#Rousseauian Philosophy

[philosopherking1887]

Say it with me, kids: human beings are fundamentally a mix of good and evil.*

This has been the case at all times and in all places, as you can see throughout recorded history and oral traditions, which all contain stories of violence and cruelty as well as kindness and generosity. These tendencies occur in different proportions in different individuals. But the world is not divided into a majority of inherently-all-good people and a minority of inherently-all-evil people who could ideally be weeded out, and the worldview that says it is is incredibly dangerous for reasons that should be glaringly obvious.

* Good currently being understood to mean altruistic, cooperative, peaceable, and evil to mean selfish, violent, exploitative. This has not always been the most important value axis in all societies. There have historically been a lot of warrior cultures, in every part of the world.

[philosopherking1887]

Thank fuck someone other than me has finally said this. I'm usually the only one screaming at people to stop falling into the dichotomy of "humans are inherently good" or "humans are inherently bad/evil" -- and usually in response to the current Leftist fashion of insisting that they're inherently good, as a reaction to Calvinist-capitalist-Hobbesian pessimism about human nature or simpleminded readings of Lord of the Flies. I don't usually see people on Tumblr actually taking the La Rochefoucauld line! (That bit of diversity is refreshing in itself, even if it's equally misguided.)

I would, however, like to insist on consistency about that "there is no morality in nature" thing. What we now think of as being "good" is helping everyone and hurting no one (except, perhaps, those who deserve it because they have harmed others), but that has not always been the case. The idea of a universal obligation of altruism is a historically recent, unusual development. What has constituted being "good" in most historical contexts is helping members of Our Community (clan, tribe, city, nation, ethnos) and hurting The Enemy (rival clans, tribes, etc.). The human capacity for violence and cruelty has historically been regarded as essential to the survival of communities, just as much as our capacity for compassion and benevolence -- the two impulses just had to be directed at the right targets. And of course that must be the case: if our capacity for altruism was the only thing that was conducive to our survival as a species, or that communities have valued throughout evolutionary and cultural history, why would we still have the tendencies to violence and cruelty? Wouldn't they have fallen away, or been bred out, so to speak?

That doesn't mean that we should still value both tendencies; maybe it is best for us as a species now -- or conforms to some deeper moral truth (if you're into that kind of thing) -- if we value only the tendency to help others and never the tendency to harm them (except, as rarely as possible, in self-defense, or possibly punishment for prior harm; different versions of the 'morality of compassion' differ in their stance on retributive punishment). But we do need to accept that both tendencies exist. We should not regard those who have uncooperative, selfish, or even violent impulses as dangerous anomalies that can be eliminated once and for all (by guillotining the billionaires, say, or castrating rapists); and we should not assume that these tendencies are only the products of a specific cultural environment and will magically disappear when that corrupt environment is abolished -- usually, in Leftist discourse, white Western modern capitalist culture (and this post does not entirely escape that particular cliché). Yes, of course, socialization and education can encourage one or the other to a greater degree, but humans are not completely blank slates, either, and both original tendencies will be present in the population, and in most individuals, for the foreseeable future (unless we find a way to "breed out" the selfish and/or cruel tendencies -- which I'm assuming no one around here thinks is a morally acceptable goal to have). So if we're going to be serious about imagining what a better, more humane post-capitalist society might look like, it would be in our interests to assume that the "impulse to evil" (to use the traditional Jewish term) will continue to arise in people naturally and decide how to handle that rationally and humanely, instead of assuming that there will be no more bad behavior in our post-capitalist utopia because there will be nothing to corrupt the pure goodness of human nature, and then having no idea what to do when some people inevitably don't cooperate.

Humans pretend to be good in small ways for social clout but underneath where it counts, very definitely all selfish and bad.

[crawlingbetweenearthandheaven]

real imogen crawlingbetwenearthandheaven fans know

[wearyourdictionary]

Rousseauian [ラウセオーイアン] - (philosophy) Of or relating to the philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712–1778). https://en.m.wiktionary.org/wiki/Rousseauian

#Rousseauian [See: Rousseauian] #WearYourDictionary #Rousseau #Philosophy

https://www.redbubble.com/i/t-shirt/R-Rousseauian-Wear-Your-Dictionary-Eponym-Katakana-Transliteration-Pronunciation-English-by-WearYourWords/63997644.JZXP1?asc=u

[revolutionary-demosthenes]

John Laurens and Jean-Jacques Rousseau

“Although I cannot say that John, in Switzerland, met François Voltaire, who lived near Geneva, or Jean-Jacques Rousseau, who was Swiss-born, I suspect he may have read their works or at least encountered their followers. Whatever the source, John Laurens returned to America from Europe in April 1777 possessed with a remarkably broad mind.”

