Liberté, égalité, fraternité has a nice ring to it, doesn’t it?  It’s a rather eighteenth-century idea: we’ve pretty much given up on liberty as a guiding societal philosophy, and fraternity has an awfully sexist sound to it, but equality — oh, man, now there’s something we can sink our teeth into.  You can’t throw a stone without hitting some activist or other* crusading for a particular kind of equality for a particular broadly- or narrowly-defined group.  It’s a compelling idea, but a bad one.

[A]ll men are created equal — except, of course, we aren’t.  Some people are born healthy, others with congenital diseases.  Some people are born to well-off, intelligent, loving parents in prosperous western democracies; others are born into misery and despair in, say, North Korea.  The circumstances of our birth affect those of our childhood; the circumstances of our childhood affect our education (or lack thereof); and so on down the line.  We see the disparities produced by this chain of circumstances as unjust, and being by and large a well-meaning species we try to fix it.  Every once in a while our fixes kill ten or twenty million people.

The popular debate isn’t about whether we ought to do something about inequality, however rampant or contained, but about how much we ought to do.  On the one hand, we have some folks — usually on the right-conservative side of the political fence — who agitate for equality of opportunity: the proverbial “level playing field”, where everyone gets the same start and is free to succeed or fail on s/h/its own merits.  On the other hand, we have people — generally on the left-progressive side of that goddamn fence — who insist that only equality of outcome will do, noting that even a glassy-smooth playing field is easier to run on if you were born with long legs.  It’s a distinction without a difference.  Past outcomes determine present opportunities.

So if Equality is a false god, then at whose temple should we worship?  Let’s go back to the Declaration, which more properly insists that all men are created equal insofar as we all have innate rights to life, liberty and property.  (Well, the Declaration mumbled something about “…the pursuit of happiness”, but Locke had property in mind so we’ll go with the original sentiment.)  These are negative rights, and the Declaration goes on to assert that no government has the moral authority to fuck with them.  “All men are created equal” means that no government has special dispensation to fuck with someone based on their circumstances — be they age, race, sex, creed, or anything else irrelevant to the direct situation.  (This is proving to take a while to implement in practice, but if it was easy everyone would’ve done it.)

What we have here isn’t equality — it’s impartiality.  Impartiality is probably just as hard to achieve as equality, but it’s much easier to approximate.  Everyone is permitted to own land these days, not just a hereditary aristocracy**.  On the other hand, driving the kulaks off of their property and collectivizing their farms didn’t work out so well.  We don’t even want such cherished concepts as equality before the law — witness the furore that erupted when “the law” insisted that teenaged girls who send their boyfriends naked photos of themselves are just as much pædophiles as are real online predators.  Instead, we want assurance that no-one will get preferential — or abusive — treatment from the justice system because of their background, or their income, or their seat in the House of Representatives.

It’s impossible to give everyone a seat at the front of the bus.  It’s repugnant to force everyone to stand.  But it’s perfectly reasonable to insist that, if you’re forced to stand at the back of the bus, it’s because the bus is crowded and not because you’re black.

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* And once you have, you won’t want to stop

** Although if you own land in Massachussets and want to put up a wind farm on the coast, Ted Kennedy would like to have a word with you