Men have always tended to an exaggerated idea of the importance of events that take place in their own time. They have also always wanted to talk about what seems important to them. We can imagine a circle of them, once upon a time, airing their views over a fire in the back of a cave. Today, of course, other means exist for them to ventilate the views they want to make known. They can email, blog, tweet, text or click on the comment button.
Ego has a role both in exaggerating the importance of events and in the desire to vent one’s views. This is clearest in the extreme case of the persons in every generation who go beyond seeing events in their day as supremely important and become convinced they will witness the end of the world, as recently with some silliness about a Mayan calendar. It amounts to saying, “If God is going to bring down the curtain, He will do it only if I am in the audience.”
Lesser events than Apocalypse are colored by egotism. Thus this is the worst natural disaster of its kind ever, or this presidential election is the most decisive in U.S. history, or this crisis is the worst faced by the Church since the Reformation. Why? Because it’s happening in my lifetime, I’m here to see it.
Papal elections can be seen in such a light and perhaps more readily than other events because they are relatively rare. Their rarity, in addition to the singular importance of the papal office, can lead persons to believe the Barque of St. Peter will run aground the day after tomorrow unless St. Peter’s latest successor possesses all the qualities of St. Peter (all, that is, except his capacity to betray Our Lord). That is if the persons are full of ego and lack a historical sense.
If today’s electronic gadgetry enables persons anxious to broadcast their views to do so more easily and to a larger audience than they could in the past, modern democratism also encourages it. Indeed, it virtually exacts it. After all, of what use is our endlessly vaunted “freedom” if it isn’t exercised, including by voicing one’s views on anything and everything. As for democratism’s other sacred tenet, equality, it can be shown to exist only by demonstration, including by voicing some notion intended to refute one expressed by somebody else, like the author of an article or book. Is the author an established authority who spent days, weeks or months organizing his thoughts, researching and preparing his material, whereas it takes but moments for me to type that he is dead wrong and then click on the comment button? That’s all the better for demonstrating, at least to my own satisfaction, that everybody is equal and my opinion is as good as anyone’s.
In sum, democratism’s notions of freedom and equality are to the ego and our baser inclinations what physical exercise is to the body. They strengthen them.
At the same time there is a paradox Chesterton could encapsulate in a few words were he alive to observe it. As the illusion of freedom offered by democratism becomes more all-embracing, but the real thing ever more limited, men feel increasingly powerless, diminished, reduced to being simply one more face in the crowd or the Social Security number by which the government knows them. What results from this?
Dostoyevsky, of whom I never tire of speaking as my friend and colleague Dr. Robert Hickson does not tire of Belloc, gained an insight that marks all his work while doing time as a political prisoner in the forced-labor camps of Siberia where all the inmates really were equal, the identity of all being reduced to their convict number and wretched camp life. It is that stronger in men than even the will to survive is the desire to make a mark, to leave in the world some trace they have passed through it, to be heard if only by a last shouted curse.
Ego is certainly involved in this desire, but this desire is not selfish. It is not one man with an inflated idea of himself and importance of his views trying, under the cover of democratism, to exalt both at a cost to somebody else. It is actually life-affirming. It arises from the need all men have to believe existence has meaning and that they may live to some purpose congruent with it (all men, that is, save the one who succumbs to the spirit of nihilism – the belief there is nothing to believe. God help this man.). I suspect this desire may be more strongly felt among the men who produce articles and books than among those who simply click on the comment button, but it also operates in the latter and is not to be disparaged unless the impulse to click on is purely destructive. In whichever case, whether it is the life-affirming desire or selfish drive to assert one’s own self at the expense of another, it reflects the fact society is becoming like one vast labor camp with a sign hanging over the entrance: Slavery is Freedom, Degradation is Equality.
The thoughts I am expressing here are inspired by some strong comments posted in reaction to an article by me recently published on this website, “Reacting to Pope Francis”. They are not meant to discourage readers’ comments. Far from it. Commendation is always appreciated, but so is correction when it is of some point genuinely in need of it. Especially welcome are comments that will expand everybody’s understanding of a subject, including the author’s. My trouble with some of the reactions to my article was that the persons posting them clearly had not bothered to read past the first paragraph before clicking on the comment button. They were that anxious to join a chorus of so-called Traditional Catholics that began to denounce the election of Pope Francis from the moment he stepped onto the balcony of St. Peter’s (“He is not vested as he should be!” they cried.) Their attitude was well captured by a still photo from the movie Twelve Angry Men that the website’s publisher chose by way of illustrating my article.
It also put me in mind of something Oscar Wilde wrote and that could serve as an epigram for the present article (he alludes to an incident that took place when Titian was painting a portrait of Emperor Charles V): “One who is an emperor or king may stoop down and pick up a brush for a painter, but when the democracy stoops down it is merely to throw mud.”
That said, I must add that the comments posted to my article could not be compared either in substance or tone to “mud” I’ve seen posted by putative Catholics elsewhere on the worldwide web, some of it so rabid it reads as if written by a crazed Evangelical to whom the Pope, any Pope, is the Great Beast 666. Often, the writers speak of the Pope, and several other recent pontiffs, as “bad” without specifying what exactly they mean.
I think I know. A Pope would be “bad,” or perhaps not Pope at all, as long as he fails: 1) to decree what no Pope will: the immediate replacement on the altars of all the world’s churches of the Novus Ordo Mass by the extraordinary rite; and 2) he does not otherwise run the Church as they would if God were smarter and arranged for a conclave to elect them.
It is ego and democratism gone about as far as they can.