-- Slaves in the Family, by Edward Ball

Why did John Laurens have the beliefs he did about the distribution of wealth? It’s something I wonder about a lot. My best guess for a while was simply that Laurens felt guilty about having so much when others had so little. And that still may be party or completely true. But I want to talk about another possibility in this post: that Laurens’s beliefs about wealth equalization were inspired by the Enlightenment philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau. 

For background: Rousseau was a philosopher with fairly unique beliefs about wealth. He wrote, “no citizen should be so rich that he can buy another, and none so poor that he is compelled to sell himself.” He believed that a government should seek to bring about freedom and equality, and that the will of the people was most important. His preferred form of government was a direct democracy.

(Note that I am by no means an expert on Rousseau, but I have done some research on his philosophy for this post. If anyone wants to add or correct, feel free to do so.)

Rousseau argued that wealth inequality and a society in which one was constantly trying to have more than others was a recipe for unhappiness and conflict.

In the book Black Patriots and Loyalists: Fighting for Emancipation in the War of Independence, the author Alan Gilbert stresses that Laurens’s abolitionist beliefs were inspired by Rousseau:

“In 1771, fifteen years after Rousseau published Du Contrat Social (The Social Contract), John Laurens had studied law in Geneva. In courts, debate clubs, and taverns, he was surrounded by advocates, with varying levels of comprehension, of the Rousseauian view. But Laurens really did understand it.”

Not only was Rousseau born in Geneva, but his beliefs were apparently still popular there. Alan Gilbert also states:

“If the people retained their ‘virtues,’ Laurens insisted, America ‘will abound with great characters.’ Trade with the mother country, and riches, however, could destroy this possibility. It would lead to what republicans called a corruption of the common good, the domination of government by the wealthy, and its use against the poor: Americans ‘would have advanced to a corrupt state with no intermediate maturity.’

Emulating Rousseau, Laurens would ‘never regret poverty and the loss of trade if there can be established, either with or without Great Britain, a government that will conduce to the good of the whole.’”

Rousseau had a lot of beliefs that lined up with Laurens, and it is certainly worth noting that only after Laurens went to Geneva (and therefore, after he was exposed to Rousseauian philosophy) did Laurens vocalize abolitionist and wealth-equalization views.

Part of Rousseau’s philosophy around wealth was that wealth equalization was bad in part because it made people unhappy. This belief is echoed in a letter from John Laurens to Francis Kinloch: “a Happiness which Riches cannot give, results to the Individual, and Strength and Grandeur are ensur’d to the State, I agree with you that it is required in the Government to which I give the preference...”

And speaking of this letter, guess who Laurens specifically names in it? None other than Jean-Jacques Rousseau. He tells Kinloch, 

“these Rewards I grant you are not calculated to enrich the Individual and introduce all the odious and destructive Consequences of Riches_ but they are fully satisfactory to a Virtuous Mind_ surely no virtuous philosophic Mind will take Offence that the useful industrious part of the Community, should have their persons and properties equally protected with those of the most enlighten’d Men_ nor think it unreasonable, that they should choose Men whom they judge worthy of the important Trust of Governing_ I will not repeat here the Maxims respecting Government, which have been established by a Sidney, a Locke, a Rousseau, and which strike Unison with the Sentiments of every manly Breast_” 

I post about how this letter has a lot of wealth-equality beliefs here, and I don’t think it is a coincidence that Laurens names Rousseau after his declaration of “the odious and destructive Consequences of Riches.”

Though I don’t think there is a way to prove that Laurens’s remarkably enlightened beliefs about the distribution of wealth came from Rousseau, it seems like the most likely explanation.

If this is true, it also offers more insight to Laurens’s beliefs about government as a whole, and how Laurens might have influenced the American republic. 

[this-old-whig]

The Liberty of Conscientious Association

The Right of Personal Estate

The inalienable right of every person to the freedom of rational conscience necessarily entails the corollary right to use any resource acquired by their own labors for whatever pursuit they see fit, except insofar as the acquisition of such is predicated upon obstructing the natural right of another person to do likewise. Without this subordinate right, the right to freedom of conscience lacks concrete standing for its operation but remains an abstraction; no species of resource can be affixed concrete value for human flourishing independent of such pursuits, without subordinating the natural right of free evaluation to some arbitrary sensibility.

