Ping Pong 13: The Heart of Mankind
The previous Rant was very unkind about Locke. It argued that many of the world’s callousnesses and inadequacies are caught up within the dynamics of Locke’s empiricism, for better or for worse. That is, it is Locke’s achievement that he codified for posterity, the relationship between an individual and their experiences. A relationship that then defined a sense in which any individual owns not only their experiences but also the world beyond these experiences. A form of owning which tied freedom with property, and blends choice with callousness: A conjunction of consequences which informs many of our debates today. In this Rant, I will redress the balance and explore a perhaps more positive, if still problematic, aspect to Locke’s thought. The aspect which I have in mind is Locke’s understanding of what a state of nature looks like, and why this state actually matters for us all, both individually and collectively.
Locke’s criticism of Hobbes’ state of nature comes down to the criticism that Hobbes had not gone far enough into the nature of humans in the state of nature, before he drew off its consequences. Hobbes had therefore argued that a state of nature was only a state of war and anarchy. A state which it was best to forget or get out of as soon as possible, and to which no one in their right minds would ever want to return. Locke suggests that a state of war is merely a derivative state of the state of nature. Before this state existed, Locke suggests, one must imagine a world that was nearly empty of individuals. In such a world, which while it was comparatively empty of humans was necessarily full of rich resources, humans would have no need to fight or even any particular need to form wider societies. On the contrary, humans would be gathered together in small family groups, each group having the rights to regulate its own existence, and form their own series of property relations.
The State of Nature therefore starts off for Locke as a state of peace and abundance. War then comes on this world from an aspect or natural dynamic of the state of nature itself. - The problem that such a state has, is that no one can ever define exactly how one should resolve arguments. There is nothing therefore, stopping any blood feud from ripping across society, and plunging it into war. Moreover as the numbers of people expanded, and so the abundance was compromised, there is nothing to enforce the property rights of the country. There is therefore nothing to stop acts of injustice or to mitigate how to allocate scarce resources – no state to guide or direct. The result is then all too frequently, that the state of nature slips into a state of war, as people take the law into their own hands. The only answer to this problem being strong and unified government.
True to his links with the colonization of America, Locke presents us with very much a state of nature which pitches the world of the small property owner or trader on the edge of the unknown; very much ‘an American Dream’. Each individual family therefore operates as a good ‘middle class’ (or at least educated) Englishman, to set up a well regulated world for themselves and their nearest and dearest. And yet this world is pitched on the edge of the abyss. Not only will the forces of disorder break in from without (be they Indians in Locke’s day or Islamicists); but also the society will itself be forever sending armed forays out into the outer dark, into the state of war or the wilderness, to ensure that its own little patch is safe and sound.
The world then ends up being profoundly split into local spheres of order, and a large dark territory fall of noise, fury and anarchy. The forces of law and order are moreover allowed to do what they wish within the anarchy in order to define their little worlds, and their own rights and privileges. The state of nature, poised as it is only on the edge of the abyss of war, is therefore the world of realpolitik. Locke however wants to offer us hope that there is more to the world than this state of peace bounded in war. He is indeed keen to offer us a double sense of redemption. On the one hand, Locke offers a very personal redemption. That is, a way that we might understand how we might behave or at least understand our behaviour to minimise the risk of war. On the other, he offers us a ruse to take one beyond the state of war, and to form society. Each of these moves will then need to be considered in turn.
It is of course an old adage that when people talk of human nature they mean something unpleasant. If we say then, ‘that is just human nature’ we mean someone is a bastard and that is it -and yet in this very definition there is almost an affection. The Individual indicated might be being a bugger, and yet that fact is itself understandable and allowable. People are just like that. It is Locke’s great triumph that he defined this strange sentiment which at once concedes but justifies humans to be thugs.
Before Locke, this aspect of humanity’s fallen nature was seen an universally unpleasant and dangerous. Here Hobbes is very typical. Hobbes never draws a line between ‘human nature’ (understood in the sense above) and the state of war. Because humans are what they are, Hobbes argues, wars and famine necessarily result. Human greed or desire is therefore left to itself wicked and dangerous. It must therefore be contained within the prison of society and never allowed its freedom beyond that mould. Locke by contrast argues that human nature of itself is simply contained within selfishness. A human is therefore not wicked or foolish or even mad, but merely obsessed with self love and with their own concerns. These concerns left to themselves are then to be encouraged. The problem only comes when that individual is pitched into the world beyond their local concerns and local selfishness.
This last point then changes entirely the point of a state. For Hobbes the state was a necessary paradigm, without which a human could scarily think in any ordered manner (let alone be human). For Locke its task was rather different. A state was needed to define ways or manners within which different self-interested groups might relate to each other, or at least not conflict with one another. This move of course defined the state as a second order phenomena. Its role was not to intervene in the day to day running of a community, but rather to ensure that this community did not offend or disrupt the lives of others. In effect a state became therefore the means that allowed individual selfishnesses their own freedom, while ensuring that freedom did not plunge the entire society into war. Locke’s dream is that one might, through the state, eventually define the rules of benevolent selfishness.
Moreover this ‘rule for selfishness’ (or state) matters as it defines the axis within which people who do not know each other well, might be expected to behave. That is, it codifies in the rubric of a state (or a declaration of universal rights or a market place) the series of moves that allow humans who do not know each other and therefore who owe nothing to each other might be expected to conform to. Or at least the rules that if one side or other does not conform to, will allow the other to accuse the this transgressor of sharp practice and acting against that wider collective interest (by risking a state of war). The state is legitimized because it, and it alone has the ability to transfigure individual acts of selfishness, and shows how these acts play on the larger stage which is composed of many such acts. It’s role is to define the sense of a ‘collective’ axis beyond any one act, that makes it then in the interests of the wider community that certain rules are followed whilst others are condemned.
