The Menace of the Herd, or Procrustes at Large

IV OCHLOCRATIC CULTURE

“There are only three respectable human beings: the priest, the warrior, and the poet. To know, to kill, to create.” — Baudelaire.

BEFORE we proceed in our general analysis we must remember that the great medieval homogeneity of the three decisive ideals — the ideal man from the separate points of view of either Church, State, or Society — has been almost irretrievably lost. The saint, the good citizen, and the hero could be represented by one and the same person; the laws, precepts, recommendation and tastes of Church, state, and society very seldom contradicted each other and their present antithesis is only a further sign of the atomization and inner decay of our modern life. St. Louis was not only an ornament of the Church, but also the first and best Frenchman and a hero on the battlefield. Saints were “popular,” citizens fulfilled religiously their political duties, heroes prayed. But the ideals of Church, state, and society have ceased to be identical today and the “gentleman” (the modern social ideal), the saint and the good citizen have lost every trace of synonymity. Neither the pagan state nor the pagan society would protest against a man having twenty mistresses; neither Church nor society would anathematize a modest gambler; the Church would indict a grownup as well as a child for disrespect for his or her parents, but the state mindful of the legal twenty-one year limit would only condemn the latter while society nowadays would take little interest in such a recurrent phenomenon. Human activities thus receive a totally different judgment from these three agents; one can remain a “gentleman” while paying an unjust wage (by Church standards clearly a “sin crying to heaven for vengeance” which is put on the same level as murder and sodomy).

The divergence between these attitudes toward man in his categories of existence creates actually a deep unrest in western society. National socialism as well as communism have desperately but not honestly striven to solve this cardinal problem by eliminating the Church ideal completely and amalgamating the good citizen with the hero into a single unit. It is interesting to see that they make a perverted use of the innate thirst for sanctity by permitting certain traits of the saints (certainly not the supernatural or ecclesiastical ones) to reappear in their dreary, new synthesis. The young Communist or young National Socialist is ascetic, yet his asceticism is offered up to entirely worldly purposes. And in the case of war (one of the deeper, psychological reasons for Nazi and Soviet militarism) he has at last an occasion to manifest his qualities of a secular sanctity which are so apt to be displayed in umbra mortis. Thus we may be tempted to see in the modern totalitarian establishments a synthesis of all the three elements provided we are willing to consider their concept of sanctity to be an Ersatz, or a travesty of the living original. Communist and National Socialist tyranny is thus partially also due to the pressure which must be exerted in order to weld these two (or three) concepts together. What we witness east of the Rhine is not an organic reconstruction but an enforced “reaction,” a brutal effort to re-establish a harmonious past by force and terror. The French Revolution, the great overture of continental “democracy,” had been engaged in a similar effort.

The radio seems to be the last word in the possibilities of a uniformistic appeal, but it was the uniform, the military uniform closely followed by the civil uniform, that marked the beginning of the bourgeois age. In the nineteenth century we see the “gentleman” making his bow to the bourgeois, herdist ideas in sartorial matters — the dinner jacket, and tails, and other dull formal suits confirm this fact. Neither was the new uniformity restricted to male apparel. This new tendency was in essence totalitarian and encroached upon all human matters.

The gentleman of the nineteenth century had broken, once Victorianism loomed on the horizon, with the wild and liberalistic vagaries of his forefathers. His background was frequently middle class and in England it was the influence of the Low Church which molded his type. He was deadly afraid to be different. On the Continent it was compulsory military service and in England the public school which fostered the herd instinct. To be different was treason and indecency. The religious principles of old were replaced by taboos. The return to primitive society had begun.

It is perfectly true that ochlocrats and democratists of all countries emphasize the necessity of “democratic” states to be composed of “free men” with the best possible education. This is not only true of our American ochlocrat but also of his more radical colleague in Berlin, Moscow, and Rome. The clamor for this ideal citizen fills the press, radio lectures, and textbooks of America as well as Sweden, Germany, and Russia. But the bitter truth is to be found in the fact that modern ochlocratic societies are intrinsically urban and that the city dweller is practically never free.1 Extraordinary people, i.e., those who are “different” and refuse to bow to the furious demand of the masses to become “regular,” have no place in an identitarian society. Often they have to choose nowadays between the concentration camp of the superdemocracies, the social ostracism of the old-fashioned “democracies” or an eremitical existence far away from the pulsating regimented life of the great social and political centers.

