Machan's Musings - Some Tricky Ideas to Watch Out For
by Tibor R. Machan
Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712-1778) was a very influential social and political philosopher who argued that, while human nature is benign and good, society has corrupted us and now we are pretty nasty and "everywhere in chains." He also defended the dubious idea of "the general will," some superhuman source of obligation we all must obey, which spawned all kinds of harmful collectivist ideas that are used by some folks to rationalize the violation of individual rights.
Rousseau’s notion of the innocent and good savage, corrupted by society, is actually a great confusion. If we are all so nice and gentle to begin with, why did society turn out to be so nasty and mean? What is society, anyway, other than large assemblies of human beings? If society is making us all nasty, it is, of course, people who are making us nasty. And then they certainly didn’t start off being so nice and gentle, after all. If they had, they wouldn’t perpetrate the corruption Rousseau blames on society. If society is nasty, then, well, people managed to become nasty all on their own, society or no society.
A recent letter writer to USA Today demonstrated the influence of Rousseau when he wrote, "Basic human instincts, unless corrupted by society, bear natural traits for morality and ethical integrity." So, again, we are all good to start with, but something insidious called "society" corrupts us and we end up not-so-nice. And on and on goes the nonsense.
A related issue arises when people say that it is their culture that makes them think this or do that, as if there were some big, transcendent being called "culture" that went about doing stuff. But what is culture? It is, really, no more or less than the various institutions, artifacts, projects, and the like that people produce, and which become the defining attributes of certain groups of them living in certain regions of the globe—the Germans, Swiss, Israelis, and so forth. Culture cannot make people do anything, because culture is people doing things.
Why is it so tempting, then, to keep talking about how society does this, and culture does that? Probably because it caters to the myth that no one is really responsible for his or her conduct, for what is on his or her mind, for the good and bad things that come of what one does. No, it’s always something else—society, culture, the country—you name it, and it’s what’s responsible. We, in turn, are but puppets being manipulated, and none of us makes things happen, none is responsible. But we also desperately need some wise cadre that will repair the culture and get everything straightened out for those of us under culture’s influence. Yet, how have they escaped the influence of the culture so they can repair it all?
The same kind of ruse is perpetrated by the big "we" that many people make use of when they want to coerce everyone to follow their lead. We, for example, in Orange County, have decided to have a light rail system; or we, in Washington, DC, decided to build a massive sport stadium. In virtually every community, there are those who make use of this royal "we" to peddle some project they do not have the honesty to call their own, nor the diligence and wherewithal to convince others who don’t share it to come on board with their support. No, by using this "we," they aim to convince both themselves and others that the idea in question is indeed everyone’s idea and, thus, everyone may be taxed and otherwise coerced to support it since they really want it, too.
We pay a very high price indeed for the bad habit of not calling such folks to task on their tricky uses of language. This is how the much more solid notion—that everyone has a right to his or her life and works, and that others must ask to use these for their own purposes—is lost in the shuffle.
To resist the ruse, one must pay attention and notice just what the we, the society, the culture, actually is, and decide whether these terms are being used accurately or, as I would maintain, mostly to perpetrate a fraud.
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