As a young man, G.K. Chesterton entered a literary contest, the given topic of which was, “What’s wrong with the world?” His entry was exactly two words long: “I am.” I don’t recall whether he won or not. Certainly he wouldn’t do so today, when every educated person appears to believe that he is what’s right with the world, while anyone who disagrees with him is not only wrong, but a bad person as well.
There is something grimly comical about the contemporary humorless quest for social and political perfection by people who are not only themselves manifestly imperfect but very often bad in proportion to the intensity of that quest, though almost always without seeming to know it.
Some years ago the Washington Post adopted for its motto the proposition that “Democracy dies in darkness,” which had the thing entirely wrong. The truth is that it is attempts to realize “transparency” in politics that so often has results unfortunate for the workings of a democratic political system when made by imperfect people with an imperfect understanding of the frequent necessity for secrecy in the conduct of delicate affairs of state, the lack or breach of which can cause democracy to perish suddenly and unpleasantly, in the light of day.
I have in mind particularly those people who style themselves Democratic Socialists (an oxymoron if there ever was one) who are all too plainly (except to themselves, of course) either historical ignoramuses, self-deluded fantasists or mendacious scoundrels bent on wrecking civilization.
It was axiomatic for the philosophers of the ancient world that democracy is the penultimate step in the political evolution from more or less free societies to tyrannical ones. The maxim is one that needs to be revived and taken to heart by the contemporary western world, which is presently suffering from Stage Three democratism, the final phase of which may now be inevitable.
The tyrants of the classical epoch were at least frankly honest regarding their ambition to achieve absolute political power – and the means by which to attain it. They were equally honest about themselves and their own characters, which they did not endeavor to conceal, never bothering to disguise the fact that not only were they men of the world, but bad men to boot. Virtue, to them, was merely a word, as honor was to Falstaff. They had no interest, like their present-day equivalents, about “making a better world,” only in making it their world. The Founders of the American Republic, on the other hand, demonstrated the extent of their knowledge of human nature – and of their own – by the system of checks and balances they embodied in the Constitution, and also by the wisdom they displayed in defending their handiwork in the Federalist Papers.
In the current liberal-democratic world, the typical aspirant tyrant on the left, whether calling himself a social democrat or something else, and bereft, apparently, of anything like self-knowledge or self-awareness, seems to imagine himself as Flannery O’Connor’s “New Jesus,” Santa Claus and the Tooth Fairy in one and the same person. He sees himself as an angelic revolutionist who, having vanquished the Class Enemy and appropriated his powers for his own, will assert them like St. Francis moving benevolently among his animal friends.
It is likely that a few elements of the contemporary left do wish to establish what they imagine to be the perfect society and that, in this sense at least, they are honest about their pursuit of a transformative social and political agenda, not least because its fulfilment would confirm them in their self-image as philosopher kings endowed with the worldly power they suppose themselves entitled to.
Every educated person seems to believe that he is what’s right with the world
In this respect, anyway, I doubt they merit comparison with Mao Zedong, who, viewing the Chinese people as dirty, ignorant and undeserving peasants, acknowledged that half the population of China might have to die were he to acquire the atom bomb. (This is the same man whom Henry Kissinger called “a philosopher” after returning from Beijing with Richard Nixon in 1972.)
On the other hand, they fail to recognize the fact that worldly perfection cannot be achieved by imperfect beings, and that they, as revolutionaries, differ from the class or ideological Enemy in their thinking only, rather than in their human nature. Being essentially ignorant, overgrown children with the narrow and undeveloped minds and personalities of the contemporary undergraduate, they are infinitely more naive, intellectually and morally speaking, than the Robespierres, Lenins, Stalins, Maos and Ches who preceded them, and from whom they draw their revolutionary enthusiasm.
Unfortunately, the fact does not make them, in the long run anyway, less dangerous than their predecessors. Quite possibly it makes them more so, like the young rattlesnake which, not knowing how to calibrate its venomous discharge to the size of its prey, is more deadly than the adult one.
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