American Transcendentalism

American Transcendentalism:
An Indigenous Culture of Critique

By Kevin MacDonald

Ex: http://www.counter-currents.com/

Philip F. Gura
American Transcendentalism: A History ^[2]
New York: Hill and Wang, 2007

Philip Gura’s American Transcendentalism provides a valuable insight into a nineteenth-century leftist intellectual elite in the United States. This is of considerable interest because Transcendentalism was a movement entirely untouched by the predominantly Jewish milieu of the twentieth-century left in America. Rather, it was homegrown, and its story tells us much about the sensibility of an important group of white intellectuals and perhaps gives us hints about why in the twentieth century WASPs so easily capitulated to the Jewish onslaught on the intellectual establishment.

Based in New England, Transcendentalism was closely associated with Harvard and Boston—the very heart of Puritan New England. It was also closely associated with Unitarianism which had become the most common religious affiliation for Boston’s elite. Many Transcendentalists were Unitarian clergymen, including Ralph Waldo Emerson, the person whose name is most closely associated with the movement in the public mind.

These were very intelligent people living in an age when religious beliefs required an intellectual defense rather than blind acceptance. Their backgrounds were typical of New England Christians of the day. But as their intellectual world expanded (often at the Harvard Divinity School), they became aware of the “higher criticism” of the Bible that originated with German scholars. This scholarship showed that there were several different authors of Genesis and that Moses did not write the first five books of the Old Testament. They also became aware of other religions, such as Buddhism and Hinduism which made it unlikely that Christianity had a monopoly on religious truth.

In their search for an intellectual grounding of religion, they rejected Locke’s barren empiricism and turned instead to the idealism of Kant, Schelling, and Coleridge. If the higher criticism implied that the foundations of religious belief were shaky, and if God was unlikely to have endowed Christianity with unique religious truths, the Transcendentalists would build new foundations emphasizing the subjectivity of religious experience. The attraction of idealism to the Transcendentalists was its conception of the mind as creative, intuitive, and interpretive rather than merely reactive to external events. As the writer and political activist Orestes Brownson summed it up in 1840, Transcendentalism defended man’s “capacity of knowing truth intuitively [and] attaining scientific knowledge of an order of existence transcending the reach of the senses, and of which we can have no sensible experience” (p. 121). Everyone, from birth, possesses a divine element, and the mind has “innate principles, including the religious sentiment” (p. 84).

The intuitions of the Transcendentalists were decidedly egalitarian and universalist. “Universal divine inspiration—grace as the birthright of all—was the bedrock of the Transcendentalist movement” (p. 18). Ideas of God, morality, and immortality are part of human nature and do not have to be learned. As Gura notes, this is the spiritual equivalent of the democratic ideal that all men (and women) are created equal.

Intuitions are by their very nature slippery things. One could just as plausibly (or perhaps more plausibly) propose that humans have intuitions of greed, lust, power, and ethnocentrism—precisely the view of the Darwinians who came along later in the century. In the context of the philosophical milieu of Transcendentalism, their intuitions were not intended to be open to empirical investigation. Their truth was obvious and compelling—a fact that tells us much about the religious milieu of the movement.

On the other hand, the Transcendentalists rejected materialism with its emphasis on “facts, history, the force of circumstance and the animal wants of man” (quoting Emerson, p. 15). Fundamentally, they did not want to explain human history or society, and they certainly would have been unimpressed by a Darwinian view of human nature that emphasizes such nasty realities as competition for power and resources and how these play out given the exigencies of history. Rather, they adopted a utopian vision of humans as able to transcend all that by means of the God-given spiritual powers of the human mind.

Not surprisingly, this philosophy led many Transcendentalists to become deeply involved in social activism on behalf of the lower echelons of society—the poor, prisoners, the insane, the developmentally disabled, and slaves in the South.

* * *

The following examples give a flavor of some of the central attitudes and typical social activism of important Transcendentalists.

Orestes Brownson (1803–1876) admired the Universalists’ belief in the inherent dignity of all people and the promise of eventual universal salvation for all believers. He argued “for the unity of races and the inherent dignity of each person, and he lambasted Southerners for trying to enlarge their political base” (p. 266). Like many New Englanders, he was outraged by the Supreme Court decision in the Dred Scott case that required authorities in the North to return fugitive slaves to their owners in the South. For Brownson the Civil War was a moral crusade waged not only to preserve the union, but to emancipate the slaves. Writing in 1840, Brownson claimed that we should “realize in our social arrangements and in the actual conditions of all men that equality of man and man” that God had established but which had been destroyed by capitalism (pp. 138–39). According to Brownson, Christians had

to bring down the high, and bring up the low; to break the fetters of the bound and set the captive free; to destroy all oppression, establish the reign of justice, which is the reign of equality, between man and man; to introduce new heavens and a new earth, wherein dwelleth righteousness, wherein all shall be as brothers, loving one another, and no one possessing what another lacketh. (p. 139)

George Ripley (1802–1880), who founded the utopian community of Brook Farm and was an important literary critic, “preached in earnest Unitarianism’s central message, a belief in universal, internal religious principle that validated faith and united all men and women” (p. 80). Ripley wrote that Transcendentalists “believe in an order of truths which transcends the sphere of the external senses. Their leading idea is the supremacy of mind over matter.” Religious truth does not depend on facts or tradition but

has an unerring witness in the soul. There is a light, they believe, which enlighteneth every man that cometh into the world; there is a faculty in all, the most degraded, the most ignorant, the most obscure, to perceive spiritual truth, when distinctly represented; and the ultimate appeal, on all moral questions, is not to a jury of scholars, a hierarchy of divines, or the prescriptions of a creed, but to the common sense of the race. (p. 143)

Ripley founded Brook Farm on the principle of substituting “brotherly cooperation” for “selfish competition” (p. 156). He questioned the economic and moral basis of capitalism. He held that if people did the work they desired, and for which they had a talent, the result would be a non-competitive, classless society where each person would achieve personal fulfillment.

Amos Bronson Alcott (1799–1888) was an educator who “believed in the innate goodness of each child whom he taught” (p. 85). Alcott “realized how Unitarianism’s positive and inclusive vision of humanity accorded with his own” (p. 85). He advocated strong social controls in order to socialize children: infractions were reported to the entire group of students, which then prescribed the proper punishment. The entire group was punished for the bad behavior of a single student. His students were the children of the intellectual elite of Boston, but his methods eventually proved unpopular. The school closed after most of the parents withdrew their children when Alcott insisted upon admitting a black child. Alcott supported William Garrison’s radical abolitionism, and he was a financial supporter of John Brown and his violent attempts to overthrow slavery.

Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882) stirred a great deal of controversy in his American Scholar, an 1832 address to the Harvard Divinity School, because he reinterpreted what it meant for Christ to claim to be divine:

One man was true to what is in you and me. He saw that God incarnates himself in man, and evermore goes forth to take possession of his world. He said, in this jubilee of sublime emotion, “I am divine. Through me, God acts; through me, he speaks. Would you see God, see me; or, see thee, when thou also thinkest as I now think.” (p. 103)

Although relatively individualistic by the standards of Transcendentalism, Emerson proposed that by believing in their own divine purpose, people would have the courage to stand up for social justice. The divinely powered individual was thus linked to disrupting the social order.

Theodore Parker (1810–1860) was a writer, public intellectual, and model for religiously motivated liberal activism. He wrote that “God is alive and in every person” (p. 143). Gura interprets Parker as follows: “God is not what we are, but what we need to make our lives whole, and one way to realize this is through selfless devotion to God’s creation” (p. 218).

Parker was concerned about crime and poverty, and he was deeply opposed to the Mexican war and to slavery. He blamed social conditions for crime and poverty, condemning merchants: “We are all brothers, rich and poor, American and foreign, put here by the same God, for the same end, and journeying towards the same heaven, and owing mutual help” (p. 219). In Parker’s view, slavery is “the blight of this nation” and was the real reason for the Mexican war, because it was aimed at expanding the slave states. Parker was far more socially active than Emerson, becoming one of the most prominent abolitionists and a secret financial supporter of John Brown.

When Parker looked back on the history of the Puritans, he saw them as standing for moral principles. He approved in particular of John Eliot, who preached to the Indians and attempted to convert them to Christianity.

Nevertheless, Parker is a bit of an enigma because, despite being a prominent abolitionist and favoring racial integration of schools and churches, he asserted that the Anglo-Saxon race was “more progressive” than all others.[1] He was also prone to making condescending and disparaging comments about the potential of Africans for progress.

William Henry Channing (1810–1884) was a Transcendentalist writer and Christian socialist. He held that economic activity conducted in the spirit of Christian love would establish a more egalitarian society that would include immigrants, the poor, slaves, prisoners, and the mentally ill. He worked tirelessly on behalf of the cause of emancipation and in the Freedman’s Bureau designed to provide social services for former slaves. Although an admirer of Emerson, he rejected Emerson’s individualism, writing in a letter to Theodore Parker that it was one of his deepest convictions that the human race “is inspired as well as the individual; that humanity is a growth from the Divine Life as well as man; and indeed that the true advancement of the individual is dependent upon the advancement of a generation, and that the law of this is providential, the direct act of the Being of beings.”[2]

* * *

In the 1840s there was division between relatively individualist Trancendentalists like Emerson who “valued individual spiritual growth and self-expression,” and “social reformers like Brownson, Ripley, and increasingly, Parker” (p. 137). In 1844 Emerson joined a group of speakers that included abolitionists, but many Transcendentalists questioned his emphasis on self-reliance given the Mexican war, upheaval in Europe, and slavery. They saw self-reliance as ineffectual in combating the huge aggregation of interests these represented. Elizabeth Peabody lamented Emerson’s insistence that a Transcendentalist should not labor “for small objects, such as Abolition, Temperance, Political Reforms, &c.” (p. 216). (She herself was an advocate of the Kindergarten movement as well as Native American causes [p. 270].)

But Emerson did oppose slavery. An 1844 speech praised Caribbean blacks for rising to high occupations after slavery: “This was not the case in the United States, where descendants of Africans were precluded any opportunity to be a white person’s equal. This only reflected on the moral bankruptcy of American white society, however, for ‘the civility of no race can be perfect whilst another race is degraded’” (p. 245).

