The Menace of the Herd, or Procrustes at Large

IV THE AMERICAN SCENE

“Democracy, I do not conceyve, that God did ever ordeyne as a fitt government either for church or commonwealth. If the people be governors, who shall be governed? As for monarchy and aristocracy, they are both of them clearly approoved and directed in Scripture.” — John Cotton.

THE peculiar strength of England, which is due to the fact that an upper class with numerous aristocratic elements actually directs the destinies of the country, was also characteristic of the United States of America. This becomes evident if one visits Jackson Square in Washington. There in the middle of this open space adjoining the White House one can admire Old Hickory parading on a horse, yet the effigy of the paragon of modern American “democratic” ideas is surrounded by four statues each representing a hero of the War of Independence which had taken place two generations before the presidency of Andrew Jackson. There we see Tadeusz Kościuszko the Pole of old, noble Lithuanian lineage, Baron von Steuben, the Comte de Rochambeau, and the Marquis de Lafayette. Count Kasimierz Pulaski, the only General who was killed in the Revolution, has his monument in Savannah, but Baron de Kalb on account of his undistinguished parentage was probably not considered worthy enough to be represented in the exalted society that had come to this country in order to fight and, if necessary, to die for liberty — not for equality.

The British King was, for our aristocratic squires (among whom we find George Washington, descendant of King John II), nothing but a stubborn and arrogant primus inter pares, and the republican form of government promised them an aggrandizement of their power as well as more Liberty — the great aristocratic ideal.1 They disliked the idea of being a “royal” nobility which radiates only a secondary light like the moon.2 Here was now the opportunity to become “suns” again. There were men like Alexander Hamilton, a brilliant bourgeois, who wanted to re-introduce monarchy, but the squirarchy was glad to have escaped the central control. George Washington, who had aspired to the title “Highness,” found his wish frustrated. Neither had the Judges of the Supreme Court the title “Your High Mightiness” granted by the Constitution — as Benjamin Franklin proposed it in later years.

Slavery was naturally nothing to boast of; the frequent patriarchal treatment of slaves does not alter the fact that the idea of selling and buying human beings is the outcome of a thoroughly commercialized mentality worthy of a modern baseball or football club, which so often “trade in” their declining celebrities. Yet it is difficult to decide whether the main reason for the war of secession was to be found in the egoistic economic consideration of Southerners or in the determination to oppose the centralizing efforts of the Federal Government. The fact that most southern generals and political leaders had few or no slaves seems to justify the latter assumption. We have seen it in our days that the Catholic Church in the United States assailed the “humanitarian” Child Labor Amendment for reasons which find their justification in the strongly anticentralistic tradition of the Church, a tradition, unfortunately, not always sufficiently upheld.

About the quality of this immigration one has to be highly skeptical. Nobody ever leaves his homeland for good if he is not to some extent déraciné. It is an idle illusion to think that the most courageous and enterprising Europeans came to America; the truth is that an overwhelming majority of all immigrants who crossed the Atlantic were either a personal failure in Europe and hoped to make riches quickly in the New World or that they belonged to a political, racial, or religious group which had failed collectively in the struggle for power and survival. It is difficult to imagine somebody leaving his fatherland because he was too happy and too successful. Neither were there such idealists who just yearned for a “harder life.” Competition was far harder in Europe and there was always less elbowroom, but men like Thyssen, Lord Nuffield, Bat’a, Schneider, Krupp, and Juan March have proved that spectacular careers in the industrial, commercial sphere are not an American privilege and it is too well known that “birth” is a mere handicap in the political field of the Continent.6

Success became the great nostalgia for many Americans because they or their forefathers had written on their forehead the words defeat or failure.7 We can see this well in some of the “patriotic” poems of Edgar Guest, reflecting a popular sentiment, which abound in the praise of material success.

Yet immigration proved at one and the same time to be a factor of diversity. It gave a certain variety to the big cities with their various “quarters” in which immigrants of specific races huddled together. (The smaller and medium-sized town dominated by the middle-class, not the midwestern isolated farm, became the strongest factor in the process of Americanization.) And while the poor, penniless, and prideless immigrant started automatically to imitate the established families, which were Anglo Saxon (and Dutch), these retained much of their influence by intermarrying after British pattern with the rising elements of the plutocracy.

The main emphasis was now shifted from “culture” to “civilization.” This change was deplorable but almost necessary. Culture is personal and something rooted; civilization on the other hand is “international,” interchangeable, and ambulant. (See Appendix IV.) There could be no melting pot, no Americanization on the basis of a new synthesis of Slovakian peasant dresses, Sicilian songs and Swedish folk dances. Only the jalopy, the overall, the ice-cream soda and the corner drugstore could serve as common denominators. In order to denationalize and to re-nationalize the “Bohunk,” American society at large had to make its change from the emphasis on culture to the acclamation of depersonalized, collective, and common civilization. It was self-sacrifice for the native and often torture for the newcomer. It is difficult to see how this procedure could have been avoided. We still feel the effects of its aftermath.

It is a superstition of many Europeans, and also of some Americans, to believe that the United States has a classless society. The absence of titles does not justify this view and if one mentions the existence of social stratas one is often told to go out West where such social differentiation does not exist. Yet gigantic and socially “democratic” states like Nevada have a population of less than one hundred thousand, and most Americans live in the quadrangle between Chicago, St. Louis, Washington, and Boston, and it is this part of the United States which is further ahead in the scale of material development and therefore has greater significance.

Aristocratic as well as plutocratic elements have helped here in a stratification of Society and the contribution of the plutocratic element has not always been the happiest one. It is an artificial element, but it has to be regarded as a reality.

Every intelligent foreign observer will be struck by the sight of the rapid formation of classes from the shapeless fragments which were dumped on the Atlantic shores of America. There was actually never a moment of stagnation. The formative process of social stratification is one of the strongest factors of American life, and it produced phenomena which are as ridiculous, uncharitable, and weird as those we could observe in European countries in their respective formative periods — in England during the eleventh century, in early Moscovian “Russ,” in the Balkans after the Turkish withdrawal, in France under the Merovingians and Carolingians.

From the forties of the past century on, social ambition was the most potent factor in American social life and the greatest incentive for the American self-immolation in hard work. The American male of the white-collar class does not work himself to death because he wants to buy more commodities or because he wants to spend lavishly his earnings in interesting travels. What he wants is the desired place in the community, the better “background” for his children. Up to the age of forty-five when he gets his nervous breakdown, or to the age of fifty-five when he dies in the Cancer Hospital, or at 60 when he is found dead over the dictaphone, he hardly gets more than a fortnight a year off from his work to enjoy life and freedom (like his wife or his daughter). There is the type of the young lawyer in downtown New York who works daily till eleven p.m. in order to “make good.” And this “making good” is nothing but the flat denial of equality, so much emphasized; it means rising to a “higher station in life,” to a higher class.

The proverbial man from Mars, free from any bias, would be struck in the United States by the aspect of a society trying madly, desperately, and with an almost religious intensity, to get rid of its primeval “democratic” and egalitarian condition. The society pages, read avidly by taxi drivers, charwomen, and waitresses, the social registers, and color distinctions, the emphasis laid on greater or lesser “prominence” of “civic leaders,” the hints at “blue blood” and “restricted neighborhoods,” and the macabre earnestness and ceremonial etiquette with which social events are celebrated would remind him of a stage of Martian society when its members were not yet properly labeled and had therefore no courage to relax its rules and personal exclusiveness. Every bridge drive, every reception arranged in order to “honor” a debutante, the rivalries of glamor girls (all well born and endowed with hard cash), the snobbing of actresses, Jews, and producers (quite in step with eighteenth-century England), the advertisement of “socialites” smoking Camels, drinking wines, or pouring whiskies, as well as the endless inquiries about questions of etiquette in the dailies, plus the rising sale of Emily Post’s manuals — all these phenomena show not only the youngness of a society but also the grim determination to be molded after some hierarchic pattern, to continue the aristocratic tradition of the Anglo-Saxon world, and to put structural liberty above equality. A competitive society knows no other equality than the equality of opportunity. To maintain that American Society is intentionally egalitarian and “democratic” is sheer folly. We can, naturally, pass a judgment over a given society, only if we compare it with others. A misjudgment may therefore be forgiven to an American who never had the occasion to go abroad and is reared in Hollywoodian conceptions about continental European society. But if a traveled man in the possession of the means of comparison repeats the cant about American egalitarianism in society matters, he can justly be accused of idiotic stubbornness or utter blindness, because never in history has a society striven so sincerely to pass quickly through its egalitarian stage of development as the American.

