ONE OF THE TEXTS about computer programming I once attempted to understand said that every computer program, even simple ones, had defects in them that would either fail to be noticed or understood by even the best programmers, that bugs were inevitable. That was something that always struck me as an insight into the contingency of every human endeavor, that everything that human beings make is bound to have unforseen problems to it that no one should ever pretend are not there. Fixing those as soon as they become apparent is the best way to deal with them, pretending they are not there and requiring fixing is bound to eventually lead to a crash.
Our Constitutional republic is a real-life example of that, the Constitution is the program that has not been patched as needed - indeed the major ones from the 1960s have been removed we are headed for a crash of disastrous dimensions.
As ususal, RMJ has a more than just thought provoking post up that presents John Adams' conclusions about the inbuilt perils of democracies and that what virtues democracy may have, those are also prone to the madness of mob rule.
I beseech you, sir, to recollect the time when my three volumes of Defense were written and printed, in 1786, 1787, and 1788. The history of the universe had not then furnished me with a document I have since seen—an Alphabetical Dictionary of the Names and Qualities of Persons, “Mangled and Bleeding Victims of Democratic Rage and Popular Fury” in France During the Despotism of Democracy in That Country, which Napoleon ought to be immortalized for calling “ideology.” This work is in two printed volumes, in octavo, as large as Johnson’s Dictionary, and is in the library of our late virtuous and excellent vice president Elbridge Gerry, where I hope it will be preserved with anxious care. An edition of it ought to be printed in America; otherwise it will be forever supressed. France will never dare to look at it. The democrats themselves could not bear the sight of it; they prohibited it and suppressed it as far as they could. It contains an immense number of as great and good men as France every produced. We curse the Inquisition and the Jesuits, and yet the Inquisition and the Jesuits are restored. We curse religiously the memory of Mary for burning good men in Smithfield, when if England had then been democratical, she would have burned many more, and we murder many more by the guillotine in the latter years of the eighteenth century. We curse Guy Fawkes for thinking of blowing up Westminster Hall; yet Ross blows up the Capitol, the palace, and the library at Washington, and would have done it with the same sangfroid had Congress and the president’s family been within the walls. O! my soul! I am weary of these dismal contemplations! When will mankind listen to reason, to nature, or to revelation?
I thought about it a little last night.
I'd argue that calling the French Revolution and the Reign of Terror "democratical" when what it was was a government by various and competing mobs of educated aristocrats of a theoretical bent who had control of an army who, like the Republican-fascists here and now, are harnessing the fury of an effective and enraged margin of the underclass. It is impossible to know how representative of the People of France any of it was, as the various civil wars in various regions of France, such as the War in the Vendée, it's doubtful that the central government and its factions had the support of a majority of The People. Nothing like a modern conception of egalitarian democracy existed in France during the revolution anymore than it did in Russia during its civil war after the Revolution.
I will point out in passing that calling the American Revolution and, in fact, the adoption of the Constitution a "democratic" act is unwarranted because it is doubtful that a majority of subjects at the time of the Revolution or citizens at the time of the adoption of the Constitution would have given it their just consent. Indeed, they couldn't have because the largest majority of citizens were prevented by law from having any vote on that. We, by habit and custom, skip over that defect in the program of our Constitutional government but it is and has been there from the start and its consequences are something we live with as a very real, very dangerous reality. Yet talking about it is strictly forbidden, "liberty" the apple of the eyes of every officially deputed every right thinking person today, does not extend to that.
I would also argue with Adams about the reign of the, admittedly, bloody, Catholic Queen Mary and his comparison of her exaggerated bloodiness to an alternative history of a "democratical" England as compared to the very real blood soaked reign of her father before her or her sister, Elizabeth's, after her. To compare her reign to an imagined "democratical" alternative is not necessary when the actual history provided any number of non-democratic reigns of terror such as Henry VIII's was right there for him to have known of. Though Protestant polemics of the kind that furnished the imaginations of someone like even John Adams blinded him to that. I do think that anti-Catholic prejudice did influence his thinking throughout.
For example, I could quibble with his other examples such as "the Inquisition and Jesuits" - actually, in the case of the Jesuits and examples such as the "Jesuit Reductions" in Paraguay which, for their human-guaranteed defects were models of enlightenment given the alternatives managed by secular rulers and superior to anything done by any English speaking secular or Protestant rulers, with the exception of the Quakers in North America. I would love to know if there are reliable figures that would really show what I've read, that you were far more likely to get out of the Inquisition alive and with your limbs intact than you were from the 18th century English legal system which hanged huge numbers of poor people for petty theft or the law as administered under the administrations Adams was a member of and those of his colleagues which he supported. You were certainly more likely to get out of it alive than you were an accusation made under the modern, 20th-21st century "scientific" anti-democratic regimes or, indeed, the anti-clerical French Revolutionary system.
