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 to a comprehensive plan as to precisely what the mixture should be like is beyond the powers of the present author.
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.
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.
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 17th 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 foundation 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 both true 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.
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.
Furthermore, horned cattle tend to dominate dehorned members of the same species. 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. 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 some people convinced themselves, and succeeded in convincing others, that they were closer to the spirits, or gods. Other factors involved are descent from some particularly prominent ancestors; special rights allegedly conferred some time ago (often, the older the better); and wealth. Differences in physical force, intelligence, aggression, courage, health, age and sex can also make themselves felt. Animals are simpler in this respect. As far as we are able to judge they do not have gods. They do not treasure the memory of ancestors, or acquire formal “rights,” or own property that can be kept or given away. Even if they did, they would be unable to leave any of those things to their offspring.
Inside each group competition for the top positions, and thus for the advantages that inequality confers, is keen. Individuals who try to upset the existing pecking order may, should they fail, suffer severely. Nevertheless, barring extreme shortages of food and / or sexual partners as well as overcrowding, the fact that some animals dominate and others acknowledge that dominance does not prevent the members of most groups from living together in reasonable harmony. To the contrary, it is perhaps the most important reason why they can do so without tearing one another to pieces all of the time. It provides a shortcut to deciding who gets how much of what, and when. Inequality, in other words, is precisely the principle upon which their social life is based and is made possible.
The way he sees it, within every group of primates a constant struggle for dominance is taking place. Once established, it manifests itself mainly in the form of privileged, meaning unequal, access to sexual partners and, under some circumstances, food.
Inside each group, all adult males dominate all females. The struggle for power is what makes them tick. Much of it is waged by political methods, meaning manipulation and the formation of alliances. Display of power, visible, auditory, or both, also play a very important role. However, chimps are very aggressive animals. Competition can easily explode into violence — which may or may not be followed by reconciliation. Fights to the death, including the squeezing out of testicles, have been recorded. Among both species of apes dominance would be meaningless if it had not been accompanied by its opposite, subordination, and the behavior that is appropriate to it. For every animal that is more than equal there must be at least one that is less so. Some chimpanzees literally grovel in the dust in front of others. Such behavior can be understood as a kind of ritualized confirmation of the dominance relationship.
At any one moment, the position of each individual in the hierarchy reflects his or her personality, age, experience, and ability to form connections with others. As among humans, dominant individuals tend to be surrounded by others of both sexes. Subordinate ones are isolated and may even deliberately isolate themselves further still.
Countless similar studies of other primates have shown that, among them too, dominance and subordination are pretty much universal. The position of each individual in relation to all the rest is determined very precisely by its qualities, physical and mental. In this sense it is even possible to speak of “justice” or, at any rate, equity. Some monkeys seem to understand that equity consists of each individual obtaining what he deserves according to his qualities. They react angrily when it is disturbed.
In particular elders, thanks to their supposed proximity to the spirit-world and their ability to influence it, enjoyed respect. Often they could obtain resources from the young and make their views prevail.
Going one step further, few if any even of the simplest societies regard their neighbors was equal to themselves.
The Greeks called foreigners barbaroi, barbarians. The implication was that they could not speak properly and were less than fully human. As Aristotle later put it, they were, “by nature, slaves,” unable to govern themselves but in need of a master (despotes; in Greek, the word can refer both to a slave-owner and a political ruler). Other examples abound. There probably has hardly been a clan, tribe people, or nation whose members did not place themselves at the apex of creation. Doing so, they regarded most, perhaps even all, foreigners as inferior to themselves.
Though the people inside each group hardly knew each other, let alone the members of the opposing group, they quickly started to feel their own superiority. Proving, perhaps, that we are programmed to do just that.
Many of them greatly admired the equality, and consequently the freedom from oppression, that “savages” in distant lands supposedly enjoyed. Volume after volume celebrated their simplicity, their honesty, their courage, their generosity (also in the sense that they shared their women and gave them to anybody who wanted them), in short their nobility.
Man was born free, and he is everywhere in chains.
19th-century travelers, imperialists and ethnographers tended to take the opposite view. The customs, particularly in respect to sex, which their predecessor had interpreted as noble and exalted, they saw as bestial. As with Rousseau, every “savage” was supposedly equal to every other and did not have any authority over him. Thus the communities in which they lived were understood as mere “hordes.” They lacked the organization needed for taking large-scale collective action, let alone building and maintaining a sophisticated civilization.
Looking back, it appears that all the participants in the debate were wrong. A closer examination of teh facts would have shown that hordes of perfectly free men and women enjoying equal authority, status and access to resources of every kind, including each other’s sexuality, have never existed and probably could not have existed. To paraphrase Hobbes, perfect equality, like its concomitant perfect liberty, can only exist when each individual lives alone in a desert, where it is meaningless. Even the simplest known societies were, to a considerable extent, based on inequality. While there were neither permanent social classes nor institutions, different people were caught up in what were often extremely complex networks of deference, rights and duties.
The transition from band societies to fully developed, hierarchically organized, chiefdoms must have been an extremely complex process. Occasionally it may also have worked in reverse as chiefdoms disintegrated and fell apart because they were decapitated by war and conquest. The difficulty is not only that there are countless intermediate rungs, but that each anthropologist seems bent on producing his or her own hierarchy which is incompatible with that outlined by the rest. Some speak of elders, some of big men, some of priests, some of war leaders, some of chieftains. Others see segmented or acephalous (headless) societies, or sodalities, or stratified societies. Others still see extended families and moieties and clans and tribes and nations; not to mention centralization and its opposite, decentralization.
The most important factors responsible for the move towards chiefdoms were probably as follows: A growing population, which led to increased contact among people and made some form of government necessary; the development of material culture, including in many cases the discovery of metal-working, which led to specialization, exchange, and hoarding; and war. The last factor named, war, might itself be considered part consequence, part cause, of the other two. The three factors were combined in an endless number of ways.
The important point is that, in all this, there was not even a pretense at equality. From the chief down, superiors, while engaged in an unending game of musical chairs among themselves in which the prize was power, ruled and exploited. Commoners either accepted their fate or were destroyed.
If only because the polygamy practiced by the paramount chief and his relatives meant that he had many of the latter, coups and fights over the throne were not so much the exception as the rule. A chief’s death was particularly likely to result in conflict. As a result, dynasties seldom lasted more than two or three generations. At times, so downtrodden did members of the lower classes feel that they rose in more or less spontaneous action, more or less successfully. Neighboring chiefdoms also clashed; over water, over agricultural land, over pasture, over all kinds of property, and over women. Provided one side did not exterminate the other, the normal outcome of a victorious war would be even greater inequality than before.
Life itself, zoologists claim, is one long struggle to reach the highest position as soon as possible, stay there for as long as possible, and take advantage of the nutritional and sexual privileges that accompany it. The struggle is waged with every means, often including violence.
They theorized that at first, prophets, shamans, and assorted miracle-workers were able to translate their knowledge into influence. As influence gradually grew into authority, authority into power, and power into property and privilege, chiefdoms emerged.
How it came about we simply do not know. Furthermore, among humans as well as many animals, inequality, accompanied by deference — meaning inequality that is recognized — was exactly what held the community or group together. Had it been otherwise, individuals competing for material and sexual resources, would presumably have torn one another to pieces. Not just occasionally, as is actually the case, but all of the time.
Starting as early as the third millennium, both Egypt and Mesopotamia were occupied by some of the most unequal and most hierarchical despotisms the world has ever seen. To convince oneself of this fact one only has to look at the pyramids. If there were any limits to the power of the Pharaohs, as well as the Assyrian, Babylonian and Persian kings, they were of a technical nature, not a legal one. The Greeks themselves always referred to the ruler of Persia as “the Great King.” At least until the time of Alexander and his successors, they themselves had nothing of the sort.
Briefly, geography and the biosphere that goes with it can explain much. But on its own it cannot tell us why some societies developed in certain ways and others did not.
In both cities, essentially the move towards the polis meant the dismantlement, sudden or gradual, of earlier, kin-based, organizations. Their place was taken by a single arrangement based on geographical location and citizenship.
