Pubic policy in the West is argued on many fronts, but the roots of all of our debates are in the Enlightenment. Arguably, the three most important men of the Enlightenment are Hobbes, Locke and Rousseau. They are the giants whose shadows are still felt today. When Progressives, for example, proselytize on behalf of equality and inclusion, they are relying on Rousseau, and to a lesser extent Locke, as the foundation of their argument. Libertarians root their ideology in the ideas of Locke, specifically with regards to property.
The starting point for the men of the Enlightenment was man’s natural state or how they imagined humans acted before civil society. Hobbes imagined that man’s natural state was a “war of all against all” and civil society was imposed to protect men from each other. Locke imagined that man was naturally cooperative, looking out for one another and that civil society was a natural outgrowth of man’s nature. Similarly, Rousseau imagined that man in his natural state was virtuous and altruistic.
Obviously, that is an absurdly generalized version of three of the greatest thinkers in human history. The point I want to establish is that the foundation of modern Western society is rooted in notions about man’s natural state. The men of the Enlightenment did not have access to detailed studies of hunter gatherers. They did not have the fossil record or an understanding of evolution and genetics. They were simply conjuring the possible starting places by working backwards from where they stood in the timeline.
And they were wrong.
While we don’t know the nitty-gritty details of early modern human society, we have some rough contours of how our ancestors lived before settlement and writing. We also have loads of studies of our nearest relatives that allow us to understand what pre-modern man must have been like before we split off on our own evolutionary branch. Even if you reject evolution, we have examples of hunter gatherer populations in the modern age that live, most likely, as our ancestors lived at one time in Eurasia.
What we know, with a high degree of certainty, is that humans were never in a state of nature as Hobbes imagined. We were always in cooperative groups, most likely kin based groups. While conflicts between groups of humans over territory and resources would have been common, these groups exchanged women and food with one another too. Marrying off women from the clan to men of the neighboring clan would have been an important way to keep the peace, settle disputes and bind people together.
Similarly, human societies were not egalitarian paradises as Rousseau imagined. Human beings developed compassion for one another based on familial relations. Trog guarded the interests of Grog because it was good for both. Similarly, they were hostile to strangers for the same reason. Compassion for others is no more or less natural than hostility to others. In both cases, they are driven by biological necessity. One group of humans would share scarce resources internally, but gladly let strangers starve to death
The point here is two-fold. One is that we know a lot about the biological nature of man that the men of the Enlightenment did not know. Genetics is opening up vast new areas of understanding. Continuing to base our moral philosophy on vague speculation that has proven to be incorrect does not make a lot of sense. For instance, we know with certainty that nature does not bestow her gifts equally, but she does so predictably. Continuing to operate as if we are born a blank slate is rather foolish, given what we now know.
Further, we know that human evolution was local and on-going after humans spread out from Africa. Asians have physical characteristics that are unique to people from Asia. Northern Europeans have physical features unique to them. These variations must extend beyond the physical, into cognitive areas as well. Assuming that moral codes, for example, are universal is as nutty as assuming that people everywhere have red hair. The way in which people see themselves, there relationship to one another and their place in nature is not universal.
An assertion like “all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their creator with certain unalienable rights” works great if by all men you mean all the men of your tribe, your ethnicity or your lands. It falls on its face when you apply it to all humans everywhere. Similarly, the political economy of Sweden works great when it confined to Swedes in Sweden. It does not make any sense to the people of Syria because they are different people with different natural abilities and cognitive skills.
The Enlightenment came along with the revolution in commerce. The West was suddenly rich and the old feudal order was no longer workable. The industrial age gave us intellectual movements that built on the Enlightenment and attempted to create a moral philosophy to match the industrial world. We have just gone through a technological revolution and we are in the midst of a revolution in the understanding of human biology. Accordingly, a new moral philosophy is certain to develop and evolve to match our new understanding.
