A fabulous essay, right on target on many issues, very well expressed. My own view is that the people who whine about equality are just jealous of what others have, ignorant or disinterested in hard they worked to get it. Life is full of inequalites; some people are born tall, strong, handsome, some aren't. Do the equality fools want everything and everyone to be exactly equal? What a dull place the world would be. 'Equality' is pushed by Marxists to make people miserable, unhappy with their lot, it is a tactic to destroy and demoralise.
My closest friend has a puppy called Harry. Short for Harrison. Named after "Harrison Bergeron", the Kurt Vonnegut short story about a world where:
"... everybody was finally equal. They weren't only equal before God and the law. They were equal every which way. Nobody was smarter than anybody else. Nobody was better looking than anybody else. Nobody was stronger or quicker than anybody else. All this equality was due to the 211th, 212th, and 213th Amendments to the Constitution, and to the unceasing vigilance of agents of the United States Handicapper General."
That dystopian satire shows what a foolish project it is to attempt to engineer a world with equality of ability and outcome (as opposed to equality of opportunity).
And yet here we are now. In a world where exams must be made easy so that almost anyone can pass, and half the pupils can go to university. A world where, regardless of the strange things you do with your hair, clothes and body, you still get to be told you are "beautiful".
Great series!! Ivory towers… my god the profs I know are tremendous hypocrites, who push these concepts of equity on student sponge minds, but would swoon and protest if they didn’t get their generous pay and pensions, plus sabbaticals, summers off and an array of benefits their equivalents in the private sector could only dream of.
This whole equity thing, as you know, started very well with the objective to provide equality of opportunity, but like so many ideas has experienced scope creep.
Wokeness that shouts about "equality" or "equity" is not just a paradox: it's hypocritical as well. Since it is an elitist movement and most of the regular people (formerly called: the workers) do generally not adhere to its principals, the woke mob (or the elitists) have now started to call these people "populists". Now populists are the unwashed masses that experience the most disadvantages from the woke policies: they have to watch how their affordable housing gets scooped up by newcomers out of Africa (while they themselves have been on a waiting list for it for over 15 year); they have to watch how their children's education goes down the drain because it is perpetually scaled down to fit the weakest link, they can now no longer afford to look after their own children because you need at least two incomes to buy a house (after women were encouraged to go to work - it did nothing for women per se but everything for the prices of houses, which of course in the end only benefited the banks). It always amazes me to hear people who keep preaching about "equality" call a substantial proportion of the people "garbage". Or "deplorables". And the parties they vote for "populist" at best, or "right-wing extremist" at worst. Where's the equality in that???
I agree that the heavy lifting in improving living conditions has happened through technological innovation.
But I also believe that governments have contributed some invaluable adjuncts such as Social Security and Medicare.
An even more important governmental contribution has been universal free public education. The United States and Germany were the first two countries to have universal free primary education (three R's). This helped these two countries to surge ahead in the 19th century. Britain did not have free public education for all children until 1870!
Later, it became evident that productive citizens need more than primary school. Now, high school is regarded as normative, and governments work hard to make college education available to all who want it and can handle it.
Education is obviously the key to personal opportunity. The most beneficial concept of equality is the opportunity to move ahead to the best of one's abilities. Thus, I argue that the Democratic Party could repair its fortunes by offering left-behind citizens a new right to lifelong job retraining. This concept is simple enough and exciting enough that it could penetrate the right-wing disinformation media bubble. It can fit on 100,000 billboards. See my substack post:
What I was getting at here is that it is enterprise and wealth-creation that is the main DRIVER of progressive/egalitarian political projects rather than the other way round. The record of progressive POLITICS as a driver is not a good one (witness the history of communism). I do take your point though and would accept that my observation on this was rather broad brush (this is inevitable to a degree with essay-writing. Too much hedging/parenthesis and it can become clunky and unreadable).
Where I disagree with you is on the matter of Lifelong training and education. I actually worked in this field myself for the first half of my career and it's a dismal memory for me. Formal education and training systems inevitably become captured by the groupthinking, virtue-signalling but self-serving culture that has wrecked our schools and universities in recent decades. Lifelong education Yes but it must be basically AUTODIDACTIC, not system-driven to be fruitful....and in my more optimistic moments I think that the internet has made this much more possible (for those with a will to learn). No amount of 'help' will help those without that will to learn.
I will read your linked piece though and also comment there if I have anything useful to say.
"...this egalitarian crusading has rarely been driven by uprisings from the downtrodden. It has mostly been driven by a relatively privileged..."
True. Another good example is the New Harmony project, which gave birth to the word "socialism". It was founded by a very wealthy industrialist, Robert Owen.
