!!!!
Democracy is dead.
.
.CRISIS MAGAZINE
A Voice for the Catholic Faithful
.
I say so not because I have ceased to believe in it. I retain a half
guilty affection for that worst of all forms of government, except for
most of the rest. I say so because everyone else has ceased to believe in it.
.
Yesterday I asked my students what comes first to their minds when I
say that some country is a democracy. Immediately they turned to two
things. One was the machinery of elections. In a democracy, you get to
vote. The other was freedom of speech, defined in a libertarian way,
without regard to truth or to the good of any community. In a democracy,
you get to spit venom.
So I asked them to turn to Chesterton’s discussion of democracy, in Orthodoxy. For
Chesterton, democracy is not a system, and not the intellectual product
of experts in political science. It is rather a deep human feeling,
inchoate even in children. Its first principle is that “the essential
things in men are the things they hold in common, not the things they
hold separately.” In other words, what is essential about me is that I
am a human being and a man, that I had a mother and father, that I eat
and drink and breathe, that I talk and sometimes hold my peace, that I
like a good laugh, that I am a husband and father, that I grew up in a
place that still commands my affection, and that I bend my knees in
prayer. It is not that I am a professor of literature, that I read nine or ten languages, or that I can recite large blocks of Paradise Lost by
heart. The miracle is man himself, any man and each man. The true
democrat looks with wonder upon that fine rarity called the common man.
Armed with this healthy wonder, the democrat can acknowledge
excellence where he finds it, without servility. He can also be a farmer
laughing merrily at the clumsy Lord Corpulent trying to boost himself
up to the saddle, or a carpenter laughing merrily at the professor of
architecture who cannot hammer together a simple box. The democrat can
bow to Lord Corpulent, not taking him entirely seriously, and can smile
and roll his eyes at Professor Rhomboid, not taking him seriously
either. And in matters that affect everyone, he need not duck and scrape
to any lord or professor or self-styled expert at all.
.
Chesterton’s second principle is that “the political instinct or
desire is one of those things which [men] hold in common.” In other
words, it is also natural in us to come together to seek the common
good: “The democratic faith is this: that the most terribly important
things must be left to ordinary men themselves—the mating of the sexes,
the rearing of the young, the laws of the state. This is democracy; and
in this I have always believed.”
.
I then asked my students to imagine a small community. Call it
Summerville. The people of Summerville want their children to know how
to read good books, write clear English, and perform with ease those
arithmetical operations we all have to perform. They want them to know
the history of their country, honoring it without sentimentality,
criticizing it without ingratitude or cynicism. They want them to know
things about the natural world. They want them to know about other
nations past and present. So they are going to build a school, decide
upon a course of study, order books, and hire teachers. The question
then is simple. Will you let them do that?
.
The students were uncomfortable. What if the parents disagreed? What
if they were not expert in a certain area? I noted that I was not
spinning a fabulous tale. I was not describing a new thing in the world.
This is what the people of Summervilles have always done; until
Professor Dewey and his “science” of education and the machinery of
bureaucracy took their authority away from them. Dewey pretended to love
democracy, and perhaps he believed his pretense. But it was not
democracy that made him Dewey-eyed. It was control.
.
If you wish to impose a single set of “assessments” upon a hundred
thousand schools in the country, or upon thousands of schools in a
state, you may be wise, you may be foolish; you are probably ambitious
and arrogant; but what you cannot be is a democrat. If you believe that a
school board should at all costs be packed with “professionals,” lest
ordinary people disrupt the smooth functioning of the educational
machine, you may be a fine engineer, but you cannot be a democrat.
If that is true of education, it must be true many times over with
regard to raising children. The policeman who arrests teenage boys for
offering to shovel their neighbors’ snow for money may be following the
letter of an ordinance; but neither he nor those who insist upon the
ordinance can be called democratic. The avenging harpies of Child
Protective Services, descending upon an ordinary mother and father who
allow their children to play outside without constant surveillance, or
who allow them to proceed home from school by that time-tested method
known as walking, may have sheaves of statistics to warrant their
intrusion. They cannot have one word of democratic poetry.
