Continuing yesterday's answer to the question posed to me by a Boston radio personality, I offer Reason #2. That question, in short, was why America is so thoroughly divided over the Bush presidency and the war in Iraq. Why the viciousness? Why the hate?
Part of me is tempted to reduce the issue solely to economics: never before have so many people had the means, power and opportunity to profit from political ax-grinding. Never before have there been so many pundits, so many critics, and so many customers willing to pay for punditry that tickles the ears. In the 1960s, during the Vietnam War, there were really only three sets of TV pundits, those on ABC, CBS, and NBC. Today we giggle at the old-fashioned thought of a few talking heads in pre-satellite quaintness; we've got instant news dished about the cosmos in instant fashion, with everyone serving as anchorman or anchorwoman. But with loads of markets and media through which those markets can be reached, money swirls around opinion, news and commentary like never before. There is a lot of action of which everyone wants a cut.
But it is about much more than money. It is about our being kings and queens.
Reason #2: Democracy is inherently divisive.
There are quotes we read every day that go in one eye and out the other. And then there are quotes that go in both eyes and clang around our heads for the rest of our lives. Here is one such mind-changing quote of Professor Raphael Demos' of Harvard University. Demos was describing Plato’s conflicts with his culture:
The Sophists gave rise to the prevailing tone of cynical disillusionment. They preached the relativity of all values. Private interpretation is the sole guide to conduct; right is nothing but power. What is good here or now, is bad elsewhere or at some other time. Man is the measure of all things - not collective man but the individual. Truth depends on one’s point of view; both virtue and belief are conventions; they have no basis in the nature of things. Plato took a determined stand against the Sophists... According to Plato there is a true right and wrong, which is a universal principle for all times. ... He objected to democracy, because a democratic society has no standards; the test is merely self-expression. The democratic life is one without a pattern, in which every desire is gratified because it is there, not because it is right. [emphasis added]
You need to read the quote again, then tape it to your bedroom ceiling. It is one of the most astute and prophetic statements ever made, astute in its trenchant insights, prophetic in what it says about today's culture wars (though Demos wrote this in 1937 about Plato's cultural battles 2,000 years earlier). What it suggests is that democracy is inherently divisive, where each voice is valid and each impulse is recognized by the chair. What it suggests is exactly what we each see in our workplaces everyday, where everyone knows more than the boss; it is what we hear on every op-ed page, where everyone is a better president or general; it is what we hear in our churches and synagogues, where everyone is a better pastor, priest, rabbi. We live in a culture where everyone could, in theory, run for president, or even be president. We live in a culture wherein we teach our children that there is no dream they should not dream; that they can be anything they want to be, even the CEO of America; or that they, as mere amateurs, can nonetheless critique with pride the performances of the best athletes, writers, philosophers, or religious leaders in the world.
Oscar Wilde wrote that even if his pursuit of Art was thwarted, he would nonetheless write on the lintel, if he could, scribbling there the word "Whim." If Art is Whim, democracy is whimsical. For it is inherently schizophrenic and moody, adapting to each powerful majority or protected minority with nary a thought. Its tastes are capricious; its thirst for change unslakeable. Everyone is right, even when they are wrong yesterday and perhaps wrong tomorrow. For even error is celebrated as "participation," or "openness," or as a vital part of "dialogue," provided, of course, that the object being discussed is not the anathema du jour. For to be wrong the wrong way is unforgivable.
There is a rarely mentioned fallacy called the fallacy consensus gentium. It is a relative (among others) of the fallacy argumentum ad populum. The latter is committed when one asserts that a thing must be true because it is popular; the former is committed when one asserts that a thing must be true (or false) because most people deem it so. The fallacy consensus gentium is the most democratic of all fallacies: voting and polling, the modus operandi of democracies, are used to determine the laws of the land. But to some of us, moral issues are not to be determined by a show of hands; we don't care what most people think about behaviors X and Y. We believe that unencumbered reason can determine truth, falsehood, and moral decency. But to submit moral and even political issues to a vote, at least to the logically minded, is to celebrate fallaciousness. Democratic rule is inherently irrational, built entirely on fallacy.
And democratic rule is hardly what most of us want when crisis hits the fan. I do not want a democratic fire department putting out a fire in my home; I do not want a democracy removing my gall bladder. I do not want a democracy running FEMA in the face of a Category 5 hurricane; and I do not want a democracy shaping the ecclesiastical and religious teachings necessary for the salvation of my soul. Democracy may be what is necessary for the governance of a country, but it need not permeate every aspect of life, particularly when we tout our society as based on reason. Democracy's inherent fallaciousness proves it to be full of wishful thinking. Forming committees may indeed build fraternity and community, but a committee is the last thing one wants protecting that fraternity and community from terrorism.
Granted, not every democratic decision is about morality. Historically, democratic decisions in this country addressed policy, how the body corporate should enforce laws, or recover taxes, or fund a military. But increasingly, or so I believe, we are voting on moral issues; we are polling on right and wrong, up and down. To extend democratic processes beyond their scope, to depend on them for guidance through moral and social issues, is to court disaster; for unreason is the fount of such dependence.
Thus, we can conclude two things. First, the divisiveness of American culture is native to democracy; democracy is built on the illogic of fallacy. Second, democracy is purposefully indifferent to any absolute that is not the absolute of majority opinion, particularly that majority which is won in the United States Supreme Court. For the attentive, that fact cannot be more ironic.
Tomorrow, reason #3.
Contratimes
©Bill Gnade 2005/Contratimes - All Rights Reserved.
