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Essays, Opinion, & Commentary |
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by George J. Irbe
The Importance of the Dark Side This essay concerns human nature, and, coincidentally, the peculiar aversion to discuss and take into account the uglier aspects of it (e.g., envy, greed, resentment, desire to dominate, etc.) by philosophers, anthropologists, sociologists, and most of all by legislators who are increasingly engaged in forging of what is called 'social legislation'. We can be sure that men have been learning from experience and precedent about everything that they can expect, in terms of dispositions, inclinations, and actions from human (i.e. their own) nature ever since they have had the intellectual wherewithal to do so. It is also quite certain that men were compelled to take note of their own nature because of their own frequently abusive and destructive behavior. The learning was motivated by necessity rather than curiosity, in order that they could devise counter-measures for bad behavior by individual members of their social group. This men could do even without delving deeply into the causes for bad behavior, by simply basing the counter-measures on an empirical and pragmatic appreciation of their own nature. Most, if not all, customs, rules of just conduct, and laws, which are the indispensable framework material for building and maintaining a society, have come about by this kind of pragmatic approach, which does not bother finding anthropological, sociological or psychological explanations for the uglier manifestations in human nature, but simply accepts such manifestations as a given. In the crudest terms: we know that there will always be individuals who cheat, steal and murder, and we can devise protective and punitive measures against such individuals, unless they also happen to be our masters, in which case it usually requires mass action, i.e. a revolution, to deal not just with the bad individual but also other men who are supporters of the power structure of the bad individual. To show how important it is to take the darker side of human nature into account, if only in a general way, we can point to the Constitution of the United States. It is one of the most successful efforts - if not the most successful ever until now - to create a realistic framework for a self-governing free society. Its enduring success is in no small part due to the fact that the Founding Fathers were frank about recognizing the imperfections of their own human natures and who, therefore, created structures and instruments in the Constitution which would curb and counteract actions by men motivated by such imperfections. We have the historically memorable statement by James Madison (here taken from Forrest McDonald's Novus Ordo Seclorum, p. 205):
Madison was saying that men are not angels; in other words, that they have not the ideally perfect natures of angels but rather the imperfect natures of men. This kind of empirical understanding of the uglier side of human nature has been sufficient through the ages for the promulgation of proscriptive (ought-not) rules and laws of just conduct for individuals and at times - the Constitution of the United States being the shining example - for creating a system of checks and balances within the organization of government in anticipation of the fact that inevitably some individual or group will attempt to do something to adulterate or subvert government institutions so as to gain unfair advantage over others in the pursuit of their own selfish interests. In all those instances, then, of making proscriptive ought-not rules and laws pertaining to just individual conduct, or for emplacing of constitutional safeguards, it has proven to be sufficient to proceed on the simple expectation that certain bad acts will be attempted by men, sooner or later. It has not been necessary to take the next step, which would be to gain an understanding of the specifics of human nature and particularly of those attributes of it which could be the agents and reasons for bad actions by men. However, recognizing the potential for nefarious behavior in human beings has become really important with the advent of the Welfare State. It has proven to be a costly error in our collective judgment to reason that, because social welfare legislation is not about constraining human misbehavior but rather about providing benefits to the needy individuals, therefore aspects of human nature - good or bad - do not enter into the equation at all. Industrialization and the attendant rapid increase in wealth- generation has increased society's expectations from government. The concept of the organized Welfare State, rarely known before in history, suddenly became the paramount objective for most of the governments of the industrialized societies and also for those which were striving to become industrialized. As it is, failure to recognize the vulnerabilities of social programs to the inevitable attempts at exploitation by individuals who are motivated by nothing more sinister than the normal nefariousness of human nature has often brought disastrous economic consequences on governments and societies in the 20th century. At the same time, social welfare legislation has received much unwarranted reverence from the unsophisticated public at large. The public has been led to believe that social welfare legislation - in actuality only mere government regulation - has the same gravitas as legislation of laws of just individual conduct, and therefore there is the erroneous assumption that social welfare legislation carries with it the customary rigor of laws of individual conduct. As Friedrich Hayek has stated in Chapter 6, Vol. 1 of Law, Legislation and Liberty:
