This applies to both marital (sexual) and distributive (economic) relations. Christianity formally rejects all types of utopianism, usually predicated on egalitarianism. In short, it is unnatural—even anti-natural—to expect, as today’s popular culture does, a uniformity of roles and talents among human beings.
Forced equality bears wicked fruits. As such, we should reject the notion of “gender neutral language,” “participation trophies,” ties in ball games, and measures toward perfectly equal incomes among households. Instead, we should insist upon gender-specific grammar, trophies only for champions, tiebreakers in sports, and a meritocratic economy which guarantees to each his due. Only these are truly Christian and aligned with natural law.
Radicals have recently changed the world by crying out “diversity, diversity!” while simultaneously condemning all forms of non-egalitarianism. This is a bold contradiction. But it has heretofore gone unnoticed, or at least unannounced, by retrogrades. Truly healthy diversity is achieved by the widespread cultural acknowledgement of a talented “natural aristoi” (as Thomas Jefferson noted) and its opposite (i.e., a less talented average citizen). The retrograde announces the following economic fact of life: certain sorts are more talented, bigger, faster, and better than others. Along similar lines, men and women comprise natural opposites. Egalitarianism is evil because it denies these basic truths of nature.
Of course, two exceptional forms of modified equality do qualify as Christian: equality of dignity and of opportunity, exceptions in the Christian arenas of matrimony and political economy, respectively. First, let’s examine “equality” in the realm of matrimony. Men and women are naturally, unalterably disparate. By now, radicals have used the slippery concept of equality to justify the near-total destruction of matrimony. Sexual equality (even more than its economic sibling) proves to be a juggernaut, engulfing everything it touches.
The retrograde understands that men and women are not at all equals: men are superior at being male, as women are superior at being female. The Christian doctrine of complementarity involves equality in dignity between men and women but not in function or power. As a term of art, dignity stands for the proposition that all human beings—every man and woman alike—enjoy rights in the eyes of God on account of their immortal souls. Yet dignity does not accrue from merit or usefulness. On the other hand, sexual roles and talents have quite a lot to do with merit when we consider the functioning of the efficient household economy: men were built to do some things and women were built to do others.
Accordingly, even universal human rights (e.g., life or liberty) pertain and accrue to the two sexes differently. The manner in which men and women spend their rights should be expected to vary. In fact, men and women prove to be complementary precisely because of the natural disparity of function and power between them. A husband admires his wife’s grace, as she admires his efficacy.6
Everything of a sexual nature after the 1960s grew monochromatic, uniform, and bland. Radicals violated their own claimed admiration of diversity, suggesting across all cultural venues that neither the male set of qualities—power, assertion, and activity—nor the female set—fealty, gentleness, and receptivity—turn out to be sex-specific. Through lies, force, and cajoling, radicals convinced most people that culture, not nature, fabricated the sexual differences commonly observed prior to the sexual revolution. In other words, radicals popularized the lie that nature does not lay out “gender roles.” Sexual equality was their primary means of leveling the landscape: women should become soldiers and pretend to like it; men should become doddering wet nurses and pretend to like it.
Like all utopian visions, sexual equality created an actual dystopia, a hell on earth. The retrograde seeks to undo this. Through truth, forceful reasoning, and cajoling, retrogrades must reverse this sweeping cultural lie by showing the joy of the disparity between the two sexes, especially in the form of healthy marriages. Our mutual differences make men and women natural partners: they make us see and appreciate one another’s strengths, which are not sex-fungible.
Strangely enough, much of the retrograde’s logic regarding the complementarian rapport between the two sexes applies with equal rigor to just economics (in a less sexy way): in the economic case, the radicals attacked the merit which generates natural economic diversity. As Pope Leo XIII reminds his reader in warning against the new socialist reconfiguration of the mutual relationship between workers and their bosses, “each needs the other: capital cannot do without labor, nor labor without capital.”7 The great pope goes on to specify the danger: “To remedy these wrongs the socialists, working on the poor man’s envy of the rich, are striving to do away with private property, and contend that individual possessions should become the common property of all, to be administered by the State or by municipal bodies. They hold that by thus transferring property from private individuals to the community, the present mischievous state of things will be set to rights, inasmuch as each citizen will then get his fair share of whatever there is to enjoy.”8
Once more, egalitarianism is evil, Pope Leo XIII reminds us. On the contrary, he makes it clear that in a robust and just political economy with reasonably fair conditions, “what you reap is what you sow.”
Pope Leo wrote one of the most important encyclicals of all time simply by channeling the basic anti-egalitarian attitudes of Aristotle and Thomas Aquinas. According to Aristotle, fairness (or “distributive justice”) honors proportion: “for if persons are not equal, they ought not have equal shares.”9 More specifically, fairness honors geometrical proportion: unequal shares for unequal merit. Conversely, equality haphazardly “honors” what Aristotle calls arithmetic proportion—equal shares for unequal merit—but Aristotle deems that such egalitarianism violates justice. Thomas Aquinas, for his part, agrees: “If property were equalized among the households, … it would lead to a corruption of the polity. It also follows that the equalization of possessions is unsuitable from a consideration of the gradation of personages, as well as from human nature. There is a difference between citizens just as there is between members of a body. … The virtue and function of different members is different.”10
The retrograde knows that in actuality there were two, not one, socialist “errors of Russia” warned against at Fatima in 1917: sexual egalitarianism and economic egalitarianism. The West has succumbed to both, although moderate right-wingers have usually picked one side or the other to spend energy in countering.11 Both egalitarian errors of Russia must be undone, however. Both must be decried and defeated in the West. Retrogrades have been appointed by the late hour to be the soldiers fighting to the death this two-front war.
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6 The natural force that arises in that space of inter-sexual admiration may only be described as attraction, a beautiful phenomenon that cannot exist without male-female differences. The natural law ensures that, on account of stark sexual differences of body and soul, men and women have indispensably different roles to play. Thus are they drawn to one another. Women are attracted to the strength, assertiveness, and activity of good men; men are attracted to the fealty, gentleness, and receptivity of good women. Along those lines, males attract females through leadership, just as females attract males through fealty. Natural complementarity dictates a beautiful “fit” between men and women. At least, this was the case before radicals began attempting to pervert human sexuality in the popular mind: they did so by equalizing the sexes (or claiming to have done so).
7 Rerum Novarum, 19.
8 Rerum Novarum, 4.
9 Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, V, iii, 7-8.
10 Thomas Aquinas, De Regimine Principium, Book 4, Ch. 9, p. 76.
11 As shown clearly by the “Melee at CUA” debate on 9/5/19 between David French and Sohrab Ahmari, both types of non-retrograde conservative—post-liberals and classical liberals—have chosen to combat one but not both types of Russia’s errors.