Most people care about equality. They care even when the call for equality is derided as “identity politics,” for to the surprise of those seeking to stoke the culture wars, there has not been much public indignation at the taking of the knee, the rescue of drowning migrants or the toppling of statues. Enthusiasm for the English football team did not diminish when they showed that they knew and cared about poverty, racism and homophobia. Donations to the Royal National Lifeboat Institution reached £200,000 in a single day after Nigel Farage accused it of running a “migrant taxi service.” A jury of citizens in Bristol concluded that forcibly removing the statue of a man made wealthy through the proceeds of slavery, and dumping it in the harbour, was not an act of criminal damage. The real criminality was his.
All these are welcome reminders that people are not so blind to the inequalities of the present or iniquities of the past as some of our politicians would like to think. But the culture wars continue, as do attacks on so-called identity politics, and one part of what sustains these is a mistaken belief that we are already recognised as equals.
I do not mean by this that anyone imagines us equal in our material resources or political influence, and I doubt that many really believe us equal in our chances of a good life. But we still accept too readily the notion that equality is a key value of our society, a founding principle of European liberal democracies. And in one sense it is. Equality is a much talked about and celebrated value, enshrined in the principle (if not practice) of equality before the law, and encapsulated in what still strikes me as the astonishing achievement of universal suffrage. These give political and legal expression to philosopher Jeremy Bentham’s supposed dictum that each is to count for one and none for more than one. It is that belief in basic equality that lies behind the outrage at revelations about parties at No10 when the rest of us were trying to abide by some of the pandemic’s toughest restrictions on our social interaction. We do not think it right that there should be one rule for us and another rule for them.
So it’s not that equality, in this basic sense, isn’t a central value informing contemporary society. It’s that this equality has always been attached to conditions, always accompanied by hierarchy and exclusion, and never been as inimical as we might like to believe to the differential valuation of human beings.
Political theorists tend to think of 17th-century Europe as a key moment in the evolution of “modern” ideas of equality, a moment when the idea of humans as natural equals began to shape people’s thinking and threaten previous assumptions about some being born to rule. The turn towards nature, however, as the reason to think of one another as equals, simultaneously created alibis for deeming all too many people naturally unfit for equality. Think of the American Declaration of Independence, with its confident assertion that all men are created equal and endowed by their creator with unalienable rights; and then recall that nearly a century passed between that and the abolition of slavery. Think of the French Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen, insisting that men are not only born but remain free and equal; and try to square this with the subsequent history of French colonialism. Think of either of these and the refusal, until well into the 20th century, to imagine women as the legal equals of men. The shared human nature that was offered up as the justification for thinking of people as basically equal was specified in ways that restricted it to only certain kinds of human being. The others were either explicitly set outside the remit of equality, or simply not noticed as possible candidates.
The specification sometimes involved a particular image of rationality (this was frequently deployed to deny women any claims to equality); sometimes a notion of the moral capacities that supposedly separated those deemed capable of being civilised from those considered impossible to educate (a standard line used to justify both slavery and colonisation); and by the 19th century, when binaries of gender and taxonomies of race were becoming particularly rigidly formalised, appeals to “nature” were working as much to establish gradations and exclusions as to assert any commonality. This is always the risk when one thinks of equality as justified by some shared human characteristic. The equality becomes conditional on people exhibiting that characteristic, and exhibiting it in what is deemed the correct way.
This is a process that continues well into our own time, with some philosophers still suggesting that those who fall short of a certain level of cognitive ability cannot be counted as “persons.” It also continues in the multifarious ways through which we differentiate between those humans we consider important and those we more readily discount.
There has been a lot of discussion about the brutality with which the £20 a week uplift to Universal Credit was removed, thrusting many low-income households back into poverty just at a time when costs of living were rising. But it’s also worth thinking about what the temporary uplift and its subsequent ending tell us about the unequal valuation of human beings. Why did the government feel obliged to introduce this uplift? Was it really because it worried about families on Universal Credit losing work and being plunged into deeper poverty? Or was it because the pitiful level to which benefits had been successively reduced over the past decade was regarded as too pitiful for “ordinary” citizens? It was when people previously living on average wages, and those previously living on considerably more than average wages, were suddenly faced with the reality of life as a benefit recipient that the government announced the increase. And how revealing that, once a semblance of normality returned, that acute poverty level of subsistence was once again deemed appropriate for those on Universal Credit. The only sense I can make of this is the differential valuation of human beings.
Equality is not something we “discover” about people, but something we bring into existence
The belief that we are already recognised as equals in some basic sense can blind us to the prevalence of this kind of differential valuation. It blinds us to the extent of class disdain in our society, a disdain practised even by politicians who are supposedly there to represent us. It also forms the backdrop to attacks on identity politics, and is what gives sustenance to culture wars. When people object to an unnecessary focus on inequalities of gender, sexuality or race, or complain about what they see as a trivialising obsession with risky jokes and questionable turns of phrase, their resistance suggests they regard any such inequalities as things of the past. Of course, they may say, women used to be treated as lesser than men, black people as lesser than white, and homosexuals used to be locked up. And they may accept that much of today’s wealth was derived from slavery. But to keep going on about this is perceived as at best anachronistic, at worst as seeking to turn the tables on the previously privileged so that they become the disfavoured instead.
When “Black Lives Matter” first emerged as the slogan around which to mobilise opposition to police violence against black people, it was countered by the seemingly correct, but in that context meretricious, “All Lives Matter.” This was represented as a rebuke to the favouritism of stressing only black lives: “it’s not just black lives, but all lives that matter.” But the rebuke only makes sense if you think that people are already treated equally by the police or the law. The whole point of “Black Lives Matter” is precisely that all lives “should” matter, but that at the moment they do not. In this case, as in most instances of what gets labelled identity politics, people are not mobilising to win special favours for their identity group, but to expose and challenge an existing inequality of treatment.
Getting beyond this means breaking more completely with the idea that we are equals because of some shared human characteristic, and recognising more fully how far we are from even a basic equality. Equality is not about “nature”; it is not conditional on us exhibiting particular human properties; and it is not something we should feel obliged to justify by reference to any such characteristic. Equality is the claim we make on others when they fail to recognise us as their equals, and the commitment we make to ourselves and others to regard one another as equals. It is not something we “discover” about people, but something we bring into existence. It is not a matter of finding out that others are sufficiently like us to be regarded as our equals. Equality is something we do—and on contemporary evidence, something we don’t yet do very well. Given the gap between the fond imaginings of living in a society that already holds equality as a core value, and the persistence of gradations and disdain, we cannot afford the easy disparagement of identity politics nor the facile stoking of culture wars. Even a basic equality that regards us all as in some important sense equals is still a long way off.
