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.
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.
“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
all i can say is Amen to Mr. Lewis. thanks for the post.