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We hold these truths to be
self-evident,
Here we go, into the soaring idealistic part of the
document. This is the part that is quoted ad
nauseam by anyone even remotely involved with politics, and the part of
this entry that’s going to get me into a lot of trouble somewhere down the line.
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.
Let’s separate this out further.
that all men are created equal
This is the very phrase that sparked the idea for this project,
as my experience shows this premise—the bedrock of most Enlightenment
philosophy—to be false; maybe not in the eyes of the law or of God, but in
reality. First of all, this is very much a descendant of the Scottish
Enlightenment, with several phrases copied directly from John Locke. This was
an age before genetics was conceivable, before evolution (outside of some proto-Lamarckian
theories, one of which was put forward by none other than Erasmus Darwin,
grandfather of Charles) was known, before even the concept of an “old Earth”
(one over 6000 years old) was widely accepted.
Knowing all of this, the idea that all men (putting aside
the Founders’ rather limited definition of “men”) could be created equal
(forget the question of “creation”, that is for another place and time) is naïve
at best, and leading to dark and dangerous places at worst.
Even at the moment of conception, one embryo is unequal with
any* other. It might have certain defects that cause it to get flushed out in
the next menstrual cycle, or others that cause it to never make it to birth. It
might have other genetic defects that lead to mental disorders (such as autism),
physical disorders (various types of cancer, Down’s syndrome, cystic fibrosis,
and a host of others), or put the future person at a higher risk of many other
problems (other cancers, depression, alcoholism, and others). The product of
two people with nobody in their families over 5’5” is not going to be a
professional athlete (apologies to Señor Altuve and Mr Bogues).
In the womb, there are environmental factors that come into
play to make each* unborn child even more unequal. Anything that the mother contacts during gestation will somehow affect
the fetus. Epigenetic factors—essentially the idea that environment can trigger
certain inherited traits—is likely a major cause of homosexuality, obesity,
heart disease, and even changes in lifespan. Caffeine use has been linked to
ADHD, frequent alcohol use can lead to numerous issues for the child, the
mother’s stress can increase the chance for many different problems down the
road, and others that I don’t have the time or space to list here.
*Identical twins (or
more), of course, are the exception here.
Now, I mentioned “dark and dangerous places”, because it
only takes a quick twist of logic to change “created equal” into “must be made
equal”. This was first seen in the French Revolution, driven by Rousseau and
other post-Locke thinkers into an egalitarian frenzy. Marx played with this
idea, and concluded that the classless society was inevitable, coming about
regardless of any action on the part of any one person or elite group. Lenin
and Stalin tried to enforce this idea from the top, but only succeeded in
creating a single ruling class above a massive, poverty-stricken working class.
Eugenics became a favored idea to bring this about by sterilizing criminals and
the mentally ill, and was taken to its logical extreme by the Nazi regime
(which discredited the concept to the point where most who had supported it
before the war denied that they ever had). Vonnegut covers the most extreme
egalitarian society imaginable in “Harrison Bergeron”, where anyone with the
slightest advantage is forced to hide it or wear a handicap to negate it.
Certain elements of the feminist movement refuse to concede that women are
different—forget better or worse, but different at all—from men, despite the obvious impossibility of this argument.
After birth, of course, the inequality between people (even
identical twins) continues to increase, and this is the very definition of
humanity: we are all different, all unique, better or worse at some things than
others, imperfect and imperfectible.
