Must the Materialist Deny That "All Men Are Created Equal"?

by Francis J. McGarrigle, S.J.

The common universitarian view of the world, called "materialism," holds as its basic principle that human beings, like everything else, are solely matter, with merely the powers of matter, acting only in one possible way and determined solely by the interplay of associated masses and their powers. Holding this view, materialists correctly agree, with most other thinkers, that matter and its powers cannot really choose one of alternative actions, so that in the same circumstances the other alternative could have been chosen instead. Consequently a materialist will hardly admit that matter and its forces has any right to equal treatment by associated matter and its forces.

Suppose that we set in motion on a table a number of billiard balls of various sizes and weights. Each ball when struck by another will move with a speed and direction, which is determined by the balls' mass, speed, angle of impact, and circumstances. The balls have no choice of action or reaction; much less have they any right to equal treatment by the other balls. For materialists, such too must be the situation of human beings.

It is beside the point for the materialist to introduce here psychology as a difference of action and reaction of human beings. That too, according to him, must be rigidly determined by the one invariable violence of "the resultant of forces and masses," like all other matter. Ultimately, materialism and mechanism differ only in name. In matter, then, inequality reigns absolutely and universally. Holding that man is only matter, the materialist must hold that absolute and universal inequality is the only possible form of human existence and treatment of others. Call materialism science, if you will; you cannot call it American. For the dialectical —that is, logical—materialist, the Americanism that "all men are created equal" must be like the "campaign promise," not to be taken seriously by the wise, an assertion for the simple-minded, noble sounding but impossible.

It is not a rash assumption that the majority of our professors, who form the thinking of our nation's future guides, are materialists. We find their view of mankind in the thousands of college textbooks on psychology, anthropology, philosophy and other studies of man as man. With very rare exception they all deny or ignore the very relevant fact that men are something more than beings completely driven by the inequality of the forces of matter.

Their fundamental understanding of the human being is that he is always forced in his thinking, willing and acting by the fixed laws of his material being. They must hold in evident consequence that his treatment of others is determined by the invariably prevailing inequality of matter. The principle on which materialism must stand, or it falls apart, is that all existence is struggle between unequal material forces, in which the strongest, or fittest, invariably survives and the weaker is suppressed. This is the principle of materialistic evolution, which is seen as the mainspring of the whole universe of reality.

Among unequals, what society
Can sort? What harmony or true delight? (Milton, Paradise Lost, 8,383)

Charting youth's course to the port of life's voyage, our secular higher education is as uncomfortable and unhappy as the Ancient Mariner. Around its neck hangs the dead albatross of man's spirituality, shot by its crossbow of materialism. For the materialist, eternally determined evolution of matter is the whole existence of humanity and of all that is. Its whole process is action of unequal material forces, in which only greater violence means survival— "nature red in tooth and claw." Existence for each and all is violence in one form or another; violence is the creative law of all beings: so speaks the Zarathustra of materialism.

Spencer, the high priest of materialistic evolution, logically concludes from it that justice is the survival of the fittest (Utilitarianism, c.5). His ruthless god, the resultant of forces, implacably drives on the development of matter, of which man is only a kind. He and Huxley fashioned and fitted the hilt of evolution to the blade of inequality and, flourishing it, raised the materialist's battlecry: Long live the stronger! Death to the weaker! Violence is salvation and perfection of the Superman! Exaggeration? Genteel materialism is cool fire. Soviet apostles of this gospel of violence tell the tall tale of Baron Munchausen to the proletariat that violent class-struggle is driving its arm through the mouth of the vicious bear Inequality to grasp its tail and pull it inside out as benevolent Equality for all men.

Human equality cannot be the result of materialistic evolution, "through the social process," as John Dewey would have us think. By its very nature, evolution of matter alone results perforce in inequality. Equality is the cause of society's operation; it is the root, not the flower or fruit, of society.

Only he can reason to the equality of men who first has reasoned to the spiritual souls in the material bodies of men—only he who knows with the poet of human equality, Walt Whitman: "I pass death with the dying and birth with the new-washed babe, and am not confined between my hat and boots."

