February 10, 2019
MY CORNER by Boyd
Cathey
RACISM, SEXISM, and the
Idea of Equality: What Is America All About?
Plus,
Two Superb Essays by Christopher De Groot
Friends,
I return to a topic that I have addressed
previously on various occasions. Given what is occurring in our society and
culture, the ever increasing frenzy and hysteria associated with what is called
“the women’s movement” and the ever-changing, always-elevating “racism test,” a
review of the basics, a return to and familiarity with our history, is
incumbent on us if we are to survive as a nation.
The real problem is that American history,
that is, American history that is not completely warped by a predetermined
progressivist ideology, hardly exists today as a subject taught in most US
colleges and universities. And on the high school level, one is fortunate these
days to find a teacher who is not convinced that “race” and “sex” are
the only factors that actually shaped our nation, or who is not so cowed by
political correctness that he or she doesn’t fear to deviate from the new
ironclad template.
This disastrous situation in education should
be self-evident to most observers of academia, but it is not…and apparently not
for many conservatives and Republicans.
Wonder why and how so many millions of
Millenials now ardently believe extreme socialism is the way of the future? Or,
why an innocent college prank from forty years ago brands you as a “racist” or “sexist”
for life? Or, why most students now believe the United States at its founding
was dominated by “white racists” who imposed a “toxic [white] masculinity” on these
shores?
Look to our schools and colleges.
Just this
past week I attended a legislative reception for North Carolina legislators
hosted by the North Carolina Sons of Confederate Veterans. Outside, surrounding
the host facility were shouting and screaming demonstrators, mostly Millenials,
from several radical leftist groups located in central North Carolina,
including the Workers’ World Party [https://www.facebook.com/pg/DurhamWWP/photos/?ref=page_internal
], the Hillsborough Progressives Taking Action
[ https://www.hptaction.org/], and
Antifa of North Carolina [http://www.occidentaldissent.com/2018/08/27/big-league-politics-exposes-violent-north-carolina-antifa-cell/
].
Their
praxis is to attempt to shut down opponents of their world-view. On an
increasing number of college campuses the concept of “free speech” for those
who dissent from the far Leftist viewpoint is no longer acceptable. The Yale [University] Daily News [February
8, 2019] now advocates spying on “white boys” so that when these “privileged”
males reach fame, the silly words or pranks they committed in college decades
before can be used against them: “I’m watching you white boy. And this time, I’m
taking the screenshot!” wrote the editorialist [https://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2019/02/yale-university-newspaper-editor-urges-students-to-spy-on-white-male-classmates-to-be-able-to-ruin-their-careers-in-the-future/?omhide=true]. And the
student newspaper of Dickinson College in Pennsylvania, asked: “should white boys still be allowed to share their
‘opinions’? Should we be forced to listen? In honor of Black History Month, I’m
gonna go with a hell no.”
At the
reception as legislators and their wives got out of their cars, the screaming
Leftists would approach them, hurling epithets and demanding to know why they “supported
racism and the KKK.” Additionally, they had cameras filming each and every
guest, shouting “we know who you are and where you live, and we are coming for
you!”
This,
then, is what your college dollars—the
tuition you pay—have produced. And
this is the result of the bounty and largesse of such globalist financiers as
George Soros and those like him, who bankroll these folks and their mob demonstrations.
This is the
result of an educational narrative that dominates our educational system. And
it is a fundamental template that is now shared not only by the frenzied revolutionary
Left who get up in the faces of conservative legislators and attempt to shame
them or scare them into silence or compliance, and who will follow them to
their homes, but also, in effect, ironically by nearly all of the major
conservative voices we hear on Fox or read in such publications as National Review.
You read
that correctly….
That
narrative is that America was founded on an “idea,” and that idea was “equality
for all.” America, according to both the Progressivist Left and the Neoconservatives who dominate
the “conservative movement,” is a “propositional nation,” based on the nebulous
idea of “equality.” But, according to this version of our history, from the
beginning that “idea” was perverted by evil white men and even more, evil
slaveholders who prevented America from living up to its ideals.
That is
not only inculcated into the minds of our children and students, but also is propagated
as fact by the near-totality of our political class, whether in Congress or via
the media.
Of
course, Mainstream Conservatism attempts in its own way to rescue the idea by
prattling on about “equality of opportunity” and that the Left has taken the
concept “too far.” Yet, by accepting this as our original foundational
principle, they inevitably fall to those who carry it to its logical extreme,
and, thus, end up enabling them and, in a way, normalizing their narrative.
