Equality: The Impossible Quest

265 Pages·2015·1.83 MB·English

by  Martin van Creveld

Equality: The Impossible Quest
by Martin van Creveld
Published by Castalia House
Kouvola, Finland
www.castaliahouse.com
This book or parts thereof may not be reproduced in any form, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in
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permission of the publisher, except as provided by Finnish copyright law.
Copyright © 2015 by Martin van Creveld
All rights reserved
Editor: Vox Day
Cover Design: Christopher Jallini
Cover Image: The Danaides, John William Waterhouse (1903)
Version 001
Table of Contents
Introduction
1. Whence Inequality?
2. The Greek Miracle
3. The Proud Tower
4. Islands in the Sea
5. Liberal Equality
6. Socialist Equality
7. The Rise and Fall of Racism
8. Minorities Into Majorities
9. Brave New World
10. Death and Beyond
11. The Promise and the Threat
Acknowledgements
Endnotes
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Introduction
The histories of justice and liberty have often been written. Not so that of
equality, which, so far has failed to find its proper biographer. There seems to be
no equivalent to Plato's On Justice (better known as The Republic) or to John
Stuart Mill’s On Liberty. That is strange, for equality is quite as important as the
other two. Never has this been more true than in our own day. On one hand, we
are inundated by volumes that warn us of the dangers of growing socio-
economic gaps and by movements that protest against those gaps.[1] On the
other, equality’s opposite, discrimination, has not only become taboo but is being
used as a lever for all kinds of social reforms, credible and incredible alike.
In fact, so closely linked are the three concepts as to be inseparable. Where
there is no equality there can be neither justice nor liberty. On the other hand,
equality itself is not without its dangers. Should it be pushed too far, it can easily
reach the point where it limits, or even eliminates, both liberty and justice. Most
people will agree that, for both individuals and communities to be able to lead
“the good life,” a proper mixture of all three qualities is needed. Yet submitting a
comprehensive plan as to precisely what the mixture should be like is beyond the
powers of the present author. Instead, while keeping the other members of the
trio in mind, this volume will trace the history of equality from the earliest times.
This includes its origins, its development, the various forms it has taken, its
benefits and its costs.
On the face of it equality is a simple concept—what could be simpler? In
reality, nothing is further from the truth. To realize this fact, all one has to do is
to follow the tortuous phraseology of Sun Yat Sen, the great early twentieth-
century Chinese revolutionary and reformer. Sun Yat Sen received parts of his
education in Hawaii and British Hong Kong and he traveled widely. Returning
home, he realized that the idea went too far for his people. Especially
problematic were the members of the urban, better-educated, classes who formed
his principal audience. While they were the only ones who might understand
what he was talking about, he well realized that they would almost certainly feel
threatened by it. Hence he did what he could to reassure them. Adopting
democracy, he said, would lead to political equality. Everyone would have the
right to elect and to be elected. But that was as far as things would go. The
traditional Chinese system of “true equality,” meaning the kind that placed the
“sage” on top of the social ladder and the “dullard” and “inferior man” at the
very bottom would remain intact.[2] In Sen’s more popular work, Three
Principles for the Chinese People, equality is hardly mentioned at all.
There is equality before God and there is equality here on earth. There is
natural equality and there is the kind of equality that human society creates.
Some people even want to extend equality to animals and plants as well. There is
equality of body and there is equality of mind. There is economic equality and
there is equality before the law. There is civic equality and there is political
equality and there is equality of opportunity and there is equality in death. There
is equality among individuals and there is equality among groups, nations, and
races. In Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World this truth is held to be self-evident
that men (and women, though Huxley does not say so) are equal in respect to
their bodies’ physico-chemical makeup but in no other way.[3] The list goes on
and on. That is why equality is impossible to define—and also why, instead of
engaging on a hopeless attempt to do so, I have chosen to write its history
instead.
To begin at the beginning, is there any sense in which equality is “natural?”
If not, how when, where, and why did the idea develop? What forms has it
assumed? What role has it played in human history? How did theory and
practice interact? Are we getting closer to it? What is the promise? What is the
threat? To answer these questions, we shall start in the animal kingdom.
