A reader writes:

You’ve talked about how reason alone can’t prove the equality of man, and this intuitively makes sense to me. But how do you understand this part from paragraph 19 of Caritas in Veritate:

As society becomes ever more globalized, it makes us neighbours but does not make us brothers. Reason, by itself, is capable of grasping the equality between men and of giving stability to their civic coexistence, but it cannot establish fraternity.

At first brush, this seems to contradict your conclusions. I’ve thought of at least one alternative, though: that reason can grasp this concept, but that it can’t divine it on its own. Anyways, just curious on your take. Thanks!

The Holy Father is, of course, perfectly right here, but then so am I. 🙂 Reason can grasp equality, under healthy and optimal circumstances unfettered by things like insane materialist ideology, tribal loyalties blown all out of whack, and a thousand other bad fruits of original sin and concupiscence. But, historically speaking, such optimal circumstances are vanishingly rare and, before the arrival of Christianity, were attained with about the same frequency that monotheism was attained by pagans: virtually never. The modern world owes its breezy assurance that equality is “self-evident” simply and solely to one thing: the fact that Christian assumptions about the equal dignity of all human beings was kneaded into European culture for two millennia until everybody took it for granted. Get rid of that leaven and, although reason will be able (under optimal circumstances) to grasp it, it will nonetheless become vanishingly rare that it will, in fact, happen. What, after all, is abortion and infanticide rhetoric but the pagan reassertion that some lives are more equal than others? What is racism but the same thing? Or class warfare. Even in Christian times, the itch to reduce the Other to something less is simmering just beneath the surface. Get rid of Christianity and a thousand sophists like Peter Singer will be happy to supply “scientific” argument for human inequality as a justification for murder and oppression. They will be wrong and evil. But most “reasonable” people will credit them anyway.