Like a fox, in equality (Part 1)

 by Takuan Seiyo  

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Equality and Freedom are antithetical notions. America, which started as the Land of Freedom, has turned into the Land of Faked Equality, at the expense of freedom. An essential balance has been lost, not the least concerning the definition of who can be a member.

_{"The fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows one big thing."
— Archilochus, 680 BC – ca. 645 BC}

_***

Part 1 — Under God and Judge

Of all bedrock Americana, none has caused me more intellectual malaise and emotional bewilderment than the phrase, "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal."

What does it mean, "All men are created equal"? It reads like one of those slogans where every single word is a lie, and the whole adds up to a larger lie. Why "all men," when Negro slaves and Indians were excluded? Why only "men" but not women? Why "created," when people are unequal already at conception, let alone at birth? Why "equal" at all, when "men" are not equal, have never been, and, judging by the fate of past utopian egalitarian societies, can never be?

And how do you deal with the man who wrote these words: a slave-owning, natural aristocrat of good breeding and elitist predilections; a bon vivant connoisseur of fine wines, bespoke haberdashery and all that's exquisite ranging from china to book bindings? How do you place these words and this man in the context of his times, when most of his compatriots ate barley from earthenware pots and didn't know their Seneca from their snake oil peddler's pamphlet? 

All this is so confusing that my companion fox, Ogin, has been gnawing at the corner of my computer screen, waiting for me to shut up so that she can speak and save us from embarrassment. But I'll let her chew on it for a while.

I am not going to go the way of Moses, Jesus, Locke and Ruth Bader Ginsburg here, other than noting that the idea of the inherent dignity and equal worth of all humans is the great gift of the Jews to Western civilization. But the inclusion of the last name in the above pantheon indicates that I have a  problem with the way this equality thing has evolved.

I know that you think you know what the Creator knows, and has said, and had His clay creatures write down and teach to the rest of us.  I know what Thomas Aquinas wrote, and I know what the Rabbi said last Friday night, and what the defense attorney sold in his bill of goods in the closing statement to the jury. But I am more humble than that, at least since the day I've taken in this fox who was posing as a nubile female fan waiting for my autograph, and then turned to giving me a fox roast every day before dinner. Instead of pretending that I can look into the Creator's mind, and lift natural laws and rights from there, I prefer to deduce His intentions from His creation.

Consider Dr. William Henry Cosby, Jr. Are you his equal?

Let me refresh your memory. Dr. Cosby was born in 1937 on the wrong side of the tracks in Philadelphia. His father was a mess steward in the Navy. William himself joined the Navy after flunking school in the 10th grade and finding the prospect of a career in shoe repair unappealing.

An inauspicious beginning, but note that even in those early days there were signs that the gods had lavished unfairly. Already in elementary school, little Will was captain of the baseball and track & field teams, class president, and the number one jokester.  By junior high, he was leading in football and basketball, too. No doubt, by the time he had transferred to Germantown High, he must have been cutting a wide swath among the prettiest girls around, for he'd grown into a handsome youth, full of wit and vitality. Nothing gets them like making them laugh, which was Will's special talent. None of that, though, distracted him from working at a variety of pre-and-after-school jobs, including selling produce and shining shoes, to help support his family.

After his Navy service, William won a track and field scholarship to Temple University, where he also played on the football team. He left in his sophomore year, to make a living. After establishing himself financially, he returned and finished his BA at Temple; then went on to get an MA and a Doctorate (in 1977) from the University of Massachusetts.

Since then, he has published books, and has attained wide professional recognition. He is respected in his community. He is financially secure and lives in a nice house. He has been married to the same woman since 1964, and has fathered five children.   

Did I mention Dr. Cosby is black? Nowadays it puts you in the privileged camp, but back then, it was a stigma; a handicap he had to overcome, in addition to his poverty.  The man has achieved so much; traversed such a distance in his life.

So, again, I'll ask you, are you his equal?

I'll make it easier for you. I will answer first.

I will have no problem meeting Dr. Cosby as an equal. I can stare him down easily. I started with far worse handicaps than he had: social, political, personal. There are worse things than being born a black and poor man in the US of 1937. Like being born a black man in the Africa of 2007, or under Bolshevik occupation after the Nazis had erased your entire family and its place in society, leaving only two semi-living skeletons to conceive you.

