10.

“THE END OF HISTORY”: A CRITIQUE OF

LIBERAL DEMOCRACY

Every kingdom divided against itself is brought to

desolation,
and every city or house divided against itself will not
stand.
Matthew 12.25.

Introduction

By 1789, and especially after the first phase of the

French revolution reduced the power of the French
king to that of a constitutional monarch, liberalism
was the most popular political theory among the
educated classes of Europe. Liberalism in politics
seemed the natural counterpart of reason and
enlightenment in philosophy, morals and theology
as a whole.

The popularity of liberalism has remained strong

to the present day. In spite of the shocks of the
French revolution and other national revolutions in
the nineteenth century, and the still greater shocks
of the Russian revolution and the other communist
revolutions in the twentieth, liberalism today
appears stronger than ever. But how sound are its
foundations in actual fact?

Hieromonk Seraphim (Rose), explained both the

positive teaching of Orthodoxy on political
authority and why, for the Orthodox, liberalism
rests on shaky foundations: “(…)”
[202]
The Social Contract

Just as the basis of authority was transferred by

liberalism from the grace of God to the will of the
people, so the whole basis of political argument was
transferred from the order ordained by God to the
order created by men in order to satisfy the
demands of their fallen human nature – that is, from
theology to psychology. This transition is most clearly
seen after the collapse of Cromwell’s dictatorship in
1660 and the establishment of a constitutional
monarchy in England. Before that, both Anglican
monarchists and Independent radicals had based
their arguments on the Bible, on the state of man in
Paradise and the Fall. Thus the monarchist Filmer
held that kings held their patriarchal power by
rightful inheritance from the first patriarch, Adam;
while the Independents asserted that communism
had been the original prelapsarian state and would
be so again in the coming millenium. However,
after the struggle between monarchists and radicals
had been resolved in a compromise leaving the
aristocratic landowner-capitalists in effective power,
the English political philosophers, abandoning
arguments based on Holy Scripture, based their
arguments on a purely mythical social contract for
which they did not even begin to claim authority in
the Bible, and, more importantly, on the purely
utilitarian principle of the rational maximisation of
personal interest, or desire.

The theory of the social contract essentially

comes down to the idea that the state began through
the citizens getting together and making a contract
with their future rulers, giving power to the rulers
in exchange for certain elementary rights for their
subjects. This contract is the foundation of political
legitimacy. On the foundation of this shaky, and
purely mythical social contract the English political
philosophers sought to build the ideal polity and
the structure of rights and laws which would hold it
together. They differed on the nature of that polity:
for Thomas Hobbes desire is maximised in an
absolutist State; for John Locke – in a constitutional
monarchy. But for both thinkers the main purpose
of the State was security of life and property
together with a minimum of freedom in which to
enjoy that life and property.

“In all its forms,” writes Roger Scruton, “(...)”[203]

Consequently, a basic objection to social contract

theory put forward by Hegel is that this original
premise, that “our obligations are self-created and
self-imposed”, is false. We do not choose the family
we were born in, or the state to which we belong.
And yet both our family and our state impose
undeniable obligations on us.

Of course, we can rebel against such obligations;

the son can choose to say that he owes nothing to
his father. And yet he would not even exist without
his father; and without his father’s nurture and
education he would not even be capable of making
choices. Thus we are “hereditary bondsmen”, to use
Byron’s phrase, and the attempt to rebel against
these bonds only accentuates their existence.
 In this sense we live in a cycle of freedom and
necessity: the free choices of our ancestors limit our
own freedom, while our choices limit those of our
children. The idea of a social contract entered into a
single generation is therefore not only a historical
myth (as many social contract theorists concede); it
is also a dangerous myth. It is a myth that distorts
the very nature of society, which cannot be
conceived as existing except over several
generations.

But if society exists over several generations, all

generations should be taken into account in
drawing up the contract. Why should only one
generation’s interests be respected in drawing it up?
For, as Scruton continues, interpreting the thought
of Edmund Burke, “(...)”[204]

“Every people,” writes L.A. Tikhomirov, “is, first

of all, a certain historical whole, a long row of
consecutive generations, living over hundreds or
thousands of years in a common life handed down
by inheritance. In this form a people, a nation, is a
certain socially organic phenomenon with more or
less clearly expressed laws of inner development…
But political intriguers and the democratic tendency
does not look at a people in this form, as a historical,
socially organic phenomenon, but simply in the
form of a sum of the individual inhabitants of the
country. This is the second point of view, which
looks on a nation as a simple association of people
united into a state because they wanted that, living
according to laws which they like, and arbitrarily
changing the laws of their life together when it
occurs to them.”[205]

Metropolitan Philaret of Moscow criticised social

contract theory as follows: “It is obligatory, say the
wise men of this world, to submit to social
authorities on the basis of a social contract, by
which people were united into society, by a general
agreement founding government and submission to
it for the general good. If they think that it is
impossible to found society otherwise than on a
social contract, - then why is it that the societies of
the bees and ants are not founded on it? And is it
not right that those who break open honeycombs
and destroy ant-hills should be entrusted with
finding in them… a charter of bees and ants? And
until such a thing is done, nothing prevents us from
thinking that bees and ants create their societies, not
by contract, but by nature, by an idea of community
implanted in their nature, which the Creator of the
world willed to be realised even at the lowest level
of His creatures. What if an example of the creation
of a human society by nature were found? What,
then, is the use of the fantasy of a social contract?
No one can argue against the fact that the original
form of society is the society of the family. Thus
does not the child obey the mother, and the mother
have power over the child, not because they have
contracted between themselves that she should feed
him at the breast, and that he should shout as little
as possible when he is swaddled? What if the
mother should suggest too harsh conditions to the
child? Will not the inventors of the social contract
tell him to go to another mother and make a
contract with her about his upbringing? The
application of the social contract in this case is as
fitting as it is fitting in other cases for every person,
from the child to the old man, from the first to the
last. Every human contract can have force only
when it is entered into with consciousness and good
will. Are there many people in society who have
heard of the social contract? And of those few who
have heard of it, are there many who have a clear
conception of it? Ask, I will not say the simple
citizen, but the wise man of contracts: when and
how did he enter into the social contract? When he
was an adult? But who defined this time? And was
he outside society before he became an adult? By
means of birth? This is excellent. I like this thought,
and I congratulate every Russian that he was able –
I don’t know whether it was from his parents or
from Russia herself, - to agree that he be born in
powerful Russia… The only thing that we must
worry about is that neither he who was born nor his
parents thought about this contract in their time,
and so does not referring to it mean fabricating it?
And consequently is not better, as well as simpler,
both in submission and in other relationships
towards society, to study the rights and obligations
of a real birth instead of an invented contract – that
pipe-dream of social life, which, being recounted at
the wrong time, has produced and continues to
produce material woes for human society.
‘Transgressors have told me fables, but they are not
like Thy law, O Lord’ (Psalm 118.85).”[206]
 The eighteenth-century Enlightenment
developed and deepened the trends towards
utilitarianism and “psychologism”.