Another worthy entry in your series, Graham. On point 1: inequality: kicking against this basic reality is kicking against nature itself, since no human being is born exactly the same or "equal" as any other; On point 2: "It has mostly been driven by a relatively privileged but malcontent middle class intelligentsia...." likewise with feminism, which overwhelmingly comes from upper middle-class, privileged women who actually have little to complain about but make a career out of doing so; 3: "Being able to discriminate between the real and the wishful is fundamental to an intelligent maturity both at an individual and a societal scale." Great quote! Sadly Western society has been engineered into a state of semi-helpless infancy so this explains a lot about "woke"; 4: "an implicit recognition of an inevitable degree of luck-of-the-draw in a person’s life..." relates to point 1. Case in point: artists, writers and musicians who are every bit as skilled and talented as their more famous peers but remain mostly unknown; a specific example is the English prog-rock group Camel from the '70s whom many are only now discovering. The great William Blake was known only to a few peers during his lifetime.
As far as wanting a more lavish lifestyle or envying those who have more, this has never been a problem for me. I long ago learned to live with minimal income by enjoying pleasures in life that aren't dependent on wealth—books, music, nature.
Lots to agree with there Sean. Re..."case in point: artists", I think this every time my wife has Sky's amateur artist show on the TV. So much latent talent on display there but who does our cognoscenti lionise instead?.... Damien-somebodies-or-other grifter no marks.
Cunningham’s opinion is that we should never make any effort to mitigate bad luck or bad choices and in fact should do everything possible to make those disadvantages worse. Rich kids can be lazy worthless drug addicts and get away with it, while poor kids will lead shit lives despite being nearly flawless. The role of government is, in Cunningham’s worldview, only to protect the existing hierarchy of race, gender, and, especially, wealth, ensuring that nobody can rise out of the place where they were born.
“Wokeness” is not about ‘virtue signaling.’ It is about ensuring that irrelevant things like race or gender don’t prevent anyone from participating in any activity, especially public life. It is always about basic justice and decency.
'Cunningham's opinion'......."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."
I guess it must be that you don't actually READ things before trolling about them.
You make a bland statement about generally supporting a social safety net followed by a long list of specific policies you oppose including something as anodyne and necessary as wheelchair ramps. Perhaps if you discussed specific social justice policies you support your position would be more persuasive. What you have said here is ‘sure,I believe society should be open and accepting, but only so far as it doesn’t change anything I want to say or do.’
As per his comment, I don't think that you have accurately described his view. My point is that it's not always just the "luck of the draw", sometimes there are real structural problems with our institutions that compound that draw.
What changes should we make then? Cunningham clearly states that he opposes even mild alterations like wheelchair ramps, so I have a hard time imagining he wants anything more aggressive.
About the charitable giving divide between progressives and conservatives - I think it's due to the socialist minded believing that the state should provide, and charity should be unnecessary.
Agreed on everything except for: "To the physically disabled: Sorry but we won’t necessarily want to build ugly concrete ramps alongside every public stairway". Physically disabled people should not be barred from access to public buildings. I don't mind as long as you find an alternative means of access.
On disability: those physical barriers prevent people with disabilities from fully participating in public life. The ramps may be ugly but are better than excluding people from basic parts of citizenship.
I don't think it's competition or greed which kills equality. Equality itself is ambiguous. Not everyone democratic political party can fit into any other democratic system. Same for multiculturalism. Our values allow only some degree of multiculturalism. Equality is the standard position of anyone from their position. We all consider ourselves egalitarian at some level. Even nietzsche and might makes right advocates. There's some fundamental view of man, or however we're conceived of, where we are equal. So in that sense it means and adds nothing.
Relativism in that sense started in the 19th century. These ages sorta imply the next one but with maxwell's electromagnetism it opened up a relativity with light which was fixed by ether until Einstein broke it open. For math it was opened with Euclidean axioms being broken for 3d objects. It spread into psychology etc. These are connected to romanticism which localized man in nature even though romanticism still assumed a connection with nature through aesthetics.
A fabulous essay, right on target on many issues, very well expressed. My own view is that the people who whine about equality are just jealous of what others have, ignorant or disinterested in hard they worked to get it. Life is full of inequalites; some people are born tall, strong, handsome, some aren't. Do the equality fools want everything and everyone to be exactly equal? What a dull place the world would be. 'Equality' is pushed by Marxists to make people miserable, unhappy with their lot, it is a tactic to destroy and demoralise.
