Democracy and Equality

In conversation with some colleagues the other day, the topic of the American election came up.  One person said that the Americans should amend their system so that whoever wins the popular vote wins the election.  I responded that this was a bad suggestion.  Democracy, I argued, is the worst concept of government there is.  America’s Founding Fathers, I argued, while wrong to give themselves a republican (no king) form of government, at least had the sense to invent the electoral college to filter the popular vote so that their democracy was less direct.

 

Someone else said that I was advocating dictatorship, as if this was the only alternative to democracy.  Apparently he had forgotten that I have explained my views quite clearly in the past. Legitimate government is a representative model on earth of the government of the universe in Heaven.  That means the reign of kings.  Or, should the succession fall to a woman as in the case of our late Sovereign Lady of blessed memory, Elizabeth II, a queen.  Since human beings are fallen and sinful and lack the perfect justice of the King of Kings in Heaven, the institution that provides the governed with representation in the earthly king’s government is also acceptable.  This is the ancient institution of Parliament.  That it is ancient and has proven itself through the tests of time, and not the fact that it is democratic, is why it is acceptable. 

 

Dictatorship is not the opposite of democracy but its ultimate expression.  I don’t mean the original dictators, who were officials of the Roman Republic, appointed by the consuls (co-presidents) to handle an emergency, usually military in nature. I mean dictators in today’s usage, which is synonymous with what the ancients called tyrants.  Whatever you call it, however, a dictator or tyrant, this kind of person is the ultimate democrat.  For he seizes power by rallying the mob behind him.  He is the opposite of a king, whose position in his realm is an extension of that of the father in the home or the patriarch in the older, more extended, family.  A dictator is always “Big Brother”, the first among equals.  Eric Blair knew of that which he wrote.

 

This colleague defended equality on the grounds that the Lord made us equal.  “Chapter and verse” I responded.  There is no chapter and verse, because this is not the teaching of the Scriptures.

 

Like democracy, equality is one of those abstract ideals that Modern man has made into an idol.  The ancient Greeks knew better as can be seen in the myth of Procrustes, whom Theseus encountered and who made his guests fit his one-size-for-all bed by either lopping parts of them off or stretching them.  Kurt Vonnegut Jr.’s “Harrison Bergeron” is an updated version of this story.  Equality is a very deceptive idol because of its surface resemblance to the ancient good of justice.  Justice, however, demands that each person be treated right.  Equality demands that each person be treated the same as every other person.  These are not the same thing. 

 

The difference between treating people right and treating people the same can be illustrated by further ripping the mask off of equality.  Equality passes itself off as the virtuous ethic of “You should treat a perfect stranger as if he were your own brother.”  In practice, however, what it really means is “you should treat your own brother as if he were a perfect stranger.”  In the field of economics equality is socialism, the system that presents itself under the mask of Charity or Christian Love, the highest of the spiritual or theological virtues, when behind that mask is Envy, the second worst of the Seven Deadly Sins.

 

The ancients knew that equality and democracy, far from being the goods and virtues they purport to be, basically boiled down to two wolves and a lamb voting on what to have for supper.  Modern experience adds that the false idol of equality leads inevitably to the dehumanization of mass society in which each person is reduced to just one number in the multitude.

 

My colleague argued that each person is equal in worth or value and that this can be seen by the fact that Jesus died for everybody.  We should not be making a big deal about people’s worth or value, however, because to do so is to commoditize human beings.  The value or worth of something is what you can exchange it for in the market.  Jesus applied the concept of value to human beings once.  This was in Matt. 10:21 and Luke 12:7 which record the same saying.  Jesus’ point here is not egalitarian.  God cares for the sparrows, you are worth more than them (this is a hierarchical, not an egalitarian observation), therefore you should trust God to take care of you.  The only other time the word value appears in the New Testament – worth doesn’t appear there at all – is in Matt. 27:9 which speaks about the silver Judas was paid to betray Jesus. 

 

Yes, Jesus died for all.  To say that this made people equal is a major non sequitur.  It introduced a new distinction between people.  Those who trust in Him are saved by His death.  Those who don’t, are condemned all the more for their rejection of the Saviour.  Where they are equal, that is, the same, is in their need for Christ’s saving work.

