RULE AND RELIGION

Now the truth is, when you talk about the ordinary people, everyone, acquiring the disciplines needed to rule nations, it's pretty hard to see what you could mean but religion. Ordinary people have never ruled nations. Monarchs, kings and queens, emperors have ruled the nations, and overwhelmingly they have been divine, gods or anointed by or directly representative of gods or God. If they weren't themselves the leader of religion in their society, I'd guess without exception they've been allied in the exercise of their authority with the institution and leaders of religion. So just on that rudimentary historical logic, a ruling people is going to be religious.

It is no surprise that the people who did the thinking about modern democracy saw it in religious terms. The Enlightenment thinkers expounding principles of freedom and human rights did it still within the old monarchical framework, a king of divine right. The benign monarchs who were going to provide these freedoms - and in some countries did provide some - were divine. Then you had the French revolutionaries realising that democracy was the only way to realise those principles, and I'll come back to them. But the Enlightenment and Revolution had drawn on the English institutional leadership of several centuries, and that was a constitutional monarchy of divine right. The revolutionaries drew on the new American nation, and Alexis de Tocqueville, a French aristocrat, toured America in the 1830s, just forty years after the French Revolution. He wrote Democracy in America, which I haven't had time to read, and am thinking about organising a group reading of it on the Education page. But here's what Isaac Kramnick attributes to Tocqueville in his Introduction to it:

"America was proof that the democratic spirit did not necessarily degenerate into anarchy and disorder as writers in the Western tradition ever since Plato had predicted. Europeans need not fear the future, for, as Tocqueville demonstrated, America was a democracy where liberty, property and religion were all highly honoured. Nor could Europeans stop the democratic tide. It was historically inevitable, indeed, divinely inspired. To resist democracy was, according to Tocqueville, to resist the will of God. For seven hundred years democratic revolutionary ideals had spread through Europe seeking to broaden the avenues of power, and behind it all Tocqueville saw the egalitarian ideals of Christ, the conviction that human beings were by nature equal and alike." (p xxv)

I'll come back to Christ, who is of course today commonly referenced as a democratic source in The Australian newspaper and generally, as I'll come back to the replacement of the divine monarch of France with democracy. But to maintain the original progression of my thinking about this, we know that for all the French revolutionaries drew on England and America, they did this with an inspirational fervour unequalled outside France. We know this fervour cast the new democracy in religious terms. But how, with the ordinary people replacing the divine monarchs, with them turning the democratic revolutionary ideals of seven centuries to which Kramnick and Tocqueville refer into reality, with them overturning Western opinion since Plato that democracy would disintegrate, was this going to work? Clearly, this was about the ordinary person transforming themselves through unwavering self-belief into a highest possible state of being. We know this was the underlying premise of the Enlightenment and Revolution. And as to religion, we can see that the analogy of it, for instance, with the Christian's disciplined pursuit of virtue, self-purification of sin, for heavenly salvation, was unmistakeable. 

But if we can talk spiritually of cars and horses, that points all the more to spirituality of our association with our fellow humans and citizens. They are who we fall in love with and love most of all, naturally as ourselves, they are our inseparable partners in democratic society, as, let's pull no punches, they are to us potentially the greatest danger, barring biospheric catastrophe, defining the duality of civilisation and barbarism. It is with our fellow citizens that we must unite to rule, the will of a tolerant majority being all democracy was ever premised on, and divided from whom we must accordingly fall. They are who we must reason with if we are to govern, who we must love if our unity is not to be fragmented. 

DISCIPLINES RELIGIOUS AND DEMOCRATIC

As to disciplines then, when we consider that to rule the Earth involves the addition of Reason to Love, and addition which must add substantial disciplinary demands to the disciplines of Love, there can hardly be any doubt that we are talking about religious discipline. If there was doubt, to dispel it we would only have to consider that the Revolutionary Fraternity of Liberty, Equality, Fraternity can be seen as going back to the Christianity of "Do unto others as you would have them do unto you", "Love thy neighbour as thyself", and so on. How democracy which then added the further discipline of reason to that Christian Love could be anything other than religious defies imagination, and it comes as no surprise that the revolutionaries, and later writers like Tocqueville, viewed it as such. My account in CODE of the operational interdependence of Reason and Love is really just another add-on to their partnership already already established as the disciplines of a religion which is democracy. 

