THE FAULT OF MODERN DEMOCRACY.

Evening Star, Issue 21080, 18 April 1932, Page 9

THE FAULT OF MODERN DEMOCRACY.

TO THE EDITOtt. Sir, —The fault of modem democracy —a fault that is common to the capitalist ■ and the Socialist —is that it accepts economic wealth as the end of society and the standard of personal happiness. We have made the increase of wealth the one criterion of social improvement, and consequently our aristocracy is an aristocracy of money makers, and our democratic ideal is mainly an ideal of more money for everyone. But the standard of life is really not an economic but a vital thing; it is a question of how you live rather than how much you live on. Just as a man who buys one’s house does not buy one’s family and friends and interests—all the things that made up the life that was lived in that house—so two men may possess the same money income and yet have totally different standards of life. Even if we could guarantee every unemployed person an income of £4OO a year, we should not have solved the vital problem of unemployment, which is the problem of social maladjustment. St. Francis of Assisi possessed no income at all, and his material standard of life was below that of a modern tramp. But for all that he was infinitely better off than the modern unemployed, because he had achieved a complete measure of social adjustment. To take a less extreme instance, during the happiest and most productive part of his life Wordsworth had, I believe, an income of about £7O a year, and he would have been no better olf with a million, because he had the way of life that suited him. If he had lived in a different kind of society, for instance, in modern America, he would have needed twelve times that income, and he wofild still have been cramped and unsatisfied. The great curse of our modern society is not so much lack of money as the fact that the lack of money condemns a man to a squalid and incomplete existence. But even if he has money, and a great deal of it, he is still in danger of leading an incomplete and cramped life, because our whole social order is directed to economic instead of spiritual ends. The economic view of life regards money as equivalent to satisfaction. Get money, and if you get enough of it you will get everything else that is worth having. The Christian view of life, on the one hand, puts economic things in the second place. First seek the Kingdom of God, and everything else will be added to you. And this is not so absurd_ as it sounds, for we have only to think for a moment to realise that the ills of modern society do not spring from poverty; in fact, society to-day is probably richer in material wealth than any society that has ever existed. What we are suffering from is lack of social adjustment and the failure to subordinate material and economic goods to human and spiritual ones. To take a concrete example. The difficulties of our present situation are largely due to the fact that England sacrificed her agriculture and her agricultural population in the last century in order to become the workshop of the world. The preservation of our agrarian foundation was perfectly possible, but it would have involved loss of immediate profit, a simpler standard of life, and a lower national money income, aiid consequently it was sacrificed to our industrial supremacy. Wo got the money, but wo have paid the price in the loss of national stability and of a balanced social economy. But the most serious loss is not the loss of economic self-suffi-ciency; it is the loss of the rural class, which has destroyed the old foundation of our national life and dried up the stream of British colonial expansion at its source. And even more serious are the spiritual consequences of economic materialism. Europe gained the leadership in world culture, not by its material wealth, but by its pre-eminence in the things of the mind—in science and literature, and ideas. It created the ideals which the rest of the world followed. If modern democracy were to involve giving up this mission and abandoning spiritual leadership for material satisfaction, then it would justly mean the decline of Western culture.

But, as we have seen, democracy is by no means essentially materialistic. The democratic movement was founded on idealism, and if it is losing its ideals that is not tho fault of the people as a whole. The vital problem of democracy is the problem of spiritual leadership. We need men who are something more than cunning manipulators of tho political and economic machine—men who stand not for success c r material efficiency, but for all the old Christian ideals of faith, hope, and charity.—l am, etc., Akestos. April 16.