When envy is disguised as equality

I've never figured out why Americans can be so enthusiastic about equality. It’s necessary in many areas, of course – in math equations, in human rights, and in voting – but it’s dull. If values had color, courage would be red, joy yellow, hope green, peace blue, comfort tan, creativity purple, and equality gray. I’ve also never figured out why gray is the most popular color today. It’s the dullest of all colors. It’s the color of compromise, and of fog. And of our lives.

… If I gave every student the same grade (the class average, say), that would be injustice, not justice. Justice means giving each thing or person its, his, or her due, and obviously what’s due or right to minerals, plants, animals, men, women, and God is not the same. Trees do not have the right not to be cut down and used for building materials; people do. Pregnancy is not a right that is “due” to males any more than growth is “due” to minerals. Animals are not people and do not have the rights that humans do… There is hierarchy everywhere, both in nature and in every functioning society. And that means superiority and inferiority. Men are obviously superior to women at being men, and women are obviously superior to men at being women. …

Why do we deny this? Where is this confusion coming from? Confusions in the head are almost always from brokenness or perversions in the heart. What passion in the heart is at the root of this passionlessness? Gray equality, in itself, is unable to stimulate the heart’s passion, but resentment at inequality can do that. I suspect that the passion that generates the war on inequality is coming from one of the seven deadly sins: envy.

… The opposite of equality is hierarchy. The universe is a hierarchy; nature is a hierarchy. And acting according to nature always causes joy, while acting against nature always causes pain. And therefore, equality’s denial of hierarchy, due to envy, causes spiritual pain. The result of envy is always misery, while the result of exulting in hierarchy is two great joys: the joy of admiring and learning from a superior and the joy of helping and teaching an inferior; the joy of exercising rightful obedience and the joy of exercising rightful authority. This is the main reason why envy steals away our happiness: it makes these two great goods into evils.

… heaven is not a democracy. America is a great place to live, but America is not heaven, and heaven is not America. God is not our equal, our chummy buddy. We worship Christ the King, not Christ the kitten.

…Communist states, which worshipped equality, had to create advertising propaganda to reward hard workers because the removal of private property removed the natural incentive and passion to work.

Excerpt from Wisdom of the Heart: The Good, the True, and the Beautiful at the Center of Us All, by Peter Kreeft (TAN Books, 2020), pp. 132-136. www.TANBooks.com

PETER KREEFT, PH.D., is professor of philosophy at Boston College and also at King’s College in New York City. He’s written over 80 books and is in wide demand as speaker. He is a convert to Catholicism from Reformed Protestantism.