Emerson and other Transcendentalists were outraged by the Fugitive Slave Law of 1850. Gura notes that for Emerson, “the very landscape seemed robbed of its beauty, and he even had trouble breathing because of the ‘infamy’ in the air” (p. 246). After the John Brown debacle, Emerson was “glad to see that the terror at disunion and anarchy is disappearing,” for the price of slaves’ freedom might demand it (p. 260). Both Emerson and Thoreau commented on Brown’s New England Puritan heritage. Emerson lobbied Lincoln on slavery, and when Lincoln emancipated the slaves, he said “Our hurts are healed; the health of the nation is repaired” (p. 265). He thought the war worth fighting because of it.

* * *

After the Civil War, idealism lost its preeminence, and American intellectuals increasingly embraced materialism. Whereas Locke had been the main inspiration for materialism earlier in the century, materialism was now exemplified by Darwin, Auguste Comte, and William Graham Sumner. After the Civil War, the Transcendentalists’ contributions to American intellectual discourse “remained vital, if less remarked, particularly among those who kept alive a dream of a common humanity based in the irreducible equality of all souls” (p. 271). One of the last Transcendentalists, Octavius Brooks Frothingham, wrote that Transcendentalism was being “suppressed by the philosophy of experience, which, under different names, was taking possession of the speculative world” (p. 302). The enemies of Transcendentalism were “positivists” (p. 302). After Emerson’s death, George Santayana commented that he “was a cheery, child-like soul, impervious to the evidence of evil” (pp. 304–305).

By the early twentieth century, then, Transcendentalism was a distant memory, and the new materialists had won the day. The early part of the twentieth century was the high water mark of Darwinism in the social sciences. It was common at that time to think that there were important differences between the races in both intelligence and moral qualities. Not only did races differ, they were in competition with each other for supremacy. Whereas later in the century, Jewish intellectuals led the battle against Darwinism in the social sciences, racialist ideas were part of the furniture of intellectual life—commonplace among intellectuals of all stripes, including a significant number of Jewish racial nationalists concerned about the racial purity and political power of the Jewish people.[3]

The victory of Darwinisn was short-lived, however, as the left became reinvigorated by the rise of several predominantly Jewish intellectual and political movements: Marxism, Boasian anthropology, psychoanalysis, and other ideologies that collectively have dominated intellectual discourse ever since.[4]

*  *  *

So what is one to make of this prominent strand of egalitarian universalism in nineteenth-century America? The first thing that strikes one about Transcendentalism is that it is an outgrowth of the Puritan strain of American culture. Transcendentalism was centered in New England, and all its major figures were descendants of the Puritans. I have written previously of Puritanism as a rather short-lived group evolutionary strategy, supplementing the work of David Sloan Wilson on Calvinism, the forerunner of Puritanism.[5] The basic idea is that, like Jews, Puritans during their heyday had a strong psychological sense of group membership combined with social controls that minutely regulated the behavior of ingroup members. Their group strategy depended on being able to control a particular territory—Massachusetts—but by the end of theseventeenth century, they were unable to regulate the borders of the colony due to the policy of the British colonial authorities, hence the government of Massachusetts ceased being the embodiment of the Puritans as a group. In the absence of political control, Puritanism gradually lost the power to enforce its religious strictures (e.g., church attendance and orthodox religious beliefs), and the population changed as the economic prosperity created by the Puritans drew an influx of non-Puritans into the area.

The Puritans were certainly highly intelligent, and they sought a system of beliefs that was firmly grounded in contemporary thinking. One striking aspect of Gura’s treatment is his description of earnest proto-Transcendentalists trekking over to Germany to imbibe the wisdom of German philosophy and producing translations and lengthy commentaries on this body of work for an American audience.

But the key to Puritanism as a group strategy, like other strategies, was the control of behavior of group members. As with Calvin’s original doctrine, there was a great deal of supervision of individual behavior. Historian David Hackett Fischer describes Puritan New England’s ideology of “Ordered Liberty” as “the freedom to order one’s acts in a godly way—but not in any other.”[6] This “freedom as public obligation” implied strong social control of thought, speech, and behavior.

Both New England and East Anglia (the center of Puritanism in England) had the lowest relative rates of private crime (murder, theft, mayhem), but the highest rates of public violence—“the burning of rebellious servants, the maiming of political dissenters, the hanging of Quakers, the execution of witches.”[7] This record is entirely in keeping with Calvinist tendencies in Geneva.[8]

The legal system was designed to enforce intellectual, political, and religious conformity as well as to control crime. Louis Taylor Merrill describes the “civil and religious strait-jacket that the Massachusetts theocrats applied to dissenters.”[9] The authorities, backed by the clergy, controlled blasphemous statements and confiscated or burned books deemed to be offensive. Spying on one’s neighbors and relatives was encouraged. There were many convictions for criticizing magistrates, the governor, or the clergy. Unexcused absence from church was fined, with people searching the town for absentees. Those who fell asleep in church were also fined. Sabbath violations were punished as well. A man was even penalized for publicly kissing his wife as he greeted her on his doorstep upon his return from a three-year sea voyage.

Kevin Phillips traces the egalitarian, anti-hierarchical spirit of Yankee republicanism back to the settlement of East Anglia by Angles and Jutes in post-Roman times.[10] They produced “a civic culture of high literacy, town meetings, and a tradition of freedom,” distinguished from other British groups by their “comparatively large ratios of freemen and small numbers of servi and villani.”[11] President John Adams cherished the East Anglian heritage of “self-determination, free male suffrage, and a consensual social contract.”[12] East Anglia continued to produce “insurrections against arbitrary power”—the rebellions of 1381 led by Jack Straw, Wat Tyler, and John Ball; Clarence’s rebellion of 1477; and Robert Kett’s rebellion of 1548. All of these rebellions predated the rise of Puritanism, suggesting an ingrained cultural tendency.

This emphasis on relative egalitarianism and consensual, democ­ratic government are tendencies characteristic of Northern European peoples as a result of a prolonged evolutionary history as hunter-gatherers in the north of Europe.[13] But these tendencies are certainly not center stage when thinking about the political tendencies of the Transcendentalists.

What is striking is the moral fervor of the Puritans. Puritans tended to pursue utopian causes framed as moral issues. They were susceptible to appeals to a “higher law,” and they tended to believe that the principal purpose of government is moral. New England was the most fertile ground for “the perfectibility of man creed,” and the “father of a dozen ‘isms.’”[14] There was a tendency to paint political alternatives as starkly contrasting moral imperatives, with one side portrayed as evil incarnate—inspired by the devil.

Whereas in the Puritan settlements of Massachusetts the moral fervor was directed at keeping fellow Puritans in line, in the nineteenth century it was directed at the entire country. The moral fervor that had inspired Puritan preachers and magistrates to rigidly enforce laws on fornication, adultery, sleeping in church, or criticizing preachers was universalized and aimed at correcting the perceived ills of capitalism and slavery.

Puritans waged holy war on behalf of moral righteousness even against their own cousins—perhaps a form of altruistic punishment as defined by Ernst Fehr and Simon Gächter.[15] Altruistic punishment refers to punishing people even at a cost to oneself. Altruistic punishment is found more often among cooperative hunter-gatherer groups than among groups, such as Jews, based on extended kinship.[16]

Whatever the political and economic complexities that led to the Civil War, it was the Yankee moral condemnation of slavery that inspired and justified the massive carnage of closely related Anglo-Americans on behalf of slaves from Africa. Militarily, the war with the Confederacy was the greatest sacrifice in lives and property ever made by Americans.[17] Puritan moral fervor and punitiveness are also evident in the call of the Congregationalist minister at Henry Ward Beecher’s Old Plymouth Church in New York during the Second World War for “exterminating the German people . . . the sterilization of 10,000,000 German soldiers and the segregation of the woman.”[18]

It is interesting that the moral fervor the Puritans directed at ingroup and outgroup members strongly resembles that of the Old Testament prophets who railed against Jews who departed from God’s law, and against the uncleanness or even the inhumanity of non-Jews. Indeed, it has often been noted that the Puritans saw themselves as the true chosen people of the Bible. In the words of Samuel Wakeman, a prominentseventeenth-century Puritan preacher: “Jerusalem was, New England is; they were, you are God’s own, God’s covenant people; put but New England’s name instead of Jerusalem.”[19] “They had left Europe which was their ‘Egypt,’ their place of enslavement, and had gone out into the wilderness on a messianic journey, to found the New Jerusalem.”[20]

Whereas Puritanism as a group evolutionary strategy crumbled when the Puritans lost control of Massachusetts, Diaspora Jews were able to maintain their group integrity even without control over a specific territory for well over 2,000 years. This attests to the greater ethnocentrism of Jews. But, although relatively less ethnocentric, the Puritans were certainly not lacking in moralistic aggression toward members of their ingroup, even when the boundaries of the ingroup were expanded to include all of America, or indeed all of humanity. And while the Puritans were easily swayed by moral critiques of white America, because of their stronger sense of ingroup identity, Jews have been remarkably resistant to moralistic critiques of Judaism.[21]

With the rise of the Jewish intellectual and political movements described in The Culture of Critique, the descendants of the Puritans readily joined the chorus of moral condemnation of America.

The lesson here is that in large part the problem confronting whites stems from the psychology of moralistic self-punishment exemplified at the extreme by the Puritans and their intellectual descendants, but also apparent in a great many other whites. As I have noted elsewhere:

 

Once Europeans were convinced that their own people were morally bankrupt, any and all means of punishment should be used against their own people. Rather than see other Europeans as part of an encompassing ethnic and tribal community, fellow Europeans were seen as morally blameworthy and the appropriate target of altruistic punishment. For Westerners, morality is individualistic—violations of communal norms . . . are punished by altruistic aggression. . . .

