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Perspectives on Religion and Capitalism
Posted by: | CommentsBy Edmund Opitz
The two major terms in my title are subject to extravagant misunderstanding and occasional abuse. Some of this is natural, due to limited knowledge; much of it is willful and ideological. It is appropriate, therefore, that I try to elucidate at the very beginning how the term “religion” is to be used in this paper. The meanings I attach to “capitalism” will be clarified as we proceed.
It is my understanding that religion, at bottom, is not one sector of human experience separate from other portions of human experience; it is more like a common core. A college or university, for academic purposes, may have a department of religion alongside departments of chemistry, history, mathematics, or whatever, and this fact may mislead. In actual living, and in its deepest sense, your religion is not one subject among other subjects; your religion is the fundamental way you approach, understand, and evaluate all subjects. It consists of your first principles, the truths you regard as self-evident, the basic axioms you take for granted, and through which you view everything else. Your religion colors your outlook upon the universe, affecting the way you look upon life, your relation to other people, your treatment of things.
Religion is many faceted; it has its history, its doctrines, its exercises, its rituals, its ecclesiastical structures, and so on. But the central core of every religion is its vision of the cosmos, its understanding of the nature of ultimate reality. For the purpose of this paper I shall put aside several important elements of religion and use the term as equivalent to world-view, or Weltanschauung. Everyone entertains some image of the entire scheme of things, a mental picture of what the totality—in the final analysis—is like. Some have pictured the universe as an immense and intricate piece of clockwork, a mechanism; others regard it as a gigantic organism, or as the great ocean of being, or as a feature less Absolute. Everyone operates in terms of some image of the nature-of-things, for to be human is to be a metaphysician. My own world-view is that of Christian theism.
A Creative Intelligence
Those who entertain the religious—or theistic—world-view conduct their lives on the premise that a Creative Intelligence is working out its mighty purposes through nature, in history, and above all, by means of persons. The Divine Intelligence is creative, as witness the continuing emergence of novelty on the world scene; the Divine Creativity is intelligent, because wherever we look we find a deft and ingenious adaptation of means to ends. There is order, beauty, elegance, economy and balance from one end of this universe to the other. Human beings may come to a sense of kinship with this Creative Intelligence by aligning themselves with the movement and configuration of its thrust.
At the same time we may become keenly aware that vast stretches of this universe appear to be indifferent to us. I refer to the natural order, the realm of nature subject to the laws of physics, chemistry, and the other sciences. Cause and effect operate inexorably in nature, independent of our fears and wishes. A stone falls to earth in response to the tug of gravity, and we have no choice but to adjust our actions to this and other physical laws. Natural forces affect our actions, and natural disasters cause human injury and sometimes death. The natural world piques our curiosity, and we seek to understand it so as to cope with it more successfully. Nature will never surrender unconditionally to man, but nature’s stubborn otherness provides a necessary condition for the exercise of human freedom.
The nature we confront is a nonhuman Other, and this Other is neutral, so far as we as individuals are concerned; the rain falls on the just and the unjust alike. But if this were not so—if the Other were responsive to the conflicting and the constantly changing whims of billions of human beings, submissive to our rituals and incantations—if the Other were not largely neutral and/or indifferent it would be chaotic.
Actually, the Other is an order, a vast and comprehensible order consisting in discoverable patterns and recurrences. The neutral orderliness of nature provides a basis for understanding and explanation; it affords a significant measure of predictability, allowing us to plan our lives and achieve our goals. A neutral order provides the necessary condition for exercise of the freedoms and powers proper to human nature. And as we come into a working relationship with the Other a sense of kinship begins to develop.
Let me illustrate: A man confronts a portion of the Other in the form of a body of water; a pond or a stream. He complains because the water is cold, wet, and indifferent to him; furthermore, the water is an obstruction, impeding him as he wades through it. But this same water, to an expert swimmer, is the necessary vehicle for his freedom as a swimmer. The swimmer does not complain about the water’s friction, even though it does impede his progress through it and slows his speed. For him, the friction of the water is the same thing as its buoyancy, and without the buoyancy swimming would be impossible. The exhilaration our athlete derives from a vigorous swim begets his belief in the friendliness of at least this little segment of the cosmos—which now appears to have been constructed just for his delight. The relation is symbiotic. There is resonance between ourselves and the Other.
The realm of nature out there may sometimes appear arbitrary, indifferent to human values, or even antagonistic. But shirt perspective even slightly and we realize that if nature were not neutral—that is, if nature could be bent to the human will we would not be free beings. If nature were not largely recalcitrant and unyielding, we free beings would have no incentive to cooperate intelligently with it, making use of its forces to advance our purposes—simultaneously strengthening our own powers and refining our skills as we do so.
Human Capacity for Choice
It is obvious that we human beings do not merely react mechanically to external stimuli—we are capable of a creative response to our environment. B. F. Skinner and his behaviorists declare that human beings are capable of little more than a Pavlovian reaction to a stimulus; they speak for themselves. They don’t speak for us, for at the very core of our being we bear the imprint of the Creative Intelligence which is back of all things. We are gifted with free will, and it is this capacity for choice which makes us partakers of the primordial creativity.
Let me offer you some words of the great Russian religious philosopher, Nicholas Berdyaev: “God created man in his own image and likeness, i.e., made him a creator too, calling him to free spontaneous activity and not to formal obedience to His power. Free creativeness is the creature’s answer to the great call of its creator. Man’s creative work is the fulfillment of the Creator’s secret will.”
Human nature is threefold; we are implicated in nature, we are part of some society, and we are touched by the sacred. We human beings, with a portion of our being, are directly geared into nature. Drop us from a height and gravity operates on us just as it does on a sack of grain. The chemical processes going on inside our bodies differ little from the way those chemicals interact outside our bodies. We are largely within the same network of causal sequences which characterize nature.
