Matthew Cochran:
It’s only been a few centuries since the idea of equality became a staple of Western political conversations. In that time, it has brought about some substantial benefits. We no longer divide our citizens into peasant and lord or master and slave, for example. Those with power and authority can be brought before a judge and answer to the same law as those they govern. It’s a concept that would be quite novel in many times and places, but it has been effective when it comes to curbing abuses of authority (while it lasts, at any rate.) It’s no wonder that equality has become a powerful political concept. Appealing to it has great potential to spur action and provoke change.
Nevertheless, such power has a tendency to corrupt even good ideas, and equality is no exception. As the West became more and more impressed with this new hammer it acquired, we began to see every social problem as a nail. As time passed, we sought to extend equality and enforce it within every area of life—often to our own detriment. Eventually, we changed it from a political tool with specific and defined purposes to a broad, factual belief to which all human thought and behavior must be made to conform.
When this happened, equality ceased to be our servant and instead became our god. Rather than a means to an end, we deemed it valuable for its own sake, and today it claims unjust authority over our lives.
‘Equality,’ the Modern Incantation
C. S. Lewis wrote about this transformation half a century ago in “Screwtape Proposes a Toast.” In it, the demon Screwtape discusses Hell’s efforts at undermining every form of human excellence through modernity. He wants the humans to use the word “democracy” as a kind of incantation—not as a term with a clear definition, but as a sound that invokes a particular set of feelings in both speaker and audience. Screwtape advises his underlings accordingly:
You can use the word Democracy to sanction in his thought the most degrading (and also the least enjoyable) of all human feelings. You can get get him to practise, not only without shame but with a positive glow of self-approval, conduct which, if undefended by the magic word, would be universally derided. The feeling I mean is of course that which prompts a man to say I’m as good as you.
Our everyday language has changed a bit since 1959. Nowadays, when Americans use democracy as an incantation, it is usually to generate certain feelings about our military adventurism in the Middle East. However, we do use equality in precisely the way Lewis describes. In the same paragraph, Lewis himself connects democracy with “the political ideal that men should be equally treated” which Screwtape uses to “make a stealthy transition in [human] minds from this political ideal to a factual belief that all men are equal. Especially the man you are working on.”
Regardless of how the magic word has changed, the practical function of the incantation has not. Although the word is shouted far and wide, we seldom consider what we actually mean by equality. Neither do we question exactly what measurements or characteristics we suggest are equal. Sometimes we mean our standing before the law, other times we mean our virtues, still other times we mean our genders, but we never bother to specify because the specifics have become unimportant to us.
By and large, invocations of equality are merely used to ward off good judgment by generating feelings of offended entitlement that cry either “I’m as good as you” or, perhaps just as common among the social-justice warriors who most regularly abuse the word, “He’s as good as you.” No excellence can be acknowledged lest others feel ashamed or left out.
Overemphasizing Equality Erases Distinctions We Need
Some of our most poisonous philosophies have only managed to afflict America under the aegis of this kind of equality. No matter what our differences may be, we are told that these differences make no difference because we are all equal. Yet civilization hinges on the being able to recognize and judge certain differences. When we willfully fail to do so, the natural consequences are dire.
Socialists, for example, proclaim an idealistic equality of rich, poor, and everyone in between as their rationale for equalizing wealth and income among them in fact. They chant equality over incomes and outcomes and expect society to fall in line. But a broad equality that purports to cover every aspect of economics ignores the very important distinction between the industrious and the lazy—between those who produce wealth and those who merely consume it.
Unfortunately, a society that is either blind to this difference or dismisses it as unimportant is fundamentally incapable of either discouraging laziness or rewarding and training a strong work ethic. It cannot encourage economic excellence among its citizens because it flattens the difference between excellence and inferiority. Equality instead demands the redistribution of wealth among lazy and industrious alike. Accordingly, such a society rewards the administration of wealth rather than its production, for only administration can achieve this venerated equality.
This is precisely how our own economy has shifted over the years. Administration does have a legitimate role to play, in that it aids the productive by greasing the wheels of commerce; but we do not treat it as a mere supporting role. The wealthiest of us are increasingly found among the bankers—those who administrate the wealth others have produced and skim off as much as they can.
