Declaration of Freedom - Chapter 4

Chapter IV: The Idea of Equality

Dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.

 - Abraham Lincoln 

The two great ideas of liberty and equality are often mentioned together, but the right relationship between them is far from simple. Though we may be sure that both are needed in a genuinely free society, there are many ways in which their relationship is marked by tension rather than by harmony. It is relatively easy to have liberty, at least of a certain kind, if we are not concerned with equality, because then we merely allow nature to take its course. We give the strong members of the community liberty to dominate others as they like, to acquire wealth as they like and to keep as they like. Such a system is bound to be so ruthless that equality, in any meaningful sense, is impossible. On the other hand, it is relatively easy to maintain equality if we are not concerned with personal liberty. We might make all wages everywhere the same, but in that case we should be denying the freedom of enterprise of those willing to work longer and harder and better. We could equalize the externals of education by forcing all to stop school at sixteen, but such equality would deny the freedom of each to learn according to his capacity. '

That the conflict between the two ideas of liberty and equality has long been felt is shown by the forthright statement of the American statesman, john C. Calhoun, made more than a century ago:

Now, as individuals differ greatly from each other in intelligence. sagacity, energy, perseverance, skill, habits of industry and economy, physical power, position and opportunity—the necessary effect of leaving all free to exert themselves to better their condition must be a corresponding inequality between those who may possess these qualities and advantages in a high degree and those who may be deficient in them. The only means by which this result may be prevented are either to impose such restrictions on the exertions of those who may possess them in a high degree as will place them on a level with those who do not, or to deprive them of the fruits of their exertions. But to impose such restrictions on them would be destructive of liberty, while to deprive them of the fruits of their exertions would be to destroy the desire of bettering their condition.

Recognizing that the two great ideas of liberty and equality are different, and that they are necessarily in tension, we must find a way in which they can be combined in practice. Perhaps each principle really needs the other, each saving the other from itself, for each alone may be damaging. Freedom without equality tends to become license, while equality without freedom produces stultification. The ideal situation is one of dynamic equilibrium in which the leading ideas of democracy balance and help one another.

Though equality is an old idea, much mentioned in the last two thousand years and particularly in the last three hundred years, the idea is often misunderstood, both by those who espouse it and by those who reject it. In the first place, therefore, it is important to try to see what equality is not.

When Lincoln and other contributors to the idea of a free society speak of equality, they do not refer to equality of powers or of production or of character. One of the most obvious facts of life, which all of us note at a very early age, is that human beings are strikingly unequal in all of these matters. Physically, some men are three or four times as strong as others, able to perform many times as much work. Intellectually the contrast is still greater, as may be realized when we compare an average person with a man like Sir Winston Churchill. This is the sort of inequality which Plato mentioned so effectively in the Republic and which, he thought, made democracy, as he understood it in Athens, a fantastic hope. If intellectual inequality is more marked than physical inequality, moral inequality is still more so. The contrast between self-centered and cruel persons on the one hand, and the saints and heroes on the other, is really incalculable.

If democracy should prove to be inconsistent with factual inequality, then democracy would have to be given up, because the factual inequality is beyond argument. If democracy means that one man’s opinion is just as valuable as another's, democracy is obviously doomed. The value of human opinions differs in every area of experience, most vividly so in science, but not merely in science. If we were to take a million people at random and, on a question of astronomy, balance their judgment against that of six really skilled astronomers, possessing adequate instruments, it would be far more reasonable, in case of conflict, to trust the judgment of the six rather than the judgment of the million.

The truth is that democracy is and always has been vulnerable at this point. If the business of the state is the most important business, we ought to employ in it the best men, not merely average men, who, by some luck, get themselves elected to public office. We need, in positions of responsibility, not common men, but superior men, superior, that is, in character and social concern, as well as in intellectual powers. All that Plato says against democracy is valid if democracy is limited to the kind of democracy he described.