Not a man to be content with half-measures, Lycurgus also had movable property gathered and redistributed. To prevent the return of inequality by way of trade and hoarding, gold and silver were banished. Henceforward the Spartans had to make do with an iron currency that was clumsy to use and only suitable for making the smallest purchases. With the disappearance of money, Plutarch says, every kind of vice also vanished. Not only luxury, bug vagabondage, harlotry, the kind of deception practiced by soothsayers, and other societal ills simply disappeared.
Such was the importance Lycurgus attributed to equality that it applied even to death. Not only did he prohibit any kind of objects to be buried with their owners, but tombs were not supposed to carry the names of their occupants.
In all this, the major deviations from equality were the fact that private individuals could not speak in the assembly; that only old men could be elected to the Senate; and that the kingship was hereditary and limited to members of just two families. When somebody asked Lycurgus about this, his response was to tell the man to “go and first establish democracy in your own household.”
Even in their case, as Lycurgus himself made clear, equality did not quite imply democracy, i.e. the right to equal participation in government.
In the reign of Agis, gold and silver money first flowed into Sparta. With money came greed and a desire for wealth prevailed through the agency of Lysander, who, though incorruptible himself, filled his country with the love of riches and with luxury, by bringing home gold and silver from the war.
Even so, the danger existed that those who, though freed, had lost their land would now turn into an urban Lumpenproletariat. Evidently it was with this problem in mind that Solon sought to put the economy on a new basis by stimulating industry, trade, shipping, and the circulation of money. Without rough economic equality and a strong middle class, neither Greek democracy nor the polis itself would have been possible.
Instead the reforms took place amidst ferocious political struggles between “conservative” aristocrats and “progressive” democrats.
The Athenians also insisted on isonomia in the sense of equality in front of the law. Both before and since in most polities, different laws were applied to different classes of people. Very often the most powerful people, be they kings or emperors or tyrants, were not subject to any law at all. Not so in classical Athens. In it, absolute obedience to the law was required from all without distinction.
Similarly Polybius, the 2nd-century BC Greek historian, has a lot to say about the crimes Nabis committed in his attempt to restore equality to Sparta, when he murdered people right and left. 1700 years or so later, Machievelli thought that the chief weakness of Sparta, as compared to Rome, was its reluctance, extreme even by Greek standards, to admit foreigners into the citizenry. Yet Machievelli well understood that keeping foreigners out was an absolute prerequisite for maintaining the kind of equality that existed among the homoioi. Sparta, in other words, was built on a contradiction. It was a contradiction that could only end, and eventually did end, in its downfall.
Passing to the Englightenment, most French and British thinkers rejected Sparta’s militarism. Like Herodotus (and Thucydides) before them, they noted the suppression of the individual by the state, his complete subordination to the demands of the latter, the consequent loss of liberty, and the tendency to neglect of letters and the arts. All of those, of course, were themselves both cause and consequence of the famous Spartan combination of frugality and equality, specifically including equality of wealth. Perhaps surprisingly, in view of his subsequent reputation as the grandfather of both Communism and Fascism, one of those who attacked the Spartan version of equality was the great philosopher Georg Friedrich Hegel. To him it was destructive of the “free individualism” that was, or ought to be, the supreme goal of any polity.
Continuing where Rousseau had left off, they saw Sparta as the incarnation of civic virtue. Too often, they did not allow the fact that the equality was forced and life itself regimented to the nth degree to disturb them too much.
The Nazis, as usual, added a peculiar twist of their own. For them the Athenian version of equality, going hand-in-hand with democracy as it did, was effete and effeminate. Insisting that the Spartans were northern “Dorians,” Third-Reich historians claimed that they maintained their equality, and with it their greatness (as long as it lasted) by rigorously excluding the members of inferior races and refusing to mix with them in any way. The homoioi, in other words, were a model. The helots deserved to be treated like dogs, enslaved, exploited, and even killed.
Whether or not we agree that the city enjoy eunomia, “good laws,” Spartan equality was of the kind that usually prevails inside an armed camp. Personal freedom did not exist. Everyone was elevated or, depending on one’s point of view, reduced to a common denominator.
Land, still considered the most important resource of all, was to be owned by the community. Part of it would be dedicated to the gods, part would support the soldiers, and part feed the farmers.
Other critics still, notably Thucydides, took the opposite tack. To them, the trouble with democracy and the isonomia with which it was largely synonymous was that they went much too far. To use Plutarch’s excellent metaphor, what was wrong with Athens was that it lacked a steadying “keel.” In its absence the assembly, largely made up of people who were without property and easily swayed by demagogues, veered now in one direction, now in another. It always risked going to extremes. As many incidents during the Peloponnesian War in particular illustrated, a sane, balanced, continuous policy was very hard, perhaps impossible, to devise and maintain.
Plato, an aristocrat if ever one there was, also joined Thucydides in criticizing the other side of democracy. That included its “feverish” nature, its encouragement of unrestricted competition among individual (and equal) citizens, and its inability to keep a steady course. Indeed he compared the ruler in a democracy to a trainer in charge of some big and dangerous beast. To avoid being eaten, he is forever forced to follow the beast’s every whim.
As is currently the situation in the EU, however, they never even approached a common citizenship. Citizens did not see themselves as an accidental gathering of people. Rather, they believed they were sharing some kind of common ancestry. It was the sacred task of each city to defend the heritage which represented its essence, distinguished it from the rest, and justified its existence.
Internal exclusivity meant that, inside each polis, only part of the population enjoyed equal rights. None was a democracy as the term is understood today. Both in antiquity and later some would go further, arguing that what equality existed came at the expense of liberty (in Sparta) and stability (in Athens). Others considered it as fake; merely a device where by a relatively small group of people, namely adult male citizens, dominated the rest. External exclusivity meant that there were strict limits to how large any polis could reach without ceasing to be what made it unique. This exclusivity goes far to explain the limited success city-states enjoyed in foreign policy and war, and why they eventually gave way to different, larger and more powerful polities.
All other city-states, by refusing to extend citizenship and accept outsiders on an equal basis, remained rather small. Many probably did not have more than a few hundred citizens. Sooner or later they fell victim to polities that, organized on different principles, were much larger than themselves. The one exception to the rule was Rome.
The republic in question knew neither the Spartan principle of socio-economic equality nor the Athenian one, of which Pericles had boasted, of isonomia. Instead, the population was divided into three classes, i.e. the Senators, the Knights, and the common people. Membership in the upper classes was based on descent and property. Moral conduct also counted for something, since the censors who reviewed the lists every five years had the right to remove those of whom they disapproved on such grounds from the rolls. Of equality before the law there could be no question whatsoever. So large were the gaps between the classes that for a member of the lower ones to sue his superior was almost unheard of. And when it came to punishment, Senators, in particular were exempt from its most degrading forms.
Originally only senators, known as patres conscripti (registered fathers) could claim leading positions.
So firmly rooted and so self-evident was inequality that even popular reformers such as the Gracchus brothers and Julius Caesar were descended from highly aristocratic families.
As a rule, the Romans neither destroyed Italian cities they had defeated nor enslaved their inhabitants. Nor, on the other hand, did they incorporate their former enemies into their own polity by bestowing citizenship on them. Instead they demonstrated their own political genius by signing treaties with them, giving them limited rights such as connubium (the right to intermarry with Roman citizens) and commercium (trade). Technically the polities that were treated in this way were known as foederati or allies. This meant they no longer had the right to conduct an independent foreign policy, which was handled almost entirely by the Senate at Rome.
Also starting with Augustus, emperors very often appointed themselves pontifex maximus, supreme priest. In this capacity they mediated between their subjects and the worlds of the gods. The inequality that was the result of the elevation of one man over all the rest was accentuated by developments at the bottom of the pyramid. As everyone and everything became firmly subject to the emperor, distinctions between citizen and noncitizen became less important. The so-called Constitutio Antoniana of 212 AD, which gave citizenship to all empire’s inhabitants, carried this process to its logical conclusion. The shape of the social pyramid had changed. In theory, it reached the point where, instead of tapering towards the top, it consisted of a mighty pillar on which stood a single man.
In practice, things were not pushed quite so far. No man, however mighty and however competent, could rule all the rest on his own without the help of associates, big and small. To enlist and maintain their collaboration he had to give some kind of quid pro quo. Men continued to vary enormously in power, rank, and property.
