Egalitarianism As A Revolt Against God
Chrysippus once stated that “Nothing can prevent some seats in the theatre from being better than others.” Austrian Murray Rothbard famously argued that not only can those seats not be prevented from being better, they actively should be different because egalitarianism is a revolt against nature. He went as far as to claim that
The egalitarian world would necessarily be a world of horror fiction - a world of faceless and identical creatures, devoid of all individuality, variety, or special creativity.
Rothbard lays out a debilitating case against egalitarianism time and time again, however, he is limited in his metaphysical arguments. He learns from St. Thomas Aquinas regularly but can’t take the final jump to see how this revolt against nature is truly a revolt against God Himself. A lesson that we can turn to Aquinas to learn.
Aquinas explains to us that diversity exists in things for a reason:
Any active cause must produce its like, so far as this is possible. The things produced by God could not be endowed with a likeness of the divine goodness in the simplicity in which that goodness is found in God. Hence what is one and simple in God had to be represented in the produced things in a variety of dissimilar ways.There had to be diversity in the things produced by God, in order that the divine perfection might in some fashion be imitated in the variety found in things.
For us as humans to experience divine perfection, we must have diversity. If God created an absolutely perfect being in no discernible way different from Himself it’d be immutable from Him and thus would not be a separate being. In creating us as external things, we no longer have his divine simplicity. We just have bits and pieces of His divine goodness scattered throughout all of us. But it isn’t the same goodness scattered evenly across the universe, there is diversity in things so that the divine perfection may be shown in every way we can see it. This diversity inherently leads away from egalitarianism, as Aquinas further explains:
Consequently, that the likeness which created beings bear to God might be heightened, it was necessary for some things to be made better than others, and for some to act upon others, thus leading them toward perfection.
Aquinas wrote this explaining predominantly the difference in complete intellectual beings - like angels - and beings like humans and objects as basic as rocks. He was explaining that each of these have different levels of perfection, however, there is no reason to simply stop at these rough groupings. Among angels, there are archangels. Among rocks, there are diamonds. Why would we operate as if the degree and order to which created things bear God may differ in angels and in rocks but wouldn’t solely within the grouping of humans. Lord knows that I am better off because of the people who were better than I and helped lead me closer - though I am still infinitely far from it - toward perfection. What’s also important to remember in all of this is that this difference in degree to which one bears God was entirely on purpose because
It is also clear there can be no accident in God. If all perfections are one in Him, and if existence, power, action, and all such attributes pertain to perfection, they are necessarily identical with His essence. Thus none of these perfections is an accident in God.
There are no accidents in God, thus if there is diversity in things and if that diversity in things causes inequalities in things, then these things were on purpose. To strive for egalitarianism - in fact, to treat egalitarianism as anything more than actively revolting - is not just contrary to “our nature” but contrary to a very intentional nature put in us by God.
Connor Mortell