Inequality isn’t inevitable
Social and economic inequality remains deeply entrenched in Western society despite 300 years of Enlightment-inspired thinking — and fighting — about equality. The standard narrative of social development says this is unavoidable because large complex societies must inevitably be unequal. But we have a hundred years of archaeological and anthropological evidence that says this is simply not the case. Perhaps the individualism of Enlightenment thinking has taken us as far along the path to equality as it can? Perhaps if we want a more equal society it’s time to adopt a new paradigm and learn something from people that followed different paths to achieve it long before the Enlightenment even began.
I had an odd thought recently, namely:
“Where did the idea that some people deserve more than others come from?”
Who was that first person that decided that they had a right to accumulate resources for themself and deny others any right to those resources?
Turns out it was a naively stupid question. And not a new one.
It’s the exact same question Jean-Jacque Rousseau was asking in the mid-1700’s:
“The first person who, having enclosed a plot of land, took it into his head to say this is mine and found people simple enough to believe him was the true founder of civil society. What crimes, wars, murders, what miseries and horrors would the human race have been spared, had some one pulled up the stakes or filled in the ditch and cried out to his fellow men: “Do not listen to this imposter. You are lost if you forget that the fruits of the earth belong to all and the earth to no one!” ― Rousseau, 1763.
I say it was a naively stupid question because, having now researched the issue, I realise the very way I asked it is a product of my own misguided modern thinking. Asking “When did inequality start?” presupposed that there was a time before when inequality wasn’t, and betrays just how much my own thinking has been influenced by the likes of Roussea and other Enlightenment thinkers. The question I probably should have been asking was:
“Where did the idea that all humans are equal come from?”
Because although the concept of equality per se goes back to antiquity, the idea that all individual humans are in some sense equal is actually a very modern thought.
What do we mean by equality?
The dictionary tells me that to be equal means “to be the same in quantity, size, degree, or value”. Equality is something measured on some sort of scale, and is a judgement that two “things” (persons, objects, phenomena, ideas etc) have parity on the particular scale being used.
This means that equality is totally a human construct. Equality means what we define it to mean. There is no fundamental law of nature or any immutable objective truth that we are resting on. It rests on nothing more than our ideas about the way the world is, or should be.
So where did the idea of the equality of individual humans come from? To answer that I’d like to look in turn at nature, history and philosophy.
What does nature have to say?
If you look to nature for a basis to human equality you will be sadly disappointed. Because according to nature, all humans are decidedly not equal.
For starters nature actually creates inequality — in all species. The evolution of life requires diversity. Species evolve precisely because different individuals are unequal with respect to their ability to survive. And this is as true for humans as it is for any other species. Were it not, humans would probably have come to an evolutionary dead-end and gone extinct long ago. So at the most fundamental level, evolution actually requires us to be biologically unequal. And that fundamental inequality is critical to our ongoing adaptation and survival.
Furthermore, as far as we can tell humans have always been hierarchical social animals, with certain individuals exercising more social power than others and getting a greater share of resources than others. Hierarchy, and therefore by definition inequality, seems to be something written in to our DNA. All modern apes have hierarchical social structures. And our closest relatives, bonobos and chimpanzees have complex societies with defined cultures remarkably similar to humans. Humans seem to be wired in pretty much the same way as all apes, even today. And since we share the same ancestry as bonobos, chimps and all the other apes we presumably have always been that way.
This is another reason my opening question was naively stupid. The first person to think he (and on balance I’m happy to assume it was a he) deserved more than some other person probably wasn’t a human at all. He was probably one of our ancestral apes, and his thinking, such as it was, was no doubt the product of eons of evolutionary selection for the survival of his genes. The pattern started way, way, way back.
What does human history have to say?
So this brings us to Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712–1778), Genevan philosopher, writer and composer, and his thoughts about that first person who said “this is mine”.
In my title I suggest we should all forget Rousseau, but this is not to imply any disrespect. There is absolutely no question that Rousseau was a great thinker and deserves his position in the panoply of western philosophers. He authored many works but is perhaps most famous for two highly influential books, first his Discourse on the Origin and Basis of Inequality Among Men (1755) and second his book On the Social Contract; or, Principles of Political Rights (1762). The latter was particularly influential on the French Revolution. But it is the earlier work that is of immediate interest here.
