C. S. Lewis wrote:
When equality is treated not as a medicine or a safety-gadget but as an ideal we begin to breed that stunted and envious sort of mind which hates all superiority. That mind is the special disease of democracy, as cruelty and servility are the special diseases of privileged societies. It will kill us all if it grows unchecked. The man who cannot conceive a joyful and loyal obedience on the one hand, nor an unembarrassed and noble acceptance of that obedience on the other, the man who has never even wanted to kneel or to bow, is a prosaic barbarian.
[…]
Every intrusion of the spirit that says “I’m as good as you” into our personal and spiritual life is to be resisted just as jealously as every intrusion of bureaucracy or privilege into our politics. Hierarchy within can alone preserve egalitarianism without. Romantic attacks on democracy will come again. We shall never be safe unless we already understand in our hearts all that the anti-democrats can say, and have provided for it better than they.
This spirit that says “I’m as good as you,” is in my opinion endemic to both Protestantism and Democracy as ideologies. Not all Protestants and not all people who support democracy are afflicted with this disease, but resistance towards acknowledging hierarchies of knowledge and virtue has become a core value of both movements. Resistance to hierarchies of virtue leads both to resistance towards recognizing Saints and also to the idea that “all sins are equal.” Fortunately, this is impulse is limited by obvious intuitive realities.
Resistance to hierarchies of knowledge, on the other hand, has reached pandemic proportions. There’s even a name for this: the Dunning-Kruger effect!
aflexiblechain 