Men, If Only Matter, Have No Free Choice, No Rights, No Equality

To be "created equal" men must have "inalienable rights," with corresponding obligations in others to respect those rights; for human equality can be only in rights and obligations. Rights and obligations arise only from the law of human nature and from man-made law carrying out the law of nature. Therefore, only beings that are under the Natural Law and under human "positive" law can have rights and obligations. But only those who have free choice, only persons, can be under such law. Therefore only persons, only freely choosing beings, can have rights and obligations. Now, it is clear to all that, properly speaking, mere matter cannot have choice; only a non-material, or spiritual, being can have it. Hence, if men are nothing but matter, and not also spirit, they can have no free choice, they cannot be under natural or human law, they cannot have rights and obligations, in which alone they can be equal. Bootless, then, is the assertion of the equality of men by the materialist, holding as he does that man is but matter determined always in his action by the invariable laws of matter.

Materialist abhorrence of a spiritual soul in man seeks in vain a footing for human equality. Mere matter with its material laws essentially and absolutely spurns equality of any kind. All events and all history of matter are exclusively the inevitable "resultant of unequal forces." In equal right to liberty the materialist must see, as R. Tawney says in Equality (ed. 4, rev. London, 1952), "a particular interpretation of liberty, according to which freedom for the pike is death for the minnows."

The power freely to choose in some of his actions is man's interior liberty and the sole possible source of his exterior liberty of speech, of teaching, of suffrage, association, religion, etc. Only in such interior liberty of choice and in its consequent spirituality of being can men have the rights and responsibilities of equals.

Walt Whitman, in his "Democratic Vistas," sees his beloved equality of human beings as the flower and fruit of man's spiritual nature and, still more, of his Christian spiritual nature:

What Christ appealed for in the moral-spiritual field for humankind, namely, that in respect to the absolute soul, there is in the possession of such by each single individual something so transcendent, so incapable of gradations that to that extent it places all beings on a common level, utterly regardless of the distinctions of intellect, virtue, station, or any height or lowliness whatever. . . .

Do away with light and you do away with shadow; do away with human free choice and spiritual nature, and you do away with human equality. Human equality is not measured in inches, pounds or ergs, the only measurement for the materialist. The sole tenable reason and source of the equality of men will be found in this fact: for the proper development of social human nature, men must have rights and responsibilities which are the same for all. That is why we call human equality the law of man's nature, the Natural Law, or as Grotius declares (War and Peace, 16, 49, n.2) : "The natural mother of rights is human nature itself."

Human equality is not merely a way of thinking about human beings; it is not a mere consciousness of ourselves; it is not public opinion; it is not State law asserting it. It is inalienable right to the goods of social living that are necessary for every man's social nature; it is inalienable obligation to accord those social goods to one who has a right to them. Human equality is the atmosphere which man must breathe to grow to his full development.

To be a voter with the rest is not so much, says Walt Whitman ("Democratic Vistas"). But to become an enfranchised man and now, impediments removed, to stand and start without humiliation, and equal with the rest . . . may be the forming of a full-grown man and woman— that is something.

A right is a moral power, that is, a sufficient reason to obtain, hold or dispose of, a good in social relations, intended by Natural Law or by valid law of man as an interpretation and application of the Natural Law. The "moral power," or reason, establishing a right is the need of a person whose human nature demands that it be fulfilled. This demand by human nature, by the Natural Law, is both obligation of the bestower of a good and the essence of right in the receiver: jus; and its fulfillment is justice, the realization of equality.