The Discourse on Inequality is a masterful work, full of critical insight and seductively elegant in its arguments — hence its popularity and influence. In it Rousseau, anticipating Darwinian evolution by more than two decades, describes the hypothetical trajectory of humankind from an idyllic free and fulfilled “noble savage” living in a “state of nature”, to an ego-driven, narcissistic and war-like being competing for status in complex societies. And it is this imagined “state of nature” that creates the problem.
Image: Michael Reid Gallery
Rousseau’s discourse can be seen as a romantic rebuttal of English philosopher Thomas Hobbes’ (1588–1679) rather bleak assessment of the life of pre-civilisation humans as “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short”. Rousseau’s alternate view was very much influenced by the published accounts of indigenous north American peoples that were wildly popular in European society at the time, and in particular the contrast he saw between these anthropological anecdotes and his own lived experience of Genevan and Parisian society. The problem isn’t so much what Rousseau wrote, it’s that over time people began to think of what he wrote as historical fact, when actually he quite explicitly states that the piece is a thought experiment for the purposes of which he deliberately ignored historical fact.
“Let us begin therefore, by laying aside facts, for they do not affect the question. The researches, in which we may engage on this occasion, are not to be taken for historical truths, but merely as hypothetical and conditional reasonings, fitter to illustrate the nature of things, than to show their true origin . . .”
Rousseau, Inequality, p10.
Unfortunately Rousseau’s hypothetical trajectory of human social development — from “noble savages” living free and happy in apparently egalitarian hunter-gatherer bands to large, complex, violent and highly unequal societies — laid the foundation for the modern idea that there is a linear and uni-directional progression of human society from “bands to tribes to chiefdoms to states” (a classification system for human societies proposed by anthropologist Elman Service in 1962). Highly influential contemporary authors such as Francis Fukuyama (The End of History and the Last Man, 1992), Jared Diamond (The Third Chimpanzee, 1991; Collapse, 2005 amongst others) and Yuval Noah Harari (Sapiens, 2012) all tend to default to this simple idea of the linear “progress” of human society. It’s perhaps not surprising since it fits perfectly with our understanding of the evolution of life, and also with the western concept of “development” as being a linear directional progression from simple to complex.
The problem is that it’s almost certainly not true.
Not in the sense that this course of development is linear, uni-directional or in any way inevitable. And not in the sense that so-called “hunter-gatherer societies” were unconsciously occupying a ‘less developed’ position on the natural trajectory and were merely ‘behind’ more ‘advanced’ societies in the Western world. Ironically it is evidence from the very same indigenous societies of north America that so enticed Rousseau, as well as many others, that shows us today that this simple linear idea of human social development is actually a myth that we would do well to forget.
It’s complicated!
For some years now anthropologist and anarchist David Graeber (Professor of Anthropology at the London School of Economics) and archaeologist David Wengrow (Professor of Comparative Archaeology at University College London) have been challenging this widely accepted myth about human social development. And in no small way.
They assert, for example, that the so-called “agricultural revolution” never happened (not in any way that resembles the standard narrative at least), and that in general the development of human societies around the world has been a much more diverse and dynamic process than most of us have been led to believe. They state that academics have known that this is the case for at least a century and that Rousseau’s “state of nature”, for example, is typically done away with in the first lecture of Anthropology 101. When I looked for evidence that what they are saying here is true I found it right away. It’s all there in black and white. Yet despite all this archaeological and anthropological evidence against it, for some reason the simple to understand and [I suspect] culturally palatable myth has persisted in mainstream consciousness.
“The story we have been telling ourselves about our origins is wrong, and perpetuates the idea of inevitable social inequality.” Graeber and Wengrow
Graeber and Wengrow are something of a “dynamic duo” and you can find many of their jointly delivered talks on this subject on the internet. Their clearest essay on it outside the academic literature is probably “How to change the course of human history (at least, the part that’s already happened)” and I highly recommend you read it. I would struggle to further condense this summary of their work, and I certainly can’t improve on it, so if you’ll forgive the long quotes I’ll let them speak for themselves:
“Overwhelming evidence from archaeology, anthropology, and kindred disciplines is beginning to give us a fairly clear idea of what the last 40,000 years of human history really looked like, and in almost no way does it resemble the conventional narrative. Our species did not, in fact, spend most of its history in tiny bands; agriculture did not mark an irreversible threshold in social evolution; the first cities were often robustly egalitarian. Still, even as researchers have gradually come to a consensus on such questions, they remain strangely reluctant to announce their findings to the public — or even scholars in other disciplines — let alone reflect on the larger political implications.”