Yo, Reverend, years before Tawana Brawley Muhammad lay in that dumpster in Hymietown, covered with feces, my father lay under a mountain of dung for weeks on end, hiding from the Waffen SS when not hitting them.  Even though you wear that white turtleneck stained in no King's blood, you are not his equal. Even though you have a talent for shakedown and pompous oratory, you are no equal of Dr. Cosby or most anybody I can think of. Begone, ye pompadoured wretch. By the way, Reverend, have you sent that letter of apology to Steven Pagones, yet?

Given where and how I started, compared to Dr. Cosby I feel good about myself. I've braved bigger obstacles than he has, managed to get a better education than he has, have attained success and international recognition in my field, have a good marriage and good friends. And I've done it all without kissing ass, nepotism, stabbing people in the back, stealing or relying on taxpayers' assistance, ever, even in the direst of circumstances. I have made good use of the hand I was dealt. I give myself a B+.

But I have not told you the whole truth. For when the future Ph.D. dropped out of Temple, he went into showbiz.  By 1963 he had revolutionized American comedy — without once using a 4-letter word or cheap riffs on the N-word. By 1965, he had become the first-ever black lead of a weekly dramatic TV series, I Spy. He would win two Emmys for that stint.

Four more weekly TV series followed between 1969 and 1992. Cumulatively, these shows made Bill Cosby one of the most beloved and popular figures in American history, leading to syndication profits, lucrative TV commercials, comedy albums, the whole nine yards.  Cosby is said to be worth about half a billion dollars now. I don't know about you, but I respect a man who makes that kind of money by the strict application of talent, brains, character, virtue, and hard work.

I am just getting started. In 1986, Bill Cosby's event at Radio City Music Hall broke that venue's 53-year-old attendance record. His 1986 book, Fatherhood, sold 2.6 million hardcover copies and 1.5 million paperback.  It was the fastest-selling hardcover book of all time.  His book Time Flies had the largest single first printing in publishing history — 1.75 million copies. He has had 21 albums on the national pop charts. He has earned eight Gold Records and five Grammy Awards.

I don't even want to go into the man's basic goodness, how many millions of people he has made happy, his charitable work, mentoring of the less advantaged, honorary degrees, civic awards, hall of fame inductions, White House dinners, the Presidential Medal of Freedom, and much more. The man has reached a station in life when those who honor him are honored by his accepting the honor.

Now, I will ask you again. Are you the equal of Dr. William Henry Cosby, Jr.?

I am not. Should you captain a boat that capsizes, and only one place remains on the raft to which both Bill Cosby and I are clinging, choose him. The man is a national treasure; I am not. When he enters the room, I shall rise. When the same maître d' at The Four Seasons who has just told me "We don't accept reservations until July" seats Bill Cosby at the best table on a walk-in basis, I shall not complain.

Life is unfair. I'd love to have been born with the better hand that Cosby was dealt, but even if I played his hand, it's far from certain that I'd have attained his heights. Character, stamina, discipline, perseverance, good thoughts, good cheer, right choices, and chance, matter too. Why would you insist that just because I am poorer, I have a claim on Bill Cosby's money? Why, just because I am white and my parents suffered unjustly, would you want to put me ahead of Cosby's son in the queue at Yale? If you assert that God has created us equal in his image, where do you get the hubris to try to undo coercively what God himself has wrought in Cosby's life or mine?

If you want to play the Father Vogler part in Amadeus, go ahead, tell me, "We are all the same under the skin. We are equal in the eyes of God."

I shall then cock my head, wait a beat like F. Murray Abraham's Salieri, and repeat his smashing retort, "Are we?"

"Okay," you will say, "maybe the divine basis for equality has been overdone. But we do live in a democracy with equality under the law and equal civic rights and protections. That's the premise."

As to equality under the law, I am sure that if I had one copy of every book, pamphlet, article, and court document chewing on this issue, I could fill a good-sized municipal library. The fox has bitten into my trousers and won't let me move one inch in that direction. She says that I am too stupid to try a furtive run across a meadow watched over by magnificent harpy and haribon eagles like Robert Heron Bork, for whom I'd be just a morsel of cucumber sushi.

