The presumption of the value of social equality is deeply entrenched in Australia. Australians downplay class difference, even though that difference is deeply entrenched in their society. From the clash between the ‘silvertail’ Manly Sea Eagles and the working class South Sydney Rabitohs (both filled with players earning ten times the average wage) to the political bearpit, egalitarianism is a presumed value in the culture of ‘mateship’. As one commentator notes, it plays a significant part in a candidate’s political chances, and reactions for and against it may even have decided the 2001 Federal election. [1]
Gabriel lists at least five variants of the egalitarian impulse ‘deployed in Australian public life’:
- Collective egalitarianism, working together for the common good;
- Anti-establishment egalitarianism, a distrustfulness of those who claim authority
- Classlessness, the absence of class consciousness
- Sameness, the common consumption of services and culture
- Equal opportunity, access to the same opportunities to participate in public life.
Understanding this is important, as much of the Labor left reaction against growing Pentecostal churches in the ‘marginal seats’ was based on the same critique their spokesmen made of ‘the aspirationals’. As both Gabriel, and C S Lewis, point out, they are wrong on a number of accounts. It is, however, important to realize that this sort of ideology is strong in democratic societies, and departure from it can be the cause of secular critique of Christian values. The assumption among the ideologs is that resistance among Christians to egalitarianism as a form of sameness (Gabriel’s type 4) is the same as rejection of egalitarianism as a whole is both baseless and destructive. The peril in that line of thought was pointed out by C S Lewis in his 1943 essay in the Spectator, simply called ‘Equality’.
‘I am a democrat’, wrote Lewis, ‘because I believe in the Fall of man’. [2] Lewis’ point was that political equality existed not as a tried solution for training humans toward the Good, but as a defense against the evident historical recurrence of human evil. In his apologetic fantasy, Screwtape Proposes a Toast, he notes:
For “democracy” or the “democratic spirit” (diabolical sense) leads to a nation without great men, a nation mainly of subliterates, full of the cocksureness which flattery breeds on ignorance, and quick to snarl or whimper at the first hint of criticism. And that is what Hell wishes every democratic people to be.
One can misread him here. This is no Anglican traditionalist attempt to grasp at fading elitist power (though Lewis worked in the high temples of elitism, the pre-mass society University system all his professional life), but rather an attempt to ask what is the ‘good’ towards which the values of a society are directed. It is a question not asked in Australia. We do not ask ‘what is the good?’ but rather ‘what is the useful?’It is the well-attested byproduct of having sprung into existence as a string of British colonies in the late Enlightenment, under the particular gaze of Jeremy Bentham. [3] The problem with that is that it can lead one to assume that having values necessarily means having good values. With religious views derided in the public sphere (I write two weeks after Richard Dawkins’ recent potboiler – The God Delusion- was turned into a television special on the Australia public broadcaster, and a week after the Australian Writers Festival hosted Michel Onfray, author of the Atheist Manifesto), seeking for ‘the good’ is out of style. Dawkins’ self-promoting delivery of what Alister McGrath calls ‘ another dogmatic fundamentalism’ [4] may be embarrassing to other atheists, but it is a common enough faith at this end of the world.
As Lewis notes, however, Christians hold social equality as a relative rather than absolute good. Democracy is necessary, because it restrains evil (mostly). Like ‘tolerance’ (by whom? Of what?) however it is a functional necessity, rather than a source of life or energy: ‘there is no spiritual sustenance in flat equality’. [5] So Christians find themselves in all sorts of sectors of the political spectrum. Some, are indeed collective egalitarians, participating in communes, working for greater equality in economic distribution around the world. They are so, however, not because their aim is equality, so much as a restoration of God’s justice, or simply because they seek a purer expression of Acts 2 spirituality. Some, like Lewis, know history well enough to be distrustful of those who claim improper authority. In that sense, they are anti-hierarchical egalitarians rather than anti-establishment egalitarians. Their political positions might well coincide with anti-establishment egalitarians, but the very word ‘anti’ would give them pause. Their egalitarianism in this sense is based on the priority of protecting the weak against the effects of the Fall, and of preserving for God a proper primacy of authority. Long before Marx promoted revolution against capitalist elitism, therefore, the covenanters in Scotland overthrew a government which sought to impose secular authority over spiritual matters, and to place the King on the same standing as the ‘one head of the Church’, Christ. Both are social revolutions, and though their inspirations are miles apart, they converge in one matter- the need for proper restraint of human claims to power over others.