And
“Modern authors have a tendency to use prehistory as a canvas for working out philosophical problems: are humans fundamentally good or evil, cooperative or competitive, egalitarian or hierarchical? As a result, they also tend to write as if for 95% of our species’ history, human societies were all much the same. But even 40,000 years is a very, very long period of time. It seems inherently likely, and the evidence confirms, that those same pioneering humans who colonised much of the planet also experimented with an enormous variety of social arrangements. As Claude Lévi-Strauss often pointed out, early Homo sapiens were not just physically the same as modern humans, they were our intellectual peers as well. In fact, most were probably more conscious of society’s potential than people generally are today, switching back and forth between different forms of organization every year. Rather than idling in some primordial innocence, until the genie of inequality was somehow uncorked, our prehistoric ancestors seem to have successfully opened and shut the bottle on a regular basis, confining inequality to ritual costume dramas, constructing gods and kingdoms as they did their monuments, then cheerfully disassembling them once again.
If so, then the real question is not ‘what are the origins of social inequality?’, but, having lived so much of our history moving back and forth between different political systems, ‘how did we get so stuck?’ All this is very far from the notion of prehistoric societies drifting blindly towards the institutional chains that bind them. It is also far from the dismal prophecies of Fukuyama, Diamond, Morris, and Scheidel, where any ‘complex’ form of social organization necessary means that tiny elites take charge of key resources, and begin to trample everyone else underfoot. Most social science treats these grim prognostications as self-evident truths. But clearly, they are baseless.”
Graeber and Wengrow lay out the evidence for their claims in their paper and I encourage you to check it out. The take home message for my purposes is this:
“ ‘civilization’ does not come as a package. The world’s first cities did not just emerge in a handful of locations, together with systems of centralised government and bureaucratic control. . . . there is absolutely no evidence that top-down structures of rule are the necessary consequence of large-scale organization. . . it is simply not true that ruling classes, once established, cannot be gotten rid of except by general catastrophe.”
In other words inequality is not the inevitable consequence of the development of large complex societies. History shows us that we can actually have any kind of society we chose. So if this is the case what kind of society should we chose?
What does philosophy have to say?
Helping us with that question is of course one of the fundamental roles of philosophy, and the question of “What constitutes a just society?” has been central to western philosophical thought since antiquity. This is the context in which the idea of equality first appears in the Western tradition, specifically in what is known as Aristotle’s ‘formal equality principle’ where he tells Plato to “treat like cases as like”.
Aristotle teaches us that a just society does not treat everybody the same (what he terms “numerical equality”), but rather treats people in relation to their due (something he terms “proportional” or “relative equality”). Identical treatment, he says, is only just when the persons or situations under consideration are also identical. However when people are unequal in some key relevant respect, justice requires that we treat them unequally in proportion to that inequality.
Sounds great right? Positively egalitarian! But look again. Because while egalitarians certainly do embrace this principle, so do aristocrats, perfectionists, and meritocrats! Pretty much everyone agrees that persons should be assessed according to their differing deserts (in the broad sense of fulfilling some relevant criterion). And pretty much everyone agrees that reward and punishment, benefits and burdens, should be proportional to those deserts. But it all hangs on what people believe others deserve. Plato and Aristotle both leave open who is due what, so they leave plenty of scope for inequality depending on how you define people’s rights, deserts, and worth.
And this is how things played out for millennia in ‘Western’ history, because until the Enlightenment it was widely assumed that human beings were unequal by nature, that there was a natural human hierarchy, and that this natural hierarchy justified all kinds of unequal treatment. Ancient systems of justice were very clear in specifying the worth of various members of society (men, women, slaves etc) and therefore prescribing what just treatment and distribution actually meant. From Hammurabi (1792–1750 BCE) to Moses (c1200 BCE) and beyond, what constituted justice and equal treatment depended entirely on where you stood in the social hierarchy, and the differing perceived worth of individuals in different classes.
Over time the idea that people might be equal in some fundamental natural sense began to take hold. First with the Stoics (from around 300 BCE) who believed in the natural equality of all rational beings, and then with the early Christians (from about 100 CE), who regarded all human beings as equal before God. This latter idea was subsequently taken up both in the Talmud and in Islam.
