Part Four – Misconceptions of Equality and Rights
The concept of rights brings us to a concept of self-determination and of human will without definition or limit in conflict with nature and culture, and that irrationality results from overreliance on the concept of equality.
If there is perfect equality, nothing will ever happen, for perfect equality is perfectly static. There is equality, but it is not static or absolute. It is dynamic and intermittent. Here’s an analogy. When we look at you standing there we see a magnificent example of human being, standing upright, your weight on your two legs equally. Let us say that one leg represents the male half of humanity and the other the female. As long as you are still there is a perfect equality between them. But humanity has things to do, and so cannot just stand there. You are on the move, and as you do your weight transfers from one leg to the other. With every step one leg pushes off and the other absorbs the impact of the ground. In any snapshot there is no equality between the male and the female side, for at any moment each is doing the inverse of the other, each acting for, and compensating for the action of, the other. As long as you are walking you are out of balance, one leg extended, the other bent, so there is no moment of settled equality. Men and women can be perfectly equal as long as nothing has to happen. But humanity has to act, to provide and care for itself, and to care for the next generation, so humanity is on the move. There is reciprocity, mutuality, complementarity and, at instants, equality. But the demand that equality between men and women be achieved and so finally established is a device to throw Christians off their way, for it is a concept that cannot bear a world that is not static, and a static world is a dead one.
Humans are mortal. We exist in time, we grow old, we give way to those younger than ourselves, and then we are gone. We may, or may not, discover that all the fun of life consists in passing life on, in serving others and preparing them to take our place. If it is to continue, the human race has to bring new generations into being. If our generation decides that it doesn’t care much about the human race, that it doesn’t want to pass its life and its culture on to another generation, it won’t. It appears that many of our contemporaries don’t care to have children, and our most vociferous ideologists don’t care to pass on the culture we inherited. Our generation has decided not to bother with having babies at replacement rate, so left to ourselves, our population would slowly reduce in size. No problem there, except that we are never left to ourselves. For even those who have no children of their own wish to be looked after, and so our national economy draws in young people from other cultures, with no concern for equality between the sexes, or which are even determined to root it out. The paradox is that those opposed to the idea of children of their own are dependent on the offspring of cultures who are quite ready and willing to replace them and to replace their views with views diametrically opposite. This childless world of our ideological classes is being pushed aside by other societies that keep women in a subordinate role, producing children without any concern for freedom, consent or self-control, or for economic or ecological sustainability.
The debate about equality between men and women is now trumped and rendered irrelevant by the concept of transgender. If I am a man and you are a woman, you may fairly charge me with acting unjustly toward you by failing to treat you as my equal. But if I am a man and you are a woman, but I declare that I am transgendered and am now therefore a woman as much as you are, I give you no recourse. I have undermined even your ability to charge me with acting unjustly and so have undermined the possibility of justice between us.
Transgender is one of a number of issues that show the irrationality and confusion, and consequent unhappiness, that arise when traditional Christian concepts and arguments are not presented because Church leaders are not familiar and with them or confident of them. All Christian conceptuality and reasoning is intended to be employed by the Church in its public witness to protect our societies from the totalitarianism to which they are always vulnerable.
