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The Seven Dimensions

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The New Religion, and its Victims



The voice of the people is the voice of God.‎
‎- Proverb‎



The death of one religion and the birth of another mark an epoch. The requiem for ‎Marxism was at once the trumpet call for democracy. ‎


The secular creeds - the two aforementioned, and nationalism - have been the religions ‎of twentieth century men and women. 'Secular religion', far from being an oxymoron, ‎stands for verifiable facts. Ninian Smart has adumbrated the seven dimensions of ‎religion. We go over them in turn with respect to democracy.‎


‎(1) First, there's the ritual dimension of the quinquennial vote, the municipal and local ‎elections, the swearing-in ceremony....(2) Then there's the experiential or emotional ‎aspect: every election is preceded by months of campaigning during which euphoria and ‎heightened expectations prevail. (3) The narrative or mythical dimension of democracy is ‎fairly obvious: there's the identification over 2,500 years with Greek democracy, with ‎Harmodius and Aristogeiton, with the overthrow of the Peisistratids, with Cleisthenes. ‎Locally, there is the identification with those who overthrew a 'tyrant': in Bangladesh, ‎December 6, 1990 is recalled every year as the day General Ershad was overthrown; in ‎America, the 4th of July serves a similar purpose. (4) Democracy, more than nationalism, ‎has a far richer doctrinal dimension, ranging from - to take an arbitrary span - the ‎treatises of John Locke to the output of John Stuart Mill. (5) The ethical dimension: ‎values (observed in the breach) of tolerance, equality, accountability, are inculcated in ‎voters. (6) The social and institutional aspects of democracy stand out - literally: there's ‎the elected President or Prime Minister with his or her regalia and elaborate ceremonies. ‎‎(7) The material embodiment of democracy is often magnificent: in Bangladesh there's ‎the Assembly Building designed by Louis Kahn; The Capitol, the White House and ‎Westminster Palace are imposing monuments to democracy (Ninian Smart ,The World's ‎Religions (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice Hall, 1989), pp 10 ‎‎- 25‎). As de Tocqueville ‎observed: "Nowhere do citizens appear so insignificant as in a democratic nation; ‎nowhere does the nation itself appear greater, or does the mind more easily take in a wide ‎general survey of it. In democratic communities the imagination is compressed when men ‎consider themselves; it expands indefinitely when they think of the State. Hence it is that ‎the same men who live on a small scale in narrow dwellings, frequently aspire to gigantic ‎splendor in the erection of their public monuments.( Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy ‎in America, Volume 2, trans. Henry Reeve, http://www.blackmask.com, ‎Chapter XII)"‎



Two unfortunate consequences follow: the goodness of democracy becomes evidence-‎transcendent, like the goodness of God; and its preaching becomes an article of faith. The ‎latter first.‎




Richard Vinen remarks: "Some regretted the quiet, undramatic nature of most European ‎life at the end of the century and felt that Europe had become a colourless place.( Richard ‎Vinen, A History in Fragments: Europe in the Twentieth Century, (Cambridge, ‎Ma: Da ‎Capo Press, 2001), p. 520‎)" These people included Francis Fukuyama (He has recently ‎dissented from his earlier views, making them more interesting.‎). But he might as well ‎have been speaking of Larry Siedentop.‎






Democracy has no better disciple than Francis Fukuyama who lamented that "The end of ‎history will be a very sad time. The struggle for recognition, the willingness to risk one's ‎life for a purely abstract goal, the world-wide ideological struggle that called for the ‎daring, courage, imagination and idealism, will be replaced by economic calculation, the ‎endless solving of technical problems, environmental concerns and the satisfaction of ‎sophisticated consumer demands.( Quoted with disapproval by Vinen, same page‎)" To ‎die for an idea - and to kill for an idea - are virtues for Fukuyama. Vinen comments: ‎‎"Those who had once 'risked their lives for a purely abstract goal', rather than working ‎for the State Department and the Rand Corporation, often took a different view". ‎


