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PORTSIDE CULTURE

WHY SOME ARE MORE EQUAL THAN OTHERS  
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Richard V Reeves
February 1, 2024
Literary Review
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_ This book, writes reviewer Reeves, "ought to be read by anyone
interested in equality, and also anyone interested in people, history,
God, politics, religion, nationalism, war or love." _

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_Equality: The History of an Elusive Idea_
Darrin M McMahon
Basic Books
ISBN-13: 978-0465093939

The Remigia cave, about eighty miles north of Valencia, features
paintings dating from around 6500 BC. Some depict bands of archers
hunting ibex; others appear to show executions. These are the ones
tourists come for. But the most significant image is the least
dramatic. Fourteen individuals gather closely together, watching a
lone figure departing from the group. It appears to be an ostracism
– a social death, not a physical one.

The hunter-gatherer tribes of that era were perhaps the most equal
communities in human history. But this egalitarianism was strictly
bounded. Individuals who were not part of the tribe or who broke its
norms were cast out or killed. Inclusion required exclusion.

In a famous essay, the economist and philosopher Amartya Sen pointed
out that we are all in favour of equality. We just disagree about
whether we mean equality of money, or power, or respect, or legal
standing, or whatever. The question is ‘equality of what?’ But
there is an even deeper question than this: ‘equality of _whom_?’
Where is the line between those considered as equals and those who are
not – between the fourteen and the one?

This is the question animating _Equality_, a landmark work of
intellectual history by Dartmouth historian Darrin McMahon. ‘Time
and again we have seen controversies play out over equality’s
“substance” and the degree to which it could admit of
difference,’ McMahon writes. ‘Did equality imply common religious
or national belonging? Was it delimited by sex, title, or race? Or did
it free up individuals to make claims on the collective regardless of
the fortunes of their birth?’

It is easy to invoke equality without facing its limits. _Contra_ John
Lennon, it is actually very hard to imagine a world with no countries.
‘For all the high-minded talk of “global equality” in recent
times’, McMahon writes, ‘its contours have most often been
imagined from within the walls of nation-states, where equality
extends only to those who share a passport and more often than not a
place of birth.’

McMahon has set himself an almost impossible task: to analyse
humanity’s most powerful and contested idea throughout history and
across the globe. Most attempts at total histories of ideas fail.
Depth is sacrificed to achieve breadth, the reader is marched along
too strict a chronological path or the author gets stuck in an
etymological quagmire. But McMahon succeeds. This book is deeply
researched, tightly argued and sparklingly written. It ought to be
read by anyone interested in equality, and also anyone interested in
people, history, God, politics, religion, nationalism, war or love.

The book is structured around what McMahon calls ‘figures’ of
equality, a term he uses in the rhetorical sense of a ‘figure of
speech’. These figures are explored in roughly chronological order,
from ‘Reversal’, the overturning by hunter-gatherers of the
dominance of our ape ancestors, all the way to ‘Dream’, the
invoking by 20th-century reformers such as Martin Luther King of a new
concept of equality founded on universal brotherhood. The only
downside of this approach is that it involves a degree of repetition.

There’s no romanticisation in these pages. Not only did
hunter-gatherers kill or expel in order to maintain order, they also
formed hierarchies. Or rather, hierarchies formed them. McMahon
insists that hierarchies are everywhere in human history, just as they
exist in every primate community. Human beings ‘cannot live without
hierarchies’, he writes, since ‘status is part of the air we
breathe’.

One of the big advantages of human hierarchies is their diversity:
there’s more than one way to be top dog. McMahon writes that
‘unlike animals, we regularly inhabit multiple hierarchies at once,
with the result that a low-status individual in one environment, say a
janitor at a corporation, may be a high-status individual, the captain
of the company softball team, in another’. This insight is not
developed, but it is critical. One way to square equality with
hierarchies is to scramble them, not only over generations but also
over the course of an average day. In other words, you defang
hierarchies not by denying them but by multiplying them.

While hierarchy is a human constant, the term itself is of Christian
origin. One of the most important Early Church fathers,
Pseudo-Dionysius, coined the term, describing hierarchy as part of
God’s ‘perfect arrangement’, especially in the celestial realm
– there are, after all, archangels as well as mere angels – and
the ecclesiastical one, with archbishops above bishops, and so on.

But at the same time, religion in general (and Christianity in
particular) has been among the most propulsive forces for equality in
the last two millennia. Both Jews and Christians learn that each of us
is made in the image of God. Early Christians lived essentially as
communists, while Early Church leaders, following Christ’s example,
were outspoken critics of the wealthy. St Basil the Great, for
example, told his fourth-century congregation in Caesarea that ‘the
more you abound in wealth, the more you lack in love’ and that a
rich person who failed to help a poor person was a ‘murderer’.

McMahon explores the role of trinitarian theology as a foundation for
equality. The triune Christian God consists of three separate persons
(Father, Son and Holy Spirit) who are ‘consubstantial’, sharing
the same essence (or substance), and therefore equal. This idea helps
Christians to explain how people can be unique, separate individuals
and yet made of the same divine stuff and therefore equals. ‘God’s
children … likewise share a common nature,’ McMahon writes. ‘The
mystery of the Trinity seemed to reaffirm the essential likeness of
human beings in relation to one another – seemed to reaffirm their
essential equality – however different they might be.’

