The Communism of the 21st Century

Cardinal George Pell, the Archbishop of Sydney asks a question which is
neither completely secular nor religious, one which Thomas Jefferson might have
revolved in his mind but which no modern politician would dare discuss. Pell
rhetorically asks whether democracy must of necessity be spiritually empty. Not
whether it can occasionally be, but whether it must be. In an article published
in the Australian,
he says:

Lately there has been interest in the possibility of "Islamic
democracy". These descriptors do not simply refer to how democracy might
be constituted, but to the moral vision democracy is intended to serve. This
is especially true in the case of secular democracy, which some insist is
intended to serve no moral vision at all.  ... But think for a moment
what it means to say that there can be no other form of democracy than secular
democracy. Does democracy need a burgeoning billion-dollar pornography
industry to be truly democratic? Does it need an abortion rate in the tens of
millions? Does it need high levels of marriage breakdown, with the growing
rates of family dysfunction that come with them? Does democracy (as in
Holland's case) need legalised euthanasia, extending to children under the age
of 12? Does democracy need assisted reproductive technology (such as IVF) and
embryonic stem cell research? Does democracy really need these things? What
would democracy look like if you took some of these things out of the picture?
Would it cease to be democracy? Or would it actually become more democratic?
...

The alarm with which many treat people in public life who are opposed to
these things often implies that they are a danger to democracy. This
overreaction is, of course, a bluff, an attempt to silence opposition, almost
suggesting that these practices are essential to democracy. ... From outside
Western culture, of course, come other possibilities. It is still very early
in the piece, of course, but the small but growing conversion of native
Westerners within Western societies to Islam carries the suggestion that Islam
may provide in the 21st century the attraction that communism provided in the
20th, both for those who are alienated or embittered on the one hand, and for
those who seek order or justice on the other.

I am not sure that the Cardinal's proposed "democratic personalism"
is a viable alternative, but he asks a logical question which cannot be evaded.
When the Founding Fathers created the framework for procedural democracy it was
unnecessary to spell out its ends because those were largely provided by the
moral, ethical and religious consensus of the underlying society. When that
underlying civilizational consensus has been destroyed or diluted, as is the
case in Western Europe and to a lesser extent the United States, what intrinsic
ends does a value-neutral democratic mechanism serve? The answer possibly, is
whatever it can be put to, like a Turing Machine which adopts whichever persona
the loaded instruction set demands. Then Dutch democracy becomes the Muslim
right to chuck a hand grenade out the door at policemen come to arrest them for
plotting to blow up a public landmark. Democracy becomes a vehicle waiting to be
hijacked; a metaphor for the old saw that someone who believes in nothing will
believe in anything.

But of course the process of secularization -- or 'value emptying' as Pell
might put it -- has not been entirely uniform. In actuality, while whole chunks
of the West have thrown out their traditional value systems, other chunks have
been busy proseletyzing theirs. As Episcopalian churches have emptied the
fundamentalist Islamic mosques have filled. That uneven development, if left
unchecked, may eventually mean that the magnificent mechanism of secular
democracy, which serves no value of itself, will be arbitrarily assigned a goal
by the majority most willing to hijack it. Pell's observation that "the
small but growing conversion of native Westerners within Western societies to
Islam carries the suggestion that Islam may provide in the 21st century the
attraction that communism provided in the 20th ..." will mark him in
liberal Australian circles as a bigot. It should mark him as a wit, for he has
managed to slander those they would least offend by comparing them to those
they most admire.

Jean
Paul-Sartre seized upon Dostoevsky's dictum that "if God did not exist,
everything would be permitted" to justify existentialism. He forgot that
Dostoevsky added that if God did not exist, we would be compelled to invent him.
For if, as Sarte argued "in the present one is forsaken" why should
the future when it arrives be less forlorn than today? For good or ill, man can as much
live under a heaven swept of stars as endure a sky without stars to dream of. If
Agustine of Hippo was right, that  "our soul is restless until it
rests in Thee" then when all the lights of the Tabernacle are extinguished
the Kaaba
will beckon in the desert.