[This is Chapter Sixteen of Murphey’s book Socialist Thought.]
Chapter 16
VIEWS OF HUMAN NATURE
The worldview each of the major
philosophies entertains about people and their fundamental traits is highly
influential in the formation of the philosophy's other concepts.
Many Burkean
conservatives see man as a fallen creature, touched profoundly by "human
depravity." Man is a sinner,
subject to the weaknesses of the flesh and the fallibilities of human will and
intellect. This view of man understandably leads to the Burkeans'
desire to "put a lid on" the depraved tendencies of mankind by
integrating people tightly into an organic whole. A strong religion, a powerful state and the
ties of tradition and faith all serve to direct an otherwise miscreant humanity.
Classical liberals hold generally to
a mixed view of human nature, seeing a combination of good and bad, capability
and weakness. The goodness and strength lead, then to the "vitalist
perspective" that posits that the vital energies of millions of people
acting voluntarily can be counted upon to produce a high level of well-being.
The evil and
weakness, on the other hand, lead to recognition of the need for the Rule of
Law, restraints upon the potential abuse of all forms of power, and a
ubiquitous ethical consensus.
Socialist
thought is varied in its view of human nature, as we will see. But
there is one very powerful tradition that emanates from Jean Jacques Rousseau
and that takes a strongly optimistic view of the altruistic brotherliness of people in general. It holds that if ever the warping effects
of materialism and greed, brought on by
private property and a competitive nexus, can be done away with, humanity can
return to an "original human nature" that was group-oriented and
loving.
Not
all socialists have shared this view of human, but it has served as the ideal
foundation for at least one very important type of ideological response by
alienated intellectuals to their alienation from bourgeois society. It does this in the following ways:
(1)
It lends itself easily to utopianism. A
perfected society is seen as both possible and workable. All that needs to be done is to root out the
warping influences that currently deprive mankind of its appropriate form. This
belief in a socialist utopia of one kind or another has been held by several
important thinkers and schools within socialist thought: it underlay much of
the thinking of the Russian revolutionaries, such as Bakunin, Kropotkin, and
Chernyshevsky; it is perhaps the most important underpinning of left-wing
anarchism; it was a mainstay of much of the counter-cultural thinking within
the New Left; and even though Karl Marx denounced "utopian socialism"
as "unscientific" because it
lacked a theory of history, he incorporated the utopian vision as the
end-point of his philosophy when he anticipated socialism's arriving at a
"classless society" after the "dictatorship or the
proletariat" had eliminated the residual traits of capitalism. Thinkers who have based their utopianism on a
Rousseauistic view of human nature include: Sir Thomas More (who preceded
Rousseau), Bakunin, Kropotkin, Chernyshevsky, Bellamy, Fourier, George Orwell
and Marcuse.
(2)
The values it asserts are distinctly at odds with so-called
"bourgeois" values. They militate
against competitiveness, acquisitiveness and the pursuit of individual
self-interest. Accordingly, those who
hold to it are provided the basis for a thorough-going critique or existing
society, which is seen as at odds with human nature as best conceived.
(3)
The utopian vision provides a compelling "end" that has often served
to justify even the most extreme of "means." We need to be sensitive to a point that is
often overlooked in today's milieu: that anyone who advocates violent
revolution or even piecemeal terrorism against advanced civilization is
actually opting for a course of
action that is potentially disastrous as well as
bloody. In reality he calls for the
death and mutilation of countless people; and beyond that he makes problematic
the very existence of a decent and humane social order. Such a hierarchy of values is only possible
for him because in the depths of his alienation he has devalued entirely the
existing social order. He calls, in
effect, for mankind to leap over an abyss.
This is plausible rather than ludicrous only if (a) conditions on the
current side of the abyss are felt to be bad enough to provoke the leap (and
here his alienation comes in to reinforce this feeling), and (b) the
prospective conditions on the other side are thought to be a substantial
improvement. The utopianism, if taken seriously, supplies this second aspect.
Needless
to say, the expectation of a utopian outcome leads to the disillusionment that
follows someone’s actual experience with revolution and collective power. This
disillusionment is itself an important part of the history of twentieth century
socialist thought.
