In a college classroom in New York in 2009, I recall a situation where a female student seated next to me responded to my remark about the negative human rights by declaring (rather umbrageously) “All human rights are equal!”
I got into no argument at all with her on this subject, but I remember thinking, “This is the inane conclusion of simplistic, self-righteous ideology.” I was at least twice as old as she, and I almost certainly knew more about the background of that”equality” thinking than she did. In the 1950s, the United States Supreme Court revisited the racial segregation issue and famously reversed its previous assertion that public institutions and accommodations could be “separate but equal.” The predictable outgrowth of this (barely accommodated in the ‘50s) thinking was that things that are separate are inherently unequal, and thus the equality that we sought as an integral of our justice scheme would necessitate that people not be separated by race, religion, or other distinction. To achieve our political goals, distinctions (affording “separation”) were to be rejected; justice necessitated essential freedom, and freedom required that we not be deliberately separated from one another sociologically.
But agreeing this new twentieth century ethic meant that we would need to not only discount differences in physical appearances (“race”), but also every other distinction that suggested or inclined to or upheld political inequality: males and females were equal, all socioeconomic classes (officially) culturally equal, and all religions and ethnicities were equal.
In rushing self-righteously toward that which seemed so just, so principled and necessary, we discounted the absurdity of what we were championing. We would ultimately insufficiently appreciate the real distinctions and differences that candidly informed our politics; we would bypass unarguable truths. We’d end up pretending that since all religions were “equal”, the Voodoo religions of the Caribbean and the major monotheistic religions (Islam and Christianity) would be placed on an absolute par with one another, and the poor were the “same” as the rich. Ultimately, however, our efforts would flail and fail; there was no escaping the fact that the poor were not really equally rich – no matter how much we tried to pretend that they were – and Islam and Christianity and Voodoo were not truly “equal”, not at all identical, but, in all truth and candor, distinct.
There is, of course, a conspicuous usefulness in working philosophically toward the sublime goal of social justice and its salient sine qua non: equality. Yet, while declaring separateness anathema, we would incline toward the absurdist proposition that things are the “same” when they patently aren’t. My interlocutor in 2009 wanted to self-righteously agree her political worldview, and thus she rejected the “negative human rights” as somehow more important or significant than other rights: all rights were perfectly equal. But there is the death penalty issue among the negative human rights. It is axiomatic that no one can claim any human rights at all when he or she is no longer alive; and with physical death go all one’s erstwhile rights entire! And this is in contrast to the other rights, such as the rights to education or to employment, or to marry, or to “change one’s religion.”
Life is hence necessarily and ineluctably a keystone human right.
At the very core of any laudable and sustainable progressive philosophy is not just some sort of assumed “betterment” or “justice” or contrived “equality”, but a sound commitment to rational truth. And our eagerness to be more righteous than the guy or gal sitting next to us pushed us into the absurdity of pretending that Islam was somehow not separate from Christianity, hence not unequal; they were the same.
They are not the same, and most boilerplate progressives work bitterly and indignantly at an absurdity: that things transpicuously and incontrovertibly different are the same.
There is a compelling logic in treating some things as essentially politically equal (thus “same”), but we must take care not to follow the illogic that things very obviously different are actually “equal”. Children will never be equal so long as they occupy the same social space as their unequals: adults. The justice rendered them must arrive from an awareness that their condition is peculiar and they are quite obviously forever vulnerable and starkly unequal.
We must instead champion a responsibility ethic that directs us to the fair and compassionate treatment of those who are very factually unequal. But many a self-proclaimed “liberal” will look upon my suggestion with revulsion: “What use has justice for paternalism and condescension?”
But alas, it is useless to argue against the existence of bitterness because one does not like bitterness. Children, and disparate religions, and sociological and socioeconomic distinctions are always with us, always part of our reality. And surely, justice does not depend on any measure of unreality for its probity and virtue! Individuals and groups are different, and there is no use in stultifying oneself in arguing contrariwise.
We must understand fully the ever-unbridgeable difference between what we want and what we are. Greater factual equality (in law, in opportunity, and in sufferance) are goals of excellent and irreprehensible politics, not fully realized, extant experience in this, a universe unconscious, a realm of caprice and mischance. Our scheme of justice and our institutions must finally yield, albeit with considerable misgivings, however uneasily and reluctantly, to the unselfish and compassionate potential of humankind.