(4) Increased emphasis on the affairs of the
present world as opposed to an afterlife.
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(5) A growing humanitarianism, being respect
for and kindness to others for their own
sake as fellow natural creatures.
The Enlightenment, however, was a phenomenon
limited to the literate, wealthy, and noble classes. The
masses of the European populace were still impulsive and
superstitious. The 16th and 17th centuries also
encompassed Europe’s great witchcraft hysteria, when
millions of victims were tortured and burned to death at
the stake, primarily in France and Germany. The
appearance of Halley’s comet in 1682 was popularly
interpreted as a sign of divine wrath.
So the “confused” climate of Hobbes’ era continued to
pervade much of the Enlightenment as well. It may be
hypothesized that the forthcoming age of revolutions was
energized by the spread of Enlightenment techniques
among a general populace insufficiently educated [and
“enlightened”] to handle them save through
oversimplified, extreme, violent methods.
John Locke (1632-1704) was an advocate of a
“reasonable” Christianity, admitting pro forma the
possibility of revelation but not taking it into political
account. His religious toleration was noteworthy but
limited, excluding as it did atheists and Catholics. Locke
saw humanity as having begun in a “state of nature”:
“Men living together according to reason, without a
common superior on Earth with authority to judge
between them, is properly the state of nature.”
The opposite of the state of nature is civil society:
“Those who are united into one body and have a common
established law and judicature to appeal to, with
authority to decide controversies between them, and
punish offenders, are in civil society one with another;
but those who have no such common appeal, I mean on
Earth, are still in the state of nature.”
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The basis for Locke’s civil society is cooperative self-
preservation. Locke does not talk significantly in terms of
such ideals as charity, ethics, morality, virtue, love, etc.
His basis for society is positive, assuming willing
cooperation, as opposed to the point of view of Hobbes,
whose society came together through hatred and fear.
The state of nature shouldn’t be endured, since it is
characterized by poverty and hardship. [Locke uses the
Indians of the Americas as an example of people living in
the “natural state”.] The remedy is civil government.
Locke introduced a “labor theory of value”, saying that
it is the changes wrought in the natural animal, vegetable,
and mineral goods of the Earth which makes them
valuable. Another way to make them valuable is to
restrict the supply by closing off producing areas, i.e.
private ownership of land and assets. Locke defends
private ownership and accumulation of wealth and power
through money as raising the general standard of living
above that of “penury”, which he attributes to the state of
nature. Hence the concept of property becomes central to
Locke’s civil society. “The great and chief end … of men’s
uniting into commonwealths and putting themselves
under government is the preservation of their property.”
This “property” is defined to include “life, liberty, and
estate” (the basis for the famous phrase in the U.S.
Declaration of Independence).
Since self-preservation (including personal property)
is the most powerful emotion, Locke feels that any
government which is not based upon it is fighting nature
and will not survive. He takes issue with the ancient
philosophers, who considered the emotions to be things
to be suppressed and conquered in favor of rational
virtues. Politically he was a social contract theorist,
advocating a de facto contract between the people and the
government to provide for the people’s “life, liberty, and
estate”: “Political power, then, I take to be a right of
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all less penalties for the regulating and preserving of
property, and of employing the force of the community in
the execution of such laws and in the defense of the
commonwealth from foreign injury, and all this only for
the public good.”
Locke is responsible for the doctrine that all
government should be limited in its powers and exists
only by consent of the governed. He introduces the
concept of inalienable rights, which cannot be
“contracted” away to the government or anyone else. He
postulates that “all men are created equal”: “… there
being nothing more evident than that creatures of the
same species and rank, promiscuously born to all the
same advantages of nature and the use of the same
faculties, should also be equal one amongst another,
without subordination or subjection.”
Locke’s preferred form of government is limited
government, with the legislative branch superior to the
executive. He considered the judicial function to be
included in the legislative. He advocated policy-making
based on what he called the “law of the greater force”,
which is interpreted to mean majority rule. [This implies
the “democratization of truth”, which Plato had utterly
rejected.]