The next big thing in public policy will most likely be based in Human Bio-Diversity, unless the good thinkers go the Muslim route and begin to slaughter the men of science. Heading off down the road of mysticism and magic is not out of the question, but the more likely option is the people preaching equality and inclusion follow the Shakers into the history books. What comes next will be a public debate rooted in biological reality. How best to manage the bone-deep differences in human populations.
There will also be a degree of magical thinking as that helps grease the wheels of society, but the disaster of multiculturalism, the memory of it as well as the residue on the ground, will mark it in the same way the Holocaust has marked fascism. Instead, debates about what to do for X people will be bounded by the debate over the limits of compassion for out-groups. Many of these arguments will be just as wrong as the arguments in favor of inclusion are today, but they will be wrong in a different direction.
I’m not so sure in the long run that multiculturalism will be remembered all that badly; I’m not saying that it hasn’t been a bad thing but the question is how history will be written and that depends on who wins out in the end. It may not end up remembered at all. Look at how early 20th century progressivism is taught. Its possible that the textbooks of the 2090s will just have a nice square on the left side of a page that nobody really pays attention to talking about multiculturalism the way we talk about anarchists or William Jennings Bryan today.
“I’m not so sure in the long run that multiculturalism will be remembered all that badly;”
Oh, it won’t be once the whole slave – master thing has been established, the masters will write the history to their glory.
“There will also be a degree of magical thinking as that helps grease the wheels of society, but the disaster of multiculturalism,…”
The term “Magic Dirt” has been making the rounds with various Sociology/Poli Sci/Economics
duffers outside the ivied cloisters.
One wonders what humans were like prior to inter-group language use and the “internal dialog” (self-consciousness or “meta-consciousness”). An interesting read on this question is the 1976 “The Origin of Consciousness and the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind” by Julian Jaynes. Was homo “sapiente” before becoming conscious of himself?
The Adam and Eve myth has at its heart the loss of paradise as a result of achieving self-consciousness and losing primal innocence. Taoism posits a “golden age”, in which self-consciousness–the internal dialog–didn’t exist. It is of course impossible for a self-conscious and verbal adult to truly empathize with or understand an adult in a society of adults that are all pre-cognitive verbally, but speculation on the subject is fascinating!
Every ten years or so, I drag out my copy of Jaynes and reread it to make sure I didn’t dream it all up myself. Mankind passed through some kind of window of senescence only a few thousand years ago, and Jaynes’s thoughts find a deep resonance within me. He might not be completely or even mostly right, but he’s onto something.
Would we all agree that as a species, we are still in the process of crawling out of the mud? It is all a matter of perspective and context. Human nature never changes, until it does. The burden we must bear is all the over-credentialed bureaucratic types who are convinced they can do it thirty years if they just have a little more power and money than they currently find available.
Julian Jaynes definitely deserves to be better known. He sounds like a lunatic, but a remarkably persuasive lunatic.
“Would we all agree that as a species, we are still in the process of crawling out of the mud?”
No.
Much to think about here. This site teaches me more than all the years of “higher” education I have suffered, and does it in such an easy, casual way; it is wonderful.
When you state, “An assertion like “all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their creator with certain unalienable rights” works great if by all men you mean all the men of your tribe, your ethnicity or your lands.”– That is exactly what our Founders did mean, IIRC.
The Constitution’s Preamble clearly says so: “We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.” (Italics mine.)
Seems to me that this is the crux of the matter. Our Founders knew the people who made America what it is; they did not consider that someday the Cloud people would bring in millions of unassimilable foreigners and pretend that they will become Americans just by being here (the Magic Dirt theory of Americanism.) They were interested in providing for their own kind, and for their children and children’s children. They never thought that this idea would be so twisted as it’s now become. Some now think the whole world can be Americans if only they arrive here and stay a while.
I think that the demographics of the Founders’ day would bear this out, but I have no references- in electrons or dusty tomes- to bolster this thought; what say the historians here?
One thing to keep in mind about the enlightenment philosophers is that they wrote their philosophies with a political end point in mind and that they didn’t simply start out with a basic idea and allow deduction to take its course. If you keep this in mind whenever you read any philosopher at all it can keep you out of harm’s way. No use becoming a true believer.