Thus J.S. McClelland writes: “The springs of

human behaviour (the phrase is Bentham’s) were
the passions, or, as in the primmer language of
utilitarianism, the desires to seek pleasure and
avoid pain. The passions were implanted by nature.
They were what gave human life its vital motion,
and the operation of the passions could ultimately
be explained in physical, that is, physiological,
terms. The faculty of reason which nature had
implanted in the minds of men had as its function
the direction of the human passions towards the
accomplishment of desirable ends, though there
was in fact no agreement in the Enlightenment
about what the relationship between reason and the
passions exactly was. Some thought, like Rousseau,
that all natural desires were naturally virtuous, and
that only living in a corrupt society implanted
'’unnatural’, that is wicked, desires. Others, like
Hume, thought that reason was the slave of the
passions, by which he meant that the ends of
human conduct were provided by the desires, and
all that reason could do was to show given desires
how to accomplish their ends. The consensus of
Enlightenment opinion seems to have been that
reason could in some sense control and direct the
passions towards ends which were ethically
desirable. The passions were by their nature blind,
even part of brute nature, and they were certainly
shared by the other animals. Natural reason must
therefore have been given to man to counterpose
itself to the passions, either because the passions
themselves could not know how to satisfy
themselves without guidance, or because the
passions themselves became fixed on ends which
were undesirable on a rational view of the matter.

“In the field of moral philosophy,

Enlightenment’s goal was a rational system of ethics
which would at the very least modify, and perhaps
completely replace, the existing systems of ethics
derived from religion, custom, and accident. Some
forms of human conduct, and some of the ends of
human conduct it was hoped, could be rationally
demonstrated to be preferable to others. Reason
must have been implanted by nature to point these
differences out. There must be a way of showing
that true human happiness was attainable only
through the attainment of virtuous human ends.
The culminating point of moral philosophy would
be reached when reason could demonstrate that the
truest form of human happiness consisted of the
encouragement and spectacle of the happiness of
others. It is notorious in the history of ethics that the
Enlightenment project failed to show that it was in
fact possible to derive from reason a set of ethical
principles capable of sustaining the loyalty of all
rational men, and there is a notable irony in the fact
that it was Hume, at the very heart of the
Enlightenment, who showed why the enlightened
project in ethics was bound to fail…”[207]

In the field of political philosophy, it became

axiomatic that the maximisation of desire, or, more
simply, “the pursuit of happiness”, as the American
Declaration of Independence put it, could be
achieved only through government of the people,
by the people and for the people – in other words,
in a democratic republic, or, failing that, in an
enlightened despotism or constitutional monarchy
which placed the happiness of the people as a whole
as its aim and justification.

This was a distinctly unromantic view of human

nature, and the arrival of a more romantic view of
human nature towards the end of the eighteenth
century, in the writings of such men as Rousseau
and Hegel, made possible the emergence of a more
revolutionary model of democracy to rival that of
Anglo-Saxon liberalism. This model led, not to
liberal democracy, but to fascist totalitarianism.

Fukuyama’s Thesis

Let us now examine one attempt to compare the

Anglo-Saxon and Hegelian models of democracy.

The End of History and the Last Man by the

Harvard-trained political scientist Francis
Fukuyama represents probably the best-known and
best-articulated defence of the modernist world-
view that has appeared in recent years. In view of
this, any anti-modernist world-view, and in
particular any truly coherent defence of our
Orthodox Christian faith, must take into account
what Fukuyama says and refute it, or, at any rate,
show that his correct observations and analyses
must lead to different conclusions from the ones he
draws. What makes Fukuyama's thesis particularly
interesting to Orthodox Christians is that it is
possible for us to agree with 99% of his detailed
argumentation, and derive considerable profit from
it with regard to our understanding of how the
modern world really works and where it is heading,
while differing fundamentally from him in our final
conclusions.

Fukuyama's original article entitled "The End of

History?" argued, as he summarized it in his book,
"(…)"[208]

Fukuyama's original article appeared in the

summer of 1989, and it received rapid and dramatic
support from the collapse of communism in Eastern
Europe almost immediately after. Thus by 1991 the
only major country outside the Islamic Middle East
and Africa not to have become democratic was
Communist China - and cracks were appearing
there as well. Not that Fukuyama predicted this
outcome: as he honestly admits, only a few years
before neither he nor the great majority of western
political scientists had anticipated the fall of
communism any time soon. Probably the only
prominent writers to predict both the fall of
communism and the nationalist conflicts and
democratic regimes that followed it were Orthodox
Christian ones such as Gennady Shimanov and
Alexander Solzhenitsyn, neither of whom were
noted as champions of democracy. This is in itself
should make us pause before trusting too much in
Fukuyama's judgements about the future of the
world and the end of history.
 Nevertheless, it must be admitted that at the
present time History appears to be going his way. It
is another question whether this direction is
the best possible way, or whether it is possible to
consider other possible outcomes to the historical
process.
.
1. Reason, Desire and Thymos

Why, according to Fukuyama, is History moving

towards world-wide democracy? At the risk of
over-simplifying what is a lengthy and
sophisticated argument, we may summarise his
answer under two headings: the logic of scientific
advance, and the logic of human need, in particular the
need for recognition. Let us look briefly at each of
these.

First, the survival of any modern State militarily

and economically requires that science and
technology be given free rein, which in turn requires
the free dissemination of ideas and products both
within and between States that only political and
economic liberalism guarantees. "(…)"[209] Nor can
the advance of science be halted or reversed for an
indefinite period. Even the destruction of
civilization through a nuclear or ecological
catastrophe, and the demand for a far more careful
evaluation of the effects of science and technology
such a catastrophe would elicit, would not alter
this. For it is inconceivable that the principles of
scientific method should be forgotten as long as
humanity survives on the planet, and any State that
eschewed the application of that method would be
at an enormous disadvantage in the struggle for
survival.

