ON DEMOCRACY AND AUTOCRACY: PERSPECTIVE ON CENSORSHIP IN TODAY'S WORLD D. B. Timmins, PhD Preface In my early arrogance at having been accepted for graduate studies at Harvard University after graduation from the U of Utah, I allowed hubris to lead me to the thought that at last I would have the opportunity to study under some of the great minds of the day. My principal concern was that my preparatory studies at the U would enable me to compete at Harvard without disgracing myself. I soon learned that my readings at the U, as directed by Professors, Durham, Wormuth, Rich, and others, was at least as broadranging and deep, if not more so, than most of my Harvard classmates. And when after earning my PhD, with honors, I went to Paris as Deputy Economic Advisor to the U.S. Mission to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (later also serving as Executive Assistant to our NATO Ambassador) I found that it was the education I'd received at the U which proved more instructive and applicable in my work than even what I'd learned at Harvard. My initial arrogance quickly matured into an appreciation of the wisdom and instructional astuteness of my University of Utah professors. This article is written in part in appreciation for their contribution to my thirty-eight year career as a professional diplomat. Virtue, Democracy, and Censorship One doesn't usually remember many specific utterances by one's university professors, especially after forty-five years. But in the years immediately after WW II the Political Science Department of the University of Utah had a particularly notabled roster of professors: Francis Worthmuth, who turned out an impressive number of students who went on to distinguished careers in politics, law, and diplomacy; Sam Rich, who had served during the war at the American Embassy in Madrid, and went out of his way to recruit his more able students for careers in diplomacy; and G. Homer Durham, later Academic Vice President of the U, President of Arizona State University, and Commissioner for Higher Education of the State of Utah. There of course were others, but these three were most influential in their effects on my thinking and subsequent career. I had the opportunity to contribute a paper to a Festschrift published by Professor Wormuth's students in honor of his retirement from the U at the end of a distinguished career. So far as I am aware, no such memorial has been published for either Professors Durham or Rich. This article is by way of being my personal Festshrift for them. I remember in particular a lecture by Professor Durham, my first instructor in political theory, in detail. Dr. Durham reminded his beginning classes that almost all great examples of artistic, cultural, and literary creativity occurred under autocratic governments. This, of course, was before the later post-WW II explosion of US global cultural dominance -- such as it is. Dr. Durhan's explanation was that such creative freedom has without exception always led to excesses which in time bring the state to the brink of dissolution. Sovereign autocrats, not being subject to prior law, can in such event reach out to censor, imprison, execute, or exile the causes of such risky excesses. Whereas magistrates in democracies, being but other citizens elevated for the sole purpose of executing existing law, have no such powers. Democracies must therefore depend on widespread, if not universal, civic virtue (and, historically, upon strict censorship) to avoid the social perils of excessive creativity and diversity. Durham believed that this weakness of democracies, results in a natural cycle. Athens and Rome, among other historic examples, started out as virtuous republics; but having weakened censorship in response to criticism of their increasingly prosperous citizenry who wished to share the cultural richness of more autocratic states, both Athens and Rome soon found their society deteriorating into licentious abuse of this freedom, in no great delay bringing survival of the state into question. Every former republic without exception has thus eventually found itself compelled to resort to autocracy to hold the state together and defend itself against foreign enemies, or experience overthrow and dissolution. This, indeed, is one of the principal reasons most political theorists have considered democracy the most unstable form of government. Those in the least acquainted with political theory will recall Aristotle's classification of states into one of three categories (six, taking into account the perverse mirror-image of each): Monarchy, or rule by a single sovereign above the law but benignly motivated to promote the prosperity and civic welfare of his subjects (and its perverse opposite, Tyranny, in which a single, evil ruler represses and abuses his subjects in the interest of his own power and glory). Aristocracy, or rule by the gifted few (contrasted with its perverse negative Oligarchy, or the powerful few ruling in the interests of their own property and influence). And, finally, democracy, or rule of all under previously established law, rather than by a single man or or a few men. As noted, democracy has historically been distrusted by philosophers and wise men because of its inevitable tendancy to degenerate into ochlocracy, or mob rule -- or to end in resort to autocracy to avoid dissolution. Many of the Founding Fathers of the United States, including Alexander Hamilton, wished to create the new nation as a monarchy with George Washington as hereditary king, fearing that democracy in the New World could not long endure. Moral Virtue and the Roots of American Democracy Alexis de Tocqueville, early French visitor and commentator on American society and government, despite his open admiration of many things American, commented negatively on the hyper-virtuous religiosity, narrow-mindedness, and resultant cultural poverty of the typical citizen of the United States. As a representative of one of the great, artistically and literarily liberal autocracies of the day, he considered this intellectual impoverishment too great a price to pay for the civil freedoms he otherwise admired in America. Contemporary America and Contamination by World Culture As one reflects on the enormous changes in American society, particularly over the last two generations -- the abolition of even the most benign forms of literary censorship