 

I recommend reading Erik von Kuehnelt-Leddihn for clarity on this matter.  Start with his Liberty Or Equality? The Challenge of Our Times.

The Tory and the Collective

In the twentieth century there were several attempts to define “left” and “right” in their political sense, as poles governing the political spectrum. Such attempts by their very nature were misleading as they required the reduction of complex political views to something so simple that it could be plotted on a chart. Thus the effort tended to be self-defeating, producing confusion where clarity was intended.

An example of these oversimplified spectrums was that of individualism v. collectivism with individualism being the right pole and collectivism being the left pole. As I pointed out in my last essay, my own political outlook of Toryism – the classical conservatism that upholds royal and ecclesiastical authority for the common good of the whole society – does not chart well on this spectrum because it is both individualist and collectivist, but individualist in a different sense than the classical liberal and collectivist in a different sense than the contemporary leftist. I then explained the difference between Tory individualism and classical liberal individualism. In this essay I intend to explain the difference between Tory collectivism and leftist collectivism.

Collectivism, in a general sense of the word, is a way of thinking in which the emphasis is placed on the group rather than the individual. In the context of economics it ordinarily suggests some form of socialism or communism, which is one of the reasons for the association between collectivism and the left. Toryism, however, can also be legitimately described as collectivist. When Naim Attallah asked Enoch Powell what it means to be a Tory in a 1998 interview, in his answer, the famous Tory statesman remarked that a Tory “reposes the ultimate authority in institutions – he is an example of collective man.” (1)

Note that Powell spoke of institutions – plural – rather than “an institution” – singular. In this, the most fundamental difference between Tory collectivism and leftist collectivism can be seen. The Tory believes in a plurality of collectives, each with its own sphere of influence, starting at the local level with examples such as the family, the local neighborhood, and the church parish. We could call this the horizontal plurality of collectives. The Tory also believes in a vertical plurality of collectives, which means that at the higher level of the national society he sees collectives of collectives, rather than merely collectives of individuals.

The Anglican Church, at one time known as the “Tory Party at prayer”, is a good illustration of what I mean. At the national level, in my country, you have the Anglican Church of Canada. Within that there are four ecclesiastical provinces. Each of these consists of several dioceses, which in turn are made up of multiple parishes. Each parish is a collective, within a collective, within a collective, within a collective – and you could extend the number of collectives further since the Anglican Church of Canada is part of the worldwide Anglican Communion, which in turn is part of the larger Christian Church.

When we enter the realm of politics, the Parliament that writes Her Majesty’s laws for us in Ottawa, writes them, for better or for worse, for the entire country of Canada, which includes ten provinces and three territories with governments of their own, which in turn consist of several cities, townships, and rural municipalities with local governments.

The Tory places a great deal of emphasis upon the importance of both the horizontal and the vertical plurality of collectives. Society, for him, is not and should not be a mere aggregation of equal individuals who just happen to live in the same place, at the same time, under the same government, but is a living thing, in which individuals and groups, join together in different ways and at different levels to form an organic whole.

Leftist collectivism is not like this. It is very much about a single collective, which it calls “the people”. This collective, has but a single institutional expression, that of the state. The Tory and the leftist both believe in an institution they call “the state.” Both would say that the state is the institution that passes laws for the common good of the society, but this is where the coincidence of their views of the state ends. The Tory holds to a classical view of the state, grounded in the thought of the ancients, whereas the lefist holds to a modern view of the state, that can be traced to the eighteenth century philosophy of Jean-Jacques Rousseau. The difference is sufficiently large to justify the assetion that the Tory and the leftist are talking about two different institutions.

The Tory sees the state as one of many institutions, albeit the highest in any given society, vested, as Enoch Powell said, with authority. More specifically, the Tory sees the highest authority in society (2) as vested in the royal sovereign, and the state as the institution (3) that excercises that authority. The left’s ideal, on the other hand, is the democratic state, an institution that is the voice of the people, expressing what Rousseau called their “volonté générale”. Such a state, is the embodiment of power rather than authority, a fact openly acknowledged by the left in their oft-heard slogan “power to the people”. The difference between authority and power is that authority is the right to command, whereas power is the strength to coerce. All government must have a degree of power backing its authority to ensure its stability but civilized government does not rely upon this power except in cases of necessity because the overuse of power undermines authority. In the left’s ideal state, where the people and government are one, power is everything, specifically the strength of the numbers which is the force of the mob.

