op-onions:

Pretty disappointed with Idea Channel for misrepresenting egalitarianism as a “man thing” that’s somehow inherently anti-feminist.

If it makes you feel any better you’re not alone! Disappointment abounds with regard to my stance on egalitarianism. Also regarding my stance on the gender wage gap, which I wrote about here.

Maybe it’s helpful for me to explain my reasoning? The last thing I want to do is misrepresent the beliefs of calm, cool and collected people who are concerned that there is a significant part of the population not enjoying equal rights. Maybe I was hasty and we can find some middle ground.

I think one big misunderstanding stems from the fact that egalitarianism, much like feminism, has many branches. There is one umbrella term but under that umbrella a vast array of beliefs, politics and philosophies which guide each sub-community. What makes this even more complicated is that for the people in those sub-communities, it’s pretty likely they think of their feminism, or their egalitarianism, as THE FEMINISM or THE EGALITARIANISM. So when someone leverages judgement on one or the other, based upon a different subset of beliefs or politics, it feels disingenuous or straw-man-like. “That’s not what my beliefs are!”, etc. So I want to fully cop to the fact that I am about to do exactly that: represent egalitarianism based upon a narrow or specific understanding. It’s where I get it totally and completely wrong that I want to get it more right and be better in the future.

As far as I understand it, the general principle of egalitarianism is “equality”. That all people should be treated as equals regardless of their race, gender, socio-economic status, and so on. This is awesome! And great! There is no shortage of people who agree. I agree! The question then becomes How does egalitarianism seek to accomplish this very lofty goal? I have developed two reactions to this question based upon my personal experience: the first derived from seeing egalitarians “in the wild”, so to speak, and the second based upon my understanding of egalitarian philosophy. So I’ll talk about those two things, in order, and maybe I will reveal some of my own ignorance.

In Idea Channel’s Three Laws of the Internet video, I describe egalitarianism as “another word for feminism at its best”, but as a diversion, a Men’s Rights project, as its worst. I said this because as far as my feminism is concerned (remember: this is hugely subjective), we’re working towards equality for all people. Same as egalitarianism! Feminism attempts to accomplish this by addressing the facets of society which have devalued women or the feminine in all its complex forms, and in doing so made life worse for everyone, men included. I’ve written about that on tumblr before, here.

When I say at its worst, egalitarianism is a Mens Rights project, I am talking about this: the following is a screenshot of the all-time top voted posts on r/egalitarianism.

In fairness, most of these posts are rather old. Here are the top posts for the last month:

There are lots of problems with using this as an example of egalitarianism writ-large. reddit is a very particular place, with very particular demographics. I’ve even talked about how the technology of reddit can encourage complete and total nonsensical bile to float to the top. I’m not going to excuse myself of the above, admittedly poor sampling. I am admittedly basing this entirely on my personal experience. In that experience, the above posts are representative of many egalitarians (on the internet, at least).

What exactly is being represented here? To my eyes, for a philosophy concerned with the equality of all people, there is an overwhelming focus on men or the rights of men in response to the actions and opinions of women / feminism. There is one mention of race (two if you count Affirmative Action), no mention of women’s rights specifically (there’s that “whatever their gender” post and that one “Free the nipple?” post contains the phrase “Do you think women are just fighting for something just for the sake of fighting for equality […] ?”), no mention of religious freedom or how to address socioeconomic disparity (the Affirmative Action post questions whether it’s bad to be “pushing minorities above the status of majorities to ‘make up’ for the past”), trans rights, sexual orientation, etc etc etc. The popular r/egalitarian conversation reads, to me, as a reaction to feminism and largely focused on men.

Moving to tumblr, things get a little better. I encourage you to take a look through search/egalitarianism. One particularly interesting thing to notice is that many (if not most) posts which are tagged “egalitarianism” are also tagged “anti-feminism” AND “feminism”. This suggests, again, that the people making egalitarian posts see it in relation, and in many cases counter, to feminism.

There are lots of good reasons for this, especially on tumblr. Callout culture is awful and exclusionary feminism abounds. And when one decides they do not want to be a feminist for the above reasons one can get caught in this trap of feeling like they have to manufacture a difference. Like what happened in American Politics, the gap between the sides must grow ever larger such that compromise becomes impossible. If Feminism is identified as X, then anti-feminist egalitarianism but be as not-X as possible, which then leads feminism to further entrench itself in response, being as not-not-X as it can be. This drives the poles and leads feminists to be judgmental (a thing of which I am infinitely guilty) and egalitarians to focus on exactly the things feminism does not, when really, hopefully, we want to accomplish exactly the same things, different ways.