Fukuyama's words are echoed by Robert Kagan:‎

‎"The United States is a liberal, progressive society through and through, and to the extent ‎that Americans believe in power, they believe it must be a means of advancing the ‎principles of a liberal civilization and a liberal world order." ‎‎(www.policyreview.org/JUN02/kagan.html‎) ‎



And should that order mimic disorder, so much the worse for the world. ‎



Unsurprisingly, Larry Siedentop's book Democracy in Europe is perhaps the most ‎explicit attempt to elevate democracy to the status of religion: he identifies democracy ‎with Christianity. "For the Christian God survives in the assumption that we have access ‎to the nature of things as individuals. That assumption is, in turn, the final justification ‎for a democratic society, for a society organised to respect the equal underlying moral ‎status of all its members, by guaranteeing each 'equal liberty'. That assumption reveals ‎how the notion of 'Christian liberty' came to underpin a radically new 'democratic' ‎model of human association' (italics original). "Thus, the defining characteristic of ‎Christianity was its universalism. It aimed to create a single human society, a society ‎composed, that is, of individuals rather than tribes, clans or castes." (Larry Siedentop, ‎Democracy in Europe, (London: Allen Lane The Penguin Press, ‎‎2000),pp 194 - 208‎)‎



One cannot help concluding that the proselytism inherent in the view of democracy-as-‎religion must inevitably lead to violence on a worldwide scale. The very universalism ‎that Siedentop boasts as the unique characteristic of democracy, derived from ‎Christianity, excludes and downgrades other civilisations - a repetition of early European ‎feelings of superiority that one thought had been eschewed among intellectual circles. As ‎Huxley noted: "The word [democracy] conjures up ideas of universal liberty and ‎happiness. The hearer feels an expansive emotion, a pleasing enlargement of his ‎personality, following on the idea of the loosening of restraints. He can be moved by ‎repetition of the word to take violent action (italics added)." (Aldous Huxley, "A Few ‎Well-Chosen Words", Aldous Huxley: Complete Essays, Volume ‎II, 1926-1929, ed. ‎Robert S. Baker and James Sexton, (Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 2000), p. ‎‎59 ‎)‎



And that is precisely what the U.S. President George W. Bush has done. He has played ‎on people's emotions by stating his credo in the following terms: "the liberty we prize is ‎not America's gift to the world. It is God's gift to humanity.( The Economist, December ‎‎18th 2004, p. 50‎)" Judging by the number of victims and S.E. Finer's remarks below, the ‎gift would appear to be from the other party. ‎



Now for the evidence-transcendence of the goodness of democracy. Democracy's ‎goodness, on the other hand, works, like God, in mysterious ways: in the case of the ‎deity, we accept that as part of faith. But democracy should surely be more transparent ‎than the divine will! This faith in democracy precludes all rational analysis of democracy: ‎no amount of empirical evidence can disprove the 'essential' goodness of democracy, or ‎the sagacity and honesty of the masses. When a set of beliefs has been put beyond the ‎reach of empirical verification, we are in very dangerous territory. Violence will be ‎perpetrated in the name of the creed and then deemed to be necessary and even glorified. ‎In fact, even if society becomes violent due to democratic change, it will be seen by its ‎proponents as having 'improved' and got 'better' by virtue of that change alone. This is ‎religion at work - religion of the most dangerous and fanatical kind. Bertrand Russell ‎once wrote: "Belief in democracy, however, like any other belief, may be carried to the ‎point where it becomes fanatical and therefore harmful" (http://www.personal.kent.edu/~rmuhamma/Philosophy/RBwritings/ideaHarmMan.htm).




