Introduction
From the description of the
book at the Mises Institute site:
[Kuehnelt-Leddihn] marshals
the strongest possible case that democratic equality is the very basis not of
liberty, as is commonly believed, but the total state…. He further argues the old
notion of government by law is upheld in old monarchies, restrained by a noble
elite. Aristocracy, not democracy, gave us liberty.
I will review here the first
chapter: Democracy and Totalitarianism: The Prophets. To
properly capture the meaning of the title of EvKL’s book, consider that
democracy is the most appropriate, if not only, proper political expression for
a society comprised of “equals.” So, you could consider instead:
Liberty or Democracy.
History
The notion that tyranny
evolves naturally from democracy can be traced back to the earliest political
theorists…
Aristotle offers a glimpse;
Plato's Republic offers “an almost perfectly accurate
facsimile….” EvKL does not rely solely on such ancient sources; he
focusses on those from the one or two centuries prior to the totalitarian
twentieth century – those who saw the direction that the West was taking since
the Enlightenment and could see where this path would lead.
The long gap in examples
between Plato and the Enlightenment was because democracy during this
intervening time was relatively unknown except for the case of certain city
governments. This changed with the American and French
Revolutions. Some observers saw this movement toward democracy as
one which would provide stability and balance; others saw it merely as a step
toward tyranny and total servitude.
EvKL offers a long list of
such thinkers, concentrated in the first half of the nineteenth
century. Something for me to consider, given statements I have made in the
past: about half of these could be called liberals, and these were the most
vocal in their denunciation of the pending evil:
Contemplating this list it is
certainly no exaggeration to state that, during the nineteenth century, some of
the best minds in Europe (and in America) were haunted by the fear that there
were forces, principles and tendencies in democracy which were, either in their
very nature or, at least, in their dialectic potentialities, inimical to many
basic human ideals —freedom being one among them.
Democracy: the god that was
destined to fail.
Standing Naked Before Man
Lord Canning, who had a sharp
eye for the signs of the times, stated that “the philosophy of the French
Revolution reduced the nation into individuals, in order afterwards to
congregate them into mobs."
We saw this idea in Nisbet’s work. Democracy
is based on all men created equal; democracy demands uniformity. It
is this uniformity that threatens liberty and gives rise to tyranny:
Citing Benjamin de Constant,
writing in 1814:
[Despotism] has an easier
road with individuals: it rolls its enormous weight over them as easily as over
sand.
Lower Your Shields
Lower
your shields and surrender your ships.
We
will add your biological and technological distinctiveness to our own.
Your
culture will adapt to service us.
Resistance
is futile.
Continuing with Benjamin de
Constant
The same code of law, the
same system of weights and measures, the same regulations, and (if one can
arrive at it) eventually the same language—this is what one proclaims the
perfection of any social organization. . . .
Arguments in favor of liberty
that are grounded in universalism cannot stand in the way of the
totalitarianism that results from conformity; certainly, universalism demands
ever expanding (in geography and scope) conformity, and conformity neuters the
individual – more precisely, conformity destroys the intermediating social
institutions that stand between man and an all-powerful State.
Jacob Burckhardt writes,
regarding a speech of President U. S. Grant:
The complete programme
contains Grant's latest address, which points to a single state
with one language as the necessary aim of a purely acquisitive
world
In the words of an early
example of pop-culture virtue signaling, we are the world.
The Lowest Common Denominator
In
one of many observations offered by EvKL that has a very unfortunate similarity
to events of our own time, N. D. Fustel de Coulanges offers:
With two or three honourable
exceptions, the tyrants who arose in all the Greek cities in the fourth and
third centuries reigned only by flattering whatever was worst in the mob and
violently suppressing whoever was superior by birth, wealth or merit. This
technique, already noted by Plato, is intrinsically democratic—in the classic
sense.
As Dostoyevski writes
in The Possessed:
Shigalyov is a man of genius.
He has discovered “equality." He has it all so beautifully written down in
his copy-book. He believes in espionage. He wants the members of society to
control each other and be in duty bound to denounce their neighbours. Everybody
belongs to all and all belong to each single one. All are slaves and equals in
slavery. As a final resort there will be calumny and murder; but the most
important thing remains equality.
If equality is the objective,
which task is easier – and certainly more likely: turn all men into Jesus
Christ, or turn all men into the devil?
We
When economic efficiency is
the criteria used for liberty….
It is the 26th century and
humans have become “Numbers”—automatons who prioritise efficiency over freedom.
We is a dystopian novel by
Russian writer Yevgeny Zamyatin, completed in 1921…. People march in step with
each other and are uniformed. There is no way of referring to people except by
their given numbers. The society is run strictly by logic or reason as the
primary justification for the laws or the construct of the society. The
individual's behaviour is based on logic by way of formulas and equations
outlined by the One State.
In the One State of
the great Benefactor, there are no individuals, only numbers.
Life is an ongoing process of mathematical precision, a perfectly balanced
equation. Primitive passions and instincts have been subdued.
