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The Four
Sacred Cows of Democracy
by Rabbi Ze'ev Chaim Lifshitz
Translator: Dr. S. Nathan
l'ilui nishmat Esther bat Mordechai
l'ilui nishmat Meyer Hirsh ben Laibel
(NOTE: This
article is Chapter 2 OF an
essay on Law.)
Four Principles of Civil Liberty
The most supreme, sacrosanct value in western
democratic society is the freedom of the
individual. In order to ensure that this value shall never
be violated or deprived, not even by the
bureaucratic mechanism of the democratic regime
itself, democratic society has isolated four
principles that promote the interests of civil
liberty. Out of these,
a sort of fundamental
legislature of human rights in
a free society has emerged. These four principles
fall into the category of "taboo." They may not be
touched under any condition. To harm them is to
harm the very soul of democracy itself.
These
four components of individual freedom have acquired the status of
sacred cows in every sense. They are named Art, Scientific
Research, Journalism and The
Law. Plump and complacent, but also cross and
suspicious, these four cows graze by the eastern
wall of our secular-liberal society.
The extent to which you worship them is the
yardstick by which your
culture and enlightenment are measured.
These four "primary categories of
damage," if
we may borrow mishnaic terminology,
share in common an immune status. Beyond
the reach of criticism by mere
mortals, even on issues of human morality
and fundamental human values, they are exempt from
any considerations. Certainly they need not concern themselves with national
loyalties. The cow must be
allowed to go her own way. She may trample and
destroy anything that happens across her path; it is forbidden to
arrest, curb or even attempt to calm
her.
Paradoxical and
grave indeed is the phenomenon by
which the sworn enemies of democracy exploit
these cows as
Trojan horses. Out of their bellies, they spew
forth to destroy, shaking the pillars and the very
foundations of the democratic regime. They need
not fear that their conspiracy will be exposed for
on the contrary, whom more than they, show such
utter concern for the sacred
cows? They are their most
devout worshippers.
Elias Kanti's great work, "Blinders," illustrates this process, illuminating it in new
dimensions, going a level
higher than the Kafkaesque in describing the
terror of the grotesque, when law separated from
its meaningful content, destroys both. The law is
embodied in Kanti's
monstrous gatekeeper. Values, naked and forlorn,
are embodied in Kin the Sinologist, a pathetic
image of the detached,
defenseless scientist.
Following is a brief description of
the nature and scope of each of these ritual
bearers:
Art
Art is the freedom of the creator to give
expression to his spirit and to his senses in
every manner and in every context that seems fit
in his eyes. He bears no obligation toward any
values or conventions, hallowed as they may be
within the social tradition. His allegiance is to
the value of art alone. And you, little private
citizen – commoner – have no authority to judge
the artistic creation except by the criteria of
artistic value. And if you are not proficient in
such matters, base creature that you are, be so
good as to muzzle your mouth.
In truth, definition of the concept
"artistic value" entails a complex and
comprehensive study in esthetics. Yet in the
democratic reality of our own day, it suffices for
a work to have come forth from the hand of one who
considers himself an artist. It is then considered
a work of art, acquiring thereby, instantaneously,
the privileges reserved for the sacred cow.
Thus do license, vulgarity, primitive
emotion and ignorance, representing themselves as
vital artistic expression, invade the top echelons
of society. We find that art, rather than serving
as a refining and broadening force, is turned into
a source of spiritual retardation. It has become
infamous for its destructive effect upon an entire
society and upon its youth. It degrades values
held by western humanistic tradition to be basic
to human existence. Every repulsive behavior,
every pathological perversion becomes justified
and legitimate. Through the intricate dialectics
of stupidity, it becomes a respectable expression
– bearing existentialist tidings, as it were.
Depravity, the wallowing in the sewage
and waste waters of human experience, the debasing
of the human image and the delight in its shame,
all of these have become not merely permissible.
Under the inspiration of art, they are imbued with
an aura of superiority. Woe to the one who points
out naively that the emperor is naked. The bearers
of the banner of freedom, progress and
enlightenment come forth immediately and silence
him. He is placed in the public stocks, to be
shamed by all, and the cow reaches great heights
in her absurd and paradoxical existence.
