The Right Side of History

by Ben Shapiro

  It’s an obvious truism that nations find collective identity in language and culture. But the question is whether that culture forwards fundamental God-given rights, or whether that culture becomes an excuse to take away rights in the name of collective self-preservation. Romantic nationalism is not patriotism. But the appeal of romantic imperialistic nationalism has never died. And that fiery appeal, unmoored from any transcendent values, has burned millions in its heat.

  THE UTOPIA OF LEVELING

  The French Revolution’s murder of the Judeo-Christian God meant substituting a supposedly more realistic materialism for transcendental values. The Bible contended that man could not live by bread alone; the French Revolution contended that without bread, nothing else mattered. Thomas Paine, author of the most important political pamphlet in modern history, Common Sense, saw the French Revolution as a powerful, necessary move in favor of social leveling. An ardent atheist, Paine rejected the value of Judeo-Christian morality, and instead promoted redistributionist materialism. In particular, Paine targeted the class distinctions that so characterized Europe. “The Aristocracy,” he wrote, “are not the farmers who work the land . . . but are the mere consumers of the rent.” And those aristocrats were living off the backs of a “great portion of mankind . . . [who suffer] in a state of poverty and wretchedness.” Paine wrote, “One extreme produces the other: to make one rich many must be made poor; neither can the system be supported by other means.” Paine would also argue that “the working hand perishes in old age, and the employer abounds in affluence.” No wonder Revolutionary France made Paine an honorary citizen.

  Paine quickly became a devotee of proto-socialist Gracchus Babeuf. “Property,” Babeuf’s followers argued, “is, therefore, the greatest scourge on society; it is a veritable public crime.” Paine quickly began to believe the same, and advocated for a system of “ground-rent” for property ownership, the proceeds from which would be distributed among the citizenry. Paine argued that private property was a mere convention, and that all private property was actually the work of society at large: “Personal property is the effect of society; and it is as impossible for an individual to acquire personal property without the aid of society, as it is for him to make land originally.” Thus the state is master over all private property. And a revolution would be necessary to effectuate that reality.23

  The French Revolution didn’t end in a communist utopia. But according to Karl Marx, it was the first step in the gradual evolution of markets toward communism. In The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Napoleon, a pamphlet written in 1852 regarding the French coup of 1851, Marx wrote that the French Revolution had set for itself “the task of unchaining and setting up modern bourgeois society,” but that its own commitment to classical republican ideals had prevented the class uprising that could liberate its citizens from the shackles of class;24 that revolution, Marx thought, had nearly been achieved in the communist movements that spread across the continent of Europe like wildfire. And soon, that communist utopia would be achieved. As Marx and Friedrich Engels wrote in The Communist Manifesto in 1848, “A spectre is haunting Europe—the spectre of communism.”

  So, what was this specter?

  Today, Marx’s more aphoristic credos have become legendary—“From each according to his ability, to each according to his need,” and “Workers of the world, unite!” and the like. But his philosophy represented a radical new attempt to find meaning in a world without God. Like Paine before him, Marx saw free markets as a system of exploitation. According to Marx, the value of a product could be measured by its “socially necessary labor time”—the average number of work hours needed to create a product. Manufacturers could only gain profit by artificially driving down the socially necessary labor time, or by forcing laborers to work longer hours. The capitalist can only become rich by exploiting workers; workers never see the fruits of their labor thanks to capitalists taking the “excess” labor off the top for themselves.25

  This system, Marx believed, demeaned human beings. Human beings are built to produce “in accordance with the law of beauty,” not merely for survival; labor makes men free, Marx stated. But “in tearing away the object of his production from man, estranged labor therefore tears him away from his species-life, his true species-objectivity . . . his inorganic body, nature, is taken from him.”26 What sort of human beings would be produced by a truer system of labor? The man freed to be an individual by the collective. Marx posited that “only in community” does an individual have “the means of cultivating his gifts in all directions; only in the community, therefore, is personal freedom possible. . . . In a real community the individuals obtain their freedom in and through their association.”27

  Eventually, human nature would be restored by the collapse of capitalism—and this collapse would, in turn, drive the creation of a new man, a better human being. Marx’s promise was a transcendental promise, not merely a material one. Like Rousseau, Marx believed in the power of the collective.

  And like Rousseau, Marx saw a return to human nature as a good to be bought at the cost of civilization. Communion with the collective, in Marx’s view, can only be brought about by changing history. Like Hegel, Marx attempted to uncover the plot of history, which he thought inevitably led to a brighter future. But unlike Hegel, Marx believed that human beings had to take an active part in their history-making in order to change themselves. Human beings, Marx posited, were animals, and thus part of their environment—but they could also change the environment in which they lived, and, by doing so, change themselves. All that would be required was the will to overthrow old systems. Mankind could be perfected through a program of rigorous and continuous revolution. Abolishing private property would end alienation; abolishing the family would end the exploitation of children by parents and wives by husbands. “Does it require deep intuition to comprehend that man’s ideas, views, and conceptions, in one word, man’s consciousness, changes with every change in the conditions of his material existence, in his social relations and in his life?” Marx and Engels wrote in The Communist Manifesto. Yes, of course the old morality would be abolished—but more important, it would be made utterly obsolete by the creation of new human beings, since all prior morality was reliant on “the exploitation of one part of society by the other.”28

  The Judeo-Christian God would have to be buried. “The abolition of religion as the illusory happiness of the people is a demand for their true happiness,” Marx stated.29 Greek search for purpose would have to be directed at revising society itself. A new age would be born. And a new human being would rise to occupy it.

