Alexis de Tocqueville's writings about early American social and political life are popular in America, but his criticisms are ignored. One problem which Tocqueville saw and which which atheists should be able to relate to is how dissenters are silenced through a culture of fear. Tocqueville focused on political dissent, but what he wrote is true about religious dissent, too. Popular religion in America even today demands deference and submission, making dissent and criticism difficult.
In Fear: The History of a Political Idea, Corey Robin writes:
Tocqueville identified anxiety as a political problem that could be resolved by political means: anxiety was the political weapon of a tyrannical majority, which drew its power from law, ideology, and institutions, and subjected minority dissenters to the threat of ostracism. How to fend off this tyrannical majority? By dividing and decentralizing political power, and by encouraging participatory and local organizations, which would put less power at the majority’s disposal, and more at the dissenters’. This wasn’t an altogether happy picture, but it did hold out the possibility that if political power were fragmented, freedom might thrive and anxiety diminish. [emphasis added]
Fragmented power creates room for individual liberty. In government, the separation of powers is supposed to prevent any one branch or department from acquiring enough power to infringe on popular liberty. The same holds for religious liberty: the more religious power is distributed through society, the easier it is to dissent from any one religion or even from all religions.
We see this in how religious pluralism undermines traditional Christian privileges. America is being de-Christianized because other religions insist on equality; in the process, the power of Christian institutions, beliefs, and leaders drops. Unfortunately, making room for liberty doesn't mean everyone takes advantage of it:
But even in the first volume, Tocqueville’s analysis contained a corrosive subtext: the individual conformed not because of any distribution of power, not because of laws, ideology, and institutions, but because he was too weak, psychologically, to insist upon his freedom. In the second volume, published in 1840, this weak psyche metastasized into an entire culture, beyond politics and power, almost beyond hope. With his desperate emotional need to belong, the modem, democratic self did not have to be actively frightened into submission: he was already anxious by virtue of his inability to stand on his own, already prepared, with no encouragement, to hand over his freedom.
While in the first volume laws, ideology, and institutions helped create a culture of quiescence, the second was dominated by a darker vision, where political solutions were almost helpless against a preexisting culture of loneliness. The second volume represented more than a simple change of focus. It was a wholesale rejection of the first, which Tocqueville had come to believe was “distorted, common, and false,” offering in its place “the true and original Picture” of modem life.
Few are aware of Tocqueville strong criticisms of democracy and rejection of many of his optimistic views. Even fewer would likely agree with Tocqueville’s complaints, but he makes valid points and many are similar to 20th century Marxist critiques of liberal democracy.
The tyrannical mass, Tocqueville believed, represented a new kind of political animal, brandishing new instruments. It did not wield the “clumsy weapons of chains and hangmen.” Instead, it roamed about the land, arranging a dull sameness through sentiments. The new agent of fear was a majority wielding power not through traditional offices or weapons of state, but through the social mechanisms of popular opinion and common belief. [...]
Just as the foundation of the majority’s power was political, so were the weapons it wielded against dissenters. The majority threatened dissenters not with physical violence or prison but with isolation, telling those who challenged it, “You are a stranger among us.” It did not deprive dissenters of their rights; through ostracism, it made those rights ineffective. In democracies like the United States, Tocqueville believed, exercising power depended upon the cooperation of like-minded men and women.
Without the ability to talk to fellow citizens, the dissenter was politically crippled, incapable of advancing his goals. “You can keep your privileges in the township,” the majority would declare to the dissenter, “but they will be useless to you, for if you solicit your fellow citizens’ votes, they will not give them to you, and if you only ask for their esteem, they will make excuses for refusing that.” The dissenter’s potential allies were well aware that if they joined him, they too would face isolation and be equally crippled, and so they kept their distance from him.
Once again, this is about political dissenters but the words also apply to religious dissenters — and especially atheists, though for us sometimes the threats of physical violence do exist. This is an argument for why atheists should organize: individual dissenters may be denied access to popular government, but not if enough of them get together and support each other.
The desire to conform is probably less a function of mass democracy than a natural function of the human species. We are social animals, after all, and social cohesion made survival easier as we evolved. Lone dissenters are more likely to die out in the bush; strongly connected social groups that work together and sacrifice for each other are more likely to survive and thrive.
It might be fair to say liberal democracy takes advantage of what's already inherent in the human species: achieving greater conformity not through outside force, but through an internal desire to be liked, to belong, and not to stand out. That we have these desires seems indisputable, so the question is how liberal democracies can overcome them. Perhaps we need institutions or procedures to ensure that dissent and liberty are not just theoretically possible, but positively supported.
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