Beneath the chaff of emotion, the facts regarding democracy, according to S.E. Finer, are ‎these: "The Forum polity is comparatively rare in the history of government, where the ‎Palace polity and its variants are overwhelmingly the most common type. Only in the last ‎two centuries has the Forum polity become widespread. Before then its appearance is, on ‎the whole, limited to the Greek poleis, the Roman Republic, and the mediaeval European ‎city-states. Furthermore, most of them for most of the time exhibited the worst ‎pathological features of this kind of polity. For rhetoric read demagogy, for persuasion ‎read corruption, pressure, intimidation, and falsification of the vote. For meetings and ‎assemblies, read tumult and riot. For mature deliberation through a set of revising ‎institutions, read instead self-division, inconstancy, slowness, and legislative and ‎administrative stultification. And for elections read factional plots and intrigues. These ‎features were the ones characteristically associated with the Forum polity in Europe down ‎to very recent times. They were what gave the term 'Republic' a bad name, but made ‎‎'Democracy' an object of sheer horror." (S.E.Finer, The History of Government from the ‎Earliest Times, (New York: Oxford ‎University Press, 1997), pp. 46-47‎)‎




And as late as 1927, and six years before Hitler's electoral success, Aldous Huxley could ‎write: "Only the most mystically fervent democrats, who regard voting as a kind of ‎religious act, and who hear the voice of God in that of the People, can have any reason to ‎desire to perpetuate a system whereby confidence tricksters, rich men, and quacks may be ‎given power by the votes of an electorate composed in a great part of mental Peter Pans, ‎whose childishness renders them peculiarly susceptible to the blandishments of ‎demagogues and the tirelessly repeated suggestions of the rich men's newspapers." ‎‎(Aldous Huxley, "Political Democracy", Aldous Huxley: Complete Essays, Volume II, ‎‎‎1926-1929, ed. Robert S. Baker and James Sexton, (Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 2000), pp. ‎‎‎216, 228 ‎)‎





Huxley's solution to the democratic problem was the 'aristocratic state' - that is, a ‎bureaucracy. The ideal exam would select people for the task they are best suited to ‎perform. "That every human being should be in his place - that is the ideal of the ‎aristocratic as opposed to the democratic state. It is not merely a question of the ‎organisation of government but of the organisation of the whole of society."‎




However, since then, criticism of democracy has fallen strangely silent - democracy has ‎indeed been elevated to the level of a 'creed', to use Huxley's expression. ‎



That the - unmentioned - pathologies of democracy are, nevertheless, fresh in the minds ‎of the European elite has been glaringly obvious since the Austrian election that produced ‎a government consisting of the Freedom Party. Louis Michel, the foreign minister of ‎Belgium, said that voters can be "naive" and "simple". Of Jorg Haider's Freedom Party, ‎he says that to be a democratic party "you must work by democratic rules, you must ‎accept not to play on the worst feelings each human being has inside himself" (italics ‎supplied) (The Economist, February 26th 2000, p. 66‎).‎




The masses were rarely consulted during the European project, and only when the ‎infrastructure of the European Union was firmly in place. One senior German diplomat has ‎been quoted as saying: "If we had had a referendum on the Treaty of Rome, people might ‎have rejected it on the grounds that it raised the price of bananas". (The Economist, October ‎‎5th 2002, p. 52‎) And when they said "No" in a referendum, they were asked again and again. ‎A paltry few bother to vote for Members of the European Parliament - because only a ‎paltry few understand the leviathan that is the European Union (in the 1999 elections to the ‎European Parliament, turnout fell below 50% for the first time, and had voting not been ‎compulsory in Greece, Italy, Luxembourg and Belgium, turnout would probably have ‎been 42%!( The Economist, February 24th 2001, p. 55‎) In 2004, turnout was, in fact, ‎‎45% - The Economist, June 19th 2004, p. 14‎). An elite terrified of the prospect of another ‎war conceived the entire project. ‎



The response to the pathologies of democracy in Europe was 'consensus politics': ‎European leaders eschewed ideology (Vinen, p 299‎). Finally, Huxley's vision of a ‎bureaucratic polity has become a reality: Europe is run by unelected bureaucrats. It is ‎only remarkable that the Europe has surrendered control over both fiscal and monetary ‎policy - the latter to the fiercely independent European Central Bank, and the former to ‎the 'stability and growth' pact - if we do not keep in mind the memory of the pathologies ‎of democracy evidenced during the two world wars. ‎




