Should we accept inequality?

Putting aside purely economic considerations, living with others on a share-and-share-alike basis is simply a better way to live

The proposal here is not one of state control of the economy. That was attempted in Russia and elsewhere during the twentieth century and was not a success.

The proposal is rather one of decentralization; of small scale rather than large scale; of many warm, sharing human communities rather than a single collectivity.

There are examples from the past as well as the present to draw upon for a smaller, more human-scaled equalitarianism. An economic textbook describes the Zuni people of the American Southwest during the 1920s as one model to follow:

“The family . . . comprising as many as twenty-five persons . . . was the main organizational unit of . . . economic life. . . . In sharp contrast to the American economy, there was a general absence of acquisitiveness and competition. . . . To some extent, these transfers equalized the levels of living among the families of the tribe, preventing the extremes of poverty and great wealth.”

R. Martin and R. Miller, Economics⁵³

The Israeli kibbutz represents an even more intentional model of shared living, since kibbutz members join voluntarily and share everything as completely as possible on principle. In the early days before the formation of the State of Israel, this shared life was very hard. Malaria and dysentery had to be overcome, along with the harshest privations: cloth sacks stitched together for clothing, primitive communal privies, endless manual labor, three glasses to be shared by an entire community, as described by Prime Minister Golda Meir in her memoirs. Today the harshness is gone, but the ideal of a shared life remains.

The ZuniAmerican Southwest, 1920s. Not designed, just how the tribe worked.

The kibbutzIsrael. Joined on purpose, and in the early years extremely hard.

Twin OaksNear Charlottesville, Virginia, since 1967. Still running.

A whole countryTried in Russia. He says at the outset that it was not a success.

The struck-through cell is the one this side is not asking for, and it says so first, before making any other claim. That is what the word decentralization is doing in the second sentence.

An important manual of small-scale equalitarianism in Britain, America, India, and elsewhere is economist E. F. Schumacher’s inspiring little book Small is Beautiful. Schumacher was a sensible, practical man who felt that people should simplify and downscale their life wherever possible without indulging in grandiose or utopian fantasies. He recognized that the greatest obstacle to human peace and happiness was not institutional arrangements per se, but the “greed, envy, hate, and lust”⁵⁴ within all of us. But he did think that large disparities of wealth inflamed both greed and envy, and he warned about the violence that rampant consumerism does to our soul:

“I suggest that the foundations of peace cannot be laid by universal prosperity, in the modern sense, because such prosperity, if attainable at all, is attainable only by cultivating . . . drives . . . which destroy intelligence, happiness, serenity, and thereby the peacefulness of man.”

E. F. Schumacher⁵⁵

The systemNot the greatest obstacle, on his account.

GreedInflamed, he thought, by large gaps in wealth.

EnvyThe same, and the reason the gap matters even to those it does not starve.

Hate and lustInside everybody, and untouched by any arrangement of the economy.

This is unusual for an argument about money, and worth pausing on. The man whose book is the manual for this side says the real trouble is not institutional at all. He wants the gap closed anyway, because of what he thinks a large gap does to the people either side of it.

A director of the E. F. Schumacher Society, Satish Kumar, a former monk, added: “. . . we are realizing, after 200 years of industrial revolution, that we have gone too far in one direction. We need to bring some kind of balance between the spiritual and the material.”⁵⁶

Spirituality, peacefulness, even pacifism are ever-present threads in the fabric of contemporary small-scale equalitarianism. President Luiz Inacio (“Lula”) da Silva of Brazil spoke for most equalitarians when he told a meeting of the Socialist International in 2003 that “The only war we should be waging is against hunger and inequality. That’s a war worth fighting.”⁵⁷

And 2004 US Democratic Party presidential primary candidate Dennis Kucinich made a similar point by proposing the creation of a federal “Department of Peace, which would seek to make non-violence an organizing principle in our society and to work with the nations of the world to make war itself archaic.”⁵⁸

In addition to spirituality, nonmaterialism, and peacefulness, ecology and environmental protection have also emerged as important themes of most small-scale equalitarian thinking. Thus the website of Twin Oaks, an intentional community near Charlottesville, Virginia, states that: “Since the community’s beginning in 1967, our way of life has reflected our values of cooperation, sharing, nonviolence, equality, and ecology.”

