The instinct of columnists, when they realize to their abject horror that they have made some factual mistake, or misrepresented some speaker in a material way, is to put a little correction in the most discreet and discrete place they can find, generally as an isolated footnote at the end of their next column. But I like the idea of putting it up front, and waving it around a bit. This is because I think the best “teachable moments” come from mistakes; and our own, not other people’s.
As my learned colleague John Robson pointed out to me the other day, I misrepresented in this space last Sunday the position of the great scholar, ecclesiastic and poet Alcuin of York (died AD 804). This happened when I tried to trace, too shallowly, the origin of the phrase “Vox populi, vox Dei” (the voice of the people is the voice of God). I merely checked my memory against the reasonably authoritative Oxford Dictionary of Quotations (the second edition of 1953; later editions are too irritating, for reasons we won’t go into here). As in other such dictionaries, the phrase alone is given without context, and as in the better ones, a source is provided: “Letter to Charlemagne, AD 800, Works, Epis. 127.”
Now, my reader will be appalled to learn I had not a copy of the works of this estimable Yorkshireman on my own shelves, and no time to visit a library. I simply assumed, without thinking it through, that Alcuin was a proponent of this idea: that God, somehow and sometimes, may speak through “the people.”
I myself don’t believe that for a moment, and I have a much lesser mind than Alcuin’s, so why in God’s name would I simply assume this?
As Robson informed me, the full sentence from which this phrase was extracted could be found even through Wikipedia. They in turn had lifted it from an equally online Oxford quotations database:
“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.”
May Alcuin forgive me.
In that sentence we see, stabbed to the heart, the problem with all “democracy.” That problem is not with the mechanisms of voting and representative government, per se. Some arrangement must be made to govern a country (in the broadest sense of “a tract of land,” not in the narrowed sense of “a modern nation state”), and a parliamentary or representative democracy might well be the least bad way of doing it. We must not cheaply dismiss our constitution, without prudently considering the alternatives.
But as I was saying last week, and wish to say again, from this different angle, democracy becomes a lethal enemy of all human freedom and decency from the moment “populist” ideas are taken too much to heart. For a “people” that is of a single mind is not a deliberative assembly. It is instead a howling mob.
I had the remarkable luck to have this basic, “Tory” political lesson instilled by “events” when I was a child, for, at the age of seven, I was caught in the middle of a bloodthirsty mob in Lahore, Pakistan. I had the opportunity to see, with my child’s eyes, human blood quite literally running in a gutter. It has been evident to me ever since that the voice of the people most assuredly is not the voice of God. It is the “vox et praeterea nihil” (a voice and nothing more).
Alcuin is not merely a “medieval thinker,” he comes from a period that is glibly described as the “Dark Ages” in our schools, to encourage students to ignore it (Indeed, our contemporary schoolboy or schoolgirl is likely to graduate with “high self-esteem” and no confident knowledge of anything that happened before he or she was born). This was, in fact, the formative period of our civilization, and everything we are depends on some understanding of it.
But while I may seem to have been trying to be cute, above, I am in fact rather ashamed of having fallen thoughtlessly into the same error that I frequently condemn in other people. It is the error of not taking seriously the more distant past, and the formative thinkers of our civilization; of being casually dismissive of minds far wiser than our own.
One of the things that built our civilization, and has contributed to every other great civilization, is reverence for the past. With its extinction comes the extinction of the civilization itself: it loses all of its moorings.
In this case, the mooring we have lost is the deep understanding that human beings are fallible, and that human beings “in the mass” are dangerously fallible. That the truth is something which exists outside of us, not something we can ever vote on. That, “the voice of the people” is something we should, in sanity, instinctively distrust.
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