Equality and Justice

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)

Democracy and Equality

In conversation with some colleagues the other day, the topic of the American election came up.  One person said that the Americans should amend their system so that whoever wins the popular vote wins the election.  I responded that this was a bad suggestion.  Democracy, I argued, is the worst concept of government there is.  America’s Founding Fathers, I argued, while wrong to give themselves a republican (no king) form of government, at least had the sense to invent the electoral college to filter the popular vote so that their democracy was less direct.

 

Someone else said that I was advocating dictatorship, as if this was the only alternative to democracy.  Apparently he had forgotten that I have explained my views quite clearly in the past. Legitimate government is a representative model on earth of the government of the universe in Heaven.  That means the reign of kings.  Or, should the succession fall to a woman as in the case of our late Sovereign Lady of blessed memory, Elizabeth II, a queen.  Since human beings are fallen and sinful and lack the perfect justice of the King of Kings in Heaven, the institution that provides the governed with representation in the earthly king’s government is also acceptable.  This is the ancient institution of Parliament.  That it is ancient and has proven itself through the tests of time, and not the fact that it is democratic, is why it is acceptable. 

 

Dictatorship is not the opposite of democracy but its ultimate expression.  I don’t mean the original dictators, who were officials of the Roman Republic, appointed by the consuls (co-presidents) to handle an emergency, usually military in nature. I mean dictators in today’s usage, which is synonymous with what the ancients called tyrants.  Whatever you call it, however, a dictator or tyrant, this kind of person is the ultimate democrat.  For he seizes power by rallying the mob behind him.  He is the opposite of a king, whose position in his realm is an extension of that of the father in the home or the patriarch in the older, more extended, family.  A dictator is always “Big Brother”, the first among equals.  Eric Blair knew of that which he wrote.

 

This colleague defended equality on the grounds that the Lord made us equal.  “Chapter and verse” I responded.  There is no chapter and verse, because this is not the teaching of the Scriptures.

 

Like democracy, equality is one of those abstract ideals that Modern man has made into an idol.  The ancient Greeks knew better as can be seen in the myth of Procrustes, whom Theseus encountered and who made his guests fit his one-size-for-all bed by either lopping parts of them off or stretching them.  Kurt Vonnegut Jr.’s “Harrison Bergeron” is an updated version of this story.  Equality is a very deceptive idol because of its surface resemblance to the ancient good of justice.  Justice, however, demands that each person be treated right.  Equality demands that each person be treated the same as every other person.  These are not the same thing. 

 

The difference between treating people right and treating people the same can be illustrated by further ripping the mask off of equality.  Equality passes itself off as the virtuous ethic of “You should treat a perfect stranger as if he were your own brother.”  In practice, however, what it really means is “you should treat your own brother as if he were a perfect stranger.”  In the field of economics equality is socialism, the system that presents itself under the mask of Charity or Christian Love, the highest of the spiritual or theological virtues, when behind that mask is Envy, the second worst of the Seven Deadly Sins.

 

The ancients knew that equality and democracy, far from being the goods and virtues they purport to be, basically boiled down to two wolves and a lamb voting on what to have for supper.  Modern experience adds that the false idol of equality leads inevitably to the dehumanization of mass society in which each person is reduced to just one number in the multitude.

 

My colleague argued that each person is equal in worth or value and that this can be seen by the fact that Jesus died for everybody.  We should not be making a big deal about people’s worth or value, however, because to do so is to commoditize human beings.  The value or worth of something is what you can exchange it for in the market.  Jesus applied the concept of value to human beings once.  This was in Matt. 10:21 and Luke 12:7 which record the same saying.  Jesus’ point here is not egalitarian.  God cares for the sparrows, you are worth more than them (this is a hierarchical, not an egalitarian observation), therefore you should trust God to take care of you.  The only other time the word value appears in the New Testament – worth doesn’t appear there at all – is in Matt. 27:9 which speaks about the silver Judas was paid to betray Jesus. 

 

Yes, Jesus died for all.  To say that this made people equal is a major non sequitur.  It introduced a new distinction between people.  Those who trust in Him are saved by His death.  Those who don’t, are condemned all the more for their rejection of the Saviour.  Where they are equal, that is, the same, is in their need for Christ’s saving work.

 

I recommend reading Erik von Kuehnelt-Leddihn for clarity on this matter.  Start with his Liberty Or Equality? The Challenge of Our Times.