Likewise, the largest and most successful businesses tend to be the ones who are better at influencing government administrators to provide them special favors and opportunities. Meanwhile, as Lewis observed over 50 years ago, taxes and penalties meant to equalize rich and poor are destroying the middle class. These were precisely the people most willing to make sacrifices so their children would be better-educated and more productive than they were themselves—the class which, Lewis notes, “gave to the humans the overwhelming majority of their scientists, physicians, philosophers, theologians, poets, artists, composers, architects, jurists, and administrators.”
Why “equality”? Because they don’t want to use the word “socialism.”
We used to have a wonderful proof of the old anti-equality-of-outcome meme.
It was a school program called ”Junior Achievers.”
At school, usually by force, all of us were divided into an equal number of groups.
We were all given an equal amount of raw materials.
Then, according to our group’s decisions, we tried to turn those raw materials into a profitable product.
Turns out, many groups had no ”idea’s man (or woman.)
Other groups lacked the follow-through required to actually create the product.
And still other groups had no success in their marketing abilities.
So, one group always did way better than those who also competed.
In fact there were almost always at least one or two groups that simply didn’t do anything with their raw materials.
So, in the end, what started at the same line ended in widely different ways.
Equality mongering is easy because it will never have to end.
Even Jesus Christ said ”You will always have poor people among you.”
But, like other ”dog whistle” words, ”inequality” is code.
PS, the most recent ”code” word is ”Taxpayer.” It turns out that is ”code” for Conservative!
@Nanny G: Saw some test info on O’Reilly tonight. US scored very low on every category. No one has a clue as to why. Everyone talked all around the ‘real reason’. In the US, the students are a mixture of hundreds of cultures. From the smartest people on earth to the dumbest people on earth. Everyone is taught to the lowest level so everyone is being dumbed down. In every other country in the world testing is basically only one ‘culture’ and everyone is taught to the ‘highest standard’. It’s like the old “don’t keep score” exercise. So no matter how it is sliced and diced, the smarter/hard working ones are supporting the dumber/ non working ones. Nothing is going to change, uh, well except it’ll likely continue to go downhill
@Redteam:
The socialist-left continue to display their utter incompetence at managing anything beyond the furthering of their political agenda. With them, it’s not whether what they do is sensible or even workable, it’s just about getting it enacted and damn the end results. Then they just move on to their next political agenda item, blaming their designed-to-fail failures on the political opposition, rather then the flawed, hackneyed behemoths they have created.
@Redteam and Ditto:
Both of you seem convinced that the United States is headed downhill – nay, LEADING the race to the bottom of the barrel! And with the much-anticipated and never-disappointed predictability of Flopping Aces Conservatives, Ditto blames Liberals (the “socialist left”), while Redteam inscrutably seems to suggest that the problem is our social diversity. (Redteam, didn’t we kind of sacrifice any possibility of having a socially coherent country when we cobbled together the first thirteen states into “These United States” and then went on to add even more “states” from the wide assortment of original colonies that were founded and peopled from different countries across Europe?)
Seems to me that you both are pining for something other than a democratically elected republic, which is what this country was set up to be. This GROWING underclass of needy people that you are pulling your hair out over OF COURSE are not going to vote for candidates who promise to take away their “support.” Yes, they ARE going to vote for the more “socialist” candidate.
Your job is difficult to the point of being impossible. You have to somehow convince the MAJORITY of voters that it is in their best interest for the country to take away from them their food stamps, their ObamaCare subsidies, their Medicare, their Social Security, and ALL of the other free-bees they are currently receiving, and make them pay full price for all of the things that our capitalist, profit-motivated, media-mounted, commercial messaging empire has brainwashed them into believing that they cannot live without.
How do YOU think that’s going to go?
Instead of pointing fingers at living politicians who are still taking votes AWAY from you, why don’t you blame the DEAD politicians – those liberally wrong-minded “Founding Fathers” – who so wrong-headedly proclaimed that “All Men Are Created Equal”. Where else do you think this “equality problem” came from? As if that wasn’t bad enough, the country has amended its constitution over and over again to REINFORCE this erroneous notion that men – and even WOMEN – are “equal,” when anyone with a lick of sense and a measuring tape can see – and prove – that they are not.