This process is accelerated, thanks to English traditions and English influence, as well as due to the fact that the older aristocracy, largely surviving, can be used as a “yardstick.” This struggle has its tragicomical aspects, like the “social registers” published by small committees who decide who does and does not belong to “good society.” Competing committees, set up by those snubbed and left out, publish other registers and “blue books,” and in the end we have quarrels and antagonisms as bitter as those related by Kotoshikhin, the Russian historian, who described the hatreds and intrigues of the Boyars in connection with their seating at the Czar’s table. Only countries with a fixed caste system like India are ignorant of the vices of snobism.

Yet the “democratic” past and the mammonistic present oscillates in the background, and social life in the United States can thus not be dissociated from publicity which after all, costs money. No press in the world, not even the dailies of England, Hungary, or Afghanistan, devote so much space to social life. The imitative urge of the “lower” classes is almost limitless and the interest for the doings, whims, and entertainments of the Upper Ten are truly “national.” America and England are in this respect so near to each other; the marriage of Princess Marina to the Duke of Kent, the marriage of a princess of a then exiled royal house of the Balkans with the younger son of a symbolic ruler, is probably still in many people’s memories on account of the overwhelming publicity it received. In an “autocracy” of the type of Wilhelminian Germany or Franz Joseph’s Austria, or even in Imperial Russia such a troth would not have interested anybody except a few courtiers and the Dames des Halles. Marriages of imperial princes or archdukes would have been reported with a few lines in the papers. Yet in the “Marina Marriage” (just as in the case of the Simpson affair) the ochlocratic tendency for publicity as well as the romantic and nostalgic curiosity for the doings of the “higher ups” cooperated harmoniously.

Racialism as a herdist feeling always went hand in hand with ochlocracy. In Periclean Athens men with a foreign father or mother were not considered to be full citizens. Human beings seem unfortunately to have an inborn urge to look down on somebody. Where social stratification is incomplete the contempt for the foreigner appears as a substitute for a pagan disdain for the lower classes. (No nation has a stronger dislike for foreigners than the French or the Swiss.) To this eager seeking for the “underman” one has to add the dislike for diversity, and to that identitarian sentiment may still be joined semireligious ideas about one’s own superiority or messianic mission. Differences in nationality manifest themselves largely by a characteristic of speech, a “foreign accent”; differences in race are more fatal because they exclude assimilation and add the barrier of “color.” The German or Irish immigrant who did not open his mouth was still a neutral entity, the Negro, the Jew, the “dirty-white” immigrant from southern Europe immediately gave away his “secret.”

Where herdist feelings can finally lead is well demonstrated by an event that happened not so long ago in the deep South. A young Catholic fell in love with a mulatto girl. No social stigma would have been attached to him had he made of this young woman his mistress. But having more respect for the law of God than for the state law he took her to the North and married her secretly. Some time after the return of the couple to the South (where the woman was considered to be the young man’s lover) a child was born to them. Unfortunately it came out at the baptism that the infant was not the fruit of an illegitimate union. “General will” was outraged, the law of the herd was violated and “action” had to be taken. The populace stormed the house, murdered the mother and the baby.9 No comment is necessary.

If defenders of the equal civil rights of all Americans voice their grievances, they are usually told that miscegenation is not desirable. This is definitely not the issue. In the knowledge of the erotic tastes and psychological tendencies of the North American it is very doubtful whether miscegenation would never reach greater proportions than right now. Yet social intercourse with Negroes and (what is much more important) equal opportunities given to colored citizens of these United States do not mean automatically or necessarily an increase of intermarriage. Americans suffer somehow from the haunting complex of a high school romance, office romance, college romance, subway romance, resort romance, boat trip romance. Literature and the movies have filled their imagination to that extent with a love-and-marriage complex that they can hardly imagine inviting the Lincoln Whites or the Washington Dukes for a drink without starting a “romance” between the young people of the respective families.

Discrimination on the other hand is a crime. One might make a case for or against segregation10 If a Catholic Church in the South has one side reserved for Whites and the other side reserved for Negroes, one might argue about it. But to force the Negroes to sit in the last benches or to insist that they receive communion only after all white communicants had received the Body of our Lord is perhaps good Nazi custom, but it is certainly not Catholic usage. This is obviously discrimination for which we all will have some day to pay the price. May God be lenient to us in that hour of retribution!

(The skepticism of old cultures has naturally also its dangers. It deprives nations of their élan and when it encroaches upon Truths — not mere views — it can be devastating in the religious sphere. The skeptic of an old and mature culture is always a liberal in the pre-Manchester sense, and there is nothing more attractive than a man who can unite in himself both elements: a total faith and a total lack of prejudice: absolute Catholicity and absolute generosity.)

There is less differentiation in the Middle West than in the North- or Southeast. Birth and race are less, while money is more important. The society there is “younger” and the development slower on account of the lack of “yardsticks” in the form of blue-blooded families. Money is power and that is what counts in a primitive society. Sixty or seventy years ago the six-shooter often spoke its mighty word west of the Mississippi. Western society was then in the same stage of development as the Herulians of Odoaker or the Saxons under Hengist and Horsa. Today far-Western society is going through an early medieval period.14 Tomorrow it may experience a period of Humanism and Renaissance.

The cities in the Middle West look clean and prosperous, the soil is fertile as far as the eastern rim of the Dakotas where the dustbowl and erosion become a problem, the people are more naïve (a medieval virtue), hearty, direct, friendly, and not yet engrossed in the process of building up a hierarchy, and the stigma of a primitive, “democratic” civilization — monotony — is in full bloom. This monotony, deriving from an industrial civilization, is at the same time one of the two great handicaps under which the natural development of society is suffering. The other great identitarian factor between the Alleghenies and the Rockies is the almost complete absence of mountains with the exception of the romantic Black Hills and the Ozarks.

If we unfold a road map of many a midwestern state (for instance, Iowa or Kansas) we see nothing but a uniform mass of quadrangles, the counties and the roads cutting each other in right angles. Wherever the roads meet there is a town or agglomeration of houses which shows no visual difference from the one twenty miles away. The stores, chapels, banks, libraries, filling stations, and town houses are practically all the same and the uniform advertisements of oil companies, “cokes,” automobiles, and cigarettes cancel whatever variety there may have been. There are no peasants but only farmers, living in “fragments of megalopolis” (as Spengler expressed himself), and not in villages. They own the ground, yet there is a curious readiness to part with it whenever it is necessary or profitable.

Farther out West one is struck by the ruins of ghost towns either of an agrarian or industrial nature. Dustbowls, depressions, aridity, dissication, careless exploitation of the soil, and exhaustion of mineral wealth have destroyed once flourishing communities. The inordinate desire to get rich quickly has depleted many a national resource. The planless destruction of timber and forests have caused not only dust but also floods. Agriculture is suffering heavily and has to be aided by the state. The deputies and senators of agrarian districts used to demand ever increasing subventions and a planned economy is something which cannot be avoided any more. Economically America has come of age (every maturity is “tragic”) and the times of an expansive economy, depriving Indians of their hunting grounds and other “limitless possibilities” are definitely over. And the sooner America realizes that, the better. The whole question of the “New Deal,” made more serious by the problem of a war economy, hinges on this problem.

We have spoken about the cultural chronology of America. Economically speaking one may come to the conclusion that America in 1925 was where Europe used to be in 1880, but there is less chronological difference between the United States and the Continent of today. The social reforms of the New Deal remind strongly of Bismarck’s reforms which were intended to take the wind out of the sails of Social Democracy in Germany. These reforms (Roosevelt’s as well as Bismarck’s) were timely, necessary, just, and also politically expedient. One may quarrel about their individual merits and the shortcomings in their application, but they could not be avoided. The decrease of liberties and the increase of centralism they entailed is deplorable, yet they are the price we pay for “progress.” One could certainly — contrary to general views — stop “progress” but the thing one cannot do is to accept “progress” and to refuse to pay its price. This is suicidal and as catastrophic as permitting automobiles and to refuse, in the name of liberty, to set up traffic rules.

In comparison to Europe, the old abundance and the old elbowroom of America seems to continue; automobiles were long rotting away in their lugubrious graveyards, automobiles which would have done service for at least another half decade in countries of the Old World. There are still butlers in America who are paid twice as high as Bulgarian university professors and advertising managers with salaries of European cabinet ministers. Yet the fact that the times of an extensive economy are over cannot be explained away. The country may have larger per capita riches than it had sixty years ago, yet the material wants have increased in a greater proportion and the raw materials have declined considerably. “Democracy” in the political sense is based on experimenting — the sometimes vague experimenting of laymen — and this is far too costly to countries without limitless riches. The expert and the skilled become more and more a necessity and the fantastic complications of modern technique, modern finance, modern economy, modern foreign policy, and modern production methods render unguided lay opinion more and more obsolete and hazardous for practical application.