Only in two respects did equality prevail in Rome. First, adherents of the Stoic school of philosophy asserted the natural equality of all human beings. All, slaves included, had sprung from the same stock. They lived under the same skies, had the same biological makeup and needs, and were equal under natural law. However, Stoics never made any kind of organized attempt to tear down existing political, social and economic inequalities. How could they, given that they tended to be upper class men with an emperor, Marcus Aurelius, at their head?
Second, to quote Caligula, who prided himself on his lack of shame in his behavior and readiness to tell the truth, the emperor could do anything to anyone at any time he wanted, including cutting his or her throat. He did not even have to give his reasons. The situation in other empires was usually similar.
In the quest for support, most emperors turned to religion and claimed some kind of divine descent. Even if they did not, they saw themselves as appointed by god and headed the religious establishment of their empires.
One of the most important and long-lived official ideologies that underpinned government and justified the unequal power that some people exercised over others was Chinese Confucianism. Unlike most other civilization, China did not have a supreme god. In some sense, indeed, it did not have any gods at all. As a result, instead of claiming to be descended from the supreme god, Chinese emperors carried the title Son of Heaven (Tien) and claimed to rule over All under Heaven. The way Confucius described the universe, all the inhabitants of All under Heaven were part of a single, though vast, family. Inside that family, everyone and everything had its place which was also mandated by Heaven. Moderns were duty-bound to respect ancients, inferiors, superiors, youngsters their elders and women, men. All these obligations were supposed to be reciprocal. In return for being revered, served and fed, superiors owed inferiors guidance, protection, and benevolence. Confucius himself emphasized that reciprocity — “do unto others as you would have others do unto you” — stands at the very heart of his teaching.
In this system the central value was harmony, not equality. Social life was to be based on the recognition that all people have their proper station in life. They should be treated, and should treat others, accordingly. In this sense, indeed, harmony was consciously meant as a substitute for the inequality nature had created and which was an essential prerequisite for any civilization. Laws, or rather codes of conduct, were not formalized but had to be planted in the people’s hearts and minds instead. The means for doing so were goodwill, example and education, not prohibitions and punishments. This in turn reflected the belief that everybody, however low his or her position in life, had the potential to become virtuous. In this sense at any rate, everyone had indeed been born equal to everybody else.
Not everyone was happy with this way of looking at things. On one side of Confucianism was Daoism. Like Confucianism, it can be seen as a religion, a philosophy, or both. Also like Confucianism, it opposed written laws — “too many laws make the empire decline.” It differs in that it put the individual, not the community, at the center of things. It recognizes that different people have different ways of attaining Dao, meaning “the proper path,” “excellence,” or “a state in which the gap between the existing and the desirable is closed.” To be sure, the rights, tasks and duties of the king were very different from those of the commoner. Still, and it is here that Daoism and Cofucianism differ, everyone is theoretically able to achieve his Dao without reference to anyone else. In this sense all are equal. The Daoist hero, if that is not an oxymoron, is the perfectly self-contained individual. At the same time, so attuned is he to the world that he achieves everything without doing anything.
Rulers in monotheistic societies differed from the rest in that they could be neither divine nor semi-divine. In Judaism this even applied to King David, the most favorite king of all. The most they could aspire was to be God’s chosen, or anointed.
Early Christian congregations formed small, powerless minorities in a pagan sea. They drew their members mainly from the lower classes and were as egalitarian as any communities have ever been.
Later things changed. In heaven, the saints were carefully graded according to their importance. Here on earth, once the Church had emerged from the underground and was officially recognized as the carrier or the state religion it lost no time in building an enormously elaborate hierarchy that consisted of patriarchs, hegemons, cardinals, archbishops, bishops, deacons, and a whole host of less important dignitaries. Each of them occupied a different rank, possessed different powers, and enjoyed different privileges. As any number of Episcopal residences shows, the gap that separated the purple-clad princes of the Church from the simple parish priest was quite as large as those that prevailed in the secular world.
Rather, as was also the case among Christians, equality before God served as an excuse not to institute it on earth. In this sense Marx’s quip that religion is the opium of the masses rings all too true.
It was precisely because no monotheistic ruler could be a god that all three religions could introduce the strange — strange in the sense that, historically speaking, it is rather exceptional — belief that all believers are equal in the eyes of God. In theory they were ready to take in anybody regardless of race, color, nationality, sex and previous creed. Their God was far mightier and far more remote from mankind than in most other religions. He was “the mover who was not moved.”
Everywhere emperors surrounded themselves by elaborate hierarchies without which their rule would have been impossible. Inside each hierarchy some owed their positions to the fact that they were related to the emperor by blood, marriage, or adoption. Other were elevated because of their aristocratic status, i.e. descent, whereas others still were appointed on the basis of loyalty and competence. Some entered the hierarchy from the aristocracy, others made their way up from the bottom. Inside each hierarchy there was a constant jockeying for power. In the end, everything depended on getting the emperor’s ear. In many places independent rich and influential people who were not a part of the imperial hierarchy did indeed exist. However, being outsiders, their position was often as precarious as that of the hierarchy’s members, if not more so.
As we saw, the very fact that city-states rested on citizen-bodies whose members were, in some important ways, each other’s equals formed a formidable obstacle to their unification and expansion. No group has ever been eager to share its privileges with others; as a result, in most cases those obstacles remained insurmountable. Empires, being based on inequality, even if it was only a “soft” inequality dressed in Confucian etiquette, did not suffer from this disadvantage to nearly the same extent. From antiquity down to quite recent times, in principle and very often in practice they were able to swallow up many smaller polities, city-states included, and incorporate many peoples without having to worry about this aspect of the problem. An empire might be defined as a polity that, precisely because it was not rooted in equality, was able to do all those things. But for inequality, most empires could hardly have become what they were.
To be sure, there was a price to be paid. Everywhere superior, regardless of whether it was by status, religion or nationality that they differed from subordinates, had to devote a considerable part of their resources to holding them in their proper place. When that effort failed, as it notoriously did in the case of the Aztec, Inca, and Mughal empires, the entire elaborate structure came crashing down like a house of cards. Not so long ago the same happened first to the various European colonial empires and then to the Soviet Union. Yet considering how mighty some empires became, and how long they lasted, it seems to have been a price they were well able to bear.
Not every empire or kingdom succeeded in preserving its centralized structure over extended periods. Partly this was because distances were often too very great and communications, very poor. To relay information from the capital to the frontier and back might take weeks or more. To assemble an army and march it to a trouble spot took considerably longer still. As a result, provincial governors and officials could not be strictly controlled. The point might come where they were able to leave their positions to their offspring. Understood as a political concept, feudalism was invented during the Enlightenment. As we saw and as we shall see again, the thinkers of that period were obsessed with “equality.” “Feudalism” stood for the opposite of equality as well as anything else associated with the “dark” or “Gothic” ages, as the middle ages were known.
Others define feudalism as a regime where the aristocracy rules by right; others still as one that, in contrast to both the ancient polis and the modern state, drew no sharp distinction between the public and the private. Indeed it could almost be said that the public realm did not exist; government was based not on abstract principles but on personal loyalties. Such a system seems well attuned to human nature. That, in turn may explain why many feudal regimes around the world have often been very long-lived indeed.
At first, chiefs dined in the midst of their men with everyone sitting side by side on long benches. Next, they moved themselves to the head of the table. Next, another table was joined so the first so as to form a T; next, the crossbar of the T was raised and put on a dais. Slowly but surely, chiefs were elevated and metamorphosed into kings. The final step was to interpose a curtain between the king and his queen and everybody else. Only on special festive occasions was the curtain removed so that everyone might see the royal couple eat. From there it was but a short step to instituting ceremonies during which they alone ate while everyone else was obliged to watch.
Although family ties were necessarily important, feudal society was not based on kin to quite the same extent as chiefdoms were. What really counted was fealty on one hand and serfdom on the other. Both, but fealty in particular, created a reciprocal set of rights and obligations. Fealty was formalized by means of ceremonies, gifts, oaths, and later, written documents. The duties of both lords and vassals were laid down by custom. As a result, considerable variation existed both from one place to another and over time. In theory a simple chain led from the highest prince, i.e. the emperor or king, down to the lowliest squire. From him it went on to the serfs who lived on his land and worked it for him. The difference was that, whereas fealty was supposed to be individual, voluntary, and subject to periodical renewal, serfdom was collective, compulsory and hereditary.
