February 29, 2020
MY CORNER by Boyd
Cathey
Equality vs.
Liberty: You Can’t Have Both
Friends,
The March 2020 issue of The
New English Review contains a new essay that I’ve authored, a bit longer
than what I send out usually via this Blog format. It is titled: “Facing the
Egalitarian Heresy of the 21st Century.” It’s the fifth piece I have
written for NER, and essentially it makes the point, historically and practically
(and from Divine and Natural law), that the application in society of equality
is antithetical to liberty, that the more “equality” is imposed, the less
liberty you will have. My argument goes
against the sacred “talking points” of current conservative elites, the conservative
establishment, who have bought into a Leftist narrative. That template is
distinctly not conservative, not traditional, and in fact, not really tenable. A
major and central tenet of historic conservatism is that it is resolutely “anti-egalitarian.”
Whether you cite Edmund Burke or any of the American Framers,
even Thomas Jefferson, you will not find equality held up as a founding
principle. Yes, there is wording in the Declaration of Independence about “all
men created equal,” but understanding that document (which lacks constitutional
status) demonstrates that the equality meant was one of fair and equitable representation
of the colonists in the British government. The Declaration, in a real sense, is a kind of propaganda document, and obviously did not address such topics as slavery,
property-determined voting, or women’s rights: those things were individual
state issues. That was not its purpose. To attempt to incorporate it into
our constitutional fabric and perversely read it is truly destructive of
the republic. I won’t go on further.
My essay addresses some of the essential philosophical aspects. I pass it on to you today with the
hope that you will read it:
Facing the Egalitarian Heresy of the 21st Century
Poet Henry
Wadsworth Longfellow, in The Masque of Pandora,
writes, “Whom the gods would destroy, they first make mad.” He was not the
first to use a version of the phrase, which is found in Sophocles’ play, Antigone.
But the meaning has been fairly consistent for over two millennia.
Aren’t we witnessing this today?
A large number of our fellow citizens
seem possessed by a kind of madness. They seem to exist in a kind of parallel
universe, with its own set of beliefs, its own standards of truth and
particular narrative of facts. In almost every respect this universe represents
the contrary, the negation, of the inherited, rooted foundation on which our
historic Western and Christian civilization is based.
This contrary reality did not all of
a sudden spring up, it has existed and been cultivated and nurtured for
centuries. Its founding ideologues understood that their premises and desired
objectives ran up full force against the ingrained traditions and historic
legacy of a culture and civilization that traced its origins not only to the
beliefs of the ancient Hebrews, but also to the highest art, philosophy and
statecraft of the Greeks and Romans.
Encouraged by the Emperor Constantine
at the First Council of Nicaea (325
A.D.) and two centuries later by the Emperor Justinian the Great,
the empire both East and West recognized the primacy of Divine Positive Law—the
laws and revealed teachings of God and His Church. But not only that: this
transformation signaled the explicit foundation of Europe based not only on
Revelation, but also upon the reality of Natural Law, those rules inscribed in
nature and integral to it that also have as their Author, God Himself. The
Christian civilization that came about was built securely and firmly not only
on Holy Scripture but also the traditions and the legacy of those ancient
cultures that were not destroyed by the Faith, but fulfilled and completed by
it.
In the incredibly rich inheritance of
ancient philosophy there was a recognition that there were discernible “laws”
which govern the orderly operation and functioning of the social order and make
possible a harmonious communal existence within society. What the Christian
church did was to confirm the existence of those laws while adding a capstone,
a divine sanction and specificity derived from Revelation and the teachings of
Jesus Christ and the Church. Thus, this transformation of ancient society was
prescriptive, conservative in the best sense of that word.
Is this template not the exact
opposite of the modernist, progressivist revolution which seeks to cut society
off from its inheritance, depriving it of the accumulated wealth of that
heritage?
No doubt, change and reform, in some
degree, always must occur in society. But these changes do not affect the
necessity of our acceptance of the unaltered and unalterable higher laws given
by God or the laws inscribed in nature. Rather, they occur on a practical level
in any well-functioning society. There is a quote from Prince Giuseppe di
Lampedusa’s famous novel describing the revolutionary turmoil of mid-19th
century Italy, The Leopard (Il
Gattopardo): “Things will have to change in order that they remain
the same.” In 1963 director Luchino Visconti directed an exquisite film of the
same name based on that novel, starring, quite improbably, Burt Lancaster. The
film vividly portrays the tensions between the immemorial past and the
circumstances created by political and social change.
What Lampedusa’s principle character,
the Prince of Salina is saying is that no society—no culture—can completely
denude itself of its inheritance and its history and actually survive. And more,
a denial of natural law and the Divine Positive Law ends catastrophically. Such
experiments in total revolutionary transformation have inevitably ended in
violent bloodshed and incredible destructiveness—in the massacres of the French
Revolution, and more recently, in the Gulag and the concentration camp, or in
blood-soaked Maoism.