We are natural beings, but that’s not all we are. We are also social beings, involved in history. Occurrences in nature are explained in terms of causes; actions in history and society are explained in terms of choices. Society is our natural habitat. Society is a spontaneous order—as F. A. Hayek has taught us—emerging out of human choices but not resulting from conscious human design.
Social order—comprising both the written and the unwritten law, together with custom, convention, habit and taste—social order may occasionally appear to stand athwart the individual to frustrate his immediate intentions. But everyone knows, on sober second thought, that our very survival as individuals depends on social cooperation under the division of labor; human beings are interdependent. Everyone, therefore, has a personal stake in the fashioning, the strengthening and the refining of the structures of a free society. The free society provides the optimum environment for every productive, peaceful person.
Participants in a Divine Order
There are natural elements in our make-up, and everyone carries a portion of some society in his very being. And there is a third thing. Analyze human nature and you discover elements in it which are not reducible to either nature or society, important as those facets of human nature are. We participate in an order of reality which is beyond nature and beyond society. Call this the sacred order or the divine order, if you wish; or call it God—the unconditioned Creative Intelligence in which all contingent existence, including our own, is grounded.
The word “supernatural” has been battered beyond use, and in any event, it is completely “natural” for the person to bear the marks of sacredness in his own being. This fact has important political implications. In the 18th century, this central sacredness in the person—as he is conceived within the theistic world-view—was politically translated. The sacred in persons found secular expression as the idea of inherent individual rights “endowed by the Creator,” the rights referred to in our Declaration of Independence.
Given the idea of individual rights, in virtue of what a person genuinely is in his true being, it is the task of political philosophy to fashion a legal structure designed to protect every person’s private domain, secure the rights of all persons equally, and maximize everyone’s opportunity to choose and pursue his personal goals. A uniquely religious political philosophy oriented toward these ends was called Whiggism in the 18th century, and Liberalism during much of the 19th. Whiggism and Liberalism endeavored to protect each person in his life, his liberty and his property. The free economy, or capitalism, is the natural counterpart to Whiggism; you get capitalism in the second place when you have Whiggism in the first place. Whiggism lays the necessary political ground work for the set of economic arrangements called capitalism.
The Capitalistic Order
As 19th-century Classical Liberalism turned into the diametrically opposed thing called liberalism today, the economic order became less and less free market as governmental regulations and controls progressively expanded over the economy. Capitalism—ideally—means simply private property, individual liberty, and the voluntary exchange of goods and services between freely contracting parties.
Capitalism is what happens in the realm of industry and trade when force and fraud are eliminated from that realm. It involves peaceful competition for the privilege of serving consumers better, with a reward in the form of profit going to anyone the consumers believe has served them well. Capitalism is the only productive economic order, and the only equitable one; it submits everyone’s offering of goods and services to the collective judgment of his peers and rewards him according to his contribution—as his peers assess it.
I firmly believe that a society of free people is impossible if economic actions are fettered and controlled by the government bureaucracy. The free market economy, or capitalism, is the only way free people can organize their bread and butter activities—business, industry and trade. This mode of economic activity—capitalism—enjoys a symbiotic relationship with the legal system and political structures called Whiggism in the 18th century. Whiggism and capitalism are the two sides of the same coin; you can’t have one without the other.
Whiggery goes back to the 17th century—although Lord Acton made a good point when he referred to St. Thomas Aquinas as the first Whig. The Puritan religious movement in
17th-century England spawned a political arm of Dissenters and Nonconformists in opposition to the court party, whose members were contemptuously called Whiggamores—a Scottish term for horse thieves. Whiggery bore its best fruit on these shores, in the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, and The Federalist Papers.
Whiggery in America
Whiggery gave rise to political structures designed around the sovereign individual person, to secure his rights, protect his private domain and afford him maximum scope to pursue his personal goals. These legal and political structures—which are the earmark of a free society—represent the secular projection of a religious vision of man and the universe unique to western civilization.
The introduction of Christianity into the Classical World of two thousand years ago had important political consequences, for this religion taught that only a part of man is social, a portion of his being is God’s. That which is God’s is sharply marked off from that which is Cae sar’s. The realm which is Caesar’s becomes a mere province in the all-encompassing Kingdom which is God’s.
There are half-gods, false gods, and tribal deities—idols all. We worship the gods of power, wealth, fame or pleasure—or whatever else evokes our highest priorities. Some god you must have. Whatever thing you value so much that you would sacrifice all other values to it; whatever elicits your ultimate devotion; that which you invest your most at-dent emotions in—this is your god. The nation state in our time usurps a god-like role as the arbiter of men’s destiny. It is a chief characteristic of the 20th century that multitudes of men and women in the world-wide mass movements of our time—secular faiths like Communism, Fascism and Naziism—have consecrated first-rate loyalty and devotion to fifth-rate dictators.
Every human being is capable of first-rate loyalty and dedication, and logically we need to match this up with a first-rate object, the Object of ultimate concern—the one true God. Only the Supreme Being, God, merits the utmost devotion and consecration of which human beings are capable.
Religious Premises
If there is to be a society—in the sense of a culture—there must be a measure of agreement as to the relation between God and man, and as to the nature of man and his proper end. There must be some agreement as to what constitutes justice, honor and virtue. The source from which a society derives its understanding of these matters is its religion. In this sense, every society is cradled in some religion, Christian or otherwise. The culture of China is unthinkable without Confucianism; Indian society is the expression of Hinduism; and Islam is composed of followers of Mohammed. In like fashion, our western culture stems from the Judeo-Christian tradition; we are a branch of Christendom.
Our own institutions and way of life are intimately related to the basic dogmas of the Christian religion. From this faith we derive our notions of the meaning of life, the moral order, the dignity of persons, and the rights and responsibilities of individuals. Ours is a religious society, but it has its counterpart in a secular state. The Constitution forbids an official church, an act which permits religion to exercise its unique authority directly, unhampered by ecclesiasticism.