As
history this nation founded on the idea of equality is false, and as policy it
means the end of this country, the death of the republic, and the triumph of
the far Left, enabled by a faux conservative opposition that accepts
the fundamental precepts of the Left.
Among the voices
who have demurred and who have demonstrated historically the falsity of this
view and its eventually fatal results for what remains of our republic have
been such historians and authors as George Carey, Mel Bradford, and Barry Alan
Shain. Bradford back in 1976 warned presciently
in a long essay in the pages of the Modern
Age quarterly (Winter issue, 1976) of the incompatibility of
the Neoconservative “propositional nation” vision with the inherited traditions
and republican constitutionalism of the Founders and Framers. In that
stand-alone essay, “The Heresy of Equality,” Bradford laid bare the clear intentions of
those who came together to form the American nation, while giving the lie to
the Neocon narrative that the republic was founded on universalized propositions—“ideas”—of
equality and liberal democracy. Those notions, he pointed out perceptively,
were a hangover from their days and immersion in the globalist universalism
that owed its origin to Marx and Trotsky, and to the Rationalist “philosophes”
of the 18th century, rather than to the legacy of kinship and
blood, an attachment to community and to the land, and a central religious core
that annealed this tradition and continued to make it viable.
What Bradford
revealed in his research about our original Constitution was ultimately distilled
in his superb volume, Original
Intentions: On the Making and Ratification of the American Constitution (Athens,
GA, 1993). It remains a primary source for anyone interested in how we got our
Constitution and what it means.
Along with
Bradford, Colgate University historian Barry Alan Shain has confirmed in his well-documented The Declaration of Independence in
Historical Context: American State Papers, Petitions, Proclamations, and
Letters of the Delegates to the First National Congresses (2014) that our old republic was not founded on
abstractions about “equality” or “democracy,” or some fanatical zeal to “impose
our democracy and equality” on the rest of the world, or that we were “the
model for the rest of the world,” to paraphrase the neoconservative writer
Allan Bloom. We were a country founded by those who had left the old world in
family and community, from England and Scotland, from Germany and France, and
eventually from other countries, in search of better lands for them and for
more opportunity for them and their children.
Historian David
Hackett Fisher’s impressive study, Albion’s
Seed: British Folkways in America (1989), details and traces that quest, a
quest that carried with it the beliefs, the blood, and the culture of those
immigrants from the old world to the new. Unlike the Puritans of Massachusetts,
most of the new Americans did not come to these shores to establish some “new
City of God,” some new “Shining City on a Hill.” Their goal was not to establish
an egalitarian Utopia, from which then they would go forth to impose equality
and democracy on the rest of the world. They brought with them their customs, their
folklore, their music and arts, and their religion from the old world. And as
they moved West across the Appalachians and across the Great Plains to the
Rocky Mountains they carried that culture with them.
My father’s own
family originally came to Philadelphia in 1716, having passed a few decades in
County Monaghan in what is now Northern Ireland, and before that from Ayrshire,
Scotland. Coming down the Great Wagon Road they made their way to old Rowan and
Mecklenburg counties in North Carolina by the 1740s, from which they spread
out, a few finally reaching the California gold fields in 1848, some founding a
town that continues to exist even today, Catheys Valley, close to Yosemite
National Park.
And what is
fascinating is to scan a phone book from 1950 for Catheys Valley and compare it
with the parish registries from old Ayrshire and Monaghan counties from three
centuries before: the family surnames in large part remain the same. Those
people who departed Scotland in the early 1600s left in family, and they remained
together when they came to America.
Robert W. Ramsey’s
study, Carolina Cradle: Settlement of the
Northwest Carolina Frontier, 1747-1762 (1964), maps the “Scotch-Irish
Settlement” in Rowan County, North Carolina, in the 1740s. And those recorded surnames
are in the main the same as a century before and as two centuries after in
places like Catheys Valley. Like other immigrants my ancestors came as part of
a community. The concept that they were somehow possessed of a mission to “remake”
and democratize the world and that they were in the vanguard of a globalized and
Utopian egalitarianism, would have struck them as the antithesis of their
shared beliefs.
