[This is Chapter Thirteen of Murphey’s book Socialist Thought.]
Chapter 13
THE ENVIRONMENTALIST ASSUMPTION
The central
concept in the Left's ideological perspective is the view that many millions of
people, even in advanced civilization, are trapped deterministically by the
pressures of life or of society. This is
logically prior to the exploitation theories, for which it serves as a
foundation. In the usual order of analysis, it should be considered first. I have reversed the order so that the tangible
practicality of the exploitation theories could provide a backdrop that would
give the reader an immediate sense of the specific significance of the more
amorphous concept of entrapment.
In this
chapter we will see the ways the entrapment concept has been expressed within
socialist writing. Before we survey the literature, however, it will be useful
to summarize the discussion of the "environmentalist assumption"
which appears in my Burkean Conservatism and Classical Liberalism,
beginning at page 162:
Summary of my
earlier analysis: A Burkean
conservative believes that a person's environment is considerably less
important in its impact upon him than is the person's relationship to God. The Burkean
accordingly considers that both the Left and classical liberalism, as varying
types of rationalistic and secular thought, share an assumption that people are
mainly, if not, entirely, the creatures of the environmental influences upon
them.
So far as it
goes, the Burkean's view on this is correct. Any secularist will be inclined to say that
the environment [by which I mean the total circumstances of a person’s life,
which is a different use of the word “environment” than has become customary
since the advent of the ecology movement] has a major impact on the individual
and on mankind in general. But this
shouldn't obscure the point that classical liberalism and the Left disagree
sharply about the specific application of the environmentalist perspective.
They are divided so sharply, in fact, that considerable insight can be gained
into each philosophy by understanding its views on this point. They disagree in
three separate but interdependent ways:
Their first
point of disagreement is about the amount of energy and self-starting
motivation most people bring to life. The Left tends strongly to see the
individual's situation and behavior as determined by the "inputs" he
receives from his environment. The classical liberal, on the other hand,
believes the individual is not primarily a passive receptor -- but instead
contributes significantly to the process by his own volition, intelligence and
energy. To the Left, a great many individuals are inert, trapped and
consequently exploited; to the classical liberal, the individual is an active
manipulator of life in his own right. This difference could be one simply of
degree, but innumerable conversations over the years have convinced me that the
gulf is quite wide, reflecting a polarization of views about this point.
Before we
leave this first aspect, it is worth noting that the Left's imputation of
inertia to so much of humanity is inconsistent with its faith in Rousseau's
view that people are spontaneously creative, if only other people don't put
barriers in their way by discouragements, frustrations and sources of boredom. Rousseau's perspective appears in Emile,
his book on education, which has been the foundation for the modern
"progressive" and "unstructured" philosophy of education.
Rousseau's optimism about human nature leads into and justifies moral
relativism and permissiveness; it also provides the basis for a belief in
possible utopias.
This optimism
is contradicted when the Left comes to assess, for example, the ability of an
employed
The second
point of disagreement has to do with whether a moral imperative relating to
individual capability should precisely be a part of each person's social
environment.
The critic of
classical liberalism argues that "your individualism heartlessly demands
that each person 'pull himself up by his own bootstraps.'" He believes the classical liberal is
expecting the individual to do it all by himself, entirely on his own
motion. But this is a mistaken
assessment of what the classical liberal is saying. It is true that the classical liberal does
posit a substantial amount of energy in the individual. But when an individual "pulls on his own
bootstraps" in a classical liberal society, he is hardly doing it entirely
on his own. In such a society a social consensus on an ethic of self- reliance,
responsibility, effort and initiative is precisely a part of the individual's
social environment. This consensus is
impressed upon him from birth by his parents, school, church and peers. He doesn't produce it, but is led by it to
exercise his own faculties. When the
individual internalizes this ethic, it becomes the basis for his self-discipline
and a part of his motive-power.
