Chapter 5 of 27 · The Menace of the Herd, or Procrustes at Large by Erik von Kuehnelt-Leddihn
I. Identity Versus Diversity
“It is surprising to observe how constantly we find all our political questions complicated with theology.” — Proudhon.
IN ORDER to understand history in general and the issues of our troubled times in particular we must bear well in mind that political movements, political forms and establishments, are always based on instincts, sentiments, conceptions, and tendencies deeply seated in our souls. Even those who would like to see the word soul substituted by the term “glands” will have to admit that successful political ideas must have an appeal somewhere deep in our personalities. They can hardly be based on sheer intellectual suppositions.
Great stress has been put in the past on facts related to character, such as introversion and extroversion, individualism and collectivism — aspects which do not lack a certain inner connection. Yet they should be supplemented by another pair of mutually antagonistic human trends which have been hitherto neglected by political psychologists. One of these trends stands for identity and uniformity, while its counterpart expresses the yearning for diversity.
The former is an animalistic instinct which we have in common with all gregarious animals. It urges us to seek the company of our “equals,” to move in the society of people of our own social status, of our tastes, our likes and dislikes, our race and political conviction, our cultural background, our financial strength, and perhaps even of our sex.
Aristotle says that man is a “political animal,” but this trait of our character is not necessarily a consequence of the fact that we are created in the image of God. God is not a “social animal,” yet sheep, wolves, and monkeys undoubtedly are, and so also in the insect world locusts, bees, ants, and termites function as a group. The more “primitive” man is (in the characteriological not anthropological sense) the more he is guided and directed by the herd instinct, which prompts him to seek “congenial” company and to obey scrupulously the written or unwritten commands of the group.
The true “herdist” will carefully avoid acting or thinking originally, in order not to destroy the uniformity which is so dear to him, and he is also ready to rise immediately against anybody who dares to act independently and thus destroy the sacred unity of the uniform group to which he belongs. The loyal herdist will not rise alone against the sacrilegious offender; he will have the support of the rest of the circumscribed society and thus a mass action of collective protest will take place, forcing the “lonely individual” to conform or to withdraw. It must be fully borne in mind that no one of us is completely free from the influence of the herdist instinct and even the noblest among us yield to its dark appeal in one form or the other.
The herdist instinct is furthermore not only personal, in the sense that it clamors for a personal collectivism; it creates also a longing and desire for the visual or acoustic contemplation of identitarian or uniformistic phenomena. The true herdist, the man truly dominated by that inferior instinct, will not only rejoice in marching amongst twenty thousand uniformly clad soldiers, all stepping rhythmically in one direction, but he will find an almost equal gratification in contemplating the show from a balcony. He will not only be happy in sitting amidst two hundred other bespectacled businessmen, drinking beer and humming one chant in unison, but the aspect of a skyscraper with a thousand identical windows will probably impress him more than a picture by Botticelli or Zurbarán.
The herdist is the born enemy of all personal hierarchies as well as of most hierarchies of value. The modern political philosophies and the Industrial Revolution have strengthened the herdist element in all civilized countries; a Parteitag in Nuremberg, the beach of Brighton during a bank holiday, a military parade on the Red Square in Moscow or a subway train during the rush hours in New York afford voluntary or involuntary manifestations of the herdist spirit or the herdist order of our days. It is needless to emphasize that the herdist is a convinced egalitarian, that he has an inveterate suspicion regarding everything original or unique, a hatred for everything beyond his comprehension, a hostile uneasiness for things which are “low” or organically natural. The peasant with his strong personality is no less a target for his contempt and scorn than the “stuffed shirt,” the “high-hatted” aristocrat, or the “high-brow” intellectual.
The ideal dwelling place for the herdist is the city, the megalopolis with its apartment houses, clubs, cinemas, theaters, offices, factories, and restaurants. Here the herdist has ample opportunity to live the life of the masses, to lead an impersonal and lonely existence in a truly dehumanized ant heap, to love and like nobody but himself and perhaps those similar to him.
