“The hatred of excellency is very real. Everything that points to the world of the mind and to the discipline of an ultimate moral law is despised and hated. If good and evil are valid and basic categories of thought, then the idea of an elite is inescapable. The idea can be abused, a wrong kind elite fostered; but, despite this, the concept of excellence remains.John Dewey, however, objected strongly to the orthodox Christianity because of its commitment to the ideas of right and wrong, heaven and hell, the saved and the lost, and he objected to it on the grounds that it fostered the idea of a ’spiritual aristocracy.’ ‘I cannot understand,’ said Dewey, ‘how any realization of the democratic ideal as a vital moral and spiritual ideal in human affairs is possible without surrender of the conception of the basic division to which supernatural Christianity is committed.’ More than one generation has been reared on Dewey’s philosophy. Having denied the validity of standards above man, it looks for vitality from within and below man.”

R. J. Rushdoony
Noble Savages – pg. 130

Today I read an article bemoaning that California Christian parents continue to send God’s covenant seed to government schools because California has recently passed rigid pro-sodomy education laws. Now, I don’t fault the push to get those children out of California government schools given how the California schools have been taken over by the rainbow crowd, but given the second paragraph of the quote above people should have seen the danger coming long before it finally arrived. Further, wise men would have recognized, given Dewey’s presuppositions, that eventually the kind of laws would be passed that California has recently passed in regard to its pro-sodomy educational platform. I will go even further. I submit that within the next 20 years the current pro-sodomy educational platform will give away to perversions that are in excess to the ones that are now currently being taught as normative.

Second, note that Rushdoony is suggesting that the category of an elite is inescapable. If good and bad are categories that are retained then whoever in the culture excels in what the culture has identified as ‘good’ will be considered elites and correspondingly those who lag in the category of ‘good’ will be among the cattle herd masses. This even applies to a culture that says that what is good is the idea that there is no good. The elites will be those who most earnestly seek to flatten out all moral distinctions and the herd will be comprised of people who still think in terms of explicit moral distinctions.

Third, note Rushdoony’s last sentence in the quote above. When God’s objective Law-Word is dismissed then another objective has to be located that man can latch on to for a standard. Some governing Law-Word from somewhere will become the objective standard, even if the objective standard is human subjective categories that have been objectified. In our culture the Law-Word that is often found ‘within man’ comes from standardized tests, polls, and judicial decisions governed by a legal positivism ethic. When the search for vitality for standards descends within man the consequence is a standard that shifts with the winds of humanistic elite manipulation.