So ran a comment from a perceptive reader who shares my understated enthusiasm for democracy run riot. Such scepticism is as old as democracy itself, which is an interesting paradox.
Ask any student of history about the greatest contributions Athens made to our civilisation, and he won’t have to think long. Democracy and philosophy will be his first picks.
Yes, except that the greatest Athenian philosophers, Socrates, Plato and Aristotle along with most of their predecessors and followers, shared my reader’s feelings about democracy – or perhaps it would be chronologically fairer to say that he shares theirs.
Aristotle, never one to pull punches, called democracy a “deviant constitution”, while in one of his Republic dialogues, Plato relates a catechistic exchange between Socrates and his democracy-loving interlocutor.
If you had to set sail on a long and arduous voyage, asked Socrates, who would you rather have skippering your ship, a random man off the street or an experienced mariner well-versed in the seafaring arts? The latter of course, answered the younger man. Then what makes you think that the former could be trusted to decide who should steer the ship of state?” asked Socrates.
That was a good question, and in the subsequent 2,500 years people have been unable to provide a good answer. So, to be on the safe side, they stopped asking the question. Ideal or not, total enfranchisement is beyond doubt.
Athenian democracy was of course as different from ours as a toga is different from a pair of jeans. It was limited and it was direct.
It had no need for any system of representation. The 30,000 or so fully enfranchised citizens (out of the population of about a quarter of a million in Athens at her peak) could all vote for every piece of legislation direct, with 5,000-6,000 constituting the quorum. In fact, Plato suggested that this wasn’t only the minimum acceptable but also the maximum desirable number of active participants in a democracy. Going over that cut-off point, he warned presciently, would result in mob rule.
Socrates, according to Plato, wasn’t opposed to democracy as such. He just believed that voting should be a qualification, not a birthright. Before casting their ballot, people should establish their credentials, prove that they have pondered the relevant issues at depth, learned much about them and sought counsel from learned men and treatises.
However, even such mild criticism was too much for democracy to bear. A court of 500 top Athenian citizens sentenced Socrates to death, perfectly democratically. Democracy voted to kill him for asking awkward questions about it.
Athenian education was also different from ours, and I doubt Socrates would retain his faith in the elevating power of learning should he miraculously find himself on a modern campus. If no one but students and professors of philosophy had the vote, we’d have an equivalent of Pol Pot at 10 Downing Street.
This points to a problem both wider and worse than anything observed or even envisaged by the great Greeks. At issue here is a whole civilisation that has succumbed to a deadly disease of which politics is only the most visible symptom.
By a process of steady erosion interspersed with occasional violent outbursts, the civilisation that began in Athens, was galvanised in the first century and flourished for centuries thereafter, was taken over by institutionalised mediocrity. Intellectually vulgar, aesthetically crude and morally corrupt individuals won the right to impose their puny minds and character on society.
The house was still standing, but it had become a mere shell. It was now inhabited by severely limited people who were either unaware of their limitations or, worse still, proud of them. And they had the power to inflict their deficiency on society at large, raising mediocrity to a lofty height. Mediocrity was the new excellence.
People left what they saw as servitude to aristocracy and the church, committing themselves instead to the bondage imposed by self-satisfied nonentities, the dominant type in today’s public life. What at the time of Plato and Aristotle wouldn’t have passed muster even as a quaint opinion is now seen as a valid idea to be imposed on society.
People were sold the rotten goods of equality: any idea was as good as any other, and the one to choose was the one enjoying the widest support. In fact, the very concept of an idea became devalued.
An idea, meaning a conclusion reached by an internal debate on a theoretical subject, used to be a luxury way beyond most people. At the time our civilisation was at its peak, people at large didn’t have ideas. They had beliefs, customs, habits, rules they lived by, local standards, folk arts such as ballads, songs and dances.
Ideas on things like philosophy, politics, aesthetics, law were left to minorities who had the requisite talent and training. Such minorities decided what books should be published, what music should be publicly performed, what laws should govern society – and yes, who should man the institutions passing, administering and enforcing such laws.
Those minorities had to be thoroughly trained and educated practically from birth to acquire the necessary expertise, the right to have ideas and the character to implement them. It was universally accepted that such a background was essential, and those without it could only come up with wrong and probably dangerous simulacra of ideas, not ideas worthy of the name.
That changed overnight, in historical terms. There are more of us than of you, said the intellectually vulgar men. Hence it’s vulgar ideas, tastes and principle that should rule the roost. And, by definition, everyone can have those.
Hence everyone should decide what is true, just and beautiful, and the only way everyone can decide is by a show of hands. These hands may clutch ballot papers, sledgehammers or wads of banknotes, whichever it takes to do the job required. It doesn’t matter. What matters is the absolute rule of the common, which to say vulgar, man.
People whom Plato and Aristotle would have seen as either idiots or raving lunatics acquire a reputation as savants, those they would have regarded as liars or even petty criminals become businessmen or politicians, those devoid of the basic intellectual skills the Greeks saw as a prerequisite for speaking in the agora become known as philosophers. As a result, we have a civilisation that creates a sea of information, yet next to no one able to navigate a course through it leading to anything but the rocks.
A society in which an empowered majority are cannibals will elect only cannibals to public offices, accept only cannibalistic ideas as true, promote only arts catering to cannibalistic tastes, pass laws legalising cannibalism – and use every medium at its disposal to brainwash the public that cannibalism is better than any other diet.
Replace cannibalism with intellectual vulgarity, aesthetic tastelessness and moral decrepitude, and this is a fair picture of modern society. At some point, subversive elites created the masses in their own image, and now the masses repay the compliment of creating elites in their own image. The circle is complete, and it’s vicious.
The only way out would be to break the circle, but that would involve a major cataclysm, of a kind that no decent people would wish to countenance. Barring that, we should get used, if we aren’t already, to corrupt and incompetent nonentities governing us, giftless hacks shoving what passes for art down our throats – and people who haven’t made the slightest effort to develop their minds pontificating on every subject under the sun.
Democracy – which is to say equality – of ideas and tastes goes hand in hand with modern political democracy, and the notion of one vulgar man, one corrupt vote reigns supreme. I don’t know which kind of democracy is the cause and which is the effect.
In all likelihood, they developed concurrently in response to some widespread need, an inner compulsion to claim squatting rights over the edifice of Western civilisation. Whatever that compulsion was, it wasn’t virtuous.
Is it wrong to feel pride in the fact that my comment became the title for an article on this blog? “Less than ideal” is a phrase my family have come to know well. It is part of my knack for understatement, perhaps one of the last vestiges of my English ancestry.
Equality is a myth, though it now has become the battle cry of modern man when anyone suggests there exists a hierarchy of any type. As C.S. Lewis wrote, I do not believe that God created an egalitarian world. I believe the authority of parent over child, husband over wife, learned over simple to have been as much a part of the original plan as the authority of man over beast. Amen. But I suppose in the materialist/atheist world one collection of atoms is as good as any other.
Secularists proudly proclaim they have replaced Christianity with “Science” as the explanation for all reality. But science teaches us the absolute opposite of human equality. Inequality in the natural world is the very engine of Darwinian evolution. Human equality is entirely a religious concept, based on the fact that humans have souls created by God and, unlike our physical bodies, one soul cannot be superior to another. Physically and mentally no human is the equal of any other. I think that in just the past few days this space has offered ample evidence of that – on the mental side, at least. But here we are: one man, one vote. Less than ideal.