Well, we  accept that Jefferson and others were not being candid when they said that they believed that all men are created equal – indeed, they protested that this was a self-evident truth. And it is as untrue today for the United States – which are hardly united – as it was in 1776. 

Nevertheless, most people in the Western world give at least lip service to the Enlightenment view that each of us has our own worth or dignity simply because we are human.  Kant called this the Principle of Humanity.  It, and what I understand to be the rule of law, underlie what is involved in the term ‘western civilization’.  (Although the adjective does put me on guard – what is different about the ‘eastern’ version?)

My sense is that there is growing unease and unrest about the sources of division between people and their entities or polities – not in any order: race, faith, knowhow, and wealth.

Race

Race is something that we are born with, like it or not. Black people and white people feel different by instinct.  And how many feel that they have the bad end of the equation?  Those who feel worse off claim to be the victim of unfairness or injustice.

This problem is vicious because it turns people against each other and leads to name-calling, branding, and scapegoating.  That is a denial of the very notion of equality, or our inherent worth arising just from the fact that we are human.

And it comes with our ancestry.  We are stuck with it from birth.  It goes against what Sir Henry Maine in Ancient Law called the movement from status to contract – we go from being put in a box from birth to where we can make our own way around the slippery pole. 

You can see a throw-back to this kind of helplessness in those who have been in prison or who have lived under a totalitarian regime.  They have little or no sense of self-determination.

In its worst form, this disability involves caste – a descent that Maine also saw.  In speaking of the degeneration of Hindu Law, Maine referred to the time when ‘division into classes which at a particular crisis of social history is necessary for the maintenance of the national existence degenerates into the most disastrous and blighting of all human institutions – Caste.’

The curse of race and tribalism was not known to the apes, but with us it also led to slavery.  That is as complete a denial of humanity as you can get.  Slavery blighted the United States, and continues to do so.  Those who made the British Empire almost universally regarded the original inhabitants of the lands they colonized– like our First Nations – as inferior and expendable. 

But they were gentle and sensible compared to Spain and Portugal in South America, and most of Europe in Africa.  These places are all deformed and scarred in one way or another by the cruel way in which the white invaders – ‘waterborne parasites’ according to one Cambridge lecturer of colour – treated them.  It was not just cruel, but perfidious.

And if you believe that the toleration of slavery was inconsistent with the notion of ‘civilization’, then no nation was civilised until 1833 – when England abolished by statute what the common law had already ruled was illegal. 

That bears reflection – the United States and Russia did not emancipate slaves or serfs until 1863.  ‘Civilization’ may be a lot more novel than Lord Clark thought.

Religion

Why, you may well ask, did those who claimed to worship a merciful God take so long to act on this denial of humanity?

The issues arising from race and religion have one thing in common.  It is difficult, to put it softly, to look at those issues through the lens of logic.  We are in the realm of instinct and faith.  And the differences those issues lead to in us produce the most appalling and venomous results among us that go back to the time when Satan got the better of Eve and ‘earth felt the wound.’  We were all cursed.

Ultimately all religions rest on faith.  Attempts to warrant the existence or nature of God logically now look at best comical.  But our governance must be seen to rest on sensible pillars – and it can be analyzed and justified in logic. How can the two be reconciled?

It is sufficient to look at, say, Burma, France, India, Iran, Israel, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, the UK, and the US as examples of how different nations have grappled with this issue of the role of religion in government. 

One issue is that commands that are said to come from God carry so much more weight than those coming from Caesar.  Abortion in the U S is an example.  Commands from God tend to be absolute, and Caesar has no plausible claim on the afterlife.

There are wars between those of different faiths, but the worst may be wars between sects of the same faith.  Germany experienced the full horror of two world wars.  But in a survey taken in the 1960’s, most Germans nominated the Thirty Years War as the worst in their history.

And this need for the supernatural is encouraged by the spread of nonsense and the failure of language and courtesy coming from social media. 

Nor is it easy to legislate to limit the power of the supernatural.  The King of England is the head of the Church of England.    That is anathema in the U S where there are constitutional safeguards.  Yet religion does not interfere with government in England in the way that it does in America – starting with the dollar.

