Abstract: My hope with this essay is to offer arguments to support my view that in a world where truth, equality, and value are largely questioned or even outright dismissed as antiquated myth-conceptions, we still have a lot to gain by holding to and affirming that truth exists, all men are created equal, and the value of human life cannot be measured in economic terms.
0. Introduction.
”We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal”. This is a foundational statement for our current world order. However, it is becoming increasingly evident that not all people hold ”these truths to be self-evident.” In fact, many cast doubt on the existence of truth at all. Others hold that the exact opposite is self-evident: that men are in fact not equal. And it is not entirely inconceivable how someone could arrive at such conclusion, for when we take a look around us, what we see is a lot of inequality. And what do we mean by inequality anyway? What equality were the Founding Fathers and what equality are we, who hold to the same ostensibly self-evident truths, talking about? As we shall see, these questions operate at the intersection of ethics, epistemology, political philosophy, and economic politics and thus require an extensive philosophical and ethical framework to be answered, a framework which, I am convinced, the Bible provides with unmatched wisdom and clarity.
Much of human suffering has come from the ill-conceived notion that human value is best measured in economic terms and that thus equality must mean there can be no more rich nor poor in society. Particularly nefarious minds have used such sentiments to manipulate masses and consolidate power and economic means for themselves. Looking at these developments, it becomes unignorably clear that there is but one set of ideas that ensures all people are treated equally and justly so that they can live a dignified life that is free of avoidable suffering: the set of ideas that
1. truth exists,
2. all men are created equal, and
3. the value of human life is not measured in economic terms.
In this essay, I wish to discuss each of these ideas in turn and show how the gospel helps us affirm them even when they often seem to disagree with our lived experience.
1. Truth exists.
”What is truth?” Pilate asked Jesus when presiding over his ”court hearing”. We know that he posed this question rhetorically and cynically because he left immediately after asking the question; he was not interested in what Jesus had to say in response. To better understand this question, let me first briefly review some facts about cynicism and then show how it relates to the existence of truth.
1.1 What is Cynicism?
- Cynicism is truth’s oldest enemy. It is the opposite of honest curiosity. It does not seek truth, instead it rejects even the idea of truth’s existence and labours hard to signal intellectual superiority by simply questioning everything.
- Cynicism was what had led to the original sin in the garden. The prelude to the fall was the serpent calling into question the truth of the Word of God by way of a cynical joke: ”Are you really going to tell me he forbade you to eat from any of the trees?”
- Cynicism does not deal in arguments. It just makes a joke of every argument. It questions everything without offering any alternative.
- Cynisism is different from skepticism in that a skeptic is honestly interested in the truth but chooses a prudent approach to finding it. Contrary to a cynic, a skeptic believes in truth and is interested in finding it but he does not outsource the truth-finding process: he does not simply trust others to go through the evidence like a gullible person would but wants to work through the process to arrive at the conclusion himself.
So, in summary, we can say that in a way cynics are agnostic toward the existence of truth. They do not really care whether truth exists at all, while skeptics, on the other hand, believe in its existence but take great care in finding it.
The post-modern critical approach towards truth is at least a very close relative to the cynical approach if not its identical twin: it also outright denies the existence of truth. The idea that objective reality does not exist and that instead subjective experience is all there is, is extremely popular in our post-modern, and specially in the academic world of our time. At the very least, subjective experience is given preference over objective reality and seen as ”more real” (W. V. Quine, 1951). Whatever conforms most to an individual’s ”personal experience” and ”feels right” is sold as valid subjective / individual truth.
1.2 But truth exists.
But there are also voices in academia that cut right through the clatter and recognise that ”To ’see through’ all things is the same as not to see.” (Lewis, 1943). Putnam (1978) shows that the statement ”There is no (absolute) truth!” is a self-refuting statement for it is itself a(n absolute) truth claim. She thus shows that ”there is at least one a priori truth”–in other words: truth exists. Of course, the question of whether truth exists has profound implications for our understanding of ethics and morality, ontology, epistemology, and philosophy more generally. Feyerabend (2020), in arguing for a post-modern approach to epistemology, is famously credited with coining the term ”anything goes”. If there is no truth, then nothing truly matters.
