Posted on 10/05/2018 12:47:59 PM PDT by CondoleezzaProtege
I'm a democrat because I believe in the Fall of Man. I think most people are democrats for the opposite reason. 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 don't deserve a share in governing a hen-roost, much less a nation. Ivor 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 introduces a view of equality rather different from that in which we have been trained. I do not think that equality is one of those things (like wisdom or happiness) which are good simply in themselves and for their own sakes. I think it is in the same class as medicine, which is good because we are ill, or clothes which are good because we are no longer innocent. 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 de- grading or evil thing at all. I think it was intrinsically as good and beautiful as the nakedness of Adam and Eve. It was rightly taken away because men became bad and abused it.
(Excerpt) Read more at archive.spectator.co.uk ...
Marshall McLuhan wrote in The Gutenberg Galaxy that de Toqueville wrote in Democracy in America that “Freedom and Equality are Inversely Proportional”. Having looked it up in de Toqueville, it turns out that de Toqueville used words similar to that assertion, but it doesn’t quite say what McLuhan said.
I found it stark in CS Lewis’ That Hideous Strength, that a re-awakened Merlin notes how materially comfortable we are in comparison with his time, but how shabby our comfort is, without magnificence in garments, or nobility among today’s “great” and powerful.
Now I’m lucky that I have heard on YouTube, the single instance of CS Lewis’ voice, in a BBC radio broadcast that somehow survived. I can hear his own voice in reading his essay on this mystery of freedom.
It is isn’t the voice of one of our contemporaries. We have lost too much that people for former, saner times took for granted without even noticing it, and in our time, we can’t even guess what is normality in the mode of life that people in past ages breathed and basked in with a kind of noble innocence.
Prescient.
Here in Washington State we still have mob rule - in the form of Referendums (putting the dum in voting).
20 second sound bites on a “Protect our Children from Assault Weapons” to sell a 30+ page law that includes gun safety classes for life if you want to buy a gun, restrictive gun locks in your home, ban on sales of .22 plinking guns to 20 year olds, etc.
bookmark
CS Lewis was of course a British subject, and we and the Brits are two peoples separated by a common language.
Wow, thanks! Great comments by all too.
Ping to look that up later.
On "equality," our own Russell Kirk, in his "Ten Conservative Principles," observed:
" The only true forms of equality are equality at the Last Judgment and equality before a just court of law; all other attempts at levelling must lead, at best, to social stagnation. Society requires honest and able leadership; and if natural and institutional differences are destroyed, presently some tyrant or host of squalid oligarchs will create new forms of inequality."- Dr. Russell Kirk, in "Ten Conservative Principles"
Indeed, what Lewis describes in the British context is relative to the Monarchy, its ministers and Parliament who in theory have Authority, as the Sovereign or his representative, to cast aside English Common Law.
In the American context what he describes is a strong call for the Limited government of the Constitution and the Founding Fathers, a government enabled by the Law that created it to only address certain things and NOTHING more.
People miss that the American Constitution is an enabling act and as such is different than written constitutions that define the departments of government and broadly outlines their responsibilities. The Constitution enumerates not attributes and responsibilities but attributes and Powers, reserving the balance of all other potential powers to others besides the federal. Responsibilities are inferred from the few Powers enumerated.
Lewis might not have realized the reason why he mistrusts men with power would have utterly disqualified even early American progressives from ever holding office if people always thought clearly. Even then it took the pernicious influence of those early progressives, the co-opting of the natural and proper loyalties to the States for the federal government, to even make possible FDR and company throwing the Constitution to the curb ...and even THEN they had yet to be taken over by the very people that anticommunists and antifascists alike had been warning us of.
Of all Presidents who have ever been, the only reason I don’t rank LBJ as the most corrupt is that as bad as he was he still an American crook ... I just cannot imagine him crassly selling us out for personal gain, the whole country, as the Clintons and Obama did.
Aside: LBJ was a bit like that one D.C. - Marvel crossover where the Joker learns that Red Skull isn’t just a persona assumed, that he really was a Nazi, and what is easily the most murderous and capricious villain in all of comics announces that he’s about to pound the Skull into the pavement because, psycho he may be, he’s an AMERICAN psycho.
I could see Joker — that Joker from the crossover — if he were real, confiding in Batman that once he knew what Hillary was really like and how she’d sell us out he ended up stuffing ballot boxes for Trump ... and he just can’t forgive her that she made him try to steal an election for any Republican. Then he’d put on a MAGA hat and confess through tears he feels like he’s somehow betrayed FDR even then.
People in different parts of London are historically separated by a common language.
“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”
Absolute Brilliance
+1
"Sir," said Merlin, in answer to the question which the Director had just asked him, "I give you great thanks. I cannot, indeed, understand the way you live, and your house is strange to me. You give me a bath such as the Emperor himself might envy, but no one attends me to it: a bed softer than sleep itself, but when I rise from it I find I must put on my own clothes with my own hands as if I were a peasant. I lie in a room with windows of pure crystal so that you can see the sky as clearly when they are shut as when they are open, and there is not wind enough within the room to blow out an unguarded taper; but I lie in it alone, with no more honour than a prisoner in a dungeon. Your people eat dry and tasteless flesh, but it is off plates as smooth as ivory and as round as the sun. In all the house there is warmth and softness and silence that might put a man in mind of paradise terrestrial; but no hangings, no beautified pavements, no musicians, no perfumes, no high seats, not a gleam of gold, not a hawk, not a hound. You seem to me to live neither like a rich man nor a poor one: neither like a lord nor a hermit."
The innocence of the ancients did not extend to their failure to understand evil. It was their very appreciation of the power of evil and the difficulty of overcoming evil that led to our magnificent Constitution, to the Bible, and to the various re-awakenings that peppered past ages.
Liberals today are naive to the very evil that flows from their beliefs. They are deluded by a false sense of their vaunted intelligence. They are instead, dense, thick headed, small minded, weak willed, and without the desire to engage in the struggle to learn hard truths. Progressives are, in a word, dumb.
If only they were dumb!
The word you seek is "ignorant."
all i can say is Amen to Mr. Lewis. thanks for the post.
Bookmark for Joker v. Red Skull. Never heard of that one before. Also to remind myself to investigate CSLewis some more.
I used the word dumb because progressives are constitutionally incapable of rigorous thought. They are not simply ignorant, a correctable condition. They are dumb, witless, unable to think.
Dumb in the original sense means incapable of speech.
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