What Is the Great Modern Orthodoxy?

This is an excerpt from my forthcoming book By No Means Equal to be published in October.

What is the one thing you cannot speak against without being regarded as wicked and immoral?

Is it not the idea of equality? This is the first principle of modern Western democracies and is applied to wider and wider fields. But what is its basis? Does it derive from the study of nature? One would assume it must but when you look for a possible origin, it is hard to find. For equality does not exist anywhere in nature and the belief in it has no reasonable foundation since people are very different. They are not the same so they are not equal. It's that simple. In fact, no two things in the created universe are the same. The only things that are so are machine-made and these we describe colloquially but perceptively as having no soul. This leads one to think that perhaps the contemporary belief in equality is a consequence of the denial of soul which is the bedrock assumption of modernity. For modernity is based on the separation of Man from God. That is its defining characteristic.

No doubt the ideological belief in equality was also a reaction to the pronounced inequality that existed in the pre-modern age. But, like many reactions, it was an over-reaction and we went from one extreme to another. Or maybe from a perceived extreme to a real one. The further you get from truth, the more truth seems extreme. The idea of the oneness of humanity which gained currency from the eighteenth century onwards was also a factor. An inner oneness should not negate outer differences but the tendency of humanism has been in that direction as the rejection of spirit resulted in what belongs to that level of existence being brought down to and mis-expressed in the lower level as it can no longer be expressed in its proper sphere.

Equality taken to its logical conclusion means everyone, or even everything (for why stop at human beings?), is the same. There is no better and no worse. Everything is reduced to a uniform level which means that the idea of quality is undermined. You can either have quality or equality. You can't have both. We now live in an age in which quantity takes precedence over quality and it is therefore inevitably an age of general decline, intellectual, moral but most of all spiritual. This is the hidden side of democracy.

We need to restore balance but that will require such an upheaval in our current way of thinking that deeply entrenched beliefs which have grown up over 200 years will have to be thrown out. The idea of hierarchy will need to be re-established in some form, and people will have to accept that, though we all form part of the human family, we are not equal, certainly not as far as this world is concerned and probably not even the next. Perhaps if we replaced the word equality with justice we might make some progress. Equality means nothing. It describes nothing real. All human beings deserve respect but if you regard them all as equal you will destroy civilisation just as we are destroying it now. Besides, can you restrict equality just to people? Once you have started, where do you draw the line? These things have a tendency to move on to the next stage once they have established themselves, and even now there are many people who regard human beings and animals as equal. What this will mean in practice is that anything that separates humans from animals will be regarded as suspect. To make the higher and the lower equal here and now, you have only one recourse. You must bring down the higher.

Men are by no means equal on the earth plane but that is not a cause for dismissing anybody. With these words the Masters have summed up the situation. All human beings have intrinsic value in the eyes of God and all have the potential to become godlike. But that potential has been realised by only a few completely, the saints, and in some it has been totally lost, the demons. In between those two extremes there are as many shades as there are souls. By giving in to the illusion of equality we are actually destroying spirituality because we reduce it to something that no one has more of than anyone else. It becomes something that is within us all to begin with and does not need to be grown, developed and worked for, just realised. This both devalues the individual and flattens the transcendent. Goodness, truth, beauty and holiness are made meaningless. That is the end result of egalitarianism. Everything is reduced to nothing. Cosmos is returned to chaos, the only state of true equality.