C.S. Lewis and the Tyranny of Equality

The Christian apologist and novelist C.S. Lewis (1898–1963) was no believer in “equality of outcome”. To many today, this makes him sound like a terrible elitist—but Lewis was a committed democrat. The political pursuit of “a fair deal for all”, he realised however, would all too often merely end up ensuring a “poor deal for all”, even if it was an “equally poor deal for all”, not what the champions of such ideals intended.

Despite his deep religious beliefs, Lewis thought a theocracy of any kind was just about the worst form of human government conceivable—including theocracies which explicitly did not believe in the existence of any God at all, like communism or fascism, which have often been characterised as sublimated totalitarian political religions, particularly by the philosopher Eric Voegelin.

In particular, Lewis saw the dangers for the Western world in the adoption of “progressivist” forms of technocratic atheistic theocracy, such as what he termed “scientocracy” and welfarism: the so-called “soft totalitarianisms” so many see at work in the West today. In a 1959 letter to a Chicago journalist, Lewis prophetically wrote as follows:

Ought we to be surprised at the approach of “scientocracy”? In every age those who wish to be our masters, if they have any sense, secure our obedience by offering deliverance from our dominant fear. When we fear wizards the Medicine Man can rule the whole tribe. When we fear a stronger tribe our best warrior becomes King. When all the world fears Hell the Church becomes a theocracy … In England the omnipotent Welfare State has triumphed because it promised to free us from the fear of poverty … The fears from which scientocracy offers to free us are rational ones … But we cannot trust these New Masters any more than their predecessors. Do you see any solution? A hundred years ago we all thought that Democracy was it. Neither you nor I probably think so now. It neither allows the ordinary man to control legislation nor qualifies him to do so. The real questions are settled in secret and the newspapers keep us occupied with largely imaginary issues. And this is all the easier because democracy always in the end destroys education [by imposing equality of outcome upon all students].

Lewis could easily have been writing today.

“Give up your freedom and I will make you safe” was the age-old offer of such early post-war #BeKind regimes, Lewis also warned in this same letter, but the real danger was that, in supposedly making us all “safe” in this way, such equitable-sounding administrations would actually just try and remake man’s eternal God-given human nature wholesale. In trying to be fair, once again, states of very great unfairness would only end up being produced.

In a 1958 article for Observer, Lewis warned:

We must give full weight to the claim that nothing but science, and science globally applied, and therefore unprecedented Government controls, can produce full bellies and medical care for the whole human race: nothing, in short, but a world Welfare State. It is a full admission of these truths which impresses upon me the extreme peril of humanity at present. We have on the one hand a desperate need; hunger, sickness, and the dread of war. We have, on the other, the conception of something that might meet it: omnicompetent global technocracy. Are not these the ideal opportunity for enslavement?

Lewis could have been writing about modern-day bodies like the WEF, UN, IMF, EU and WHO here. Indeed, in his 1945 Christian sci-fi novel That Hideous Strength, he imagined the creation of just such an omnipotent and supposedly “benign” global technocratic body. He called it NICE (National Institute for Co-ordinated Experiments). Dictatorships always pretend to be nice, don’t they? Communists inevitably come to power saying they are doing it “for the people”—millions of whom they immediately then set about imprisoning, persecuting, immiserating or liquidating, Pol Pot-style, but only ever for their own good.

Today, unspoken Western technocratic totalitarians of a (so far) mercifully less murderous bent seek office promising us all such ostensibly benevolent things as progress, fairness, and equality. To their opponents during debates, they can then ask such misleading questions as: “Don’t you believe in fairness of outcomes?” But what if such pleasant-sounding bromides are not actually quite as benign as the “democrats” make them at first appear to be? Rather than NICE, perhaps such bodies should actually be called EVIL (Equality Violates Inherent Laws) instead?

Once, thought Lewis, the whole idea of political philosophy was to identify eternal truths about human nature and then adapt the structure of the state to accommodate (or tame) them accordingly. Following the Enlightenment, it increasingly seemed as if this had all been turned upside down; instead of adapting prevailing modes of government to human nature, rulers increasingly sought to adapt human nature to prevailing modes of government.

