It is a good article. I notice the same dissonace with Prager over equality from which virtually every modern suffers, though:

“By equality, I do not mean the belief that men and women are equal human beings, a belief that all decent people hold. Rather, I mean the feminist and politically correct definition of equality: sameness. Men and women have come to be regarded as the same, not simply as equals.”

What Prager fails to realize is that equality _does_ mean sameness. It means sameness in some particular respect. The difference between older versions of political equality and more modern ones isn’t categorical; it is just over what sorts of particular things we will use discriminating police power to insure are the same.

The supposed distinction between “equality” and “sameness” doesn’t hold up. They _do_ mean the same thing; and frankly the sooner that folks on the Right accept that fact and explore its consequences, the better.

I also notice that Prager thinks that anyone who disagrees about equality is not a decent person. So the net result is that anyone who refuses intellectual assent to self-contradictory liberalism is beyond the pale, outside of the sphere of decent human beings that constitute legitimate voices in culture and politics.

Look at it this way: when someone says that all men are equal, he means they are the same in some particular respects. Nobody ever means, by equality, that everyone is or ought to be the same in every respect. He -always- means that people are or ought to be the same in some particular respects - particulars that ought to be supported and enforced by the social, cultural, and legal order.

Sameness and equality are equal; equality and sameness are the same.

Dribble,drool! These so-called young ladies think it glamorous in showing enough disrespect for themselves so as to attract attention. They become the bait from which men are lured. It has absolutely nothing to do with equality of the sexes. Methinks too many are reading too much philosophy. Wake up, this is the way it is along with all the other nonsense floating around us. Each generation pushes the envelope a little further. Perhaps in the next, Bible-toting and overdress may be the fashion. But this is stretching the imagination beyond all reality. THe problem with much analysis of the social scene is that situations or types like the one posed here is placed entirely in one group. Not all young ladies behave this way.Are we to say that everyone behaves normally in public? The exceptions do not become the rule!

To Matt, can’t we simply interpret Prager as saying that women are equal to and the same as men with regard to their human dignity?

Mr. Auster: certainly. My objection is to the fact that Prager claims that his version of equality is not sameness, when in fact it is sameness.

My claim is not that there are no ways at all in which all human beings are the same, which would be obviously wrong. Nor is it that those areas of actual sameness have no political consequences (e.g., if every human being is an end in himself it follows that grinding human beings up for fertilizer is wrong). Rather, my objection is to the idea that equality and sameness are different things and that the leftists/politically correct have misunderstood the distinction. There is no distinction for them to misunderstand.

Every equality/sameness is a substantive and particular equality/sameness. In an effort to avoid disputes over particular substantive moral and political differences, liberalism has (since its infancy) attempted to invent the abstraction “equality” as a way of avoiding talking about the particulars and of condemning anyone who wants to talk about the particulars. It doesn’t work though. Sameness is equality; equality equals sameness.

I was going to make the same point as Matt. When speaking of the equality of men and women, you have to point out what exactly is equal. Human dignity is a good one, I think, but it is hard to derive practical consequences from it. Certainly, “equality before the law” is not an accurate term. You have to take sex into account when making decisions about child custody, the military, and welfare. And more, if we were honest.

“You have to take sex into account when making decisions about child custody, the military, and welfare. And more, if we were honest.” True. Perhaps it would be useful to distinguish between the rights that have some relation to concepts of natural law, or some other traditional basis for discerning rights, and the bogus “rights” that are constantly invented in liberal society.

With that distinction, we can see that serving in the military is a privilege, not a right, granted by a society based at least in part on the pragmatic concern for who is best able to defend the country in time of war, who contributes to group cohesion in the military and who detracts from it, etc. Similarly, a welfare payment is not a right, but a privilege granted by society when it is deemed in the best interests of society, and withdrawn when it is no longer in the best interests of society. Child custody should be granted based on what is in the best interests of the children, not based on a claimed “right” by either parent.

The question then is whether common sense traditional distinctions between men and women EVER run afoul of true rights as traditionally understood, or whether they only come into conflict with modernist inventions of “rights”, loosely defined as “anything I claim to want for myself”.