Precisely due to the fact that resources cannot be affixed value apart from use, the spoilage of resources for one’s purposes due to accumulation beyond personal utility represents an obstruction of the right of others to affix value, offering a natural limit on the extension of concrete standing for one’s personal view of flourishing. Conversely, no one can lay claim by natural right to the seizure of resources in which the labor of another was independently invested, as doing so amounts to materially obstructing another in their use of their liberty of rational conscience. Parental dominion extends only as far as is necessary to guard the maturation of the immature, aiming at promoting their eventual flourishing on their own terms according to natural right, earned solely by fellow-feeling for their humanity, not by the usefulness of their labors to the one who claims dominion, contra Calhoun. (If parents are incapable of providing such guardianship, provision by others in civil society is therefore earned by fellow-feeling for their humanity, lest a category error be committed by not preserving their independent flourishing until maturity.)

Civic Duty And Atomic Preference

Through voluntary participation in a joint process of mutual reasoning with the rest of the public, each person thereby consents to the direction of the public will of their own decision-making as pertains to the protection of their natural rights to ‘life, liberty, and [personal] estate’ (to paraphrase Locke), and only on the understanding that every other person who so participates is similarly subject to its direction. Such is the liberty of conscientious association, the concrete social operation of the freedom of rational conscience that is the inalienable right of every person; compelling participation in the process of reasoning on any further stipulations is to commit a category error, denying the actual character of one’s fellow persons. On this basis, civil society obtains the power to develop legislative conventions to preserve the lives of those participating in it, and to minimally secure for its members a reasonable opportunity to acquire property for their personal pursuits. This remains true even against what the preferences of some participants might be as atomic individuals; in this capacity, their associates simply serve as an aid to their own project of rational flourishing against their irrational sensibilities, and if they do not desire such controls, then they must also abandon the aid of such. Attempting to retain these benefits of association while imposing individual preference on them against the direction of the public will by force, represents the disintegration of civil society into anomie and not liberty (in any responsible sense). 

As such, the opportunity to employ one’s labor in good conscience cannot become merely a matter of another’s discretion within society. For a civil society is already a voluntary conscientious association, and the discretion of individuals or voluntary associations within it cannot be privileged over civic fellow-feeling, as if their atomic sensibilities were absolute. Thus, civil society may generate legislation regulating the discretionary use of property by its members to insure the natural rights of other members against the adverse impacts of such, as long as the members regulated thereby are permitted to join in the process. Likewise, if by such public convention a select body of the public is dedicated to legislation, then this body has every right to raise the revenue necessary to fulfill these functions from the property of the entire public (regardless of the personal preferences of participants as atomic individuals), as long as the constitution of select body is subject to the joint deliberation of the taxed public. Further, as a derivative of the aforementioned liberty of association, such a select body and their deliberations must be free from prior executive stipulation, or else their legislation can’t be given substance by a free conscience.

The Liberty of Association and Unqualified Incorporation Within A Collective

Yet this directing power cannot rightfully consist of an unqualified dominion over human beings, but rather must be tailored towards securing these natural rights to the greatest degree actually possible. Because these rights are possessed by virtue of our questioning nature and not mere social construction, they are neither incorporated in the public’s legislative will nor at its own sovereign discretion, pace Rousseau. While on its face, that doctrine may seem radically republican because it renders all things subject to the construction of the will of the people, in the end it becomes criminal, because it wrongly assumes that our fellow human being does not and cannot meaningfully exist for us prior to public determination, denying them any true liberty of conscientious association. In doing so, Rousseau’s doctrine undercuts the very sympathy necessary for civil society, while substituting in its name the passing sensibilities of mere combinations, foolishly ‘constructing’ new humanities out of whole cloth while denying the bivalent nature of what really exists. The ability of individual human beings to responsibly define their own existence is only undercut by the idea that they are defined without qualification by a collective that cannot exist apart from them, whatever Rosseau thought to the contrary.

Hence, while civil society may as an end-result of public deliberation choose to assert the eminent dominion of the public over the personal estate of any one of its members and seize it for public use, such legislative action cannot rightfully be performed without fully compensating the private owner or owners for its use. Failing to do so renders the concrete base for the operation of the inalienable liberty of conscience in peril of the passing whims of combinations of actors.  Civil society may not, any more than a private person, rightfully claim parental dominion over its members’ labors and reduce the measure of the value of their labors to their social utility, and a fortiori may not allow the seizure of their estate by another private person whose labor is attributed greater social utility, as this denies their prior humanity. While parental dominion over private labor will rarely be claimed as long as the deliberative body is coterminous with the entire public (as it nearly lacks any meaning), when by convention a select body of the public is dedicated to explicit legislation, then the claim of that select body to such dominion over the society they represent appears more feasible, if still lacking any basis on natural right. More generally, a civil society will not compel its members to directly act or not act in that which does not deny to others their natural rights or leave them a matter of private discretion; the power to raise revenue for fulfillment of the public will regardless of atomic sensibilities does not extend to making people labor against conscience.