For the penumbra side of it, I yield the stage to one of my favorite men of the law, Andrew McCarthy, who wrote this in the NRO blog on 5/9/07:

It is certainly true that judges (and the rest of us) must construe the Constitution and statutes.  But when judges do that in a way that invents things the text does not support, most people think that is illegitimate, even if they grudgingly accept it.  And when judges look at a clear clause like, “[n]or shall [any state] deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws,” and purport to “interpret” it as if it said, “Any state may deny any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws if the Supreme Court decides society would be better that way,” that is illegitimate.  Even if the public does not rebel over it, it promotes disrespect for the law and harms the reputation of the Court.

This gives me an entrée to state my humble, tax-paying citizen's opinion that, in a Republic, ought to be all-important: we have no equality under the law, even if we do a little bit better in this area than most civilized nations.

To begin with, what is this Imperial Judiciary thing, anyway? In a Republic, why would any citizen be obligated to call another "Your Honor"?  I will gladly call Bill Cosby or Ward Connerly, or Judge Janice Roberts Brown "Your Honor," and stand up when either enters the room. I honor him and look up to her, after all; not because of what they do for a living but because of what they have done with their lives, and how. But the judge, sitting there elevated in his black robe, may be pleasuring himself with a penis pump under the cover of his bench, or he has just pleasured a child rapist with a 60-day taxpayer-funded vacation, or  is about to be impeached for corruption, which will qualify him to be next in line to head the US House of Representatives' "Select" (these are sneer quotes) Committee on Intelligence. Your Honor? My foot.

That black robe might as well be ermine, for the judge rules a fiefdom over which, in practice, he exercises semi-tyrannical and hardly-checked power. He will throw you in jail or reach into your pocket for your failing to kowtow, or for any reason he fancies. It's "My court" this, and "My court" that, even though it's me who is paying his salary.

You can't do much about it, either, for His Lordship exercises seigniorial rights. You are an attached serf if anyone and his ambulance-chasing lawyer or ambitious prosecutor has Nifonged you into His Lordship's court, ruining you even if you are innocent. If you think that the system provides for the easy removal of crooked or unjust judges, just check the tortuous circumstances of Alcee Hastings' impeachment; only the 7th successful impeachment of a judge in US history.

The Stop Abuse Webring lists the ten worst judges who ought to be impeached but won't be, for as these bloggers say, "Congressional refusal to discipline members of the federal judiciary for trampling the rights of the rest of us has turned our federal courts into instruments of oppression and creators of social problems almost beyond belief."

Suppose now that the judge is wise and righteous. Are we equal under the law?

Consider the alternative scenarios of Bill Cosby and me going on trial for involuntary manslaughter. Wading through thick crowds of well-wishers, reporters, photographers, and TV network news presenters, Cosby walks into the courthouse chaperoned by a Dream Team of lawyers, each one of whom is a celebrity in his own right.  At some point in the trial, the awe-stricken judge will ask him for an autograph. Every word uttered in that courtroom, every twist of law and procedure, will unveil before tens of millions of TV witnesses.

Now, suppose that I am the one on trial, not Bill Cosby. Will I have the same quality of legal talent in my corner? Will the judge have the same incentive to serve justice? Will the jury be as earnest? To ask these questions is to answer them.

And it's okay by me. Even if you had enough money to hire the Dream Team, there aren't enough such lawyers to fill the need. If you believe that a felon ought to be let off because he was poor and couldn't afford Robert Shapiro, or because he was black and couldn't adjust to an "oppressive white culture," you are crazy enough to be appointed Professor of Critical Social Thought at any Ivy League university.

Equal justice as an ideal is good enough for me, if it be the animating principle of jurisprudence, and not the coercive machine of Utopia. If this were meant to be Utopia, God, whom you invoke as authority on  justice and equality, would have made it so. Which is why I won't defile your day with more than a passing reference to sweet-sounding serenades like "fair equality of opportunity" or "distributive justice," that hide vile Vladimirian viruses within their Trojan timbers. There are battalions of Ph.D.s and LL.D.s toiling in the fields of Justice and Equality, who would benefit society much more by toiling in the fields of lettuce and strawberries.

