Democracy - The Religion And Its Victims

I was an English language teacher at a Catholic seminary in Dhaka on Asad Avenue called the Oblates of Mary Immaculate (OMI). After class, I used to have regular conversations with the rector, Fr. Bejoy D’ Cruz, a short, portly young man with intent eyes.

One afternoon, over a cup of coffee, he was telling me how difficult it had become to recruit young men to the priesthood. He said that young people in the west preferred to join NGOs.

This was a revelation.

We have seen that people in Bangladesh join or set up NGOs for rational reasons – money. However, westerners do the same for the old, extra-rational motives that once directed them to the pews and pulpits. The number of priests and nuns have been declining in the occident, the number of nuns especially so, the total of those not called offset by the increasing ranks from Asia and Africa. All over Europe and North America (albeit, as mentioned, not in Asia and Africa), the numbers of priests and parishioners will continue their remorseless decline, as observed by a newspaper. I started class with eight seminarians, and next year there were sixteen. God has emigrated.

In a conversation with an American priest, Br. Donald, he said it was much better to be here in Bangladesh, where people take religion seriously, than in America.

Charles Taylor, in A Secular Age, discusses the issue of ‘meaning’ as addressed by a French thinker, Luc Ferry (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 2007, p 677). The latter gives instances of young people who have achieved a strong sense of meaning in their lives through membership of Medecins Sans Frontieres, but ‘horizontally’, not ‘vertically’. No doubt, similar observations can be made about membership of other NGOs, like Amnesty International or Article 19. Thus, people find meaning in their lives through something greater than themselves, without being other-worldly. But they, nevertheless, manifest a need for transcendence.

Again, the same writer observes the mobilisation of resources in the event of a distant calamity, such as a flood or earthquake. He attributes this outpouring of empathy not only to the media and methods of transportation and the fact of economic plenitude, but something less tangible, not unconnected to the Christian past. “The same media and means of transport don’t awaken the same response everywhere; it is disproportionately strong in ex-Latin Christendom (p 371).”

Taylor observes that new forms arise in history in spiritual traditions which are carried forward and reshaped so that subsequent periods show the same spiritual inclinations in a revised, but mirrored form. “I have argued that this is true for exclusive humanism in relation to Christian faith, in the centrality of benevolence, for instance. I have even argued that exclusive humanism couldn’t have arisen without this analogue to agape. (pp 679-680)” Indeed, religion is reconstituted.

A similar line of thought emerges in Democracy in Europe, by Larry Siedentop (Harmondsworth: Allen Lane The Penguin Press, 2000). More interesting than Taylor, Siedentop traces democracy to Christianity. He observes: “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 (p 194, italics original)”.

“Mediaeval noblemen did not believe in individualism”, observes Yuval Noah Harari in Sapiens (Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind, Croydon: Vintage, 2014, p 128). One’s place in the social hierarchy determined one’s worth. Teenage sons of barons did not have private rooms on the second floor of the castle “with posters of Richard the Lionheart and King Arthur on the walls”, let alone a locked door closed to parental supervision. He slept with other boys in a large hall, always on display and always alert to what others saw and said. It was the hierarchy and others’ perception of him that determined his true worth.

The individual makes his first appearance through Machiavelli and Luther, according to Alasdair McIntyre (A Short History of Ethics, London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1967, p 121). “For the first time, the Absolute Individual confronts the Absolute State” wrote J.N.Figgis, as quoted by McIntyre, of the period after the Reformation (p 124).

Siedentop bemoans the lack of shared beliefs in Europe and the lack of democracy (hence the title, deliberately echoing Tocqueville’s book). The latter is due to the former, for which he blames anti-clericalism and multiculturalism (sometimes together).

Anti-clericalism hardly consists with this benign view of Christianity. Christianity has been consistent with persecution, autos-da-fe, slavery, serfdom, absolutism, war, racism, capitalism, and, today, democracy (as he claims). Siedentop takes anti-clericalism as an unfortunate aspect of European culture today without querying its origins, motivation and legitimacy. In recent times, clerical sexual abuse of children as well as nuns, along with the concomitant cover-ups, have confirmed the worst suspicions of the anti-clerical.

“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.” It is Christian ontology that undergirds liberal values. The primary and foundational commitments to equality, reciprocity and individual freedom are constitutive of Western society; the commitments to tolerance, pluralism and scepticism are derivative and secondary (p 210).