Fukuyama admits that the logic of scientific

advance and technological development does not
by itself explain why most people in advanced,
industrialized countries prefer democracy. "For if a
country's goal is economic growth above all other
considerations, the truly winning combination
would appear to be neither liberal democracy nor
socialism of either a Leninist or democratic variety,
but the combination of liberal economics and
authoritarian politics that some observers have
labeled the 'bureaucratic authoritarian state,' or
what we might term a 'market-oriented
authoritarianism.'"[210] And as an example of such a
"winning combination" he mentions "the Russia of
Witte and Stolypin" - in other words, of Tsar
Nicholas II...

Since the logic of scientific advance is not

sufficient in itself to explain why most people and
States choose democracy, Fukuyama has resort to a
second, more powerful argument based on a
Platonic model of human nature. According to this
model, there are three basic components of human
nature: reason, desire and the force denoted by the
almost untranslateable Greek word thymos. Reason
is the handmaid of desire and thymos; it is that
element which distinguishes us from the animals
and enables the irrational forces of desire
and thymos to be satisfied in the real world. Desire
includes the basic needs for food, sleep, shelter and
sex. Thymos is usually translated as "anger" or
"courage"; but Fukuyama defines it as that desire
which "desires the desire of other men, that is, to be
wanted by others or to be recognized".[211]

Now most liberal theorists in the Anglo-Saxon

tradition, such as Hobbes, Locke and the founders
of the American Constitution, have focused on
desire as the fundamental force in human nature
because on its satisfaction depends the survival of
the human race itself. They have seen thymos, or
the need for recognition, as an ambiguous force
which should rather be suppressed than expressed;
for it is thymos that leads to tyrannies, wars and all
those conflicts which endanger "life, liberty and the
pursuit of happiness". The American Constitution
with its system of checks and balances was
designed above all to prevent the emergence of
tyranny, which is the clearest expression of what we
may call "megalothymia". Indeed, for many the
prime merit of democracy consists in its prevention
of tyranny.

A similar point of view was expressed by the

Anglican writer, C.S. Lewis: "I am a democrat
because I believe in the Fall of Man. I think most
people are democrats for the opposite reason. A
great deal of democratic enthusiasm descends from
the ideas of people like Rousseau, who believed in
democracy because they thought mankind so wise
and good that everyone deserved a share in
government. The danger of defending democracy
on those grounds is that they are not true. And
whenever their weakness is exposed, the people
who prefer tyranny make capital out of the
exposure. I find that they're not true without
looking further than myself. I don't deserve a share
in governing a henroost, much less a nation. Nor do
most people - all the people who believe in
advertisements, and think in catchwords and
spread rumours. The real reason for democracy is
just the reverse. Mankind is so fallen that no man
can be trusted with unchecked power over his
fellows..."[212]

But this argument is deficient on both logical and

historical grounds. Let us agree that Man is fallen.
Why should giving very many fallen men a share in
government reverse that fall? In moral and social
life, two minuses do not make a plus. Democratic
institutions may inhibit the rise of tyranny in the
short term; but they also make it almost certain that
democratic leaders will be accomplished
demagogues prepared to do almost anything to
please the electorate. One man's thymos may check
the full expression of another's; but the combination
of many contradictory wills can only lead to a
compromise which is exceedingly unlikely to be the
best decision for society as a whole. In fact, if
wisdom in politics, as in everything else, comes
from God, "it is much more natural to suppose," as
Trostnikov says, "that divine enlightenment will
descend upon the chosen soul of an Anointed One
of God, as opposed to a million souls at once".
[213]
The Scripture does not say vox populi - vox Dei,
but: "The heart of the king is in the hand of the
Lord; he turns it wherever He will" (Proverbs 21.1).
[214]
 In any case, has democracy really been such a
defence against tyranny? Let us take the example of
the first famous democracy, Athens. In the sixth
century B.C., Athens had been ruled by Solon, one
of the wisest and most benevolent of autocrats, who
showed his superiority to personal ambition by
retiring into voluntary exile at the height of his
fame. In the mid-fifth century, Athenian democracy
was led by a good leader, Pericles. But by the end of
the century Socrates, the state's most distinguished
citizen, had been executed; Melos had been reduced
and its population cruelly butchered; a vainglorious
attempt to conquer Syracuse had been abandoned;
and a futile and morale-sapping war against Sparta
had been lost.

The lessons were not lost on the philosophers of

the next century: Plato turned from democracy to
the ideal of the philosopher-king; while Aristotle
made the important distinction between
"democratic behaviour" meaning "the behaviour
that democracies like" and "democratic behaviour"
meaning "the behaviour that will preserve a
democracy" - the two usually do not coincide. The
behaviour that democracies like is peaceful money-
making and pleasure-seeking. The behaviour that
will preserve a democracy is war and strict
discipline, in which the rights of the individual
must be subordinated to the will of the leader.
Moreover, in order to attain democracy, the rights of
individuals must be not only subordinated, but
destroyed, sometimes on a massive scale.

As Shakespeare put it in Julius Caesar (II, 1):

 Ligarius. What's to do?
Brutus. A piece of work that will make sick men whole.
Ligarius. But are not some whole that we must make
sick?

Thus it is a striking fact that all the greatest

tyrants of modern times have emerged on the back
of violent democratic revolutions: Cromwell - of the
English revolution; Napoleon - of the French
revolution; Lenin - of the Russian revolution. And
was not Hitler elected by the German democracy?
Again, democracies have been quite prepared to
throw whole peoples to the lions of tyranny for
ephemeral gains. We think of the Helsinki Accords
of 1975, by which the West legitimised the Soviet
conquest of Eastern Europe; or Taiwan's expulsion
from the United Nations at the insistence of Red
China.

On the other hand, the German idealist tradition,

as represented by Hegel, attributed a more positive
value to thymos. Hegel agreed with the Anglo-
Saxons that democracy was the highest form of
government, and therefore that the triumph of
democracy - which for some reason he considered
to have been attained by the tyrant Napoleon's
victory at Jena in 1806 - was "the End of History".
But democracy was the best, in Hegel's view, not
simply because it attained the aim of self-
preservation better than any other system, but
also, and primarily, because it gave expression
to thymos in the form of "isothymia" - that is, it
allowed each citizen to express his thymos to an
equal degree. For whereas in pre-democratic
societies the satisfaction of thymos in one person led
to the frustration of thymos for many more, thereby
dividing the whole of society into one or a few
masters and a great many slaves, as a result of the
democratic revolutions of the eighteenth century the
slaves overthrew their masters and achieved equal
recognition in each other's eyes. Thus through the
winning of universal human rights everyone, in
effect, became a master.