I wonder when the Alt-Right will get around to embracing George Fitzhugh.
“all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their creator with certain unalienable rights”
This is a statement about human law. All men have the same rights by God and must work to have them revoked by their fellow humans. This statement is anti bondage not pro equality of intelligence, ability, or station. I enjoy your writing very much and often agree with you and then sometimes disagree but you really blew it on your analysis of what Jefferson (and Locke) meant by this sentence.
” How best to manage the bone-deep differences in human populations.”
By separation, that’s how. Some peoples are incompatible with others. That is how God did it and that is how it is done well. It is what we do by nature because forming tribes, as you say, is natural. Don’t go where you ain’t wanted and stick to your own kind might be classified, currently, as racism but, that is what we do naturally, by God.
It’s not too often that I run across a post that truly engages my intellect. This one did. It was like seeing an old mathematics problem suddenly re-stated in such a way that it provides a new insight.
Best Regards
What we know, with a high degree of certainty, is that humans were never in a state of nature as Hobbes imagined. We were always in cooperative groups, most likely kin based groups. While conflicts between groups of humans over territory and resources would have been common, these groups exchanged women and food with one another too. Marrying off women from the clan to men of the neighboring clan would have been an important way to keep the peace, settle disputes and bind people together.
Similarly, human societies were not egalitarian paradises as Rousseau imagined. Human beings developed compassion for one another based on familial relations.
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I won’t disagree with your statement here, but I think you need to realize in context that the archaeological record shows that hunter gatherer societies were far more violent than modern ones and far more violent than most people think. I would recommend to you two books by archaeologists that document this:
War Before Civilization: The Myth of the Peaceful Savage – Lawrence Keeley
Constant Battles: The Myth of the Peaceful Noble Savage – Steven LeBlanc and Katherine Register
This behavior continued into the Neolithic and beyond. IIRC Keeley is able to provide statistics based on ethnographic information that show on a percentage basis, neolithic level peoples in New Guinea continually experienced a death rate (driven by warfare) that exceeded that experienced by the Soviet Union in World War II.
I don’t disagree that violence has declined and declined sharply after settlement. The world Hobbes imagined was a world without any cooperation between people and that is clearly wrong.
To be fair to Hobbes, he wasn’t asserting this as a matter of historical record. As Zman notes, his “state of nature” was a thought experiment, not a scientific hypothesis. He was trying to ground his arguments for social order on the firmest foundation he could. (I think he even admits somewhere in not-Leviathan that no known societies were like this). He spends umpteen pages before the state-of-nature stuff arguing about physics, memory, volition, etc. Tl;dr – the 17th century just didn’t work like that, but the more I see of this world, the more I think Hobbes — wrong as he was on so many things — is still just about the only political philosopher worth reading.
If you really want to be fair to Hobbes, just ignore the old fukk 😛
“An assertion like “all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their creator with certain unalienable rights” works great if by all men you mean all the men of your tribe, your ethnicity or your lands.”
Created by God, human rights are vested equally in all men. However, as you’ve demonstrated, equal rights do not lead to the assertion nor does it imply that all men are equal in all ways.
Evolution may be a valid if limited hypothesis, but it hardly captures the fullness of nature. The inherent attribute of evolution, change, leads to many questions to which there are few answers. Even if evolution has not yet established a significant difference between one species of human versus another, it is important to keep in mind that evolution divides its subjects. Mankind, it has been posited, evolved from the great apes, leaving us are both apes and humans. If evolution evolves mankind, then won’t there be more than one kind of human?
Some today would apply ‘human rights’ to all of God’s creations: dogs, cows, apes and dolphins in particular. As a non-evolved human (how would I know?), holding fast to all known rights protects me from those who have evolved.
But then, how could anyone survive? Can’t eat cows, vegetation, mountains, rocks or even dirt as they are all God’s creations and share equal rights with all others.
