When God Insures the Social Contract
1989. Revised 2010.
While inadvertently inventing modern social thought, Jean-Jacques Rousseau looks beyond the hurly burly of this war or that, one or another squabble between alienated burghers, or the spat the butcher just had with the candlestick maker, to discern the relationships that foster human conflict, somewhat like the trained archeologist chips past hardened sediment, surrounding a recently unearthed find, to anticipate the structure of the broach, spear head, or tablet at its core.
However crude his methodology, Rousseau must engage such analysis, in his First and Second Discourses, before he can tease out what "divine will" has accomplished from what "human art has pretended to do." Rousseau contrasts Nature— which he sees as humanity's most authentic essence— against Culture, which modifies human nature, usually to distort it. Before burdening themselves with civilization, humans roamed their grasslands, coasts and river valleys as free individuals, sheltered and fed by Nature. But although Nature provides the text of Rousseau's gospel, since "nature never lies," Rousseau depends upon God, considered aloof and following non-interventionist policies, at least in this world, to guarantee Nature's inherent value, based upon some inherent rational order within it. Nature never lies. Why would the Clockmaker God bother creating a world that practices deceit?
Born to parents who enjoyed the privileges of Genevan citizenship, yet were of modest means, abandoned by a father who fled a jail sentence after taking fists to a military man, a voracious reader whose temperament left him ill-suited to education's discipline, fond of country life and long walks on the roads, traipsing back and forth among faiths, betrayed by and betraying sophisticate friends such as Diderot and Frederick Melchior Grimm, maintaining prickly relations with patrons, sickened by the smiling subterfuges and preening superficialities of polite society, detesting the cruel and short-sighted martial entertainments of the powerful, as many a thinking, sensitive mind has before and since, Rousseau diagnoses civilization as a disease (Durant and Durant) and in the First Discourse advocates returning to "customs [that] were rustic but natural, [where] differences of conduct announced at first glance those of character" (Rousseau 37). A consensus about the social good, unaffected by sophistry or deceit, would produce laws that are actually good because they would be natural, for, "most [people] speak directly by Nature's voice" (95). Human nature's primal goodness, when civilized pretenses and compromises leave it unsullied (64), would prevent law-by-consensus from falling into the sheer relativism of the tyranny of the 51%.
In its moral implications, Rousseau's picture of the natural human condition anticipates Immanuel Kant's Categorical Imperative, loosely paraphrased as, "for whatever good you would have others do, that do yourself." Only it rises not as a duty imposed upon the individual, but as common sense, recognized as such by the free, who oblige themselves to observe it since they see it is a prerequisite for liberty from others. As Rousseau renders it, "the state of nature is that in which the care of our self-preservation is the least prejudicial to the self-preservation of others…" (129). Although both formulas parse the Golden Rule, known in various incarnations since antiquity, Rousseau explicitly applies it to the political sphere. Freedom means living by laws, not by the whims of sovereigns (79). A resuscitated natural condition internalizes laws in the hearts of its citizens.
The Second Discourse resembles nothing so much as Rousseau's creative retelling of the Edenic Fall, caused not from poaching fruit forbidden by a fatherly, but temperamental, super-tyrant, but from yielding to the temptations, which seem at first innocent, of a division of labor. While living independent of one another, for the most part, within the primal forest or within the most casual, undeveloped communities, humans maintained both freedom and equality:
As long as men were content with their rustic huts, as long as they were limited to sewing their clothing of skins with thorns or fish bones, adorning themselves with feathers and shells, painting their bodies with various colors, perfecting or embellishing their bows and arrows, carving with sharp stones a few fishing canoes or a few crude musical instruments; in a word, as long as they applied themselves only to tasks that a single person could do and to arts that did not require the cooperation of several hands, they lived free, healthy, good, and happy insofar as they could be according to their nature, and they continued to enjoy among themselves the sweetness of independent intercourse. But from the moment one man needed the help of another, as soon as they observed that it was useful for a single person to have provisions for two, equality disappeared, property was introduced, labor became necessary, and vast forests were changed to smiling fields which had to be watered with the sweat of men, and in which slavery and misery were soon seen to germinate and grow with the crops. (151)Rousseau identifies the first moment of humanity's self-exile from Nature with the moment the first aspiring landowner, who, after marking off a bit of land and declaring, "this is mine," met bemused acquiescence from his cousins and in-laws (141). The rest of the blood-drenched historical record elaborates all the implications of such claims, after the first communities based upon property right appear.
Natural inequalities in handling axes and hoes or making them, which mattered little when people lived in relative isolation, exaggerate in competition. Sparring within the new agricultural order squeezes the less able producers out: "the stronger did more work: the cleverer turned his to better advantage." A state of social inequality results, with the richest, most powerful producers on top. Inevitably finding their possessions threatened by theft, one of the loser's compensating strategies, the wealthy hire guards, and their ability to command force becomes the wealthys' insurance of their social position. The will to power for the sake of power itself emerges (154-156). Having armed guards at their disposal, the plutocrats raid neighboring villages and incorporate them into their power sphere, creating larger political units in the process (156-157) while giving relatively unorganized communities good reason to form states of their own. War is born. Constant dispute within and without leads to the arbitration of law. As Rousseau pithily puts it, "all ran to meet their chains, thinking they secured their freedom…" (159). After natural rights yield to property rights, class rights slowly suborn property rights, and class rights eventually breed monarchies. Natural rights become lost in slavery and forgotten in battle.