This loneliness, this solitude amongst the many, is usually not even mitigated by an awareness of the presence of God.1 The herdist who tends in the political sphere to be a Leftist — i.e., a national or an international collectivist — feels little attracted by the idea of God’s existence who after all is “different” and represents the top of the pyramid of a hierarchic system which the herdist, disbelieving in souls, is unable to accept.2 The herdist is truly the homme médiocre whom Ernest Hello has described so aptly;3 he is simply forced to stand for mediocrity because it has as the “medium” (the “fifty-fifty”), the best chance to become the rallying point and the focus for the mass movement, the mass sentiment, or the mass norm.
The antagonist of the herdist, on the other hand, the “romantic” man, is not moved by identity and uniformity but by diversity. We must be careful not to confound the true “romantic” with the “rugged individualist” who puts up a desperate and losing struggle against an impending collectivism, or with the mentally unbalanced egotist who is extravagant in order to draw general attention. One hardly finds the latter type in a rural or “backward” surrounding. Gustave de Nerval promenaded his tame lobster in the streets of Paris and not in the loneliness of the Dauphiné.
Yet there is nothing freakish in a man who longs for people different from himself, different in sex, in race, in convictions. The ideal antiherdist longs for God and to be with Him. He may long for countries far away, for travel, adventure, and a life full of variety in externals or internals. The romantic is not moved by an element of fear as the herdist who is hiding his person in an anonymous collective, but he seeks the fullness of life with all its diverse aspects. At its loftiest, his aspiration is for the fuller life of the spirit. The Germans speak of das romantische Lebensgefühl and one might therefore name the moving power in the antiherdist, the romantic spirit, a label which might well serve its purpose.
But while using this label we have to bear in mind that we do not imply a basic affinity between its meaning and the historic literary romanticism of Germany at the beginning of the nineteenth century (and even far less so of French romanticism of almost the same period). Irving Babbitt in his brilliant Rousseau and Romanticism has very aptly characterized the spirit of the Romantic Movement in Europe and little can be added to his genial analysis of this disorganized outbreak of desperate vitality between arid classicism and deadly industrialism. The Pseudo-Romanticism of our days showed such mad outbursts as weird Californian sects, blue fingernails, tree sitting, and “jitterbug” dancing. The advent of national socialism and communism was marked by a curious and sudden increase of all kinds of extravagant fads even in the religious sphere of which the hysteria in connection with Rasputin and the cheese-eating Weissenberg sect were the most conspicuous.
It should not be forgotten that none of us lacks the herd instinct completely and that there is scarcely a human being who is totally devoid of the romantic spirit. But while the herd instinct of those “who want to march through life together, along the collective path, shoulder to shoulder, wool rubbing wool and the head down” (José Ortega y Gasset) — is of the animalistic order, the romantic spirit is purely human, divine.* The plenitude of life so eagerly sought by the Romantic, as here conceived, is inaccessible to the animal. The terrifying diversity of the total cosmos (visible as well as invisible) has no meaning for the termite or the herdist with their limited existences in their limited buildings.