Matthew Cochran should have skipped C.S. Lewis and focused on Kurt Vonnegut’s “Harrison Bergeron,” which in my opinion is the ultimate spoof on the absurdity of “equality.” And it would not have hurt if he had made a few intelligent extrapolations from Darwin’s theories of what SHOULD happen to the “fittest,” as opposed to the “also-rans.”
Yes, we are losing most of the races we are in with the rest of the vermin on this planet, but it isn’t really the fault of today’s Democrats. Blame our Founding Fathers, and you might also fault Jesus for having gone so soft on the poor.
@George Wells: George, I won’t actually disagree with any of the points you made. As far as the original intent of the founding fathers, while they were probably mostly correct in what they intended, it just hasn’t worked out that way. There is a lot of difference in saying that all persons are created equally and with certain rights and saying that the outcomes of everyone should be determined ahead of time by politicians that are mostly anxious to be re-elected. A theory behind taxes, for example, let everyone support themselves and keep a great percentage of what they make, say 80%. The remainder going to common interests such as National Defense, but very little going to support anyone that just will not work. Also, guaranteeing everyone a High School Diploma just because they show up over 50% of the time is not helpful to those that actually want to learn something.
As I said, you take the dumbest persons and put them in a room of smart persons, then teach them all at the same level, the smart persons (or the dumb ones either) are going to learn a damn thing. But those smart ones will likely succeed anyhow and end up supporting those dumb ones. (‘dumb’ is a metaphor for dumb, lazy, sorry, won’t work, etc people)
unfortunately we can’t go back and ‘unring’ the bell. It got rung long ago. As to how to get out of this situation, just do whatever we can to elect the most conservative people we can and hope that something happens to wake up the socialists so that they realize they have to contribute also.
No, I don’t blame Jesus for his teachings. He did not teach anyone to be a mooch or to be a crooked politician. His example would be for everyone to support themselves and their families and to help those who were not able to do so.
@Redteam #6:
Oh, indeed the bell is rung. The house is burned down, and no hoping for better times (or voting for conservatives) will undo the damage. You now have an increasingly poor majority that is unable to support itself IN THE MANNER THAT IT HAS BECOME ACCUSTOMED TO, and these people – in spite of the GOP’s efforts to disenfranchise them piecemeal through voter-ID initiatives and the like – can VOTE. You CAN’T convince enough of them to vote away their “support” checks.
So what you have is the trend toward socialism that you are whining about, and that isn’t going to change so long as poor people get to vote. They’re not smart enough to see that they’re part of the problem, and YOU’VE taught them to always blame the other guy. If you cannot see that there is no way out of this rat-trap-of-a-predicament that you’ve boxed yourself into, well, you’re as dumb as those poor people.
Not Jesus’ fault?
“Blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the Earth.”
(Meek = Poor)
That phrase was likely intended to give some hope to the great masses of people who will NEVER get a decent slice of the pie in THIS lifetime. Sort of to keep them from rebelling or committing suicide in large enough numbers to threaten the fat lives of the privileged “ruling class.” Kind of like the line of people getting on the bus telling the bus driver that the guy behind them was going to pay for everybody. Yeah, THIS life sucks, but just wait ’till you see how nice the NEXT one is. You’d have to be pretty stupid to buy that scam, but that’s the nice thing about poor people – they’re usually pretty stupid. They took the bait, hook, line and sinker. Took it so well that they don’t bother trying to better themselves in THIS life, appreciating the idea that these few, short years on Earth are nothing compared to the eternity of heavenly bliss that awaits them on the other side. THAT’S what I blame Jesus for. The hope he gave them in the NEXT life robbed them of the incentive to better themselves in THIS one.
Try to rhetorically wiggle out of THAT if you want, but you know in your heart that I’m right.
One last thought is that this notion of “equality” didn’t come from the Bible. THAT book was full of slaves and people – especially women – being “property.” When the Founding Fathers penned that “All Men Are Created Equal” line, they were playing with, not scripture, but the most liberal of Euro-trash ideas that were flashing in the contemporary pan. How lucky we were to have immortalized the relatively novel sentiment in the formative first documents of our nation. Now we’re stuck with it.
