Column: Dartmouth professor studies equality through the ages
Published: 07-20-2024 2:15 PM |
Reading Darrin McMahon’s book “Equality,” especially on the 60th anniversary of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, connects the debate during that transformative movement to battles over equality in the present moment.
The Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. drew his inspiration not only from the Declaration of Independence and Christianity but also from Mohandas Gandhi’s non-violent civil resistance movement called Satyagrah (Sanskrit: Truth force), writes McMahon, a historian of ideas at Dartmouth College. Gandhi himself was deeply influenced by the teachings of Jesus and by Leo Tolstoy’s writings on civil disobedience and nonviolence, as well as Henry David Thoreau’s essay “Civil Disobedience.” Thoreau’s transcendentalism had Indian philosophical origins.
In these eclectic sources, King saw, “The guiding hand of equality and the moral arc of the universe,” as he said in his celebrated speech “I Have a Dream,” that “we hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal.” Barack Obama’s ascent to the White House was an embodiment of that dream.
But one man’s rise to the top does not mean the end of the struggle for equality for the rest.
It’s paradoxical that while we all want equality, we don’t know how complex are its dimensions, including political, economic, social and gender, and how they interact with and condition each other. As McMahon writes, “The assertion of equality invariably depends upon assumptions of inequality, and most often generates new inequalities in the process.”
Therefore, to make equality sustainable, we need more than idealism and pious slogans. We need some institutional and legal structure such as the 14th Amendment — the amendment that fulfilled the American Revolution — because there can be no equality without equal protection of the laws.
The 14th Amendment has been shaping the idea of equality in America as a fundamental principle of non-discrimination; for example, the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education Supreme Court decision that struck down school segregation. The end of Jim Crow laws helped demolish the legal basis for racial segregation and discrimination in the Southern states.
The Civil Rights Movement served as a roadmap for other groups seeking equality. The Black Power Movement highlighted racial pride, economic empowerment and the creation of political and cultural institutions for Black people in the United States.
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While the struggle for women’s rights has a long history, the Civil Rights Movement helped usher in a new wave of feminism in the 1960s and 1970s, aiming at issues like workplace discrimination, reproductive rights and legal inequalities. Much later, the #MeToo movement emboldened women who had been sexually harassed or assaulted to expose their abusers. Many high-profile individuals and celebrities faced allegations and met serious consequences for their actions, leading to a momentous cultural shift as to how such behaviors must be dealt with.
The LGBTQ+ rights movement gained momentum after events like the Stonewall Riots in 1969. And advocates for the rights of people with disabilities fought for equal opportunities and access, leading to the Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990.
Today, equality remains an essential concept in the quest for social justice. McMahon, however, argues that equality has never been a universally accepted idea, but rather a challenging concept that has been recast and redefined throughout history.
Even our primitive ancestors, hunter-gatherers, had developed some kind of socio-psychological leveling system to enforce what McMahon calls “fierce egalitarianism.” But once they began to settle down in agrarian communities, the idea of ownership, and consequently the need for control, command and hierarchy, made leveling everyone as equals a difficult proposition. Societies grew more diverse and complex because of religion, race, caste, class, ethnicity, nationality and gender, all of which became tools of differentiation, classification, inclusion and exclusion, complicating efforts toward equality.
Spanning millennia, McMahon examines how the concept of equality was practiced in ancient societies like Greece, Rome, and early Christian communities, often regarding notions of citizenship, slavery and religious doctrines. As he says, “Where civilization on earth reigned inequality was triumphant.”
Enlightenment thinkers popularized modern liberal notions of equality, but these ideas contained inherent exclusions based on race, class and gender. For example, the French Revolution promoted equality in citizenship, but women were not granted the same rights as men and colonial slavery was not abolished. Thinkers like Marx and Engels saw equality as a bourgeois concept that failed to address deeper structural inequalities of class. Stalin’s attempt at communist leveling led to the Great Terror, as did Mao’s Cultural Revolution. Fascists and National Socialists rejected universal equality in favor of an exclusionary “equality of race or type,” which led to the horrific Final Solution.
Non-Western cultures and religions like Islam, Confucianism, Buddhism and Hinduism have conceptualized equality differently from Western societies. For example, Hinduism is a caste-based system where people are equal within their caste but unequal with other castes, even though under the Constitution all are equal. Caste in India is an example of what McMahon calls “A circle of equals,” that excludes others as unworthy and unequal.
The book’s constant theme is that although equality is elusive and ephemeral, “the human capacity to imagine equality is protean, and that the concept itself is tremendously adaptable and resilient.” But McMahon admonishes that building regimes of inequality, systems of “hierarchy and dominance of intense scale and intensity,” is equally natural for Homo sapiens, who for all their capacity for cooperation, “have been creatures of power,” and “essentially semi-despotic,” which requires eternal vigilance against reversion to a Hobbesian state of nature.
Narain Batra is the author of “India In A New Key: Nehru To Modi-75 Years Of Freedom Democracy.” He lives in Hartford.