Likewise, it offends natural right for any revolutionary society to retroactively change the civil status of a person’s behavior in the aftermath of its commission, or to define a person or association as guilty of violation of the public will by mere convention. For in neither circumstance had the person concerned at the time of the action actually removed themselves from subjection to the direction of the public will, though they may perhaps be hoodwinked into believing they had done so during the process of deliberation or after by a deft enough hand. Rather than the individual being guilty of breaking the implicit, inviolable compact under-girding all civil deliberation, in such a case the legislators are guilty of denying to the individual the liberty of not violating their own conscience as a precondition of association.  Furthermore, even when such uncivil means seem to accomplish civic ends by bringing those suspected of finessing away defiance of the public will under its power, they in fact only reinforce the conspiratorial intransigence of such by rendering taking civic responsibility for one’s actions impossible by definition.

A particular creed about human flourishing can therefore only be maintained in the last instance by persuasion and not by compulsion; it violates natural right for any particular creed to be proscribed by convention, or for revenue from the property of the public to be prescribed for the promotion of a particular creed.  Any duties entailed by a specific creed may be promoted only by means which avoid doing violence to the conscience, but rely on prior voluntary acceptance. Sincere civic motives concerning joint subordination to the direction of the public may indeed lead societies naive to power to the mistake of expecting exclusive patronage by public officials of specific ends of rational flourishing over others, because on its face this seems conducive to enforcing the results of discussion. However, official prescription of any particular creed by its very nature places it above the social context where it was shown to merit special consideration, consequently isolating itself from ongoing public discussions and inadvertently ensures that it fade from future public interest. As a result, continued devotion to the one-time civic creed seems to demand that heedlessness of the creed be understood as intransigence of public convention, mercilessly laying added conditions for civil society on the rational conscience.  Such imprudence only becomes destructive of the very roots it seeks to protect, innovating trivialities it imagines as important memories, catching itself up in a vicious cyclone from which it can’t escape intact; the creed may be exposed to renewed interest and reborn in a new context, but only in spite of such activity. Regardless of how illuminating it is, no creed can deny conscientious objection without harming itself, and so the public officer must prescribe the creed of natural right to be free from such compulsion as necessary (if not sufficient) for wisdom, and proscribe any creed acting to usurp coercive office as if its own estate. (Naturally, nothing prohibits a wise public officer from promoting a particular creed with their own personal estate, or personally arguing for the merits of that creed or against others, provided that this creed of natural right restrains their public office.)

Common Education

Thorough instruction in the civic conventions governing one’s society and their anthropological context, is necessary to participation in public deliberation, lest substantive preceding deliberation be nullified by ignorance or misinformation. Hence, a minimal common standard of education, developed by prior public deliberation on the relevant facts, is essential to the common good, and so must be raised in accordance with increasing participation in the process of public deliberation, if needless destruction of opportunity and life are to be avoided. While such instruction can never extract human sympathy from its admixture with self-serving motives brought to education, it can ameliorate their corrosive effects by tempering individual judgement against tyranny via investigation of past personal and collective heedlessness, and thus informing social construction piecemeal.

[jxckspxcer]

PHILOSOPHY QUIZ

RESULTS

                            Objectivism | Nietzchean | Rousseauian 

Metaphysical Axis: How you view reality.

Materialism: All of reality is physical and material. Spiritualism: Some of reality transcends the physical and material.

Societal Axis: Your attitude toward society.

Egoism: The individual is most important. Altruism: The community is most important.

Decision-making Axis: How you approach decision-making and your actions.

Idealism: The underlying principles are most important. Pragmatism: The results are most important.

Sensuality Axis: How you approach your indulgences.

Hedonism: Pleasure is intrinsically good and should be desired. Asceticism: Abstinence from pleasure in order to discover meaning is most important.

Meaning Axis: Whether you believe in objective meaning.

Nihilism: Neither meaning nor morality are objective. Moralism: Morality and meaning are objective - to some extent.

Values Axis: What you value most.

Rationalism: Intellect and logic. Romanticism: Passions and the heart.

Epistemology Axis: Your attitude towards knowledge.

Skepticism: We can never truly know anything for sure. Absolutism: There are objective truths that can also be understood.

