The Historical Mind

Humanistic Renewal in a Post-Constitutional Age

Justin D. Garrison, Ryan R. Holston, Justin D. Garrison, Ryan R. Holston

• Publisher: SUNY Press
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781438478449
• Topic: Política y relaciones internacionales
• Subtopic: Historia y teoría política

America is increasingly defined not only by routine disregard for its fundamental laws, but also by the decadent character of its political leaders and citizens—widespread consumerism and self-indulgent behavior, cultural hedonism and anarchy, the coarsening of moral and political discourse, and a reckless interventionism in international relations. In The Historical Mind, various scholars argue that America's problems are rooted in its people's refusal to heed the lessons of historical experience and to adopt "constitutional" checks or self-imposed restraints on their cultural, moral, and political lives. Drawing inspiration from the humanism of Irving Babbitt and Claes G. Ryn, the contributors offer a timely and provocative assessment of the American present and contend that only a humanistic order guided by the wisdom of historical consciousness has genuine promise for facilitating fresh thinking about the renewal of American culture, morality, and politics.

Part I

The New Humanism

The two essays in this section serve as representative illustrations of the humanism developed by Babbitt and Ryn. In “What I Believe: Rousseau and Romanticism,” Babbitt begins by explaining the profound influence Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s writings have had over the last two centuries in virtually every area of study. At the center of Rousseau’s new vision of the world, Babbitt argues, is a fundamental assertion in the Discourse on the Origin of Inequality that it is not humans themselves who are fundamentally responsible for their social ills, but their institutions. In identifying this sentiment as such a pivotal moment in modern thinking, Babbitt first establishes the importance of what, in the broadest sense, might be termed historical consciousness. For, it is Rousseau’s understanding of Western institutions as irredeemably corrupt, and worsening all the time, that has exercised a revolutionary influence on subsequent generations.

By “revolutionary,” one need not think only of the Jacobins, Robespierre, and the immediate political fallout of Rousseau’s writing. For Babbitt, what is revolutionary in Rousseau’s philosophy is the dramatic change in thinking about human nature and our relationship to the past. Under attack, Babbitt claims, are the truths of the inner life—the struggle between good and evil within the human soul. Once preserved by traditional religion, these truths are now undermined by what Babbitt calls “sentimental humanitarianism,” an ideology that follows Rousseau in replacing “theological” with “sociological” explanations of our social ills. This spirit of Romantic idealism, Babbitt further argues, combines in the modern era with the spirit of utilitarian rationalism to demand radical social reform in the most moralistic of terms. In order to combat this tendency, Babbitt appeals to the concrete evidence of historical human experience at the levels of both the individual and society. Thereby he attempts to rebuild the traditional meanings of moral concepts such as “virtue” and “justice,” which now apply mainly to the arrangement of social institutions, through a “keen discrimination” of the intellect. Babbitt’s effort to recover the wisdom of traditional morality demands the recognition that there are some human experiences that never go away, particularly the happiness (eudaimonia) that accompanies the life of measure and the corresponding misery and suffering attendant to sensual indulgence. It is only by restoring our belief in the importance of “the war within the cave”—the ethical struggle for self-restraint within human beings—that Babbitt believes we can hope to survive the civilizational crisis wrought by Rousseau and humanitarianism.

In “Power without Limits: The Allure of Political Idealism and the Crumbling of American Constitutionalism,” Ryn examines the ideological trend Babbitt identifies after nearly one hundred years of its ascendancy. Why is it, Ryn begins, that the Framers of the American Constitution were concerned, above all other objectives, with putting limitations on the powers of those in government? An older view of human nature prevailed, he explains, which the Framers inherited from the classical and Christian tradition—one that was fearful of the social consequences of original sin. On their account, human beings are unable to be trusted with unrestrained political power. The needs of good government point not only to the formal, institutional controls or restraints on official power from without, so often identified with the U.S. Constitution, but also to the idea that a less formal system of internal restraints or “checks” must be relied on to control the selfishness and ambition of leaders, as well. In other words, as conceived by the Framers, the American constitutional system depends not only on institutional limits on political power, but also on what Ryn calls the “constitutional personality” of its members, that is, the character type that disciplines selfish appetite so that one may live harmoniously in community with others.

