Perspective

I know I'm a lousy blogger. So sue me. I'm sure I'll get back around to doing it more regularly. This morning I received a forward that was pretty profound and it struck me so much that I wanted to share it here. I'd be interested to hear if this hits anyone else as it did me - kind of an epiphany-evoking concept.

Democracy, Prosperity and Religion
By Clayton M. Christensen, Professor of Economics, Harvard University

Is there a situation where democracy won’t work? I learned the importance of this question in a conversation 12 years ago with a Marxist economist from China who was nearing the end of a year’s fellowship in Boston, where he had come to study two topics that were foreign to him: democracy and capitalism. I asked my friend if he had learned anything on these topics that was surprising or unexpected. His response was immediate and, to me, quite profound: “I had no idea how critical religion is to the functioning of democracy and capitalism.” Though de Toqueville also had observed this, I had never made this association between religion, democracy & capitalism in my mind. But it was like this guy parachuted in from Mars – and this is what he saw.

He continued, “In your past, most Americans attended a church or synagogue every week. These were institutions that people respected. When you were there, from your youngest years, you were taught that you should voluntarily obey the law; that you should respect other people’s property, and not steal it. You were taught never to lie, and to respect the life and freedom of others the same as your own. Americans followed these rules because they had come to believe that even if the police didn’t catch them when they broke a law, God would catch them. Democracy works because most people most of the time voluntarily obey your laws.

“You can say the same for capitalism,” my friend continued. “It works because Americans have been taught in their churches that they should keep their promises and not tell lies. An advanced economy can function only if people can expect that when they sign contracts, the other people will voluntarily uphold their obligations. Capitalism works only when nearly all people voluntarily keep their promises.”

My friend then invited me to look around the world at those countries where, in his words, “America had snapped its fingers at the country and demanded, ‘We want democracy here, and we want it now!’” Unless there was already a strong religious foundation in those countries, he asserted, democracy has failed miserably.

There are religions in every country, of course. But he made clear that democracy-enabling religions are those that support the sanctity of life, the equality of people, the importance of respecting others’ property, and of personal honesty and integrity. Those religions also had to be strong enough that they held power over the behavior of the population. People had to believe that God would punish them even if the police and court system did not. He then gave some examples. In Russia, for instance, there are religions – but few people are influenced by them. As a result many people avoid taxes, and the government cannot collect them. Murder, bribery and stealing are a part of everyday life. American foreign policy has been naïve in Haiti and the nations of Africa that have been torn by such brutal civil strife. “You just think that because democracy works for you that it will work everywhere. It only works where there is a strong foundation of this particular type of religion.”

Obedience to the Unenforceable. In the course of researching more deeply the issue my friend posed I happened upon an elegant summary of what he taught me, penned by Lord John Fletcher Moulton, the great English jurist, who wrote that the probability that democracy and free markets will flourish in a nation is proportional to “The extent of obedience to the unenforceable.”

My Chinese friend heightened a vague but nagging concern I’ve harbored – that as religion loses its power over the lives of Americans, what will happen to our democracy? Our prosperity? We are living on momentum. The ethic of obedience to the unenforceable was established by vibrant religions. Some of these teachings have become a part of our culture. As a result, today there are many Americans who are not religious, who still voluntarily obey the law, comply with contracts, value honesty and integrity and respect other people’s rights and property. This is because certain religious teachings have become embedded in our culture. But is culture a stalwart, active protector of democracy’s enabling values? I don’t think so.

Those who seek to minimize the role that religions can play on the public stage are making two very serious mistakes that stem from their not having asked the right questions. First, they are seeking to minimize the very institutions that have given us our civil liberties in the first place. And second, the debate swirling in judicial discourse about the separation of church and state is a false dichotomy.

The classes of religions. If we broadly define them as philosophical traditions, there are two classes of religions: theistic religions and atheistic ones. Zealots of atheistic religions who assert that theistic religions must be separated from our fabric of democracy, even as they knit the doctrines of their religions into our legal and regulatory frameworks, are asking the wrong question, and therefore giving us an answer that may well prove to be toxic to democracy.

When the instinct of even a minority of people in a society is to steal what belongs to others, lie when it suits their selfish purposes, evade taxes, demand bribes and disregard the rights of others, then capitalism won’t work, either. Just look at our current economic crisis. It didn’t take many Americans whose instinct was to take what belongs to others and to stretch rather than obey the rules, to cause capitalism very nearly to collapse. When the extent of disobedience to the unenforceable grows, not just democracy, but prosperity becomes in jeopardy. We treasure democracy because it gives us freedoms of speech and the press. But attempting or imposing democracy without near-universal obedience to the unenforceable strips from us other crucial freedoms, which include the freedom from want, and the freedom to be employed.

When a nation lacks the requisite foundation of extensive obedience to the unenforceable, what form of government will work? Unfortunately democracy and capitalism won’t. It requires the rule of a strongman who defines the rules and then wields the power required to compel obedience. Living proofs of this hypothesis cover the globe.

It’s not a coincidence that the countries that have transitioned from poverty to prosperity in the last 40 years – including Korea, Chile, Taiwan, Singapore, Portugal and the Dominican Republic – all were led by relatively iron-fisted dictators, who had the instinct and ability to wield power quite ruthlessly, in some instances, to break the vested interests of those that profited from the corruption that had trapped those nations in poverty. Impoverished countries with democratic governments such as the Philippines, in contrast, struggle to prosper because imposition of democracy has simply democratized corruption to the point that capitalism won’t work: The investments that would stimulate prosperity simply cannot be made, because you can’t bribe enough people to make anything happen. The fact that Medvedev and Putin are usurping political and economic power in Russia is a manifestation that Russia isn’t yet in a situation where democracy will work.

Those who assume that the atheistic religions of secularism are a better backbone for freedom and prosperity than the theistic ones that they are trying to push under the back seat, have a huge burden of proof which they’ve not had the intellectual fortitude to discuss, let alone bring forward.

(Taken from a commencement address at Southern New Hampshire University on May 16, 2009)