Friday 7 December 2012

The desire for 'equality' is natural to humans; as natural as sin

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The desire for 'equality' is natural to humans but that don't make it good.

Natural in the sense that children (for instance) will spontaneously plead for 'equality' and will (loudly, repeatedly) assert the injustice of inequality.

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A five year old boy claims it is not fair that he must go to bed at seven when his nine year old brother goes to bed at eight.

The five-year-old claims equality with the nine-year-old on this particular matter, insofar as it gets him (more of) what he wants.

The context makes clear that the demand for equality is evil - because dishonest (at least: it misrepresents reality and subverts good order).

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But why does the demand for equality have any rhetorical force?

That too must be natural.

Well, equality reduces to 'same'; and a genuine claim of equality is a claim of sameness.

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But sameness is indivisible.

Sameness is sameness.

What is irrational, incoherent, evil - Leftist - is to divide identity and demand sameness in specified areas (where more is wanted) and not in others.

And to claim sameness where there is difference is an evil; just as it is to claim difference where there is sameness.

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Thus all claims of equality which stop short of sameness are evil (including such sacred cows as 'equality before the law' - which has not ever been and cannot ever be and should not ever be true).

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NOTE: I am, of course, talking about human beings. In physics things are different - in physics sameness is divisible. I wonder to what extent the error of dividing sameness/ equality into specific domains came from a false application of what works in physics?

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12 comments:

James James said...

" 'equality before the law' - which has not ever been and cannot ever be and should not ever be true"

What do you mean by this?

Moldbug has a new post arguing that presumption of innocence is silly, and courts should use Bayes' theorem...

Bruce Charlton said...

@JJ - The decisive example is that men and women never have anywhere been treated the same by the legal system. The evidence is everywhere you look; but for specific evidence see The Woman Racket by Steve Moxon.

I have also blogged on his topic before:

http://charltonteaching.blogspot.co.uk/2010/09/common-sense-law-versus-nonsensical.html

http://charltonteaching.blogspot.co.uk/2011/05/innocent-until-proven-guilty-rubbish.html

JP said...

"The decisive example is that men and women never have anywhere been treated the same by the legal system."

It is the "should not ever be true" part that gives me pause.

It is certainly true that they are not treated the same in fact; but it is not clear why they should not be treated the same as a matter of principle. If a woman steals or kills, why not give her the same sentence a man would receive for the same offense?

Bruce Charlton said...

@JP - Men and women are different - any specific behavior therefore means something different for each.

To treat that which is different as if it was the same is unjust.

This was very obvious in psychiatry. Physical violence (of a given level, say attacking nursing staff without provocation) is evidence of greater psychopathology in a women than in a man: it means something different.

stephens said...

Whether by accident or design, by using "equality" the leftists are slowly destroying the things they have always been against.
In schools children are taught that all religions must be given equal validity therefore they don't have to take any of them seriously as, at the very least, most of them will be wrong.
I should imagine soon, Churches that marry couples, but refuse homosexuals, will be under threat from "equality" laws.
If this happens I can see a future where couples can only get married in the least Bible based churches, those which will also offer marriages to homosexuals!
If that happens church marriage would have little more validity than a "civil partnership!"
The leftists want christianity and christian marriage sidelined, just one of many equal options, quaint outdated traditions.

ajb said...

So, why have those campaigning for greater equality been winning, time and again - if what they are claiming is based on an obvious error (or falsehood)?

Bruce Charlton said...

@ajb - There are several answers.

At one level there is the one I gave yesterday "In other words actually-existing-equality was driven by envy and resentment and fear and expediency" - equality was invented as a fake virtue to justify all the above sins (well, fear isn't a sin) to which humans are naturally prone.

But the way in which equality has displaced real virtues, and the way it is used to invert natural law and advocate actual, known, intuited sin - well, this to me speaks of demonic influence, strategic purposive evil straight out of The Screwtape Letters.

Scripture says that in this world evil will 'progressively' triumph until the end - and this is one aspect of it.

FHL said...

A quick story:

A wife is cooking a meal for her family and guests when she calls her husband to pick up plastic silverware. “Get the spoons because they're cheaper.” she says.

The husband enters the store and finds the spoons cost 3 dollars and the forks also cost 3 dollars. “They're the same,” he says to himself - which you must admit is a perfectly reasonable thing to say under these circumstances. But then a store employee comes along and changes the price tag of the forks. They have just gone on sale. Now the forks are only 2 dollars.

So he buys the forks and goes home. There he and wife sit in embarrassment as they and their guests awkwardly try to shuffle soup into their mouths with their plastic forks.

“I told you to get the spoons!” whispers his irritated wife.
“You told me to get the spoons because they were cheaper than the forks, not because we were having soup!” he retorts.

People need to be careful of how they portray differences, otherwise they may inadvertently end up promoting a false equality instead.

James James said...

"The decisive example is that men and women never have anywhere been treated the same by the legal system."

Oh I see. But you are using "equality before the law" in a different sense to everyone else. Most people think "equality before the law" refers to judicial impartiality.

Bruce Charlton said...

@JJ - Hmmm. I would assume judicial 'impartiality' was simply judges not being corrupt - i.e. using legal criteria in judgment, not some other non-legal criteria (such as how much the person will pay in bribes).

I was assuming that 'equal before the law' referred to innovations such that the same laws began to be applied to Normans and Saxons in medieval England, whereas for several generations there were different laws for Normans and Saxons.

Or the different laws for men and women; and different sentencing.

James James said...

I do see what you're getting at. "Equality before the law" is a misleading phrase. How about "The law should treat equal people equally, and different people differently". Or better, "the law should only take relevant factors into account". So if class is irrelevant but sex is not, judicial impartiality means that the defendant's class should not change the probability of conviction, whereas their sex could do so.

The law shouldn't take into account

Bruce Charlton said...

@JJ - I think your comment is incomplete; but most of it seems intact.

Class need not be irrelevant if it is explicit; I imagine there could be (have been) just laws applicable to one class but not another.

What is not just is covertly discriminating laws, such as we have at present with Hate Crimes, for example: which purport to apply to all, but are enforced unilaterally.