The National Catholic Welfare Conference submitted on request to the United Nations a "Declaration of Human Rights," (Catholic Mind XLV, 1012; April 1947) which are the basis of the equality of man. Among these rights, belonging to man by his very nature, are:

life, bodily integrity
private and public worship of God
religious education and association
private property, personal liberty
proper care under the law
liberty of speech and press
choice of marriage and kind of life
adequate education
choice of work, living wage
collective bargaining
guidance of children's education
taxation for needs of society
courts of justice
a nationality
access to means of living
independence of the State

It is true, as some object to human equality in rights, that all rights, like everything else, are unequal in individual persons. The answer to this is rather obvious: equality means that all have the same rights of human nature, but not all in the same degree. This was the explanation of American human equality of the Declaration of Independence given by Lincoln at Springfield, 1857:

I think the authors of that notable instrument intend to include all men, but they do not intend to declare all men equal in all respects… They defined with tolerable distinctness in what respects they did consider all men equal—equal with certain inalienable rights, among which are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.

To light a candle at noon: all persons have equally a right to life, including the million fetuses yearly murdered by induced abortions in the United States. But the President has the same right in a higher degree, that is, there are more reasons why he should not be murdered. A baby and an adult have equally right to private property; but the baby has not the disposition of its property. In a word, all persons are equally human beings; and all other persons have the responsibility of treating them as human beings. In the concrete all men are unequal in particulars; but with Bobbie Burns we must sincerely agree: "a man's a man for a' that."

Inequalities In Our Land Of Human Equality

It took the bloody operation of the Civil War to cut out of our body politic the cancer of the horrendous inequality of slavery of the human being. The country still needs to remove the cancerous remnants of this inequality in its treatment of free colored people by the whites. We have, peacefully in most part, won the equality of social justice for the wage earner. We have still to win our equality of freedom to choose the education of our children according to our consciences.

In a decent democracy we must not be forced to buy with money the equality in liberty, which is already ours by birthright, by our nature, by the Constitution in general and by the Supreme Court in particular in the Oregon School Case, 1925:

The fundamental theory of liberty, upon which all governments in the Union repose, excludes any general power of the State to standardize its children by forcing them to accept instruction from public teachers only. The child is not the mere creature of the State; those who nurture him and direct his destiny, have the right, coupled with the high duty, to recognize and to prepare him for additional obligation.

Catholics must pay $1.3 billion for the education of other American children and are forced to pay a second $1.3 billion for the exercise of their equal right to religious education of their own American children. Because many parents are unable to pay twice, they are forced to send their children to schools where religion is banned and where the teaching is based on abhorrent suppositions of materialism.

To penalize parents thus because of the practice of their religion, under the subterfuge of separation of Church and State, is to penalize equality in religious liberty. To seek a religious education for one's children is to be of a spiritually colored race. Dr. Iddings Bell, educator of Chicago University, a non-Catholic, observes in this regard, in his book Crisis in Education (Whittlesey, 1948):

As the American school is now conducted, there is no such thing as religious liberty in religious education; there is liberty only to be unreligious. ...

Those that think that to give funds to a religious body for schools, in which religion matters, is somehow tied up with uniting Church and State, would seem to be just plain ignorant and illogical people.

The Constitution of a country is not necessarily the just norm of equality among its citizens; otherwise, the Constitution of Cuba rightly determines what is just equality amongst its citizens. Just human equality is the norm of what a Constitution should be, not vice-versa. Much less is the court's interpretation of the Constitution, as some assert, just human equality.

We have in our Constitution the most admirable assertions of human equality and rights ever stated as a Constitution by any country in history. We cannot say as much for its, at times, benighted interpretation by our positivist Supreme Court. Their principle for determining the meaning of the Constitution seems to be that of positivist Justice Holmes: what the majority wants. The Supreme Court's assertion of the attitude of State to religion is neither an interpretation nor application, but a contradiction of the principle of the Constitution prohibiting the establishment of a national Church. The Supreme Court establishes a State religion of secularism, a veritable religion, through their establishment of the secularist nature of public education. A true religion proposes a purpose of man's existence and the means to attain it. Secularism, like Marxism, despite communist protestation, does nothing else but this. Education, unpleasant as this declaration may be to the National Educational Association, is of necessity a form of religion professing an end of human life and the means to that end.

Certainly the Constitution, beyond quibble, declares as fundamental to Americanism that all citizens are equal and to be treated equally before the law. The law is class-unconscious and color-blind. It flatly rejects a second class of citizens. It asserts equal opportunity for all in all forms of social contact. How then can the Supreme Court and Administration of the United States permit the States to treat citizens, continually and generally, as unequal and second-class before the law, in clear disregard of the Constitution?