Many young ladies wear revealing clothing today because they have been taught by thier handlers that there is a close relationship between sexual and political power.

By wearing revealing clothing, young girls appear to be displaying sexual availability. In truth however, this fashion statement is not intended to be sexual, rather it is an expression of feminist political will.

Licentiousness exists in America today as a battle cry among both feminists and homosexuals,
and serves to unite both groups.

When the left feels that a sufficient number of
young ladies have been indoctrinated, they will launch the final assault on American culture.
Probably within the next ten years.

That’s a very interesting comment by Ron. One can indeed observe a movement within feminism advocating licentiousness - Naomi Wolf comes to mind. The homosexualist movement holds promiscuity and licentiousness as one of its fundamental “rights.” There’s little doubt that an indoctrination program directed at young women - especially white women - is already in place in public schools and universities nationwide, along with the ongoing war on white boys. What in Ron’s view would be the final assault?

“when someone says that all men are equal, he means … that people are or ought to be the same in some particular respects”

But if this is what it means isn’t the idea coherent? And isn’t it sometimes true - eg. if Mr. Auster says that everyone possesses some basic human dignity in equal measure? I thought Matt’s view was that it is always either false or incoherent to say that people are or should be political equals?

Julien asks a good question, but he posted the same comment three times. This is something that has been happening fairly often lately. I ask VFR participants, if there is a slight delay in seeing your comment posted, please be patient and don’t click the Post button again.

Julien writes:
“I thought Matt’s view was that it is always either false or incoherent to say that people are or should be political equals.”

It is, and the political qualifier is the important bit. Politics is the process whereby we discriminate between people and restrict their freedoms based on that discrimination. That people may be exactly the same in some particulars in some ontological sense is not something that can be willed into existence via the discrimination-by-force that characterizes every possible government action.

For example, someone might argue that a law against grinding people up into fertilizer is a law that enforces equality. It isn’t though. It is a law that discriminates between those who want to grind people up into fertilizer and those who do not, and restricts the freedom of the former. The attempt to frame an authoritative discrimination as an enforcement of equality is ultimately incoherent, since it may (or may not) involve an implicit acknowledge of common traits - some specific sameness - but in its action it is always an authoritative discrimination.

And indeed, in the modern age there are those who argue that people ought to be able to grind other people into fertilizer as long as the ones to be ground up have consented. So the ultimate consequences of liberal incoherence are playing out.

Is it incoherent to think that an authoritative discrimination is based in a recognition of some kind of equality? A law discriminating between the people who want to grind others up into fertilizer and their prospective victims might be justified by the principle that both groups possess human dignity in equal measure. Wouldn’t this be to make that a principle of political equality, insofar as it has this connection to law?

Here’s another take: time was when women seeking husbands didn’t have to offer sexual favours. Doubtless they always sought to appear attractive, but they weren’t under intense pressure to show all the goods. The pill and the sexual revolution changed all that. A woman has to offer the promise of sex, and usually sex itself, to keep a man around long enough to start thinking about settling down. If the woman isn’t willing to come across, some other woman is. Of course, not all men operate at this level, but enough do to condition female expectations. Dressing like a whore (to speak plainly) follows logically—it’s just advertising what’s on offer. A few years before his death, C.S. Lewis wrote that “these desperate signs of competition fill me with pity”. Consistent with this are the headlines on the women’s magazines you see in the supermarket checkout lines. For every one about women’s sexual pleasure there seem to be ten about men’s—with titles that are all variations on “ten sleazy moves that will keep him by your side” (i.e., that will keep him from abandoning you for some other woman who’s willing to debase the currency a little more). And best to start as early as possible—being a competition-class courtesan takes practice. What a shame that we’ve allowed women to come to this.

I may be wrong, but I don’t think that the current, extreme self-exposure by women—the bizarrely plunging necklines, the nipples showing through the fabric, the belly exposed, and exposed below the waist—is connected with attracting a mate in the usual sense. To me it seems a form of nihilism.

