Ominous Parallels (15 page)

that “the end of all government is the good and ease of the people, in a secure enjoyment of their rights, without oppression”; but it must be remembered, that the rich are
people
as well as the poor; that they have rights as well as others; that they have as clear and as sacred a right to their large property as others have to theirs which is smaller; that oppression to them is as possible and as wicked as to others.
¹¹

The genius of the Founding Fathers was their ability not only to grasp the revolutionary ideas of the period, but to devise a means of implementing those ideas in practice, a means of translating them from the realm of philosophic abstraction into that of sociopolitical reality. By defining in detail the division of powers within the government and the ruling procedures, including the brilliant mechanism of checks and balances, they established a system whose operation and integrity were independent, so far as possible, of the moral character of any of its temporary officials—a system impervious, so far as possible, to subversion by an aspiring dictator or by the public mood of the moment.

The heroism of the Founding Fathers was that they recognized an unprecedented opportunity, the chance to create a country of individual liberty for the first time in history—and that they staked everything on their judgment: the new nation and their own “lives, fortunes, and sacred honor.” If liberty requires the principled recognition and practical implementation of man’s individual rights, then Lord Acton, the famous student of liberty, spoke the truth when he said that liberty is “that which was
not,
until the last quarter of the eighteenth century in Pennsylvania.”
¹²

The American approach to liberty, however, rested on the philosophy of the Enlightenment—primarily, on its view of reason and its view of
values,
i.e., on its epistemology and its ethics. And in regard to philosophy the Americans of the revolutionary era were counting on Europe.

There was no American attempt to give systematic statement to the ideas of the Enlightenment mind, and little concern with the technical issues involved in their defense. The American thinkers functioned within an intellectual atmosphere largely taken for granted, made of generalized tendencies absorbed from Europe and invoked when necessary, in no particular order, in the course of letters, pamphlets, essays, and the like. It was an era dominated by men of action, philosophically minded but eager to apply to politics the abstract principles they had learned; men who assumed, insofar as they raised the question at all, that the philosophic base of their principles had already been established beyond challenge by the thinkers of Europe.

The Americans were counting on what did not exist. There was no such base in Europe. In every fundamental area, the thought of the European Enlightenment was filled with unanswered questions, torn by contradictions, and eminently vulnerable to challenge.

In epistemology, the European champions of the intellect had been unable to formulate a tenable view of the nature of reason or, therefore, to validate their proclaimed confidence in its power. As a result, from the beginning of the eighteenth century (and even earlier), the philosophy advocating reason was in the process of gradual, but accelerating, disintegration.

John Locke—regarded during the Enlightenment as Europe’s leading philosopher, taken as the definitive spokesman for reason and the new science—is a representative case in point. The philosophy of this spokesman is a contradictory mixture, part Aristotelian, part Christian, part Cartesian, part skeptic; in short, it is an eclectic shambles all but openly inviting any Berkeley or Hume in the vicinity to rip it into shreds. The philosopher taken as the defender of nature could not establish its reality. The philosopher taken as the defender of scientific law could not validate the concept of causality, held that basic causes are outside man’s power to grasp, and stated explicitly that a “science of bodies” (i.e., a science of material entities) is impossible. The philosopher taken as the champion of the senses was promulgating every doctrine necessary to invalidate them. The philosopher taken as the spokesman for the unlimited power of the human mind was proclaiming (in effect) that the field open to human cognition is a precarious island surrounded by a sea of the uncertain, the subjective, the unintelligible, the unknowable.

When the men of the Enlightenment counted on Locke (and his equivalents) as their intellectual defender, they were counting on a philosophy of reason so profoundly undercut as to be in process of self-destructing.

The same destruction was occurring in Europe in the field of ethics. Although Locke and others had held out the promise of a rational, demonstrative science of ethics, none of them delivered on this promise; none could define such an ethics. Meanwhile, European voices, rising and growing louder, were declaring that the principles of ethics are based ultimately not on reason, but on
feeling.

James Wilson, one of the most distinguished legal philosophers of the American Enlightenment, a man who signed both the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution, expresses this view clearly. Reflecting the influence of Hume (and others), Wilson declares: “The
ultimate
ends of human actions, can never, in any case, be accounted for by reason. They recommend themselves entirely to the sentiments and affections of men, without dependence on the intellectual faculties.” Morality, he states, derives from man’s “moral sense” or “instincts” or “conscience.” As to the validation of this faculty’s pronouncements, “I can only say, I feel that such is my duty. Here investigation must stop. . . .”
¹³
Jefferson, among others, held similar views. But, regardless of who formally agreed or disagreed with Wilson on this issue, the fact is that he spoke for all of them: no American did identify the basis of a rational, scientific ethics; all, admittedly or not, were relying for ethical guidance on what they felt to be moral.

