In 'Equality,' Darrin McMahon shows the path has always been fraught - The Washington Post - 0 views
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equality history politics culture economics
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When civilizations promote parity along one axis, they tend to lapse back toward hierarchy along another. Legal equality may be offset by widening economic rifts, as in Western democracies today; the expansion of the franchise to a larger segment of the male population may be accompanied by the fervent demonization of women or non-natives, as in ancient Athens; movements for justice may prompt reactionary backlash, as in France after the 1789 revolution.
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At a time when equality is widely lauded as an uncomplicated good, McMahon’s sweeping if occasionally schematic study provides a thought-provoking reminder of its pitfalls
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lthough the concept of equality may seem intuitive, it is surprisingly difficult to pin down with any precision.
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“When people speak of equality,” McMahon stresses, “they invariably speak of the equality of something.” The central question is the one so famously and pithily posed by the economist Amartya Sen in his landmark 1979 lecture of the same name: “Equality of what?”
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McMahon surmises that our foraging forebears were probably staunch egalitarians, at least when it came to the division of labor within their communities.
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even in the idyllic days of prehistory, there was a catch. Early humans probably adhered to what the anthropologist Christopher Boehm called an “egalitarian hierarchy,” in which, in McMahon’s words, “the many combine to dominate the few,” exiling those who challenged the pecking order (or so those cave paintings seem to suggest)
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And even though hunter-gatherers probably treated suitably compliant members of their own clans equitably, in-group/out-group rivalries “undoubtedly played a role in the cohesion” that each group achieved internally
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our ancestors maintained order within by sewing discord without, vying violently with competing clans and expelling (or even killing) upstarts who threatened to distinguish themselves too dramatically from the pack.
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The very concept of equality, which requires both difference and sameness, generates comparable tensions in almost every society in which some version of it is promoted.
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, the temptation to maintain harmony within a group by degrading those outside it has been irresistible for centuries — and remains so to this day.
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But if the monotheistic religions “proclaimed fellowship among the children of God,” McMahon wryly clarifies, they were also “quick to banish from the family those who rejected the faith.
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Many of the most prominent thinkers of the period considered women and people of color too irrational to merit legal recognition
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in the 1700s, French revolutionaries inspired by the Enlightenment maintained that equality was a right bestowed on every man by virtue of his intrinsically rational nature
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“We want to be treated with fairness and on equal terms, accorded recognition and respect,” McMahon writes. “But at the same time we seek distinction, aiming to set ourselves apart.
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If equality so ineluctably contains the seeds of its own undoing, the moral arc of the universe cannot be trusted to bend toward justice. On the contrary, McMahon argues, equality is not an inevitability but a hard-earned improbability.
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it is not equality but its opposite that is always encroaching, dogging every attempt at progress, stalking its rival like a shadow, patiently waiting to strike.
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In his ambitious new book, “Equality: The History of an Elusive Idea,” Dartmouth history professor Darrin M. McMahon proposes that the “elusive idea” in question is expansive enough to vindicate both accounts. His wide-ranging survey of equality throughout the ages demonstrates that progress toward achieving it is almost never linear.