Which brings us to the methods of egalitarianism. I mentioned briefly how my feminism thinks it might address societies ills… how does egalitarianism seek to do that? The document I am most often shown in response to this question is the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy’s entry on Egalitarianism, so we’re gonna take that as our source. If you have a different source, please! Share it with me. I want very badly to read it.

The first thing to note here is that this entry was written by man, Richard Arneson. It mostly references and quotes the work of other men. Most of the most frequently quoted men are white. Here is a screenshot of a section of the bibliography that contains the highest density of women:

Eighty people, total, are cited. Eight of them are women. I don’t have time to do all the googling right now to figure out how many people of color are cited, or non-academic theorists or trans people but my guess is that it’s not many. I could be totally wrong. If someone wants to do this legwork, that’d be amazing.

I would call this “off to a bad start.” Intrinsic to whatever process results in equality is the knowledge and respect of the subjectivities of the oppressed. I am not saying if someone is offended, they are automatically right and I am not saying people who are not oppressed cannot assist, in some way, in the fight against oppression. What I am saying is that the only way the privileged can assist is by listening to, and understanding the perspectives of people who do not experience equality. As it stands, this text which egalitarians share with me as an example of their politics and philosophy on how to address oppression references very few non-male perspectives, and most likely very few non-white, non-male perspectives. It is a text about equality written by and referencing people for whom practical inequality is a mostly-theoretical concern.

But hey - ok. Maybe there is some amazing behind the scenes work and when we dig into the text, they’ll hit it out of the park. We get off to a good start with sentences like “People should get the same, or be treated the same, or be treated as equals, in some respect.” and “People should be treated as equals, should treat one another as equals, should relate as equals, or enjoy an equality of social status of some sort.” Boom! Thats awesome. But we already know that. The question we’re trying to answer is HOW. How does egalitarianism seek to do this?

According to this text egalitarianism seeks to do this by providing the same “opportunity” and “condition” for all people. Another way of saying this is “All people should be able to participate” and “All people should be able to act freely given their available resources.” BUT as this entry reads: “As currently used, the label ‘egalitarian’ does not necessarily indicate that the doctrine so called holds that it is desirable that people’s condition be made the same in any respect or that people ought to be treated the same in any respect. An egalitarian might rather be one who maintains that people ought to be treated as equals—as possessing equal fundamental worth and dignity and as equally morally considerable.” Basically: we should consider all people as being fundamentally equal, but that doesn’t mean the realization of equality on a social or cultural level.

Egalitarianism, as described here, in no way identifies, deconstructs or addresses discourse, attitude or behavior which result in the oppression of others in the actual world (FWIW, such practices are at the very core of feminism and why I find it not only practically useful but also endlessly fascinating). Rather, egalitarianism, as defined above, is a framework for determining how and why we might consider all people in some way fundamentally (metaphysically?) equal. Egalitarianism, it is probably worth noting, has it’s roots in Christian Theology. It is very concerned with the moral worth of a person, and that idea’s relationship to justice. It charts no (or scant) course on addressing inequality as it is perpetrated between actual people (or people and institutions) based upon respective characteristics or beliefs; it leaves such things up to other modes of thought, or to the people themselves. In this way, many egalitarian views have a toe in libertarian territory.

Other choice quotes from this Plato entry include:

“A just and egalitarian society is not plausibly held to be obligated to do whatever turns out to be necessary to bring it about that their members attain any given level or share of quality of life.”



“In theory, equality of opportunity could be fully satisfied in a society in which wealth passed along by inheritance from generation to generation [which] fundamentally determines everyone’s competitive prospects. In this society jobs and positions and so on would be open to all applicants, but the only applicants who have the skills that qualify them for desirable posts are the children of the wealthy. They alone have access to the training and acculturation that confer skills.”

I am not interested in this kind of equality. This is equality in theory, this is free market equality. This is not equality in practice in that it does not seek to level the playing field for the benefit of people who are in some way oppressed. It takes the un-level playing field as given and says “If you trip, guess you weren’t agile enough. But hey! On some deep, moral level, you are worth as much as everyone else! Even that guy spiking the ball in the end zone!”

So.

What’d I get wrong?

(via )