personal element. To say ‘floreamus’ is to say ‘I will flourish’, or ‘We will flourish’. ‘Una’ denotes a singular, or unified, thing – it can mean simply one discrete object, or it can signify that things are being brought close, as to only be distinguishable as one. So to say ‘una’ in this context is as if to say ‘We do this as one’.
Together, ‘Floreamus Una’ means ‘We will flourish as one’, which is – by all means – quite synonymous with the translations of the expression I have seen.
By itself, an expression says very little in the way of insight. As it happens, you cannot simply translate phrases into Latin to give them more value, outside of the eyes of the particularly snobbish. But for such a short, obscure expression, one that I had seen little of elsewhere – it was still enough to make me think. For it is hard to deny that we are far from a world in which we are all enabled to flourish together.
There is no question that the world is – and always has been – a place of competition. Assuredly, our furthest ancestors were bound by the constraints of evolutionary growth, and the people we see today were brought forth from chains of the most competitive individuals fighting for survival and reproduction. In the modern era, we see much of our inexorable tie to competition in the form of our politics. The world is divided between the better off and the worse – and our society itself seems to be constructed as if to enable the former to proliferate their own opportunities to the expense of the latter. At any stage of our history and development, you can see how individuals have always sought, by some element within themselves, to attain superiority over others.
Some would argue this is not as bad as a passing glance would suggest. Competition, they would say, breeds excellence – when people are challenged from within and without to always strive to greater heights, they will make it further than they ever would have otherwise, to the benefit of more than themselves. I think there is a hint of truth in this sentiment, but there are two issues I have with taking it wholly to heart.
For one, this sentiment assumes an ideal of meritocracy. People reach greater heights in society than others because they were competitive – they were of greater merit than the other people in their own domain. In practice, we all know that society is far from an ideal of meritocracy. People attain great heights on the basis of birthright and chance; whether in the form of daddy’s riches in the modern day, or divine right as you might hear most prominently in the Feudal era. In any time and place you choose to examine, there will doubtlessly be potential successors to Einstein who are left in the dust by a world that won’t give them the same opportunities as far less meritable people.
Another question the sentiment raises, especially with such considerations, is whether competition is innately to the benefit of humanity. We see it most clearly when we turn our eyes to the great conflicts of the world and the contribution of the most affluent to them. There are politicians who leverage their great power and influence to harm our neighbours, and even our citizens, in the name of their moralistic cause. There, too, are people of enough riches to sustain the world and the well-being of the destitute, who instead pollute our waters and farmlands to facilitate their own luxuries of life. Were our systems to truly promote the most meritocratic to these positions, perhaps the story would be different – but it is hard to argue that the benefits from the highest of us truly trickle down.
Yet all of this idle consideration does not change the fact that we do, and will continue to, live in a world of competition. Many before me have suggested that we need to work against our drives for competition to make a just world – for evidently, at the heart of much of our failure to flourish together is a problem with our systems of competition. But would we really start to flourish were we to throw out these preconceptions entirely and start over?
I would argue no, and I would argue it precisely because I don’t think there is a coherent, humanistic argument against a legitimate meritocracy. Though a meritocracy can be equitable, it is – inherently – an unequal society; it is a society in which some people are placed in greater positions than others, on the basis of their ability.
Perhaps that isn’t the most appealing first sentence to speak on the argument. But it deserves some consideration of its implications. Imagine a world where all the doctors treating us for our most debilitating conditions are the most qualified, excellent doctors of them all – people segregated by nothing other than their pure ability to heal us. Surely, we would say, this is a good thing for all of us; we do not need to be one of these top beneficiaries to say so. We would only flourish more in our lives if our doctors were the most competent they could be, our politicians the most honest, our business enterprises the most ethical. But such a construction requires competition – between those who are more or less competent, honest, ethical, and what have you. For us all to flourish to our greatest extents, we need things to be a bit unequal.
As people more versed in political theory may be aware, I am not the first person to have such a line of thought. In A Theory of Justice, John Rawls outlines and argues for numerous principles that a society ought to follow if it seeks to be considered just by its people. Among these, he suggests, is the ‘Difference Principle’. To paraphrase his work: the unequal distribution of primary goods within a society is just – so long as they continue to benefit those people who are the least gifted by those primary goods. In other words, it is not a problem for someone to gain something with no loss on anyone else’s part; it becomes a problem when the gain of the most fortunate is to the expense of the less.
I find – at least – this particular argument Rawls presents to be compelling, for many of the reasons I have already outlined. Though there may be differences, at the heart of both his thesis and mine is the recognition that we all flourish together when our world is dedicated to improving the conditions of its people and pulling us up to new heights – not merely pulling others down as to place us all on the same plane. Perhaps, to tie everything back together, this is what the world really needs for ‘Floreamus Una’. Neither the reckless competition built into our instinctual drives, nor the total erasure of disparities between our unique selves. Simply a world in which we have the opportunity to contribute to each other’s lives in the constraints of our own merits, such that no one is left behind. And perhaps, while some could argue for a revolutionary stance from this, we might just be able to start by changing our narrow slice of the world in our own small ways.