Essential to the formation of this personality in the early republic, Ryn continues, was the “unwritten constitution”—the traditional morality and customs that habituated self-control and made acceptance of the Constitution’s “parchment barriers” possible. Without this, even Madison’s famous “ambition counteracting ambition” would have meant very little when faced with human beings who would indulge their will to power. Drawing on Babbitt’s critique of humanitarianism, Ryn proceeds to demonstrate how the mendacious flattery of Rousseauistic idealism has fueled a rejection of these customary or traditional restraints on our appetitive selves and justified increasing governmental power. Having reimagined human beings as naturally good, Rousseau’s new conception of human nature supports the claims of various elites as well as leaders in both major US political parties who demand centralized political power in the name of promoting “freedom,” “equality,” and “democracy.” It is just such power grabs the Framers most feared. Vindicating Babbitt’s prescient warnings, Ryn concludes that a revival of “the constitutional personality” is all that can save America and its people from those whose idyllic imaginations ultimately turn diabolical as they demand unlimited power for the realization of their allegedly incontestable ideals.

CHAPTER ONE

What I Believe

Rousseau and Religion

Irving Babbitt

I

Rousseau is commonly accounted the most influential writer of the past two hundred years. Lord Acton, indeed, is reported to have said, with a touch of exaggeration, that “Rousseau produced more effect with his pen than Aristotle or Cicero or Saint Augustine or Saint Thomas Aquinas or any other man who ever lived.” At all events, this saying needs to be interpreted in the light of the saying of Madame de Staël that “Rousseau invented nothing but set everything on fire.” His leading ideas were abundantly anticipated, especially in England. These ideas made their chief appeal to a middle class which, in the eighteenth century, was gaining rapidly in power and prestige, and has been dominant ever since.

The Rousseauistic outlook on life has also persisted, with many surface modifications, to be sure, but without any serious questioning on the part of most men of its underlying assumptions. To debate Rousseau is really to debate the main issues of our contemporary life in literature, politics, education, and above all, religion. It is not surprising, therefore, that his reputation and writings have from the outset to the present day been a sort of international battleground. One cannot afford to be merely partisan in this strife, to be blind to Rousseau’s numerous merits—for example, to all he did to quicken man’s sense of the beauties of nature, especially wild nature. Neither should one forget that there is involved in all the strife a central issue toward which one must finally assume a clear-cut attitude.

Regarding this central issue—the source of the fundamental clash between Rousseauist and anti-Rousseauist—there has been and continues to be much confusion. A chief source of this confusion has been the fact that in Rousseau as in other great writers, and more than in most, there are elements that run counter to the main tendency. Rousseau has, for example, his rationalistic side. On the basis of this fact one professor of French¹ has just set out to prove that, instead of being the arch-sentimentalist he has usually been taken to be, “the real Rousseau is at bottom a rationalist in his ethics, politics, and theology.”

Again, there are utterances in Rousseau quite in line with traditional morality. Another American scholar has therefore set out to show that it is a mistake to make Rousseau responsible for a revolution in ethics. Still another of our scholars has managed to convince himself on similar lines that Rousseau is not primarily a primitivist in his Discourse on Inequality.

Most remarkable of all is a book that has just appeared,² the author of which covers with contumely practically all his predecessors in this field on the ground that they have been blinded by partisanship, and promises to give us at last the true meaning of Rousseau. Yet this writer does not even cite the passage that, as Rousseau himself correctly tells us, gives the key to his major writings. It is to this passage that every interpreter of Rousseau who is not academic in the bad sense will give prominence: for the thesis it sums up has actually wrought mightily upon the world. It has thus wrought because it has behind it an imaginative and emotional drive not found behind other passages of Rousseau that might in themselves have served to correct it.

