Introduction
On 2017/04/20, Judge Andrew Napolitano published: What if We Don’t Really Govern Ourselves?, a simple and coherent article questioning whether democracy exists in the United States and whether democracy is, in any case, an absolute good or an answer to our various political problems. Napolitano’s essay is in the form of questions which move relentlessly through terrible possibilities. His essay begins:
What if our belief in self-government is a belief in a myth? What if the election of one political party over the other to control Congress changes only appearances? What if taxes stay high and regulations stay pervasive and the government stays oppressive and presidents fight wars no matter what the politicians promise and no matter who wins elections? What if the true goal of those whom we elect to Congress is not to be our agents of self-government or even to preserve our personal liberties but to remain in power by getting re-elected?
And that essay by Judge Napolitano ends:
What if the selective use of the data acquired from mass surveillance can be used to manipulate anyone by those who have access to the data? What if those who have access to the data have used it to manipulate the president of the United States? What if all this constitutes a grave but largely unseen threat to our liberties, not the least of which is the right to self-government?
What if we don’t really govern ourselves? What do we do about it?
I fear and believe that we Americans are the citizens in a mostly gentle sort of totalitarian society. Such a society was, in fact, foreseen by Tocqueville back in the 1830s when he looked into the American soul and saw its potential strengths and weaknesses. (See any of the English language editions of Democracy in America which might be found in your local library or library borrowing system.)
For now, I’ll move on. A day after Napolitano published the above referenced essay, Pat Buchanan published Is Democracy in a Death Spiral?, on the same, high-quality website run by Ron Unz.
Once again, I’ll quote the beginning and end of the essay under consideration.
Buchanan begins with a quote:
“You all start with the premise that democracy is some good. I don’t think it’s worth a damn. Churchill is right. The only thing to be said for democracy is that there is nothing else that’s any better.
…
“People say, `If the Congress were more representative of the people it would be better.’ I say Congress is too damn representative. It’s just as stupid as the people are, just as uneducated, just as dumb, just as selfish.”
This dismissal of democracy, cited by historian H. W. Brands in The General vs. the President: MacArthur and Truman at the Brink of Nuclear War, is attributed to that great populist Secretary of State Dean Acheson.
Buchanan ends his essay thus:
How, outside an external attack that unites us, like 9/11, do we find unity among people who dislike each other so much and regard each other’s ideas and ideals as hateful and repellent?
Democracy requires common ground on which all can stand, but that ground is sinking beneath our feet, and democracy may be going down the sinkhole with it.
Where liberals see as an ever-more splendid diversity of colors, creeds, ethnicities, ideologies, beliefs and lifestyles, the Right sees the disintegration of a country, a nation, a people, and its replacement with a Tower of Babel.
Visions in conflict that democracy cannot reconcile.
Is Democracy Possible? Is it Compatible with Christianity?
What is Democracy? Is it no more than a set of procedures for electing important government officials? Is it more complete, even to being a way of life? Is it a mere attitude which can cover the empowerment of a minority of Athenian men or a perhaps truer democracy in Switzerland or the political machine system of the United States?
Keep those standard ways of thought in mind, but keep another thought in the front of your mind: Christians are bound to believe that the Body of Christ is the perfect and complete human community; that Body is the union of Christ with all of His brothers and sisters. Our understanding of the Body of Christ should guide all of our thoughts about the best possible forms of human communities—including those we describe as `political’. Even the most secular of political beliefs and acts should be compatible with our Christian beliefs.
That Christian thought should also guide us in answering two questions I’ll raise, without claiming any plans or hopes of answering in any authoritative manner.
Is Democracy Possible?
I doubt if democracy is truly possible, at least not for most human communities.
- First, most citizens in any large society will be ignorant of what needs to be known to be responsible voters and to retain their democratic forms; most will also lack the time or energy or sense of responsibility to learn what they should know and to think about it in terms of the issues or persons subject to votes.
- In addition, a successful society with any sort of government will likely build up wealth and centralized power that will attract various sorts of scoundrels right up to the level of ruthless men of genius and ambition, such as Julius Caesar or Genghis Khan. That’s the end of the old form of government, democracy or other.