Siedentop claims that Christianity, unlike other faiths, “interiorizes God”. Christianity is not a social group worshipping itself a la Durkheim, but a social group premised on the individual as a free agent. This interiorization is the source of conscience and a sphere of choice protected by human rights. “That is the kernel of truth embedded in the Protestant version of Christianity – the kernel which makes it plausible to claim that Protestantism, for all its aberrations, is a more self-conscious form of Christianity than Catholicism (p 211).”

Islam, and multiculturalism, come in for heavy criticism. Clearly, Islam is deficient and defective, and its values “abhorrent”. Islam prioritises men over women, fathers over daughters, husbands over wives (curiously Siedentop doesn’t expend much energy on Hinduism which as we have seen, is characterised by the Homo hierarchicus; the sex ratio at birth in Bangladesh, a Muslim country, is 1.04 males per female, while in India it is 1.12 males per female, a result of female foeticide unknown in Bangladesh. When Nehru passed away, his daughter, Indira, was not able to light the funeral pyre; that duty fell to Indira’s son, Sanjay. Son-preference runs deep in India (Nehru: A Political Biography (p 7)).

Mahima, gang-raped by ruling party student-thugs, was a simple Muslim girl – young, but nevertheless deficient for being Muslim. A Christian, European girl would not have killed herself because her society would regard her as a person first, a woman, a daughter, a wife, second. Failing the family honour (a collective sentiment) would have been intolerable, a social death. She chose an actual death.

Siedentop approves of the “superb” spread of the language of human rights throughout the world, constituting an almost universal culture, the “ultimate and least resistible form of Western influence, something which must appear to defenders of other faiths as the last form of Western imperialism (p 213)”.

We have seen throughout this essay that the pursuit of democracy and the pursuit of human rights have been at odds in Bangladesh, and indeed, in South Asia. Assault and battery of children protesters, extrajudicial killings and disappearances, far from denting the popularity of an elected government, in fact augments is. Nor is the issue of human rights free of incoherence: the right of the foetus versus the right of a woman to abortion are vehemently disputed issues even in the West. The rights of workers to job security vary between continental capitalism and Anglo-Saxon capitalism, and so on. Torture seems to be employed even by liberal regimes whenever national security is threatened.

As one would expect from someone who believes in universal values, Siedentop maintains that “the only form of Western imperialism that remains legitimate is ideological (p 188)”.

Interestingly, no other civilisation seems to wish to project its values onto the world, no doubt because these values are parochial and particularistic. The reader will have noticed that criticism of democracy in these pages have come from anthropologists, who are necessarily interested in the parochial and particular (and one politician philosopher, similarly focussed on the empirical and real).

The time has come to raise the all-important question (‘the million-dollar question’ if not so many lives had been involved): Despite all the evidence, from political psychologists, social psychologists, journalists, historians, anthropologists…despite all the evidence, why does this faith in democracy endure – in the west? (In Bangladesh, we have looked at both rational and irrational reasons for such faith).

Happily, the European elite have fewer illusions about democracy. Jean Monnet has been quoted by The Economist as having “thought it wrong to consult the peoples of Europe about the structure of a community of which they had no practical experience”. However, the European Union vigorously champions democracy in Bangladesh, even going to the extent of whitewashing fake elections (with the Carter Centre, as we saw above). And even as Jeanne Kirkpatrick was writing her classic essay on dictatorship and double standards, she observed that “No idea holds greater sway in the mind of educated Americans than the belief that it is possible to democratise governments, anytime and anywhere, under any circumstances.”

The invaluable question was posed in the 1930s by Joseph Schumpeter in his book Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy (New York: Harper and Row, 1950): “But how is it possible that a doctrine so patently contrary to fact should have survived to this day and continued to hold its place in the hearts of the people and in the official language of governments? The refuting facts are known to all; everybody admits them with perfect, frequently with cynical, frankness. The theoretical basis, utilitarian rationalism, is dead; nobody accepts it as a correct theory of the body politic. Nevertheless, that question is not difficult to answer (pp 264 – 265).”

Before answering the question, Schumpeter presents arguments against the eighteenth-century view of democracy, which he defines as “the democratic method is that institutional arrangement for arriving at political decisions which realizes the common good by making the people itself decide issues through the election of individuals who are to assemble in order to carry out its will (p 250)”. Then he draws the implications of the definition.

He affirms that there is no common good which everyone can be persuaded to accept by rational considerations. On the level of the individual will, we, in a democracy, will have to attribute to it a level of independence and rationality that are “altogether unrealistic”, meaning, anti-empirical.     