And what they felt is the Enlightenment mixture, which they inherited from their European mentors: the mixture endorsing Aristotelian self-assertion and self-denying, Christian love; with moral superiority awarded to the latter.

In America, the egoist element went deeper than in Europe. It was embedded implicitly in the foundations of the country. It was presupposed by the new, individualist system, which stressed the right of each man to the preservation of his own life and the pursuit of his own happiness. But the Americans did not identify the ethical issue in such terms. The general tenor of their (unsystematic) ethical statements, the dominant sentiment voiced during the period, is captured in a few brief extracts from Jefferson.

The philosophers of the ancient world, he writes, were “really great” in defining “precepts related chiefly to ourselves ... [but in] developing our duties to others, they were short and defective.” They did not advocate “charity and love to our fellow men” or “benevolence [to] the whole family of mankind.” It was Jesus who left man the principles of “the most perfect and sublime” ethics—the ethics of “universal philanthropy, not only to kindred and friends, to neighbors and countrymen, but to all mankind”; the ethics which recognizes that there is “implanted in our breasts a love of others, a sense of duty to them, a moral instinct, in short, which prompts us irresistibly to feel and to succor their distresses....”
¹⁴

The Americans were political revolutionaries but not
ethical
revolutionaries. Whatever their partial (and largely implicit) acceptance of the principle of ethical egoism, they remained explicitly within the standard European tradition, avowing their primary allegiance to a moral code stressing philanthropic service and social duty. Such was the American conflict: an impassioned politics presupposing one kind of ethics, within a cultural atmosphere professing the sublimity of an opposite kind of ethics.

The signs of the conflict and of the toll it was to exact from the distinctively American political approach were evident at the beginning. They were evident in Jefferson’s proposal for free public education; in Paine’s advocacy of a number of governmental welfare functions; in Franklin’s view that an individual has no right to his “superfluous” property, which the public may dispose of as it chooses, “whenever the Welfare of the Publick shall demand such Disposition”; etc.
¹⁵

The American Enlightenment, like the European, came to an abrupt end. “Its ideas were soon repudiated or corrupted,” writes Herbert Schneider, “its plans for the future were buried, and there followed on its heels a thorough and passionate reaction against its ideals and assumptions.”
¹⁶
It was a reaction prepared for by the Enlightenment itself, by its own philosophic deficiencies, by the seeds it had nourished and allowed to sprout—the seeds of an irrationalism it was not equipped to combat and an altruism it predominantly endorsed.

Philosophically, America was born a profound anomaly: a solid political structure erected on a tottering base.

The Founding Fathers did not know that the era in which they lived and fought and planned was on the threshold of yielding to its antipode. They did not know that they had snatched a country from the jaws of history at the last possible moment. They did not know that, even as they struggled to bring the new nation into existence, its philosophic grave-diggers were already at work, cashing in on the period’s contradictions : in the very decade in which the Founding Fathers were publishing their momentous documents, Kant was publishing
his.

Symbolically, this is America’s philosophical conflict, running through all the years of its subsequent history. The conflict is: the Declaration of Independence, with everything it presupposes, against the
Critique of Pure Reason,
with everything to which it leads.

6

Kant Versus America

The first form of the Kantian invasion was the movement that dominated the course of nineteenth-century American philosophy: German metaphysical idealism.

The impetus to this movement in America was the desire to save religion from the onslaughts of science and of the Enlightenment mind. Brushing aside the revolutionary era’s approach to philosophy, generations of American intellectuals unearthed every old-fashioned form of its antithesis, including Platonism, Orientalism, and Puritan mysticism. But for their chief inspiration they turned to the latest trends, the ones coming out of Germany.

The first wave of this American Germanism, the
transcendentalism
of Ralph Waldo Emerson and his circle, represents an eclectic, “literary” version of German romanticism. After the Civil War, as this version waned, similar ideas moved into the colleges, assuming scholarly form; for decades, until the turn of the century, the greatest power in our philosophy departments was
Hegel.

Throughout the century, the idealists converged on the same view of reality: reality as a supersensible, “organic” dimension, i.e., God, construed as a “universal mind,” an “oversoul,” an “Absolute Self,” etc. Physical nature, being merely “appearance,” is essentially unreal, these literati and professors taught the country—and so are individuals, who are not separate entities but merely fragments of a single cosmic consciousness.

To defend such claims, the transcendentalists invoked the standard romanticist method. They lavished praise on intuition, instinct, faith, feeling, the heart, mystic insight, etc., and heaped random abuse on the senses, the intellect, logic, consistency, science. Their later academic counterparts took a different tack. Like Hegel, they presented themselves as champions of rationality, while framing ponderous constructs aimed to undercut every essential element and premise of the Aristotelian concept of reason (such as the senses, science, the finite, and much more). In its own sedate fashion, it was more thorough an epistemological assault than anything that had emanated from the New England seers.

