Egalitarianism: all people are people, and deserve equal treatment under the law:. Egalitarianism is the foundation of civilized society; without it, there are no standards to which appeal can be made, and what you have instead is not civilization, but institutionalized barbarism.
That’s why, to me, egalitarianism is one of the most important principles after reason and benevolence. (You’ll note I didn’t say “rationality” there, because in my conceptual lexicon, logic, rationality, and reason each refer to three increasingly sophisticated ways of thinking, and for most problems, rationality just doesn’t cut it. But to see why, we’ll have to wait until we get to the Ls or Rs). Even if we are making good choices, with good intent, if the system does not apply those to all people equally, we are still failing them.
Most of the problems we have in society ultimately come down to failures to implement egalitarianism. Royalty? Bigotry? Misogyny? Corruption? Oligarchy? Communism? Ultimately, all of these tools of oppression come down to the basic principle that there’s one special group of people – a family, a race, a gender, an in-group, power-brokers, a party – who is ideally suited to making the rules for everyone else, and once that is established, money and power quickly start getting sucked into those old vampires.
This is why another concept that I’m fond of, “authorial endorsement,” is relevant to a famous science fiction story, “Harrison Bergeron” by Kurt Vonnegut. In the story, everyone in the United States is “finally equal” in the far future because the United States Constitution dictates no-one can be better than anyone else: pretty people have to wear ugly masks, strong people have to wear weights, smart people have to wear concentration-destroying devices, and so on, and so forth, ad absurdum.
People who should know better claim this story is something called “satire,” and Vonnegut himself liked to pretend that his story didn’t mean exactly what it seemed to mean, but for the rest of us, the story endorses the conclusion that equality under the law means equality of outcomes. Typically, that either appeals to the bigot in you who’s offended by the idea that the law should treat everyone equally – and the people who I knew growing up who liked that interpretation of the story did indeed grow up to be bigots – or else you quickly realize that the story is aggressively missing the point of egalitarianism.
Equality under the law can’t mean equality of outcomes. It can’t. Not everyone starts in the same place; it isn’t even possible to define a uniform frame of reference from which everything could be viewed in the same way. The rules of relativity are inescapable. The only way to ensure equality of outcomes under the law is to treat people differently if they start in different places. And that’s not egalitarianism.
We need one law for all people. We need to treat all people as people. That means both trying not to enshrine differences and not to erase them; it means both trying not to privilege one group of people nor trying to erase others. It’s fricking hard. But it’s what makes our civilization a civilized place for everyone.
Some people don’t like it. I know quite a few. Many of those seem offended if the world simply contains people different than they want to see, and some of them even seem outraged if the world makes reasonable accommodations for people whose needs are different. Trying to pretend different people all have the same needs, or that we can ignore people who are minorities, also is not egalitarianism: it’s putting your thumb on the scale so that some “default” group gets most of the resources.
Under governments powered by tax dollars, egalitarianism involves not taking too much from anyone so that they can’t live, taking more from those who can give more without constraining their freedom of action, and giving to people based on their needs, not on their membership in a privileged group. Sometimes that means giving from the wealthy to help the needy; sometimes a particular needy person can’t get a break or a wealthy person gets a break that they don’t need, because that’s the way the law works out, and unless it’s a matter within our personal discretion, we can’t put our thumbs on the scale. Again, it isn’t easy: we just have to keep trying and trying again until we get the system right … or find that new exception.
But trying to treat all people like people is what makes our civilization worth living in.
-the Centaur
Pictured: The Old Veteran at Point Lobos, an ancient tree which has weathered many storms.