The great achievements — sanctity, heroism, holy wisdom, the beatific vision — are not eagerly sought for by the herdist who like the beasts of the field longs to be a “secure” animal (to use an expression of Peter Wust) instead of being proud to remain an “insecure” animal, which man is by nature and in the order of things. Hostile to adventure, which after all was one of the great magnetic powers of the Middle Ages, the herdist moves cautiously in the broad stream of the mediocre masses avoiding all extremes except those in a frenzied mass hysteria. Yet Christianity is an extreme. The yoke of Christ is not a lesser menace to his meager and miserable personality than the iron postulates of the Cross — of the same Cross which is a flat denial of his shining rule of the “fifty-fifty,” and disturbing to all his cautious calculations and plannings. Only the select can be closely confronted with the Absolute without taking flight. Only the saints, but not the “commonsensical” herd, can and will surrender to the “Holy Folly of the Cross.” For this reason we have such hatred on the part of the mediocre man, who hates any sort of hierarchy, whether of the saints or of sanctity itself. Sanctity is not only an extraordinary condition but also an adventure. And adventure belongs to the domain of the “Romantic.” Adventure is a solitary enterprise, like sanctity, and therefore not congenial to the herd and the herdist.4 The herdist in turn is bent upon “imitation” (not in the sense of an Imitatio, a following, but of mere copying), and his imitation is partly the result of his lack of originality, his lack of creative power and his inner weakness which must be covered up by some sort of protective coloring, a mimicry which makes it difficult to distinguish him from the rest and from the “norm.”5
One should, in that connection, certainly not forget the “greatest” adventure of the herdist, his banal excursions into the animalistic aspects of sex. Here he hopes to drown the despair over his loneliness in the herd. The Romantic may be alone, but he is never lonely, and that because of his knowledge of the presence of God. (Certainly, also, there is more loneliness in an apartment house or in a crammed subway than in a village with widely dispersed cottages.) Yet the restriction of adventure to the sexual sphere is the reason why our urban culture and civilization is so terribly oversexed. The great thirst does not go for “women” or “men” but for sex alone, sex for sex’ sake. It is not the attraction of the other sex, but sex as a drug and escape. It thus stands in the same category as the movies. Modern man, having abandoned the supernatural, here seeks for perhaps a last consolation, in order not to be completely overpowered by machine and monotony.
It should not be denied that the ugliness and the deadly routine of traditionless urban civilizations engendered often a nostalgic thirst in man for beauty and romance, and this may be the reason for the enormous power of Eros in the technicized world. In the shadow of soul-murdering offices and workshops, of desolate railway yards and “main streets,” without character and expression, love becomes the only emotional experience and woman the only living memory of nature and a paradise lost.
Yet natural love between the sexes is not the real fulfillment of emotional herdism. Homoeroticism is anything but rare among leading Leftists of the nationalistic or the international brand.* It is a well-known fact that the latter have openly fought for decades against laws prohibiting not only this vice but have defended even more bestial practices.** This inclination is frequently promoted (never conditioned) by specific cultural ideas and concepts.6 Identitarian cultures and groups favoured the growth of this vice in all ages.
Sex is, as Dr. Allers emphasizes it, a means of expressing love and not an original cause as well as a final end, as Freud seems to imply. Genuine love is never love of one’s self but love of another “person.” The greatest love is the love of God and the lasting “marital” love between the sexes overbridging the immense psychological abyss between man and woman is not unrelated to the love of God; it is basically the love for one of His children. The very delight in the otherness of the beloved person is a tacit, loving recognition of God’s all-embracing greatness. True love between man and woman accepts the mysterious variety of God’s creation whose harmony even original sin did not entirely destroy.
The intrinsic immorality of perverted love lies in its being fundamentally egocentric. It is the rejection of the grandeur and the mysterious diversity of this God-made world; it is love of one’s own person in the same sex and therefore nothing else but sexualized egoism.*** And herein lies also the ethical inferiority of herdism. The true herdist (who certainly is not always a pervert) is nothing but an egoist who cannot tolerate anybody differing from himself. John Doe, the identitarian, wants a nation, a world, a universe peopled by millions of John Does. He cannot sympathize nor like anybody at variance with John Doe. No wonder that his wishful dream is a humanity of John Does without God or Devil. The herdist is by necessity a humanitarian.
