Tuesday, July 26, 2022

Diversity, Inequality, and Family

If you were trying to minimize inequality, and were being rigorous about it, each person would have to be identical to all others. Because, if they were different, it would be highly likely that in some way or other, if you added up all their natural traits, they would add up to some people being better off, inheriting more privilege, than others.

Their environments and sets of experiences would also have to be identical, so that their present selves would not have any more privilege (or disadvantage) than each other, this ensured by them not having different past selves.

So, in order to have diversity, we have to allow (and implicitly or explicitly excuse) a certain amount of inequality.

Controlling human lives so that they are identical and perfect inhibits the expression of free will, and may inhibit intentions of free will as well, because perhaps to not express your free will weakens your capacity to naturally will what you will. (I think of the analogy of keeping a dream journal, which encourages your "subconscious self" to remember dreams. So, acting on your free will may encourage your will to be alive, as it is a voice that may close up if it is not called on to speak.) To act on your will lets you see what it looks like in the world, helping you to grow. So, from an MSL standpoint, enforcing rigorous equality may be a mistake, because it could make life less useful in bringing about spiritual growth.

Enforcing relative equality may have benefits, but at some point we have to let go of equality, before it becomes an absolute, and choose something else to be our absolute.

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An argument against inequality might (possibly) solely consist of lists of the harms that inequality causes. In that case, maybe what really matters are those harms, and not the inequality itself. If there is some way to have inequality (and thus diversity) without harm, then that might be the way to go.

When families are working right, they are groups of people that possess radical inequality which doesn't cause harm. Parents, for instance, are hugely different than their children, and have powers far beyond what their children possess. Yet, when a family is working right, that does not pose a threat to either parents or children.

It does make sense to me that on some level, we ought to look at each other as equals. Maybe, despite their differences in age and wisdom, ideal parents look on even their under-5 aged children as equals -- on some level -- and treat them in some sense as equals. But that doesn't mean that on other levels, we may not be different, and therefore (very likely) unequal.

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