Human history, however, refutes their basic assumption.
It is true that mankind has never experienced real equality, wherein members of a given society all have the same social status. But “progress” has always meant equalization. “Equal” is a social term and means having the same social status.
The progress of human society has always been accompanied by the expansion of groups to include new groups of people who recognized their belonging together. Mankind was first divided into families, sibs, and tribes. Every human being outside the group was an alien and had no status in the group, no “equality.” Groups fused into larger units; and in the process of settling down, distinction between clans and families was finally broken down to give way to a new human organization: a regional unit based on geographical boundaries,” uniting within its framework members of various families and sibs as full-Hedged citizens, and therefore as more or less “equals.”
That was the beginning of our civilization. The groups increased from small units comprising one or a few villages to national units and finally empires, although mostly by force and conquest. The structure of all these groups remained full of inner contradictions. While human beings, bound together by common laws, were compelled to respect and accept each other, they were no longer integrated in a homogeneous and close unit, as had previously existed within a clan. Members of different families, becoming fellow citizens, could no longer kill each other as they did before, but their friendship and cooperation were still limited. Short of physical destruction, they could abuse, cheat, and exploit each other. Necessity for a very subtle method of warfare and self-protection may have been one of the forces which compelled man to use his brains more than his fists. One’s fellow man became a very peculiar mixture of friend and enemy. This type of human relationship, characteristic of the whole “civilized” society, invaded even the close relationship within the family.
As human culture, based on mutual exploitation, has made so little progress in respect to human interrelationships, many despair of any future progress of mankind. What, they ask, has been gained by all the development of science, by all the technical progress, if man suffers today as never before, if war ravages and threatens more violently and more destructively than in any previous time? If we compare our present civilization with that of the ancient Greeks, small indeed is the progress man has made. We must recognize, however, that even today we belong to the same cultural period as the ancient Greeks. One of the reasons why the ancient world could not develop a new social order, why mankind at this period could not progress, was its inability to eliminate the enemy within the group. Society at this time was a slave society and did not permit the acceptance of fundamental and equal human rights. The idea of human equality, however, had already been conceived and survived-as Christianity-the deep cultural relapse which mankind suffered during the Middle Ages. Not until the Renaissance could the cultural level of the ancient world is slowly resumed.
Since then, mankind has witnessed rapid progress. Especially was the fundamental tendency to unify accelerated when science and technology brought men closer together than they had been before. Distances shrank, and the whole’ civilized world became one unit, first of knowledge and act, more recently also economically, although not yet politically. Empires arose again, embracing the whole world. Today the view is widely accepted that the world is one family-the family of man. We all belong together, irrespective of color and race, of creed and culture; even irrespective of the degree of civilization. Whatever happens in one part of this earth affects all of mankind. This growing unity levels off the distinctions between human beings. The French and the Russian Revolutions ending feudalism, the Bill of Rights, and the American Civil War are milestones in the emancipation of all underprivileged groups. The idea of human rights brought recognition of the rights of laborers, children, women, and all races.
But the rise of the previously suppressed groups engendered the insidious drive of reaction. Equality, a promise to one group, is a threat to the other. As the growing equality of women intensifies and aggravates the struggle between the sexes, so, in general, emancipation provokes all those who consider their privileges endangered. Consequently, competition increases universally, and warfare in its most violent and heinous form results, threatening the whole culture and the very existence of mankind. But reaction never can win. The wheel of time never turns back, except in complete collapse. It is possible to destroy a whole culture-mankind has often experienced such destruction -but never has one stage of development been followed by a reestablishment of what had preceded. If mankind survives at all the terrific upheaval of our days, it can never be as it was before laborers, women, and all races gained social status and full citizenship. Either we shall perish, or we shall establish real equality, which is the basis of democracy. There must be a new order that will give meaning to this word so often used for a principle so little practiced. 