The title of this essay suggests that a political form, democracy, might be to blame for our current crisis. I submit that no political form is that important. Forms are secondary in politics, capable of helping or hindering, but they are not at the core of political destiny. If we feel like blaming our present decline on democracy as such, let us remember the Swiss, a living historical example assuring us that democracy is fully compatible with a strong sense of purpose and vigorous action when needed. What we now call “democratic disorder” is precisely an absence of purpose, a faltering sense of reality, a shrinking from vigorous action, a failure of nerve. One should look deeper than mere form to discover the sources of such ailments.
Let me suggest that we are observing an advanced state of dissolution of our cultural patrimony, which is Christian. We are a Christian society, a fact that has little to do with the number of faithful and active Christians in our midst, but rather with the foundation of our culture. Western civilization came into existence through the unifying impulse of Latin Christianity. No other religion has ever wielded a similarly powerful influence in the centuries of our existence. The historical metamorphoses of our culture can be understood only in the relations to the Christian origins, even though not all these mutations have worked in favor of Christianity. Modernity, indeed, has been a great movement disparaging and attacking both the Christian Church and its faith. In the course of this movement much of Western life was profanized, meaning that God and the sacred were driven out to the point of disappearance. To a larger extent, though, modernity brought about processes of secularization which, in the act of perverting, maintained Christian modes of thinking and living.1 Marxism, whose vision of a socialist future is an “immanentization of the Christian eschaton” could not have been spawned in a non-Christian culture. Indeed, all modern ideologies are perverted, secularized varieties of the Christian message of salvation, and the vision of man’s transfiguration. Well they may assert the certainties of science in their analysis and prediction, but they require faith all the same, in their case, faith in history, in the Revolution, in psychoanalysis, in collective economics, in the Party: faith grievously misplaced but faith nevertheless.
No need to dwell on the pseudo-religious quality of modern ideologies, which has been sufficiently belabored and is now accepted as correct analysis. Not all of our modern culture consists of ideologies. The ideologies have come to overshadow everything else because, and in so far as, they are organized, armed, and wield a huge club of terroristic power. Still, much of contemporary life, particularly outside of the metropolis, goes on under the peaceful ordering of Christian consciousness. Even when one visits a country in plain political turmoil and economic disarray, like Italy, one is astonished to find the family largely intact. That kind of discovery is by no means confined to Italy. In many parts the tradition of our culture continues, and not merely as a sectarian backwater. Now between the ideologies and the tradition no peace is possible. A deep hostility stems not merely from the ideologists disparagement of piety, Christian dogma, and the transcendence. This is not a contemporary version of the religious conflicts of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Irreconcilable hostility rather is caused by the ideologists’ total subversion of the practical order of politics, rooting in their false image of man, their presumption of certainty about future destiny, their quest for total power, their principled polarization of all humans. Thus, wherever ideologies organize and arm themselves for action, the gulf of latent warfare opens between them and the tradition, and ideologists have not been able to close that gulf when they established themselves in the place of a people’s government. In Russia, Spain, Yugoslavia, open war did erupt, and that remains a possibility in almost all other Western countries, in the presence of armed ideologies.
If other countries have managed to escape civil war until now, it is because of the existence of a third element, an urbanized middle class committed to neither the Christian tradition nor the ideologies, and occupying most leading positions in society. One may describe them as a class of profanized people. They have rejected the Christian assumption of man’s fallen nature and thus have little or no sense of the reality of evil. Conversely they feel no need for God’s salvation and manage to put their whole trust in efforts of human enlightenment, which must be called their ultimate hope. For about two hundred years these people have lived on the leftovers of Christian moral capital. They kept the concept of the human soul, using it without visible embarrassment. They spoke easily of human dignity, without being very clear about what it is that dignifies even the lowest and least intelligent man. The equality of men as creatures made in God’s image, as well as all alike being sinners, became in their minds a postulate of equality tout court. Human freedom, the outreach of consciousness as it overflowed any intended object and also marveled at its own thinking, as well as the freedom of faith-formed by-love, assured by the evidence of “God’s humility,” was turned into a limitless ambition for human power. For a while love was still seen as “the greatest” of the excellences, even though it took the disguise of “altruism.” Men continued to call each other brothers even while having little use for a common father. Victorian civilization managed to instill considerable residual moral strength into a largely profanized Christian milieu.