There is naturally a genuine fear abounding lest the last token of active political right left to the modern slave — his right to vote — may also be abolished. It is a truism that every genuine officialdom is always out to destroy or at least to decrease the control of the nonexperts, of the parliaments or congresses, and to render them powerless if an opportunity arises.18

The problematic nature of lay control becomes apparent if we think about practical questions which have been put before the electorate. The elections of 1936, for instance, decided the future and continuation of the New Deal. A young historian who had majored in economics for his Ph.D. degree was particularly interested in this issue and embarked upon the venture to examine the vast project in earnest. After six weeks of intensive studies he saw that it would take him at least seven or perhaps ten months to be in the position to pass a pertinent judgment on this extremely complicated economic plan. There are probably not more than 3000 American voters (and maybe even less) who are competent critics of the New Deal, and yet we find 50,000,000 voters who have very definite opinions about it. If one would make an effort to find out how they came to their conclusions one would see that almost everybody judges the plan from a purely personal point of view; one man, for instance, will formulate his opinions according to the sales he had during a certain period and another one will use employment in his own community as a measuring rod. But no momentary or local success (or failure) can be taken as a basis for a fair judgment. A financial policy might bring enormous benefits over a period of twelve years (three Presidential terms) and end with total disaster, or it might work out the other way round.19

We already have mentioned the fact that the blind belief in the intelligence of the man in the street, who can solve the most difficult problems, intuitively is fundamentally Lutheran. Luther believed in the utter wretchedness of human beings in their moral sphere, but he thought at the same time that every cobbler can expound the Scriptures, which is full of passages over which learned theologians haggle for decades and even centuries. The Catholic Church, on the other side, taught the opposite doctrine; while not despairing over human nature in its moral sense she always preserved a healthy skepticism about the intellectual faculties of the average man.

This Protestant optimism and egalitarianism in intellectual matters is hostile to any form of authority or hierarchy in the field of reasoning, and thus we see in the earlier forms of popular government not only economic planning becoming impeded but every planning in general. A constructive foreign policy, even in a representative republic, is rather handicapped. One has only to remember the political testaments of kings and emperors who planned things two or three hundred years ahead. Yet in a republic or constitutional monarchy one course is followed by one government and another one by the next. Elective constitutions have an inherent dislike for a continuity of power and they rest on the assumption that four or eight years are a long time to carry out even the most elaborate program. Such views are far from reality unless we think in terms of destruction; the work of decades can naturally be destroyed in a few weeks time. In America we have in addition not only changing politicians but also changing administrations. This lack of equilibrium is particularly disadvantageous in foreign affairs, where “democratically” governed nations frequently lose the confidence of other nations because they cannot be trusted further than the next cabinet or the next president.

Popular representation in the United States (as anywhere else) faces the grave problem of quality; quality of the voters, quality of congressmen and senators. There is unfortunately little doubt that the lack of political education (which has its limits) and that an indiscriminate franchise have contributed a great deal to this deficiency. We have purposely written about the indiscriminate, not general franchise. The latter has the advantage that it gives the individual citizen a feeling of organic relationship to his country (which is effected in a more prosaic way by the income tax). But general franchise should not mean equal franchise, and the two elements of knowledge and merit should definitely be taken into consideration. Here, quite exceptionally, we will disregard the accepted system of the Founding Fathers who had taken from English usage the system of property qualifications. On account of its mammonistic implications we will not consider it any further. (Income, real estate property, taxes, etc., fall into this category.)

The proposal we make here is very tentative and should only serve as an indication as to where the solution of the problem may be. The idea would be to give to certain persons additional votes for each “merit” or “competence.” These votes will be accumulated. There is little doubt that it would take money and trouble to verify in each case the number of votes an individual person is entitled to, but where the question of quality enters no sacrifice should be avoided. There would have to be a permanent commission checking up each voter’s status. As basis for additional voting rights the following qualities could serve:

  1.  Being 50 years of age or over.

  2.  The possession of a B.A. or B.S.

  3.  The M.A. degree, all doctor’s degrees (Ph.D., M.D., etc.).

  4.  Active military service abroad.

  5.  Invalidity as a result of such service.

  6.  Being widowed by a war.

  7.  Administrative offices held for over 15 years.

  8.  Heads of families of 4 children or over.

  9.  Priesthood,   ministership, etc.

10.  Managing or directing of large enterprises.

11.  Managership of large public organizations.

Under these circumstances a physician aged fifty, who served in the war and is providing for four children, would have the power to poll six times. The mechanical, numerical majoritism which holds such evil sway over parliamentarian institutions could thus be broken in order to preserve their existence. It would be an end of the prevalent system of merely “counting noses.”

Yet a reform would also be necessary on the other end of the line. An examination commission under the direct supervision of the Supreme Court should see that certain educational standards among representatives and senators are kept. These examinations should cover subjects like ethics, geography, history, constitutional history, foreign politics, economics, etc. This would similarly help to raise standards and to increase the respect of the citizens for their representatives. The word politician has today unfortunately a rather derogatory connotation, and each time a paper publishes a drawing symbolic of a congressman one will find the picture of a dirty, wicked old man with bagging trousers and a slimy leer. Such popular connotations destroy (in the very long run, it may be admitted) all confidence in representative government.

A meticulous observer could see in the years preceding America’s entry into this war, in certain circles in Washington, a weariness with uninformed lay opinion in general and with Congress in particular. This impatience and anger over the delays caused by fruitless talk and filibustering in Congress are mostly notable in the departments where educational standards are high, admission is dependent upon rigorous examinations, and secrecy must necessarily be strictly observed; this is the case in the State Department as well as in the Army and Navy. An almost identical situation could be found in many European states prior to the suppression of parliamentarian institutions (see pp. 193–194).

Such a process is naturally not ochlocratic. Already Charles Maurras has said (De Démos à César, Paris, 1930, p. 35): “Democracy is the rule of numbers; such a government implies equality. But organization implies inequality. Thus democracy and organization are mutually exclusive.”

In the meantime America suffers greatly from the handicap of electing a large part of the nonfederal officialdom by the people; even policemen and judges are often elected by hobos, little businessmen, and migratory soda jerkers.22 Under these conditions it is obvious that courts can often not afford to be independent. A few miles behind Richmond or Chattanooga the most ochlocratic of all judiciary systems — lynching — is still in force. In a strictly ochlocratic world the only logical judiciary procedure based on general disapproval is lynching, and the democratic Athenians cooled their anger on unpopular fellow citizens in a bloodless lynching without photo cameras and blowtorches — through ostracism. Yet not less immoral than lynching is the passing of a verdict while listening with one ear to the Vox Populi. The judge who did not want to risk his popularity and his job has been immortalized by the Book of Books — this man, who rather obeyed the Jewish mob than his own conscience and who tried in vain to wash his hands in innocence, is Pontius Pilate.

The great enemy of the “bureaucracy” in every capitalistic country is the plutocratic-capitalistic group. An incorruptible and exclusive administration only increases the ire and hatred of the haute finance, which has always shown disdain and contempt for the European bureaucracy that provided the nobility with new blood.23 The stubborn, proud, and puritanical officialdom with “Titles without means” irritated them highly on account of their interference with financial activities.

At least one must leave it to the American plutocracy that they understood very well how to impress the masses. The Little Man acquired, as time went on, a far greater respect and veneration for the Rockefellers, Carnegies, Morgans, Vanderbilts, and Mellons than his German equivalent for the Radziwills, Hohenlohes, Löwensteins, Schönburgs, Schwarzenbergs — names which were frequently not known to the Man in the Street.

In order to keep his prestige the plutocrat had to instill the idea into the people that his own values are the highest in the world, that material standards are of a primary importance, that nations with little enthusiasm for material progress are retrograde. Once the pioneer with his covered wagon had disappeared he was replaced by the salesman who considered himself to be a “potential millionaire.” The weakness of socialistic movements in America prior to 1929 is largely due to the fact that people preferred the hope for a million to the certainty of thirty dollars a week. Like the soldier of the Napoleonic period with the proverbial baton in the knapsack, so the ambitious young American saw himself prophetically with all the glory of a million-dollar banking account.24 Only after the great crash do we see the desire for more security gaining momentum.