The historical and logical sequences here are parallel. Jesus could not expect the people of two thousand years ago to rule the nation, as much as he anticipated democracy, The Bible does this not just with Love, as Paul says, even above Faith and Hope (Corinthians 1 13), and that is not to overlook that both faith and hope are very revolutionary Enlightenment, but by making people equal in the sight of God, made in His image no less, saying "The meek shall inherit the Earth", telling his people that "...whoever would be great among you must be your servant" (Matthew 20 25-26) and much more, not least of which was His own human individuality. Enlightenment and revolution in France, England and the United States decided 1800 years later that the people were ready to rule, now being capable of the further requirement of Reason for that. The religious character of what is involved is inescapable, hence CODE. 

This is not the place to dwell on the fact that democracy has in its modern history been seen as only political in character for the most part, rather than spiritual, beyond the fact that this was an error which accounts for democracy's current decline in the early 21st Century, wholly or partly depending on the emphasis in one's analysis. I should take just one major example associated with this in our society, an overwhelmingly economic life. Whether that's of trying to turn insufficiency into sufficiency, sufficiency into comfort, and for the tiny minority who turn comfort into opulence I can't speak, but with this process involving for nearly everyone either welfare dependence, or working for or struggling against large corporations, state and private, it seems relatively minimal in its spiritual offering. (I'll come back to "relatively"). Here I think Marx's theory of alienation, especially of labour, must repay study, including whether it extends to the small businessperson. What I have sketched seems to be a life too much of servitude to economic gain, competition posing the serious risk of isolation of the individual, perhaps in the nuclear family, from community, a lifetime of highly specialised routine application of intelligence, if any intelligence is required in a job, falling far short of realisation of full intellectual potential. It all offers little scope for the spirituality of community or Reason. Constant focus on material externals, even luxuries, seems to detract from considering - Pope Francis' word is "distract" - what would make our lives most  meaningful, individually and jointly with others. It's another way of saying we have elite rule rather than democratic full realisation of the individual and the people. The simple contrast is with the spirituality of ruling the society, always with all that implies.     

9th March 2020

In fact, it seems that 2 days after the paragraph three above beginning "This is not the place to dwell on the fact that democracy has in its modern history..." was written, this is indeed the place to dwell on modern democracy being seen as only political. There you go. 

CAPITALISM WRECKING DEMOCRACY: QUALIFICATION 2

I am going to deal with the second qualification I mentioned above, an error of thinking that all rule is material or temporal, (I use "temporal" as distinct from "religious", though CODE is Earthly). This may anticipate a little of what follows it. 

I have argued that much of what the democracy of the French Revolution replaced was religious, such as the divine monarch, and in status the Church itself. But as far as the monarch goes, it can be replied that the monarch also ruled temporally, and that material was the primary nature of the king's power, really overriding the king's own divinity and even perhaps the alliance with the Church. Why should not the democracy which replaced the monarchy be seen as equally driven by the forces of temporal rule, as mainly political? Well, there's no reason it shouldn't be seen that way, in that it is a natural mistake to make, except that it is a mistake.

What the transfer of the temporality of monarch to democracy overlooks is that democratic rule is a different kind of rule. For the monarchy, a temporal dominance may have been OK, although many will argue, no, the divinity was always dominant. But, I am suggesting, democracy's different. With the changed form of rule to democracy, the religious needed to become completely dominant. I've just defended capitalism in a relative sense against the charge of aspirituality. I think we can comfortably argue that as capitalism has brought the West to affluence, a purely material notion of rule might well see the people narrowly focused on their material well-being, with the oppressive and despiritualising effect described in the earlier paragraph where I mentioned the qualifications on capitalism's despiritualising effects. It would be no wonder if the people lose faith in democracy if this error robs us of spiritual satisfaction, as well as executive effectiveness for the people, by causing its misrule. The guilt of capitalism, real enough viewed objectively in isolation, is actually the error of temporal, material rule rather than the religious rule democracy requires. 

Here I think we can argue that the French revolutionaries on the back of the Enlightenment had it right. 

