No, not that kind, that utopia where each contributes according to their abilities and takes according to their needs. Too many have died for an ideal scarcely closer now than when Croesus flaunted his gold. No, I mean something more essential, more defining, more obvious - the moral equality of all human beings: the idea that, despite the vast global discrepancies in wealth, life expectancy and everyday experience, despite the elevation to iconic status of sports stars, entertainers, and even X-Factor runners-up, no human being is intrinsically worth more than another. In a real existential sense, we celebrate all human life because we are all in this together, even though each of us will go out of it alone. 

This kind of equality is fundamental, democratic and terrifying. ‘What makes mankind tragic,’ wrote Joseph Conrad, ‘is not that they are victims of nature, it is that they are conscious of it.’[1] Our moral equality arises from our despair. This was a common theme in medieval and Renaissance times, though it was dressed in religious doctrine. ‘We owe God a death,’ ran the common English proverb. Medieval churches would often put the black skeletal figure of death on their otherwise brightly painted walls. Hans Holbein’s woodcuts, The Dance of Death, warned all, from emperors and popes to peasants and paupers, that they must be ready at any moment for the judgement of eternity. 

Yet from that sense of doom Christianity became the single most important movement in creating our sense of moral equality. Ancient thinkers were hardly unaware that we all die and many rejected the belief in an afterlife. But it rarely equated to a sense of moral equality here on earth. Marcus Aurelius, for example, suggested that we would all dissolve into atoms, but expected his citizens stoically to endure their given lot. Christianity challenged this. Not by advocating social revolution (‘Render unto Caesar’ and all that) but by asserting that before God, both in this life and after, the poor and the hungry, the widow with her mite and the leper in his loneliness, were the equal of any slave-owning plutocrat. That wasn’t of much practical help for the oppressed, you might say, but it beats at the heart of our human self-consciousness today. It is the idea that drives democracy, with all its faults (two cheers only for it, said E.M.Forster [2]), that makes us disdain unearned entitlement, and at its lowest level of significance makes us resist being patronised. It is a matter of all humans’ dignity that how we view the lame, the weak, the physically or mentally handicapped, is a measure of our progress. It was a failure of the Bishop of Oxford to tell the Darwinians, Huxley and Spencer, that singular truth.[3]  

The institutions of Christianity, of course, have often failed to live up to the very precepts that made it such a force for good. From the medieval benefit of the clergy to the grandiose tombs of Renaissance popes to the corruptions inherent in any edifice of power, Christian churches have had the same familiar failings as any secular organisation. Wander through the cathedral glories of York and Canterbury and Durham and you might ask whether they’re really so different to Chatsworth and Blenheim and Harewood. But their purpose was very different. They were built not only to show God’s glory but to humble man’s kings. As Lord Denning might have put it, ‘Be you never so high, your God is above you.’ And that’s true even if God doesn’t exist. Cathedral services are free to all.  

The Christian church’s journey from Christ to violence and injustice is a horror story well known. The certainties of faith and the arrogance of humans are a frightening combination. That’s why the Enlightenment needed to ecrasez l’infame [4], and thus begin the era of human rights and declarations. But, having ditched doctrinal debate, it explored rather than supplanted the Christian vision of human equality. Eventually it gave those fortunate enough to benefit from its success the right to pursue happiness in their own chosen way, to have a say in their governance, and to dislodge a brick or two in the wall of privilege. And it bequeathed us a proper sense of guilt. If we refrain from looking at, let alone helping, the starving child, it is because we shrink from the pain of injustice: we know that child has the same moral worth as the fittest, richest, cleverest, most grown up adult human being. ‘Suffer little children to come unto me,’ said Christ who put their value beyond all the learning of the Pharisees.[5] 

Of course, moral equality can lead down tortuous paths. The right to be heard can mean the most bigoted drown the concerns of the most vulnerable, but moral equality is not about the triumph of either ignorance or reason. They have their own separate battle and laws are there to stop words provoking violence. For moral equality is not an intellectual matter. It is partly a conscious or even spiritual sense of being human, but even more it is a visceral feeling in the gut of us all. Philip Larkin, a man sometimes condemned for misogyny, saw a television programme about middle aged spinsters seeking comfort from an obviously fake preacher. In a brilliantly cruel stereotype, he described them as ‘moustached in flowered frocks.’ But he didn’t mock, patronise or sentimentalise them. Instead he demanded that we recognise they are exactly - exactly - like all of us: ‘In everyone there sleeps / A sense of life lived according to love.’[6] The unattractive, the beautiful, the weak, the old, the young, the desperate and the satisfied: we are none of us intrinsically better than another. It’s a mere truism, no doubt, but it’s got humanity here and it will help to get us further. And it reminds us, we are all in this together. 

[1] Joseph Conrad, ‘Letter to R.B.Cunninghame Graham, 31 Jan. 1898’ : Collected Letters. 

[2] E.M.Forster, ‘What I Believe’ : Two Cheers for Democracy. 

[3] In 1860 Samuel Wilberforce, Bishop of Oxford, and T.H.Huxley famously disagreed over the merits of Darwin’s recently published ‘Origin of Species’. Herbert Spencer joined the general debate with his neo-Darwinian view of the survival of the fittest. 

[4] Voltaire, ‘Essay on Tolerance’ & private letters. Interestingly he built a church for the villagers at Ferney but ensured that above its entrance his name was in larger letters than God’s (‘Deo erexit Voltaire’). 

[5] Luke 18.16. All three synoptic gospels contain the same story. 

[6] Philip Larkin, ‘Faith Healing’: Collected Poems.