Thank you
My closest friend has a puppy called Harry. Short for Harrison. Named after "Harrison Bergeron", the Kurt Vonnegut short story about a world where:
"... everybody was finally equal. They weren't only equal before God and the law. They were equal every which way. Nobody was smarter than anybody else. Nobody was better looking than anybody else. Nobody was stronger or quicker than anybody else. All this equality was due to the 211th, 212th, and 213th Amendments to the Constitution, and to the unceasing vigilance of agents of the United States Handicapper General."
That dystopian satire shows what a foolish project it is to attempt to engineer a world with equality of ability and outcome (as opposed to equality of opportunity).
And yet here we are now. In a world where exams must be made easy so that almost anyone can pass, and half the pupils can go to university. A world where, regardless of the strange things you do with your hair, clothes and body, you still get to be told you are "beautiful".
Great series!! Ivory towers… my god the profs I know are tremendous hypocrites, who push these concepts of equity on student sponge minds, but would swoon and protest if they didn’t get their generous pay and pensions, plus sabbaticals, summers off and an array of benefits their equivalents in the private sector could only dream of.
This whole equity thing, as you know, started very well with the objective to provide equality of opportunity, but like so many ideas has experienced scope creep.
Thank you
I saw a list of salaries at Ofcom recently, the top ten apparatchiks all on c£250,000 each and NONE doing what Ofcom was set up for.
Wokeness that shouts about "equality" or "equity" is not just a paradox: it's hypocritical as well. Since it is an elitist movement and most of the regular people (formerly called: the workers) do generally not adhere to its principals, the woke mob (or the elitists) have now started to call these people "populists". Now populists are the unwashed masses that experience the most disadvantages from the woke policies: they have to watch how their affordable housing gets scooped up by newcomers out of Africa (while they themselves have been on a waiting list for it for over 15 year); they have to watch how their children's education goes down the drain because it is perpetually scaled down to fit the weakest link, they can now no longer afford to look after their own children because you need at least two incomes to buy a house (after women were encouraged to go to work - it did nothing for women per se but everything for the prices of houses, which of course in the end only benefited the banks). It always amazes me to hear people who keep preaching about "equality" call a substantial proportion of the people "garbage". Or "deplorables". And the parties they vote for "populist" at best, or "right-wing extremist" at worst. Where's the equality in that???
I agree that the heavy lifting in improving living conditions has happened through technological innovation.
But I also believe that governments have contributed some invaluable adjuncts such as Social Security and Medicare.
An even more important governmental contribution has been universal free public education. The United States and Germany were the first two countries to have universal free primary education (three R's). This helped these two countries to surge ahead in the 19th century. Britain did not have free public education for all children until 1870!
Later, it became evident that productive citizens need more than primary school. Now, high school is regarded as normative, and governments work hard to make college education available to all who want it and can handle it.
Education is obviously the key to personal opportunity. The most beneficial concept of equality is the opportunity to move ahead to the best of one's abilities. Thus, I argue that the Democratic Party could repair its fortunes by offering left-behind citizens a new right to lifelong job retraining. This concept is simple enough and exciting enough that it could penetrate the right-wing disinformation media bubble. It can fit on 100,000 billboards. See my substack post:
Dems can win by selling ONE BIG Idea
Lifelong job training for all American citizens
https://kathleenweber.substack.com/p/dems-can-win-by-selling-one-big-idea
What I was getting at here is that it is enterprise and wealth-creation that is the main DRIVER of progressive/egalitarian political projects rather than the other way round. The record of progressive POLITICS as a driver is not a good one (witness the history of communism). I do take your point though and would accept that my observation on this was rather broad brush (this is inevitable to a degree with essay-writing. Too much hedging/parenthesis and it can become clunky and unreadable).
Where I disagree with you is on the matter of Lifelong training and education. I actually worked in this field myself for the first half of my career and it's a dismal memory for me. Formal education and training systems inevitably become captured by the groupthinking, virtue-signalling but self-serving culture that has wrecked our schools and universities in recent decades. Lifelong education Yes but it must be basically AUTODIDACTIC, not system-driven to be fruitful....and in my more optimistic moments I think that the internet has made this much more possible (for those with a will to learn). No amount of 'help' will help those without that will to learn.
I will read your linked piece though and also comment there if I have anything useful to say.
The lifelong trade right to training that I am proposing is opt-in. It's available but not a requirement. Therefore, the unmotivated will never apply.
"...this egalitarian crusading has rarely been driven by uprisings from the downtrodden. It has mostly been driven by a relatively privileged..."
True. Another good example is the New Harmony project, which gave birth to the word "socialism". It was founded by a very wealthy industrialist, Robert Owen.