Hegel's philosophy was an explicit challenge to

the Christian view of political freedom and slavery,
which regarded the latter as a secondary evil that
could be turned into good if used for spiritual ends.
"For he that is called in the Lord," said St. Paul,
"being a servant, is the Lord's freeman: likewise also
he that is called, being free, is Christ's servant" (I
Corinthians 7.22; Onesimus). So "live as free men,"
said St. Peter, "yet without using your freedom as a
pretext for evil; but live as servants of God" (I
Peter 2.16).

St. Augustine developed this teaching: "Ciudad

de Dios 19:15."[215]

But this doctrine offended Hegel's pride,

his thymos. So without arguing in detail against it,
he rejected it as unworthy of the dignity of man.
And he rejected Anglo-Saxon liberalism for similar
reasons, insofar as he saw placing self-preservation
as the main aim of life and society as effete and
degrading. He would have agreed with
Shakespeare's words in Hamlet, IV, 4):
 What is a man,
If his chief good and market of his time
Be but to sleep and feed? A beast, no more.[216]

The essence and glory of man consists in his love of

glory and honour:

Rightly to be great
Is not to stir without great argument,
But greatly to find quarrel in a straw
When honour's at the stake.

For the greatness of man lies in his transcendence of

self-preservation, in his capacity for self-sacrifice.
And this is a manifestation of thymos.

Fukuyama develops the Hegelian critique of

Anglo-Saxon liberalism as follows: "…
"[217]

Now to the Christian ear there is an inner

contradiction in this critique. While agreeing that
there is something profoundly repellent in the
bourgeois liberal's selfish pursuit of comfortable
self-preservation, we cannot agree that the struggle
for recognition is anything other than a different,
and still more dangerous, form of egoism. For what
is self-transcending in the pure affirmation of self?
Patriotism, courage and generosity are indeed noble
passions, but if we attribute them to the simple need
for recognition, are we not reducing acts of
selflessness to disguised forms of selfishness? Thus if
Anglo-Saxon liberalism panders to the ignoble
passion of lust, does not Hegelian liberalism pander
to the satanic passion of pride?

It follows from Fukuyama's analysis that the

essential condition for the creation of a perfect or
near-perfect society is the rational satisfaction both
of desire and of thymos. But the satisfaction
of thymos is the more problematic of the two
requirements. For while the advance of science and
open markets can be trusted to deliver the goods
that desire - even the modern consumer's highly
elastic and constantly changing desire - requires in
sufficient quantities for all, it is a very tricky
problem to satisfy everyone's thymos without
letting any individual or group give expression
to megalothymia. However, democracy has
succeeded by replacing megalothymia by two
things. "(...)"[218]

In other words, democracy rests on the twin

pillars of greed and pride: the rational (i.e. scientific)
manipulation of greed developed without limit (for
the richer the rich, the less poor, eventually, will be
the poor, the so-called “trickle down” effect), and
pride developed within a certain limit (the limit, that
is, set by other people's pride). There are now no
checks on fallen human nature except laws – the
laws passed by fallen human beings - and the state’s
apparatus of law-keeping. That may be preferable
to lawlessness, as Solzhenitsyn pointed out in the
1970s, comparing the West with the Soviet Union;
but it means that within the limits of the laws the
grossest immorality is permitted. Truly a house
built on sand!
 “There are three kinds of obedience,” writes
Metropolitan Philaret: “mercenary obedience that is
for one’s own benefit, servile obedience out of fear,
and vainglorious obedience for the attainment of
privileges. But what must we say about their
merits? It cannot be denied that they are all better
than disobedience, they can all in various cases be
successfully used against the temptations of
disobedience; but is there any pure and firm virtue
here?

“Virtue that is not sufficiently pure cannot be

sufficiently constant, just as impure gold changes its
appearance and reveals a mixture. Just as it is
natural that every action should be equal to its
cause and should not extend beyond it, so we must
expect that obedience that is based only on fear, on
mercenariness, on the satisfaction of vainglory, will
be shaken when vainglory is not satisfied, either
through the inattentiveness of him who bestows
awards or through the greediness of the vainglory
itself; when the obedience that is demanded by the
common good is contrary to private advantage; and
when the power that terrifies by lawful revenge or
punishment is either not sufficiently strong or not
sufficiently penetrating and active…”[219]

2. Democracy and Nationalism

Now there are two "thymotic" phenomena that

will have to be controlled and neutralized if the
democrat's ideal of a satisfied, isothymic citizenry is
to be achieved: religion and nationalism.
 Nationalism is a threat because it implies that all
men are not equal, which in turn implies that it is
right and just for one group of men to dominate
another. As Fukuyama admits, "(...)"[220]

Since democracy cannot contain give expression

to nationalism without contradicting its own
egalitarian principles, it has to undermine it - not by
force, of course, but in the democratic way, that is,
by sweet reason and material inducements.
However, sweet reason rarely works when passions
run high and deep, so in the end the warring
nations have to be bribed to keep the peace. This
works up to a point, but experience shows that even
economically advanced countries whose desire is
near to be satisfied cannot control the eruption of
thymotic nationalist passions. Thus "(…)"[221]

In spite of this fact, the ideologues of democracy

continue to believe that nationalism is a threat that
can only be contained by building ever larger supra-
national states. Thus the European Community was
founded in 1956 on the premise that, besides the
economic rewards to be reaped from the Union, it
would prevent the recurrence of war between the
European states in general and France and Germany
in particular. Of course, the bloody breakdown of
supra-national states such as the Soviet Union and
Yugoslavia does not speak in support of this
argument. But the democrats riposte by declaring
that it is not supranationalism as such that was to
blame for these breakdowns, but rather the
communist system, which suppressed the thymotic
aspirations of its citizens and so fuelled nationalism
instead of sublimating it.