Humanitarianism had always a great difficulty in seeking to stabilize its position. The denial of God and soul created an anthropocentrism which by a trend of its own tended to identify humanity with “nature.” Humanitarianism, which started with the most sentimental premise (man is God), ended therefore finally with the acceptance of the law of the jungle. The Leftist mentality of today is hardly characterized by a loving mildness. Irving Babbitt in his Rousseau and Romanticism has pointed out that the early “romantic” theatrical productions attacked primarily the lachrymose glands of the spectators. Profuse weeping and crying took place even on the stage itself. What a contradiction to the latest phase of humanitarianism and anthropocentrism! The young National Socialist is not less tearless than the young Communist. Ilya Ehrenburg wrote a novel called Moscow Does Not Believe in Tears, and indeed it does not. And so the old dictum of Grillparzer holds true:
| Der Weg der neuen Bildung geht Von Humanität Durch Nationalität Zur Bestialität. — (1849) |
(The way of the new culture goes From Humanitarianism Through Nationalism To Beastliness.) |
This was probably little understood during the poet’s own lifetime, but has received a bitter and clear meaning in our days. It has ceased to be paradoxical and shows the fatal evolution of godless group feeling and déraciné collectivism.
The masses and their leaders who pay such fervent homage to herdist ideologies are, as E. v. Kuehnelt-Leddihn emphasized it, of an extreme blood-thirstiness and the circenses offered to the antique and modern masses were and are spectacularly sanguinary displays. The indignation of the American masses in the first six months of World War II about the delay of the great carnage was boundless. The lack of terrifying headlines cost the Allies many sympathies. (We still remember the outcry about the “phony war.”)
The individual courage of the herdist may be limited, but attacking with the herd he can become an easy victim of a true mass psychosis and perform “wonders.” The Soviet films dealing with revolution and civil war have always emphasized the success of mass frenzy. The herdist’s lack of true humanity even makes him predisposed for sadistic acts such as we have witnessed during the Spanish Civil War or in many a concentration camp.
We must furthermore always bear in mind that equality presupposes the perpetual application of force; equality after all is an unnatural condition — it is just as unnatural as a completely straight line, a geometrical plain, a perfect circle, distilled water, etc. It needs the intervention of human agencies who have to curtail and to stem the natural growth and development sometimes in the most brutal and cynical way.7 Docteur Guillotin, Procrustes, the mythological Hellenic bandit, and the magistrate of Strasbourg who decided during the French Revolution to demolish the tower of the medieval cathedral because it was higher than the surrounding houses, belong all to the same category.8 Dostoyevski, in his Possessed, has predicted accurately how an egalitarian superdemocracy would function.9 The Soviets have fulfilled this prophecy to the letter.
At this phase of our analysis it would be advantageous to draw up a chart which summarizes the elements and conditions of herdism and romanticism. This tabulation does not express the desire to support or to confirm any sort of modern environmentalism which tries to use the natural influence of environment as basis for a new materialistic determinism. This new environmental determinism (as, for instance, preached by John Dewey and his behaviorist forerunners) is an even more evil invention than Calvin’s doctrine concerning predestination. Environment is merely a factor, an influence exercised on the human free will, but not a fatal and coercive power.
As a result of this last item:
| Exaggerated worship of health | Indifference to health |
| The “hectic life” | The contemplative life |
| Doctor worship (“Men in White”) | Worship of saints |
| Speed (Auto as expression of our mortality) | Slowness, procrastination |
| Cowardice | Courage |
| Cautiousness | Carelessness |
| Escapism | Facing of issues |
Such a list contains naturally many sweeping generalizations and it could without doubt be continued ad nauseam. It represents a very superficial effort to bring the issues into a system and only one of the items has been analyzed as to some of its final logical deductions. It is nevertheless obvious that all these separate aspects are closely interrelated, interconnected, and interdependent.* True herdism, elevated from the status of a low and contemptible instinct to the supreme level of an ideology, of a Weltanschauung, has become a tremendous force in our modern culture and civilization. The herdist ideologies, based on that powerful animal instinct, have attacked and transformed most spheres of human activities including love, sex, and politics. The different “democratic”** (and superdemocratic totalitarian) parties of the twentieth century have continued and fostered this process of dehumanization of our Christian culture to a degree hitherto unknown in the annals of human existence.
