Is equality the answer?

Statistics on wealth and income distribution suggest that in the last decade our society has become less equal. Some members of the UK Government reportedly favour a drive towards equality as their USP for next year’s election. An interviewer for any job other than Government might ask why a decade heading in the opposite direction is a qualification for championing equality now, but that is not in fact the key question. The key question is whether equality should matter at all, even to the left.

It is easy to think that equality is what progressive politics has always been about. This is partly true, but when equality has been high on the progressive agenda the consequences have usually been disastrous. The cry for equality has been associated with the worst excesses of violent revolutions and the Terrors which usually follow them. It is of course true that inequality can be harmful to society, but usually only when other conditions are present, for example when people are so badly off they feel they no longer have a stake in society. Inequality is often a symptom of social problems rather than the disease and prescribing equality is a mistake which has often killed the patient, as in the aftermath of the Soviet and Chinese revolutions.

For several decades progressive thinking has been organised around the idea of social justice, often taking the work of John Rawls as its intellectual justification. But social justice is no more than equality disguised by hiding its ugliest consequences. Rawls saw social justice as fairness, where some inequality is allowed but has to be justified by the benefits it provides to the disadvantaged. In fact he put forward a sophisticated version of the childhood practice of ensuring that a cake is evenly divided by making the cutter choose their piece last. Rawls’ theory, as its critics have often pointed out, begs the question why equality is the only fair distribution anyway. As a snapshot of society at a particular moment a state of perfect equality might look fair, but only because all the dynamic elements, including the history which led up to that moment and the evolution which will then take place, have been taken out of the picture. It is dynamism which makes equality absurd, the whole business of what to do once everyone has been made equal and then some work harder, smarter or luckier than others. Must we constantly rebalance to maintain equality? If you accept this answer, you have either to explain why society will not grind to a halt because nothing is worth any effort, or else allow so much power to the State to effect constant redistribution that society will succumb to tyranny.

This last idea, that equality is incompatible with any degree of freedom, became associated in the eighties with the right-wing theorist Friedrich von Hayek. It was taken by Lady Thatcher’s circle as an argument against a socially active State, but that was a mistake which has discredited the underlying idea. It is only an argument against a State which attempts to impose the false goal of equality. The idea that the pursuit of equality leads to tyranny goes back at least two hundred years earlier to David Hume, the finest mind of the Scottish Enlightenment (writing, all the more impressively, before the excesses of the French Revolution). Equality cannot be maintained without the constant and intrusive exercise of power and is therefore incompatible with freedom. That is not a right wing theory, it is a fact supported by a great deal of evidence. It would be dishonest of the left to pretend otherwise just to mislead the disadvantaged into lending their support.

Political thinking is easily polarized by word pairs. It often happens that the negative form of a word has the real power and misleads us into going too far in the opposite direction. Equality is not a good thing just because inequality can be very bad. Injustice, by way of comparison, is the powerful concept of the justice/injustice pair. As Amartya Sen has recently argued, important though it is to remove injustice we should not conclude that perfect justice is a feasible aim, any more than we should conclude that history can have an end. As an aside, inequality itself is often caused by past injustice, but even then it does not automatically follow that it will be just to deal with inequality by trying to recreate what we think might have happened without the wrongs of the past. How many new injustices would we create by so doing?

So we might ask, heretically, why is inequality wrong? If I have sufficient, for example, does it even matter that you have more? To insist that it does verges on the unworthy but easily sold politics of envy. If I do not have sufficient the case is very different - but what surely needs to be addressed is how my lack can be put right. Insufficiency is what should concern us, not inequality. We cannot begin to find solutions until we see this clearly. Injustice might sometimes be at the root of the problem, but not every inequality, not even every insufficiency, is someone else’s fault. Redistribution might contribute to a solution, as everyone but the most rabid right wing apologist will accept. But redistribution which does not cure the insufficiency may be pointless and excessive redistribution may do damage of its own. Whenever equality becomes a political goal in its own right ideology has taken over from common sense. Insufficiency is the real enemy but the questions which need answering before action are empirical, not ideological.

We should be deeply concerned about genuine insufficiency, not only in our own society but around the world. As an expanding world population meets the effects of climate change that concern will become the key challenge of the future. But mistaking that challenge for a problem about equality helps no one and confuses issues which already wallow in interest politics and ideology. European politics has been arranged for a long time along a left/right, equality/freedom axis. A shift to an axis which has insufficiency at one extreme may already be under way, but it is much needed. Such a shift might help us to accept not only that insufficiency should be the focus of concern but that excess is at the other extreme. If that is so, the equilibrium position may be to learn how to be content with sufficient. That will be enough of a challenge.