Isolating Democracies: the Absurdity of Complete Autonomous Law

Throughout history we can see with some consistency and reliability a historical development of government from Democracy to Tyranny, usually with a brief stop off in simple Mob rule devolving into the chaos requiring the single person leadership of a tyrant.  Plato himself outlined such an eventual devolution of Democracy in his dialogue The Republic.  JPII echoes also focuses on Democracy at the end of his encyclical Evangelium Vitae, and though he seems to make reference to this eventual devolving into tyranny (“When a parliamentary or social majority decrees it is legal… to kill an unborn life, is it not really making a ‘tyrannical’ decision? [Evangelium Vitae, paragraph 70]”, he concerns himself not so much with this eventual transformation as with the stop off in Mob rule.  For JPII, the Mob rule of a devolving Democracy occurs when the citizens consider themselves “the true rulers” whose “freedom would require that on the legislative level [their] autonomy of individual consciences be acknowledged (EV, paragraph 69)”.  This itself creates a dysfunctional society where two diametrically opposed tendencies are proclaimed and attempted to be upheld.  When a society so descends into chaos, only a system revised to reflect the moral or the natural law and return the society to a state in which human dignity and flourishing is recognized and provided for.

The two diametrically opposing views of a Democracy descending into Mob rule are both claims to different forms of complete freedom: freedom of each individual’s choice in the moral sphere, and freedom from the responsibility of following through with individual moral choice when dealing with everyone else.  The members of the society first “claim for themselves in the moral sphere the most complete freedom of choice and demand that the state should not adopt or impose any ethical position but limit itself to guaranteeing maximum space for the freedom of the individual”.  On this side of the coin, the only limitation that is placed on the individual freedom of the citizens is anything that infringes upon any other citizen.  On the flip side however, a Democracy where the citizens are the absolute moral authority requires that “in public and professional duties… each one should set aside his or her own convictions in order to satisfy every demand of the citizens which is recognized and guaranteed by law”.  Not only does the society wanting complete moral autonomy want their individual will to be absolute and inviolable, but they also want complete freedom from responsibility in violating their own definitions of morality when it comes to dealing with other individuals.  Moral choice becomes reduced to the law, and the individual moral choice so adamantly insisted upon becomes nothing more than an inconsequential personal preference akin to whether you prefer ketchup on your hamburger.  Complete relativism and isolation ensues, as there is nothing freeing oneself from the confines of his own subjective experience which is absolute, but only absolute for him, inconsequential to his neighbors and set aside to even interact.  

Such a society can as a result never truly have any sense of value for the human person, for the very core identity and values which make a person up must be discarded upon encountering any other individual.  The only way past such radical isolation and reduction of the human condition is a return to a governmental system based on either specifically the Divine moral law or at least the natural law, which “no individual, no majority, and no state can ever create, modify or destroy, but must only acknowledge, respect and promote (paragraph 71)”.  Really, he is not actually outlining a governmental’s return to either the moral or the natural laws, but highlighting the intricate link between the two: the “moral law which, as the ‘natural law’ written in the human heart, is the obligatory point of reference for civil law itself (paragraph 70)”.  Such a law exists not because individuals or systems create it but exists in witness and respect for “certain fundamental rights which innately belong to the person, rights which every positive law must recognize and guarantee”, the first of which is the basic right to simply exist.  

Without recognition of the moral law, existing and imposed upon persons simply because of the dignity of human life all law devolves into chaos and irrational violence.  Democracies set upon the theory of complete individual autonomy create laws which themselves are not even laws, coming not from an ordinance of Reason (the requirement laid out by Aquinas and referenced by JPII) but from a place of deluded fantasy which would admit any and all atrocities given the correct “context”.  By returning to the moral order, a task which requires a mere recognition of the law already written upon the human heart, Democracies can not only create “an ordered social coexistence in true justice so that all may ‘lead a quiet and peaceable life’”, providing ample support for the human life but can in fact increase their own longevity and forestall their own decay into tyranny and chaos.