Equality is a tricksy notion. It has intrinsic appeal. For example, the principle that there should be one law for all, and that before the bar of justice all should be treated equally, regardless of wealth, title, position, or lack thereof is intrinsically and self-evidently just. It is the unjust society which has one law for the rich and another for the poor, and which has regard for a man's "face" when deciding guilt or innocence.
This is a fundamental Christian principle. The law of God declares that judges must never take a bribe and that justice is to be administered "blindly"--that is, neutrally, without regard for class, colour, or culture. Justice, in order to be just, must maintain strict impartiality. (Deuteronomy 16:19) Because God does not take bribes, nor must His judges.
When a culture moves from being grounded upon God and His law, bribery rapidly reappears.
In democracies, it starts with the ballot box. Politicians and political parties in secularist democracies offer bribes to voters (who are the ultimate judges within a secular democratic system). To secure electoral support, craven politicians openly bribe the voter, promising him wealth, income, assistance, and direct monetary benefits if he will vote for the craven bribe-offerer. Such a system rapidly perverts justice, not the least because such bribes--to be paid--require the forced extraction of property from one's neighbour via the oppressive taxing power of the state. It is no accident that secular western democracies have become vast engines of bribery and corruption, where equality before the law was tossed out long ago.
A Christian Commonwealth would be expected to remove this aspect of inequality before the law. It would move against such electoral bribery and corruption. Politicians who promised money or the equivalent to certain interest groups and sectors of society in exchange for their votes would likely be charged with bribery and corruption of the electorate.
In our secular Western democracies, money talks--and virtually everyone listens. Bribery in one form or another is rampant. Corruption and influence peddlers are welcome guests in the judgement halls of government. Contributors to politicians and political parties line up for the payback, the "return on investment", whether it be a plum government job, the legislative consent for a construction project which will be awarded to the donor, or the passing of legislation favouring one's own business either directly through subsidies or payouts, or indirectly, through shafting competitors with a brazen piece of twisted law. All these are examples of judicial inequality, which, by definition, are unjust. Equality before the law is a fundamental principle of justice largely dismembered on the gibbet of the modern democratic state.
But other idealistic notions of equality are manifestly unjust and contrary to the very creation order itself. Human beings are exceedingly diverse, equipped by nature with a broad range of gifts and capabilities, aptitudes and abilities. Some are born healthy; others born sick and afflicted with disease. Some are tall; others short. Physical characteristics and features vary widely. Whilst in some measures human beings are precisely equal--they are all born reflecting the image of God Himself--in virtually all other measures they are diverse. This diversity is part of the glory of mankind as a species. To insist upon equality in such things is manifest nonsense, if not carnal envy, or an attempt to assuage feelings of guilt on the part of the better off.
Moreover, each person is born into a family or household or living situation of some kind or other. Some are born into immensely wealthy households; others are born into poverty and squalor. Some soar on the heights of fame and fortune, yet die from drug overdoses or from becoming enslaved to alcohol or addicted to cocaine or meth. Some use their wealth and success to serve others less accomplished or successful, not out of guilt but true charity and compassion. Others are destroyed by their success. Whilst none of us choose the circumstances of our birth and early life, our character and scruples and morals deeply affect what we subsequently make of our lives. Such choices--for good or ill--affect our lives and exacerbate socio-economic inequality.
Moreover, throughout our lives we play a multitude of roles, some of which cast us as equals with others, some cast us as superior to others, whilst others cast us as inferior, weak, and dependant. We are surrounded by those superior to us in strength and experience and often wisdom whilst we are children and teenagers. As adults we work amongst equals, but live as superiors to our children when they are in their infancy. At the same time we are inferior to those who employ us when it comes to receiving and following work instructions, but were an employer to join a sports team of which we were the coach, the roles would be reversed. In the church, in ancient times, a Christian household may have consisted of masters and slaves, but in the local church where the family worshipped, the slave may have been a ruling church officer, and the master the congregant. The Scriptures command the slave to obey the master at home, and the master to obey the elder/slave in church matters and life.
In the light of all these rich diversities and social complexities, the drive for social equality or monochrome socio-economic egalitarianism tears human societies apart. It denies (and seeks to destroy) the rich tapestry of diversity of roles and responsibilities and the changing swirl of roles of inferiority, superiority, and equality which contributes to the wonder, the complexity, the diversity, and joy of existence in this wonderful world. In these matters, the drive for social egalitarianism is destructive as anything can be. In the end, to progress towards such a utopian and spurious goal requires a leveller, a regulator whose commands and demands enslave everyone. It is not by random accident that egalitarian doctrines in atheistic materialist societies encouraged (and required) children spying and informing upon their parents. The mad drive for spurious and impossible equality inevitably produced egalitarian uniformity and destroyed human society.
It is said that modern Russia is riven with alcoholism. This, it seems, is the unexpected consequence of living under Communist-forced egalitarianism for over fifty years. The new model Soviet man and woman were literally driven to drink under the tortuous weight of the relentless drive for social equality. One of the few "comforts" people could find was in the bottle.
Peter Hitchens, who worked in the Soviet Union for a number of years, describes what the dying years of enforced egalitarianism were like:
. . . ordinary male Muscovites (women wouldn't have dared go there) patronized beer-bars so horrible that I could only wonder at the home life of those who used them. You took your own glass--usually a rinsed-out pickle jar--and a handful of brass coins worth a few pennies, along with some dried fish wrapped in an old newspaper. you fed your coins into a vending machine, and pale, acid beer dribbled intermittently out of a slimy pipe into you jar. you then went to a high table, slurped your beer (which tasted roughly the way old locomotives smell), and crunched your fish, spitting the bones onto the floor. There was no conversation. . . .The idolatrous dystopia of forced equality destroys human beings. It's only fruit is near universal drunkenness and alcoholism.
I visited one of the special police stations that handled the drunks, and they showed me a dismal museum of the things Russians drank when the could not get vodka. Cheap Soviet aftershave, apparently, was bearable and intoxicating if drunk through cotton waste. A sandwich of black bread and toothpaste was mildly alcoholic if nothing else could be found. A popular and bitter jest told the story of a conversation in a drinker's home after the state announced a rise in the price of vodka. "Daddy," asks the child with hope in its heart, "will this mean you will drink less?" "No," replied the head of the household, "It means that you will east less." [Peter Hitchens, The Rage Against God: How Atheism Led Me to Faith (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2010), p.88f.]
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