As things were, there was often nothing to prevent the same vassal from swearing fealty to, and holding lands from, several lords simultaneously. This made the situation much more complicated.
To add to the confusion, rank did not necessarily reflect power and wealth, nor power and wealth, rank. The outcome was a vast body of aristocrats no two of whom were exactly each other’s equals.
As economies became more monetized from about 1300 onward, land gradually ceased to be the only form of wealth so that the hierarchy that was based on it was disrupted.
Doing so they acquired “privileges,” literally “private laws.”
Depending on the time and the place, the privileges nobles enjoyed included access to court: “The Fountain of Honor,” to use a British expression. On that, everything else depended. Next there was exemption from taxes. Far from paying them, many nobles had the right to levy them in the form of tolls.
In the West, however, the system was not always as watertight as seems to be the case at first glance. Study, self-acquired wealth, service and sheer competence might enable a person to rise both within the class to which one belonged and from one class into another. Both military service and the Church provided such venues. While women rarely joined the quest on their own, under certain circumstances they could advance themselves by successfully identifying an up-and-coming man and marrying him.
It is unlikely that all the people that ever existed were capable of understanding the idea of equality. However, its opposite, oppression — meaning the unjust exercise of power by superiors over inferiors — has always been understood perfectly well. History bristles with attempts, many of them very violent, to end it and put something better in its place. Such struggles often merged with ideological and religious conflicts, revolts aimed at throwing out foreigners and achieving national independence, coups mounted by one person to take power from another, and many similar conflicts. Quite possibly that is one reason why they rarely succeeded in achieving the aim. Even if they did, usually it did not take long for a different but no less unequal order to establish itself.
Some modern authors have argued that, far from wishing to abolish slavery on the way to equality, what the rebels really wanted was to become slave-owners themselves. A society without slaves seems to have been beyond their imaginations.
Still, equality before God apart, the people of no other continent seem to have developed it even as ideal.
The rebels foolishly demanded that there should be no lords, but only kings and peasants. This idea, namely that nobles of all sorts should be done away with and the bad king replaced by a good one, was typical of the middle ages and we shall meet it again.
The few rebel communities that held out for more than a few months often turned into tyrannies. Once that happened their leaders tended to undermine the equality they claimed to pursue by seizing every sort of privilege for themselves.
Whereas early Christian communities were indeed egalitarian, once Constantine put an end to persecution most of them were integrated into society at large. Not only did the Church itself become much more hierarchical than it had been, but many lay aristocrats converted to the new religion. They saw equality, if they thought about it at all, as the last of their concerns.
Under the Tibetian variety of Buddhism the Dalai Lama is, in theory at any rate, an absolute ruler. He is supported by an entire hierarchy of lesser lamas. Elsewhere, however, Buddhism does not recognize any kinds of officials who exercise authority over others. There is, in other words, no Church of which monasteries form a part and by which it is held accountable.
Monasteries survive with the aid of benefactors who donate money or food. By so doing they hope to earn merit and save themselves from spending their next lives as, say, caterpillars. Monks also ask for contributions from visitors who spend some time in them.
Both the Benedictine Rule and the Rule of the Master put great emphasis on the need to prevent monks from spending their time in idleness, which Heaven forbids, but work instead.
As the middle ages took hold, many monasteries received or purchased not only land but entire villages and the people who lived in them. Thus monasticism was perfectly compatible with serfdom, even slavery, in the outside world.
Those brothers whom the Lord favors with the gift of working should do so faithfully and devotedly, so that idleness, the enemy of the soul, is excluded yet the spirit of holy prayer and devotion, which all other temporal things should serve, is not extinguished. As payment for their labor, let them receive that which is necessary for themselves and their brothers, but not money. Let them receive it humbly as befits those who serve God and seek after the holiest poverty.
To start with Plato as the author of the most celebrated utopia of all, he was a fervent admirer of Sparta. That is not because he was a militarist. As he wrote, war is neither educational nor a game. Yet he knew full well that, in the long run, no community can survive without armed force.
To Plato, the origins of external war were luxury, the effeminacy to which it led, and the enemies it attracted. Hence he rather liked Spartan frugality. Even more important was the fact that, to him, civil war was “the worst thing in the world.”
Confucius, a rough contemporary of Plato, thought that people should deal with things as they are, not with those that should be or which they would like to be. Lao Tzu’s Daoist followers were, if anything, even more insistent on this point. This may be why, like the Europeans of the middle ages, Chinese sages rarely tried to paint an imaginary picture of a living, functioning community to replace the real one.
One and all, clearly they were written by authors who knew what hunger is like. Their main purpose is to describe a place — one can hardly speak of an organized society — where everyone has plenty to eat and rink without working. Some of those places are located in the mythological past, others in distant, almost unknown, lands. Several seem to go back to the ancient idea of a Golden Age, “Somewhere, over the rainbow.”
People spend their time almost like so many cattle, amicably sharing an endless, but very fertile, meadow. Never mind that, as the authors must have known from their own observations, in reality free-ranging cattle are as concerned with dominance as most other animals.
The illustrations that sometimes accompany the texts show the blessed dancing, bathing in the fountain of life, etc. To explain how they manage to live without working some of the legends have them drinking pure spring water, feeding on acorn and game, and wearing skins. Others speak of mountains of cheese and rivers of wine. Perhaps because there is plenty of everything to go around, equality is not so much discussed as taken for granted. There is, after all, nothing to compete for.
They enjoy all the leisure in the world; one and all, they are “lively, jovial, handsome, brisk, gay, witty, frolick, cheerful, merry, frisk… precious, alluring, courtly comely, fine, compleat, wise, personable, ravishing and sweet.” There are twice as many positive qualities on the list than letters in the alphabet. The Abbey has only two laws, namely “do as you will” and “be happy.” Since there is no government, equality, though not explicitly mentioned, does prevail. And why not, given that there is no work to be done, no competition for resources, nor any need for defense, and everyone is polite and good?
Furthermore, the kind of order needed to maintain even such equality as did exist could only be maintained by Draconian methods. More has never heard of transparency; simply to discuss public affairs outside the Council was a capital offense. Leaving one’s town without a passport was strictly prohibited. Get caught twice, and slavery is the penalty.
Every kind of labor, manual labor included, is considered honorable. Everyone loves the state and works diligently for it, though just what motivates them in doing so the narrator, a much-traveled sea captain, cannot say. He does, however, comment that they “burn with love” for their country. They are what Christian monks should be if they could give up ambition and greed. The state, in turn, meets everybody’s needs on an equal basis.
The ruler carries the title of Sole (“Sun”). He is high priest, chief executive, and supreme judge. Nobody can be Sole whose wisdom is not perfect; but how he is “chosen,” or by whom, is not clear. He appoints three principal assistants called, in translation, Power, Wisdom, and Love. They in turn appoint their own assistants, creating an entire hierarchy.
However, this democratic system does not apply to Sun, Power, Wisdom, and Love. The four of them form a cabal; the one thing that can prevent them from abusing their positions is their own infinite wisdom.
Whereas, in The City of the Sun, the basis of all good are knowledge and understanding, in Christianopolis that role is played by, what else, Christianity.
This leaves monasteries and “utopian” societies. Monasteries can only exist as islands in a large society that protects them and meets their economic needs. Often this meant, and means, a highly un-egalitarian economic basis. Among the monks a certain kind of equality may indeed exist, but only as long as their numbers are kept quite small. Once their numbers grow past a certain point, some machinery for maintaining discipline is required, causing inequality to rear its head again.
Utopias fall into two kinds. From Plato to Andreae, some are highly structured. Normally socio-economic equality prevails, but only at the cost of a powerful government that is neither egalitarian nor transparent. Another reason for this, as well as for the absence of liberty, is the need for defense and the hope to improve the human race by selective breeding. By contrast, Chinese utopias are located in secret places. Their security is assured, which enables them to do without strong government, in other words superiors and inferiors. That is even more true of medieval utopias, including Rabelais’s. Not only are they inaccessible, but production, distribution and ownership have been abolished. People, not least Rabelais’s aristocrats, live like free-roaming cattle. Either children come into the world without sex and already grown, as in the legends, or else they do not exist, as with Theleme. Otherwise they might spoil the fun and force the utopians, women in particular, to behave responsibly. Either inequality or dehumanization, it seems, is the choice utopia presents us.