However, we shall not take on the whole field of zoology. Does it really make
sense to compare ourselves to scorpions or goldfish? Instead we shall limit the
discussion to mammalians and our closest relatives, the primates. Next,
something must be said about the simplest known human communities,
commonly called band societies or, referring to others with a slightly stronger
form of organization, tribes without rulers. It will be shown that, even among
them, both in and out of the family, equality is far from absolute. As the name
implies, chiefdoms, which until not so long ago represented the most common
form of political organization on earth, were much less egalitarian than tribes
without rulers. Indeed there is good reason to believe that, both before and long
after modern imperialists introduced them to the concept, the populations of
most chiefdoms could not even grasp the meaning of the term.
The earliest known people who consciously set out to build polities based on
some kind of equality were the ancient Greeks from about 650 BC. Why, when,
and how they came up with the idea remains obscure. The experiment, which
took several different forms, was made on a relatively small scale. In all, it lasted
for about three centuries. For almost two thousand years it remained almost the
only one of its kind. Yet it has never been forgotten, and its impact on the
modern world has been enormous beyond measure. Hardly a month goes by
without a book being published on the way it was reached and how it worked.
That is why it will be treated in some detail. Both the system’s advantages and
its disadvantages, as presented by contemporary and subsequent critics, will be
discussed.
As the onset of the Hellenistic Age ended the independence of the Greek
city-states, the curtain closed again. Starting with Republican Rome, in most
polities, indeed, before the second half of the seventeenth century equality was
not even present as an ideal, let alone as a reality. To the extent that it dared raise
its head it was regarded as a threat, a mortal threat even, to the foundations of the
social order. Any attempts to bring it about had to be, and often were, stamped
out by the most brutal available means. This was true both in centralized polities,
i.e. empires of every kind, and in decentralized feudal ones. Indeed it could be
argued that, whatever the difference between the two systems, inequality was
precisely what they had in common.
Such being the case, wherever these organizations existed, and as long as
they lasted, equality’s appearances could only be isolated, temporary, and/or
imaginary. Especially in Europe, there were quite some uprisings, revolts and
wars whose declared objective was to establish some sort of equality or at least
to decrease inequality. Practically all of these experiments were defeated within
a matter of days, weeks, or months. However, as in George Orwell’s Animal
Farm, even the few that held out for a while tended to fail in their purpose. Often
the leaders, having seized power, lost no time in making themselves much more
equal than their followers. Even when they did not, they usually found
themselves constrained to resort to force, meaning unequal power, so as to
maintain the equality they themselves had created. As a result, something
approaching equality could be found mainly in the monasteries—not only
European ones—on one hand and utopias on the other. Both will be explored
here, albeit only fairly briefly.
The honor, and a great one it is, of making the first attempt to devise a
political order based on the assumption that everyone is born equal and that no
one has any more rights than anyone else belongs to Thomas Hobbes in
Leviathan (1651). From him it passed to various Enlightenment thinkers who
fervently hoped to establish equality inside their own polities. But there is a
difference. Hobbes’ citizens were equal in the sense that none of them had any
rights at all, a situation he saw as essential on the way to achieving his
overriding goal, i.e. the maintenance of law and order. His successors, to the
contrary, saw equality as a prerequisite to liberty and justice. They wanted
upper-class privileges to be abolished so middle-class people like themselves
could forge ahead as fast, and as far, as possible. That is why their version of it
has often been called liberal equality. One and all, they would have approved of
what the well-known late nineteenth-century Cambridge historian, Lord Acton,
had to say: “power [meaning, a situation where some people exercise unequal
power over others] tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.”[4]
At this point, some might argue that the plan of the book is too Euro-centric.
It is true that one may also find occasional dreams of equality in other parts of
the world. Some of them will be briefly dealt with. To repeat, however, before
1776, and putting aside the monasteries and the revolts, the only place where
they led to the establishment of real polities, even such as were relatively small
scale and only lasted for about three centuries, was ancient Greece. Hobbes
himself was a European (never mind that the British remain reluctant to admit
that fact). So were the remaining prophets of liberal equality. Thanks to
colonialism, which paradoxically created as much inequality as has ever existed
at any time and place, that kind of equality spread from Europe and European-
settled North America to other parts of the world. As one of my teachers used to
say, for centuries past people in the so-called “developing world” did not know
they were equal. But by the 1960s, and thanks above all to the invention of the
little transistor radio, the message had reached them—with a vengeance.
