Equality Ad Absurdum
Written by Robert C. Thornett |
Thursday, January 5, 2023
In Plato’s Republic, social justice is about finding harmony among all the diverse elements of society to achieve The Good. By contrast, woke social justice brands certain segments of society “oppressors” and seeks to purge them, even as it mouths platitudes about seeking diversity. Woke social justice is also antithetical to justice in the classical sense of giving “to each his due,” as Cicero put it. It recognizes only group moralities and ignores individual morality, ensuring that no individual receives their due.
The woke version of social justice is based on the fallacy that engineering an equality of power among identity groups somehow creates justice. But as Plato and Greeks before him knew, forcing any result, let alone one based on incidental markers like race and gender, often leads to bizarre outcomes and usually works against true justice for all involved.
In Book 8 of The Republic, Plato illustrates how all flawed governments (e.g., timarchy, oligarchy, democracy, tyranny) fail by misprioritizing some relative good over the absolute good. Specifically, democracies overvalue the relative goods of freedom and equality and do not know where to draw the proper limits in pursuing them. This leads to the acceptance and proliferation of all sorts of dysfunctional and unjust forms of freedom, which conflict with the true freedoms and equalities that provide the foundation for a just society. As the spirit of equality-at-all-costs takes over, democracies treat children as the equals of their parents, foreigners as equals of citizens, and students as equals of teachers; even the animals think they are equal to people and free to do whatever they want.
Wokeism is a manifestation of precisely what Plato describes: democracies’ inability to comprehend the proper limits of equality and freedom, or the fact that there need to be limits at all. Wokeism is built on the democratic error of treating equality as The Good and pursuing it ad absurdum. But like honor, wealth, and power, equality is only a relative good, which means it can be used for good, evil, and everything in between. Relative goods only become truly good when they are used for good purposes, when they are employed in the service of The Good. Unlike Plato’s world, there is no true absolute Good in wokeism, no higher principle than equality of result for its own sake.
Thus wokeism has no compass pointing to true north, no way of recognizing when equality is on course to achieve good and when it is not. It simply dons a blindfold and embarks on an endless wild goose chase in pursuit of identitarian equity. People are put in identity boxes marked “oppressor” and “oppressed” based on whatever power advantages and disadvantages their incidentals afford them, as if to be powerful were necessarily to be oppressive and to lack power were necessarily to be victimized. Every inequality of power is conflated with a form of discrimination and “oppression.” The woke quest is to manufacture an equality of power among identity boxes, calling this goal “progress.”
Take for example the case of transgender athletes competing in college women’s swimming. While the purpose of Title IX is to achieve equality by eliminating unfair discrimination based on sex, woke gender equity works against this. It advocates that someone with an unfair advantage, a male body, should have an equal chance to compete against those with female bodies. In the name of an equality of power among genders, woke identitarianism creates an inequality of power wherein female swimmers are forced into a competition that is self-evidently unfair.
Forcing Equity Brings Destruction
Long before Plato, Greeks illustrated the folly of equating equity with justice through the myth of Procrustes, a robber who invited passing travelers to spend the night. Procrustes said his iron bed would fit everyone equally perfectly. And it did, but only after Procrustes had stretched the legs of the shorter until they ripped or hammered off the legs of the taller, killing every traveler in the process. Eventually the hero Theseus came along and killed Procrustes by fitting him to his own bed.
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What We Miss When We Skip the Book of Ezra
Ezra connects to the overarching story of the Bible. We were made to worship God, but our rebellion means that we need a pure high priest to make our worship possible. Ezra reminds us of this central activity of the community of God and our dependence on him to draw us near.
The book of Ezra is an odd duck. It bears the name of a man who doesn’t appear in its first half. Though titled like a minor prophet, this is a book of history, one far shorter than most historical books in Scripture. And it is one of the few portions of God’s word set after the Babylonian exile.
I couldn’t find any data to justify this suspicion, but I would guess that Ezra is not commonly read or studied by modern Christians. I get it—among other barriers, there are long lists of names in chapters 2, 8, and 10.
Yet, this little book has much to offer!
God Works in the Hearts of Kings
God rules over kingdoms and kings—this is true everywhere and at all times. But it is made explicit with surprising frequency in the book of Ezra.
We see this in the very first verse of the book: “…the Lord stirred up the spirit of Cyrus king of Persia, so that he made a proclamation throughout all his kingdom and also put it in writing …” (Ezra 1:1)
We also read that the Lord “had turned the heart of the king of Assyria” toward the Israelites (Ezra 6:22). The author of the book blesses God “who put such a thing as this into the heart of the king, to beautify the house of the Lord that is in Jerusalem, and who extended to me his steadfast love before the king and his counselors, and before all the king’s mighty officers” (Ezra 7:27–28). Finally, as part of his confession, Ezra thanks God that he “has extended to us his steadfast love before the kings of Persia, to grant us some reviving to set up the house of our God, to repair its ruins, and to give us protection in Judea and Jerusalem” (Ezra 9:9).