But it wasn’t until the 17th century that the idea of the moral equality of human beings — that is that everyone deserved the same dignity and the same respect — began to really take hold. First Hobbes (1651) postulated that in their natural condition individuals possess equal rights. Then Locke (1690) argued that all human beings have the same natural right to both (self-)ownership and freedom. Then Rousseau (1755) states that the human race had natural equality in its [lost] harmonious “state of nature”. Then Kant (1785) writes about universal human worth, and (in 1797) equal freedom for all rational beings as the basis of human rights. These Enlightenment ideas stimulated the great modern social movements and revolutions, and were taken up in modern constitutions and declarations of human rights. That “all men are created equal” and have “certain unalienable rights” is of course written in the United States Declaration of Independence (1786) and during the French Revolution “equality, freedom and fraternity” famously became the basis of the Déclaration des droits de l´homme et du citoyen of 1789.
Two hundred and fifty years later this principle of equal dignity and respect is generally accepted as a minimum standard throughout mainstream Western culture. It does not imply that all humans are identical, but rather that underneath apparent differences we are recognizable entities that can be said to be of equal worth. Moral equality is understood as treating people as equals — that is with equal concern and respect — but not treating persons equally, since as Aristotle said, if you ignore fundamental differences this can actually be unjust. And while this fundamental idea might be widely accepted in modern Western political and moral culture, that unfortunately does not mean it is yet universally upheld in all legislation, universally applied in all institutions, or universally accepted by all community members.
“You are lost if you forget that the fruits of the earth belong to all and the earth to no one!”
― Rousseau
If achieving equal dignity and respect is still proving hard to achieve, achieving equal distribution of ‘social goods’ seems to be exponentially more problematic. When philosophers talk about ‘goods’ they are not meaning things one would buy from a store, they are referring to the entirety of benefits that can arise from being a member of society, or on the flip side the burdens that come with it. These ‘goods’ are usually divided into four categories: 1. civil liberties, 2. opportunities for political participation, 3. social positions and opportunities, and 4. economic rewards.
If all people are of equal worth, then the philosophical starting point for the distribution of all these social goods (and burdens) is that it should be done equally. As Rousseau says, in principle “the fruits of the earth belong to all”. So if anyone claims they have a greater right — to civil liberties, to opportunities for political participation, to access to social positions and opportunities, or to economic rewards — they must be able to justify this claim, and their justification must be universally and reciprocally recognised by all. It’s what philosophers call ‘the presumption of equality’: all social goods should be distributed equally unless justified otherwise.
For the most part this principle is now also generally accepted in Western democracies, but certainly not totally, and not without some very considerable fights. But over time the equal distribution of civil liberties (meaning an equal right to freedom and to equal treatment under the law), of political participation (e.g. the right to vote), and of access to social positions and opportunities (e,g, freedom from discrimination) have all become generally accepted in principle — even if not yet perfectly executed in practice. However the fourth category, the equal distribution of economic rewards, has remained a hotly contested issue for over two centuries. And it seems we are no closer to settling this issue in 2020 than we were in 1750.
The contention over social and economic inequality really centres on whether or not the state should act to establish equality of social conditions for all through political measures — such as redistribution of income and property, tax reform, a more equal educational system, social insurance, and positive discrimination. And this is essentially the battle ground between ‘the left’ — who typically argue for state action, and ‘the right’ who typically argue against it. Public healthcare, public housing, public education, public transport — if it has the word “public” before it it’s likely to be one of the battlegrounds of the fight over equal distribution of social goods. Taxation, military defense, policing and welfare are also all elements of this issue.
In accordance with the presumption of equality, if you claim that the distribution of social goods should be anything other than equal you need to be able to justify this claim, and that justification needs to be universally and reciprocally accepted. When it comes to the unequal distribution of economic rewards there is no shortage of proposed justifications to argue about! Factors that are usually considered as eligible to justify unequal treatment include things like: differing need or differing natural disadvantages (e.g. disabilities); existing rights or claims (e.g. private property); differences in the performance of special services (e.g. desert, efforts, or sacrifices); efficiency; and compensation for direct, indirect or structural discrimination (e.g. affirmative action). You will no doubt recognise these as some of the key grievances of the battle between left and right political ideologies over the past two centuries. This is the stuff we are still fighting wars over, conducting coups over, and protesting in the streets over. ‘Universal and reciprocal acceptance’ of the unequal distribution of the economic rewards of our society seems as far away as it has ever been.
Is it time for a different paradigm?
While I love philosophy and the idea that as humans we can consciously reason our way to a better world, one of the problems I have with Western philosophy is that it is fundamentally individualistic. The entire discussion above — from Aristotle on — is premised on the idea that humans are ‘recognisable entities’, that these persons have individual rights and responsibilities, and that society must ultimately deal with all its issues at the level of the individual.
