Whither Democracy?

Viewpoint has frequently visited the topic of the moral sterility which results from the secularization of a society. Wretchard at Belmont Club takes up the same theme quoting Cardinal George Pell, Archbishop of Sydney, Australia:

[T]hink for a moment what it means to say that there can be no other form of democracy than secular democracy. Does democracy need a burgeoning billion-dollar pornography industry to be truly democratic? Does it need an abortion rate in the tens of millions? Does it need high levels of marriage breakdown, with the growing rates of family dysfunction that come with them? Does democracy (as in Holland's case) need legalised euthanasia, extending to children under the age of 12? Does democracy need assisted reproductive technology (such as IVF) and embryonic stem cell research? Does democracy really need these things? What would democracy look like if you took some of these things out of the picture? Would it cease to be democracy? Or would it actually become more democratic?

The alarm with which many treat people in public life who are opposed to these things often implies that they are a danger to democracy. This overreaction is, of course, a bluff, an attempt to silence opposition, almost suggesting that these practices are essential to democracy.... From outside Western culture, of course, come other possibilities. It is still very early in the piece, of course, but the small but growing conversion of native Westerners within Western societies to Islam carries the suggestion that Islam may provide in the 21st century the attraction that communism provided in the 20th, both for those who are alienated or embittered on the one hand, and for those who seek order or justice on the other.

Wretchard's comments on the Cardinal's words are worth reading. He says for instance, that:

[The Cardinal] asks a logical question which cannot be evaded. When the Founding Fathers created the framework for procedural democracy it was unnecessary to spell out its ends because those were largely provided by the moral, ethical and religious consensus of the underlying society. When that underlying civilizational consensus has been destroyed or diluted, as is the case in Western Europe and to a lesser extent in the United States, what intrinsic ends does a value-neutral democratic mechanism serve? The answer possibly, is whatever ends it can be put to....

In other words, whatever can be done by those who wield the power, ultimately will be done if it suits their purposes. Might makes right in a religiously eviscerated society. This is the moral default position and a thoroughly secularized democracy will find it almost impossible to avoid it.

We doubt very much whether there can be a sustainable secular democracy over the long term. Democracy requires a relatively strong consensus on the question of ideals, morals, and political practices. As John Adams said, our form of government was created for a moral people and will not survive under any other. Only a commonly held belief in a Divine will can provide an anchor for the moral ideals necessary to hold disparate subcultures together.

When a democracy secularizes it inadvertantly creates self-doubt and national drift. Relativistic assumptions come to prevail. Eventually no one believes in anything very strongly, certainly not the principle that we should do what's best for the country rather than what's best for ourselves. Society becomes self-centered, egoistic, fragmented and disconnected. There's no metaphysical glue to hold competing groups together, everyone looks to his own parochial interests and sees no reason why he should care about the common good. Society becomes weak and effete. The national will to survive erodes. Law must be piled upon law to ensure behavior that was formerly governed by the inner law rooted in the conscience of each citizen, and which received its sanction from God. Government perforce becomes oppressive, and conditions become auspicious for a tyrant.

The process is well along in Europe, but European nations have had the advantage, until recently, of being ethnically and culturally homogenous. Now that's changing and democratic principles will be severely tested as large numbers of Muslim immigrants challenge the traditional assumptions of Europeans who will almost certainly discover that, having pulled the metaphysical chair out from under them, those assumptions fall flat on their backside.

Democracies require a shared ethnicity and culture or shared principles of governance. If a polity doesn't have the former, as in Japan, then it better have the latter, but a secularized society offers no basis for such principles. It can only hope for an arbitrary and transient consensus. As secularization proceeds apace in both Europe and America, and as both become ethnically more variegated, freedom will groan under the burden placed upon it. It's already happening in European countries with large Muslim populations, and the creaking and cracking of democracy's timbers as they strain under the load in Holland, France, and Germany, for example, are now being heard all the way to this side of the Atlantic.