The Way of Life: John Paul II and the Challenge of Liberal Modernity

7: Tocqueville and the Moral Trajectory of Modern Democracy

123 At first glance, one might expect modern democracy as Tocqueville presents it to be broadly congenial to John Paul II’s call for a “civilization of love.” Modern democracy, after all, is founded upon equality. In America, Tocqueville claims, equality is the “generative fact” from which almost everything flows. Generally, democratic peoples love equality above everything else, even freedom itself.1 On Tocqueville’s account, however, the modern rise of equality finds its ultimate origins in Christianity. In his “Introduction” to Democracy in America, he credits the Church with introducing equality into European society, and he suggests that the modern movement toward democracy is coextensive with “the Christian universe.”2 Indeed, Tocqueville at least comes close to suggesting that the very idea of human equality, and hence of the rights and dignity of human beings as human beings, could never have been introduced absent the Christian revelation. The ancient world, he notes, was dominated by an aristocratic social state that naturally led the mind to view men not in terms of their humanity but their class or rank. “The most profound and vast geniuses of Rome and Greece,” he contends, “were never able to arrive at the idea, so general but at the same time so simple, of the similarity of men and of the equal right to freedom that each bears from birth.” Their intellects were “limited” by Chapter 7 TOCQUEVILLE AND THE MORAL TRAJECTORY OF MODERN DEMOCRACY 124 / The Way of Life the “aristocracy of masters” that was “established without dispute before their eyes,” and it was accordingly “necessary that Jesus Christ come to earth to make it understood that all members of the human species are naturally alike and equal.”3 Nevertheless, whatever the merits of the Christian conception of equality—that all men, as created in the image and likeness of God, possess an inherent dignity that should command the respect of their fellows—Tocqueville also indicates that the rise of modern, democratic equality is far from unproblematic. The aim of Tocqueville’s book is to identify and recommend the cultural and political institutions by which this equality can be made compatible with “freedom,” “enlightenment,” and “prosperity.” To this extent his argument is inseparable from a hope for the best. In politics as in medicine, however, while prescription must imply hope, diagnosis may still give rise to dread. This is certainly the case for Tocqueville, whose argument indicates that democracy’s unchecked propensities can lead to “servitude,” “barbarism,” and “misery .”4 Indeed, Tocqueville’s account suggests that modern democracy fosters precisely those habits of thought that John Paul II presents as eroding contemporary society’s ability to maintain a principled respect for the rights and dignity of all. DEMOCRACY AND THE ECLIPSE OF GOD John Paul II contends, as we have seen, that the deepest root of the negation of human dignity is the loss of a sense of God. On his account, the rights of human beings are adequately safeguarded only when the moral law is understood to be rooted in God as the supreme good. Only then can morality be accepted as objectively true and inherently good, and hence as both binding on and good for everyone, even those upon whom it may impose an obligation to sacrifice their material interests in the service of others. In the absence of God, on the other hand, men come to view the moral law as something relatively, rather than absolutely , good—a merely human contrivance devised with a view to merely human interests. Thus even fundamental rights become negotiable and the weak vulnerable to exploitation or even extermination. Tocqueville’s thought points to similar conclusions. Religious belief, he argues, is necessary to any society as the basis of the minimal level Tocqueville and the Moral Trajectory of Modern Democracy / 125 of common thought and common action that social living requires. Tocqueville contends that all human actions, no matter how small, proceed from some “general idea that men have conceived of God, of his relations with the human race, of the nature of their souls, and of their duties to those like them.” Accordingly, men have an “immense interest ” in establishing “very fixed ideas for themselves” on these matters, because “doubt about these first points would deliver all their actions to chance and condemn them to a sort of disorder and impotence.” Tocqueville’s remark that “doubt” about religious questions leads to “disorder,” to...