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Discouraging Equality

The Mac Donald blog fest goes on, prompting this remarkable statement from Wesley Smith at First Things: Regarding Michael Novak’s post about Heather Mac Donald’s discomfort with talk of God: I too have grappled intellectually with how to analyze crucial concepts of right and wrong, good and evil, in a society that seems so pluralistic […]

The Mac Donald blog fest goes on, prompting this remarkable statement from Wesley Smith at First Things:

Regarding Michael Novak’s post about Heather Mac Donald’s discomfort with talk of God: I too have grappled intellectually with how to analyze crucial concepts of right and wrong, good and evil, in a society that seems so pluralistic morally that it frequently appears not to be a true society at all. Yet, if we look carefully, we can discern a common frame of reference underlying many of these arguments. Indeed, amid the cacophony of competing voices—whether Christian, Jewish, secularist, atheist, or none of the above—I find it encouraging that all sides in most cultural controversies at least give lip service to the belief in universal human equality.

Why is it encouraging that all sides in most controversies pay lip service to something that isn’t true?  Would it be encouraging if all sides in the debate on evolution paid lip service to the fantastical Young Earth theory?  Would it be encouraging if all sides in Egyptology paid lip service to the belief that the pyramids were landing platforms for alien spaceships?  I ask because I regard “universal human equality” to be approximately as accurate an assessment of the human condition as those other claims are accurate assessments of the respective truths in each area of inquiry.  All of them are pleasant or amusing ideas (entire sci-fi universes have been constructed around the latter), and none of them seems to have any empirical basis in reality.  As near as anyone can tell in real life, universal equality doesn’t exist, the earth really is several billion years old, and the pyramids were built by people for the Pharaohs as monumental tombs.  The first and third claims have something else in common: those who believe in each one also believe that sinister, oppressive institutions have at one time or other hidden “the truth” from the people. 

I know, I know, Mr. Smith would not have made the statement if he didn’t believe “universal human equality” actually existed.  Some will say, “Surely you believe in the equality of man!”  Alas, no. 

It is interesting that this comes as part of an ongoing response to Heather Mac Donald’s article in defense of the “skeptical” (read non-religious, non-believing) conservative’s claim to being a real conservative.  Of course, no one had really denied the skeptical conservatives their place, though I did suggest that conservatism and full-on materialist atheism don’t really make a lot of sense together, but the basic argument was that skeptical conservatives come to their conservatism through a solid grounding in experience and empirical evidence and that they can reach basically conservative conclusions on all sorts of things from politics to morality to culture largely by means of their own critical and rational thinking.  Supposing this is true, why would a skeptical conservative be inclined to accept something like “universal human equality” and pay lip service to it?  What reason would a secular or atheistic conservative have to believe this?  Indeed, since it is one of the basic principles in the conservative tradition that such equality is not real, why would any kind of conservative be so inclined? 

To the extent that there is any truth to the idea of the equality of man it would be based in a metaphysical and spiritual claim, because it is plainly false if we are to judge by any other standard.  (It is important to remember that, as Bradford and Tonsor have told us, metaphysical or spiritual equality has no necessary connection to questions of any other kind of equality.)  I have never been entirely clear where the idea of spiritual equality itself came from. 

In all seriousness, it does not, to the best of my knowledge, appear in the early Fathers–or rather it is not even a question that much exercised the Fathers.  The Gospel may invert or subvert conventional worldly hierarchies, but the belief in some sort of hierarchy is always present, particularly from the Apostle onwards. 

In patristic theology, questions of equality arose in relation to the status of the Son in relation to the Father, and later the Holy Spirit in relation to both.  Because of their common essence, they are co-equally God.  The assumption here was that those that share the same nature possess an equality in that nature, which means that all those who share in human nature are all equally human.  It does necessarily follow that all individual human beings are therefore equal, except to say redundantly that they are all human.  Arguably, our two prelapsarian ancestors possessed the fullness of created nature, which was diminished in the Fall, and the Redemption has provided the possibility of recovering the fullness of our true nature, which suggests that the only spiritual and fully natural equality of man that exists is one realised by grace among the deified.  Otherwise, all that can be said with certainty is that all men are under sin and in the need of God’s grace–I submit that it is in this, and in nothing else, that fallen men are equal.        

Someone will object and say, “But the point of this other post was not so much about equality itself, but how people should treat one another, whether or not everyone is entitled to the same protections and dignity.”  That is what the rest of the post was about, and I am getting to it.  Mr. Smith discusses a number of moral questions, most of them related to the protection of life, and frames them in terms of equality.  Now, as a matter of description, I believe he is correct that most people do argue about these controversies in terms of equality and equal rights, but this is not something that I find “encouraging.” 

For example, what can it mean to say that an unborn child is equal to his mother and has equal rights?  Does it mean that she treats her unborn child with respect and dignity only to the degree that he is equal with her?  Clearly, the child loses in any such approach.  That would suggest that we ought to treat those weaker, more defenseless and more dependent with less respect and dignity than we would those who are more our equals.  This is clearly an unjust and cruel way to treat the weakest and most vulnerable people in a society. 

So perhaps someone will invoke a metaphysical right–the child has the same rights as anybody else.  Yet all of this rights talk presupposes the child’s autonomy in a way that seems hard to credit; the child, particularly the unborn child, is not autonomous in any meaningful sense and will not be for many years.  Rather, why do we not recognise the stark inequality in such cases and acknowledge that justice and charity require of us to treat the weakest and most vulnerable with the same respect and dignity that we would if they were our equals?  Indeed, if men treat their equals with equal dignity, that is to be expected, so where is the virtue and merit in this?  Rather, does it not follow from the teachings of the Gospel that we are to treat those who are not our equals with the respect and dignity that we would give our equals?  For if human equality were true, charity would become superfluous.

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