For the practical guidance of Americans, the idealists generally condemned any form of egoism and counseled love, Christian love as construed in Königsberg and Heidelberg. We must keep in sight always “the fundamental and everlasting difference between the Idea of Duty and the Idea of Interest,” writes one leading transcendentalist; the “reward of moral approbation” belongs most of all to men “who have sacrificed themselves to a sense of duty.” If a man gives total loyalty to an appropriate “social cause, which binds many into the unity of one service”—states Josiah Royce, the leading Hegelian of the period in America—he can thereby achieve “fulfillment of himself through self-surrender ... through a willing abandonment of the seeking of his own delight. ”
¹

The collectivist tendency of transcendentalism was often hidden by an individualist veneer, which is, however, only a veneer. (For instance, Emerson’s famous doctrine of “self-reliance” demands that a man rely not on his superficial self, but on his
real
self, the “universal mind.” “All is of God. The individual is always mistaken”—this from Emerson, the alleged champion of individualism.) More philosophical than the transcendentalists, the Hegelians generally dispensed with any such veneer. Individualism, states Royce, is “the sin against the Holy Ghost.” “We have been forced to abandon the notion of
exclusive
individuality,” declares James Edwin Creighton (the first president of the American Philosophical Association), “and to recognize that individuals have reality and significance ... just in so far as they embody and express the life and purpose of a larger social whole of which they are members.”
²

Some of the American Hegelians disseminated the principle of collectivism in broad philosophical terms, without reference to its political implications. Others counseled a modest shift in the direction of statism while affirming their allegiance to the American system. Others were not so reticent. One demands that the state control all property, explaining that true freedom “rests upon the choice of the state,” and that individual liberty, so far from being true freedom, is actually “the most hopeless bondage.” Another advocates “Civic Communism,” stressing that “the Government is the very Self of man made real, made a true entity, which otherwise would be unreal, untrue, having no objective validity in the world.” Another declares that the state has “original, absolute, unlimited, universal power over the individual subject, and over all associations of subjects....”
³

During the nineteenth century it became a trend and then the rule for American students, especially in philosophy and theology, to spend a year or more in Germany absorbing the latest German culture. An army of American students absorbed it. They came home, and they repeated what they had learned. They repeated it throughout the country that had been founded on the ideals of an enlightened mind and man’s inalienable rights.

While the collectivists were finding their chief inspiration in the trends of Germany, their establishment opponents—the defenders of the American system, capitalism—were looking for answers primarily to England. During the crucial, turning-point years between the Civil War and the end of the century, they were relying for philosophic support mainly on two movements: classical economics and evolutionary biology.

The most philosophical representative of the former is John Stuart Mill, widely quoted by American conservatives at the time (and since). A weary agnostic on most of the fundamental issues of philosophy, Mill bases his defense of capitalism on the ethics of
Utilitarianism.

Utilitarianism is a union of hedonism and Christianity. The first teaches man to love pleasure; the second, to love his neighbor. The union consists in teaching man to love his neighbor’s pleasure. To be exact, the Utilitarians teach that an action is moral if its result is to maximize pleasure among men in general. This theory holds that man’s duty is to serve—according to a purely quantitative standard of value. He is to serve not the well-being of the nation or of the economic class, but “the greatest happiness of the greatest number,” regardless of who comprise it in any given issue. As to one’s own happiness, says Mill, the individual must be “disinterested” and “strictly impartial”; he must remember that he is only one unit out of the dozens, or millions, of men affected by his actions. “All honor to those who can abnegate for themselves the personal enjoyment of life,” says Mill, “when by such renunciation they contribute worthily to increase the amount of happiness in the world....”
⁴

Capitalism, Mill acknowledges, is not based on any desire for abnegation or renunciation; it is based on the desire for selfish profit. Nevertheless, he says, the capitalist system ensures that, most of the time, the actual result of individual profit-seeking is the happiness of society as a whole. Hence the individual should be left free of government regulation. He should be left free not as an absolute (there are no absolutes, says Mill), but under the present circumstances—not on the ground of inalienable rights (there are no such rights, Mill holds), but of social utility.

Under capitalism, concluded one American economist of the period with evident moral relief, “the Lord maketh the selfishness of man to work for the material welfare of his kind.” As one commentator observes, the essence of this argument is the claim that capitalism is justified by its ability to convert “man’s baseness” to “noble ends.” “Baseness” here means
egoism;
“nobility” means
altruism.
And the justification of individual freedom in terms of its contribution to the welfare of society means
collectivism
.
⁵

Mill (along with Smith, Say, and the rest of the classical economists) was trying to defend an individualist system by accepting the fundamental moral ideas of its opponents. It did not take Mill long to grasp this contradiction in some terms and amend his political views accordingly. He ended his life as a self-proclaimed “qualified socialist.”