It is a commonplace that the great values of life cannot be expressed in numbers and statistics, and this is partly the reason why the ideas of quality and permanence have been so neglected in the period of the Great American Impasse. Neither the holiness of a Santa Teresa, nor the heroism of Tone, nor yet the profundity of theological truth can be expressed in numbers. But in the technicized world numbers become involved with human or inhuman activities of every kind, which find their expression in statistical recording. The various denominations vie in their yearly revenues from whist drives and bingo parties; games are expressed in numbers which are broadcasted all over the country; human beings are said to be “worth” so and so many thousand dollars a year; Bridge has been evolved into a system of mathematical probabilities (Culbertson); houses are evaluated by their rooms and floors, and public squares by their equivalent in money. (For instance, the “Ten Million Dollar Plaza” in Washington, D. C, and the Million Dollar Highway in Colorado.) The infantile British joy in general competition, a Hobbesian bellum omnium contra omnes, has created this crazy idea of an endless humming and buzzing competition without repose.25

If somebody drives 311 miles an hour (instead of 309) in a one-man car which consumes one gallon for every two miles on an artificial driveway then he or she has furthered the sacred cause of “progress.” Even human sacrifices are made to placate the sinister god of progress. Every year about 40,000 people are squashed to death on the American highways with the help of explosive motors. If somebody would start a sect which would immolate every year about 40,000 innocent people to a god named Progressilopochtli or if a medicine were to be sold which annually cures the headache of about 20,000,000 people but kills off forty thousand men, women, and children, the police would definitely step in and the head of the sect or the manufacturer of the medicine would be confined in a prison or a psychopathic ward. Yet with our present state of mind we rather advocate the psychopathic ward for the man who would plead for the abolition of automobiles.

The worship of numbers, quantity, and size has also wrought havoc wherever it found little opposition. Education is, after all, something thoroughly “aristocratic” in the intellectual sense. Already the Ancients were aware of the fact that there are different degrees of knowledge, but ochlocracy spread the conviction that everybody with the proper educational facilities is able to learn everything. The very idea of genius or inborn talents as disequalizing factors must be repulsive to people who not only believe that we are (theologically speaking) created as equals but that we also remain equals all through our lifetime. There naturally are a fair number of scholars and educators who have protested desperately against the low standards in American higher education as well as against the view that a true education should teach “how to make a living” instead of helping the student to solve his problem “how to live” by giving him the philosophical and cultural elements for a cultured existence.

President Robert Hutchins of the University of Chicago, who advocates the study of theology and a preponderance of the liberal arts in the curriculum of colleges and universities, has been promptly branded a “Fascist,” the label which “progressive” educators stick indiscriminately on people they instinctively dislike. As if Fascism would prefer an erudition in metaphysics and the litterae humaniores to military drill and engineering!26

The so-called high schools in the United States have the level of better French elementary schools and the students normally enter college or university with a rudimentary knowledge of spelling but often also with an inordinate desire to play football and to advance their social status (which fact incidentally proves that the general evaluation of equality is still fictional). The intellectual maturity of deserving individuals as well as of the whole nation is thus impeded in the most phantastic way. It is true that a few universities maintain high standards, but these (in imitation of the British system) are not “democratic” institutions, and the number of scholarships in these private enterprises is naturally limited. America, from a social point of view, is decidedly far less of a “democracy” than France, Germany, Spain, or Scandinavia. But intellectually — in order to assure a “higher” education for the greatest number — the ochlocratic ideas have reaped an almost total victory, and most universities have usually not even the level of French lycées or German Gymnasien. The financial position of professors is frequently that of a foreman in an average factory or a policeman in a larger city. Neither is the professor’s social position an enviable one and some may remember that this title had once been given to men with long hair who played the piano in the houses of ill fame of booming frontier towns out West.

Such an atttitude is far from being “American” in a traditional sense; it is rather the result of the immigrant’s contempt for the liberal arts which do not show a handsome profit expressed in dollars and cents. The general prosperity of the nineteenth and early twentieth century have given a certain impetus to this materialistic attitude which was never shared by the best Americans. (A similar money rush could be observed in Russia from 1890 to 1914.)27 Today we have to face the possibility — less so than before 1929 — that a man lecturing on window dressing is more respected than a man lecturing on philosophy or theology, which will not aid “progress.”28 Things which are apt to be understood only by a minority do not promote sales and therefore would possibly be branded by the mob as “stuffed shirt” articles. Yet on the other side, paradoxically enough, there is a great hunger for knowledge and education which has never been properly channeled.

Others again see in the university professor some sort of Peter Pan who never grows up; he is nothing else but a faithful student who has neither the “guts” nor the energy to leave the Alma Mater and so, instead of selling automobiles or insurance, he remains within the walls of the campus undergoing later a slow metamorphosis into an M.A., a Ph.D., an instructor, and so forth.

The Presidents of American Universities are to all practical purposes absolute monarchs. European Universities on the other hand are republics. An exception is the University of Virginia which has been modeled after a European pattern. The American professor — except for the moral influence of his professional Association, after he has reached a certain rank — can be dismissed on short notice and is far from enjoying the security of a European professor in a nonfascist state, who always had the tenure of an American Judge of the Supreme Court. Needless to say that there is no academic freedom in the classic sense. Thus our professor is often a little respected member of the community and he usually knows it. In many cases the Presidents are not much better off either. He, the lord over the professors, trembles before the board of trustees made up often of smug businessmen who could hardly write a letter without looking up most expressions in a dictionary.29 But he may be semi-illiterate himself and his appointment (as in the State Universities) may have been made for political reasons. Rarely is he a scholar himself.30

The ochlocratic statistician with his numeralist views upon vital matters likes to speak about countries in terms of “success” or “failures,” always taking these terms in a material sense. There is no doubt that the Founding Fathers intended the United States to be primarily a human and only secondarily a material success. The Soviet Union may be a material success (though the readers of Manya Gordon’s book31 will doubt it very much), but it certainly is not humanly a success. The American educational system is frequently defended by the statement that it is “successful” because it was instrumental in making of the United States a “success.”

There is one more notion which ought to be dispelled and that is the opinion that only “progressive” countries with popular representations are able to produce great material achievements. The United States is fortunate in being an extremely large country, possessing great mineral wealth and one hundred and thirty-five million customers. Europe without interstate borders and a population of five hundred millions could easily produce automobiles twice as cheap as America. In order to draw a just comparison between the “efficiency” of the two continents one would have to fill a similar space with an identical amount of people and to surround the American equivalent with an unsurmountable custom barrier. One ought to pour, for instance, the Austrian population into Maine, i.e., seven million people into that one North Atlantic state which at present harbors only eight hundred thousand. Even though these seven million were to be sturdy straphangers from New York I doubt whether they would not starve the first winter and die during the second. The odds and handicaps in Europe are almost unbelievable. Unsuccessful experiments have the most dire consequences. It is this very danger of irresponsible experimenting (by the lay masses) which among other reasons finally led to the end of representative government in Europe.

 

________________

32 Seifert in his Die Weltrevolutionäre declares Liberty to be the ideal of the nobility, equality of the urban classes, and fraternity of the peasantry.

33 There are therefore also two different conceptions about “equality.” There is the idea of the Republic where everybody is a proletarian and the Republic where everybody is a king. In Hemingway’s For Whom the Bell Tolls, we encounter a “Loyalist” who proposes that everybody should be addressed as “Don.”

34 Christopher Hollis: The American Heresy, London, 1931.

35 The republican tendencies of aristocracies have been dealt with already on pp. 47–49. It is interesting to see how frequently aristocratic groups paid only lip service to monarchical principles. The return of their royal masters would put them in a position where they could only play second fiddle to the monarch’s first. As to the antidemocratic attitude of the Founding Fathers see the explanatory note, “What of Democracy?”

The aristocratic, libertinarian principles of America find expression in such apparently trifling privileges as the freedom of bearing arms of American citizens. The freedom of bearing arms existed only in one European province by 1938 — in the Tyrol, where the National Socialists canceled quickly this last remnant of medieval liberties after the Anschluss.

36 A definitely wicked Jacksonian reform was the introduction of the spoil system; Jackson was convinced that governmental affairs were so simple that every adult could cope with them successfully. His “reform” of the Presidential Electorate was similarly of an ochlocratic character.

37 See also: H. L. Mencken, Prejudices III. Series. New York, 1922. A. Knopf, pp. 22–24.

38 This should not be construed as a sign of “racial inferiority” or the like.

39 Many people will insist that there is something about the Negro face which is reminiscent of the monkey. That may be so but there is another side of the story; the pure blooded African has no visible hair on his body which the white male definitely has. The white race together with the Ainus and the Australian aborigines is the hairiest race in the world. And is that not rather reminiscent of apes?