“Everyone would have to know definitely what he wants to stand for. This definite will would have to be implemented by the ability to observe and interpret correctly the facts that are directly accessible to everyone and to sift critically the information about the facts that are not. Finally, from that definite will and from these ascertained facts a clear and prompt conclusion as to particular issues would have to be derived according to the rules of logical inference—with so high a degree of general efficiency moreover that one man’s opinion could be held, without glaring absurdity, to be roughly as good as every other man’s (pp 253 – 254).” And all this the citizen would have to accomplish by herself, ‘unaided’ by pressure groups or propaganda.

Under the rubric “Human Nature in Politics”, Schumpeter begins thus: “It remains to answer our question about the definiteness and independence of the voter’s will, his powers of observation and interpretation of facts, and his ability to draw, clearly and promptly, rational inferences from both. This subject belongs to a chapter of social psychology that might be entitled Human Nature in Politics (p 256).”

The reader will recall the title of the book by Graham Wallas mentioned before under the heading ‘The Irrational’. Schumpeter recommends the book as “the best introduction to political psychology”. (He takes Wallas to task for not taking his own premises to their logical conclusion!)

He gives a brief history of the demolition of the ‘rational’ individual. “During the second half of the last century, the idea of the human personality that is a homogeneous unit and the idea of a definite will that is the prime mover of action have been steadily fading—even before the times of Théodule Ribot and of Sigmund Freud. In particular, these ideas have been increasingly discounted in the field of social sciences where the importance of the extra-rational and irrational element in our behavior has been receiving more and more attention, witness Pareto’s Mind and Society. Of the many sources of the evidence that accumulated against the hypothesis of rationality, I shall mention only two.”

The first he mentions is the name of Gustav Le Bon, the pioneer in the study of the psychology of crowds (psychologie des foules). Schumpeter extends the denotation of ‘crowd’ to include “every parliament, every committee, every council of war” for they share with the rabble “a reduced sense of responsibility, a lower level of energy of thought and greater sensitiveness to non-logical influences”.

“Moreover, those phenomena are not confined to a crowd in the sense of a physical agglomeration of many people. Newspaper readers, radio audiences, members of a party even if not physically gathered together are terribly easy to work up into a psychological crowd and into a state of frenzy in which attempt at rational argument only spurs the animal spirits (p 257).”

The second source he mentions is, in some ways, more illuminating. “Economists, learning to observe their facts more closely, have begun to discover that, even in the most ordinary currents of daily life, their consumers do not quite live up to the idea that the economic textbook used to convey.” He has, in fact, anticipated the discipline known today as Behavioural Economics. As we have seen, Richard H. Thaler draws a distinction between Econs and Humans, the former being the fictional creature of economic theory and the latter the flesh-and-blood people of everyday life. Just as the rational individual is a textbook fiction, so the rational citizen is an ideological construct.

In the next section, Schumpeter asks his invaluable question. His answer is equally invaluable.

“First of all, though the classical doctrine of collective action may not be supported-by the results of empirical analysis, it is powerfully supported by that association with religious belief to which I have adverted already. This may not be obvious at first sight. The utilitarian leaders were anything but religious in the ordinary sense of the term. In fact they believed themselves to be anti-religious and they were so considered almost universally. They took pride in what they thought was precisely an unmetaphysical attitude and they were quite out of sympathy with the religious institutions and the religious movements of their time. But we need only cast another glance at the picture they drew of the social process in order to discover that it embodied essential features of the faith of protestant Christianity and was in fact derived from that faith. For the intellectual who had cast off his religion the utilitarian creed provided a substitute for it. For many of those who had retained their religious belief the classical doctrine became the political complement of it (p 265).”

This explains why democracy is beyond criticism and rational evaluation: the dissident is not only wrong, but morally wrong, a heretic, as was the case with Marxism.

“It actually becomes what from another standpoint I have held it incapable of becoming, viz., an ideal or rather a part of an ideal schema of things. The very word may become a flag, a symbol of all a man holds dear, of everything that he loves about his nation whether rationally contingent to it or not. On the one hand, the question how the various propositions implied in the democratic belief are related to the facts of politics will then become as irrelevant to him as is, to the believing Catholic, the question how the doings of Alexander VI tally with the supernatural halo surrounding the papal office. On the other hand, the democrat of this type, while accepting postulates carrying large implications about equality and brotherliness, will be in a position also to accept, in all sincerity, almost any amount of deviations from them that his own behavior or position may involve. That is not even illogical. Mere distance from fact is no argument against an ethical maxim or a mystical hope (p 266).”