The best strategy for a collectivist group like the Jews for destroying Europeans therefore is to convince the Europeans of their own moral bankruptcy. A major theme of [The Culture of Critique] is that this is exactly what Jewish intellectual movements have done. They have presented Judaism as morally superior to European civilization and European civilization as morally bankrupt and the proper target of altruistic punishment. The consequence is that once Europeans are convinced of their own moral depravity, they will destroy their own people in a fit of altruistic punishment. The general dismantling of the culture of the West and eventually its demise as anything resembling an ethnic entity will occur as a result of a moral onslaught triggering a paroxysm of altruistic punishment. Thus the intense effort among Jewish intellectuals to continue the ideology of the moral superiority of Judaism and its role as undeserving historical victim while at the same time continuing the onslaught on the moral legitimacy of the West. [22]

 

The Puritan legacy in American culture is indeed pernicious, especially since the bar of morally correct behavior has been continually raised to the point that any white group identification has been pathologized. As someone with considerable experience in the academic world, I can attest to feeling like a wayward heretic back in seventeenth-century Massachusetts when confronted, as I often am, by academic thought police. It’s the moral fervor of these people that stands out. The academic world has become a Puritan congregation of stifling thought control, enforced by moralistic condemnations that aseventeenth-century Puritan minister could scarcely surpass. In my experience, this thought control is far worse in the East coast colleges and universities founded by the Puritans than elsewhere in academia—a fitting reminder of the continuing influence of Puritanism in American life.

Given this state of affairs, what sorts of therapy might one suggest? To an evolutionary psychologist, this moralistic aggression seems obviously adaptive for maintaining the boundaries and policing the behavior of a close-knit group. The psychology of moralistic aggression against deviating Jews (often termed “self-hating Jews”) has doubtless served Jews quite well over the centuries. Similarly, groups of Angles, Jutes, and their Puritan descendants doubtlessly benefited greatly from moralistic aggression because of its effectiveness in enforcing group norms and punishing cheaters and defectors.

There is nothing inherently wrong with moralistic aggression. The key is to convince whites to alter their moralistic aggression in a more adaptive direction in light of Darwinism. After all, the object of moralistic aggression is quite malleable. Ethnonationalist Jews in Israel use their moral fervor to rationalize the dispossession and debasement of the Palestinians, but many of the same American Jews who fervently support Jewish ethnonationalism in Israel feel a strong sense of moralistic outrage at vestiges of white identity in the United States.

A proper Darwinian sense of moralistic aggression would be directed at those of all ethnic backgrounds who have engineered or are maintaining the cultural controls that are presently dispossessing whites of their historic homelands. The moral basis of this proposal is quite clear:

 

(1) There are genetic differences between peoples, thus different peoples have legitimate conflicts of interest.[23]

(2) Ethnocentrism has deep psychological roots that cause us to feel greater attraction and trust for those who are genetically similar.[24]

(3) As Frank Salter notes, ethnically homogeneous societies bound by ties of kinship and culture are more likely to be open to redistributive policies such as social welfare.[25]

(4) Ethnic homogeneity is associated with greater social trust and political participation.[26]

(5) Ethnic homogeneity may well be a precondition of political systems characterized by democracy and rule of law.[27]

The problem with the Transcendentalists is that they came along before their intuitions could be examined in the cold light of modern evolutionary science. Lacking any firm foundation in science, they embraced a moral universalism that is ultimately ruinous to people like themselves. And because it is so contrary to our evolved inclinations, their moral universalism needs constant buttressing with all the power of the state—much as the rigorous rules of the Puritans of old required constant surveillance by the authorities.

Of course, the Transcendentalists would have rejected such a “positivist” analysis. Indeed, one might note that modern psychology is on the side of the Puritans in the sense that explicitly held ideologies are able to exert control over the more ancient parts of the brain, including those responsible for ethnocentrism.[28] The Transcendentalist belief that the mind is creative and does not merely respond to external facts is quite accurate in light of modern psychological research. In modern terms, the Transcendentalists were essentially arguing that whatever “the animal wants of man” (to quote Emerson), humans are able to imagine an ideal world and exert effective psychological control over their ethnocentrism. They are even able to suppress desires for territory and descendants that permeate human history and formed an important part of the ideology of the Old Testament—a book that certainly had a huge influence on the original Puritan vision of the New Jerusalem.

Like the Puritans, the Transcendentalists would have doubtlessly acknowledged that some people have difficulty controlling these tendencies. But this is not really a problem, because these people can be forced. The New Jerusalem can become a reality if people are willing to use the state to enforce group norms of thought and behavior. Indeed, there are increasingly strong controls on thought crimes against the multicultural New Jerusalem throughout the West.

The main difference between the Puritan New Jerusalem and the present multicultural one is that the latter will lead to the demise of the very white people who are the mainstays of the current multicultural Zeitgeist. Unlike the Puritan New Jerusalem, the multicultural New Jerusalem will not be controlled by people like themselves, who in the long run will be a tiny, relatively powerless minority.

The ultimate irony is that without altruistic whites willing to be morally outraged by violations of multicultural ideals, the multicultural New Jerusalem is likely to revert to a Darwinian struggle for survival among the remnants. But the high-minded descendants of the Puritans won’t be around to witness it.

Notes

[1] http://www25.uua.org/uuhs/duub/articles/theodoreparker.html ^[3]

[2] http://www.vcu.edu/engweb/transcendentalism/authors/whchanning.html ^[4]

[3] Kevin MacDonald, Separation and Its Discontents: Toward an Evolutionary Theory of Anti-Semitism (Bloomington, Ind.: Firstbooks, 2004), Chapter 5.

[4] Kevin MacDonald, The Culture of Critique: An Evolutionary Analysis of Jewish Involvement in Twentieth-Century Intellectual and Political Movements (Bloomington, Ind.: Firstbooks, 2002).

[5] David Sloan Wilson, Darwin’s Cathedral (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002); Kevin MacDonald, (2002). “Diaspora Peoples,” Preface to the First Paperback Edition of A People That Shall Dwell Alone: Judaism as a Group Evolutionary Strategy (Lincoln, Nebr.: iUniverse, 2002).

[6]  David H. Fischer, Albion’s Seed: Four British Folkways in America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989), 202.

[7]  Albion’s Seed, 189.

[8] See Darwin’s Cathedral.

[9] Louis T. Merrill, “The Puritan Policeman,” American Sociological Review 10 (1945): 766–76, p. 766.

[10] Kevin Phillips, The Cousins’ Wars: Politics, Civil Warfare, and the Triumph of Anglo-America (New York: Basic Books, 1999).

[11] Ibid., 26.

[12] Ibid., 27.

[13] Kevin MacDonald, “What Makes Western Civilization Unique?” in Cultural Insurrections: Essays on Western Civilization, Jewish Influence, and Anti-Semitism (Atlanta: The Occidental Press, 2007).

[14] Albion’s Seed, 357.

[15] Ernst Fehr and Simon Gächter, “Altruistic Punishment in Humans,” Nature 412 (2002): 137-40.

[16] See my discussion in “Diaspora Peoples.”

[17] The Cousins’ Wars, 477.

[18] Ibid., 556.

[19] A. Hertzberg, The Jews in America: Four Centuries of an Uneasy Encounter (New York: Columbia University Press, 1998), 20–21.

[20] Ibid., 20.

[21] See Kevin MacDonald, “The Israel Lobby: A Case Study in Jewish Influence,” The Occidental Quarterly 7 (Fall 2007): 33–58.

[22] Preface to the paperback edition of The Culture of Critique.

[23] Frank K. Salter, On Genetic Interests: Family, Ethnicity, and Humanity in an Age of Mass Migration (New Brunswick, N.J.: Transaction, 2006).

[24] J. Philippe Rushton, “Ethnic Nationalism, Evolutionary Psychology, and Genetic Similarity Theory,” Nations and Nationalism 11 (2005): 489–507.

[25] Frank K. Salter, Welfare, Ethnicity and Altruism: New Data and Evolutionary Theory (London: Routledge, 2005).

[26] Robert Putnam, “E Pluribus Unum: Diversity and Community in the Twenty-first Century,” The 2006 Johan Skytte Prize Lecture, Scandinavian Journal of Political Studies 30 (2007): 137–74.

[27] Jerry Z. Muller, “Us and Them: The Enduring Power of Ethnic Nationalism,” Foreign Affairs, March/April 2008.

[28] Kevin MacDonald, “Psychology and White Ethnocentrism,” The Occidental Quarterly 6 (Winter, 2006–2007): 7–46.

Source: TOQ, vol. 8, no. 2 (Summer 2008).

 

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Viol de masse des Françaises en 1945

 

Viol de masse des Françaises en 1945 (1 + 2)

The Underman as Cultural Icon

The Underman as Cultural Icon:
The Saga of “Blanket Man”

By Kerry Bolton

Ex: http://www.counter-currents.com/

“Blanket Man,” known in a previous life as Bernard (Ben) Hana, was a filth ridden alcoholic, given to drinking methylated spirits attired in nothing other than a blanket and a loin cloth. He shouted or mumbled abuse at passers-by, as he squatted on the streets of Wellington with others of his ilk. He seemed harmless enough, and this writer has nothing personal against him or the way he chose to lead his life.

What I do find of socio-cultural interest is the manner by which others have turned him into a cultural icon. Such elevation to the presently esteemed status of Anti-Hero says something about the mentality of those who have revived the “Cult of the Noble Savage” that became the rage of effete upper class French society prior to the Revolution. It is a symptom of what Lothrop Stoddard called “the menace of the underman” and “the revolt against civilization.”[1]

Mr. Hana has a Facebook page ^[2] established by his admirers. There one can learn the fundamentals of his life; a hagiography, one might say. He was born February 8, 1957 and died as the result of his celebrated lifestyle choice on January 15, 2012. He was a “homeless man who wandered the inner city streets of Wellington, New Zealand. Ben was a local fixture and something of a celebrity and was typically on the footpath in the precincts of Courtenay Place which has 24-hour activity.”[2]

When the scribe of Saint Bernard alludes to Courtenay Place’s “24-hour activity,” what this means is that the nightlife brings out lowlifes who engage in drinking, vomiting, excreting in the doorways of shops, and other expressions of societal rebellion.