In this work he invented sovereignty and the sovereign. Sovereignty meant two things. The first was the need to concentrate all power in the hands of a person or body. That in turn implied the cancellation of all privileges and a return to the kind of rule under which everyone had equal rights, or, though Bodin did not dare say so openly, no rights. The second was that all sovereigns, since they could not and did not acknowledge any superior above themselves, were equal. The old idea which lay at the heart of feudal regimes in particular, about some sulers being superior and other inferior, was false.
Of the two ideas, equality among sovereigns proved more acceptable. By the late 17th century the Peace of Westphalia had turned it into an established fact.
The war provided definite proof that the days when God and religion could act as the basis of government were gone for good. How, then, to realize this goal, which was to impose order at all costs? There was only one thing to do: namely, to forget about God and go back to the beginning, back to “the state of nature.”
In the primeval state of nature, Hobbes explained, everybody had a right to everything, which is the same as saying that nobody had any rights at all. In that sense everyone was exactly equal to everyone else. “Though there be found one man sometimes manifestly stronger in body, or of quicker mind than another; yet when all is reckoned together, the difference between man, and man, is not so considerable, as that one man can thereupon claim to himself any benefit, to which another may not pretend, as well as he. For as to the strength of body, the weakest has strength enough to kill the strongest, either by secret machination, or by confederacy with others, that are in the same danger with himself. And as for the faculty of the mind, I find yet a greater equality amongst men, than that of strength. For such is the nature of men, that they will hardly believe there be many so wise as themselves, there is not ordinarily a greater sign of the equal distribution of anything, than that every man is contended with his share.”
Men are driven by an endless quest for power that only ceases with death. Hence, the outcome of natural equality is the perpetual warfare of all against all. However, humans are endowed with reason. To avoid a war which could be ruinous to all, they have agreed to sign a covenant, or social contract. Under that contract they give up all their rights and transfer them to the commonwealth, or state, or Leviathan, instead. At this point Hobbes pulls a second great innovation out of his magician’s hat. The Greek polis and Republican Rome apart, in all previous civilizations rulers had ruled because, by virtue of the divine descent and / or support they enjoyed, or their ancestry, or their wealth, they possessed greater rights than others. With Hobbes, though, the right to govern was transferred, not to a person but to an abstract entity. All the ruler did was to “carry” that entity on his shoulders and embody it. As the state, “a mortal god,” took the place of a person, or persons, inequality became superfluous as a basis for government. Inside it everyone was equal. What power one exercised and what privileges one enjoyed originated in the office one occupied, not in one’s divine descent or support, or ancestry, or property.
In America the Puritans, while in many ways conservatively-minded, at first sought to combine most of the different kinds of equality we have studied so far. That included equality before God, equality before the law, and socio-economic equality. In trying to achieve the last of those, they had the immense advantage of being able to divide a new country, or as much of it as they had acquired, among themselves. Yet they also wanted liberty. Since equality and liberty are, in principle, incompatible, such a system presupposed the kind of voluntary restraint only a community of saints can maintain.
Not surprisingly, it did not work. Early on the Puritan settlements made their living mainly by scratching the earth. As they prospered and gradually derived a greater part of their income from industry and trade, liberty gained priority over equality as in many ways it still does in the US. Socio-economic gaps among the settlements’ members started opening up. With them came differences in political power.
“The true founder of civil society was the first man who, having enclosed a piece of land, thought of saying, ‘This is mine,’ and came across people simple enough to believe him.” The failure to correct him was the origin of all crimes, wars, and murders. As populations grew the family, housing, tools, agriculture, and metallurgy made their appearance. So did specialization and the division of labor. More important still, people lost their innocence. They started seeing themselves through the eyes of others, leading to competition, vanity, influence, and authority.
From beginning to end, the objective is to preserve and foster everything in them that is “natural.” Doing so requires that people give up their birthright, i.e. the kind of freedom nature had given them. Rousseau’s ideal community offers even less liberty and is less tolerant of individual differences than the sovereign who “carries” Hobbes’ Leviathan on his strong shoulders. The latter, after all, is only interested in order. There is a paradox here. As with Plato, who put as strong an emphasis on education as Rousseau did, first people are given the most perfect education to help them become and remain what nature has made them. Next, on pain of being excommunicated, they must subordinate themselves to, and lose themselves in, the general will. In Rousseau’s paradise things are taken to the point where everybody is obliged to wear the same clothes. Even if all of this were feasible, if that is the price of equality then who wants it?
Montesquieu also suggested a bicameral legislative in which the two chambers would balance one another. And how was a system in which some governed others, albeit democratically, to be reconciled with equality? Simple, Montesquieu answered: Equality means “not that everybody should command, or that no one should be commanded, but that we obey or command our equals.”
Especially compared with Europe, a certain kind of equality, and even more so the idea of equality, did in deed prevail. The first reason for this was that a “feudal” society had never existed. That meant that descent, and the privileges it conferred in other countries, did not count for much. Slavery apart, what lawful authority some people exercised over others was solely by virtue of the public offices they held or, in the case of indentured servants, a covenant both sides had voluntarily entered. The fact that indenture was always temporary diminished its impact. The second was the absence in many places of a powerful government. Always in theory, and often in practice, whoever wanted could move west. Over there, a thin population and primeval conditions prevented strong hierarchies from being formed. The third was the lingering influence of Puritanism. It continued to insist on equality in front of God; unlike most polities at most time and places, most colonies had neither a state religion nor a powerful ecclesiastical hierarchy to enforce it. As important, in theory at any rate, it considered all work honorable.
The Constitution itself can be interpreted, and often has been interpreted, as a document deliberately designed to enable the rich to retain their property while keeping the poor firmly in their place.
The Republic has also been a model of political stability. In almost 25 decades there have been no coups, not even attempted ones. Even the assassination of a few presidents and the impeachment of one of them have not prevented power from being transferred in an orderly manner. The Constitution itself has been modified several times. Much of this is due to “equality,” meaning that no part of the population was able to lord it over the rest.
The US did, however, fully meet Plato’s description of democracy as “feverish.” The more it grew, the more it turned into perhaps the most competitive, dynamic, fastest-changing, society the world has ever seen. The more it grew, too, the stronger its tendency to engage in foreign adventures or, as George Washington called them, “entanglements.” Since at least the early 1960s, most of these adventures have been foolish indeed. Not one did anything to advance America’s interests, and several have ended in resounding defeats.
Though the countries of the Old World also moved towards equality, with them the process took very different forms. The major reason that was the existence of centuries-old “feudal” privileges which could not be abolished without a struggle. By and large, the further east one went the greater the obstacles and the longer it took to remove them.
Jefferson’s Declaration of Independence had nothing to say about property. In this it differed from its French equivalent. By promising to protect both equality and property, the latter contradicted itself. The contradiction, left-wing critics would say, was inherent in “liberal” equality.
To put rich and poor on a more equal footing, they also wanted MPs to be paid.
It did not originate from within, but was forced on the country by the smashing defeat it had recently suffered at Napoleon’s hands. Some, though not all, of the aristocracy’s privileges were abolished, as was serfdom. Henceforward all Prussian subjects were free, and a considerable degree of civic equality was instituted.
True, every adult male Prussian was now entitled to vote. However, the electorate was divided into three classes according to the taxes each person paid. Each class was entitled to fill one third of the seats in parliament. The way it was done, an upper-class voter was worth almost 20 lower-class ones.
Education was just as important. From the time of Plato on, many authors had seen it as the only possible foundation on which everything else could be built. On both sides of the Atlantic, throughout the century universal, compulsory and free education was greatly expanded. Much, though not all, of this was occasioned by the demand for equality. Not everybody could be a university professor; but at any rate it was possible to give everyone some kind of foundation on which he could later build.
Many country clubs did not accept Jews, and many university had quotas for them. In the case of the former it was probably simple anti-Semitism. In that of the latter, it was because Jewish students were so numerous and so good that faculties felt overwhelmed by them. It is said that nowadays, the same kind of reverse affirmative action is being applied to Asian students. The persistence, even in the most “advanced” liberal-democratic countries, of unofficial discrimination caused many Jews to turn to socialism. Only the latter, they hoped, would really remove the obstacles under which they labored and put them on an equal basis with everyone else.