in the name of constitutionally guaranteed "freedom of expression" to the point where the most explicit forms of written and graphic pornography are now found on the news stands of every grocery store; virtually nude dancing is now performed not only in back alley porn shows, but in the most frequented casinos in Las Vegas and Atlantic City; and performance on TV of dance routines closely mimicking the most explicit sex acts, are entering every household in the country, one must ask how much license democracy can endure before the demands of decent people compels a turn towards autocratic government. Talk shows are full of "gay" men and women insisting that their demands for "civil rights protection" to parade in the streets with their arms around one another, to lie in the public parks openly displaying their sexual perversity, and arguing for their right to engage their sexual preferences in the close quarters of combat ships, tanks, and airplanes, clearly present an assault on the civil rights of the majority to be free of activities most consider outrageous. Here is a powerful argument in favor of discretion and enforced social restraint. No one cares (or knows) what goes on in the privacy of the bedroom. But that is not enough for the "outted" homosexual in pursuit of securing his "civil rights". He (she) wishes openly to flaunt this newly asserted freedom. The demand for the "right" of gay unisex couples to adopt children, and the accompaning assertion that this will have no effect on the youngsters' emerging sexuality as they enter their teens is both unproved and socially risky in the extreme. Nor does it take account of the at least equivalent civil right of parents to rest secure in confidence that adult youth leaders will not be assaulting their children at summer camps or weekend activities. Yet all available studies establishing the social risks involved in such libertinism are attacked by gay rights lawyers as "anecdotal"; and statistics which establish that eighty per cent of youth abuse is by homosexual adults, is dismissed as "disinformation". What is one to think of the state of public morals when local officials are afraid to prosecute teenage athletes for "date-raping" scandalous numbers of underage high school girl classmates out of concern that the ACLU will defend the young males' cases on grounds that "no crime was really committed"? Propaganda of the Deed and Contemporary Political Terrorism Professor Durham and the able staff he had recruited did an extraordinary job of preparing students for the world they would be living in. Durham insisted that Political Science students undertake broad interdisciplinary studies -- anthropology, geography, economics, and the theory of revolutionary terrorism. They also sent us to the original sources for readings in political theory -- something some of us didn't experience from any other college teachers of the time until we entered graduate school. A summer seminar in which we read Bakunin and Sorel, among other authors, prepared us to understand why Arab, Irish, or Latin terrorists are willing to blow up busloads of school children or shops full of innocent shoppers, based on the theory of the "Propaganda of the Deed", thus attracting the attention of the world media and securing millions of dollars worth of free publicity to explain to the world the movements' particular grievances. I understood exactly what was happening from the first terrorist acts in the Middle East and Northern Ireland thirty-five years ago, while many of my Foreign Service colleagues still hadn't a clue why their educated, otherwise reasonable, Arab, Latin American, or Irish friends could behave in such apparently contemptible fashion against innocent women and children. Education and the Roots of Civic Virtue Perhaps quotation of a paragraph from the work of one of the world's greatest thinkers Baruch Spinoza, coupled with a piercing insight by the great British statesman/thinker Edmund Burke commenting on the excesses of the French Revolution, might give us some insight as to what has been behind the deterioration of American morals and civic virtue and what might be done, short of turning to autocracy, to buy more time before American society at large falls into the chaos of summer 1992 Los Angeles -- or any day Washington, D.C., our utterly shameful national capital; or Miami, which foreign tourists now avoid out of fear of being "Z'd" to death. In his Tractatus Politicus (chapter 6), which the author took care to have published only after his death, Spinoza said: ". . . That dominion is best, where men pass their lives in unity, and the laws are kept unbroken. For it is certain, that seditions, wars, and contempt or breach of the laws, are not so much to be imputed to the wickedness of the subjects, as to the bad state of a dominion. For men are not born fit for citzenship, but must be made so. . . . . Men's natural passions are everywhere the same: and if wickedness more prevails, and more offenses are committed in one commonwealth than in another, it is certain that the former has not enough pursued the end of unity, nor framed its laws with sufficient forethought; and that, therefore, it has failed in making quite good its right as a commonwealth." Burke, for thirty years a Member of Parliament, one of the rare supporters of the essentially conservative independence struggle of the American colonies, but opponent of the radical French Revolution which sought to remake society from the ground up -- the two movements which would determine the Western world's course for the next two centuries -- saw that it was the separation of powers, pragmatic, nonideological style of politics, and above all civic virtue, which made the difference in the two systems. To Burke, all political power is ultimately artificial, and distinctly secondary to the ties of community and custom that actually hold societies together. For Burke, Sovereignty is not a right, but a trust; and abuses of sovereignty always provoke people to challenge it (a judgment we have just seen once more validated by events in Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union). Said Burke, "I feel an insuperable reluctance in giving my hand to destroy any established institution of government upon a theory, however plausible is may be." (Today, when the constant creation of new and untried agencies and institutions