An
anomalous fact about this optimistic expectation of general altruism is that
most of its proponents have not thought it inconsistent with their view that
millions of people are inert
and trapped by their environment. It is as if the intellectual were
compartmentalizing: when he thinks about the future possibilities, he tends to
project his own traits onto humanity; but when he contemplates present humanity
his moral elitism and his desire to champion the have-not as against the acting
man of commerce and industry cause him to see people as lethargic and
unintelligent. As such, they are not
only susceptible to capitalist exploitation; they are ready subjects for the
socialist's compassion.
To
me, there is significant incongruity in this dual imputation of inertness and
altruistic goodness. For a thinker to stay with both consistently, he would
have to endorse a sort of altruism that would come from a
less-than-fully-energetic type of humanity.
I notice that George Bernard Shaw, though, found an ingenious way around
this incongruity. Asserting a plausible
half-truth, he wrote that "people who are hard,
grasping, selfish, cruel, and always ready to take advantage of their
neighbors, become very rich... On the other hand, people who are generous,
public-spirited, friendly, and not always thinking of the main chance, stay
poor when they are born poor unless they have extraordinary talents"l Shaw has avoided the dilemma by substituting a
causal relationship between goodness and poverty for the usual socialist
perception that inertness and entrapment go together. The poor man, he says, is
not so much inert as he is considerate.
Examples
of Rousseauistic optimism in socialist writing. Rousseau himself wrote that "man is by
nature good... (M)en are depraved and perverted by society."2 George Lichtheim
accordingly can say that "Christianity had tended to regard human nature
as ineradicably evil. Rousseau believed it was fundamentally good."3
This
appears in anarchist thought when D. Novak writes that "if men followed
their natural instincts, they would live in peace and harmony with their
neighbors and there would be no need of coercive institutions." He speaks
of "a stateless society of perfect equality and freedom, in which the
original attributes of human nature would attain their full expression."4
Lichtheim tells us that Bakunin's views were that
"the social community is essentially harmonious, for man is essentially
good. It is the state that blocks the
way to freedom, or rather state and Church combined. Both must be swept away."5 Fried and Sanders say about Kropotkin that as
"with all anarchists, Kropotkin believed that man is good and that
external authority is evil."6 They mention the split among anarchists
between those who hold that the natural man is basically individualistic and
those who hold that he is group-oriented.
They say that Kropotkin was of the latter type, asserting a
"natural solidarity" among men.
David
Caute tells us that "according to George Orwell,
the Left inherited the belief that truth will prevail and that man is naturally
good but corrupted by his environment."7
Kenneth
and Patricia Dolbeare have posed the issue sharply:
"Is man, by nature, egoistic, competitive, and aggressive -- as assumed by
conservatism, capitalism, liberalism, and reform liberalism? Or is he, by nature, cooperative and rendered
competitive only by the teachings of a capitalist value system and its
artificial scarcities?" They indicate that both Marxism and the New Left
have held to the latter view, which corresponds with Rousseau's.8 I notice that in an article in a recent
issue of the Monthly Review, an independent socialist journal, Harold
Freeman writes that "the desire to own anything privately is not 'human
nature,' but rather, human nature historically conditioned by early
capitalism."9
A
scattering of other views not tied into the Rousseauistic perception. There is nothing logically imperative that
requires that a socialist embrace Rousseau's optimism. In fact, a deep pessimism such as the Burkean espouses could serve as the basis for advocating
the organic ties of a socialist society.
Werner Sombart, for example, wrote during his
Nazi phase that "we believe in no purification of man; we do not believe
in the 'natural goodness of man,'... we believe rather, that man will persist
in sin till the end of time."10
R.
H. Tawney yearned for an altruistic human nature, but
was realistic enough to acknowledge that it doesn't exist: "Men work more
and dispute less when goods are private than when they are common. But it (private property) is to be tolerated
as a concession to human frailty, not applauded as desirable in itself; the
ideal -- if only man's nature could rise to it -- is communism."11
My
reading has shown me that Comte, Hegel, Bertrand Russell, Sidney Webb and even
Gandhi have held views of human nature at odds with Rousseau's.12