Over the past half century and more
we have witnessed a different kind of revolution; it does not employ as weapons
of choice the tank and bayonet, nor the Gulag as the final destination for
unrepentant opponents. It leaves nothing of substance behind in its wake. It is
an unfolding, all-encompassing cultural movement, subverting and then
incorporating in its service diverse extreme revolutionary elements injected
into our educational system, into our entertainment industry, into our
politics, even into the very language we use to communicate with each other.
The “violence” it metes out is mostly of a cerebral nature, not of the physical
kind, but rather predicated on shame, humiliation, and the fear of the loss of
a job or reputation. It plays on the natural human desire for conformity, while
steadily upping the ante in our laws—constantly moving the goalposts of what
are acceptable and unacceptable. It is the kind of intellectual “violence” now
writ large that once impelled people to look the other way when their neighbors
were hauled off to Siberia under Comrade Stalin, or to Dachau under Hitler.
But, arguably, it is worse, for it denies the very existence of those immutable
laws that govern the universe.
It has been highly effective,
utilizing as its major weaponry the terrifying twins, the inexpungable
accusations of “racism” and “sexism,” and a whole panoply of sub-terms that
accompany such charges: “white supremacy,” “historic white oppression,”
“colonialist imperialism,” “misogyny,” “toxic masculinity,” and increasingly
expanded to incorporate terms like “anti-migrant” or “anti-transgender”
bigotry.
The overarching desire of this
progressivist revolution is, in fact, not reform—not what Lampedusa’s Prince of
Salina says consolingly about some things changing so that other things can
remain the same. No, it is incredibly “post-Marxian,” making the older
Communist and Marxist revolutionary dreams seem tame in comparison. It invokes
and demands a total transformation in which nearly all, if not all, of those
institutions, those traditions, and that inheritance vouchsafed to us from our
ancestors is rudely discarded, rejected, and condemned as racist, sexist,
fascist—in other words, our remembered past is cut off from us.
This progressive revolution is
predicated on the idea of equality. Yet, in fact, the equality as envisaged
does not exist and has never existed in nature. For revolutionary “equality” is
a slogan, in reality an exercise in guile and subterfuge employed to shame and
cajole a weak-willed and gullible citizenry into eventually dissolving the
traditional social bonds and inherited natural (and moral) laws that have
governed our culture for two millennia. Its true objective is domination over
and power in society.
As an increasingly independent
outgrowth of an historic cultural Marxism formulated decades ago and insinuated
into our educational systems and entertainment industry, this assault on our
historic culture makes the template of the old Soviet Communists appear
conservative. Josef Stalin would never have, and never did, put up with same
sex marriage, transgenderism, or the kind of feminist extremism we see around
us today. True, the Soviets talked of equality, and women
occupied some professional positions, but for the Reds a strong family and
observance of supposedly “outdated” traditional morality were still important.
Revolutionary equality, in the form
of egalitarianism, is not only a rebellion against the Divine Positive Law, but
also against Nature, that is, against the way things are and function naturally
in our world, those workings and that usual consistency observed as
prescriptive laws for thousands of years.
There is a parable in the Gospel of
St. Matthew, the Parable of the Talents (Mt. 25:14-30;
The Parable of the Bags of Gold/NIV), which both mirrors and confirms those
laws. The three servants of the Master are given unequal amounts and told to be
faithful stewards and invest the talents wisely. The first two, those with the
largest amounts, comply and double their accounts; but the servant with the
least amount fails to use his one Talent, and thus is condemned: “You wicked
and lazy slave! You knew, did you, that I reap where I did not sow, and gather
where I did not scatter? . . . So take the talent from him, and give it to the
one with the ten talents . . . As for this worthless slave, throw him into the
outer darkness, where there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth.”
The parable’s message is that men are
created unequally in abilities, in status, in kinds and types of intelligence,
in physicality, in position. We must not compare our status invidiously with
those around us, for we are not judged by the talents or positions of others,
but by our own God-given unique capacity, our own talents, and how well we
measure up and fulfill our own specific roles in society. Thus, perhaps
ironically and to emphasize this point, the servant with more Talents
is blessed, but the servant with the fewest is condemned, not because
of rank or possession but because of non-compliance with the mandate of the
Master.
Egalitarianism as a movement is, as
the late Mel Bradford termed it, a heresy, fraught with extreme consequences
for Western society: “Equality as a moral or political imperative, pursued as
an end in itself—Equality with a capital ‘E’—is the antonym of every legitimate
conservative principle…there is no man equal to any other, except perhaps in
the special, and politically untranslatable, understanding of the Deity. Not
intellectually or physically or economically or even morally. Not equal!” (Modern Age,
Winter 1976, p. 62.)
It is in the realm of morality and the
observance of moral law that the effects of egalitarianism have been most
aggravated. Indeed, the destruction of masculinity and emasculation of men has
been a disastrous consequence of the “women’s movement.” For centuries—indeed,
not that long ago—an inherited code of honor, deference and respect on how to
treat women, prevailed in Western society. While, it is true, certain functions
and roles were generally not open to women historically, that in no way
diminished or lessened their critical importance and special position in
society. Indeed, as child bearers and mothers it was they who most uniquely
governed the essential running of the family and were the substantial
foundation of society.