In Jefferson's immortal words, as in Lincoln's equally great reference to them, it is not asserted that all men are equal. What is asserted is that all men are created equal. Here we penetrate behind the obvious contrast in powers and abilities to the consideration of man as man. In contrast to all the rest of creation man stands alone and unique. Between the poorest son of Adam and all beasts there is an impassable gulf. Man can be far nobler than any beast and he can be far more cruel. All of the other creatures are imprisoned by their natural appetites and tendencies, but every human being has in him the potentiality of saying “No” to his appetites. He is characteristically concerned, not merely with how he can get what he wants. but with whether he ought to get it. Man is amphibian in that he is, on the one hand, imbedded in nature, but, on the other hand, he is free from nature. Man is the creature who can use his consciousness to alter nature, history and even his own self. Though his body is extremely similar to other natural bodies, he cannot be contained within a purely natural system, for he is the one part of nature that is relatively independent of nature. Both his greatest evils and his greatest virtues arise from this relative independence, his worst sins being sins of the spirit rather than of the flesh. Because man is the creature who, by his freedom of spirit, is at variance with the whole of the rest of nature, every natural impulse is altered so that it becomes something less fixed than the impulses of other creatures. The uniqueness of man is vividly symbolized by the fact that he is the only creature who is concerned with the question of his uniqueness.

Only by reference to such considerations can the great phrases of the Declaration of Independence make sense. Equality in the language of positive science is ridiculous, but it is not ridiculous to say that all men are equal in the sense that each shares in the unique experience of being a conscious partner in the creation of novelty.

The paradox is that equality and freedom, which begin by being ideas in conflict and tension, turn out, upon analysis, to be necessary to each other. The truth is that it is impossible to make a reasonable statement of the meaning of equality except in terms of freedom. Men are equal only because all men are intrinsically free, as nothing else in all creation is free. Men are equal in the same sense that, as Pascal understood so well, differences in distance are negligible in relation to infinity. All men are equal because all men are different from the rest of creation. Men differ from one another in degree, but they differ from all other creatures in kind. There is thus a true sense in which each man can rightly look at every other man with level eyes, the differences being insignificant in the light of the great uniting bond of a common nature.

If equality is not a matter of particular powers, but of sharing in a common nature, there follows an equality of rights. These rights are not such that any government or regime can give them or take them away, but, instead, they are inherent in the situation. They are not granted, but are unalienable. That this is the true logical order is what the Declaration of Independence so brilliantly demonstrates. It is because all men are created equal, that they are endowed, "with certain unalienable Rights." A government cannot take away what it cannot bestow; all that it can do is to recognize, defend and protect. The rights in question are inherently universal, applicable to all races and nations, whether they recognize them or not, because they arise, not by fiat of any church or state or party, but from the very nature of the human situation.

The notion that equality is a matter of rights rather than ability is an exalted idea. It is also a very bold idea, for it is bound to make a difference in practical living. The proposal that we should try to provide equal rights for every son and daughter of the human race is almost overwhelming. It has a bearing on all systems of caste, on colonial regimes, on social snobbery, on business employment. To espouse, in any meaningful sense, the equality of the Mau Mau and the Members of Parliament in London, to take seriously the equality of the university student and the Chinese coolie, is, at first sight, an absurdity. Insofar as any considerable group is ever truly committed to this idea the structure of society will be revolutionized. That is why the free society is always and everywhere the revolutionary society.

The power of this idea, in the production of social change, explains in large measure the way in which the founders of the American experiment believed that their revolution was a genuine upheaval. No one, apparently, felt this more passionately and more keenly than Thomas Paine. He said:

What were formerly called revolutions were little more than a change of persons or an alteration of local circumstances. They rose and fell like things of course and had nothing in their existence or their fate that could influence beyond the spot that produced them. But what we now see in the world, from the revolutions of America and France, is a renovation of the natural order of things, a system of principles as universal as truth and the existence of man, and combining moral with political happiness  and national prosperity.

To illustrate his point, Paine quoted the first article of the Declaration of Rights of the French National Assembly as follows:

Men are born and always continue free and equal in respect to their rights. Civil distinctions, therefore, can be founded only on public utility.

Paine, as the eloquent spokesman for the new order that was emerging, was convinced of the universal validity and applicability of the principles enunciated.

The independence of America, considered merely as a separation from England, would have been a matter of but little importance, had it not been accompanied by a revolution in the principles and practices of governments. She made a stand, not for herself only, but for the world, and looked beyond the advantages she herself could receive.

The idea of equality, like the idea of liberty, can be more clearly understood if we analyze it into the separate forms which equality takes. Though there are many of these, three are supremely worthy of consideration.

The first and most generalized form of equality is equality of opportunity. If we are to understand this we must begin with the realization that we need all of the developed human powers that we can get. We are not so rich in human resources that we can afford to waste any, anywhere. The only way in which we can be sure not to waste something is to give each individual, whoever he is, the chance to show whatever powers and abilities he may possess. We know, in advance, that some will be able to go much further than others, but we have no way of knowing where genius will arise. Who could have predicted, on February 12, 1809, that two baby boys born that day. Charles Darwin and Abraham Lincoln, would contribute so much to the race? Certainly the Kentucky cabin was an unlikely place for such eminence to appear. Lincoln's life was such that his genius was allowed to develop and his ability to become apparent, but there must have been others at the time, whose powers were never known, and consequently never employed, because equality of opportunity did not exist.

