Liberté, Égalité, Clarté

Liberty and equality are slippery terms that have been used by groups as disparate as the Nazis, the American Founders, and early Christian theologians. To some, they have stood in eternal opposition requiring careful balancing while others have regarded them as entirely complimentary ideas. In our contemporary American context, the terms are, as with many things, up for grabs. And if I may, I’d like to take a stab at defining them, or at least, at clarifying their ambiguities.

In our society, inequality is a bad word. It amounts to a curse, something whispered alongside empty insults like “fascist” and “Rockefeller Republican.” To be unequal is to be wrong. But that misses something deeply embedded in human nature. Inequality is a part of what defines the evolutionary journey of humankind. Men cannot become pregnant, meaning they will never deal with the negative sickness and malaise of pregnancy but will also never experience the joy of actually incubating and growing life within the body. Conversely, women will never know what it is to be the other sexual part, for both good and ill.

Often, however, we seek to eliminate these differences in the name of equality. Technology finds ways to bend and rework our traditional ideas that beauty exists in difference and that the complementary nature of humankind, which is much more than just sexual difference, is a good thing. I would caution that just as we have used and abused our environment, changing its natural order to our will with our tools, we should beware of doing the same to ourselves. As science has made plain, the earth and its order are not ours to destroy and refine endlessly. Although we have not pushed our human experimentation quite so far yet, the wise learn from their mistakes and we would do well to respect the balance between equality and inequality.

Liberty is similarly in need of respect. It is, for both the Right and Left, often held up as the right to do whatever is wanted, to overburden and castigate the poor or to engage in any and all acts, grotesque or otherwise. But is not freedom to do all slavery to the passions underlying our decisions? Without a firmly formed conscience, liberty to do becomes slavery to desire. Yet again, our wayward destruction of the Earth come to mind. When the desire for resources overcomes moral conscience, liberty becomes folly for unchecked passion. As Gandalf says in The Lord of the Rings, “he that breaks a thing to find out what it is has left the path of wisdom.” Let us not break liberty and equality, but remember the wisdom of thought; let us clarify our terms and think of the consequences of our actions.