Aldous Huxley made similar observations about democracy, the religion. “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 (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), pp 59 - 60).”

These words were prescient. Violent action has indeed been taken to spread the faith across the Middle East. However, when a Palestinian uses the word ‘democracy’, he means oppression. When a Rohingya refugee fleeing from newly-democratic Burma hears the world, it is safe to assume that no pleasant associations come to his or her mind.

Huxley continues: “As a matter of historical fact, however, democracy has come to mean, not universal liberty, but the absolute rule of majorities. In republican America the formula of democracy is: Agree with the majority, or clear out.” He writes like a contemporary observer of American politics.

Huxley, too, was aware of the sacred nature of democracy. He writes: “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 (Political Democracy, p 228).” (When I quoted these words to an English friend of mine, he said, “Was he on mescaline?”. Huxley was writing six years before Hitler’s electoral success.)

We have seen that political and social psychologists have confirmed his view about “mental Peter Pans”, and as for the rich men, Bernie Sanders thundered “We allowed rich people to buy the US government”. He said that he didn’t have a super PAC, through which the rich channel their donations. By August 2015, he had raised $15.2 million dollars from 350,000 supporters, who, on average, contributed $31. Last year, Jeremy Corbyn referred to the “stranglehold of elite power and billionaire domination over large parts of our media”.

Schumpeter and Huxley noted the anti-empiricism mentioned above, infecting not only the layman but also the historian (such as Ayesha Jalal). Like Siedentop, Schumpeter traces democratic values back to Christianity, but without the former’s glorification. “Thus transposed into the categories of religion, this doctrine—and in consequence the kind of democratic persuasion which is based upon it— changes its very nature. There is no longer any need for logical scruples about the Common Good and Ultimate Values. All this is settled for us by the plan of the Creator whose purpose defines and sanctions everything. What seemed indefinite or unmotivated before is suddenly quite definite and convincing. The voice of the people that is the voice of God for instance. Or take Equality. Its very meaning is in doubt, and there is hardly any rational warrant for exalting it into a postulate, so long as we move in the sphere of empirical analysis. But Christianity harbors a strong equalitarian element. The Redeemer died for all: He did not differentiate between individuals of different social status. In doing so, He testified to the intrinsic value of the individual soul, a value that admits of no gradations. Is not this a sanction—and, as it seems to me, the only possible sanction —of “everyone to count for one, no one to count for more than one”—a sanction that pours super-mundane meaning into articles of the democratic creed for which it is not easy to find any other (p 265)?”

The goodness of democracy is thereby ‘evidence-transcendent’, for it is God’s plan for humanity. We have seen how Charles Taylor conceived of the reconstitution of religion in the secular. Nineteenth century Europe was a time of secular religions: nationalism, Marxism and democracy each arrived as new religions for a new society.  (Even among Arabs, faith in the fundamental goodness of democracy was in full display in 2011, notwithstanding the clear and contradictory evidence of Iraq.)

A ‘secular religion’, far from being an oxymoron, is an identifiable social phenomenon. According to Ninian Smart, in his book The World’s Religions (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice Hall, 1989, pp 10 ‎‎- 25), every religion has seven characteristics, or dimensions. We tick them off one by one, with respect to nationalism:

(1) the ritual dimension: speaking the language, saluting the flag, national holidays,  pilgrimages to sights considered important; (2) the experiential or emotional dimension: nationalism has a powerful emotional side, a fact that seems to me to explain why children are peculiarly susceptible to it, as during the Chinese May 4th Movement, or the 21st February 1952 students’ movement in the then-East Pakistan (today Bangladesh); these emotions are always kept simmering below the surface through patriotic or heroic songs, dramas…(3) the narrative dimension is obvious in nationalism: the history of the nation; the stories (fictionalized, or embellished) of great men, women and even children who made the nation what it is; (4) unlike the emotional dimension, nationalism lacks a strong doctrinal dimension, reinforcing my observation that the power of the emotional aspect renders nationalist sentiments peculiarly appealing to children; however, nationalism can appeal to a set of doctrines, such as democracy, individual freedom and rights (or it could appeal to purely religious doctrines as well); (5) the ethical dimension of nationalism refers to loyalty to the nation, martial values needed during defense (or offence), family values (to provide soldiers); (6) the social and institutional aspect of the nation-state consists in such public figures as the head of state, the army and its military ceremonies, the education system – a formidable apparatus for collective indoctrination – and even in games (the Olympics is the egregious example); (7) finally, the material dimension of religion are the physical monuments and artistic objects that have been created by the ‘nation-builders’.