Dostoyevski offers:
When a nation abandons its
religious concepts a wicked and fear-inspired craving for union is generated
which has as its goal the salvation of the belly. In this case social union has
no other aim. … But the “salvation of the belly” is the most impotent of all
concepts of union. This is the beginning of the end.
Democracy: Heads We Lose,
Tails They Win
Macaulay, writing to an
American friend in 1857:
I have long been convinced
that institutions purely democratic must, sooner or later, destroy liberty, or
civilization, or both.
De Tocqueville writes:
The absolute monarchies have
dishonoured despotism; let us be careful that the democratic republics do not
rehabilitate it.
A Vanilla World
De Tocqueville describes
“masses of men alike and equal" attracted by small and vulgar pleasures. Yet:
…above this race of men
stands an immense and tutelary power, which takes upon itself alone to secure
their gratifications, and to watch over their fate. That power is absolute,
minute, regular, provident and mild.
Other than the “mild” part,
he pretty much nailed it. Further, even as early as his time, De
Tocqueville sees a measure of groupthink unheard of in Europe – the majority
controlling the walls of intellectual thought:
But the price paid for this
sort of intellectual pacification is the sacrifice of the entire moral courage
of the human mind.
Count Montalembert offers:
To be sure, I am not speaking
about Christian equality, whose real name is equity; but about this democratic
and social equality, which is nothing but the canonization of envy and the
chimera of jealous ineptitude. This equality was never anything but a mask
which could not become reality without the abolition of all merit and virtue….
Emaciated (aka “Thin”)
Libertarianism
He continues, with – it seems
to me – a rebuke to those who place faith in the thinnest of thin
libertarianism to survive application:
No, property, the last
religion of bastard societies, cannot resist alone the onslaught of the
levellers.
Liberty’s
Father
Vassili Rozanov offers:
The deeper reason for
everything now happening lies in the circumstance that enormous cavernous
hollows were formed in the European part of mankind by the vanishing Christian
belief, and into these everything is tumbling.
Herman Melville, himself not
a Catholic, regarding the Church of Rome, would write in Clarel:
Whatever
your belief may be—
If
well ye wish to human kind,
Be
not so mad, unblest and blind
As,
in such days as these, to try
To
pull down Rome. If Rome could fall
Twould
not be Rome alone, but all Religion.
As if not enough, he would
add:
Rome
and the Atheist have gained:
These
two shall fight it out—these two;
Protestantism
being retained
For
base of operations sly
By
Atheism….
Juan Donoso Cortes, Marques
de Valdegamas, offers in his speech before the Madrid Diet on January 4, 1849:
Liberty is dead! She is not
going to rise again, not on the third day, not in three years, perhaps not even
in three centuries….
The world, gentlemen, marches
with rapid steps towards the establishment of the greatest and darkest
despotism in human memory. This is the goal of civilization, this is the goal
of the world. In order to be able to foretell these things one does not have to
be a prophet. For me it is sufficient to contemplate this terrible maze of
human events from its only genuine point of view—from the heights of
Catholicism.
For Donoso Cortes,
Christianity was the religion of liberty. By Christianity, he had
one view in mind:
He insisted that the
Reformation had fostered the rise of absolute monarchies all over Europe…
All Creatures Great and Small
The Marquis de Sade, one of
the most original defenders of democratic dictatorship, combined his immoralism
with the notion that the principle of equality should be extended to plants and
animals, not only to man.
From Popular Science:
Should Animals Have The Same
Rights As People? Humans have always seen themselves as distinct
from other creatures, but science is forcing us to reconsider that position.
All
things bright and beautiful,
All
creatures great and small,
All things
wise and wonderful:
The
Lord God made them all…. [Equal]
Post-Mortem
Henry Adams wrote, in 1905:
Yet it is quite sure,
according to my score of ratios and curves, that, at the accelerated rate of
progression shown since 1600, it will not need another century to tip thought
upside down. Law, in that case, would disappear as theory or a priori principle,
and give place to force. Morality would become police. Explosives would reach
cosmic violence. Disintegration would overcome disintegration.
H. G. Wells, once Britain's
leading progressivist, shortly before his death in 1946 was forced to write
about "our world of self-delusion ":
It will perish amidst its
evasions and fatuities. It is like a convoy lost in darkness on an unknown
coast, with quarrelling pirates in the chartroom and savages clambering up the
sides of the ship to plunder and do evil as the whim may take them.
And later:
After all, the present writer
has no compelling argument to convince the reader that he should not be cruel
or mean or cowardly. Such things are also in his own make-up in a large
measure, but none the less he hates and fights against them with all his
strength. He would rather our species ended its story in dignity, kindliness
and generosity, and not like drunken cowards in a daze or poisoned rats in a
sack. But this is a matter of individual predilection, for everyone to decide
for himself.
As offered by EvKL:
In this lament we also see
the bankruptcy of logical ethics without a religious basis
obliquely admitted. Indeed there is no “compelling argument" not to slit
anybody's throat except the Commandments given on Mount Sinai.
DÃa de Muertos
EvKL closes the chapter with
the words of Goethe:
What kind of a time is this,
when one has to envy those who have already been buried?
