Democracy as a Wellspring of Subversion
Conference
by Dr. Julián Gil de Sagredo
Taken
from www.
statveritas.com.ar
Translated
from the Spanish by Roberto Hope
Dear
friends, I am going to talk to you about democracy as a source of
subversion and I will focus my topic on the doctrinal plane from
three points of view. the theological, the philosophical and the
political.
Democracy,
from a theoretical standpoint presents different aspects for the
theologian, the philosopher, and the politician. But if theology,
philosophy and political science are assembled in a unitary
synthesis, with a common foundation, it can then be noted that these
diverse approaches are linked together by way of causality, in a
manner such that the premises in the theological order determine
in certain sense the logical consequences in the philosophical order,
and these, in turn, determine likewise its pertinent derivations
of a political nature. Let us try to demonstrate our point:
Democracy
from a theological viewpoint:
It
may seem strange to approach from a theological viewpoint a matter so
political as is democracy. Remembering, however, with Donoso Cortés,
that "the great political problems always involve a
theological problem", I dare try to discover the internal
relationships linking the two aspects, the theological and the
political. And for that purpose nothing better than to delve
into the intimate essence of democracy.
Aristotle
says that "democracy had its origin in the belief that, being
all men equal in some aspects, they were equal in all".
This belief, with time, transformed democracy into a kind of
political fashion; political fashion which now is claimed by all
states, but of which can boast only those who, as Louis
Salleron remarked with a touch of irony, "proclaim themselves
democratic with the approval of the United States and
Russia". It is quite true that the verdict of both powers
merit little respect, since, nowadays, all proclaim themselves to be
democratic: communists and anti-communists, socialists and
anti-socialists, monarchists and republicans, lefts, centers,
civilized rights and uncivilized ones, and woe to him who does not
prostrate himself kneeling before such an overreaching goddess! he
will instantly fall fulminated by her thunderous lightning, as an
"ultra", an "immobilist", an "extremist",
a "totalitarian"!
I,
on my part, do not question the charms of democracy. It may be the
hidden manna which, at dawn, as happened at the Sinai desert,
gives away a mysterious nectar which pleases the taste of all palates. It
may be the "universal panacea", the "yellow
ointment", the "abracadabra", the "philosopher's
stone" which solves all problems and remedies all evil.
What
is certain, however, is that, if we look at its external forms of
expression, we see that democracy breeds obscenity, ordinariness,
filth and vulgarity at all levels, and, which is worse, if we look at
the internal forms of thought, we will notice that, along with
democracy comes confusion, disconcert and disorientation, in ideas,
in judgment and in doctrine.
It
follows that, the more people try to define the concept of democracy
with exactitude, the more such concept appears to be ambiguous,
equivocal, and multifarious. You may know that a doctoral
dissertation presented at the University of Oslo some years ago,
picks up about three hundred definitions of democracy. Analyzing,
however, the common concept underlying all those definitions, it
can be proven that their center of gravity is the concept of
"liberty". Depending on the meaning and content we attach
to this word, we will get a particular kind of "democracy".
A possibility may exist, then, for a unique kind of democracy to be found, which could,
hypothetically, present itself without its natural incoherence,
but it is evident that no credence is deserved by a term such as
"democracy", the conceptual multiformity of which
allows for the indiscriminate traffic of all kinds of mental
commodities.
For
that reason, while admitting the possibility of finding a democracy
which could present itself without its natural incoherence ̶
which conformed with right reason ̶
we insist that what is characteristic of democracy, as what is
characteristic of liberalism from which it derives is not the
concept of "liberty" but the ideological hegemony of
"liberty"; the expression of "liberty" as an
absolute value, as a supreme category which pays no homage to any
other. The exaltation of free man as the center and axis of the universe, in a word, anthropocentrism.
Secondly,
as regardless of its political, social and economic derivatives,
democracy has a marked character of theological significance, since
it implies, in its very same concept of liberty, a seed of rebellion
against God. A seed of rebellion which shows in the plans of its
promoters, when they present it and spread it as though it were the universal religion of modern times. Religion containing as dogma,
its "faith in man", and as ritual, "universal
suffrage", the exclusive source of power and sovereignty.
Democracy
is preached as a value transcending the person and society in all
their dimensions, as the mark which impresses character, not only in
politics, but in all manifestations of the human spirit, education,
culture, science, economy, art, love; what is intended ̶ in a word
̶ is to create something sacred, untouchable, dogmatic, at a
universal scale; in such a way that it will get to substitute for God
as the ultimate explanation of the meaning of life. That is why
Donoso Cortés fittingly said that "democracy is the human
echo of the rebellion of the fallen angel". Such an echo is
reflected in the antithesis formulated by the liberal doctrine
against the Word of God. The Gospel of Saint John, chapter eight,
verse thirty-two says: "Truth shall make you free",
in other words: truth engenders liberty; words which liberalism
casts inverted: "liberty engenders truth". And, as
effects participate in their causes, and liberty is personal,
subjective, variable; the "truth" which it fabricates and
contrives will have those same characteristics. It will, therefore,
not be objective, but subjective; not absolute, but relative; not
immutable, but variable; not "the truth", but "my
truth", "your truth", "his truth".