They had no problem with private property, or free enterprise, never advocated socialism. Neither did they anticipate capitalism, and thus the present situation of huge corporations which have arisen in conjunction with the small-government and market-force-solutions philosophy of the capitalist nations. But if the Revolution advocated aa government which was fully responsible in both senses, fully attentive and executive in respect to all the people's interests, and fully accountable to them, and particularly government by parliament properly representing the people rather than by market forces, that revolutionary prescription would have cured some of the worst ills of capitalism we confront today. The root of the problem of small government economic laissez-faire is, I think, the notion that it is parliament that governs, with a material power, instead of the view that it is the people who govern, with a religious power, to which the parliament is fully subject. 

The idea that the "left" was born in the National Assembly appears as an appropriation of the popular interest by left-wing ideology like Marxism. 

The National Assembly had the interests of the people covered by a democracy governed by all the people religiously, small government and market force solutions being largely a dispossession of the popular power by the forces of money-making, plutocracy and popular division to that end. It suits the interests of capitalists well to characterise fully responsible government as "socialism".

(This ends the insertion, actually 11th March 2020. If anyone tells you they can produce a finished reconstruction of the whole society, and they can show you it in writing, they've done something I can't.)

It is the background to the French Revolution, the springboard from which it took off, that I must come back to now. This time I can quote Tocqueville on the French Revolution: 

"The French Revolution evolved in reference to this world in exactly the same manner as religious revolutions acted in relation to the world beyond the grave...

… It inspired the missionary spirit and fostered propaganda as a result of which it was able to assume the air of a religious revolution which so terrified people at the time. Or rather it became itself a species of new religion, barely formed, it is true, Godless, without ritual or an afterlife …"

                                                                 The Ancien Regime and the Revolution p 27 

That the Revolutionaries saw democracy as a religion cannot, as far as I can see, be doubted. Tocqueville here documents their religious fervour near-contemporaneously. To the earlier observations about the divinity of the monarch they were dispossessing, I should add that dispossess him they did, and his wife, to the horror of the French people, of their heads. 

"To the average Frenchman" H A L Fisher notes, "no respectability remained to a party which had given a regicide vote.." (History of Europe p 902)

 Again, you don't guillotine monarchs, in late 18th Century France, except in the name of a higher divine authority. But the Revolutionaries were just getting warmed up. Not chronologically; the dispossession of the Church of its lands and privileges came earlier, but to modern eyes, to whom perhaps the execution of the king may not seem such an epic crime, in scale. On top of the sort of privations I've mentioned, the Church, Catholic, "..specially marked out for the resentment of an anti-clerical Assembly" (Fisher p 889) was subjected to having its bishops elected by constituencies that could have included Protestants and atheists, a "gratuitous affront to the religious convictions of the people". (ibid)  The National Assembly split the clergy into rebels and compliers. It may not be compellingly obvious to us today, but from this glance at 18th Century France, the idea that the Assembly was saying to the French people in effect "We're not having religion any more, just doing politics, you know, religion's out" is plainly vacuous. Even more than with Louis and Marie Antoinette, it can only have been the replacement of one religion with another. 

In a way, then, a criticism I have made of the Revolutionaries in the old Introduction, printed above, isn't fair. I say that maybe "..but for the misjudgement of the revolutionaries about religion and the value the people placed on the church, the Marxist error would never have occurred". So I imply that the revolutionaries made the mistake of going ahead with their revolution without a religion. But no. They thought they had a religion. They were right. They did, and it was democracy. Their thinking was pretty skimpy, dumping an established church with a global institutional structure and proven popular adherence for something of unknown religious appeal and capability. I guess that's what revolutionary fervour does. But in my defence, that daffy conception of the revolutionaries telling the French that religion was out and henceforth it was just politics  in fact mirrors precisely the way democracy then developed and is perceived to-day - politics, not religion. I also say in the old Introduction, very relevant to this, that "there was never any doubt that the industrial revolution would sweep Europe with capitalism". I meant, there was no doubt to me, with the 20/20 vision of 2018. Now I've got real 2020 vision, hoho. And I then got it right by saying the revolutionaries missed the significance of the capitalist developments across the English Channel. (Fisher, p 878) 