[barzidovigeei]

moonstruck lifestyle

The furore over autism has been an acutely frustrating cultural phenomenon: pregnant with great possibility, touching on vital and fascinating issues, yet initially formulated in a one-sided and atrabilious manner that will place stumbling blocks in front of those of us who seek value and fulfillment in our personal and professional lives in the immediate years ahead. What's important to note, however, is that Ms. Polly Esther's insinuations share many of the same characteristics. With this letter, I hope to help you reflect and reexamine your views on Polly. But first, I would like to make the following introductory remark: Polly has gotten away with so much for so long that she's lost all sense of caution, all sense of limits. If you think about it, only a woman without any sense of limits could desire to dismantle national civil rights organizations by driving a wedge between the leaders and the rank-and-file members. Contrary to the Rousseauian ideal of the transparency of the general will to itself, the last time I told her cronies that I want to defy her, they declared in response, "But narcissism is a viable and vital objective for our nation's educational institutions." Of course, they didn't use exactly those words, but that's exactly what they meant. Perhaps I'm reading too much into Polly's philosophies, but they don't seem to serve any purpose other than to violate values so important to our sense of community. This is particularly interesting when you consider that our sacred values and traditions mean nothing to Polly. Of that I am certain, because you don't need to be a rocket scientist to detect the subtext of this letter. But just in case it's too subliminal for some, let me thrust it into your face right here: Polly's lackeys believe that every featherless biped, regardless of intelligence, personal achievement, moral character, sense of responsibility, or sanity, should be given the power to institutionalize elitism through systematic violence, distorted religion, and dubious science. Although it is perhaps impossible to change the perspective of those who have such beliefs, I wish nevertheless to take action.

Polly is typical of contemptuous creeps in her wild invocations to the irrational, the magic, and the fantastic to dramatize her publicity stunts. She frequently takes an accepted moral principle, adopts it as her own, and then accuses mainstream society of violating that principle for a variety of reasons. For instance, we can't stop her overnight. It takes time, patience and experience to do what comes naturally. Exactly what is Polly trying to hide? When we tease apart the associations necessary to her mindless allegations, we see that her smears are built on lies, and they depend on make-believe for their continuation. Her reasoning is circular and therefore invalid. In other words, she always begins an argument with her conclusion (e.g. that all literature which opposes solipsism was forged by dodgy shallow psychics) and therefore -- not surprisingly -- she always arrives at that very conclusion.

Did it ever occur to Polly that neither she nor her henchmen have dealt squarely or clearly with the fact that she is not just deluded, but proud of it? Apparently, the antithesis of stolid antidisestablishmentarianism is moral, religious, and cultural solidarity among the people of a nation. To top that off, it's easy enough to hate her any day of the week on general principles. But now I'll tell you about some very specific things that she is up to, things that ought to make a real Polly-hater out of you. First off, she has commented that honor counts for nothing. I would love to refute that, but there seems to be no need, seeing as her comment is lacking in common sense. I and Polly part company when it comes to the issue of chauvinism. She feels that her biases won't be used for political retribution, while I claim that the most hate-filled manifestation of blockish sentiment among crotchety drug addicts has been the way they assail all that is holy. It's that simple. Maybe she just can't handle harsh reality. Every time Polly tries, she gets increasingly successful in her attempts to harm others, or even instill the fear of harm. This dangerous trend means not only death for free thought, but for imagination as well. Let me close by reminding you that Ms. Polly Esther uses a litany of euphemisms, buzz words, and doublespeak to help her encourage young people to break all the rules, cut themselves loose from their roots, and adopt a moonstruck lifestyle.

[crowandtalbot]

The idea that in a post-apocalyptic world, all semblance of society will fall apart and man will hunt man for basic resources is out dated Rousseauian philosophy dragged out of the grave to reaffirm the place of the hyper-male in a position of superiority and reverence based on his perceived ability to survive and achieve the possession of women in said state.

It completely ignores the fact that in real world situations where tragedy destroyed all semblance of society in the area, people didn’t just “return to a state of nature” that involved killing, stealing, and raping one another. In fact, they unilaterally maintained important infrastructure systems themselves and secured a localized version of the society they had in the macro pre-tragedy. It also completely ignores the fact that humans are not predatory animals, we evolved to do two things: socialize like ridiculously well and plan for the future like ridiculously well. At a basic primal level, we look to each other for aid and band together into family-like units for protection. Any and all “alpha-male” types (total misnomer by the way, because there is no real example of the “alpha-male” in the wild or in people) will be blocked out the second they act in a predatory manor towards the people around them and then perish.

movies about apocalypses: it’s every man for himself!! you can’t trust anyone, it’s a wasteland of solo travelers and sad families, we’re alone out here

humans irl: *pack bond with strangers*

*pack bond with large carnivores*

*pack bond with robots in space thousands of miles away*

[sjohnson24]

Beyond Hobbes and Rousseau

Are you a Hobbesian or a Rousseauian? Most people’s core worldview falls into one philosophical camp or the other, which usually determines where we fall on the political spectrum.

