DeTocqueville and the Grocery Store

I love it that the GeorgiaGirl is home this summer. I love it that she sits at my kitchen counter and spills out life through a different set of lenses.

For example, tonight she linked what she sees while she works at the local grocery store to what Frenchman Alexis De Tocqueville observed while studying America in the 1830s.

Despotism may govern without faith, De Tocqueville wrote, but liberty cannot. Religion is much more necessary in the republic . . . than in the monarchy . . . it is more needed in democratic republics than in any others. How is it possible that society should escape destruction if the moral tie is not strengthened in proportion as the political tie is relaxed? And what can be done with a people who are their own masters if they are not submissive to the Deity?

In other words, restraint comes from submission to a higher authority. In tyrannical societies, that restraint is applied by force; in free ones it must come from willing submission to God's principles. When every man becomes his own moral compass, destruction follows.

A grocery store is a parade of people sporting every bent and attitude---those with much restraint as well as those who acknowledge no authority. A place to see principles of democracy in action.