Privilege is the new equality

City firms, such as State Street (headquartered in the US), are introducing minority quotas, explaining to demurring managers in crystal clear terms that failure to comply will reduce their own bonuses.

Since these seven-digit afterthoughts are the bedrock on which our whole financial system rests, those troglodyte executives are offered the choice between life and suicide. I can see only one winner there.

But what’s a minority? Is it defined as percentiles or absolute numbers? Neither, is the answer to that naïve question.

In compliance with the current carte blanche to self-identification, minority is defined as any group perceiving itself as such, with no other qualifications necessary. Thus women, who are actually in the majority, qualify – and Russian-born holders of dual American-British nationality don’t.

But enough about me. Let’s talk instead about my constant bugbear: equality.

Let’s then narrow the problem by ignoring equality of outcome, only ever demanded by the primitive fringe of a primitively evil doctrine: communism. Let’s further put aside the more civilised but similarly unrealistic demand for equal opportunity, which, as I’ve often argued, is fully achievable only in prison.

At issue today is one type of equality seen as virtuous and desirable by the whole political spectrum: equality before the law. Fans of Enlightenment slogans insist that this is the sense in which the word or its cognates was used in variously subversive American and French documents of the 18^th century.

The founding document of the US treats this type of equality as an inalienable right. This interpretation isn’t restricted to the New World. Every decent person anywhere in the West nods his agreement, and every Western government enshrines this right legally.

Equality before the law is then an indisputable legal right. Derivatively indisputable is the inference that violating this right is illegal.

The law, in the West at any rate, is like God. It looks down on people from such a lofty perch that all of them look the same. You have the same rights as I, we have the same rights as they, they have the same rights as anybody else. Are you with me so far?

Thus a member of any group possesses certain inalienable rights, the same for all because the law is the same for all. I know I’m banging on about the same thing, but hell, repetition is the mother of all learning (repetitio mater studiorum in the original).

Hence a woman, homosexual, black, Asian, transsexual and whatnot have all the same rights as all of us. We are all equal before the law.

Yet then it transpires that, in addition to the rights shared by all, members of the groups perceived as minorities have other rights, those the rest of us are denied. In other words, they enjoy privileges.

Thus I have no protection under the law from being publicly described as a colloquial word for pudendum, which I don’t resemble in any other than the metaphorical sense. I have no right to that protection.

By contrast, the law protects a black person from epithets specifically based on his race, or a homosexual from any epithets relevant to his sexuality. The other day, for example, a friend’s sister, a dainty woman of about 5’2’’ and seven stone, had a spat with a neighbour, as one does.

In the heat of the argument she called him a “poof”, rudely but, as it happens, justifiably. The man, who tops her by more than a foot, immediately filed a complaint, claiming he felt physically threatened.

That evening three burly coppers came to the woman’s house, arrested her and threw her in the cage at the nick, where she spent the next 24 hours before appearing in court.

If I were insulted by a reference to any of my characteristics, or even other people’s (it’s that pudendum again), I’d have no recourse. Should I file a complaint, I’d be the laughingstock of the policeman and all his friends. And no cop would turn up at my offender’s door.

Thus members of some groups have all the same legal rights I have – plus others that don’t apply to me. You may or may not consider this fair, but it’s certainly not just. Equality before the law is, after all, a universal principle of Western jurisprudence.

This explains the title above: privilege is indeed the new equality – in the same sense in which oppression is the new liberalism, uniformity is the new diversity and socialism is the new conservatism.

Modernity is one contiguous paradox and one ongoing spree of vandalism – cultural, social and linguistic. In pursuit of their wicked ends, the vandals are willing to stamp into the dirt even their cherished inaugurating principles. Such as equality before the law.