Capitalism Under Fire
The word “capitalism” itself has always been controversial, having been brought into use by Marxist writers for polemical purposes. Werner Sombart, a Marxist, claims to have been the first to use the term “capitalism” systematically in his analyses published around the turn of the century. The term still has pejorative connotations, as many people use it, including those who prepare ecclesiastical pronouncements.
The World Council of Churches was launched at a meeting of churchmen in Amsterdam in 1948. This ecumenical group appointed a commission on The Church and the Disorder of Society, chaired by one of my former teachers, John C. Bennett. The report of this commission kicked up a considerable stir because it recommended that “The Christian Churches should reject the ideologies of both laissez faire capitalism and communism . . .” When the press asked Dr. Bennett what he had in mind as the middle ground between communism and capitalism, he said it was British Trades Union socialism.
Precisely what did Dr. Bennett and his commission think they were rejecting when they turned their backs on capitalism? Well, they told us, by listing the four earmarks of the thing they dismissed. I quote from their report. (1) “Capitalism tends to subordinate what should be the primary task of any economy—the meeting of human needs—to the economic advantages of those who have most power over its institutions; (2) it tends to produce serious inequalities; (3) it has developed a practical form of materialism among Western nations in spite of their Christian backgrounds, for it has placed the greatest emphasis upon success in making money; (4) it has also kept the people of capitalist countries subject to a kind of fate which has taken the form of such social catastrophes as mass unemployment.”
Everyone who has had even a limited exposure to the economic thought of men like Mises, Hayek, Friedman or Hazlitt recognizes the flavor of schoolboy Marxism in these allegations. If there is a form of social organization which gives economic advantages to the powerful at the expense of the rest of us, makes money grubbing the highest good, and periodically throws masses of people out of work—then every person of good sense and good will would oppose that system.
But if you really want to dismantle the thing Dr. Bennett and his cohorts ignorantly label “capitalism,” there’s only one way to do it, and that is to labor on behalf of the free society on all three of its levels; the free market economy, the Whig political structures which sustain it, and the theistic Weltanschauung on which all the rest depends.
The Rule of Law
Whiggery insists on the Rule of Law—one law for all persons alike, because all are one in their essential humanness. Equality before the bar of justice means maximum liberty for all persons. In The Wealth of Nations, Adam Smith speaks of his “liberal system of liberty, equality and justice.” People are free to the extent that such ideals come to prevail in practice, and the only economic arrangement compatible with a free people is the market economy, or capitalism properly understood.
I should like to speak for a moment about the important distinction between principle and practice, or theory and history. Many good illustrations of this point are to be found in the history of the Church over the past nineteen centuries, where we find several instances of a wide discrepancy between Gospel Christianity and the practices of the Church in certain eras. The Church has occasionally sanctioned tyrannous political rule, it has lent its support to persecutions, inquisitions and crusades. It has forgotten its primary mission while pursuing secular ends like wealth and power.
In the economic realm, too, principle is sometimes obscured by malpractice. The late Wilhelm Roepke put it this way: “We must make a sharp distinction between the principle of a market economy as such . . . and the actual development which during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries has led to the historical form of market economy. One is a philosophical category, the other an historical individuality . . . a non-recurrent compound of economic, social, legal, political, moral and cultural elements . . .”
The theory of free market economics is one thing; the way some people used or misused such economic freedom as was available to them in 1870 or 1910 or 1960 is something else again. A listing of the misuse or abuse of any specific freedom cannot be made part of a case against that freedom, for a mere multiplication of instances does not constitute proof one way or another. The case for freedom of the press does not stand or fall, depending on any evidence you might muster that editors are idiots and reporters knaves.
It is absolutely certain that freedom will be misused, simply because we are human beings. The fact that people sometimes misuse their freedom is indeed bad, but to try to correct the misuse of freedom by the denial of freedom would be infinitely worse. If there were a Richter Scale to measure social dislocation, the misuse of freedom would be one or two; the denial of freedom would be seven or eight—disaster.
Take this matter of academic freedom—a principle nobly exemplified by many educational institutions. Academic freedom does not justify the expectation that you will have Einsteins in the physics department, Nobel prize winners in chemistry, or a Whitehead in philosophy. Academic freedom could be justified on its own terms even if it could be demonstrated that the majority of professors had mail order degrees, turned up tipsy in class, and never cracked a book. Given these conditions on a campus there would be good grounds for a faculty house-cleaning; but a catalogue of these bad conditions does not add up to the first step in the argument against the principle of academic freedom.
Academic freedom is a sound principle even if many teachers are incompetent and others betray their profession. We defend freedom of speech and freedom of the press even though we are dismayed by the inferior quality of much of the spoken and written word. Freedom of wor ship is a good thing and we stand for separation of church and state even though some of the results are not to our liking. And by the same token we believe in freedom of economic enterprise—even though consumer demands and producer responses to them fall short of the Good, the True, and the Beautiful. As do the efforts of some contemporary philosophers, I dare say.
Economic Freedom
Economic freedom is to be cherished for itself, just as we cherish every one of our liberties. But economic freedom is doubly important because it sustains all the rest; economic freedom is the means to every one of our other ends. Economic freedom represents our livelihood, and whoever controls our livelihood has acquired critical leverage over every other aspect of our lives as well.
We stress private property as an absolutely essential ingredient of a society of free people, an ancient bit of wisdom which Alexander Hamilton referred to twice in The Federalist. In the 79th Paper Hamilton wrote: “In the general course of human nature, a power over a man’s subsistence amounts to a power over his will.” Control the economy and you control people. So it is not simply for the sake of economic freedom and the prosperity it creates that we argue that business, industry and trade should come within the Rule of Law and be freed from governmental dictates, and bureaucratic regulations.