The problem with treating statutes and regulations that are enacted by a legislature to promote the objectives of social engineering as if they have the same weight as laws which are passed in the interests of just individual conduct is this: the laws of individual conduct are enacted in order to counter the worst that can be expected from any given individual, whereas statutes and regulations that intend to provide some social welfare benefit to a certain segment of society do not make any provisions at all for the worst in human nature and blithely expect only the best from all individuals concerned. This error in judgment about human nature guarantees that the worst will inevitably show up and soon bring the social program into disrepute, incurring its condemnation by the tax-payers. Another way of putting it is that laws of universal just individual conduct are, by their very definition, themselves safeguards against bad human conduct and hence against the bad side of human nature in general. Social welfare legislation has no such inherent safeguards, even though it, too, should be constructed so that it has a built-in immunity against the abuse of the program's benefits that can be anticipated as surely as the sunrise from the very individuals the program aims to help. Very few people today would dispute the fact that the majority of the public have by now become accustomed to, and expect the services from, institutionalized social welfare programs; the only variance is the degree to which socialization is accepted from one country to the next. In view of this permanent ensconcement of belief in the necessity for social welfare in the public's mind , one would expect that, having had all the bad experiences with social legislation which ignored the dark side of human nature, legislators of social programs would now give serious attention to it. One would also expect the legislators, as per usual practice, to turn to the appropriate experts for advice and recommendations concerning the problem at hand, in this case the problem being a better understanding and a honest consideration of human nature. However, with a few exceptions, that is not the case. The Importance of Envy and Ressentiment When philosophers, sociologists, and political scientists talk about human nature - and those among them who recognize that it exists (not all of them concede even as little as that) invoke it quite often in their discussions - they pay hardly any attention to the potential that men have for acting badly, although that potential is universally and equally present in the natures of all men. Generally, it is the nobler side of human nature that is discussed in terms of its desires, needs, and aspirations. Often the undesirable characteristics of human nature are not even acknowledged, and hardly ever is their universal presence in all men of all races admitted as a fact, as if non-recognition could make the bad characteristics evaporate away. I suspect that this blind spot regarding human nature can also be attributed to the generally prevailing zeitgeist about the noble nature of socialism itself. Helmut Schoeck notes at the beginning (p. 9) of his comprehensive work, Envy: A Theory of Social Behaviour, that in the 20th century there has been a curious "increasing tendency, above all in the social sciences and moral philosophy, to repress the concept of envy", and he speculates that this has happened because "the political theorist and the social critic found envy an increasingly embarrassing concept to use as an explanatory category or in reference to a social fact." Schoeck goes on to note that one cannot find a single instance of 'envy', 'jealousy' or 'resentment' in the subject indexes of the prestigious journals on sociology and anthropology over long periods of time in the 20th century. J.H. Berke reports this as well in The Tyranny of Malice, and also remarks that "in the indices of two major studies of human aggression and destructiveness, one didn't mention envy at all (or greed or jealousy), and the other mentioned it only once (greed once, jealousy not at all)" [p.13]. Berke adds a quote from Geoffrey Chaucer's The Parsons Tale:
