Society and its Purpose
Appendix 10. (404).
The same can be said about the culture of India. A discreet use of the intelligence was maintained in one part of the nation while the remainder sank ever more deeply into a state of intellectual inertia. The first part, which grew ever smaller and was finally restricted to the Brahmin caste, sustained the weak, civil life enjoyed amongst the people. We can however make our observation more general and apply it to all the peoples of antiquity.
When States originate, there is very little difference between the culture of the heads of nations and that of the people. Everyone formed the people, and in these conditions the populace could easily enter into discussions concerning government; the nation was administered through the ideas common to the masses, not on the basis of calculations requiring a high degree of reflection. As things progressed, one section came to possess greater means for developing its intelligence and lifting itself much higher than the reason of the masses. These persons engaged in religious and administrative matters. As they realised how their knowledge elevated them above the common people, they used it to restrict government, science, religion and even ownership to themselves.
The people, conscious of their own ignorance, looked with extraordinary esteem on these sages (who for their part knew exactly how to maintain and increase this esteem through all kinds of formalities) and assented without difficulty to government by other people of greater foresight. The natural tendencies of the people were more inclined to do this as they approached the final social stage with its inevitable corruption. Thus, the people were excluded from social government partly by the ambition and greed of powerful individuals, partly by government’s becoming too complicated for them and superior to their capacity, and partly by the people’s own retreat from public affairs on the basis of a certain instinct for inertia which developed together with corruption. As a result, the multitude was deprived of the only source of instruction with which it was able to sustain its own intelligence, that is, the practice of public consultation about State matters. Other means of education, so abundant in Christian societies, were totally lacking in pagan societies whose masses suffered irreparable corruption on all sides. It has rightly been said:
| When I think of the Greek and Roman republics and compare them with the
republics of America, I see libraries full of manuscripts and an uneducated
populace on the one hand, and innumerable newspapers and educated people on the
other. I then go on to consider all the efforts which are nevertheless made to
judge one side with the help of the other and to foresee, through what occurred
two thousand years ago, what will occur in our own times. I am tempted to burn
my books to avoid applying anything other than new ideas to such new social
conditions. (Tocqueville, De la Démocratie en Amérique, t. 2, c. 9) |