It is easy to see how the concept of egalitarianism emerged from our evolving Age of Reason - a filleted, rationalised re-imagining of Christianity, stripped of enchantment and its transcendent spiritual dimension. ‘God loves us equally’ becoming ‘this life on this earth must be strictly ‘fair’ to each and every one of us’. In reality of course it never is and never will be. TS Eliot’s bleak observation that "Humankind cannot bear very much reality" will perhaps eventually come to be Western egalitarianism’s epitaph.
It has also become a commonplace on the intellectual Right to view Social Justice – the modern West’s dominant political/philosophical framework – as a shadowy penumbra of the Christian religion that birthed it.......a kind of quasi-religion. Social Justice, as political project, can be viewed as a kind of egalitarian evangelism. Society must be made to love us equally and must not be allowed to be ‘unfair’ [* see note 3 below]
As discussed above, this idea attracts almost universal support in the Liberal West... up to a point. Nobody should needlessly die of poverty; the law should apply to everyone equally; everyone should have the vote; no arbitrary barriers (such as your sex or the colour of your skin) should be imposed on your opportunities in life. This conception of Social Justice seemed to jog along in a reasonably sane and sensible (albeit imperfect) manner for a good while in the aftermath of WW2. I say “seemed to” because there were undercurrents working below the common-sense surface. One of them – perhaps inevitable given man’s competitive nature – was the emerging social justice competition that we currently endure...... "I'm more of a victim than you are"....."no I'M more of a victim"..."no I am.....
During the course of the 20th century, an insidious, creeping concept of Relativism took hold....first of the visual arts and then ‘progressively’ of our social norms…..
The strongest undercurrent was another 20th century intelligentsia mind-game.... Relativism. Social Justice had - in its original, albeit vaguely defined, conception – been universalbut limited. It encompassed ‘fairness’ for both sexes and all races but there was still an implicit recognition of an inevitable degree of luck-of-the-draw in a person’s life. An implicit recognition that some are born brighter, healthier, prettier etc than others and you just have to do your best with the cards you were dealt. If one was disabled in some way, say, or sexually dysphoric in some way, then one would have to accept that such abnormalities would, to some extent, affect the choices open to you in life.
An important clarification is needed here. There is nothing inherently pejorative about the word ‘abnormal’. Many of us are abnormal in some ways (I am abnormal in some ways). The fact that one cannot in our time use the word without it being assumed to be pejorative is a measure of how far egalitarian psychology has distorted our understanding of reality. Being able to discriminate between the real and the wishful is fundamental to an intelligent maturity both at an individual and a societal scale. But of course ‘discriminate’ has become another innocent word that has become labelled Social Justice heresy. Now in 2024 heaven forfend that anyone should have to face up to the possibility of their being socially atypical!
During the course of the 20th century, this insidious, creeping concept of Relativism took hold....first of the visual arts and then ‘progressively’ of social norms and eventually pretty much everything. The consequences have been huge. But they have been sufficiently slow and incremental to advance largely unnoticed in the public mind. Relativism expanded during the course of the 20th century from being just an esoteric fringe art movement - of little interest to any but its adherents among the cognoscenti - to being the cradle of a perverse wholesale mutation of Liberalism. And once it became fused with Relativism, Liberalism, as a philosophical framework, , became woefully unequal to the setting of any common sense boundaries....to saying: No it’s not ‘all relative’. Not everything is as good as everything else. Eventually, in our time, it became Wokeness ....that huge, ugly brat child making shrill demands that nobody tell it anything it doesn’t wish to hear.
The end stage of the egalitarian purity spiral is actually a new kind of inequality. It went from - in 1910 - censoring the hoi polloi from being able to say: Sorry but those random abstract squiggles on your canvas mean nothing to me. They are nowhere near the artistic equivalent of a Raphael, a Vermeer or a Degas to - in 2024 – telling the general public that: “all your traditions; all you ideas of what is right and true, all the ‘goods’ that you saw as immutable arewrongthink”.
Censoring them from being able say:
to the immigrant: Sorry but if you want to thrive in your new chosen country you must learn the language; not expect everything in translation;
or: Sorry but no we do not consider your traditional culture entirely compatible with ours and so - if you want to migrate here - you must embrace our Western traditions and be prepared to jettison some aspects of the ones you were brought up with;
To the self-identified ‘queer’: Your sexuality is, of course, your affair and nobody else’s business but people should not be expected to enthuse about it being pridefully ‘celebrated’ on the streets of their town;
To the libertine: Sorry but the consequences of your self-abandon are not to be picked up at the public expense. Some self-discipline is the better way to be;
To the physically disabled: Sorry but we won’t necessarily want to build ugly concrete ramps alongside every public stairway:
To the obese: Sorry but this is your problem; not society’s. Get a grip on your dysfunctional life choices;
To the Rap fan: Sorry but this tuneless, snarling gangsta-rap is not remotely on a par with previous great Black music.
Etc etc.....add your own bugbear here!
A final paradox....The end stage of the egalitarian purity spiral is, bizarrely, actually a new kind of inequality. What we have come to in the 21st c. West has been rightly described as Anarcho-tyranny ...a socio-political order that increasingly clamps down of the freedoms of decent law-abiding Mr and Mrs Normal Person whilst, at the same time, giving ever greater license to the lawless and freakish. [more on that in Part 3]
Alongside Egalitarianism and Relativism, there has been a third seismic socio-psychological shape-shift during the course of Liberalism’s 20th c. ‘progress’. In Part 3. I will explore: the weakening of social norms that hold humanity’s narcissistic tendencies in check, and: an accompanying atrophying of any sense of personal responsibility for one’s own fate.
When I was growing up in the '50s there were still some remnants of the old Christian moral sense that we all need to hope for forgiveness of our sins. You might ritually do this before a meal or starting the school day or going to bed. It was, for the great majority, only a residual habit but nevertheless its moral conception of The Good Life was still in the atmosphere.... just about. Prior to the 60s there was a latent sense that everyone (including oneself) has a Good Side and a Bad Side. A sense that we are all capable of good deeds but also that all of us are prone to sin and error. The Social Justice religion discussed above could be seen as a kind of outsourcing of the 'sin and error' part of the dyad from one’s personal self to some external, social abstraction ....some xyzism.
More on all this in Part 3
[* note 3] atheists tend to fail to notice that - like it or not - all of human history shows us that religion is, one way or another, hard-wired into the human condition.
Graham Cunningham
https://substack.com/@grahamcunningham