Smart then goes on to adumbrate the seven dimensions of Marxism.

It should be clear to the reader that democracy, like nationalism and Marxism, has similar characteristics:

(1) First, there’s the ritual dimension of the quinquennial vote, the municipal and local elections, the swearing-in ceremonies....At election time, the people come together. Voters vote for the national good (however ill-equipped they are to determine this) and not just for their narrow self-interest (Against Democracy, p 49). There is a period of transcendence at election time, lasting several weeks, if not months. (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 Cleisthenes and Greek democracy, the Glorious Revolution, the American Revolution….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 by brave boys (who were in reality thugs, but never mind); 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; the ‘people’ are represented through popular songs, dances, dramas, poetry and folk-tales. (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. 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, trans. Henry Reeve, Book 2, Chapter 12).” Not surprisingly, even democratic architecture conduces to a feeling of transcendence.

The highest level of human growth, according to Abraham Maslow, is that of transcendence. Transcendence, for Maslow, encompasses the need to rise above the interests of the self, to find fulfilment in helping others reach their potential (The Allure of Toxic Leaders, p 129).

According to Jean Lipman-Blumen, control myths are rationalisations that use to persuade ourselves to act or desist from acting, and these are deep-buried in our subconscious existential, psychological and psychosocial needs. “Both because of and despite the fact that they travel incognito, these powerful control myths prevent us from even attempting to overthrow toxic leaders (p 130).” She lists several control myths, but the most powerful and positive ones come at the end, or at the top, for they promise ennoblement and immortality, thus speaking to the needs that Maslow describes as self-esteem, self-actualisation and transcendence. A few samples follow (pp 135-136).

“This leader is an unique being. Participating in his/her vision will make me unique, too.” (Self-esteem and belonging; self-actualisation and transcendence.)

“Whatever promises the leader makes will come true.” (Safety)

“This leader’s vision is so ennobling, I would follow her to the ends of the earth.” (Self-actualisation and transcendence)

“When I am part of the leader’s group, I can do no wrong.” (Aesthetic [order, symmetry and beauty]; self-actualisation and transcendence)

“Being part of the leader’s group fills me with a sense of doing something really important.” (Cognition and transcendence)

“The vision is worth any sacrifice.” (Transcendence)

“Attaining the vision through my heroic efforts will earn me immortality.” (Transcendence)

The writer adds: “Believing in the special, god-like qualities of the leader makes it difficult to evaluate his claims to mana.”

“They beat her to death with their clubs,” wrote a student about his teacher. “It was immensely satisfying.”

“The Great Proletarian Cultural Revolutionary bugle to advance” first sounded 52 years ago, on May 16th 1966, when Mao approved a secret circular declaring war on “representatives of the bourgeoisie” who had “sneaked into the Communist Party, the government, the army and various spheres of culture”. Between May 1966 and Mao’s death in 1976, which in effect ended the Cultural Revolution, over 1 million died, millions more were banished from urban homes to the countryside and tens of millions were humiliated or tortured.

How could an entire nation follow a toxic leader like Mao Zedong? Jean Marie-Lupmen has a few answers. She also explains the allure of toxic leaders in Bangladesh, Pakistan, India and other places like Cambodia and the Soviet Union. 

Mao stood on the threshold of Paradise, Communism, the end of prehistory and the beginning of history. A few million deaths seemed a paltry sacrifice in a cost-benefit analysis. He stood at the terminus of human civilisation, the Prophet over the Promised Land, with his eager Communist disciples.

Charles Taylor, although the winner of the Templeton Prize, is clear-eyed about the history of Christianity, unlike Siedentop, and the dangers to the devout. He observes:

“So religious faith can be dangerous. Opening to transcendence is fraught with peril. But this is particularly so if we respond to these perils by permanent closure, drawing an unambiguous boundary between the pure and the impure through the polarization of conflict, even war. That religious believers are capable of this, history amply attests. But atheists can as well, once they open themselves to strong ideals, such as a republic of equals, a world order of perpetual peace, or communism. We find the same self-assurance of purity through aggressive attack on “axes of evil”, among believers and atheists alike. Idolatry breeds violence (p 769).”

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 (‘Ideas That Have Harmed Mankind’, Unpopular Essays (Bombay: Blackie & Son (India) Ltd, 1979), p. 149).”