The confusion about the alleged harmony between modern ochlocracy and Catholicism is largely due to a great deal of wishful thinking, misunderstood patriotism, and the ambiguous elasticity of certain technical terms. Let us take, for instance, the word equality. How frequently do we hear responsible Catholics talking glibly about the equality of human beings! Maritain has warned all about the indiscriminate use of this term and he proposed to use the expression Unité du genre humain.10 Gustave Thibon has not only taken egalitarianism severely to task but he has also pointed out that the efforts to create equality have engendered at the same time the most violent inequalities. All those who by their free will or their disposition are unable to conform to the prescribed standards of equality — and there will always be such a minority — will after the efforts of leveling stand out more distinctly than in a nonuniform society.11 These are then usually the “traitors” who do not “play the game” and must be executed, exiled, or weeded out like the aristos under Robespierre, the burzhuys under Lenin, or the Jews under Adolf Hitler.
It must furthermore be borne in mind that equality stands for monotony and not for harmony. A harmonious melody can only be established by different unidentical musical tones. These tones must be assembled and have to follow in a certain sequence; otherwise they will result in chaos and not in melody.12 Human society presupposes such an inequality and unity. Thibon has seen very clearly this issue which can only be solved in the sign of love.
“It consists in purifying and organizing the inequalities from the point of view of a deeper equality, or, to put it more precisely, in making inequality serve unity. But this unity, what else is it but love and what is love without God.”13
This clarification is quite necessary because many a good Christian — and that holds true for most of those living in the Western Hemisphere — has an unclear notion about human equality.14 The American Declaration of Independence mentions the fact that the human beings are “created equal.”* This is true in the theological sense, and in the theological sense only. Two newly born babes are equal before God whether their parents are white or colored, American or foreign, registered in the Virginia Blue Book or in the rogues gallery. This theological equality continues until the time comes when they commit morally responsible acts. Judas Iscariot and St. John the Evangelist were equally conceived in original sin and free from personal sin, but how different their end! Heaven and hell are not identical. It is actually the privilege of our environmental determinists to discard the terms “saint” and “sinner” and to supplant them by pragmatic expressions like “social-unsocial” or “adapted-unadapted.” Dostoyevski prophesied this moral relativism in his chapter on the Grand Inquisitor (Brothers Karamazov), where he sees humanity declaring through the mouth of its science that there are no trespasses and no sinners but only “hungry people.”
From a purely human and material point of view we are utterly unequal — unequal in the eyes of our fellow men (which matters less) but also unequal from an absolute material standard. From that point of view we are not even born equal; the syphilitic babe and the healthy newcomer in this world are different in material quality. The stupid and the intelligent man or woman, the physically strong and the physically weak, the learned and the unlearned — they are all humanly unequal from the aspects compared. And of course there is also a hierarchy of characteristics. The Theist will give precedence to spiritual qualities over intellectual qualities, and most people will value intellect higher than mere bodily strength.
Apparently a great deal of misinterpretation is floating about concerning the interpretation of the American Declaration of Independence. The signers would certainly have been the worst hypocrites had they given to their document the same interpretation that so many give to it today.15 We can understand their attitude only if we remember the fact that the basis of the American Republic is an aristocratic whiggish one, which largely lacked that deeper “democratic” element in social relations as we find it in southern and eastern Europe, and perhaps in South America.