That, perhaps, is the way to the future - the forum-bureaucratic polity or a purely ‎bureaucratic polity (neither of which even figures in Finer's history of government, since ‎they have never existed) or the traditional bureaucratic-palace polity. The common ‎element in each of these possibilities is the bureaucratic element, and the downgrading of ‎the forum element. The less power exerted by the people, or in the name of the people, ‎the safer the world will be. ‎




Larry Siedentop bemoans the loss of people power. "The direct election of Euro MPs is itself ‎hardly more than a fig-leaf which fails to conceal the over-sized member of the European ‎body - the power of the European Commission and a bureaucracy imperfectly controlled by ‎the Council of Ministers". (Siedentop, p. 122‎) ‎




One has only to examine the legacies of the French Revolution to appreciate the dangers ‎inherent in people power. Without the people's sovereignty, the people's army, the ‎people's language and culture - in short, the people - the First and Second world wars ‎would have been impossible: every force unleashed by the French revolution incubated ‎into the world wars. ‎




According to J. M. Roberts: "Europe had, after all, been prepared for war by the first age ‎of mass education and literacy, by the first mass newspapers, and by decades of the ‎propagation of ideals of patriotism. When it started, the Great War, which was to reveal ‎itself as the most democratic in history in its nature, may well also have been the most ‎popular ever.( J. M. Roberts, Twentieth Century: The History of the World: 1901 To The ‎Present ‎‎(London: Allen Lane The Penguin Press, 1999), pp. 244-5‎)" (Emphases added). ‎



Suffrage in Selected European Countries before 1914 (Finer, p 1638‎)‎
Austria; 1907; Universal Male Suffrage
Belgium; 1894; Universal Male Suffrage‎
France; 1870; Universal Male Suffrage
Germany; 1870; Universal Male Suffrage
Italy ; 1912; Universal Male Suffrage
Netherlands; 1894; Universal Male Suffrage
Spain ; 1900; Universal Male Suffrage
Sweden; 1909; Universal Male Suffrage
Switzerland; 1874; Universal Male Suffrage
United Kingdom; 1884; 4.38 million = 15% population ‎




For even the Social Democrats 'blood proved thicker than water', (Finer, p 1548‎) and ‎they abandoned their socialism and pacifism to support their respective nations. This, ‎despite the fact that the socialist vote was increasing; that socialist parties were becoming ‎firmly entrenched in national parliaments: the Social Democratic Party had 1 million ‎members, controlled 90 newspapers with a circulation of almost 1.5 million and attracted ‎‎4 million votes.(Vinen, pp 32 - 33‎) Rather, this essay would argue, it was because of their ‎increasing contact with voters that they had to respond to the war along nationalist lines. ‎The French Revolution established and sacralised the citizen-soldier-voter link. ‎




A legacy of the revolution was the combination of the two principles of the 'Declaration ‎of the Rights of Man and the Citizen': first, the nation decides its own destiny, and, ‎second, 'the nation' means the People (Finer, p. 1547‎). The French nation was not to be a ‎collection of individuals, but a union of persons into one family: worship of the collective ‎self. As Finer observed "...the Revolution became a kind of religion, and one that ‎everybody was supposed to share" (Finer, p. 1544‎). The Declaration 'consecrated the ‎principle of election by or through the People' (Finer, p. 1534‎). The deification of the ‎people had begun: the French people deified, the Germans soon reacted by deifying the ‎German people. Finer quotes Heine as having anticipated Nazi Germany 100 years before ‎the event: "There will come upon the scene armed Fichteans whose fanaticism of will is ‎to be restrained neither by fear nor by self-interest; for they live in the spirit, they defy ‎matter like those early Christians who could be subdued neither by bodily torments nor ‎by bodily delights...he has allied himself with the primitive powers of nature, that he can ‎conjure up the demoniac forces of old German pantheism....The old stone gods will arise ‎from the forgotten ruins and wipe from their eyes the dust of centuries and Thor with his ‎giant hammer will rise again, and he will shatter the Gothic cathedrals... (quoted by Finer, ‎p. 1549‎) ‎