Incidentally, the free economy does not go unregulated—operating within the Rule of Law, the economy is regulated by the buying habits of consumers. We defend economic freedom—voluntary exchanges of goods and services between freely contracting parties—because every one of our more important freedoms depends critically on private property and free exchange.
It is my contention that a society of free people has a free economic order as an essential element of it. John Maynard Keynes, in backhanded fashion, lends support to my contention by declaring that his theory of economic planning adapts nicely to a totalitarian political order. In a Foreword to the 1936 German translation of his General Theory, Keynes had this to say: “The theory of aggregate production, which is the point of the following book, nevertheless can be much easier adapted to the conditions of a totalitarian state than . . . under conditions of free production and a large degree of laissez-faire.”
Axioms of a Free Society
Capitalism—the free economy—appeared on the political foundation laid down during the eighteenth century by Whiggism in a period when the cultural climate of the West was at least vestigially Christian. The intellectual soil of Europe still bore the marks of centuries of tilling by the teachings of the Church. Theism had yielded to Deism in the eighteenth century but Deism was not secularism, and Deism did lay great stress on the three basic axioms of a free society: (1) each person is endowed with certain rights; (2) each person is gifted with free will; and (3) there is a moral law binding on all persons alike.
The eighteenth century’s faith in reason really constitutes a fourth axiom; this was the belief that the universe is rationally structured, and so, by taking thought, unaided by revelation, we could convincingly prove that human beings possess inherent rights, free will, and a conscience which attaches them to the moral law. These four items constitute the heart of the religious Weltanschauung. If your image of the cosmos has three ingredients—reason, rights, free will and the moral law—you have the proper religious foundation for the free society, of which the economic expression is capitalism.
The nineteenth century brought about a complete change in world-view, from Deism to Materialism. The latter finds its explicit and most familiar exposition in the Dialectical Materialism of Marx. The world-view of Marxism has no genuine place for reason, free will, the moral law, or the sacredness of persons. The same is true of every other variety of Materialism. Materialism sometimes goes by other labels, such as Naturalism, or Secularism, or Positivism, or Humanism.
Whatever the name, the thing here discussed is the theory which maintains that reality is reducible, ultimately, to mechanical arrangements of material particles. This is the non-theistic Weltanschauung, logically denying everything the theistic Weltanschauung affirms: inherent rights, reason, free will, and the moral law. Some Materialists may assert one or more of these religious axioms, but none of these axioms can logically be grounded in a universe consisting ultimately of nothing more than material particles, electrical charges, or whatever.
We hear much talk these days about “rights,” but to call something a “right” does not make it a right. Privileges, granted or withheld at the discretion of the state, may be called “rights,” but this notion is worlds apart from the idea of individual sovereignty in virtue of a sacredness in the very being of each person.
Free Will and Morality
Free will is incompatible with philosophical Materialism. If man is wholly natural, and if Nature is all-there-is, and if Nature is the realm where cause and effect operate inexorably, then men and women are as much caught up in causal sequences as water, stones, gases, and everything else. It follows that free will is a delusion, determinism a fact. “Man is unconditionally subject to the natural conditions of his environment,” a leading thinker tells us. Man does not act; like everything else in nature he is acted upon; he merely reacts.
A mechanistic universe has no moral dimension; there is no right and wrong per se. But people can’t avoid making moral decisions; human beings are habituated to thinking in moral terms, or perhaps the human mind is so constructed that it cannot function outside the moral categories. Those who assert that the universe lacks a moral dimension, frequently argue that the social system determines what is right and what is wrong—which is to subordinate ethics to politics.
Again, one hears it said that each person decides for himself what is right and wrong for him. The inference is that the private will of each person is his only “authority”—there being no external norms or standards universally binding, to which the will and actions of every person should conform. Every man rolls his own and does his own thing. Whim, impulse, instinct, inclination, are the spurs of action. “If it feels good, do it,” is the contemporary folk wisdom conveyed by bumper stickers.
If the cosmos provides no clues for human conduct; if justice is of merely human contrivance, representing the interest of the powerful, then no one has any moral obligation to do anything when he happens to feel like doing something else. By the same token, no one has any warrant for telling anyone else what he ought to do, or not do. This is what each person decides for himself, each getting his kicks in his own way, each doing whatever turns him on. The old covenant has been shattered, the rule book discarded.
Having reached this point, the argument is hoist with its own petard. The weak doing their thing are at the mercy of the strong doing theirs. The unscrupulous doing their thing is why good guys finish last. Some people get their kicks by preventing other people from getting theirs, and there is no rule to say them nay. Those who want to live and let live are put under the thumb of those who strive for ascendancy over others because for these latter the exercise of power “feels good.” You cannot tell those who hanker after power that tyranny is “wrong,” because they will tell you that wielding power is “their thing,” which you have been at such pains to tell them to pursue!
The non-theistic world view has no real niche for the concepts of inherent rights and free will; it has discarded the norms without which no genuine ethical decision is possible; it makes reason the tool of class interest. Materialism is the appropriate ideology for a totalitarian society, but the Materialist who seeks to provide a rationale for the free society has saddled himself with an impossible task.
The Moral Foundations
Economic arguments for capitalism fall on deaf ears unless people, on other grounds, have first era-braced a philosophy of man and society which incites them to seek their own good while working for the well-being of the whole community, that is to say, when they have given proper weight to the argument for the free society based on ethics, inherent rights, and free will.
The ethical argument for the free society limits governmental power by surrounding it with moral restraints. There is not one law for magistrates and another for citizens; rulers and ruled are alike under the moral law. Statutes must conform to a higher law, or divine law, superior to the enactments of legislators, discovered by reason and intuition.
The argument from inherent rights views society’s political agency as having the negative function of securing each person’s private domain, protecting his life, liberty, and property, in order that he might have maximum freedom to pursue his personal goals.