The passage to which I refer is one that occurs in Rousseau’s account of the sudden vision that came to him by the roadside on a hot summer day in 1749 in the course of a walk from Paris to Vincennes. This vision has an importance for the main modern movement comparable to that of Saint Paul’s vision on the road to Damascus for the future development of Christianity. Among the multitude of “truths” that flashed upon Rousseau in the sort of trance into which he was rapt at this moment, the truth of overshadowing importance was, in his own words, that “man is naturally good and that it is by our institutions alone that men become wicked.”

The consequences that have flowed from this new “myth” of man’s natural goodness have been almost incommensurable. Its first effect was to discredit the theological view of human nature, with its insistence that man has fallen, not from Nature as Rousseau asserts, but from God, and that the chief virtue it behooves man to cultivate in this fallen state is humility. According to the Christian, the true opposition between good and evil is in the heart of the individual: the law of the spirit can scarcely prevail, he holds, over the law of the members without a greater or lesser degree of succor in the form of divine grace. The new dualism which Rousseau sets up—that between man naturally good and his institutions—has tended not only to substitute sociology for theology, but to discredit the older dualism in any form whatsoever.

Practically, the warfare of the Rousseauistic crusader has been even less against institutions than against those who control and administer them—kings and priests in the earlier stages of the movement, capitalists in our own day. “We are approaching,” Rousseau declared, “the era of crises, and the age of revolutions.” He not only made the prophecy but did more than any other one man to insure its fulfillment. There are conservative and even timid elements in his writings; but as a result of the superior imaginative appeal of the new dualism based on the myth of man’s natural goodness, the role he has actually played has been that of arch-radical. In one of the best-balanced estimates that have appeared, the French critic, Gustave Lanson, after doing justice to the various minor trends in Rousseau’s work, sums up accurately its major influence: “It exasperates and inspires revolt and fires enthusiasms and irritates hatreds; it is the mother of violence, the source of all that is uncompromising; it launches the simple souls who give themselves up to its strange virtue upon the desperate quest of the absolute, an absolute to be realized now by anarchy and now by social despotism.”

I have said that there has been in connection with this Rousseauistic influence a steady yielding of the theological to the sociological or, as it may also be termed, the humanitarian view of life. One should add that there enters into the total philosophy of humanitarianism an ingredient that antedates Rousseau and that may be defined as utilitarian. Utilitarianism already had its prophet in Francis Bacon. Very diverse elements enter into the writings of Bacon as into those of Rousseau, but, like those of Rousseau, they have a central drive: they always have encouraged and, one may safely say, always will encourage the substitution of a kingdom of man for the traditional Kingdom of God—the exaltation of material over spiritual “comfort,” the glorification of man’s increasing control over the forces of nature under the name of progress.

Rousseauist and Baconian, though often superficially at odds with one another, have cooperated in undermining, not merely religious tradition, but another tradition which in the Occident goes back finally, not to Judea, but to ancient Greece. This older tradition may be defined as humanistic. The goal of the humanist is poised and proportionate living. This he hopes to accomplish by observing the law of measure. Anyone who has bridged successfully the gap between this general precept and some specific emergency has to that extent achieved the fitting and the decorous. Decorum is supreme for the humanist even as humility takes precedence over all other virtues in the eyes of the Christian. Traditionally the idea of decorum has been associated, often with a considerable admixture of mere formalism, with the idea of the gentleman. Humanism and religion in their various forms have at times conflicted, but have more often been in alliance with one another. As Burke says in a well-known passage: “Nothing is more certain than that our manners, our civilisation, and all the good things that are connected with manners and with civilisation, have, in this European world of ours, depended for ages upon two principles; and were indeed the result of both combined; I mean the spirit of a gentleman and the spirit of religion.”

