DarkCaesar

Still Waters Run Deep...

The Social Context of Equality

In America’s ongoing culture wars, what we are really fighting over is what kind of social context we will choose for America. Talking about culture is always a venture that is fraught with high levels of risk, because for one thing, there is no solid definition of culture that really sticks. The closest definition is that culture is the shared beliefs, behaviors, and social environment connected with a particular aspect of society or society as a whole. 

Another way of describing this is to say culture is the politics, economics, mores, traditions, religions, etc. that inform our social context. This begs the question of who decides our social context.

America’s social context was defined by Rich, White, men. They felt they were oppressed by a system which raised one nominally rich white man above all other white men, so they made it a point to state that all men are created equal. They were a rich minority, so they created a system that favored the rich and protected their interests even if they were in the minority. Many of them were rich because of slavery so they created a system that at minimum tolerated slavery if not outright endorsed it. They were men so they gave little thought to the rights of women. 

This is a simple way of putting it, but these decisions ultimately defined the character of America as a representative democratic, capitalist state with serious sociopolitical and cultural divides concerning race, gender, and class. 

It has always fascinated me that in the Declaration of Independence it states: 

We hold these truths to be self-evident, 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.

In the movie Lincoln, President Lincoln mulls equality between races and comments that Euclid’s mathematical axiom holds that two things equal to the same thing, by definition are equal to one another. 

It is astounding that America’s founding fathers would not have understood the incoherence of their positions even as they were devising America’s social contract. In their deliberations, the question of how to count slaves came up. The answer was that they are human perhaps, but something less than a White man. Every five slaves should be counted as 3, for the purposes of voter representation. But even in that decision they implicitly admitted that Black men at least were equal to the same humanity as White men, and logic dictates that two things equal to the same thing are in fact equal to each other. 

It only gets more perplexing when gender is considered. Men and Women are undoubtedly human and again if two things are equal to the same thing, they are equal to each other. 

So even though they may not have understood what they were doing fully, the founding fathers wrote a document that basically says that it is self evident (meaning you don’t even have to think or contemplate it) that humans are equal and have “inalienable rights” (meaning humans come with these rights).

Under this premise, we can come to the understanding that every discussion in politics essentially comes down to a contestation about whether equality is our social context or what it means to have equality in our social context. If part of the role of government is to ensure that the rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness are respected, how does it do that? 

With respect to this simple statement, there is always an obligation to make sure American citizens have lives which are as free as possible and we must ensure that each citizen has an equal ability to exercise their inalienable rights. Given that America didn’t start out by giving everyone freedom, we must continually work on America to ensure that it recognizes where we are failing to respect the rights of humanity and put a social context in place which rights the situation. 

This means at any given time certain classes of people will have to be given breaks in the interest of equity. It would be a mark of integrity if we could be honest about our system and admit that it hasn’t always provided equality for everyone. Not only has it not provided equality for everyone, at various points in history and currently there are social attitudes, policies, and even laws in place which reinforce inequality. Effective work in equity would be to recognize that there are actually people failing to reach their potential through no fault of their own, but because of obstacles set up by our system and social context.