Value for Sunday of Week 46 in the season of Assessing

Equality

People wish to be treated equally, and to have a fair chance to succeed in life.

Equality is to be found only in the spiritual dignity of man, and that will only be understood among us. If we were brothers, there would be fraternity, but before that, they will never agree about the division of wealth. [Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov (1880), Part II, Book VI, Chapter III, “Conversations and Exhorations of Father Zossima”.]
Until we get equality in education, we won’t have an equal society. [Sonia Sotomayor]
Equality is the soul of liberty; there is, in fact, no liberty without it. [Frances Wright]

A commitment to universal human worth and dignity necessarily implies a commitment to equality. People do not agree what the nature and extent of that equality should be.

At least, it must include equal opportunity. Most people in the developed world probably would agree with that statement but in fact we do not practice it. Millions of children are born into poverty every year. Those in impoverished lands have virtually no chance to survive, let alone prosper and thrive as we understand those words in the United States. The issue here is equality in fact.

There is value in the opportunity to improve our circumstances by hard work. If talent gives some people advantages over others, we are best advised to foster and encourage their development for the good of the individual and the good of all..

Demonstrably, the most prosperous countries are mixed economies with as many capitalist features as are consistent with sustainable prosperity. In the economic war between capitalism and communism, capitalism has won, decisively. But there is plenty of room for socialist features of political economy within a mixed capitalist economy. In no nation in the developed world does a pure capitalist economy exist. It never has and it never will, for the simple reason that capitalism, with its foundations in human greed, tends to excess if unchecked. For that reason, state intervention in and regulation of the economy will always be necessary in technologically advanced economies with complex systems of industry, finance and information exchange. The only way this will change is if technology advances to such an extent that it allows virtually all aspects of the economy to be controlled individually or locally, as was the case when people grew their own crops and purchased almost no consumer goods. People may complain that government only makes the problem worse but in point of fact, the main reason this is true in quasi-democratic nations like the United States is that most people do not pay attention to or understand the economic forces behind their politics.

Income inequality is a growing concern, again, throughout the developed world. Excessive income inequality threatens social stability and, eventually, prosperity itself. Wealth is and always has conveyed power. If a few people have a certain relative amount of wealth, they also have too much power. That power allows them to structure the terms of economic exchange, in other words, to rig the game. There simply is no getting around this fact, which history demonstrates time and time again – the robber baron era (Gided Age) and the Roaring Twenties in the United States alone – and yet the American people consistently have failed to prevent excessive accumulations of wealth, and are doing it again.

Our technology and the state of our knowledge have advanced to such an extent that a near Utopia is within our grasp, if only we could see our way clear to it. We must understand that our place in society is just that: it is a place at the table. Dinner will not satisfy basic needs, let alone be pleasant, if some have no recourse but to scramble for the crumbs under the table. At the same time, the table is only so big: we must make responsible choices in our consumption of resources, including our reproductive choices. If people ever figure this out, the good life may yet be attained and sustained.

Then there is political equality, equal rights, and equal treatment under the law. A nation is not truly free if these rights are not granted to all. This is equality in form.

Real

True Narratives

Histories:

Thomas Picketty, A Brief History of Equality (Belknap/Harvard University Press, 2022): “Much of the current discussion of inequality focuses on the period since 1980, when the benefits of growth began to go much more narrowly to the rich than they had before. Although Piketty hardly disputes this, he announces here that he has come to tell an optimistic story, of the world’s astounding progress toward equality. He does this by creating a much wider temporal frame, from 1780 to 2020, and by focusing on politics and measures of well-being as well as economics.”
Daniel R. Biddle and Murray Dubin, Tasting Freedom: Octavius Catto and the Battle for Equality in Civil War America (Temple University Press, 2010).
Elisabeth Griffin, Formidable: American Women and the Fight for Equality: 1920-2020 (Pegasus Books, 2022).
Charles Postel, Equality: An American Dilemma, 1866-1896 (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2019).
Joel Spring, Deculturalization and the Struggle for Equality: A Brief History of the Education of Dominated Cultures in the United States (Routledge, 8th edition, 2016).
Thomas Healy, Soul City: Race, Equality, and the Lost Dream of an American Utopia (Metropolotan, 2021): “The story of Floyd McKissick’s dream, struggle and, ultimately, failure to build an American city on behalf of Black citizens is one of the greatest least-told stories in American history. In ‘Soul City,’ Thomas Healy chronicles this tragically quixotic enterprise by McKissick, a civil rights activist turned capitalist, who attempted, beginning in 1969, to build ‘Soul City,’ a Black-run city on a former slave plantation in rural North Carolina, close to Southern Klan country.”
Christen Bryson, et. al., eds. Womanhoods and Equality in the United States: 20th-21st Century Perspectives (Routledge, 2024).

Movements promoting radical egalitarianism:

Daniel Gavron, The Kibbutz: Awakening from Utopia (Rowman and Littlefield Publishers, 2000).
Henry Near, The Kibbutz Movement, volume 1: Origins and Growth 1909-1939 (The Littman Library of Jewish Civilization, 1992).
Henry Near, The Kibbutz Movement, volume 2: Crisis and Achievement 1939-1995 (The Littman Library of Jewish Civilization, 2008).
Rupert Fike, ed., Voices from the Farm: Adventures in Community Living (Book Publishing Company, 1998).
Diana Leaf Christian, Creating a Life Together: Practical Tools to Grow Ecovillages and Intentional Communities (New Society Publishers, 2003).
Diana Leafe Christian, Finding Community: How to Join an Ecovillage or Intentional Community (New Society Publishers, 2007).

From the dark side:

Phil Klay, Uncertain Ground: Citizenship in an Age of Endless Invisible War (Penguin Press 2022): “America’s Wars Are Fought by Relatively Few People.”

Technical and Analytical Readings

Ronald Dworkin, Sovereign Virtue: The Theory and Practice of Equality (Harvard University Press, 2000).
G.A. Cohen, Rescuing Justice and Equality (Harvard University Press, 2008).
Bruce Feltham, ed., Justice, Equality and Constructivism: Essays on G.A. Cohen's Rescuing Justice and Equality (Wiley-Blackwell, 2009).
Kate Pickard and Richard Wilkinson, The Spirit Level: Why More Equal Societies Almost Always Do Better (Allen Lane, 2009).
Richard Wilkinson, The Impact of Inequality: How to Make Sick Societies Healthier (New Press, 2005).
Richard Wilkinson, Unhealthy Societies: The Afflications of Inequality (Routledge, 1996).
Richard Wilkinson, Mind the Gap: Hierarchies, Health and Human Evolution (Yale University Press, 2001).
Ichiro Kawachi and Bruce P. Kennedy, The Health of Nations: Why Income Inequality Is Harmful to Your Health (New Press, 2002).
Louis P. Pojman and Robert Westmoreland, Equality: Selected Readings (Oxford University Press, 1996).
Dierdre Nansen McCloskey, Bourgeois Equality: How Ideas, Not Capital or Institutions, Enriched the World (University of Chicago Press, 2016).

Photographs

Documentary and Educational Films

Inventing Our Life: The Kibbutz Experiment: a documentary film about life in the Israeli Kubbutz, where everyone shared equally

Imaginary

Fictional Narratives

Struggles for equality:

George Orwell, Animal Farm (1945): an iconic tale of how all animals are equal but some are more equal than others.
Karen Tei Yamashita, I Hotel (Coffee House Press, 2010), ten stories drawn from San Francisco's Asian communities in the 1960s and 70s.