Two Cheers for Democracy

Two Cheers for Democracy is a collection of E.M. Forster’s non-fiction work, including essays, lectures, and broadcasts. First copyright in 1938, it is a humane response to the insanity of fascism and violence.

“The climate is political,” Forster writes in the Prefatory Note to the 1951 edition. “And the conclusion suggested is that, though we cannot expect to love one another, we must learn to put up with one another. Otherwise we shall all of us perish.”

I first discovered this marvelous volume a few years ago (bought a copy, lost it). Thanks to a second-hand bookshop in England, I can once again spend time with a luminous mind whose words might have been written yesterday.

“The menace to freedom is usually conceived in terms of political or social interference… a tyrant who has escaped from the bottomless put… But this is too lively a view of our present troubles, and too shallow a one. We must peer deeper if we want to understand them, deep into the abyss of our own characters.

“Man grew out of other forms of life; he evolved among taboos; he has been a coward for centuries, afraid of the universe outside him and the herd wherein he took refuge.

“The tyrant no longer appears as a freak from the pit, he is becoming the norm, country after country throws him up, he springs from any class in society with an ease that once seemed admirable; requiring only ruthlessness and opportunity, he supersedes parliaments and kings.” (pp 9–11)

And that’s just the beginning.