Thomas Hobbes was a 17th century philosopher who argued that deference to authority, and faith in strong leaders, the law and civic institutions are necessary to save us from ourselves. Otherwise, in his view, humans would continually fight over power and resources.

Jean-Jacque Rousseau was an 18th century philosopher who argued the opposite, believing that humans start out innocent and get corrupted by society. Private ownership of land was anathema to him, and he famously said, “You are lost if you forget that the fruits of the earth belong to all and the earth to no one!”

Hobbes was a social Darwinian over two centuries before Darwin was born. He is considered the “father of political philosophy,” which is to say, he poured the philosophical foundation for the system that is crumbling around us today.

As the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy states, “Hobbes is famous for ‘social contract theory,’ the method of justifying political principles or arrangements by appeal to the agreement that would be made among rational, free and equal persons.”

“He is infamous for having used the social contract method to arrive at the astonishing conclusion that we ought to submit to the authority of an absolute—undivided and unlimited—sovereign power.”

(c) Wellcome Library; Supplied by The Public Catalogue Foundation

Rousseau, on the other hand, is considered the father (again in the sexist language and practice of philosophy) of the Romantic Movement. Rousseau’s saw “philosophers as the post-hoc rationalizers of self-interest, as apologists for various forms of tyranny, and as playing a role in the alienation of the modern individual from humanity’s natural impulse to compassion.”

In short, Hobbes “tooth and claw” view of nature is the philosophy of plutocrats and autocrats on the right, whereas Rousseau’s notion that “nothing is so gentle as man in his primitive state” often underlies people’s views on the left.

For myself, I see these as two sides of the same debased coin. On one hand, humans are only immutably self-centered and self-interested if we accept ourselves and resign to humanity as such. On the other hand, the notion of “humanity’s natural impulse to compassion” is poppycock.

Hobbes was correct in saying that in the “state of nature,” human life was “nasty, brutish and short.” But Rousseau was correct in saying that “everything degenerates in the hands of man.”

Ironically, Hobbes is seen as a philosopher of hope, since “though violence is in our genes, we go to extraordinary lengths to contain it.” Whereas Rousseau was “consistently and overwhelmingly pessimistic that humanity will escape from a dystopia of alienation, oppression and unfreedom.”

We live in the self-fulfilling prophecy of a Hobbesian world. That’s demonstrated by an incredibly wrongheaded article in the Telegraph about a month before Donald Trump was elected, entitled, “Science shows Thomas Hobbes was right—which is why the Right-wing rule the Earth.”

Such a view fails to make the first distinction of any intelligent human being, which is between nature and human nature. Both questions have to be left open. What nature essentially is, and what humans essentially are, are unanswerable questions with certainty and finality.

That said, the evolution of “fully modern humans” produced a qualitatively different kind of creature. Philosophers acknowledged this fact long before Hobbes and Rousseau put their own spins on the old conundrum of ‘man’s place in nature.’ The attempt to scientize human behavior, epitomized by the fad of evolutionary psychology and the “science shows” mentality, is the mark of our absurd age.

Traditional Christian theology both recognized and believed it resolved what used to be called “the riddle of man” by positing special creation, adding insult to injury by proclaiming, “man is made in the image of God.” Even as a boy I thought it must be one miserable God if that’s true.

My philosophical obsession as a young man was in this area, what’s called “theories of human nature.” The basic direction of humankind is to separate, divide and increasingly fragment the earth and ourselves, whereas all other life unfolds in seamless wholeness. I had to find out how evolution could produce a creature, so-called Homo sapiens sapiens (“wise wise humans” no less) which operate antithetically to nature’s essential movement.

If nature is essentially a movement of seamless wholeness unfolding over eons, and wholeness is essentially good, how could nature evolve such a creature as man, which is increasingly, if not inherently fragmented and corrupt?

Put another way, why do humans, a single, supposedly sapient species, have the capability of dominating the planet to the extent that we’re bringing about the Sixth Mass Extinction in the entire history of life on Earth?

I found out I feel, but then saw that the explanation doesn’t change the explained, beginning with myself.

However it does provide a good philosophical foundation, though as David Bohm, the man Einstein called his spiritual and intellectual son wisely advised me, “Don’t make another philosophical system out of it.”

Martin LeFevre

[philosopherking1887]

Another rant about Neo-Rousseauianism on the Left

Why do people in the online Left have to set up this false dichotomy between “people are inherently evil” (i.e., selfish, competitive, aggressive) and “people are inherently good” (i.e., altruistic, cooperative, caring -- since those are the meanings we all tend to assume these days)? Showing examples of people being altruistic, or evidence that ancient humans cared for the vulnerable in their communities, doesn’t prove that that is the pure, sole essence of human nature; it shows that that’s part of human nature.