A hierarchic state or society on the other hand can always find some useful job for the outsider (the uncommon man) because everybody is expected to differ not less from those whom he serves than from those whom he rules. He has to be unique and not “regular.” Neither must we forget that everybody in the vertical or hierarchic structure is “important”; everybody serves and rules; everybody has responsibilities toward those under him and duties toward those above him. People in such a society not only feel important (as in ochlocracies) but they actually are important. Everybody can leave a crowd without much ado but the collapse of a man standing somewhere in a living pyramid of acrobats can easily be a catastrophe2

The ochlocratic state on the other side needs human sheep who become party members. We must bear in mind that a two-party system in which the parties are not divided by philosophical differences is the only meager guarantee of a survival of political democracy.3 The plurality of philosophical antagonistic parties dug the grave of political democracy in Germany, France, Austria, Spain, and Italy. In order to save and preserve the uniformity of the political philosophy which not only dominates the intellectual scene of a country but also constitutes the common denominator of the two parties, strong social and educational sanctions are necessary; only an open or silent agreement between all the opinion-forming agencies (press, radio, school, cinema, publishing, advertising) can keep this rigid uniformity. The full cooperation of society, which possesses after all the most potent sanctions, is an indispensable prerequisite. Education, in the new totalitarian democracies, must also have necessarily a low standard in order to prevent a development of the critical faculties of the individual. Traveling abroad, which automatically widens the intellectual horizon, evokes comparisons, and stimulates thinking, is discouraged if not actually prohibited. The more old-fashioned “democracies” could trust these tasks safely to society which needed little organizing effort to carry out their supervision.

On the other side we find also a curious uneasiness toward the true intellectual. The British public school dislike for the “clever boy” (the “swot”) is always awake in most “democracies.” While reverence is paid to the sciences because they are useful the philosopher is rather looked upon as a joke. He ranks almost as low as the theologian. This attitude is thoroughly justified when we bear in mind that the scientist who only deals with means4 can hardly become a menace to the ochlocratic “way of life” like the philosopher or the theologian who deals with the ends of our existence. This attitude is also the reason for the curious perversion of values and the efforts to mold our behavior as well as our personal philosophy (Weltanschauung) after bio-chemo-physical patterns. The mischief of interviewing engineers as authorities on religion, of inventors as experts on afterlife, of mechanics on foreign policy, and of doctors on the moral justification of euthanasia has clearly the same source. The times, on the other hand, when bishops will expound their views on the molecular theory in tabloids, and Jesuit provincials write books about airplane motors and new ways to make synthetic rubber are still far ahead. (And this despite the ochlocratic reverence for lay opinion.)

But the fact remains that democrats are suspicious of the abstract thinker, and that they prefer their nations to be led by businessmen and engineers. The United States only once had a professor in the White House and this experiment ended with disaster. It must be admitted though that these prejudices are well founded. The high educational standards of continental Europe created an intellectual aristocracy, and aristoi are always by nature proud. After having passed through the most rigid examinations this highly selective small group refused, whatever its social origins may have been, to be put on the same level with the rest of the population. Differentiation remained as pronounced as in the feudal age. Yet there was even another, more dangerous element in that educational system than mere differentiation and selection. The classical and humanistic training of the Lycée and the Gymnasium with their severe standards5 kept the philosophical element in the political parties alive. This extensive and intensive and nevertheless, in every sense of the word, “liberal” education fostered a plurality of philosophies which in turn made a plurality of parties necessary. These parties were divided by ideological abysses which could not be overbridged. Once the two-party system became obsolete on account of the plurality of opinions the result was a “House divided against itself” by metaphysical oppositions. These conflicts could only be ended by the artificial silence imposed through the firing squad or the concentration camp. The abysses dividing the philosophical parties could not be spanned — least of all in countries without the ochlocratic-protestant tradition of compromise; their dogmas made them mutually exclusive. Thus we should not be in the least surprised to see “democracies” dying a form of death which was considered since the days of Plato and Aristotle to be the natural form of their demise — their transition into tyranny, the absolute rule of a former party leader.

It must be recalled in this connection that the liberal Rousseauan spirit pervading the more old-fashioned democratism was instrumental in dispelling the fear from such a ghastly and undignified end; it was repeatedly emphasized that no establishment based on force was able to last. Liberal optimism, conceiving man as a courageous being without original sin endowed with an inordinate thirst for liberty and justice, showed little interest for our megalopolitan straphanger and viewed humanity predominantly as an agglomeration of bons sauvages. Yet the white race consists largely not of human beings but of employees. Facing the choice of cash or liberty they will always choose the former because it spells safety.