1.3 Surprise: Truth is a person.
Surprisingly, the Bible is as counter-cultural today as it was 2,000 years ago, when Pilate posed his famous question. Not only does the Bible affirm that truth exists but it elevates truth to the highest possible virtue by equating it with God when Man-God Jesus says ”I am the truth” (John 14:6). Truth, according to Christianity is a person and it is God. This sets Christianity apart from all other religions. Sure, other religions, too, may and (generally do) see truth as something worth pursuing. But no other religion ever goes to the extreme of recognising truth as the only objectively viable way and at the same time something deeply personal. Only in the Bible is truth presented as an ideal person: the ideal and the relational united in one person–Jesus Christ. All other religions only see truth as some far away abstract ideal and always leave concessions for life in the ”real world:” for ”white lies” that further a particular agenda or protect lives. Instead, the Bible teaches that any falsehood is of the devil–evil personified–who is called the ”father of lies” (John 8:44). To seek truth is to seek God. To seek truth is to seek Christ.
2. All men are created equal.
”What is justice?” asked Plato in his ’Republic’ and the entire enterprise of philosophy is said to have originated with that question. One cannot talk about equality without talking about justice. Equality is but a means by which people hope to achieve justice. Justice is the end that people seek. And having talked about truth, there is one difficult truth we need to accept about equality: it is a myth.
What is clear is that our modern understanding of the the idea of equality is intricately linked to the idea of meritocracy, which was very dear to the Founding Fathers, and which they firmly implanted into society, from whence it grew like a mustard seed to permeate culture and society in a way that led most of us today to ”believe” in it in one way or the other. Meritocracy is the idea that ”all men” have the same opportunities (opportunities of equal quality) and are treated equally by a system in the sense that each individual gets the same reward for the same amount of effort. All reward and achievement is thus purely merit-based. For the sake of argument, let us view meritocracy and equality as synonyms here, even though, strictly speaking, meritocracy is only equality of opportunities and rewards. The two terms are thus not exactly equivalent but the criticisms of meritocracy can be extended to other conceptions of equality, which we may delve into some other time.
As Yale law professor Daniel Markovits (2019) shows, meritocracy is a myth in three ways:
1. It does not exist.
2. Not only does it not exist, even if it existed, it wouldn’t work.
3. Not only would it not work, even if it worked, it would actually make things worse.
2.1 Equality does not exist.
Pure meritocracy or true equality of opportunities does not exist because even in the most meritocratic system, luck plays a role. In other words, the quality of opportunities available to an individual always depends on factors over which he has no influence. Specifically, luck plays a crucial role in at least three dimensions: the inherited factors of an individual, the particular external circumstances of a decision, and the general socio-cultural environment into which an individual was born.
Firstly, we have no say in what talents and gifts we are born with, what family we are born into, whether that family can support us in the pursuit of the development of our talents and gifts or not, or the place we are born in and whether we have the necessary opportunities to develop our gifts and talents in that place. So, the quality of opportunities available to an individual depends on the family he was born into (or whether he was even born into a family at all), whether he was born with any disabilities or not, whether he was born as a boy or a girl, and all kinds of other things related to his genetic makeup, such as intelligence, personality type, and talents–all factors, over which he obviously has either no or only very limited control.
Secondly, let us look at an illustrative example that demonstrates the role of luck in real life. The decision of whether an individual is selected as a candidate for his dream job or college etc. depends not only on his own credentials but also on things that have nothing to do with him and over which he has no influence, such as the mood of the decision maker and how thoroughly he looks at the applicant’s application, which in turn is affected by even more unpredictable factors, such as the weather or the decision maker’s diet.
Finally, even if an individual is lucky to be born with all the talent in the world, into the right family with enough means to support his talent but into a time or place where these particular talents are not valued, all his talent will count for nothing. For example, a superstar basketball player today certainly will not have achieved his success without hard work and talent but he was also lucky to be born into a time and society in which the talent of playing basketball is being valued and rewarded. So, the quality of opportunities available to an individual also depends on the time and place into which he was born.
2.2 Equality does not work.
But pure meritocracy or true equality of opportunities does not only not exist. Even if it existed, it would not work. That is because even if privileges are earned through merit, they accumulate over time and always end up being passed on in a non-meritocratic way. Meritocratic elites will inevitably accumulate privileges that will favour their progeny, so that any meritocratic system undermines itself. The descendants of meritocratic elites will have privileges that will make their lives easier but which they did not earn: they will merely have been lucky enough to be born into the right families. There is no way around this self-defeating property of meritocracy.
