“All men are created equal”

Obama a marker on post-racial path

The Declaration of Independence

“All men are created equal”?

What does that mean, exactly, even ignoring the embarrassing notion, best neglected, that this is a self-evident truth?

Neither taken individually nor in groups are all men – all humans – equal with regard to everything, or even merely everything that matters.

Neither in their acquired skills nor in their natural endowments, and again neither as individuals nor as distinct racial or other, smaller, population groups.

Men are larger and stronger than women, and only a fool would deny this is nature as well as nurture.

And men are more violent than women, too; and this is likewise rightly attributed to both nature and nurture.

Jews are smarter than gentiles, and for a very long time this has been attributed, at least in part, to the intelligence-killing genetic impact of millennia of monasticism in Christian lands, during which intelligence was simply bred out of the Christians.

As for the apparent natural intellectual inferiority of American blacks to those of Africa as well as to the euro-whites of America, it has been said that only the less bright Africans were taken as slaves, survived the passage, or survived and were allowed to reproduce under slavery.

Analogous explanations have been offered for a sometimes suspected inferiority in intelligence of American euro-whites to the whites of Europe.

I am not aware of any like explanation for the like inferiority of American Indians to American whites or East Asians.

In any case, only fools, fakers, and those who wish to be deceived claim none of this is real, or none of this is nature and all of it is nurture.

Too, no one thinks all individuals are in fact or by natural endowment equal with respect to special or especially noteworthy talents or abilities.

Mozart began composing at five and wrote an opera at twelve, if I recall correctly; I can barely whistle a tune.

Carl Friedrich Gauss was making ground-breaking discoveries in math in his teens.

Saul Kripke taught himself Ancient Hebrew by age six and had read all of Shakespeare by age nine.

So what, after all, is the significance of the Declaration’s ringing claim that all men are created equal?

Despite being propaganda intended for the wide public of the time, it was not a demagogic rejection of the obvious diversity of human endowments and achievements.

It was not even a rejection of the idea of natural inequalities of races or nations.

It was and is a rejection simply and solely of hereditary differences of power, status, authority, rights, or privileges.

It was and is a rejection of caste.

It was a rejection of monarchy, aristocracy, serfdom, and slavery.

It was a demand for republicanism and popular government.

That, at any rate, was the intention of the 18th Century, of the Age of Enlightenment, honestly construed.

It was not quite a demand for government of the people, by the people, and for the people – an idea that, despite bluster and boilerplate and probably not excepting Lincoln, no one really takes both literally and seriously.

The Gettysburg Address

Government by the people?

Actual democracy?

Many are the reasons both obvious and weighty against it, not the least compelling being that the exercise of political power is a full time job.

And another, too, is decisive, all by itself: the people are often malevolent and at all times and in all nations vain, willfully ignorant, impulsive, egoistic, gullible, and stupid.

Whereas, though it’s a matter of degree, their betters are generally only vain, egoistic, and often malevolent.

A sensible person would want to make a government more democratic only in order to give the many a chance to protect themselves from the predations and indifference of the few, managing for themselves a better share, so far as they are capable, of the benefits of civilization and social life.

And always in despite of the awful vulgarity of mass politics and mass culture.

Hence, by the way, a crucial function of the system of representation is and has always been to ensure those with their hands on power were not as bad as the people as a whole, and so would not rule as badly.

To keep the rabble out, in other words.

Not a perfect mechanism, no.

But something.