The Equality Hustle

Perhaps you want to know what our great minds are contemplating these days. Political philosophers Thomas Piketty and Michael Sandel, from Paris and Harvard, are about to publish a book about equality.

At a time when New York City has an idiot candidate for mayor who drones on about equality it does not feel like a bad idea to ask what equality is, whether it is desirable, and whether it is achievable.

In the most obvious and everyday sense of the term, equality is an ideal that never becomes realized. (except perhaps in mathematics) Perhaps that is why serious thinkers are contorting their minds in order to pretend that we can achieve it.

We will agree, without any disagreement, that we are not equal. We are not equal in height, weight, intelligence, ability, character, wealth, strength and even maturity. The notion that we are equal collapses once we ask the most obvious questions.

You might think that when Thomas Jefferson was intoning that all men are created equal he was not talking about these types of equality. He was suggesting that all human beings have the same and equal rights to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.

It is a universalist theory, one that presumably will lead to the advent of a universal state, a Heavenly City, in which everyone will be equal to everyone else.

Otherwise, you will easily note that all citizens of our republic have rights that are not granted to non-citizens, like the right to vote. Nationhood and the identity that comes with it exist in relation to other nations. You might belong to one but you do not belong to all of them. 

And yet, cultures are not all created equal. Some are better; some worse. Some produce wealth and prosperity for their members while others avoid production in favor of more decadent pursuits. Richer or poorer, smarter or dumber, more or less peaceful… different cultures excel in different ways.

Besides, if no one was better than anyone else at badminton, what motivation would you have to improve your game?

Without inequality there would be no competition. There would be no pride in being successful at competition. And, let us not forget the words of New York Mayor Eric Adams-- there is no dignity in receiving a handout.

The principle of competition says that you can earn what you have. As for the notion that we should provide basic goods for everyone, thus redistributing income, it has been tried and it has failed. When you remove the motivation to work harder, people tend to work less.

A London Review of Books blog post about the book makes the point:

It is hard to shake the feeling that the centrality of these particular kinds of stigma in the book’s conversation stems more from their consequentiality for what is viewed as the left’s central political project of redistribution rather than a more general engagement with inequalities of recognition and respect. What about stigmatised groups who do not decide the outcome of elections, and their claims to equality?

Of course, this is traditional Western idealism. The Enlightenment philosophers thought that they had dispensed with religion, but, as Carl Becker famously argued, they were mining the tradition of the Heavenly City. They were doing secular eschatology, straight out of the book of Revelation.

For those who care about intellectual history, this idealism also comes from Plato’s Republic and Augustine’s City of God. The notion of a state that provides equally for everyone suggests a basic matriarchy, named a Mutterrecht by Swiss sociologist J. J. Bachofen in the mid-nineteenth century. 

Thinking that human society is best organized as a matriarchy suggests that it is like a mother who cares for her children equally. Obviously, this infantilizes people and makes them all dependent on the state. It has never ended well.