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.
Ping to look that up later.
"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.