Democracy. as it has developed in the free world, is not a device by which differences of ability are obscured or neglected, but one by which differences are permitted to appear in their true light. Democracy is not, in any sense, a denial of the need or the fact of leadership. Every organized society must have leaders if it is to survive. It differs, however, from every other form of government in the manner in which leadership is discovered and developed. It differs, as has been brilliantly said, “in that it does not arbitrarily exclude anyone from a position of leadership.”

The obvious ideal is that situation in which the best persons make the critical decisions, but in which each person has an equal chance to demonstrate whether he is one of the best. Though great ability is often inherited, it is not inherited in all instances; therefore, each person should be judged by what he can demonstrate in himself, rather than by what his ancestors were. This is why the inheritance of honored titles is really absurd. Perhaps the grandson of a Negro slave deserves more truly to be a senator than does the son of a senator. In any case, if the slaves grandson is the most qualified of the citizens, by ability and experience and character, to be senator, it is fundamentally wrong to keep him out of this high responsibility, simply because of the accident of race.

In Chapter III we considered the freedom to work as one of the primary human freedoms, but this freedom is vastly enriched if we add to it the right of equal employment. The right to equal employment is more important to many today than the right to equal education, though we have not made the former as much the object of a crusade as the latter. If a man knows that, in spite of his preparation, he will not be accorded an equal chance at the job which becomes available, he is correct in believing that he is being denied something fundamental. The free way of life involves an equal chance to enter employment. an equal chance to rise within the employment and equal pay for equal work.

We become so accustomed to the relative equality of opportunity, which we have in some parts of the modern world, that we tend to forget how revolutionary and how essentially modern it is. We do not, of course, practice it perfectly anywhere, but it is at least the standard by which we judge our failures and by which we seek to overcome our irrational prejudices. Herein lies the immense importance of the unanimous decision of the Supreme Court of the United States, holding that segregation in the public schools, on the basis of race is unconstitutional. Practice in this regard is not yet perfect or consistent and the principles enunciated by the court are not yet universally accepted, but a standard has been raised and the raising of the standard is an event of the widest significance. The crucial words are:

Separate educational facilities are inherently unequal. Therefore we hold that the plaintiffs and others similarly situated for whom the actions have been brought are, by reason of the segregation complained of, deprived of the equal protection of the laws.

Sometimes we see the idea in practice, the banker's son and the janitor's son studying together in the same schoolroom, the coal miners son awarded a university fellowship, and the child of the poor immigrant elected to Congress. What we need to understand now is that equality of opportunity, in order to be genuine, must go much further than it has gone already. This equality must be demonstrated in every phase of existence, if it is to be consistent. It is not sufficient, for example, to give equality of employment, but to deny equality of housing. Equality of opportunity is meaningless unless it includes opportunity to buy or rent decent quarters in which to live and to rear a family.

The second practical form which equality takes is equality of justice. The idea is that every human being must be equal before the law, no one being given a trial less fair than any other. This is embodied in the very idea of law and has received numerous expressions in its historical development. Characteristic expressions are the classic representation of justice as blind, so that favoritism can have no part in the proceeding, the Biblical assertion that God is no respecter of persons, and the salute to the flag in which the climactic words are, "With liberty and justice for all.” The most famous of all such expressions is that of Habeas Corpus, the provision that the accused man has the privilege of direct confrontation with the charge. The name of the writ arose because of insistence that the prisoner has the right to demand that the jailer produce his body in court and certify the cause of his detainment. So important did this seem to the Founding Fathers of the United States government that, though most rights appeared only in the Amendments, this one was placed in the Constitution itself.

In the great burst of democratic faith, appearing three hundred years ago, the idea of legal equality received especial emphasis, particularly in the political philosophy of William Penn. Penn's position was much more thoroughgoing than that of most others who enunciated the principle, but who, by a strange lapse of logic, failed to apply it to any except white men. In his Concessions, dated July 11, 1681, Penn wrote:

That no one shall, by any ways or means, in word or deed, affront or wrong any Indian, but he shall incur the same penalty of the law, as if he had committed it against his fellow planter.