The point is that the revolutionaries could claim to have had the answer to capitalism in their new democratic religion of Liberty Equality Fraternity - if democracy had retained its religious character. I have seen the conflict between capitalism and the Revolutionary motto mostly with Fraternity, which at the same time I identify with Christian Charity or humane Love. So I acknowledge that they dumped the Church one minute and put its Christian essence back the next. Fraternity didn't work against capitalism, but then the Christian Church didn't either in countries where it remained undisturbed. But I'm saying Fraternity failed because the conception of democracy shifted from religious to political. If Fraternity had been given effect as "All the people ruling together, including the parliamentarians", it may have been more effective with capitalism. Again on revolutionary optimism, if they had understood the situation with capitalism, they might nevertheless have expected Equality to be a bulwark against it. Today, rightly or wrongly, capitalism's inequality is the chief charge against it. But as part of a religion rather than a politics of democracy, Equality may also have been more effective. Liberty, just to complete the treble, seems to have been the best success of the motto. But freedom to do little or nothing is a hint that most citizens would hardly give Freedom full marks. As politics, the Revolution's democracy would hardly score a pass.  

So no, democracy isn't the political mechanism of electing a bunch of people to parliaments to argue about who should pay what taxes or go to gaol for what or how much to spend on schools. Democracy is the religion whereby the people rule through disciplined reason and unity from humane love of their fellow citizens because their rule is the only guarantee of their freedom. What parliament does is what the people tell it to do, because they retain power over it as, Jesus said, their servant. The democracy, like the Church, has a government, like the Vatican; has politics, like any instrument of power; has its people, like the flock of the Church; has its holy books, pretty much all the ones where people have written wisely I guess, especially the ones I quote; has its god and its disciplined devotional observances, like any religion. But, as described, the powermongers manage to make politics the whole system, and the people and their religion get pushed aside as every puff rushes into the vacuum. 

A DUMMY SEPARATION

Does this pose a problem for the separation of church and state? Not at all as that principle is conventionally understood, since it was only about all the people making laws and governing. Nobody wanted just the Catholic or just the Anglican Church making laws, especially when its leaders weren't elected by all the people. 

Revolutionary democracy never had that problem. 

But the separation is a very useful device indeed for establishing that the government of the nation must be secular. 

Dictionary.com usefully tells us that means  "of or pertaining to worldly things that are not regarded as religious, spiritual or sacred; temporal". That is, it set parliamentarians up very nicely at the head of a democracy which was political, seeming to legitimise the exclusion of a revolutionary democracy which had the alarming feature that the people indeed saw it as spiritual and sacred, which meant they could have ruled through it, further reason for their considering it spiritual and sacred. Excluded, of course, for no apparent reason. I must keep an eye out for whether the Revolution said anything about the separation of church and state, though they'd have meant the Catholic Church. You can't separate the church from the state when they're the same thing. 

So, folks, time to step up. Luckily, they have taken so much power from us, that starting to get it back in big chunks, like with Voter Policy Ranking, won't be hard. 

People will take what's written here as they find it, but I don't think a revolutionary perspective on it is uncomfortable. A civil revolution. It's about the people taking back power that's been taken from them. Or, if that's making too much of the Revolution, the elites taking power that should have been the people's. I think that's important, because in response to the current brawling about which existing system is the right one - the brawling vigorously promoted by the elites to keep the chattering classes diverted with chattering - it's best to be able to say, simply, that there isn't a "right one". We've had ideas about an acceptable system, a Revolution for one, but we've never got there, never had one.

The elites who took that power know that if the people elevate themselves to take it, the elite heyday is over. They'd be keen to keep us passively and dividedly diverted from real power, play on our weaknesses, and try to pass that off as democratic leadership.

Looks like we trusted them and they let us down.  

I think after expounding a lot of theory you need to explain how to put it into effect, straight away, even though that is strictly for the Theory and Practice page on this site. Giving effect to this theory presents a quandary, in that I've said it's easy for the people to make s start acquiring more power, yet I'm saying people will have to rise to a level of citizenship never before achieved. The resolution of that quandary may be that people have not risen to greater heights of citizenship, stronger discipline, and so on, precisely because they have deprived of power, that the order of things you'd expect, where the citizens improve to get power, has to be seen in the reverse light, that it is not having power that has kept the citizen down, gaining power thus itself elevating. It really looks like the depowering of the people may involve the mechanism of not letting the people taste power in the first place so they'll never know what they were missing, never get a sense of what it requires, never have to rise to that level. "Ignorance is bliss" as  someone recently put it on Facebook, except that the people are not happy with their politics or society. The elites seem able to live with that, as long as people are "happy" with their impotence, happily squabbling, happily watching television. More on this later. The hopeful part of it is, if the people can make a start of gaining power, that will itself be democratically uplifting of them, in Reason and communal Fraternity.

