Equality
Discussion
Francois Tremblay
"The word evokes two general extremes. One is the total dehumanizing equality that reduces man to a machine, famously parodied in the story Harrison Bergeron, where people are made scrupulously equal in capacities by burdening them with crippling handicapping devices or weights. The other is the absurd capitalist concept of “equality of opportunities,” meaning nothing more than “you can get what you can get” (which leads today’s “socialists,” who are in fact as capitalists as everyone else, to try to make opportunities available to everyone, instead of correcting the more fundamental problems).
Therefore the question is: if you seek social equality, what is it that you seek to equalize?
To Benjamin Tucker, equality means “the greatest amount of individual liberty compatible with the equality of liberty,” or more clearly, to first equalize everyone’s freedom to a straight level, and then to maximize that level. But then we must ask: what is freedom? I think a simple definition can be given along the lines of “to be free means to be able to act according to one’s own desires to a certain degree.” It is of course impossible to act as one desires in an unlimited manner: no matter how much humans would like to have a native ability to fly, this is not possible."
(http://accesstoinfo.blogspot.com/2010/03/any-hierarchy-that-exists.html)
Hierarchy and Equality
Francois Tremblay:
"Why are hierarchies inherently anti-freedom and anti-equality? Because they are predicated on the principle that a small group of people must and should control the vast majority, which implies a severe limitation of freedom. Their operating mechanism is organized and formalized control for the benefit of a few (and, by extension, for the survival of the hierarchy), leading to the accumulation and acceleration of inequality. Certainly, if we look at history, we see that inequality stems, in an overwhelming majority, from the accumulation of inequality inherent to the existence of hierarchies (organized religion, government, corporations, etc), and very little from man’s bodily or mental inequalities, which are much more limited in scope.
The opposite of a hierarchy, which is predicated on a strict relation of obedience between superior and inferior, is equality of authority. None may order anyone else to act against his values, because every individual’s values are as important as everyone else’s. Following the universality principle, if one person or a group of people have the authority to issue orders regarding a specific domain, then all people have that authority, or none may have it. Any hierarchy is therefore eliminated."
(http://accesstoinfo.blogspot.com/2010/03/any-hierarchy-that-exists.html)
Chinese ('Pingdeng'), vs Western notions of equality
Jeng-Guo Chen:
"Although Tan Sitong was sympathetic with imperialist projects that he witnessed and envisaged in Asia, his idea of pingdeng was a far cry from modern Western notions of equality. Western ideas of equality have a long and complicated history that lies outside the scope of this paper. Suffice it to say, Western equality is, by and large, concerned with economic rights and political rights. Different schools of philosophy might disagree on how equal human beings were or should be, but they shared a tendency to believe that equality had to be measured by legal forms in one way or another. From the natural law tradition and the notion of property rights to modern constitutionalism, the notion of equal moral capacity in political choice or cooperational competition, legality is the predominant feature of Western conceptualizations of equality. Modern Western imperialism, inheriting the dual concept of dominium and imperium, also evolved around the contractarian frame of mind. Equality was represented in equality of treaties and reciprocality of trade. On the other hand, Tan Sitong’s concept of equality is not bounded with legality or right to possession. In Tan’s ideal world of pingdeng, every person regarded his or her own family as mere hotel lodging. He or she was passing temporarily on the earth so that there was no need for possessions. In short, Tan’s idea of equality has little in common with a Lockean notion of individualism, which is in part derived historically from the idea of equity in political economy. Possession stemmed from desire. Tan argued that nothing but eradication of the fountain of desire, namely, ego, could give rise to true pingdeng.
- When the consciousness of self-caring is eradicated, then the ego is submerged; when the ego is submerged, then distinctions die away, then pingdeng emerges; when pingdeng is obtained, human beings are able to understand one and another completely, as mirrors reflecting the other without any dirt on them, thus the perfection of connecting others and myself.
Though he mentioned in passing “equal distribution of wealth,” Tan’s vision lacked a truer jurisprudential scheme. The Western idea of equality was individualistic in nature, while Tan’s idea of equality was situated in the simultaneous coexistence of the self and others."
More Information
- Extended discussion of the concept at http://accesstoinfo.blogspot.com/2010/03/any-hierarchy-that-exists.html
- an extensive discussion by Daniel Bitton, in his critique of The Dawn of Everything: "what the term “egalitarian society” implies, followed by an examination of the history of the anthropological literature on egalitarian hunter gatherer societies." [1]