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If you are poor and oppressed, what better world do you dream of? Whats on offer these days, in the worlds dream factories?
Is it enough to dream of democracies as secular as Europes? Fully stocked supermarkets and universal health care are brilliant. But are they enough?
The democracies I know best did not get to be such without huge collective struggles at key junctures in their history. Not all these revolts were violent, but the risk was always there. The struggle for freedom has required great boldness, good timing, conspiracy, a readiness to sacrifice your very life. You do not rise to that without hope and faith in something.
Hearing of the idealistic crowds of world changers at Porto Alegre, meeting in the shadow of what Susan Richards calls the long slow death of socialism, I am curious as to what inspirational ideas will sustain those people in their struggle. How many truly think God is with them? Do any still believe in the old scientific prophecy of Saint Karl that capitalism is doomed to fail, that a completely new society is feasible?
In the past, improvers in poor countries took many cues from western ideologies; I wonder how much of the inspiration needed to fuel the bumpy ride towards modernisation will come from the west in future, and how much from indigenous traditions. It seems as if those who are struggling against tyranny, especially in poor countries, are having some problems with inspiration. The current ideologies of left, right and centre are failing them.
Right-wing dream factories
Western conservatives would conserve democracy, but would you ask their help to create it? Hint: I am not talking about imposing it through war, but creating it from within. The right in a poor and tyrannised country may support the status quo, the local oligarchy. But a group that takes its cue from the right in the west must support democracy.
How was democracy won in England? It annoys right wingers when I say it, but they have the left to thank for many of the freedoms they now celebrate. By the left at any historical period I mean those who were excluded from power and dreamed of a more democratic polity: from the radicals in Cromwells army at the Putney debates who argued for universal suffrage more than a century before the American Revolution, all the way through the anti-slavery campaigners, the Tolpuddle Martyrs, the Chartists, the nonconformists and Catholics who wanted the right to vote, to suffragettes and gay rights advocates.
When I see such people being celebrated by the right, I will know they are getting to grips with globalisation; thinking about how to recreate in other countries the democracy they value in their own. Yes, the conservatives in Anglo history were a crucial moderating force restraining the wild and even totalitarian dreams of the utopians. But you would never have had a constitutional monarchy, restored by the right, if the left-wing sectaries in Cromwells army had not first gone too far and chopped the old kings head off.
I do not see any conservative dream factories that have a hope of inspiring the kind of energy, hope and fire needed to create democracy in a poor country. They are so focused on wealth creation, so determined to free us from left-inspired regulations, that they have lost track of what is needed to inspire people with a democratic dream.
Gary Jones, in openDemocracys discussion pages, decries every sort of collective behaviour. To me, this looks like the sad tendency of the right to exaggerate individualism. The powers in this world act collectively, with networks of money, patronage, military force, influence. Freedoms can only be won from them by collective action. Individualism itself is only made possible by collective action against tyranny. Libertarians along with the rest of us need to understand how to inspire productive collective action. Aint no liberty without it.
Left-wing religious inspirations
What is the comparable challenge to the left?
The lefts biggest trouble is that it has never got to grips with how to create wealth. When we see the left celebrating Adam Smith and Frederick Taylor both men who claimed the good of the common person as their goal, and whose ideas have arguably done more to enrich the common person than any others we will know they are getting to grips with globalisation. But that is a truism of todays politics.
A more interesting point may be that the left has to think about how many of its own heroes were religiously inspired. In its self-righteous secularism, the left may not have appreciated that most of the worlds people are believers. And that innumerable radical heroes in the past were believers. Four examples:
(1) The first national liberation struggle in recorded history, writes Michael Lerner, was that of the Jewish Maccabees against the Hellenic tyrant, Antiochus. Many Hellenising Jews had accepted his rule. Lerner writes, (my italics):
To fight against superior military force was totally illogical and unrealistic from the Hellenisers standpoint. But the Maccabees rejected assessments of realism that derived from the framework imposed by the imperialists, and drew instead upon the Jewish religion and the stubborn spirit of a people who had come to believe that every human being was created in the divine image, hence had a right to be treated with respect and decency. These were people who could not submit to the rule of the imperialist, and whose religion taught them that they need not, because the central Power of the universe was a power that rejected the reality of oppression. The Torah told the tale of their origins in a slave rebellion against another imperialist power thought to be invincible Egypt of the Pharaohs.