I've used the "easy-sounding" term "implementation" in the heading,  with the tone of "Here's the policy, here's how to apply it". But even on the optimistic view, that power will itself improve us - I'll get to Voter Policy Ranking in a moment - I think we have to recognise that improvement by power will only be a start - that power will make serious demands for its proper exercise. And there's the worry, which is again for later, that just changing mechanics of power in the system leaves the way open for further manipulative depowerment of the people - that the seat of popular power can only ever be properly in the people themselves, their consciousness of the necessity of their rule to freedom, through Reason and Charity. The extent of the demands of power on the people is suggested by the following article of the CODE manifesto, which will be on the Theory and Practice page:

"The CODE democratic citizen is at the same time a ruler of society, a supplicant to their fellow citizens, and a slave to Reason."

That's a lot, and demanding, though also rewarding. No more suffering by personal comparison with other people. You can't rule equally and  do that. We're supplicants to our fellow citizens for Fraternity - Charity, Love, trust - in return of course for our offering it to them. That'll put occasional strains on the imagination. Yes, everyone is always a slave to Reason, if they want to get anything right. People who aren't just piggyback on the ones who are, until they bring them both down. But however necessary people think Reason is, I don't think many will consider it's easy, in the arena of discussion with other people, nor assisted by the postmodernists Derrida saying it's tyranny, and Foucault, torture.

But, I've also said above that we've been so substantially depowered, that that has made gaining substantially increased popular power easy thorough changes to the mechanics of voting and government that are pretty obvious, Voter Policy Ranking being just one, but a notable case. Being mechanics, that's immediately a Rule and Reason thing. I'll leave the details to Theory and Practice, but the end result of it is that after each election you'll have from the people a priority order of a full range of governing policies, maybe twenty or thirty, a full governing program for the government, but very fully informed as to the people's priorities among the policies of the losing party, which may have got the support of nearly half the people. So, popular rule, subject to parliamentary discretion and explanation; greater policy emphasis in the parties; much stronger bipartisanship; empowered elective mandate; Senate, media and States now positioned as much more openly defying the will of the people;  better quality Party personnel; so it goes on. And this brought about by, say, one in fifteen voters for starters, a million, reading maybe 60 one-page policy statements from the parties, so they can do the policy ranking. It'll catch on. We may not have to get rid of the Constitutionally corrupted Senate and the six superfluous States in a country with less people than California, Texas or Florida.

That sketches  the spread of a mechanical change through the political system,  with considerable effect, reminding us of two things. First, that happens in systems - interdependence of elements. But more important, the depowering of the Australian people is a deception, a fine deception in that it must be maintained that Australia is a democracy, even though it isn't. The characteristic of most deceptions is that you only have to expose them at one point, lift the concealing veil to reveal  part of the hidden truth, and they dissolve completely. Nobody's eavesdropping behind the curtain? So that foot we can now see belongs to nobody?

So, the mechanics of dominoes within the political system and all it includes are one thing. And the feedback of mechanical change to improvement of the people we can see straight away. A million people, just one voter in fifteen, reading 60 pages of proper policy explanation from the parties, prioritising the policies, is demanding of effort and reason. Will a mechanical change towards greater bipartisanship facilitate a more harmonious, uniting and reasoned approach to discussion of issues of government in place of the present partisan rancour?  Quite likely, you'd think. But the mass media won't like that. It generically needs conflict, for sales, ratings and its own power, not a quietly united, harmoniously deliberating, ruling people. A more finely reasoning people won't suit political parties of demagogic slogan and ideological prejudice at all. And there is no reason for me to evade the question that the elites will continue to ask: Is a rancorously quarrelling people expressive of the aggressive reality of human nature?  Are we not at heart still the barbarians of the law of the jungle before the social contract, the children of our violent evolution? Won't the strategy of making sure out emotions dominate the space where our reason should be, thus keeping it well out of the domain of our loving each other, continue to divide and degrade us into impotence? Can we really stop cannibalising each other's vote?  Can we reason about government from a societal as well as an individual interest, ideological or personal? Aren't we, ultimately, helpless prey of our human weaknesses? Aren't they for our leaders to exploit?