John Boyne’s novel, The boy in the
striped pajamas (2007) is about the slaughter in the gas chamber
in the Nazi concentration camps. The book ends thus:
Of
course all this happened a long time ago and nothing like that could ever
happen again.
Not
in this day and age.
Is this true? Those things can
never happen again?
I think this ending is not right.
First, it’s not true that it all happened a long time ago. Seventy years is not
a long time for historic events. Second, it’s not true that those things could
never happen again. Have we forgotten
the Ruanda massacres in the nineties?
But perhaps the author meant
that those things can never happen again in Europe. Have we forgotten the Srebrenica massacre and the Sarajevo tragedy,
also in the nineties?
Or perhaps he means that these
things cannot happen in a democratic country. Has he forgotten that Hitler
reached power after a democratic election? Has he forgotten that the Athenian
democracy was discredited for millennia by their death sentence against
Socrates, the result of a secret vote that took place just after the
restoration of democracy, which followed the oligarchy imposed by Sparta after
the Peloponnesian war?
Democracy is the least bad of
all political systems, true, but this does not mean that the majority rule, the
essence of democracy, must be used everywhere else, also in fields where its
efficiency has not been proved or happens to be contradictory.
The methods of democracy are
not applicable to the search for truth, the object of science and philosophy.
If scientific theories were subject to the rules of democracy, a new theory
would almost never be able to prevail, for new theories must always fight
previous pre-conceived ideas and get adepts little by little, by means of
argumentation and reasoning. A
scientific theory never prevails because it is accepted by a majority, it must
be universally accepted.
Great discoveries, like Mendel
genetic laws, can be forgotten for decades, because nobody understands them and
their author has come ahead of time, but finally they are re-discovered and win. A single discovery (the Michelson-Morley experiment) staggered Newton
mechanics, an established theory for two hundred years, and brought Albert
Einstein to build a new revolutionary theory. If the majority rule were in
effect, many new theories would never prevail and science would progress
slowly, if at all.
The objective of science is
finding truth. Theories are supported by facts: results of
experiments, paleontological discoveries and so forth. A theory is convincing when
many facts support it. If science ever falls under the rule of political
democracy, things like this could happen again: in 1897, the
General Assembly of the state of Indiana passed a law ruling that the value
of pi would be equal to 3.2 in that state. This is ridiculous, but it did
happen. If political democracy takes control of science, science is dead.
 |
| The death of Socrates, by Jacques-Louis David |
Besides science, which cares about what is true and false, we also
have ethics, which cares about good and evil. Science
tells us how things are, ethics how they should be. Ethics
should not be under the control of democracy, of the majority rule. The death
sentence against Socrates is a sufficient proof.
In many Western countries with
democratic governments, there is a growing tendency to assert that good and
evil are what the parliament decides. This is extremely dangerous. With our kind
of political parties, it just means that good and evil is what the party leader
will decide. A person or a group of persons should never consider themselves
above good and evil. If this is allowed, one day we may have a law forcing
compulsory euthanasia for all people above eighty, or a conflict between law and religious freedom. If it is allowed, any day we
may meet again the boy in the striped pajamas.
Manuel Alfonseca
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