Their social-political experiment would do what it could to allow for equality of opportunity: an equality that would enable and empower gifted and talented people to rise as high as their skills and persistence would allow. What their experiment did not envisage—or desire—was a coercive equality of outcome that would impose an artificial form of equity without regard for differences in skill, merit, and values. Yes, they consciously and deliberately chose to abolish all hereditary titles—the Constitution actually forbids the government from granting any such titles—but they never intended to abolish all distinctions. Indeed, had they attempted to do so, they would have violated their own commitment to the innate dignity of each individual: a dignity that rests in great part upon the acknowledgment and fostering of our individual uniqueness.
How sad then that our Founding Fathers’ quest for political equality—in which each individual is accorded equal dignity and protection before the law—has, in the hands of many modern “planners,” morphed into a quest for sameness mandated by law. How tragic that their brave and bold experiment—that citizens can make their own laws and govern themselves without slipping into anarchy or mob rule—has given way to a plethora of social engineering “projects” which range in their impact from silly and naïve to virulent and anti-humanistic.
I have titled this book “The Dangers of Egalitarianism” because I believe that egalitarianism, in its many and varied manifestations, poses one of the greatest threats to the stability, welfare, growth, and indeed continuation of Western civilization. And, since the western world—both for good and for ill—still exerts a profound influence on the behavior, goals, and values of the rest of the world, it is no exaggeration to say that the dangers of egalitarianism are potentially global in their impact.
First, a word of definition. In this book, I will be using the word “egalitarianism” to signify not the quest for political, educational, and occupational “fairness,” but the growing desire on the part of many of the “shapers” of the western world to break down all distinctions between people—whether those distinctions be between men and women, parents and children, clergy and laity, the more educated and the less, the more physically strong or beautiful and the less, or the more economically successful and the less. Along with this breakdown in distinctions has come an attempt to collapse traditional standards of goodness, truth, and beauty and to redefine the parameters of such institutions as marriage and the church, grade schools and universities, government and the military.
My overall purpose in this book will be threefold: to uncover and analyze some of the major sources, methods, and ramifications of egalitarianism; to describe the kind of lowest-common-denominator world that would be created if egalitarianism were ever to achieve all of its goals; to offer a counter-vision of a society in which hierarchy, elitism, and distinction rightly understood work hand-in-hand with freedom and creativity both to strengthen community and to enhance individual human dignity. Though I will in my analysis use the words conservative and liberal, I will use them in a wider historical and philosophical sense and not to define narrow partisan battles between Republicans and Democrats. Indeed, this will not at all be a “current events” book or one that drags its readers through a sea of statistics and sociopolitical studies. I will, accordingly, avoid bogging down my narrative either with sociological-anthropological “academese” or with sound bites from pundits and policy wonks. I will draw my inspiration instead from such time-honored classics as Plato’s Republic, The Federalist Papers, Edmund Burke’s Reflections on the Revolution in France, Matthew Arnold’s Culture and Anarchy, Ortega’s Revolt of the Masses, and John Paul II’s The Theology of the Body.
Though I am an English Professor I will be writing not as a narrow, overly-specialized “academic,” but as a man of letters who would engage, inspire, and challenge his readers by synthesizing the wisdom—both philosophical and aesthetic—of the past in order to help us to move forward toward the future. What I will be seeking in my chapters is not so much “facts” as truth, not so much physical artifacts as the living human voice of our ancestors. And I hope to embody that wisdom and truth in a lively, personal prose that pays homage not to the false idol of “objective” scholarship but to what Wordsworth called “the native, naked dignity of man.”
Let me acknowledge here at the outset that I write this book from the perspective and worldview of a broadly evangelical Protestant with a strong respect and affinity for the sacramental and ecclesiastical structures of both Eastern Orthodoxy and Western Catholicism. Still, that does not mean that this book is meant only for Christians; my vision, in fact, will be as much humanistic as it is Christian, and will honor and celebrate our dual Greco-Roman, Judeo-Christian heritage. Although Chapters Nine and Ten, in which I offer a sacramental and Trinitarian understanding of marriage and the sexes, relies heavily on orthodox Christian doctrine, the other chapters are more broad based in their foundational presuppositions and should appeal to all those who have been concerned, if not alarmed, by the West’s rapid and often uncritical embrace of egalitarian principles.
Whether one believes in God the Father or in Mother Earth, it is clear that the creative impulse set loose in our world is one that loves variety. There is nothing blandly uniform about the animal, the vegetable, or even the mineral world. Diversity is the rule, the theme, if you will, of life on planet earth. Unfortunately, the egalitarian planners in our schools and universities who have fought to achieve multiculturalism have more often than not steered us away from true diversity into an increasingly gray, mediocre, and androgynous world.
It is time that we reclaimed those differences and distinctions that make each of us uniquely valuable and that inspired our Founding Fathers to build a diverse yet unified society that would embody their high vision of E Pluribus Unum.