Liberty or Equality

Humanity is perhaps going to be shrewder and more clever, but certainly not better, more intelligent and more enterprising. I see the time coming when God will lose His delight in mankind, and when He will let it be beaten into fragments so that creation can be remade and rejuvenated.

—GOETHE

I will not cease to hold under the banner of religion in one hand the oriflamme of monarchy, and in the other the flag of the civil liberties.

—CHATEAUBRIAND (1827)

I CAN very well imagine that the patient English or American reader who has followed me to the bitter end and has often asked himself what sort of blueprint for the establishment of a lasting, just, and truly liberal order the writer of these lines would propose. Whoever peruses this book cannot fail to make the observation that these studies have by and large a negative, a critical character; he may have expected the rejection of totalitarian tyranny, but probably not the no less emphatic condemnation of the “only” alternative, the “universally accepted” palliative of democracy.

Yet at this point an important remark has to be inserted. The author is very well aware of the fact that there are countries, that there are situations, historical periods and psychological environments, which narrow the scope of practical choices. A monarchy in Rome around the year 100 A.D. might have prevented the outbreak of the civil wars which shook the nation to its foundations; but psychologically there was not the slightest chance for a return to Tarquinius Superbus, and it took the Romans centuries of imperial rule until they realized that their republic had gone. No monarchic “restoration” is offered in these pages to the United States; a political change of that sort could at present only end in ridicule—and disaster. A harmony between constitutional forms and national characters is absolutely necessary, and nothing is more calamitous than to overlook this fact. Political theory, political practice, and human realities are to a certain extent distinct elements, but the necessity of having them brought into some sort of organic relationship cannot be disregarded.

Still, we want to use as the background for our own constitutional blueprint countries other than the United States and Switzerland—in other words, countries of the non-Protestant world. We are naturally conscious of the fact that dabbling in blueprints for ideal forms of government would invite a great many scholars to raise their eyebrows, since they do not want to deal with even “theoretically possible” utopias. But such a projection and speculation is precisely the thing we here have in mind.

Our proposal for a form of government adapted to preserve liberty in modern times, and steer clear of the calamitous errors we have described, is based on four premises or, rather, postulates: (1) the greatest reasonably possible liberty of the person must be preserved and protected, since liberty is part and parcel of the common good; (2) the party system must be abolished because of its inherent drive and tendencies toward totalitarianism; (3) the ideological and philosophical struggles, which can neither be suppressed nor made an organic part of the governmental machine, have to be relegated to the private sphere of society; (4) the will of the majority has no right to prevail over the reasonable and the useful; the utilitarian and rational values in turn have to be subordinated to the commands of ethics and religion.

On the basis of the first three premises we therefore propose to establish a constitutional “equality” between a corporative popular representative body and the executive, administering the “bureaucracy.” The representatives in the corporative “Diet” are freely elected. The administration consists of officials coming from all layers of the population; they are employed on the basis of competitive examinations, plus one or two probationary years after having thus demonstrated their knowledge and ability.

Neither the popular representation nor the executive has an ideological pattern. The popular representation expresses honestly and freely the wishes and demands of the various groups of interest (ordines, to use a Latin term). In a sense it consists of “lobbies.” The executive, dominated by the ministries, tries to attain the useful and the feasible.

The corporative Diet can reach decisions which have binding power if they are unopposed by the executive or the Supreme Court, and receive the signature of the head of the state. But the ministries also can issue regulations, which become laws if they are not vetoed by the Diet, the Supreme Court or the chief of the state. Thus we get a clear and unequivocal separation of the two things: “What is good,” and “What the people want.” The pretensions, make-believes and dishonesties of mere “politics” can thus be dispensed with.

The fourth organ is the Supreme Court, which also has the right to propose motions, through a representative in the Diet. This Supreme Court, whose members are appointed by the Church (or churches) and the universities, but can be vetoed by a three-quarter majority of the Diet, has to examine all laws and decide as to their compatibility with (a) the constitution and (b) the moral law and ethics. The Supreme Court with its two departments holds a right of absolute veto. It is obvious that a deep religious cleavage or a variety of denominations would constitute a not inconsiderable obstacle to the establishment of such a court.

