Dictatorship is not a passing phase. It is deeply lodged in the mechanism of human order. To thwart it, we must exercise every political, economic and educational muscle we have. Only then can freedom prevail – and it will.
I would not usually have the temerity to write an essay disagreeing with Winston Churchill about his views on freedom, but on this occasion I must do exactly this. When the dark clouds of tyranny were gathering on the British horizon in 1938, Churchill addressed the people of the United States – an early effort to mobilize their energies and sympathies against the coming European storm. What he said, and what we think about it, has much relevance to the situation in Ukraine today.
On October 16, 1938, Churchill had this to say about the curse of dictatorship, a view that resonates with the current crisis: ‘Dictatorship – the fetish worship of one man – is a passing phase. A state of society where men may not speak their minds, where children denounce their parents to the police, where a business man or small shopkeeper ruins his competitor by telling tales about his private opinions; such a state of society cannot long endure if brought into contact with the healthy outside world.
The light of civilised progress with its tolerances and co-operation, with its dignities and joys, has often in the past been blotted out. But I hold the belief that we have now at last got far enough ahead of barbarism to control it, and to avert it, if only we realise what is afoot and make up our minds in time. We shall do it in the end. But how much harder our toil for every day’s delay!’
On February 24 of this year, a fulsome 84 years after Churchill’s speech, it became painfully apparent that we have not got sufficiently ahead of barbarism to control it. It ambushed a civilization possessing mobile phones, microwave ovens, self-driving cars and other technological marvels, the products of an advanced society that Churchill could not have dreamt of.
How is such a thing possible? I submit that Churchill’s optimism was laudable and hopeful, but premature. Dictatorship does not depend upon human knowledge, technological sophistication, or our scientific insights into the human condition. It resides in human minds at all stages of our development, and at no point should we assume that it has been surpassed by the ‘light of civilised progress,’ as Churchill put it.
Nevertheless, if we throw off the complacency that we can advance beyond it, we are better equipped and ready to battle it at any time that it expresses its terrible depredations.
Dictatorship comes in many forms, and we could examine fascism, socialism, communism and the varied and diverse forms of collectivism that give it succour and encouragement.
But whatever its technical expression, in all cases its root is the passivity of humans and their readiness to be led with the strength and clarity that endears the dictator to his or her people.
Passivity is the enemy of liberty. As people abnegate the effort to actively challenge the political environment in which they live, the vacuum created is filled by the demagogue. And when he or she has assembled the instruments of state terror while the bovine population go about their anodyne lives abjuring any responsibility for the emerging fear, the passivity is no longer passive, it is enforced by the iron rod of the ruler.
And then it is all too late. Passivity becomes an active effort to avoid the prison, the gulag, or even worse. Passivity becomes an energetic activity to avoid the attentions of the state. Demonstrating a disinterest in the world is the very means to survival.
Passivity can overwhelm any society, whether it be a slave-owning ancient Egyptian empire or a space-faring technological civilization. This explains why Churchill was wrong about dictatorship being a passing phase.
No form of enlightenment can guarantee that passive resignation is able to sufficiently and permanently overcome in order to ensure no room for the dictator.
Indeed, one might even be cynical enough to wonder whether the technological products of our comfortable age make it more likely that populations will give up their liberties to enjoy the benefits of luxury.
The light of civilised progress may provide the fertile ground for tyranny, not its diminution.
But I do not come here to suggest that Churchill’s admonition that ‘we shall do it in the end’, as he put it in reference to controlling the barbarism of dictators, is wrong and that we must accept dictatorship as an indefeasible feature of our societies.
Instead, I only want to suggest that we should not expect that as our societies advance, we will inevitably enter into an age that is free of barbarity. This is a difficult conclusion for the hopeful. It seems miserable at best to conclude that humans cannot rid themselves of the terrors of dictatorial force and that we cannot find a permanent way to quash these afflictions.
There are scientists out there who might claim that in the future we will be able to engineer the human brain itself to remove its violent tendencies. Even if we cannot avoid the emergence of a dictator here and there, eventually we will be able to engineer compassion and understanding into all human minds to make them benevolent.
Then perhaps Churchill would be right that the products of the light of civilised progress can save us from dictators and their depravities. I defer this marvellous vision to the future, and I cannot say whether such a thing is possible.
I am not convinced that a neurobiologist knows enough about the human brain to be able to tell us whether such a proposition can be achieved, or that even if we could engineer universal compassion, it would not stymie emotions so essential to many impressive products of the human mind, from art to great literature.
In the meantime, with the practicalities of such science fiction unsure, we must work with the human clay that we have. We must assume that this is our lot and work out how to deal with it.
At all stages in our progress, we must seek out the buds of dictatorship and nip them before they can grow. If we do not, then they will expand until they become branches that on each passing day become ever more difficult to remove except with great force, filling our history with heroic efforts to overcome burdens that were once simpler.
The Russian vice currently clamped across the east of Ukraine is a new episode of this ancient truth.
What is the antidote that we need? It is essential that we wage a war on human passivity. I use ‘we’ to refer not only to nations that have the habitat of dictatorship, but to all of us. This antidote knows no specific culture, racial view, or history.
It calls on us to engage with our political systems, to take part in local and national groups.
Especially it implores us to get politically involved precisely when we detect the early signs of fear encouraged by governments, for a fear of speaking out is the sure sign of the land being tilled for tyranny.
The fight against passivity calls to us to constantly work for free economic systems alongside democratic and free political systems. The surest way for the dictator to exert political will is to control the economic sphere and the resources of a nation.
A population must be actively vigilant for great accumulations of wealth in government and its associates.
Above all, the education system must produce children who have a healthy suspicion of state power.
This need not be a destructive cynicism against the great good that the collective power of the state can achieve, from the construction of hospitals to roads, but it calls on a population to look askance at the state and be watchful and vibrantly critical and questioning of its actions.
We might say that contrary to the legal system of a free nation, which should assume innocence in an individual until proven guilty, the state should be considered potentially guilty of nefarious plans until it proves its intentions and actions are innocent.
The ‘presumption of innocence,’ a fundamental tenet of a free society when it comes to the individual, should not apply to the collection of humans who call themselves the state. We might call this the ‘presumption of unhealthy power,’ and it should always be the starting point in dealing with the state.
Then, and only then, can the clamouring dictator realise that there is no landscape of passivity ready for him or her to exert their unyielding creed on a receptive population. The constant push-back of active civic involvement in the political and economic realms keeps the would-be tyrant contained.
But with every sinew raised against dictatorship in this way, we must still have the spirit within all of us that yearns for freedom. Tyranny cannot be finally thwarted without the quiet cries in all human minds that say to us: ‘Advance the cause of freedom! Advance liberty!’
Charles Cockell is Professor of Astrobiology at the University of Edinburgh.
The views expressed in this article are the author’s and not necessarily those of the Kyiv Post.
