Let Real Equality, Not Totalism, Bloom

The excellent online magazine Areo just published this piece by Race Hochdorf, showing how Allan Bloom foresaw the present alarming trend on the "Left" toward sexual totalism: https://areomagazine.com/2018/08/31/eros-an-obituary/

I comment on the article page about the pseudo-physics silliness in one of the passages quoted from Bloom, which annoys me as someone who didn't just take physics in college, but also idolized Albert Einstein from age nine, when I read Lincoln Barnett's The Universe and Dr. Einstein and became acquainted with the serious use of phrases like "action at a distance."

But that's a personal quibble. More importantly, I want to comment on Bloom's use of the phrase "radical egalitarianism," which Bloom defines as "one that seeks utopia through sameness." I think it's more appropriate to call this "totalistic egalitarianism" or "egalitarian totalism," for two reasons.

One is that it's mistaken to equate radicalism with totalism. A radical approach is one that goes to the root of an issue, instead of only dealing with it on a surface level. Radical egalitarianism, in the socialist sense, is indeed different from the liberal sort, because it isn't satisfied with merely formal equality. It insists that there isn't real, substantive equality unless there's real equality of opportunity, and that doesn't exist as long as society is divided into classes, i.e., as long as the people who do the work of society aren't the same as the people who own and control the wealth and the productive process. The point of this substantive equality isn't to erase individual difference, but to allow it to be expressed freely, no longer deterred by fear of material want resulting should one's difference prove unpopular.

The other reason is that the totalism of which Bloom warns is only "egalitarian" in a very superficial sense. Seeking "utopia through sameness" presupposes that someone has decided in what particular way everyone will be the same -- and that everyone else hasn't. Hence, in the context of sexual totalism, it leads to "the demand to end [alleged] patriarchy by creating a paternalistic government tasked with looking after women, who, bless their hearts, are incapable of looking after themselves."

But even if the present sexual totalism were not gender-biased in the way that it is -- infantilizing women while demonizing men -- it would still not really be egalitarian, because it fails to distinguish substantive from formal inequality in the opposite direction. It refuses to acknowledge that people can play with formal inequality from a position of material equality and therefore real freedom, which is entirely different form sexual coercion. Thus, in fact, it violates true equality by denying the erotic submissive or dominant the same right to fulfillment that others enjoy.