"If democracy is about participating in
self-government, its first requirement is a supportive culture, a complex of
beliefs, values, and practices that nurture equality, cooperation, and
freedom."
Oh how those who have rooted for the success of
young democracies — in Europe after the French Revolution, in South America
after Bolivar, in Africa after colonialism, in half the world after 1945 — have
to believe Sheldon Wolin's words. Democracies grow only in a supportive culture, and there seem
to be only a few of these. Americans
are lucky that so many squires in seventeenth-century England, rather than
fight, said what they did to each other: "Let us reason together." That they had the kind of culture that
supported that kind of character.
But we don't have to look abroad. We've seen how easily indifference to
the cultural inheritance can jam the democratic works. Newt Gingrich ignored the unwritten
rules, rules never supported by anything but that inheritance, and shut down
the government. Mechanics alone,
the strictest constitution in the world, can never keep a democracy going.
Some doubt that, outside of a few fortunate Northern
European countries and their migrating descendants, it can be kept going. Democracy
"soon wastes,
exhausts, and murders itself," said John Adams, long before African and
South American experience lay before us.
Adams was looking back, in 1814, at what had happened in France and the
rest of Europe after the Revolution.
"There never was a democracy yet that did not commit suicide,"
he could understandably conclude.
It makes you sympathize with the French effort to
preserve laicité, or secularity, keeping
religion out of government and state policies. They're trying to hang on to the values of their
revolutionary generation.
I have heard Americans speak of laicité as if it were just another peculiarity of
"those funny Frenchmen."
That's so careless. The
Frenchman's goal can't just be the goal of a nationality or party or class or
race. It has to be the goal of
everybody who roots for democracy. Theocracy, at the bottom of so many religious slopes, is the
death of democracy.
Prime Minister Erdogan in Turkey is showing us right
now how slippery the slope is.
Come in as a Muslim demonstrating how committed a Muslim government can
be to Western democratic values, experience some extraordinary stress, and
where are you? Throwing 120
independent journalists in jail (see last week's papers) and carrying your
nation another mile closer to the theocratic bottom demanded by literal
interpretation of your Scripture.
"Demanded." That's logical demand, not popular demand. The people, the ones identified as
Muslims in our society, may be as undemanding of theocracy as any
democrat. You can be assured of
that by induction from their general behavior, as revealed in surveys. Deduction from their Scripture,
however, can put them only in one place, on the theocratic bottom, the same
place deduction from the Jewish Scripture puts Jews. Scripture says God gave you certain property so you settle
on it. Scripture says God gave you
orders to acquire safe territory for believers so you go for it.
That's the bottom some law of religious gravity
seems to pull culturally attached people toward. Any time they relax — or,
since this is religion we're talking about, "tighten up" — it exerts itself. With Jews and Muslims the bottom of the
slope (not to be confused with the fallacious slope in logic), that bottom is theocracy,
rule by God.
Inner-world and other-world religions will have
different bottoms, but Islam and classical Judaism are outer-world, and their
bottom is action on earth. Though
Christianity is mixed, with some
sliding toward inner purity and others toward a world-rejecting heaven, no
reader of the New Testament can slide toward worldly possessions. And that's what the Promised Land and Allah's
Caliphate are.
What the careful will be doing is discriminating
among religions and, if they have responsibility, acting in a way consistent
with what they find. If Wolin is
right, that means that Americans looking at newcomers will have to distinguish
cultures supportive of democracy from cultures destructive of it. Baldly, in today's terms, they will have
to "practice discrimination."
Which ones are subject to the law of religious gravity? Which will slide to a worldly bottom and
which ones won't? The bottom is
where you quit celebrating diversity.
How various the bottoms of the world's religions
are. A hermit's cave, an ascetic's
pillar, a crusader's ship, a missionary's hut, a leper's colony nursing station,
a ghetto's soup kitchen, a
zipperless wardrobe, a platoon of self-lashers, a hill where infidels' heads
are cut off. Extremes, but occupied
because what they are extremes of is admired further up the slope, by the
moderates of the religion. Believe
self-denial is holy and the man living on a pillar becomes the holiest of holy
men, a cultural hero. Crave heroism
in that culture, crave it to the point of sickness — as the unfulfilled, the
failures, the crushed and unworthy, the lost adolescents do — and you climb a
pillar and try to burn out your eyes looking at the sun.
Distinguishing among religions according to their
bottoms, where terrorists are found, is not prejudice but (if you're going to
play the put-down word-game at all) judice,
its lift-up opposite. Careful
judgment. Only the most careless
multiculturalism will give it up.
Judice here results in likelihood, not certainty,
and does not justify injury of anybody. It tells you, inside the country, which newcomers may need a
culture-change, may need re-education.
Like profiling , another precise word dragged into the put-down game, it
tells you which people need special observation.
Special observation. Be ready to hear, "Police state!" if not
"Bigotry!" and "Prejudice!" from the careless. The motives are fear of offending,
wounding, alienating. All good
motives, but we know how often goodness blinds us to carelessness, and here
carelessness can poison us. Our
officials doing the observation are trying to protect this rare and fragile
thing, democracy.
We observe, and distinguish, and most of the time it
is unnecessary. Nearly all
newcomers learn quickly and become better informed about American government
and values than natives are. They
are less of a threat to democratic government than Newt Gingrich is. By the second generation there is no
question that they have absorbed the culture that Wolin says democracy needs to
maintain itself.
But not all of them, and it's their treatment that
tests our minds when our hearts go out — in welcome, in tolerance, in humanity,
in Christian love, and sometimes, yes, in habit and reflex — to newcomers and
foreigners. We pass or fail
according to what we come up with.
We'll know we've failed when we get hauled before a European court for
crimes against humanity, or, at the other end, when we get mugged by what we
smiled at.
It's very hard ahead of time to know what's best,
but we make it easier if we constantly keep in mind our main goal: keeping our culture supportive of
democracy. We make it a lot harder
if we take that to be the same as keeping it white. Anybody who makes any skin color the problem or the solution
makes it harder. Toni Morrison, whatever her service to
racial justice, makes it immeasurably harder (think of her
prestige!) when she tells us, as she did in the 11-21 New Yorker, that
all
immigrants to the United States know (and knew) that if they want to become
real, authentic Americans they must reduce their fealty to their native country
and regard it as secondary, subordinate, in order to emphasize their whiteness.
Unlike any nation in Europe, the United States holds whiteness as the unifying
force. Here, for many people, the definition of “Americanness” is color.
No, no, Toni, not
"emphasize their whiteness" but emphasize their commitment to "equality, cooperation, and
freedom," the values Sheldon Wolin says are necessary. Whiteness is not "the unifying
force," culture is. The definition
of Americanness cannot be color; it has to be "a complex of beliefs,
values, and practices." If that's
not what "a real authentic American" is, then down we all go into the pit John Adams saw waiting for us, the last
self-murdering democracy on the pile.
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