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Malcolm Pollack comments:
I liked your brief post on running-as-equalizer, and how stubbornly our natural inequalities will always dash our hope of sweeping them under the rug. ("Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn't go away.")
There's even another natural inequality you didn't touch on, namely the difference between those who have the fiber to get off their asses to go running in the first place, and those who won't - between those who do, and don't, have the will and wisdom to suffer consciously to improve their future selves.
That, in my (insufficiently) humble opinion, is likely the most important inequality of all.
A stimulating comment. Now for some commentary on the comment.
A. Life is hierarchical by any measure in all dimensions including physical, mental, moral, and spiritual. We are not equal as individuals. And the same goes for groups. The 'woke' attempt to enforce 'equity' is bound to fail. There will never be equality of outcome. Merit will inevitably find a way of asserting itself. In the short term, the institutionalized assault on merit will be disastrous for the vast majority while profiting the oligarchic enforcers of 'equity.' In the long term, the enforcers too will suffer. For as Malcolm, points out, "reality doesn't go away."
Not only is the attempt to enforce 'equity' bound to fail, it cannot count as a value in any sound value hierarchy. For 'equity' is unjust.
Note also that the enforcement of 'equity' is selective: Is there 'equity' in professional sports? For that matter, are professional sports the home of 'diversity' and 'inclusion'? The questions answer themselves. In the NBA and the NFL qualifications matter. Real qualifications, not 'woke qualifications.' No DEI there! Examples of 'woke qualifications' include being black, being female, and being lesbian as in the case of the current presidential press secretary. The point is not that being black, being female, and being lesbian, whether taken singly or 'intersectionally,' should disqualify anyone from a government job; the point is that they cannot count -- to a sane and reasonable person -- as qualifications sans phrase.
Equity' is (or was) a perfectly good word that leftists have hijacked and re-defined to mean equality of outcome/result. Linguistic hijacking has proven to be an effective leftist tactic. Leftists are subversive of right reason and natural order and the mother of all subversion is the subversion of language. Hence the wokester predilection for Orwellianisms, e.g., "Abortion is health care."
B. In Malcolm's concluding sentence he alludes to humility and the questions it raises in the present context. He suggests that he himself is insufficiently humble. Is humility then something good? I was put in mind of a couple of lines from a poem by Goethe:
This is not easy to translate, but the thought is that only the worthless are modest; the good celebrate the deed. The good are not humble, but accomplished; they are made happy by and celebrate their accomplishments. The couplet has a Nietzschean, and thus anti-Christian flavor. Here political theology enters the picture.
Suppose the Christian God exists. Then we all are equal, and not just in the eyes of the law, or by abstraction from our positions in the various hierarchies mentioned above, or via some such conceit as John Rawls' Original Position behind the Veil of Ignorance. We are equal not just de jure but de facto. We are equal in fact as sons and daughters of one and the same eternal Father. The fact is not empirical but metaphysical. The equality is a function of the infinite distance between the all-perfect God and mortal man with his manifold imperfections. The natural hierarchies that so impress us here below are nothing to God: all the empirical differences of physical prowess, IQ, etc. shrink to nothing from the divine point of view.
One unavoidable question is whether the political equality of persons can be maintained without a theological foundation. Suppose there is no Judeo-Christian God. What could possibly support the manifestly anti-empirical belief in equality? After all, it is a plain fact that we are not equal in the ways mentioned above. If reality is exhausted by the natural (space-time and its material contents) and is thus in principle empirically accessible 'all the way down and up,' then what possible basis could belief in equality of person have? What would make this belief non-illusory?
I would say that if you are not an anti-wokester, if you do not reject the DEI agenda and all the depredatory absurdities that follow in its train, such as the assault on merit, then you are not sane and reasonable. Does it follow that the anti-wokester who is an atheist and a naturalist must also be a rejector of equality in all its senses? To specify and sharpen the question: Is there any rational justification, on the assumption of atheism and naturalism, for holding, as I in fact do, that slavery is a grave moral evil?
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