Part III (b) – O Equity!
[Diversity and Inclusivity have been introduced earlier. The third person of the unholy triad Equity is the most complex and egregious among them. This essay considers Equity as a concept in its origin and thereafter, as it drew in several ideas that have permeated, conjugated with, enshrouded, enlightened, negated or transmogrified it over the ages – and lays out its contemporary occidental cultural nature.]
Aequitas in Perspective
With the division of labour, …which in its turn is based on the natural division of labour in the family and the separation of society into individual families opposed to one another, is given simultaneously the distribution, and indeed the unequal distribution, both quantitative and qualitative, of labour and its products, hence property: the nucleus, the first form, of which lies in the family, where wife and children are the slaves of the husband. This latent slavery in the family, though still very crude, is the first property, but even at this early stage it corresponds perfectly to the definition of modern economists who call it the power of disposing of the labour-power of others. Division of labour and private property are, moreover, identical expressions: in the one the same thing is affirmed with reference to activity as is affirmed in the other with reference to the product of the activity.” “That the abolition of individual economy is inseparable from the abolition of the family is self-evident.
Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, “The German Economy” Manuscripts, 1845-6
Incubo
Themis does hold her scales but they are not suspended at the fulcrum. Instead, she clutches the waxen and perforated sinistral pan. Her head also is denuded, her tresses Medusa-like throbbing with a life of their own; her blindfold flutters in tatters at her feet, being swept away in the silent tempest. Her uncovered eyes gaze vindictively at the billowing snow. She whispers to the trees – to the evergreens and the bare, the steadfast and the swaying, the towering erect and the ramified – that she is truly blind. And her charm captivates, and they may assent to her enchantment. Her bewitching tones energise the wind and engurgle the flowing fluid of the streams unaware of the maelstrom they are willingly creating.
The snowflakes melt at as more form, flutter, flit and flirt with her, encircle and espouse her – and yet this is not a snowfall from the heavens, but a blizzard of fickle and fluctuating flakes formed out of iron and clay. Thrust into her hands is a heavy sword – a sharp contrast to her voice – honed and flaming on one side and blunted dumb on the other, but her arms unnaturally muscular enable her to wield it. Her sinews pulsate with resentment as she stabs at the memory of who she used to be, or perhaps to the shock of what she has become, that gold has turned into slime – and beheads and consumes the lambs who will be lambs and the serpents who refuse to concede that they are chickens, and the lions roaring their rectitude in hunting deer. And yet she is called Thebes.
Astraia is cloaked in the shadow of sentiment, burdened by bias and obscured in the penumbra of prejudice. She has submitted to subjectivity, unveiled herself to impropriety; her wings cling to influence and the embers of her aureole is enfolded in favour. She is sold to partiality and colludes with criteria inappropriate and irrelevant. Yet the apparatus is intact, indeed glowing and resplendent, glorified. The cogs are oiled, the wheels are greased, the cam rotates elegantly. Pistons reciprocate, and combustion is controlled. Gasoline in, velocity thundering out. And it is said she is Astraia.
The tablets are cracked, fragmented, and the word is discarded as if it never was. They were merely a construct in stone. It is as if there never was a fire, is a fire, not a fire, what is fire. I am the spark, the spark comes from the earth, the depths. The law is written on sand and the beach is at the mercy of the tides.
Forsooth, we brood upon a phantasy, a classical calamity, ye-thinks.
Doce me justificationes tuas
Let is now examine contemporary reality. Justice demands gold not only for participants but also for the spectators, and the lame need only run the last ten yards to ensure they win the race together with the sprinter who started from the blocks. Indeed, if deemed sufficiently oppressed, fluidly marginalised in a minority, or identifiably categorically victimised, you may not need to run at all because the third person will provide you with a gold medal, in consideration of your circumstances, historic or otherwise. Likewise, the most competent person and the best performer will not receive any reward if they are not of a suitable colour, or subject to or pretending to unnatural inclinations.
The supreme and the exalted in a nation are unwilling to call a woman a woman; and men win women’s beauty pageants. Yet here are quotas for identified women on corporate boards and such is proudly proclaimed and accepted as equitable. Dystopic, and yet what shareholders of companies, chancellors of universities, presidents of countries and headmistresses of schools are nodding to today – and perhaps these visions of Thebes and Astraia are no dream after all.
Equity, a word lately more common among accountants and stock brokers, etymologically contains the sense of equality but also carries connotations of impartiality and fairness. In Roman law, naturalis aequitas supplemented with benevolence and charity what was strictly due to justitia.
Marxism posits that human existence is an on-going struggle between two classes of people, and while these classes may have had different names during the course of history, one is always the oppressor and the other is the oppressed. Marxism envisions – or rather is a nightmare of – a world without love where exploitation rules. The objective is the abolition of the classes by the elimination of the oppressor by means of revolution, in order to create a utopia of common ownership of resources – and thereby attain a certain equality among individuals in terms of material possessions – while obfuscating the individuality of individuals who cease to be such, and who become elements within an equalised group.
Contemporary assertions of equity upon society – apart from being assets minus liabilities or corporate common stock, these definitions themselves derived from equity of redemption law related to property – demand not the equality of opportunity for socio-economic advancement, nor mercy in the sentence consequent to a legal judgement, but rather the equality of outcome. Equity is what social justice warriors mean by equality when they use the term, often in association with “gender”, and hence the quotas and whines of under-representation of the allegedly oppressed groups. Equity then, within a sociological context, is in some sense a subset of equality, but swollen with a notion of justice that suggests that the failure of society to provide equity is unjust – and these ideas dominate policy in government, universities, corporations and other social structures.
The pan-socialist logic if pursued would lead to the conclusion that it is unjust that an assembly is constituted of different components, that we do not have two more eyes protruding from our shoulders instead of arms, that all employees are not on the board of directors, and that everyone in the army is not an infantryman. It would be bias that a navy does not have helicopters, or that the air force does not have boats. There may have been corruption when Tumypoqette received the contract, and it may have been unfair that the minister’s son became the prefect – but the mere fact that Tumypoqette Partners and Undadatable Pvt Ltd were not both given the contract or at least half the contract each is not per se unethical.
Likewise it is not wrong that the netball team has one captain and only one girl gets to play wing defence, or that another is dropped from the team and has to serve as water-girl during the match, and she is disappointed about it, or is even psychologically impacted with risk of mitigation of her self-actualisation – nor is it unjust that a human being has a head and a heart, and other parts that do other things together and coordinated in the service of the sustenance and flourishing of life within an organic body. Oganisations may not have hearts, but they will be dysfunctional when all are heads or all feet.
Dignum et iustum est
Suum cuique yes, but to form a resolve to render justice, and thereafter to execute and manifest it, justice and the law it observes must have objective and decisive criteria and prudent norms, and these need to be based on sound morals. Just laws, policies and process need certainly to be informed and tempered with solidarity and mercy, indeed charity, but they also need to be founded and built on an authentic understanding of man – inclusive and constituted of male and female, in case such an exposition of the term is necessary. The rejection of an authentic anthropology as the basis of justice and law, enabling the consequent embrace and enthronement of group utility, Kantian autonomy, property, eqalitarianism and other reductionist criteria, which is the death knell of justice, and which fells a society deluded by it. Contemporary social justice theory dependent on such criteria as überbau spur and catalyse the creation of deities such as this unholy triad, worship of whom does lead to a woken yet waken nightmare, as it already has.