We're Not All Created Equal...And That's Okay

    Two hundred and fifty years ago, King George III formally declared Americans to be rebels and traitors. So ended the colonists’ hopes for a peaceful reconciliation, and set the path to declare a new nation based not on blood or any other kinship, but on a proposition; that all men are created equal. On the heels of America’s quarter-millennium since the Declaration of Independence, I want to do something a bit unfashionable: I want to defend inequality.

    First of all (before you start typing your “Peter is being a jack-ass, again” comments), let me state unequivocally, that everyone should be treated with equal respect and dignity, and are deserving of equal opportunities as far as their talents can take them. But all men (and women) are not the same. We have unequal curiosity, unequal intellect, unequal talent, unequal courage, unequal drive, and unequal achievement. I want to defend this kind of inequality because I believe it is the most important way that Americans can distinguish themselves, and because being honest about inequality is the most important way that one can help themselves be extraordinary, if you so desire. 

    Alexis de Tocqueville, the great 19th-century critic and chronicler of early American democracy, noticed that the passion for equality dominates every American institution. He admired this democratic spirit, but he also issued a warning. He warned that the concept of equality is the most powerful compulsion in the American mind. A dominating drive for equality suffocates the very people whose uncommon talent, courage, and vision could pull everyone else upward. Without those rare sparks of excellence, there are no breakthroughs. No bold leaders. No innovations. No radical thought that disrupts the human tendency toward lazy conformity.

    De Tocqueville famously observed that people in democracies might come to prefer equality in servitude to inequality in freedom. In the name of making all things equal, we end up equal only in mediocrity. And that is the surest path to slavishly submitting to authority, submitting to bad ideas, submitting to an overbearing government, and submitting to the soft tyranny of low expectations.

    I believe that equality, without excellence, is the surest path to national decline. A free society, to remain dynamic and free, must enable those gifts to develop rather than force them into a common mold. So even in a republic of equals, we need small sanctuaries of aristocracy and excellence to ensure the success of liberty. Democracy runs on equality; freedom and excellence run on inequality. The tension between those two realities shapes almost every real problem in education today. So how do we respect every person’s equal dignity and opportunity while also recognizing and cultivating individual excellence?

     Nearly every university in America has decided to answer that question by abandoning excellence. Harvard hands out more A’s than any other grade. Yale gives nearly 60 percent of students straight A’s. Princeton no longer requires Greek or Latin to major in the classics. Columbia PROUDLY ditched the SAT. In our leading institutions, honors are handed out like M&Ms while calculus and Shakespeare are quietly dropped.

    Call me crazy, but I’m pretty sure you cannot democratize a serious education by watering it down and expecting to keep its substance. Plato fed through ChatGPT turns Plato into a mediocre social media post. Macroeconomics without some basis in calculus is just cable news polemics. Everyone carries different strengths, abilities, and passions. To pretend otherwise is to flatten human experience into mediocrity. 

    The truth is that excellence has no shortcut. When people mass-produce artificial diamonds, they turn out to be pebbles that nobody values. The attempt to counterfeit excellence only cheapens it. If you make the difficult and the extraordinary dumbed down or commonplace, you destroy it.

    As Thomas Jefferson put it: “There is a natural aristocracy among men. The grounds of this are virtue and talents.” Jefferson proposed a model school where each year, “Twenty of the best geniuses will be raked from the rubbish.” Bold phrasing aside, Jefferson’s point was crucial: Let the best rise from any condition, and educate them deeply for the common good. That, to me, is the most American solution/philosophy to the reality of human inequality. We cannot (and should not) make everyone the same, but we can ensure that anyone, from anywhere, with ability and drive, has the chance to climb as high as they are able to.

Write to Peter; magtour@icloud.com