ONE: EQUALITY
We probably wouldn’t be talking about equality at all if Jefferson had not written that damnable phrase about "all men being created (by our Creator) equal"
We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed.
Government, under the Declaration, becomes the agent of the Transcendental Moral Code here on earth. It is governments’ job to immanentize God’s morality.
But there is a practical question. How do we go about it in this specific time and place: The United States between the 18th and 21st centuries?
Disagreements About Equality
Jefferson’s words in the Declaration could be accepted and taken literally. Liberals have tended to do so. Conservative Willmoore Kendall denied that the founding fathers intended to make equality a goal for the government. Other conservatives, such as Eastland and Bennett try to get around a literal acceptance of the Declaration by bringing in additional material.
Conservatives Forced To Address Equality
Equality and morality became entwined so that conservatives were forced to address whether slavery and discrimination were immoral. Under pressure conservatives were forced to come up with a way to deal with a call for equality within the secular world of the United States between the 18th and 21st centuries.
Make no mistake, Equality of Opportunity is secular, not Transcendental. The debate about the morality of slavery and discrimination was a secular debate. People struggled with the issue of how to take God’s Transcendental and objective equality and immanentize it into our secular world.
The Ensuing Debate
What does God-created equality mean in our secular and profane world? Harry Jaffa defines the equality of man in the inbetweenness of our souls: lesser than angels and greater than the beasts.
…human freedom depends upon the recognition of an order that man himself does not create. Man is not free to disregard the hierarchy of souls in nature….all our liberties rest upon the objective fact of the specific difference of the human soul from subhuman souls….
Jaffa takes Jefferson’s words literally and believes that equality is the fundamental principle of the United States as a nation. His view naturally nationalizes the pursuit of equality as a goal.
Willmoore Kendall, says "whoa," "hold on." The founders never intended equality to be a goal of the government. He points out that the word equality is not found in the Constitution. He says also, in an eloquent and long passage that the word equality in the Declaration is not so straight forward as Jaffa believes.
To some [of the Founding Fathers] the words no doubt meant merely that all men were created equal in the eyes of God. To some they no doubt meant merely that all men were created with an equal claim to justice under the existing law [our emphasis]. For some they no doubt expressed the hope, though merely the hope, that the republic about to be formed would be that land, the first land of all lands ever and anywhere, in which men would become equal, that is achieve the equality of which humble and disadvantaged men have often dreamt dreams that other men have called Utopian. To some the words no doubt meant merely the hope that America would be a land in which men would be anyhow more equal than elsewhere….To some the words no doubt meant the hope that the new republic would be one in which men - well, white men, and male men only, not female men, for no one had yet thought of going in for that sort of thing - would cast equal votes in at least some elections for public office. To some they may have meant - that is all I can say because I find no evidence of it - the hope that America would be a land in which government, political authority, would take steps to make men equal….because that is what the words have come, in the fullness of time, to mean to some amongst us, some even of the most learned amongst us. [Buckley and Kesler, Page 75]
Taken literally, Jefferson’s declaration that government was instituted to secure equality among men supports the last of the possibilities that Kendall lists, that:
…the hope that America would be a land in which government, political authority, would take steps to make men equal…
In response to Kendall, Harry Jaffa cites Lincoln’s understanding of equality as expressed in the Gettysburg Address and declares that equality is and always has been the central virtue of our government.
Eastland and Bennett also bring Lincoln into the debate and claim that both Lincoln and Jefferson believed that man’s equality lies in the equal possession by all men of a moral faculty. This is their way of evading taking the Declaration literally.
Lincoln, they say, viewed man’s moral faculty as the highest of man’s God-given attributes.
…the way in which men are equal [is] in regard to their moral faculty….which makes man…capable, therefore, of self-government and of consenting to social obligation [ed. Being a good citizen of the State].
Eastland and Bennett thereby shift equality from a governmental obligation to an individual obligation. They open the door to individual moral failure and to the idea that people get what they deserve based on how well or ill they employ their moral faculty. Pretty slick. They’ve changed the subject.
In the meantime Kendall is replying to Jaffa. Kendall says that the Gettysburg Address:
…made the victory of the Union armies the occasion for an official transformation of our constitutional, Conservative revolutionary past, into a sanction for a Radical-Liberal revolutionary future.
Kendall was defending state’s rights. He consistently emphasized that the right of the individual states to pass laws consistent with their local culture was more important that passing laws that supported the dignity of all men. As long as individuals were treated equally under existing law, whether the law was good or bad, the state was upholding the due process clause of the 14th amendment.
Equality of Outcomes Or Equality Of Opportunity?
How do we get from an equality of souls mandated by God to the contention that equality in the profane world consists of equality of opportunity?
The answer is that conservatives believe that inequality is a necessary condition to a stable society; that God understands this and made people unequal. Conservatives fear the effects on society of what they call leveling.
The Declaration (and the idea that all men are created equal) is a problem for conservatives because it presents a second and competing idea about God’s real intentions.
Conflict With Democracy
Conservatives’ response has been to emphasize the inequality that exists in men and society and to say that this is God’s real intention.
But in addition to the question about God’s real intentions - equality or inequality of men - there is another ideological conflict specific to the values of democracy. Implicit in the idea of democracy is the elimination of all artificial barriers in law and custom which deny or inhibit the ability of individuals to exercise what talents God has given them. Slavery and discrimination are contrary to the conditions for democracy.
For the liberal a democratization of social, economic and political ownership is a necessary condition for democracy.
Conservatives counter liberal democracy with the free market, claiming that the free market has the ability to distribute social, economic and political ownership according to the distribution of character in the United States and the distribution of character is a consequence of individual moral choice.
The removal of artificial barriers such as slavery and discrimination, conservatives maintain, gives individuals the opportunity to compete with each other for their chosen objectives according to their God-given talents.
The conservative verdict is that God prefers inequality within a democracy, derived from his unequally bestowed God-given talents.
God-Given Sinfulness
In the conservative narrative God gives talents. As we’ve seen, various conservatives acknowledge that God also gives men less praiseworthy attributes with which to compete in the free market.
As M. Stanton Evans points out, it is utopian to believe that the free market distributes consequences only according to good character.
Liberals are concerned not with "Equality of Outcomes" as conservatives claim, but with the barriers that are continually put back into place because of man’s sinful nature.
George Will has a cautionary observation for conservatives to consider.
Conservatives rightly stress equality of opportunity rather than equality of outcomes. Conservatives are, therefore, fond of the metaphor of a footrace: All citizens should be roughly equal at the starting line of the race of life. But much that we have learned and continue to learn - and we are learning a lot - about early-childhood development suggests that "equality of opportunity’ is a much more complicated matter than most conservatives can comfortably acknowledge. Prenatal care…infant stimulation, childhood nutrition and especially home environment - all these and other influences affect the competence of a young "runner" as he or she approaches the academic hurdles that so heavily influence social outcomes in America….surely it is indisputable that "equality of opportunity" can be enhanced by various forms of state action. [George Will, A Conservative Welfare State]
Will acknowledges that God-given talents are influenced by the society into which they are born, i.e., the specific time and place of an individual’s birth and existence.