The process culminated in 1948 when liberal equality was extended to “everyone” and formally enshrined in the UN Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Yet as considerable as the achievements of liberalism and democracy were, they did little to reduce socio-economic inequality. So little, in fact, that many came to regard liberalism and democracy as mere fig leaves to cover its absence.
Man is the animal that invents its own past. Never was that more true than in the 19th century; and never more than that at the hands of socialist and communist writers. Like so many other modern ideologues, they discarded God and looked to history to make their case.
Then as now, some tycoons felt the need to justify their wealth by helping build a better world. Others, such as the railway-car manufacturer George Pullman, hoped to turn a profit as well. He did so by renting out houses to his workers and introducing the truck system whereby the latter received their pay in company money. The coupons in question could only be spent at the company’s shops. Equality through semi-slavery, one might say.
To save money, many communities were set up in relatively uninviting places and led a fairly frugal life. Nevertheless, maintaining equality proved harder than many had expected. Even administering a relatively small community consisting of a few dozen members takes some skill and charisma. Not everybody was a Lycurgus or a Solon who, having carried out their reforms, exiled themselves from their native cities. Instead, leaders who had those skills and that charisma often translated them into privileges of every kind. In the case of Mormon communities, those included not just money and comforts but sexual access to many of the community’s female members. Some leaders even tried to pass their status, and of course their privileges, to their offspring. At the other extreme were members who, far from contributing as much as they could, had joined specifically because they were unwilling or unable to make it on their own in the outside world.
Meals were taken in common, and indeed the completion of the communal dining hall always acted as visible proof of the fact that the kibbutz had become firmly established.
Nevertheless, in the long run the kibbutzniks were swamped by the rest of Israeli society. As the latter became better of economically, living standards rose. Kibbutz members wanted a piece of the action even if it meant, as it almost always did, greater inequality among them. The outcome was transformation. Some kibbutzim did away with common meals and children’s houses so that members came to live in their own, considerably enlarged apartments and even bungalows. Others started paying their members differential salaries based on the skills their work demanded and their performance. All most all ended the free distribution of clothes and other household items. Some transferred houses and the land on which they stood to private ownership. Since some of the land in question is enormously valuable, the process often gave rise to the most acrimonious disputes imaginable. As the saying goes, “small place, big hell.”
Rather like most monasteries, past and present, all of the different kind of communities discussed in this section formed islands within much larger societies. Especially in the early Middle Ages, and also in the Middle East, some monasteries were heavily fortified to withstand Norse or Arab marauders. On the whole, though, they were unconcerned with what is usually the most important function of any government, i.e. the use of armed force for offense and defense.
It was only around 1900 that the German socialist Eduard Bernstein and the Russian communist one Vladimir Putin drew a clear line between socialism and communism. Socialists hoped to achieve their goals gradually, peacefully, and by democratic means as more and more people voted for them. Not so communists, who believed they could only do so by setting up a tight body of disciplined party members, engaging in bloody revolution, and imposing the dictatorship of the proletariat.
Many countries in Western Europe and Australia adopted a democratic form of socialism. Others, located in Asia and Africa, claimed to combine socialism with dictatorship or, as they preferred to call it, one-party rule. Yet they were not strictly communist.
Socialists raised the same old questions as Plato had: is a system that grant civic equality but leaves socio-economic inequality intact really egalitarian? How just is a justice system that impose the same fine for the same offense on rich and poor alike? Isn’t it true that economic power can be, and often has been, translated into political power as well? And isn’t it true that the “voluntary” submission of the poor in all liberal systems is often not voluntary at all? By far the best-known documentation that sought to undermine belief in liberal equality was the Communist Manifesto. Its authors, Karl Marx and Engels were aged 29 and 27 respectively when they wrote it in 1848. In thunderous prose, they denounce every form of oppression by one class of another from the beginning of history on.
American workers dreamt of becoming capitalists, not of eliminating them.
The problem of poverty was also alleviated, though it never disappeared. Still, equality did not come for free. First, many of the nationalized industries proved to be monuments of inefficiency. Second, taxation, and with it the share of the state in GDP, went up, sometimes dramatically so. So heavy was the burden that, during the 1970s, almost all the countries in question suffered from chronic underinvestment. With underinvestment came massive underemployment. Unemployment led to transfer payments, which led to taxation (or, if it did not, to inflation), which led to underinvestment, and so on in a vicious cycle few countries escaped.
Second, much of what equality socialism was able to achieve was due to a series of measures the Communist Manifesto never mentioned: namely, transfer payments, or entitlements, as they are often called. In Britain, during the same period, they amounted to fully one quarter of GDP. Even in the US, by 1977 almost half of the population was receiving them — at the expense of the other half, needless to say. Early in the 21st century they accounted for the largest part of the current-account deficit by far. Speaking of equality, is there really any reason why some should be entitled to something regardless of work, merit, or accomplishment? Should one receive money from the state merely because one is young, or old, or divorced, or homeless, or sick, or shiftless? Perhaps so; as Saint Thomas Aquinas wrote, the reason why God has created the poor is to encourage the rest of us to give to charity. By doing so we preserve our humanity. A society that does not help its weaker members does not deserve to be called a society at all.
Third, Marx and Engels looked down on “utopian” socialists, a term they themselves had coined. Their own views, they claimed, were based on “scientific materialism” and historical processes whose laws they had mastered and whose general direction they could foresee. Objective facts, not wishful thinking, should rule supreme. Yet this approach did not prevent them from sharing the idea that the end of exploitation of inferiors by superiors and the establishment of socialism / communism would make government unnecessary. Instead of government, whose sole purpose was to enforce inequality between the classes, there would be administration.
As it turned out, nothing could be more mistaken. Socialism did not mean that managers took the place of politicians and that politics, meaning the process whereby society determines who gets how much of what, waned away. Instead, the opposite happened. Managers became politicians and politicians, managers. Far from losing power, politicians increased it. They took over a whole range of fields that they had previously been content to leave more or less alone, reaching deep into society’s guts. To return to Britain as our example, politicians, or else political appointees, now ran every one of the industries listed above. This meant that, in addition to democratically ruling other their fellow citizens, they also wielded direct economic control over millions of workers. With power came privilege, in other words inequality.
As Marx had predicted, it was brought about through revolution and a bloody civil war. In the process countless aristocrats, wealthy people, and senior civil servants who had served the previous regime were killed and had their property confiscated. The same fate overtook anybody identified as “an enemy of the people” or, to quote Lenin, whose existence was considered “inexpedient.” If there were any trials at all, they were of the kind where the accused is not permitted to defend him- or herself. As Marx had also predicted, these events led to the creation of the dictatorship of the proletariat or, to be precise, of a small clique of determined leaders who claimed to represent it.
Most communes numbered 4-5,000 households though some were larger than that. Each was a kind of cage to which people were bound by a system of household registration, work units, and terror over themselves and others. Production was carried out in common as each member was assigned his or her task every morning. Private cooking was banned and meals were taken in dining halls. Some communes even tried to prohibit the use of money.
Everywhere members, depending on their party rank, were privileged. Senior officials were better paid, but that was the least of their benefits. The latter included homes and vacation homes; superior access to transportation in form of private cars and chauffeurs; superior access to educational facilities for themselves and their children; superior access to cultural, entertainment, and leisure facilities; superior access to information, both domestic and foreign; and superior access to hospitals, clinics, etc.
Unless some superior official had ordered it to be used against them, members of the elite were also largely free from police harassment. That in turn meant they could break the law as they saw fit.
Often they married each other, giving birth to something like a hereditary aristocracy.
For half a century after 1848 Socialism and Communism were all but indistinguishable. It was only around 1900 that they clearly separated.
Liberalism aimed at instituting a kind of equality that would enable everyone to compete with everyone else on a legally equal basis. Socialism sought a world in which everyone would be so equal that competition itself would become superfluous and fade away. Despite their difference, proponents of both doctrines agreed with Hobbes that nature, or God as the case might be, had created all men equal. Liberals thought inequality grew out of competition and attempted to organize things in such a way that everyone should be allowed to compete under equal conditions. Socialists thought it grew out of private property, and the more extreme of them tried to eliminate it.