2.3 Equality is bad.
Finally, not only would meritocracy or true equality of opportunities not work. Even if it worked, it would be bad, i.e. morally wrong or evil. The reason is that charity is impossible in a purely meritocratic world. Supposing we were able to construct a purely meritocratic world, one would not be able to ”help those in need” because as soon as someone did that, that world would cease to be purely meritocratic.
Furthermore, a purely meritocratic world would give meritocratic elites a valid moral justification for their success and at the same time morally keep them from excercising charity. They would believe they had earned their success: they deserve whatever they achieved. This means that whoever has not earned it, also deserves whatever situation he is in. That is because any system advertising itself as being meritocratic necessarily needs to communicate that every position in the societal distribution is being awarded solely on the basis of merit or lack thereof. Such a world would thus be full of pride, misery, and hopelessness, because there is no reason, incentive, or even possibility for anyone to try to alleviate the situation of people who ”rightly” find themselves in the situation they deserve to be in.
So, in summary, we can say unequivocally that equality, at least of opportunities, is really a myth. It may be a myth that is useful and effective to an extent, but it is a myth nevertheless. Similar arguments can also be made for other conceptions of equality and equity. They, too, are fundamentally myths: they do not exist. If they existed, they would not work. And even if they worked, they would not be morally desirable. Nobody in their right mind and heart would want to live in a perfectly meritocratic or „equal“ society. But if equality is nothing but a myth and yet the means we employ to seek justice, how then can we possibly hope to achieve justice or even believe it exists?
2.4 Surprise: But justice prevails.
Once again, the Bible surprises us, even in this regard. In spite of all the evidence to the contrary we find in real life all around us, the Bible emphatically affirms that justice not only exists but will ultimately prevail. Justice is the final outcome. We can rest assured of that. And that is because justice is not achieved by us. It is carried out by God. Justice will be served not because of anything that we have done or the way we have done it but because God is just and only what is of God prevails while everything else will eventually be destroyed by God. This does not absolve us from our responsibility to pursue justice in any way, but it alleviates us from the weight of the responsibility of bringing about justice in the world. We can devote all our energy to living justly while not having to worry if we do not see our lived justice resulting in a juster world or even if we see our lived justice being met by injustice.
The existence of a perfect divine judge also has a second implication that is even more practical and that is that God is the model template for true justice. To seek justice is to seek God. This means that we do not have to seek revenge if we feel mistreated because God will restore justice for us in due time. And it also means that we live justly by imitating God. Now if God had just stayed in heaven and nobody had ever seen him, it would have been rather difficult for us to understand how to live out this justice in practice. But luckily for us, he did not stay in heaven but left heaven behind, became man, and lived a model life of perfect justice for all the world to see. Now we can live justly by imitating Christ. To seek justice is to seek Christ.
3. Human value is inherited, not earned.
“What is a man worth?” is a question that has occupied the minds of many great philosophers and thinkers. They have come up with many different answers but overall, we can categorize their answers into two groups. There are those who believe that human value is instrumental, i.e. relating to something a person does, while others believe that human value is inherent meaning that what a person does has no bearing on his value as a human being. One philosopher who thought of the value of human life as instrumental was Aristotle, who held a teleological view, meaning that in his eyes, the value of anything, including humans, was measured by its degree of fulfilment of its purpose. Consequently, a man would be worth more, the more he fulfilled his purpose. On the other hand, the Christian position has always been that human value does not depend on what a man does but exclusively on who made him. In this section, we shall look more closely at both these positions and what they entail.
3.1 Instrumental Value: On men and leeches.
A danger of idolising meritocracy that Daniel Markovits does not discuss in his book is that it can lead to the misguided belief that human value is rooted in a human’s performance and contribution to society, in his “worth to society.” If we take an even cursory look at human history, we very soon realise that the assumptions civilisations implicitly make about what gives a human being his worth have dramatic consequences for every aspect of our lives. They particularly have dramatic consequences for the way we treat each other because they determine our fundamental conception of justice.
For instance, if we hold to the misguided belief that our worth stems from our ethnic heritage and genetic purity, we will favour our compatriots and discriminate against people from other people groups, going as far as trying to eradicate them just like the Nazis, who followed such an ideology of “Aryan superiority”, did with people groups they despised, such as gypsies and Jews. Contrary to popular belief, the Nazis did not simply enjoy being evil. They were convinced they were serving justice by making way for their ethnic group and eradicating those they considered a threat.