“Prerogative” is Locke’s term for the ability of the
executive, king or otherwise, to occasionally act above
and beyond the written law “for the public good”. “The
people shall be judge” whether the powers of government
are being used to endanger the people. According to
Locke, an abusive executive is actually “warring” on the
people by using the force they entrusted to him against
them. Thus he is no longer a political leader but a tyrant.
He, not they, is outside the society.
Locke distinguished between rebellion and revolution.
He approved of the former and disapproved of the latter,
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since revolution implies the overturning of the entire
social order as opposed to ridding the society of a tyrant.
Locke bases his political philosophy upon reason,
paying lip service to rational ideals. Like Hobbes he
wants to build a system that will reflect “basic man”
rather than one which sets ideals and expectations for
him that he cannot reach. The advantage of this kind of
system is that it never over-reaches itself and rarely falls
victim to hypocrisy of a structural sort, since not much
except cooperation and stability is expected of it. The
disadvantage is that it is a difficult system to improve by
inspired or intellectual leadership, since the political
power is concentrated in majority opinion - which tends
to be sluggish, conservative, complacent, and
apathetic -
unless a crisis shocks it into action. Political power can be
corrupted through the economic, social, or demagogic
manipulation of the people.
10. Secular Emotional Free Will
Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712-1778) begins his Social
Contract (1762): “Man was born free and everywhere he
is in chains … How did this change come to pass? I do not
know. What can make it legitimate? I believe I can
resolve this question.”
Rousseau, like many other Enlightenment
philosophers, postulated an impersonal God more-or-less
identical to the “divine natural law”. He saw no
connection between the actual essence of God and
conventional religious institutions; they distort and
pervert. They are valuable only insofar as they contribute
to society as reflections of the general will. As a popular
ordering device he would rather cynically propose the
institution of a “civil religion” requiring belief in God,
immortality, happiness of the just, punishment of the
wicked, and sanctity of the social contract and the laws.
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Subordinate to the civil religion, religious creeds would
be tolerated if they themselves are tolerant.
Rousseau feels that the defects of civil society are due
to its basis in economic motivations. Since personal profit
is the primary factor determining human relations, trust
and fellowship are destroyed, and selfishness and neglect
of civic duty are encouraged. The rich use society to
protect their privileges, and the poor are oppressed by
this same use of society.
Rousseau denies that progress in the arts will
ultimately improve manners and morality [as the
mainstream of the Enlightenment supposes]. Rather the
arts are increasingly corrupted because of their
requirements for luxury and patronage in order to
prosper. Moreover their subjects emerge from the vices of
the soul: idle curiosity and desires for unnecessary
comforts.
Rousseau’s ideal societies are the city-states of ancient
Greece (Sparta in particular) and Rome, because they
were operated - at least originally - on the principles of
virtue. His modern ideal state would be an improvement
upon their basic concepts.
Rousseau feels that the other social contract theorists
were not radical enough in their efforts to understand
pre-political man. Hobbes was correct in saying that
societies are built on hostility and avarice, but wrong in
saying that man is naturally this way. Locke was correct
in saying that societies’ purpose is to protect private
property, but wrong in saying that this is natural and
reflects justice.
Rousseau’s “natural man” has two fundamental
passions: self-preservation and sympathy with others of
his kind. Natural man differs from other animals because
of his capacity for free exercise of the will. He is not
governed merely by instinct. The awareness of this free
will is evidence of the spirituality of the human soul [=
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implies its somewhat vaguely-conceived reflection of
logos?]. Man can also use his will to improve his level of
knowledge and sustain it over generations. It is this same
free will which is man’s downfall, because he has used it
to move from a “free animal” existence to the misery of
civil life based upon inequality and private property.
Modern man cannot very well go back to a natural
state of existence, so … “[The problem is] to find a form of
association which defends and protects with all the
common force the person and the goods of each
associate; by which each, uniting himself to all, obeys
nevertheless only himself and remains as free as before.”
… to have one’s cake and eat it too: to reapproach natural
freedom while retaining the benefits of civil society.