It is of course this claim that has formed the powerhouse of the spread of capitalism across the world. The capitalist societies have held out the hope to all other communities that they only had to learn a certain set of moves or adopt a certain series of rules or regulations, in order to tame or discipline the wildest of greeds. Or to put it slightly differently, it is this freeing of greed that traditionally at least allows capitalism to enslave humanity, and to do so in the cruellest of ways. Capitalism’s initial move is always simple enough, it offers that many of one’s most cherished greeds really can be realized if only one agrees to accept a certain rather innocent series of norms and values. Humans, their eyes fixated on the ‘might be’ (‘I might win the lottery’) of greed, then willingly pay the price. The result is then the feeding frenzy of South Sea Bubble trading schemes (be it the Dot.Com bubble or property prices/sub-prime mortgages in America or resources in Africa). The consequence is of course then, that when these schemes collapse, the individuals who are caught up in them, find themselves in a very real sense bound up to ‘the bigger picture’ to which they now owe money, and are therefore to which they are how beholden. Capitalism operates the rules of greed, by setting that greed free, in order to trap it within an axis of debt and collectivity.
On the personal level, Locke therefore defines the axis within which it became possible to free selfishness from its associations with war or sin, and to allow it to be a genuine force within the world. On the level of the formation of society, Locke defines rather carefully (if unintentionally) why it is so difficult to form a state, and what follows on as a consequence of that difficulty. This difficulty essentially originated in the nature of the selfishness of the communities that need to be poured into that state. There is a fundamental assumption within Locke, that such a selfishness is necessarily compatible with other similar selfishnesses. If these differing selfishnesses pull apart therefore, the entire Lockean enterprise to form a certain sort of state from a certain state of nature would be in vain. This failure of selfishness to coalesce has then two rather different aspects.
On the one hand Locke of course assumes that the contractors to form an axis are of roughly the same power and influence. If they were not, the entire system collapses as there would really be no reason why the more powerful should sacrifice their position in the interests of the less powerful. Hence Locke’s argument rests upon a state of nature in which families of roughly the same kind and shape coexist. This is of course all very well in a thought experiment, but then imposes very great limits on the use of the theory to define exactly how an individual state is formed. One only needs to see the fate of such organizations as the United Nations, to understand that here was a body which was essentially constituted on self-consciously Lockean lines. That is, it was a group of individual states who came together under the banner of a certain set of rules, and in order to mitigate excesses of selfishness. And yet such a project was flawed from the start, as long as certain nations were rich enough and powerful enough to ignore the United Nations (all the more so as they were the ones funding it). A social contract is therefore only viable as long as it remains in the interests of all concerned to keep to it. The moment that it is not (and in a world of widely dissimilar powers it is difficult to understand when it ever might be), then the contract is in effect valueless, and we are back in the politics of the frontier society once more.
On the other hand it is of course integral within the Lockean conception of the state that all families and therefore all forms of selfishness are broadly speaking similar. He does not consider therefore the idea that there might be rather different forms of selfishness; and that each form might be embodied within a different and conflicting organization. Once this complexity is factored in, it becomes of course really rather difficult to define a single axis for selfishness, as people might want to be selfish in very different ways. The only way that the modern apostles of Locke can escape this impasse is to somehow claim that there is something special about their form of selfishness. The claim is then made that it is somehow either more natural or at least more material (that is for example, it is concerned with the natural desire for property). At this point these apostles are of course forced back on the argument which I made last week. They can only be the missionaries of hope if they ignore (or seek to destroy) everything that does not conform to the rather restricted circumstances within which that hope can be defined. And the sceptic of course would at this juncture, point out that the same could be said of almost any political system.
Ultimately Locke is the most paradoxical to thinkers. - The thinker who wants to try to persuade us that it is alright to be selfish (if not excessively greedy). So long, that is, as that selfishness is codified and contained within a series of rules which articulate its potentially violent nature, and renders it useful. And yet, while Locke is no doubt the master of defining what this benevolent selfishness might look like in the context of one culture and one time (Seventeenth Century Europe), his argument starts to flounder, once it is applied in situations other than the very narrow circumstances in which it was given. This last point would perhaps not matter much (many thinkers are time or culture bound), if it had not been for the fact that the entire point of Locke’s argument was that he (and no other) had found a theory which defied both history and culture, and was universally applicable. A conceit which then only mattered because all too frequently Locke’s argument is taken at face value. We assume that it could be applied to other peoples and cultures (and in other times) and then blame those cultures and peoples when it fails to work (they are somehow not ‘mature’ enough to like us).
Once again perhaps this would simply dissolve into a tragi-comedy if we did not have in our back pocket a genuine ‘shock troop’ of westernisation: Greed. For as the West discovered a while ago, if it hypes up the material greed of other people, it can free spirits which as a rule only capitalism (and therefore the Lockean paradigm) can then contain. The West thereby poses the rest of the world with a very deep challenge. If it wishes to resist the politics of Locke and his theories of greed, it needs to find a dogma strong enough either to resist material greed (Islam) or channel it in different way (China). What makes this dilemma all the more tricky is of course that this greed has not only spread westernization cross the globe, but it has also spread pollution and destruction, meaning that the choice to resist or channel greed anew (and so escape Locke) has attained a new and far more fierce urgency. However in understanding how one might make this move, it will be clearly necessary to turn again to one’s definition of what an individual is. Is it possible to allow for an individual without reverting to a metaphysics of ownership and greed? This was a problem which taxed the generation of thinkers which followed Locke, and will be the subject of next week’s Rant.
