The Action of Equality
it must needs be that there be an organization of my people, in regulating and establishing the affairs of the storehouse for the poor of my people, both in this place and in the land of Zion—
4 For a permanent and everlasting establishment and order unto my church, to advance the cause, which ye have espoused, to the salvation of man, and to the glory of your Father who is in heaven;
5 That you may be equal in the bonds of heavenly things, yea, and earthly things also, for the obtaining of heavenly things.
6 For if ye are not equal in earthly things ye cannot be equal in obtaining heavenly things;
-thus D&C 78:3-6
Like some of you, I have developed an allergy to the concept of equality, as who wouldn’t if the whipmasters shouted “equality” with each blow on you of the lash. But that is the fault of the whipmasters, not the (sadly much abused) concept.
Paradoxically, I have become more alive to the idea of a group of people joining together as peers because of some great animating friendship and cause. Like it says right there in those verses, “to advance the cause.”
But that isn’t the point of this post.
Somehow out of verses 5 and 6 I got the realization that equality is not a status. Equality is an action. It is the action of acknowledging someone with respect and friendship. Oh, those aren’t the right words, but that is the idea. Equality is the action of fellow-feeling. The same thing as ‘fellowship,’ if that word hadn’t acquired its own set of connotations where we have lost the connection with ‘fellow.’
What we commonly say against schemes of enforced equality is that they deny agency. In other words, they are bad because they mandate us to do something that we could gain moral value in choosing. That’s true, as far as it goes. But the real objection to schemes of enforced equality is that they are impossible. They are trying to enact a contradiction. They are like mandatory love. Literally, actually. True equality doesn’t mean sameness in status or condition, which is mostly impossible and not actually desirable anyway. True equality is the action of a kind of love.
So a scheme of enforced equality is actually at very best mandating the results of mutual recognition, mutual respect, and mutual love, without actually mandating what causes the effect, because the cause cannot be mandated.
Sometimes schemes of enforced equality do get real equality, when the forced giver and the forced recipient unite in their mutual hatred of the schemer. But not always and not often, because often the point of enforced “equality” is to prevent real equality by giving the giver and the recipient a reason to hate each other.
E.C.
October 18, 2021
I think the idea you are trying to grasp for is the reason why my Sensei insists that in our class, it doesn’t matter what rank we have, we all salute one another with respect, since we are all valuable as human beings.
Eric
October 18, 2021
I think it’s worth comparing this to the uses of equality in the Book of Mormon, particularly Alma 28:13,
“And thus we see how great the inequality of man is because of sin and transgression, and the power of the devil, which comes by the cunning plans which he hath devised to ensnare the hearts of men.”
Here Mormon is concluding that inequality is a product of sin and transgression, and I’ve been chewing on how that can be ever since I really noticed that verse. No firm conclusions yet.
G.
October 19, 2021
@EC,
I think the idea I am struggling towards reverses the cause and effect of your sensei. Bassing inequality on us all having the same status as human beings is still basically the status or category focus that I think may be a mistake. If a quality is a decision and an action, then you would say that the students in your dojo, whatever their rent, are all valuable as human beings *because* you salute them with respect.
It’s mind bending. It may not be right. But it’s the point I am trying to make.
G.
October 19, 2021
Eric,
That is an extremely interesting and profound scripture.
Put in terms of this post it is actually extremely straightforward to explain. There is a lot of inequality because people sinfully decide on the actions of inequality instead of deciding on the actions of equality.
But I think it has layers of meaning that go beyond that
G. K. Chesterton
October 20, 2021
In truth it is inequality that is the illusion. The extreme disproportion between men, that we seem to see in life, is a thing of changing lights and lengthening shadows, a twilight full of fancies and distortions. We find a man famous and cannot live long enough to find him forgotten; we see a race dominant and cannot linger to see it decay. It is the experience of men that always returns to the equality of men; it is the average that ultimately justifies the average man. It is when men have seen and suffered much and come at the end of more elaborate experiments, that they see men as men under an equal light of death and daily laughter; and none the less mysterious for being many. Nor is it in vain that these Western democrats have sought the blazonry of their flag in that great multitude of immortal lights that endure behind the fires we see, and gathered them into the corner of Old Glory whose ground is like the glittering night. For veritably, in the spirit as well as in the symbol, suns and moons and meteors pass and fill our skies with a fleeting and almost theatrical conflagration; and wherever the old shadow stoops upon the earth, the stars return.