Equal - Part 1

Mike Lundy

In the contest of ideas about society, the question whether all people are equal is pretty fundamental. (This is Part 1 of a 3-part article about the history of this question.)

The dictionary gives a range of meanings for equal; I've extracted those most relevant:

1a: equivalent/same in mathematical value or logical denotation; b: like in quality, nature, or status: c: like for each member of a group, class, or society  2: impartial regarding or affecting all objects in the same way

I hold the view that all people are of equal value and status. I recognise that people are different in temperament, ability and life story, but I believe everyone should have the same basic rights and impartial treatment before the law. I realise that many people do not share this view.

From the adjective equal we indirectly get the noun for the principle of human equality: egalitarianism. 

1: a belief in human equality especially with respect to social, political, and economic affairs 2: a social philosophy advocating the removal of inequalities among people

I say 'indirectly' because English borrowed the word egalitarian from the French égalitaire, originally from the Latin aequalitas meaning 'equality' and added the English noun-building ism. (And sure, equal-ism doesn't sound like an inspirational principle, unlike the more mellifluous egalitarianism.)

Like me, you may have been taught the last 500 years of Western history* has been a dogged struggle to achieve legal and social equality for more and more people. Famous words have been written - 'all men are created equal' - and held up as icons of the moral progress of humanity. 

But lately, my world view had a massive shake up. I learned that the majority of people who took to armed conflict in the name of 'equality' did not believe that human beings were equal at all. They were actually fighting for something else. 

Small steps toward egalitarianism?

For most of recorded history, society has been anything but egalitarian. With the advent of agriculture then industry, our prehistorical egalitarian society changed over time to become more complex, more organised and thus more structured. This structure has tended to be hierarchical - a social ranking of power. And those holding the most power, those at the top of the hierarchy, quite liked it there and were regularly pretty brutal to maintain their position.

My image of the path back to a more egalitarian society has a series of conflicts involving the powerful few - emperors, kings and queens, the aristocracy, those with inherited wealth, the clergy and slave owners with their armies - against everyone else, the 'masses'. The masses regularly rebelled against often tyrannical social arrangements.

Much historical writing and numerous national monuments portray these famous social and political revolutions as driven by a belief in egalitarianism. The human drive for equality would eventually overcome!

 

But a closer read of history reveals this to be far from the truth. For example, the signatories to those famous words 'all men are created equal', knowingly and deliberately excluded many men and all women from this status. The author of those words, Thomas Jefferson, owned slaves all his life - clear evidence he did not believe that all men, or all humans, are 'created equal'.

What I learned when I read more about these famous struggles and statements of 'equality' has completely changed my understanding.

Magna Carta, 1215

The English Magna Carta (Great Charter) signed in 1215 is often cited by politicians and campaigners as an important symbol of liberty, and a document still held in great respect. The 'people's judge', Lord Denning (1899–1999) described it as 'the greatest constitutional document of all times - the foundation of the freedom of the individual against the arbitrary authority of the despot'. 

However, the original Charter was limited to the relationship between the monarch and a group of 25 rebel barons, rather than the rights of ordinary people. The Charter gave this group of barons alone certain church and legal rights, access to justice, and limits on how much they had to pay the Crown. Over time it was revised multiple times, used by successive monarchs to end rebellions by giving more, but still quite limited, rights to wealthy landowners. Everyone else kept their 'lot in life' including the people who participated in the rebellions with the barons and later landowners.

So, the Magna Carta was nothing to do with the idea that all people were equal, more to do with the extremely wealthy trying to protect their assets from a rapacious king.

The United States Declaration of Independence, 1776

The second paragraph of the preamble to the United States Declaration of Independence reads: '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." Throughout the body of the Constitution itself, the terms 'persons', 'people' and 'electors' are used.

The American War of Independence (1775-1783) rallied the masses with promises of liberty and equality. The revolution defeated British tyranny and oppressive taxation, but the wealthy, white, male government then recreated a social and political structure in which they maintained their own high status above the 'masses' and could do business unfettered by British interference.

Despite the self-evidence of being 'created equal', there was the small fact that the word men meant 'men who were white, educated and owned property'. Women were clearly not men, despite 'man' being used to mean 'person' in legal writing at that time. Poor men or men from Asia were not 'men of substance', and too ignorant anyway. And slaves were not even in contention for equality as they were legally categorised as 'things', not people. Easy - all out.

The subsequent United States Bill of Rights (1789) consisted of 10 Amendments to the Constitution which asserted the rights of citizens (i.e. wealthy white men) to prevent the new national government making laws which might restrict them (i.e. the wealthy white men). It was not concerned with any concept of equality or human rights.

So, the American revolution was no fight for the equality of all, more a rebellion against excessive taxation regime and control by a distant king.

Those who assumed power continued to assert they were dominant because they were inherently better and that the unequal status of people was 'the natural order'. For example, George Fitzhugh (1806-1881) dismissed the 'self-evident truths' as utter nonsense: 'Equality means calamity. Subordination, difference of caste and classes, differences of sex, age and slavery beget peace and good will.'

Many of these supposedly naturally 'unequal' people had participated in the various conflicts in the name of equality. They wrote about their bitter disappointment and outrage at the failure to extend 'equality before the law' to them. Maria W. Stewart (1803 to 1879) a journalist, lecturer, abolitionist and women's rights activist, is one example.

Over several hundred years, poor white men, black men and women have achieved the right to vote and various other legal rights, often through bloody and protracted fights. However, despite each step toward equality before the law for more people, many maintained the view that a fundamental and 'natural' hierarchy existed, and that all people were not in any way to be considered equal.

