Stairway to Equiheaven

Part 2 of The Madness of Intelligentsias essay, in which I hone in on the psychology of Egalitarianism and Social Justice.

Chapter 3: LOSING OUR RELIGION....AND FINDING ANOTHER ONE

Equality, I spoke the word as if a wedding vow. Ah but I was so much older then, I’m younger than that now. (My Back Pages  Bob Dylan)

Saint Perpetua on Ladder to Heaven (Jan Luyken) & Dante Paradiso (Wikimedia Commons)

‘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 20^th 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 – ie. 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 of the utmost 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]

Chapter 4: SOCIAL JUSTICE?.....IT’S ALL RELATIVE

Good Shepherd: Ward & Hughes; Wheel of Fortune: Troy book; Envy: Bruegel (Wikimedia Commons)

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 20^th 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 20^th century intelligentsia mind-game....  Relativism. Social Justice had - in its original, albeit vaguely defined, conception – been universal but 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 20^th 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 20^th 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 are wrongthink”. 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.

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 immigrant: 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 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!

Strip cartoon: Norman Pett; Seven Sins: Mohr (Wikimedia Commons)

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 21^st 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 20^th c. ‘progress’. In Part 3. I will explore:

the weakening of social norms that hold humanity’s narcissistic tendencies in check

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 next month

[* note 1] Yes, it’s true that unequal ability and luck would (and does) result in ugly and grim urban environments anyway but what then exactly have those trillions really achieved?

[* note 2] I have often come across reports of evidence that things like charitable donations and good neighbourliness are, if anything, more common amongst the conservative voter than the progressive. I doubt if this is actually empirically provable and in any case I haven’t ever thought to bookmark such reports...apart from this very recent one in which a Democrat voter muses on the kindness of her republican neighbours. Whatever else drives egalitarian psychology it  isn’t above-average big-heartedness....that isn’t the reason. So what is? I do not believe that egalitarian sentiments are generally actually mendacious. On the contrary I would say that they typically genuinely believe their own pretty story. But my impression, down many decades of people-watching, is that they do so because a) it is so deliciously self-flattering and b) they have a low threshold of self-deception.

[* 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.