The Church understood that women were
not the same as men, that women were different and that they had unique
God-given roles. Like the Blessed Virgin in Bethlehem who cared for the Cradle
in the Stable and nourished the Son of God who would bring grace and salvation
to the world, the primary role of women was the nourishing of familial
offspring and the continuation of the human race. There could be no more
significant role than this and, in that sense, women occupy in Christian
teaching an exalted and unequalled position, modeled on that of the Blessed
Virgin.
What folly, then, to even discuss
“equality” in this sense.
Our present culture is filled with
raging egalitarian revolutionaries—many political, many academic, many in
entertainment, many in media. They are, to quote T. S. Eliot, “destroying our
ancient edifices to make ready the ground upon which the barbarian nomads of
the future will encamp in their mechanized caravans.” (Eliot, Notes
Towards the Definition of Culture, 1948, p. 108.)
These revolutionaries tell us that
they strive for “correcting historic inequality” and “freedom from oppression.”
But their program—their revolution—is a dystopian nightmare which pushes the
unobtainable goal of egalitarianism. That program destroys true liberty and
succeeds in enslaving millions in unrequited passions and envy, unbound and
unreasoned, cocooned in a pseudo-reality. In their quest for an abstract
equality they destroy the historic liberties which define and give texture to
human society.
The late author-essayist, Erik von
Kuehnelt-Leddihn, in his classic volume,Liberty or Equality, wrote:
. . . it suffices to say that the
artificial establishment of equality is as little compatible with liberty as
the enforcement of unjust laws of discrimination . . . ‘Nature’ is anything but
egalitarian; if we want to establish a complete plain we have to blast the
mountains away and fill the valleys; equality thus presupposes the continuous
intervention of force which, as a principle, is opposed to freedom.
Liberty and equality are in essence
contradictory. (Kuehnelt-Leddihn, Liberty or Equality, 1952, p. 3.)
And again Bradford: “The only freedom
which can last is a freedom embodied somewhere, rooted in a history, located in
space, sanctioned by a genealogy, and blessed by a religious establishment. The
only equality which abstract rights, insisted upon outside the context of
politics, are likely to provide is the equality of universal slavery.”
(Bradford, A Better Guide than Reason, 1979, “Preface,” p. xii.)
In their frenzied revolt against the
laws of nature and nature’s God, the revolutionaries qualify as what the great
English writer G. K. Chesterton called “lunatics.” In his volume, The Poet
and the Lunatics (1929), Chesterton’s character Gale asks the
question: “What exactly is liberty?” He responds, in part:
First and foremost, surely, it is the
power of a thing to be itself. In some ways the yellow bird was free in the
cage . . . We are limited by our brains and bodies; and if we break out, we
cease to be ourselves, and, perhaps, to be anything.
The lunatic is he who loses his way
and cannot return. Now, almost before my eyes, this man had made a great stride
from liberty to lunacy. The man who opened the bird-cage loved freedom;
possibly too much . . . But the man who broke the bowl merely because he
thought it a prison for the fish, when it was their only possible house of
life—that man was already outside the world of reason, raging with a desire to
be outside of everything.
Our modern egalitarian
revolutionaries have, to use Chesterton’s parable, gone mad. In their frenetic
quest for abstract equality and a freedom not rooted in place, family and
history, they are men and women “already outside the world of reason,” enslaved
by an unrestrained rage to destroy the edifice of Western Christian
civilization which is grounded on both Divine Positive and natural law. That
destructive rage is matched only by their profound inability to create anything
of real and lasting value to replace what is destroyed.
This is where we find ourselves in
America today.
It is no exaggeration to state that
millions of our fellow citizens have been infected by an ideology that posits a
mythical, egalitarian “counter-reality” which has poisoned their thinking and
worldview to the point that co-existing with them in the same nation, in the
same geography, becomes increasingly difficult if not impossible. Their
template is highly aggressive and contagious; it must increase and grow, or it
dies. And, if opposed, it fights back viciously and with total war.
The nightmare scenario described by
Chesterton nearly a century ago has arrived today with full force: it surrounds
us, it cajoles us, it demands total subservience . . . especially if we have
the slightest inclination to think for ourselves, to doubt the new dogmatic and
constantly advancing egalitarian templates on feminism and racism. What was
perhaps tolerable five years ago is now met with demands for the execution of a
social and political death sentence, and what may be tolerable today will soon
be seen as a sin against the triumphant and ever-evolving social justice
warrior mantra of truth.
That is, until men stand and
forcefully oppose this lunacy, completely, honestly, rationally, and without
hesitation.
________________________Boyd D. Cathey was educated at the University of Virginia (MA, Thomas Jefferson Fellow) and the Universidad de Navarra, Pamplona, Spain (PhD, Richard M. Weaver Fellow). He is a former assistant to the late author, Dr. Russell Kirk, taught on the college level, and is retired State Registrar of the North Carolina State Archives. Has published widely and in various languages, and is the author of The Land We Love: The South and Its Heritage (Scuppernong Press, November 2018). He resides in North Carolina
