All animals are created equal, but some animals are more equal than others.
– George Orwell, Animal Farm
All men are created equal.
–Declaration of Independence
Teachers in American public schools are expected to affirm the “equality” of all humans. The Founding Fathers saw it as a truth “self-evident”. But if human equality were to be considered thus, as something real - a fact not fabrication - what sort of reality would it be? I confess that I have never found the metaphorical identity of equality to be “self-evident”. Nonetheless, I do believe in it and will try here to make it a bit more evident for the hapless teacher.
For equality to be a reality of our world, of what sort of stuff will it have to consist? What shared property could make me equal to you and to Mother Theresa and Einstein – and to every baby born with Down syndrome and every vicious criminal? This common element of our being – if it exists – must be something immune, on the one hand, to any limiting effect of individual ignorance or depravity, and, on the other, to distinctions of genius or virtue.
Happily, the one coherent description of equality has nothing to do with — but asserts the absence of — differences sometimes associated race or other human characteristics. It is rather the assertion that the specific element of the human self that can qualify man for what is often called salvation is fully active in us all, and this is the freedom of all to choose or reject the good. This proposition is worth our elaboration for the teacher and the school who face the task of daily asserting the equal worth of every child.
Since 1776 universal equality has been a litany of America’s officeholders and seekers, though seldom with definition. As a slogan, the term seems useful to political causes ranging from free markets to socialism.
For example, it became (and remains) heresy in the liberal academy to doubt that human intelligence is spread evenly among all races. Of course, as I myself believe, the professors are probably right, but is this even relevant to the question whether equality holds for “all men” as Jefferson wrote? I fear not. Today’s academy has made it an issue of the distribution of a certain feature, not of the individuals but of human groups.
So cast, the claim becomes a virtual self-contradiction. If intelligence be the stuff so important to human worth, how does it solve the egalitarian problem to measure it by clusters – boys and girls, blacks and whites? And what then is the implication for the dignity of the dull individual of every race? No one claims that all humans are equal in intelligence; I fear that our well-meaning “egalitarians” have shot themselves (and most of us) in the foot.
This is delicate stuff, and I propose to be understood. The many sciences of the brain are, so far, unable to determine –and thus to compare- the distributions of the genetic intellectual potential of the unborn to perform on Western measures of IQ and the ability to learn in school. Moreover, even if science one day is able to test for the IQ of the early fetus, the problem remains. Human environments are diverse and have very different effects upon the child, even before, but certainly after birth, frustrating scientific comparisons. Hence, I can only assert my unscientific conviction that the genes of children born halfway around the world are statistically indistinguishable in intellectual expectation from those of my own children and the rest of the human mob.
This in no way diminishes my angst over the damage to the dull person of any group or race that is wrought by the IQ fascination of our civilization. The drop out knows that brains are the thing, and I ain’t got ‘em. I am short on what the world values. If I only had a brain!
Nor has the ascendance of Darwin done the IQ egalitarians any favors. Gradually becoming the holy scripture of the public school and university, his message seems to leave us humans non-symmetrical, at least if the capacity to “survive” be understood as a personal excellence. In any case, the survival of the “fittest” places an embarrassing burden of explanation on those of Darwin’s admirers who would cling to human equality as a fact while teaching children that some of us are born losers.
But this squabble over the “equality” of racial and other groups is simply a distraction. To be real and consequential, equality must lodge in us all in some shared capacity that is not subject to the inevitable variations of genetics, material environment and sheer luck.
My own conviction is this: Equality (if it be) must involve a universal capacity to choose between apparent good and evil; I emphasize “apparent,” because honest mistakes are inevitable, and – for equality’s sake – must not diminish the self-perception achieved by the actor. Equality must be understood to consist simply in the universal human ability to honor the good as best one can - or to reject it. This idea that man’s perfection lies simply in doing the best he can to find the good, then to do it, can be puzzling. The final good – the perfection of the self – becomes detached from the objective correctness of the ethical decision.
The abiding confusion about the separation is illustrated in the conclusion to Tennyson’s Ulysses.
… that which we are, we are: one equal temper of heroic hearts, made weak by time and fate, but strong in will to strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.
The problem here is “to find.” Some of us (all of us) fail on occasion to find. If our honest mistakes about the focus of the good corrupt our selves, equality is impossible, for we simply don’t always get things right. Happily, there is one thing that the most marginal mind can always do; that is to strive, to seek the right path, then to act according to one’s conviction. Maybe Tennyson meant exactly that. It depends on the comma after “seek”; must one actually “find” or only “seek to find.”
Conversely, of course, that same equal self can, instead, freely and rationally, refuse to serve any authority but his own ego. In making decisions he does not seek beyond it. He pursues nothing but this own apparent advantage. If, unknowingly, he chooses the authentic good, it is to his own corruption.
In this capacity to choose the good – or not – lies the possibility of human equality as something intelligible and real. Doing one’s best, first to locate, then to achieve the good is an option for persons of all degrees of intelligence above zero. And, in this view, he who does try his best achieves the enrichment of his own self even as he mistakes the good.
His human opposite (and equal) freely chooses loyalty to himself only, and thereby achieves what? Dante left him in permanent torment. I would rather imagine his self-corruption as painless, inspired and eternally boring – just as he was in life. Dante, of course, could be right.
I think this all has practical implications. It is common for the teacher to encourage the student to seek and thereby to “find yourself.” Understood as encouraging the child to think seriously about the choices we all have to make ‘twixt good and evil, this is plausible pedagogy. If, however, the teacher means – or is understood to mean – literally, do your own thing, this is dangerous business, individually and socially. Such amoralism may rarely be the intended message of teacher or school, yet it easily slides into the ambiguous sloppy stew of ethics handed us by John Dewey, the Supreme Court, feeble schools of education and the acquiescence of too many of the rest of us.
Such dysfunction cries out for a curriculum of ethics more robust and transparent than “follow your own star.” Of course, by our free nature, we all must and will do exactly that; but this inevitable personal journey of the human will – toward or away from virtue - will always entail free choice between the authority and invitation of a real good and its replacement and domination by the lure of the ego. The teacher should say exactly this, and offer arguments for choosing the often-hard path of the good.
It is a political curiosity that the only human equality that makes sense cannot be taught, because of the rules governing religious expression and support of education. This may be the historic moment to begin the schools’ crawl back to an authoritative ethic. Whether conceived as Natural Law philosophy or plain-spoken religion, the good society does not depend on the state to define the good life, but rather empower the parent to be the child’s authentic star to honor and follow so long as his or her developing reason and conscience allow.
It is thus that government might best honor the reality of the human equality that satisfies the author’s reason might, at this historical moment, fail to qualify for the traditional public schools’ curriculum, being plainly dependent upon the “creator” whom the rebel colonial credited with our equal being in 1776. But the rules governing religious expression and support of family choice in education could change before America’s kindergartners are ready for their senior prom.
