by Allan Bloom
Even less do students expect to learn anything about their situation from old literature, which from the Garden of Eden on made coupling a very dark and complicated business. On reflection, today’s students wonder what all the fuss was about. Many think their older brothers and sisters discovered sex, as we now know it to be, in the sixties. I was impressed by students who, in a course on Rousseau’s Confessions, were astounded to learn that he had lived with a woman out of wedlock in the eighteenth century. Where could he have gotten the idea?
There is, of course, literature that affects a generation profoundly but has no interest at all for the next generation because its central theme proved ephemeral, whereas the greatest literature addresses the permanent problems of man. Ibsen’s Ghosts, for example, lost all its force for young people when syphilis ceased to be a threat. Aristotle teaches that pity for the plight of others requires that the same thing could happen to us. Now, however, the same things that used to happen to people, at least in the relations between the sexes, do not happen to students anymore. And one must begin to wonder whether there is any permanent literature for them, because there do not seem to them to be permanent problems for them. As I have suggested earlier, this is the first fully historical or historicized generation, not only in theory but also in practice, and the result is not the cultivation of the vastest sympathies for long ago and far away, but rather an exclusive interest in themselves. Anna Karenina and Madame Bovary are adulteresses, but the cosmos no longer rebels at their deed. Anna’s son today would probably have been awarded to her in the amicable divorce arrangements of the Karenins. All the romantic novels with their depictions of highly differentiated men and women, their steamy, sublimated sensuality and their insistence on the sacredness of the marriage bond just do not speak to any reality that concerns today’s young people. Neither do Romeo and Juliet, who must struggle against parental opposition, Othello and his jealousy, or Miranda’s carefully guarded innocence. Saint Augustine, as a seminarian told me, had sexual hang-ups. And let us not speak of the Bible, every no in which is now a yes. With the possible exception of Oedipus, they are all gone, and they departed in the company of modesty.
When young people today have crushing problems in what used to be called sexual relationships, they cannot trace them back to any moral ambiguity in man’s sexual nature. That was, of course, what was erroneously done in the past.
Separateness
Civilization has seemingly led us around full circle, back to the state of nature taught to us by the founding fathers of modern thought. But now it is present not in rhetoric but in reality. Those who first taught the state of nature proposed it as a hypothesis. Liberated from all the conventional attachments to religion, country and family that men actually did have, how would they live and how would they freely reconstruct those attachments? It was an experiment designed to make people recognize what they really care about and engage their loyalties on the basis of this caring. But a young person today, to exaggerate only a little, actually begins de novo, without the givens or imperatives that he would have had only yesterday. His country demands little of him and provides well for him, his religion is a matter of absolutely free choice and—this is what is really fresh—so are his sexual involvements. He can now choose, but he finds he no longer has a sufficient motive for choice that is more than whim, that is binding. Reconstruction is proving impossible.
The state of nature should culminate in a contract, which constitutes a society out of individuals. A contract requires not only a common interest between the contracting parties but also an authority to enforce its fulfillment by them. In the absence of the former, there is no relationship; in the absence of the latter, there can be no trust, only diffidence. In the state of nature concerning friendships and love today, there is doubt about both, and the result is a longing for the vanished common ground, called roots, without the means to recover it, and timidity and self-protectiveness in associations guaranteed by neither nature nor convention. The pervasive feeling that love and friendship are groundless, perhaps the most notable aspect of the current feeling of groundlessness, has caused them to give way to the much vaguer and more personal idea of commitment, that choice in the void whose cause resides only in the will or the self. The young want to make commitments, which constitute the meaning of life, because love and nature do not suffice. This is what they talk about, but they are haunted by the awareness that the talk does not mean very much and that commitments are lighter than air.
At the origins of modern natural rights teachings, freedom and equality were political principles intended to bring both justice and effectiveness to the relationships of ruling and being ruled, which in the conventional order were constituted by pretended rights of strength, wealth, tradition, age and birth. The relations of king and subject, master and slave, lord and vassal, patrician and pleb, rich and poor, were revealed to be purely manmade and hence not morally binding, apart from the consent of the parties to them, which became the only source of political legitimacy. Civil society was to be reconstructed on the natural ground of man’s common humanity. Then it would appear that all relationships or relatedness within civil society would also depend on the free consent of individuals. Yet the relationships between man and woman, parent and child, are less doubtfully natural and less arguably conventional than the relations between rulers and ruled, especially as they are understood by modern natural rights teachings. They cannot be understood simply as contractual relationships, as resulting from acts of human freedom, since they would thereby lose their character and dissolve. Instead they seem to constrain that freedom, to argue against the free arrangements of consent dominant in the political order. But it is difficult to argue that nature both does and does not prescribe certain relations in civil society. The radical transformation of the relations between men and women and parents and children was the inevitable consequence of the success of the new politics of consent.