The Supreme Court in 1930 declared in Cochrane v. Louisiana that it is not unconstitutional to use public funds to supply the millions of parochial pupils by public funds with non-religious schoolbooks. Nearly all States refuse to do so.

To this, secularists thoughtlessly counter: "It's up to the State to determine whether this aid will be given to parochial school children." It is decidedly not up to any State to decide whether or not it will dispense distributive justice, or to decide whether aid, allowed by the Constitution, will be given to all American children equally. It is decidedly not up to any State to deny in practice that all American children are equal and to be treated equally within the Constitution. This is also the injustice, calling on our nation the curse of "the God of justice," of many a State in its very unequal distribution of school funds to schools attended mostly by negroes. "Woe to him that buildeth up his house by injustice" (Jer. 22:13)!

Catholics have allowed themselves to be maneuvered into a false position by their acceptance of the false sense of ambiguous expressions. "Aid to parochial schools" is aid, not to the Church, but to the parents and pupils—aid which other parents and pupils receive, who belong to other religions. Aid is asked by Catholics to buy, not religious books, but books of general education. Salaries are asked for teaching, not religion, but other branches of learning. Aid for building is asked, not for religious use, but for general education. This is all constitutional and must in justice be given in a democracy.

While this aid is admittedly not direct aid to religion, it is outrageous and desperate quibbling to assert, as is often done, that the State must not give, according to the Constitution, any indirect aid to any religion. Such an interpretation of the Constitution is not realistic. Use of the roads in going to Church or to school, police and fire protection, many other public services and government in general, all paid by public funds, are indirect aid to all religions. If indirect aid, given to the Catholic religion by supplying a general education for Catholics, is forbidden by the Constitution, so is the indirect aid forbidden which is given to other religions in giving general education to members of other religions in public schools. To answer this by saying that Catholics must go to public schools if they wish to receive distributive justice is to pile on the Mt. Ossa of inequality the Mt. Pelion of totalitarian indoctrination of all children in secularism and of the denial of liberty of education and of religion.

In 1947, the Supreme Court ruled in Everson v. Board of Education that it is not contrary to the Constitution to supply bus rides with public funds for Catholic children going to parochial schools. In this matter, most States refuse to treat Catholics equally with others and with impunity are flagrantly unjust, with the U. S. Administration's tacit consent. A number of States assert that a union of Church and State is formed by giving parochial school children lunches and health service as they do for other children in public schools. An attorney general of Maryland decrees that it is a union of Church and State to allow parochial schools to tap into an educational TV program of the public schools. In Oklahoma Catholic school children are denied admission to a public remedial-reading course—forsooth because it is a union of Church and State for Catholics to learn to read at public expense as other children do (Cf. America, Dec. 9, 1961).

Is this American justice, which we wish all the world to admire? Our enemies don't miss a bit of it. It is some of their most persuasive and unanswerable propaganda utterly discrediting our lofty declaration in the U. N. of the human liberties and of men's equality. The Soviets have plenty of "Truth" broadcasting to return to the nations. We preach all over the world the liberte, egalite and fraternite of democracy through multi-million-dollar propaganda of radio, TV, and printed matter, and through our earnest diplomats and noble Peace Corps. Here at home we give the lie to our propaganda. Behind their back we cut the ground from under our faithful representatives, as the world is not slow to point out to them, by our bigoted inequality of treatment and denial of the liberties of many millions of our minorities. Not without reason our American delegates of peace and social development hear the shouts: "Yankee, Go home! We want none of your democracy and equality of man! Get equality yourselves before you try to give it to us!"

The Virus Of Inequality: Fear Of Losing Profit, Power, Prestige

The chief advantage of inequality is money for the dominator. The second is dominance over others' minds and lives. The third is preservation of prestige, or negatively, hate of rising rivals in a free society. Secondary and less disreputable motives are proposed; but they are mostly a smoke screen under which these three reasons attack human equality without being seen in their shamefulness.