But that is what we
are told is the mission of America, that is what our schools and colleges teach,
and that is what we have failed to accomplish. And it is the door ajar that has
permitted the growing extremist Left to seize the initiative and apply these “propositions”
in such a way as to facilitate their success on the road to converting the
republic into what will be an authoritarian state that will make present-day
Venezuela look desirable. For “equality” is a chimerical goal. In the hands of
ideologues it becomes the cudgel to enslave those who disagree, the triumph of
the savage pigs of Orwell’s Animal Farm,
who accomplish their evil under the rubric of equality: “All animals are equal,
but some animals are more equal than
others!” Inherently, the Leftist
revolutionaries recognize this: Power is the ultimate goal, complete power over
us and power to transform what is left of this nation into something that even
Orwell’s pigs might find unimaginable.
Two recent essays
by my friend, Christopher De Groot, examine some of these questions, adding
valuable detail and acute observations. Christopher’s new Web site, The Agonist [www.theagonist.org], I recommend highly
for its superb articles and commentary. Here are his fine pieces:
The United States of
Abstractions
January 18, 2019
America was founded by British Protestant men. The Constitution,
as we read in its Preamble, was meant to “secure the Blessings of Liberty to
ourselves and our Posterity.” And yet, today ethnic traditionalism—a concept
that includes religion—is off the table as a political good for white
Americans. Indeed, anyone who, like Rep. Steve King, even dares to ask, in
short, “What’s so bad about white traditions?” is sure to be condemned as a
racist, and as happened to King, punishment may swiftly follow.
Any nationalism that wants to be acceptable in polite
company—including Congress—must now be founded on certain Enlightenment
abstractions: equality, liberty, and the like lofty notions. For the state
itself exists, according to the enthusiastic believers, to realize these goods.
There are, however, a number of problems with this conception of
the state. To begin with, most people really aren’t all that serious about
America the propositional nation. Of course, they’re happy to sing the praises
of equality and liberty, as they are of free markets and limited government,
but in practice, such language mainly functions as a means for realizing
individual interests and group interests, not any national good.
Our affections being, for the most part, local and rather
limited in their applications, we find that talk about supposedly universal
abstract goods is usually meaningless outside of its rhetorical (and often
merely manipulative) purpose. Man, moreover, is essentially irrational;
therefore, as motivating forces, and as justifications for the state itself,
equality, liberty, and the rest pale in comparison with religion and the notion
of “our people.”
To be sure, traditional blood-and-soil nationalism is hardly an
unmixed good. It can make, and has made, for some immoral and crude attitudes
and behaviors. Yet it’s strange that, while many people recognize the problems
associated with such ethnic traditionalism, few of us seem to have a proper
skepticism regarding the abstractions that, we’re to believe, are now the
purpose of and justification for the state itself. Few people seem to know, or
at least take seriously, the truth that the Enlightenment values which so many
cherish, or appear to cherish, are themselves the fruits of organic, local,
context-specific traditions.
One notable exception is the Israeli philosopher Yoram Hazony.
“The Dark Side of the Enlightenment,” Hazony’s April 6, 2018, article in The
Wall Street Journal, is a wise corrective for our naive
rationalists, so I will quote it at length:
Consider
the claim that the U.S. Constitution was a product of Enlightenment thought,
derived by throwing out the political traditions of the past and applying
unfettered human reason. Disproving this idea requires only reading earlier
writers on the English constitution. The widely circulated 15th-century
treatise “In Praise of the Laws of England,” written by the jurist John
Fortescue, clearly explains due process and the theory now called “checks and
balances.” The English constitution, Fortescue wrote, establishes personal
liberty and economic prosperity by shielding the individual and his property
from the government. The protections that appear in the U.S. Bill of Rights
were mostly set down in the 1600s by those drafting England’s constitutional
documents—men such as John Selden, Edward Hyde and Matthew Hale.
These
statesmen and philosophers articulated the principles of modern Anglo-American
constitutionalism centuries before the U.S. was created. Yet they were not Enlightenment men. They were religious, English nationalists and political conservatives.
They were familiar with the claim that unfettered reason should remake society,
but they rejected it in favor of developing a traditional constitution that had
proved itself. When Washington, Jay, Hamilton and Madison initiated a
national government for the U.S., they primarily turned to this conservative
tradition, adapting it to local conditions.
Nor
is there much truth in the assertion that we owe modern science and medicine to
Enlightenment thought. A more serious claim of origin can be made by the
Renaissance, the period between the 15th and 17th centuries, particularly in
Italy, Holland and England. Tradition-bound English kings, for example,
sponsored path breaking scientific institutions such as the Royal College of
Physicians, founded in 1518. One of its members, William Harvey, discovered the
circulation of the blood in the early 17th century. The Royal Society of London
for Improving Natural Knowledge, founded in 1660, was led by such men as Robert
Boyle and Isaac Newton, decisive figures in physics and chemistry. Again, these
were politically and religiously conservative figures. They knew the arguments,
later associated with the Enlightenment, for overthrowing political, moral and
religious tradition, but mostly they rejected them.