If now we turn our attention again toward the age-old problem of liberty, great care must be taken in order not to confuse the different aspects and issues. Liberty can be menaced from the outside as well as from the “inside” of the individual person. An inward menace of the exercise of free will is for instance madness or psychological inhibitions. Outward elements which may be instrumental in the suppression of human liberty are the state, society, the organization of labor, etc. The problem of external liberty must clearly be viewed from the angle of historical record and mechanistic probability. Every society, every state, every organization imposes limitations on the individual and the question is merely where to find the greatest and the least of the freedom-suppressing efforts and effects.

There is clearly always a deeper connection between society and state. The latter usually mirrors the mind and the inclinations of the former, but there is always the possibility of change. Society may undergo a development which alienates it from its own political institutions, which then subjectively or objectively become “obsolete.” A small, determined minority sometimes “conquers” the state machinery and “re-educates” society, molding it through the agencies of a new state into a new society, Such a process may become extremely painful. It is usually connected with a total loss of liberties.

The control of society over the individual can be more perfect and efficient than that of many a secret police organization east of the Rhine. In England we have more or less the “control” of society,6 in imperial Russia we had the control of the state. Provided that the Germanies can really produce a National Socialist and the Russians a Bolshevik society — and we have to face the possibility that both might ultimately succeed — then life in these countries must become more intolerable than it is at present. Japan, for instance, was most successful in combining the totalitarian supervision of the police with the totalitarian supervision of society as well as of organized religion. Enforced idealism is always fateful and homogeneity must grow organically. A society sanctioning wholeheartedly all state laws is a questionable asset from a libertinarian point of view. Such a society has frequently the inclination to practice the most “democratic” form of rendering justice and that is lynching.

This sort of punishment is after all based upon direct ochlocratic consent within definite groups or sections. It must be most inspiring for a true “democrat” to see “We, the people” taking the law in its own hands and thus dispensing with a judge who might disregard the most sacred declaration of mankind, the “voice of the people.” The victory of the numbers under these circumstances is complete; no pleading is possible because it is also superfluous. It would be very “undemocratic” if the reasoning or the appeals of a single human being (in this case the victim) could override the general will which in its inscrutable wisdom has already decided to roast a Negro slowly to death with blowtorches applied to the most intimate parts of his body.

Treitschke did not exaggerate very much when he stated about seventy years ago that the total amount of liberties was probably greater in Prussia than in Switzerland. Neither would it be an overstatement to affirm that a shepherd in the absolute monarchy of King Zog ten years ago enjoyed a freer life than one of those miserable straphangers working in a Wall-Street law firm.

There is no modern democratism without a city civilization.7 We have already mentioned the fact that the illusion of progress is the driving motor of modern democratism, but “progress” becomes only evident in a megalopolitan civilization.8 Countries with few cities and a rustic uncommercial culture are relatively immune from democratism. The non-Protestant countries of eastern Europe are almost exclusively agrarian. One finds there tendencies toward agrarian socialism, yet the ideas of the “Green International” (or what the Hungarians call the csizmás diktatura — peasant-boot dictatorship) are not democratic. The Mediterranean countries, too, show little inclination to embrace modern, ochlocratic ideas. There are, of course, smaller and medium-sized cities in the Mediterranean area, but they seldom have a technical megalopolitan character (with the exception of Catalonia) and they have preserved the hierarchical structure of bygone times; their population is only in the process of becoming a shifting mob. These cities are frequently still dominated by a Church, a castle, or a monastery — both in the architectural as well as in the psychological sense. The Norwegian village is seldom an agrarian unit; it is usually only a harbor and fishing center. On account of the large seagoing population it is considerably déraciné.9

The limitation of our liberty caused by the technological development is probably still in its initial stage. H. L. Mencken in a fit of deplorable naïveté once told us that every invention means the elimination of a priest. This can be revised by saying that every new invention calls for an additional policeman. What we experience in the realm of government control in “progressive” countries is nothing but the first clouds heralding a bigger storm. We have all the prospects of a total aerial war with bacilli, gas, and high-grade explosives and there is a possibility that mankind may unloose dark powers over which they will finally lose control like Goethe’s sorcerers’ apprentice. Today it is already evident that small or agrarian countries are completely dependent on the equilibrium between the larger nations. They live in the very shadow of slavery and the ochlocratic law that the numerically larger groups take precedence over those numerically weak is now fully applied to them.