The left, to reiterate, cares about one collective, the people, and one institution, the state, and its goal is to make the latter the full political expression of the voice and collective will of the former. Who do the left mean when they speak of the people?

In the early days of the left, when it was the party of revolution seeking to overthrow the ancient, classical, and Christian order, the people were the governed as opposed to the established authorities. In the nineteenth century, a specific political phenomenon known as nationalism sprung from the roots of Rousseau’s philosophy and the French Revolution. We don’t often think of nationalism as being leftist today, but it was recognizably so then, and in this stage of the left, the people were the nation, that is, an ethnic group defined by a common racial ancestry, language, religion, and other cultural markers. The leftist nationalists sought to overthrow the royal houses and the Catholic Church to establish the democratic nation-state, embodying the voice of their particular nation. In the twentieth century, the left moved on from the nation, and began to speak of the people in international terms and on a global scale. This evolution of leftist thought is quite in keeping with the left’s avowed progressivism, when we consider Canadian Tory philosopher George Grant’s description of progress as the movement of history towards a “universal and homogeneous state”.

Nineteenth century leftist nationalism, in its attempt to create democratic nation-states, was suspicious of the other collectives and other institutions that had claims on people’s loyalties and affections, and insisted that one’s loyalty to the nation-state be undivided and come before all other loyalties. Today this is what leftists insist upon such loyalty to all of humanity and perhaps to a future democratic world state that will embody the voice of this global scale people. It is here that the leftist collectivist and the liberal individualist approach each other, in their mutual distrust of the plurality of traditional, organic, collective institutions that share claims on our loyalties. From different starting points, the leftist and liberal arrive at mass society, the single large collective, first on a national scale now growing internationally to the global scale, that is an aggregate of equal, undifferentiated, individuals rather than a many-layered organism.

Nothing could be further from Tory collectivism than this.

(1) https://quartetbooks.wordpress.com/2010/05/14/no-longer-with-us-enoch-powell/
(2) The authority of God is higher, but that is an authority that transcends society, rather than an authority within society.
(3) NB, that the state in the Tory view, is a collective institution, made up of several institutions of which the two Houses of Parliament, the various ministries, and the Courts are examples.

We and I

Ayn Rand, who fled the Soviet Union as a young woman to become a screenwriter and novelist in the United States, is remembered for her ultra-individualistic philosophy, a blend of classical liberalism, Nietzcheanism, and materialism that she called Objectivism. Her message about the heroic individual, defying all collective restraint in pursuit of an enlightened selfishness, is tiresomely proclaimed from every page of her lengthy novels Atlas Shrugged and The Fountainhead. Amidst all the atheistic and materialistic dross of her writings, there is a nugget of gold to be found, however, in her early novella Anthem. This short novel, first published in 1938, depicts a future dystopian society in which a collectivist government has banned the word “I” and its cognates as “unspeakable” and rigidly enforced this ban with capital punishment to the point that most of the members of this society can now only think in the collective plural. Her hero is a young man, a Promethean type like all of Rand’s heroes, the individuality of whom, the intense conditioning processes of his society has failed to eliminate.

One gets the impression from Rand’s writings, that she would have preferred a society that is a mirror image of the one she has depicted in Anthem, a society in which the word “we” and the concept it represents, has been eliminated. The dark irony of this, of course, is that such a society would be just as totalitarian as the one in her novel. I suspect this is what Whittaker Chambers picked up on when, in reviewing Atlas Shrugged for National Review in 1957, he said that from almost every page of the novel “a voice can be heard, from painful necessity, commanding: ‘ To the gas chambers — go!’”. (1)

Nevertheless, Rand made a very important point. A society in which individuality was ruthlessly stamped out, in which people are forbidden to think and speak of themselves as “I”, would be a horrible society. This Rand knew from her own experience, as she was twelve years old when the Bolsheviks, a revolutionary party of extreme collectivist views, took over her native Russia and turned it into a totalitarian state. The reason such a society would be so horrible is that individuality is an essential and important part of our nature as human beings and it is contrary to our good and to the happiness that is derived from that good to suppress human individuality.