But belief in democracy is not like any other belief, just as belief in the goodness of God and His plans for humanity is not like any other belief. Belief in the goodness of democracy is evidence-transcendent: it exists despite all evidence to the contrary. Brennan insists, time and again, that “democracy is not a poem or painting (p 125)”, that it must be evaluated just as we would evaluate a hammer, as a means to an end, not an end in itself (p 14). In this, he harks backs to Schumpeter’s contention that we must be able to discuss democracy “rationally like a steam engine or a disinfectant (p 266).”

And we have seen that, in Bangladesh, belief in democracy, unlike any other belief today, may be carried to the point where it becomes fanatical and therefore highly profitable. For a section of our intelligentsia, belief in democracy is extremely rational.

Take a contemporary and pressing instance of the disjunction between democratic reality and democratic faith. It comes from Latin America, where the Latinobarometro survey reported in the Economist shows great dissatisfaction with democracy and a simultaneous preference for democracy!

The proportion of people who are dissatisfied with how democracy works has jumped from 51% in 2009 to 71%. The share that is content has dropped from 44% to 24%, its lowest level since the survey began more than two decades ago. However, more than half say that it is better than any other system, though that has dropped by 13 percentage points over the past eight years. The share who are neutral has risen from 16% in 2010 to 28%.

The chasm between reality and aspiration is deepest in Venezuela, where more than half the people say they do not have enough to eat. Although just 12% of Venezuelans are happy with how their “democracy” functions, 75% prefer democracy to any other system. Yet it was the democratically elected Hugo Chavez and his successor Nicolas Maduro who helped to take the food out of their mouths. Millions voted with their feet.

(On the other hand, Nigerians have turned out to be more rational: in the 2015 presidential election, turnout was just 43%; in the last one, it dropped to 35.6%. Nigerians have learned from experience, and they may also have been doing a little basis arithmetic: the value of a vote is 1 divided by the number of voters – a value almost equalling zero, which makes voting irrational (Against Democracy, p 110).)

A variant of theodicy seems to be at work in appraising democracy. On the cusp of religion and politics, I turn for assistance to a poet, Edmund Blunden, and his heart-wrenching poem, Report on Experience.

I have been young, and now am not too old;

And I have seen the righteous forsaken,

His health, his honour and his quality taken.

     This is not what we were formerly told.

I have seen a green county, useful to the race,

Knocked silly with guns and mines, its villages vanished,

Even the last rat and last kestrel banished―

     God bless us all, this was peculiar grace.

I knew Seraphina ; Nature gave her hue,

Glance, sympathy, note, like one from Eden.

I saw her smile warp, heard her lyric deaden;

     She turned to harlotry;― this I took to be new.

Say what you will, our God sees how they run.

These disillusions are his curious proving

That he loves humanity and will go on loving;

     Over there are faith, life, virtue in the sun.

There can be no quarrel with the last quatrain, just as there can be none with the first three: this tension is part and parcel of religious faith. But when we ask why sixteen-year-old Ripon Sikder had to be burned alive in a hartal, taking eleven days to die, it is not our faith in God, but our faith in democracy, that is, or should be, shaken.  

“’They were only war casualties,” he said. “It was a pity, but you can’t always hit your target. Anyway they died in the right cause.’

‘“Would you have said the same if it had been your old nurse with her blueberry pie?”

“He ignored my facile point. ‘In a way you could say, they died for democracy.’”

Readers will recall this exchange between the English journalist Thomas Fowler, the narrator, and the undercover OSS agent, Arden Pyle, in The Quiet American by Graham Greene (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1955, p 179).

In the event, 4-5 million Vietnamese men, women and children died for democracy. When one has God on one’s side, and the others don’t, it is legitimate to kill.

Fowler’s facile point about “your old nurse with her blueberry pie” raises the essential question: what if he/she were one of ‘us’, and not one of ‘them’?

Charles Taylor similarly raises the essential question: “And sympathy can so easily be blocked by ideology, even (though rarely) in the case of one’s own children, but certainly when it comes to others (A Secular Age, p 701)”. With the followers of Jim Jones, we have seen that sympathy can be blocked even in the case of one’s own children.

In Party Animals: My Family and Other Communists, David Aaronovitch details his parents’ love of the Soviet Union and Communism. Anything could be justified to a true believer, even Stalinism. “Perhaps there are children of very devout Muslims or evangelicals who will read this and nod along,” he muses.