@George Wells: So
Not quite sure how you got hung up on “you”, but I suspect the problem is as much your’s as it is mine. and I suspect the solution is gonna have to involve ‘us’. I’ve never voted to give handouts to anyone. And have never supported the government ‘supporting’ persons. (while Social Security is a problem, primarily because so many get the benefits ‘they’ never paid for. It (as most socialist programs) was slipped in ‘under the right conditions’. While the original documents and all their equality were fine, it’s been the terrible abuse of the meanings that are killing us. Having a natural right to free speech is not intended to mean that the person having free speech is to be supported by others while exercising that speech. It really started being bastardized during the 20’s, 30’s and 40’s when the Communicrats were in control and starting giving the store away to keep getting more voters to continue to give the store away. I’m not going to change things, I’m 75 (almost) and won’t live long enough to lead any changes. I wish my children were being left a better world than I came into, but that’s not going to be the case. As long as we don’t even care enough to, at least, elect a ‘natural born citizen’ to be the president of the country with indivisable patriotism for this country, we can only get more of what we get.
Obama, obviously not qualified, being run down by Cruz, who says he wants to follow the constitution (unlike Obama) except ‘he’s not a natural born citizen’ either. So, does he believe what he says, or is he ‘just a politician’. You don’t have to answer, I know the answer.
@Redteam:
The “you” that you are apparently objecting to isn’t intended to mean “Redteam,” it’s meant to mean EVERYBODY. I use this term because saying “What you have here is a big mess” sounds better to my ear than saying “What everybody has here is a big mess.” Don’t take it personal.
I’m not sure why you are bothering to bring up Obama’s birth record again. The issue is dead… you must be terribly bored.
For that matter, Ted Cruz’s birth isn’t going to be an issue either. Not a court in the land would decide with you on the Obama issue, INSPITE OF THE FACT THAT SOMEWHERE NEAR ONE HALF OF ALL JUDGES IN THE LAND ARE REPUBLICAN, and not a court in the land will find against Cruz either.
Wonder why that is?
In Cruz’s case, he was born an American citizen because the womb he popped out of belonged to an American citizen. Just because that womb happened to be in Canada at the time it popped doesn’t mean that what came out isn’t a “natural-born” American citizen. What it DID mean was that the baby was ALSO legally a Canadian citizen. If you can’t wrap your mind around the concept of dual citizenship, maybe you shouldn’t have the right to vote in the first place. But don’t worry. Ted Cruz isn’t going to be the next president of the United States… OR Canada. He’s just a caricature of a nasty Republican, a clown making pretend that God is the ultimate authority in politics in order to scam money from stupid Christians who mistakenly think he has a real chance at the White House.
Almost all politicians run this racket, so you can’t blame him.
@Redteam:
You might notice that my last few posts make the argument that notions of “Equality” aren’t based upon Biblical guidance, and they are not supported by scientific evidence either. In other words, there isn’t any REAL reason to believe that “All Men Are Created Equal.” It was just a “nice thought” that was making the rounds in circles of the European cognoscenti in the eighteenth century, and our “Founding Fathers” wanted to demonstrate their worldly intellectualism by climbing on board.
That said, we’re stuck with it. Our Constitution and our laws are lousy with it, liberals pushing for equal rights (like gay marriage advocates) are using it to get what they want, and there’s nothing you can do about it. It is a fundamental principle of our collective self-governance that is every bit as basic as the freedoms of speech, assembly, religion etc. that our Constitution guarantees.
No, we were not CREATED “equal,” but we granted ourselves this idea that we call “equality,” and we did so in a manner that so thoroughly ingrained it in our way of life that it is virtually immutable.
Now, I happen to think that, in the balance, equality is a good thing. It places some small brake on the otherwise irresistible pressure of the powerful to subjugate the less fortunate. Our laws are certainly not foolproof, and more often than not, the powerful manage to more than adequately take unfair advantage of the less powerful. “Survival-of-the-Fittest” is not long frustrated by the petty rules of Man. So I don’t shed any tears when, occasionally, the little people win a small skirmish, when they gain some small crumb of an advantage that they would not otherwise enjoy but for a well-meaning bit of equal-rights legislation that bleeds to the liberal left.