Equal rights does, in fact, imply that everyone is equal. If people aren’t equal, then why do they have equal rights? It is much like one vote per person implies that everyone’s opinion on the future of country is equal to everyone else’s; the borderline-illiterate gangbanger has an equal say as the genius millionaire inventor.
This is as absurd as giving votes to women.
“Even if evolution has not yet established a significant difference between one species of human versus another…”
The average Jew is smarter than every Black in existence. Not a significant difference?
18th century language is easily misunderstood. Witness the 2nd Amendment. Ergo, “all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their creator with certain unalienable rights” would be written today as “all men are endowed by their creator with certain unalienable rights equally”. That is, it would be so written by the men who wrote that document. Our intellectual and moral giants of this day would simply write that all men are created equal.
“To try to do something which is inherently impossible is always a corrupting enterprise.” Michael Oakeshott
Excellent summation. I think we’re coming to the end of the Enlightenment, too. I hope we don’t lose the Bill of Rights along the way.
Finally_! A sincere effort to rethink the Christian heresy that was the Enlightenment without falling back into absolutism, says he being provocative. IIRC, absolutism was a reaction of the European bourgeois townsfolk against predatory feudalism by setting up the biggest badass noble as king-by-divine-right on whom their protection depended. As is the way of humanity, costly royal bastards and newly granted hereditary privileges to those making themselves useful to the king multiplied to eat up the surplus produced under the relative order of absolutism (+ technology). So a new religious dispensation was needed discredit the divine sanction of absolutism and to prevent all society’s resources being locked up in a tangled rainforest of rules and elite privileges where sun only comes in when one of the canopy trees falls over from old age and decay. Sort of like where we’re heading on Wall St.
Hence the Enlightenment which denigrated unearned privilege by twisted the Christian principle of human equality before God into human equality before man. And because inherent equality was obvious nonsense to anyone with two eyes to see, observable inequality had to be the work of the evil forces, hence the blank slate postulate of human nature. In anticipation of Stalin’s wreckers and saboteurs, the righteous progress of the light of reason (directed history was also a Christian concept) was being held back by corrupt social institutions that could be set right by elite logic and rule.
Positing that the blank slate of human nature (twisting the Christian concept of Imago Dei) was inherently good, enabled ‘the vanguard of the proletariat’ to justify any sort of depravity on their own part: They are advancing humanity towards its secular millennial kingdom (another twisted Christian doctrine) – the complete rule of reason_!
This formulation remains immensely attractive today, particularly in the academy, for obvious reasons (power, money, sex, etc.) despite its obvious historical refutations: If there’s one thing that history teaches, it’s human depravity.
off topic, but does anyone else here know “Cold Fury”? That guy’s been around 15 years and his blog has disappeared/expired this week according to the Hover page I keep getting.
I assume some others here are familiar with him- he posts and comments on our host’s stuff regularly. That might even be how I discovered this site earlier this year.
It is a mystery. It appears his domain expired. Maybe he just decided to quit at that date.
Last I heard he was moving his site host and is temporarily over at DailyPundit.
Cold Fury = Mike Hendrix. I didn’t see an announcement of a move, just disappeared and all his archives, followed Symrian’s hint and there he is…
Thanks both for this info.
I can confirm that Mike Hendrix of Cold Fury is now at Daily Pundit, run by Bill Quick.
Bill has just changed hosts, with much difficulty, and Mike is also in the painful process of changing; as yet his domain isn’t directing to his new address (or something like that, I’m not an IP guru.)
For now both Mike can be found here: http://dailypundit.com/
Good post, overall. I have one question about one detail:
“Even if you reject evolution, we have examples of hunter gatherer populations in the modern age that live, most likely, as our ancestors lived at one time in Eurasia.”
Who are you referring to? The Abbos have been settled, and now live on the run-off of Western civilization; alcoholism and social dysfunction are rampant. The San Bushmen have been settled, same thing mostly. The American Indians, what’s left of them, with the exception of some very unusual matriarchal-oriented groups deep in the Amazon, are either alcoholics languishing on reserves (North America) or mixed with Spanish Euros to produce mestizos, or, again, settled, poor, and ridden with alcoholism and the other stuff. The Eskimos don’t do any of the traditional things anymore; they all live in modern trailer parks now that the last generation to live the traditional Eskimo lifestyle has died off.