The argument from free will is that the free society-free economy—Whiggism-Capitalism—provides the only social arrangements consonant with the nature of a creature gifted with the capacity to choose. The fact that each person is in charge of his own life, responsible for making the countless decisions required to bring his life toward completion, requires social conditions of maximum opportunity for choice. Human nature and the free society are complementary, two sides of the same coin. A society humane and just needs economic arrangements to match, and this means capitalism.
The free economy does not beget itself; the free economy appears only after we have the free society. And the free society emerges only after generations of exposure to the idea that there is a sacredness in persons which, in the political and economic spheres, demands liberty and justice for all. It is a mandate of our better nature as well as a requirement of our religion, that we work toward a society where every person has the widest possible scope to exercise his capacity as a freely choosing person, guiding his life by reason, within the moral law.
Is it not true—as Thomas Jefferson reminded us—that “The God who gave us life, gave us liberty at the same time.”
Originally published in The Freeman, December 1981.
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Architects of Leviathan
Posted by: | CommentsBy Edmund Opitz
Opitz delivered this paper in October 1973 before Hillsdale College students and faculty during “Political Morality: From Socrates to Nixon,” the first seminar of the Center for Constructive Alternatives in the 1973-74 academic year.
The Norman Conquest was actually a conquest. The group of men assembled around Harold at Hastings in 1066 was not a delegation from the local booster club to welcome William and his associates; it was an army. Nor were the Norman knights on a scenic tour of the Channel; they were an invading force armed and prepared for battle. The two groups of armored men fought one day in October, and the Normans won the victory. William followed up his initial success with other victories and established himself as sovereign over this island territory. The conqueror of England now owned the place and rewarded his one hundred and seventy Norman followers by giving them portions of English earth. The division of the spoils went something like this: William permitted the Church to retain its acreage, amounting to about one-quarter of England; he allotted 20% to himself, thus accounting for 45% of England’s land mass. One-half of the remainder was given to ten Norman nobles, which left about 27% to be divided up among one hundred and sixty knights. The Normans were the new rulers of England, and they also owned the country. The Normans were the governors of England, having captured public office in a literal and not a metaphorical sense. They were not voted into office; they seized power. The Normans conquered the English and the government of England came into their possession.
Every nation has come into existence in a similar fashion; in the aftermath of war. Nations are not brought by the stork; nor do nations come into being as a result of any sort of social contract. The myth of an original compact should not be confused with history. Human society is sui generis, but the nation in which we live—and other nations likewise—achieved sovereignty over the land mass we call our own by killing off or driving away the territory’s previous inhabitants. Similar procedures were practiced by earlier generations, and so on back to the dawn of time. Such is the moral setting in which nations are born, and so must be the manner of their survival—they must be prepared for armed defense. No political theory which overlooks this is worth much.
Real people live in nations. Humanity, on the other hand, exists only in the imagination. Now, you can do things with humanity that you cannot possibly do with people. The imagination can reduce real people to abstract units of mankind; it can scramble and rearrange these units according to a preconceived Plan; and presto chango, the vision of a perfected humanity living in a plastic utopia! If the real world disavows this chimera, so much the worse for the real world. The real world is full of wicked men and evil institutions, and as soon as the Planners have killed them off the new humanity will enter its Shangri-La!
Beware the armed visionary! His efforts during the past two centuries to bring about the impossible by means of the intolerable have nearly done us in! In sober truth, a perfect resolution of human difficulties is not for this world. The human condition permits only amelioration of our lot, not its perfection. And when amelioration has done its best the human burden will still be on our shoulders for each of us to bear as best he can.
My intention is not to underscore the dark, seamy, underside of the human record; history’s tragic side is there for all to see, once ideological blinders are removed. My purpose is to pay tribute to the human capacity to endure, to bounce back, to achieve, to create. Out of the disorder of the Norman Conquest there emerged eventually the order of English society—with its Common Law, its intricate system of feudal fights and duties, its idea of “the immemorial rights of Englishmen,” the formation of Parliament, and so on. And this is not all. These people produced monumental works of art, a noble literature, a body of philosophy. They were notable in religion and in education. And they produced a well-knit society whose texture was tough enough to endure for centuries.
The process was not without “blood, sweat, and tears,” but when it was accomplished the government of England reflected the character and temperament of the people of England.
Man is indeed a political animal in this respect, that he fashions governments in his own image. This is true even in a conquest situation; it is obvious in a democratic system. It is self-evident that the politicians elected to public office are men who embody the consensus. The successful candidates are those who most persuasively promise what voters believe government should deliver; politicians operate on that slippery spectrum bounded, on the one hand, by what voters expect and demand of government, and by what they will put up with from government, on the other. A nation tends to get the government it deserves, in the sense that pressure groups will eventually organize to make wrongful demands upon government, unless the nation’s “aristocracy of virtue and talent”—men with the ability to teach what expectations and demands are legitimate—are needed. When educators, philosophers, and men of letters fail to properly nourish the intellect, the conscience and the imagination of a significant segment of a society, they betray a sacred trust as teachers of mankind, and in the wake of their defection a secular religiousness becomes the popular faith. Leviathan is the god of this faith. Men serve Leviathan in the confident expectation that he will provide his votaries with ease, comfort, security, and prosperity. The modern world does indeed provide more of these things for more people than earlier periods, but it also exacts a toll in the form of perpetual warfare, social unrest, hardening of the arteries, softening of the brain, and a troubled spirit.