The word “democratic,” in connection with the Catholic (or schismatic) world, is, as we have pointed out at the beginning, not a happy one. In these countries, whether they have a highly hierarchic social structure or not, we find a certain “demophil” sentiment. De Tocqueville remarks in his De la Démocratie en Amérique that Americans are often astonished and even shocked about the familiarity between masters and servants in France. The insolence of Sancho Pansa also fits perfectly into this picture. Such Catholic pseudo-egalitarian sentiment can obviously not spring from the acceptance of a human equality, which does not exist, but from the aforementioned fact that the most important human value — the degree of sinfulness or sanctity — is hidden to our eye and only revealed in its completeness to God. The nonchalantly polite but nevertheless free interclass manners in the Catholic world are the natural consequence of a conventional (nonideological) egalitarianism, based on the profound knowledge that our final status — on the other side of the grave — will be basically different from our present one. Further more, because of the human fact that we are all images of God and potential saints (not excluding sinners like the young Augustine or Maria Magdalena), it follows that Catholics, grown up in a Catholic culture, pay reverence to everybody regardless of his color, class, and publicly manifested morality. The attacks against human dignity on the other hand are attacks against God’s dignity. There is only a pragmatic but not a basic difference between a Nazi and a Bolshevist concentration camp on one side, and the looting and desecration of a Church in Catalonia on the other,
“He who has never looked through man’s outward condition to the naked soul,” says Channing, “and there seen God’s image commanding reverence is a stranger to the distinctive love of Christianity.”
The great struggle of our time is the twofold assault to which Christian doctrine is exposed from both groups of identitarian herdists. There are first of all the universal herdists clamoring for the absolute equality of all human beings, provided they accept “proletarian” standards of wealth, behavior, and morals, which Communists insist upon. This involves logically the denial of the existence of morals and the acceptance of a determinism* as preached by Teachers College, Columbia, and now gradually conquering the youth of the United States.
Needless to say that every successful attack against the concept of free will results in an almost total degradation of human dignity.’ It puts us beyond good and evil and fosters a fantastic quietism or an even more fantastic irresponsibility. It is nevertheless amusing to see determinists of all heretical denominations — Calvinists, Marxists, Behaviorists — flocking to clubs and leagues defending civil liberties. Liberties to be enjoyed without free will! One sees how far the prostitution of logic has led many of us. This great confusion is also apparent in the standing phrase that “democracy stands for equality before the law,” whereas the law is largely interested in iniquities and inequalities.16 There is, of course, one great excuse for these confused minds and that is that they all have continued in the bottom of their hearts to believe in free will. Determinism is too inhuman and suicidal to be generally and sincerely accepted and the charge which remains is largely that of hypocrisy.17
The second attack against integral Christendom, gaining momentum right now, comes from the nonuniversal herdists. They put the human beings into watertight hierarchic categories frequently of a racial nature. This new racial determinism, creating racial aristocracies, responsible to a collective “race” but not to a personal God, and racial proletariats with no hope of an earthly salvation, is not less a danger than the classic panherdism. The desire for racial purity in order to achieve the perfectly uniform herd leads to brutal persecution and finally to the strictest imaginable uniformism. The Germanies without the Jews will be an even more monotonous place than the Germanies with persecuted Jews. We will experience in Central Europe the integral boredom which Myerezhkovski considers to be the fatal characteristic of the Realm of the Antichrist.18
If we look at the historical record of herdist ideologies in relation to the largest Christian Church then we see a great amount of mutual suspicion, strife, and condemnation. European ochlocracy in the political and cultural sense of the nineteenth century (i.e., “liberal democracy”) took root in a rather dechristianized society where the Church was purely on the defensive (1789–1919). We have on the other hand no right to doubt the sincerity of many Catholics — European or American — in their positive acceptance not only of political ochlocracy but even of some of the more elusive tenets related to its underlying philosophy of a herdist pattern.
