Can we be Equal and Excellent?
It has often been said that you can’t keep a good man down. But most human societies have been organized to keep good men down. There have been systems in which the individual status was determined not by his gifts or capacities, but by his membership in a family, a caste or a class. Such membership determined his rights, privileges, prestige, power and status in the society. His ability was hardly important.
The idea of democracy first developed in the eighteenth century. The nations affected by the industrial revolution discarded the idea of society being divided on the basis of heredity. People wanted a society in which everybody was equal before law. There was no upper or lower class. There was no discrimination on basis of caste, colour, creed or sex. Yet even in the United States we find society divided on the basis of class. The newspaper columns talked about the superior classes.
Certain preparatory schools were considered “fashionable”. There were exclusive clubs and traces of “class consciousness” were there even in casual conversation. There were colleges which gave special consideration to the sons of alumni, the clubs which weighed family background in selecting new members; mothers did not want sons to marry “below his station”.
We all love the idea of equality but what does the term equality really mean? First of all, we must believe that all men are equally worthy of our care and concern. We come as equals into this world and equal shall we go out of it. Beyond this we believe that men are equal in the possession of certain legal, civil, political rights. We believe with Aristotle that the only stable state is the one in which all men are equal before the law.
But we know that men are not equal with regard to the talents that they possess, and because they are not equal in talents they can also not be equal in their achievements. That is why we have stressed on ‘equality of opportunity’. “We may not all hit home runs,” the saying goes “but every man should have his chance to bat.” Equality means an equal chance to compete within certain rules established by our particular society.
The concept of equality prohibits cruelty in the strong, protects the weak from injury and defines certain rules of equality which should be respected.
It does not do away with the fact that there are individual differences or their consequences.
The modern concept of equality has produced certain measures which most Indians regard as essential, like the minimum wage laws and the principle that each citizen has one vote.
In 1856 when the statue of Benjamin Franklin was unveiled in Boston, the principal speaker said, “Lift up your heads and look at the image of a man who rose from nothing, who owed nothing to parentage… but who lived to stand before kings…”