Yeah, but you think Tom Fleming’s a nihilist, too. :)

I know Paul is jesting, but let me respond seriously. It’s not impossible that a young woman exposing herself like a whore, and an insanely grumpy paleoconservative intellectual, have something in common, and that that something is nihilism. Nihilism is the organizing idea, the dominant force, of our time, and it takes many forms.

After all, the full title of Fr. Seraphim Rose’s important book on the subject is “Nihilism: The Root of the Revolution of the Modern Age.”

I’ll gladly read it. Nihilism is certainly a soil in which sexual libertinism, and the consequent debasement of women, naturally grows.

There was a fascinating lead article in the “style” section of a recent Sunday New York Times. Illustrated by young women who would look demure to bobbysoxers, it claimed that both the fashion industry and young women were turning rather dramatically against the exposure trend, and dressing conservatively. Of course, this was portrayed as a seasonal, rather than long-term, trend. But it certainly is a relief.

They cited several celebrities who were leading this trend. One of them was actress Maggie Gyllenhaal. Good for her. I find this ironic, though, as the first time I did a search for her, up popped a full-frontal still from an early flick. She’s living this down!

Remember the streaking fad? That lasted all of one summer— 1974, thirty years ago. (Incidents since then have been isolated.)

Let’s hope the “carpenter’s crack” craze of 2003 will go the same way, along with Avril Lavigne’s entire œuvre.

Julien: My apologies for not replying sooner. Either I or VFR have become much busier, as I no longer manage to see all the comments before they disappear off of the main page.

Julien wrote:
“A law discriminating between the people who want to grind others up into fertilizer and their prospective victims might be justified by the principle that both groups possess human dignity in equal measure. Wouldn’t this be to make that a principle of political equality, insofar as it has this connection to law?”

There is no need for a principle of political equality that is not redundant here, though, and since people don’t like what they say to be redundant - they want it to add to the conversation - the demand for political equality will always degenerate into that _something more_ that we call liberalism. “Political equality” purports to add something to our concept of the good, but in every case in which it would actually be applied it is unnecessary. Even a tyrant who is not a complete moral monster recognizes that it would be bad to grind his slaves into fertilizer.

My general claim is not that it isn’t possible for equality to ever mean anything whatsoever morally. It is that it isn’t possible for equality to mean anything politically that isn’t redundant, and since people want what they say to be meaningful “political equality” always degenerates into self-contradictory assertive liberalism.

Let me put this more simply as a test of political assertions, where a political assertion is a contention that government ought to enforce something.

Suppose there is a political assertion that can be made using equality as its basis. There are two components to the assertion: the justification, and the action (an authoritative discrimination, the antithesis of equality) that it entails.

If the political action cannot be framed and justified in a way that does not invoke equality at all, it is invalid. These additive assertions-of-equality - that is, demands that government enforce some discrimination that can ONLY be justified on the basis of equality - are what we call “liberalism”. (Or really liberalism is a constant equivocation between redundancy and this sort of assertive self-contradiction).

If we can’t justify a government action in some way that does not invoke equality at all, it becomes self-contradictory liberalism: the demand that we authoritatively discriminate in general in order to eliminate authoritative discrimination in general. Therefore what is needed is unequivocal discursive repentence - to completely eliminate equality from our political discourse without exception; to see “equal” as a red flag that indicates that a political assertion is invalid unless it can be justified on other grounds that do not invoke equality.

Matt,
I think I understand your position but I still don’t see how it applies to this example. Suppose someone were to say something like this: “It’s illegal to grind people into fertilizer because it’s wrong, and the reason it’s wrong is that all people possess a basic human dignity in equal measure”. This would be to justify a law by appeal to morality - in particular, to moral equality. My suggestion is that this is also a notion of *political* equality insofar as it is the justification for a law. In what way is this notion of equality redundant (or self-defeating)? It’s true that everyone, even a tyrant, will probably recognize that it’s bad to grind people into fertilizer. But I don’t see how that shows that it would be redundant to explain why it’s bad by appeal to moral equality.

Julien:

What would be the difference between saying “all people possess human dignity” and “all people possess a basic human dignity in equal measure”?