Envy is an ubiquitous presence in human nature. It is difficult to define envy as a discrete emotion, or to separate it out from other human emotions; it forms the substratum for many of them. Even of greater importance is the fact that envy is also a group emotion and thus a part of collectivist political ideologies and practices of our times. Therefore, it merits special attention when we talk about human nature. In Egalitarian Envy: The Political Foundations of Social Justice, de la Mora gives an excellent summary of man's views on envy from antiquity to the present. As mentioned above, Schoeck has noted the scarcity of studies of envy in the modern era. Similarly, de la Mora notes how reluctant we have always been to face and discuss the envy in us:
In Envy: A Theory of Social Behaviour Helmut Schoeck quotes Kant's statement in The Metaphysics of Morals which conveys the same understanding of envy being a normal component of human nature:
Schoeck further recognizes that a certain controlled amount of envy, like many lethal poisons which are curative when used in small quantities, is essential to the functioning of society:
In connection with my own understanding that envy is the substratum for, or blends with, many of the other human characteristics, it is appropriate to note what J.H. Berke has to say in The Tyranny of Malice:
There is another important, and much ignored, malady of human nature which can affect large groups of society differentiated by class, ethnicity, or nationality. It is generally called by its French name of "ressentiment". The closest equivalent word for ressentiment in English is "rancour." Ressentiment was investigated and described fully by the German philosopher Max Scheler, in 1912, in his work whose English title is Ressentiment and Moral Value-Judgment. In a new edition (1998) of the work as volume VII in the Marquette Studies in Philosophy, titled simply Ressentiment, translated by Lewis B. Coser and William W. Holdheim, Manfred S. Frings states in the Introduction:
As Scheler describes the phenomenon of Ressentiment, I suspect that at least a little bit of it shows up in most of us at one time or another, and it too has a great bearing on the implementation of 'social legislation' in, so to say, the 'real world':
Under the topic of envy, Aristotle has dealt so completely with the different manifestations of this crucial part of human nature in his Rhetoric, that I thought it worth reproducing here in its entirety. Please note that he speaks for all of us, using the pronoun "we". Aristotle shows that envy is the common denominator in many of our undesirable traits, such as vanity, greediness, ressentiment, and jealousy.
In Praise of Human Nature The typical incomplete evaluation of human nature is exemplified by a lecture on it by the noted Aristotelian philosopher Mortimer Adler. I think it appropriate to choose Adler for this demonstration of the currently popular practice of seeing human nature through the proverbial "rose-colored glasses" because Adler is known as a philosopher of common sense, but in this instance he does not show the same pragmatism as his favorite sage, Aristotle, who was not quite as sanguine regarding what to expect from human nature. In a lecture titled "On the Nature of Man," given at the opening of the Aspen Institute for Humanistic Studies on July 1, 1950, Mortimer Adler begins by stating very correctly that man does have a species- specific nature, and that "if moral philosophy is to have a sound factual basis, it is to be found in the facts about human nature and nowhere else." Regrettably, in the rest of the lecture Adler fails to discuss all the facts about human nature. He also states correctly that "free will or free choice, which consists in always being able to choose otherwise, no matter how one chooses, is an intellectual property, lacked by nonintellectual animals", and gives "both the jurisprudential and the theological definition of a person", which is: "A person is a living being with intellect and free will." Adler classifies all the many different things that one can expect from human nature under the quite appropriate collective term of "potentialities"; he states that "human nature is constituted by all the potentialities that are species-specific properties common to all members of the human species. It is the essence of a potentiality to be capable of a wide variety of different actualizations." But Adler is looking through the "rose-colored glasses"; he talks in glowing terms about the potentialities as if they consisted only of great and noble achievements by man, without ever mentioning that these very same potentialities include, as well, the capacity for bad dispositions and bad actions. In the following discourse on the potentialities Adler actually appears to ascribe a very minor role to innate human nature (at least, that's how I understand his phrase "individual chosen behavior") and just about everything to "nurture" in the development of the individual. He thus comes very close to disclaiming any real significance to the "human nature" which he has categorically asserted does exist, but which actually appears to be not much more than the model of human nature popular with the rationalistic collectivists who see it as an "empty vessel" at birth. Adler says:
Questions/Comments? Post them in The Radical Academy Forum Mr. Irbe's Website: Classical Liberal George E-mail Address: George J. Irbe |
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