Today the leading elements of our culture have come to the end of their tether. This is what we mean when speaking of “democratic disorder.” The Christian capital has been used up in the hearts and minds of those who have discarded its regenerating faith. The Enlightenment’s vision of a brave new world is known to have been a Fata Morgana. When once there seemed to be something of great promise, there now is nothing. And thus the deepest convictions, long held over assouvenirs of an erstwhile Christian faith, go limp and drop to the ground, like so many worn-through rags. Our judges, even when imposing punishment, often are unsure of its meaning and justification, and frequently doubt whether what is called evil is not merely an effect of circumstances. Professor Walter Berns reports how, at a meeting of the Advisory Council of the National Institute of Law Enforcement and Criminal Justice, he asked this gathering of eminent men of the law; “Why not commit crimes?,” a question which no one answered, amidst great embarassment.2 We are materially living by an economic system of free enterprise which has generated unprecedented wealth, but our politicians feel a call to play an adversary role toward that system, and dedicate themselves to an expanding system of freely handed-out incomes. Educators, while steadily enlarging their apparatus, lack a vision of purpose. They are largely hostile to the cultural tradition it is their business to transmit, and to the standards of excellence that form the quintessence of education. One can multiply these examples ad libitum. In the multiple, they may give an impression of so many unfortunate derailments, each of which may well be “fixed.” The full scope of the crisis comes into view only as we look at countless and typical middle-aged men and women engaged in desperate quests for “their identity,” “their life-styles,” and “values they will create,” “the new person” they will make out of themselves as they go from one programmed panacea to another: “I’m OK, you’re OK,” Transcendental Meditation, “est,” “touch therapy,” “Hare Rama, Hare Krishna,” and a multitude of other similar ones. For a day or a week they believe they have been saved from the inner void, only to fall back into it with an ever greater sense of helplessness. Here is the urban educated middle class, in the final stage of profanization which attends the crumbling of the last vestiges of Christian legacy so that no beliefs are left any more.
Western humanity thus falls into three distinct elements: 1) The nihilistic ideologists who, under the sway of History deified, believe in nothing; 2) the urbanized and educated middle class of cultural leaders who know not in what to believe; and 3) those who believe in the God of Christianity. The first element is “the specter haunting Europe” (Marx, Communist Manifesto), the last element abide on quiet islands of order, asit were, but the profanized second element furnishes the leaders of education, the media, the bureaucracy, and the government. In other words, the power of making policies and setting our direction isin the hands of people who are spiritually, intellectually, and morally adrift. This includes many leaders of the younger generation, the thirty- to fifty-year-olds who were still impressionable in the sixties and came out with their world in ruins.
The lack of conviction of this element does not mean that they are lacking in motives. The motives, however, have shallow roots. Or, to put it in different words, there are motives but no principles. We see an abundance of feelings which are alleged to be capable of serving asreliable guides. Even these feelings still bear the stamp of their Christian origins. Politicians vaunt their “compassion.” One need not doubt their sincerity, but the emotion is no longer controlled by understandings of ultimate reality, of human nature, and even of the causal relations between things in this world. Freedom likewise has become a mere emotional aspiration without shape, or relevance to order. Something similar happened to the concept of virtue in ancient Rome: At first it was not any virtuous deed that won the award of glory but only that deed of excellence which served the salus publica, the wellbeing and endurance of Rome. Later, after the Punic Wars, there developed that “excessive lust of glory” which craved sensational fame in the eyes of the masses, by deeds that were remarkable without in any way serving Rome, and in some cases even directed against Rome. “Glory” was taken to be identical with “being a celebrity.” As virtue in ancient Rome separated itself gradually from the public good, so now freedom has cast loose from order, community and the Creation. It has become void of any content of value except itself, so that it is experienced in a process of denying, one after another, obligations, limitations, bonds, values, and distinctions. Other motives there are, for instance: perfection (also an adopted child of erstwhile Christian parentage) but now become a brat throwing tantrums in its desire to get, instantly, flawless human institutions, and yelling for a club to go after the parents who are responsible for the flawed ones. And equality is still around, once a humble assumption about the human condition (“we all are in the same boat,” “we all alike are sinners,” “Christ died to save us all”) but now bloated into a domineering, uncompromising imperative, served emotionally rather than rationally, an idée fixe perniciously feeding a more and more universalized discontent.