When we attempt to assess the modern malaise we are tempted to say: “An enemy hath done this thing.” But the truth of the matter is that we have done it to ourselves—the actively guilty, the passively guilty, the ignorant, the stupid, and all the innocent bystanders—we are all in this thing together. Every society has its characteristic pecking order, and ours is no exception. Certain men, certain ideas, certain life styles are at the top of the pecking order; the masses admire and seek to emulate these men, ideas and life styles. If these ideas and styles are not life enhancing, there is frustration and thwarting at the deep levels of human nature and a whole society is sidetracked. The Remnant who keep the faith are superfluous; society has no use for their services. Such a society will necessarily get Leviathan—a government which matches its warped and ill-favored nature. Edmund Burke puts the matter plainly in a letter to a constituent in Bristol:
Believe me, it is a great truth, that there never was, for any long time, a corrupt representative of a virtuous people; or a mean, sluggish, careless people that ever had a good government of any form. If it be true in any degree, that the governors form the people, I am certain it is as true that the people in their turn impart their characters to their rulers. Such as you are, sooner or later, must parliament be.
Civilizations rise and fall. Why this occurs is the subject of learned speculation and debate. There is little unanimity among scholars, who disagree among themselves even as to the yardsticks by which decline and progress might be measured. But even though the overall movement of a civilization as a whole cannot be detected by those within it, there are two trends in the modern world in all progressive countries, where the facts are clear; the first has to do with politics, the second with economics. The thrust of eighteenth century Whiggery and of Classical Liberalism was to pry various sectors of life out from under the yoke of the State, to free them from political controls. The aim was to shrink government to a limited, constabulary function. The twentieth century has reversed this trend, with a vengeance. The theory of the free society has come under increasing attack, and totalitarian governments have emerged in nation after nation.
As Classical Liberalism expanded the voluntary sector of society the economic controls of the Mercantilist era were removed from business, industry, and agriculture. Adam Smith demonstrated that—within the framework of the Rule of Law, which Liberalism supplied—the economic order was subtly regulated by the buying habits of consumers; and the free economy began to emerge within western nations. Freedom in economic transactions was never fully achieved in any nation, but we made greater progress in that direction in the United States than elsewhere, and we paid lip service to the ideal of the market economy. But ideals change. Freedom did not bring about utopia and in the aftermath of this disappointment, a new scheme captured the imagination of the intellectuals—national planning for the achievement of national purposes and goals. The New Deal marked a major change in the popular attitude toward the free economy; efforts to frame the rules necessary for attaining competition in the marketplace gave way to the urge to put the marketplace under bureaucratic regulation. The free economy is now being phased out, step by step.
I am a believer in the free society and in the free economy. The free society is to my taste because I like its variety, the diversity it encourages, the spontaneity it permits. And I like the free economy because it is more productive than any alternative; people eat better, have more things, are more secure in their possessions. Freedom works, and therefore I resist the collectivizing trends of the twentieth century which would transform people into creatures of the State. But my belief in freedom is grounded, ultimately, on my reading of the nature of the human person. Man, I believe, is a created being; there is a sacred essence in him. Man is on this planet in consequence of a mighty plan—of whose outlines we may gain faint intimations—and his life is used to further a vast purpose—of which we are given an occasional clue. If man is indeed a created being, and the members of a society act upon their belief that such is their nature, they will begin to frame political theories consonant with their convictions. They will erect political structures designed to safeguard the sacred essence in each person; the law will attempt to maximize each person’s opportunity to realize his earthly goals. Believing that God wills men to be free, such a society will regard any trespass on the true liberty of even the lowliest individual to be a thwarting of some intent of the Creator. The deep conviction that each human being is a person and not a thing will generate ideas of equal, inherent rights; and this central dogma will exert pressure on personal attitude and conduct, on government and law, on every level of the free society, to bring all into harmony with the key belief that man is a created being.
But suppose man is not a created being. Suppose the human being is not a person, but a thing. If the universe is simply brute fact, mindless and meaningless; reducible in the final analysis to mass and motion—then man is a thing just like any other item in the catalogue of the planet’s inhabitants. Suppose we assume—as do many of our contemporaries—that man is the chance product of the random movement of material particles. Man’s haphazard appearance on a fifth rate planet is, then, a fluke; he just happened to occur, as the accidental by-product of physical and chemical forces. He’s merely a part of nature, like every other species on the planet. Except that the human species is more foolish than the rest, and has a great gift for make-believe which renders its continued existence problematic!
When we confront a strange object we try to size it up, so we’ll know better how to deal with it. If it’s a person we get onto a person-to-person basis; but if it’s a thing we treat it like a thing. We make a crucial decision here, and the way we decide depends upon our basic philosophy, our understanding of the fundamental nature of the universe. If we have embraced some variety of Materialism as our philosophy then we must eventually come to the logical conclusion that human beings are things, and once we conclude this we’ll begin to treat people as things. People then come to be regarded as units of the State, as objects to be manipulated, as pawns in a political game to be used and used up in some national plan, as guinea pigs for experiments in genetic engineering, as robots programmed for utopia. Shades of 1984!
I am prepared to argue that we get the free society only after the consensus has firm convictions about the sacredness of persons, and that we get the free economy only after we have the free society. Now, when we reflect on the nature of persons we involve ourselves in some pretty deep philosophical and theological questions, and some of our contemporaries are impatient with such speculations. They believe that the intellectual opponents of the free market can be devastated by straightforward economic arguments, and once we have the free market everybody will be doing his own thing and we’ll get the free society as a matter of course. Things are not this simple; if they were, freedom in human affairs would be the rule; voluntary transactions and unhampered exchange would then mark the economic life of all nations. The reverse is true: freedom has always been in jeopardy, and the liberties which expanded during the Classical Liberal Era are now contracting everywhere.
There is a deep-rooted urge in each person to be unhampered in the pursuit of his own life goals, but this individual instinct for freedom has only rarely in history been institutionalized as the free society. Likewise, each person has a deeply rooted desire to conserve his energy and improve his material well-being; trade and barter are as old as mankind. But despite the economizing urge the free economy seldom appears on this planet. The free society and the free economy did emerge in the eighteenth century and freedom expanded during the nineteenth. An excellent literature came into being to expound and defend political and economic freedom, despite which freedom retreated during the twentieth century because there was a leak at the philosophical level, where we deal with the nature of personhood and the meaning of life.