B. Science
The business of science, claim the disciples of
this sacred cow, is the investigation of ultimate
and uncontestable truth. Therefore, no limitation
or restraint may be imposed upon it by any party
or outside interest, for what power can remotely
resemble or compare to absolute truth? Therefore
the man of science has the divine right of kings.
(We will not pause here to delve into the
character of the true man of science. We will only
mention that he bears no resemblance to the priest
of the sacred cow.) He may violate the rights of
others, he may trifle with the beliefs and
proprieties of entire societies because they are
not considered members of the scientific
community. He may deliberately and arrogantly
desecrate the values and traditions that
generations have held sacred. It is characteristic
that every apprentice researcher sees himself as
the new Galileo, and every minor lecturer, utterly
devoid of culture, is by his own perception at
least Voltaire.
Matters are particularly grave in the
science of medicine, for here the practitioners of
medicine adopt for themselves the right to
determine the fate of a human life by weighing
considerations such as its advantages to science.
Medical experiments are practiced upon human
beings. These are dubious and reckless from a
scientific perspective, and criminal from a moral
perspective. Many and various are the ethical
philosophers who have exhorted against this peril
yet it continues; it is a routine practice. What
makes medical research particularly deadly, aside
from the fact that most people lack the
professional capacity to criticize these matters,
is the fact that one can apparently justify any
experimental procedure, as repugnant as it may be.
One need merely evoke the virtuous and morally
illogical claim of the “good to mankind” which
eventually will grow out of this research in the
course of time. A simple reference to its
contribution toward saving human life in the
future will suffice. It is a sort of standard
abstract life saving of the human race. Indeed the
very fact that science’s relationship to values
has become a subject of philosophical inquiry,
gravely examined from every aspect, offers a
hundred testimonies to the sense of Olympian
separatism, of the arrogant hubris which
characterizes scientific research.
By the power of this sense of
superiority, the sacrosanct academic brotherhood
insists upon immunity to all criticism or
restriction. Who is the one so worthy as to come
and to teach them? Who can enlighten them, the
possessors of truth, in the manners and norms of
decency? The academic community will not tolerate
any meddling in its affairs or any examination of
its linen; rather the world must lend an ear to
its song, and honor its greater wisdom.
Thus is the academic community exempted
from critical evaluation, bountifully endowed by
society with every means at its disposal, and
pampered and coddled like those infant children
who delight us by the very fact that they exist
and enrich our world. Gradually, university
campuses in the western world have grown to become
the ideal hothouse: Law breaking, anti-democratic
elements are grown and cultivated there, to expand
without limit.
Out of the midst of the campus population
of lecturers and students come forth the leaders
and members of unscrupulous and inhuman terror
gangs. Bearing the banner of this revolution or
that one, they cast their dread over the entire
civilized world. Their only objective: the
eradication of the democratic society itself, to
its very foundations. Their hatred knows no bound
toward that society whose reverent awe of academic
freedom permitted them to flourish undisturbed.
C. Media
The media embodies another element of civil
liberty: The public’s right to know. In principle,
a free press serves one of the vital interests of
the democratic way of life, because it acts as an
alert and efficient supervisor, overseeing the
procedures and actions of the ruling bodies lest
they betray their trust. There is no doubt that
the watchful eye of the media and its swift
reporting ability serve as a deterrent to
established government, and force it to follow
democratic norms.
Yet the difficulty lies precisely here:
Media reporters have hallowed “the right to know”
which, from their perspective refers to “the right
to report.” They have turned it into an autonomous
value which may not be subjected to criticism of
any sort. This right is not supervised in any way,
and one may not set any boundaries to it.
Information must flow to the public without
inhibition and without delay. The newsman
reporting from the scene may ignore all secondary
issues, so to speak, such as morality, politics,
or national security. He may invade an
individual’s private space, and he may be cavalier
with the well-being of an entire country. Only the
news must flow and the public must know.