In reality, Hobbes was breaking revolutionary grown. In all of history, nothing could be less self-evident than the idea that everybody was, or ought to be, equal. Starting during the first half of the 19th century, powerful voices began asserting that inequality, this time not between individuals but between human “races,” was a biological fact. Far from wasting their efforts in a vain attempt to fight it and eradicate it, men and women should do what they could to protect and foster it. Failure to do so was tantamount to declaring war on their own “blood” — and, in the end, bringing about a situation where human civilization itself might collapse.
True racism consists of three elements. First, there is the notion that the groups in question differed not only physically but mentally, i.e. in intelligent, emotional makeup, criminal tendencies, etc. Second, those characteristics are said to be inherent and heritable so that they pass from one generation to the next. Third, the people of some races are superior to others and are entitled to rule over them, if not to enslave them, exploit them, and even exterminate them in pursuit of their own objectives.
There probably has never been a society that did not hold at least one of these beliefs. The ancient Greeks considered themselves as freedom-loving by nature and thus superior to everybody else. The Romans were prepared to grant that others excelled them in some fields, but only as long as those others allowed them, the Romans, to rule over them.
Many of these societies also placed restrictions on the freedom to marry. Moslem men could marry Christian women (if the latter converted), but Moslem women could not marry Christian men. Jews were supposed to marry only within their own group.
Of the three, the white race was the only one capable of building an orderly, sophisticated, civilization. That civilization, in turn, went back through the Germanic tribes, Rome, and Greece all the way to the “Aryans” of ancient India.
Since some races were superior to others, the greatest sin of all was miscegenation. Mixing blood could only lead to chaos and degeneration.
Even Gobineau’s own country, France, was not immune. The French nation was made up of three sub-races. They were, in descending order of excellence, Nordics, Alpines, and Mediterraneans. The first two were clearly white but the last-named had been tainted by an infusion of black and Semitic blood.
Not that racism was new to America as none other than Jefferson had led the way: “Comparing them by their faculties of memory, reason, and imagination, it appears to me that in memory they are equal to whites; in reason, much inferiors as I think one could scarcely be found capable of tracing and comprehending the investigations of Euclid; and that in imagination they are dull, tasteless and anomalous.”
America being a country of immigrants, blacks were not the only victims of racism. At various times Germans, Irish, Italians, Mexicans, and of course Chinese and Japanese were all looked down upon and discriminated against. Visiting foreigners often made Americans uncomfortable by their comments on this contradiction. Nowhere else was the eugenics movement as strong as precisely in the land of the free.
When Japan proposed that a paragraph concerning the equality of all races be included in the Charter of the League of Nations, its demand was rejected.
Instead, racism was directed primarily against two groups. Austrian Germans, of whom Hitler was one, very much feared being swamped by the Slav, mainly Czech, populations of the Empire since the latter’s birth rate far exceeded their own.
Furthermore, gradation was a question of race, not religion or wealth or anything of that kind. No mere human hands could alter what nature in her wisdom had determined. Attempts to do so could only lead to bastardization, degeneration, and, ultimately, the demise of the superior race. “National Socialism opposes the theories based on the equality of all men.”
Ancestry was equated with race, race with the alleged superiority of Germanic people over all the rest. WW1, which saw Germany fighting practically the entire world, added the idea of a common fate — one everybody shared “in prosperity and in ruin,” as Germans say.
In the words of one famous slogan, “you are nothing, your Volk is everything.” In face of the people or nation, all individuals were equally insignificant. Something has already been said about traditional German obsequiousness and submissiveness to authority.
The Nazis were neither the first or the last who insisted on keeping the blood of their own group “pure.” Like others, they put a special emphasis on female chastity. They claimed that any woman who slept with an Untermensch, or subhuman, even once would spoil her blood forever and could no longer have healthy Aryan offspring.
Like Roman god Janus, the Third Reich had two faces. On one hand it was nothing if not hierarchical. On the other it emphasized to Golden Rule: “Treat your comrade as you would like him to treat you.” What distinguished the Nazis was the fact that, instead of referring to humanity as a whole, they only meant healthy members of their own “racial community.”
Sooner or later, all of these peoples, and many other as well, learned the lesson that the people whom they despised so much were at least their equals in the place where it mattered most of all, i.e. the battlefield.
It was only brought to an end in 1975. For 40 years before 1965 the US took in immigrants on the basis of racial quotas expressly designed to discriminate among people from different parts of the world. To this day many European countries do whatever they can to prevent immigrants from Asia and Africa from entering. Japan has exceptionally rigid immigration policy. So, for different reasons, does Israel. Poor countries may be more permissive, but only because few people want to enter them anyhow. Both rich and poor pay lip-service to the idea that all men are equal. Yet their laws and day-to-day behavior shows that they do not believe in it any more than the ancient Athenians, who rigidly excluded other Greeks from citizenship, did.
Yet South African was not the USA. Its economy was almost entirely dependent on the export of foodstuffs and raw materials, so in the long run it was in no position to ignore external pressures and UN-imposed sanctions.
As the character in the French comic series Asterix puts it, people don’t mind foreigners as long as they stay in their own foreign places. On the whole, the world is probably not much closer to equality than it has ever been.
As the Nazis also found out, in some ways it is easier to kill hundreds of thousands or even millions of people than to decide exactly who should, and should not, be killed.
The most important privileges were the right to be supported by their husbands and the right not to go to war, not to fight, and not to die for their dearly beloved rulers, polities, and countries.
If demographics count for anything, the future of patriarchy — not the comparatively mild form of patriarchy that is said to have characterized the West, but the more rigorous Islamic variety — seems assured.
The result was “the typical human pattern by far is sex-for-food deal between a man and a woman with children attached.”
Having joined her sister in running a school for girls, she believed that most women were only too happy to accept the privileges that men, seeking sex and love, were offering them. Never mind that the price of privilege was subordination.
As has been said, the feminist movements’ cathedrals are the abortion clinics on one hand the adoption agencies on the other.
Many feminists who demand equality do so primarily because they despise women and admire men.
Among the worst sinners in this regard were the Nazis. They simply killed many of those who could not look after themselves and whom they perceived as inferior. That, too is a way to impose equality.
However that may be, in today’s “advanced” countries, the drive towards equality has reached the point where almost anybody who says anything about a member of a “disadvantaged” group can be, and quite often is, accused of being offensive. To avoid committing thoughtcrime, many of us engage in Newspeak.
Social science is an inexact science and presumably will always remain so. Definitions capable both of expressing an idea or concept in an unambiguous way and of surviving ongoing change are very rare, perhaps nonexistent. In their absence, what constitutes “offensive behavior” and “offensive speech” is very much a question of individual decision as well as political power. The quest for equality is causing them to expand all the time. Countless acts and words that were acceptable yesterday no longer are so today.
Paradoxically, but perhaps not surprisingly, in may ways the quest for equality is taking us back to times and places where people did not believe in it and may not have even heard of it or known what it meant. In some of those places they were prohibited from believing that there was no God. Now, in many of the self-proclaimed advanced countries, equality itself has been turned into the most jealous, and most vindictive, god of all. He may not demand bloody sacrifices and prayer, but he certainly requires certain forms of decorum and acceptance of dogma as well as an endless capacity for simulation, dissimulation, hypocrisy, and embracing one euphemism after another.
Add the other groups, and it is clear that “minorities” have turned into the majority.
The outcome is a new phenomenon known as reverse discrimination. Its targets are groups, usually white males, whose members were, at one time or another, perceived as the “dominant” ones. As the law has turned against them, with every passing day they are being made less equal than the rest. Some countries, notably Britain, even have a “minister for equality.” As of 2012 the portfolio was held by a woman. Her real job, taken straight out of 1984, is to make sure men in general and able-bodied heterosexual ones in particular are discriminated against as much as possible.
Many social scientists are now obliged to submit their projects to “ethics committees.” Hence those who still dare to ask the relevant questions will run into difficulties even before they start. Research into the differences, biological and social, between sexes is still permitted, but only on conditions that the results favor men. Those whose findings indicate the opposite will find the road ahead filled with obstacles.
The timing appeared as propitious as it could be. The US was flourishing like no nation before or since. Economic growth was steady, inflation moderate, unemployment way down. The War in Southeast Asia was already under way, but it had not yet developed into the all-devouring cancer it was to become during the next few years. To quote a visiting German journalist, “utopia and reality seemed to coincide.” Taking a minority of about 11 percent of the population by the hand so as to enable each person to “become whatever his qualities of mind and spirit would permit” did not seem impossible either economically, socially, or politically.
