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However, Christianity subverts the ordinary hierarchical patterns. Christ articulates this most clearly in the Gospel passage where James and John ask to sit at His right and left hand in the Kingdom to come. He seizes the opportunity to instruct the twelve, saying: “Whoever desires to become great among you, let him be your servant. And whoever desires to be first among you, let him be your slave —just as the Son of Man did not come to be served, but to serve, and to give His life a ransom for many” (Matthew 20:27-28). Living with the tension
by Presbyter MATTHEW BROWN
H
ierarchy has a bad reputation. We associate it with oppression, abuse of power, and corruption. Equality, on the other hand, we see as a virtue, especially those of us in Western societies. Consider all the major revolutions of the modern period, including the American Revolution, French Revolution, and the many socialist revolutions of the 20th century. Was each one not a struggle for a more equal society? The slogans of these movements are still familiar to us today: “All men are created equal,” “liberty, equality, fraternity,” and “workers of the world, unite!” And yet, what exactly is meant by equality is often unclear. And this helps explain why something so ‘obviously’ good can be met with such rancor. We do not all operate with the same conceptualization of equality, nor is that concept always entirely clear in our own minds. This is why certain issues surrounding equality — like gender parity, transgender identity, gay rights, racism, immigration, and wealth inequality — are so divisive. We think of hierarchy and equality as merely pertaining to the realm of human society, as if they were some veneer that could be stripped. They are far deeper than that. The truth is that we have a deep biological attachment to hierarchy. We are neurochemically wired to seek our place in the dominance hierarchy of our social group; recent advances in neural imaging and molecular technology have only made this more clear. The same principle is true for almost all animal life, down to crustaceans. It is also reflected in our religious lives: in worship, we recognize that God is at the top of the cosmic hierarchy, and in this way we flourish inside the most stable and enduring dominance hierarchy of all, the one that is completely transcendent.
jacob's well
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Another way to frame hierarchies is by seeing them as structures of competence. In terms of evolution, hierarchies have traditionally helped ensure the greatest chance of group survival. When a hierarchy does not place the best people in the best places for their given abilities, for the greatest good of the group, it’s bound to eventually collapse. Corrupt hierarchies just do not last. Competent hierarchies do. Hierarchy also has an existential root. All values are hierarchical. To value something is to prefer it over something else, to judge it as better. In fact, hierarchy and inequality give life purpose and meaning. To posit an aim for your life is to put something at the top and make other pursuits subservient to it. Without hierarchies, we couldn’t make choices or even survive. Even the desire to survive over not surviving is itself a hierarchy of value. Hierarchy is an unavoidable and permanent aspect of reality. Order itself is inherently hierarchical; the only alternative is undifferentiated chaos. However, our place in the social hierarchy is determined by comparison to others — not by some absolute metric. Take poverty, for example. We feel we are rich or poor, not based on whether we have food, whether our kids can go to school, or whether we have enough clothes, but in terms of how fashionable our clothes are compared to our neighbor's, or how big our house is compared to our friends’ houses. We might be rich compared to people who lived hundreds of years ago, but that isn’t enough for us to perceive ourselves as being rich. All social hierarchies are relative in this same manner. This demonstrates to us how socially bound our sense of purpose, achievement, and meaning is. The trouble is that inequalities tend to produce resentment, violence, and social instability. Consider the condemnation of the prophets in the Old Testament. Was not their chief message to the people of Israel that the rich and powerful were oppressing the weak and poor among them, and that God was angry about it? What usually followed if they were not repentant? Violence and social upheaval. The correlation between inequality and social instability is well established. As social stratification increases, so does the society’s instability. That is why, for example, increases of violence in any given city or region can usually be explained by increases in inequality.
