Equality and the 'Miserific Vision' of Leftism
One of the most diabolical tenets of leftism is the notion of “equality.”
Christians, of course, believe that all men are equal in dignity, that Christ shed His blood and died upon the cross for each and every one of us; yet we recognize that there are essential distinctions and differences between persons.
Male and female, for example, are distinctly and even fundamentally different from one another. Leftism, on the other hand, endeavors to annihilate any such distinctions, all in the name of equality. This is evinced in nearly all of the agendas which leftism promotes.
Mass immigration is founded upon the leftist principle that distinctions between nations do not matter, that unique and age-old cultural differences are themselves antithetical to “equality.” Feminism made the claim that men and women are “equal,” not in dignity and value before God, but that the two sexes are essentially interchangeable.
Transgenderism, of course, picked up this thread and followed it to its natural conclusion, positing that the distinction between male and female can be eliminated physically, not just socially or economically. The homosexual agenda also assaults the difference between male and female, taking as its equality-minded slogan the nonsensical phrase “love is love.”
Abortion also promotes this leftist ideal of “equality,” ensuring that women, like men, do not need to carry a child in their wombs — and the cost of this “equality” is untold millions of lives brutally ended.
While “equality” sounds like a pleasant concept, the leftist implementation of it inevitably results in absolute and abject misery. A recent illustration of this maxim may be found in Canada, where the government shut down a restaurant’s free meal voucher program benefitting the needy because the vouchers were only written in English.
Of course, the Frankensteinesque horrors of gender transition surgical theaters and the hellish human sacrifice of abortuaries illustrate this point far more vividly and far more tragically, but no matter where leftism enforces its program of “equality” it leads to misery. This is the principle upon which Hell operates.
The Colombian philosopher Nicolás Gómez Dávila once wrote, “Hierarchies are celestial. In Hell all are equal.” This aphorism explicates the diametrically opposed principles of both Christianity and leftism.
In Christianity, distinctions and differences are essential, and while all are equal in dignity, those distinctions and differences only serve to elevate and clarify that inherent dignity. Under the reign of leftism, however, “equality” demands the destruction of those essential distinctions and differences and, consequently, affects the destruction of human dignity.
In his 15th century epic “The Divine Comedy,” the Italian poet Dante Alighieri portrayed the souls in Heaven at one point as jars, jugs, and glasses full of water: all of them are of different sizes, but all are filled to brimming. He wrote, explaining the principle: “But all those souls grace the Empyrean; and each of them has gentle life — though some sense the Eternal Spirit more, some less.”
The notion of equality in Heaven is, paradoxically, hierarchical. Not all souls are equal in stature — St. Paul, for instance, may have a more monumental place in Heaven than the local churchwarden — but all are equal in that they love God with their whole selves.
In his illustrative imagining of Heaven, “The Great Divorce,” the author C.S. Lewis depicts this principle in a different manner. While touring Heaven, Lewis sees a beautiful woman clothed with “courtesy and joy,” attended by angels and musicians and adoring animals.
He mistakes her for Mary, the mother of Christ, so great is her spiritual majesty. He is corrected by his guide, the Scottish author George MacDonald, who tells him, “It’s someone ye’ll never have heard of. Her name on earth was Sarah Smith and she lived at Golders Green.”
What unites those in Heaven is not an absence or eradication of the essential and unique distinctions and differences with which God made them, but their adoration of and devotion to the God who made them. By contrast, those in Hell — the “Miserific Vision,” as Lewis called it — are united, and indeed equal, in misery. A rejection of the distinctions and differences put in place by God is, in the end, a rejection of order.
The American archconservative Russell Kirk once explained, “Order is the first need of the soul.” This is because, of course, God is Order Himself and the human soul is made for unity with God and naturally longs for Him. In rejecting the order that God has established, in the name of “equality,” leftism not only rejects God but attempts to supplant Him, to take His place.
This is the first of all sins, the sin of Satan Himself, and the sin with which he tempted Adam and Eve in Eden. Again, paradoxically, the vice is perilously close to the virtue. What God offers is complete and total unity with Him in the Beatific Vision, an intimate communion with Him, achieved by accepting the graces and mercies He offers and bending our wills to align with His so entirely that they become eventually indistinguishable.
What Satan promises (and can, of course, never deliver) is not becoming one with God but rejecting Him, ignoring Him “to the point of annihilation,” as Lewis put it. In short, Hell is full of little gods, of souls who all claim — whether explicitly or implicitly, whether in their small, everyday choices or whether in epoch-defining atrocities — to be God. The obvious conclusion is that if everyone is “God,” then no one is God, there is no God.
The leftist notion of “equality” is predicated upon perversion of God’s promises. While the equality experienced in Heaven incorporates the essential distinctions and differences which God has lovingly breathed into the souls He has made and cultivates and rejuvenates dignity, the equality of leftism, which finds its final fruition in Hell, destroys those distinctions and differences, consequently destroying dignity, in the stillborn hope of finding that every man is a god, but finds instead only the Miserific Vision.
This article appeared originally on The Washington Stand.
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