Hierarchy is a Moral Good
Is our a movement of the left, or right? Does it matter?
Definitions of political movements are tricky things. Like any human institution, political parties and movements are contingent and relative, products of history and context. What is considered “left”, “liberal” or “popular” in one era is reactionary in another. Representative government (of a sort) at one time was the norm in the ancient world; it vanished for thousands of years before reappearing again. Every time and place will reckon political orientations differently; your mileage may vary; the French assembly of the early 1790s is not a universal model.
Still, there is some benefit in these broad terms, because they do track to a tension in human life: inequality. Broadly speaking, the right and left can be defined based on their opinions on human equality.
Modern leftism, (since the 19th century) generally, is a movement that emphasizes human equality as a moral good. Its issues over the years have been equal political access for all residents of a particular country as “citizens’, emancipation of slaves; identical political rights for women; some sort of equalization of negotiating power between labor and capital; socialism or the equal ownership of the means of production; the equal representation of nation states at some sort of world-parliament; racial egalitarianism, legal structures to stop private discrimination, “sexual preference equality”, international organization and various equal access laws that continually expand as new categories are created. These issues have in common the basic assumption that people are equal in some fundamental way that is more important than their differences; these ideas take a dark turn when their ideology reaches the necessary corollary that since people are equal, they must also be fungible. At worst, this can lead to strict ideological conformism, economic disaster and mass-murdering political purges.
Modern rightist movements (since the French Revolution) have broadly been movements that have sought to maintain or emphasize human inequality as a moral good. Its issues have been the maintenance of various aristocracies and monarchies; attempts to restrict or qualify the franchise; a defense of various liberal contractual and property rights; aggressive foreign policies to benefit the nation-state; defending romantic and nationalistic impulses before ‘rational’ ones; the maintenance of racial hierarchies where they exist; defending gender, cultural, religious and sexual norms, and finally, a defense of property and capitalist wealth distribution against various redistribution schemes. These issues have in common the basic assumption that people are not the same, and some certain hierarchy is thus moral and good because it is based on that inequality. These ideas have occasionally taken a dark turn into slavery, war and atrocity.
On almost every issue above, the left has won, and the right has lost. Some of the “right-wing” causes look quite shocking to modern eyes. Yet, the stubborn fact of human inequality remains, and this is why, ultimately, the Integral Nation is a movement of the right, even though it shares none of the goals of the reactionary regimes of the past.
Human inequality is a basic and undeniable fact of human existence. In any maternity ward in America, you will find babies that are born hale and hearty; others that are sickly, or disabled; or will be inflicted with lifelong physical problems. Some people have financial sense and grow wealthy; others spend every penny they have, regardless of how much money they are given. Athletic ability is not evenly distributed. Some are born ugly, some beautiful. The propensity for addiction is largely genetic; mental illness is largely also inherited. Intelligence is not evenly distributed; it varies enough that people of average intelligence cannot perform higher-order jobs, such as engineering and medicine. In every area that matters, people measure differently.
A fact without context is meaningless, however. Things exist by virtue of what they are not; everything contains its opposite. To what purpose is inequality put? What meaning do these facts have?
If you show a child a photograph of a group of men, and ask him to order them in height, from tallest to shortest, he will do so. If you ask him to rank them from shortest to tallest, that child will reverse the order. So it is with hierarchy; the inequality of human beings- of citizens- does not exist for the sake of the hierarchy, but rather the hierarchy must exist because people are unequal. But how they are unequal and why matters; it matters far more than the fact that they are unequal.
This is the context for moral inequality.
Every hierarchy has within it, implicitly or explicitly, a statement of values by which it orders and ranks people. It is those values- a moral sense- by which hierarchy exists. These values are its justification for ordering human life.
And this is the distinction between the Integral Nation’s view of inequality and the hierarchy of previous historical societies: virtue. A hierarchy must be ordered by values; inequality- difference- is required for dialectic, for a synthesis of parts of the whole. Division of labor is the sign of civilization; specialization increases as technology and social organization advances and grows. Incorporating those differences into a unitary body that honors and uplifts them to some goal, some value, is the work of the State.
Hierarchies -reified inequality- of the past were based on many things- birth (feudalism), money (republics), religion (many medieval states, theocracies), military castes (the same), race, and exploitative economic domination (colonialism). What we are proposing- in an abstract way- is hierarchy of virtue.
It is clear to us that all are not equal in virtue; and our society at all levels has become dominated by those who lack virtue- often those who are the least virtuous rise the highest. This is perverse.
Hierarchy is not a dirty word- it is an organic thing, a natural thing, a moral good. Aristotle defined justice as giving to each what they deserve- that’s all hierarchy is. It is our duty to ensure that it is virtue that defines one’s role in society- active, expressed virtue- not wealth, fame, or any other artificial criteria.
To treat people as equals- to not reward good, and punish evil- is worse than social agnosticism. It is injustice.
Hierarchy is inevitable. What we can do, together, is work for a society, for a State, where distinctions between people are determined not by obscene wealth, nor by media manipulation, but by understanding and rewarding the virtuous among us. A timocracy, in the true sense, the rule of honor.