II

All the points of view I have been distinguishing—Baconian, Rousseauist, Christian, humanistic—often mingle confusedly. From all the confusion, however, there finally emerges a clear-cut issue—namely, whether humanitarianism, or, if one prefers, the utilitarian-sentimental movement, has supplied any effective equivalent for Burke’s two principles. As for the “spirit of a gentleman,” its decline is so obvious as scarcely to admit of argument. It has even been maintained that in America, the country in which the collapse of traditional standards has been most complete, the gentleman is at a positive disadvantage in the world of practical affairs; he is likely to get on more quickly if he assumes the “mucker pose.”³ According to William James, usually taken to be the representative American philosopher, the very idea of the gentleman has about it something slightly satanic. “The prince of darkness,” says James, “may be a gentleman, as we are told he is, but, whatever the God of earth and heaven is, he can surely be no gentleman.”

As to the spirit of religion, though its decline has in my opinion been at least as great as that of the spirit of a gentleman, it is far from being so obvious. In any case, everything in our modern substitutes for religion—whether Baconian or Rousseauistic—will be found to converge upon the idea of service. The crucial question is whether one is safe in assuming that the immense machinery of power that has resulted from activity of the utilitarian type can be made, on anything like present lines, to serve disinterested ends; whether it will not rather minister to the egoistic aims either of national groups or of individuals.

One’s answer to this question will depend on one’s view of the Rousseauistic theory of brotherhood. It is at this point, if anywhere, that the whole movement is pseudo-religious. I can give only in barest outline the reasons for my own conviction that it is pseudo-religious. It can be shown that the nature from which man has fallen, according to Rousseau, does not correspond to anything real, but is a projection of the idyllic imagination. To assert that man in a state of nature, or some similar state thus projected, is good, is to discredit the traditional controls in the actual world. Humility, conversion, decorum—all go by the board in favor of free temperamental overflow. Does man thus emancipated exude spontaneously an affection for his fellows that will be an effective counterpoise to the sheer expansion of his egoistic impulses? If so, one may safely side with all the altruists from the Third Earl of Shaftesbury to John Dewey. One may then assume that there has been no vital omission in the passage from the service of God to the service of man, from salvation by divine grace to salvation by the grace of nature.

Unfortunately, the facts have persistently refused to conform to humanitarian theory. There has been an ever-growing body of evidence from the eighteenth century to the Great War that in the natural man, as he exists in the real world and not in some romantic dreamland, the will to power is, on the whole, more than a match for the will to service. To be sure, many remain unconvinced by this evidence. Stubborn facts, it has been rightly remarked, are as nothing compared with a stubborn theory. Altruistic theory is likely to prove peculiarly stubborn, because, probably more than any other theory ever conceived, it is flattering: it holds out the hope of the highest spiritual benefits—for example, peace and fraternal union—without any corresponding spiritual effort.

If we conclude that humanitarian service cannot take the place of the spirit of religion and that of a gentleman—Burke’s “two principles”—what then? One should at least be able to understand the point of view of those who simply reject the modern movement and revert to a more or less purely traditionalist attitude. Dogmatic and revealed Christianity, they hold, has in it a supernatural element for which altruism is no equivalent. Religion of this type, they argue, alone availed to save the ancient world from a decadent naturalism; it alone can cope with a similar situation that confronts the world today.

But does it follow, because one’s choice between the religious-humanistic and the utilitarian-sentimental view of life should, as I have said, be clear-cut, one is therefore forced to choose between being a pure traditionalist or a mere modernist? At bottom the issue involved is that of individualism. The Roman Catholic, the typical traditionalist, has in matters religious simply repudiated individualism. In this domain at least, he submits to an authority that is “anterior, superior, and exterior” to the individual. The opposite case is that of the man who has emancipated himself from outer authority in the name of the critical spirit (which will be found to be identical with the modern spirit), but has made use of his emancipation, not to work out standards, but to fall into sheer spiritual ana...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Part I. The New Humanism
• Part II. Culture and Imagination
• Part III. Ethics and Character
• Part IV. America and Constitutional Spirit
• Part V. America, Humanism, and the World
• Conclusion
• Contributors
• Index
• Back Cover