We should always bear in mind that the Church and ochlocracy cooperated badly in Europe, that the forces inimical to the Church always fostered ochlocratic tendencies. One cannot dismiss the latter fact as purely accidental. Of course there is no incompatibility on dogmatic grounds. The question moves on a plain where in dubiis libertas is written in flaming letters: “In doubtful matters, liberty.” Yet the atmosphere, the parfum of the Church and that of “democracy,” when blended in the political and cultural sphere, emits a bad stench. A parallel reading of the works of our authoritative “democratic” essayists, poets, and other creative writers (from the Leaves of Grass to the City of Man) with the encyclicals of Gregory XVI and Pius IX would give a mortal shock to many “progressive” Catholics who think that the Church ought to come to terms with the spirit of our time . . .19 (which may, overnight, become the spirit of yesterday). These encyclicals at least express the spirit and policy of the Church in unmistakable directness and clearness.
Efforts have never been wanting to bring Catholicism and ochlocracy under the same denominator, and these efforts can easily be traced back to two specific sources: (1) wishful thinking influenced by the desire to meet certain situations, and (2) wishful thinking due to environmental and personal circumstances.
In the first category we find a few theorists who saw (rightly) a danger in the autocratic aspirations of monarchs of the type of James I, rulers who displayed caesaropapistic tendencies (the “Divine Rights of Kings”), tendencies which unfortunately were not entirely confined to Protestant rulers although the latter fell an easier prey to such temptations. In order to counteract these aspirations. St. Robert Bellarmine and other of his fellow Jesuits proposed a mixed form of government in which aristocratic and democratic elements were called to check a proclivity which Protestantism so eagerly pretended to oppose — idol worship, this time in the form of the worship of a single human being.
In the second category we find Catholic thinkers and political theorists who grew up in a non-Catholic cultural atmosphere pregnant with ochlocratic ideas; these were usually guided by the desire to find a justification for the political ideas of their surroundings and to provide ochlocracy and democratism* with a background of Catholic thought. The representatives of this category are often brilliant Catholic philosophers, theologians, or controversialists, but they frequently lack the understanding for Catholic mentality and Catholic tradition. They are sometimes Jewish or Protestant converts or (as in most cases) members of the Catholic dispersion.
Their task does not lack a certain irony. A non-Catholic civilization provided them with a finished product in a political atmosphere tense with ochlocratic propaganda and powerful ochlocratic elements in their culture. As a result they feel they have to write an a posteriori defense of something which they have hardly helped to bring into existence. They are engaged in an effort to baptize with greater or less success a form of government and civilization which their spiritual forefathers looked upon with hatred and suspicion. Frequently in their enthusiasm they impute to ochlocracy intentions and characteristics which are alien to its actual form and tradition.
Naturally they are intelligent enough to be aware of the fact that the justifications for the “democratic” order given by their countrymen or even coreligionists are not “watertight” from a Catholic point of view, and that the Rousseauan influence on the usual concept of “democracy” is extremely strong. They construe therefore very cleverly, and with good logical arguments, a case for a non-Rousseauan democracy which is at one and the same time a theorem and a “program.” Dr. Mortimer Adler is a radical example of this school of thought, radical because he goes to the extreme of calling democracy the “only good and morally justifiable form of government.” But here we are more interested with the less radical group which sees in ochlocracy (“democracy”) one of the good forms of government or perhaps the best of the good forms of government which as we know was never advocated by the Founding Fathers and has even less chance to succeed the present constitution, the representative republic.
Yet their programmatic “democracy,” purified from the pagan conceptions of Rousseau, has little hope for success in the Catholic world because the average (and sometimes even the outstanding) Catholic hardly takes himself as seriously, from a secular point of view, as does the Protestant or atheist. Our great Catholic democratists, who are such excellent logicians, lack frequently the insight into the Catholic mentality of the rank and file in Catholic countries. The “typical” Catholic of the Mundus Catholicus is certainly not a communitarian. While not hostile to a personal attachment, he resents excessive legal ties at the same time. Neither is he free of a healthy cynicism and worldly pessimism, which traits are rare in the (more naïve) Protestant. If medieval man would have been told that he could “appoint” his kings or superiors, he might have become quite interested in the proposition. Yet on discovering that his vote was scheduled to be drowned in an ocean of millions of other votes his reaction would have been that of a man whose leg had been pulled successfully.*
The Catholic of the Catholic tradition is (without being necessarily an egoist) a man whose outlook starts with the “I” and not the “We.” Every political or cultural ochlocracy is based on the “We,” which makes it so unacceptable to men deeply personalistic and alien to the Protestant concepts of “individualism” or the eastern enthusiasm for collectivism. While all modern non-Catholics (in culture) begin their philosophies with the preamble that men (or specific groups of men) are more “like” than “different,”* the reaction of the average Catholic (in the Catholic world) would be utter astonishment if not disapproval.