It seems to me that the “equal” business is at best redundant. It makes a sound as we utter it, but does it add any meaning? If anything it opens the possibility that human dignity can be measured and quantified. And if it can be measured and quantified, it can be manipulated and used to justify means-end reasoning.

So I think even in this specific example a political assertion of equality 1) adds no legitimate meaning whatsoever, and 2) opens up the likelihood of asserting error where that likelihood did not exist before.

I don’t deny the possibility of “equal” meaning something non-redundant in morality somewhere, but as soon as there are political implications it seems to me that it is either redundant or outright erroneous.

I think the meaning of “in equal measure” is just what you suggest: it’s not the case that Bill Gates or Fidel Castro or the Aryan superman possesses more of this basic human dignity than anyone else. So it isn’t redundant, especially when considered in contrast with all the theories that assert that people *don’t* possess human dignity in equal measure - Bolshevism, Nazism, multiculturalism and the like.

It’s true that in saying this we imply that it can be quantified and used in means-ends reasoning. But that in itself doesn’t show that this use of the term is either redundant or erroneous. Maybe it could be used to further bad ends and ideas - although I’d think it could also be used to oppose them - but that’s another issue, it seems to me. (Incidentally, I wonder if you aren’t making too rigid a distinction between morality and politics? If there *is* a non-redundant, true assertion about moral equality, I’d think it’s very unlikely that it won’t figure into politics somehow or other.)

Dennis Prager has just posted part 2 of his analysis of young women’s dress habits. See http://www.townhall.com/columnists/dennisprager/dp20040224.shtml for his reasons three through six.

Julien wrote:
“I think the meaning of “in equal measure” is just what you suggest: it’s not the case that Bill Gates or Fidel Castro or the Aryan superman possesses more of this basic human dignity than anyone else.”

I still don’t see what true thing saying “all people possess basic human dignity” fails to say and “all people possess basic human dignity in equal measure” says. (Incidentally I am not fond of either expression, since to me humanity is a category not something that is measured out in greater or lesser quantities).

I could say:

1) All tables possess an equal measure of tableness; or

2) All tables possess tableness.

The former is like the statement “all people possess an equal measure of human dignity”. Both of the “equal measure” statements do not, as far as I can tell, add anything to what we actually know about the actual person or the actual table. What they do encourage, however, is a nominalist view of the categories “table” and “human”.

Matt,
I think your analogy is a bit unfair. To say that all tables “possess an equal measure of tableness” - or even merely that they “possess tableness” - is of course just an absurdly complicated way of saying that tables are tables. Either is just a tautology. But it isn’t tautologous to say that people possess a morally relevant dignity. One could believe that there are people without believing that such a property exists. As did Stalin or Pol Pot, perhaps. So a better analogy would be a comparison between

“All tables are sturdy”

and

“All tables are equally sturdy”.

Plainly those don’t mean the same thing.

As the example suggests, the mere fact that humanity or human dignity is a category doesn’t mean it can’t be “measured out in greater or lesser quantities”. Plenty of categories are like that: if A and B are both be red, for example, it may also be true that A is redder than B.

So it would be coherent, and consistent with the statement

(1) All people have a basic dignity

to say to say that, as it happens

(2) Some people have more of this basic dignity than others.

(Or that some people are more fully human than others.) The phrase “in equal measure” serves to deny this claim: (2) is *not* consistent with the claim that all people have this dignity in equal measure.

The assertion that everyone has this property in equal measure differs from the assertion that everyone has this property in the most straightforward sense: the one claim is merely that everything has the property, the other is that no one has it to a greater degree than anyone else.

Julien,

Sorry once again for the tardy reply, if you are still there.

I don’t believe that I denied, and I certainly did not intend to deny, that categories like “red” or “sturdiness” exist which manifest themselves in different intensities. What I deny is that the thing modern people appear to mean by “human dignity” is one of them.

This is a good illustration of how “equality” _seems_ to assert something true while introducing error. The human dignity that makes it wrong to use people as fertilizer is something that everyone possesses, or more accurately is something that possesses or categorizes every human being. The word “equal” is introduced, and people of good will accept it because it seems to resist the stalinist notion that some people can have more of this quality and some less. In resisting that error, though, it accepts the premise - that this is a quality that can be measured and that can in priniple have different intensities.