But what makes Saint Bernard especially esteemed by the champions of the generic Underman is that he was a Maori, complete with matted, filthy, dreadlocked hair, and perhaps the epitome of what liberals, nihilists, and anarchists see as the living vestige of the Maori as he was, prior to European colonization: the “noble savage,” existing in the midst of a modern Western city.

Saint Bernard, despite sizzling his brain with alcohol and marijuana, was no fool, and on the few occasions the City Council attempted to do something about his plight, he had a ready answer for the Courts, exploiting the deference New Zealand society is obliged to show for all things “Maori,” whether real or contrived:

Ben was a self-proclaimed devotee of the Māori sun god Tama-nui-te-rā, and claimed that he should wear as few items of clothing as possible, as an act of religious observance. As a result, he was also tempted from time to time to remove all his clothing, which resulted in the consequent attendance of police officers.[3]

Another blogsite devoted to “Brother,” as he called himself, euologizes his contempt for authority, including his squatting with others of like state, at Wellington’s Cenotaph near Parliament Buildings.[4] On this blogsite one can read comments by, for the most part, admiring youths, aptly expressed in pidgin English, who were in such awe that they could only admire Saint Bernard from afar, as if a Christ-like figure too divine to be approachable, but an individual around which myths and legends can be spun:

• “When he i [sic] first saw blanket man he gave me a big as nod [sic] and he has a smile that makes you feel warm inside.”[5]
• From someone who wants to follow the way, the truth, and the life: “Inspiring Shit When i`m A Bigg Girll ii Wanna Bee Justt Like Him He`sz My idol.”[6]
• “mayn this dude is fucking awesome,, gu cunt. i always go to wellie and see him and he always smiles and nods (and mumbles haha) Hez a legend!”[7]

Such is the “evolution” of New Zealand “English” under several decades of liberal education, where grammar and spelling are not corrected by teachers lest the “creativity” of the child is ruined and s/he is left with a feeling of having failed.

However, Saint Bernard became an icon to more than just ill-educated youngsters. Many of the artistic, intellectual and scribbling classes see him as “a carefree spirit,” rather than an individual who became unbalanced after killing his best friend as the result of drunk driving and died through alcoholism. Marcelina Mastalerz in an interview with “Brother” relates her first impressions of his countenance:

He has become an iconic figure of Wellington’s Cuba Mall and Courtenay Place. Wrapped in a purple blanket, nearly naked, with his long dreads and carefree spirit, to many he is an annoying homeless man who simply won’t go away and who is destroying the beautiful, clean image of our city.[8]

At least this was my opinion of him when I first arrived to Wellington. I would see him, make a sour face and above all avoid eye contact as I quickly crossed the street. After all, his lifestyle and that of mine seemed to illustrate two contrasting worlds, which neither of us would ever understand.

But I started to wonder, who is this ever-present figure, who has no shame in living a lifestyle that society finds unacceptable and degenerating? Surely he must be either an alcoholic, drug addict, insane or all of the above, right?

No. “Brother,” what he likes to call himself, is neither an alcoholic[9] nor an unhappy man. He likes his lifestyle, and above all the freedom, which it gives him.[10]

Ms. Mastalerz was surely blinded by the Light, not to have perceived Saint Bernard as an alcoholic, if not a drug addict. What she saw was a Tolstoyan visage of a man who had succeeded in throwing off all the encumbrances of Civilization, and returned to the “state of Nature” that is heralded by effete intellectuals and bourgeoisie who could not last a day in such a state, but who envy those who seem “happy” to live in filth, rationalized as living an “alternative lifestyle,” or as Ms. Mastalerz and her type insist, living “carefree” and in “freedom.” It is what Lothrop Stoddard called “the lure of the primitive.”[11]

In the course of the interview Saint Bernard relates the gospel of the Underman quite articulately, and one readily sees why he is so irresistible to those who feel the burden of Civilization.

M: I saw the documentary Te Whanau o Aotearoa — Caretakers of the Land. In it you set to establish a “village of peace”– Aotearoa. How is that plan going?

B: It’s getting better. We established a political party “Te Whanau o Our Tea Roa.” There’s one million of us.[12] We live love, peace, harmony, equality at the top irrespective of age or gender.

M: If you had the power to do anything, what would you do?

B: I don’t want power. Power belongs to the people.[13]

Saint Bernard, beneath the filthy façade, worn like a halo, articulated the very ideology that is upheld by the multitude of purveyors of Western decline, from the denizens of the streets to Green Party Members of Parliament, the Secretary General of the United Nations Organization, or the President of the United States: “love, peace, harmony, equality at the top irrespective of age or gender,” the present-day catch cries of Western decay; the contemporary counterpart to “Liberty, Equality, Fraternity.”

It is no wonder that Saint Bernard became such an admired figure: This is the Age of the Anti-Hero. In bygone days, our heroes were great soldiers and explorers. Today, a hero can be a filthy drunk who lived, cussed, smoked, and crapped on the city streets. A figure who would be one of a multitude in Calcutta; a figure who will perhaps one day also be one of a multitude in all the cities of a bygone Western Civilization: the Fellaheen.

Another scribe for Saint Bernard, Nyree Barrett, provided a class conflict analysis of “Brother”:

Hana pervades the experience of Wellington, whether we like it or not, he is one of the most visual men in the city and because of this he carries a certain amount of celebrity status. He is the protagonist of Abi King-Jones and Errol Wright’s documentary Te Whanau o Aotearoa, the subject of a Wikipedia site, the inspiration for photographic assignments and poetry (albeit bad poetry), and a “character” to be dressed up as. During the recent rugby sevens tournament I saw a group of young men wearing fake dreads and versions of Hana’s distinct purple blanket.

He is imitated, yet when he discusses his many political ideas through his movement Te Whanau o Aotearoa, they are deemed unimportant. This quasi-political party seeks a reclamation of Aotearoa, from its current state as a bureaucratic colony to an egalitarian and racially non-exclusive land. The alienation and inequality in New Zealand is, for Hana, only going to be solved through a complete upheaval of the current system. This sounds an impossibility in a society so entrenched in hierarchy and class. Despite this, Hana’s ideas do deserve to be heard without his homeless status stifling our reception of them.

If the homeless and mainstream society are ever going to be able to live in one space in harmony, as Hana suggests we do in his ambitious vision of Aotearoa, we must first question and change the mainstream perception of life on the streets.[14]

Here again, Saint Bernard is perceived as a great philosopher and political leader, rather than as a wretch who squatted in filth. He is the New Zealand liberal’s version of the most famous “blanket man” of all: Gandhi. He is extolled as the leader of a “political movement,” which seems never to have amounted to to more than a half-dozen other homeless pot smokers who squatted about him within the central business district.

The latest eulogy to Saint Bernard is a play which we are told will further “immortalize” him. “The Road That Wasn’t There,” to be performed at the world fringe festival at Edinburgh, Scotland, was “inspired” by Hana. Playwright Ralph McCubbin Howell, now resident in Britain, wanted to write something about New Zealand “while taking inspiration from folktales.” “Who better to draw on than a man who became a legend within his own lifetime?”[15]

The play is aimed at children, using puppets, and Hana has been made into a puppet of what is — presumably unintentionally — monstrous visage. Other tributes include a song created in 2012 in tribute to Hana, recorded and released by ZM Radio;[16] and a 2007 Victoria University presentation on Hana by sociology lecturer Mike Lloyd and Doctoral student Bronwyn McGovern.

When Hana died of alcohol poisoning in 2012, a makeshift shrine was created at Courtenay Place, where messages were written on the walls of the ANZ Bank building, and flowers, candles, food and other items were left in tribute. Cecilia Wade-Brown, the Green Party’s Mayor of Wellington, were among those who paid tribute to Hana.

The local Anarchists — a melange of pot-smoking street people and mentally aberrant, histrionic bourgeoisie — quite naturally proclaimed Hana as one of their own and produced a signed, limited edition run of prints depicting the frail, doddering “Brother” as a heroic, strident revolutionary. To the Anarchists, “Blanket Man led quite and [sic] extraordinary life and will be missed by many Wellingtonians and New Zealanders alike following his recent death.”[17]

Where once bards wrote of Knights they now write of Blanket Man. He is an archetype of civilization’s decay, and as such is instinctively embraced by those, whether journalists, lecturers, street kids, or artists, high and low, who feel that civilization is an imposition. I saw the future visage of the Fellaheen West, and it squatted in filth on the streets of Wellington.

Words

1. L Stoddard, The Revolt Against Civilization: The Menace of the Underman (London: Chapman & Hall, 1922), republished 2012 by Wermod & Wermod.

2. “R.I.P. Blanket Man,” “About,” http://www.facebook.com/pages/RIP-BLANKET-MAN/273891829339723?sk=info ^[2]

3. Ibid.

4. “Blanket Man,” http://www.bebo.com/BlogView.jsp?MemberId=3895594292&BlogId=3895641359 ^[6]

5. Dr. Stevo, Ibid.

6. Nirvana, ibid.

7. Minta, ibid.

8. Wellington has long since stopped being “beautiful’ or “clean.” I have to question the aesthetic sensibilities of Ms. Mastalerz.

9. Apparently drinking methylated spirits is not to be regarded as a sign of alcoholism.

10. Marcelina Mastalerz, “A Different Way of Life: Interview with ‘Brother’ (a.k.a ‘Blanket Man’),” http://www.bebo.com/BlogView.jsp?MemberId=3895594292&BlogId=3895641359&PageNbr=2 ^[6]

11. L. Stoddard, chapter IV.

12. Probably an exaggeration.

13. Marcelina Mastalerz.

14. Nyree Barrett, “Perceiving homelessness in Wellington,” http://www.bebo.com/BlogView.jsp?MemberId=3895594292&BlogId=3895641359&PageNbr=2 ^[6]

15. Sophie Speer, “Myth of Blanket Man takes time trip at coveted Fringe,” The Dominion Post, Wellington, June 26, 2012, http://www.stuff.co.nz/dominion-post/culture/performance/7172069/Wellingtons-Blanket-Man-immortalised-in-play ^[7]

16. http://www.zmonline.com/player/ondemand/blanketman-song ^[8]

17. Wellington Craftivism Collective, http://wellingtoncraftivism.blogspot.co.nz/2012/01/blanket-man-limited-edition-prints.html ^[8]

 

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Article printed from Counter-Currents Publishing: http://www.counter-currents.com

URL to article: http://www.counter-currents.com/2012/06/the-underman-as-cultural-icon-the-saga-of-blanket-man/

Fabrice LUCHINI à propos de Louis-Ferdinand CÉLINE

 

Fabrice LUCHINI

à propos de Louis-Ferdinand CÉLINE

Lettre sur l’identité à mes amis souverainistes, par Dominique Venner

Lettre sur l’identité à mes amis souverainistes,

par Dominique Venner

Ex: http://fr.novopress.info/

Quand on appartient à une nation associée à Saint Louis, Philippe le Bel, Richelieu, Louis XIV ou Napoléon, un pays qui, à la fin du XVIIe siècle, était appelé « la grande nation » (la plus peuplée et la plus redoutable), il est cruel d’encaisser les reculs historiques répétés depuis les lendemains de Waterloo, 1870, 1940 et encore 1962, fin ignominieuse de la souveraineté française en Algérie. Une certaine fierté souffre nécessairement.

