Dean's World

Some time ago I got an email from a Dean's World commenter asking me why I don't like the philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau. I never answered because I had to think hard about it. But here's what he asked:

"According to the Columbia Encyclopedia, "Jean Jacques Rousseau attempted to reconcile the natural rights of the individual with the need for social unity and cooperation through the idea of the social contract."

"Do you agree with this assessment? And is your dislike of Rousseau's ideas somehow rooted in the belief that natural rights and social contract cannot coexist?"

First off, I don't happen to believe that natural rights exist. You only have any rights at all because the rest of us pretty much agree that you do. Even if we disagree with some right that the law gives you, most of us agree that it's more important to respect the Rule of Law which sustains that right than to ignore it. So even when we don't like the result--say, we don't think you have a "right" to an abortion--most of us agree that respecting the law which gives you that right is more important than defying the law in order to prevent you from exercising that legally-given right.

In short: there are no "god given" rights, and there are no "natural" rights. There are only those given by the law. Without that, the only rights you'll ever have are those you can demand for yourself by brute force--and that becomes "might makes right," and it becomes chaos and oppression.

I view civilization as a long, tortuous, torturous, climb up out of the muck and mire. We as a race have, over thousands of years, pulled ourselves out of the primitive existence that Hobbes referred to as "Solitary, Poor, Nasty, Brutish, & Short." (Which, by the way, also happens to be the name of my law firm. [budoom-chee!])

At the core of Rousseau's philosophy, on the other hand, was the notion that civilization was ruinous and evil and corrupting. He believed that man in his natural state could be described as the so-called "noble savage," uncorrupted and untainted by the oppressive nature of civilization.

Mind you, if you look at anthropological data, that view of the "noble savage" is not, entirely, without merit. If you look carefully at what archaeologists and anthropologists have discovered, primitive hunter/gatherers generally lived somewhat longer, somewhat healthier lives than the more technologically advanced primitive agrarians. Their lives were just less stable and secure. But there's no evidence that they were ever less warlike, less cruel, or more enlightened in any meaningful sense--and theirs was obviously a dead-end path. If you look at any people living in primitivism today, the vast majority of them are delighted to latch onto things like radio, television, t-shirts, cars, vaccines, antiobiotics, and all those "corrupting" influences of civilization. We now live longer, safer, more secure lives than any primitive peoples.

There's a good reason why most primitive people are quick to grab the tools and comforts of civilization: primitivism, real primitivism, sucks ass. Furthermore, despite Hollywood romanticism, primitive people are no more "enlightened" than we are, and are just as inclined toward bad behavior when put into situations that encourage bad behavior.

Rousseau on the other hand chose to attack civilization as corrupt and evil by its very nature.

Rousseau also believed in the so-called "blank slate," wherein children were basically born uncorrupt and perfect, and that they only ever turned out bad if they were poorly raised. What caused poor childrearing? Why, civilization of course!

This "blank slate" thinking, the idea that there is no such thing as human nature, is probably responsible for more death and destruction in the last 100 years than any single philosophical idea in history. For it led the Marxists, the Fascists, and many others to believe that if you just repeated certain slogans often enough, they would become a reality. The ultimate expression of that thinking was Pol Pot's Cambodia.

Rousseau went to great lengths to describe ideal childrearing techniques, which basically involved parents doing as little as possible to inculcate values or morals in them. His theories on this were given great credence by many wealthy dilettantes, which is doubly amusing because Rousseau himself was a gigantic a*****e as a father: he had many children with his wives and mistresses, all of which he immediately threw into orphanages.

Rousseau was also a huge believer in emotion and sentiment over reason and logic. Better to cry and show your real emotions than to reason things out. Sentiment was more important to him than common sense. Marry this with his ideas of the "noble savage" and the idea that civilization is corrupt and evil and that children would turn out perfect as long as you avoided any civilizing influences, and it laid the path--in my view--for the idea that facts don't matter, human nature doesn't exist, and if we just raise kids with the right ideas, the world can be perfected.

I believe it was only a short step from there to the most murderous philosophies the world has ever seen. The Communist and Fascist experiments were based on that same basic idea: if we all just believe in a specific ideal, we can have Heaven on Earth. And if anyone gets in the way of that, well, they're just reactionaries and need to either be re-educated or destroyed.

Thus was born Pol Pot, Stalin, Hitler--really, all of the worst ideologies of human history.

Although I am not a social conservative, and I have criticisms of some of those on the other side of Rousseau on many issues--religious conservatives share many of his same flaws, in my view--I honestly believe he was probably the single most destructive, not to mention just plain asinine, philosopher who ever lived.

I'm pleased that I'm not the only one who thinks so. While I've been chewing on this question for at least a month, this discussion over at Methuselah's Daughter finally got me off my duff enough to write about this. (And I'm glad to see that I'm not the only one out there who thinks very little of "noble savage" romanticism.)