I responded to a few questions from a journalist yesterday, and ended up spending a fair amount of time on them. Sometimes, it’s helpful to write for someone besides the usual audience, because it forces you to explain yourself in new ways, and put a little more thought into things.
One of the questions she asked was “Do you think equality between men and women is an admirable or necessary goal?” I think regular readers would know that I don’t – at least not in the way in which “equality” is understood today – but it’s important to explain why, because the modern concept of equality has to be debunked.
I think I did a fair job of doing so without wasting too many words, so I thought I should post that response for readers. We should all be armed against this idea that equality is an unqualified blessing, because one of the first accusations one faces these days is that of being anti-equality. I think we might as well own it — agree and amplify so to speak. Equalism is becoming the bane of our time, and there’s no good reason to make compromises with it.
So here’s my response:
Do I think equality between men and women is admirable or necessary? I could answer the easy way and say that it’s impossible, which it is, but to be more specific I also think it’s an absolutely terrible, evil goal that is very harmful and destructive when pursued. I don’t think so because “a woman’s place is in the kitchen” or some other simple aphorism, but because men and women together comprise humanity, and each part is required for us to survive, just as different parts of an organism are required. Would we declare an arm and a leg equal? Or a heart and lung? Or even the left and right hemisphere of the brain? It’s just an appalling idea to me, and beyond comprehension. If men and women were suddenly equal, humanity would cease to exist in short order, and that sounds pretty awful. I think it’s the worst kind of dystopia imaginable.
There’s only one kind of equality that we can honestly speak of, and that’s a spiritual concept that applies to each of us as “souls.” In the sense that we love all of our children, God loves each of us, and in that we are “equal” — man, woman, Greek, Jew, slave, free, etc. Now, I’m not pretending to preach here; I’m agnostic, but my point is that the concept of equality is entirely religious in origin, and mainly Christian. Our current secular concept of equality is based on this religious idea, which is exactly why it developed in the Christian West and nowhere else. Nowhere at all — feel free to check up on that. Of course, we can extrapolate some of this religious concept of equality to the law, and we have to a great extent, which is overall a very good thing.
But there are limits. The law cannot defy nature, as King Canute so famously demonstrated when he commanded the waves to be still. So even the law recognizes that the sexes are not equal in all ways, and it will always continue to do so. Women are some of the biggest supporters of this, because they know that strict legal equality would be a very raw deal for them.
When you’re talking about social equality, again, it’s an abomination and a dystopian nightmare. Think of the totalitarian measures that would be required to make all boys and girls “equal.”