In recognizing this, it is important that we do not lose sight of the fact that the word “we” also represents an essential part of our human nature, one that is at least as important as our individuality. Try and imagine a society in which there was only “I” and no “we”. This would eliminate the “we” of marriage in which a man and a woman sacrifice part of their individuality to bind themselves and their lives together as one. It would further eliminate the “we” of family, the basic human collective to which each of us looks for such basic human needs as love and security. It would eliminate the “we” of friendship and any other human bond formed by sharing common interests and activities, needs and wants, likes and dislikes, pleasures and pains, joys and sufferings.

An individualist might interject that he has no objection to collectives, provided that they are voluntary associations that individuals willingly join and from which they can withdraw at any time. Surely, however, the “we” that is the family is more important, more fundamental to the human good and to human happiness, than the business partnership or the social club. Yet while the latter are voluntary associations, the former is not. It is held together by relationships that are permanent, based on blood, and which are not voluntary, relationships such as that of a mother to her daughter, a father to his son, and a brother to a sister.

Those who see only the individual, the “I” and who only recognize the collective, the “we”, when it is a voluntary association of “I”s are as mistaken as those who see only the collective and insist that the good of the “we” requires that the rights and freedoms, the dreams and aspirations, of the “I” be suppressed. Indeed, their mistake is one and the same, a failure to recognize that man is by nature both individual and collective, both “I” and “we”, and that the “I” and the “we” both need each other.

Both versions of this mistake are paths that lead to the same destination – a totalitarian society with a tyrannical government. This type of society and this type of government are the enemies not only of the individual and his freedom, the “I”, but of the plurality of smaller collectives that make up a traditional, organic society, the many different “we”s of family, neighborhood, community, church, guild, and club. The essential, defining, characteristic of a totalitarian society is not merely that it is a collective but that it insists upon being the only collective, the only “we”. A totalitarian society is therefore a mass society, i.e., a society in which most of the population are individuals who have been uprooted and alienated from the many smaller “we’s” of traditional, organic, society and thrown together into one large mass collective that is organized from the top by a large, highly centralized government, that regards itself as the voice of this one big collective “We”. A government with a totalitarian ideology may create a mass society from the top down by striving to eliminate or at least minimize the influence of all the smaller rival “we”s that it looks upon with jealousy and suspicion. Conversely, liberal individualism, by uprooting individuals from the traditional, organic, collectives of family, church, and community, creates the conditions that favour a totalitarian government that is anything but liberal in the best sense of the word.

Plato and Aristotle taught that men could only achieve happiness by attaining the good, i.e., by finding and fulfilling the end for which they were made and fitted. To do so, men must cultivate virtue. The good of the whole society, however, was greater than the individual goods of its members, and it is for the purpose of achieving this higher good that society is organized politically with a government and laws.

As true as this concept of the ancients is it requires balance, otherwise it can be twisted to serve the purposes of totalitarian collectivism. The classical liberal doctrine of the rights and liberties of the individual provides one sort of balance, but it is an insufficient balance. Liberal individualism has the effect of breaking down organic society into alienated individuals who form masses, creating just the sort of conditions that lend themselves to the rise of totalitarian collectivism.

The necessary balance, that harmonizes the Platonic concept of the good of the whole with the liberal defense of the freedom of the individual, is provided by the plurality of small collectives that together make up organic society. It is only in the framework of the organic society of family, friends, and neighbours that the individual can speak his “I” and expect to be heard. In mass society his “I” is lost among thousands, millions, even billions of other “I”s. The diffusion of man’s collective nature through a plurality of “we”s helps keep the big “we” of the society as a whole from being distorted from its good purposes and becoming an instrument of oppression. It is only in traditional, organic society with its plurality of small collectives that both the “we” and “I” of human nature have their fullest expression.

(1) http://www.nationalreview.com/articles/222482/big-sister-watching-you/flashback/page/0/2