Among all of the social phenomena that Alexis de Tocqueville noted during his stay in America, he found what he called “equality of conditions” to be the most striking. Everywhere he looked he found Americans who were literally obsessed with equality, fueled by the sacred truth that “all men are created equal.” Tocqueville was removed enough from American society however to see how dangerous an exaggerated insistence on equality could be. In fact, he thought that this insistence was really rooted not in justice, but in envy, explicitly saying so in a letter to a friend: “equality is a slogan based on envy. It signifies in the heart of every Republican ‘Nobody is going to occupy a place higher than I.’”
A simple glance at those around us will be sufficient for us to recognize that the tent of equality can only be stretched so far. So vastly different are the members of humanity in looks, physical prowess, intellectual skills, material wealth, personal character, spiritual gifts to name just a few, making only the most incredulous question whether personal equality is a real thing. That is because man is both naturally equal and naturally unequal. All men and women have a natural equality regarding their origin and destination. Having come from the hand of the Creator, made in His image, men and women are equal in their destiny to share in His likeness forever. It is from this natural equality that they derive their right to life and the liberty to pursue of happiness.
Natural Inequality
Equally each man will stand before God and be judged. But He will be judged according to how he used his talents (c.f. Matthew 25:14–30). This implies that man is not only naturally equal, but also naturally unequal. Echoing the sentiments of Our Lord, the Church has repeatedly affirmed this natural inequality. In his Encyclical Humanum Genus, Pope Leo XIII reminded the Faithful that inequality is natural and willed by God:
In like manner, no one doubts that all men are equal one to another, so far as regards their common origin and nature, or the last end which each one has to attain, or the rights and duties which are thence derived. But, as the abilities of all are not equal, as one differs from another in the powers of mind or body, and as there are very many dissimilarities of manner, disposition, and character, it is most repugnant to reason to endeavor to confine all within the same measure, and to extend complete equality to the institutions of civic life. Just as a perfect condition of the body results from the conjunction and composition of its various members, which, though differing in form and purpose, make, by their union and the distribution of each one to its proper place, a combination beautiful to behold, firm in strength, and necessary for use; so, in the commonwealth, there is an almost infinite dissimilarity of men, as parts of the whole. If they are to be all equal, and each is to follow his own will, the State will appear most deformed; but if, with a distinction of degrees of dignity, of pursuits and employments, all aptly conspire for the common good, they will present the image of a State both well constituted and conformable to nature.
Pope Leo XIII, Humanum Genus, 26
The analogy (as opposed to a metaphor) of the body is particularly appropriate because it does away with Tocqueville’s concern of envy. Parts of the body always have a complementarity. It is only when the body is riddled with disease that they become competitive. This struggle between complementarity and competition is the battle that goes straight through the heart of each man’s fallen social nature. The devil, the diabolical one (literal meaning is the one who tears apart), wants to split mankind through envy. God is the Symbolon, the One Who Brings Mankind together in Christ. It is in this spirit that the Church has always sought to lead men and women to find their vocation and fulfillment through their station in life.
We call it the body politic then because it is like a living organism with a hierarchical nature. But this carries with it a serious temptation—to use politics to create equality where there naturally isn’t any. Democracy is the tool of choice for doing this because it rests upon an assumption of political equality among the citizenry. Whether or not this is a reasonable assumption we can visit another time, but that it is used to enforce equality where there is inequality is a great threat to freedom. This was the great flaw in the French Revolution as Lord Acton pointed out in his lectures on the French Revolution: “[T]he deepest cause which made the French Revolution so disastrous to liberty was its theory of equality. Liberty was the watchword of the middle class, equality of the lower.”
Equality as a Threat to Liberty
When we attempt to manufacture equality it is always at the cost of liberty. Recall that liberty an external condition by which we are unhampered in our use of our internal freedom. Equality can only be created from the crumbling fragments of liberty. In order to keep inequality in check the higher privileged must have their liberty taken away. Unable to raise the underprivileged up to the level of the privileged, the privileged must be taken down a few notches. It is animated by a mob mentality that is only possible from within a democratic mindset.
Some might object to the use of the term “privileged” to describe those who occupy the higher rungs of the social hierarchy. That is because of the poisoning of our minds through a democratic paradigm causes us to recoil at even the faintest whiff inequality. But there is such thing as just privilege that comes from natural inequality. All unjust privilege should be rooted out, but not all privilege is unjust.
Indiscriminately attacking inequality is harmful to the common good because, in leveling society out, it leads to a form of stagnation in which the mob exerts a gravitational force that orbits the lowest common denominator. But is also does great harm to the underprivileged, possibly more than the privileged, in that by bestowing certain rights on them, it demands responsibilities that are above the abilities. The democratic planners then must readjust not just the responsibilities of the underprivileged but lower those of the privileged as well.
This is not a condemnation of democracy per se, but instead a refusal to allow it to be exploited as a tool of creating equality. Instead, the Church looks to the protection of a “sound democracy” that is “based on the immutable principles of the natural law and revealed truth, will resolutely turn its back on such corruption as gives to the state legislature in unchecked and unlimited power, and moreover, makes of the democratic regime, notwithstanding an outward show to the contrary, purely and simply a form of absolutism” (Pope Pius XII, Democracy and a Lasting Peace).