So is the democratic model of supranationalism

represented by the European Union solving the
problem of nationalism? The evidence seems to
point in the opposite direction. As the moment of
the irreversible surrender of national sovereignties,
i.e. monetary union, draws nearer, resistance seems
to be stiffening in several countries, as witnessed by
the majorities against it in many national polls. And
as this resistance becomes stronger, so the sweet
reason of the Eurocrats turns into the harsh
language of threatened coercion. Thus the French
Prime Minister has proposed that those countries
who decide not to join the monetary union (he has
in mind especially Great Britain, the most sceptical
of the Union's nation states) should be subject to
economic penalties. And the German Chancellor
has said (again, his remarks are aimed particularly
at Britain) that the result of a failure to unite in
Europe will be war. This is in spite of the fact that
there has been no war or even threat of war in
Western Europe for the past fifty years!

So much for the "voluntary" union of states in the

spirit of democracy and brotherhood! If you don't
surrender your sovereignty, we will crush you! This
is the language of nationalist hatred in supra-
national guise, and it points to a central paradox or
internal contradiction in democracy.

The contradiction consists in the fact that while

democracy prides itself on its spirit of peace and
brotherhood between individuals and nations, the
path to democracy, both within and between
nations, actually involves an unparalleled
destruction of personal and national life. For much
has been said, and truly said, about the destructive
power of nationalism; but much less about how it
protects nations and cultures and
people from destruction (as, for example, it
protected the Orthodox nations of Eastern Europe
from destruction under the Turkish yoke). Again,
much has been said, and truly said, about how
democracy creates a culture of peace which has
prevented the occurrence of major wars between
democratic states; much less about how democracy
has drastically weakened the bonds created by
societies other than the state, from the ethnic group
and the church to the working men's club and the
mother's union, with the result that, deprived of
community identities, atomized, democratic man
has found himself in a state of undeclared war
against, or at any rate alienation from, his
neighbour.

This may explain why, at just the moment when

democracies seem to have matured and solved all
major internal contradictions and inequalities, new
nationalisms are appearing - the Basque, Scottish
and North Italian nationalisms, for example, in the
modern European Union. For men must feel that
they belong to a community, and not just to such an
amorphous community as "the European Union",
still less "the International Community". But to
create a community means to create partitions - not
hostile partitions, not impermeable partitions, but
partitions nevertheless, partitions that show who is
inside and who is outside the community, criteria of
membership which not everyone will be able to
meet. The resilience of nationalism in both its
positive and negative modes is a sign of the
perennial need for community, a need which
democracy has abysmally failed to satisfy. And
while Fukuyama fully accepts the existence and
seriousness of this lack in democratic society, he still
seems to think that the most important and
powerful sources of community life, religion and
nationalism, are either already out or on the way
out.

Thus in an uncharacteristically bold and

unqualified statement he declares that "(…)"[222]

As for nationalism, he recognizes that this is

likely to continue and even increase in some regions
for some time yet. But in the end it, too, is destined
to "wither away". Thus he considers the rise of
nationalism in the highly cultured, democratic and
economically advanced Germany of the 1920s and
30s to have been "the product of historically unique
circumstances". "(…)"[223]

Pathological and extreme Nazism may be, but it

cannot be dismissed as simply an ugly but easily
excised wart on the superbly toned body of
Modernity. Hitler was elected in a democratic
manner, and Nazism was the product of one of the
fundamental internal contradictions of democracy,
the fact that while promising fraternity, it
neverthless atomizes, alienates and in many other
ways pulverizes the "brothers", making them feel
that life is a jungle in which every man is essentially
alone. Sovietism was also a product of democracy,
and an exposure of still more of its internal
contradictions - the contradictions in and between
the concepts of freedom and equality. These
"deviations" to the right and left do not point to the
righteousness of a supposed "royal way" in
between. Rather, they are symptoms, warning signs
pointing to the inner pathological nature of the ideal
they both professed and to which they both owed
their existence.

The European Union gives as its main

justification the avoidance of those nationalistic
wars, especially between France and Germany,
which have so disfigured the region's history. But
the old nationalisms show no sign of dying. And in
traditionally insular countries, such as Britain, or
traditionally Orthodox ones, such as Greece,
attempts to force them into an unnatural union with
other nations with quite different traditions appear
to be increasing centrifugal tendencies. Moreover,
the European Union has signally failed to introduce
unity among the nations in other parts of the
European continent, such as the former Yugoslavia.
For pious exhortations are as useless in the faith of
nationalist fervour as exhortations to chastity in the
face of aroused lust. In both cases grace is required
to give power to the word.

The problem is that when the grace that holds

apparent opposites in balance is absent, it is very
easy for a nation, as for an individual person, to
swing from one extreme to the other, as the history
of the twentieth century, characterised by lurches
from nationalist Fascism to internationalist
Communism shows. Late in the nineteenth century
Constantine Leontiev saw that the nationalism of
the states of Europe could lead to a no less
dangerous internationalist abolition of states “... A
state grouping according to tribes and nations is…
nothing other than the preparation - striking in its
force and vividness - for the transition to a
cosmopolitan state, first a pan-European one, and
then, perhaps, a global one, too! This is terrible! But
still more terrible, in my opinion, is that fact that so
far in Russia nobody has seen this or wants to
understand it...”[224] “A grouping of states according
to pure nationalities will lead European man very
quickly to the dominion of internationalism.”[225]

3. Democracy and Religion

The second threat to democracy is religion.

Religion is a threat because it postulates the
existence of absolute truths and values that conflict
with the democratic lie that it doesn't matter what
you believe because one man's beliefs are as good
and valid as any other's. As Fukuyama writes, "like
nationalism, there is no inherent conflict between
religion and liberal democracy, except at the point
where religion ceases to be tolerant or egalitarian."[226] It
is not surprising, therefore, that the flowering of
liberal democracy should have coincided with the
flowering of the ecumenical movement in religion,
and that England, the birthplace of liberal
democracy, should also have supplied, in the form
of the Anglican Church, the model and motor for
the creation of the World Council of Churches. For
ecumenism is, in essence, the application of the
principles of liberal democracy to religious belief.

Paradoxically, Fukuyama, following Hegel,

recognizes that the idea of the unique moral worth
of every human being, which is at the root of the
idea of human rights, is Christian in origin. For,
according to the Christian view, "(…)"[227]

Leaving aside for the moment the question

whether this is an accurate representation of the
Christian understanding of freedom and equality,
we may note that, however useful this idea has been
in bringing the slave to a sense of his own dignity, it
has to be rejected by the democrat because it
actually reconciles him with his chains rather than
spurring him to throw them off. For Christianity, as
Hegel - and, it would seem, Fukuyama, too -
believes, is ultimately an ideology of slaves,
whatever its usefulness as a stepping stone to the
last ideology, the ideology of truly free men,
Democracy. If the slaves are actually to become free,
they must not be inhibited by the ideas of the will of
God (which, by definition, is of greater authority
than "the will of the people") and of the Kingdom of
Heaven (which, by definition, cannot be the
kingdom of this world). The Christian virtues of
patience and humility must also go, and for very
much the same reason. For the revolution
needs proud men, greedy men, impatient men, not
ascetic hermits - even if, after the revolution, they
have to limit their pride and impatience, if not their
greed, for the sake of the stability of democracy.

