Unequal Fraternity

 In some fundamental sense equality matters.  Equality matters in what makes us the same - our human nature.  What though makes us unique is our human energy, our hypostasis, our personality.  And this is where equality runs against what it means to be human.  For equality, as New Right pagan thinker Alain de Benoist, has powerfully argued, leads to the crushing of uniqueness.  

We find also in the work of Aleksandr Dugin's murdered daughter, Darya Dugina, an argument against equality and for hierarchy.  Hierarchy, literally meaning the rule of the sacred, for Dugina, is the key principle of her metaphysics, allowing an ascent to the divine.  Darya Dugina was a Christian Neoplatonist.

From the perspective of a totally orthodox Orthodox Christian, Christos Yannaras, pointing to the distinction between energy and essence in the writings of the Palamite, emphasises the irreplaceable and unrepeatable energy of the person as opposed to the "individual" - the individual being the human being reduced to his nature and the need to survive in a fallen world of death.  The person, through the transfiguration resulting from the Incarnation, transcends the death-determined existence of the individual and lives a life of communion through Christ within the church.

French-Canadian Orthodox iconographer and writer Jonathan Pageau has done a great deal to bring the idea of the sacred and the hierarchical to a much wider audience.  He points to the inversions and subversions taking place in post-modern society and how any drive for equality really leads to a subversion and an inverted hierarchy.

These different angles all point to the necessity of hierarchy to give meaning as opposed to the flattening effect of equality.  Equality turns us all into replaceable and repeatable individuals.  From feminism making men and women interchangeable to the destruction of cultures that are considered illiberal and traditional - the drive for equality creates uniformity in a flat world where ascent becomes impossible.

Various movements on the "right" promoting capitalism and meritocracy do a disservice to the idea of hierarchy.  Any idea of hierarchy based on destabilising competition in the pursuit of material betterment, really just treats us all the same.  It reduces us all to mere materialistic individuals without the possibility of transfiguration through the spiritual life.  

There is of course some value to bettering yourself in this material and temporal world, but it ranks far lower in a hierarchy of meaning than achieving any level of transcendence and transfiguration.

The unequal disparities in wealth as a result of economic competition that helps the ruthless and brutal to triumph is not a hierarchy.  It is certainly unequal, but it is a subverted hierarchy of the mercantile class.  It is not a hierarchy because the social links are broken and every man becomes an individual pursuing his own survival and "the Devil take the hindmost".

The liberal ideology that lies behind capitalism is just as much a creature of the Enlightenment, if not more so, as Marxism.  There is an ontological equality that reduces every unique person to a replaceable individual. 

Hierarchy is not simply inequality.  No it literally means rule of the sacred and therefore we must enter into ideas of participation in higher meaning and ascent to higher levels of spiritual being to truly understand the word.  This is achieved not through reducing people to competing individuals pursuing their self interest.  It is rather human beings entering into communion vertically with God and horizontally with their neighbour in love.  And love is the underlying power of true hierarchy, it is what sustains and powers hierarchy.  The bishop cares for his laity, the laity honour their bishop.  The Christian monarch is linked to his subjects through his noblesse oblige and the people out of loyalty to him symbolically linking us to the King of Heaven.

The early communists strove for a loving and neighbourly society without the vertical aspect.  This was bound to turn everyone into replaceable and repeatable individuals.  They hubristically and rebelliously rejected God.  The capitalists wanted to form a new vertical structure based not on sanctity but upon an individualistic restructuring through the force of competition, not love - all again became replaceable individuals and love was a fool's game.

Only if we rediscover a society based upon love and hierarchy can we hope for people to be again understood as uniquely precious personalities linked to one another in communion and through a unique place in the society through their particular and unique networks of relationships and their personal creativity.  And all this is only possible in the context of a spiritual hierarchy giving secular life meaning.

In the globalist world such a return seems unlikely.  Countries, cultures and people are becoming ever-more replaceable and the same in the global economy.  Only in the Church can this affirmation of the person necessarily within a hierarchy earthly and celestial be firm and sure.  As the world around us turns into a very equal, but very dehumanising and reductive place, insofar as the Church resists secularising forces and ideologies then it alone will remain a place of hierarchy that affirms and sanctifies the human person.