Refusing to accept what human beings were actually like was progressively abandoned in favour of deciding what they should be like, and then devising an entire raft of increasingly unrealistic policies which treated the imaginary ideal state of man as his actual extant one—the kind of thinking which culminates in such fantasy-world proposals of the present day as abolishing prisons and somehow expecting all crime to magically disappear, rather than to proliferate endlessly, as is actually the case.

It seems Lewis’s idea of “true politics” was not based upon an obsessive assessment of specific policy positions of differing political parties, but of the natural life of the polis, the actual people of any given electorate, considered first and foremost as human beings, not as voters specifically. As such, he sought what has been termed the “permanent in the political”, that is to say, he felt that what constitutes good politics is primarily defined by “that which most coincides with natural law”, primarily the natural law of natural human nature.

As Lewis wrote in English Literature in the Sixteenth Century (1954), the true business of government “is to enforce something that is already there, something in the divine reason or in the existing custom … If it tries to be original, to produce new wrongs and rights in independence of the archetype [of human nature], it becomes unjust and forfeits its claim to obedience.” There is a good critique somewhere in there of the hubris of many contemporary human rights laws which purport to magically create various suddenly invented new “rights” for people, such the “right” not to be misgendered at work, for example, which would have been wholly inconceivable until about five minutes ago.

One of the genuine traditional God-given rights of mankind was the right of exercising free will, something Lewis felt the state should only intervene in wherever the use of such free will negatively and significantly interfered with the wellbeing of others, as with the free-will decisions of criminals to rape, murder or steal. So, for example, despite being a Christian, he did not believe homosexuality should be illegal, merely a private matter between a man and his god (or lack of). Forcing the polis to worship homosexuality, however, as increasingly happens in the West today, would most assuredly not have met with Lewis’s approval. That would be totalitarian utopianism at its worst: as clear an example of a government trying “to be original, to produce new wrongs and rights in independence of the [human] archetype” as could be imagined.

The whole post-Enlightenment ideal of “progress”, at least in a political and moral, as opposed to a technological or scientific, sense was false, thought Lewis. Human nature was inherently fallen, and thus not perfectible, and so, consequently, neither was human society.

Today, we hear much from progressives about the alleged inherent flaws of Western civilisation, from racism to sexism, being supposedly “systemic” in their nature. The solution generally advanced is to reform such faulty systems wholesale, as if utopia can be legislated for by brute force of bureaucratic fiat. But as the true reasons for the flaws of human society lie in the wholly ineradicable flaws in human nature itself, the illusory “fixes” proposed will only produce new problems in their turn, many of them far worse than the initial evils, real or imagined, they were introduced to eradicate.

Later editions of Lewis’s famous 1942 epistolary novel The Screwtape Letters came with a 1959 addendum, “Screwtape Proposes a Toast”, in which the Senior Devil Screwtape addresses the subject of politics, giving an after-dinner speech to the assembled Legions of Hell, in which he speaks of how “Democracy is a word with which you must lead them [humans] by the nose” by utterly subverting its meaning to such an extent that blindly following its path will lead them all inevitably into a state of eternal damnation—creating a Hell for them, both on Earth and afterwards.

Originally, advises Screwtape, the word was “connected with the [admirable] political ideal that men should be equally treated”. However, “a stealthy transition” was then to be implanted in men’s minds to “a factual belief that all men are equal”, a complete human fiction which, for example, shall be henceforth implemented in schools by virtue of an “all must have prizes” philosophy by which no child is allowed to fail.

Such a regime of “parity of esteem” may sound like kindness, but is in fact no kindness at all. Screwtape recalls the tale of the ancient Greek tyrant who illustrated his own idea of “equality” by cutting with his sharpened cane the top off every stalk of corn in his field which grew anywhere above the average height: think of the cynical (yet largely accurate) old definition of socialism as the practice of “making everyone equal by bringing everyone down to the same low level”.

As Screwtape explains, such a “democracy” will lead only “to a nation without great men, a nation mainly of sub-literates, morally flaccid from lack of discipline in youth, full of the cocksureness which flattery breeds on ignorance, and soft from lifelong pampering”. Such an outcome will be excellent from Hell’s point of view, as the resultant weakling nation will consequently be easily crushed as soon as it comes up against a less “democratic” nation like (in today’s terms) Communist China, “where children have been made to work at school, where talent is placed in high posts, and where the ignorant mass are allowed no say at all in public affairs”.