In pre-Darwinian times we also find biblical explanations given for the diversity of races. The superstitious belief that the Negro descends from Cain who was guilty of “misconduct” with a female gorilla is widely accepted in the South. The Reverend La Peyrère, a Dutch preacher of Huguenot descent, published, in the middle of the seventeenth century, a book in which he affirmed that some human beings had been created on the 5th (!) day of the Creation. This preadamitic theory foreshadowed the concepts of modern racialism.

40 Our racial discrimination was frequently mentioned by the more intelligent isolationists as the reason for our “staying out.” They indicated that America had no right of sharing a crusade where equal rights had been made an issue. This argument is less cogent than it seems at the onset and reminds one of the objection of medieval sectarians to pay obedience to anybody who is not in the state of grace. But the man who cannot help himself may well help somebody else, and vice versa. If it is easier to extinguish the neighbor’s burning house than one’s own then it is better to aid where help can show results.

41 It must be admitted that all statutes designed for segregation were discriminatory in their effects.

42 The National Socialists were at least liberal enough to recognize officially all “Aryans” (people of “German and kindred blood”) as “equals.” The United States in some respects is more particular in its racial legislation. The immigration laws of 1924 gave the North Italians (those living north of the Po River) a higher quota than the South Italians. This is the only case of a European country being dissected by that regulation. The North Italians have, naturally, more “Nordic” blood than the South Italians, their white skin is “cleaner” than those of the “greasy, dirty-white wops.”

An octoroon Negro in the South will similarly be considered to be a Negro, while the National Socialist will accept him as an Aryan. A negro mulatto and a quarteroon could participate in the plebiscitarian comedies of the Third Reich (as half and three-quarter “Aryans”) but men from the same category would be to all practical purposes (tests!) debarred from the poll in Georgia or Mississippi.

43 “Democratic” America produced in 1915 a highly successful film — the “Birth of a Nation” — in which the superiority of white people over Negroes was dealt with in a way which would impress any Nazi audience. A girl who was in danger of being raped by a Negro “defended her Aryan birthright.” This film was made 18 years before the Reichstags fire. . . .

In parenthesis: Professor Hooton’s (Harvard) statistics show that the Negro race ranks lowest in rapes. Cf. E. A. Hooton, Crime and the Man, Harvard University Press, 1939, p. 302.

44 The circumstantial evidence published by Salvador de Madariaga in his Christopher Columbus proves this almost conclusively.

45 There is certainly something medieval about midwestern painting which becomes strongly apparent in some pictures of Grant Wood. (“American Gothic”) Yet Protestant Middle Ages are not the same thing as Catholic Middle Ages; they have an inner severity and seriousness which were not even shared by the most zealous Grand Inquisitors.

46 The muddle in the use of political terms in America is complete. While “conservatives” are nothing but manchesterian liberals, the so-called liberals are nothing else but pro-Communists and even the New Deal is considered to be a “liberal” line of action The word federal stands naturally for “centralistic” and so forth.

47 See the cooperation of Swedish conservatives with the Socialists against the industrial liberals in social questions. The member of the squirearchy expects the manufacturer to treat his workers as he himself treats his farm hands, mainly if they are old and sick. Social Security is actually a conservative and aristocratic institution.

48 There were, of course, a few industrialists and capitalists like Mr. Marshall Field of Chicago who understood the signs of the time.

49 The specifically American problem of a transition from lay to expert rule lies in the fact that the primary justification for bureaucratic control is in the economic field. It is unnecessary to emphasize that there is a majority of fields of human endeavor and activity where a control from above would be completely out of place and constitute an unnecessary increase of state powers. Yet in America economics play such an important role, not because there is “more” economic activity (which is about the same proportionately per cent in every country because with the exception of beggars and millionaires’ sons everybody has to earn a livelihood), but because Americans attach such great importance to economic values. A bureaucratic control of economic life in a country where such great sentimental value is attached to the material aspects of life is — in a way — an attack against the central nerve of many an American, and the fear that total control may follow is thus not entirely unfounded. Economic control in the U. S. may be an equivalent to religious control in India, cultural control in Germany (the greatest present despair of Germans), or state control of sports and games in England! A control of private life or a control of the diet such as this free nation tolerated for half a generation in the form of the Volstead Act would be unthinkable in Fascist Italy. The only solution of the coming problem lies therefore in a metanoia, in the methodical relegation of business and economics to a lower sphere of human consciousness.

50 It must also be borne In mind that man today is relatively less educated than his forefather 500 years ago; he knows proportionately less of the total existing knowledge and also proportionately less about the essentials of public affairs. Education could by no means keep up with the inventions and the growing “complicativeness” of human existence. Less and less people are therefore able to reason in spite of an increased education, and nothing remains to the masses but to judge, to go “on hunches” and thus to contribute to the “sensate” character of our epoch. The “total result” of our intensified educational efforts and the popularization of the three R’s is merely a weakening of human memory, as modern man has everything “on file.”

“Common Man” is thus in reality entirely helpless and his public apologia by dictators who need his blood, by politicians who need his vote and by manufacturers and editors who need his pennies, lacks the ring of sincerity. Even within the ochlocratic framework he is unable to shape his own destiny. All that will not induce the Christian to have contempt or disdain for the Common Man, who is nonetheless our Fellow Man with an immortal soul. Yet this does not change the fact that there can be no “Century for the Common Man.”

51 There are exceptions and somebody rousing the latent “romantic” sentiments may be elected due to the fact that he is totally different in habitus and appearance from the electorate. The lion hunting, bearded Mr. Tinkham from Massachusetts is a typical example illustrating this exception.

52 It is naturally only the well-established “bureaucracy” that can “afford” to be generous and unbureaucratic. The political appointee or the provisional official who can be dismissed at any time will always stick slavishly to the rules in order to avoid criticism or dismissal. It is the civil servant of the traditional order, holding his office for life, who (contrary to general assumption) can take the courage to judge cases by their individual merits.

(See the inefficiency of the amateurish British bureaucracy in their dealing with the stranded “enemy aliens,” well described by E. Lafitte in his book, The Internment of Aliens, London, 1941, Penguin.)

53 See the sheriff in Erskine Caldwell’s masterful description of a lynching in his short novel Trouble in July, New York, 1940.

54 If we believe that it is just to inherit material goods from our parents one has to consider it a crying injustice that there are no hereditary titles in the United States. The millionaire, who made riches unscrupulously, can leave a fortune to his son. Yet none of the honors of great administrators, judges, scientists, artists, or soldiers are bestowed upon their offsprings.

55 “To abolish millionaires would have been to dash one’s own hopes.” George Santayana, Character and Opinion in the United States, New York, 1920, p. 198.

56 The English public schools are thoroughly imbued with the spirit of competition. They could hardly be visualized without the elements of cooperation and team-spirit.

57 Sinclair Lewis described with more insight than Mr. Hutchins’ opponents the anti-humanistic tendency in Fascism in his It Can’t Happen Here, New York, 1935, pp. 250–252.

58 It must be kept in mind that no country in the world was so thoroughly permeated with the spirit of the nineteenth century (1814–1914) as the United States — with the possible exception of Australia and New Zealand. Only a geographical fragment of the present U. S. lived a political and cultural existence in the eighteenth century and the imprint the nineteenth century left on the United States was therefore largely made on a blank. The culture of the individual centuries though divided in time has to share a common space in Europe and their marks can only be found in a maze of other phenomena. America on the other hand merely spent her babyhood in the eighteenth century; childhood and adolescence are to be found in the nineteenth century which, for her, is still not terminated.

59 Jacques Maritain almost created a riot at the “Conference on Science, Philosophy and Religion” in autumn 1940 when he read a paper which pleaded for a hierarchy of knowledge placing theology at the top and the sciences at the bottom, thus leaving to philosophy an intermediary position. (An even greater furor was created by a paper read by Professor Mortimer Adler who charged the materialist professors with being greater enemies of civilization than Hitler.)

60 A State University had a football coach who “quite naturally” had a salary far superior to that of an ordinary professor. This coach wanted a higher salary. He was told that the budget would not permit it. He handed in his resignation and the students demonstrated. The board of trustees convened and found that the budget really did not permit such an increase in salary. But they found a solution in firing the president and appointing the football coach in his place and meeting his demands by adding up both salaries.

61 The strongest condemnation of the American Universities can be found in Abraham Flexner’s Universities in America, England and Germany, New York, 1930.

