René Girard XII: “All Men Are Created Equal”
The text below is an old draft of an excerpt from the book Catharses.
One of the central principles of political theory is the notion famously summarized in the United States Declaration of Independence with the statement: “All men are created equal.” The Declaration holds this principle as “self-evident”. Well, where is the evidence?
The vast inequality in material positions of people in different social classes could not possibly have inspired such an idea. Neither could, later, the evolutionary idea of varying degrees of fitness in competition in promulgation of genes. The Founding Fathers were either very disingenuous, or they had something else in mind, some sort of an elephant in the room that we can’t finger because we are too close to it. The elephant in the room, I believe, is what René Girard talks about: mimesis.
Men want the same things as other men because their desires are learned from other men. Whatever differences they may start with, acquisitive mimesis draws men towards the same material and metaphysical desires, constantly bringing them into conflict, but also enabling them to see “eye to eye”, to recognize the other as an individual just like themselves. From this essential recognition of the other springs all conflict, but also all sense of community, and all sense in general. It is the mimetic foundation of human experience that forces all laws and regulations to treat all men as equals, and to apply to individuals equally.
Benjamin Franklin wanted to write in the Declaration that the equality of men is “sacred and un-deniable”, before the writers settled on “self-evident”. Their claim that it is sacred could be traced back to their Christian heritage, which from the earliest times promulgated the equivalent idea that all men are created in the image of God, and used it in campaigning against many oppressive institutions, including slavery and branding and other mutilation of slaves. Christianity has always emphasized the filiality of humankind with its Creator. Considering the Creator as perfectly just, Christian doctrine cannot but conclude that He loves all his children equally.
In fact, if we consider the world’s cultures one-by-one, we can argue that not a single one holds inequality of men as a fundamental principle. European monarchies, or Monarchy in general, which in the eyes of American revolutionaries was the main villain, did have inherited titles and privileges, but European monarchs also subscribed to Christianity, by which they were bound to hold social inequality as provisional to governance, and not as an absolute value. Wherever else one finds social inequality, it is always justified by the powers-that-be as some sort of an aberration, or a consequence of sin, or some sort of divine punishment, and not how things were meant to be.
Yet in the modern times, in which man has been viewed as an experimental object, there has crept in a new kind of suspicion of fundamental inequality of humans. It is no surprise, at least in retrospect, that the recession of the sacred has undermined the concept of intrinsic human value. In terms of René Girard’s mimetic theory, the sacred has historically been linked to collective violence, and worship of the sacred in practical terms began as a political act of recognizing that any individual human is powerless in its face.
Culture, as the mechanism that promotes peace and equity, cannot hold to the notion that men are intrinsically unequal, at least not for a long time. However, individuals can. Yet, is such an attitude not the definition of sociopathy? Can permanent and absolute disdain for another human lead to anything constructive? Is it not such beliefs that drive individuals to crime, and nations to self-destruction? Our mimetic nature causes us to identify ourselves with the other. If we have a disdain of the other, we soon find ourselves having a disdain for ourselves. This creates a positive feedback loop of negative mimesis that leads a society down the path of self-destruction. Could not the American Civil War and Nazi Germany be interpreted in this light?
When today we hear protests against the principle of equality, it mostly comes as an expression of cynicism or disillusionment. “Thomas Jefferson wrote that all men are created equal, yet he owned slaves.” This quip is common commentary on the subject among younger Americans, whose expectations of equality have risen too high to relate to those of the eighteenth century. Westerners today are too civilized to consider that Thomas Jefferson may have justified slavery as a provisional institution, much like serfdom was provisional in the minds of many Christian squires in Europe. This is not to say that their beliefs were absolutely right, but it is to show that those who held them at the very least felt the need to justify them. The Spartans were not right to subject Helots, their slaves, to arbitrary slaughter and humiliation, but they probably justified their action by ascribing to Helots some deserved divine curse. This explains why they could oppress Helots while holding honour and freedom as absolute principles. In general, oppressive institutions needed to be justified in one way or another as provisional reactions to the fallen state of all or part of humankind, and as the world would move towards Revelation, whatever that meant to different cultures, these institutions were expected to fade out. Today, we are fortunate that they have indeed faded as much as they have, and that we have moved away form such harsh provisions.
Yet, the last century has created a new kind of general ambivalence towards the principle of equality. I would be interested to hear an open commentary on the claim that all men are created equal from today’s atheists. A few generations ago, it was possible for a communist to adamantly reject God whilst adamantly demanding radical equality, but if you talk to today’s youth, you will find that those who reject existence of God also embrace a certain romantic narrative of genetic determinism. I cannot see how they can hold that all men are created equal. This is not to say that they are all eugenicists; it appears that most of them see genetic inferiority as a temporary embarrassment that is best not talked about and that, in any case, we are all inflicted by to some degree. Perhaps then they are not much different that Thomas Jefferson and his ilk in that they too view human inequality, in their case scientifically determined genetic inequality, as a provisional and temporary state to be tolerated until we achieve trans-humanism. “Let the dummies and uglies frolic for now, and keep them from breaking too much furniture, and once the singularity comes around, we are all getting uploaded to the cloud anyways.”