That discontent, in turn, has none of the dignity of genuine rebellion, in Camus’ sense. It manifests itself in a whimpering withholding of affirmation and loyalty, in a bleating “nay” towards everything that can be called existing structure. The unsatisfiable emotional drive for equality, the frustrated demand for perfect human performance, the peacelessness of pursuing unshaped freedom, all induce people to withhold allegiance and respect on the grounds that imperfect institutions of order have no right to exist. “There ought to be something better than our penal system.” “Our economy consists of sinful institutions.” “Nothing but the absolutely safe car can satisfy us.” With such attitudes we criticize not merely this or that action or practice, but the entire set of institutions, and ultimately deny piety and loyalty to the nation whose history has nourished us. As we feel that the state no longer deserves our prayers, national security appears as a guilty use of power, compulsory service for its defense a public abomination, and any vigorous foreign policy a part of “imperialism.” Thus, while we still have the technology, the money, the weapons, the manpower, we are lacking the mind that can relate these means to the nation’s purpose among other nations. Our absence of will, our “failure of nerve,” are symptoms of the void at the heart of human beings, who, having lost their beliefs, have no firm grasp on reality. In an editorial, “Ronald Reagan?,” the Wall Street Journal drew this sketch of the situation: “Four years ago, the political system . . . reached outside the mainstream, for a fresh new face. . . . This time the system is reaching for an old face . . . because it then can have some confidence in where he stands. . . . If Mr. Reagan fails, the failure will not be his alone. This week the political news is dominated by an old face speaking an old message. That is an indictment not of Ronald Reagan, but of an entire generation of American political leadership” (July 14, 1980).
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If the “democratic disorder,” then, is properly assessed as stemming from spiritual roots, as a crisis of profanized man and the power he wields in our society, no merely political remedy can avail. New policies, new programs, fewer programs, new parties, even the return of “old men,” all these would be tantamount to mere band-aid treatment of a disease of a spiritual core. Our minds are attuned, not to spiritual problems and evaluations, but to political analysis and political recommendations. Our crisis had been rightly diagnosed in terms of the failures of “profanized man” even before 1950. It has been said, that early, that this malady of a spiritual “dead end” requires the cure of a total collapse, not merely what one calls a historical catastrophe, but the kind of collapse that extends into the particular souls of men. Profanization of life can be transcended only in and through suffering: not any kind of suffering, but the extreme suffering in which even the last possibility of life seems to be lost. The human being who undergoes this kind of suffering may then experience that, as he is falling straight down, apparently into a bottomless abyss, he actually is not dropping into nothingness but rather finds himself being carried.3 Wilhelm Kamlah, who made this statement, arrived at this insight in the World War II situation. Since then, a philosopher’s idea expressed in an academic book has been borne out by the great event of the spiritually regenerative experiences of zeks in Soviet Labor camps. In the extremity of personal and collective annihilation, men like Solzhenitsyn discovered the divine reality, without help from dogma or kerygma. The community of this experience—or rather, of experiences in forms of a variety of religions—shines forth in the title of a witnessing book: From Under the Rubble. A number of different individuals, with varying backgrounds, describe the movement of healing from the disorder of a profanized existence, and the resulting emergence “into history.” So far, the Soviet Union seems to be the only place where that movement has occurred on a significantly large scale, even though its testimony has stirred the souls of Czechs, Poles, and Hungarians with great power.