The power which the western media has
acquired in the course of these last few decades
by virtue of the value that it upholds - the great
sanctity of which it has managed to instill into
the civil consciousness - has long since deviated
from the framework which placed the role of the
press as government critic. It has become – and
this is especially true of television – the most
absolute ruling power in the western democratic
world. Practically speaking, it is correct to
describe the modern media as a superpower. This
superpower is not born of democratic processes.
Yet it wields its far reaching influence upon
western governments. It is a power that
intervenes, directs and determines the outcome of
events, even if they are of a crucial nature.
International wars are waged in conformity with
the agenda of those who rule the media. Indeed,
television is a near-perfect realization of
Orwell’s Big Brother, the all powerful tyrant that
manipulates his citizens in their own homes.
Because he brainwashes them within their own
private space, outside manipulation can never be
detected.
Again, as in the academic world, it is
precisely the anti-democratic elements that
exploit the sacred cow. Their extraction is from
other cultures. They are bred of traditions devoid
of the concept of individual freedom. Their goal
is simple: They would like to undermine western
democracy and eventually to take control of it.
These elements capitalize on the bias of the
media. They proclaim loudly “the right of the
(western) public to know.” They take cynical and
shrewd advantage of this “value” that they
“cherish” in order to further their influence over
western governments and over public opinion in the
free world.
D. Law
The manner in which the legal system is embedded in
the social consciousness as an independent value is
an issue, which we discuss extensively in various
sections of our work. Nevertheless, we shall remark
here that this process of the consecration of the
law, and of society’s submission to it, has the most
absurd aspect of all of those processes that beget
the sacred offspring, which we have enumerated here.
For
the prevailing law, by the very nature if its
creation and origins, is heir to its power and to
its very existence only by virtue of the consent of
human beings to create it and to uphold it. Common
secular law has no resources for its existence
beyond the consent of mortals who have organized
themselves into a social framework. They have agreed
to live according to a law that will regulate the
course of their lives for their benefit. As to
humanistic myths regarding “natural law,” we do not
address them here for obvious reasons.
To
relate to the law as to a value that stands on its
own authority, to turn this into the ultimate
measure of public and political life, can be
classified as an absolute reversal of orders. It is
a fulfillment of the prophecy “when the slave shall
reign…” Law, designated from its very conception to
serve man, becomes an independent entity. It becomes
man’s master. Rather than judging a law by its
suitability and its competency in arranging human
affairs in the manner most positive and beneficial
to human development, rather than measuring a law by
its tendency to reflect human meaningful content
faithfully, a human being is judged and evaluated by
the extent to which he cleaves to and embraces the
law. He is measured by the measure of faith that he
puts in the legal system. This is the nightmare
described in Kafka’s great work.
It appears that the vital lessons concealed in
Kafka’s work have not been learned. The legal
mechanism is attaining increasingly powerful status
in democratic regimes. It has acquired the status of
an autonomous system. It is a self-sustaining
sentient being that operates only out of its own
motives and needs. It is heedless, this
Frankenstein, of anything that lies outside the
narrow confines of the law.
The State of Israel was established at a moment of
profound moral crisis for the Jewish people. During
this period, its citizens were undergoing a process
of dissociation from the existential meanings of
Jewish tradition. The State of Israel adopted the
law as a substitute for its abandoned values.
Glorification of the law was turned into an
educational goal. The administrative regime
cultivated among the people an absolute faith in the
law, a reverent nearly mystical awe of its
institutions and its attendants. These were
represented as the oracle, of perfect character and
integrity, from which no secret of the ways of truth
and of justice in any area or subject could ever be
hidden. Courthouses and especially the Supreme Court
were, in the eyes of the people and of their
instructors, miniature temples. The verdict of the
judges of Israel was the word of the oracle - which
splits asunder and rises forth from the temple. Any
word of criticism or inquiry concerning a verdict,
or any aspersion cast upon the absolute wisdom of
the judges was perceived to be utter sacrilege.