The classical
liberal asserts that a "moral imperative" to capability and
self-reliance is absolutely necessary for a free society. But the Left, for its part, attacks such an
ethic. The Left isolates the ethic of self-reliance by using a culturally
relativistic method to categorize it as "Puritanic" or
"bourgeois." This assault on an ethic of responsibility reflects,
again, the Left's drive to undercut bourgeois life. The result is that the Left
disagrees profoundly with classical liberalism about what the content of the
ethical environment of the
individual is to be. The Left favors ethical inputs
that will stress the individual's support for collective action, such as when
it urges an ethic of "social responsibility"; but it opposes the
ethic suitable for an individualistic society.
The third
point of disagreement relates to the opposing perspectives of the general
environment and its effect on the individual. The Left considers the
environment monolithic, entrapping, overpowering in
its compelling sweep. Classical liberalism, though, sees the individual’s
environment -- especially in advanced civilization -- as pluralistic, rich in
the diversity of its suggestions. To the classical liberal view, the individual
(especially if he brings his own vitality to the situation and he is impressed
by society with an imperative toward doing so) can do a great deal to select
his own environment and its continuing influence upon himself. Every time he takes a class or visits a
library he is making an extended environment available to himself that can open
new vistas for him. The
"environment" in this sense is far from entrapping.
In all three
points of difference, we see that classical liberalism affirms the ability of
people to be free in a civilization such as ours, and that the Left holds
instead to theories of entrapment, determinism and exploitation that deny the
possibility of freedom in the absence of what they see as the helping hand of
collectivism. This explains why the Left sees itself as libertarian, while
classical liberalism views the Left as destructive of freedom.
Socialist
writing includes frequent expression of the Left's perspective on each of these
three points. The examples I will give are by no means exhaustive, but are
representative:
1. The
individual's lack of vitality. Brian
Abel-Smith's Fabian Tract Freedom in the Welfare
State centers its argument on the view that most
people lack capability and need help in virtually every area of life. Speaking of the plight of the
"dependent," he says "there has been a long history of
exploitation of the young, the sick, the aged, the senile, the mentally ill and
the subnormal in private profit institutions." He goes on to say that there is a
"limited ability (on the part of) any ordinary consumer to understand what
he is buying" and this leads him to the conclusion that "public
intervention is needed to prevent the consumer being sold what he does not
want. And it is no good talking about
freedom of choice if people have neither the money nor the knowledge to
exercise it." In the same vein, he
later says that "one of the most neglected fields today is that of advice
on job selection." And then he says
"we must protect children from parents who fail to see the importance of
education for their children's future."l
The image he creates of humanity, even in an advanced society such as
The lack of
vitality will be apparent from everything else I will quote relating to the
other two points, but first it is worth noticing what Daniel Bell has said
about Communist thought: "The
individual, central to the liberal theory of a market society, was for the
Bolshevik a helpless entity.”2
2. Opposition
to an ethic of self-reliance; blaming "society" for misconduct and
dependency. In countless ways,
socialist authors have removed moral expectation from the individual and
shifted blame to his broader environment.
Speaking of
Robert Owen's views, Thomas Kirkup
said that "the chief points in this philosophy were that man's character
is made not by him but for him; that it has been formed by circumstances over
which he had no control; that he is not a proper subject either of praise or
blame."3
Rousseau
wrote that "all wickedness comes from weakness." Later he added that "evil in general can
only spring from disorder."4 As with all of Rousseau's writing,
reverberations have continued to the present day. In an essay by Danilo
Dolci, winner of the Lenin Peace Prize in 1959, for
example, it is said that the "old" concept of "sin" has
given way to a "new" concept of "insufficiency."5
(To the extent that there is sincerity behind the
Marxism-Leninism
translates the broader blaming of "society" into the dialectical
language of class struggle. Lenin wrote
that "the fundamental social cause of excesses which consist in violating
the rules of social life is the exploitation of the masses, their want and
their poverty."6
This
perspective arises in part from the desire by alienated intellectuals to negate
what they see as a "bourgeois" ethic. It arises also, however, from
the rationale of pooling, since it is thought that the pooling of resources, by
taking away the insecurities of human life, will remove the motives for
misconduct. We are going back 2500 years when we read the comments to this
effect by the character Praxagora in Aristophanes'
delightful spoof on socialist thought: "All pressure from want will be
o’er. Now each will have all that a man can desire, cakes, barley-leaves,
chestnuts, abundant attire, wine garlands, and fish; then why should he wish
the wealth he has gotten by fraud to retain?"7
A classical
liberal sees moral weakness as one of the roots of poverty. A socialist denies
this. George Bernard Shaw ridiculed the idea when he wrote of "some
inconsiderate person (who) repeats like a parrot that if you gave everybody the
same money, before a year was out you would have rich and poor again just as
before."8 I remember that my grandfather used to say that
"if you were to redistribute all the property equally in
3. A
monolithic, deterministic view of the environment. To the Left, the setting in which the
individual finds himself is so solid, so compelling, that he has little power
against it. Determinism sweeps over him,
depriving him of all meaningful volition.