Let’s consider the the United States which was founded as a republic (sometimes called a representative democracy) and fell from that state to one of political machines, including Tammany Hall which was founded a few years before the American Constitution was written and adopted. The distinguished French political philosopher, Bertrand de Jouvenel, made this claim: that the United States has a political machine system and not a democracy or republic. We Americans act within a republican form which is increasingly being corrupted to a pseudo-democracy which seems to be even more useful for the two political machines left, the national leaderships of the Democratic and Republican parties; beginning in the 1960s, those two machines destroyed the local and ethnic machines and concentrated the money-grubbing and electoral power in their own criminal hands.
I am not saying that those two political machines are all-powerful. Outsiders have had some success even to the extent of gaining seats and holding some power at the state level and in the Senate and House of Representatives. Some have even had some lesser success in running for president. Bertrand de Jouvenel pointed out that honest politicians did sometimes arise and win important office, under that older American political machine system, but they were exceptions and they are probably more exceptional under the current system. In any case, that insightful Frenchman observed that political machines survive by taking in money and valuable (money-generating) favors from satisfied clients; those machines need amoral or immoral politicians who will vote with the interests of those clients rather than voting with the interests of the nation or their particular voters (for example, in Ohio) or their moral beliefs.
Sometimes cynicism is justified: when I hear American political leaders or high-level bureaucrats or think-tankers speaking of “spreading democracy,” I see them as vultures, ready to exploit the peoples of the United States or Iraq or Ukraine or Russia or…nearly any country or group within any country, except of course for bankers or corporate heads or any other owners or allies of the governmental decision-makers.
I’m going to run around a lot of interesting analyses—which I’m not immediately prepared to carry out nor do I feel called to head in that particular direction—and claim that democracies, even republics, under modern conditions are impossible so far as their self-government characteristics go. The form might exist but the reality of self-government can’t exist. The world is too complicated for even local leaders to understand to any meaningful extent; the common man has no time, no inclination, often no capacity, for understanding even the general backgrounds of North African countries, Middle-eastern countries… Heck, most residents of the Northeastern states of the US don’t even understand a little of what is going on in California or Texas or Michigan.
It is a great moral fallacy, a matter of sin to Christians, to think there to be a right to a certain political system under which the crucial decisions (who are to be the leaders) are made by people who don’t, and often can’t, understand the modern complex world. This is to say it is a sin to claim and exercise even the illusion of power when you have no plans, and perhaps no capability, of gaining some understanding of those who, for example, face death as a result of you helping to vote an imperialist or interventionist into the White House.
Moreover, it creates a situation where all sorts of scoundrels can take advantage of those masses who escape their confusion and anxiety about the world by adopting simplistic ideas about that world, about the moral authority of the American leadership elites, about the thievery and other crimes those elites are committing against their own citizens and the greater crimes they have committed and are committing against citizens of other countries.
Here’s part of the problem behind Christian failure to even try to deal with political systems from a Christian viewpoint—other than the Medieval and early modern eras when Kings dominated and Christ was seen as King, as if our Lord the carpenter and itinerant preacher were really some sort of failed King during His mortal life. The Lord Jesus Christ accomplished what He came to do; we should understand His life in that light. He wasn’t a failed King; if He had wished to be a King, then He would have been a successful King, still greater than King St Louis IX—to say the least. In fact, He was a carpenter and then became an itinerant preacher. And He never agitated for democracy or any other form of self-government. I think He was in favor of, and will bring His friends to, a state of self-government of a sort, but not any sort we can quite realize in this world. Worst still, we Christians have failed to even approach the issue of proper political structure by considering Christ’s life on earth and what He was trying to accomplish.
In any case, Christian churches have let themselves become ghettos outside of the domains of modern empirical knowledge and thought—however much fools can wave their hands and say, “There is no conflict between science and religion.” In a sense, that’s true, but the conflict comes in human beings, communal and individual. The conflict is realized particularly strongly in the youth who learn from their culture, including entertainment as well as schools, that men evolved from ancestors shared with chimpanzees and then are forced to go to church on Sunday to hear someone babble on about men falling into their currently imperfect and incomplete condition, falling from a state of some sort of perfection. Were our ancestors in a state of grace and perfection? Or were they apish creatures?
