John Shook is Vice President of Research at the Center for Inquiry and the director of the Naturalism Research Project.Democracy works much better in societies where a wide separation between church and state is enforced. Secular humanism’s de¬mand that the political system remain free from religious domination secures much breathing room for democratic liberties.
The American Bill of Rights, for example, rightly begins by separating church from state. The Founders, fearful of governmental power, stressed protection of the people from tyranny, especially tyranny over their minds and voices. Liberated from fear of coercive power, the people were expected to move toward self-government. Naturalism has not received enough credit for helping with this development.
We can begin rethinking the relationship between democracy and naturalism by noticing that very little direction about how the people should practice democracy is actually provided by the U.S. Constitution.
The separation of church from state was a wise beginning, but that was just what it was—a beginning. Some of the Founding Fathers worried about the future of democracy as they considered other separations between the people: the wide differences of culture, language, and religion, as well as the physical distances separating the state Why Democracy Needs s. For example, by 1790, German immigrants comprised approximately 8 percent of America’s population. Benjamin Franklin, John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, Alexander Hamil¬ton, and others publicly speculated about the dangers of mass immigration.
They hoped that the cultural and political traditions of English-speaking Americans would not be diluted or marginalized by the newer arrivals. These worries about diversity are magnified by skeptics of all ages who doubt whether democracy’s promise of self-government can be fulfilled.
Such skeptics, dismayed by democracy’s lack of an authoritative center to force agreement, look elsewhere for that needed authoritative voice. Even friends of democracy sometimes falter when confronted with the pluralism of moral, cultural, and religious diversity. Presidents Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson, along with Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis, insisted that immigrants could become “real Americans” only after surrendering their ethnic identity.
As cultural groups were successfully asserting their civil rights and demanding equal respect in the late twentieth century, intellectuals such as Arthur Schlesinger Jr. and Samuel P. Huntington have continued this defense of the establishment by urgently pleading for assimilation and homogeneity in order to save democracy.Does democracy naturally work best when a society has little diversity? Perhaps, but democracy is precisely the form of government that has been designed to best cope with diversity, and diversity is more “natural” than uniformity.
Some northern European democracies are quite homogeneous (for example, Sweden and Denmark) and their transitions to democracy in the twentieth century have been very successful. However, these countries were imitating older democracies, especially England and the United States, which were pluralistic societies.
If a society is uniformly agreed about custom and morality, aristocracy is far simpler and more efficient than democracy.
Democracy is not easy, but it is a far better alternative to the civil and religious strife that pluralism can too frequently provoke within a nondemocratic system.
The dominance of aristocracy until the twentieth century was strongly supported by religion. Most religions have been tempted by a recurring dream of a utopian society united by one morality and controlled by a priestly aristocracy.
Too many religions have become nightmarish when used as ideological weapons to violently compel conformity and assimilation. Religionists almost always regard human diversity as unnatural and undesirable.
From the divine perspective, religionists say, human pluralism is a regrettable, worldly problem in need of a drastic solution.
The violence required by the hopeless quest for religious uniformity, so prevalent in Europe’s history, inspired the Founders to do their best to prevent religious strife in America. They deliberately chose democracy, and this choice seems well justified.
To the world’s surprise, America has more or less successfully integrated large numbers of diverse immigrant populations over the past two centuries with little organized violence involved.
Such collisions of cultures anywhere else in the world had typically resulted in mass bloodshed. Democracy deserves most of the credit for America’s unparalleled status as a peaceful immigrant nation.
From the natural perspective, it is easy to see that immense cultural diversity is an undeniable and permanent fact about the world. Viewed naturalistically, democracy is a sensible invention constructed to help cope with inevitably pluralistic societies.
But an invention must be judged by its effectiveness.
Any political system—democracy included—can only be as good as its basic assumptions about the human beings who will be citizens. No theory of government based on a false view of human nature deserves attention.
Conveniently, religions that would also be governments make sure to claim that human nature vitally needs aristocratic supervision. The idea behind this is that people are too ignorant and evil to be entrusted with controlling their own lives. But, of course, this self-serving claim is not justified by any serious empirical study of human nature.
What does human nature look like from the naturalistic perspective? The sciences have long struggled with the difficult problem of viewing human nature directly.
What could human nature be before socialization transforms a new human being into a member of a particular culture? There are two primary methods for detecting this elusive human nature, if it exists at all: we can search for behaviors that most infants have in common, and we can also search for behaviors that most cultures have in common.
The study of infants has yielded very little knowledge that could be useful for politics. The infant’s simple instincts and reflexes have no apparent implications for determining the best political system. Indeed, the human infant is an innately flexible learner, is ready at birth to acquire any culture anywhere in the world. On the other hand, the comparative study of the world’s cultures has already yielded much knowledge relevant to politics. In his 2002 book The Blank Slate, Stephen Pinker summarizes several important cultural features that are universal across human societies.
The features most relevant to politics include:People have the family as their primary social group.
People form other kinds of social groups for cooperative purposes. People easily share within social groups but only rarely share between groups.