When British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher famously said in 1987 “There’s no such thing as society” she was actually speaking one of the fundamental truths of Western political philosophy. “There are individual men and women and there are families.” she went on to say. “And no government can do anything except through people [i.e. “persons”], and people [“persons”] must look after themselves first. It is our duty to look after ourselves and then, also, to look after our neighbours.”
Far from heresy, this is Enlightenment-inspired Western political orthodoxy. Yet the statement caused outrage amongst many in the Western world at the time — outrage which interestingly was reprised at the time of her death in 2013. But why did people who had lived their entire lives in a system built on that foundational truth react so vociferously? Why did the suggestion that “There’s no such thing as society” seem to so many to be absurd, wrong, and in some way selfish, cold and heartless?
Why the visceral reaction to the suggestion that society didn’t exist? Could it be that deep down, despite all our hard fought intellectual individualism, in our viscera humans are . . . oh I don’t know . . . social animals? Could it be that our instincts for being part of a society is written in our DNA right there alongside our instincts for individual survival? Perhaps to humans society is not actually “nothing” at all but is, at the most fundamental level, everything. And perhaps our individualistic Enlightment-inspired thinking is fundamentally at odds with important aspects of our true human nature?
Was Rousseau possibly even more wrong than I originally thought? Could his imaginations of egalitarian pre-civil-society humans — based on stories of egalitarian indigenous Americans — have possibly overlooked a key fact? Namely that egalitarianism is a product of Western philosophical thought and, like all our philosophies, it is fundamentally individualistic. It is literally the political philosophy that states all individuals should be treated as equals and have the same political, economic, social and civil rights.
But what if your society doesn’t have any individuals?
What if your society is operating within an entirely different paradigm where individuals aren’t recognised, only groups are?
If you have had the privilege like me to live amongst indigenous societies like that you will immediately recognise this alternate paradigm. It probably clashed painfully with your Western individualism on a daily basis, as it did mine. It probably did your head in as you struggled to grasp how people could think like ‘that’ and act like ‘that’. It certainly did mine. It’s a world where individuals are hardly seen and rarely, if ever, singled out or celebrated. It’s a world where ‘I’ means nothing and ‘us’ means everything. It’s a world of bewildering community cohesion, and seemingly cold indifference to individual identity. The value of life is paramount, but the value of ‘a’ life is curiously, seemingly callously, unimportant. So profoundly different is the experience of this consciousness that I suspect unless you have experienced it you will struggle to appreciate just how starkly different it is to the individualistic Western paradigm. It’s as different as night is to day.
Had Margaret Thatcher been born into one of these societies she might well have said
“There’s no such thing as an individual, there’s only society. And it is our duty to look after society first.”
Could it be that these societies we’re constantly being told were “egalitarian” were not actually egalitarian at all? Could it be that they just look egalitarian to Western eyes, and are called egalitarian by Western researchers because that’s the only way we can describe those social relationships from within the Western paradigm? Could it be that these societies operated within an entirely different paradigm where the individual is nothing, and society is everything, and therefore the very idea of the equality of individuals has no real meaning?
It seems possible to me that our Western conception of egalitarianism, of the equality of individuals, might be being misapplied to these societies. And I’m not saying that just to be nit-picky about the semantics. I’m saying it to raise the possibility that we could be missing something really important. In applying a concept developed within our own paradigm to social systems from vastly different paradigms we may be blinding ourselves to how these societies actually operate. And therefore blinding ourselves to the wisdom they have to offer us, and robbing ourselves of opportunities to achieve greater inequality in our own society.
This is pure conjecture on my part at this point. I’m still looking for discussion of this idea in the published literature, so please leave me a comment below if you have any leads.
In the meantime I will be conducting a bit of a thought experiment of my own.
Graeber and Wengrow tell us that:
“Those same pioneering humans who colonised much of the planet also experimented with an enormous variety of social arrangements . . . And in fact most were probably more conscious of society’s potential than people generally are today.”
What wisdom might these societies have to offer our own, stuck now as we have been for some centuries in a quagmire of individualistic inequality? Having failed so miserably to solve the problems of social and economic inequality through the individualistic Western paradigm, is it perhaps time to look within the alternate paradigms of societies who have actually managed to do it successfully?
Perhaps Enlightenment thinking has taken us as far down the path to equality as it can? We may not want to actually forget Rousseau, but maybe it’s time to put him back on the shelf and listen more to the wisdom of some of those indigenous societies that so inspired him.