We now know our line of evolution passed through some apish creatures. We share an ancestor with chimpanzees, before that with all sorts of nice or nasty creatures. If we Christians are to continue to speak our Christian truths as part of a package which includes the non-truth of a fall from a state of grace, we are likely to have a bad understanding of human nature, a bad understanding of human political possibilities, a bad understanding of God’s plans for us—that is, a bad understanding of the meaning of salvation.
We need to consider both aspects of human being discussed in the prior paragraph: how human being evolved and what God’s plans are for us. Leave aside the clear fact that we have some idea of God’s plans for us but need to speculate a bit, to prepare ourselves for sharing God’s life in the world of the resurrected.
So it is:
- We human beings are embodied. We have limited capacity to acquire or properly use true knowledge, abstract or concrete—the latter being largely empirical. We have limited time and energy. We are imperfectly virtuous. We, at least the American `we’, are very bad at choosing leaders who are properly knowledgeable, adequately intelligent, even minimally morally well-ordered.
- God clearly plans for us, some of us or many of us or—unlikely—all of us, to share His life through complete and perfect communion with His Son and with every other friend of His Son.
Is Democracy Compatible with Christianity?
The Body of Christ has no governance in the sense of a central power structure. Christ Himself rarely ordered His followers about and when He did, telling them to put out in their boat and He’d meet them on the other side or announcing they were going up to Jerusalem, He was quite gentle in His manner. That despite the fact that the disciples were strongly against going to Jerusalem, for reasons that proved to be quite valid from the perspective of mortal human beings.
Jesus’ leadership was quite different than that of a general ordering his troops into battle, even much different from the leadership of a general who went into battle with his troops—we can think of General Teddy Roosevelt, Jr going with his men onto the beach at the invasion of Normandy in June of 1944. To be sure, the leadership style of the Apostles was a mixed-bag of sorts. They most certainly didn’t have the Presence of the man(-God) who taught with such authority. They sometimes led by way of developing a consensus, after which the community—or, at least, it’s many lower-level leaders—moved in a way sort of describable as “one.”
In general, there are some more suited to specific roles of authority; we should follow certain men and women in learning how to carry out acts of charity in a manner non-condescending and other men and women in learning how to listen and to counsel troubled human beings or how to guide boys and girls trying to find their way in life or still others in coming to abstract understandings of God’s Creation or parts of it. This last is interesting if only because certain abstract thinking for the Body of Christ, or one of His constituent parts, might be provided by some not ordinarily considered to be talented in abstract thinking such as tinkerers as the most obvious example. Henry Ford was one specific example, Thomas Alva Edison another—perhaps the sheer theoretical brilliance of Nikola Tesla explains the antagonism each expressed toward the other. Even fairly mundane technology such as modern American house-building materials and techniques represent a partial but important understanding of this world and of human life. It says something about differences between peoples when we think of the tendency of farmers from the tribes of Northwestern Europe to live in nuclear families separated from their neighbors whereas most farming peoples live in villages with their fields sometimes being communal.
The Body of Christ is the perfect and complete human community and the goal of true Christians is to play their part in the development and life of that Body; we are saved as part of that Body or we are not saved at all. St Paul tells us so in his First Letter to the Corinthians—all of chapter 12 is relevant but there are some verses which are particularly enlightening in this context.
ICor 12:12 tells us:
For just as the body is one and has many members, and all the members of the body, though many, are one body, so it is with Christ. [The Holy Bible, Revised Standard Version: Catholic Edition, 1966.]
In a book I recently released for free downloading, The Shape of Reality, I reached something of a new level for my thought, making it a little more explicit how modern mathematical ideas can provide concepts and words for discussing the reality of communities. To date, I’ve largely drawn upon differential geometry and topology; I’m currently exploring basic abstract algebra as well as dynamics for further ideas on making my descriptions of complex entities more complete.
