More Equal Than Othersby
Christopher Alexion Author Kurt Vonnegut died last week at age 84, leaving his skeptical but stubbornly human stamp on American literature. Like most English majors, I studied Vonnegut in college, but it's for a short story one of my professors recommended outside of class that I actually remember him. Americans today regard Vonnegut's legacy as cynical – which it certainly was. Yet his story "Harrison Bergeron," written in 1961, reveals a more positive upshot of Vonnegut's doubt: his mistrust of the state. "Harrison Bergeron" is bitterly hilarious in its treatment of state-imposed equality. Vonnegut's dystopian tale begins in the year 2081, when "everybody was finally equal." These residents of the future aren't simply "equal before God and the law" but "equal every which way." The omnicompetent state, aided by the latest technology, has finally succeeded in removing all inequalities of strength, beauty, and intelligence. As C. S. Lewis predicted in The Screwtape Letters, democracy has become an excuse to stifle human achievement. If one stalk of wheat is higher than its neighbors, lop the little bugger in the name of equality. Vonnegut's glorious society accomplishes its goals through the office of the United States Handicapper-General. Vonnegut details some of the methods used to remove all "unfair" advantages: Beautiful people must wear masks. The strong have weights padlocked around their necks. Smarter folks are required to wear radio earpieces that scatter their thoughts with periodic random noises. One part of the story sums up the situation with particular wryness:
Vonnegut's story emphasizes the potential for abuse present in even the healthiest democracies. Equality is a great thing, but human beings are dim-witted enough to take this gift to extremes that eventually destroy whatever it was we were trying to protect. That's why our efforts toward equality need vitally to be guided by a love of liberty. Naked equality is just another name for tyranny – for if everyone's going to be equal in all aspects, then no one can really be free. To use Vonnegut's satirical examples, basic differences of genes and talents face the wrath of the Handicapper-General. To use more familiar images, the money- and power-hungry state uses coercive action to redistribute wealth and force Americans to comply with increasingly thorny regulations. Murray Rothbard saw the same point in Vonnegut, and the same danger in contemporary America: There is one and only one way, then, in which any two people can really be "equal" in the fullest sense: they must be identical in all of their attributes. This means, of course, that equality of all men – the egalitarian ideal – can only be achieved if all men are precisely uniform, precisely identical with respect to all of their attributes. The egalitarian world would necessarily be a world of horror fiction – a world of faceless and identical creatures, devoid of all individuality, variety, or special creativity. In such a system, equality itself becomes an illusion, protected by political smoke and mirrors. The state speaks of equality while it's riveting our chains, and at times can come up with some pretty nice buzzwords. Social justice is taking place. Unfairness is being removed. Man is taking charge of his own destiny. But C. S. Lewis warned us not to buy in: Let us not be deceived by phrases about "Man taking charge of his own destiny." All that can really happen is that some men will take charge of the destiny of the others. They will be simply men; none perfect; some greedy, cruel and dishonest. The more completely we are planned the more powerful they will be. (God in the Dock [Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1972], p. 316) Yet perhaps a different twentieth-century novelist made the point most clearly when he pointed out that when those in power trumpet equality, there's always a catch. They always end up being more equal than others. April 17, 2007 Chris Alexion [send him mail] is a graduate of Thomas Edison State College and lives outside Baltimore. |