Two Cheers For Democracy

"You’ve touched there on why he’s interesting. It’s partly because the context in which he writes these essays, in the 1930s, is eerily similar to the context in which we find ourselves today, unfortunately. Not to be hysterical about it, but a lot of the geopolitical factors are very similar. The crisis of liberal democracy that we’re living through is the same as the crisis of liberal democracy of the 1930s. You seem to get this cycle in democratic life when people just get bored, almost, of democracy. They just think, ‘it’s hard work and it’s not very glamorous.’ It’s no surprise, I think, that when ISIS are trying to recruit people in Britain and around the world, they make great play of the crusade and dramatic Lord of the Rings -style stuff. Democracy, by contrast, is rather dull. And, although it has great results, these results are the results that people get used to and don’t value in the long term, like peace and security and reduction of inequality. Once you’ve got used to those, you don’t value them. “The crisis of liberal democracy that we’re living through is the same as the crisis of liberal democracy of the 1930s” E M Forster is writing in a similar context. You’re right that most people remember him for his novels. His novels are beautiful and every one of them is a humanist work of genius, emphasising the connections between people and what holds us together, relationships, the possibility of human contact. You have that famous phrase from Howards End “only connect” that resounds down the ages. He is a good example of a humanist writer in his novels, for all those reasons. But he wrote his novels quite early in his life. I don’t think he wrote another one after the age of 45 and he lived to 90. They were over quite quickly, and he spent the rest of his life as a public intellectual. He’s similar, in that sense, to Bertrand Russell. E M Forster and Bertrand Russell were both patrons of the Humanist Association. They said, at the time, that if Bertrand Russell was the head of humanism, then E M Forster was the heart. And I think that that’s quite true. The essays in Two Cheers for Democracy span a period of about twenty years—through the 30s and the 40s—and they’re incredibly humane. He touches on the prejudices of the day, the emerging totalitarianisms, and he has a wonderful essay on anti-Semitism. Very gently and with a novelist’s skill, he lays bare how stupid anti-Semitism it is—how baseless and groundless and foolish. “You seem to get this cycle in democratic life when people just get bored, almost, of democracy” When you start the essay, you think it’s going to be an essay about being bullied at school, because he starts it by saying, ‘When I was at prep school, it was incredibly shameful to have a mother. The rumour would go round and people would say Smith’s got a mother!’ And, then, when he was at his next boarding school, having a mother was accepted as inevitable but it was shameful to have a sister. You think this is going to be an essay about irrelevant childish prejudices, and then he says, ‘I thought I’d escaped all of this with school but now today I find, all of a sudden, it’s a terrible shame to know a Jew or to be a Jew.’ And suddenly, it brings into sharp relief the stupidity of prejudice. He’s incredibly good at that. He writes about dictators. He’s writing, of course, about Mussolini and Hitler. Today, it would be Erdogan and Putin. You can read that essay and it’s the same thing. He talks about how dictators want to grind the people down into a single person but they’ll never win because humanity is stronger than that. Diversity is stronger than that. The liberal attitude is stronger than that. He’s not a wild optimist. He does think that most of human history is pretty awful and the light is in the bits in between. He thinks there are liberal people who are good in every age but that sometimes they are very few in number. He says, ‘I do not believe in Belief. But this is an Age of Faith.’ People can’t get enough of it so you have to defensively adopt a creed of your own. I think that’s important. That’s what Forster’s essays make clear. It’s what we’re experiencing again today, and we don’t have the solution to it. There needs to be a drama and romance to democracy that we don’t have. They maybe have a touch of it in America with the idea of the town hall and the ballot box, but it hasn’t done them much good recently. The last people, I think, to have a good, powerful mythos of democracy were probably the Athenians. That’s a very humanist thought as well. Even big lofty concepts like world peace start with our own relationships. There’s nothing coming down from the top. We build it all from the bottom up. Connecting with people, building relationships with people, building social peace and then civic peace and then, hopefully, world peace at the end of it, that’s the only way it’s going to happen. When Eleanor Roosevelt was drawing up the Declaration of Human Rights, she said that human rights began in the “small places” of people’s lives. That’s the same sort of thinking. But equally you mustn’t exhaust yourself on these things. Another way in which E M Forster’s values of morality are very relevant is that he’s putting a value on helping others, and doing your best, but he’s also putting a value on making sure that’s not to the detriment of everything else. You still live. You’ve got to keep yourself intact. Harold Blackham—who was one of my predecessors here as Chief Executive of Humanists UK—said, “One has to be friends with oneself before one is fit to be a friend” and I think that’s good thinking."