As another example of modern ambiguity on the subject, I remember a social studies lesson in high school whose theme was the idea that “we are equal, but we are different”. The statement looks in agreement with what has been said so far. The claim to equality always seemed to carry a certain violent undertone: “If you think I am not equal to you, well, we will see about that”. What I did not quite understand was how our differences are supposed to work themselves out. We were obviously different, but just as obviously, these differences were bound to cause envy. If someone’s bank account was significantly different than mine in the sense of being much higher than mine, it seemed quite naïve of my high school teacher to expect me to simply let it go and say to myself something like, “Well, some people are millionaires, and some people are broke. Some flowers are red, and some flowers are yellow. It’s the differences that bestow beauty to the world!” The admonition to recognise both equality and difference appeared to be at odds with itself, a clear example of a double bind. And psychologists tell us that double binds are what causes people to go mad.
The shortcoming of this high school summary of the human condition was that it presented both equality and difference as stemming from the individual. Each individual happens to be equal to every other individual, and each happens to be different. Let us ignore here the semantic objections that “different” is one of the synonyms for “unequal”, and go with a certain economics metaphor in which two asset can have equal monetary value but different form; for example, a $50,000 car and a $50,000 house. Considering the statistics of the matter, saying that each individual is different is a platitude, and saying that each individual happens to be equal is an impossibility. That is, it is an impossibility of we consider individuals as independent, random variables generated by the universe. To reconcile the paradox, we should reconsider the assumptions that individuals are independent, random variables. And according to René Girard’s mimetic theory, they are not. Humans are greatly influenced by other humans; they are fundamentally mimetic.
Girard’s mimetic theory gives us a fresh angle of looking at the idea that all men are created equal. He puts forward a vision of society permanently threatened by destructive forces beyond any single individual’s control, and these are the coupled forces of desire and violence. It was the tremendous success of modern civilization in taming these forces that, ironically, created a “safe space” isolated enough from the founding violence to spread the illusion that individuals play the role of masters of nature, history, or of their fellow men. Girard’s theory that mob rule underlies all human institutions debunks this illusion and uncovers a lost truth of human nature. It shows equality of men not as an altruistic wish, but in the human propensity to generate contagious twin rivalries wreaking havoc on social institutions.
Indeed, the Declaration of Independence was a declaration of war, and the statement that “all men are created equal” is fighting words. A violent mob, Girard tells us, is marked by lack of differentiation, with individuals fused into one undulating mass looking for sacrificial blood. When a mob precipitates, being unequal is the one thing to avoid at all costs, because any differentiating traits may cause mimetic polarization of the mob and get the differentiated individual lynched. The Declaration of Independence can be seen as a civilized form of the archaic sacrificial mechanism: American unanimity building around the scapegoat of British monarchy.
This is not to say that the American society is built around removal of differentiation; no state is nor can be, as disappearance of differentiation is nothing but chaos. However, the spirit of the Declaration recognizes the power of the people, their fearsome ability to turn into an undifferentiated mob, and therefore their political primacy. That the mob selects the rulers is the reality of human nature recognized by the Founding Fathers, who in their declaration rebut the idea of decadent Europe that rulers are somehow fundamentally above the crowd: “Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed." Even in times of peace, the notion that all men are created equal is a recognition that all men have the potential to become equal, not necessarily in their ability to earn the same salary or achieve the same scores on IQ tests, but more importantly, in their ability to contribute to an undifferentiated mob that destroys all institutions.
In order to develop a healthy political attitude we need to disabuse ourselves of the notion of permanent differentiation, and recover the notion that differentiation is a precarious product of the violent scapegoating mechanism. Our resentments do not spring from irreconcilable differences with others, but from our desire to be like others. In our desire to be differentiated, in other words to find a meaning in life, we paradoxically imitate the perceived differentiation of the other. We compete with the other for one and the same social niche, and in the process, we become like them. It is only by channeling our aggressions away from each other and towards a common victim that we can get off each other’s throats, so to speak, and each settle into a unique and safe social role. One’s differentiated role is blessed (“sprinkled with blood”) by the unanimous mob, originally literally sprinkled with blood of the sacrificial victim. Rather than making the modern error of looking to identify and satisfy an endless array of supposedly authentic desires, we should recognize that desire is mimetic, giving rise to envy, shame, and violence. Political theory must consider equality of men not merely as an ideal, but as a threatening reality that must be carefully managed in order to maintain peace.
Read more in the book Catharses.