  Fortunately, Marx had a program that could achieve this world-changing transformation. First, the proletariat would “use its political supremacy to wrest, by degree, all capital from the bourgeoisie, to centralize all instruments of production in the hands of the State”—and naturally, this would entail “despotic inroads on the rights of property” that could appear economically untenable, but would soon work themselves out. This would involve abolition of property in land, a heavy progressive tax, confiscation of all property of emigrants and rebels, centralization of credit in the state, centralization of all means of communications and transportation by the state, extension of those means of production by the state, forced labor (“equal liability of all to work”), forcible resettlement of populations, and free education. Then, magically, the ills of modern society would disappear—the conditions for the existence of class antagonisms will disappear, and the glory of the collective will be established for all time: “In place of the old bourgeois society, with its classes and class antagonisms, we shall have an association in which the free development of each is the condition for the free development of all.” The individual will define himself by association with the collective, and the collective will work as a unified individual.30

  Marx offered a transformative vision of humanity, a system of meaning and purpose. He acknowledged that suffering would follow from his recommended
policies but suggested that such suffering would in the end result in a Messianic age of man, in which collective reason would unify with individual meaning. Marx’s specter would indeed come to dominate the world, looming astride civilization like a vengeful anti-deity. His philosophy would damn millions to slavery—and haunt the openness and freedom of the post-Enlightenment world with the specter of glorious utopianism.

  THE UTOPIA OF BUREAUCRACY

  The rise of nationalism and the rise of collectivism were both driven, at their root, by the Rousseauian worship of the general will. But how could such a general will ever find its way to practical implementation? Individual action outside the rule of the general will would only undercut the general will; individual action outside the nationalistic state could only detract from the power of the state; individual excellence would only undermine the leveling process necessary for transforming man.

  Unless, that is, individual excellence was yoked to the service of the state. That yoke would be termed bureaucracy. The term bureaucracy is a mashup of the French word bureau, meaning the material used to cover desks, and the Greek term kratos, meaning power. So the term itself literally meant “desk power” or “office rule.” Bureaucracy was already prevalent in France before the French Revolution, but the Revolution created a bureaucracy of its own, despite its own insistence that such bureaucracy was an evil of the ancien régime.31

  Proponents of state power quickly began to praise the rise of an expert bureaucracy that could do the people’s will—without, of course, consulting with the people, who were, after all, a bunch of rubes. Whereas democrats like Alexis de Tocqueville considered the bureaucracy a new form of oppressive oligarchy, Hegel called bureaucrats the “universal class,” since their goal was to fulfill the general will. Bureaucrats were to be trained in ethics and organization. And if properly governed, people would naturally resonate to patriotism: “the consciousness that my interest, both substantive and particular, is contained and preserved in another’s (i.e., in the state’s) interest and end.”32 Hegel’s reverence for bureaucracy would later be deepened and broadened by German sociologist Max Weber (1864–1920), who declared that merit-based bureaucracy could bring about a better world, predicating “the exercise of control on the basis of knowledge.”33

  But didn’t such an oligarchic worship of centralized control cut against the supposed foundations of the Enlightenment itself? Didn’t individual rights come into direct conflict with a small clique of all-knowing experts, ruling from above?

  The man who solved this conundrum was Auguste Comte (1798–1857). Comte is often disparaged today based on his belief in pseudoscientific silliness like phrenology—the study of the shapes of skulls to determine differences among human beings. But we are still living in Comte’s framework.

  Comte provided a philosophical basis for bureaucratic oligarchy: atheistic science. Widely considered the father of sociology, Comte believed that human development had begun with religious pseudo-authority—human beings paying attention to obscure moral codes they believed had come from God, thanks to their own superstition. But during the French Revolution, power moved from the priests and the kings toward science. Now, Comte recognized that the French Revolution had been a failure, but only because human beings weren’t capable of moving directly toward governance by science—the Revolutionaries had made the mistake of seeking meaning in universal values like human rights. Those individual rights ran directly counter to the necessity and power of the state. But the Revolution’s failure demonstrated the truth: the only truths could be found in hard scientific fact, in scientific positivism.34

  In 1822, Comte wrote his Plan for the Scientific Work Necessary to Reorganize Society—his suggestion then, as it was throughout his career, is that human knowledge could lead to the imposition of rational laws that could reorganize all of humanity. Expertise was the basis of governance. And all inquiries into transcendental values were worthless, except insofar as they served man. Science was philosophy was religion. All were the same. It made perfect sense, therefore, when Comte founded the religion of humanity, designed to fill the gap left by churchgoing. Comte’s church never met with success—it turns out that banning God and worshipping at the altar of pseudoscience will take a toll on membership—but it set the groundwork for the era of high-minded Western progressivism.

