Two Wolves and A Sheep

"The Triumph of Representatives," William Hogarth, 1755

The Anglo-Saxon scholar Alcuin once wrote to Charlemagne, “And those people should not be listened to who keep saying the voice of the people is the voice of God, since the riotousness of the crowd is always very close to madness.” We of the 21st century can no doubt agree with Alcuin of the 8th. It’s a disturbing thing when the Mubaraks and Gadhafis of the world are unseated, mistreated or killed by the very people who brought them to power years ago. It would be shameful enough if it had been a single person who had offered himself in service to a master only to turn around and stab him in the back. But what are we to say when the instigator of this madness is an entire people? It makes the theorists’ claim that the people are a safer repository for liberty than the prince look specious at best.

One would have divine sanction for these macabre doubts, too. There is no religion in the world so opposed to the Tyranny of the 51% as Christianity. Chapter 23 of the Book of Exodus contains a prescient warning against such mob rule: “Do not follow the crowd in doing wrong. When you give testimony in a lawsuit, do not pervert justice by siding with the crowd….” The New Testament continues this theme vividly. Indeed, we Christians have the distinction of being the only religion who can claim God as a casualty of democratic vote. Though he was raised from the dead, this was the work of an autocrat.

My point is not that monarchy or oligarchy is better than good, old “demokratis,” which, as an ideal, has been there right along with us throughout all the summers of Western Civilization. No, I agree too much with Winston Churchill that “…democracy is the worst form of government - except all those other forms that have been tried from time to time.” Christianity recognizes that all men are equal, that they are given rights by their Creator – and this is the foundation of democracy. But it's not the cornerstone. Intimate knowledge of our own sin is. Truly, the only thing that makes the voice of people the voice of God is when the people know they are the farthest things possible from God. When they can acknowledge that they are the silliest, most temperamental and dangerous beings in the universe, then democratic government just may work – fingers crossed.

This knowledge of our fallenness is the vital ingredient missing from democracy across the globe today. It’s why Athens and republican Rome fell thousands of years ago and the French and Bolshevik revolutions created Hell on earth. It’s why the media’s pet Arab revolutions never know what to do but tear themselves apart once Big Brother’s gone. It’s why Occupy Wall Street’s solution is far worse than the problem. We’re no longer democrats because we recognize that we can’t trust ourselves with power over other people. We’re democrats because we think that we deserve whatever anyone else has. The same rights, the same treatment and the same amount of money. Bertrand Russell was right: "Envy is the basis of democracy."