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The Seven Dimensions
By Iftekhar Sayeed (about the author) Page 1 of 3 page(s)
For OpEdNews: Iftekhar Sayeed - Writer
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).
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