All that said, I think John Adams warning in this is, actually something that anyone who favors democracy as the best to be hoped for alternative to every other form of government should take extremely seriously.
Democracy is a human endeavor, even the most carefully made government of, by and for The People, an era of equality and good will will have its defects, some which are extremely dangerous, especially as those develop under human administration and governance AND AS THEY BUILD UP ACCRETIONS OF LEGAL RULINGS AND HABITS IN TIME. I am skeptical about Adam's assertion that democracy is short lived, what he would have based that on when he said it in 1814 is of little to no relevance for the modern conception and practice of democracy.
As I heard a Black commentator (in the fog of illness I really don't remember who it was) say last week, the United States was certainly nothing like an egalitarian democracy before the adoption of the Voting Rights Act in 1965 - I would doubt that once the Roberts Court dismantled it, there is no honest case that we have remained one. That the Roberts Court used the United States Constitution to ratfuck egalitarian democracy is certainly relevant to anything like an objective appraisal of the situation and how it fits in with Adams' criticism of democracy.
The extent to which, by 18th century standards, the disastrous French Revolution was "democratical" it provided a valid warning of the dangers of government based on the choice of a majority of those permitted to have a vote. That may have provided someone like Adams a conscience saving excuse as to the anti-democratic features of his Constitution but it doesn't work the way he wanted to use it now.
I think, in the case of the United States under the written Constitution AND HOW THE PRESENT REPUBLICAN-FASCISTS ARE WORKING IT, it's especially worth considering that he lauded Elbridge Gerry whose actual MO in politics and government was known at the time to be pretty sleazy. As I once noted, Charles Beard said:
Elbridge Gerry, of Massachusetts, participated extensively in the debates of the Convention, but his general view of government was doubtless stated in his speech on May 31, when he expressed himself as not liking the election of members of the lower house by popular vote. He said on this point : "The evils we experience flow from the excess of democracy. The people do not want virtue; but are the dupes of pretended patriots. In Massts. it has been fully confirmed by experience that they are daily misled into the most baneful measures and opinions by the false reports circulated by designing men, and which no one on the spot can refute. One principal evil arises from the want of due provision for those employed in the administration of Governnt. It would seem to be a maxim of democracy to starve the public servants. He mentioned the popular clamour in Massts. for the. reduction of salaries and the attack made on that of the Govr. though secured by the spirit of the Constitution itself. He had, he said, been too republican heretofore: he was still, however, republican, but had been taught by experience the danger of the devilling spirit.”
I said at that time:
It should be noted that elsewhere in the book Beard goes into Gerry's care in making sure the new Constitution and the system it set up was in accord with his massive land speculations in the West, turning public lands into his lands for his own profit.
He is the one who put the "gerry" in the "gerrymander" when he drew up the Massachusetts senatorial maps to rig things to his liking. Adams, being from the same state must have known more about that more than we do now, when he wrote what is quoted here. I would love to know if there is any letter or other document that shows that Gherry's election rigging was related to his reading of the book Adams puts in his hands but, alas, which I can't find on Archive.org. *
The problem with democracy under a fixed, written Constitution as hard to amend as ours has become due to the number of small-population states with reactionary and regional interest is that there are anti-democratic corruptions embedded in the Constitution Adams had a hand in creating. The evils that, perhaps, he may have accepted or even thought were acceptable due to his distrust of The People in democracy immediately were taken up by his valued colleagues to inflict other evils that were in their own interest. The evils of the later French Revolution may have not been prevented if the intellectuals and other power-seekers who grabbed control of the central government and army had been actual democrats, actually valuing equality, liberty and fraternity (which their every actions proved they had no intentions of putting into practice) and the mobs that they harnessed may have done as much or more damage than they did.
The problem of democracy in the United States isn't a matter of wisdom, it's a matter of a lack of devotion to the unselfish principles of equality, morality and universal good-will, tempered by the practical necessity that where those are lacking the law must impose that as a legal requirement on those who are resistant to them, the extent to which that is possible for the maintenance of egalitarian democracy, decency, domestic tranquility and the common good.
In the attractive but hypocritical and problematic French revolutionary slogan, equality and fraternity are incompatible with absolute liberty. Liberty that destroys equality and devotion to practicing fairness and decency (doing to others what they would have done unto them) has to be restrained. Freedom is dependent on the common good, probably more than it is unrestrained personal preference. America is saturated with the Hollywood-TV-internet cult of absolute personal liberty at the expense of the common good. Every person, especially every proud-boy a king, to riff of of a would-be American populist dictator of 90 years ago.
* I wish I had the time to compare Adams' criticism of the suppression of that book he said was in Gherry's library to what his friends like Thomas Jefferson said about David Hume's History of England.
.
No comments:
Post a Comment