The Paradox of Equalitarianism
If we think of morality as the set of best-known technologies for preserving and extending the opportunities for life, — seen as the epistolutionary process of self-organization, — then morality isn’t something projected from us onto the world at all, but something that the world imposes on us. Our niche is forcing us to behave morally…morality is an inescapable feature of all life, including single-celled life. Moral progress, then, is the inevitable consequence of the process of life continuing to exist…morality is the place toward which all living behavior is aiming through epistolution. It is an increase in the the set of opportunities for synchrony, for knowledge, and for cooperation between living things and with non-living things.
Memes and genes are some of the tools we use to pursue this goal. These are the only entities we know of that contain heritable knowledge. We use them as templates for building solutions in our epistolutionary process. These are templates, but there are other templates we use, of course…water molecules, electrons, etc. Anything that passes through our bodies without markedly changing could be seen as a template for our epistolution.
Why are there popular communicable memes that openly defy moral progress? For example, the idea that people are ineradicably separated by our gender and racial identities and that these identities impose very different moral burdens upon us. This is an expanding set of memes that drives an increasingly incoherent set of beliefs about humans. On the one hand, our scientific and social understanding of individuals is erasing the value of the distinction between one identity and another, and on the other hand, a moral pressure is increasing to sharply acknowledge the value of that distinction. This is leading to increasingly bitter conflicts, pitting women’s rights against trans rights, and Black rights against multiracial identities and other people of color. On a basic level the idea that all humans are equal in ability and equally deserve the fruits of opportunity is in conflict with the idea that there are oppressors and that oppression must be rectified by remolding the preferences and behaviors of society. Equality is the aim of social justice, but equality cannot coexist with social justice.
If one group and another are equal, the distinction between the two groups dissolves and there is only one group. In order to preserve the ability to discriminate against oppressors, one must maintain a sharp boundary between oppressor and oppressed. There is no way around this paradox; it exists at a basic logical level. This was the opening clarion of the Civil Rights movement…there is no “separate but equal.” The only way to achieve equality would be to ignore identities entirely, yet identities are the footholds that people are seeking to use to discriminate between groups to achieve equality. If there is a Black and a white, then Black and white are never equal. If there is no Black and no white, then I am Black and I am white, and you are Black and you are white. If this is the case, I take the same blame for oppression and also lay claim to the same fruits of social justice as you do.
This situation is intolerable to pessimists, because there is no way out of the paradox without a complete jubilee. The only way to reach a solution would be to forgive all debts. All debts.
Why is the reverse occurring? Why are the debts incurred by oppressors piling higher and higher? Why are more exquisite sensitivities to past social injustices arising? Why are present-day humans, who are more and more distant from those past oppressions and less directly responsible, nevertheless inheriting more censure for the sins of their ancestors and more erosion of the validity of their privileges? Nothing is more universal in history than valid hierarchical inherited privilege…and yet it is dissolving faster than ever.
The answer must lie in the niches moral power over our bodies. These attitudes, these beliefs, are not direct windows onto new truths but indirect instruments by which the niche is forcing us to enact equalitarianism. This forcing is larger and deeper than our comprehension, and deeper than our epistemology. Competition, as I have written before, requires that the winners prevail, and it also requires that the fruits of winning be redistributed among all participants. This is the origin of species (pools of genetic competition) among multi-cellular life, and the origin of political movements aiming at deeper and deeper forms of equality. Our communicable morality is using these provably false ideas of identity to extend equal opportunities among all participants in the meme pool, just as sexual reproduction does in the gene pool. The end result is an extreme and novel equality that is felt and interpreted as an extreme inequality inherited from the distant past.
These ideas are neither believed nor disbelieved. The first move of a rights activist is to award their opponent with the power to do great harm to themselves simply by disagreeing with them and rejecting the importance of their distinct identity, and the second move is to become enraged when their opponents exercise this power. Because humans are agreeable, the opponents respond by suppressing their disagreement, and concealing their felt commonalities, declaring that they admit they “could never know” what it must be like to be another. This is a masquerade of empathy which is in substance a lack of empathy. This is not very satisfactory to the rights activist, because everyone can detect lying, so the tests for sincerity become more and more discerning and invasive. As a result, the dishonesty becomes more profound and undetectable. And there is no one on this earth so benighted that they could not be said to be more oppressed than someone else, so we all must exercise this dishonesty in some domain.
The only solution to this dishonesty would be to feel disparities in power so deeply that there would be no remaining solidarity at all between humans, no commonality, no empathy. Empathy was the intention of these activists, but the paradox they are driving forward must extinguish empathy. “Who are you to presume to know my struggle?” says the activist. “I do not know but I witness” says the oppressor. “Who are you presume to witness?” says the activist. “ I do not witness but observe” says the oppressor. “Who are you to presume to observe?” says the activist. “I do not observe” says the oppressor, “You are alone.” “At last we are equal.” says the activist.
I do not have the standing to ask for optimism, and neither do you. No one deserves forgiveness. And yet it is.