The groups I’ve just covered are really on the fringes; I mean, you can’t get much more fringe than Alaska and the Kalahari Desert. Respectfully, I can’t think of a single hunter-gatherer group that still lives a lifestyle that would be recognizable to our hunter-gatherer ancestors in Europe, the Asian steppe, or to any non-Eurasian hunter-gatherer group either.
We’ve overrun them all, from one corner of the Earth to the other.
The Bushman have probably been studied more than any group. The Sentinelese are the most entertaining, but least understood. Observing the few remaining pre-settlement peoples helps tie together what is found in the fossil record and what we can pickup from written sources from the first settled people.
It’s great that the San have been studied, past tense, because they don’t live the hunter-gatherer lifestyle anymore.
Visit the Wikipedia page on the San Bushmen and what you’ll find is a slightly sad picture of San children in Western clothes, tangible evidence of the following quote, also from Wikipedia:
“From the 1950s through the 1990s, the San switched to farming because of government-mandated modernisation programs.”
Genetically, still a treasure trove of scientific research. Culturally and linguistically, too, probably. But no longer living their traditional lifestyle, no longer hunter-gatherers.
And we also have loads of information on native American populations from first contact. By “modern age”, I meant post-Enlightenment. I’m in the camp that pegs the start of the modern era at around the French Revolution or thereabouts. We have stamped out pretty much all the hunter-gatherers at this point, but we have enough data on those we encountered within the modern age to make some reasonable guesses about how pre-settlement people had to live in Eurasia.
” I can’t think of a single hunter-gatherer group that still lives a lifestyle that would be recognizable to our hunter-gatherer ancestors in Europe”
Let me introduce you to the Dindus.
I concede. Lol.
Never underestimate the isolation of New Guinea.
I like to taunt my liberal acquaintances that I, the uber-reich-winger who definitely does’t “fucking love science,” am the only person they know who *really* believes in Evolution. Humans are mega-monkeys, no? Monkey troops are ruthlessly hierarchical, and nobody would confuse an orangutan for a bonobo. They’re…wait for it… different species. Rapine and the war of all (troops) against all (troops) is the daily reality of monkeys (and every other species). If you want to assert that evolution stopped in one, and only one, species at some point in the past, fine… but I’ll need to see the fossil record. Honestly, there’s more evidence that Adam and Eve rode around the Garden of Eden on triceratops than there is for “race is a social construction.”
There are some theories that can hold up even if parts of them turn out to be wrong. There are other theories that collapse if any part of them is wrong. The blank slate view of the world cannot survive even one example of human behavior being genetic. They used to gloss of the physiological differences, but multiculturalism, oddly enough, has made that impossible. The result is the absurd claims that a man can will himself into being a woman or that if you practice for 10,000 hours you can become an NBA center, even if you are 5’4″.
My hunch is these ridiculous claims are a sign these people are at the panicked end point where they see no plausible way out so they are grasping at the implausible. As I said, Hillary may win and the state could start rounding up people like me and you. It’s happened before so there is no reason to exclude it from the list of possible outcomes. But, reality is that thing that does not go away when you stop believing in it.
The ten thousand hour rule always seemed fishy to me. I was in classes for gifted children and there were two boys who just were different. Even compared to the rest of us, they would just master stuff so instantaneously and effortlessly that it didn’t even seem human. I knew them well enough to know they weren’t practicing or trying. Quite the opposite, in fact. Their brains just worked in different ways. It’s been the same with the true musical prodigy I knew. He never practiced except the night before lessons, and he was the best student in the conservatory. I’m sure it was the source of resentment among classmates.
I found this out in my surgical residency. Attending hate it when a second year resident shows better surgical judgement and skills than they do. If I hadn’t had such high in service test scores I’m sure I would’ve been kicked out.