By Michael F. Duggan
I never put much stock in programs touting the perfectibility of humankind. Consciously or unconsciously, I always subscribed to the sentiment expressed by the late Tony Judt: “If we have learned nothing else from the 20th century, we should at least have grasped that the more perfect the answer, the more terrifying the consequences.” All utopian revolutions fail, and attempts at sweeping holistic change result in instability and eventually violence. The best we have are piecemeal solutions (Popper, The Open Society and its Enemies).
Two foundational thinkers who I never warmed up to are John Locke and Karl Marx. Locke, in all of his narrow, legalistic glory, believes that people are so rational that we need only a minimal framework of rights and laws to allow them to do the right thing. Anybody who has read history, sociobiology, or a newspaper knows that this is nonsense. I like the idea of rights, but believe that they are enforceable fictions with no independent existence. Marx believes that people (at least the proletariat tribe) are so benevolent, so cooperative, so rational, that they will band together out of historical necessity into a worker’s paradise. It is difficult to know where to begin to criticize such a ridiculously rationalistic outlook.
Before Locke and Marx, there was Thomas Hobbes, the primitive English realist whose life spanned the most tragic period of modern Western history before the World Wars. Hobbes, who lived to be 91 and died peacefully on the magnificent Chatsworth estate, held that in a state of nature, life is “nasty, brutish and short,” and that this state is one of war of all against all. I liked the realism of Hobbes, but thought that he goes too far. If life was a continuous universal struggle reminiscent of a vulgar understanding of the Darwinian jungle, then it seems that we would have all killed each other off by now.
And then there was Hume, who said that “reason is, and ought only to be the slave of the passions.” His outlook is between Locke and Hobbes, but tending toward the latter. Now this was on to something, and a perspective with real nuance: people are capable of reasons but it is not dominant in them. They are not perfectible, but nor are they completely deprived. Throw Montesquieu into the mix and divided government and the balancing of power, and you have something like a modern republican outlook, like that embraced by the Founders and Framers. Jefferson and the antifederalist perspective favored the individualism and right-orientation of Locke, and Hamilton and the Federalists favored the centralization, law and order, and the balancing of power of Hume and Montesquieu. The two views merged powerfully in the modern ideas of social democracy prescribed by Theodore and Franklin Roosevelt. This, I thought, was the best a nation our size could probably achieve.
As an American and a historian, I embraced the view that combined Lockean idealism and Humean realism. But over the past couple of decades, I have had a sneaking suspicion that the United States that I have known might have been just a fleeting moment, an apex, the moment of zero gravity at the top of a rollercoaster’s highest parabolic curve, and the we are probably on the way down. Throw in some modern sociobiology and Malthus and population theory, and Hobbes might turn out to be right after all.