It might be said, with some exaggeration, that the first state-of-nature teachers paid little attention to the natural teleology of sex because they were primarily concerned with analyzing away the false appearances of teleology in the existing political arrangements. (I mean by teleology nothing but the evident, everyday observation and sense of purposiveness, which may be only illusory, but which ordinarily guides human life, the kind everyone sees in the reproductive process.) Hobbes and Locke marshaled their great talents to explode myths of rulership that protected corrupt and selfish regimes, such as Menenius’ tale:
There was a time when all the body’s members
Rebelled against the belly; thus accused it:
That only like a gulf it did remain
I’ the midst o’ the body, idle and unactive,
Still cupboarding the viand, never bearing
Like labor with the rest; where the other instruments
Did see and hear, devise, instruct, walk, feel,
And, mutually participate, did minister
Unto the appetite and affection common
Of the whole body. The belly answered …
To the discontented members, the mutinous parts
That envied his receipt; even so most fitly
As you malign our senators for that
They are not such as you …
‘True is it, my incorporate friends,’ quoth he,
‘That I receive the general food at first
Which you do live upon; and fit it is,
Because I am the storehouse and the shop
Of the whole body. But, if you do remember,
I send it through the rivers of your blood,
Even to the court, the heart, to the seat o’ the brain;
And, through the cranks and offices of man,
The strongest nerves and small inferior veins
From me receive that natural competency
Whereby they live. And …
… though all at once cannot
See what I do deliver out to each,<
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Yet I can make my audit up, that all
From me do back receive the flour of all,
And leave me but the bran….
The senators of Rome are this good belly,
And you the mutinous members; for, examine
Their counsels and their cares, digest things rightly
Touching the weal o’ the common, you shall find
No public benefit which you receive
But it proceeds or comes from them to you,
And no way from yourselves.
(Shakespeare, Coriolanus, 1. 95-156)
In the place of such an “organic” tale they provided a rational account of legitimacy that made each individual the judge of his own best interests and gave him the right to choose rulers who were bound to protect him, abstracting from the habits of thought and feeling that permitted patricians under the colors of the common good to make use of plebs for their own greedy purposes. Hobbes and Locke gave the plebs equal rights to selfishness. The ruled are not directed by nature to the rulers any more than the rulers naturally care only for the good of the ruled. Rulers and ruled can consciously craft a compact by which the separate interests of each are protected. But they are never one, sharing the same highest end, like the organs in Menenius’ body. There is no body politic, only individuals who have come together voluntarily and can separate voluntarily without maiming themselves.
Hobbes and Locke supposed that, although the political order would be constituted out of individuals, the subpolitical units would remain largely unaffected. Indeed, they counted on the family, as an intermediate between individual and the state, partially to replace what was being lost in passionate attachment to the polity. The immediate and reliable love of one’s own property, wife and children can more effectively counterpoise purely individual selfishness than does the distant and abstract love of country. Moreover, concern for the safety of one’s family is a powerful reason for loyalty to the state, which protects them. The nation as a community of families is a formula that until recently worked very well in the United States. However, it is very questionable whether this solution is viable over the very long run, because there are two contrary views of nature present here. And, as the political philosophers have always taught, the one that is authoritative in the political regime will ultimately inform its parts. In the social contract view, nature has nothing to say about relationships and rank order; in the older view, which is part and parcel of ancient political philosophy, nature is prescriptive. Are the relations between men and women and parents and children determined by natural impulse or are they the product of choice and consent? In Aristotle’s Politics, the subpolitical or prepolitical family relations point to the necessity of political rule and are perfected by it, whereas in the state-of-nature teachings, political rule is derived entirely from the need for protection of individuals, bypassing their social relations completely. Are we dealing with political actors or with men and women? In the former case, persons are free to construct whatever relations they please with one another; in the latter, prior to any choice, a preexisting frame largely determines the relations of men and women.
There are three classic images of the polity that clarify this issue. The first is the ship of state, which is one thing if it is to be forever at sea, and quite another if it is to reach port and the passengers go their separate ways. They think about one another and their relationships on the ship very differently in the two cases. The former case is the ancient city; the latter, the modern state. The other two images are the herd and the hive, which oppose each other. The herd may need a shepherd, but each of the animals is grazing for itself and can easily be separated from the herd. In the hive, by contrast, there are workers, drones and a queen; there is a division of labor and a product toward which they all work in common; separation from the hive is extinction. The herd is modern, the hive ancient. Of course, neither image is an accurate description of human society. Men are neither atoms nor parts of a body. But this is why there have to be such images, since for the brutes these things are not a matter for discussion or deliberation. Man is ambiguous. In the tightest communities, at least since the days of Odysseus, there is something in man that wants out and senses that his development is stunted by being just a part of a whole, rather than a whole itself. And in the freest and most independent situations men long for unconditional attachments. The tension between freedom and attachment, and attempts to achieve the impossible union of the two, are the permanent condition of man. But in modern political regimes, where rights precede duties, freedom definitely has primacy over community, family and even nature.
