North of the Shire

Here is my own opinion on history and government. Given all that we have discussed thus far, I have a theory of history, or perhaps it would be more accurate to call it a theory of government in history up to and including our own time.

I believe that it is our natural bent to desire a kingdom. Most of our fantasy tales center around this theme and while there are good kingdoms, bad kingdoms, good kings and bad kings, fantasies never come up with democracies for some reason.

We can see that even the Israelites in the Old Testament Scriptures wanted a king badly enough that God gave them one. It was God’s plan that the Israelite nation would have God as their king and that was the substance of their various covenants, beginning with Abraham. In the end, Jesus Christ came as the King of the Jews, from the line of David the king so that God was once more king of the Israelites as well as the rest of the peoples and nations that enter into the Kingdom. His Kingdom as we know, is not of this world, even while present in this world.

But if we think this is only in the realm of fantasy and dreams, let us see what happens in real life. If we look closely at the various forms of government and political ideologies that have arisen since the time when kingdoms were the norm among our ancestors, we can see that in terms of the exercise of real power and how that power devolves in practice, it is possible in most circumstances to sketch the outlines of a kingdom.

Let us look at the Soviet Union as an example. Ostensibly this was supposed to be the governance of the worker, for the worker; and the hierarchy of elites, whether industrialists or nobility, whether based on achievement or birth, was to be wiped away in an egalitarian paradise. But what happened? There quickly was put into place a system wherein party elites ruled, with a supreme leader on down. The average comrade in the Soviet Union had no more real freedom or power than the average peasant under the Czars of Russia. The structure was essentially the same, under a different name and a different method of selection of rulers. Moreover, the economic privilege that accompanied the level of power in that regime quite distinctly paralleled the same economic privilege that characterized the kingdoms of old, with their levels of nobility in ascending importance right up to the king.

Let us look at a democratic republic like the one that exists as the United States of America. In the beginning, the founders desired to have something akin to an inverted pyramid structure, such that local governments were the most important, the next level down being the state governments and the bottom, least important level being the federal government, the government of the Union. In Catholic social doctrine this structure is a practical application of the principle of subsidiarity. In America, the ideal was individual freedom under the rule of law rather than the workers ruling all in a collective, and the vision was of the individual American applying himself to his own pursuits and supplying his own needs and that of his family, finding common cause in public pursuits among those closest to him, his immediate neighbours.

But what has happened in America? The pyramid has been reverted such that the greatest power is in the President and there is a hierarchy of powerful elites that descend down from that superstructure, having economic privilege to accompany their power. The people even revere the President, or at least the office, in much the same way as a king is revered. Despite egalitarian theories and stated ideologies, whether based on freedom or collectivist thinking, we find that the elites find their way to the top in any political structure, and the peasants find their way to the bottom.

Of the several variations of individualistic or collectivist oriented governments that we see in Europe, on close examination we will find the same devolving of power, influence and wealth to the few at the top and gradually diminishing to those many at the bottom.

What I am pointing out is that we create kingdoms wherever we go, and under any name of system that we chose. Some are more blatant, some are more benevolent, but most are unwilling to recognize the truth, even those like Canada, who are descendents of colonies of a former empire controlled by another kingdom. Even in truncated and “democratized” kingdoms such as England, the old structures never really go away, although they are populated by different people.

FIRST THINGS PART FOUR