But this last point leads Fukuyama to a still more

important admission: that religion is useful, perhaps
even necessary, to democratic society even after the
revolution. For (…) One example of such a survival
is the "Protestant work-ethic", which is the
recognition that work has a value in and of itself,
regardless of its material rewards.

The problem for the democrats is that the

thymotic passions which were necessary to
overthrow the aristocratic masters and create
democratic society tend to fade away when the
victory has been won but the fruits of the victory
still have to be consolidated and defended. It is a
profound and important paradox that men are
much more likely to give their lives for unelected
hereditary monarchs than for elected presidents or
prime ministers, even though they consider the
latter more "legitimate" than the former. The reason
for this is that very powerful religious and patriotic
emotions attach to hereditary monarchs that do not
attach to democratic leaders precisely because,
whether consciously or unconsciously, they are
perceived to be kings not by the will of the people,
but by the will of God, Whose will the people
recognizes to be more sacred than its own will.

Fukuyama struggles bravely with this ultimately

intractable problem: "(…)"[229]
 Quite so; but is it rational to believe that telling
the people that "they must come to love democracy
not because it is necessarily better than the
alternatives, but because it is theirs" is going to fire
them more than the ideas of Islamic Jihad or "The
Mystic Union of the Aryan race"? Is not loving an
ideology just because it is my ideology the ultimate
irrationality? Is not an ideology - any ideology - that
appeals to a Being greater than itself going to have
greater emotional appeal than such infantile
narcissism? Moreover, the "purer" a democracy, the
more serious the problem of injecting warmth into
"the coldest of all cold monsters". For what
"democratic" or "civic culture" can replace, even
from a purely psychological point of view, full-
blooded religion - believing in absolute truths and
values that are not just projections of our desires?

Fukuyama discusses at some length how

democratic society allows its megalothymic citizens
to harmlessly "let off steam" - that is,
excess thymos - through such activities as
entrepreneurialism, competitive sport, intellectual
and artistic achievement, ecological crusading and
voluntary service in non-democratic societies. He
has much less to say about how thymos is to
be generated in relation to the central values and
symbols of democratic society when that society is
becoming - in this respect, at any rate - distinctly
anaemic and "microthymic". Why, for example,
should I go to war to make the world safe for
democracy? To defend the good of "tolerance"
against the evil of "intolerance"? But why shouldn't
my "enemy" be intolerant if he wants to? Doesn't
tolerance itself declare that one man's values are just
as good as any other's? Why should I kill him just
because, by an accident of birth, he hasn't reached
my level of ecumenical consciousness and remains
mired in the fanaticism of the pre-millenial, non-
democratic age?..

The fact is that whereas democracy wages war on

"bigoted", "intolerant", "inegalitarian" religion - that
is, religion which believes in absolute truths and
values that are valid for all people at all times, and
which make those who believe in them and act by
them better, in the eyes of believers, than those who
do not, - it desperately needs some such religion
itself.

It needed it at the beginning; for it was only

through the quasi-religious fervour of the English,
French and Russian revolutions that the old regimes
in those countries were swept away - and since the
end of democracy justifies all ends in the
perspective of History, it does not matter to the
democrats that this religion was much more like the
bloodthirsty sacrifices of Moloch and Baal than the
humble, self-sacrificial love of Jesus Christ. It needed
it in the middle, when some kind of religious
enthusiasm was necessary to whip up the peoples in
defence of democracy against communism and
nazism - an enthusiasm that was shown to have
become dangerously weak at the time of the
Vietnam war. And it needs it even more now, at the
end, when the cancers of atomism, relativism and
me-too-ism threaten to eat up the whole of
democratic society from within.
 But where, having spent all the vast propaganda
resources of the modern state in preaching the
superfluity, if not complete falsehood of all religion
over a period of hundreds of years, are the
democrats going to find such a religion? In Gaia, the
ecologist's earth goddess, who gives birth to
everything that the democrats desire, while
punishing, through natural and man-made
catastrophes, all those who, through
unforgiveable megalothymia, disobey her
commands (i.e. the ecological balance of nature)? In
the New Age, which worships man in every aspect
of his fallenness, not excluding his union with the
fallen spirits of hell? If the vice-president of the
world's most powerful democracy can believe in
this, then anything is possible. And yet, and yet -
how can modern man return to such atavistic
paganism when it contradicts the very cornerstone
of his philosophical world-view and the primary
engine of his prosperity - the scientific method?

4. The Dialectics of Democracy

In the last section of his book, entitled "The Last

Man", Fukuyama examines two threats to the
survival of democracy, one from the left of the
political spectrum and one from the right.

From the left comes the challenge constituted by

the never-ending demand for equality based on an
ever-increasing list of supposed inequalities. "(…)
"[230]
 The proliferation of new "rights", many of them
"ambiguous in their social content and mutually
contradictory", threatens to dissolve the whole of
society in a boiling sea of resentment. Hierarchy has
all but disappeared. Anyone can now refuse
obedience to, or take to court, anyone else - even
children their parents. Bitter nationalisms re-emerge
even in "the melting pot of the nations" as Afro-
Americans go back to their roots in order to assert
their difference from the dominant race. The very
concept of degrees of excellence as something quite
independent of race or sex is swept aside as, for
example, Shakespeare's claim to pre-eminence in
literature is rejected because he is he had the unfair
advantage of being "white, male and Anglo-Saxon".

Fukuyama rightly points out that the doctrine of

rights springs directly from an understanding of
what man is. But the egalitarian and scientific
revolutions undermine the Christian concept of man
which the founders of liberalism, both Anglo-Saxon
and German, took for granted, denying that there is
any essential difference between man and nature
because "man is simply a more organized and
rational form of slime". It follows that essential
human rights should be accorded also to the higher
animals, like monkeys and dolphins, who can suffer
pain as we do and are supposedly no less
intelligent.[231]

"(…)"[232]

The paradox is that this new understanding of

life, human and sub-human, is in fact very similar to
that of Hinduism, which has evolved, in the form of
the Indian caste system, probably the most
stubbornly inegalitarian society in history!