Matthew Cochran and his friends should stop whining about it. They have bigger fish to fry.
@George Wells:
I don’t really think he’s ‘whining’ about it. I think he’s just explaining it. He seems to recognize the problems, and as you and I, he doesn’t have a solution either. Society can’t just take from those that will and give to those that won’t because there will, very quickly, become more that won’t. Bringing an illegal across the border and then giving that illegal all the same benefits that Americans have spent their life for, is not a winning situation. Affirmative action is a terrible idea, because those that were so anxious to do away with the ‘low on totem pole’ position, suddenly became very happy to put themselves at the top of that totem pole, but what about those that now find themselves at the bottom of that pole, solely because of color. I don’t, and have never, believed that “all men are created equal’. I do, basically, believe that everyone is born with certain rights, but they are then governed by laws in the country where they are born, so their rights may be severely curtailed for that reason. That’s the rights I think the founders were trying to ensure were not taken away. Take a simple one. The right to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed. That doesn’t mean, have a license, have a permit, it means you have the right to keep and bear arms without ‘any’ laws infringing that right.
I think you might feel the same way toward ‘gay’ rights.
But back to an old point. Why are test scores lower in the US? Because all men are not ‘created equal’. Some people can be educated from books, some can’t. But to put all of them in a class and then teach that class to the level of that one that ‘can’t learn’ is the reason people aren’t being educated. I have a neighbor that was a school teacher. She taught classes where she was not only required to give the ‘dumb’ students the test questions ‘before’ the test, but she was required to also give them the test answers ‘before’ the test. She was ‘at times’ required to have only one answer on multiple choice questions. They still missed the questions. She finally quit in disgust. What do you think the smarter kids were leaning in that same classroom while she was spending all that time with the lesser students? This doesn’t only happen in Louisiana. Common Core is a part of this program.
@Redteam:
“Society can’t just take from those that will and give to those that won’t because there will, very quickly, become more that won’t.”
Oh yes it CAN. It DOES. I’m not making a defense of it, but I sure cannot argue that it can’t be done when here it is being done right in your (and my) face.
It’s happening everywhere, not just here in America. There are simply too many people, and not enough pie to go around. The natural resources of the Earth are not infinite, and when the number of people continues to expand, each person’s share gets smaller. Blaming the problem on one political party or the other ignores the real problem – that there are too many people.
Sadly, war is the only solution that has a real chance of relieving population pressure. The Chinese tried mandatory population control, and that went bust. Many were hoping that some wonderful epidemic would do the job, but so far, we’ve been cleaver enough to at least hold our own against germs and viruses. Apparently, our only relief will come at the expense of just about every other living thing on the planet. Oh, well, whatever it takes, right?
Yes, I suppose that the “Founding Fathers” believed as you do that we are “born with rights.”
Personally, I don’t buy it. Every right that I can point to is a right that some group of men has granted me or denied me, at their whim. Oh, they defend their decisions by claiming that these “rights” are “inalienable,” or that they are “God-given,” but if that was really the case, why would men be bothering to repeat them their own laws?
We were born with nothing, and we check out with the same balance in our accounts. The rights we have in life are granted by the men who rule our lives, and we accumulate what wealth they allow. When we succeed, it is more the product of our effort not to make ourselves an attractive target than the product of hard work. Then, regardless of what we did or did not “accomplish” in life, we leave everything behind when we die.
Pretty simple.
@George Wells:
I agree, maybe I just didn’t clarify that I think there is an end point. I should have said ‘can’t continue to’. Because it will reach an end point.
I don’t share your feeling, at this time, that the world is over populated. There are billions of acres of arable land available to plant crops and fruit trees to support those that are here. We just need more of those ‘that won’t’ to get off their butts and plant those acres. Consume some of that CO2 that some are fraudulently using to further their aims of confiscating ‘OUR” stuff.
