I recently wrote, as I have done in the past, that equality is an idol that Modern man has substituted for the good that the ancients called justice. To this it should be added that equality is fundamentally an intellectual shortcut that reveals the laziness of the Modern mind by contrast with the rigour of the ancient. Justice requires that we consider each person with whom we come into contact and behave towards him as he deserves or, if mercy and benevolence are called for, better. It is far easier to apply a cookie cutter, one size fits all, standard to everyone and this is the temptation of equality.
It never
ceases to amaze me how many of those who have no problem recognizing as evil
most if not all of the evils spawned by the worship of equality nevertheless
bow their knee to the idol itself.
One person
I know is opposed to abortion, to the agenda of the alphabet soup of
alternative gender and sexuality, and to all sorts of other similar things that
deserve opposing, for he is an evangelical and whether or not he can identify
the Scriptures condemning these evils or articulate the ethical or moral
theological argument against them, he is against what evangelicalism is
against.
The demand
for legal, easily-accessible, and taxypayer-funded abortion, however, arose
because certain people thought that their whackadoodle goal of imposing the
Procrustean bed of equality on the sexes took precedence over the lives of
unborn human beings. Men and women are
not equal and cannot truly be made equal but even the pretense of equality
cannot be maintained without neutralizing the huge difference between the sexes
in terms of the burden reproduction imposes on each.
This same sexual
egalitarianism spawned the alphabet soup agenda. If men and women must be thought of as equal
then they must be thought of as being the same for equality means
sameness. If men and women are equal and
therefore the same, then why should men not choose men rather than women for
their mates or women choose women rather than men? Or for that matter, if men and women are
equal and therefore the same, why can’t a man be a woman or a woman a man?
None of
these imbecilic ideas could have gained the slightest bit of traction had
Modern minds not first been duped into worshipping the idol of equality.
Then there
is all the evil that has been done in an attempt to achieve economic
equality. Marxists – the bad ones, the
followers of Karl rather than Groucho – believed that human unhappiness was
caused, not by human sin as it is in reality, but by inequality which itself
was caused by property which divided people into unequal classes of “haves” and
“have nots” perpetually seeking to oppress and overthrow the other. Eventually, they maintained, this would give
way to a collectivist workers’ paradise in which everything is collectively
owned, all are equal, each contributes to his ability and receives in
accordance to his need, and everyone is happy.
In an attempt to put this hogwash into practice, totalitarian terror
states which murdered 100 000 000 people were established throughout a third of
the world in the last century.
There are
those who would acknowledge all of this but maintain that there are good forms of
equality as well as all these bad ones.
These all can be explained, however, and better, without having recourse
to the concept of equality. Take the
idea of “equality under the law.” All
the merit in this concept is better expressed as “the law is the same for
everybody under it” than as “everyone is the same in the eyes of the law.” This is because the real point here is the
unity of the law and not the sameness of those under it.
Then there is the idea of equality in the Church. Some get this idea out of St. Paul’s words in
Gal. 3:25-28. The Apostle doesn’t say
that all are equal in Christ, he says that all are one in Christ. His instructions in other epistles on certain
matters would be rather difficult to square with this passage if equality is
what was intended here.
In “Democracy
and Equality” I answered the claim that we are equal in “worth” or “value” by
observing that these terms, which denote what one can get for a commodity in
the market, are rarely applied to human beings in the Bible and never for the
purpose of saying that we are all equal in value. “Dignity” would be a better word than either “worth”
or “value”, because it cannot commodify human beings when applied to them. Rather than thinking of it as something in
which we are all equal, however, it would be better to say that there is a kind
of base level dignity attached to being human to which individuals add or from
which they subtract by their personal merits and demerits.
Equality is
a concept that is useless at best, dangerous and evil at worst. It is time to ditch it and return to the good
the ancients called justice. After all “He
hath shewed thee, O man, what is good; and what doth the Lord require
of thee, but to do justly, and to love mercy, and to walk humbly with thy God?”
(Mic. 6:8)
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