Human beings everywhere, in all cultures and time periods, have always shown a mix of ‘good’ and ‘evil’ behavior. Both tendencies exist in all groups; (almost) all individuals have both tendencies within them. Why is it so difficult to draw the inference that both are equally natural, and neither is a mere imposition of the artificial conditions of civilization (or capitalism, or Western colonialism, or whatever)? Then you won’t be ~shocked~ when people sometimes are selfish and violent, sometimes for no good reason -- i.e., when it’s not somehow determined by their social situation (or they’ve been “corrupted by society,” in more overtly Rousseauian terms).

Why does this bother me so much? It all comes back to what my professor in a history seminar on the French Revolution said about how Rousseau’s philosophy led to the Terror, which I didn’t fully understand at the time, but which has come to make more and more sense as I spend time in Leftist spaces on the internet. Rousseau claimed that human beings are naturally good, but living in society, particularly in corrupt social structures that makes some people dependent on others, corrupts their natural inclinations to sympathy and leads to envy and the desire to dominate others. If we can just institute perfect social structures, then, everyone would return to their naturally innocent, benevolent state. (Rousseau’s own views are a little more complicated, but this is more or less how the Jacobins read it.)

But what happens when people continue to show selfishness and the desire to dominate within a social structure that has been (in theory) perfected? What’s wrong with them? Ideally, they can be ‘reeducated’; but if they persist in not being appropriately good-natured, they must be dangerous anomalies, and there’s no choice but to extirpate them from society, to purify it. This was what happened during the Terror, when people appeared to the Jacobins to be working against the good of the people (as they understood it): they must still be corrupted remnants of the old society, unsuited to have a place in the new.

Left Anarchism rests on the Rousseauian assumption that if you just leave people to their own devices, they will all be benevolent and prosocial; that what actually makes people bad is the existence of laws and institutions, and if no one has institutional power, then no one will harm or wrong anyone else. But we have zero evidence that this is true, and it honestly just seems like a perverse interpretation of human history. Under lawless as under lawful conditions, people still show a mix of benevolent, self-interested, and malicious impulses and behaviors.

The idea that humans are or should be naturally good, not naturally a mix of good and evil, encourages the idea that people should be punished not just for breaking explicit laws, but for behaving immorally (or even just having those inclinations), because it shows that they are somehow intrinsically wrong or corrupted, a dangerous deviation from wholesome human nature. And the only mechanism available to sanction anti-social or ‘immoral’ behavior in a society without laws and institutions is vigilante or ad hoc mob violence. Who decides what’s deserving of punishment? Who decides what the punishment is? Anyone and everyone. It has the potential to collapse into a kind of totalitarianism, where everyone has to fear their neighbors -- but now they have no clear way of knowing what will incur punishment. (And frankly, we already see this kind of thing in microcosm in the self-cannibalism and purity politics of online spaces dominated by certain strains of Leftist ideology and social justice rhetoric.)

A system of laws is preferable to anarchism for exactly the same reason that it’s preferable to authoritarianism and client-based systems of affiliation and loyalty (feudalism and its smaller-scale variants): it minimizes arbitrariness. Generally speaking, people have a way of knowing what they can do and what they’ll be punished for; they’re not subject to the whims of individual rulers or vigilantes. Most people will follow the laws because they want to be cooperative, or just because everyone else is doing it. But some people need the threat of predictable sanction so that their self-interest will guide them to behave in ways that are beneficial to the community. The rule of law rests on the assumption that people are a mix of altruistic and selfish, cooperative and opportunistic. Ideally, institutions moderate the ability of opportunistic individuals to wield power arbitrarily. They are built to harness a combination of the altruism and self-interest, the generosity and ambition of individuals to work for the good of the whole society.

And if the laws and institutions aren’t working for the benefit of the whole society? You change them; you don’t tear them all down on the assumption that the mere existence of institutions is what causes oppression and injustice, and that an egalitarian utopia will materialize as soon as all the Bad People (the billionaires, or the cishet white men or whatever) are guillotined (or eaten, or shot into the sun). There’s not a single class that can be identified and pruned out as the source of all evil in society. There will still be selfish, opportunistic, competitive, violent tendencies within people after the ones currently in power have been executed; you can’t rely on Fundamentally Good Human Nature to reassert itself in the absence of those Few Bad Apples.