Penn's principle was that, in matters of justice, we must eliminate all of the accidental factors, leaving only the central factor of a person created with responsibilities and inherent rights. Differences of sex, of race, of social standing, count in many ways. but not in the way of justice. Penn even went so far as to protect the equality of convicted criminals. Article V of his Charter of Privileges, published in 1701, affirms "that all criminals shall have the same privileges of Witnesses and Council as their Prosecutors." He knew that the test of the revolutionary idea lies in its applicability to the hated and the unworthy. Paine continued the theme almost a century later when he said. at the conclusion of his First Principles of Government, “lie that would make his own liberty secure must guard even his enemy from oppression.’

The principle, as enunciated in aphoristic form by Thomas Paine, is particularly relevant when a country is endangered from within by those who would destroy it if they could. A government of free men has the right and duty to protect itself and its institutions against all threats of subversion, so long as the methods it uses in this task are not inconsistent with the way of life which it is the intention to preserve. It is necessary to put especial effort into the protection of the legal rights of those who would undermine legal rights, because the temptation to make an exception is so understandably great.

If democracy is merely the rule of the majority, as the origin of the name seems to suggest, it will often prove grossly unjust. If citizens vote and the group with the numerically greater strength exerts its will ruthlessly over the helpless minority, the consequence is a tyranny that is not essentially different from any other despotism. The minority, therefore, must be zealously protected and respected, for the minority is not insignificant merely because it has been outvoted. We are strengthened in this conviction by the realization that the minority has often been proven right, judging by the verdict of history.

Equality before the law is especially important when there are great social and financial and educational differences in the community. A Negro man who is accused of rape ought to be given exactly the same kind of protection from the mob and the same opportunity for adequate representation by counsel that would be given to a white man accused of rape. It is manifestly unjust for the rich to be able to employ the most brilliant lawyers to plead their cases, while the poor must be satisfied with less talented helpers. It is obviously unjust for the rich and highly placed to be able to forestall punishment by repeated judicial appeals, while the accused persons with few connections, but no more guilt, spend their time in prison. Because human nature is fallible and weak, perfection is never obtained in these matters, but it is of immense value to have the standard clear.

Essential to the standard is the great idea of due process, the wonderful protection to the ordinary man in the assurance that any legal attack upon him must be an orderly and recognized procedure. The words of the Magna Carta, of 1215, are: “No freeman shall be taken or imprisoned, or dispossessed, or outlawed, or banished, or in any way destroyed, nor will we go upon him, nor send upon him, except by the legal judgment of his peers or by the law of the land." The principle is given modern form in the Fifth Amendment of the Constitution of the United States in the following words, the brilliant simplicity of which we owe principally to James Madison: “No person shall . . . be deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law.”

There is no point in the modern world in which the contrast between the two kinds of life is more striking than in the practice of equality before the law. The terrible contrast is between due process and the system of secret police, with confession produced by brainwashing and with secret imprisonment without limit. In contemporary Russia there is, no doubt, a fair measure of equal justice as between man and man. One private person who can show that another has banned him may get redress, but the matter is far different when the struggle is between the citizen and the state. Against the injustice of the state the individual has no recourse at all, for the concept of equal justice does not apply to this relationship, so far as the communist ideology is concerned. In any free society, however, the state must follow the same procedure as that followed by an individual and is bound by the same rules of evidence.

That this striking contrast is chiefly a matter of procedure does not make it unimportant, for, as the dean of the Harvard Law School has told us, “methods and procedures are of the essence of due process, and are of vital importance to liberty.’ A democracy need not be soft to offenders or subversives, but it must see to it that the rules are not suspended. The question is not whether the criminal or seditious persons are punished. The question is whether those whose guilt is affirmed, but not yet proved, will have a fair trial in the open or whether they will hear the dreaded knock at the door in the middle of the night. No difference between the two worlds is more striking than this.

A third form of equality is equality of suffrage. Voting is not the essence of a democratic system, but it is one of the necessary factors, the largest possible extension of the system of checks and balances which is the best—known antidote to despotism. How else, other than by a system of representatives, can the affairs of the total society be managed? It is manifestly impossible to assemble, in one place. all of the citizens of a modern state. We certainly do not want our leaders to achieve their position by the privilege of heredity, because this denies opportunity to excellence as it appears in other families. We dare not have our leaders self-appointed, after the fashion of dictators, or arrive by military overthrow because, though this method may sometimes insure the rule of the strongest, it certainly does not insure the rule of the best. ‘No man,’ said Lincoln, “is good enough to rule another without that other’s consent."

