On the Limits of Nets Where Whales are Concerned

When democracy meets human passions

I believe in political equality. But there are two opposite reasons for being a democrat. You may think all men so good that they deserve a share in the government of the commonwealth, and so wise that the commonwealth needs their advice. That is, in my opinion, the false, romantic doctrine of democracy. On the other hand, you may believe fallen men to be so wicked that not one of them can be trusted with any irresponsible power over his fellows.

-C.S Lewis

Though the following program will be familiar to some, I think we need to make like early-2000s Daft Punk and do it . . . One More Time. This is because there still seems to be a number of well-meaning patriots who believe our best hope for freedom lies in the recovery of good ol’ fashioned democracy. The main problem, they say, is that government is no longer populated by “the people.” It has been hijacked by hostile, small-minded bureaucrats.

Now, there’s truth here, and not a small amount of it. But the question remains —where did they come from then? Is the HoC the victim of foreign hostile takeover? Are our elected officials just WEF marionettes? And the truth is . . . well, maybe. But the other not-so convenient truth is that most of them grew up in our schools, were raised by our families, and were inculcated by our worldview. They went out from us, and we have found they are indeed of us.

And here is the blowfly in the democratic ointment.

The Spine of Democracy is Virtue

It turns out that the founding fathers’ greatest fear was not liberalism, nor globalism, nor marxism. It was the kind of cushy, limp-wristed materialism that would open the door for all those other things. Their greatest fear was that religion and virtue would be strangled into irrelevance and some other night terror would move into the void.

Here’s just a sampling of their foresight:

George Washington: “Human rights can only be assured among a virtuous people.”

Benjamin Franklin: “Only a virtuous people are capable of freedom.”

James Madison: “To suppose that any form of government will secure liberty or happiness without any virtue in the people, is a chimerical [imaginary] idea.”

Thomas Jefferson: “No government can continue good but under the control of the people; and . . . their minds are to be informed by education what is right and what wrong; to be encouraged in habits of virtue and to be deterred from those of vice . . . These are the inculcations necessary to render the people a sure basis for the structure and order of government.”

Samuel Adams: “Neither the wisest constitution nor the wisest laws will secure the liberty and happiness of a people whose manners are universally corrupt.  He therefore is the truest friend of the liberty of his country who tries most to promote its virtue.”

Patrick Henry: “A vitiated [impure] state of morals, a corrupted public conscience, is incompatible with freedom.”

John Adams: “We have no government armed with power capable of contending with human passions unbridled by morality and religion. Avarice, ambition, revenge, or gallantry would break the strongest cords of our constitution as a whale goes through a net. Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.”

Democracy isn’t effective because it believes the mob is somehow more virtuous than the politicians. The mob has proven it can be just as savage, if not more so, than the bourgeoisie.

Democracy has been so effective because of its pessimistic view of human nature. Which means two things. First, there needs to be checks and balances to prevent power accumulating in any one person or party. That’s why we have elections every four years and the presence of an opposition party. While these don’t stop corruption, they help slow it down. Kind of like in the movies when the good guy is getting chased and tips over a crate of oranges while he’s running. It’s not a solution. It’s a limiting factor.

Second, it means that for democracy to work, there must be some system operating from the outside and working to form just laws and shape public conscience. Christianity provides the best of these systems as its goal isn’t simply controlling human nature but transforming human nature.

When law abandons its derivative identity (i.e., from God), not only is it reduced to just another plaything for government to manipulate, but society is then left with “human passions unbridled.” And human passions were never meant to be bridled by government. Government exists as one arm — albeit a sworded arm — of a just society. It was never meant to be the totality of society. Government is meant to exist alongside family and churches as a distinct sphere of authority — to punish the few who choose to reject the fear of God.

When government, itself now corrupt, is saddled with the restraint of the mob, also corrupt, we’re left with the whale/net phenomenon Mr. Adams so eloquently alludes to. As God has been forcibly removed from the public sphere, we are now witnessing what it looks like for human passions to be unleashed. And what it looks like the adjective “hellish.”

And here we come to the point. The goodness of the voting public is only as good as the goodness of its individual parts. I can’t build a car out of car parts sourced from a tin shed in Bengali and magically come up with a nice car at the end. The car will only be as good as the parts. So the public will only live, and vote, and govern, as virtuously as the state of its collective soul — which increasingly resembles one of my son’s famous “triple-roasted” marshmallows.

The good news is that even though things may look dark now, they’ve been dark before. Consider the following by Arnold Dallimore:

For the past thirty years numerous evangelical people have been saying, ‘There can never be another revival! The times are too evil. Sin is now too rampant. We are in the midst of apostasy and the days of revival are gone for ever!’ The history of the eighteenth-century Revival entirely contradicts that view. It demonstrates that true revival is the work of God — not man — of God who is not limited by such circumstances as the extent of human sin or the degree of mankind’s unbelief. In the decade between 1730 and 1740 the life of England was foul with moral corruption and crippled by spiritual decay, yet it was amidst such conditions — conditions remarkably similar to those of the English-speaking world to-day — that God arose in the mighty exercise of His power which became the eighteenth-century Revival. In an over-all view of a century of British history we are able to observe these conditions, not only in themselves, but as to their cause, their effect and their cure.

Canada is broken — not like a broken finger or a broken ankle. More like a corpse that fell out of a 100-story building. Administering 30 cc’s of “government by the people” to a corpse is not going to do anything. The only solution to national depravity is national revival. It is Canadians and Americans and Chinese and Russians and Africans seeing and tasting the goodness and rightness of the fear of God and the beauty of His Son. There is no nation on earth that is pleasant without His Word.

And we should never get tired of saying it.

May He restore His work in our day.