Athens and Rome had it easy.  Their gods did not claim exclusive rights, and the ancient cities as a whole were tolerant about religion.  The major faiths today mostly claim to have the only good answer.  They are like exclusive gentlemen’s clubs.  (And let’s face it, they were made by men, and attempts to put a woman in the godhead look at best fuzzy to the outsider.) 

So, most religions on their terms are unfounded in the eyes of a majority in the world, but most people are happy to put their faith in that which they acquired by accident – and the rest of us just go along for the ride.  That is not a good space to be in if you subscribe to the view that people who claim to have the answer are not to be trusted.

None of the major faiths has a clean record on avoiding conflicts between their followers or among their competitors.  There are increasing demands for more laws against ‘hate speech.’    Those laws commonly exclude scripture.  Otherwise the Koran and the Bible would be the first to be committed to the bonfire.

Knowhow

Some people are better at looking after themselves than others.  That goes for families, tribes, towns and nations.  It is difficult to give examples without giving offence.  The English showed the way in governance.  The French did so in painting, Germany in music, and Russia in the novel.  Great advances in science came from great men – like Galileo, Newton and Einstein.  Wall Street is the capital of capitalism.  Some nations just conduct their affairs better than others.  And some minorities look after themselves better than others.

All this shows why it is wrong to brand someone as having some attribute just because they come from a certain family, tribe, town or nation. 

But it also leads to envy and greed, and the wish to assert power over others.

Wealth

The first three issues cannot be measured.  That is not the case with the fourth.   You can daily read of CEOs earning a hundred times what is earned by one of the few human beings left in their charge.  Or of 95% of the wealth in the world being controlled by 1% of the population. 

The lines of Yeats immediately come to mind – word for word.

Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.

To repeat, that is word for word what is happening in the eruptions in Paris and elsewhere in Europe today.  And we are of course talking of the very opposite of equality.

The leading nations of the western world have been living beyond their means.  They are spending more than they are prepared to collect in tax, and their lenders are very uneasy.  So, Paris is caught between the barricades and the bond markets (the lenders), and whole generations feel excluded or disenfranchised. 

Worse, the inequality of wealth – income and assets – is taking on the complexion of a class war, so that Paris may again come to contemplate the distinction explained to Louis XVI on 14 July 1789 – between a revolt and a revolution.  The latter, said Carlyle, was ‘the Madness that dwells in the hearts of men. In this man it is, and in that man; as a rage or as a terror, it is in all men.’

So, many people in the western world have lost the comfort of religion.  They are fast losing confidence in their organs of business and government.  We in Australia just let the Westminster System die. We are losing the ability to talk calmly about our differences or to tolerate doubt.  And the whole future of the planet is in doubt.

Worst of all, the new generation does not have any faith in progress in the future.  They feel beset by doubts and fears that are anything but saucy.  My generation took for granted, even after the bomb, that we were going forward.

The moral, political and financial collapse of the United States enshrouds the west with fear and a dumb sense of unreality.  There had been signs, but the steepness of the decline calls to mind the ‘banality of evil’ described by Hannah Arendt.  (Among other things, the betrayal of the Ukraine means that the U S does not have one ally that trusts it, and the failure of the war against Iran leaves that nation more determined than ever to get the bomb.  Why?  Because the bomb brings immunity.  Just look at those who have it.)

Any community requires its members to show some tolerance and restraint, and for people to allow shades of meaning and differences of opinion.  All those go missing for people with narrow minds, a preoccupation with themselves, and a disregard for reality – all hallmarks of the most powerful men in the world.  People like Musk, Trump and Zuckerberg are cordially loathed, but they could not care less.  If they represent some kind of amoral benchmark, what hope have the rest of us got?

The iPhone has obliterated childhood.  Children retreat to their own virtual reality, and wonder if robots will run unmanned holes in the wall at Maccas.

My sense is that we in the west are being called on to pay a very high price for our sustained failure to deal with the kinds of inequality that we have allowed.  Just how that may evolve is way above my head. 

But there is a real risk that the whole shebang, in a phrase left to us by Gibbon, may collapse under the weight of its own stupendous fabric, and the only question will be not why it collapsed, but how it kept going for so long.

What I do know is that faith, hope, and charity, in any sense of that word, are in very short supply, and my grandchildren face a very different world than that in which I was born.  There is no glorious summer in sight at the end of this winter of our discontent.

We had, I am sad to say, the best of it.