The spirit of this choice must inevitably penetrate into all the details of life. The ambiguity of man is well illustrated in the sexual passion and the sentiments that accompany it. Sex may be treated as a pleasure out of which men and women may make what they will, its promptings followed or rejected, its forms matters of taste, its importance or unimportance in life decided freely by individuals. As such, at least according to thinkers like Hobbes and Locke, it would have to give precedence to objective natural necessity, to the imperatives of self-love or self-preservation. Or sex can be immediately constitutive of a whole law of life, to which self-preservation is subordinated and in which love, marriage and the rearing of infants is the most important business. It cannot be both. The direction in which we have been going is obvious.
Now, it is not entirely correct to say that mankind at large is able to treat sex as a matter of free choice, one which initially does not obligate us to others. In a world where the natural basis of sexual differentiation has crumbled, this choice is readily available to men, but less so to women. Man in the state of nature, either in the first one or the one we have now, can walk away from a sexual encounter and never give it another thought. But a woman may have a child, and in fact, as becomes ever clearer, may want to have a child. Sex can be an indifferent thing for men, but it really cannot quite be so for women. This is what might be called the female drama. Modernity promised that all human beings would be treated equally. Women took that promise seriously and rebelled against the old order. But as they have succeeded, men have also been liberated from their old constraints. And women, now liberated and with equal careers, nevertheless find they still desire to have children, but have no basis for claiming that men should share their desire for children or assume a responsibility for them. So nature weighs more heavily on women. In the old order they were subordinated and dependent on men; in the new order they are isolated, needing men, but not able to count on them, and hampered in the free development of their individuality. The promise of modernity is not really fulfilled for women.
The decay of the natural ground for the family relationships was largely unanticipated and unprepared for in the early modern thinkers. But they did suggest a certain reform of the family, reflecting the movement away from the constraints of duty, toward reliance on those elements of the family that could be understood to flow out of free expressions of personal sentiment. In Locke, paternal authority is turned into parental authority, a rejection of a father’s divine or natural right to rule and to rule permanently, in favor of a father’s and a mother’s right to care for their children as long as they need care, for the sake of the children’s freedom—which the child will immediately recognize, when he reaches majority, to have been for his own benefit. There is nothing left of the reverence toward the father as the symbol of the divine on earth, the unquestioned bearer of authority. Rather, sons and daughters will calculate that they have benefited from their parents’ care, which prepared them for the freedom they enjoy, and they will be grateful, although they have no reciprocal duty, except insofar as they wish to leave behind a plausible model for the conduct of their own children toward them. They may, if they please, obey their father in order to inherit his estate, if he has one, which he can dispose of as he pleases. From the point of view of the children, the family retains its validity on the basis of modern principl
es, and Locke prepares the way for the democratic family, so movingly described by Tocqueville in Democracy in America.
So far, so good. The children are reconciled to the family. But the problem, it seems to me, is in the motive of the parents to care for their children. The children can say to their parents: “You are strong, and we are weak. Use your strength to help us. You are rich, and we are poor. Spend your money on us. You are wise, and we are ignorant. Teach us.” But why should mother and rather want to do so much, involving so much sacrifice without any reward? Perhaps parental care is a duty, or family life has great joys. But neither of these is a conclusive reason when rights and individual autonomy hold sway. The children have unconditional need for and receive unquestionable benefits from the parents; the same cannot be asserted about parents.
Locke believed, and the events of our time seem to confirm his belief, that women have an instinctive attachment to children that cannot be explained as self-interest or calculation. The attachment of mother and child is perhaps the only undeniable natural social bond. It is not always effective, and it can, with effort, be suppressed, but it is always a force. And this is what we see today. But what about the father? Maybe he loves imagining his own eternity through the generations stemming from him. But this is only an act of imagination, one that can be attenuated by other concerns and calculations, as well as by his losing faith in the continuation of his name for very long in the shifting conditions of democracy. Of necessity, therefore, it was understood to be the woman’s job to get and hold the man by her charms and wiles because, by nature, nothing else would induce him to give up his freedom in favor of the heavy duties of family. But women no longer wish to do this, and they, with justice, consider it unfair according to the principles governing us. So the cement that bound the family together crumbled. It is not the children who break away; it is the parents who abandon them. Women are no longer willing to make unconditional and perpetual commitments on unequal terms, and, no matter what they hope, nothing can effectively make most men share equally the responsibilities of childbearing and child-rearing. The divorce rate is only the most striking symptom of this breakdown.