That way, the intellective faculty becomes subordinated to the
volitive, understanding subordinated to will, light to darkness,
objective order to the subjective: We have attained relativism and
with relativism, skepticism. This is the corrosive, devastating
origin of liberalism, the multifarious expression of which is
democracy.
Its
effects are denounced by the same Donoso Cortés in the following
terms: "just as the Word of God, when rightfully interpreted,
is the only one capable of giving life, so will also that same word,
when disfigured or wrongly interpreted become capable of producing
death". Remember, for instance, the transformation of
sacred concepts operated by ecclesiastic progressivism. Our Savior
is transformed into a "liberator
of the proletariat"; the salvation of the soul,
transformed into "liberation from economic servitude";
charity ̶ a theological virtue ̶ into "human love"
and philanthropy; Christ's spiritual reign into a "temporal and
earthly kingdom"; theocentrism into "anthropocentrism".
So, in disfiguring, in inverting the meaning of Jesus Christ's
words, in founding truth on liberty and not liberty on truth, death of
the real objective order is produced and, as a consequence, death in
the political, social, and economic order. There you have democracy
from a theological viewpoint. The rebellion of liberty against
truth, the rebellion of man against God. Let us now look at democracy
from the philosophical viewpoint.
Democracy
from a philosophical point of view
This
subversion, of a theological sign, which places liberty ahead of
truth, engenders, as a consequence, a second subversion, which could
be called philosophical, by which virtue man's liberty ie put ahead of
those laws or principles which conform to his own nature. Yes, the two-pole conception of man, which binds him with God as his ultimate
end, and binds him with society as an intermediary and instrumental
end gets distorted in its individual projection by Luther and
Descartes, who inspired liberalism, and in its social projection by
Hobbes and Rousseau, who made liberalism happen.
Let
us see how:
Luther
makes man independent of God because in the binomial of salvation,
will-grace —binomial
which definitively resolves man's destiny for eternity,
he subtracts will from grace, making exclusively the latter
responsible for salvation and granting the former such autonomy as
proceeds from the free examination. The first step has been taken, human
will is autonomous.
Descartes
makes understanding independent from the work of God, from God's
creation, inasmuch as from the binomial of truth adequatio rei ad
intellectus, he subtracts understanding from objective reality,
since intelligence does not reach truth by subjecting it to reality
but by creating it, fabricating it. Taken this second step: not
only the will but also the intellect becomes autonomous, it
dictates its own laws. We find ourselves, then, before man's
absolute autonomy, intellectual and volitive. We have thus attained
liberalism's first dogma: "liberty". But, at the same time,
we have detached man from his proper end, verum as regards his
understanding, bonum as regards his will and, since a person's
end individuates the person as regards his acts, we have deprived the
person from his authentic individual dimension.
That
is how you can explain that a king, such as Juan Carlos I,
being a Catholic in private, promulgated and published an impious and
atheistic constitution. And that, ministers who proclaim themselves
to be Catholic such as Cavero and Landelino Lavilla, should have submitted to
the Congress of Deputies, a divorce law which infringes upon Divine
and natural law. Thus, with a Catholic king and with Catholic
ministers, an anti-catholic society and an anti-Catholic State began
to be shaped. Such are the genialities of Maritain, a mind as subtle
as contradictory. Converted from Protestantism, he never finished
assimilating Christianity, returning always to the roots from which he
sprung.
Let us lastly examine democracy from a political viewpoint.
Democracy
from a political point of view:
Even though philosophers say that
“ab absurdo sequitur
quodlibet”,
and thus that "error is not consistent with itself", we
must admit —nevertheless—
that a certain logical coherence exists between errors; in this case
between the theological, the philosophical, and the political errors.
Since
liberalism, in placing liberty before truth in the theological order,
deforms the hierarchy of ends of human nature itself in the
philosophical order, it also deforms, as a consequence, the natural
structure of society in the political order. From this disorder
comes the confrontation promoted by liberalism against the
spontaneous structural framing of social forces which constitute the political structure of society according to the order established
by God, because He is nature's Creator. Established order which, to
prevent on the one hand the excesses of individual liberty and on the
other the excesses of authority, put between them, by society's
natural evolution, certain buffering cushions called "intermediary
bodies".
