Mysticism and Majority Rule

We earlier examined some of the (in practice, in the course of ordinary work) largely unexamined metaphysical and even mystical principles that are required for science.  Here is a sketch of something similar in the realm of political theory.

In his newspaper column for 22 Feb 1954, Walter Lippmann wrote:

There is no way of proving the doctrine that all souls are precious in the eyes of God. … The doctrine proceeds from a mystical intuition.

Nevertheless, he says, following Chesterton, that such a notion must lie behind the democratic ideal, or that ideal is groundless -- metaphysically unmoored.

He then goes on -- in a rather Chestertonian passage of his own -- to observe:

The mystical democrat had said, ‘Gold and precious stones are of no account’;  the literal democrat understood him to say that everybody ought to have gold and precious stones.

He is respectful of the democratic ideal, as well as the mystical intuition behind it;  but polemicizes over and over, throughout his long career, against a tin idol in the hands of the practical democrat, “Majority Rule” (or, as he often puts it, the whim of the plurality or protority, since that’s all you need to win a multiply contested election).

Although the principle of majority rule derives a certain sanctity from the mystical sense of equality, it is really quite unrelated to it.  There is nothing in the teachings of Jesus or St. Francis which justifies us in thinking that the opinions of fifty-one percent of a group are better than the opinions of forty-nine percent.

(Or, in one celebrated case, of forty-nine percent plus five Supreme Court justices.)

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A related notion, which can be held by someone who is not a democrat in either sense, is that of the Group Mind, or World-Soul, or General Will (Rousseau’s volonté générale).  To make this notion coherent is notoriously difficult.

Lippmann again, in The Good Society (1937):

Many particular interests do not in any conceivable combination constitute the general interest.

And again, in  The Public Philosophy (1955, ch. 3), he not only observes the distinction between “the people” and “The People” (like that of democrats and Democrats), but even between italicized and non-italicized versions of the latter  -- which must have been a tough sell, since in those days  neither typewriters nor newspapes used italics:

… the discrepancy between The People as voters and The People as the corporate nation … A prevailing plurality of the voters are not The People.