It is a fact which we must duly note that Western publics have had great difficulty with Solzhenitsyn’s report, and, even more, with the inferences he has drawn from this event (the “event” not being confined to the one Solzhenitsyn but to a great number of Russian zeks).His conclusion, in his Letter to the Soviet Leaders, that “Christianity is the sole alternative,” is a statement of clinical precision. Western leaders, even those of the profanized type, seemed willing to accept that much, even though they immediately placed Solzhenitsyn in the pigeonhole of a “romantic reactionary.” What they could not forgive him, however, was his criticism of the West, particularly as expressed in his Harvard Commencement Speech. Yet, Solzhenitsyn neither rejects the West as an ally nor turns against it in hostility. His criticism is confined to manifestations of disorder which diminish the West’s effectiveness in the common fight. Western leading countries, after all, have not undergone an experience of healing suffering comparable to that of the Gulag zeks. Solzhenitsyn is far from recommending that we seek such suffering. The early Church discovered and taught the truth that suffering must not be sought but merely patiently endured when it comes. All the same, the United States has not been defeated, occupied, subjected to starvation and to systematic public falsehood. Its citizens have not lived together in situations where both physical and moral existence trembled on the edge of the abyss. I believe that Solzhenitsyn’s critique of the West is correct, that his is a friendly criticism 180 degrees different from his criticism of the Soviet regime. What is more, his complaint about our shortcomings does apply to the entire West. Some experience comparable to that of the zeks might have been had in Germany, where in fact it did occur, but only in desperately few and isolated cases which did not give rise to a movement, as in Russia. Rather the broader healing effect of these experiences was blocked by the desperate endeavor of most people for personal justification, in the face of the collective odium of Nazi guilt falling on Germany.
All this really constitutes an excursus about a question that must concern all who reflect on the problem “Beyond Democratic Disorder.” There is, indeed, such a “beyond,” but accessible only by a strait gate and narrow way. The wide gate and broad way of conventional politics allows of no hope except that of temporary palliatives. Actually, this is not a new insight. Ever since Augustine’s City of God Western man has been aware that government, public policy, and administration cannot offer human salvation. That, however, does not mean that the differences between better and worse government deserve to be slighted or despised. They are important, albeit within the limits of politics in the wider range of human existence. It is not only fitting, then, but necessary that we turn to the practical possibilities available to a government consisting not of profanized men, but of persons living in the Christian tradition, even though their hold on it may be tenuous. What can they do? What criteria of order are available to them?
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One first thinks of principles, chiefly because the profanized man is unable to muster any consistency of principle, as he is largely swayed by emotions. Our judicial system, above all its penal code, are badly in need of some restoration of principles. We need a renewal of the principle of punishment, and a new will to discover principles in the face of abortion, sexual libertinism, and drugs. Our foreign policy requires an acknowledgement of principle with regard to Communism, and the Soviet Union in particular. The particular problem we face here is that of a selective moralism which singles out the Soviet Union, from all other countries, for special condemnation, and thus poses the question of morality in foreign policy in a new way.4 Principle in foreign policy serves as a criterion to distinguish between impermissible compromises which would destroy moral substance, and permissible negotiations which leave the moral code intact. On the other hand, a universal fusion of moral principle with foreign policy in the Carter style of “support for human rights” must be avoided because of its utopianism, tendency to imperialism, and the likelihood of resulting Quixotic policies.5 On the other hand the policies of ideological and millenarian parties claim to be principled, and are indeed principled in their own way, but the principles themselves are fallacious and irrational. More about this later.
Secondly, a government of persons rooted in the Christian tradition should be capable of more realism than profanized men can attain. An editorial in the Washington Star on the death of William J. Baroody characterized him as a “profoundly religious man,” but continued: “At the same time, this man of values a good many people find old-fashioned if not downright anachronistic, had an extraordinarily cool and discerning eye for trends. . . . Mr. Baroody maneuvered AEI front and center to a position where it is financed by leading foundations and respected by old opponents as well as by a widening—and bipartisan—circle of new friends.” (July 31, 1980) The “realism” of tradition-anchored people may manifest itself in a concern for a preservation of structures, political, economic, and cultural. In that perspective, contemporary politics falls into the dichotomy between doctrinaire activism, basically rebellious, and the politics of structure, governed not merely by “piety” in the ancient Roman sense but also by a clear assessment of “real possibilities.” The contrasting concern of doctrinaire activists is rather with “possible realities.” As one looks at the politics of structure from the point of view of principle, one may find it frequently unprincipled, because it does what is expedient for the structures rather than what is required by doctrine. All the same the concern for structure is essentially a “long view” toward principle. A masterly analysis of a politician of structure is contained in Eugene Davidson’s The Making of Adolf Hitler (New York, 1977). General von Seeckt, the commanding officer of the Reichswehr in the first decade of the Weimar Republic, was a man of monarchical principle. He made up his mind, however, to serve with utmost loyalty any viable government that would be produced by the Leftist policies of the postwar years and to disregard his own principles, so that his support might serve to preserve the existence of Germany as a political entity. One might call this a case of principled abandonment of principle.