You think there shouldn’t be billionaires? Great, I agree on that. But the solution is not to execute the people who are currently billionaires because they made all their money by exploiting people and they were immorally hoarding all their wealth instead of giving it away to people who are starving. You know what that sounds like to me? The revolutionaries beheading Louis XVI not because he broke any identifiable laws, but because “no one reigns innocently.” You can’t execute people for being immoral. You make laws so that people who are inclined to behave immorally can’t do massive harm to others without incurring predictable penalties. You rewrite the tax code so that it’s impossible for anyone to become a billionaire without breaking the law. You change employment laws so that employers can’t exploit their workers in the ways that were necessary for the owners to become billionaires. If the billionaires broke existing laws to amass their wealth, make sure they’re prosecuted “to the full extent of the law,” as they say. But the sentence for committing financial crimes, tax fraud, employment violations, etc. is unlikely to be the death penalty. Can you prove that bad working conditions caused deaths? Great, maybe you can get ‘em on negligent homicide. But there’s no sane, rational, sustainable system that can license summary executions for people who caused a lot of harm by doing bad things that were legal, or didn’t carry the death penalty, at the time they did them.

[byronsbookblog-blog]

Discourse on Political Economy

Jean Jacques Rousseau

4/22/17

Rousseau has an interesting philosophy.  His notion of politics travels many lengths and breadths until it lands where he ends the book here.  In other books, he has said that ideally, there would be no private property.  In this system, we would all live in a patriarchal society, where a man was master of his house and must take no orders from anyone.  He admits that, since we have private property, there is no way to go back to this.  Society, as we find it, is best organized into a republic (elective aristocracy).  That is where this book comes in.

The basis of law is property.  Since we have property, it must be protected by the state.  The end of the book is a bit anti-climactic.  It supports progressive taxation, which, at the time, was revolutionary.  He supports smaller states, because that is the only way to foster patriotism.  "but how can they love it, if their country be nothing more to them than to strangers, and afford them nothing but what it can refuse nobody?"  When there is patriotism people will willingly follow laws, and respect each other’s property.

His view of politics is based on economics.  "It is therefore one of the most important functions of government to prevent extreme inequality of fortunes; not by taking away wealth from its possessors, but by depriving all men of means to accumulate it; not by building hospitals for the poor, but by securing citizens from becoming poor."  He was an intuitive economist, "money is the seed of money, and the first guinea is sometimes more difficult to acquire than the second million."

Apparently Barney Fife was a Rousseauian.  He paraphrases, "the first of all laws is to respect the laws,' when he says, "Rule one: Obey all rules."  I looked and looked, but could find nowhere where Rousseau condemns writing on the walls.  Maybe when he talks about respecting the public welfare?  He embodies the paradox, "Without law and order man has no freedom."  In the end, he gives no room for civil disobedience.

"to no man does the law prescribe magnificence; and propriety is no argument against right."

[philosopherking1887]

LOL, someone blocked me for suggesting that selfishness and altruism are both basic components of human nature, and that selfishness wasn’t invented by capitalism. This confirms me in my hypothesis that many people on the far Left are ideologically committed to a neo-Rousseauian worldview according to which human nature is fundamentally good, meaning altruistic and cooperative, and that people only behave in selfish and competitive ways because they’ve been corrupted away from their true nature by capitalist society. To which I would want to ask: where did capitalism come from? Aliens?

I say that they are “ideologically committed” to this view of human nature because their desired political aim -- socialist anarchism -- is only viable if they are correct, and once capitalism has been eliminated no one will try to break the social rules or free-ride. Or if they do (because those old capitalist habits might be hard to break!), they can be successfully reeducated. Except maybe for the profoundly evil ruling classes, who must be guillotined, because they are the source of all evil in society. Does any of this sound familiar?

You can’t literally blame Rousseau for the Terror, because he probably didn’t expect that his ideas would be taken as gospel by any governing regime, but there’s a reason that historians point to the Jacobins’ espousal of Rousseau’s philosophy as an important causal factor. The reason is this: if you think human nature is basically good, but certain people persist in acting badly (i.e., selfishly), you’re committed to thinking that these people are either reparably corrupted, and hence amenable to reeducation, or irreparably corrupted, or somehow not quite human. In the latter two cases, you have no choice but to eliminate them to keep them from corrupting anyone else.

Most systems of laws depend on the assumption that human beings are mostly cooperative, but sometimes they aren’t. Norms will be followed most of the time because people are cooperative and inclined to want to do their part in keeping the community running smoothly; but for people who aren’t motivated that way, there’s the threat of sanction. I fully acknowledge that capitalist culture has been damaging because it emphasizes the selfish aspect of human nature, rewards approved kinds of selfishness, and regards other kinds of antisocial behavior as inevitable and only manageable through increasingly harsh punishment. (Well, there are a lot of factors in that latter, including Christianity’s “human beings are inherently sinful” attitude.) My warning is that failing to see selfishness as equally a part of human nature, failing to expect and account for the moral grayness of human nature, can lead to horrific regimes of oppression.