A Point About Equality

I'm reading some things about Equal Protection with regard to sex discrimination, and among other things (like that Phyllis Schlafly is absurdly annoying to read) I'm having the following thought about equality: being on the "winning" end of an unequal, oppressive caste system is not a good thing. It would be much better indeed to be part of a generally equal society. Now, there's a very limited sense in which this is not true: some material social resources are simply limited in supply, and therefore when the master class can steal the servant class' resources through the organs of social power, it "wins." It gets more stuff. Great.

Of course, to compensate for what might be a somewhat larger amount of material goods for your master class, you participate in a great injustice, and are treated as participating in a great injustice. The breakdown of mutual respect for one another as free and equal citizens that someone like John Rawls is concerned with in unjust societies doesn't just hurt the oppressee, for those who are oppressed will surely not respect their oppressors in this way. They have no reason to, and yet, if you are someone demographically within the group on the "winning" end of the injustice who believes passionately that this injustice is wrong, you are likely to get the same disrespect as anyone else who shares your skin color, or anatomy, or sexual preference, or whatever.

Then we have another dynamic, that just as members of the subjugated class are conditioned to a life of inferiority, members of the subjugating class are conditioned to a life of superiority. This is dramatically visible in the case of sex discrimination, where the flip-side to women's being conditioned to a life of abandoning personal ambition to do thousands of hours of unpaid household work is that men are conditioned to a life of neglecting one's personal life and loved ones in order to work long hours in a boring job to make money. Women, justly, are likely to presume that any man they meet in a bar is like Barney Stinson, a calculating predator just trying to get them in bed and walk away the next day (or even worse, as Barney always goes to the trouble of "convincing" the woman to sleep with him, instead of resorting to some form of coercion); this hurts decent, innocent men, and yet they can't really object. Likewise, men are made to feel that if they aren't Barney Stinson, they're not "real" men.

You get the point. In terms of pure material goods, at best we're talking about a zero-sum game when we play at oppression. It might be substantially negative-sum: promoting women's equality in the workplace dramatically increases economic output. But then on top of that at-best zero-sum game, we've got the vastly negative-sum game in terms of nonmaterial goods. Society is just made worse by oppression. It's made worse for the oppressed, obviously, and it's made worse for the oppressors, even if they don't notice it but especially for the ones who do. That's why men should be every bit as much feminists as women, and why white people should be every bit as opposed to discrimination against African-Americans as those African-Americans are: that is, completely opposed. Discrimination and oppression hurt everyone, ultimately.





Of course, this doesn't mean that the people on the "losing" end of that oppression aren't really losing, and don't have cause to complain that they're being oppressed and treated unequally. The point is basically just that being treated as a free and equal citizen is superior to being treated as a first-class citizen, as well as being (obviously) better than being treated as a second- or third-class citizen. Theoretically I'd like to think that this line of argument could give a straight person standing to challenge a lack of gay marriage, for instance, but I doubt the courts would ever buy this.