I think you’re on the right track. Kimball confuses the importance of transcendental moral principles, and their relationship, with hierarchy as it is embedded in a society and between societies. How this confusion is typically expressed can be summed up as follows:

1.) within a society: “If there are no lower classes, everything is permitted.”

2.) between societies: “If there are no benighted peoples, everything is permitted.” (AKA, the prejudice that “The wogs begin at Calais”).

Thus, any serious attempt to address the scullery maid as a scullery maid can be dismissed as being a relativistic, nihilistic, utopian, etc. attack on the “social order.” Similarily, let’s suppose that this maid is an immigrant from Jamaica: any attempt to seriously come to terms with — or even to try to understand — her specific heritage as a Jamaican will be discounted as a relativistic, nihilistic attack on Civilization.

From this position, it is often (and unfortunately) the case that looking down upon someone because she is a scullery maid or a Jamaican is confused with looking up to God. The mischief that arises from the original set of prejudices is thus compounded.

Maybe somebody should have asked Chesterton’s scullery maid whether she wouldn’t have preferred a little post-modern boredom once in a while.

Having lost all sensitivity, they have given themselves over to sensuality so as to indulge in every kind of impurity, with a continual lust for more.

To take just a single example, the marriage debate, the victories by those who want to redefine marriage is most often seen in the weariness expressed by some of their opponents. Unmoored from the joy of marriage grounded in the creation of new life, this weariness leads to pessimism, resignation, and capitulation.

Pessimism is not in being tired of evil but in being tired of good. Despair does not lie in being weary of suffering, but in being weary of joy. It is when for some reason or other the good things in a society no longer work that the society begins to decline; when its food does not feed, when its cures do not cure, when its blessings refuse to bless. We might almost say that in a society without such good things we should hardly have any test by which to register a decline; that is why some of the static commercial oligarchies like Carthage have rather an air in history of standing and staring like mummies, so dried up and swathed and embalmed that no man knows when they are new or old. But Carthage at any rate was dead, and the worst assault ever made by the demons on mortal society had been defeated. But how much would it matter that the worst was dead if the best was dying?

Chesterton, G. K. (2005-03-21). The Everlasting Man (p. 125). Old LandMark Publishing. Kindle Edition.