Cherry-Picking C.S. Lewis on Egalitarianism: A Corrective
This recent meme shared out of Moscow, Idaho triggered my curiosity:
The question mark arose because, while these may have been Lewis’ words, the sense seems too one-dimensional for Lewis. So, like a good Berean (or maybe just a regular Berean), I looked it up. I learned a few things that may (or may not) surprise you.
The quotation as presented is a criticism of “egalitarian” thought. Likewise, the same quotation is featured in an article by sometime Wilsonite compatriot Joe Rigney. (This is the same fellow who recently joined Wilson’s Man Rampant to inform us, in the name of all things truly-masculine-leadership, that “empathy” is a “sin.”) Rigney squeezes in a figment of Lewis’s real context in his article, but glosses over it as a mere sidebar, when in reality it is the greater thrust of Lewis’s point: we live in a fallen world beset by abusers of power, not one in which positions of power can be inherently trusted and some golden age of patriarchal rule will fix everything.
On the contrary, Lewis’s point is that our human attempts at such hierarchies were rightly taken away because time after time, we abuse them and harm people. Yes, our institutions and law of equality may be artificial, but they are necessary as checks upon human evil.
The fraud of both the meme and the larger article is the highly selective cherry-picking of Lewis’s commentary on equality. When read in full, a message almost completely opposite emerges, and it is the better half of Lewis’s nuance on equality that is so deficient throughout most of the half-baked version of Christian worldview these men too often push.
Both efforts stress only the part of Lewis in which he emphasizes the facts of nature that people in nearly all measures are not always “equal.” Of course, we emerge as some larger, stronger, more gifted in various ways, etc. Lewis’s point, however, is abstracted, and from it a lesson contrived: a warning about envy arising when a lesser looks up at a “superior.”
Left in this form, there can follow much finger wagging and the requisite blasting of leftist tyranny, commie propaganda, etc. Ha ha, we patriarchal conservatives are so much better and right all along! Just listen to Lewis!
Were it only that with which we had to contend, the lesson would be adequate and apropos. But there is precious little talk about how envy and lust beset those who relish inequality and positions of superiority even more so—and that is Lewis’s fuller point. After the selection lifted by Wilson, Lewis almost immediately negates the intended thrust of these guys by adding:
I believe that if we had not fallen, Filmer would be right, and patriarchal monarchy would be the sole lawful government. But since we have learned sin, we have found, as Lord Acton says, that “all power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.” The only remedy has been to take away the powers and substitute a legal fiction of equality. The authority of father and husband has been rightly abolished on the legal plane, not because this authority is in itself bad (on the contrary, it is, I hold, divine in origin), but because fathers and husbands are bad. Theocracy has been rightly abolished not because it is bad that learned priests should govern ignorant laymen, but because priests are wicked men like the rest of us. Even the authority of man over beast has had to be interfered with because it is constantly abused. . . .
These are truths that I think even the Moscovite religionists would not deny in their attempts to reenact 1890 (or 1850—it’s not always clear), but their formulations and proclamations so often fail to consider these effects of the fall in both practical outlook and systematics, too.
Lewis’s point is that even if we affirm the rightfulness of rigid hierarchies as a divine theory and order, we nevertheless destroy them in actual practice because of our sin. And isn’t this what we see so often, especially in these circles that feature radical emphasis on hierarchical roles?
Lewis’s point, further, is that while we can criticize radical leftist tyrannies founded in ideologies of equalitarianism, that does not automatically mean the answer is in conservative patriarchy or monarchy, etc. This other route is not only also beset by the same sins of envy and lust as the leftist route, but is more dangerous in some senses because we are speaking of positions of power.
In a separate essay on “Equality,” he further explains these ideas. Note: he does something which you rarely hear our would-be patriarchalist leaders do: he exhibits his own humility and inherent unfitness to lead. He says,
A great deal of democratic enthusiasm descends from the ideas of people like Rousseau, who believed in democracy because they thought mankind so wise and good that everyone deserved a share in the government. The danger of defending democracy on those grounds is that they’re not true. And whenever their weakness is exposed, the people who prefer tyranny make capital out of the exposure. I find that they’re not true without looking further than myself. I don’t deserve a share in governing a hen-roost, much less a nation. Nor do most people—all the people who believe advertisements, and think in catchwords and spread rumours. The real reason for democracy is just the reverse. Mankind is so fallen that no man can be trusted with unchecked power over his fellows. Aristotle said that some people were only fit to be slaves. I do not contradict him. But I reject slavery because I see no men fit to be masters.
This much alone falsifies the spin put upon Lewis’s comments by men like Rigney and Wilson, who are clearly trying only to leverage the great writer’s name to further certain delusions of social order. If we are to learn anything from what Lewis actually said, it would be that the view of patriarchy advanced by these men ironically has more in common with right-wing pagans like Aristotle than the Christian view. The latter sees the dire need for equality because sinful and envious men abuse positions of power, including those men and those positions in a Christian society.
Lewis continues:
This introduces a view of equality rather different from that in which we have been trained. . . . I don’t think the old authority in kings, priests, husbands, or fathers, and the old obedience in subjects, laymen, wives, and sons, was in itself a degrading or evil thing at all. I think it was intrinsically as good and beautiful as the nakedness of Adam and Eve.
I would quibble with him here, but not on his immediate conclusion:
It was rightly taken away because men became bad and abused it. . . .
This is a lesson I have been trying to get across on so many fronts for so long. Those of us contending for biblical law and biblical worldview have absolutely no moral high ground from which to pontificate to the rest of the world until we have addressed the abject failures in the practices in our own selves and religious societies: the histories of oppression, racism, and so much more. As I’ve said a hundred times now: leftism advances because the church refuses to lead in radical sacrificial humility and service. Statism fills every single void and more where the churches deny their divine missions and duty, for decades now.