Herbert Spencer, the thinker most admired by the conservatives of the Gilded Age, tried to defend capitalism by claiming with Kant that reality is unknowable, then by interpreting the “phenomenal” world according to the theory of evolution.

In Spencer’s view, every aspect of nature (not just the origin of species) is governed by evolution; the lower forms of life thus become the metaphysical model, by reference to which human life is to be understood. The lower forms subsist by competing for a limited food supply available in nature; therefore, according to evolutionary theory, there is an inexorable “struggle for existence,” in which the less adapted are doomed to perish. Ignoring the fact that man is a different kind of entity—that he survives by production and is able to create a constantly increasing amount of wealth—Spencer concludes that the “survival of the fittest” is the law of human life, also.

In time, Spencer holds, the process of evolutionary human breeding will weed out the weak, perfect the strong, and guarantee mankind’s happiness; but this will happen only if men do not interfere, i.e., do not seek, by economic controls or welfare legislation or undue charity, to hamper the fit or nourish the unfit. Hence governments should adopt a policy of laissez-faire.

Spencer accepts the principle of individual rights, but it is not part of his own distinctive viewpoint. According to his theory, the freedom of the strong is justified not because man has rights, but because such freedom will ultimately advance the welfare of the species. To achieve the same end, the weak are to be allowed to perish. In both cases, the operative standard of value is not the life of the individual but, in Spencer’s words, “the further evolution of Humanity,” “the making of Man,” the “life of the race.”
⁶

Spencer’s defense of individualism, like Mill’s, proceeds from the premise of collectivism, and from the moral code at its base.

Human nature, Spencer says, is now in a comparatively low moral state, but gradually it will be reshaped. In the course of eons of evolution, selfishness will atrophy. Eventually men will reach a level of altruism “such that ministration to others’ happiness will become a daily need—a level such that the lower egoistic satisfactions will be continually subordinated....” In this future Utopia, men will be eager to commit acts of self-sacrifice for their fellows; they will be so eager for self-immolation “that the competition of self-regarding impulses... will scarcely be felt.”
⁷

This is the kind of moral ideal handed on to his American followers by the leading nineteenth-century champion of the system based on the profit motive. The Americans listened. Moral conduct is “the disinterested service of the community,” writes John Fiske, Spencer’s leading philosophic disciple in the United States; immoral conduct is “the selfish preference of individual interests to those of the community”; the “all-important consideration” is “the well-being of the community, even when incompatible with that of the individual. . . .”
⁸

William Graham Sumner, the best-known Social Darwinist in America, represents a different development of Spencer’s ideas. Sumner respected the traditional individualist virtues and did not preach altruism. But being a sociologist, not a philosopher, he did not offer any philosophic defense of the way of life he admired and often unwittingly acted to undermine it. Thus he denied the concept of natural rights; proclaimed that laissez-faire is not “a rule of science,” but a matter of mere expediency; and ended as a skeptic, holding that there are no objective moral standards, and that “an absolute philosophy of truth and right ... is a delusion.”
⁹

The American defenders of capitalism had no answer to the ideas coming out of Germany, not in any branch of philosophy and especially not in the field of ethics. As a rule, they struggled not to resolve but to evade the moral issue confronting them. The economists were wont to say that man (“economic man”) is selfish by nature, and that the capitalistic status quo is therefore unalterable, no matter what the moral dreams of visionaries; besides, they often added, the moral status of capitalism is not a proper concern for economists, to whom, they said, questions of good and evil are irrelevant. The followers of Spencer were even more ardently deterministic. Man, they believed, must accept his current low moral state, sit back for millennia, and await the millennium. In a remark to a contemporary, one American Spencerian eloquently expresses this conservative mentality: “You and I can do nothing at all [in regard to current social evils].... We can only wait for evolution. Perhaps in four or five thousand years evolution may have carried men beyond this state of things. But we can do nothing.”
¹⁰

The defenders of capitalism spent their time broadcasting the vibrations of guilt and futility. Implicitly or explicitly, they were telling the country: human intelligence is impotent to control the course of society, men are helpless in the face of their own motivation, laissez-faire appeals to the evil in men, but men are stuck with it.

The United States had been founded by men who were convinced that man is
not
impotent. Once, that conviction, in conjunction with the Enlightenment code of values, had led Americans to revolt against tyranny. Now, however, the conviction reversed its historic role: abandoned by the pro-capitalists, it was picked up by the burgeoning statist groups of the late nineteenth century. These groups became the wave of the American future. They had two invaluable assets on their side: they were applying to practical politics the fundamental ideas accepted for years by the country’s leading intellectuals; and they encountered no
moral
opposition anywhere.