In Ezra a group of Israelites journeyed from Babylon to Jerusalem to rebuild the temple of God. Since they left captivity, traveled through dangeous territories, and settled in an occupied land, these people needed the approval, help, and protection of the local and central rulers.
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Why Reformed Christians Are Vulnerable to Social Justice
Reformed theology is diametrically opposed to social justice ideology. But many Reformed people today are mostly just 5 point Calvinists who do not embrace our confessions or the implications of the solas.
Many young Christians didn’t learn how to understand justice from Scripture. So in college, they learned how to understand justice from culture.
And now, they think injustice is justice. And they interpret Scripture through culture, not culture through Scripture.
That’s why many professing Christians are more committed to Black Lives Matter than Biblical theology.
But our culture’s understanding of justice—or social justice ideology—hasn’t only infiltrated colleges, it’s also infiltrated churches. Professors are influencing Christians to adopt an unbiblical view of justice, and pastors are encouraging them to embrace it—especially Reformed pastors.
I’ve received hundreds of emails from people over the last couple months. And they’re almost entirely from people who feel pressured to adopt social justice ideology or critical theory from their Reformed pastors.
Social justice has become so widely accepted in mainstream Reformed circles it might be considered their sixth point of Calvinism. Some influential leaders and organizations look like they identify with social justice just as much as they identify with the five points of Calvinism and the five solas.
At this rate, social justice is probably going to be one of the major legacies and pitfalls of the Young, Restless, and Reformed movement—and it’s precisely what John MacArthur warned us about that almost a decade ago.
In 2011, John MacArthur said:
“The [Young, Restless, and Reformed] movement as it is shaping up also needs to face up to some fairly serious problems and potential pitfalls.
As the Young, Restless, and Reformed movement has taken shape, some of the best-selling books and leading figures in the movement have been completely uncritical (and in some cases openly supportive) of seeker-sensitive-style pragmatism.
And one cannot be genuinely “Reformed” and deliberately worldly at the same time. The two things are inconsistent and incompatible. To embrace the world’s fashions and values—even under the guise of being “missional”—is to make oneself God’s enemy (James 4:4). Many supposed reformations have faltered on that rock.”
John MacArthur was severely criticized for those words, but he was right.
The Young, Restless, and Reformed movement—or New Calvinism—was born as an alternative to the seeker-sensitive movement, but it’ll die as its own version of the seeker-sensitive movement.
Like the seeker-sensitive movement, the Young, Restless, and Reformed movement embraced a celebrity culture and naturally, an elitist model that sometimes prioritizes tribalism over truth, compromise over courage.
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Canada’s Suicidal Slide
The value of human life is not based on any extrinsic quality. Period. It’s instead based on the fact that humans are made in God’s image. We belong to Him, not to ourselves. This is ultimately why the slope from accepting some suicides to all suicides is so slippery.
If it is true, as Richard Weaver famously put it, that “ideas have consequences,” it is also true that bad ideas have victims. On no other contemporary issue today is the connection between a bad idea and its victims clearer than assisted suicide. In no other nation today are the bad ideas and their victims more aggressively embraced than in Canada.
In a lengthy and powerful essay at The Atlantic this month, David Brooks exposed just how monstrous Canada’s so-called “medical aid in dying” regime has become since it was enacted in 2016. Originally, Canada only permitted the request for medical aid in dying to those with serious illness, in advanced or irreversible decline, unbearable physical or mental suffering, or whose death was “reasonably foreseeable.” The criteria are vague enough. Since the law went into effect, however, the number of Canadians killed annually has gone from 1,000 to over 10,000. In 2021, one in thirty Canadian deaths was by assisted suicide, and only 4% of those who applied to die were turned down.
Were all these people terminally ill or suffering from serious and irreversible conditions? Hardly. In fact, Brooks tells the story of a man whose only physical condition was hearing loss yet who was “put to death” over the objections of his family. Another patient had fibromyalgia and leukemia yet wrote that “the suffering I experience is mental suffering, not physical. I think if more people cared about me, I might be able to handle the suffering caused by my physical illnesses alone.” One otherwise healthy 37-year-old who suffers from schizoaffective disorder and is unemployed said, “logistically, I really don’t have a future. … I’m not going anywhere.” As of Brooks’ writing, that man was awaiting approval for assisted suicide.
Simply put, Canadians who need help are instead being helped to kill themselves because they’re depressed, lonely, or mentally ill. And the slope keeps getting slipperier. Brooks described patients who have been pressured by doctors and hospital staff into killing themselves to avoid medical bills. Earlier this year, the Canadian Parliament’s Special Committee on Medical Assistance in Death recommended extending the program to “mature minors” as young as twelve.
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