These
natural social ropes placed between the State and the individual,
between the giant and the dwarf, which prevent the frontal
collision with one another, interpose those barriers which protect
the person making it immune to the abuse of those in power. The
impact, then, of state action does not fall on the social molecules
as a deluge which ravages and destroys, but as still water, canalized
through those intermediary institutions which it must cross, which
have the role of filters to clear it and soften it. It is not so
easy, then, for a totalitarian state to atomize the people, or in a
liberal state, where individual liberties turn into licentiousness
and anarchy, to undermine the foundations of authority, because
between them are interposed, in the one case as in the other, those
contention embankments which constitute the natural social corporate
bodies.
For
this reason, the intermediary
bodies
and the social
order
are two concepts so closely bound together that a natural social
order is not possible without intermediary bodies. An artificial
social order —the result of compulsion— may be possible without them.
Nor can there be intermediary bodies except within a range, between
its two extremes, its opposite ends, where these bodies can develop
their existence. Thus, a society with no intermediary bodies,
as promoted by liberalism, the democratic society of universal
suffrage, of political parties, of man-as-number, of individuals as
votes, is an invertebrate, inorganic, flattened society, dispersed
into individual atoms, in amorphous crowds; it is a society diluted
in a de-personalized mass, easy prey to demagogy, to confront it
to power, as well as easy prey to fraud and deceit, to exploit it
from positions of power.
And
in such a de-personalized and inorganic society which nullifies all
possibility of hierarchical structuring through intermediary bodies,
economic liberalism finds the proper field to develop its doctrinal
postulates. Postulates which by inverting the scale of social values
established by Saint Augustine in de
Libero Arbitrio,
book first, chapter fifteen, it not only impregnates human life with
a materialistic sense, but it ends up reducing to economics the
ultimate explanatory reason for man, as though a person were
substantially homo
economicus rather
than homo
rationalis.
Liberal
economics, based on the principle of "solve et coagula":
dissolve and coagulate; that is, first de-personalize and then
massify promotes the uprooting of man from its familial and social
medium, detaching him from the bonds that used to protect him,
leaving him defenseless, without personality and without
responsibility, and in this way it incorporates him without
resistance into an amorphous mass which it can manipulate at
discretion.
Such
economic liberalism, such democracy, which raises profitability as
the supreme criterion of its doctrine condemns in the name of such
sovereign criterion, the small family farm, the small factory or
shop, the small grocery store, the small market, all of which are
drowned, asphyxiated, by the huge agricultural and forestry concerns,
by the great industrial complexes, by the great department stores,
the large supermarkets and the huge hypermarkets. In the name of
that sovereign criterion, family homestead, and small landholdings are
eliminated, the mass of salaried persons is swelled, idolatrous cult
is rendered to production and to work. In the name of such sovereign
criterion, anonymous, liberal capitalism is created, which detaches
capital from the hands of its owners and casts it in the anonymity of
the great financial powers, national and multinational. They are the
inventors of industrial society and its indispensable support: "the
society of consumption",
as the sole categories which divide the social body into producers
and consumers.
To
this sad role of producer or consumer gets human dignity to be
degraded. Such is, in the final instance, the liberty hawked by
liberal economy; and so is the road left clear and expeditious to
impose its monopoly and tyranny over the mass of producers and
consumers.
And
—finally—
in the name of such criterion, anonymous capitalism is transformed
into speculative capitalism, money industry for the sake of money,
with which everything is bought and everything is conquered, including
the State itself, which is the final goal. In that way, economic
power is confused with political power, and totalitarianism sets in, the ultimate consequence of liberal principles. A consequence, equally
ultimate, of a disorder the root of which rests on the exaltation of
liberty outside its limits.
This
limitation, which in the theological order comports the alienation
with respect to God, in the philosophical order the alienation with
respect to man, and in the political order the alienation with
respect to society. From the theological disorder, the philosophical
disorder follows, and from this the political disorder; three
consecutive failures: theological, philosophical, and political.
Three eloquent proofs that give evidence of: first, the rebellion
against God; second, the rebellion against God´s law in man; third,
the rebellion against God´s law in society. Eloquent proofs which
determine and demonstrate how liberalism, how democracy which is its
reflection, constitute the basis and foundation of its
subversion.
The
ideas that I have just exposed do not remain in the stratosphere of
thought, but are dynamic, tend to become reality, to descend to the
social field, to encase themselves in flesh and bones, and once they
have penetrated society and have acquired sufficient maturity, are
the ones which bring about, in fact, the great cataclysms, the
great national and international revolutions... but this could be the subject of another conference: the demonstration that democracy not
only in the doctrinal plane, but in the actual and social plane is a
wellspring of subversion.