LeStourgeon Online

Democracy: What is it Good For?

I usually hear arguments about the downfall of European society or American culture as it compares to the downfall of Rome.  From a book review of What’s Wrong with Democracy?: From Athenian Practice to American Worship, Aaron MacLean describes Loren J. Samons II’s view of the parallels between the democracies of America and ancient Athens:

[Samons] does not simply seek to tell a cautionary tale, and draw some tortured moral. Rather, his central critique of democratic politics, or at least his most compelling, is fairly subtle. He feels that Americans have lost sight of something that Athenians knew very well, at least in the fifth century: That government is a means to perceived social ends, be they justice, private property, strong families, or other plausible suggestions. Our rhetoric frequently mistakes a means (democracy) for an end. Of course, when we get to thinking about it, we recall that ours is a liberal democracy, designed with at least one end very much in mind: to protect individual liberty (something which would have seemed curious to the Athenians, who did not share our modern notion of a state from which one needs protection, oppression being an intimate, neighbor-on-neighbor affair in those days). This retort does not impress Samons. In his own words:

The idealization of freedom through democracy has led modern America to a precipitous position. Implicitly denying man’s desire for a society based on beliefs and duties that lie beyond a system of government and the rights this government (democracy) is designed to protect, we have replaced society’s extrapolitical goals with the potentially antisocial doctrines of freedom, choice, and diversity.

Samons praises the very thing about the (fifth century) Athenians–their strong set of social and religious practices, and the sense of political duty with which they purchased their freedom as a city–which many contemporary historians prefer to dismiss as retrograde, or at the least as uninteresting aspects of Athenian society, while he blames that very thing–democratic government–which is widely held to be their greatest achievement. He feels that the modern American polity suffers from a sort of moral drift, and that, as happened to the Athenians in the fourth century, we now like to discuss our rights more than we like to perform our duties. Liberty, after all, seems pretty thin gruel when separated from responsibility.

What sort of health, Samons inquires, can one attribute to a society in which abortion is viewed not as a violation of the duty to one’s own but rather as a right, an exercise of personal liberty, which might even be celebrated?

Interesting, but I am not enough of a classics guy to really critique the view.  I think I should add the book to my reading list.  Thoughts?

Posted by blestou on May 17th, 2007 — Culture, Politics, Doctrine