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SUNDAY SPECTATOR
November 8, 2009
The people
Two cheers for democracy!" ... "The worst system of government except for all the others!" ... "More cruel than wars or tyrants!" ... As everyone knows, these sentiments come, respectively, through E.M. Forster, Winston Churchill, and the Epistulae Morales of Seneca.Perhaps Seneca got closest to the truth, and not that later Roman, Alcuin, who declared (in a letter to Charlemagne, apparently), "Vox populi, vox Dei!": The voice of the people is the voice of God. Depends what you mean by "the people," and what you mean by "God." It is in the nature of all political slogans to distract us from thinking about such things; to make us accept the most abstract and ambiguous terms as if their meanings were self-evident. Everyone knows who "the people" are, and a neuron lights in the brain of even the most obtuse atheist when he hears the word, "God." He knows exactly what he doesn't believe in. The surprise is to find that many Christians and other monotheist believers think just like the atheist. They, too, have little pre-packaged images or ideas of "God," that they have spent no time thinking through, and the only difference is that they "believe" what the atheist "disbelieves." But I'm not going to go there, today: into the religious questions that are so tragically under-discussed in our society; today's sermon is strictly "secular." And the pre-packaged image or idea I am dealing with is that of "the people." I use this term myself in these columns, often with droll intentions. The pre-packaged idea itself "evolves" from one generation to another, and I'm so old that I can remember using "the people" drolly to satirize Marxists and other movement socialists, sometimes even the NDP. The joke, which I expected my reader to understand, was that with only a small minority of the actual citizens of a country supporting them, they would glibly declare themselves to be speaking for "the people." Anyone with eyes for nakedness could see they were speaking instead for their own little psychotic factions. Alas, the joke rose towards cosmic proportions in countries that had fallen under the polished jackboots of these malicious buffoons, and therefore came to be called "The People's Democracy of" ... this or that. In the modern nation state, or Nanny State as I'm inclined to call it -- since it "evolved" from a system of government into a form of universal daycare -- the term means something quite different from what it did when we just had governments. In the U.S. Constitution, for instance, "we the people" refers quite specifically to all the emancipated adults, and was certainly intended to be breathtaking in its sweep. For we may forget that Constitution was a revolutionary document. In the more conservative, and "British," parliamentary systems, the American use of the word "people" long had the ring of jingo, as a demagogic device to sneak around the back of Parliament itself. Needless to say, in my own "constitutional" formation, I am more British than American; but the two seem almost identical when compared to "popular" revolutionary traditions embedded in the various dark hearts of Europe. And this is because we have stuck quite consistently to the convention of holding reasonably boring elections at intervals of a few years, in all the English-speaking countries. It is almost as if our very language excludes the possibility of a coup d'état, or a coup de main, or a coup de grâce, or a coup de théâtre, or any other kind of stroke. But no language can exclude anything. It was just by some miracle that the core notion of "common sense" -- of taking things sometimes towards the cliff, but not over -- became instilled in the genius of our language, and possibly not in some other ones. This has, I think, helped make the English language such an acceptable "lingua franca" in lands quite extremely diverse. I think the Latin language travelled, in space and time, also from such a virtue -- its calm spirit -- as well as from the obvious causes of conquest and convenience. The word "people" in English has so many associations, but in almost every one of them it remains the collective of "persons" and the opposite of a mob. Think, for just one example, of the beautiful expression, "the people in the playground," applied to children, sometimes by themselves. By comparison the old Greek "demos" within the word "democracy," spread through all the European languages, carries some flavour of the singular beast, of the leviathan, arising from the seas. The notion that "that can't happen here" is also a distinctive English-speaking one, part and parcel of a faith in "the people" as an aggregation of "persons," a jury of some sort. David Warren
© Ottawa Citizen
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