The Great Chain of Being, as educated Man saw it anyway, was God's ordering of classes of being --- from very imperfect to PERFECT.
Nothingness was at the very bottom, and God at the very top : Man was in the high middle area.
But note the perfect and imperfect were born that way : their perfectness was ascribed , not something learned and earned/un-earned by being marked in some merit testing.
Life hadn't been tested and then graded from top to bottom in some Great Bell Curve of Life.
And in any case, no one asked God about all this human-devised ordering .
If they had, He might have dismissed this ordering with a laugh.
He might say that the Great Chain was just His ordering of life from simple to complicated - and the humans' point was what , exactly ?
After all, He explained, a locomotive was a much more complicated tool than a hammer but that hardly made it the more 'perfect' tool to quickly put a nail into a plank.
Anymore than one should prefer to assign a big Blue Whale over a tiny cat to keep the mice out of the barn on the grounds that Bigger is always Better.
God, Christians believed, had made all these forms of life - each best suited to a different role - all on the same day all on the same earth : in a fundamental sense this was the basis for their claim for the equality of all human life.
By contrast , Darwin talked openly , at times , of perfection and progress in the same breath.
His theory of evolution was ideally suited to being seen as as the constant evolution of life towards ever more perfection.
So now life was, in this new Darwinian world, one great long civil service exam, open to all, an "equality of opportunity" for all species.
Success in that exam, that great open test of meritocracy , got one a lifelong sinecure.
But failure could now be a death sentence .
There could be no cries of bias or unfairness as Nazi tribunals sentenced the handicapped to a 'therapy of death' - had not all the population equally written the same IQ test - was that not fair ?
And it couldn't really be said that the handicapped were accused of failing due to some moral failing or laziness.
No, they were simply those tools of Nature coming off of Life's assembly line that had failed the stress test and had to be tossed in the crusher bin.
It was all very objective, rational and scientific.
All very modern , even liberal in this bureaucratic 'death by meritocracy' ....
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