62 Workers Before and After Lenin, New York, 1940.

• 1* See the letter of Mr. William S. Bennet, prominently displayed in the New York Times, Apr. 5, 1942.
• 2* Apart from the fact that we rather borrow our terminology from the Fathers of the Constitution than from radio commentators or the speakers at women’s clubs.
• 6* The expression democracy in the notes, Appendix I, as used by American and foreign authorities, has its classical, standard meaning and is equivalent to the term ochlocracy in the text.
• 7* Military Manual published in 1928 and in use for the succeeding four years. (TM 2000–25)
• 9* Democratic rights for school children have been postulated by the disciples of John Dewey, while David Lloyd George demanded in all earnestness plebiscites for the Central African jungles (in a public speech on Jan. 5, 1918).
• 10* About the problem of “democracy” in relation to the popular representation in the United States. See pp. 247–248.
• 14** This idea has been well developed in Josef Leo Seifert’s brilliant work Die Weltrevolutionäre (Von Bogumil über Hus zu Lenin), Vienna, 1930. This work is based on P. Wilhelm Schmidt’s and Gräbner’s Kulturkreislehre. It is also symptomatic that the leaders of the republican movements of Italy, Hungary, and Austria are all titled; Count Sforza, Count Ferdinand Czernin and Count Michael Károlyi. A scion of the princely family Löwenstein represents German republicanism in the United States. (The reader is warned that the terms “First Estate” and “Second Estate” for the Nobility and Clergy are interchangeable as they are not really historical. Only the term “Third Estate” is unequivocal.)
• 18*See Chateaubriand’s Mémoirs d’Outretombe, who is very much convinced of Napoleon’s aristocratic background.
• 19*Rather typical is the Polish proverb: “Cudzych królów gromić, a grozić swojemu”—“Subjugate foreign kings and defy your own!” It breathes a thoroughly “whiggish” spirit.
• 22*Guglielmo Ferrero in his The Reconstruction of Europe, New York, 1941, makes a very strong point of this fact.
• 23* The countries of the oldest “national” continuity in Europe are Bulgaria, Croatia, and Hungary. Of these the Hungarians and Croats alone can claim also an unbroken continuity of statehood which is the more interesting because the Hungarians are not Europeans, but of Mongoloid, Finnish-Turkish descent.
• 24* The Slovaks speak a language which is almost identical with Czech but their history, tradition, and character marks them out as a totally different people.
• 25** The Serbs cynically listed in their statistics every Bulgarian as “Yugoslav.” Neither was a difference made in their census between Serb, Croat, and Slovene.
• 26*** Another attempt to create a “linguistic” frontier was made in the case of the new (1940) border between Rumania and Hungary which clearly shows that the National Socialist genius is always able to beat the “democratic” mind in its own game, be that even the noble competition in absolute stupidity.
• 27* The first sign of a change of mind was Philipp Menczel’s book Trügerische Lösungen which was published in the early thirties. Herr Mènczel is a zionistic Jew from Czernowitz in the Bukovina (then under Rumanian rule).
• 28* This resentment is little justified. The German line of the Habsburgs never permitted the Inquisition to work in their hereditary countries and while Protestants did suffer disadvantages (outside of Hungary) these were never of a penal character as for instance those imposed upon British Catholics.
• 29** Theodore Roosevelt, not less than Mr. Wilson, was in favor of a partition of “that survival.” The anti-Habsburgian tradition in the United States dates from the great Kossuth reception in New York. Yet one might doubt whether the American public would have been so overenthusiastic had it known the truth about M. Kossuth’s political views, mainly in regard to national minorities.
• 30*** Aeneas IV, 625.
• 31**** The main pillar of this ludicrous “order” was besides the League of Nation the so-called “Little Entente,” consisting of Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia, and Rumania, who had replaced the “ramshackle” Austro-Hungarian Empire. It was the task of this combination of Ruritanian “democracies” to prevent Germany’s expansion toward the East. The total incongruity of their own power in relation to this task was manifest when we remember that the main activity of this trio consisted in securing their problematic survival. This they could only hope to carry out successfully by preserving the status quo — in Austria and Hungary. Neither country was permitted to restore the Habsburgs to their throne, and Budapest and Vienna were repeatedly warned that such an action would constitute a casus belli. (Hungarian revisionism constituted another “danger.”)
• 32TO PUT in its right light and scientific context the technical word democracy is naturally our first task. Representative government as established in the United States is not synonymous with democracy. The Founding Fathers established a republic (res publica, politéia), not a democracy. And many of the Founders of the Constitution of this country have repeatedly emphasized this fact in so many words. Some of the best American minds have again and again called attention to this important fact and have protested loudly against the use of the term democracy for the fundamental laws of their country, which they respect and by which they abide.*
• 33We see, then, from the plurality of present-day connotations of democracy that it would be thoroughly unjustified to use the term “democracy” in any other sense than in the classical and universal one.* We may well agree that the mischief started by uneducated popularizers has already reached such proportions that a Hercules is needed to clean this Augian stable of popular misconceptions, false labels, and mispresented ideologies. Even some of the more intelligent writers have become a prey to popular pressure, and as modern intellectuals do not lead the masses any more, but follow them and subordinate their ideas and language to the demands of the market, the confusion has now reached its climax.
• 34Today democracy is confused with liberalism,* freedom, and prosperity alike.
• 35“Democracy” as an ideal of the Founding Fathers is equally denied by W. H. Hamilton and D. Adair in The Power to Govern (New York, 1937, p. 158). It must also be borne in mind that the protest against calling the Constitution democratic comes from historians of all groups, yet while Rightists praise lack of “democracy” in the Constitution, “Leftists” like Charles Beard* and H. Rugg are prone to condemn it outright.
• 36We have said before that it is difficult to find the exact reasons for the growing popularity of the word democracy and democratic taken from a dead language which is thoroughly nonunderstandable to 999 out of 1000 Americans. The decline of classical education in favor of progressive “self-realization” has favored the increased use of wrong labels. It is deplorable that even Catholics have become victims of this chaos in verbiage. They have naturally “their” democracy, the Leftists have “another one,”* and even Conservatives indulge in the worship of a thing called “democracy” with a thoroughly different content. The only way out would be to discard the label completely, restore it brutally to its pristine meaning, and to call the things hitherto covered by the label with their proper names.
• 37In order to denote the classical interpretation of democracy as well as its cultural concomitant we have chosen to use the word ochlocracy and — as its adjective — ochlocratic.* The Greeks used this expression strictly in the sense of mob rule, regardless whether these mobs created majorities or minorities. The selection is not a very happy one, and the reader is reminded that we understand under “mob” not the “lower classes,” but just the vast masses of inferior people which can be found everywhere; these products of a soulless culture and civilization who in their terrifying mediocrity are neither fish nor flesh, have neither face nor expression, neither wisdom nor knowledge, piety nor enthusiasm, faith nor charity, hatred nor love, those who go neither with the angels nor the devils and because of their lukewarmness will be spat out by our Lord on the day of reckoning.
• 38It is almost in the strictly classical sense of the Greek word ochlocracy, to which reference has just been made, that the United States Army Military Manual* defines democracy in Section IX, Lesson 9, on “Representative Government.” Having first described autocracy as resulting in “arbitrariness, tyranny, and oppression,” it goes on to what it considers the opposite extreme:
• 39While many may consider the government established by the Founding Fathers as a constitutional democracy, it is clear that no such idea entered into the mind of those from whom Americans derive their form of government, nor did these men give coloring to such an interpretation by their own actions.*
• 40We must furthermore always bear in mind that equality presupposes the perpetual application of force; equality after all is an unnatural condition — it is just as unnatural as a completely straight line, a geometrical plain, a perfect circle, distilled water, etc. It needs the intervention of human agencies who have to curtail and to stem the natural growth and development sometimes in the most brutal and cynical way. Docteur Guillotin, Procrustes, the mythological Hellenic bandit, and the magistrate of Strasbourg who decided during the French Revolution to demolish the tower of the medieval cathedral because it was higher than the surrounding houses, belong all to the same category. Dostoyevski, in his Possessed, has predicted accurately how an egalitarian superdemocracy would function. The Soviets have fulfilled this prophecy to the letter.
• 41The confusion about the alleged harmony between modern ochlocracy and Catholicism is largely due to a great deal of wishful thinking, misunderstood patriotism, and the ambiguous elasticity of certain technical terms. Let us take, for instance, the word equality. How frequently do we hear responsible Catholics talking glibly about the equality of human beings! Maritain has warned all about the indiscriminate use of this term and he proposed to use the expression Unité du genre humain. Gustave Thibon has not only taken egalitarianism severely to task but he has also pointed out that the efforts to create equality have engendered at the same time the most violent inequalities. All those who by their free will or their disposition are unable to conform to the prescribed standards of equality — and there will always be such a minority — will after the efforts of leveling stand out more distinctly than in a nonuniform society. These are then usually the “traitors” who do not “play the game” and must be executed, exiled, or weeded out like the aristos under Robespierre, the burzhuys under Lenin, or the Jews under Adolf Hitler.
