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.