Another worthy entry in your series, Graham. On point 1: inequality: kicking against this basic reality is kicking against nature itself, since no human being is born exactly the same or "equal" as any other; On point 2: "It has mostly been driven by a relatively privileged but malcontent middle class intelligentsia...." likewise with feminism, which overwhelmingly comes from upper middle-class, privileged women who actually have little to complain about but make a career out of doing so; 3: "Being able to discriminate between the real and the wishful is fundamental to an intelligent maturity both at an individual and a societal scale." Great quote! Sadly Western society has been engineered into a state of semi-helpless infancy so this explains a lot about "woke"; 4: "an implicit recognition of an inevitable degree of luck-of-the-draw in a person’s life..." relates to point 1. Case in point: artists, writers and musicians who are every bit as skilled and talented as their more famous peers but remain mostly unknown; a specific example is the English prog-rock group Camel from the '70s whom many are only now discovering. The great William Blake was known only to a few peers during his lifetime.
As far as wanting a more lavish lifestyle or envying those who have more, this has never been a problem for me. I long ago learned to live with minimal income by enjoying pleasures in life that aren't dependent on wealth—books, music, nature.
Lots to agree with there Sean. Re..."case in point: artists", I think this every time my wife has Sky's amateur artist show on the TV. So much latent talent on display there but who does our cognoscenti lionise instead?.... Damien-somebodies-or-other grifter no marks.
"She's buying a stairway to heaven."
Hi Graham, nice post. You might appreciate this which makes similar points: https://neofeudalreview.substack.com/p/the-egalitarian-ratchet-effect-why
Thanks....I'll take a look
Great post, clearly explained
Thank you
Well done, GC. Passed your piece on to my family.
Thank you for that LRP. Hope it makes them want to subscribe!
“whether that inequality arises from bad luck, bad genes, inferior abilities or even bad choices.”
Valid, but what about the institutions that exacerbate or fail to mitigate the consequences of these?
Cunningham’s opinion is that we should never make any effort to mitigate bad luck or bad choices and in fact should do everything possible to make those disadvantages worse. Rich kids can be lazy worthless drug addicts and get away with it, while poor kids will lead shit lives despite being nearly flawless. The role of government is, in Cunningham’s worldview, only to protect the existing hierarchy of race, gender, and, especially, wealth, ensuring that nobody can rise out of the place where they were born.
“Wokeness” is not about ‘virtue signaling.’ It is about ensuring that irrelevant things like race or gender don’t prevent anyone from participating in any activity, especially public life. It is always about basic justice and decency.
'Cunningham's opinion'......."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."
I guess it must be that you don't actually READ things before trolling about them.
You make a bland statement about generally supporting a social safety net followed by a long list of specific policies you oppose including something as anodyne and necessary as wheelchair ramps. Perhaps if you discussed specific social justice policies you support your position would be more persuasive. What you have said here is ‘sure,I believe society should be open and accepting, but only so far as it doesn’t change anything I want to say or do.’
Where are you willing to compromise?
As per his comment, I don't think that you have accurately described his view. My point is that it's not always just the "luck of the draw", sometimes there are real structural problems with our institutions that compound that draw.
What changes should we make then? Cunningham clearly states that he opposes even mild alterations like wheelchair ramps, so I have a hard time imagining he wants anything more aggressive.
About the charitable giving divide between progressives and conservatives - I think it's due to the socialist minded believing that the state should provide, and charity should be unnecessary.
Agreed on everything except for: "To the physically disabled: Sorry but we won’t necessarily want to build ugly concrete ramps alongside every public stairway". Physically disabled people should not be barred from access to public buildings. I don't mind as long as you find an alternative means of access.
Everything else is spot on.
On disability: those physical barriers prevent people with disabilities from fully participating in public life. The ramps may be ugly but are better than excluding people from basic parts of citizenship.
I don't think it's competition or greed which kills equality. Equality itself is ambiguous. Not everyone democratic political party can fit into any other democratic system. Same for multiculturalism. Our values allow only some degree of multiculturalism. Equality is the standard position of anyone from their position. We all consider ourselves egalitarian at some level. Even nietzsche and might makes right advocates. There's some fundamental view of man, or however we're conceived of, where we are equal. So in that sense it means and adds nothing.
Relativism in that sense started in the 19th century. These ages sorta imply the next one but with maxwell's electromagnetism it opened up a relativity with light which was fixed by ether until Einstein broke it open. For math it was opened with Euclidean axioms being broken for 3d objects. It spread into psychology etc. These are connected to romanticism which localized man in nature even though romanticism still assumed a connection with nature through aesthetics.