The whole point is to subvert the meaning of the word democracy so that the initial noble goal of “equality of treatment” becomes subtly yet disastrously redefined as “equity of outcome” instead, an idea constantly hymned by today’s progressives—the ultimate such equitable outcome being complete civilisational collapse for all.

As Lewis wrote in his 1945 essay “Membership”: 

I believe in political equality. But there are two opposite reasons for being a democrat. You may think all men so good that they deserve a share in the government of the commonwealth, and so wise that the commonwealth needs their advice. That is, in my opinion, the false, romantic doctrine of democracy. On the other hand, you may believe fallen men to be so wicked that not one of them can be trusted with any irresponsible power over his fellows … I do not believe that God created an egalitarian world. I believe the authority of parent over child, husband over wife … to have been as much a part of the original plan as the authority of man over beast. I believe that if we had not fallen … patriarchal monarchy would be the sole lawful government. But since we have learned sin, we have found, as [the Victorian-era 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 a legal fiction of equality. The authority of father and husband has been rightly abolished on the legal plane, not because this authority is in itself bad (on the contrary, it is, I hold, divine in origin), but because fathers and husbands are bad.

For the Christian Lewis, democracy in practice, then, is based upon the pure “legal fiction” that all men are equal, when actually, hierarchy is a natural and God-given thing. But, whilst each king considered in the abstract may, to Lewis, have a divine right to rule, considered in the concrete he is an actual, specific, fleshly embodied human, with all the inevitable flaws and foibles attendant upon such a fallen state. Hence the old idea, “better a bad parliament than a good king”, as, beyond outright civil war, there is no way of ousting the latter, whereas a bad parliament may always ultimately be voted out of office.

As Lewis said in a 1942 piece, “Equality”, “the real reason for democracy” is not that men are equal and perfectible by fiat of the state, but “just the reverse. Mankind is so fallen that no man can be trusted with unchecked power over his fellows.” Hence, the true reason for Lewis supporting democracy is simply that, thanks to mankind’s fallen nature, though deeply imperfect it is at least superior to dictatorship: shades of Winston Churchill’s old reported quip to the effect that “democracy is by far the worst form of government, apart from all the others”. Equality, Lewis continued, “is in the same class as medicine, which is good [only] because we are ill”.

But what happens when, as seems the case to many alarmed and dissenting observers today, the very meaning of the terms “democracy” and “equality” appear, very subtly, and very damagingly, to have been redefined by so many political Screwtapes without most voters even realising the fact? It would be a brave candidate who stood up on the stump and said, “What we need in society these days is a little less equality,” but by doing so, he may well do the entire electorate an immense good turn. He might prompt them, like C.S. Lewis, to stop for a moment and wonder whether, under current technocratic modes of Western government, we really have much true equality left amongst us at all, or just a fake inverted imposter merely posing under that same term?

According to Aristotle, “The worst form of inequality is to try to make unequal things equal.” Online, this quote is now often politically twisted to try and justify the precise reverse of what it actually means—namely, the art of treating unequal things as if they were equal, when in truth they are not. According to left-wing reform website Elevate Society, for example, Aristotle’s quote:

… suggests that attempting to create equality by treating unequal things the same is misguided. It acknowledges that different individuals or groups may have varying needs, experiences, and challenges. Instead of pretending that all inequalities can be eliminated by superficial measures, the focus should be on addressing the root causes of inequality and creating equitable conditions that allow everyone to thrive … Consider the educational system. A standard classroom approach treats all students as if they have the same learning capacity and style—it tries to make “unequal things equal.” However, this can lead to inequality … Rather than trying to make all students “equal” by treating them the same, the focus should be on providing an equitable education, ensuring each student has the support they need to thrive. This respects the fact that students are “unequal” in terms of their individual abilities and learning styles, which is a natural and positive aspect of human diversity.

According to left-wing US Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor, “Until we get equality in education, we won’t have an equal society.” I think the opposite is true, if by “equality”, you mean its complete organised inversion. But then, when I was young, I was lucky enough to have been educated in a system so appallingly unequal that some of the teachers encouraged their students to read C.S. Lewis.

Steven Tucker is a UK-based writer. His latest book, Hitler’s & Stalin’s Misuse of Science, exposes how the ideological abuses of science once perpetrated by the Nazis and the Soviets are being repeated today by the hard Left who have captured so many of our institutions of learning