EQUALITY
AT THE STARTING POINT – WHAT AN INJUSTICE
By Prof. Plinio Corrêa de
Oliveira (*)
I hear people repeating at every moment that justice
demands all persons should have the same
opportunities when beginning their life, education, or career. According to
this view, education should be equal for all, and the curricula in the
different professions should also be equal. This, then, would result in the
more worthy persons inevitably standing out from the others. Thus, merit would
find its encouragement and recompense, and justice would finally reign over the
earth.
At times, in today's world where many a piece of
foolishness seeks to put on a "Christian" disguise, this way of
viewing things presents itself in certain "Christian" colors. Thus,
it is argued that at the end of each man's life, God will reward each according
to his merits without considering his station in life at birth. From the
standpoint of Divine Justice and everlasting consequences, the value of the place
where each person made his start is negated. And it becomes praiseworthy,
right, and Christian for men to try to organize their terrestrial existence
according to these norms of celestial justice, placing the advantages of
earthly life equally in the reach of all so that they will be attained by those
who are more capable.
Before analyzing this principle in itself, it is good
to note some of the ways it is being applied in one place and another.
There are businessmen who consider the inheritance of
their businesses to be a questionable privilege. Accordingly, they do not want
their sons to become the owners of their businesses merely by the right of
inheritance. Instead these sons will be employees like all the others, starting
out at the bottom with the most humble duties and responsibilities. They will
only rise to the position of running the businesses if they are the most capable
ones.
In fact, it is not rare to find affluent persons who
feel a certain uneasiness of conscience about transmitting their goods to their
sons: won't they be benefiting from a questionable or unjust privilege if they
are allowed to acquire goods that did not come from their own work or personal
merit?
Another example may be noted — this time in the field
of education. Some families of good social position and advanced education
consider it an imperative of social justice to establish uniform standards in
the primary and secondary schools. In order to achieve this, they would close
or reform all educational institutions of different levels in existence today.
In this way, the doctrine according to which all
starting points must be compelled to become equal is gaining ground. If this
doctrine is implemented fully, it will result in consequences that will stifle
initiative, destroy achievement, and overthrow the whole regime of private
property.
Before continuing, it is important to emphasize the
picturesque contradictions into which the defenders of these theses habitually
fall. Since they are deifiers of merit as the only criterion of justice, they
tend to feel that if students are given equal conditions, merit will invariably
assert itself. Accordingly, they generally favor schools of progressive or
modern education which are contrary to rewards and punishments, on the pretext
that both of these create complexes. In this way, the idea of merit and its
inescapable corollary, guilt, are eliminated from the education of the future
citizens of a civilization based on merit.
Ironically, these very deifiers of merit usually show
themselves to be favorable to the idea that all tombs should be equal. Thus, at
the end of a terrestrial existence organized only according to the criterion of
individual merit and at the very moment of entry into a happy or unhappy eternal
life according to the principle of merit or guilt, any special recognition of merit
must be excluded. Equal tombs are established for the outstandingly wise man
and for the common man, for the innocent victim and the infamous murderer, for
he who has spread schisms and heresies and for the hero who has lived and died
defending the Faith.
How can it be possible at one and the same time to
praise merit so much and also to deny it?
What a contradiction! But the contradiction of these
adepts of equality (and for everyone at the starting point) is even more
shocking when they at the same time declare themselves to be enthusiastic
defenders of the institution of the family. Considered from a thousand
different aspects, the latter is the most resounding negation of equality at
the starting point. Let us see why.
There is a natural, mysterious, and sacred fact which
is intimately tied to the family. It is biological inheritance. Obviously, some
families are more gifted than others in this respect; this frequently depends
on factors which have nothing to do with medical care or highly hygienic rearing.
And, moreover, biological inheritance brings with it important consequences in
the psychological order. There are families which, during the course of many
generations, have transmitted artistic gifts, a gift for speaking, a talent for
medicine, an aptitude for business, etc. This transmission by the family of the
same characteristics down through the generations destroys the principle of
equality at the starting point.
Furthermore, the family is not merely a transmitter of
biological or psychological gifts. It is an educational institution, and, in
the natural order of things, the first of all pedagogical and formative
institutions.
For this reason, the person who has been educated by
parents highly gifted in art, culture, good manners, and morality, always has
a better starting point. The only way that the impress of parental influence
can be eliminated is by suppressing the family and by educating all children in
state schools according to the practice of the Communist regime. From this, we
see that there is a more important hereditary inequality than that of
patrimony, that is to say, there is one that results directly and necessarily
from the very existence of the family.
And what about the inheritance of the
patrimony itself? If a father really has the heart
of a father, he will necessarily love his own son more than others, his son who
is flesh of his flesh and blood of his blood. Moved by this love, he will work
according to the Christian law and spare no effort, sacrifice, or vigilance to
accumulate a patrimony that will protect his son from the many disasters life
can bring. Having this desire and zeal, the father will produce much more than
he would if he did not have children. And, then, at the end of a lifetime of
work, he will die happy because he knows he is leaving his children in
favorable circumstances. Let us suppose that at the moment of his death, the
state were to come and in the name of the law, confiscate his inheritance in
order to impose the principle of equality at the starting point. Would not this
imposition trample underfoot one of the most sacred values of the family, a
value without which the family is not the family and life is not life? That
value is paternal love — yes, the paternal love that protects and assists the
child.
Far beyond the very idea of merit, it protects and
assists him, simply and sublimely because of the simple fact that he is his
child.
And that real crime against paternal love, which is
the suppression of inheritance, can it be committed in the name of Religion and
Justice?
(*)
Reproduced from “Folha de S. Paulo”,