You may have missed my point. Being born with a right and being born with the right to exercise that right are 2 different things. A simple example, you may have been born with the right to say what you wish, but someone may limit your right to exercise freedom of speech. Also, no one is born with the right to be supported by someone else while they exercise that right.
So true. When I had a heart attack, I was ‘clinically’ dead for some time. I didn’t see a bright light, there were no angels or devils there, there was total blackness til I woke up hours later. Had I not ‘checked’ back in, I suspect that would have been all there was.
@Redteam #13:
“A simple example, you may have been born with the right to say what you wish, but someone may limit your right to exercise freedom of speech.”
I think I see where we’re at odds here. I don’t call that a “right,” I call that an “ability.” You are ABLE to say any stupid thing you want – that’s what I consider “free will.” At the same time, the Laws of Man might well forbid you to ever utter a single sound – that is, you DON’T have a “right” to say anything. The word “right” indicates that you can do something (that you have a “right” to do) WITHOUT getting punished for doing it. You DON’T have a “right” to walk into a building and start shooting people. You CAN do that – you are ABLE to shoot people – you just don’t have the RIGHT to do it. Those “rights” are determined by the consent of those governed (in a democracy) or by decree (in a monarchy or some such arrangement.) If you live in a society that forbids you to talk, you don’t have the “right” to talk, but you ARE able to get yourself punished for breaking that law. Do you understand the difference? Evidently, you believe that you have more rights than you really have.
“Being born with a right and being born with the right to exercise that right are 2 different things.”
Same problem. You are splitting semantic hairs and tying yourself into logic knots attempting to make a point that isn’t there. Figure out the difference between a “right” and an “ability” and your problem goes away.
Sorry you had to almost die to figure out that there isn’t anything on the flip side of this 45 RPM single we call “life.” It’s not all that long-playing, in spite of what it looks like when you’re young, and when it’s over, you discover that there isn’t any way to “Play it again, Sam.”
Oh, and you’re not completely correct about unlimited resources. Yeah, there is more land that could be farmed, but we’re covering it faster and faster with housing developments, and our supply of clean water is dwindling. Like all resources, there are alternatives, but they become progressively more and more expensive to exploit. Desalinated sea water is a costly option, compared with unpolluted ground water, right? And with the numbers of unproductive humans growing faster than the numbers of productive ones, who is going to pay for everything… tell me again? It isn’t impossible to recover gold out of the air we breathe (there is a vanishingly infinitesimal vapor pressure of gold at ambient temperature, but it’s there) and it is technically feasible to recover gold from sea water, but nobody is seriously considering doing it commercially because the cost is prohibitive. At some point, feeding X Billions of people will be both technically possible and commercially impossible. I won’t live to see the day, thankfully, but in the mean time I plan to eat as many lobsters as I want, because at some point, there won’t be any left at any price.
OINK!
@George Wells: As you’ve made the point, we’re only discussing semantics. Nothing you’ve said about rights/ability/etc is different than i’ve said, only different words used.
Don’t know where you come up with the idea of limited resources. Probably 95% of the land in this country is available to grow food. Whereas, as in the parish where I live, it used to be maybe 30% ‘farmed’ today it is closer to 5%. That is true throughout this country. Most food in the world is being grown in other countries because the labor is cheaper and productivity is high.
The business about fresh water getting short is a ‘climate change’ argument, of which there is no proof of. Mother nature built the earth using physics. That’s a science. There is a certain amount of water in the atmosphere, it is the same amount as was there a billion years ago and will be here a billion years from now. There are ‘virtually unlimited’ amounts of fresh water in the US. Some of it may temporarily be in the wrong place, but it’ll get where it needs to be before they run out because when water gets short somewhere, it gets too much somewhere else. Mother nature also does a great job with ‘desalination’ of sea water. Every drop that comes in over the west coast is recently desalinated from the Pacific courtesy of Mother nature. She’s not giving up that job. A few years ago a large reservoir near me was getting to a record low. All the commiserating about “what are we gonna do’? Well MN went to work and withing a few days in late summer that year, the reservoir was running over. Just because the federal government is doing all they can to drive farmers in California out of business does not mean there is an ‘actual shortage’ of fresh water there.
I’m not gonna spend much time worrying about the amount of fresh water in the world.