When the decline of our total liberties is mentioned one frequently hears the counterargument voiced that the Middle Ages were characterized by the institution of serfdom, an institution by no means as universal as the layman is wont to believe. Yet the essence of the legal relationship between the serf and his overlord consisted in the fact that the former was tied to a soil which enjoyed “protection” from the latter. For this protection the serf was forced to work one, two, or sometimes even three days a week for the knightly racketeer. Negligence or unwillingness to work could be punished by a score of fines or castigations, yet it was impossible to turn the serf from his land. He could neither be “fired” nor dispossessed. Modern man in the city is from that point of view even worse off than the serf. In eighty out of a hundred cases he does not own a home but lives in literal serfdom. Provided he earns four checks of fifty dollars each in a month he can retain three of those, but the fourth he has to turn in to his landlord. That means — to all practical purposes — that the individual tenant works one and a half days each week for the landlord. His refusal to do so would end more disastrously than the ancient serf’s because he would be turned out from his home and his meager possessions be removed to the street. Thus to talk about modern freedom is mere cant when we exalt it in juxtaposition to medieval freedom.

Yet there is still another tyrannical aspect of technicism and progressivism, one even more oppressive and psychologically more subtle. Ernst Jünger hinted at it in Der Arbeiter.11 This other menace lies in the fact that man is made more and more dependent, more and more “vulnerable” and helpless in emergencies, thanks to the collective, summary, and synthetic, and communitarian character of our technical institutions. There is no doubt that a peasant dependent on a tractor (i.e., on engineers, factories, mechanics, oil fields overseas, refineries, rubber plants, etc.), is less “free” than another one using a horse-drawn plough. Every electrical installation, communal sewer, and gas pipe involves a decrease of independence. The specialization of knowledge makes the very conception of life outside of well-organized and up-to-date communities for modern man, spoiled by the gadgets and amenities of “progress,” unattractive. It would be sheer hypocrisy if we would deny that for us the idea of living beyond the reach of a dentist is almost terrifying. There is no doubt that skills have always a liberating effect, but knowledge, contrary to general belief, does not always make men free. Psychologically it has frequently a depressing and enslaving effect. An ignorant savage facing an attack of appendicitis in a jungle feels “freer” than an explorer under the same circumstances (because the latter interprets the symptoms correctly — but his knowledge only makes him in his helplessness certain of his doom). And in spite of our ridiculous pride in the finely woven net of urban and progressive dependencies (dainty meshes which enslave us completely) we have retained full admiration of the truly independent man, of Robinson Crusoe. The debacle of civilizations is frequently due to mechanical destructions and disruptions of the communitarian machineries by external or internal forces. If man, at the time of such a minor catastrophe, has already been reduced to the status of a pure animal sociale, lacking all forms of independent existence, then the damage may be so great, and appear to all concerned so irreparable, that all hopes, all will for resistance and recuperation, yield to blank despair and lead thus to complete disintegration.

To all these horrors of technicism one must add the scourge of monotony and the tyranny of time. Cities like London, New York, Berlin, Paris, Chicago, Pittsburgh, Detroit, or Glasgow are high spots of slavery in comparison to Albania, Bulgaria, or even Central Africa. The slavery of the watch and clock, the bourgeois, anthropocentric slavery of material prestige and successful competition (to slave in order to keep up standards), the wage slavery of the proletarian, the school slavery of the children, the conscription slavery of the adolescents, the road slavery, the factory slavery, the barrack slavery, the party slavery, the office slavery, the parlor slavery of manners and conventions — all these slaveries make political “freedom” appear a bitter joke.

The microscopic importance of a single vote has been discussed in a previous chapter. But to think logically and clearly in proportion ratios can hardly be expected from the desperate gray masses of straphangers with their starved personalities craving to attribute a material importance however small to their miserable egos.12 What else is their life but an endless streaming and “commuting,” six days out of seven, over the same beaten track in trolley cars, railways, subways, “els,” taxis, and buses from the suburbs to the centers of the cities where the clocks turn their hands menacingly, as the galley wardens used to swing and to crack their whips in the days of old. The person in these dehumanized beehives is entirely subjected to a collective whole, to his work, to machinery, to the commercial product, to the process of trade. We have to ask ourselves in all candor whether a free Negro in Mozambique has not more independence than — let us say — a British tax official or a Dutch white-collar worker. The free Negro only works in order to feed and nourish his family (and a little more if he wants to). If he prefers he can work during the night and sleep during the day. He can interrupt his work as often as he likes. He can choose freely between different methods to carry out his work. But our progressive white-collar worker has no choice. In fact he lives in a trembling fear of dismissal, unemployment, disease, and death. “Lack of independence” is written on his face which has lost the defiant expression of freedom so typical of the “backward” mountain peasant. Whatever he needs he has to buy. He cannot produce anything for himself besides money — paper signed by some government. He is only a miserable link in a long chain.

