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Popular Government and Intemperate Minds
| Article
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14756 |
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Section : |
MODERN THOUGHT
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| Issue
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11 / 1988 |
4,092 Words |
| Author
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Russell Kirk
Russell Kirk is the author of more than thirty books,
including The Conservative Mind, now available in its seventh
revised edition. |
At the beginning of the twentieth century, few states in the world could be called democratic. Yet much personal and local freedom existed under the reign of law.
Near the close of the twentieth century, nearly every political regime throughout the world professes to be democratic. Yet in many lands, personal and local freedom has been extirpated.
On the face of things, it appears that the triumph of democracy, far from preserving or enlarging freedom, has brought to power a host of squalid oligarchs.
How is it that we find ourselves in this bent world of anno Domini 1988--all the evangels of Progress having been refuted by circumstance?
T.S. Eliot, in 1939, on the eve of the Second World War, stated better than I can today the hard truth about our political condition in his little book The Idea of a Christian Society: "For a long enough time we have believed in nothing but the values arising in a mechanized, commercialized, urbanized way of life: it would be as well for us to face the permanent conditions upon which God allows us to live upon this planet.” He went on to decry the Benthamism and secularism that continue to oppress us half a century later:
“Unless we can find a pattern in which all problems of life can have their place, we are only likely to go on complicating chaos. So long, for instance, as we consider finance, industry, trade, and agriculture merely as competing interests to be reconciled from time to time as best they may, so long as we consider "education" a god in itself of which everyone has a right to the utmost, without an ideal of the good life for society or for the individual, we shall move from one uneasy compromise to another. To the quick and simple organization of society for ends which, being only material and worldly, must be as ephemeral as worldly success, there is only one alternative. As political philosophy derives its sanction from ethics, and ethics from the truth of religion, it is only by returning to the eternal source of truth that we can hope for any social organization which will not, to its ultimate destruction ignore some essential aspect of reality.”
Then my old friend Eliot set down a forthright line that I quote often:
"The term 'democracy,' as I have said again and again, does not
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