  Continental progressivism—the philosophy of Hegel and Comte, among others—made its way across the Atlantic Ocean in the form of John Dewey (1859–1952), a man that Professor Robert Horwitz described as “the foremost American philosopher of democracy of the twentieth century.” Dewey believed that social science could be used to engineer a new world and a new humanity. Dewey thought that the great ill plaguing the United States was its materialism—like Marx, Dewey said that production and consumption had locked human beings into a vicious cycle of meaninglessness. But there was good news: that cycle could be broken, and without Marx’s brutal class warfare. Instead, all that was needed was “intelligence.” If we were simply smart enough, we could solve all of our problems. As Dewey wrote, “the most direct and effective way out of these evils is steady and systematic effort to develop that effective intelligence named scientific method in the case of human transactions.”35

  Dewey did recognize another problem, though. Science, he stated, is typically aimed at an agreed-upon end: we research how to stop cancer, for example, because we all agree that cancer is an evil that must be eradicated. So, what common end should unite us in politics? Is it freedom? Equality? Virtue? Certainly not—Dewey disowned such notions as universal truths, mocking the founders for their bizarre loyalty to “immutable truths good at all times and places.”36 Dewey’s answer was simple: ask Darwin.

  What, you may ask, does Darwin have to do with anything? Well, says Dewey, Darwin showed that everything changed and became more complex over time—and that was good. It was our job to facilitate human “growth”: physical growth, emotional growth, intellectual growth. Our “purpose is to set free and to develop the capacities of human individuals without respect to race, sex, class or economic status.”

  But this raises yet another question: what about democracy? What about consent? What if I’m not interested in growing the way John Dewey thought I should be interested in growing? Well, then, I’m just not “intelligent” enough—the state should be able to scientifically investigate the various players in any democratic system and put its thumb on the scale on behalf of those associations that are most valuable for growth. Furthermore, the state ought to reeducate children toward the type of growth the intelligent bureaucrats have endorsed; children are, in effect, the property of the state.

  Yet again, we ask, who will decide the direction of the state? Dewey’s answer, in the end, is simple: we just don’t know. Government must change and adapt toward the end of making its people better. Pragmatism is the watchword. Whatever works is moral. Government must use its means to promote empowering rights—things citizens need in order to “grow.” The state would shape the citizen, and the citizen would shape the state until, as in Hegel’s thought, the two merged: “The State is then the completed objective spirit, the externalized reason of man; it reconciles the principle of law and liberty, not by bringing some truce or external harmony between them, but by making the law the whole of the prevailing interest and controlling motive of the individual.”37

  The philosophy of scientifically based expertise proposed by Hegel and Comte and espoused by Dewey came to fruition in the administration of Woodrow Wilson. Woodrow Wilson studied Hegel; he was a devotee of Herbert Spencer, himself a fan of Comte and the philosopher who actually coined the term survival of the fittest.38 And he thought that the American Founding Fathers had been wrong—that the social contract theory and inalienable rights of John Locke and Thomas Jefferson were a load of bunk. Liberty was malleable, changeable, just as Dewey said: “No doubt we are meant to have liberty; but each generation must form its own conception of what liberty is.” And governme
nt was in the business of progress, not in the business of protecting eternal truths: “All that progressives ask or desire is permission—in an era when ‘development,’ ‘evolution,’ is the scientific word—to interpret the Constitution according to the Darwinian principle; all they ask is recognition of the fact that a nation is a living thing and not a machine.”39 In Wilson’s vision, the community always took precedence over the individual; scientifically minded experts could best run the country; and the president—you know, someone like Woodrow Wilson—could act as the repository of the Rousseauian general will. “The President,” Wilson stated, “is at liberty, both in law and conscience, to be as big a man as he can. His capacity will set the limit.”40

  From now on, American government would no longer base itself on the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution of the United States. It would base itself on the pragmatic progressivism of Dewey and Wilson—an ever-growing bureaucracy, self-assured and confident in its own scientific expertise, and aware of its own authority to help shape the formation of the American people from the top down.

  THE CATACLYSM

  In the absence of Judeo-Christian morality and Greek teleology, each of these visions offered a shining, exciting new purpose to humanity. The philosophy of the American founding represented the apex of a philosophy that could provide all four elements of meaning necessary for the building of a civilization: individual purpose and communal purpose, individual capacity and collective capacity.

  But romantic nationalism, collectivist redistributionism, and scientific progressivism did away with the individual need for meaning. The four elements of meaning collapsed downward into two: communal purpose and communal capacity. The individual virtually disappeared in each of these domains. Individuals were only valuable as members of the collective: as sources of the general will, to be embodied in the unified culture of the state; as members of economic classes, who could unite to overthrow the nature of humankind itself; as citizens to be cultivated by the state, their expertise to be placed in service of the greater good.