It is self-evident that this whole system has to be based on a constitution which clearly defines and limits the prerogatives and powers of the state. The rights and liberties of man (liberty of the press, printing, association, private property and so on), must be duly safeguarded in such a written document.

This very rough blueprint could be supplemented by an endless score of minor details, which we leave to the imagination of the reader.

We are being forced, anyway, to rely increasingly on government by experts, and we have pointed out before that the discrepancy between the things which are theoretically known, the scita, and those which ought to be known by the “politicized” masses, the scienda, is increasing by leaps and bounds. Even if it is true that general education is improving and that the general level of education is rising—which we sincerely doubt—the political and economical problems with their implications as well as the scientific answers for their solution are growing in number as well as in complexity. This is a race between an arithmetical and a geometrical progression. To ask a peasant from Central Switzerland in a Landsgemeinde whether a concession should be given to a cheese factory is one thing, and to ask a man in the street in Kalamazoo or Welwyn Garden City what sort of diplomacy should be used towards Mao-Tse-Tung’s China is quite another. Yet this discrepancy is equally apparent in the modern “politicized” executives. In 1815, at the Congress of Vienna, it was sufficient for a Foreign Minister to have a good grasp of history, geography, genealogy and human psychology—besides the mastering of the French language. Today such knowledge, even theoretically, would be entirely insufficient. Twenty years of intensive study and travel, twenty years of delving into such additional subjects as international law, racial psychology, military affairs, economics, agrarian sciences, geopolitics and a whole score of other disciplines seem to be indispensable. And yet, the grim truth has to be found in the fact that our modern foreign ministers have not ten per cent of the knowledge, the insight, the manners and the experience of a Metternich, a Castlereagh, a Talleyrand, a vom Stein or a Humboldt. Usually their linguistic capacities are so limited that without the help of interpreters they could only bark at each other. We have seen in the immediate past men who had the fine experience of selling champagne, of driving buses or imbibing their knowledge for their tasks from reading H. G. Wells. And the decline from 1815 to the level of 1919 is probably as great as the dègringolade from 1919 to 1945.

We have insisted before, in a note, that the system of bricklayers lording it over architects will not work because it is opposed to reason and that knowledge is even necessary to choose experts or to co-ordinate their divergent views. A chimney-sweep sitting in council with three medical experts will hardly derive a profit from the exchange of their opinions, nor will a theologian listening to three atomic physicists debating an aspect of nuclear fission. Knowledge cannot be disregarded. It must be prevented from becoming a weapon for enslavement (which it might), but it must be respected in its place.

Let us even load the dice and compare the brilliant amateur with the miserable professional. Let us imagine we have suffered an attack of appendicitis and have been duly warned by a qualified physician that in case of a repetition of the pains an operation should be immediately performed. Yet one day on a trip through the South Seas, thousands of miles from the coast, another severe attack sets in. On board the ship there is the nastiest, dirtiest doctor we have ever seen in our life, an alcoholic with trembling hands and ill-fitting glasses. On the other hand, on the self-same boat there is a young man of excellent qualities, a poet and thinker, a painter and philosopher, who receives our whole-hearted admiration. Hearing about our predicament, he offers his help; he can borrow a scalpel from the doctor or a knife from the kitchen; there is an encyclopedia in the saloon with diagrams of the human body and he sincerely promises to do his best. Yet what stands to reason? Will we turn in our emergency to the horrible surgeon or to the brilliant young man? It is needless to comment any further on the obvious answer. And herein lies the advantage of mediocre monarchs trained for their jobs over dashing popular amateurs.