(2) Anglo democracy. Christopher Hills work on the left wing of the Reformation may have led current lefties to see the religious zealots as their forebears Quakers, Baptists, Ranters, Familists and other sectarians, as well as the radically egalitarian Levellers and Diggers, who cut off the Kings head. But that doesnt mean any modern person on the left would have felt comfortable with these folk.
They were also forebears of todays religious right in America, as Kevin Phillips shows in his book The Cousins Wars. It was the religious radicals in Cromwells army who pushed the more moderate puritans aside and created the republic. These wild folks came largely from the backward North and West, as Hill has shown. Their theology held that individuals had a hot line to God no intermediaries necessary: No Priest, No King. In this were seeds of democracy and religious toleration, even of liberation for women and slaves, but also of theocracy: a mixed bag.
(3) Anti-slavery. John Newton, the English slave ship captain, got religion and eventually, after some years, worked out that Christianity meant slavery was wrong. I once was lost, but now am found, was blind, but now I see! he wrote in his hymn, Amazing Grace. He helped convert the young politician William Wilberforce to the cause.
Wilberforce fought 19 years to get slavery banned in Britain (1807), and another 26 until it was banned in the Empire (1833). Christian faith was central to keeping him and many of his colleagues going over so long a period. Their campaign buttons, made by Josiah Wedgwood in porcelain, showed an African in chains with the caption: Am I not a man and a brother?
(4) Anti-Fascism. And what kept the French Resistance going over so long a period, when to fight against superior military force was totally illogical and unrealistic, and most French were not up to the task, not even the Christians? Many in the resistance were sustained by their Marxism, which told them that the central power of the universe was the dialectic, which promised the inevitable victory of the proletariat in the class struggle.
I am not a Jew, a Christian or a Marxist, but I recognise the role that inspiration and beyond-rational belief played in the lives of so many people in their struggles against tyranny. I could have chosen many other faiths as illustrations also Islamic, Hindu, Buddhist but I am not as well versed in them.
I have not been forced to fight such a fight against such odds as these people were. Would my agnostic, moderate beliefs have sustained me? I do not know. I do know that in a crunch I would like to have such people struggle beside me. Anyway they might well be the only ones there.
I also vehemently know that I would not want to live in a theocratic or Marxist state. I applaud various sources of inspiration as long as the apocalyptic, theocratic or totalitarian temptations in them are not acted upon.
We have to live with the fact that often the people who get up the courage to fight tyranny do so in the name of some inspiration which, taken to a logical conclusion, may become its own form of tyranny. I do not know if a Jewish state could work, but the current one is not working. Cromwell became a dictator and suppressed the Irish brutally. Wilberforce was against trade unions: he wanted an end to slavery, but not, it seems, to wage slavery. About the Marxists, enough said.
The people I most admire, are those who like Lerner and others at Tikkun fight their fights with care taken as to their rhetoric, with deep thoughtfulness about how the better world may come about, with respect for the others point of view.
Challenge to left and right: inspire us, listen to our deepest aspirations
If you want to isolate or insult your political opponents, call them religious, sectarian, practitioners of voodoo economics, unwilling to give up their sacred cows whether those are identified as belief in free markets (things never yet seen in nature, according to the left) or a non-hierarchical, unselfish new society (likewise, in the view of the right).
You can divide any inspirational political philosophy into the sensible policy prescriptions part, and the religious part. Where you draw the line between the two says a great deal about who you are.
Marx called religion the opium of the people. Raymond Aron called Marxism the opium of the intellectuals. But one persons opium is anothers high. Perhaps we need some highs to tackle the immense weight of poverty and injustice? Is the religious or utopian part of political philosophies so wrong?
If we see such inspiration as dangerous but indispensable, how does that affect the way we will relate in future to wild groups which have the seeds of both democracy and totalitarianism in them?
Out of ideological fear and disdain, the United States spent the cold war fighting every nationalist movement that used the dangerous language of Marxism. Thus it drove Castro and Ho Chi Minh into the arms of the Soviets. We need to look beneath the metaphors of liberation which people use in their desperation, to find the longings they have for respect, purpose, pride, fairness.
There are going to be some wild Christian as well as Islamic radicals out there in the coming years too is the secular left and centre ready to talk, or will we cold shoulder these people into more fascist directions? A left that is comfortable with religious language will get further in poor countries than a secular left. Martin Luther King and Malcolm X, follower of Islam, we miss you.
A right that is comfortable with the popular revolts which are necessary to bring in democracy will have a better chance of moderating the extremists.
Isnt poetic, metaphorical, utopian or religious inspiration a necessity? Did a people ever create its own democracy without it?
