Inequality and Antichrist
Once Christianity was privatized, hence eliminated as a public and social force in the law, the rise of a secular religion called Leftism or Liberalism to replace it was inevitable.
It was inevitable because a vacuum of opinion on metaphysical matters is as impossible as erecting a mathematics without axioms. Without Christian metaphysics, first assumptions of secular metaphysics govern society.
Hence, in the modern period, the first assumptions of secularism entered into all the areas, hospitals, universities, family law, and public charities, which once had been controlled by canon law, and administered by the Church.
Those assumptions are that truth is subjective, that logic is a mere word game unrelated to reality, that virtue is relative, that beauty is in the eye of the beholder, and that the mind exists as a side effect of matter in motion; that God is dead and therefore the impersonal forces of history are God; that Christ is but one wise man among many; and that man is but one animal among many, and like them, lacks dignity and lacks free will, and therefore liberty and equality are myths, and the brotherhood of man is a joke.
One form of secularism says that since men are unequal, the elite should rule the benighted; another says that since men are unequal, the master race should rule the inferior races.
The idea that all men deserve equal treatment under the law, and equal dignity despite their differences in talent, virtue, wealth and social position, and that all men are brothers under the skin, is an idea unique to Western Civilization. It has its roots in Jewish theology and Athenian philosophy, which are the two wellsprings from which Christendom flows, but it is an uniquely Christian artifact.
Perhaps in India, a member of the Brahmin caste can claim to be morally superior by birth to an Untouchable, on the grounds that Karma, in reward or penalty for deeds done in past lives, has raised or lowered the caste into which the soul is reborn in his life. That is not the Christian notion.
Perhaps in the ancient world, the patricians of Rome, counting their descent from Aeneas, and hence from divine Venus, knew themselves to be more beloved of the gods than barbarians and lesser races. Elysium was reserved for heroes and demigods.
The Christian notion is that a saved peasant goes to heaven and a damned rich man goes to hell. Each man is judged by his own deed, and taken naked before the Judgement Seat, without any worldly trappings, robes, crowns, or coins to be seen. The prince who did not repent is thrown on the lake of fire; the pauper who confessed his sins and confessed Christ as Lord is brought to the bosom of Abraham. Rank hath no privileges on Doomsday.
The concept has been abused by secularists claiming that true equality or social justice equality can only be achieved by the rule of the elite over the benighted or the master race over their inferiors, but no one should be foolish enough to mistake this false notion of equality, egalitarianism, for the reality.
The idea of equality is not the idea that difference of talent, virtue, wealth and social position do not exist. It is not the idea that these differences are undesirable and should expunged by a redistribution of wealth and a suppression of talent.
The idea of equality is the mystical Christian idea that DESPITE the obvious differences of talent, virtue, wealth and social position, all men are and should be judged each man on his own merit, and all men are equal in the sight of God, hence equal in the sight of the law.
That is all the word means and all it has ever meant.
The antichristian idea is precisely the opposite: it is the idea since men are not equal in rank and wealth, intelligence and talent THEREFORE they are not equal in dignity, not to be judged each man on his own merit, but to be judged collectively. By this logic, a man of the elite or of the master race has rights and privileges protected at law which those whom birth or matters outside human control place at a lower rank in their social hierarchy do not and can never enjoy.
The denunciation of equality is the unmistakable ensign and battlecry of the Antichrist.
About John C Wright
John C. Wright is a practicing philosopher, a retired attorney, newspaperman, and newspaper editor, and a published author of science fiction. Once a Houyhnhnm, he was expelled from the august ranks of purely rational beings when he fell in love; but retains an honorary title.