• 42The confusion about the alleged harmony between modern ochlocracy and Catholicism is largely due to a great deal of wishful thinking, misunderstood patriotism, and the ambiguous elasticity of certain technical terms. Let us take, for instance, the word equality. How frequently do we hear responsible Catholics talking glibly about the equality of human beings! Maritain has warned all about the indiscriminate use of this term and he proposed to use the expression Unité du genre humain. Gustave Thibon has not only taken egalitarianism severely to task but he has also pointed out that the efforts to create equality have engendered at the same time the most violent inequalities. All those who by their free will or their disposition are unable to conform to the prescribed standards of equality — and there will always be such a minority — will after the efforts of leveling stand out more distinctly than in a nonuniform society. These are then usually the “traitors” who do not “play the game” and must be executed, exiled, or weeded out like the aristos under Robespierre, the burzhuys under Lenin, or the Jews under Adolf Hitler.
• 43It must furthermore be borne in mind that equality stands for monotony and not for harmony. A harmonious melody can only be established by different unidentical musical tones. These tones must be assembled and have to follow in a certain sequence; otherwise they will result in chaos and not in melody. Human society presupposes such an inequality and unity. Thibon has seen very clearly this issue which can only be solved in the sign of love.
• 44“It consists in purifying and organizing the inequalities from the point of view of a deeper equality, or, to put it more precisely, in making inequality serve unity. But this unity, what else is it but love and what is love without God.”
• 45This clarification is quite necessary because many a good Christian — and that holds true for most of those living in the Western Hemisphere — has an unclear notion about human equality. The American Declaration of Independence mentions the fact that the human beings are “created equal.”* This is true in the theological sense, and in the theological sense only. Two newly born babes are equal before God whether their parents are white or colored, American or foreign, registered in the Virginia Blue Book or in the rogues gallery. This theological equality continues until the time comes when they commit morally responsible acts. Judas Iscariot and St. John the Evangelist were equally conceived in original sin and free from personal sin, but how different their end! Heaven and hell are not identical. It is actually the privilege of our environmental determinists to discard the terms “saint” and “sinner” and to supplant them by pragmatic expressions like “social-unsocial” or “adapted-unadapted.” Dostoyevski prophesied this moral relativism in his chapter on the Grand Inquisitor (Brothers Karamazov), where he sees humanity declaring through the mouth of its science that there are no trespasses and no sinners but only “hungry people.”
• 46Apparently a great deal of misinterpretation is floating about concerning the interpretation of the American Declaration of Independence. The signers would certainly have been the worst hypocrites had they given to their document the same interpretation that so many give to it today. We can understand their attitude only if we remember the fact that the basis of the American Republic is an aristocratic whiggish one, which largely lacked that deeper “democratic” element in social relations as we find it in southern and eastern Europe, and perhaps in South America.
• 47Needless to say that every successful attack against the concept of free will results in an almost total degradation of human dignity.’ It puts us beyond good and evil and fosters a fantastic quietism or an even more fantastic irresponsibility. It is nevertheless amusing to see determinists of all heretical denominations — Calvinists, Marxists, Behaviorists — flocking to clubs and leagues defending civil liberties. Liberties to be enjoyed without free will! One sees how far the prostitution of logic has led many of us. This great confusion is also apparent in the standing phrase that “democracy stands for equality before the law,” whereas the law is largely interested in iniquities and inequalities. There is, of course, one great excuse for these confused minds and that is that they all have continued in the bottom of their hearts to believe in free will. Determinism is too inhuman and suicidal to be generally and sincerely accepted and the charge which remains is largely that of hypocrisy.
• 48Needless to say that every successful attack against the concept of free will results in an almost total degradation of human dignity.’ It puts us beyond good and evil and fosters a fantastic quietism or an even more fantastic irresponsibility. It is nevertheless amusing to see determinists of all heretical denominations — Calvinists, Marxists, Behaviorists — flocking to clubs and leagues defending civil liberties. Liberties to be enjoyed without free will! One sees how far the prostitution of logic has led many of us. This great confusion is also apparent in the standing phrase that “democracy stands for equality before the law,” whereas the law is largely interested in iniquities and inequalities. There is, of course, one great excuse for these confused minds and that is that they all have continued in the bottom of their hearts to believe in free will. Determinism is too inhuman and suicidal to be generally and sincerely accepted and the charge which remains is largely that of hypocrisy.
• 49The second attack against integral Christendom, gaining momentum right now, comes from the nonuniversal herdists. They put the human beings into watertight hierarchic categories frequently of a racial nature. This new racial determinism, creating racial aristocracies, responsible to a collective “race” but not to a personal God, and racial proletariats with no hope of an earthly salvation, is not less a danger than the classic panherdism. The desire for racial purity in order to achieve the perfectly uniform herd leads to brutal persecution and finally to the strictest imaginable uniformism. The Germanies without the Jews will be an even more monotonous place than the Germanies with persecuted Jews. We will experience in Central Europe the integral boredom which Myerezhkovski considers to be the fatal characteristic of the Realm of the Antichrist.
• 50We should always bear in mind that the Church and ochlocracy cooperated badly in Europe, that the forces inimical to the Church always fostered ochlocratic tendencies. One cannot dismiss the latter fact as purely accidental. Of course there is no incompatibility on dogmatic grounds. The question moves on a plain where in dubiis libertas is written in flaming letters: “In doubtful matters, liberty.” Yet the atmosphere, the parfum of the Church and that of “democracy,” when blended in the political and cultural sphere, emits a bad stench. A parallel reading of the works of our authoritative “democratic” essayists, poets, and other creative writers (from the Leaves of Grass to the City of Man) with the encyclicals of Gregory XVI and Pius IX would give a mortal shock to many “progressive” Catholics who think that the Church ought to come to terms with the spirit of our time . . . (which may, overnight, become the spirit of yesterday). These encyclicals at least express the spirit and policy of the Church in unmistakable directness and clearness.
• 51If there were nothing else than the final and inevitable development of political ochlocracy into the modern party dictatorships it ought to be enough to make the Catholics more skeptical toward this governmental tendency and its ultimate consequences. (We refer here also to the demand of “more democracy!”) It is not a good counterargument to state that everything is evil in a state of exaggeration. Herdism is essentially a “low” sentiment. As nucleus and carrying power of a philosophy of earthly existence it becomes definitely an evil. A real good on the other hand can never be exaggerated enough. There can never be, in human society, enough of the acceptance of the Cross and of charity, never enough loving differentiation and hierarchy, never enough of the spirit of Maundy Thursday when our Lord, the pope, the emperors, kings, and bishops knelt down to wash the feet of twelve Apostles or of twelve beggars. Nor is the custom discontinued in our day. This is hierarchy and charity, order and love.
• 52Yet the great impulse for our modern ochlocracy and democratism comes from France. The French Revolutionaries have tried to copy antique forerunners, but they were not very lucky in their efforts. There is a certain Swiss influence connected with this revolution, yet this element has nothing to do with the democratic peasant spirit of the Original Cantons. It emanates from the eighteenth-century enlightenment which has a strong Swiss, or rather Genevan background. This French town, acquired by the Swiss at a later period of their existence, had already produced its famous two Johns: Jehan Cauvin (from Noyon) and Jean Jacques Rousseau. M. Dunan’s humanitarian Red Cross, the assassination of Empress Elizabeth, the League of Nations, and the socialism of M. Nicole were scheduled to follow.
• 53This pagan geocentrism has changed the very content of our culture. The “happy end” of the cheap, popular novels and the films is nothing but the outcome of the supposition that the human drama finds its ultimate conclusion here on earth. The Calvinists in their materialism took a similar attitude. The more subtle Atheist, of greater experience, has contempt for the “happy end” and substitutes for it a stubborn heroical pessimism which comes pretty near to integral despair. The modern Catholic French writers like Mauriac and Bernanos avoid the happy end in relation to this life. Paul Claudel, in L’Ôtage, expresses his disbelief in earthly justice by punishing the people of good will and rewarding the villains in the last scene of this play. For the Christian the earth is essentially a “vale of tears.”
• 54It is important to remember that Christianity had not abolished slavery. Neither had the Church ever praised this institution, like Calhoun, because the whole relationship of master to slave was not important enough in the light of a life eternal to be combated with furious indignation apart from the fact that even a slave had every protection in a truly Christian society. But now the servant was an “eternal” servant, the master an “eternal” master, and the rich man possibly all through his assumed existence a rich man; thus the hatred of the lower classes now became wide awake. The employees had during the Middle Ages a knowing smile for those in the higher stations of life; they knew it could easily happen that a rich prince might suffer agonies in hell while a leprous beggar sat in the immediate nearness of God’s throne.
