ON INEQUALITY, HUMAN’S NATURAL STATE

 

In Middle Way of American Equality,11/22/2024, by Daniel Mahoney (Tom Klingenstein.com) , the author calls the world we inhabit “obsessed with inequality”.   According to Mahoney doctrinaire proponents of egalitarianism rail over “equity” and “social justice” and posit that all “disparities” we see in the economic and social status of our citizenry are the result of racism or oppression of “the underclass”.  Blame too often falls on “the white ‘privileged’ majority” when the real cause of disparities is the simple fact that humans—though belong to the same species —are not clones of each other…we are all unequal in our physical manifestation, our physiology our mental capacity and even our proclivity to disease. 

Mahoney defends the US Declaration of Independence which states that “all’ men (i.e. human beings) are “created equal”in the eyes of the state.  according to Mahoney the Founders did not propose that all humans were “equal”. They knew better. Though the term “equity” (an “all come-out-even” policy) was likely not part of their lexicon. It is certain they would have claimed it unattainable.

For the Founders inequality must have been a manifest fact of Nature. Mahoney supports his contention against this false vision of equality by way of intriguing and eloquent quotes from Tocqueville, Abe Lincoln, Thomas Sowell, Burke, Hawthorne, and even Dostoevsky. In each case these authors underscore how this corrupt unnatural vision of equality has always had the potential to threaten actual democratic equality of opportunity. These seekers of equity supported oppressive totalitarian regimes, which, generate instead a form of oppression and injustice. Any move toward equity goes against the natural order of the universe. 

In July of 1776 Thomas Jefferson (in the Declaration of Independence) wrote: “We hold these truths to be self evident, that all men are created equal, …..endowed by Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of happiness.”  

And we find that many years later, the UN, Universal Declaration of Human Rights states: “All human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights”, no one claims the right to absolute equity.  

There is no absolute equality….thankfully we are all very different form each other. Each of us is a unique individual (and perhaps there i no need for all those supposedly distinguishing marks like tattoos).  And for this reason we must expect natural variation in physical, physiological mental and other factors, even response to disease and environmental stimuli. 

 

I write here to underscore the position of our brilliant and enlightened 18th century Founders who understood well that no humans are “equal” in the sense that they have identical abilities traits or characteristics. Human “inequality” is the natural state of “man” and Nature.

The natural world supports this idea.

Every living organism from a paramecium to pachyderm is a unique individual with established genetic variation which clearly distinguish every individual from every other one of its species. Variations in genetic material is expressed in the physical, physiological and other aspects of every living organism and assures, that each one varies in some small way from every other. As is well known, DNA analysis can precisely identify each one of us from the 8 billion others of our species on this Earth.  

In fact the entire biosphere—is based on the fact of individual genetic diversity, expressed in the physical manifestation (phenotype) of the genetic material carried in the nuclei of each cell. These variations are expressed in the inequality of each member of a species.  In fact all of evolutionary change is based on the necessity of the inequality of individuals. Indeed, there would be no humans on Earth, had the primitive organism from which humans evolved—been asexually formed as genetic clones of each other. The process of biological evolution requires individual inequalities, which then permit the environment, in which these natural beings exist to select for those better adapted.  In this way the process of Natural Selection- nature “selecting” those organisms which are best adapted to survive and reproduce their species has occurred over the four billion plus years of earth history.

We as a species would not exist were it not for nature’s assurance of inequality!