In
short, the principal advances that today’s Enlightenment enthusiasts want to
claim were “set in motion” much earlier. And it isn’t at all clear how helpful
the Enlightenment was once it arrived.
Needless to say, the figures Hazony references weren’t beset by
our decadent, self-destructive aversion to the national interest and our own
heritage. They took such values for granted, and working within their
traditions, they were able to accomplish the marvelous things that they did.
The fertility rate in Hazony’s Israel is 3.1 births per woman. Here in the U.S.
it’s 1.7 births per woman. That figure, like those found throughout Europe
(Iceland alone excepted), is below population replacement level, a reality that
presents many long-term economic challenges. Meanwhile, if current trends
continue, fiercely nationalistic China will surpass the U.S. as the world’s
dominant power in the near future.
In view of all this, it seems clear that the propositional
nation isn’t as valuable as the neocons, the Jaffaites, and other ardent levelers would have us
believe. It’s often said, for example, that open borders are necessary to maintain
population growth. But this assumes that immigrants, on the whole, are adequate
for a 21st-century cognitive economy, even though the vast majority lack the
requisite skill sets. Open-borders advocates also overlook issues of cultural
compatibility and the need to put America’s own working class first. Indeed,
the trouble with the propositional nation is that it raises the question of why
there should be a nation at all: If the lofty abstractions are what America is
for, and how it justifies itself, then why should only “our people” enjoy them?
Is such exclusivity not, at bottom, a blood-and-soil thing? Yes, it is.
Many people today seem to think that government works rather
like computer programming: Simply implement the right policies, and people can
thrive anywhere. But men and women are not software, and besides, this
Enlightenment dream ignores the actual character of the Enlightenment itself.
Finally, we should know by now that such blind rationalism easily lends itself
to foolish and destructive endeavors, such as democratic nation building in the
Middle East.
Do the limitations of the propositional nation mean we should
embrace ethnic traditionalism? I must confess my perplexity here, which I think
many people in our uncertain time will share. I’m an atheist who doesn’t
identify with white people (or any other group) in a deep sense. Still, I
remain a reactionary for several reasons, one of them being my opposition to
the technocratic, homogenizing world order that men like Steven Pinker call for with great fervor. Writing in Quillette, Pinker happily notes that “The demographic sectors that are the hottest hotbeds
of populism are all in decline: rural, less educated, older, and ethnic
majorities.” Nevertheless, such Deplorables have given Pinker and his ilk a lot of pains:
For
believers in Enlightenment and progress, the second year of Donald Trump’s
presidency felt like being strapped to a table and getting a series of
unpredictable electric shocks. They include his kissing up to autocratic thugs,
undermining a free press and judiciary, demonizing foreigners, gutting
environmental protections, blowing off climate science, renouncing
international cooperation, and threatening to renew a nuclear arms race.
Of course, however, the confidence man is never without good news. “But before we imagine the
future as a boot stamping on a human face forever,” he continues (alluding to
George Orwell’s 1984),
…we need to put authoritarian
populism in perspective. Despite its recent swelling, populism appears to
have plateaued. A majority of Americans consistently disapprove of Trump, and in Europe, nationalist parties won a median of just 13 percent of votes in 2018 elections…. The travails of Trump and
Brexit in 2018 are a reminder to supporters that populism works better in
theory than in practice. Lined up against it are democratic checks and balances
within a country and pressures toward global cooperation outside it, the only
effective means to deal with trade, migration, pollution, pandemics, cybercrime,
terrorism, piracy, rogue states, and war.
And
though Trump and other reactionary leaders can do real damage, and will have to
be opposed and contained for some time to come, they are not the only actors in
the world. The forces of modernity, including connectivity, mobility, science,
and the ideals of human rights and human welfare, are distributed among a wide
array of governments and private-sector and civil-society organizations, and
they have gained too much momentum to be shifted into reverse overnight.
