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COMMENTARY
November 1, 2008
Crowds & power
If my reader celebrated All Hallows' Eve last night, will he also celebrate All Hallows today, or "All Saints" as we say in current English? And will he continue through this late autumn weekend, observing "All Souls" tomorrow? It would, after all, be perverse only to celebrate witches and ghosts and goblins, and not the morning light of Christendom that chased them all away. Who could be so perverse?Sanctity is sanity. A saint is that rare person who is completely sane, who can look broadly on things as they are, without flinching. Saintly behaviour consists in not flinching -- not out of some private stoicism, for no man can stand unaided against the hurricane when it comes -- but in the clear light of Grace. That, at least, has been the Christian teaching over 20 centuries, and will be for 20 more, and 20 times 20, if the years remain. My column today is about politics, but I have gratuitously mixed in religion from the start. I do not think we can have a clear sight of politics, if we do not begin with a fairly clear sight of reality, which means eyes open, so wide as they will go, to everything before us. "Everything" does not include only our present station in life, and our present imagined or unimagined problems, or even the Earth considered as an ecological whole. Everything we see, with our own living animal eyes, will soon pass away. A clear sight looks beyond the visible, towards a reality beyond chance and change. A clear sight requires a destiny and purpose that is not confined to any worldly ambition. A Christian view of politics, or the religious view more generally, is therefore different in kind from the "agnostic" or "atheist" or "secular liberal" view. To this day the great majority of people living on this continent take a religious view, at least in the moments when they are fully honest and candid with themselves. These moments may only occur as a by-product of stress or grief: when our illusions are stripped away by events, and we are left facing the emptiness out of which all illusions are summoned. It is not true that "there are no atheists in the trenches"; only true that the trenches are where the atheists despair. In the religious view, which is sometimes indistinguishable from what we now call the "conservative" view (though with a very small "c") politics are merely of this world. We must live in this world, and make the best of it, and we may take considerable latitude in arguing about the best that is achievable. But for the irreligious -- the people for whom this world is all there is -- politics can easily become everything. The very human instincts that turn towards prayer, towards heaven, towards God, turn easily instead towards human idols, towards the contemplation of a heaven on earth, towards utopian hopes and aspirations -- and finally, towards demonizing all those who appear to be getting in the way of "progress." As they inevitably must: for the definition of the "good" which progress seeks comes into dispute, between those whose futurity is here, or elsewhere. In civic life, persons of all persuasions must accommodate each other, live and let live. This at least has been, in the best, old-fashioned sense of the word, the "liberal" notion guiding public policy. Or, it was the liberal notion in a time when North American society was still, in the mass, unambiguously Christian. Let those within the Church get on with their lives; let those outside the Church get on with theirs; and let the State not intrude in the lives of either. Buttressing this view was the Protestant, later secular, idea of "conscience." Let no reasonable man or woman be forced to do what he does not think right. We have a crisis in our political life, which seems nowhere as apparent as in the U.S. election, to be decided this coming Tuesday. As ever, the crisis is heralded by public confusion, and the emergence of a demagogue. My sense is that the old liberal notion of "live and let live" is breaking down, is proving unworkable (for reasons that would take far more than a newspaper column to explicate). My fear is that we are crossing a threshold, in which "crowds and power" (compulsion, tyranny) are in the ascendant; that we are on a path where the saints become martyrs. I pray that I am wrong. David Warren
© Ottawa Citizen
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