The Enlightenment Was The Beginning Of The Great Leveling: Stove 2

We continue our series on the works of David Stove by picking up where we left off with the first essay in On Enlightenment. Part I here.

It will be obvious, in a painful and depressing way, that we suffer from the disease of egalitarianism, well captured in the modern religious slogan of DIE—Diversity, Inclusion, Equity. Diversity to quash the successeful and boost the unable, Inclusion to excuse all behaviors except those aligned with Reality, and Equity the happy utopia when Equality has leveled all things to an undifferentiated goo.

Egalitarianism contains two contradictory ideas: that everybody is equal and that everybody ought to be equal. If everybody is equal, how can there exist those who are unequal? The nonsensical answer is to suppose they are unequal in a malevolent way, their malice holding back true Equality. Departures from Equality can thus only be negative, and caused to be negative by forces. Forces which must be battled.

Where did this bizarre idea of egalitarianism arise?

Most of the elements of the Enlightenment can be traced back to classical antiquity, but its egalitarianism cannot. That everyone ought to be equal is a moral idea which simply never occurred to anyone in antiquity; not even to the most wide-ranging thinkers, such as Plato or Aristotle. Still less did the ideal of equality ever play any part in practical politics. There was indeed a widespread mythology of a Golden Age in the past, when there had been no conflict, no inequality, no private property, and no work; the earth spontaneously supplied food to all. But no one ever proposed a restoration of equality, or of any other feature of the Golden Age.

Egalitarianism was not always a thing:

…the idea that everyone should be equal is so deeply ingrained that we think everyone must always have been of the same opinion. Hence, for example, we assume that the slave-revolts and slave-wars, which punctuated Greek and Roman his- tory, were attempts, however abortive, to abolish slavery….

No one in antiquity ever proposed the abolition of slavery. Moreover, it is the height of folly to think that anyone should have proposed its abolition. You might just as sensibly think that people should now propose the abolition of electrical power and the petrol-engine. There was simply no other economic form which civilization could then take. Of course, there were peoples, and were known to be peoples, among whom the institution of slavery did not exist; but they were not civilized peoples. Their prisoners-of-war were simply killed and, among certain tribes, eaten.

Of course, we do have such maniacs among us now who would ban oil. It’s not much of a stretch to say this is egalitarianism applied not only to people, but to “the earth” as well, which is a slave to us and cannot fight for itself. There’s the negative departure caused by malice again. Note carefully that the nitwits who fight on behalf of the earth do so by destroying high art—another leveling. The equalitarian impulse is strong in them.

Stove says don’t be fooled by Enlightenment re-writing of history to imply an hankering for Equality that never existed. Egalitarianism is not ancient; it is relatively new. So where did the notion of Equality arise? Christianity, say some:

As an actual force in history, the ideal of equality has its roots in Christian, not in classic, ground. There are plenty of passages in the Bible, of course, and especially in the New Testament, which point clearly to equality, and even to communism, as Christian ideals. There are plenty of similar passages in some of the early Fathers too. In fact, Christianity has always carried communism as a kind of “spare wheel,” though, like all spare wheels, it is forgotten most of the time.

Nietzsche’s plaints will come to mind. And many now are satisfied to let Nietzsche have the last word on this. Yet, Stove says, we should not so fast in casting blame on Christianity:

But it had always been equally easy, of course, to assemble other Biblical passages which point, equally clearly, in the very opposite direction; in the direction of submission to authority and acceptance of inequalities. And it was on this side that the whole weight of the organized church fell for a thousand years after Constantine adopted Christianity as the religion of the Roman Empire. Western Christendom, even more than Eastern, was essentially hierarchical, in every secular sphere as well as in every sacred one.

My own favorite of these many passages is the parable of the talents, which turns out to be a terrific pun. St Paul says we all have “different gifts, according to the grace that is given us”, which would be not possible if Equality held. I take the Book of Job as read. In a similar vein, St John tells us:

And Jesus passing by, saw a man, who was blind from his birth: And his disciples asked him: Rabbi, who hath sinned, this man, or his parents, that he should be born blind? Jesus answered: Neither hath this man sinned, nor his parents; but that the works of God should be made manifest in him.

