Can the Moral Life Survive Democracy?
Kenneth Minogue, Australian political theorist and Emeritus Professor of Political Science at the London School of Economics, asks whether our current understanding of the meaning of democracy leads to servility and to the diminishment of our moral life.
In the June issue of The New Criterion, Minogue talks about our relationship to those we’ve elected to represent us, the changing definition of democracy, the meaning of happiness and freedom, what makes us human, and the politicization of morality.
A provocative piece to ponder, I’d say, as we approach our July 4th celebration of Independence Day.
Our rulers, then, increasingly deliberate on our behalf, and decide for us what is the right thing to do. The philosopher Socrates argued that the most important activity of a human being was reflecting on how one ought to live. Most people are not philosophers, but they cannot avoid encountering moral issues. The evident problem with democracy today is that the state is pre-empting—or “crowding out,” as the economists say—our moral judgments. Nor does the state limit itself to mere principle. It instructs us on highly specific activities, ranging from health provision to sexual practices. Yet decisions about how we live are what we mean by “freedom,” and freedom is incompatible with a moralizing state. That is why I am provoked to ask the question: can the moral life survive democracy?
Minogue argues that our representatives– our rulers, if you will– make us responsible to them instead of being responsible to us. And they’re losing their patience:
My concern with democracy is highly specific. It begins in observing the remarkable fact that, while democracy means a government accountable to the electorate, our rulers now make us accountable to them. Most Western governments hate me smoking, or eating the wrong kind of food, or hunting foxes, or drinking too much, and these are merely the surface disapprovals, the ones that provoke legislation or public campaigns. We also borrow too much money for our personal pleasures, and many of us are very bad parents. Ministers of state have been known to instruct us in elementary matters, such as the importance of reading stories to our children. Again, many of us have unsound views about people of other races, cultures, or religions, and the distribution of our friends does not always correspond, as governments think that it ought, to the cultural diversity of our society. We must face up to the grim fact that the rulers we elect are losing patience with us.
Our rulers are theoretically “our” representatives, but they are busy turning us into the instruments of the projects they keep dreaming up. The business of governments, one might think, is to supply the framework of law within which we may pursue happiness on our own account. Instead, we are constantly being summoned to reform ourselves.
This kind of moralizing, Minogue argues, used to be left to churches. I think, though, we’d have to admit that moral messages from government are not something new. Blue Laws prohibiting Sunday shopping and Prohibition come immediately to mind.You can probably think of lots of other examples. Minogue is considered a libertarian by some accounts, so we’ll acknowledge where he seems to be coming from. But having said all that, Minogue does get one wondering about what seems to be a growing governmental role for telling people how to live. He doesn’t mince words here:
Debt, intemperance, and incompetence in rearing our children are no doubt regrettable, but they are vices, and left alone, they will soon lead to the pain that corrects. Life is a better teacher of virtue than politicians, and most sensible governments in the past left moral faults to the churches. But democratic citizenship in the twenty-first century means receiving a stream of improving “messages” from politicians. Some may forgive these intrusions because they are so well intentioned. Who would defend prejudice, debt, or excessive drinking? The point, however, is that our rulers have no business telling us how to live. They are tiresome enough in their exercise of authority—they are intolerable when they mount the pulpit. Nor should we be in any doubt that nationalizing the moral life is the first step towards totalitarianism.
When government assumes too great a role and deprives of us our own decision-making, Minogue says, we are diminished as individuals and as a society:
By “the moral life,” I simply mean that dimension of our inner experience in which we deliberate about our obligations to parents, children, employers, strangers, charities, sporting associations, and all the other elements of our world. We may not always devote much conscious thought to these matters, but thinking about them makes up the substance of our lives. It also constitutes the conditions of our happiness. In deliberating, and in acting on what we have decided, we discover who we are and we reveal ourselves to the world. This kind of self-management emerges from the inner life and is the stream of thoughts and decisions that make us human. To the extent that this element of our humanity has been appropriated by authority, we are all diminished, and our civilization loses the special character that has made it the dynamic animator of so much hope and happiness in modern times.