The signal having been given by the single most powerful person on earth, equality of opportunity began its march of conquest.
Sometimes students of different races were compelled to sit next to one another. This was equality with a vengeance, except that it did not work. It did not work because forcing students to attend schools they did not want to attend was seen as degrading by those at the top and those at the bottom alike. It did not work because, in most cases, instead of those at the top pulling the bottom-most upwards, the opposite happened. It also did not work because the parents of those at the top, realizing what was happening, moved their children from public schools into private ones. Since doing so was expensive, often it made the more equal more equal still.
For good or ill, adults could not be treated as the children were. But they could be, and often were, subjected to many other forms of reverse discrimination. Often this was done in the name of “diversity.” The invention of the term itself reflected the fact that, instead of one group demanding special rights for itself, there were now many.
Those responsible for enacting the relevant laws and supervising the process were, almost without exception, members of the upper or at least upper-middle classes. They were well educated, lived in expensive neighborhoods, and had their children attend good schools. They had good jobs and good incomes. Their positions were safely beyond the reach of most minority groups, ethnic ones in particular, whom they claimed to be helping improving their condition. Thus the burden of achieving diversity was not uniformly, or at least widely, distributed over society as a whole. Instead it was thrust primarily onto the shoulders of one particular group. Its members were elderly, blue collar, and male.
This is one reason why female politicians in Germany, Chancellor Merkel included, tend to reach the Bundestag faster than their male colleagues. In other words, being a woman automatically means being put on the fast track — with all the advantages and disadvantages, such as less time for one’s own life, that such a track entails.
The largest “minority” consists fo women. As a result, “gender equality” may well represent the most difficult problem of all. At stake are not some marginal adjustments but the creation of an entirely new society with no historical precedent whatsoever. It used to be said that, to get ahead, a woman must be much better than any man (some added that, fortunately, that was not very difficult). Now in many cases things work the other way around. In many countries, men are being systematically discriminated against from infancy on.
In large part this is probably because, certainly as far as Western countries are concerned, ours is the most peaceful period in history. One’s chance of dying in war have become very small indeed. Under such conditions women no longer need men to protect them as they always have. Men, a minority, are finding themselves with their backs up against the wall. But how long will men’s lamb-like acquiescence with their new status in which women have all the privileges and they bear all the burdens last?
We live in an age where no regime is deemed legitimate unless it is democratic. That is why even many of those that are nothing of the kind call themselves “People’s Republics.”
In a sense, people have always tried to improve on whatever qualities nature had given them.
Much of this is done in the name of inequality. Some people want not only to be more equal than others but to look it, too. One author speaks of enhancing what she calls “erotic capital.” Erotic capital, she explains, is what makes some people, especially women, so much more attractive than others. It gives those who have it a huge advantage in life.
And what happens to a fetus that is found to be severely abnormal but which the mother, for whatever reason, refuses to abort? Should she be coerced? E chi paga, as the Italian say? Who pays?
Science having learnt “to discriminate among births,” almost everybody is energetic, sanguine, creative, receptive and good-tempered. Those who are not have died out or are dying out. As Wells specifically says, utopians know neither kindness or mercy. In a world where everybody is perfectly equal such qualities are not required. All children are born to perfectly healthy mothers. They grow up under perfectly healthy conditions, receive a perfectly good education, and form a perfect race of “stark Apollos.”
Another possibility is that ongoing developments will give rise to so much discontent, especially among men, as to result in armed rebellion and blow democracy itself sky-high. The two scenarios may be combined. Historically speaking, rare is the ruling class that has given up its privileges without a bloody fight.
Even less than monks, who after all lead an orderly life, are soldiers, especially those on campaign, in a position to know exactly when death may be coming at them. Not knowing when their time will come, it is necessary to ensure, as far as possible, they will be ready to face it at all times. The methods used for the purpose could easily fill a separate book.
When focusing on the question of equality, we are facing a paradox. Since ancient times, no organizations have been more hierarchical, more disciplined, more unequal, than armies. In general, the stronger the military hierarchy is, the better the army…. All this is done to ensure that there should be no confusion as to who issues orders and who obeys them and carries them out. When danger threatens and death is harvesting people on every side, equality and democracy are the last things we want.
How to decide who is to go on the suicidal mission that will open the way to the rest of the army? Who will stay behind in order to cover its retreat? That is why, commanders have often asked for volunteers to step forward and undertake the most dangerous missions of all.
Without equality, cohesion is inconceivable. Cohesion, the ability to stick together an stay together through thick and thin, is the most important quality any military formation must have. Without it such a formation is but a lose gathering of men, incapable of coordinated action and easily scattered, and of little military use. In all well-organized armies at all times and places, the first step towards cohesion has always been to put everyone on an equal basis. Often the process starts when all new recruits are given the same haircut.
Long after the war has ended and they themselves have retired, soldiers look back in nostalgia to the time when they were all equal. They meet, they reminiscence, they drink, and they visit the places where they fought.
In a different way, the same applies to Buddhism. For Buddhists heaven and hell are located not in the non-existent afterlife but here on earth. However, as long as people live they are graded on a kind of point system. Those whose karma is good will be reborn into a higher station than the one they left behind. A wise person will therefore do well to invest in merit so as to become more, not less, than he is.
Clearly Dante was a man of immense learning familiar with all the sciences of his day.
Unlike Hell, Paradise is a place of sunlight and temperate weather. There are located those who exercised the four cardinal virtues, i.e. prudence, justice, restraint, and courage; also, of those who practiced the three theological virtues of faith, hope and charity.
Strangely enough, it is precisely the religions which never cease claiming that, as far as they are concerned, everybody is equal in the sight of God which have imagined the least egalitarian afterlives of all. One cannot help wondering whether there is a lesson there.
Kingdoms and empires whose center did not hold, and which allowed their leading members to pass their privileges to their offspring, readily degenerated into feudal systems.
The driving force of monasteries was religion. In both east and west, many monasteries incorporated some sort of relative, though hardly ever absolute, form of equality. Yet monasteries were utterly dependent on the protection and support of the unequal societies around them.
Furthermore, similar to many socialist and all communist ones, the ship the Nazis ran was highly centralized and highly authoritarian. What equality was achieved, in other words, had to be paid for by liberty.
Countless chiefdoms and kingdoms were born, rose, prospered, declined, died, and were replaced by others while equality was given hardly a thought. From Egypt to Persia and China to imperial Rome, some of the most powerful empires ever paid no respect to the concept.
These empires developed ideologies that were anything but egalitarian. One of the most important of those, Confucianism, has outlasted all the rest. Its emphasis on hierarchy, the deference of inferiors to superiors, and social harmony still plays a paramount role in large parts of today’s world and will almost certainly continue to do so for a long time to come. Singapore, by common assent one of the most successful modern polities, attributes its achievements to Confucian principles.
Hundreds of millions of people, who before they were conquered by modern imperialism had never heard about it, turned it against their masters and appealed to it to justify their own liberation. The quest for it has been the source both of great progress and of countless wars, some of them very bloody. If anything it seems to become more powerful, not less. Like everything else it is unlikely to last forever; but at present practically any movement seeking any kind of social change is compelled to adopt it. No substitute is in sight.
Second, liberty. Imposing equality entails the sacrifice of liberty because, as both history and biology prove, whenever people and animals are left alone it will not be long before some start becoming more equal, even much more equal, than others.
Third, truth. Here the problem is that, in many cases, the dogma of equality requires giving up the search for truth, even the idea of truth itself. Isn’t treating all religions — or for that matter opinions — equally tantamount to saying that they simply do not matter? Conversely, are we going to prohibit those who still believe in the reality of race, as opposed to “ethnicity,” from speaking freely like everyone else? Do we really want a situation, which in many places already exists, where in order to prevent “bias,” only blacks are allowed to do research on blacks, women on women, and the like, thus making sure that the truth, assuming such a thing does in fact exist, will never be discovered?
Monogamy, meaning the kind of legal equality that prevents any man from cornering and marrying more women than any other, is certain to lead to a sharp distinction between legitimate and illegitimate offspring and, in this way, give birth to its opposite.