To describe a political regime, we must also describe the souls of the citizens. Regimes do not take to unfavorable descriptions of their way of life, no matter how justified. And no correlation need exist between what a regime says it is and what it actually is. Regimes with written constitutions announce the standards by which they wish to be judged. They may reject their own self-proclaimed principles. Behind all regimes and written constitutions are principles of reason about human nature and its functioning. These principles of reason always take precedence over positive, or even constitutional, law We judge regimes by what they are, not what they say they are, or what they enforce. A regime of pure positive law that admits nothing higher than itself has already sown the seeds of its own corruption.
The present pope, while praising “democracy” and “rule of law,” has been notably cool to western political regimes and their current self-descriptions. He has coined the words “democratic tyranny” to describe those regimes that, in their institutions and ways of living, “choose death.” He has been reviled for his efforts. A democratic tyranny is one in which not only the rulers are corrupt and self-serving, but the people, in their own personal lives, display the same disorders of the soul one sees in the rulers. The pope is in the enviable, or unenviable, position of asking whether all regimes should be judged by a single, universal standard. He is not a cultural relativist who opines that a thing can be right in one time or place and wrong in another. He has personally seen too much to overlook the fact that one cannot use contradictory sets of principles.
The standards of reason and law apply to all regimes. Whatever the legitimate differences that might exist among civil societies (and there are many), those differences are not so great that what is evil can be made right in one place or time or that what is right can be made evil in another. To be sure, evil can attain the approval of civil, that is, positive law It can be enforced by police and military; it can be enacted by legislature; it can be approved by courts.
Anthony Cardinal Bevilacqua remarked that “we will fail as a people if we do not recognize the lessons that must be learned from our country’s moral and spiritual climate over the past year. This crisis has brought truth and morality to the forefront. We must now move forward from a presidential crisis that has torn at the moral fiber of this country” (National Catholic Register, Feb. 21, 1999). We might ask, what are these lessons? Surely not that lying and perjury are legitimate instruments of public procedure. Moving “forward” evidently does not mean replacing the classical standards of right and duty with those of expediency and moral disorder.
Yet we would be naive if we did not recognize that one school of thought and practice—probably the majority opinion—does think that our regime has in fact successfully replaced the standard or classical norms of right and wrong, which are also found in revelation. “Truth and morality” are in the “forefront” because they are being rejected as legitimate criteria of public order. Those who hold these classic standards are being marginalized. Indeed, they seem to marginalize themselves by finding the public order more and more unsupportive of their way of life.
What is ironic about this situation is that the mean of morality has itself shifted more and more toward the extremes. Aristotle said that some words always indicate that something is wrong, that it can never be a mean. Ideas as basic as the Ten Commandments or their rational equivalents are today considered to be at the fringes of personal or social morality. Once these standards are rejected, to hold them becomes a threat to the state. Even reason and revelation become threats to “public order.” Those who hold them are declared to be outside of the culture, fanatics. The “lessons” of the past year suggest the validity of this description of our regime.