While they contain some truth, on the whole, these passages are
quite glib and cheap, complex issues being simplified into progressive
boilerplate. I don’t have the space for analysis, however, so let me simply
observe here that this sort of thinking is just what should be expected from
the rather neocon-like Quillette
crowd. Indeed, Quillette recently
had a party in Toronto, where David Frum and Ben Shapiro themselves were in attendance. Like those two warmongering
hysterics, and like Pinker himself, it is the function of the Quillette crowd, in politics,
to lend a naive rationalist faith to the technocratic globalist agenda.
National sovereignty, and the desire of ordinary people to govern themselves,
are to be subordinated to the calculations of large expert organizations, many of them transnational. And all this while Europe is
gradually dying off, with America perhaps not far behind.
Like the neocons, the Quillette crowd
says all the right things about equality, universal human rights, humanism, and
the like moral clichés, for as intellectuals know very well, there is ever a
good living in such pretense. The Quillette crowd
is led by the magazine’s founding editor, Claire Lehmann. Although she is
celebrated as a steward of “free thought,” precisely the opposite is true; as I
explain in my essay “The Intellectual Dark Web’s Unwise Center,” Lehmann is a
fraud. In this respect, she is of course akin to neocons like Frum and Shapiro. The two groups are ideological bedfellows, and the independent
right should regard the Quillette crowd
with the same suspicion and distrust as it does the neocons.
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The Evils of Equality
During the State of the Union address on Tuesday, a group of
female Democrats, dressed in all white (in tribute to the suffragettes of the
early 20th century), sat looking quite unimpressed by the president’s rhetoric.
Seeing their faces, which ranged from sullen to sour, I felt profound sympathy,
and looking back on the young beauties I used to date, I hoped our poor elected
representatives would give yoga classes and Instagram a try, for they were
bitter and in need of a diversion.
For some,
the female Democrats represent the growing gender divide in politics, and the
trouble Donald Trump would likely have getting enough female votes in order to
be reelected in 2020. Others are optimistic about the spectacle. For instance,
at American Greatness,
Sebastian Gorka writes:
The
party that has built its image as the party for the oppressed, for minorities,
for the working class, sat scowling as the president regaled everyone else with
the news of how his policies have brought employment, security, and prosperity
to our nation, the likes of which the world has never seen, and especially to
exactly those groups. Freshman diva Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) couldn’t
even bring herself to applaud the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agent
President Trump recognized for rescuing more than 300 girls and women from
human-traffickers. Ah, yes, the “party of women.”
But
the masterstroke was the president’s decision to celebrate women—even those
scowling women. He celebrated especially the historic number of women gainfully
employed, including within the halls of Congress. Suddenly at that mention, the
self-declared suffragettes looked at each other, decided to stand up, high-five
the air and cheer. For themselves. And they had no idea what he had just done.
This
was rhetorical jujitsu the likes of which I thought I would never see again
since Trump’s “I’m with you!” moment in New York. In one deft joyous flourish
of heartfelt celebration for the fairer sex, Donald Trump the master orator
showed the “New Wave” Democrats for who they truly are: a selfish,
mean-spirited, parochial, clique that only care for themselves and not for real
Americans. No number of policy papers or campaign ads could do that. Pure
genius.
Gorka, who
is hardly an unbiased observer, may be attributing “pure genius” to the
president where he simply enjoyed good luck. It was surely decided in advance
that Trump would “celebrate women,” and the female Democrats being so averse to
him, it was only that celebration which prompted them to “stand up, high-five
the air and cheer.” And only “for
themselves,” of course.
But while that reaction certainly “showed the ‘New Wave’
Democrats for who they truly are,” whether it will significantly increase
Trump’s appeal to women voters is an open question. If anything, the reaction
confirmed that the female Democrats can’t stand him. What’s more, polls since
Trump was elected in 2016 suggest that his support among women, already pretty
low, has decreased. Gorka and other Trump partisans are thrilled to see the
true colors of the new identity-politics Democrats, but those true colors
aren’t news, and it’s unlikely that Trump will gain many female voters on the
left after Tuesday’s display—they won’t support him in any event—though it’s
possible that he’ll gain some right-leaning women who had been on the fence.