If we believe our worth stems from how much money we have, we will either try to accumulate as much money as possible and exploit or despise those who have less, or, if we have a slightly more sophisticated sense of justice, we will try to redistribute wealth until everyone is „finally worth the same.“ As history has shown again and again in countries like the Soviet Union, this always leads to an unimaginable destruction of wealth, lives, and happiness and the concentration of power in the hands of a few. That should tell us that there is something fundamentally flawed about this assumption, too.
And finally, if we believe that our worth stems from our “value to society”, we will have contempt for those who cannot or will not for whatever other reason, contribute to society. Just think of the argument often employed to support abortion that foetuses are not a viable life form and rely on their mother to survive.
It turns out that whenever we base our conception of justice on something that we humans do, we always end up identifying a class of “parasites” that threatens our conception of justice. This term has been employed in a shockingly consistent fashion by each of the groups I mentioned. The Nazis thought of the Jews as parasites and would refer to them as such (Musolff, 2007). In communist societies, business owners were considered parasites—the term the Soviets used was “Kulaks” (Fitzpatrick, 2006). You will hear the term “parasites” employed to refer to people who exploit the social welfare system by proponents of meritocracy (Hogan and Haltinner, 2018). And there are pro-abortion advocates who will happily argue that foetuses are technically parasites because they live off their mother’s body (Meilaender, 1979). It should be clear to everyone that any talk of parasites is in no way compatible with any conception of equality. If all are equal, there can be no parasites. Which leaves us again with the question: What gives me my worth? Maybe turning once again to the Founding Fathers can give us a clue? To understand how the Founding Fathers understood human value, it will be instructive to look at their conception of justice and equality and see what implicit assumptions about human worth it reveals.
3.2 Inherent Value: Created equal.
So, what did the Founding Fathers mean by ”created equal”? Does it even matter for us today what they meant? Equality in the statement in the opening introduction is directly tied to the doctrine of creation. We are not just equal. That would in fact be a nonsensical statement. We have already seen that equality is a myth–it does not exist. We are not equal. What we are is created equal. This doctrine is the great equaliser that distributes value evenly among all human beings: men, women, kings, pawns, born, unborn, all gradients of intelligence, all gradients of melanin level, all gradients of social status, even when reality seems to paint a vastly different picture. We are all equal in that we were all equally created by the same God and in his image. That is what dignifies us. That is where we derive the value of human life from. And that is what gives human life real rather than just abstract or some theoretical or conceptual value. Because of this, we have a responsibility before our creator to treasure all life. Because of this, we have dignity.
Looking at the ideas that influenced the Founding Fathers in their formulation of the Declaration of Independence, we see that what they meant by ”created equal” was primarily equality in terms of dignity. And even though evidence suggests the Founding Fathers were primarily thinking of ”men” in terms of ”nations” in the context of the Declaration of Independence (meaning that Americans should have the same rights as Britons living on the British Isles) (Rakove, 2019), the term ”created” here indicates that the idea of individual rights and equality in dignity were at least also present in their minds for God created an individual man, not a nation. Needless to say that in the public discourse and perception, the individualistic significance came to completely overshadow any other initially intended meaning rather quickly. Even though many of the Founding Fathers themselves were not Christians (but Deists) and even though they themselves were at the very least questionable in their conduct, it is beyond doubt that they were drawing from a rich tradition of Christian thought, to the extent that even after their concentrated efforts to strip away all Christianity from their ideas, they are still left with a deeply Christian ethical essence in the end. The ideas about equality held by the Founding Fathers were in fact Biblical ideas that had been unearthed by the Reformation (see e.g., „A Treatise on Christian Liberty“ by Luther, 1520) and then picked up, developed, and propagated by the Enlightenment.
The Founding Fathers were right about many things but they were wrong about one thing: these truths are not self-evident at all. They were revealed a long time ago but ignored for much of history and then had to be laboriously uncovered again. The Founding Fathers may not have lived up to these truths, but they knew them to be true. In a way, their statement ”all men are created equal” was an aspirational and to some extent one could say even a prophetic one. The Founding Fathers viewed it as a positional statement: equality means equal in terms of dignity, equal in terms of being subject to a universal law (which implies that all men should also be treated equally before any written code of law), and equal in terms of being equally endowed by their creator with a number of universal human rights.
