The Missing Roots of Democracy : Latin America Needs the Tempering of Commercial Habits

The Western Hemisphere is the democratic hemisphere. North America has been won by democracy. And democracy is the only political system that will satisfy the soul of Latin America, Octavio Paz has written, the only system that will ever be regarded there as wholly legitimate. This is true, Paz notes, even though Latin Americans have difficulty making democracy work.

The visit by Pope John Paul II to Uruguay, Chile and Argentina this week is therefore an important intervention in the history of this hemisphere. Uruguay and Argentina have turned toward democracy in recent years, and there is an immense popular desire for a speedy return of democracy in Chile.

Since, for Roman Catholics, the Pope is the representative of Christ on Earth, he has a higher standard to meet than solely to encourage democracy. Indeed, he would have no justification for encouraging the latter if history had not shown that there is no better way to secure liberty from tyranny.

Long before any bill of rights or written constitution was composed in modern history, both Judaism and Christianity taught that God the Creator knows every human person by name, loves each, values each with infinite love, and grants to each a dignity proper to no other earthly creature. From this vision came a belief in the inalienable rights endowed by God in every individual. The political history of the Western world has thus been a long, dark struggle of experimentation in which humans have labored mightily to devise political institutions to “secure these rights.”

From the days of Simon Bolivar (1783-1830) until today, Latin America has wrestled against a feudal inheritance rooted in the Holy Roman Empire, struggling to institute governments that do “secure these rights.” Although Latin American democracies have often been fragile and impermanent, recurrent military dictatorships have provided harsh instruction in the superiority of democracy in the protection of rights.

There are two reasons why democracy is so fragile in Latin America. One is that, in the words of James Madison, human rights cannot be protected by “parchment barriers.” Their true protection lies in the habits, associations and institutions of particular peoples. And no people can preserve democracy who fail to embody the required habits in their own daily behaviors.

Among these are respect for the “loyal opposition”; courteous dissent and civil argument; mastery of the arts of compromise, both among rival principles and among conflicting interests; the submission of personal passions to reasoned dialogue, and the appropriate differentiation of the art of politics from the logic of absolutes.

The Pope will not be able to complete his task in Latin America, therefore, if he does not emphasize the specific habits and virtues necessary for democratic living, which are distinct from the habits and virtues of pre-modern living.

The second reason democracy is fragile in Latin America was first articulated by Montesquieu. Every social system teaches and embodies its own particular virtues. Feudalism sang the praises of class, grace, heroism, dash, glory, high culture and disdain for the merely utilitarian. The underside of these virtues is stagnation, systemic legal impediments to all but the aristocratic class, religious fanaticism and a martial spirit.

To overcome these impediments, Montesquieu thought, democratic peoples require the tutelage of commercial institutions, which tend to soften manners, reduce fanaticism, teach respect for small losses and small gains, inculcate respect for law, cherish alertness, reward industriousness and favor progress in science and the practical arts.

In Latin cultures, those who are educated in the aristocratic virtues typically despise commerce. Despising commerce, they undercut the chances of what Montesquieu called the “commercial republic,” and thus they weaken the very political institutions that would “secure these rights.”

Obviously the commercial virtues are not sufficient. They must themselves be checked and tempered by other moral strengths and excellences, springing from nobility of character, learning, humanistic law, the arts and religion. Nonetheless, training in the commercial virtues is a necessary (but not sufficient) condition for the successful acquisition of democratic habits.

Without democratic habits, and apart from the tempering of character secured by commercial institutions, the prospects for stable democracies are not high in Latin America (or anywhere else). How well the Pope grasps--and communicates--such points will show how profoundly he has grasped “the new science of politics,” which led in 1787 to the writing of the U.S. Constitution. It was then, 200 summers ago in Philadelphia, that there first burst into flame that prairie fire of love for democracy that now has slowly spread through this democratic hemisphere.