In praise of inequality

The world is very hierarchical and very unequal. 

This is because nature is very hierarchical and very unequal. 

If you believe in God you believe that this is divinely ordained. 

Conservatives always argued against equality being a good thing in principle, until John Major, asked in the House of Commons by Tony Blair if he believed in equality, answered yes. 

A long time before that conservatives had stopped arguing for inequality as a good thing in itself or in other words the merits of hierarchy, but hierarchy is the most important conservative principle of all, along with preserving the authority of the state.

Tradition and freedom are very important but less essential, from a conservative point of view. In theory, liberals also believe in freedom and in the nineteenth century really did so.

The conservatives are not defending hierarchy, inequality or the authority of the state very well at the moment, and certainly not tradition or freedom, but nature has a habit of reasserting itself over abstract ideas and human reason. 

Shakespeare might or might not have been a secret Catholic but he was certainly a high Tory. He put the essential Tory doctrine into the mouth of the crafty Ulysses in Troilus and Cressida.

Take but degree away, untune that string,

And, hark, what discord follows! each thing meets

In mere oppugnancy: the bounded waters

Should lift their bosoms higher than the shores

And make a sop of all this solid globe:

Strength should be lord of imbecility,

And the rude son should strike his father dead:

Force should be right; or rather, right and wrong,

Between whose endless jar justice resides,

Should lose their names, and so should justice too.

Then every thing includes itself in power,

Power into will, will into appetite;

And appetite, an universal wolf,

So doubly seconded with will and power,

Must make perforce an universal prey,

And last eat up himself.

On the other hand the French revolution attempted to design the world according to abstract, rational principles. It partly failed but in the end partly succeeded. 

Its consequences include not only Marxism but, indirectly, Nazism (equality meant all races were equal but fraternity meant nationalism) and much of the world we live in. 

Obviously that includes riots by Black Lives Matters supporters and articles in the Daily Mail calling counter-demonstrators thugs.

Let me please (it's my blog!) quote these words of Disraeli yet again.

"In a progressive country change is constant; and the great question is not whether you should resist change which is inevitable, but whether that change should be carried out in deference to the manners, the customs, the laws and the traditions of a people, or whether it should be carried out in deference to abstract principles, and arbitrary and general doctrines."

Unfortunately,  the manners, the customs, the laws and the traditions of Western peoples have been warped since 1945 and especially since the 1960s by abstract, general, egalitarian and statist doctrines of a sort that would have horrified Disraeli. 

The groundsprings of Western greatness are being blocked.

The Chinese, who are Communists but also Confucians, see Donald Trump as a symptom of America's decline and Black Lives Matter protests as another symptom. You, gentle reader, will have your opinion on this.