When "Equality" Is Envy Demanding Revenge
There's a world of difference between justice and resentment.
In 1944, during the closing years of the Second World War, C.S. Lewis wrote a column for the political and literary journal Time & Tide under the title Notes on the Way.
One essay, ‘Democratic Education,’ explored the growing demand for equality in his day and warned that not every appeal to equality arises from noble motives or good intentions.
Lewis observed, “The demand for equality has two sources — one of them is among the noblest, the other is the basest of human emotions.”
The first source, he argued, is a genuine desire for justice and fair play. The second, however, is the hatred of superiority.
Lewis rightly found that fallen human nature often resents excellence. People can come to despise those who are stronger, wiser, more gifted, or more accomplished than themselves. And rather than aspiring to similar excellence, they seek to drag down the excellent.
In Australia, we have a term for it: Tall Poppy Syndrome. The concept derives its name from an ancient story recorded by Roman historian Livy. According to the account, Sextus Tarquinius sent a message to his father, the Roman king Lucius Tarquinius Superbus, on how to maintain control over a captured city.
The king didn’t say a word. Instead, he silently cut the heads off the tallest poppies in his garden. Sextus understood that his father was advising him to cut down the most powerful and influential in the city to secure the top position.
For Lewis, the modern-day equivalent is rhetorical. It’s found in branding others with certain labels to discredit them and drag them down, not to the level of the discreditor, but beneath him. It is pure envy, he said, and it is insatiable.
“The more you concede to it, the more it will demand,” Lewis explained. “No attitude of humility which you can possibly adopt will propitiate a man with an inferiority complex.”
American theologian Jonathan Edwards defined envy as “A spirit of dissatisfaction or opposition to the prosperity or happiness of others.”
Similarly, English Minister Nathaniel Vincent said, “How much of hell is there in the temper of an envious man! The happiness of another is his misery; the good of another is his affliction. He looks upon the virtue of another with an evil eye and is as sorry at the praise of another as if that praise were taken away from himself. Envy makes a hater of his neighbour, and his own tormentor.”
Thus, forced equality is a dead-end pursuit. It will never satisfy those motivated by envy, because resentment often demands revenge.
As such, Lewis insisted that equality has proper limits. While equality is indispensable in law and politics, it becomes destructive when applied indiscriminately to every sphere of life.
“Equality (outside of mathematics) is a purely social conception,” he said. “It applies to man as a political and economic animal. It has no place in the world of the mind.
Lewis argued, “Beauty is not democratic—she reveals herself more to the few than to the many, more to the persistent and disciplined seekers than to the careless. Virtue is not democratic—she is achieved by those who pursue her more hotly than most men. Truth is not democratic—she demands special talents and special industry in those to whom she gives her favours.”
Political democracy is doomed, Lewis argued, if it tries to extend its demands for equality into these higher spheres.
“Ethical, intellectual, or aesthetic democracy is death.”
Of course, a healthy society ought to pursue equality before the law, but it should also celebrate excellence. Justice requires that all people be treated equally as citizens, but justice is not so blind that it can’t recognise that truth, beauty, virtue, and talent are not distributed equally.
We may be equal in worth, but we are not all equal in nature. Some people can jump higher than others.
Whenever envy masquerades as equality, the outcome isn’t a fairer society but one that punishes excellence and rewards mediocrity. It is a weight fastened around the neck of society. Consequently, everyone is poorer for it. When excellence is hindered, the whole community suffers.