The economizing spirit is concerned to save energy and resources; it strives ceaselessly to diminish imputs and maximize outputs. Which is to say that economics is the drive to get more for less. Now, unless this more-for-less impulse is counterbalanced by non-economic forces it develops into a something-for-nothing mentality. And when the something-for-nothing mentality takes over the free economy dies of auto-intoxication.
The advice to “do your own thing” has been repeated so often as to be an incantation, and if freedom could be had by casting a spell then the free society would be a shoo-in. But the free society cannot be sustained by magic, and lacking a personhood, the advice to “do your own thing” is an invitation to disaster. The weak doing their thing are at the mercy of the strong doing theirs, and the unscrupulous have the upper hand over the rest…I belong to a bicycle club and have two friends with whom I ride. Joe is a weightlifter, a powerful man, and a “square.” Fred is a middle aged retiree with strong affinities for the youthful life styles of today. We three were in a resort town for a bike rally, and in addition to cyclists there were many young people whose sartorial and tonsorial disarray proclaimed their devotion to individual liberty. The three of us stopped for refreshments at a soft drink stand and watched the passers-by. A pair of especially unkempt and unwashed young men strolled by, and Joe—the muscular “square” muttered, half under his breath, “I’d like to wring their necks!” Fred, a gentle and sympathetic soul, said, “But, Joe, they’re only doing their thing.” To which my obvious retort was, “Yes, Fred, but Joe’s thing is wringing hippies’ necks!”
Classical Liberalism was built around the idea of the Rule of Law, equal justice for all, and thus it erected certain guidelines and standards, whose observation maximized each man’s liberty in society. And it framed these rules because each person is a sacrosanct individual, free in virtue of his very nature.
When convictions about the sacredness and mystery of personhood are energized, then men will seek to erect institutional safeguards around each individual, and we move toward the free society. But if the prevailing philosophy has a faulty doctrine of personhood, then people lose that sense of their true humanness which would lead them to strive for an ordered liberty, and we lapse into the closed society. Modern thought, the ideology which has prevailed during the past two centuries, has many facets and some undeniable strengths.
But it has one glaring defect; it has no adequate doctrine of personhood. This ideology is reductionist in tendency, whenever it contemplates the Self. It reduces men to animals and animals to machines. It defines thought as subvocal activity, dismisses reason as rationalization; explains mind as a mere reflex of activity among the braincells; and invokes the conditioned reflex to account for every variety of behavior.
I am painting with a broad brush in order to highlight a drift or tendency in modern thought, “a mean, sluggish, careless” streak in the realm of ideas. When a thinker uses a finely tuned instrument—his mind—to reach the conclusion that thought cannot be trusted, we have evidence of corruption in philosophy. Let me illustrate.
There are philosophers of considerable and deserved reputation who have dreamed up world views in which human beings figure as creatures of a lesser stature than persons. Be it noted, however, that the philosopher guilty of devaluating personhood generously exempts himself from the strictures he applies to others! Given his blind spot, he concludes that it is only other people, the mass of mankind, who fall within the scheme of manipulable objects; the philosopher who regards us as unpersons finds another category for himself. He’s the philosopher king! Bertrand Russell, in a celebrated essay entitled “A Free Man’s Worship,” declares that “Man is the product of causes which had no prevision of the end they were achieving; his origin, his growth, his hopes and fears, his loves and his beliefs, are but the outcome of accidental collocations of atoms.” In short, we are merely the result of a chance arrangement of particles. Now, it is obvious that Lord Russell regarded this idea worth putting onto paper and publishing, which would not be the case unless, in the first place, he regarded this idea as being more truthful than alternative views. But how can the designations true or false be applied to an “accidental collocation of atoms?” By the internal showing of Russell’s statement, his own beliefs are below the idea level; they are subreason. And in the second place, the publishing of these words bespeaks a wish on the author’s part to persuade other people of the validity of his position. But why bother to offer enlightenment to creatures whose beliefs are nothing but the chance result of blind forces?
Bertrand Russell was immensely gifted as a philosopher and mathematician, but his philosophy is deficient in its attempts to account for self-hood; it has no adequate place for persons. And if Russell is deficient here, how much more deficient are the lesser men who instruct us in the meaning of life! The widespread irrationalism of the present day represents the dead end of a philosophy which developed a world view wherein was no proper niche for the creator of that world view—the philosopher himself. It takes a brilliant and ingenious mind to arrive at such a paradoxical conclusion which so blatantly denies the obvious. Any fool knows that white is white and black, black; so does the wise man. But in between the fool and the wise man are those who are able to argue with perverse brilliance that white is a kind of black. C. A. Campbell, emeritus professor of philosophy at Glasgow University, makes a sound observation: “As history amply testifies, it is from powerful, original and ingenious thinkers that the queerest aberrations of philosophic theory often emanate. Indeed it may be said to require a thinker exceptionally endowed in these respects if the more paradoxical type of theory is to be expounded in a way which will make it seem tenable even to its author—let alone to the general philosophic public.”