It is the same old story in very abstract form. In order to get the good result, we accept premeses that ultimately undermine the good result and turn it into its opposite.

My position is that there is no point in opposing liberalism unless we repent utterly of its primordial premeses - the primordial premeses that introduced the errors that got us here in the first place. Otherwise our apparent conservative victories are just bones tossed on the floor to keep us acting like good doggies, while underneath we are accepting the very premeses that drive our ultimate downfall.

Political equality seems to reject the notion that people can be used for fertilizer while at the same time introducing the premise that makes using people for fertilizer possible. Eveyrone accepts it because of that initial seeming, and in the end we get Auschwitz, the Gulags, Cambodia, planned parenthood, etc.

Better to simply reject equality as a political premise and resist using people for fertilizer on other grounds. Equality is unnecessary, and the effect of embracing it is exclusively to introduce error. Anything good it appears to achieve can always be achieved by other means; therefore outcomes attributable to equality-qua-equality - things that could not be said in other ways or achieved by other means - are always, without exception evil.

And by the way, this all shows how embracing political “equality” is _essentially_ nominalist. Back in the good old days before William of Ockham we could have said “categorically” and people would have known what we meant. But now instead of it being categorically wrong to treat people as purely means to an end, we have to say that everyone has equal dignity. Humanity has been transformed from an inviolable category into something we can measure out in different intensities and adjust according to our will, all supposedly in the name of maintaining the integrity of the category!

That is why it is just as important to reject nominalism as it is to reject liberalism. Liberalism could not exist without nominalism. If there is some underlying true good to something liberalism is asserting, the assertion can always be replaced by a realist formula that uses “categorical” instead of “equally”. The effort at reformulation is worth it; indeed it is essential to the survival of what remains of Western Christendom.

“Political equality seems to reject the notion that people can be used for fertilizer while at the same time introducing the premise that makes using people for fertilizer possible.”

There are two things here. One is the question of the actual character of the assertion that people possess this moral dignity equally; as far as I can see there’s no reason to think it is tautological or incoherent. The other is the question of whether it would be morally good for people to believe it - regardless of whether it’s true or false. Here I can see your point, but I don’t see that the risk of introducing this premise bears on the character of the original assertion. True, the assertion implies that it is in principle possible that people are not equal in this respect, but that doesn’t show that it’s incoherent or tautologous.

“And by the way, this all shows how embracing political “equality” is _essentially_ nominalist.”

I don’t really see this either. Why can’t a realist hold that there exists a certain universal, moral dignity, which is equally present in each person? Realists of course have to allow that *some* properties are instantiated in different intensities - redness, etc. (And actually, isn’t it hard to think of *any* property that in principle could not be instantiated in different intensities? Truth, beauty, justice, triangularity?) How then would it require a rejection of realism to suppose that moral dignity is a property of this kind, although as it happens it is possessed equally by everyone?

“Why can’t a realist hold that there exists a certain universal, moral dignity, which is equally present in each person?”

Nominalism is about denying universals, breaking down category barriers, and replacing them with the human will through the negotiation of language. Saying that everyone has equal dignity is the first discursive step toward breaking down that category barrier because it implies that in principle, this dignity is the sort of thing that could come in different measures.

Matt,
I’m sorry but I still don’t understand why the fact that the claim

“Everyone possesses moral dignity in equal measure”

is a “first discursive step” towards nominalism shows that it is a nominalist claim. The claim “God exists” might be a “first discursive step” towards Christianity, but it isn’t an intrinsically or exclusively Christian claim, and it would even be consistent with the denial of Christian doctrines.

Likewise, every realist has to allow that many universals *do* come in different measures - redness, triangularity, justice, etc. This is undeniable. So if it is nominalist to think that a universal can come in different measures, every sane person must be a nominalist. But if it isn’t *in general* nominalist to take this view of a universal, why is it nominalist as regards this particular universal, Moral Dignity?