Rousseau’s solution is that everyone first give all of his
rights and property to the state, and submerge his
personal will in a cooperative “general will”. The only
true source of morality is this “general will”. Because it is
a function of all the citizens, it is limited in its flexibility,
and this limitation establishes the boundaries of morality.
Having moved from a benevolent state of nature to a civil
society which encourages hostility and avarice, mankind
needs a social contract which best reflects the “general
will”. This “general will” will most closely approach the
virtues of natural mankind.
If a man obeys his private will in a civil state, he
reduces himself to the level of a brute animal and causes
society to degenerate into an oppressive, power-
manipulative system. He must formulate his own will in
terms of relevance to moral principle [as expressed by the
“general will”]. Thus society “forces him to be free” - to
exercise his will in coherence with the “general will”. His
conscious acceptance of this responsibility results in his
true human dignity.
Rousseau is a republican by necessity, since modern
states are too large for direct democracy. He considers
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representative government unfortunate, however, since it
weakens the expression of the “general will”. He
advocates a majoritarian voting system, but he stresses
that this will work only if people do not vote according to
their private wills, but according to the rather severe
morality imposed by the “general will”.
Rousseau despised the democracy known to his time
as “a wild anarchy of self-interest”. Factions - such as
political parties and interest groups - would have to be
outlawed as devices corrupting a person’s interests and
motives away from those of the “general will”. Rousseau
allows no reserved or inalienable rights against the
government [as does Locke], because they de facto
weaken the “general will” by allowing individuals to
ignore the social contract at critical moments. Moreover
it is the private life of the individual which determines his
respect for public laws and institutions.
Rousseau is perhaps a little too conveniently
considered the philosopher of the French Revolution [as
Locke is of the American]. It is true that Rousseau’s
espousal of emotion over reason, and his glorification of
the masses (the “general will”) lend themselves to this
interpretation. But the actual causes of the French
Revolution (more properly Revolutions, as there was a
series of them) were the inability of the French absolute
monarchy to effectively run the country, and a national
financial crisis caused by almost constant war and the
exemption of the nobility and the clergy from domestic
taxation.
During the Revolution Rousseau’s appeal was never to
the middle classes of the “third estate”, who were uneasy
about the
property-abolition aspects of his philosophy.
Rather his appeal was to the more radical elements in the
lower classes, who gained power for a time during the
Reign of Terror.
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11. Free Will:
Religious Curse to Secular Obliteration
So in this exhaustive and tragic historical survey of
humanity’s grappling with a purely-Mechanistic concept
of “free will”, we have seen it proceed from religious curse
to secular monster, both perceived to require subduing
and surrender by the individual either to God or to
society. The religious demand, culminating in the
maniacal extremism of the Reformation, held out no
hope or compensation for such surrender. The later
social-contract theorists’ arguments ranged from the
most ominous relief from nihilistic anarchy to some
degree of cooperative benefit and cultural emotional
stability.
The premise of “free will” thus required its
obliteration, either voluntarily or coercively. Once again
Orwell’s 1984 describes the inevitable result: a
totalitarianism in which the individual has not only
relinquished his individuality, but indeed cannot even
conceive of it apart from the Rousseauean “general will”
of the Party:
“But how can you stop people remembering
things?” cried Winston. “It is involuntary. It is outside
oneself. How can you control memory? You have not
controlled mine!”
O’Brien’s manner grew stem again.
“On the contrary,” he said, “you have not
controlled it. That is what has brought you here. You
are here because you have failed in humility, in self-
discipline. You would not make the act of submission
which is the price of sanity. You preferred to be a
lunatic, a minority of one.
“Only the disciplined mind can see reality, Winston.
You believe that reality is something objective,
external, existing in its own right. You also believe that
the nature of reality is self-evident. When you delude
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yourself into thinking that you see something, you
assume that everyone else sees the same thing as you.
“But I tell you, Winston, that reality is not external.
Reality exists in the human mind, and nowhere else.
Not in the individual mind, which can make mistakes,
and in any case soon perishes; only in the mind of the
Party, which is collective and immortal. Whatever the