Since all conceivable alternatives are grossly unsatisfactory, voting, in spite of its dangers and its inadequacies, remains the only way compatible with the idea of a free society in its emerging fullness. We cannot make voting a perfect device, since there are always those who can be bought or cajoled, but we can surround the practice with helpful safeguards. For one thing, we can make sure that the voting is really secret. But it is not sufficient that voting be secret; it is also necessary that the people know that it is secret. There is never real equality of voting until the humblest citizen is sure that there cannot be reprisals, either from employers or from family or from the government. Because most men are not very brave, we must make it relatively easy to do the unpopular thing, according to the individual conscience. Voting, if it is not a farce, must not only be secret; it must also represent a genuine option between alternatives. The countries in which the Marxian ideology is dominant often go through the motions of voting, but it is hard to see how any of the participants can take it seriously. Not only do the officials see how the ballot is marked; what is worse is that only one set of candidates appears on the ballot. Thus there is a denial of choice and, inasmuch as man is unique because he is the creature who can choose in the light of a principle, this is a denial of what is unalienable. The right to vote and to make the vote a reality is not trivial; it is fundamental.

Voting may validly be limited by evidence of minimum intelligence, but it may not validly be limited by sex or race. To deprive the illiterate of the vote may be a good thing, since intelligent voting requires information and knowledge. This the illiterate citizen may not be able to acquire, but qualifications which have nothing to do with intellectual or moral factors are inconsistent with the fundamental principle of equality of rights. The recognition of this inconsistency was the occasion for the Fifteenth Amendment to the Constitution of the United States and later of the Nineteenth Amendment, which is patterned on it:

The right of citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of race, color, or previous condition of servitude.

The right of citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of sex.

What is always amazing is the slowness with which we see the implications of great and controlling ideas which we already suppose that we accept. Why did we have to wait until March 30, 1870, to see anything as obvious as the validity of the Fifteenth Amendment? Why did we have to wait until August 26, 1920, to see that differences of sex were wholly immaterial in matters of suffrage? Even harder is it to understand how the sensitive and brave Thomas Jefferson could write the Declaration of Independence and not be forced to work at once for the complete elimination of slavery. lie was, at the end, moving toward emancipation, but how could he fail to see it in July, 1776?

It is strange, indeed, to see the way John Locke handled the question of slavery, especially in The Second Treatise on Government. We might expect him to denounce slavery, since he had said repeatedly, not only that all men are born free and equal, but also that "no one can be put out of this estate and subjected to the political power of another without his own consent." Yet Locke had an answer more ingenious than convincing, as is shown in the following sentences:

But there is another sort of servants which by a  name we call slaves, who, being captives taken in a just war, are by the right of nature subjected to the absolute dominion and arbitrary power of their masters. These men having. as I say, forfeited their lives and with it their liberties, and lost their estates, and being in the state of slavery not capable of any property, cannot in that state be considered as any part of civil society, the chief end whereof is the preservation of property.

The degree to which the free society is an open society, able to change in fundamental ideas, is shown dramatically by the way in which the thinking of john Locke, though he is still honored as one of the chief contributors to the heritage of freedom, has been transcended and rebuked. The chief way in which advance beyond Locke's thinking has been made consists in the lessening of emphasis on the rights of property, and a consequent increase of emphasis on the rights of persons. The result is that, in those areas most influenced by Locke's thought. the countenancing of slavery is now impossible. Slavery is impossible where equality of rights is passionately maintained.

There is no more curious development in history than that according to which slavery has been reintroduced and securely established in one part of the world at the same time that it has become wholly unthinkable in the other parts. Though the term “slavery” is not used in the U.S.S.R., its institution there is undeniable. Vast numbers are relegated to forced labor in situations where escape is virtually impossible, many of them without even the semblance of a trial. This is not the imprisonment for crime which all civilized communities recognize, but condemnation to slavery because of dissent.

Since the revolutionary idea of equality is the fundamental cause in the elimination of slavery, existence of slavery in any society is vivid evidence that the idea of equality, and especially equality before the law, is therein denied. By the clever use of propaganda, the communist order has been successful in convincing millions that it is the revolutionary order, but the establishment of slave labor camps is the test case to prove that the revolutionary claim is spurious. It is the free society that is the revolutionary one, and the chief incentive to continuous revolution is the excitement of trying to pro duce a human situation in which equality is more than a word because it has become a reality.