How
very many public and national misfortunes have
befallen the State of Israel because of the attitude
of undiscriminating adoration of the law that had
been cultivated among her people. Matters becomes
especially grave, they actually take on a grotesque
aspect when hostile elements actively seeking
Israel’s downfall learn how easily this attitude can
be turned to their advantage. Among the Arabs,
sensitivity to the value of the legal regime and to
the authority of consensual law is a foreign
concept. It is unheard of in their native culture,
but they may use it for their own purposes. They
have learned that it is possible to make use of the
legal terminology of the Israeli court system in
order to inflict injury upon the “Legal State” of
the Jews.
E. The War of the Gods.
As mentioned, that which endows the sacred cow
with its status is the fact that in the public eye
it appears to embody a value of civil liberty. It
is entrusted with the duty of protecting the
individual from the arbitrary limitation and
inhibition of his freedom of movement by the
authorities and by established government.
However, the sacred cow itself needs to be
protected from harm by hostile elements. It must
be fully enabled to stand its guard, and to
faithfully carry out its task. Therefore, society
has granted it immunity that is, for all intents
and purposes, absolute.
From a logical perspective, it could not
be otherwise. If the value that the sacred cow
represents is not immune and exempt from every
existing limitation, then it is no longer a
supreme ideal. The cow is then deprived of her
power to serve democracy in the manner that she
was instructed to serve it. At best she can be
considered a desirable social consensus. If there
is any power, before which the cow is compelled to
bow her head and moo submissively, then her
sacredness will automatically expire. All of her
sublime power will be exposed as mere illusion.
For this reason it has never occurred to
society to consider the nature of the relations
that must obtain between the four sacred cows,
among one another. It has not defined the status
of one cow vis a` vis another cow. Rather, all are
sacred, all are supreme, and all enjoy unlimited
immunity.
Thus it can happen that a war of the gods
will break out. One cow battles another, or all
the cows fight among themselves, as certain
conflicts of interest exist between them. Since
society has not determined the protocols of
priority, or of mutuality that are to prevail
among the sacred ones, these wars can escalate.
The law that governs the battle of the titans is
the same law that governs the “natural condition”
described by Hobbes: “The more violent one
prevails.” The cow who is heftier, whose priests
are more aggressive, and whose artillery is more
lethal, subdues her weaker enemy. Exactly like in
Pharaoh’s dream, one cow swallows another. But not
quite – Pharaoh’s dream reflects a more democratic
vision, for after all, the thin cow swallows the
fat one. Whereas in the reality of the western
democracies, violence reigns supreme when speaking
of the war of the gods, in their most brutal
manifestations, and results are only natural and
predictable: The stronger cow subdues the weaker.
Thus it comes about that the news media
and the law reach a point of confrontation.
Certain requirements of the law may impinge upon
the sacrosanct privileges of the news media, and
may deprive the newsman’s “freedom of reportage.”
For example: The legal system may demand of a
journalist that he reveal the source of certain
information that he has obtained. The journalist
refuses, for he reasons that this constitutes
intervention in his sublime task and a setting of
limitation upon him that is unthinkable. In a case
of this sort, the law will not consider the status
of the media, or to the fact that it is charged
with actualizing civil liberty. It will not be
overly critical of the means that it employs in
order to compel the defiant journalist to obey its
demands. It will exert its superior power (which
the law grants it) against him, and it will put
him – all of his sacredness notwithstanding – on
trial.
For the most part the law must have
recourse to aggressive imposition of its
authority, being frequently incapable of acquiring
information by professional methods such as police
expertise, when investigating some legal issue or
other. In order to conceal its own ineffectuality
and to justify its own good name, the law will not
hesitate to violate the sanctity of another
democratic value - the citizen’s right to know.
A similar adversarial relationship is
encountered frequently between art and the law.
