One Ring to Rule Them All

(Note: 18/8/10: The Real Catholics have pulled the video: Perhaps to spite the people they thought were "wrenching it out of context to try to make a weak point" to use the words of one of my detractors)

When I watched the above video on PZ Myers’ blog my first reaction was that it must be a trolling spoof or at least a tongue in cheek production with the aim of baiting the PZ Myers of this world. But seemingly not: The man in the Video, Michael Voris, a Catholic who talks and sounds very much like a fervent Protestant fundagelical, has a series of YouTube videos promoting Catholic religious hegemony. Nothing unusual about that you might think given that this blog is always criticizing the authoritarian spiritual hegemony of some Protestant sectarians. So what’s new here?

Voris tells us that “Our nature is fallen” and is “self absorbed”. Fair enough, I can go along with that; its core Christian doctrine. But then suddenly out of the blue we get this:

….Only virtuous people should be allowed to vote! … Limit the vote to faithful Catholics…. Only true Catholics look at God. …. When true Catholics vote they cast them with an eye to what God desires not fallen human nature …. Democracy is doomed to failure… The only way to run a country is by benevolent dictatorship – a Catholic monarch.

Surely this man can’t be serious! He must be having us on! The last time I saw a very similar looking manifesto was when I read “Mein Kampf”. It is difficult to credit that anyone, in the light of Western History, can still hold such views.

Isaiah Berlin has made us very conscious of the difficult balancing act between positive and negative liberty that must be maintained in a democracy. Given the human nature that we all share, both extremes of positive and negative liberty have undesirable consequences: Positive liberty can drift toward dictatorship; negative liberty drifts toward market chaos.

The problematical question that never occurs to anti-democrats is this: Just who is going to decide who is virtuous enough to rule autocratically? Who is going the “morally bootstrap” the first virtuous autocratic government? Can fallen beings trust themselves to identify, let alone implement, the absolute government of the virtuous? Power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely. Voris ought to learn the main lesson of that famous book by fellow Catholic J. R. R. Tolkien where the tempting and corrupting effects of absolutism find an excellent metaphor in the One Ring to rule them all, One Ring to find them, One Ring to bring them all and in the darkness bind them.

Oliver Cromwell did away with the crypto-catholic dictatorship of Charles I and consolidated parliament. Trouble was, Cromwell himself didn’t understand or know how to handle parliament. He was repulsed by the cacophony of voices of competing (self) interest that was the English parliament and so he effectively dissolved it and became dictator; although credit to Cromwell, true to his beliefs, he was probably a reluctant dictator. Cromwell blew his chance and failed at the test of getting the balance between positive and negative liberty right. The Protestant Cromwell, like the Catholic Voris, was of the opinion that once you’ve got rid of “all them others” somehow the rule of the virtuous and Godly would just emerge. But it didn’t: Parliament became a forum of argument and counter argument expressing the inevitable balance of interest of a democracy; that is what authentic parliament is all about - we must simply accept it and run with it. But the puritanical Cromwell couldn’t accept it. The only solution Cromwell could think of, like Voris, is to enforce the autocracy of a self-righteous and probably self-appointed oligarchy. However, we have to make all due allowance for Cromwell: In the history of Western government Cromwell was breaking entirely new ground without the hindsight of past models to go on. Voris does not have that excuse, and ought to know better.

Ironically, anti-democratic leanings are also a recrudescent phenomenon among Protestants in spite of their Biblio-centric individualism. Hierarchal absolutism is not far under the surface of the mindset of some Protestants as typified by the following quotes taken from a ministry that shall remain nameless:

Some have wrongly taught that the local churches are autonomous, that once an apostle establishes a local church and appoints the elders, he is through with that church and should stay away…..The leaders in the church must take the lead in all things. They must be the leading sheep, the head sheep, in the flock. When the sheep at the head of the flock move, the rest of the sheep follow ….The elders should be regarded, obeyed, and honored by the saints.

The tempting and corrupting effects of the "One Ring" are, alas, as real in church government as they are in society at large (See my last post).

The two faces of English democracy:

Cromwell: The uncompromising face of positive democracy

Walpole: The compromising face of negative democracy

The fact is that truly democratic government will always have to emerge from an ongoing and contradictory tumult of voices, interests, perspectives and viewpoints that tug in different directions; such are the consequences of the ambiguities and sinfulness inherent in our world. Sir Robert Walpole, England’s first prime minister, well understood the underlying self interest that often motivated democratic rule and referred to it as “the natural state of human affairs”.

There is no one party that has a monopoly on righteousness any more than it has a monopoly on sin. As the good book says:

For there is no difference, for all have sinned and come short of the Glory of God (Rom 3:23)

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During the last 'benevolent' Catholic dictatorship even dissenters were given a stake in government.