Rousseau appeals to "the author of one's being" to justify his natural right to freedom (167). Humans are born free because created so. Once created, alas, humans develop the logic of civilization on their own, often proving ill stewards of their natural rights. Yet Rousseau recognizes that his grand story is purely hypothetical, a cluster of "conjectures" on human beginnings "better suited to clarify the nature of things than to show their true origin" (103). His account merely construes what could be believed about the genesis of civilization had Holy Scripture not better informed us. While this apology might be rhetorical subterfuge of his own, meant to deflect the inevitable charge of apostasy, Rousseau's belief in God is genuine enough. Hence, deistic belief at the least, if not a conventional commitment to any orthodoxy, guarantees Rousseau's assertion of inherent human rights, an idea we still hear voiced today by Messieurs Carter and Bush towards their contrasting ends, following Jefferson, who prefaced it in the Declaration of Independence in a year when Rousseau was still alive.
Posing his conjectures before two centuries of anthropological spadework— that Rousseau himself has in part inspired— began digging up the details, and theorizing before Darwin created an alternative framework, Rousseau saw little choice but to rely on some kind of theism to justify his ideology of Nature. But this is a fateful flaw. If Nature requires grounding in a Transcendent, and would be seen wholly arbitrary without it, its inherent value could become uncertain and ambiguous if confident belief in the Transcendent weakened, as is the case today, and had already long begun as Rousseau wrote. Nature's value might even become a matter of indifference, existing as an "Other" that cannot command our appreciation, to the extent that we do not perceive it to be "for us," something we can mindlessly exploit. In deriving natural right from a source outside of Nature, Rousseau allows the claim of those rights to be undermined when belief in that particular Source seems incredulous. Rousseau did not have to go that route. Spinoza, whose deism was entirely naturalistic, if it could be considered deism at all, had preceded him.
Our science commonly sees creation today as god-less and self-organizing, a self-created Created which evolves, in minute locations, from a primordial state of comparative simplicity (Dawkins, Stegner). Our anthropology and psychology and even our literary criticism have challenged the whole idea of an inherent human nature. Even back in Rousseau's day, Locke, a more conventional theist, undermined this concept through his notion of the tabula rasa, or blank slate, a metaphor for the endless malleability of human mind and morals through learning and environmental influence. Thus, Marx later saw human nature defined by a web of social relations, even as he also saw it, like Rousseau, constrained, oppressed and enslaved by them. Freud saw it defined through the dynamic negotiation the unconscious ego makes between biological drives and internalized public mores. Foucault would dissolve human nature altogether, replacing it with unstable signifieds that blind social power confines and dominates through discursive practices. While 20th century Post-Structuralists see the discrediting of essentialism as enabling social advance, through dispelling certain myths about race, class, and gender that so often justify unjust social orders, their ceding the ability to appeal cogently to basic and universal rights, grounded within the innate qualities of human beings, cripples their case for human rights before juntas or insurgents that prize other values instead. Even democracies need to be rebuffed, periodically, when out of avarice or fear they cross the line. For human rights to temper, if not trump, considerations of nationalism, commerce, religious chauvinism, or national security they must be seen as being non-negotiable, based upon rights that Nature all by itself cedes to individuals.
Rousseau saw this much clearly. Various researches and arguments, which correct, if not rebuff, Locke and Foucault, and countervail against such views that would dissolve human nature and nullify human worth, offer Rousseau partial rehabilitation. Controversial and still very much a sketch awaiting further refinement, an adequate, naturalistic picture of civilization's origins would, however, look more Hobbesian than Rousseau would prefer, at least in terms of civilization's origins. Through camouflage and stealth, nature often lies. Red in tooth and claw from the species's very beginning, the violence and compulsion that follows upon primal peoples' fall from Grace, as Rousseau depicts it, springs not from innocence. With what vague knowledge we still have about the fall of pleistocene economics and culture, it is easy to imagine that agriculture, a defense against collective starvation, eventually necessitated defense against common foes, and this accelerated civilization's growth. But so did trade. Instead of an accidental consequence of social cooperation that went awry and snowballed, the story we now read is more nuanced. Not Hobbes or Rousseau, but both. With Adam Smith thrown in.
As Stephen Pinker persuasively argues in The Blank Slate, people are not quite born blank. Instinctual drives and reactions predispose us to particular behaviors, such as language acquisition. But ethnology, along with common observation, would assert that humans' instinct to acquire does not end with language, and coveting probably predates language. Along with the tendency to herd together in packs, trade our toys with our friends (that is, play tit for tat), invest in our young— though not always with all the sympathy they might like— and elect alpha leaders to whom others defer, save for the occasional challenger. And to desire to murder those who cross us.
A theory of natural right independent of dubious and hopelessly sectarian theistic hypotheses starts here, appraising how instincts condition human plasticity. Not to legitimate oppression in the name of some unwarranted biological determinism, but to recognize behavior's deep, and actual sociobiological roots. Starts, but does not end there, as it identifies counter-balancing tendencies of cooperation and mutual assistance, just as Rousseau, horrified by Hobbes, attempted to do, and work with them to move from Is to Ought. Yes, let us start here, only without romanticizing root human nature, producing in consequence many misguided solutions whose public failures, ranging from Communist social engineering to public housing projects to certain education reforms, now make them seem terribly naive.