We ought to be more concerned with properly recognizing the fuzzy nature of reality, than with devising Platonian orthodontics in which to cage and cripple the cross bite of unconfinable actuality. Our orthodontists themselves are cripples. What business do they have crippling reality?

Just look at the doyen of all orthodontists, Plato.  Pages upon pages of platonic palaver, on issues such as what is knowledge.  This guy says knowledge is perception, and then he says, no, knowledge is true belief, and Socrates has a dream, and we settle for knowledge as true belief plus account of the composition of the object of the belief.

Far be it from me to knock Socrates; I am just arguing for balance.  For what has been lost in that discussion, and in our culture, is the issue of the knower. Compare Plato to what the 17th century warrior and Zen teacher, Suzuki Shosan, has taught:

Be aware of yourself and know yourself. No matter how much you have learned and how much you know, if you don't know yourself, you don't know anything. Indeed, if you don't know yourself you cannot know anything else. 

Shosan wrote elsewhere that (S)ocial principles are nothing but the application of genuine honesty, making reasoning accurate and action just. But our social principles are interpreted for us by married religious leaders who lie about frequenting male prostitutes; and married national leaders who depend on what is is and lie under oath; and married state leaders who turn gay American on the taxpayer's dime while the wife is giving birth at the hospital; and legislative leaders who build bridges to nowhere with your money, having first bought Nowhere; and faux-Cherokee academic leaders who falsify and plagiarize and give comfort to the enemy while preaching justice; and business leaders who backdate stock options to add another Pollock to their collection behind that operating budget staple, the $6,000 shower curtain; and cultural leaders who count barrels of shekels in the back room while in the front room gangsta Pied Pipers lead a lost generation out of Hamelin.

What use it is to you or me that such people coo about equality and justice? When the mirror is so soiled, it cannot reflect truth and reality even with the help of Socrates or Jefferson. 

I am not happy with the way our binary 1/0, Yes/No cognitive mode has dealt with the issue of equality and justice. That's why I am going to unleash the fox into this maze. She wields the kind of fuzzy logic that Professor Lotfi A. Zadeh conceived in the mid-1960s at UC Berkeley. Predictably, Zadeh could not find anyone in the US interested in the commercial application of his ideas, so he took them to Japan. Today, you can't cook rice, wash a pair of socks, or ride an elevator in Japan without fuzzy logic's interpreting reality far better than our ON/OFF model can do.

In the late 1990s, when a Chinese university tried to list all the consumer product categories using fuzzy logic, the list exceeded 100 pages. So listen up, for it is we who could have been producing and selling all these products to the world. Instead, we have been turning college students into race maniacs and "Social Justice" fiends instead of making them into engineers and technicians. That's why our steel mills turn into casinos.

I do want to live in a society that treats equals equally, and grants every member the basic, if unnatural, Lockean rights of the US Constitution.  Nonetheless, as Niels Bohr has said, "The opposite of a correct statement is a false statement.  But the opposite of a profound truth may well be another profound truth."  Equality and Freedom are antithetical notions. America, which started as the Land of Freedom, has turned into the Land of Faked Equality, at the expense of freedom. An essential balance has been lost, not the least concerning the definition of who can be a member.

I came to America because I sought greater freedom. Now I have to sit on a bus by a branded boom box barbarian brandishing Bloodz b's at 115 bitch decibels, and I can't tell him to shut up because he'll pull a gun the right to which, along with the right to ride a bus, he, but not I, should have been denied by law, and he will shoot me, and the witnesses will wither, and Reverend will demonstrate in front of the courthouse braying "Auuuull men are created equal" into the bullhorn, and the white elite will hide under its desks, the lowlife will be let out on probation, and I will be branded Racist, hounded out of my job, and charged with the crime of hateful thought.

This has all turned into a pathetic farce. So, next time, I'll howl about the inequality fostered by our legislative and executive branches, and I'll let the Oriental fox try to find a path out of this bog.

Culture: General

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