Minogue connects this loss of independence to what he calls the servile mind:
It is this element of dehumanization that has produced what I am calling “the servile mind.” The charge of servility or slavishness is a serious one. It emerges from the Classical view that slaves lacked the capacity for self-movement and had to be animated by the superior class of masters. They were creatures of impulse and passion rather than of reason.
Freedom doesn’t mean doing whatever you want to. Even slaves, Minogue notes, play when the cat’s away. Freedom implies obligations and being responsible for the consequences of one’s actions.
What freedom actually means is the capacity not only to choose but also to face the consequences of one’s choice. To accept employment, to marry, to join a cause, to sustain a family, and so on, all involve responsibilities, and it is in the capacity to sustain self-chosen responsibilities, the steadiness to face up to the risks and inevitable ennui inseparable from a settled life, that we exhibit our freedom. And its essence is that each individual life is determined by this set of chosen commitments and virtues (whatever they may be) rather than by some set of external determinants or regulations. Independence of mind requires thinking one’s own thoughts: poor things many of them may be, but they are our own, and we have found some reasons for thinking them.
Minogue worries that we are becoming a society “in which the servile seek security in avoiding the risks of life, even at the sacrifice of their freedom. And it cannot easily be recognized in action.”
It’s easier to recognize the “servile mind” in social conditions, he says. Although the dependency issues resulting from the welfare state are seen and acknowledged, its reach, he says, is broader than that. It promotes victimhood and offers an “education in how to be a victim.”
More generally, the duty not to offend the vulnerable classes in speech has been codified as the amorphous thing called “political correctness.” As disposing of the power not only to rebuke, but also to enforce by penalties, such codification makes the codifiers our masters. We must obey less in deference to the law than from the demand to regard “correctness” as a moral virtue. To legislate opinion is itself to create a servile relationship. Codification of this kind destroys the freedom to respond to each other (within the law) as we choose.
Minogue stresses the importance that voluntary associations have played in free societies— something that DeTocqueville observed as well in his visit to America in the 1830s.
These associations expressed that capac- ity[sic] for spontaneous institutional creativity which so impressed visitors to Europe, and especially to Anglophone countries. The crucial mark of independence was the ability to generate the resources needed for life without dependence on governmental subsidy, and it constituted “respectability.” No doubt it was sometimes easier for the rich to sustain such independence, but moral character was the crucial point. The respectable poor in the nineteenth century recognized themselves, and were recognized by others, as having a proud sense of their independence.
DeTocqueville says that American voluntary associations act in much the same way as the class of aristocrats do in a monarchy, by providing secondary bodies that prevent the abuse of power by the prince or, in democracies, the “moral empire of the majority.”
According to Minogue, the concept of society has changed. He’s talking here mostly about Europe, but sees the change to a lesser extent in America, too. What’s new, he says, is that:
it has become less an association of independent self-moving individuals than an association of vulnerable people whose needs must be met and sufferings mitigated by the power of the state.
And the meaning of victimhood has expanded, he says, to include the perpetrators of crime, who are often seen as victims of society itself.
Minogue’s argument is that once people justify certain actions by the state in the name of democracy– whether it’s equalization or a misguided understanding of “social justice” or regarding people merely as victims or interest groups– individual moral agency is destroyed.
Moral integrity becomes holding the right opinions:
Our inherited moral idiom is thus being challenged by another, in which individuals find their identifying essence in support- ing public policies that are both morally obligatory and politically imperative. Such policies are, I suggest, “politico-moral.” Such an attitude dramatically moralizes politics, and politicizes the moral life. It feeds on our instinctive support for good causes. Yet it also suggests that the most important sign of moral integrity, of decency and goodness, is not found in facing up to one’s responsibilities, but in holding the right opinions, generally about grand abstractions such as poverty and war. This illusion might well be fingered as the ultimate servility.