• 55Yet the conquest of time and space is only partially a final aim and ultimate goal of a herdist society. Every ideology visualizes a certain end and ochlocracy is no exception of the rule; the end is not as clearly formulated as in communism and one can say that it has been agreed upon by some sort of general consent. But even in spite of the fact that this ultimate aim is not of such a teleological nature as that of the proletarian Millennium of Karl Marx,** it is nonetheless chiliastic; the democratic middle class of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries always believed in some sort of “endless progress.” “Progress” is for the convinced ochlocrats a consoling Utopia of madly increased comfort and technicism. This charming but dull vision was always the pseudo-religious consolation of millions of ecstatic believers in ochlocracy and in the relative perfection and wisdom of Mr. and Mrs. Averageman Utopias in general are surrogates for heaven; they give a meager solace to the individual that his sufferings and endeavors may enable future generations to enter the chiliastic paradise. Communism works in a similar way. Its millennium is almost the same as that of ochlocracy. The Millennium of Lenin, the Millennium of Bellamy, the Millennium as represented in H. G. Wells’s, “Of Things to Come,” the Millennium of Adolf Hitler and Henry Ford — they are all basically the same; they often differ in their means to attain it but they all agree in the point of technical perfection and the classless or at least totally homogeneous society without grudge or envy. This identity of teleological outlooks explains the mutual admiration of certain déraciné Americans and Soviet-Russians for their respective fatherlands.*
• 56Yet the conquest of time and space is only partially a final aim and ultimate goal of a herdist society. Every ideology visualizes a certain end and ochlocracy is no exception of the rule; the end is not as clearly formulated as in communism and one can say that it has been agreed upon by some sort of general consent. But even in spite of the fact that this ultimate aim is not of such a teleological nature as that of the proletarian Millennium of Karl Marx,** it is nonetheless chiliastic; the democratic middle class of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries always believed in some sort of “endless progress.” “Progress” is for the convinced ochlocrats a consoling Utopia of madly increased comfort and technicism. This charming but dull vision was always the pseudo-religious consolation of millions of ecstatic believers in ochlocracy and in the relative perfection and wisdom of Mr. and Mrs. Averageman Utopias in general are surrogates for heaven; they give a meager solace to the individual that his sufferings and endeavors may enable future generations to enter the chiliastic paradise. Communism works in a similar way. Its millennium is almost the same as that of ochlocracy. The Millennium of Lenin, the Millennium of Bellamy, the Millennium as represented in H. G. Wells’s, “Of Things to Come,” the Millennium of Adolf Hitler and Henry Ford — they are all basically the same; they often differ in their means to attain it but they all agree in the point of technical perfection and the classless or at least totally homogeneous society without grudge or envy. This identity of teleological outlooks explains the mutual admiration of certain déraciné Americans and Soviet-Russians for their respective fatherlands.*
• 57Yet while civilization is basically lack of friction, smoothness, comfort, and material enjoyment we have to look at traditional Christianity — with its violent opposition to euthanasia, abortion, contraception, pacifism, and individualism — as being something “uncomfortable.” Christianity is after all the only great religion which does not content itself with preaching indifference toward suffering, like the Stoa or Buddhism, but actually sees in suffering, sustained in the right spirit, a positive value. And just because Christianity in general, and Catholicism in particular, are neither keen on mere “beauty” or “comfort” but stand for magnificence (Grandeur, Grossartigkeit) they reject naked aestheticism or civilization if not in the letter at least in the spirit. It is difficult to project into the frame of a comfortistic civilization* the picture of Christ, hanging on the cross with a body convulsed by pain, the palms torn to shreds by the heavy nails, the hairs glued to the scalp by sweat and coagulated blood. It ought to be repeated again that culture is always “magnificent.” Pure, uprooted l’art pour l’art civilization, on the other side, is always practical and utilitarian and thus is bound to enter into conflict with integral Christianity and every true culture, because neither culture nor the Church are ever “practical”; they are — in a bourgeois, not a cosmic sense — highly unpractical. No wonder therefore that integral Christianity is more at home in those parts of the world where culture is predominant and civilization at a low ebb. Southern India is thus a more favorable soil for the Church than Pittsburgh or Detroit. Civilization is geocentric comfort. But culture, which must be bought by bitter suffering (there is neither art nor sanctity without suffering), points always toward heaven. And the ochlocratic millennium hell bent upon avoiding suffering will turn its back toward heaven.
• 58Yet ochlocrats who never tired of accusing conservatives and Catholics of superstition, illogical traditionalism, and “unscientific” procedure make an act of faith in the inner illumination of the individual and the infallibility of numerical majorities. Phrases like “forty million Frenchmen can’t be wrong” display, nevertheless, a gross misunderstanding of logic; never in history has there been a more farcical and insipid amalgamation of Lutheran and Rousseauan confusion than in the interpretations underlying elections and the general franchise. Luther already was certain that everybody ought to be his own Pope by making use of his own wits in a private interpretation of the bible after dispensing with expert theological judgment; every interpretation was more or less right and had to be tolerated provided it did not conflict with the general line of the Reformers’ intention, and provided — last not least — that it did not lead back to Rome. The ochlocratic “liberal” is indeed in a difficult position toward the followers of terroristic heresies and his belief that “truth stands by itself” has often proved to be suicidal. He is therefore inclined to abandon his liberalism and to turn ochlocracy into a brutal totalitarianism. Luther with his ducal and baronial disciples was followed by terrorists of the type of Calvin, Thomas Münzer or Jan van Leyden, just as Robespierre succeeded Mirabeau and Noailles.
• 59But still, the political franchise is not given to minors and there is little doubt that by this fact the democratic principles are already violated. The Utopia runs into troubled waters. If neither knowledge, nor work, experience, sex, or taxes make any difference, why then, we ask ourselves, should age be taken so seriously? One could imagine that a European university student at the age of nineteen is more intelligent than a street cleaner at the age of thirty, or that a wounded young soldier at the age of twenty has merited more of his country than a prostitute at the age of forty-five. Even if one lowers the age limit there will always be some who are younger and who will complain that they are tyrannized over by a gerontocracy, a rule of old men.* Pure “democracy” is for this and other reasons a political impossiblity and we have to ask ourselves whether it is prudent to adopt such a form of political existence which defies all efforts to make it work without a tremendous amount of alloys. Utopias never mature over a certain transitory stage in which they insure their survival by endless compromising. “Democracy” under present conditions is bound to compromise with political elements taken from aristocratic and monarchical forms of government. A parliament is always a compromise with the former and a president a compromise with the latter political ideology. Aristocracy and monarchy — both taken in a literal, not a traditional sense — are essential and indispensable political elements; there is even “government” in the case of the population being entirely passive. We have to face the bitter fact that the (inner) consent of those governed is under modern conditions rather an accidental than an essential of government. There may be even a good government without popularity and a bad government enthusiastically supported by the “howling mob.” Not even the moral question is solved by the presence or absence of support, and there will be few political casuists who will argue that the people have an inherent right to wickedness which may be enforced against a good but unpopular government.*
• 60It is certain that worship of quantity is one of the most important characteristics of modern democratism, a characteristic which finds its living expression in the increasing interest for the comparison of physical units in the form of statistics. This ochlocratic quantitativism fosters also the belief that the mathematically larger part of the nation has the right to transform its theories into practice. There is nevertheless another element which ought not be overlooked; the element of compromise. The voter in every country has first to make a compromise between his own views and those of the local candidate, who in turn has to compromise with his party. In countries without the two-party system the compromise is extended to one between the parties for the sake of coalitions. The coalitions in their turn compromise with “reality.”
• 61It is certain that worship of quantity is one of the most important characteristics of modern democratism, a characteristic which finds its living expression in the increasing interest for the comparison of physical units in the form of statistics. This ochlocratic quantitativism fosters also the belief that the mathematically larger part of the nation has the right to transform its theories into practice. There is nevertheless another element which ought not be overlooked; the element of compromise. The voter in every country has first to make a compromise between his own views and those of the local candidate, who in turn has to compromise with his party. In countries without the two-party system the compromise is extended to one between the parties for the sake of coalitions. The coalitions in their turn compromise with “reality.”
• 62Yet the question may be raised whether “democratic” states are not far more conscious of civil liberties as regards private or public opinion. It must be remembered in that connection that liberty and democracy are not synonymous in spite of the fact that these two terms are frequently confounded in “democracies” with an aristocratic-liberal historical background. Numerical majorities are not necessarily keen to preserve civil liberties; the demand for civil liberties (and privileges) always arose from select minorities. Genuinely “democratic” societies can be brutally cruel to those who dare to be “different” in an unconventional way.