If there were nothing else than the final and inevitable development of political ochlocracy into the modern party dictatorships20 it ought to be enough to make the Catholics more skeptical toward this governmental tendency and its ultimate consequences. (We refer here also to the demand of “more democracy!”) It is not a good counterargument to state that everything is evil in a state of exaggeration. Herdism is essentially a “low” sentiment. As nucleus and carrying power of a philosophy of earthly existence it becomes definitely an evil. A real good on the other hand can never be exaggerated enough. There can never be, in human society, enough of the acceptance of the Cross and of charity, never enough loving differentiation and hierarchy, never enough of the spirit of Maundy Thursday when our Lord, the pope, the emperors, kings, and bishops knelt down to wash the feet of twelve Apostles or of twelve beggars. Nor is the custom discontinued in our day. This is hierarchy and charity, order and love.
* Irving Babbitt in his Rousseau and Romanticism speaks of the high inner qualities of imitation. Yet he speaks distinctly of the imitation of “superiors” (the Imitatio Christi, for instance) and not of the imitation of “equals,” which alone fosters the coming into existence of the uniform herd. It must again be emphasized that our text regards the label “romantic” as devoid of its historical connotations.
* It is not mere coincidence that the great bard of democratism in its most herdist and antipersonalist connotation was an extremely repulsive homosexual—Walt Whitman. It is also significant that Thomas Mann in a public speech in the defense of the Weimar Republic cited Walt Whitman as supreme witness for the new democratic sentiment of comradeship, alluding even to his psychological aberration. Hans Blüher, an outstanding pro-Nazi German writer, on the other hand accused the Jews of treating this perversion with ridicule and contempt although “it serves as basis for political cooperation.” (Cf. his “Die Erhebung Israels gegen die christlichen Güter,” Hamburg, 1931.)
** This is a logical philosophical development once man has denied the existence of a spiritual soul which primarily differentiates man from the brute.
*** A terrible conglomeration of egoism, self-love, and vanity is apparent in the letters of the unfortunate Oscar Wilde to Lord Alfred Douglas.
* See Appendix II.
** The reader is here reminded of our explanation of this term in the explanatory note: “What of Democracy.”
* See Irving Brant’s James Madison (New York, 1941) on the different efforts to clarify Jefferson’s formulation in the Constitution of Virginia. George Mason, for instance, proposed “. . . that all men are created equally free and independent,” which gives to this proclamation a libertinarian, and more manifestly nonegalitarian sense.
* Herein lies the great dilemma for the Communist Party. A revolutionary movement accepting determinism and denying free will cannot expect much revolutionary élan and little responsibility in action. The anarchists who had never accepted the Marxian fatalism of “inevitable developments” developed a greater dynamism and believed in the “propaganda of the deed.” They were a more sanguinary but less sordid class than their Marxian fellow revolutionaries.
* I.e., the philosophy of the “democratic way of life.”
* This lack of political interest is a problem in every representative government in large countries where the principle of “one man — one vote” has been introduced. About one fourth of all Americans do not go regularly to the polls. Educational, not property qualifications for the franchise, would be less democratic, but politically justified. Also qualifications of civic (and military) merits should be considered.
* This question can be argued either way; we are here only interested in the psychological reaction caused by this statement.
The Menace of the Herd, or Procrustes at Large
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