Civil censorship is an official and established
institution for the critique of art by the
democratic regime. It has the legal authority to
disqualify any artistic creation, according to its
own principles and criteria – for example, it can
declare that it is illegal to stage a particular
play or to show a particular film. In such cases,
the world of art usually responds with a show of
deep offense and unforgivable insult. Its wrath
burns within it, its fury is all-consuming. It
arms for battle to the bitter end, for the law has
attempted to circumscribe its territory. If the
government is not aggressive enough to stand upon
enforcement of the law, the offended titans of the
art world “daringly defy” the law. They rebel in
the name of artistic freedom, and stage the
illegal play in spite of all. The right of the
artist to express himself freely, however his
heart may desire, is, in their eyes, a supreme
value that cancels out every other value.
Thus we find a situation of inherent and
intrinsic contradiction. The assurance of liberty
and of the basic rights of society and of the
individual is dependent upon the invulnerability
and the immunity of the sacred cows. However,
their own immunity is broken down by the sacred
cows’ own aggression against one another. There is
no principle, no supreme value that protects the
sacred cows from assault and injury by one
another. It is obvious that there could be no such
value. It could never be found in a secular
humanistic society. The whole actuality and
definition of the sacred cow lies in the fact that
it is not dependent upon any human consent and
consensus. Rather, it is an absolute value.
The Root of All Evil: Separation in Principle
The phenomena described above demand
investigation. It behooves us to attempt to expose
their root and cause. It seems clear that there
exists a certain primary cause, embedded in modern
society’s most basic assumptions, that is
directing the entire mechanism behind these
phenomena. We do not presume to encompass this
complex problem. Social, psychological, economic
and political factors all most likely play their
role. Nevertheless, we would like to pause and
examine the one primary factor that seems to be at
the root of it. One principle seems to turn the
wheels for all the many forms and variations that
this problem takes.
It would appear that the root of this
evil is the principle of separation, an assumption
that is rooted in modern social consciousness. The
sacred cows have hastened to exploit this
principle in order to grant themselves absolute
autonomy as far as their hearts may desire. An
independence that stands beyond the reach of any
criteria for criticism whatsoever, that the sacred
cows have taken for themselves, justifies itself
through a pragmatic approach, in which reality is
divided into separate segments. Reality becomes a
series of patches and pieces. In terms of
practical application, this requires separate
systems of activity, separate spheres with no
common aspect between them. There is no
meta-structure of values to unite them into one
organic system. There is nothing to compensate for
the inadequacy inherent in every separate sphere.
Segmentation creates a situation whereby every
sphere of activity recognizes only its own
reality. It is inevitable that conflict and
competition for supremacy will rage among them.
One pushes and attempts to crowd out the other,
ignoring quite deliberately its right to exist. It
must reject every meaning or worth that the other
attributes to itself.
General principles that serve as hallowed
beliefs and as fundamental criteria in one sphere,
are not even recognized – they have no place in
another sphere. The pristine logic that serves as
science’s guiding light is rejected within the
borders of art and of the law, as though it
belonged to a separate reality distinct unto
itself. Justice, which serves as the law’s guiding
light, is not recognized in the private territory
of science or in any of the other territories. It
is as though this justice, to which the law is
subject, is not necessarily relevant in relation
to “the public’s right to know.” It seems as
though it is not appropriate for one moral value
to be equally incumbent upon all the separate
spheres.
Within this reality, of the zealously
guarded separation of territories, a paradoxical
situation is created. It is as fascinating as it
is fraught with disaster. Because the separate
systems are hostile to one another, they become
reverse companions in misery. The trouble of one
is the liberation of the other, who strives to
limit the first or to annihilate her entirely. It
is the nature of the sacred cow to be incapable of
recognizing her fellow cows' right to liberty.
In conclusion, we will consider the
Jewish approach to this question. In a society
that is organized and operates according to Jewish
belief, a war of the gods can never be declared.
Because God is the only supreme value recognized
in Judaism, this value serves as a controlling and
mediating factor among the other values that are
its derivatives. Thus historically, royalty was
subservient to prophet or priest, who represented
the godly value, and these two in turn were
subservient to the rule of the Torah.
The
fact that an entire system addresses one absolute
value provides a balancing and stabilizing effect.
It ascertains that the various value systems
operating within it are reconciled with one another.
They must operate under conditions of mutual
dependency, yet one may not deprive another of its
unique status.
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