Egalitarian Spiritual and Legal Traditions

Abstract

The egalitarian spiritual and legal tradition started in the ancient world when Cosmopolitans and Stoics proclaimed human equality and brotherhood. Medieval theologians promised human equality in heaven. George Berkeley’s plans for a seminary in Bermuda included Native Americans and James Beattie scolded David Hume for his lack of empiricism in describing Africans. Nineteenth-century African English and African American thinkers and activists resisted slavery. Jim Crow followed reining in the Reconstruction Amendments to the US Constitution. The 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights provided an aspirational foundation for global egalitarianism. In 1954, the US Supreme Court legally ended school segregation in Brown v Board of Education. The Civil Rights Movement motivated legislation against racial discrimination, in 1964–1965.

Essay and Discussion Questions

• 1. What is the difference between egalitarian theory and egalitarian practice? Give examples.

• 2. Is cosmopolitanism relevant to contemporary race relations? Explain either way.

• 3. Does one have to believe in a religion as a person of faith, to accept the value of its teachings? Explain.

• 4. If Beattie criticized Hume for his ideas about race, from ulterior motives, does that weaken the validity of his criticism?

• 5. Why was Ham’s curse important to nineteenth-century African American writers?

• 6. Why was it necessary to “re-do” the Reconstruction Amendments with Civil Rights legislation?

• 7. What do you think will be necessary to make formal equality a reality in the United States?

• 8. What purpose does the UN Universal Declaration of Human Rights serve?

• 9. Audre Lorde is famous for having said that you cannot dismantle the master’s house with the master’s tools. Is that true? How does it apply to the usefulness of the egalitarian tradition?

• 10. What would you add to the egalitarian tradition that has not been discussed in this chapter?

Glossary

abolitionist movement

—political and social movement to end American slavery.

Affirmative Action

—controversial policy of giving nontraditional candidates better chances than white males for admission and hiring in social institutions, government entities, and large corporations.

Civil Rights Movement

—period of peaceful protest and demonstration from 1954–1968, seeking to end segregation and secure equal rights for African Americans.

Cosmopolitanism

—a perspective on other individuals and groups that is tolerant of personal and cultural differences and is not restricted by political borders, language, morals, beliefs, or customs.

descriptive

—accounts of how things are.

discourse

—forms of communication, including reading, writing, conversation, public speaking, and demonstration.

due process

—treatment according to fair and just rules by legal authorities.

egalitarianism

—view that human beings are equal in important ways.

empirical

—a method of inquiry or body of knowledge that is based on known facts.

entitlements

—benefits due to people, such as education or health care.

intellectual history

—history of ideas, chronological accounts of the thoughts of major thinkers and their intellectual influences.

Jim Crow

—racist system against American blacks, primarily in the US South from the late 1870s through the mid 1950s.

liberty

—freedom from external constraint; what people have a right to do without interference from others, including government.

lynching

—killing by a mob, without trial or due process for an alleged offense; in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries in the US South and Midwest, lynching was often carried out as festival, with children present and souvenirs of the victim’s body parts taken away.

NAACP

—NAACP (National Association for the Advancement of Colored People).

normative

—accounts of how things should be or change, how people should act.

promulgation

—broadcast of a law so that those it applies to know it.

Reconstruction

—decade after the Civil War when African Americans were granted rights and protections to support their free status.

sociology of knowledge

—study of the societal context of ideas and the influence of ideas in society.

Stoicism

—school of philosophy founded by Zeno of Citium (234–362 BCE) in Athens and enduring through the third century AD, in Greece and Rome. Stoics emphasized fortitude and universal human brotherhood.

suffragists

—advocates for securing women’s right to vote.