Let there be democracy

I must say that I wasn't so much taken aback by Ivan Padovani's article Let There Always Be Life (Talking Point, February 3) as surprised by it. I don't know who Dr Padovani is but he wrote, inter alia, that he is not impressed by arguments against entrenching the anti-abortion laws made on the grounds that such entrenchment is anti-democratic. This is an argument I have made myself in the past. What surprised me when I read his argument was that he doesn't try to prove the contrary. For the first time I found someone who openly acknowledges that the said entrenchment is anti-democratic, and whose attitude is: so what, so much the worse for democracy? I hope it is noted by those members of our Parliament and others in politics who signed the pro-entrenchment petition and who, ironically, were elected, or hope to be elected, by democratic vote.

Dr Padovani makes it clear what his attitude towards democracy is that on his part he cares very little about it and, indeed, about the Constitution. To be accurate, he cares for them only to the extent that they suit his principles which, for some reason he takes as absolute. Thus, he roundly condemns statements "declaiming the sacredness of democracy and our Constitution". It is "not the institutions of democracy and the Constitution that are sacred," he says, "but, rather, it is the principles they uphold that are sacred. If a better means of safeguarding these principles were to be devised, both democracy and the Constitution could, quite happily, be ditched overnight." Now this is dangerous thinking for anyone who is a democrat and needs to be rebutted.

There is, in fact, a better way of safeguarding principles than a democratic constitution; that is a totalitarian one. Dr Padovani argues, in line with this way of thinking, and like many who support the petition, that he supports entrenchment because it will make abortion "that much harder to introduce", for future generations. "This," he says, "is the key principle of the proposal." It is also the one that renders it anti-democratic. For if the political criterion is making something one objects to, something that offends one's principles "much harder to introduce", then totalitarianism serves that purpose much better than democracy, because to change a totalitarian constitution requires more than a two-thirds vote in Parliament; it requires a revolution, and that is harder to achieve than a two-thirds vote.

Of course, the "nonsense" he refers to is really Dr Padovani's because his thinking is utterly confused and he has no understanding at all of democracy and how it works. Where does he think that the principles in the Constitution, including the "right to life" (which, incidentally, is already in it), come from? How does he think that constitutions, that are political instruments, are made? Does he think that they just come about or that someone brings them down from the mount on tablets? Constitutions are made by fiat, by the will of human beings. They are either dictated by totalitarian regimes or made by the people through democratic institutions. Their contents are not revealed to the legislators as "profound" truths; they are the fruit of experience and political maturation. The "right to life" has the same proveniance, it is not a timeless truth written into human nature or whatever, it is a concept with a very definite history that can and has been written. There was a time when it was not recognised in our European culture and there are still non-European cultures that do not recognise it. In short, it is culture-specific. It does not reflect any "unchanging law that binds human societies". It has grown in controversy, and this is why, where it is recognised, it is interpreted variously in all its different applications. A modern democracy which matures into this understanding thereby tolerates a variety of views which it values by the name of pluralism. Acknowledging pluralism would make no sense if one did not acknowledge the principle that what binds societies together is not some "unchanging law" accessible to an elite, but the desire for mutual accommodation and the virtues of tolerance, respect for persons, solidarity, civility and so on - the virtues required for and by democratic exchange. But Dr Padovani's understanding of democracy is quaint, to say the least. He sees the imposition of taxation by governments as a restriction on democracy which "is no longer what it once was and the principle of a people getting exactly what they want is not as simple as it may once have sounded".

This is confusion. In post-war democracies, as in pre-war ones a people votes a government with a programme into office; this is how it gets what it wants. If it wants to rid itself of a particular kind of taxation it will vote in a government that promises it (as our recent history amply illustrates). If that government fails to deliver or it changes its mind a people will vote in another government that will bring it back. If a voting majority in the country demands a re-introduction of slavery the democratically-elected legislators would comply. Why? Because they are democratically elected - they would obviously be the people elected by that same majority that demands the re-introduction of slavery and they would not be elected if they went against those demands. That's how democracy works.

Fortunately the West, through its growing liberal conscience, recognised early on that a democracy that becomes the dictatorship of the majority is unfair and undesirable. No one made the case better than the English philosopher/social-reformer John Stuart Mill (see On Liberty) who proposed three freedom rights intended to protect minorities from such a dictatorship, rights that are today enshrined in the political culture of the western world where democracies are liberal social democracies.

These are the right to freedom of expression, to freedom of lifestyle, and to freedom of association. A society's respect for these rights is what protects its minorities from slavery and persecution by the majority. Without a liberal conscience, in a society that believes that the majority has the right to impose its morality on its minorities or on its future generations, the possibility of persecution and oppression are never far away. And such imposition is, unfortunately, the spirit behind the entrenchment proposal.

In the final analysis the freedom rights I mentioned correspond with the principle that the majority, no matter how strongly it holds its convictions, can always be wrong and that it should be possible for the minority to turn itself into a majority by rational persuasion. It is a possibility Dr Padovani and his fellow-thinkers want to deny future generations with their plan to entrench the anti-abortion laws in the Constitution.

This principle that the majority is always fallible is one that should, indeed, be sacred. It is what distinguishes a modern, mature, democracy from the dictatorship of the majority which it should not be.