It is also necessary to discuss equality as understood by various kinds of
socialists and communists. Having originated in the nineteenth century, those
twin movements played a huge role in the twentieth. Though communism has all
but disappeared, some forms of socialism continues to make its influence felt in
many countries and may even be on the rise. Nor can we leave out the question
of race. As the title of one of the first important works devoted to the purpose,
Arthur de Gobineau’s Essay on the Inequality of the Human Races (1853-1855)
indicates, racism was specifically meant to prove that some people were superior
to others. That the attempt was unsuccessful, scientifically speaking, is hardly
worth saying. Yet paradoxically the movement that adopted racial doctrine and
used it as the theoretical basis to perpetrate perhaps the most horrible crimes in
history had a lot to say about equality, too. To ignore that fact is to miss both the
nature of National-Socialism and some of the reasons that made it as popular as,
for a while, it was. It also means passing over some of the most important
developments in the post-1945 world.
A separate chapter must examine the equality of women as well as that of
other minorities such as the sexually different and the disabled. Here it is
undeniable that some progress has been made. The trouble is that these
“minorities” have now grown into a majority. Increasingly, society is treating the
minority, which in developed Western countries consists of able-bodied
heterosexual white males, as if they were less than equal. As so often in history,
equality for some can only be achieved by discriminating against all the rest. We
must also explore the way advancing science and technology may impact the
future of equality. Finally, there must be a chapter about equality in the face of
the greatest equalizer of all: namely, death and its aftermath.
Planning to write a history of liberty, the aforementioned Lord Acton had to
give up because the subject, at any rate in the way he proposed to treat it, was
simply too large. Surely equality is no less so. Reading everything that has been
written about the subject is far beyond the ability of any individual, however
industrious and however long his or her life-expectancy. Yet once the idea had
come to me, I simply wanted to write this book. In fact it almost started writing
itself. Following the example of Thucydides in his History of the Peloponnesian
War and of most historians, Lord Acton included, until the second half of the
nineteenth century, I could have chosen not to provide extensive documentation.
I might also have decided to do the opposite, which presumably would have led
to twenty-five pages of footnotes for each sentence. In the end I compromised. I
tried to read as much as I thought was needed to understand the material
sufficiently well for the purpose at hand and to present my main sources in the
approved scholarly manner. I can only hope I have succeeded.
1. Whence Inequality?
However much some people may resent the fact, in nature inequality and not
equality seems to be the rule. Sticking to mammals, two great groups must be
distinguished. Some live in prides, meaning some females, their young, and one
or more males. That, for example, is the case among lions. Prides lead separate
lives and do not often come into contact with each other. Inside each pride, it is
the males that dominate. However, since the males of each pride must compete
with outsiders who try to take their place, inside each of them there is
considerable turnover. As a result, a regular hierarchy and dominance are not
established among them. Dominance is even less important in species whose
male members spend most of their time on their own, as orangutans do.[1]
Many other species live in groups or herds that include a fair number of
individuals of both sexes. They are, to misuse Aristotle’s saying “social
animals.” Here the situation is very different. Dominance and its opposite,
subordination, are ubiquitous. Species whose life is based on inequality include
Old World monkeys, wolves, red deer, baboons, marmosets, macaques, vervet
monkeys, bison, and rats. Both six-ton elephants and tiny mice are on the list. To
the extent that the living arrangements man has created for them allow, so are
domesticated animals such as cattle. Furthermore, horned cattle tend to dominate
dehorned members of the same species.[2] They thus provide experimental proof
of the role played by physical force and the ability to inflict damage as well as
the animals’ ability to understand these things and act accordingly.
Some veterinarians believe that neutering a horse or a dog, or de-clawing a
cat, will cause the animal to suffer through loss of status.[3] Within every
species dominance translates itself into better access to food as well as sexual
partners. In other words, the needs and claims of some receive priority over
those of others. Last, but not least, the laws of heredity mean that animals are
likely to have offspring similar to themselves. While individuals change,
inequality as such tends to be self-perpetuating. It prevails not only at any one
moment but over time as well. Seen from an evolutionary perspective, that is
probably why it has come into the world.
As we shall see, among humans inequality probably had its origin when