To be a man is to search for meaning. Philosophy begins in wonder, and we can’t help wondering what life is all about, and how human life fits into the total scheme of things. We try to decipher the mysteries of the universe, hoping to obtain a few clues to help us play our roles in life with zest and joy. We wonder if human values and ideals find reinforcement in the nature of things, and if the values that concern us most deeply—love and honor, truth, beauty and goodness—are realities. Or are they merely illusions we cling to for comfort in an otherwise cheerless existence? We consult the philosophers, and all too many of them are mired in the cults of unreason, meaninglessness, and absurdity. Man is a cosmic accident, they assure us; the universe is a moral and aesthetic blank, completely alien to us. We cannot trust our own thought processes, they say, as they simultaneously downgrade mind and insist that we accept their theories! Well, they can’t have it both ways! Of course, if matter is the ultimate reality, mind is discredited. But if this discredited instrument is all we have to rely on, how can we put any confidence in its findings? If untrustworthy reason tells us that we cannot trust reason, then we have no logical ground for accepting the conclusion that reason is untrustworthy! Well, I don’t trust the reasoning of people who champion the irrational, and I do know that our reasoning powers may be—like anything else—misused. But when human thought is guided by the rules of logic, undertaken in good faith, and tested by experience and tradition, it is an instrument capable of expanding the domain of truth. Reason is not infallible, but it is infinitely more to be trusted than nonreason!
Deep down within us we know with solid assurance that we really do belong on this planet; that we are the key component of the total richness. We know this, but we need reminding —as in these words from the American poet, the late Robinson Jeffers:
…man dissevered from the earth and stars and his history…for contemplation or in fact…Often appears atrociously ugly. Integrity is wholeness, the greatest beauty is Organic wholeness, the wholeness of life and things, the divine beauty of the universe. Love that, not man Apart from that, or else you will share man’s pitiful confusions, Or drown in despair when his days darken. [1]
I find the same sentiments in prose, from the pen of a gifted and unorthodox thinker, Anthony M. Ludovici:
The profound and cultivated man of wanton spirits, whose sense of self is the outcome of healthy impulses springing from the abundant energy and serenity of his being, not only affirms his own self and the universe with every breath he takes, but, by the intimate knowledge he acquires of life through the intensity of his own vitality, he feels deeply at one with everything else that lives. The intensity of his feeling of life helps him to perceive, behind the external differences of living phenomena, that quality and power which unites him to them. The luxuriant profligacy of nature finds a reflection in his soul, but it also finds an answering note in his feelings. Profound enough not to be deceived by surfaces, he feels the dark mystery behind himself and the rest of life, and, what is more important, guesses at the truth that he himself cannot, any more than the daisy or the antelope, stand alone, or dispense with the power which is enveloped in that dark mystery. [2]
These are the authentic accents of a religious world view, and a citizenry in whom this vision lives will invest each person with a sacredness, a protected private domain, a body of rights and immunities. The law, then, is established to secure these prerogatives of the person, and government is limited to those functions which maximize liberty and justice for all. This is Jefferson’s “Equal and exact justice to all men, of whatever state or persuasion.” This is the free society, and it is not an autonomous social order, suspended in midair; it is based necessarily on a religious foundation.
Even less autonomous is the free market. Freedom of action in the economic sphere does not beget itself, but a society which maximizes liberty for all persons equally has freedom in economic transactions as well. The free economy, in other words, is simply the label attached to human behavior in the market place when our options are open, as they should be.
“The heavens themselves, the planets and this centre observe degree, priority and place.” Shakespeare was right; there is an overarching Order and Pattern built into the nature of things. Everything has its rightful place in that Order, and each thing after its own kind manifests its nature. But man does not simply manifest his nature. Man is open-ended; he is not locked into a behavior pattern; he can choose. He does not automatically manifest his nature; rather, he must learn to express his nature by conforming himself and all his works to the universal Pattern.
Plato, in the Laws, refers to an ancient saying that God, who holds in his hands beginning, end, and middle of all that is, moves through the cycle of nature, straight to His end. And Plato adds:
Justice always follows Him and punishes those who fall short of the divine law. To that Law, he who would be happy holds fast and follows it in all humility and order; but he who is lifted up with pride or money or honour or beauty, who has a soul hot with folly and youth and insolence, and thinks that he has no need of a guide or ruler, but is able of himself to be the guide of others, he, I say, is deserted of God; and being thus deserted he takes to himself others who are like him, and jumps about, throwing all things into confusion, and many think he is a great man. But in a short time he pays the penalty of justice and is utterly destroyed and his family and state with him. [3]
We are the architects of our own Leviathan. Whenever a people goes slack, whenever the mean, sluggish, and careless are moved up to the top of the pecking order, then we get an unlovely society to match our own ill nature. But this need not be. The way we express our nature is not fixed in one mode only; we are free to change the pattern of our lives. There is a right way, a way that is good for man, a way that meets the needs and demands of human nature and the human condition, a way that fulfills the law of our being. Walking in that way, men and women find their proper happiness in a free and prosperous commonwealth.
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- From “The Answer” The Selected Poetry of Robinson Jeffers, p. 594, Random House, N.Y.
- Man: An Indictment, Anthcny M. Ludovici, p. 204, Dutton, N.Y.
- Laws, IV, 716.
—
Reprinted by permission from Imprimis, a publication of Hillsdale College.
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A Quote from Rand to Consider
Posted by: | CommentsI ran across this quote in an email on the Christian Libertarian Yahoo Group, and it struck me in a particularly poignant way. It is sad, but so true, that Western civilization is spiraling. No one knows how long it can last as is. But one thing is for sure – it will not last. Something must give.
“Do you wish to know whether that day is coming? Watch money. Money is the barometer of a society’s virtue. When you see that trading is done, not by consent, but by compulsion–when you see that in order to produce, you need to obtain permission from men who produce nothing–when you see that money is flowing to those who deal, not in goods, but in favors–when you see that men get richer by graft and by pull than by work, and your laws don’t protect you against them, but protect them against you–when you see corruption being rewarded and honesty becoming a self-sacrifice–you may know that your society is doomed. Money is so noble a medium that is does not compete with guns and it does not make terms with brutality. It will not permit a country to survive as half-property, half-loot.”– Ayn Rand
I think Rand is spot on. This is why we need to End the Fed and stop the spending spree.
I highly recommend reading Francisco d’Anconia’s Money Speech from Atlas Shrugged in entirety. Great stuff…
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