THE DEMOCRATIC DEATH TOLL: THE TWO WORLD WARS (International ‎Relations, Encyclopedia Britannica, 15th Edition‎)‎
‎ ‎
World War I; c. 8,400,000‎
World War II; c. 55,000,000‎
TOTAL; c. 63,400,000‎







One has only to note the repeated references to religion and religious feeling and imagery ‎in the preceding paragraph - both on Finer's part and Heine's - to "hear the voice of God ‎in that of the People", to repeat Aldous Huxley's expression. ‎



‎"The mass religion of The Nation was reflected in equally mass defence".( S.E.Finer, The ‎History of Government from the Earliest Times, p. 1549‎) The citizen army was another ‎legacy of the French Revolution. Compare the military strength of nations before 1789 ‎and later (Finer, p. 1549‎): ‎



‎[Peacetime Army Numbers: 1740 / 1914]
Total Wartime Strength: 1914‎

Prussia [80,000 / 750,000] (Germany) 5,300,000‎
France [160,000 / 800,000] 4,400,000‎








The qualitative change was no less striking: in 1914, the army consisted of nationals; not ‎so in the eighteenth century. We, therefore, had huge numbers able to fight, and willing to ‎kill - and be killed. Where the American War had bankrupted France and led to ‎revolution, now it was inexpensive to employ soldiers. "Every able-bodied man regarded ‎this, now, as a sacred duty. That is how, when 1914 came, so many millions of men went ‎to their graves like sheep". (Finer, p. 1552-3‎) (italics added). ‎



Or take these lines from All Quiet On The Western Front: "With our young, wide-open ‎eyes we saw that the classical notion of patriotism we had heard from our teachers meant, ‎in practical terms at that moment, surrendering our individual personalities more ‎completely than we would ever have believed possible even in the most obsequious ‎errand boy" (Erich Maria Remarque, All Quiet On The Western Front, trans. by Brian ‎Murdoch, ‎‎(London: Vintage, 1996), p. 16‎). ‎



The fanatical worship of democracy today stands to be a greater threat to the world than ‎the people we are used to calling fundamentalists. When the people are elevated to the ‎level of God, they cannot err; they have, therefore, every authority to attack other states; ‎they know better than other people, and so can subjugate them, militarily or financially; ‎those who minister to them, their priests and representatives, can appeal to an abstraction ‎that stands on a par with dialectical materialism, national socialism or Moloch. If we are ‎to survive as a race, we must jettison an abstraction that demands human sacrifice. ‎




As Hugh Brogan observes: "But Western democracy, however perfect its forms (and ‎nowhere are they entirely consistent with its principles) always has problems on its hands ‎that may prove too much for it. It could not avert the outbreak of two world wars, and a ‎third has been averted so far more through terror of nuclear weapons than by democratic ‎wisdom. Class conflicts are muted rather than resolved. Nationalism still distorts voters' ‎judgments in matters of foreign policy; greed misleads them over economic policy. ‎Demagogues are as much a menace as they were in ancient Athens, and many politicians ‎are personally corrupt". He concludes with these very important words: "If man, the ‎political animal, is to save himself and his civilizations, he cannot yet rest from seeking ‎new forms of government to meet the ever-new needs of his times." (Hugh Brogan, ‎‎"Forms of Government", Britannica‎) ‎




To be stuck in the worship of an ancient idol foredooms humanity to an early and ‎unnecessary grave. Clearly, for many people, one can never believe too much in ‎democracy - no matter how large the body count. ‎
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Iftekhar Sayeed teaches English and economics. He was born and lives in Dhaka, à ‚¬Å½Bangladesh. He has contributed to AXIS OF LOGIC, ENTER TEXT, POSTCOLONIAL à ‚¬Å½TEXT, LEFT CURVE, MOBIUS, ERBACCE, THE JOURNAL, and other publications. à ‚¬Å½He (more...)
 
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