Democracy

The problem

The forthcoming election on 12 December is, from my perspective, unique. I cannot remember such an occasion when so many people are going to vote, it appears, for a candidate in whom they have little confidence. Still, their decision has been reached for, as they believe, right political reasons. But this reflects badly on democratic governance. So some are asking, "Is democracy itself fit for purpose in the 21st century?"

The Guardian Weekly had a cover on the 15 November (2019) edition, containing the following: "Elections need fixing! Why isn't democracy giving clear answers any more?" The lead article was by a Guardian and Observer International Affairs Commentator who provided two highlighted quotes. One was, "Many citizens are expressing doubts that democracy still serves their interests." The other was, "Protesters say the political elite is corrupt and demand a clear-out, with little idea of what comes next." And with regard to recent European elections, this was said,

Spain, which held its fourth general election in as many years last weekend … will now have another minority government and the possibility of another early election. That fits pan-European trends. In Germany, France, Italy and Sweden, the grip of long-dominant centrist parties has been loosened if not broken, but has mostly been replaced by instability. Britain's general election is hyperbolically described as a 'turning point'. Yet continued gridlock is a distinct possibility after 12 December.

How different all this is from February 1989 when a lecture was given in the University of Chicago by a 36 year old, Francis Fukuyama, claiming that a turning point and not just in one nation but in World History had arrived. This was because the then Soviet leader, Mikhail Gorbachev, had said that the Soviet Union would no longer dictate to the Eastern European satellite states. Rather these states could now become democracies! So this was the beginning of the end of the Cold War (its symbolic end, of course, was the fall of the Berlin Wall, a little later, in November 1989 – exactly 30 years ago). In the light of all that, the lecture in Chicago was entitled, The End of History and Fukuyama's subsequent 1992 book was entitled, The End of History and the Last Man. Its message was that the worldwide spread of liberal democracy and free-market capitalism from, and by, the West with their lifestyles attached, could be signalling the end point of humanity's socio-cultural evolution. And democracy was to be the final form of human government.

But four years later, in 1996 Fukuyama's ideas were contradicted by another social scientist, Samuel Huntington. His best-selling book, The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order, argued that people's cultures (at the heart of which are their religious beliefs) would be the primary source of conflict in the 21st century. So to suggest that 1989 had heralded "the End of History" was nonsense. Then came 9/11 with 2,996 dead, 19 of whom were the Al-Qaeda hijackers who had hijacked the aeroplanes involved that September 2001. So, sadly, how right Huntington seems to have been, and how wrong was Fukuyama!

Further tragedies

But tragically, in the West, for many democracy is still the number one "value". That is true for Ofsted and our schools' inspectors. For the British Government decreed that our British values are "democracy" (first) followed by "the rule of law", then, "individual liberty" and, finally, "mutual respect for and tolerance of those with different faiths and beliefs and for those without faith". I am sure we all want to commend all of those, but not if that is all that is said. For without qualification "democracy" can be dangerous.

I regularly remind myself of the speech Lord Selborne made in the House of Lords in the debate on what was to be the great 1944 Education Act, and with Hitler still undefeated. For he said that Anglo-Saxon democracy cannot function,

… unless it is based on the Christian ethic, and if it is transplanted to any country where that ethic is rejected, it would wither and die amid great human suffering.

How prophetic that has been. The so-called "Arab Spring", which was encouraged by the West, in the belief that democracy was always better than autocratic rule, has, indeed, led to "great human suffering". For in Egypt, democracy was obviously going to lead to the Muslim Brotherhood being elected into power; and there were disastrous results as we've seen. Similarly, in the name of democracy in Syria, the West supported the opposition to Assad that at one stage contained a significant proportion of extreme Muslims (connected to Al-Qaeda and some to ISIS). This has been disastrous with, some say, 400,000 dead and very "great human suffering" as a result of an inconclusive civil war. Surely, there has been a serious failure to distinguish between "authoritarian" states from "totalitarian" states. Peter Berger, the famous social scientist, explains why:

The authoritarian state doesn't brook political opposition, but it leaves people more or less alone as long as they go along with the regime. By contrast, the totalitarian state seeks to control every aspect of social life. It's not enough to eschew political opposition, one must enthusiastically participate in every activity set up by the regime.

The term "totalitarian" was coined by Italy's Benito Mussolini who said his Fascist regime's basic principle was that there was to be "nothing against the state, nothing without the state, nothing outside the state." And that was certainly true in the 20th century of Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union and their imitators elsewhere in the world, and now extreme Islamist states. And such states, even when democratically elected, are terrifying and wicked. But authoritarian states are clearly lesser evils. So how we must thank God for liberal democracies. But modern democracies cannot survive indefinitely in secular states. And that is because as Charles Caput, a retired Roman Catholic Archbishop, puts it:

The deepest problem, the one that's crippling us, is that we use words like justice, rights, freedom and dignity without any commonly shared meaning to their content. We speak the same language, but the words don't mean the same thing. Our public discourse never gets down to what's true and what isn't, because it can't … After all, what can 'human rights' mean if science sees nothing transcendent in the human species … Liberal democracy doesn't have the resources to sustain its own purpose. Democracy depends for its meaning on the existence of some higher authority outside itself … Modern pluralist democracy has plenty of room for every religious faith and no religious faith. But we're lying to ourselves is we think we can keep our freedoms without revering the biblical vision – the uniquely Jewish and Christian vision – of who and what man is. Human dignity has only one source. And only one guarantee. We're made in the image and likeness of God. And if there is no God, then human dignity is just elegant words.

The answer

So the state, like a three-legged stool, needs three things: a good political order, which is liberal democracy, a good economic order which probably is compassionate capitalism, but vitally and most importantly a good spiritual order which definitely is faith in Jesus Christ as Lord and Saviour. For the real problem is human sin. That needs the gospel of forgiveness through the Cross of Christ and the resurrecting power of the Holy Spirit in the human heart. As Gladstone, the 19th century Prime Minister, well said:

The State and the Church have both of them moral agencies. But the State aims at character through conduct; the Church at conduct through character … The Church brings down from heaven a divine principle of life, and plants it in the centre of the human heart to work outwards and to leaven the whole mass: the State out of the fragments of primeval virtue, and the powers of the external world, constructs a partial and elementary system, corrective and from without, and subsidiary to the great process of redemption and spiritual recovery which advances towards it from within.
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