The Future of Democracy

People are always asking, “Do you think that the world is moving toward an authoritarian system of government? Do you think that philosophy is moving toward a new anti-idealistic realism ? Do you think that art is moving toward futurism or dadaism or “hermitism”? and so on.

I call this kind of question “meteorological”: it is like asking, “Do you think that it is going to rain today? Had I better take my umbrella?”

But moral, intellectual, esthetic and political problems are not things outside ourselves, like rain or fine weather; they are within ourselves and for that reason there is no sense in asking what is more or less likely to happen. We need solely to make up our own minds and to act, each one according to bis understanding and his capacity.

You will permit me also to state that, among the insults today offered to liberty, none seems to me more gross than that implied in the question whether the liberal system is to be preferred to the authoritarian system.

It reminds me of the story of a man who went to a friend and said: “I was given a slap in the face today, what do you advise me to do about it?” and the friend replied, “Why, if it was given to you, keep it.” It is evident that a man who asks advice about his personal dignity has already actually renounced it.

The choice between liberty and suppression of liberty is not on the same plane as a choice between things of different values, one of which may reasonably be preferred to the other—the first means human dignity and civilization, the second the debasing of men until they are either a flock to be led to pasture, or captured, trained animals in a cage.

Coming to our own times, I see the future that liberty promises always as a beacon; I do not see any light in the future promised by authoritarianism. In the past, under the forms of theocracy, of monarchy or of oligarchy, authority had at least a background of religious mystery. Modern humanistic thought has dissipated the mystery, replacing it by simple humanitarian ideals.

But authoritarianism in our times, in those we see looming ahead, is irreligious and materialistic, despite its pretenses and rhetoric, and comes down to a brutal rule of violence over people who are prevented from seeing and knowing what is going on, and who are forced to submit to leadership and give unquestioning obedience to it.

To lend glamor to this obedience by associating it with the noble and the heroic, it is usually called military discipline, which has been extended, or should be extended, to the whole of society. But military discipline has its function only as one aspect of the social order. If instead of being contained within the society, it is itself the containing body or is coextensive with society, it can no longer be called military discipline, but is a general process of fostering universal stupidity. An artist with the face of a corporal, a scientist with that of a sergeant, a politician who waits for his orders and blindly carries them out, is no longer an artist, a scientist or a politician, but an imbecile.

We see it also as a phase of mental decadence that the political problem is now usually presented in terms of “the masses,” and what is suitable “for the masses.” “Masses” are not, as people seem to believe, something new in history; they have always existed, smaller than today, to be sure, since the proportions of society as a whole were smaller, but of the same nature and with the same spirit, the same threat, the same peril.

Sound political sense has never regarded the masses as the directing force of society, but has always delegated this directive function to a class which was not economic in its basis of selection, but political; one capable of governing. The problem concerns therefore not the masses but the governing class. Here too the evil, if evil there be, is in ourselves, and in ourselves alone is the remedy. It is vain to look for it elsewhere.

Liberalism should be at one and the same time the friend and the foe of democracy. It should be its friend, because the governing class is fluid, and its efforts are applied to increasing its membership and its following and to choosing them more carefully, and thus democracy implies an administration that provides at the same time an education of the governed for governing. But liberalism must be the foe of democracy when the latter tends to substitute mere numbers or quantity for quality, because by so doing democracy is preparing the way for demagoguery, and, quite unintentionally, for dictatorship and tyranny and its own destruction.

A practical corollary for men of good will: to work unremittingly under whatever conditions prevail, with every means at hand, and continuously, to work for the preservation and strengthening of the liberal spirit, seeking the most suitable means, hut always those that lead to the end in view and not to its abandonment or its replacement by other ends.

A man who works for an ideal finds in that ideal his hope and his joy. And yet his human flesh may perhaps look for comfort in some more specific aspiration. And this too he can have, if he considers that, under the present conditions of the world, the reserve of intellectual and moral force is still enormous, and that civil liberties have been preserved in great and powerful nations. These will withstand the perils to which they are exposed and will serve as signal flares for general recovery and resumption of progress. Even under authoritarian governments the achievements won by a liberty formerly enjoyed still endure in many persistent attitudes of mind, and such governments make use of these attitudes, even while they seek to change them and to blight their seeds of future growth, destroying or compromising for the future the very productive forces which the governments need for their maintenance.

But supposing we assume that the worst will happen. The worst that can be envisaged is that the struggle which is today tearing the world asunder will culminate in the complete rout of liberty and the triumph of authoritarianism, or as it is now called, “totalitarianism,” even in the countries which have up to this time remained immune.

Well, then, freedom will succumb, to be sure, but with the certainty that the processes of acquiring it will have to begin all over again, and that, in order to begin again, people will resume the efforts which for the time being have failed to win victory but which will win it in days to come.

In this sense, and not in that of obedience, in this knowing how to suffer death for a greater life, the task of humanity is in truth inspired by a military and a heroic spirit.

To the last of your questions (which falls outside the political or moral problem) “whether authoritarian systems provide better than liberal systems for the ‘safety of the individual,’ that is, for his material and economic interests,” I can reply only with another query, “Can we suppose that our affairs will be in safer hands if we give carte blanche to others to manage them as they see fit, without the interested persons being able to intervene, to object, or even to ask questions?”

Here, too, an anecdote comes to mind, that of the king of Illyria in Daudet’s “Les Rois en Exil” who renounces his throne to live blissfully as a private individual with a woman. When he triumphantly announces to her that he has done so, she laughs in his face, “Jobard, va!” (you poor simpleton) and walks out.