‘Equality’... the word is one great big paradox. Huge numbers of us like the idea of it but the number of souls who have ever truly wanted the absolute reality of it will be vanishingly small. A good way to illustrate the paradox is to imagine some great leading crusader for Equality and then imagine their reaction were it suggested to them that they relinquish that leadership and become, henceforth, just one more foot-soldier. Competition is as hard-wired into the human condition as in the rest of Darwinian Nature. Those who have less want more; those who have more want to keep it that way. Most of the people I’ve known in my life would consider themselves egalitarian. Good people who care for their families, look out for their neighbours, do demanding jobs for the benefit of others; not just themselves. But I’ve never met anyone who’d really like, say as a middle-manager, to be on the same wage as the cleaner.
Virtually all of us though, do genuinely desire some mitigation of ‘natural’ inequality. A trade-off between the cost/benefits of competition and the cost/benefits of mitigation has long been the essence of our political/philosophical dialectic in Western democratic societies. Scarcely anybody in modern times – Left or Right – is crudely hostile to the idea of the need for some safety net beneath the harsh consequences of inequality.... whether that inequality arises from bad luck, bad genes, inferior abilities or even bad choices. The idea that a society – in order to be able to think itself civilised – must needs make provision for this safety net is near universal.
In the second half of the 20th century, this mitigation-of-inequality universal became confused – on the Progressive Left - with an egalitarian fairy-tale. A fairy-tale land of absolute equality or equity....an intrinsically unrealistic notion that can only seem remotely plausible when one spends too much time toying with abstractions and not enough time noticing the real world around you. Which brings us back to intelligentsias in ivory towers. An ever-tightening, road up Social Justice Mountain from “What about the workers?” to “What about my new ‘gender?
The problem with this abstract egalitarian itch is that its intellectual adherents seem unable to recognise when it is time to stop scratching at it. And this has led to the Wokeness that we currently endure.... a kind of egalitarian competitive mind game that leads (in current parlance) to a purity spiral. In fact, the whole two hundred year history of Progressivism could arguably be viewed as one long ever-tightening purity spiral. An ever-tightening, road up Social Justice Mountain from “What about the workers?” to “What about my new ‘gender’?....the one that I decided to be this morning”.
Contrary to pop history, this egalitarian crusading has rarely been driven by uprisings from the downtrodden. It has mostly been driven by a relatively privileged but malcontent middle-class intelligentsia - yet another paradox. All the way from the French Revolution - via Marx, Lenin and Che Guevara - to our very own Ta-Nehisi Coates. There is a huge irony to this middle-class domination of the radical Left: the more it came to embrace absolute egalitarianism, the less it concerned itself with economic inequality. Instead it became more and more focussed on the kind of pre-occupations to be found among privileged, well-healed academics....sexual ‘identities’, feminism and a white racial-guilt-tripping-by-proxy-syndrome et al.
Another paradox of Egalitarianism is that its record of delivery of its original goal – greater material equality - is dismal and especially so in the long run. Mentally walled off from the West’s great egalitarian crusades is the pesky fact that economic inequality never does seem to change much somehow despite a hundred plus years of Social Justice politics. As William Hazlitt noted two centuries ago “If mankind had wished for what is right, they might have had it long ago.” The huge improvements that undoubtedly have been made in health, welfare and the sum total of human happiness since the Industrial Revolution, are largely down to the engineer, the entrepreneur, the scientist....and sometimes the artist...but rarely the egalitarian politician, thinker or activist. The miserable, ugly social housing estates that litter our metropolitan environments across the Western world - drenched in trillions of £ of ‘welfare’ - testify to this failure. Egalitarians never choose to go and live in them, that is for sure. [* see note 1 below]
And whenever egalitarian absolutism has gained a stranglehold on the lives of its theoretical beneficiaries, untold misery and death has been the result, most grotesquely in the Chinese Cultural Revolution and the Killing Fields of Cambodia. There is a darker possible interpretation of the psychology of egalitarian intellectual zealotry – the idea that it might be (at least partly) subconsciously driven by spite and bile. Bertrand Russell hit this particular nail on the head: “If a philosophy is to bring happiness, it should be inspired by kindly feeling. Now Marx is not inspired by kindly feeling. Marx pretended that he wanted the happiness of the proletariat. What he really wanted was the unhappiness of the Bourgeois”. [* see note 2 below]
Graham Cunningham's substack Slouching Towards Bethlehem can be found here