Meanwhile, we have been busily trying to write the blueprints for rebuilding the external structure of the societies we envision: small government, abolishing public schools, ending abortion, reinstituting various old conservative laws. In so much if not all of this, we are demanding particular forms of godliness without the functions of godliness, which would more often than not be sacrificial on our part. We want a worldview edifice, not worldview seeds that first die in themselves and then over centuries grow into mighty oaks.
This is true first and foremost in our assertions to reconstruct the family. We pretend to restore Eden, so we try to reconstruct one in form. To make it worse, we misconstrue, or mix in, some forms of the fall (male domination) as if it were the original form of innocent Eden. This exacerbates the problem, because equality is not only being rejected absolutely where it should not be, but because a pagan view of hierarchy is masquerading as a Christian virtue. It is for this problem precisely that Lewis says we must have equality as a medicine and remedy against abuses of power:
But medicine is not good [in the sense that its existence points to the reality of disease]. There is no spiritual sustenance in flat equality. It is a dim recognition of this fact which makes much of our political propaganda sound so thin. We are trying to be enraptured by something which is merely the negative condition of the good life. And that is why the imagination of people is so easily captured by appeals to the craving for inequality, whether in a romantic form of films about loyal courtiers or in the brutal form of Nazi ideology. The tempter always works on some real weakness in our own system of values: offers food to some need which we have starved.
When equality is treated not as a medicine or a safety-gadget but as an ideal we begin to breed that stunted and envious sort of mind which hates all superiority. That mind is the special disease of democracy, as cruelty and servility are the special diseases of privileged societies. It will kill us all if it grows unchecked.
So, the patriarchal fallacy is but the flip side of the communistic equality fallacy. And the Moscovian fallacy of the meme and article is that of presenting on the one half of that critique which makes the other side look pagan and foolish, and not owning up to the paganism of their own. Lewis, however, can rightly condemn when our own self-professed righteous vanguards foolishly prance about in their own gaudy, romantic displays of courtliness and wear radical anti-equality ideologies on their sleeves.
Indeed, is it not so much of this that we have seen from with the circles of neo-patriarchalism and various satellites and baggage of even my own home, the Christian Reconstruction movement? I confess I have always been perturbed and critical of the Vision Forum and some CREC circles ethos of dressing up in antebellum hoop skirts and period gentlemanly attire to reenact social balls of the plantation elite. Why is it that the most outspoken of the proslavery theologians, Dabney and Thornwell, find so much emphasis throughout the writings and provocative statements of leaders in these circles, Wilson included. Why is it that in the broader scope of such “paleoconservative” Reformed circles I myself have had to battle with people expressing actual Nazi sympathies or ideologies, harboring those who did, or criticizing me for criticizing it!? Why is it also that the ratio of abused wives and daughters, sexually abused girls, including young girls, and various instances of molestation and statutory rape not only seem to occur at an alarming rate in these small circles, but are also so frequently covered up and suppressed by the very guardians and leaders who vaunt themselves warriors and protectors against all unrighteousness?
Why, in short, does there seem to be a disproportionate abundance of the very types of tyrannies Lewis is calling out among the anti-equality tribes: the abuses of men over women, pastors over parishioners, intellectuals over “average” minds, and even man over nature?
And why do these same leaders of these circles promulgate articles cherry-picking only select parts of Lewis like this, or even more misleading memes? In handling Lewis’s work itself, for example, is this level of error incompetence or actual dishonesty? Can they not see their error, or do they not care?
Whatever the reason for such failure, it needs to be confronted and replaced with the whole truth and the practice of the whole truth. It is here that simply reading Lewis in his entirety is far superior (see, I can assert inequality where it is needed!) to those who would so abuse his sentiments. Let’s let Lewis finish it for us:
Do not misunderstand me. I am not in the least belittling the value of this egalitarian fiction which is our only defence against one another’s cruelty. I should view with the strongest disapproval any proposal to abolish manhood suffrage, or the Married Women’s Property Act. But the function of equality is purely protective. It is medicine, not food. By treating human person (in judicious defiance of the observed facts) as if they were all the same kind of thing, we avoid innumerable evils.
In short, egalitarian ideas provide our “only defense” against the inevitable cruelties that arise among monarchies, elitisms, and our modern patriarchal reenactments in a fallen world.
We need not become ideological “egalitarians” in order to appreciate and incorporate the appropriate virtues equality bestows upon us. When we don’t have these, would-be patriarchs will be unchecked and truly rampant in “innumerable evils,” guaranteed by the nature of the fall and power. Just look at the lines of Cain and Nimrod. And is it not ironic that in the quest to protect the advent of “great men” from suppressive leftist equality that today’s would-be patriarchs will go so far as to razor-blade-out half the great teachings of a great man himself? Apparently, this vaunted inequality is no protection for great men, either—not against the corruption of men anyway.
The great abiding irony is this: a divinely ordered hierarchy is one in which the form of power is perfectly infused and in unity with the function of giving, sacrifice, selflessness, sharing, and, gulp, equality. Without the practice of the latter, the dogma of the former will be turned into abuse and innumerable exploitations. When the day comes that the sanctifying influences of the Holy Spirit so permeate mankind that His fruit thoroughly pervades our relationships, then the edifices and forms of hierarchy will not be needed—they will already exist in perfected form naturally. The natural deduction of this is that attempts, especially in radical form, to establish the forms before that time will inevitably result in the same failures of the past that Lewis mentions. They are, therefore, futile and destructive dreams at the present time—and that is merely speaking of such forms as are not also beset by pagan views of power and rule.