Defending tolerance: values liberty, and democracy

Reason, Nov, 2003 by Loren E. Lomasky

Liberal Pluralism: The Implications of Value Pluralism for Political Theory and Practice, by William Galston, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 737 Pages, $19

Now THAT THE last smart bomb has fallen and soaring Predators have returned to their nests, it's time to put Iraq back together again. It will be no triumph for freedom if this President Bush's Gulf War ultimately concludes by replacing one defunct tyrant with some other autocratic strongman. Nearly everyone is agreed that Iraq must now join the family of democracies.

Because this is the Middle East, that's easier said than done. But even if somehow the circle gets squared and ballot boxes replace Ba'ath dungeons, that will not be sufficient to ensure the creation of a humane and civil Iraq. The Shi'ite community comprises some 60 percent of the Iraqi population. If it votes as a bloc, it will be capable of imposing its concept of the good society on all the other groups. The tables would thereby be turned on the formerly dominant Sunni community, with the Kurds, as ever, on the bottom. An Iraq with elections, even scrupulously free and fair elections, could easily place itself in the hands of medieval-minded mullahs and archaic ayatollahs.

Democracy is not a new idea. It achieved its first efflorescence some 2,500 years ago in Greece. Democratic Athens was a scintillating experiment in rule by the demos, the people. But things that scintillate are prone to burn out. Under the pressure of an extended military and economic struggle with its great antagonist, Sparta, Athens' democracy imploded. Transient majorities came together in the Assembly to strike vicious blows at political opponents. Scapegoating and treachery abounded. The result was civil strife, defeat by the Spartans, and replacement of the discredited democracy by rule of the so-called Thirty Tyrants. The depressing story is spelled out with unmatched brilliance in Thucydides' History of the Peloponnesian Wars. For centuries this was the classic text demonstrating the unworkability of democracy.

What was needed to make rule by the people effective was the addition of mechanisms to restrain those people from overreaching and destructively turning on themselves. However, if the restraining agent was something external to the governed, then the regime would be rule of but not by the people. So the democratic conundrum devolved into the question of how a polity not controlled by another could control itself. Division of powers, as with executive, legislature, and judiciary, was a good first step. It did not, however, directly address the limits of power. Is the body politic omnipotent in its ordinances, or is its reach somehow bounded? The answer proffered by John Locks, and by his successors in the liberal tradition, is that the individual is morally prior to the state and that people have rights to life, liberty, and property that must be respected. Majorities enjoy a prerogative to rule because collective decisions must be taken from time to time, but that prerogative is limited by individuals' rights.

Although it may run counter to contemporary demo-enthusiasms to say so, the best thing about democracy is that, of all political structures human beings have devised for themselves, it is the only one that has shown itself able over the long term to sustain societies in which most people enjoy a liberty to live their lives according to their own lights. It is liberal democracy, not the pure sovereignty of majorities, that merits plaudits, both here and in the Iraq of the future. But that is precisely why the task of political reconstruction will be so difficult. Citizens will be quick to support governance exercised by their own kind--by majorities that enforce their ideas of proper religiosity, decorum between the sexes, and respect for ancestral custom. They will, however, be loath to permit deviant minorities to wander from widely acknowledged paths of rectitude. Critics will take the institutionalization of tolerance as evidence of a shameful disinclination to distinguish between excellence and mediocrity.

It is not only Islamic fundamentalists who share such sentiments. From politically correct exponents of proper genderspeak to William Bennett's virtuecrats, the urge to police personal behavior remains formidable here in democratic America. Even Locke himself endorsed laws that provide for the "direction of a free and intelligent agent to his proper interest," adding that it "ill deserves the name of confinement which hedges us in only from bogs and precipices." Why, then, should the state deny itself the power to drain bogs and fence off precipices so as to save the unwise and unwary from themselves?

Here is one answer: People have different concepts of the good life, and any attempt to impose one favored view will be contentious. Contention leads to war, and war is the antithesis of civil peace. So better to leave people to their own ways, wayward though they be.

Here is another response: We are fallible beings who do not always judge correctly concerning matters of right and wrong. Therefore we do well to let people go their own ways rather than take the risk of imposing on them what might be mistaken moral concepts.