Lewis’ concern was for the body politic. ‘Life’, to Christians, is not a biological sideproduct, but the result of attachment to God’s creative energy. Attempts to establish relative values as absolutes, he suggests, will only result in disillusionment. ‘We are trying to be enraptured by something which is merely the negative condition of the good life.’ [6] ‘Enraptured’ is the key term – the result of displacing true religion is not secularity, but secularism – an ideology which substitutes as false religion. Hence Professor Dawkins’ crusade, his preaching style, his televangelism – all religious modes he has adopted on the utilitarian presumption that what is good for the goose is good for the gander. But the goose knows that crusading, pompous preaching, and televangelism are actually the substance of their beliefs in the first place, leaving the world awash with pseudo-religious accretions of secularist individualism in place of concerted efforts to find and live 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.’ [7] Lewis, of course, was writing in the middle of the Nazi terror. Attacks on the Church had to do with the mere established order and those elements of the church which had adulterated their faith with Enlightenment apologetics. He would not have foreseen the day when collective egalitarianism, run ironically by political elites, would have been so powerful in a country as to demonize other forms of equality, or the priests of high science stooped to ensure equality of thought by insisting on ‘egalitarianism as sameness’. He did, however, understand that the human mind rationates through the process of ‘distinction’, and that to declare by social fiat that all distinction is bad would have deleterious effects on our ability to think clearly. His particular desire was to preserve proper obedience and ‘the desire to kneel’ – these spoke to his hold on a natural order in which obeisance both maintained social order, and allowed the social order to be linked to a divine order, in which obeisance is a categorical necessity. The unlinking of the latter from the former cut society off from its deepest legitimizations, disconnecting the realm in which people may choose to bow to another’s authority from that realm in which ‘every knee shall bow, and tongue confess…’. In Lewis’ mind, of course, was his great scholarly love, the medieval synthesis. To understand why Lewis felt that the democratic reductionism ‘will kill us all if it grows unchecked’, one has to read his Discarded Image. Such a love does not drive most Christians today. Translating his thought for those who live in a society which self-consciously constructs itself as the anthesis of the medieval synthesis which Lewis thought produced great beauty, requires some doing. His fundamental point, however, is still graspable – and true. Proper distinction is necessary to clear thought – and clear thinking requires the a priori acceptance of an assessment of the proper. It is not proper, in most Christian schemas, to make the relative into an absolute, to mistake mere living with Life, or to compress (as Lewis notes is so common) distinct categories of human expression and relationship into lowest common denominators. (Lewis’ example of this latter is in the compression of love into friendship. ‘Friends look in the same direction. Lovers look at each other: that is, in opposite directions. To transfer bodily all that belongs to one relationship into the other is blundering.’ If Lewis was back amongst us and relocated to New York, would what would he have made of the iconic status of the American sitcom, ‘Friends’?). As Terry Eagleton notes in a searing review of Dawkins’ book:
Even Richard Dawkins lives more by faith than by reason. We hold many beliefs that have no unimpeachably rational justification, but are nonetheless reasonable to entertain. Only positivists think that ‘rational’ means ‘scientific’. Dawkins rejects the surely reasonable case that science and religion are not in competition on the grounds that this insulates religion from rational inquiry. But this is a mistake: to claim that science and religion pose different questions to the world is not to suggest that if the bones of Jesus were discovered in Palestine, the pope should get himself down to the dole queue as fast as possible. It is rather to claim that while faith, rather like love, must involve factual knowledge, it is not reducible to it. For my claim to love you to be coherent, I must be able to explain what it is about you that justifies it; but my bank manager might agree with my dewy-eyed description of you without being in love with you himself. [8]
Social equality need not erase epistemic distinction; social distinction need not erase a commitment to ontological equality. Just because Christians promote social equality does not necessarily mean that they need to do so on the bases accepted by other people. We may well choose to believe in Collective egalitarianism without supporting expropriation, or a proper distrustfulness of those who claim authority, without being anti-establishment. We might well hold that classlessness is a description of heaven, without holding that, on the one hand, classlessness is to be equated to sameness, or that either is fully achievable here in this Fallen state. Finally, we can believe in equality of opportunity, just as political liberals do, without folding Christian conscience into liberal political rationales. We might just be doing so because of our fundamental belief that ‘He causes his sun to rise on the evil and the good, and sends rain on the righteous and the unrighteous’ (Matt 5:45). To do otherwise is to collapse categories into preferred public solutions which attack those distinctions which allow people to be private citizens. The result would merely be another form of tyranny, dressed up in the form of rational democracy. In Lewis’ day, the struggle was through the value of equality against Nazism. In our own day, it is the struggle through the value of tolerance against tribalizing fundamentalism. The result, however, is similar, albeit the voice of Christians in the public sphere is weaker today than it was in Lewis’ time.
We shall never be safe unless we already understand in our hearts all that the anti-democrats can say, and have provided for it better than they. Human nature will not permanently endure flat equality if it is extended from its proper political field into the more real, more concrete fields within. Let us wear equality [as we wear clothing]; but let us undress every night. [9]
Notes
[1] Michelle Gabriel, ‘Aspirationalism: The Search for Respect in an Unequal Society’, JAS, Australia's Public Intellectual Forum, no.80, 2004, p. 147.
[2] C S Lewis, ‘Equality’, in W H Hooper (ed), Present Concerns, London: Fount Paperbacks, 1986, p. 17.
[3] See for instance, Stephen R. Graubard (ed), Australia: the Daedalus symposium, North Ryde, N.S.W.: Angus & Robertson, 1985.
[4] A McGrath, ‘Do stop behaving as if you are God, Professor Dawkins’, The Daily Mail , 18 May 2007
[5] Lewis, ‘Equality’, p. 18.
[6] Lewis, ‘Equality’, p. 18.
[7] Lewis, ‘Equality’, p. 18.
[8] Terry Eagleton, 'Lunging, Flailing, Mispunching', London Review of Books, vol. 28, no. 20, 19 October 2006, http://www.lrb.co.uk/v28/n20/eagl01_.html
[9] Lewis, ‘Equality’, p. 20.
I sit at my desk, and I am only able to intuitively respond in agreement. I have no such language to articulate my intuition, but I still agree.
Thank you for this paper.
Posted by: Joshua Ballard | July 23, 2007 at 02:56 PM