For example, after the destructive Civil War, a new 14th Amendment (1868) granted citizenship to all persons born or naturalized in the United States, including former slaves, and guaranteed all citizens 'equal protection of the laws.' In immediate reaction and at times since, various states introduced laws to create segregation and conditions of terror for black people in their new 'equality'.

In addition, the authors of the 14th Amendment re-defined the previously non-gendered words 'citizens' and 'voters' in the original Constitution as 'male'. They did this deliberately to quash a concurrent campaign for equality by women, who had expected these rights extended to all citizens. After being thus written out of the Constitution, women then lobbied for the 19th Amendment which prohibited the states and the federal government from denying the right to vote on the basis of sex. It was introduced in 1878 and finally ratified in 1920. Meanwhile, the Equal Rights Amendment, introduced in 1923 to extinguish all legal distinction between the sexes in terms of divorce, property, employment and other matters has never been ratified. 

Essentially, the national laws proclaiming equal status did not have any impact on the deeply held belief of many people that the 'natural order' of humanity is unequal. American society remains profoundly riven about the question of equality, despite its citizens professing a deep reverence for its founding documents declaring 'all men are created equal'.

French Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen, 1789

In the years leading up to the French Revolution, the vast majority of people in France lived in extreme poverty, with no chance of escaping their situation. Peasants, artisans and craft workers were entirely at the mercy of the nobility, who had preserved much of the power of old feudal kings. A new class of wealthy businessmen made matters worse with their flagrant displays of wealth and their abuses of power. 

After a particularly bad year for crops, the destruction of livelihoods due to British imports, and the growing number of immigrants from countries colonised by France, the impoverished masses were facing famine. Despite this, they were still expected to sacrifice their meagre wheat crops as tribute to king and church. They were enraged at the different conditions for the wealthy and the poor, and they were starving. 

France's National Constituent Assembly wrote the Declaration of Rights as a civil rights document at the beginning of the French Revolution. Its first article states: 'Men are born and remain free and equal in rights. Social distinctions can be founded only on the common good.'

The rallying cry of the revolution was 'equality and bread'. Equality might be the inspirational concept, but the primary reason for the revolt against the crown and church was lack of food, symbolised by bread. The peasants wanted a system of government which would ensure food security for everyone. They saw their rulers as grossly unjust and as causing their miserable conditions.

At first there were successes - the Revolution toppled the absolute monarchy of Louis XVI, divested the nobility of their hereditary power, and completely undermined the political influence of the Catholic Church. However, this brought an armed bourgeoisie to power, who then instituted similar draconian restrictions over the poor. The peasants still struggled to subsist, and continued to resist. A second wave of revolution attempted to get rid of these new bourgeois oppressors, with ongoing social chaos and the ubiquitous guillotine deaths of The Reign of Terror. The rallying cry for equality came to be regarded by many as the howls of anarchy and terrorism.

The weakened fledgling French democracy could not deliver on the promises: it could not feed the people. Egalitarianism struggled as well because the remaining wealthy and powerful (in France but also across Europe) worked to undo all the radical changes and restore the old social hierarchies. The wealthy maintained it was a restoration of the 'natural' order. From the chaos, France emerged as an imperial state under Napoleon Bonaparte - the revolutionary agenda of equality mutated into a period of French global domination. 

So, the French revolution was fought by desperate and starving people to get food and to get rid of the obscenely wealthy who were keeping the food to themselves. 

But did the revolutionaries consider they were equal to each other? It's not really clear, but what is clear is that not nearly enough people in France did, even those who went to war under the slogan 'equality and bread'. Deep disagreement about the makeup of an 'equal' society in the new government plus the ongoing efforts of the wealthy to retake their place at the top of the pile meant that the Revolution failed.

United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights, 1948

Each of the documents above, though not their apparent failure to deliver human equality, were part of the inspiration for the United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights developed at the end of World War II. The Declaration includes specific recognition of the equality of all humans, in Article 1: All human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights, and Article 7: All are equal before the law and are entitled without any discrimination to equal protection of the law.

Of the then 58 members of the United Nations, 48 voted in favour, two did not vote and eight officially abstained. Not really universal agreement. Not even planetary. 

The 30 articles affirm human 'rights', but they hold no legal status. In fact, courts of various signatory countries have since concluded that the Declaration is not part of their domestic law and does not impose obligations under the law.

The fundamental dispute about whether human beings are equal continues. 

Egalitarian or 'equal' just for me?

The fact is that the authors and signatories to these famous historical 'human equality' documents did not believe that people are equal at all. 

What they believed is that no monarch or other person should preside over them. They considered they were being oppressed. They still believed a whole mess of humanity was not equal to them. They still believed in a hierarchical arrangement of humanity, they just moved up the ranking. They drew the line of 'people who were unequal' below them - because they had the power to do so.

This is summarised in an astute observation by playwright Henry-François Becque (1837-1899).

As Becque put so succinctly, those engaging in the conflicts against 'oppression' might have used the rhetoric of egalitarianism, but their concept of equality was restricted to being equal with those 'above' them.

It is indeed a defect.

Part 2 explores another way to understand our recent history that doesn't rely on blinded egalitarian moralising. Part 3 then looks at what we can do with an updated view of history.

*There is way too much I don't know about the history of non-Western countries to comment. 

Sources for images, used under Creative Commons.
Oppression: Javier Kohen/Flickr
American War of Independence: denisbin/Flickr 
Marie Stewart quote: AZ quotes
Guillotine: Pierre-Antoine Demarchy (Public Domain)
Henry Becque quote: AZ quotes