To modern readers, much of this might seem like the stuff of a Sunday
school lesson. But while it is clear that for much of modern history
the Church has not been a good advertisement for equality, it is also
clear that much modern egalitarian thinking rests on theological
foundations. As McMahon writes of 18th-century reform efforts, ‘The
very fact that equality was on the horizon at all owed much to these
varied Christian efforts. Over the course of centuries, Christians had
made of equality a moral good, investing it with a sacral status …
Equal was how God had made us; equal was how God intended his beloved
to be.’

St Paul famously claimed that the incarnation demolished old
distinctions, so that ‘there is neither Jew nor Greek, slave nor
free, male nor female; for you are all one in Christ Jesus’. But the
question for Christians is the same as the question for all those
advocating equality: what does the word mean in the real world, in the
thick of daily life, for politics and economics? McMahon notes that
religious claims of equality often had little purchase in the material
world. St Paul instructed Christians to obey their earthly masters.
There was no condemnation of slavery as an institution. Master and
slave were equal in God’s eyes. But right here and right now, their
position was unchanged.

The Roman Empire in which Christianity flourished had its own abstract
ideal of equality under natural law for all male Roman citizens,
_omnes homines aequales sunt_ (‘all men are equal’), a principle
that became part of the legal code itself under Emperor Justinian.
McMahon distils the partnership between secular and religious forces:
‘Thus did the Roman law and Christian theology work together, each
in its own way, to situate equality amid inequality, while concealing
inequality in equality itself. The one justified the other. And as
both the empire of Christianity and the empire of Rome grew, so did
that complementary and reinforcing function.’

The question of what makes up the _substance_ of equality occupied the
finest theologians for centuries. It is central for secular
egalitarians too. And some of the deepest thinkers on this question
come not from the Left but from the Right. Perhaps McMahon’s
greatest achievement is to take the equality claims of the Right,
including those on its extreme end, seriously. The origin of the word
‘fascism’ is _fascis_, the term for a bundle of rods with a
protruding blade. This was an emblem of magisterial power in ancient
Rome but also of connection, community and equality. There are
_fasces_ flanking the speaker’s rostrum in the US House of
Representatives. There is a _fascis_ underneath each of Abraham
Lincoln’s hands in his memorial sculpture in Washington, DC.

The fascists of the 20th century were dismissive of liberal versions
of equality, in part because these ducked the hard realities that must
be faced to achieve equality within a group: first, a clear definition
of that group; second, the deliberate exclusion of others. Fascist
thinkers were explicit about the exclusionary implications of
equality. The Nazi legal scholar Carl Schmitt wrote in 1923 that
‘the question of equality is precisely not one of abstract,
logical-arithmetical games. It is about the substance of equality.’
What would this substance be? Schmitt said it could vary. It could be
religion, belief, nationhood, tradition or ‘ideas of common race’.
But the key concept was ‘equality of type’, or _Artgleichheit_.
The idea of the _Volk_ provided a broad umbrella, shaped by common
history, culture, language and experience. But, over time, fascist
thinking, especially in Germany, developed a more explicitly racial
typology, leading to the genocidal implementation of Schmitt’s
argument that, to flourish, societies require ‘the elimination or
eradication of heterogeneity’.

The success of fascist politics was down to its clear signalling of
who would be the winners, the equals, in a new political order.
Fascist scholars and leaders understood that the desire for
recognition within a necessarily unequal society created resentment,
which could be amplified and weaponised. Drawing on the work of the
Dutch scholar Menno ter Braak (who committed suicide in 1940 rather
than live under Nazi rule), McMahon offers a chilling but necessary
reminder: ‘Where the belief in equality prevailed, resentment would
find a place. With the consequence that democratic societies would
always produce a steady stream of the very poison that could be used
to kill them off.’ The desire to be seen and valued can curdle into
reaction and hatred. ‘All human beings seek recognition,’ McMahon
writes. ‘And as populist politicians of the Right have arguably
understood far better than most in recent years, politics is well
placed to provide it.’

The rancour of modern politics is an obstacle to the practical pursuit
of greater equality. Right-wing nationalists are dusting off the
playbooks of the 1920s and 1930s, whether they admit it (or even know
it) or not. In the face of growing concerns over immigration, the
proto-fascist French thinker Maurice Barrès wrote at the end of the
19th century, ‘the idea of the fatherland implies an inequality, but
to the detriment of foreigners, not, as is the case today, to the
detriment of French nationals.’ Meanwhile, too many on the Left are
practising a rancorous identity politics of their own, in which, as
McMahon writes, ‘white heterosexual men are cast as uncertain allies
and privileged exceptions to the rest of humanity’.

There is some hard politics ahead of us, for sure. If we are to stand
any chance of cultivating a humane reimagining of equality, we will
have to do some hard thinking too.

* Equality
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* Politics
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* History
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* Philosophy
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* Christianity
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* Fascism
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* Liberalism
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