Thus the problem of our time remains—to have good government with personal liberty; to have a maximum of security with a maximum of liberty. For the solution of such a problem, democracy offers no solution, because the masses, choosing between freedom and the illusion of economic security, will usually head straight for the will-o’-the-wisp. After having fallen prey to the fausse idée claire of democracy they will succumb to the even falser idée claire of national or international socialism. When we mention the masses, all the optimistic demagogy about the superb qualities of the Common Man comes to our mind. Indeed, the old monarchies were far from being models of perfection. The ancien régime, if we look merely at its seamy side, was made up of murder, inefficiency, corruption, narrowness, immorality, procrastination, intrigue, egoism, deceit and pettiness and it had long been in need of radical reform when it disappeared. Yet it never promised a New Dawn or a Paradise on Earth and it must be conceded that it relinquished the stage of history with little opposition, almost in the expectation that the bombastically heralded New Experiments were bound to fail. And fail they did! The ancien régime had lasted a thousand years, and for over a hundred years the Continentals had tried to make a synthesis with the new forces. Then the stage was entirely left to the “Dawnists,” to our noble friend, the Common Man, and bankruptcy arrived not within a thousand years, but within half a generation. It came in a swift and deadly way. It murdered liberty by entirely new methods and it repeated the errors of the Old Government on a colossal scale: all the persecutions of Jews through the ages were dwarfed to microscopic size by Hitler’s delirious mass murders, and all the victims of the Inquisition burnt at the stake through centuries did not amount to one-fourth of the number of those cremated alive one afternoon in Dresden, when among 150,000 killed at least two-thirds perished fully conscious in the fiery flames . . . and this without an inquest, without the slightest effort to establish a real or even a subjectively imputed guilt at the very end of a war. To the horrors of the concentration camps almost girdling the globe we are at a loss to find any parallel. Thus, the crown to many a European, especially to a Central European, indeed is a symbol of freedom—not only when he thinks of the terrors of the East, but also when he reflects upon the sly process of enslavement in the West. There popular representations, resting on the comfortable fiction that the parliaments are “us,” “our-selves,” control the private lives of the “citizens” to a far greater extent than the monarchs of the past would ever have dared to regulate the doings of their “subjects.” Even a Louis XIV, autocrat, centralist and breaker of many of the best traditions as he was, would hardly have ventured to exercise three prerogatives which “progressive democracies” have claimed and do claim without batting an eye: prohibition of alcoholic beverages, conscription, and an income tax involving annual economic “confession” to the State . . . not to mention “nationalization” which is a specious form of theft.

History, unfortunately, is not rational or strictly logical, but a process which takes place in a Vale of Tears. Democracy rose in our civilization when the condition of the world least warranted it. It put tremendous weapons of technical progress into the hands of those least qualified to use them, and, allied with nationalism, it now becomes a powerful obstacle to the necessary unification of large regions. The Federation of Europe is lamentably handicapped by “politics,” that is, party-politics; and every word spoken by the various party leaders in the democracies must be weighed not so much as to their effect abroad as to their possible repercussions at the next elections. The disappearance of an effective monarchy is a special blow to the co-operation and amalgamation of the Old World, because monarchy alone would by now possess the full necessary supra-national outlook. It has got past the stage of tribal affiliations, which republicanism and democracy have by no means achieved. A Council of European Monarchs could be an effective co-ordinating body for Europe; an all-European Parliament, on the other hand, could not. Not only would it be faced, as a genuinely elected body of popular representatives, by an insuperable language problem, but, considering the level of our parliaments in wisdom and manners, as well as their ideological divisions, it would merely serve to break up, not to unify Europe. It is one thing that French deputies in the Chamber should shout at each other Scélérat! Assassin! Voleur!; but such verbal exchanges between a Communist gentleman from Toulouse and a Carlist gentleman from Pamplona might have deadly consequences. “Civil wars” on an unprecedented scale could be the result.

Thus the historical problem of our day is and remains the establishment of minimal government-from-above assuring and maintaining personal liberty. This issue cannot be shirked or permanently delayed by preserving the illusory fluidity of democratic institutions which have final control of the central government. Sooner or later this flux will congeal into the tyranny or the virtual dictatorship of a mass-party. Little it matters whether such rule is based on repeated elections won through permanent appeals to the lower half of the social pyramid, or whether it rests squarely, as in the “People’s Democracies,” on the efficiency of a ubiquitous police. Little it matters that finally a new oligarchy arises which methodically suppresses even those layers who helped to establish its sway. And since only real élites have a genuine psychological and intellectual interest in liberty, it is evident that they must have a position in political life which is more substantial than their numerical share. Needless to say, we do not identify such élites with classes or castes; they are the people capable of creative action. And creation as well as creativeness stands in constant need of liberty.

