Democracy and equality

From our beginning as a nation we have held that all men are created equal. I believe this in as much as I believe in political equality. But I also believe it is "self evident" that men and women are not all equal.

You may think all people so good that they deserve a share in the government of a nation, and so wise that the nation needs their advice. C. S. Lewis believes this to be "the false, romantic doctrine of democracy." On the other hand, you might believe fallen people to be so wicked that not one of them can be trusted with any irresponsible power over his or her fellows, which Lewis believes to be the true ground of democracy.

Lewis does not believe God to have created an egalitarian world. The authority of humanity over the beasts and parent over child seem to have been a part of God's original plan. Lewis goes so far as to say that he believes "that if we had not fallen, .... patriarchal monarchy would be the sole lawful government." Perhaps Tisco would find in this situation of unfallen monarchy the hope of a truly benign dictatorship. But since we have learned sin, we have found, as the English historian Lord Acton says, that "all power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely."

The only remedy has been to take away the powers and substitute what Lewis calls "a legal fiction of equality."

The authority of father and husband has been rightly abolished on the legal plane, not because this authority is bad in itself (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.

Equality is in the same position as clothes. It is a result of the Fall and the remedy for it. It is the hierarchical world, still allive and hidden behind a facade of equal citizenship, which is our real concern. The function of equality is protective. It is medicine, not food. By treating humans, in defiance of the observed facts, as if they were all the same kind of thing, we avoid innumerable evils. But it is not on this that we were made to live.