A century ago we saw lucre leading the charge against freedom of the slaves of the South. Bledsoe in his Liberty and Slavery, Christy in Cotton is King, Fitzhugh in Cannibals All, Calhoun in his Works, Hammond, Harper, Sims and Dew in their Pro-Slavery Argument, to mention a few slavers, make little attempt to hide their money motive for slavery. Human freedom for negroes, they said, would bankrupt numberless slave-owners and the cost of supporting freed slaves would be unbearable, while the cotton-fields would return to forest.

The South's altruist concern for the North—which in general opposed slavery—warned that the cotton-mills of the North and of Europe would have to close with hardship for thousands of workers, if they did not receive the yearly billion pounds of slave-produced cotton from the South. Eli Whitney's cotton gin invented in 1793 raised cotton export from the South from 140,000 pounds to a billion pounds in the 1850's; and resulting Southern affluence made enslavement of colored human beings justified.

As for prestige, the Moses of oppressed minorities, Lincoln, indignantly damns that perverse craving for prestige over other men, which has sparked much of the enthusiasm for human inequality in social history. The inequality of "kings who bestrode the necks of the people," the superiority of "a lighter skin," the superexcellence of "the Protestant British gentleman," he said, proclaim "the liberty of making slaves of other people." The Emancipator wrote to Joshua Speed: "When the Know-nothings get control . . . [the Declaration of Independence] will read: 'all men are created equal except negroes, foreigners and Catholics.' "

Hunger for prestige in uncultured "white trash" is ridiculous in their contempt for those of dark skin who are often their superiors in almost every way. Again it was to smile when A. T. Bledsoe took umbrage at what he considered the Northern intellectual's assumption of superiority over Southern intellectuals. Such incongruity of conduct drew from admirable Samuel Johnson, as Boswell narrates, the observation, "Sir, your levellers wish to level down to themselves, but they cannot bear levelling up to themselves."

"An equal does not subject an equal" is an axiom of law. So, God orders the Jews (Lev. 24:22) : "Let there be equal judgment among you, whether he be a stranger or a native that offends, because I am the Lord your God." Those who offer the Bible as a reason for inequality among men would do well to read this passage to the judge of a courtroom where a colored citizen is to be tried.

Mere reason teaches us that "there is one God and Father of all" His children in their unity of one end of existence. Of course, that eminent voice of Christianity, Pope Pius XII, reinforces philosophy with the supernatural truth of the Mystical Body of Christ, in which all men are called to be members (Summi Pontificatus, Oct. 20, 1939): "Those who enter the Church, be their origin or their language what it may, are to know that they have the equal right of children in the house of their Father." The Church knows no race. It knows only human beings.

Debating with Lincoln against the equality of man, Douglas declared that "equality" in the documents of Americanism "had no reference either to the Negroes, the savage Indians, the Feejee, the Malay or any other inferior or degraded race." Lincoln pertinently rejected this stand on prestige of race: "… he who would be no slave, must have no slave. Those who deny freedom for others deserve it not for themselves, and under a just God, cannot long retain it."

An American destroys his cherished cause of equality of States in his denial of equality of men. Those who cry: "States' Rights!" must also cry: "Human Rights!" State rights are the logical conclusion from no other premise than human rights. With the self-contradiction of all in equalitarians, J. C. Calhoun writes to Oliver Dyer (1849): "We are not a nation, but a union, a confederacy of equal and sovereign States." Under Americanism, under the Declaration of Independence and under the Constitution, no State has any rights contrary to "inalienable rights" of human nature. Such States as are not representative of all their citizens are not the States that "our Fathers brought forth on this continent." That State is no State, which does not recognize with racy Kipling that "the colonel's lady and Judy O'Grady are sisters under the skin."

Adlerian sense of inadequacy, seeking assurance in domination by force over others, fears equality for negroes and public education fears competition of private schools if they are given just equality of aid. Fear is the womb that begets oppression.

This item 2742 digitally provided courtesy of CatholicCulture.org