Dès les années 1930, beaucoup d’esprits français parmi les plus audacieux avaient imaginé trouver dans une Europe à venir en entente avec l’Allemagne, un substitut à cet affaiblissement constant de la France. Après la catastrophe que fut la Seconde Guerre mondiale (qui amplifiait celle de 14-18), naquit un projet légitime en soi. Il fallait interdire à tout jamais une nouvelle saignée mortelle entre Français et Allemands. L’idée était de lier ensemble les deux grands peuples frères de l’ancien Empire carolingien. D’abord par une association économique (la Communauté Européenne du Charbon et de l’Acier), puis par une association politique. Le général de Gaulle voulut concrétiser ce projet par le Traité de l’Elysée (22 janvier 1963), que les Etats-Unis, dans leur hostilité, firent capoter en exerçant des pressions sur la République fédérale allemande.

Ensuite, on est entré dans les dérives technocratiques et mondialistes qui ont conduit à l’usine à gaz appelée “Union européenne”. En pratique, celle-ci est la négation absolue de son appellation. La pseudo “Union européenne” est devenue le pire obstacle à une véritable entente politique européenne respectueuse des particularités des peuples de l’ancien Empire carolingien. L’Europe, il faut le rappeler, c’est d’abord une unité de civilisation multimillénaire depuis Homère, mais c’est aussi un espace potentiel de puissance  et une espérance pour un avenir qui reste à édifier.

Pourquoi une espérance de puissance ? Parce qu’aucune des nations européennes d’aujourd’hui, ni la France, ni l’Allemagne, ni l’Italie, malgré des apparences bravaches, ne sont plus des États souverains.

Il y a trois attributs principaux de la souveraineté :

1^er attribut : la capacité de faire la guerre et de conclure la paix. Les USA, la Russie, Israël ou la Chine le peuvent. Pas la France. C’est fini pour elle depuis la fin de la guerre d’Algérie (1962), en dépit des efforts du général de Gaulle et de la force de frappe qui ne sera jamais utilisée par la France de son propre chef (sauf si les Etats-Unis ont disparu, ce qui est peu prévisible). Autre façon de poser la question : pour qui donc meurent les soldats français tués en Afghanistan ? Certainement pas pour la France qui n’a rien à faire là-bas, mais pour les Etats-Unis. Nous sommes les supplétifs des USA. Comme l’Allemagne et l’Italie, la France n’est qu’un État vassal de la grande puissance suzeraine atlantique. Il vaut mieux le savoir pour retrouver notre fierté autrement.

2^ème attribut de la souveraineté : la maîtrise du territoire et de la population. Pouvoir distinguer entre les vrais nationaux et les autres… On connaît la réalité : c’est l’État français qui, par sa politique, ses lois, ses tribunaux, a organisé le « grand remplacement » des populations, nous imposant la préférence immigrée et islamique avec 8 millions d’Arabo-musulmans (en attendant les autres) porteurs d’une autre histoire, d’une autre civilisation et d’un autre avenir (la charia).

3^ème attribut de la souveraineté : la monnaie. On sait ce qu’il en est.

Conclusion déchirante : la France, comme État, n’est plus souveraine et n’a plus de destin propre. C’est la conséquence des catastrophes du siècle de 1914 (le XXe siècle) et du grand recul de toute l’Europe et des Européens.

Mais il y a un « mais » : si la France n’existe plus comme État souverain, le peuple français et la nation existent encore, malgré tous les efforts destinés à les dissoudre en individus déracinés ! C’est le grand paradoxe déstabilisateur pour un esprit français. On nous a toujours appris à confondre l’identité et la souveraineté en enseignant que la nation est une création de l’État, ce qui, pour les Français, est historiquement faux.

C’est pour moi un très ancien sujet de réflexion que j’avais résumé naguère dans une tribune libre publiée dans Le Figaro du 1^er février 1999 sous le titre : « La souveraineté n’est pas l’identité ». Je le mettrai en ligne un jour prochain à titre documentaire.

Non, la souveraineté de l’État ne se confond pas avec l’identité nationale. En France, de par sa tradition universaliste et centraliste, l’Etat fut depuis plusieurs siècles l’ennemi de la nation charnelle et de ses communautés constitutives. L’État a toujours été l’acteur acharné du déracinement des Français et de leur transformation en Hexagonaux interchangeables. Il a toujours été l’acteur des ruptures dans la tradition nationale. Voyez la fête du 14 juillet : elle célèbre une répugnante émeute et non un souvenir grandiose d’unité. Voyez le ridicule emblème de la République française : une Marianne de plâtre coiffée d’un bonnet révolutionnaire. Voyez les affreux logos qui ont été imposés pour remplacer les armoiries des régions traditionnelles. Souvenez-vous qu’en 1962, l’État a utilisé toute sa force contre les Français d’Algérie abandonnés à leur malheur. De même, aujourd’hui, il n’est pas difficile de voir que l’État pratique la préférence immigrée (constructions de mosquées, légalisation de la viande hallal) au détriment des indigènes.

Il n’y a rien de nouveau dans cette hargne de l’État contre la nation vivante. La République jacobine n’a fait que suivre l’exemple des Bourbons, ce que Tocqueville a bien montré dans L’Ancien Régime et la Révolution avant Taine et d’autres historiens. Nos manuels scolaires nous ont inculqué une admiration béate pour la façon dont les Bourbons ont écrasé la « féodalité », c’est-à-dire la noblesse et les communautés qu’elle représentait. Politique vraiment géniale ! En étranglant la noblesse et les communautés enracinées, cette dynastie détruisait le fondement de l’ancienne monarchie. Ainsi, à la fin du XVIIIe siècle, la Révolution individualiste (droits de l’homme) triomphait en France alors qu’elle échouait partout ailleurs en Europe grâce à une féodalité et à des communautés restées vigoureuses. Relisez ce qu’en dit Renan dans sa Réforme intellectuelle et morale de la France (disponible en poche et sur Kindle). La réalité, c’est qu’en France l’État n’est pas le défenseur de la nation. C’est une machine de pouvoir qui a sa logique propre, passant volontiers au service des ennemis de la nation et devenant l’un des principaux agents de déconstruction identitaire.

[cc] Novopress.info, 2012, Dépêches libres de copie et diffusion sous réserve de mention de la source d'origine [http://fr.novopress.info/]

Lovecraft und die Inszenierung der großen Niederlage

„I Am Providence“ – Lovecraft und die Inszenierung der großen Niederlage. Mahnung und Forderung

Geschrieben von: Dietrich Müller  

 

Ex: http://www.blauenarzisse.de/

 

„I am Providence” – ich bin die Vorsehung. Diese Worte kann man auf dem Grabstein von Howard Phillips Lovecraft lesen. Es sind irgendwie trotzige Worte, sie wirken seltsam, wenn man sich die Photographien dieses Mannes betrachtet: Ein feminines, leicht verkniffenes Gesicht, das mehr auf unzufriedene Schüchternheit schließen lässt. Das Gesicht eines Hintergrundmenschen. Frei von Ausstrahlung oder zupackender Lebenskraft. Die Worte auf dem Grabstein klingen mehr nach einem Triumph, welchen wir scheinbar nicht entschlüsseln können.

Was für einen Sinn soll es haben, sich mit diesem Mann zu beschäftigen? Er hat eine reiche Korrespondenz hinterlassen und eine überschaubare Anzahl an Geschichten, die dem Horrorgenre zugerechnet werden – das nicht ganz zu Unrecht einen zweifelhaften Ruf genießt. Selbst für einen so früh verstorbenen Mann ist seine Biographie schrecklich mager, sie bietet kaum Höhepunkte, praktisch nichts Erzählenswertes. Geboren, geschrieben, gestorben. Lovecraft in drei Worten.

Was kann die Beschäftigung mit diesem Mann uns schon geben?

Ein Portrait dieses Mannes zu verfassen, scheitert am biographischen Zugriff. Es soll uns auch nur am Rande kümmern, wie er gelebt hat. Aber aus seinen Widersprüchen und seinen Fähigkeiten lässt sich ein Destillat erzeugen, aus dem sich einiges ziehen lässt und gerade dem kritischen Geist Nahrung liefert. Mehr als Fragment kann es freilich nicht sein, das hätte ihm wohl auch gefallen.

Kapitulation hat durchaus etwas Verführerisches. Hat man erst einmal alle Hoffnung persönlich negiert, kann man sich bequem am Leben vorbeidrücken. Widerstand ist anstrengend, nervenaufreibend. Wo man sich an den Zeiten und den Menschen offensiv abmühen muss, da geht es an die Nerven, an die Substanz und der Ausgang bleibt immer mehr als ungewiss. Dem vollendeten Pessimisten ist der Eskapismus nahe.

Beides trifft auf Lovecraft zu. Es ist eine Situation, welche die Kritiker heutiger Zeiten (und gerade die Konservativen und Reaktionäre) mit ihm teilen: Alles wird schlechter, die Entwicklungen werden zur Lawine, wir werden erdrückt. Fast könnte man neidisch werden auf die Kollaborateure und ihr zufriedenes Unzufriedensein zwischen Konsum und banalen Sorgen.

