Today equality has become a preeminent quest for social justice in all aspects of our lives.
Reading Darrin McMahon’s book “Equality”, especially on the occasion of the 60th anniversary of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the result of the most transformative movement of the 1960s led by Martin Luther King Jr., has been an illuminating intellectual experience for me.
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), says Professor McMahon, a historian of ideas at Dartmouth College. Gandhi himself was deeply influenced by the teachings of Jesus and also by Leo Tolstoy’s writing “Civil Disobedience and Non-violence” as well as Henry David Thoreau’s essay “The Duty of Civil Disobedience.” Thoreau’s transcendentalism had Indian philosophical origins.
Thus, drunk deep on eclectic sources of inspiration, Martin Luther King Jr. 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. The White House as Michelle Obama observed was “a house that was built by slaves.” But one man’s rise to the top does not mean the end of the struggle for equality for the rest. The Sisyphean struggle for equality continues.
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 and condition each other. As Professor McMahon says, “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 Fourteenth 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.
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. The #MeToo movement emboldened women who had been sexually harassed or assaulted to come out and say loud and clear “Me Too” to expose the widespread prevalence of sexual harassment and assault, particularly in the workplace and in industries like entertainment, media, and politics. 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. Inspired by the Civil Rights Movement, the LGBTQ+ rights movement gained momentum, particularly after events like the Stonewall Riots in 1969. Advocates for the rights of people with disabilities drew inspiration from the Civil Rights Movement to fight for equal opportunities and access, leading to significant legislation like the Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990.
Today equality has become a preeminent quest for social justice in all aspects of our lives. Professor McMahon, however, argues that equality has never been a neat and upfront or universally accepted idea; but rather a challenging concept that has been recast and redefined in every society throughout history. Different civilizations, religions, political ideologies, and social movements have wrestled with the idea of equality, often in contradictory and exclusionary ways, but none has ignored it.
Even our primitive ancestors, hunter-gatherers, posits Professor McMahon, had developed some kind of socio-psychological leveling system to enforce what he calls “fierce egalitarianism.” But once they began to settle down in agrarian communities, the idea of ownership, and consequently the need for control and command and hierarchy, made leveling everyone as equals a difficult proposition. Moreover, as societies grew diverse and more complex because of religion, race, caste, class, ethnicity, nationality, and gender, equality became a tool of differentiation, classification, inclusion, and exclusion.
Spanning millennia, Professor 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. Marxist 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. So 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. All in the name of equality.
Non-Western cultures and religions like Islam, Confucianism, Buddhism, and Hinduism have conceptualized equality differently from the Western concept of equality. For example, Hinduism is a hierarchal caste-based system where people are equal within their caste but unequal with other caste members, though under the Constitution they’re all equal. Caste in India is an example of what Professor McMahon calls “A circle of equals,” with “substance,” which excludes others as unworthy and unequal.
Throughout the book, there’s a constant theme 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 Professor McMahon admonishes, nonetheless, 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.