Fukuyama concludes his examination of the

challenge from the Left: "(...)"[233]

Fukuyama goes on to examine "(…)

." [234]

"(…)"[235]

"(...)"[236]

For a man is in fact more than a dog or a log.

Even when all his desires have been satisfied, and
even when all injustices have been eradicated, he
wants, not to sleep, but to act. For, unlike the plants
and animals, he has a free will which needs nothing
outside itself to feed on.

The basis of this irrational freedom was

described by Dostoyevsky's underground man as:
"(…)"[237]

Here we come to the root of the democratic

dilemma. Democracy's raison d'etre is the liberation
of the human will, first through the satisfaction of
his most basic desires, and then through the
satisfaction of every other person's desires to an
equal extent. But the problem is that the will, thus
satisfied, has only just begun to manifest itself. For
the will is not essentially a will to anything - not a
will not to eat, not a will to power; it is simply
will tout court. "I will, therefore I am. And if anyone
else wills otherwise, to hell with him! (And if I
myself will otherwise, to hell with me!)"

So perhaps war (and suicide) must be permitted

in the society whose purpose is "life, liberty and the
pursuit of happiness"? Of course, this was not the
Founding Fathers' intention. They were reasonable
men. But perhaps they did not pursue their
reasoning through to its logical conclusion. Perhaps
they did not understand that those bloody Roman
dictators were not stupid when they defined the
desires of the mob as panem et circenses - bread and
circuses, in which "circuses" had without fail to
include some gladiatorial murder.

Hegel, unlike the Anglo-Saxons, did have a place

for violence and war in his system - not war for
war's sake, but war for democracy's sake. "(…)"[238]

But for men who believe in nothing beyond

themselves, whether democracy or any other value,
there is nothing ennobling or purifying about war.
It simply debases them still further. That has been
the fate of those Russian soldiers, who, on returning
from the war in Chechnya, continue the war in
mindless murders of their own people. For such
men, war has become an end in itself. In a world in
which all objective values have been radically
undermined, killing is the only way they have to
prove to themselves that they exist, that they, at any
rate, can make an objective difference to their
surroundings.
 For "supposing", continues Fukuyama, "(…)"[239]

As examples of this phenomenon, Fukuyama

cites the évènements in France in 1968, and the
scenes of patriotic pro-war enthusiasm repeated in
Paris, Petrograd, London, and Vienna in August,
1914. And yet there is a much better example much
closer to home - the crime that has become such a
universal phenomenon in modern democracies
from London to Johannesburg, from Bangkok to Sao
Paolo, from Washington to Moscow. It is as if
Dostoyevsky's underground man has now become a
whole class - the underclass of the metropolitan
octopuses, whose tentacles extend ever wider and
deeper into the major institutions and government
itself.

Democratic man, unable to free himself from the

shackles of democratic thought, superficially
ascribes the causes of crime to poverty or
unemployment, to a lack of education or a lack of
rights. But most modern criminals are not hungry,
nor are they struggling for rights. There is no need as
such in most modern crime, no idealism, however
misguided. Their only need is to kill and to rape
and to steal - not for the sake of revenge, or sex, or
money, but just for their own sake. And their only
ideal is to express their own, "independent will, at
all costs and whatever the consequences".

Thus the logical consequence of the attainment of

full democracy is nihilism, the universal war of every
man against every man, for the sake of no man and no
thing. For "(...)"[240]
 Fukuyama should have concluded his superbly
consistent argument at this point, saying: "(...)"[241]

Solzhenitsyn’s Thesis

Let us now turn to Alexander Solzhenitsyn,

whose critique of Anglo-Saxon liberal democracy
comes, not from Hegelian presuppositions, nor
from the slightest sympathy for totalitarianism (he
was, after all, the author of The Gulag Archipelago),
but from disillusion with the idea of freedom as the
supreme value as it is expressed in the
contemporary West.

For Solzhenitsyn, freedom is valuable and indeed

necessary, but not as an end in itself. Rather, he sees
it as a means to a higher end - moral perfection.
And when he sees freedom being used to
undermine rather than to support that higher end,
he waxes eloquently scornful, as in his 1976 speech
on receiving the "Freedom Fund" prize: "(...)"[242]

Solzhenitsyn did not mention what is probably

the greatest evil consequence of freedom in present-
day democratic Russia, even more than in the West
- the rise of organized crime. On March 27, 1994,
James Woolsey, General Director of the CIA, told a
senate foreign committee that the pervasiveness of
Russian organised crime, fostered by the freedoms
and restraint of security forces necessary for
democratic reform, has contributed to the popular
backlash against Yeltsin's policies and bolstered
support for right wing nationalist Vladimir
Zhirinovsky. Organized crime not only threatens all
personal and commercial freedoms: it even
threatens the life of the planet insofar as it includes
potential trafficking in nuclear weapons.[243]

The only real defence of freedom against its own

worst consequences - including, as in Russia in 1917
and Germany in 1933, a descent into a worse
tyranny than that of any hereditary monarch - is a
good set of laws and an effective system for
enforcing them. However, democracy guarantees
neither the one nor the other. For a good set of laws
depends on the wisdom and morality of the
lawmakers - and democratic lawmakers are elected
to follow the will of their constituents, not the
objective good of the country. And effective
enforcement presupposes a generally high respect
for the law in the population as a whole - a
condition which is notably lacking in most
democratic societies today. In any case, according to
Solzhenitsyn, western democratic legalism has
become, to a dangerous and debilitating degree, an
end in itself. Every conflict is solved according to
the letter of the law, and voluntary self-restraint is
considered out of the question. It is not enough to
have a wonderful system of laws and every
democratic freedom. If the people are selfish, then
life will still be hell.

Pluralism, freedom of speech and the press and

democratic elections are all fine, says Solzhenitsyn,
but they only make the choice possible: they do not
tell us what to choose. The decision of the majority
is no guarantee against "misdirection"; fascists,
communists, nationalists and unprincipled
demagogues are frequently voted in by majorities.
Even in an established democracy major decisions
can be swung by the vote of a small, but determined
and selfish minority which holds the balance of
power and can therefore impose its will on the
majority.

