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Democracy Is Medicine, Not Food (C.S. Lewis)

In his essay called Equality, C.S. Lewis gives us some helpful reminders about democracy and equality.

I’ve read somewhere in Lewis (I can’t remember where at the moment) that the reason it is barely possible to write a fairy tale without royalty is that we were meant to be a part of a monarchy. Monarchy is imbedded deep within the human imagination,and for good reason. This is the implicit theme running through the Equality article. Man is meant to serve a King. The need for authority is bound up in our nature as creatures who answer to a Creator. The need for democracy, then, comes only as a result of the Fall, as a means of providing checks and balances for sinful human beings. It is, therefore, to use his words, medicine – not food.

I could expound on this at length, but I’ve decided to simply record some memorable and thought-provoking quotes and leave it to the reader to make his or her own applications or conclusions:

  • I am a democrat [i.e. he believed in democracy] because I believe in the Fall of Man. I think most people are democrats for the opposite reason (p. 18).
  • Aristotle said that some people were only fit to be slaves. i do not contradict him. But I reject slavery because I see no men fit to be masters (p. 18).
  • I do not think that equality is one of those things (like wisdom or happiness) which are good simply in themselves and for their own sakes. I think it is in the same class as medicine, which is good because we are ill, or clothes which are good because we are no longer innocent. I don’t think the old authority in kings, priests, husbands, or fathers, and the old obedience in subjects, laymen, wives, and sons, was in itself a degrading or evil thing at all. I think it was intrinsically as good and beautiful as the nakedness of Adam and Eve (pp. 17-18).
  • 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…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 bow, is a prosaic barbarian (p. 18).

Lewis was concerned that the ‘ceremonial monarchy’ of England be conserved. For it was to him,

  • …A permanent reminder that medicine is not food. Hence a man’s reaction to Monarchy is a kind of test. Monarchy can easily be ‘debunked’; but watch the faces, mark well the accents, of the debunkers. These are the men whose tap-root in Eden has been cut… (p. 20).
  • Where men are forbidden to honour a king they honour millionaires, athletes, or film-stars instead: even famous prostitutes or gangsters. For spiritual nature, like bodily nature, will be served; deny it food and it will gobble poison (p. 20).
  • Human nature will not permanently endure flat equality if it is extended from its proper political field into the more real, more concrete fields within. Let us wear inequality; but let us undress every night (p. 20).

All quotations are from Present Concerns, a collection of essays and articles by C.S. Lewis.

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