Equality means that the social order is based on each group or person having universal rights that guarantee that they can each act independently and not be subordinated to one another. Individuals and ethnic groups are equal even if their average wealth or modal prestige are different but because none can claim moral superiority one from the other as was the case when Blacks and whites were separated as castes into superior and inferior. Equality means that everyone can take pride in their ethnicity and everyone can take pride in their occupations, or in their own individual pursuits of happiness, only some of those occupations, like prostitution or drug dealing, seen as dishonorable. There was a time when actors and actresses were regarded as disreputable and perhaps nowadays their celebrity makes them stand out as exceptionally honored, but all an occupation needs to be considered as an honest living, to be considered a worthy occupation by politicians and preachers, is to be within the law. In the light of equality, an individual can cultivate his garden or write his essay or support his family or live off his rents, and each can be thought a free choice as a way to live one’s life. Authority, on the other hand, is that the social order is marked by ranks all of them under command of hallowed leaders, whether as persons, such as God or charismatic figures,or captains of industry, or by invisible forces, such as norms or traditions, which require people to know how they are to behave in the subordinate ways of life to which they are assigned. There is always an external instruction and one cannot very well see how it could be otherwise, for then would come chaos.
The default setting in the political battle between Liberalism and Conservatism, which is the same thing as the conceptual battle between the ideas of equality and authority, is Conservatism. It always seems to get the better of the fight. The people of Israel did not have to decide to have a monarchy. The authors of “Deuteronomy” went even further in reducing the idea of freedom inherent in “Exodus” and instead made the government an institution which drained people of their independent judgments through having God berate them. Christianity starts out, as Hegel argued, as proclaiming as its primary insight the individuality and equality of all people in the eyes of God, and yet that is replaced in a few centuries or, it might be said, in a few generations, by an hierarchical order for the administration of the sacraments and the supervision of moral life.
Christians make people equal because all of them are equally sinners and worthy of a harsh judgment unless each person individually becomes suffused with a sense of having become a follower of Christ, in which case the person loses his equality by becoming subordinate to the authority of Christ and his minions. Protestantism provides some relief from the guilt inspired by Christianity. It allows a deal whereby a person trades in an ultimate moment of surrender to Christ for the freedom to think as one cares about all worldly arrangements, or at least that is what Luther says. Hobbes is based on the idea of every person the judge of the present validity of the social contract but that is easily enough turned into grooving on authoritarianism, embracing the exquisite subtlety of the way the ruler commands his subjects. And alongside Spinoza’s Liberalism, which has inspired or implied the following three hundred years of democratic government, there is the development of Conservatism that always manages to make a comeback even in a Liberal era. Conservatism can’t simply mean pre-Enlightenment ignorance because so many people find it attractive and it is so resilient.
The reason for that is the following. Buried in the depths of social structure as well as in the experience of everyday life is the fact that social stratification is everywhere. That is one of the great findings and principles of sociology. It means that just about everything in social life is differentially distributed according to social class, whether social class is defined as a person’s relation to the means of production or as a set of consumption tastes. People who are of a higher social class have more wealth, higher income, more expensive clothes, better education, more money devoted to luxuries than necessities. They also have more of less obvious things. They are healthier because they take better care of themselves in that they exercise and eat more nutritious food and they can afford better medical care and they avail themselves of medical care at the slightest indication that they may be in need of it.
This general rule also applies to matters that are assumed to be genetic or otherwise beyond social distribution. Intelligence is differentially distributed. That may be because the children of people with more money study longer and from an earlier age and are exposed to a welter of speech interactions that set them on the road to thinking that you can get your way if you learn how to ask nicely. Or it may be that the children of the better off have better nutrition when they are in the womb or when they leave it, or have more stable lives throughout their childhood. Whatever the way, the children of the poor are already way behind the children of the rich by the time of pre-k and the children of the rich or richer shine in school more often than the children of the poor, who need affirmative action to make up for their lower SAT scores. Even beauty is differentially distributed. Malnourished children and people obese because they eat empty calories are not attractive, while fashion models and movie stars of whatever race are attractive whether they are as thin as Audrey Hepburn or as curvy as Marilyn Monroe. Well to do people work out; poor people who are unemployed sit around. Retired people who are well to do play tennis; that may be why they live longer.