Das Verführerische an der Kapitulation

Viele kennen die Verführung, sich in die Schreibstube zurückzuziehen und abzuwarten, bis die Zeit einen dahinrafft. Diese leise Stimme, dass man sich umsonst abplackt und welch’ hoffnungsloser Irrsinn im dauernden Widerstand liegt. Lieber sich nicht mehr kümmern, nicht mehr teilnehmen. So sind wir doch Lovecrafts Kinder, wenn wir diese Verführung und diese Stimme kennen.

Allein: Das stellt den Zweifel nicht ab. Den Schrecken über soviel Unwissen und Dummheit. Das – durchaus auch wohlige Erschauern – beim Ausblick auf künftige Katastrophen. Man blickt aus dem Fenster und beschaut die lachend-dummen Gesichter und fragt sich, wie sie aussehen werden, wenn das Unheil zu ihnen kommt. Der Gedanke gefällt und beunruhigt uns, er zieht uns magisch an den Schreibtisch, denn ganz können wir es nicht unterlassen, uns doch mitzuteilen – und sei es auch nur dem Papier.

Nicht weil wir Erfolg wünschen oder Ruhm, sondern weil wir den Eselgesichtern einen Vorgeschmack geben wollen auf die bitteren Zeiten, welche sich für uns so klar abzeichnen. Man hat sich zwar versteckt, aber man kann den prophetischen Akt nicht unterlassen, auch weil man das falsche Glück durchschaut, welchem die Kleingeister da huldigen.

Sind wir neidisch auf die Gedankenlosen?

Halt! Moment! Wir wollten doch kapitulieren, uns nicht mehr einmischen! Uns der Passivität hingeben und alles verneinen. Wegducken und in Ruhe vergehen. Der Widerspruch nagt an uns. Sind wir neidisch? Ein unschöner Gedanke. Vielleicht so unschön wie wir und die anderen? Wir leben also weit weg vom prallen Leben. Die Menschen und ihr Alltag widern uns an. Unbegreiflich das dumme Tun und der Lauf der Zeit. Wir künden davon und werden alt. Auch aus der Ferne kann man das Schauen nicht unterlassen, die Gedanken nicht abstellen – die Qual sich zu äußern, die Frage, ob nicht alles anders sein könnte.

Schließlich knüppeln wir die Hoffnung in den Texten tot. Oder versuchen es zumindest. Nicht mehr nur wegen der anderen, viel mehr noch wegen uns selbst. Abfinden wollen wir uns mit dem Ekel und nicht aufbegehren. Die Welt ist uns unbegreiflich, aber wir uns auch. Was soll dieser Unsinn? Das Leben ist und bleibt ein Saustall und es widert uns an. Geht mir aus den Augen! Gehe mir selbst aus den Augen! Ich tue mir selbst furchtbares an, aber wir auch den anderen. Missgunst und Empathie lassen keine Ruhe aufkommen. Auch die Heimat wird Gefängnis.

Welch Verführung, welch Verschwendung! Also zehren wir uns auf

Wir werden alt im Zeitraffer. Und krank. Wir schämen uns einerseits ob des ausgewichenen Lebens und sind doch voller Vorfreude, wenn die Zeit uns endlich dahinrafft. Wir spucken auf das erbärmliche Geschenk dieses unnötigen Lebens. Nur auf die Haltung kommt es noch an, auf die letzten Meter, bevor man endlich diesem Scheißhaufen mit seinen Amöbenexistenzen entfliehen kann. Ob einfach nur ein schwarzer Vorhang fällt oder neue Welten, neue Schrecken sich auftun, ist uns egal. Nur weg! Haben wir doch geahnt (oder nur gemeint?), dass es den ganzen Wahn nicht wert ist.

Welche Verführung, welche Verschwendung! Also zehren wir uns auf: Uns rührt nicht die Frau, die wir nicht hatten, das Kind nicht, welches wir nie wollten, die Nachwelt nicht, welche wir ablehnen wie die Gegenwart. Wir haben ein Beispiel gegeben oder auch nicht. Das soll andere kümmern. Als uns das Sterben schließlich zerfrisst, blicken wir uns noch einmal delirisch um. Sicher war es alles nichts wert. Oder hoffen wir es nur?

Das ist jene drohende, zwiespältige Botschaft, welche Lovecraft, sein Leben und seine Schriften haben. Wir leben in diesem Widerspruch. Die „Fülle der Zeit“ (Gasset) wie im 19. Jahrhundert kennen wir nicht und sie kommt auch nicht wieder. In jedem Zweifler steckt auch ein Nihilist, die wegwerfende Geste, die durchaus auch großartig wirken kann. Dieser Widerspruch und diese Verführung machen uns zu Lovecrafts Kindern. Freilich: Man sollte nicht seinem Beispiel folgen. Der quälende Blick vor dem Ende muss furchtbar sein und ist eine Mahnung.

Auch die Glücklichen vergehen

Aber wenn wir schließlich in seine Texte schauen, wenn wir angenehm erschauern beim Blick in den irrsinnigen Abgrund dieser sirenenhaften Unfassbarkeit, dann spüren wir, wie nahe er uns gewesen ist. Der Ekel über den alltäglichen Menschen in seiner viehischen Zufriedenheit wird uns bestätigt und am Ende kommt das Böse zu allen und bleibt stark in seiner Unfassbarkeit. Auch die Glücklichen vergehen und ihr Sturz ist noch viel tiefer.

Das hilft über manch düstere Momente hinweg. Gerade diese missgünstige Ader, diese Lust am Unglück der Anderen befriedigt Lovecraft für uns. Deswegen redet man auch nicht gerne von ihm, vor allem in Deutschland. Aber auch in der internationalen Rezeption verschanzt man sich hinter schönen Worten oder böser Kritik.

Lovecraft hat der „Leere eine Farbe“ gegeben

Man sieht es nicht gerne, wenn der Menschenhasser und Katastrophenwünscher in jedem von uns bedient wird. Das literarische Establishment meidet seine Schriften und Visionen. Nicht alleine wegen der rassistischen Untertöne, sondern wegen der verführenden Wirkung und dieses unangenehmen Gefühls, beim eignen Widerspruch ertappt worden zu sein.

Er hat der „Leere eine Farbe“ gegeben (Camus), während er konsequent gegen sich selbst lebte. Er ist Verführung und Vergewaltigung zugleich. Destruktiv und autoaggressiv. Selbstbezogen und doch voller Empathie. Ein totaler Widerspruch. Aus der Zeit.

„I am Providence.” Alles hatte er überwunden und negiert. Und doch den Gedanken nicht unterlassen. Daran schließlich zerbrochen. Durch die Zeit hat er über diese und seine bescheidene Herkunft triumphiert, indem er seine Niederlage inszenierte. Und heute vernehmen wir vielleicht ein leises Echo eines boshaften Lachens, das möglicherweise von ihm stammt. Er war mehr als „nur“ Providence.

In unseren aktuellen Thesen-durch-Fakten-Anschlägen haben wir uns ebenfalls mit dem Thema Pessimismus auseinandergesetzt und dazu sechs Thesen formuliert: Pessimismus ist Feigheit!

Introduction to Aristotle’s Politics

Introduction to Aristotle’s Politics
Part 1: The Aim & Elements of Politics

Posted By Greg Johnson

Part 1 of 2

Author’s Note:

The following introduction to Aristotle’s Politics focuses on the issues of freedom and popular government. It is a reworking of a more “academic” text penned in 2001.

1. The Necessity of Politics

Aristotle is famous for holding that man is by nature a political animal. But what does this mean? Aristotle explains that,

even when human beings are not in need of each other’s help, they have no less desire to live together, though it is also true that the common advantage draws them into union insofar as noble living is something they each partake of. So this above all is the end, whether for everyone in common or for each singly (Politics 3.6, 1278b19–22).[1]

Here Aristotle contrasts two different needs of the human soul that give rise to different forms of community, one pre-political and the other political.

The first need is material. On this account, men form communities to secure the necessities of life. Because few are capable of fulfilling all their needs alone, material self-interest forces them to co-operate, each developing his particular talents and trading his products with others. The classical example of such a community is the “city of pigs” in the second book of Plato’s Republic.

The second need is spiritual. Even in the absence of material need, human beings will form communities because only through community can man satisfy his spiritual need to live nobly, i.e., to achieve eudaimonia, happiness or well-being, which Aristotle defines as a life of unimpeded virtuous activity.

Aristotle holds that the forms of association which arise from material needs are pre-political. These include the family, the master-slave relationship, the village, the market, and alliances for mutual defense. With the exception of the master-slave relationship, the pre-political realm could be organized on purely libertarian, capitalist principles. Individual rights and private property could allow individuals to associate and disassociate freely by means of persuasion and trade, according to their own determination of their interests.

But in Politics 3.9, Aristotle denies that the realm of material needs, whether organized on libertarian or non-libertarian lines, could ever fully satisfy man’s spiritual need for happiness: “It is not the case . . . that people come together for the sake of life alone, but rather for the sake of living well” (1280a31), and “the political community must be set down as existing for the sake of noble deeds and not merely for living together” (1281a2). Aristotle’s clearest repudiation of any minimalistic form of liberalism is the following passage:

Nor do people come together for the sake of an alliance to prevent themselves from being wronged by anyone, nor again for purposes of mutual exchange and mutual utility. Otherwise the Etruscans and Carthaginians and all those who have treaties with each other would be citizens of one city. . . . [But they are not] concerned about what each other’s character should be, not even with the aim of preventing anyone subject to the agreements from becoming unjust or acquiring a single depraved habit. They are concerned only that they should not do any wrong to each other. But all those who are concerned about a good state of law concentrate their attention on political virtue and vice, from which it is manifest that the city truly and not verbally so called must make virtue its care. (1280a34–b7)

Aristotle does not disdain mutual exchange and mutual protection. But he thinks that the state must do more. It must concern itself with the character of the citizen; it must encourage virtue and discourage vice.

