Reflective Wanderer

“All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others,” said the pigs in Orwell’s brilliant short novel warning of the dangerous ideas that lead to the Russian revolution. You see there was once a prosperous and beautiful farm somewhere in England, and the animals were all owned by a farmer… he was a good farmer as farmers go but sometimes the fowls found their way unfortunately to the farmers table, and the hen was robbed of her eggs, and the cow couldn’t eat all the grass he wanted, and the horse at times was overworked, but none complained. Until one day the boar, named Old Major, described a vision where all the animals of the word would unite, throw off the tyranny of man and live in an animal’s paradise. Old Major, to his credit, was sincere, he truly believed in this future utopia. The revolution was a success and the farm was rid of the farmer. A new code of ethics was drawn up, the first of which is “Whatever goes upon two legs is an enemy” and the last is that “All animals are equal.” The seven commandments were painted on the barn wall for all to see. After some happy days of freedom and some political imbalances, you know what happened? The pigs took more and more power, till they ended up far worse tyrants than poor farmer Jones had ever been. By the end of the book the pigs are walking around on… you guessed it, two legs.

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, the great Russian writer, makes the same point in prose. In his book the Gulag Archipelago, which is a harrowing and soul-searching personal account of the horrors of the Russain prison system, Solzhenitsyn makes perfectly clear, with numerous examples, that while under suffdom and the Czars there was injustice but they traded that for what was a living nightmare, a million times more awful. “What might have been used” he writes, “against ten or twenty people in all during the time of Biron in the mid-eighteenth century, what had already become totally impossible under Catherine the Great, was being practiced during the flowering of the glorious twentieth century… not by one scoundrel alone in one secret place only, but by tens of thousands of specially trained human beasts standing over millions of defenceless human beings.” The people were promised that if they aided in throwing off the government, freedom and equal wealth would follow. It was a lie, it’s always been a lie. Yet the most dangerous sort of lie, one mixed with some truth. The conditions for the working man were not easy, and at times definity unjust, but they traded purgatory for hell, and a piece of bread for starvation. 

The great english statesman Edmund Burke warned of the same thing in the wake of the bloody and disastrous French revolution, in his book Reflections on the Revolution in France. When men throw off lawful power structures it will not be replaced by equality, “but power, of some kind or other, will survive the shock in which manners and opinions perish; and it will find other and worse means for its support, the usurpation which in order to subvert ancient institutions has destroyed ancient principles will hold power by arts similar to those by which it has acquired it.” France had wealth and a constitution, and they threw it all away for a bloodthirsty revolution which did no one any good, least of all the poor. 

Why then does man feel the need to trade personal  responsibility and the inequality that comes with that, and embrace socialism? Two reasons; the first is simple: tyrants, like the pigs in Animal Farm, prey on the evils in any society in order to raise up men to overthrow existing power structures and place themselves at the head. It’s happened before and will happen again. The second is that a sincere person needs a paradise to believe in. If God is forgotten and you are trained to believe that any ends justify any means then you will fight and kill for your heaven. In the book The Brothers Karamazov, another Russian writer, Dostoyzosky nails this reason; “if he had decided that God and immortality did not exist, he would have at once become an atheist and a socialist. For socialism is not merely the labor question, it is before all things the atheistic question, the question of the form taken by atheism today, the question of the tower of Babel built without God, not to mount to heaven from earth but to set up heaven on earth.” Man needs to worship, and if it’s not the God of the Bible or the pagan Zeus and Hermes then the state becomes god. Not any state, and definitely not one that promises virtue and justice, but the king who best promises our own vision of utopia. Our epitaph becomes, as Kipling prophesied, “so we worshipped the Gods of the Market Who promised these beautiful things.” 

But this was man in the twentieth century, what about man in the twenty-first? In America today we don’t see the labor question bandied about all over the country, we are too wealthy for that. But we do see the rise of critical race theory and intersectionality, which is the same narrative of oppressed and oppressors that fed the great and destructive revolutions of the past. We publicly teach in our schools all the failures of the west, real and imaginary, without any of its virtues. We have our religion being rapidly replaced by another kind of religion, a different value system, and a logic that truly believes that two plus two is five. This is a revolution every inch as deadly as that of 1917 Russia or 1789 France. A people cannot exist without a common culture, even if that culture isn’t perfect. We are losing our culture. Losing to those who hate all that America and the west has stood for, and instead preach not that there is no truth–that was so fifty years ago–but an alternative truth. They claim it is one of equity, but in actuality it is another ploy to wrest power from the rightful institutions of constitutional state, traditional family, and local church, into the hands of the new leaders of society. If you think for a moment that the usurpers will create a better world than citizens of this country have enjoyed for the past few hundred years, you will wake up sorely disappointed. 

The deeper issue here is that there is a “conflict of visions” as Thomas Sowell points out. On the one hand a utopian vision, held by those who, like Rousseau, believe the problem of man is his environment; fix that and paradise is found. On the other hand, the vision is one of man with both good and evil in him, made in the image of God and also fallen. To quote Solzhenitsyn again, “the line separating good and evil passes not through states, nor between classes, nor between political parties either — but right through every human heart.” Let us celebrate virtue wherever we find it, even in the imperfect story of our own country, before it is too late. We face two choices; join the mob and pull down our statues, or accept the tradition of freedom given to us long before the founding of America, all the way back to the Magna Carta, and continue to build on it. Looking to the ultimate standard of morality given to us by God Himself, because apart from virtue and justice no people will prosper.