Press the point further to where commentators are wary to tread. People of a higher social class are probably of better moral character in that they don’t have to engage in minor thievery to get by and are articulate enough to get their way through suasion rather than through beating one another up. They allow themselves the finer feelings even if we prefer to think that romance is something the simple folk are also allowed, which allows romantic comedies, just like baseball, to be a great equalizer among the classes, even if what that means is that the poor and the comfortable overlap in those specifics but not in their other tastes. Well to do people (unless they come from Texas or Trump Tower) can like literature as well as baseball, and the romance of the better off is leavened with two career families while the romance of the poorly off is dampened by the challenge of having to somehow assemble enough money to hold off creditors.
The consequence of everything being differentially distributed is that everything is a commodity in that it can be sold at a higher or a lower price. Luxuries and necessities both cost more than a poor person can afford and less than will place a dent in a rich person’s wallet, the middle class alone having to worry about how much of a middling thing to purchase, whether in education, housing, or a restaurant to go to with the family on Friday night. Poor people are like rich people in that they spend on what they don’t need just to show they can and so purchase fancy duds or electronic devices, just much less costly ones than those purchased by the rich. Middle class people mind their pennies. No wonder they become Republicans. They are angry.
While trade creates a putative equality between the two sides to a bargain, in fact one side usually has a greater store of goods or of money and so is in a better bargaining position. The factory owner can get a worker to work for less of a wage than would be the case if there were collective bargaining; a company can corner the copper or diamond market; a consumer has little to bargain with and so begs an insurance company or an auto company to live up to what the consumer had thought he had been promised.
And so, the distribution system, which is what trade does, hands out what has been produced, as Parsons would put it, according to rules of trade dictated by custom, law and government regulation, workers now but not then allowed to bargain collectively, consumers of mortgages not today but maybe tomorrow supplied with clear contracts, bondholders now and for the foreseeable future more worthy of guarantees and government protection than those who survive on a widow’s mite.
But everyone or at least most people think of themselves as making choices, well or badly, purchasing what they want or need, the onus of a purchase on the buyer to have used money wisely, which is a freedom that becomes identified with the free enterprise system, when instead people might be focusing on the conditions that govern trade, though that would turn the consumer into the victim rather than the hero of his own material existence. I do pretty well in managing my life in the market for someone who is poor or middle class or rich, and that takes pride of place over what I happen to do for a living.
Thus the connection between hierarchy and the free enterprise system is established. The idea of trade, and that is what informs the economic theory of laissez-faire, is an idea of the putative equality offered by the marketplace. Anyone can get in. As an ideology, laissez-faire justifies the differential distribution of the rewards of the marketplace. If you lose in the job market or in the stock market, that’s just tough, and so everybody pretty much is where they should be. The losers should just stop whining. There is, of course, no reason to think that the differential distribution of rewards is inherent in the idea of trade. If everyone had resources and a minimum trading ability (or access to people who for a fee could manage their resources) then everyone could wind up with enough to live on. There is enough wealth to do that. The issue of production, as Parsons pointed out, is distinct from the issue of distribution. Why computer innovations take place is a question of production while the question of why there is a real estate bubble, which has to do with what institutions have the power to leverage mortgages, is an issue of distribution. Modern society does well with production so long as the distribution system does not get too much in the way.
People have, over the millennia, tried to compensate for the inevitability of differential distribution by creating the idea of rights and various other categories of putative equality, such as identification with an ethnic group, or the putative equality of voters, as the places where politicians and groups can take their stands. The division between Liberals and Conservatives, whatever their stripes, nevertheless remains as the division between those who advocate for the naturalness of hierarchy, which provides authority of one sort or another, and those who advocate for the naturalness of the reasoning power of human beings to alter their human relations and so can foster or bring forward a situation of equality, however much conditions are never all that ripe to sustain it, and to invent institutional arrangements, such as the First Amendment, that go a long way to sustaining some measure of equality not just in the political arena but in the social sphere because of the high regard in which the First Amendment is held.