But why does Aristotle think that the pursuit of virtue is political at all, much less the defining characteristic of the political? Why does he reject the liberal principle that whether and how men pursue virtue is an ineluctably private choice? The ultimate anthropological foundation of Aristotelian political science is man’s neoteny. Many animals can fend for themselves as soon as they are born. But man is born radically immature and incapable of living on his own. We need many years of care and education. Nature does not give us the ability to survive, much less flourish. But she gives us the ability to acquire the ability. Skills are acquired abilities to live. Virtue is the acquired ability to live well. The best way to acquire virtue is not through trial and error, but through education, which allows us to benefit from the trials and avoid the errors of others. Fortune permitting, if we act virtuously, we will live well.

Liberals often claim that freedom of choice is a necessary condition of virtue. We can receive no moral credit for a virtue which is not freely chosen but is instead forced upon us. Aristotle, however, holds that force is a necessary condition of virtue. Aristotle may have defined man as the rational animal, but unlike the Sophists of his day he did not think that rational persuasion is sufficient to instill virtue:

. . . if reasoned words were sufficient by themselves to make us decent, they would, to follow a remark of Theognis, justly carry off many and great rewards, and the thing to do would be to provide them. But, as it is, words seem to have the strength to incite and urge on those of the young who are generous and to get a well-bred character and one truly in love with the noble to be possessed by virtue; but they appear incapable of inciting the many toward becoming gentlemen. For the many naturally obey the rule of fear, not of shame, and shun what is base not because it is ugly but because it is punished. Living by passion as they do, they pursue their own pleasures and whatever will bring these pleasures about . . . ; but of the noble and truly pleasant they do not even have the notion, since they have never tasted it. How could reasoned words reform such people? For it is not possible, or nor easy, to replace by reason what has long since become fixed in the character. (Nicomachean Ethics, 10.9, 1179b4–18)

The defect of reason can, however, be corrected by force: “Reason and teaching by no means prevail in everyone’s case; instead, there is need that the hearer’s soul, like earth about to nourish the seed, be worked over in its habits beforehand so as to enjoy and hate in a noble way. . . . Passion, as a general rule, does not seem to yield to reason but to force” (Nicomachean Ethics, 10.9, 1179b23–25). The behavioral substratum of virtue is habit, and habits can be inculcated by force. Aristotle describes law as “reasoned speech that proceeds from prudence and intellect” but yet “has force behind it” (Nicomachean Ethics, 10.9, 1180a18). Therefore, the compulsion of the appropriate laws is a great aid in acquiring virtue.

At this point, however, one might object that Aristotle has established only a case for parental, not political, force in moral education. Aristotle admits that only in Sparta and a few other cities is there public education in morals, while “In most cities these matters are neglected, and each lives as he wishes, giving sacred law, in Cyclops’ fashion, to his wife and children” (Nicomachean Ethics, 10.9, 1180a24–27). Aristotle grants that an education adapted to an individual is better than an education given to a group (Nicomachean Ethics, 10.9, 1180b7). But this is an argument against the collective reception of education, not the collective provision. He then argues that such an education is best left to experts, not parents. Just as parents have professional doctors care for their childrens’ bodies, they should have professional educators care for their souls (Nicomachean Ethics, 10.9, 1180b14–23). But this does not establish that the professionals should be employees of the state.

Two additional arguments for public education are found in Politics 8.1:

[1] Since the whole city has one end, it is manifest that everyone must also have one and the same education and that taking care of this education must be a common matter. It must not be private in the way that it is now, when everyone takes care of their own children privately and teaches them whatever private learning they think best. Of common things, the training must be common. [2] At the same time, no citizen should even think he belongs to himself but instead that each belongs to the city, for each is part of the city. The care of each part, however, naturally looks to the care of the whole, and to this extent praise might be due to the Spartans, for they devote the most serious attention to their children and do so in common. (Politics, 8.1 [5.1], 1337a21–32)

The second argument is both weak and question-begging. Although it may be useful for citizens to “think” that they belong to the city, not themselves, Aristotle offers no reason to think that this is true. Furthermore, the citizens would not think so unless they received precisely the collective education that needs to be established. The first argument, however, is quite strong. If the single, overriding aim of political life is the happiness of the citizens, and if this aim is best attained by public education, then no regime can be legitimate if it fails to provide public education.[2]

Another argument for public moral education can be constructed from the overall argument of the Politics. Since public education is more widely distributed than private education, other things being equal, the populace will become more virtuous on the whole. As we shall see, it is widespread virtue that makes popular government possible. Popular government is, moreover, one of the bulwarks of popular liberty. Compulsory public education in virtue, therefore, is a bulwark of liberty.

2. Politics and Freedom

Aristotle’s emphasis on compulsory moral education puts him in the “positive” libertarian camp. For Aristotle, a free man is not merely any man who lives in a free society. A free man possesses certain traits of character which allow him to govern himself responsibly and attain happiness. These traits are, however, the product of a long process of compulsory tutelage. But such compulsion can be justified only by the production of a free and happy individual, and its scope is therefore limited by this goal. Since Aristotle ultimately accepted the Socratic principle that all men desire happiness, education merely compels us to do what we really want. It frees us from our own ignorance, folly, and irrationality and frees us for our own self-actualization. This may be the rationale for Aristotle’s claim that, “the law’s laying down of what is decent is not oppressive” (Nicomachean Ethics, 10.9, 1180a24). Since Aristotle thinks that freedom from the internal compulsion of the passions is more important than freedom from the external compulsion of force, and that force can quell the passions and establish virtue’s empire over them, Aristotle as much as Rousseau believes that we can be forced to be free.

But throughout the Politics, Aristotle shows that he is concerned to protect “negative” liberty as well. In Politics 2.2–5, Aristotle ingeniously defends private families, private property, and private enterprise from Plato’s communistic proposals in the Republic, thereby preserving the freedom of large spheres of human activity.

Aristotle’s concern with privacy is evident in his criticism of a proposal of Hippodamus of Miletus which would encourage spies and informers (2.8, 1268b22).

Aristotle is concerned to create a regime in which the rich do not enslave the poor and the poor do not plunder the rich (3.10, 1281a13–27).

Second Amendment enthusiasts will be gratified at Aristotle’s emphasis on the importance of a wide distribution of arms in maintaining the freedom of the populace (2.8, 1268a16-24; 3.17, 1288a12–14; 4.3 [6.3], 1289b27–40; 4.13 [6.13], 1297a12–27; 7.11 [4.11], 1330b17–20).

War and empire are great enemies of liberty, so isolationists and peace lovers will be gratified by Aristotle’s critique of warlike regimes and praise of peace. The good life requires peace and leisure. War is not an end in itself, but merely a means to ensure peace (7.14 [4.14], 1334a2–10; 2.9, 1271a41–b9).

The best regime is not oriented outward, toward dominating other peoples, but inward, towards the happiness of its own. The best regime is an earthly analogue of the Prime Mover. It is self-sufficient and turned inward upon itself (7.3 [4.3], 1325a14–31). Granted, Aristotle may not think that negative liberty is the whole of the good life, but it is an important component which needs to be safeguarded.[3]

3. The Elements of Politics and the Mixed Regime

Since the aim of political association is the good life, the best political regime is the one that best delivers the good life. Delivering the good life can be broken down into two components: production and distribution. There are two basic kinds of goods: the goods of the body and the goods of the soul.[4] Both sorts of goods can be produced and distributed privately and publicly, but Aristotle treats the production and distribution of bodily goods as primarily private whereas he treats the production and distribution of spiritual goods as primarily public. The primary goods of the soul are moral and intellectual virtue, which are best produced by public education, and honor, the public recognition of virtue, talent, and service rendered to the city.[5] The principle of distributive justice is defined as proportionate equality: equally worthy people should be equally happy and unequally worthy people should be unequally happy, commensurate with their unequal worth (Nicomachean Ethics, 5.6–7). The best regime, in short, combines happiness and justice.

But how is the best regime to be organized? Aristotle builds his account from at least three sets of elements.

First, in Politics 3.6–7, Aristotle observes that sovereignty can rest either with men or with laws. If with men, then it can rest in one man, few men, or many men. (Aristotle treats it as self-evident that it cannot rest in all men.) The rulers can exercise political power for two different ends: for the common good and for special interests. One pursues the common good by promoting the happiness of all according to justice. Special interests can be broken down into individual or factional interests. A ruler can be blamed for pursuing such goods only if he does so without regard to justice, i.e., without a just concern for the happiness of all. When a single man rules for the common good, we have kingship. When he rules for his own good, we have tyranny. When the few rule for the common good, we have aristocracy. When they rule for their factional interest, we have oligarchy. When the many rule for the common good, we have polity. When they rule for their factional interest, we have democracy. These six regimes can exist in pure forms, or they can be mixed together.

Second, Aristotle treats social classes as elemental political distinctions. In Politics 3.8 he refines his definitions of oligarchy and democracy, claiming that oligarchy is actually the rule by the rich, whether they are few or many, and democracy is rule by the poor, whether they are few or many. Similarly, in Politics 4.11 (6.1) Aristotle also defines polity as rule by the middle class. In Politics 4.4 (6.4), Aristotle argues that the social classes are irreducible political distinctions. One can be a rich, poor, or middle class juror, legislator, or office-holder. One can be a rich, poor, or middle class farmer or merchant. But one cannot be both rich and poor at the same time (1291b2–13). Class distinctions cannot be eliminated; therefore, they have to be recognized and respected, their disadvantages meliorated and their advantages harnessed for the common good.

Third, in Politics 4.14 (6.14), Aristotle divides the activities of rulership into three different functions: legislative, judicial, and executive.[6]

Because rulership can be functionally divided, it is possible to create a mixed regime by assigning different functions to different parts of the populace. One could, for instance, mix monarchy and elite rule by assigning supreme executive office to a single man and the legislative and judicial functions to the few. Or one could divide the legislative function into different houses, assigning one to the few and another to the many. Aristotle suggests giving the few the power to legislate and the many the power to veto legislation. He suggests that officers be elected by the many, but nominated from the few. The few should make expenditures, but the many should audit them (2.12, 1274a15–21; 3.11, 1281b21–33; 4.14 [6.14], 1298b26–40).