Once Europe could boast of a large class of craftsmen — free people with the opportunity for artistic creation; but now everything is manufactured by mass production and the result is an incredible shrinkage in the variety of forms due to standardization. There is probably a greater variety of goods in Timbuctoo or in the Sooks of Marrakesh than in Frankfort or Los Angeles. The artifacts are thus “democratized.” (Mr. Gray and Mr. Green get an identical product for an identical price.) The buyer has also to make a compromise between the actual merchandise and his taste, but the “democrat” has the consolation that the idea of compromise is very democratical. Finally we see under the impact of the countless compromises a degeneration of taste and the various industries make desperate efforts to standardize taste in order to produce more cheaply; people buy only “nationally advertised brands” and in the end we have the mass taste or rather the mass lack of taste.

The defenders of mass production emphasize the fact that modern manufacture makes more goods accessible to a greater number. They are not aware psychologically that the gain is nil. It is true that a book used to cost during the Middle Ages the equivalent of two to five hundred dollars whereas Gone With the Wind can be bought in editions of $1.49 and even less. Libraries were the privileges of a very few. But on the other side people enjoyed books far more, and the purchase of a book was a greater event in life than today the acquisition of a Cadillac. Nowadays one walks nonchalantly into a bookstore, pushes two and a half dollars over a counter, reads the book and forgets it sometimes in the suburban train.

The decline from the heights of the Middle Ages is evident; occidental man previously dominated by spiritual and ethical conceptions indulged in an intellectualism which became more and more sterile and déraciné; the brain was finally supplanted by the muscle. The fundamental explorations and inventions have largely been made by now and they multiply in geometrical progression. The communistic roots of this scheme are obvious; the tendency to have equally educated (or equally uneducated) people doing equal manipulations which result in equal articles costing the same and looking alike, is insofar intrinsically bolshevistic. The ensuing process of applanation is of devastating force.

Let us now visualize a man in Little Rock, Arkansas, stepping out of his car. It would be pretty hard to judge his “character” (his profession) from his exterior. He will have one of the myriads of Ford cars, one of thousands of ready-made suits, and shoes like most of his fellow citizens. Neither the tailor, nor the motor engineer, nor the shoemaker have known him personally because they all work for the anonymous mass. The decline becomes apparent if we compare clothing styles from the centuries before and after the industrial revolution. Yet the same sordid comparison can be made between letters and diaries from these periods. Our great-grandparents manifested all their personality in the written word while modern man in his depersonalized mediocrity prefers to send telegrams or nondescript, unorthographic notes dictated to a secretary through a phonograph. In the eighteenth century western Europe had about 70 per cent illiterates and eastern Europe almost 90 per cent, but from the bourgeoisie upward everybody was able to express himself (or herself) in writing. This alone almost justifies a limited, selective education from an ethical as well as from a practical point of view.13 Anybody who goes to school in order to be able to send telegrams and read the sporting news wastes his time and the money of the taxpayers. Mr. Averageman will rarely read a book; such an activity by itself would already be too personal. He rather sticks to magazines. Books have editions of several thousands; magazines go into millions. Magazines are “broader”; they satisfy the great mass.

But let us return to Mr. Z, the worthy “prominent” citizen from Little Rock. His prominence is largely due to the fact that his bank account of five figures dazzles the masses who consider him perhaps also to be a “civic leader.” He is bald and has a pince-nez. He drives his car around the city. He may also drive over roads, but to walk for over two hours over the pathless prairie would almost kill him. He is a city dweller and the car is practically his feet. The homo rusticus, too, has his limitations but only in a horizontal sense; he cannot expand indiscriminately in this direction. He therefore has to live more in a vertical sense, which has a material as well as a spiritual side to it. He can farm his fields more intensively, plough deeper, fertilize it, and the effect of his hard work goes deep into the soil and rises high above the surface of the earth in the form of the stalks of wheat. Beneath him is the soil and above him are the rain-bringing clouds, the wind, and the sun and — “way above,” there is God. Mr. Z has the Greens living above him, the Whites and the Blacks. The Jones and the Jenkins live next door. Nobody, on the other hand, looks into the windows of the farmer or peasant.