All of this is in the most marked contrast to the old, Marxist, large-scale equalitarian ideology of the past, which specifically attacked spirituality and nonmaterialism, rationalized violence and aggression, and left the most horrendous environmental depredations.

The old, Marxist version

1. Ran a whole state
2. Attacked spirituality
3. Rationalized violence
4. Left the worst environmental damage anywhere

The small-scale version

1. Runs a community you can walk across
2. Spiritual, and often pacifist
3. Nonviolence as the organizing idea
4. Ecology near the center of it

Read the columns from top to bottom and they are opposites on every line except the first. If you already had an opinion about equalitarianism, it is worth checking which column you were arguing with.

Small-scale equalitarianism is a vast improvement over the large-scale, state-run alternative. But there are reasons to doubt its practicality

Indeed, large-scale equalitarianism is really a contradiction in terms. If sharing is statewide, it must be enforced. To be enforced, some individuals must be entrusted with police powers. If some people have police powers and others do not, how is that equal? It is simply an inequality of power rather than of money, and will soon mutate into an inequality of money as well, as it did in Communist Russia.

1Sharing is made statewide

2Statewide means it must be enforced

3Somebody is given the power to enforce it

4That is an inequality, and it turns back into money

Four steps and you are back where you started, holding a different kind of gap. This is the argument he calls a contradiction in terms, and the No case had already given it up in its opening sentence.

This is why the French Revolutionary slogan “liberty, equality, fraternity” is nonsensical. Liberty and equality are logical opposites. If people have liberty, they will become unequal. Even if government denies liberty to safeguard equality, equality will not last.

A country decides what it cares about most

Liberty firstPeople do different things with what they have, so they end up with different amounts. The gap opens on its own, and nobody has to want it.

Equality firstLiberty has to be denied to hold the line. And on this account equality does not last anyway, because whoever does the denying has become the unequal one.

The claim is not that equality is undesirable. It is that the two words in the slogan are pulling against each other, so a country cannot simply have both by saying both.

Small-scale equalitarianism is not illogical in the way that large-scale, state-run equalitarianism is. But there are reasons to doubt its practicality. The ancient Greek philosopher Aristotle pointed out that a share-and-share-alike approach to cooperation generally leads to conflict, because members of the group will not all work as hard, or will have sincere differences about the balance of work and leisure, either of which may lead to quarrels. From this point of view, an approach to cooperation that emphasizes independence, self-reliance, and reciprocal exchange will ultimately produce more friendship and mutual assistance.

In addition, if people are going to be quarrelsome about work or possessions, it is surely better to channel this aggression into prescribed forms of mutual exchange-based competition. As Samuel Johnson said, “There are few ways in which a man can be more innocently employed than in getting money.”⁵⁹

John Maynard Keynes made the same point:

“Dangerous human proclivities can be canalized into comparatively harmless channels by the opportunities for money-making and private wealth, which, if they cannot be satisfied in this way, may find their outlet in cruelty, the reckless pursuit of personal power and authority, and other forms of self-aggrandizement. It is better that a man should tyrannize over his bank balance than over his fellow-citizens.”

John Maynard Keynes⁶⁰

People are competitive, and that is not going away

Into a bank balanceHe calls it comparatively harmless. Somebody spends their life trying to make a number larger.

Into everything elseCruelty, the reckless pursuit of power and authority, and other forms of self-aggrandizement.

Note who is speaking. Keynes is quoted on the other side of this same question a few paragraphs later, calling the system arbitrary and inequitable. Both quotations are his, and he meant both.

Opponents of equalitarianism generally take a “harder” rather than a “softer” line on a given social subject, and thus regard the small-scale equalitarian faith in Gandhian non-violence as a hopelessly utopian path to world peace. For example, here’s what Joseph Alsop, leading political columnist after World War Two and an individual thoroughly grounded in ideals of independence and self-reliance, thought about the idea of unilateral disarmament or even military weakness:

“What do we need in America to endure? It isn’t enough to say that we are very numerous, or that we are vastly rich in proportion to everyone else in the world. Being that rich simply makes us a target, if you think about it. Everybody else would like to divide up our goods. They’d like to chew us up like a dead whale on a beach, if we’d let them do it. And I have the warmest sympathy for that desire. It is perfectly understandable, and we mustn’t complain about it.”

Joseph Alsop⁶¹