In an article entitled "The Pluralists",

Solzhenitsyn writes: "They [the pluralists] seem to
regard pluralism as somehow the supreme
attainment of history, the supreme intellectual
good, the supreme value of modern Western life.
This principle is often formulated as follows: 'the
more different opinions, the better' - the important
thing being that no one should seriously insist on
the truth of his own.

"But can pluralism claim to be a principle

valuable in itself, and indeed one of the loftiest? It is
strange that mere plurality should be elevated to
such a high status... The Washington Post once
published a letter from an American, responding to
my Harvard speech. 'It is difficult to believe,' he
wrote, 'that diversity for its own sake is the highest
aim of mankind. Respect for diversity makes no
sense unless diversity helps us attain some higher
goal.'

"Of course, variety adds colour to life. We yearn

for it. We cannot imagine life without it. But if
diversity becomes the highest principle, then there
can be no universal human values, and making
one's own values the yardstick of another person's
opinions is ignorant and brutal. If there is no right
and wrong, what restraints remain? If there is no
universal basis for it there can be no morality.
'Pluralism' as a principle degenerates into
indifference, superficiality, it spills over into
relativism, into tolerance of the absurd, into a
pluralism of errors and lies. You may show off your
ideas, but must say nothing with conviction. To be
too sure that you are right is indecent. So people
wander like babes in the wood. That is why the
Western world today is defenceless; paralysed by its
inability any longer to distinguish between true and
false positions, between manifest Good and
manifest Evil, by the centrifugal chaos of ideas, by
the entropy of thought. 'Let's have as many views as
possible - just as long as they're all different!' But if a
hundred mules all pull different ways the result is
no movement at all.

"In the whole universal flux there is one truth -

God's truth, and, consciously or not, we all long to
draw near to this truth and touch it. A great
diversity of opinions has some sense if we make it
our first concern to compare them so as to discover
and renounce our mistakes. To discover the true
way of looking at things, come as close as we can to
God's truth, and not just collect as many 'different'
views as we can.”[244]

Thus just as Western democratic pluralism

would not save the West from Soviet
totalitarianism, so Russia would not be delivered
from the same totalitarianism by simply trying to
make it more democratic. Solzhenitsyn did not
believe that there was any realistic path of transition
to a democratic republic without creating a number
of nationalist wars - a judgement which we can now
see to have been prophetically true. A multi-party
democracy in Russia would be "merely be a
melancholy repetition of 1917". For the failure of
Russian democracy in 1917 was not the result
simply of the immaturity of Russian democratic
institutions, but rather of a fundamental flaw in the
basic theory and spirit of democracy. Communism
itself springs, not from traditional authoritarian
systems, which, for all their faults, still recognized
the authority of God above them, but from "the
crisis of democracy, from the failure of irreligious
humanism".[245]

Conclusion

At the time of writing (the beginning of the third

Christian millenium), liberal democracy appears to
have triumphed over all other politico-economic
systems. It has survived the socialist and fascist
revolutions of the period 1789-1945, and even
appears to be on the pointing of “turning” the last
and most powerful survival of the revolutionary
ethos, Communist China. But in both Fukuyama, an
avid supporter of democracy, and in Solzhenitsyn, a
lifelong opponent of totalitarianism, we see similar
doubts – even if these doubts are suppressed in the
former by his conviction that democracy represents
“the end of history”, the final, and best, politico-
economic system.
 The basic doubt can be expressed as follows: can
a system built, not on the eradication, but on the
exploitation and rational management of man’s
fallen passions, and not on absolute truth, but on
the relativisation of all opinions through the ballot
box, bring lasting peace and prosperity?

In a sense there is no competition; for the only

system that is radically different from liberal
democracy, Orthodox Autocracy, sets itself a quite
different goal: not peace and prosperity in this life,
but the salvation of the soul in the next. Even if it
could be proved that liberal democracy satisfied the
earthly needs of men better than Orthodox
Autocracy, this is no way invalidates Autocracy,
insofar as the true, convinced subjects of Autocracy
would gladly exchange happiness and prosperity in
this life for salvation in the next. For while the
purpose of democracy is the fullest satisfaction of
man’s fallen nature, the purpose of Autocracy is the
creation of the political and social conditions
conducive to the maximum flourishing of the
Church, whose purpose is the recreation of man’s
original, unfallen nature.

But it may be doubted whether liberal democracy

will achieve its own stated ends. The cult of reason
and liberalism, writes L.A. Tikhomirov, “very much
wants to establish worldly prosperity, it very much
wants to make people happy, but it will achieve
nothing, because it approaches the problem from
the wrong end.
 “It may appear strange that people who think
only of earthly prosperity, and who put their whole
soul into realising it, attain only disillusionment and
exhaustion. People who, on the contrary, are
immersed in cares about the invisible life beyond
the grave, attain here, on earth, results constituting
the highest examples yet known on earth of
personal and social development! However, this
strangeness is self-explanatory. The point is
that man is by his nature precisely the kind of being
that Christianity understands him to be by faith; the
aims of life that are indicated to him by faith are
precisely the kind of aims that he has in reality, and
not the kind that reason divorced from faith
delineates. Therefore in educating a man in
accordance with the Orthodox world-view, we
conduct his education correctly, and thence we get
results that are good not only in that which is most
important [salvation] (which unbelievers do not
worry about), but also in that which is secondary
(which is the only thing they set their heart on). In
losing faith, and therefore ceasing to worry about
the most important thing, people lost the possibility
of developing man in accordance with his true
nature, and so they get distorted results in earthly
life, too.”[246]

Thus even the most perfectly functioning

democracy will ultimately fail in its purpose, for the
simple reason that while man is fallen, he is
not completely fallen, he is still made in the image of
God, so that even when all his fallen desires have
been satisfied there will still be an unsatisfied
longing for something higher. “Happiness” – the
supreme “right” of man, according to the American
Constitution – is unattainable as long as only our
own, and not other people’s happiness, our own
glory, and not God’s glory, is the goal; and even if
attained on earth, it will only be brief and bring
inevitable ennui; for it will immediately stimulate a
desire for the infinitely greater happiness of heaven,
eternal joy in God. The revolutionary age that
followed the age of reason highlighted this truth,
albeit in a perverted, demonic way; for it showed
that there is more in heaven and earth and in the
soul of man – far greater heights, as well as far more
abysmal depths - than was ever dreamt of in the
complacent psychology of the liberal philosophers.

March 2/15, 1996; April 5/18, 2000.