Equality is not there, except to note that we are all made in the image of God, that are all equally sinners (St Mary excepted). But this is Equality in the sense of saying all men need to breathe air. It is not something to strive for. These Equalities are so commonplace they are rarely even thought of.

Because of passages such as the ones just mentioned, and their commonsense interpretation, Stove says:

the seeds of egalitarianism were extremely slow in coming to fruition, even in Christian soil: they lay virtually dormant from 300 to 1300 A.D. But there had always been—and there always is—a certain number of people of the kind who, in Australia, are called “bush lawyers.” Many of these people, in reading their Bibles, had made the amazing discovery that neither kings nor dukes nor bankers, neither bishops nor tithes, are things instituted by Christ. And the number of such people increased enormously with the spread of literacy, the translation of the Bible into vulgar tongues, and the invention of printing.

“Accordingly,” Stove emphasizes, “egalitarian outbreaks began to occur as the late-medieval world shaded into the modern one, and they became increasingly common and increasingly formidable.”

This point is not a small one, because Christianity is now plagued by egalitarian notions. Every man his own priest, and who’s to say who’s interpretation is right or wrong? You may say it’s yours, but, like, that’s just your opinion, to put it in the vernacular. Disputes, which seem hilariously trivial to onlookers obtain deep and passionate disagreements to believers. Splits happen at an alarming rate. How many denominations are there now? Hierarchy fades in to memory.

It’s not that Christianity started in Equality. It was leveraged to produce it. The loosening of hierarchy, such as in making reading more available, caused people to notice other “disparities”, and they ever increasingly sought a way to remove them.

One example of a plethora: Love your neighbor became love all people, because all people are Equal, so Open The Borders, and how dare you object. And so on and so forth. You know the litany—the secular litany.

Stove reminds us that in Seventeenth-Century England, as there already were earlier on the Continent, that there were several egalitarian revolts, such as the Ranters, the Diggers, and the Levellers. The Levellers had the most appropriate Enlightenment name. There is simply no way to achieve Equity without leveling. Consider the ‘D’ in DIE stands for absolute mandatory and policed uniformity, after all. Here is a passage from an amusing interaction with ChatGPT on who the Diggers (and others) were:

The Diggers, also known as the True Levellers, were a group of radical political activists and religious sectarians who emerged during the English Civil War and the Interregnum.  They were a small but vocal group who advocated for the abolition of private property and the establishment of a society based on communal ownership and control of land.  They also advocated for religious toleration and the abolition of the traditional hierarchical structure of the Church of England.

Again, you cannot get to True Equality without a leveling. Which instantly puts this in contrast to Christianity, which should be strictly hierarchical, at the least the differentiation between God and man. But even that difference is being rebelled against. We now assume we can change our very natures by our will alone. A man becomes a woman, we insist, when he puts on a dress. It took some time, as you know, but look at what the Church of England has become as it has stripped layers of its hierarchy away.

After the Church was wounded, Stove says, “The pressure on privilege of every kind inexorably increased: and then, after about 1750, the Enlightenment turned its attention, as Burke wrote at the time, from ‘the destruction of religion [to] the subversion of government.’”

The effects were so unmistakable that soon everyone knew that the air was full of lightning. The storm broke with unprecedented fury over France in 1789, and privilege, whether aristocratic, ecclesiastical or economic, suffered a blow from which it has never recovered. This was the beginning of the revolutionary era in which we still live.

In fact, of course, the French Revolution stopped very far short of extinguishing all inequalities. It even made certain economic inequalities more marked, or at least made them more obvious, by removing the veil of moral authority which had previously softened their outlines. Yet some people—the communists—held that economic inequality was the source of all other inequalities.

We finally meet our first modern communist, Babeuf, the subject of this essay, next time.

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