The health of a democracy is not to be measured by how much your representatives meddle with, but by how much they need not or dare not
meddle with; just as the health of a limb is known by how little you
have to attend to it; or the health of a marriage by how many daily
things are done as effortlessly as breathing. The healthy man strides
along with a happy indifference to the weather; it is the sickly man or
the hypochondriac who has to glower about the clouds. England was at her
healthiest when her rulers played polo more often than politics. P. G.
Wodehouse is the sanest of writers because he delights in the glorious
unimportance of lordship and ladyship, and in the more glorious wonder
of the lord, the lady, the groom, and the butler.
.
In the land of the kilt and the chieftain, every newborn baby will
now be assigned a government mentor, a walking surveillance camera. Roll
your r’s when you say “Big Brother.” It remains to be seen whether the
proud Scots, who long resisted their English overlords and held so
manfully to their ways, will look to the professors and astrologers of
Edinburgh to determine for them when they shall eat and how they shall
move their bowels. It was for this that William Wallace died. Beware the
tartan: it is bar-coded.
.
Several years ago the Swedish government abducted a small boy from
his family as they were about to fly to the mother’s ancestral home in
India. They had disobeyed the unwritten law: Thou shalt not teach thy
children at home. The boy has not been returned. The mother has suffered
nervous breakdowns; the father has gone into Eurodebt, in more ways
than one. Yet Stockholm still stands, as impregnable as the fortress of
the most overbearing of feudal lords. Not all serfs till the soil.
Which brings me to the final point. Chesterton went on to say that he
never saw the connection between democracy and a hatred of tradition.
For tradition was simply the democratic principle extended over time: it
was “the democracy of the dead.”
.
“Democracy,” he says, “tells us not to neglect a good man’s opinion,
even if he is our groom; tradition tells us not to neglect a good man’s
opinion, even if he is our father.” We might view the matter from the
other end, thus. Tradition is the greatest source of an ordinary man’s
grasp of truth. It is the distilled and ordered wisdom of the ages, and
it is available to everyone. To trust in it is like trusting in common
sense. When it goes wrong, it does not go far wrong; it is never
monomaniacal, as innovators often are. If a democracy is real, rather
than a fiction confirmed by electoral machinery, it must honor
tradition.
.
If you despise tradition, if you assume that most men have gone badly
wrong throughout all of history, and on those things nearest their
hearts and minds, then you may be a genius, you are certainly an
imbecile, but you cannot on any account be a democrat.
.
If you believe that only a social “scientist” can pronounce
definitively upon marriage, or family, or education, or the relations of
the sexes, or work, or play, you may be a megalomaniac, you may be
merely deceived, but you cannot be a democrat. If you call your lawyer
to ask whether your child should go to bed, or your federal judges to
ask whether a child should be born at all, or whether a boy is a boy or a
girl, or whether your valedictorian can say “God” without a sneer, you
may need psychiatric care, you certainly need to clear your mind of
cobwebs, but you cannot be a democrat. If you believe that you must
defer to the cultural predilections and the immense wisdom of nine
lawyers, and not to the sane whimsy of your grandmother, you cannot be a
democrat.
.
The democrat does not trouble his head about what the
bureaucrats in Brussels will say. He takes an ax to the bureau. The
democrat does not place his hopes in a sane decision from the archons of
a court royal. He may for strategy’s sake file an amicus curiae brief, but he is inimicus curiae.
But I am an owl among ruins, a pelican in the wilderness.
.
Democracy is dead.
.
.
Professor Esolen teaches Renaissance English Literature and the
Development of Western Civilization at Providence College. He is a
senior editor for
Touchstone: A Journal of Mere Christianity, and a regular contributor to
Crisis Magazine. His most recent books are
The Politically Incorrect Guide to Western Civilization (Regnery Press, 2008);
Ten Ways to Destroy the Imagination of Your Child (ISI Press, 2010) and, most recently,
Reflections on the Christian Life (Sophia Institute Press, 2013). Professor Esolen has also translated Dante.