Nor can the individual select from among the inputs he receives from his
environment.
Frederick Engels wrote that "under the brutal and brutalizing
treatment of the bourgeoisie, the working man becomes precisely as much a thing
without volition as water, and is subject to the laws of nature with precisely
the same necessity."9 This is, of course, totally opposite
to the views of Cobden and Bright, both classical liberals, who lived during
the same period in
Adam Schaff summarizes the Marxist view as being that the
individual "is -- since the moment of birth -- shaped by society and is
its product, physically and spiritually... What will be of decisive importance
is not moral self-improvement... The emphasis is shifted to society and to the
material existence shaping its development."10
B. F. Skinner
presents the deterministic view when he argues that "in the traditional
view, a person is free. He is autonomous in the sense that his behavior is
uncaused. He can therefore be held responsible for what he does and justly
punished if he offends. That view, together with its associated practices, must
be re-examined when a scientific analysis reveals unsuspected controlling
relations between behavior and environment." This reductionism leads him to a very common
socialist attitude: to want to restructure mankind through a rationalistic
manipulation of the social environment. "We need," he says, "to
design contingencies under which students acquire behavior useful to them and
their culture... The application of a science of behavior to the design of a culture...."11
All of this,
of course, relates to the socialist critique of a liberal individualistic
society, since the individual will there be considered trapped by a monolithic
social environment. Fried and Sanders
accordingly can say that "laissez-faire... meant a new kind of
servitude for the thousands of men, women and children who spent most of their
waking hours in these factories."12
2. Article by
Daniel Bell in Failure of a Dream? Essays in the History
of American Socialism, John H. M. Laslett and Seymour Martin Lipset
(ed.s), (Garden City: Anchor Press, 1974), p. 104.
3. Thomas Kirkup, History of Socialism (New York: The
Macmillan Company, 1909), p. 62.
4.
Jean Jacques Rousseau, Emile (New York:
J. M. Dent & Sons, Ltd, 1911), pp. 33, 244.
5. Article by Danilo Dolci,
“Reflections on Planning and Groups, Decentralization and Planning,” Socialist
Humanism, Erich Fromm (ed.) (Garden City: Anchor
Books, 1965), p. 422.
6. The Lenin Reader, Stefan Possony
(ed.) (Chicago: Henry Regnery Co., 1966), p. 202.
7. Joseph B. Gittler, Social Thought Among the Early Greeks (Athens, Ga.: The University of
Georgia Press, 1941), pp. 151, 152.
8. George Bernard Shaw, The Intelligent Woman’s Guide to Socialism
and Capitalism (New York: Brentano’s Publishers, 1928), p. 69.
9. Frederick Engels, The
Condition of Working Class in
10. Article by Adam Schaff, “Marxism and the
Philosophy of Man,” Socialist Humanism, Erich Fromm
(ed.) (Garden City: Anchor Books, 1965), pp. 144, 145.
11. B. F. Skinner, Beyond Freedom and Dignity
(New York: Bantam Books, 1971), pp. 17, 149, 150.
12. Albert Fried and Ronald Sanders (ed.s), Socialist Thought (Garden City: Anchor Books,
1964), p. 3.