It turns out that the only conception of human worth that does not create a class of parasites is the doctrine that each of us is created by the same God in the image of God. The moment we discard the doctrine of creation is the moment we have doomed ourselves to a life among leeches, parasites, and all kinds of other vile creatures. It is the doctrine of creation alone that bestows immeasurable worth upon every single human life, worth that extends far beyond any one person’s contribution to society, wealth, or personal features. The murderer, the thief, the infant, the cripple, the beggar, they are all worth exactly as much as Mother Teresa. They may not be to you or me, but they are to God, who made them and who is not only the ultimate judge but also the only judge who wields a perfect (i.e. correct) judgement.
Of course none of this is to be taken to imply that crimes should not be punished or that work should not be rewarded. All of that is very important, too. What it means instead is that there is a fundamental dignity and worth to human life which cannot be infringed upon no matter what a person does or does not do. This is an idea that has truly transformed the world and it has served as the ideological cornerstone for many other founding documents of nations. See, for example, the first sentence of the German constitution: ”Human dignity is inviolable.”
But what if we are the ones being mistreated? The Bible has a recipe for that, too. ”Blessed are ye, when men shall revile you, and persecute you, and shall say all manner of evil against you falsely, for my sake. Rejoice, and be exceeding glad: for great is your reward in heaven” (Matthew 5:11-12). We can bear all things with dignity and even joy if the judgement we care about is not the one of people but of God.
4. One more surprise!
We have been surprised by the Bible several times throughout this essay. The Bible provides a surprising basis for and a definition of truth, it gives us hope of true justice that defies our lived experience, and it bestows human life with more value than would ever be possible without God. Now it is time to get surprised one more time, this time by ourselves.
We have looked at three big questions in this essay: ”What is truth?”, ”What is justice?”, and ”What is a man worth?”. Now we must take one step back and ask ourselves why do we even ask these questions? Why are we so interested in truth, in justice, and in the value of human life? How is it possible that we care about justice so much if all we have ever known is an unjust world? Should injustice not be the norm for us and human life worth absolutely nothing if it is nothing but the result of an accident in space? Do you not find it odd that each one of us should have this firm conviction deep within that human life is indeed inherently valuable rather than just instrumentally valuable and that justice is really important?
Are all of these questions we ask ourselves not indicators that point to the existence of a norm giver who defined for all creation truth, justice, and human value? I should think that they are.
5. Conclusion (brought to you by ChatGPT :p).
In this essay, we have explored the meaning of truth, equality, justice, and human value. Through this examination, we find that the absolutes many seek often elude us when framed within the confines of human reasoning and societal constructs. It is the Gospel that offers a unique perspective able to integrate these elements in a coherent, though often counterintuitive, framework.
Truth, as personified in Christ, provides a foundation for understanding our world and ourselves. It stands against the cynicism and relativism that pervade contemporary discourse.
Equality, in the biblical sense, recognizes the intrinsic worth of every individual, grounded not in our accomplishments or status but in our creation in the image of God.
Ultimately, the value of a person cannot be measured by economic standards but is inherent in their being.
As we navigate the challenges of modern society, our guide should not be the elusive quest for material equality but the pursuit of a justice that respects the dignity of every person, encourages our duties to one another, and relies on the grace that transcends our own merits.
In this way, the self-evident truths that we hold dear can find their fullest expression not in the declarations of nations but in the lives of individuals transformed by the Gospel’s power to affirm truth, inspire justice, and recognise the immeasurable value of every human life.
8 June 2024
References
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Hogan, J. and Haltinner, K. (2018). Floods, invaders, and parasites: Immigration threat narratives and right-wing populism in the USA, UK and Australia. In National Identity in an Age of Migration, pages 18–41. Routledge.
Lewis, C. (1943). The Abolition of Man. HarperCollins.
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Rakove, J. N. (2019). The beginnings of national politics: An interpretive history of the Continental Congress. JHU Press.
W. V. Quine (1951). Main Trends in Recent Philosophy: Two Dogmas of Empiricism. The Philosophical Review, 60(1):20–43. Publisher: [Duke University Press, Philosophical Review].
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