In today’s world a politics of structure finds itself beset with enemies who have exclusive use of slogans of utopian perfection. A traditionalist government must not remain silent under this kind of attack. It must counter with steady and principled praise for the structures it protects, as well as for the principle of piece-meal reform as distinct from whole-sale destruction. In doing so, there is some danger of confusion regarding that which is to be defended. At least four different structures need to be distinguished:
a) a system of capitalist production and distribution, with its attendant legal framework of private property rights, a system which also produces the power of corporations and financiers;
b) a system of rapidly advancing technology which entails the increasing dependence of all persons on complex networks of technical operations, and requires much subordination of the personal element to impersonal functions; this system is as characteristic of socialism as it is of capitalism;
c) an individualist culture prone to insist on “my thing,” “my values,” “my life-style,”—all anarchistic notions denying not merely authority but also larger community;
d) a system of democratic diffusion of power, with its attendant need to make a success of complex procedures designed to produce decisions out of a multiplicity of wills and interests.
Each of these structural systems tends toward its own kind of evil. Contemporary politics inclines to seize on these evils, universalizing them into a “total critique,” or global condemnation, under the formula that evil is “systemic.” The truth is that evil, in this as in every other situation, roots in the human heart, and that each system tends to magnify and manifest human evil in its own way. A government committed to the protection of structures must not on account of that commitment excuse itself from counter-acting those by-products of the system that have come to threaten both community and individual lives. The cultivation of power is surely a legitimate function of government, but in practicing it one must not turn one’s back on goodness.
Thirdly, in Western countries the cause of freedom ranks high, possibly highest, among priorities. To this extent, an ideological element is mixed into all Western politics. For freedom, as we have just seen, can be an instrument of anarchical dissolution of society into millions of atoms. On the other hand, it can also nourish a vision of man as a conqueror of nature, or of his own past, and as an omnipotent builder of a blissful future. The latter is the vision of revolutionary humanism and the source of energy for doctrinaire politics. Freedom, as Burke already observed, can be a heady brew. A government of tradition-rooted people must aim to discern ordered freedom from its demonically destructive perversion. There is no getting around the fact that the human quest for freedom involves always man’s relation with his Creator, a relation capable of taking the path of faith formed by love, as well as the path of metaphysical revolution resulting in demonic nothingness. Thus beyond all political solutions there is always the need of man for attaining freedom in his own heart, as he wrestles with the forces of corruption within him and looks for the redemption available to him.
On the other hand, freedom today is no longer seen, as it once was, merely as freedom of “society” from the “state.” That kind of freedom is still not forgotten where the regime is totalitarian. “What’s happening in Poland can be best described as a renaissance of civil society. All the main social and professional groups are following the workers who won a right to organize independent unions.”6 In the industrialized countries of the West, however, the issue frequently is seen as freedom within society, i.e., within non-governmental economic and social structures. The slogans in vogue are quite individualistic, but one may surmise that underneath there is a desire for the protection of and respect for, patterns of habits, traditional relationships, i.e., values which each person, effortlessly sharing with others, tends to regard peculiarly his own. From the Enlightenment we derived the contempt for what Burke called “prejudices,” the order of habitual judgments constituting man’s “second nature.” Thomas Aquinas insisted that laws should be “just, possible to nature, according to the customs of the country, adapted to time and place.” He added that laws should be changed only with great care, for “when a law is changed, the binding power of law is diminished, as far as custom is concerned.” The individualistic rhetoric of the Right might therefore benefit by a period of benevolent neglect, as government focuses its concern on the way in which people habitually live in groups and secondary structures.