A person’s morality is biased toward one’s own group. People can be easily aroused to sectarian hostility and violence toward other groups. These universal features easily explain why human beings live in so many different social groups, why different religions frequently compete and clash, and why humans establish political systems to manage conflicts between groups.
We can also reasonably suppose that a political theory could not be effective if it assumes that human beings do not have these universal features.
After eliminating forms of government that contradict human nature, there remains an extremely broad range of viable political systems, from monarchy to aristocracy, fascism to socialism, and the many types of democracy.
Cultural diversity is natural, and so is political diversity.Humans, from the naturalistic perspective, are very adaptable to a wide, but not unlimited, variety of cultures and political systems. Democracy evolved over the centuries in societies that struggled with pluralism, and, from our vantage point, the choice of peaceful democracy over endless sectarian violence now seems natural. As Pinker says, “For all their flaws, liberal democracies appear to be the best form of large-scale social organization our sorry species has come up with so far.
They provide more comfort and freedom, more artistic and scientific vitality, longer and safer lives, and less disease and pollution than any of the alternatives. Modern democracies never have famines, almost never wage war on one another, and are the top choice of people all over the world who vote with their feet or with their boats.” From an objective standpoint, democracy is one of the most valuable inventions ever created by the human mind.But why does democracy need to take the naturalistic perspective seriously? After all, America’s experiment with democracy did not wait for naturalism’s scientific understanding of humanity. For generations after independence, only America’s religions competed for the best account of human nature. Still, as Pinker points out, the Founders well understood that a pluralistic society of diverse social groups would naturally slide into strident conflict and mass violence; the ugly history of Europe’s long religious wars was proof enough for them.
To deal with religious and cultural pluralism, the Founders put their faith in democracy, equal justice for all, and individual liberties. The Founders’ faith has become our faith in democracy: if the people are liberated from tyrannies over their minds, their voices, and their livelihoods, then their genuine abilities have a real opportunity to emerge.Democracy requires a “faith” in human nature—a practical faith in the potential of every person to become uniquely special. John Dewey, America’s greatest philosopher of democracy, describes this faith as a moral conviction.
“The democratic faith in human equality is belief that every human being, independent of the quantity or range of his personal endowment, has the right to equal opportunity with every other person for development of whatever gifts he has. . . . It is belief in the capacity of every person to lead his own life free from coercion and imposition by others provided right conditions are supplied.” Dewey goes on to explain that one’s faith that democracy is the most moral way of life will lead one to believe that peace is possible: “A genuinely democratic faith in peace is faith in the possibility of conducting disputes, controversies and conflicts as cooperative undertakings in which both parties learn by giving the other a chance to express itself, instead of having one party conquer by forceful suppression of the other.” Democracy is the form of government that results when a society’s citizens want everyone to enjoy a peaceful and cooperative society more than they want their own particular cultural or religious tradition to dominate everyone else.Democracy enhances all of the benefits of cultural diversity while minimizing its risks. Releasing peoples’ potential does not require forcing them to conform to some single dominant culture. The old establishment dream of cultural assimilation, like the ancient religious dream of priestly aristocracy, was just a nightmare that will fade away in the bright light of natural realities.
Democratic countries like the United States will continue to be composed of diverse cultural and religious groups. So long as a democracy’s citizens are more committed to the equal freedom and opportunity of all than to the special privilege of any particular group, democracy will flourish and grow.
This democratic commitment is a moral one that follows from a “faith” in democracy. Democratic citizens must be prepared to accept the moral responsibilities of respecting everyone’s rights and encouraging everyone’s ability to participate in political deliberation. As Paul Kurtz explains in his 2000 book Embracing the Power of Humanism, “freedom makes no sense and is literally wasted unless it is first nourished in the soil of moral growth, where it can be watered and fed.
It is as if democracy [was] suddenly imposed on people unready for it, or to whom it was alien.
It can only function effectively where there are values of tolerance, respect for the views of others, a willingness to negotiate and compromise differences, and a sense of civic virtues and responsibilities.”Democracy is the most natural response to the natural opportunity presented by pluralism. Ethnic and religious groups can flourish within democracies without fear of each other or of governmental tyranny, as secular liberalism guarantees. But unless ethnic and religious groups are able to incorporate the naturalistic perspective on human nature and all peoples’ potential, they can’t understand the nature of democracy. Without a natural faith in its moral value, no member of an ethnic or religious group can fully participate in democracy or contribute to world peace.
Further ReadingDewey, John. “Creative Democracy—The Task Before Us,” Later Works of John Dewey, edited by Jo Ann Boydston. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1988, pp. 224–230.Huntington, Samuel P. “The Erosion of American National Interests.” Foreign Affairs 76, no. 5 (September-October 1997):28–49.Kurtz, Paul.
Embracing the Power of Humanism. Lanham, Md.: Rowman and Littlefield, 2000.Pinker, Stephen. The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature. New York: Viking, 2002.Schlesinger, Arthur M. Jr. The Disuniting of America: Reflections on a Multicultural Society. New York: W.W. Norton, 1992.
Posts
No comments:
Post a Comment