We are also convinced that the attentive reader will approach us with yet another question. He may have told himself that our numerous ironic remarks about the character of a totalitarian society watching grimly over the purity and uniformity of the “common framework of reference” lose much of their pungency if one keeps in mind that our Catholic convictions must force us to defend something “rather similar.” Is Catholicism in its own way not of a fairly totalitarian nature?

We would like to answer this question by two illustrations. Let us remember, first of all, the old programme: “In necessities unity; in doubtful things liberty; in everything charity.” This programme should be heartily endorsed.

The first two postulates can well be likened to a tree standing with its trunk well rooted in the soil while its long branches, rich in leaves, are playfully moved by the wind. The trunk and the roots are the “necessities,” the branches and leaves the “doubtful things.” Yet the totalitarian societies of our modern era can be compared to a tree whose roots are perversely hanging in the air, while its branches and leaves are screwed to long metal poles and have thus become immovable.

This picture—at first glance—may seem to be rather unjust. But let us conjure up the memory of a late medieval feast. The guests have arrived in a great variety of clothes, and even the costumes of the males show the most adventurous diversity. But they all would have belonged to one faith and one basic ideology. Based on this common denominator, they would have uttered a whole score of views. Yet we can very well imagine a dinner given in a “modern democracy”—and not only a so-called “people’s democracy” of the Eastern pattern!—in which all the men arrive in a black uniform (the tuxedo or “tails”), all of them with clean-shaven faces, all of them uttering in unison with parrot-like monotony the same identical political and social clichés. After some questioning and investigation one would nevertheless find that this monotony stems from a chaotic cauldron of the most variegated religions and philosophies. If a deist Mason, a Catholic, a Barthian, a vegetarian with Hinduist notions, and a “Freethinker” consider it as natural that they all believe in equality, majority rule, compulsory education and “progress”—then we have to doubt sincerely not only the logicality of their capacity to think, but also their real freedom of thinking! And it is also self-evident that a society with different premises, but bent upon achieving the same results from its “thinking” process, has to exercise a far greater pressure than one with a uniform religious basis. In its stark irrationalism such a society must be strictly anti-intellectual, and arrive at the very rejection of methodic thought.

The concrete political situation of the present moment is not the subject of our analysis; it is nevertheless fairly obvious that “democracy,” in spite of the ubiquity of this term, has failed the expectations of mankind. Democracy, no less than its bitter fruit—the tyranny of the one-party state—has foundered as a guarantor of freedom, the rôle in which it has posed for so long. Democracy, moreover, has betrayed its own idealism (which found such pregnant expression in the “Atlantic Charter”) with greater levity than any modern despotism. Democracy, no less than modern tyranny, is morally dead, a living corpse, a whitened sepulchre; yet tyranny with its monarchical externals is at least a sinister concentration of material forces and drives.

The latter’s physical menace, heralded by the dark cloud of corroding and demoralizing fear, is addressed to all of us. Therefore we need forms of government which can give us both freedom and strength—forms of government which fulfil the ethical as well as the practical demands of the times—of all times. If historical and geographic accidents had not favoured the rise of a gigantic empire on the western rim of the Atlantic which, through its dimensions, its numerous citizenry, and its safe distance, represented a unique counterweight, the western rim of the Old World would have lost its freedom twice within the last decade. Yet how inefficient this giant can be at times in face of the planning powers of evil we have seen when, in tired confusion, it surrendered at the green table after so many splendid military triumphs. Victory gained through the twin hierarchies of industry and the armed forces, was thrown away by the politicians.

America would act wisely if she would return to her great traditions; Europe, on the other hand, insofar as she is not enslaved, is faced by a categoric imperative. She must, must find the way back to her eternal well-springs or perish. The illusions, myths and lies of the last hundred years are going to save neither her soul nor her precarious physical existence.