Yet the Z family is utterly anthropocentric — it is surrounded on all sides by other human beings. Mr. Z is independent from the wind, the clouds, and the seasons, yet he is dependent upon his boss, his timetable, and the social contacts of his wife. Besides he is a man of horizontal dimensions. He has no ties to the soil, but rushes over the surface of the globe with the help of technical contraptions.

Two very characteristic representants of the “vertical” and the “horizontal” man are the sailor and the mountaineer. The former’s characteristics have been discussed before. The mountaineer, on the other hand, lives not only in a truly vertical world but also in a well-organized, noncollective landscape; no group has a stronger personality than his. His universe — the valley — is infinitesimally small. So are his villages, so his estate. Yet he always loves liberty, and while climbing among the rocks he feels that there is nothing between him, the rope, and God. He is politically indomitable and he always enjoyed the greatest political privileges, as we saw it in the Tyrol, the Caucasus, Montenegro, Transylvania, Croatia, Navarre, Daghestan, the Basque provinces, the N.W. Frontier of India, Savoy, and Albania. The names of Andreas Hofer, Tomás Zumalacárregui, Montrose, Shamyl, Todor Alexandrov of Macedonia, Georgios Kastriota Skanderbeg, Abd-el-Krim, Sertorius, Arnold Winkelried, and the Montenegrinian leaders will never be forgotten in political or military history. The Vatican as well as the Bourbons had Swiss guards; the imperial palace in Vienna had a Bosnian watch; Albanian and Kurds guarded the Sultan; Rif-Kabyles, General Franco; Sikhs, Punjabis and Gurkhas, the viceroy of India.

Modern, urban man thinks in different “categories” than the traditional (rural) man. The “streamlined” inhabitant of the United States will first of all be an “American” and at second thought a citizen of the United States. The European “liberal” was similarly a European first, then a German, etc. The Nazi “begins” at the second category — and ends there denying hotly differences between the individual German states or tribes. Medieval man, on the other hand, was first of all the member or head of a family which (in some cases) like a state had its flag and arms. Then he was the dweller of a village or city. (St. Moritz in the Grisons, for instance.) The following step was that he lived in the Upper Engadine and only in the next category of self-cognizance was he conscious of being a Grisonian. To think of himself as a Swiss was almost a mythical afterthought, as of belonging to a subcontinental unit.

It is not only the improvement of transportation which changed this outlook. Human beings are weary of being “persons” (per se). They feel weak, helpless, and crushed. They have given up the effort to have their personal identity; and in order to safeguard their existence they seek forgetfulness and depersonalization in the largest possible collective unit.

The mass products of modern technicism, the hostility toward any sort of hierarchy, the arithmetic attitude toward elections, uniformism, and technicism — all these things will not permit the product of a democratistic civilization to accept a vertical point of view. This urban horizontalism also explains to us partly the pantheistic, deistic, and atheistic tendencies in our ochlocratic world. The horizontalist is tied down and cannot rise above himself. In his antagonism toward all hierarchy he even finally opposes the idea of God as a superior to himself, as a Supreme Being, and therefore also the conceptual images of Popes, emperors, kings, and fathers. The mountaineer is usually more pious than the mercantile seafarer, the trader, or the circus acrobat, and there is nothing surprising in the fact that alpinism has largely been inaugurated by priests and enterprising Englishmen of devout convictions.

This is also no doubt the reason why socialism and the more violent forms of ochlocracy and superdemocracy — Fascism — have to blaze their trails into the Catholic world by revolts, revolutions, and assassinations. The deep antagonism between “backward” Catholicism and these new “progressive” philosophies make a compromise impossible.

If Catholicism would not have an inner abhorrence for revolutionary practices one could probably see a long list of Catholic revolutionary movements in the Protestant ochlocratic zone. The case of Gil Robles, who let the right moment for a decisive blow in Spain pass by, is a typical example of Catholic revolutionary inertia. Of course there is Guy Fawkes (probably prompted to his deed by Burleigh’s agents), the Swiss Sonderbundskrieg in 1847, and the Irish revolutionary war against England from 1916 till 1921. Yet the list is meager and the Catholics can find consolation in the fact that Catholicism is the only conscious negation of our ailing and perverted modern world, and therefore (spiritually and intellectually at least) the only revolutionary movement. All other political philosophies — Leftist “Democrats,” National Socialists, Continental Liberals, Communists, and Technocrats — agree on the coming earthly millennium of equality, plumbing, hygiene, and statistical increases in the material sphere. Their fight against each other is so bitter only because it is in its essence fratricidical. They all believe in a more or less identical Utopia yet they differ about the means to achieve it. In this respect they resemble the unfortunate masons trying to build the Tower of Babel but who failed to achieve their goal because the confusion of languages prevented them from mutual understanding and common planning; the man who could translate their thoughts would indeed be antichrist.