of government is rampant, should one not urge equal caution regarding the opposite tendancy?). Excessive Cultural Adventurism and the Decline of Civic Virtue Might it not be that we Americans have in our enthusiasm for unbridled democracy, forgotten these lessons of history, and gone too far in giving room in our society for the cultural, artistic, and literary diversity and adventurism of less republican governments, adopting too many "plausibly laudable" theoretical social welfare programs alien to two hundred years of the established American way of life. Perhaps it is excessive cultural diversity which has brought into risk the civic unity essential to the successful operation of the republican government framed by our more virtuous Founding Fathers for a simpler age? Must we soon be compelled either to reframe some our constitutional checks to enable the Executive to enforce more restraint on the part of American authors, TV dramatists, artists, dancers, and athletic heroes; or, alternatively, could we not perhaps return to an earlier view of the purposes of education, reintroducing elements into our educational system which we've disgarded over the years as more appropriate to the church or the home rather than to government supported institutions? Indeed, even should such an attempt be made, the question arises whether it would be possible at this late date to pursuade Americans to accept more self-restraint (civic virtue) and to depend less on the state to solve every personal trial and tribulation life brings? In this regard, let's take into account that less than a quarter of young Americans grow to adulthood in a traditional family, which American society has in the past almost unconciously relied upon to impart the community values Burke felt knit societies together and the instruction in civic virtue Spinoza recognized as essential to well-ordered nations. And probably less than fifteen percent get any sort of significant moral instruction through regular attendance at church or synagogue, the agencies beyond the family and school traditionally depended upon to transmit such values. Who then is imparting the instruction in virtuous behavior essential to the operation of our democratic system now that the schools have abdicated their responsibility and families are breaking down? Spinoza warns us that when youngsters break the laws, do not respect civic authority, and hold in contempt political leaders, this is to be imputed to the failure of the state to educate its future citizens in civic virtue, not to the young "who are not born fit for citizenship but must be made so". Nor should we forget what Burke adds: that all political power ultimately depends on the invisible ties of custom and community that knit society together, not on the sizew of our armed forces, the numbers of police officers, the salaries and perquisites we accord our legislators, or the splendor of our legislative chambers or courthouses. If society is changing faster than custom and sense of community can spontaneously adapt to -- and if no one is taking care deliberately to instil a sense of community, or conciously passing on to new generations the customs and traditions vital to the stability of the state -- what then? We have seen how Iran, changing faster under the Shah's impetus for moderization than society could adapt to, turned to reactionary mullah's to restore a sense of social purpose and unity. Nor should one forget that it took France, one of the leading nations of Europe, from 1789 to 1870 -- almost a century of revolution, counter-revolution, Republics, Empires, Second Republics, and Second Empires -- to reestablish enough accepted "cake of custom" to again enjoy stable government under the "provisional" Third Republic -- which endured from 1870 to 1939, outlasting all of its presumably more permanent rivals). And there've been two more French Republics since then. But before deciding that moderating the pace of social change, or reemphasizing moral instruction in our schools hold the solutions to contemporary society's ills, we should listen to Reinhold Niebuhr, a great contemporary thinker, reflecting on the lessons of the Holocaust of WW II. Niebuhr cautions that merely paying closer attention to the education of children and young adults may not be enough. Says Niebuhr: "The most persistent error of modern educators and moralists is the assumption that our social difficulties are due to the inability of the social sciences to keep pace with the physical sciences. . . . [With] a little more time, a little more adequate moral and social pedagogy and a generally higher development of human intelligence, our social problems will approach solution. . . . "What is lacking among all these moralists, whether religious or rational, is an understanding of the brutal behavior of all human collectives, and the power of self-interest and collective egoism in all intergroup relations. . . . The easy subservience of reason to prejudice and passion, and the consequent persistence of irrational egoism, particularly in group behavior, make social conflict an inevitable in human history, probably to its end. . . . Defeated on a more obvious level, it will express itself in more subtle forms. . . . It insinuates itself into the social impulse so that a man's devotion to his community always means the expression of transferred egoism as well as of altruism. Reason may check egoism in order to fit it harmoniously into a total body of social [behavior]. But the same force of reason is bound to justify the egoism of the individual as a legitamte element in the total body of vital capacities. . . . The ultilitarian movement of the nineteenth century had the laudable purpose of pursuading men to achieve a decent harmony between selfish and social impulse. . . [But] it is significant that it merely provided the rising middle class with a nice moral justification for following its own interest. . . . . The insinuation of the interests of the self into even the most ideal enterprises and most universal objectives . . . makes hypocricy an inevitable by-product of all virtuous endeavor. . . . Men are no more able to eliminate self-interest from their nobler pursuits than they are able to express it fully without hiding it behind and compounding it with honest efforts at or dishonest pretentions of universality." (Moral Man & Immoral Society ).