The view
that “the historic number of women gainfully employed, including within the
halls of Congress” is something to celebrate is very revealing. Greater group
equality (read: ideally, sameness of outcome) is supposedly a good in itself,
irrespective of how people are living their lives, what they believe, and the
effects of their ideas and policies on the nation as a whole. Motivated by
status envy, feminists have taught women that the way to receive recognition is
through success in the workplace, which is apparently superior in value to
women’s traditional domestic roles. Yet while women are bent on achieving
“gender parity” in every field, the American family is in a bad way. I
described this in my Aug. 31, 2018, column, “Junk
Science and the Feminist Manipulation Agenda”:
In
1950, married couples represented 78 percent of households in the United
States. In 2011, the US Census Bureau reported, that percentage had dropped to
48 percent…. [In 2014], for the first
time, the number of unmarried American adults outnumbered those who were
married…. Meanwhile, only 30 percent of
Millennials say that having a successful marriage is “one of the most important
things” in life, according to the Pew Research Center, down from even the 47
percent of Generation X who said the same thing in 1997. Four in 10 Americans
went ever further, telling Pew researchers in 2010 that marriage was becoming
obsolete.
Nor
is that all of the grim statistics. Between 40 and 45 percent of marriages end
in divorce, a figure that does not account for the proportion, now larger than
ever, of people who cohabitate without marrying, or for the number of
cohabitating couples having children, which has increased tenfold in the past
decade. Four out of ten children are illegitimate. Among blacks, the proportion
is nearly three-quarters. The birth rate has fallen to a record low, and
is…short of the population replacement level.
To this I
would add an observation by the sociologist Mark Regnerus, from his article “The
Future of American Sexuality and Family: Five Key Trends,” published on Oct.
17, 2018, in Public Discourse:
Marriage is…in the throes of “deinstitutionalization.” It is no longer a shelter
to be ducked into, a way for two to construct something together out of nothing
but love. And it’s no longer expected. Instead, it’s a symbol, an unnecessary
but nice luxury item, a capstone of a successful young adulthood. Americans now
hold out for picket fences, figuratively speaking. Why? Because they can,
because they have been taught to, and—at least for men—because sex is cheap.
Unfortunately,
not everyone can afford this new type of marriage. Although the benefits of
marriage are still—in theory—available to all, marriage is increasingly a
middle- and upper-middle-class thing. As a result, income inequality—a social
phenomenon often aided by getting married—is getting worse.
The core of
Trump’s voting base is white men, but if current trends in marriage and
immigration continue, eventually the support of white men won’t be sufficient
for any Republican
president to get elected. Even in 2016 Trump wouldn’t have won the presidency
without the support he got from women on the right. Single women are
overwhelmingly liberal, and a lesser proportion of married women in the future
means a lesser proportion of conservative female votes.
Having children out of wedlock is no longer taboo, and many
women don’t believe children need fathers. Plus, as Regnerus notes, marriage is
becoming unobtainable for many working-class people. All this means that,
provided we can still fund them, social welfare programs in the future are
likely to make a greater proportion of mothers dependent on the government;
that is, fellow taxpayers. But though Uncle Sam can keep your children alive,
he can’t give them a father, a sad reality that the condition of the black
family, with its 74 percent illegitimacy rate, makes abundantly clear. There is
a huge literature showing that children who have both parents do better in
every area of life than children raised by one parent. Of course, however,
nobody can make women change their minds who regard fathers as dispensable.
It is important to understand that when it comes to gender
equality, we are very much in uncharted waters. We hear a lot these days about
women in the workplace, yet the state of the family, and of children, doesn’t
get remotely comparable media attention. Still, we don’t know whether a culture
in which most mothers and fathers have to work full-time, while their children
are effectively raised by other people, can last, let alone flourish. Both
Europe and America have been seriously altered by the professionalization of
women, while the U.S. does not have a replacement-level birth rate, and of
European countries only Iceland does. The time is not far off, perhaps, when
people realize that, like the loss of religion, the loss of traditional gender
roles entails the death of peoples.
Besides the poor state of the family, another reason to doubt
the value of equality is its tendency to debase and even obliterate higher
values. When Thomas Jefferson wrote in the Declaration of Independence that
“all men are created equal,” he meant that no man had a justification for
ruling over another. Moral concepts are not static, however, so that legal
sense of equality has morphed into the vague belief that all people are equal
in some ultimate sense. It is this that makes equality so pernicious. “He who
seeks equality between unequals seeks an absurdity,” said Spinoza. It was not
for nothing that men as different as Samuel Johnson, Thomas Carlyle, and
Friedrich Nietzsche all had contempt for democracy and equal rights. For they
knew these things function to level everyone down to a base, common plane. In
time, historical memory suffers: People forget, or never learn, why a man such
as George Washington or Robert E. Lee merits reverence. They see no one and
nothing to revere. So they do not know what reverence is, and they do not
revere at all. Quite a price to pay for equality.
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