ALL IN THE GENES?

Our society was born, at least politically, in revolutions of the seventeenth

century in Britain and the eighteenth century in France and America. Those
revolutions swept out an old order characterized by aristocratic privilege and
a relative fixity of persons in the society. The bourgeois revolutions in
England, France, and America claimed that this old society and its ideology
were illegitimate, and the ideologues of those revolutions produced and
legitimized an ideology of liberty and equality. Diderot and the
Encyclopedists and Tom Paine were the theorists of a society of "libert,
sgalit, fraternit," of all men created equal. The writers of the Declaration
of Independence asserted that political truths were "self-evident; that all men
are created equal; that they are endowed by their creator with certain
unalienable rights; that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of
happiness" (by which, of course, they meant the pursuit of money). They
meant literally all men, because women were not given the right to vote in
the United States until 1920; Canada enfranchised women a little sooner, in
1918but not in provincial elections in Quebec until 1940. And of course they
didn't mean all men, because slavery continued in the French dominions and
in the Caribbean until the middle of the nineteenth century. Blacks were
defined by the United States Constitution as only three-fifths of a person,
and for most of the history of English parliamentary democracy, a man had
to have money to vote.
To make a revolution, you need slogans that appeal to the great mass of
people, and you could hardly get people to shed blood under a banner that
read "Equality for some. " So the ideology and the slogans outstrip the
reality. For if we look at the society that has been created by those
revolutions, we see a great deal of inequality of wealth and power among
individuals, between sexes, between races, between nations. Yet we have
heard over and over again in school and had it drummed into us by every
organ of communication that we live in a society of free equals. The
contradiction between the claimed equality of our society and the
observation that great inequalities exist has been, for North Americans at
least, the major social agony of the last 200 years. It has motivated an