It is symptomatic that the stronger their disbelief in God, the greater their haste and the more accentuated their terroristic methods. While the continental liberal, with his deistic tradition and his superstition regarding the absolute goodness of human nature, prefers to lie pat and to hope for the best, the Communist with his neurotic impatience is determined to speed up development by systematic mass murder. His attitude is surprising if we remember the Marxian stand about the inevitability of the historical process which leads directly to the establishment of a dictatorship and finally a classless society of the proletariat, after which the historical and sociological development comes to a miraculous standstill. Yet godless man, shocked and tortured about the finality of death cannot wait; for his own sake he has to accelerate the historical process and in order to catch up with the time element he has to wade through oceans of blood. Thus José Ortega y Gasset’s parable of the automobile and our mortality lies at the very root of all our materialism.

 

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17 Cf. Ralph Adam Cram’s excellently written pamphlet What Is a Free Man? containing a lecture delivered at the Catholic Rural Life Conference in Richmond, 1937.

18 Modern man is not only depressed by the expectation of his physical death but also by the fact that his demise will leave no considerable gap. The death of a worker on the assembly line (a “hand”) will merely shorten the bread line. (“No man is indispensable” is a highly ochlocratic slogan.)

19 This opinion is also vigorously and convincingly defended in Harold Laski’s Parliamentary Government in England. (New York, 1938.)

20 Papers affirming the existence of a hierarchy in relation to science, philosophy, and religion were read by M. Jacques Maritain and Dr. Mortimer Adler at the “Conference on Science, Philosophy, and Religion” in New York City, September, 1940. Both philosophers affirmed that science deals only with means while philosophy and religion with the ends. Philosophy is therefore superior to science while religion as a divinely revealed knowledge is superior to philosophy. The reaction amongst the scientists and some philosophers present at the lecture was as one could expect; as high priests of a secularized century they saw in these affirmations a direct challenge against their generally recognized status.

21 These highly selective schools last seven to nine years and follow immediately the fourth or fifth grade of the elementary school. They admit only a tiny fraction of the boys after the age of ten and require an entrance examination which ends frequently in the turning down of as many as seventy-five per cent of all candidates. Of all those pupils entering the school as many as eighty per cent are often eliminated during the laborious years.

These schools incorporate the equivalent of American upper grades of elementary schools, high school, and college. The B.A. or B.S. is given at the age of eighteen or nineteen after a leaving examination. This certificate enables the young man (or girl) to go to a university. Universities on the European Continent are always graduate schools.

The standards of these gymnasia and lycées are very rigorous. Bad spelling after the fourteenth year of age would be disastrous. Spelling bees between universities are naturally unheard of. Yet the idea to make childhood and adolescence a hard time is basically sound. There is no day more beautiful in the European life than the last one in “school.” Life can offer no more horrors after the grim battles of the examinations. And it is reasonable that one begins life by eating the soup and terminates it with the sweets — not the other way round.

22 The English language has the richest variety of expressions to cover the judgment of public opinion and circumscribe the different taboos. These cautious understatements have all behind their façade of terse primness a menacing undertone.

Yet every pressure incites rebellion. There are few countries with more eccentrics than England. Yet the English eccentric (unlike his Russian confrere) is usually asocial.

23 See the criticism of the commercial city by St. Thomas Aquinas in his De Regimine Principum, II, 3.

24 Switzerland, for instance, is in spite of her alpine background a typical polis state or rather an agglomeration of polis states. Most of the “cantons” bear the name of their most important city, and they are often nothing else but the economic Lebensraum of their capital. The exceptions are the southern large cantons like Vaud, Grisons, Valais, Ticino.

25 The genuine seaman is frequently a vagrant proletarian. It is nevertheless difficult to place him in a social category. He lives certainly under extraordinary circumstances and the psychological and physical conditions of his existence are very problematic.

The severe discipline creates usually a radically leftish political tendency among the lower strata of the seagoing population in Europe while the upper layers indulge in a sort of rightism which is frequently nothing else but dark reaction.

