“HHe even created all people in the same order.” This is how one early Japanese translation of the Declaration of Independence gave the self-evident truth stated in its most celebrated sentence. To many Americans, this may seem like a common misunderstanding of “all men are created equal.” After all, the balance sheet of the Declaration’s claims seems clear enough: Everyone has equal weight. How else would the colonists claim equality with the King and hold him accountable?
But this Japanese translator realized something important: when Thomas Jefferson put pen to paper in the summer of 1776, the meaning of the adjective. okay it did not reveal itself more than its mathematical associations suggest. Samuel Johnson’s 1755 Dictionary of the English Language they had listed no less than eight definitionsincluding “like another in quantity, quality, or any other quality that admits of comparison,” “just in proportion,” and “in the same terms.”
Applied to political issues, many of Johnson’s definitions directly contradicted each other—in ways that are still relevant today. “In equal proportion” summarizes what modern liberals and progressives have in mind when they argue for policies like affirmative action. Respecting people as equals, they believe, sometimes means respecting racial differences. At the same time, many conservatives are inclined to “on equal terms.” In their opinion, be right it means that people are equal in all legally relevant ways; policies based on group differences therefore it must be rejected like treating people unequally before the law.
Many modern controversies stem from simple disagreements over some definition of okay is used. And there is much to discuss, given how many social differences Jefferson and his fellow writers left behind.
The Founders were not the first or the ultimate egalitarians who concluded that some members of society were “more equal than others,” as George Orwell put it. The Declaration’s reference to creation points us all the way back to the Book of Genesis, in which God creates men and women “in his own image.” But clearly that divine similarity did not prevent slavery, patriarchy, and many other social classes depicted elsewhere in the Bible. Likewise, human equality was nowhere to be found in democratic Athens, where only native Athenian men were recognized politically as peers.
As early as the third century, a jurist of the Roman emperor named Ulpian said that “as far as natural law is concerned, all men are equal.” But he did not mean that all human beings (male or female, slave or free) should be given equal rights. His argument was that, like the sun or rain or death, the laws of nature fell apart regardless for everyone, regardless of their wealth or status.
For the next millennium and a half, claims about equality proved to be quite compatible with sexism and slavery, as well as universal monarchy and empire. For many of our ancestors, the claim that all humans were “equal” in God’s eyes did not simply mean that they were sufficiently equal in skill to be considered equal socially or politically. Indeed, as in modern meritocracy, the main purpose to emphasize the inner equality of human beings was to excuse their unequal fates. If some people suffered or lost, they must have done something to deserve it.
Oand in 17th century England equality became the basis of political and ordinary people’s demands. One day in the summer of 1646, a prominent activist named John Lilburne came before the House of Lords and failed to kneel or even take off his hat. Briefly imprisoned by the nobles for contempt, Lilburne wrote a pamphlet asserting the “General Proposition”: “That every particular man and woman that hath breathed” was “by nature, all equal and equal in power, dignity, authority, and greatness.”
Known as “Freeborn John,” Lilburne had a knack for getting himself thrown into prison on behalf of various causes. Today, we might call him an “angry entrepreneur.” But after its closure, Lilburne’s Proposal became the defining factor of the radical Leveler movement, which later committed itself to unlocking all the revolutionary opportunities hidden in the word. okay. The Levellers demanded universal male suffrage nearly 300 years before modern England ratified it. And in a remarkable 1649 appeal to Parliament, a group of Leveler women insisted that because of them, too, they were created “okay for men,” they must also have the right to appeal to their representatives.
The Leveler movement often failed. But the Lilburne Proposal lived on as a kind of early meme—which eventually found its way into the Declaration of Independence. As it turns out, Lilburne was also distantly related to Thomas Jefferson, a cousin several generations removed. Whether Virginia was aware of this personal connection is unknown.
But in a letter written in June 1826, Jefferson summary his views on equality in language he borrowed from another Equalizer, Richard Rumbold: “The multitude of men are not born, with saddles upon their backs,” he wrote, “nor a favored few unshod and spurred, ready to mount them.” (Jefferson died two weeks later, on the same day as his best friend and political rival John Adams: July 4, the 50th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence.)
Still, the sense of equality was sufficiently distorted in Jefferson’s mind that he could, by the end of his life, claim ownership of hundreds of men and women born into slavery at Monticello—at least two of whom, we now know, were named “Lilburn.”
What makes this unfortunate in Jefferson’s life tell us about the declaration he prepared? Some readers may agree with it The New York Times Magazine“The 1619 Project,” which argues that “the goals of the founder of our democracy were false when written.” As a social justice approach, some commentators have even come to reject the term equality and want to introduce that word equality in its place.
The supposed difference comes in the popular 2010s memesshowing two cartoons of people trying to watch a baseball game in the yard. In the written panel equalityeveryone stands in the same size box, and not everyone can see the game. In the written panel equalityshorter people get extra boxes in inverse proportion to their height. But far from proving that equality is an outdated concept, the meme only shows us that Samuel Johnson’s two competing definitions of it continue to apply.
If nothing else, I hope that the strange, controversial history of okay it can help us resolve our political differences in a transparent and constructive way. Because the conflict is usually not between those who favor equality and those who oppose it. Rather, it is between people with conflicting views on what it means to be equal in the first place.
Many different meanings of okay they were certain when the Declaration was written, and they help explain why its “self-evident” truth has endured for 250 years. They also have a role to play as we pursue equality today. Perhaps, as that early Japanese translator suggested, all Americans are created in the same fashion. But what comes next is up to us.
