Vox Polpuli, Vox Dei

We are rapidly becoming a more democratic nation, and this is a most calamitous trend.

The chief desire of the democratic citizen is freedom, or license. The best democracy is where men are most free and equal. Democracy, however, is but a third part of what our republic should be. Ancient philosophers understood that democracy, just like kingship and aristocracy, would destroy itself and evolve into something else. In all three, the principle is the rule of men, the will of men, is supreme. When these rulers follow the law and make themselves subservient to it, then is greater stability achieved in the regime, for a time. But men, it is rightly said, have endless desires and where men are greater than the law the law must eventually fall victim to our desires.

In democracy people want to enjoy freedoms, and this comes to mean the freedom to do what they want and enjoy themselves. Nothing is so useful for procuring luxuries and a good time as money. So the democratic man will come to prize money, even as he covets the pleasures it buys. Men will go seeking riches, and the few best suited to this hunt will find them. The rest of the populace will simultaneously hate these men and desire to be like them. In a pure democracy, these men will be at odds with the masses and there will be blood.

A republic is rule of form, with elements of the three classical governmental styles. It is supposed to have an executive power, a conservative aristocratic streak, and a popular element. No element should be greater than the others, and each should have the power to cancel the others out, so that acts of government require the combined will of an executive (hopefully possessed of integrity of character and judgement), the aristocratic element, and the people. This prevents any attack by one constituent part of the regime against any other. This is to make it so the form cannot implode, after all, whatever dies was not mixed equally.

How does one keep such a form, where no one party may destroy another, from eroding? Cicero uses a word which becomes key to the maintenance of a republic: commonwealth. The form of the city is where men live together, bound by an idea of right and justice. But what is this right? It is certainly not the 'right' of the democratic citizen. He later draws out that this right in the commonwealth, or republic, is liberty.

Stay with me here.

Liberty, again, is not the right to do whatever you please, but the right to participate in and enjoy the fellowship of the commonwealth. Man is, for Cicero, a social being. Just like the Greeks, he recognizes that the highest most fulfilling good for men is to live in friendship (I'd like to inject communion) with one another. The greatest good of the republican is the service of his city and participation in sociable and political works.

The nature of liberty is, here especially, quite separate from what one finds in Locke or Hobbes. It is the right to participate in the life of the city, but this right is inherently tied to obligation. Machiavelli fully supported the right to free speech, with the understanding that one had the duty to use it for the betterment of the city. According to this idea, man is never really at liberty, except when he acts in love for his fellow men.

This is a lovely idea, but it is hardly a likely scenario, given the state of human nature.

How then is man to tame the demons of desire and discipline himself. The answer is the same, all the way until that putz Hobbes...I think I might have alluded to the answer.

Men must be taught to love their fellow men, and religion is sited as the only force capable of bestowing this discipline. Religion, taught in the home, by a strong family, is the foundation and backbone of a republic. It teaches men to look outside of themselves for good, and that there are greater goods than fleeting physical pleasure. It teaches men to behave.

The key to maintaining a republic is religion. Machiavelli argues that a people must be religious to be free, because religion is the way of escaping, not only our own license, but the license of others taken against us.

I live in a world that is less religious as time passes; even among those who attend churches, few are actually religious, or even have an idea exactly what it is they believe. Human nature can never be tamed, but it can be curbed. Where man have no interest in doing what is honest, decent, and good, then they will follow their desires wherever they run. Chasing the perfect hedonistic freedom of the alcoholic.

More and more, Americans chafe at anything they perceive as a check on their freedom; they have no taste for the liberties of the ancients. Pleasure is the chief good of the average American now, and by pleasure, I mean stuff. De Tocqueville also predicted this rather neatly. It was the excellence and religiosity of the people that allowed America to be a great republic, and now that the people have changed, the country will continue to change as well. Even as we have infinite desires, the form will follow, but with the same ends. We will continue on, a democratic empire, and then, like all empires and all democracies, we will collapse.