Letter from the Editor

Lazarus (1864) Daziel Brothers, engraving after John Everett Millais Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

by Presbyter MATTHEW BROWN

Hierarchy 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.

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

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.

Democracy itself can only properly function below a certain level of inequality. When a few select people control too large a share of the resources, a society can only continue as a democracy in name alone. Furthermore, if social inequality becomes too pronounced, the society itself can collapse. Consider the Ming Dynasty of 17thcentury China, the Russian Empire on the eve of the revolution, or the Weimar Republic. They all share in common vast economic and social inequality followed abruptly by societal collapse and revolution.

So where and when has equality been achieved? In his 2018 book The Great Leveler, the Stanford historian Walter Scheidel examines patterns of wealth and income inequality (which are just one aspect of inequality, broadly speaking) from the Stone Age to the present day. He finds that even 15,000 years ago, in Neolithic huntergatherer societies, resources were distributed unevenly, indicating that wealth and income inequality are as old as humans themselves. He also found that inequality tends to be greater in agrarian societies than among huntergatherers. It seems that inequality is linked to resource abundance. As soon as there is a surplus of any kind, Scheidel demonstrates, inequality tends to emerge. And the more advanced a society, the greater the abundance of resources it has, and therefore the greater the inequality. Historically this holds true. Attempts to innovate our way out of inequality and the injustice associated with it often produce more inequality instead.

The only phenomena that have historically leveled out the wealth and income of societies are what Scheidel calls the four horsemen: mass warfare; violent, transformative social revolutions; societal collapse; and catastrophic plagues. Sorry for the bad news. What this means is that wealth and income inequality have only ever been achieved by removing the surplus. There are deep reasons that inequality, at least in the economic realm, is so persistent — deeper than mere economic policies or systems. On this point Alexander Solzhenitsyn aptly wrote, “Humans are born with different abilities. If they are free, they are not equal. And if they are equal, they are not free.”

What is to be done?

So if we cannot eradicate inequality, how can we blunt its worst effects? There are conceivably two dimensions to remedying the problems of inequality: mitigating inequality in society, and changing our negative response to the inequality that persists. One is external and the other internal. Both are necessary.

The social dimension requires us to pair the inverted spiritual hierarchy of our Christian tradition with the best science, economics, and philosophy to find the solution to reducing inequality without producing a cure that is worse than the disease. As great as capitalism and meritocracy are, they do produce greater inequality precisely because they produce greater abundance. At the same time, we can learn from the catastrophic failure of authoritarian regimes in the 20th century. Those regimes failed in large part because they only tried to address the distribution of wealth without sufficient cultivation of personal virtue. Too often these regimes encouraged an attitude aimed at fixing the problems of other men without fixing those in one’s own soul. One saw the speck but not the plank.

We must both labor to ease the suffering produced by inequality, as the Church has always done through its charitable work, and address the systems and persons of power who are responsible for the inequality, which the Church also has always done. It is the prophetic voice of the Church perhaps best exemplified by Saint John the Baptist. We must treat the symptoms and the disease.

I believe we begin first by working to make our churches into communities in which equality thrives in the midst of a healthy and valid hierarchy. We must try to believe and practice what Saint Paul taught us, that “There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither bond nor free, there is neither male nor female: for ye are all one in Christ Jesus” (Gal. 3:28). We must work to achieve the harmony between equality and hierarchy within ourselves, within the Church. Only then can we go out into the world with any kind of authority and offer a remedy to what ails society. We must also guard ourselves against resentment, envy, and despair. We remember Christ’s words, “I was thirsty, and you gave Me something to drink, I was naked and you clothed Me” (Matt. 25:35). Our neighbor’s joys are ours. His hardships are ours also. Embedded in the Gospel is the cure to the problem of hierarchy and equality: We invert the hierarchy. “But he who is greatest among you shall be your servant” (Matthew 23:11).

Consider our Lord’s condescension in the flesh — his willingness to unite himself with those further down the hierarchy, that they might be raised up. Can we not imitate this in our own social hierarchies? Is not this part of the solution: voluntary self-abasement out of love? “For whoever desires to save his life will lose it but whoever loses his life for My sake will find it” (Matt. 16:25).

Jesus is not the only one inverting the hierarchies and preaching a kind of voluntary condescension down social hierarchy. The Church Fathers were also ardent critics of wealth and income inequality. Contemplate this quote by Saint Ambrose of Milan (4th century): “You are not making a gift of your possession to the poor man. You are handing over to him what is his.” If that didn’t prick your conscience enough, hear what the Didache—a 1st-century work written before the gospel of John—says: “Share everything with your brother. Do not say, 'It is private property.' If you share what is everlasting, you should be that much more willing to share things which do not last.”

Perhaps the Gospel holds more promise than political ideologies for ameliorating the pernicious side of inequality. Perhaps personal transformation and voluntary communities based on equality, like the early Church, represent the best path forward to reforming systems of inequality. Perhaps such economic policies only work when founded upon a people who have cultivated the virtue necessary for such policies to function. And perhaps this burden falls heaviest upon those at the top of any given hierarchy, whether it be wealth, intelligence, or any characteristic or ability of value, to voluntarily work to mitigate the problem of inequality by discerning the best use of their surplus for the general welfare of all mankind. “To whom much is given, much is expected” (Luke 12:48). This does not preclude political action; it merely establishes it upon its proper foundation.

There has to be broad societal buy-in for antiinequality policies or programs to work. Changing hearts and minds is essential, which is why one of the best things the Christian Church can offer the world is its theology of stewardship and its own faithful and radical adherence to that theology. All we possess, whether it be wealth or some valuable talent, belongs to all men, for the very reason that God, the source of all these possessions, has given himself freely and equally to us all. We are all coheirs with Christ and therefore all have an equal share in the common inheritance of His creation.

REV. MATTHEW BROWN is the Secretary of the Diocese of New York and New Jersey (OCA) and the Editor-in-Chief of Jacob’s Well. He is the rector of Holy Apostles Orthodox Church in Saddle Brook, New Jersey.