But make no mistake about it. Liberalism is the uphill push. Christianity was a religion founded in an idea of equality and yet its history reveals just how fraught with paradox is the relation between authority and equality. Religion, all religions, claim that religion is the ultimate form of authority and that rests on the fact that everyone follows one form of authority or another. That is the natural thing to do, even if in the modern world that is expressed as the doctrine that everyone has to have faith in something, that even atheists believe in their secular humanism (which, first of all, is not the same thing, and second of all, atheism is not a religion but the denial of the need for religion and so should not be classified as a religion simply because religionists would prefer to regard it that way). It is also the case that philosophers will claim that the authority of religious truths is subject to ethical judgment. Is it right to believe in a God who allows child sacrifice? But that is only to allow philosophers of ethics to style themselves as being in the catbird seat. Few religious people give them that much credence.
Christianity, for its part, is a religion that proclaims that all souls are in some sense equal, even if that is quite a stretch in that some people will go to Hell and some people won’t and that seems a significant difference between two sets of people. Let us allow Christians to claim merely that people are putatively equal in that each of them has the choice made by themselves or by God about whether to be classified as among the elect or among the condemned. If that is the case, then Christianity is claiming that it is doing something unnatural in that it is proclaiming a doctrine that goes against the notion that everything is differentially distributed, that everything is unequal. If that is the case, then what authority does it have for doing so? Is it that its authority as the standard of authority allows it to declare something contrary to the notion of authority?
Moreover, if that is the case, then why is it not also the case that the idea of equality is reason enough to think of people as being equal rather than unequal, to foist upon the world something that is unnatural to the world? It might be claimed that the idea of equality is merely another form of authority, but that is difficult to argue unless one has already assumed that anything is an exercise of authority. Authority, remember, is invested in something or someone external to the actor, whether that externality is the law or a person’s superego or a principle of morality. Authority, remember, is paired with power as two ways of getting things done, making them happen, when an idea of equality may reside as a passing thought or motivating thought in a person in the instant in which it is exercised, and so is rid of the idea that it is the internalization of an idea rather than an operative idea which in some sense fills the soul. Equality needs no authority to set itself in place. And if that is the case, then something else and many other things as well can be introduced into the world of inequality, and so there is no priority to inequality except as noticing that this is the way things usually are. What I have just said, however, is a sociological observation rather than a morally or religiously compelling one.
There are, in fact, two social forces, at least, compensate for the seemingly natural authority that orders social life. The first is government, whereby legislation can provide citizenship and so a putative equality in that a set of claims associated with all of those designated as having that title. Put even more clearly, people in general and not just those who are citizens are taken to have immutable and unalienable rights. It is in their nature as persons and whether or not a government is out to respect those rights, such as free speech and inviolability of person without due process of law, which usually means only when subject to judicial review. That legal framework has provided for equality of person and therefore personal freedom though only the government is strong enough to ensure that rights are given and honored when the government can also abrogate rights, and many nations have done that. But a person’s own personal rifle won’t be enough to quell the usurpation of rights, and so it is political and legal action that allow putative equality to be defended and left instead as just ideals only rarely activated.
The other bulwark and method of equality is culture, which is often misunderstood as a set of traditions and the vivid presentation of ancient or accepted custom and therefore necessarily conservative. But, to the contrary, culture is equal as is the way ethnic groups are equal in that they are distinctive. Every book or poem is also distinctive in that it is the expression of a particular consciousness and has its own set of quirks which the reader can appreciate though not necessarily improve. Indeed, the hallmark of the critic is to be beyond approval and disapproval except for how the presentation is rather than the point of view of the author or artist. That multiplicity of point of view makes every student appreciate the idea of equality even if that is recognized in that name, and there is an unwillingness to appreciate literature by those who ban books because books are an antidote to authority, itself interested in limiting books which a group treats as authoritative, whether the Bible or a political tract, rather than the universe of books treated as an ocean ever dipped into. That universe is the experience of equality, not just a marker of it.