This is clearly of great importance in understanding all human communities, including political communities.
Communities are real and most certainly is it true that a Christian should believe in the real existence of that complete and perfect human community: the Body of Christ. That Body has properties seemingly inconsistent with the existing schemes for organizing human polities, starting with the targeted state of a Body which is itself and not just the sum of its members. Yet, those members retain their individuality even as they are part of something truly greater than, in a sense—different from, any gathering of those individuals—however cooperative they might be. Communities are real.
But what about the Body of Christ, which I suggest has the properties I claim to be fundamental to a morally well-ordered world and a morally well-ordered Person or image of a divine Person: unity, coherence, and completeness?
Let me throw out this speculation about the Body of Christ, the perfect and complete human being: Maybe leaders in the usual sense are not necessary?
Maybe, just maybe, most human activities can be organized internally, and more or less spontaneously, particular human sub-communities so that the members do what is necessary, taking on roles of leader or worker or user of products or services. After all, those sharing God’s life in the world of the resurrected, or intending in this world to share God’s life, would be mature enough to work together in proper ways, taking on or shedding various roles—including that of `leader’—as needed. [Remember from my earlier writings that “to intend” in Thomistic and legal and biological traditions is not to have a motive or a goal but rather to move actively toward a new state. “To intend” is a growth process.]
This seems more than a bit speculative, but let’s return to a great prophet: St Paul, in ICor 12:14-20, tells us by analogy from an individual human body to the Body of Christ:
For the body does not consist of one member but of many. If the foot should say, “Because I am not a hand, I do not belong to the body,” that would not make it any less a part of the body. And if that ear should say, “Because I am not an eye, I do not belong to the body,” that would not make it any less a part of the body. If the whole body were an eye, where would be the hearing? If the whole body were an ear, where would be the sense of smell? But as it is, God arranged the organs in the body, each one of them, as he chose. If all were a single organ, where would the body be? As it is, there are many parts, yet one body. [The Holy Bible, Revised Standard Version: Catholic Edition, 1966.]
This is where my thoughts begin to fade away, because I’m not quite ready to speculate further on a good way to use Christian revelation to provide either a narrative or a metaphysical structure for putting together modern empirical knowledge and modern abstract ways of thought (largely mathematics) in order to make sense of the world around us. (Both structures are likely needed.)
Yet, I will put forward some thoughts which are tentative even as speculations.
- All that is human, all skills of building and of teaching and of exploring reality and of making theories about what is known and so on, will remain with the Body of Christ in the world of the resurrected. Though we think of this world, Heaven or Paradise, as being a place of pure rest and play, Disneyland raised to some strange perfection and completeness, all legitimate and worthy human parts and aspects will be completed and perfected in that world of the resurrected, as parts and aspects of the Body of Christ.
- The Body of Christ isn’t organized in a manner at all hierarchical, though Christ is the Head in some substantial sense. Yet, even Christ Himself is our Brother much more than He is our King. His Lordship isn’t that of a human king raised to divine levels but rather that of a wise and generous older brother raised to divine levels; the Lord Jesus is tolerant of our failings and weaknesses and there to help us become more like Him.
- To expand a little upon the above, but also to borrow from ideas found in the letters of St Paul, each individual human being saved as a member of the Body of Christ, will remain himself or herself while also being the entirety of that Body. This is to say that each of us will have `use’ of all the parts and aspects of Christ and also of all the talents of intellectual and artistic geniuses in the Body and also of all the talents of the giants of charity (Christian love) in the Body and also of all the talents of the practical men and women whose skills of homemaking and home-building will remain part of human life in the world of the resurrected which is the true home of the Body of Christ.
The bottom line, in the context of dealing with democracy and other forms of human political organization, is: there might be leaders but we will all share in those leadership activities and those leaders will not be bosses or exploiters as they often are in this mortal realm.
I wrote this essay under the title: Is Democracy Possible? Is it Compatible with Christianity?. To answer these two questions:
- Probably not.
- No.