Letter
from Lhasa, number 341. Joseph Marie de Maistre
between misunderstanding and fear
by
Roberto Abraham Scaruffi
de Maistre, J. M.,
Quatre chapitres inédits sur la Russie, Libraire D’Aug. Vaton Editeur, Paris, France, 1859.
(de Maistre 1859).
Joseph Marie de Maistre
Joseph de Maistre, a Savoyard
philosopher, politician, writer, historian, lawyer, magistrate and diplomat,
reflects all the sordidness and backwardness of the Kingdom of
Piedmont-Sardinia. While the British looked at novelties as chances to be
exploited, the De Maistre approach is fearful because he does not understand
the nature of State/government, of power. The advices he provides are defensive
and odd because he is apprehensive of what he cannot understand and so he does
not know how to use. Finally he provides advices for perpetuating backwardness
and instability instead of modernization and of a real Conservative program [Conservative in its British meaning, not
in its etymological one] based on it.
At the same time, he is
intellectually honest and sincere. He tell what everybody, in the power
networks, thinks. While usually rulers and their intellectuals mystify, he
talks freely and honestly. Power usually uses double speech. There is what it
thinks and there is what it tells for mystifying what it actually does. De
Maiste who, evidently, does not know the real art of power, which is the art of
deceiving people for better exploiting and dominating them, tells what power
thinks but it avoid to openly tell.
According to the author,
before Christianity, slavery was considered a necessary part of the political
order because that is a consequence of human nature and psychology. For him, if
everybody has real civil rights, there is no way to govern a nation.
All this is
incontestable. In fact, nowadays events show, everyday more, that freedoms,
rights, democracy, absence of slavery, are only nominal while, by subtler and
stronger other ways, the slavery and inequality have been formally denied be
everyday reaffirmed and even in the harshest and more barbarian ways. People
are persecuted and assassinated, from State/government, even without any formal
and apparently fair judgment. States/Governments claim and want you to believe
that you have rights while, in front of State/government, you have not.
There are partially
secret laws giving unlimited and unaccountable power to governments, and to
their Secret Police officers and corps. The nowadays monstrous development of
State Terrorisms and militarism in all its forms, and the correlated
unaccountability of State/government relatively to people and to formal/current
law, provides a wide range of examples about that.
The author asserts that,
in antiquity, the large majority of people was in slavery. For him, no nation
can be governed only by law. So religion is used if it can control people. In
Russia, that would be improbable, for him, so, more than removing serfdom, what
would have explosive consequence, it would be essential to reinforce nobility
and other free social strata.
If you cannot
sufficiently deceive people, you need to use pure force, so to preserve formal hierarchies. That is a form of
weakness for power. A strong power convince its people to be free and a real
protagonist, as the British Crown did with its British subjects. It went on
doing what it wanted while people was grateful to such a ‘liberal’ Crown
claiming to be subjected to people and law while it was actually not.
In de Maistre, there is
here a hierarchical vision of reality, which is absolutely realist. Is nowadays
world less hierarchical that in antiquity? It does not seem. Nothing never changed
and changes, from this point of view.
At the same time, one
should underline that deceiving people making them believe that they are free,
and manipulating them in other and more substantive way, is more effective and
efficient than open discrimination. Nowadays world is more hierarchical and
dominated by centralized aristocracies, but they are hidden ones. People must
inevitably obey without any different possible choice, although usually
thinking to live in a new era of democracy and freedoms.
De Maistre remains more
attentive to forms than substance. Soviet Russia [we know he lived well
before...], largely democratic at the lowest levels, created by its oppressive
and super-terrorist means, a more aristocratic regime than the Czarist one and,
finally, a stronger Russian power. ‘Communism’ was more DeMaistrian than
Czarism although he would have disavowed it if he would have lived at that
times. The same might be told about China, Korea, Vietnam etc. US and British ‘capitalism’
have been even more aristocratic and, since that, more successful, and world
real Empires.
The key element is
finally development and developmentalism, alias
strong oligarchies capable of real achievements. This determines the success or
the failure of social and political orders. The British monarchy could
continuously restructure its social base, while the Russian one could not and
finally perished. It was not capable to created different, more updated, forms
of serfdom.
His excessive attention
to forms leads the author to his distrust for natural sciences. He is
absolutely fearful of them. Actually the art or science of government can and
must fruitfully use natural sciences.
For the author, religion
is necessary or useful for submitting people. Science opposes religion. For
submitting science, one needs Catholicism. This seems his vision. He does not understand
that sciences can become new religions and that, anyway, also sciences are usable
and actually used for submitting people.
Enlightenment,
Protestants, Jews, also a lot of other things, make him afraid because, for
him, they weaken power. He has a fundamentalist vision of power instead than a
functionalist or a pragmatic one. Power seems from him an achievement by
itself. It come from God and so it is right and useful just for that. It is the
natural order. Whatever power really be, science makes it stronger, not weaker.
It is on the contrary its incapability to use science which makes it weaker and
destructible.
His advice for Russia is
all defensive. Limit the emancipation of peasants, their emancipation from serfdom.
Do not consider emancipation as moral. Accord nobility both for landowning and
merit at the same time. Limit the function of science and it propagation.
Favour Orthodox and Roman Christianity, overall the latter. Watch over
Protestant teaching because it is a universal dissolvent. Watch over
foreigners, because 99% of them are dangerous, overall Germans and Protestants.
For him, Calvinism is
subversive while Jesuits are the best conservative force. Sovereignty comes
from God and the sovereign personifies this sovereignty coming directly from
God. That makes the sovereign holy and all revolt against him
unjustifiable.
The inconsistency of his
political thought is not that he insists on the divine origins of political
authority but that, finally, for him, only the power he likes, an immobilist
one, has divine origins. Differently, to claim the divine origins of whatever
political power would be a tautology. While to claim the divine origins of the
power[s] we like is just a propagandist attitude. If power were really divine,
that did not need to be claimed, apart from that this assertion were a metaphor
or an allegory.
De Maistre adores forms
while abhorring the substance of reality he does not really understand.
de Maistre, J. M.,
Quatre chapitres inédits sur la Russie, Libraire D’Aug. Vaton Editeur, Paris, France, 1859.