Thus freedom to move within the easy yoke of habits must be defended today against two threats: “a) the armed violence of doctrinaire politics which destroys all habits in favor of the Party’s total organization, and b) the overbearing disposition of compassionate” governments to overlay habits with ubiquitous regulations and thus to narrow freedom by a multitude of irritating small reins. As one seeks to stop this tendency one need not defend prevailing habits as morally flawless. Their good consists to a large extent in that they are the people’s own. One is reminded that after the fall of Napoleon’s brother Joseph, who as king of Spain had set up a very enlightened and modern government, the people welcomed their own king at the border. Ferdinand VII, a monster on the throne if there ever was one, was pulled across the border by the people who had put themselves into the horses’ harness, welcoming their own bad man as “El Deseado,”the “desired one.” We should allow ourselves to be taught by this and other historical examples that freedom is not always identical with letter-perfect procedures of election, legislation, and administration. If a society is felt by its members to “fit like a glove,” it means that its people move in it with a sense of freedom, no matter what the conditions may be in our eyes.
Finally, a government that is returned to power as the hope for a radically new course of events should aim above all for sobriety. It is true that the two alternatives, liberalism/socialism on the one side, and traditionalist conservatism on the other, are political currents pointing in opposite directions, like rivers at a watershed. In the long run they will result in types of social order utterly incompatible with each other. Precisely for this reason, both sides have somewhat the air of a crusade, with fanfares of a “final battle” being heard in the background. Peregrine Worsthorne showed us, ten years ago, that no Labour Party will ever be able to muster the power required to bring about the changes it projects, given the politics of a modern democratic state. He spoke of the 1968 Wilson government in England, but what he said also applies to an American or German conservative administration. The crusading spirit remains confined to words: it has no ability to translate itself into a spirit of sacrifice and unquestioning loyalty sufficient to brave the heavy storms of systemic change. One can therefore say with some confidence that the return to power of a conservative government will be no earthshaking event, just aslittle as will be the return of a social-democratic party. In our days, the only earthshaking event that is an ever-present possibility is a Communist takeover.
Conservatives aspiring to power thus should avoid the rhetoric of ultimates. Ronald Reagan made a great mistake in repeatedly using Tom Paine’s phrase about the power we have “to make the world anew.” A similar mistake is to recall John Winthrop’s myth of “the city shining on a hill.” The mention of “enduring peace” reflects a millennarian mentality, and the word “aggression” belongs to the same group of concepts, all hatched in the heady days of League of Nations’ enthusiasm. These are manifestations of utopian enthusiasm, which entails a refusal of sobriety, and that in an age that needs sobriety as much as its daily bread. All the same, it is true that Western civilization stands at a political watershed and must choose whether it wants to go in one or the other of opposite directions. Since it can have no power, thought, to wheel on its heels in a sudden resolve, it must content itself with gradual, piece-meal and hardly noticeable change. Meanwhile, a government must appeal to its citizens in terms of competence, realism, sobriety, and personal character. Rather than whipping up enthusiasm, it must seek to bring calm to agitated souls. In the language of Camus, it must restore a sense of limits. Its rhetoric must endeavor to make the limits plausible. The most terrifying limit, of course, is a government’s inability to bring about a resolution of the spiritual crisis, which also dictates the modest amount of political power it can mobilize apart from war, and maybe even in the presence of war. And we, the intellectuals among citizens, must learn to control our own yearnings for a “new world,” as we learn to live in the one we inhabit, affirming our own history and the “real possibilities” it offers.
Notes
- On the distinction of profanization and secularization cf. Wilhelm Kamlah, Christentum and Geschichtlichkeit, Stuttgart, 1951; 19.
- Modern Age 24, no. 1, Winter 1980, 20.
- Der Mensch in der Profanitat, Stuttgart, 1949; n. 18.
- Cf. my “Foreign Policy and Morality,” Intercollegiate Review, Spring 1980, 77–84.
- Cf. my “Freedom and Rights: What Is To Be Done,” Review of Politics 40 no. 2, April 1978, 183–95.
- “Poland’s Right to Life,” Wall Street Journal, Dec. 17, 1980.