The navy and the merchant marine have always played an important part in “red” revolutions; one has to remember the Russian fleet in 1905 (“Knyaz Patyomkin”), 1917 and 1921, the Austrian navy in 1917, the German Navy in 1918, the Spanish navy in 1936. Not only Portugal, the Netherlands, and Greece but even England had certain difficulties with their navies in the past twenty years. The only group in England seriously affected by the French Revolution was the Navy which staged large-scale mutinies at Spithead and at the Nore. Sailors and officers from the Navy are often the most brutal elements in political upheavals.

26 The only European country which enforced a speed limit till about ten years ago was Switzerland which was literally covered with speed traps. Yet this system was abolished when tourists refused to drive their cars over the controlled roads of this ancient democracy.

Coercive laws in the realm of diet were similarly only in force in different “democracies” and superdemocracies. The most outstanding countries prohibiting their citizens to imitate our Lord by drinking wine were the Soviet Union, the United States of America, Soviet Hungary, and Finland. Antialcoholic legislation is also strict in Sweden, Norway, Ontario, and some American states. It is symptomatic that these prohibitive laws are typical only for “democratic,” Protestant, or communistic countries. Many Protestant countries suffer also from blue laws. The province of Ontario, for instance, has a combination of Blue Laws and antialcoholic legislation.

27 Hamburg, 1932, p. 160.

28 Every human being is extremely important, thanks to the fact that he has an immortal soul. “One human thought is more valuable than the whole visible world,” says San Juan de la Cruz. But the tragedy of modern man lies in his tendency to deny the existence of his soul and to try desperately to be “important” in the realm of material values. “Success” or “failure” is nowadays frequently measured in these terms. When we maintain that “Mr. Smith made good” we hardly imply that we see in him a spiritual rival of St. Francis of Assisi or St. Vincent de Paul.

Yet, materially, everybody is sooner or later a failure because death finally terminates every career. The great pagan sadness of modern man is largely due to his premonition of ultimate disaster.

29 Limited to the ριστοι and not to the wealthy or “wellborn.”

30 I like to emphasize here again that environment is not fate nor (theologically speaking) excuse. Even religiousness or irreligiosity does not necessarily condition moral goodness or badness. The knowing about God is a great help and a great advantage but it involves also greater obligations and duties.

31 Erik R. v. Kuehnelt-Leddihn’s, Jesuiten, Spiesser, Bolschewiken (German Edition, Salzburg, 1933), 53–54.

32It is interesting to note that the Austrian Social Democratic Party used the red flag as their party banner, a practice which was genuinely abhorred by their German colleagues who stuck to the colors of the Weimar Republic—black, red, and gold.

• 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.
• 3* About its confusion with liberty see the text concerning liberalism.
• 4* Charles A. and Mary R. Beard wrote: “As was said afterwards, the founders of the Republic in general, whether Federalist or Republican, feared democracy more than they feared original sin.” (America in Midpassage, New York, 1939, Vol. III, p. 922.) About the use of the word democratic between 1865 and the close of the century, see p. 923 of the same book.
• 5* Mob democracy is, needless to say, nearest to the concepts of St. Thomas. Thus by a play of circumstances their terminology is more accurate than that of some lowbrow Catholics.
• 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)
• 8* Cf. Stringfellow Barr’s article “Ourselves Again” in Tomorrow, Oct., 1942. Condensed reprint in the Catholic Digest, Nov., 1942. This essay of the president of St. John’s, Annapolis, not only evaluates democracy correctly, but also gives an outline of Hitler’s democratic background.
• 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).
• 11* While man living in the old, traditional form of culture is a dreamer, modern, ochlocratic man is frequently the victim of illusions.
• 12* Cf. Bernard Fay’s excellent Freemasonry and Revolution. (Boston, 1935.)
• 13* By federalism we clearly understand a tendency which is the very opposite of federalism in the American sense. We have to distinguish between centralism, federalism, and separatism; centralism wants the whole concentration of power in a single body, federalism demands a division of power with a marked influence of local administration, separatism recognizes local power only and stands thus clearly for the dissolution of the state into independent parts.
• 17TO 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.*
• 18We 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.
• 19Today democracy is confused with liberalism,* freedom, and prosperity alike.
• 20“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.
• 21We 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.
• 22In 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.
• 23It 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:
• 24While 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.*
• 25We 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.
• 26The 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.
• 27The 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.
• 28It 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.
• 29“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.”
• 30This 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.”
• 31Apparently 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.
• 32Needless 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.