In Politics 3.10, Aristotle argues that some sort of mixed regime is preferable, since no pure regime is satisfactory: “A difficulty arises as to what should be the controlling part of the city, for it is really either the multitude or the rich or the decent or the best one of all or a tyrant? But all of them appear unsatisfactory” (1281a11–13). Democracy is bad because the poor unjustly plunder the substance of the rich; oligarchy is bad because the rich oppress and exploit the poor; tyranny is bad because the tyrant does injustice to everyone (1281a13–28). Kingship and aristocracy are unsatisfactory because they leave the many without honors and are schools for snobbery and high-handedness (1281a28–33; 4.11 [6.11], 1295b13ff). A pure polity might be unsatisfactory because it lacks a trained leadership caste and is therefore liable to make poor decisions (3.11, 1281b21–33).

4. Checks and Balances, Political Rule, and the Rule of Law

Aristotle’s mixed regime is the origin of the idea of the separation of powers and “checks and balances.” It goes hand in hand with a very modern political realism. Aristotle claims that, “all regimes that look to the common advantage turn out, according to what is simply just, to be correct ones, while those that look only to the advantage of their rulers are mistaken and are all deviations from the correct regime. For they are despotic, but the city is a community of the free” (3.6, 1279a17–21).

It is odd, then, that in Politics 4.8–9 (6.8–9) Aristotle describes the best regime as a mixture of two defective regimes, oligarchy and democracy–not of two correct regimes, aristocracy and polity. But perhaps Aristotle entertained the possibility of composing a regime that tends to the common good out of classes which pursue their own factional interests.

Perhaps Aristotle thought that the “intention” to pursue the common good can repose not in the minds of individual men, but in the institutional logic of the regime itself. This would be an enormous advantage, for it would bring about the common good without having to rely entirely upon men of virtue and good will, who are in far shorter supply than men who pursue their own individual and factional advantages.

Related to the mixed regime with its checks and balances is the notion of “political rule.” Political rule consists of ruling and being ruled in turn:

. . . there is a sort of rule exercised over those who are similar in birth and free. This rule we call political rule, and the ruler must learn it by being ruled, just as one learns to be a cavalry commander by serving under a cavalry commander . . . Hence is was nobly said that one cannot rule well without having been ruled. And while virtue in these two cases is different, the good citizen must learn and be able both to be ruled and to rule. This is in fact the virtue of the citizen, to know rule over the free from both sides. (3.4, 1277b7–15; cf. 1.13, 1259b31–34 and 2.2, 1261a32–b3)

Aristotle makes it clear that political rule can exist only where the populace consists of men who are free, i.e., sufficiently virtuous that they can rule themselves. They must also be economically middle-class, well-armed, and warlike. They must, in short, be the sort of men who can participate responsibly in government, who want to participate, and who cannot safely be excluded. A populace that is slavish, vice-ridden, poor, and unarmed can easily be disenfranchised and exploited. If power were entirely in the hands of a free populace, the regime would be a pure polity, and political rule would exist entirely between equals. If, however, a free populace were to take part in a mixed regime, then political rule would exist between different parts of the regime. The many and the few would divide power and functions between them. Not only would members of each class take turns performing the different functions allotted to them, the classes themselves would rule over others in one respect and be ruled in another. In these circumstances, then, checks and balances are merely one form of political rule.

In Politics 3.16, Aristotle connects political rule to the rule of law:

What is just is that people exercise rule no more than they are subject to it and that therefore they rule by turns. But this is already law, for the arrangement is law. Therefore, it is preferable that law rule rather than any one of the citizens. And even if, to pursue the same argument, it were better that there be some persons exercising rule, their appointment should be as guardians and servants of the laws. For though there must be some offices, that there should be this one person exercising rule is, they say, not just, at least when all are similar. (1287a15–22)

Aristotle’s point is simple. If two men govern by turns, then sovereignty does not ultimately repose in either of them, but in the rule that they govern by turns. The same can be said of checks and balances. If the few spend money and the many audit the accounts, then neither group is sovereign, the laws are. If sovereignty reposes in laws, not men, the common good is safe. As Aristotle points out, “anyone who bids the laws to rule seems to bid god and intellect alone to rule, but anyone who bids a human being to rule adds on also the wild beast. For desire is such a beast and spiritedness perverts rulers even when they are the best of men. Hence law is intellect without appetite” (1287a23–31). The greatest enemy of the common good is private interest. The laws, however, have no private interests. Thus if our laws are conducive to the common good, we need not depend entirely on the virtue and public-spiritedness of men.

Aristotle would, however, hasten to add that no regime can do without these characteristics entirely, for the laws cannot apply themselves. They must be applied by men, and their application will seldom be better than the men who apply them. Furthermore, even though a regime may function without entirely virtuous citizens, no legitimate regime can be indifferent to the virtue of the citizens, for the whole purpose of political association is to instill the virtues necessary for happiness.

Notes

1. All quotes from Aristotle are from The Politics of Aristotle, trans. and ed. Peter L. Phillips Simpson (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1997). Simpson’s edition has two unique features. First, The Politics is introduced by a translation of Nicomachean Ethics 10.9. Second, Simpson moves books 7 and 8 of The Politics, positioning them between the traditional books 3 and 4. I retain the traditional ordering, indicating Simpson’s renumbering parenthetically. Unless otherwise noted, all quotes are from The Politics. Quotes from the Nicomachean Ethics will be indicated as such.

2. A useful commentary on these and other Aristotelian arguments for public education is Randall R. Curren, Aristotle on the Necessity of Public Education (Lanham, Maryland: Rowman and Littlefield, 2000).

3. For a fuller discussion of the value Aristotle puts on liberty, see Roderick T. Long, “Aristotle’s Conception of Freedom,” The Review of Metaphysics 49, no. 4 (June 1996), pp. 787–802.

4. One could add a third category of instrumental goods, but these goods are instrumental to the intrinsic goods of the body, the soul, or both, and thus could be classified under those headings.

5. As for the highest good of the soul, which is attained by philosophy, Aristotle’s flight from Athens near the end of his life shows that he recognized that different political orders can be more or less open to free thought, but I suspect that he was realist enough (and Platonist enough) to recognize that even the best cities are unlikely to positively cultivate true freedom to philosophize. I would wager that Aristotle would be both surprised at the freedom of thought in the United States and receptive to Tocquevillian complaints about the American tendency toward conformism that makes such freedom unthreatening to the reigning climate of opinion. A cynic might argue that if Americans actually made use of their freedom of thought, it would be quickly taken away.

6. On the complexities of the executive role in the Politics, see Harvey C. Mansfield, Jr., Taming the Prince: The Ambivalence of Modern Executive Power (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993), chs. 2–3.

Introduction to Aristotle’s Politics
Part 2: In Defense of Popular Government

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Part 2 of 2

5. The Good Man and the Good Citizen

Having now surveyed Aristotle’s thoughts on the elements and proper aim of politics, we can now examine his arguments for popular government. When I use the phrase “popular government,” it should be borne in mind that Aristotle does not advocate a pure polity, but a mixed regime with a popular element.

Aristotle’s first case for bringing the many into government can be discerned in Politics 3.4. Aristotle’s question is whether the virtues of the good man and the good citizen are the same. They are not the same, insofar as the virtue of the good citizen is defined relative to the regime, and there are many different regimes, while the virtue of the good man is defined relative to human nature, which is one. One can therefore be a good citizen but not a good man, and a good man but not a good citizen. History is replete with examples of regimes which punish men for their virtues and reward them for their vices. Aristotle does, however, allow that the good man and the good citizen can be one in a regime in which the virtues required of a good citizen do not differ from the virtues of a good man.

The chief virtue of a good man is prudence. But prudence is not required of a citizen insofar as he is ruled. Only obedience is required. Prudence is, however, required of a citizen insofar as he rules. Since the best regime best encourages happiness by best cultivating virtue, a regime which allows the many to govern along with the few is better than a regime which excludes them. By including the many in ruling, a popular regime encourages the widest cultivation of prudence and gives the greatest opportunity for its exercise. The best way to bring the many into the regime is what Aristotle calls political rule: ruling and being ruled in turn, as prescribed by law.

Political rule not only teaches the virtue of prudence to the many, it teaches the virtue of being ruled to the few, who must give way in turn to the many. Since the few aspire to rule but not be ruled, Aristotle argues that they cannot rule without first having been ruled: “the ruler must learn [political rule] by being ruled, just as one learns to be a cavalry commander by serving under a cavalry commander . . . Hence is was nobly said that one cannot rule well without having been ruled. And while virtue in these two cases is different, the good citizen must learn and be able both to be ruled and to rule. This is, in fact, the virtue of a citizen, to know rule over the free from both sides. Indeed, the good man too possesses both” (3.4, 1277b7–16).

Aristotle names justice as a virtue which is learned both in ruling and being ruled. Those born to wealth and power are liable to arrogance and the love of command. By subjecting them to the rule of others, including their social inferiors, they learn to respect their freedom and justly appraise their worth.

6. Potlucks, Chimeras, Juries

Aristotle’s next case for bringing the many into the regime is found in Politics 3.11.[1] Aristotle seeks to rebut the aristocratic argument against popular participation, namely that the best political decisions are wise ones, but wisdom is found only among the few, not the many. Popular participation, therefore, would inevitably dilute the quality of the political decision-makers, increasing the number of foolish decisions. Aristotle accepts the premise that the wise should rule, but he argues that there are circumstances in which the few and the many together are wiser than the few on their own. The aristocratic principle, therefore, demands the participation of the many:

. . . the many, each of whom is not a serious man, nevertheless could, when they have come together, be better than those few best–not, indeed, individually but as a whole, just as meals furnished collectively are better than meals furnished at one person’s expense. For each of them, though many, could have a part of virtue and prudence, and just as they could, when joined together in a multitude, become one human being with many feet, hands, and senses, so also could they become one in character and thought. That is why the many are better judges of the works of music and the poets, for one of them judges one part and another another and all of them the whole. (1281a42–b10)

At first glance, this argument seems preposterous. History and everyday life are filled with examples of wise individuals opposing foolish collectives. But Aristotle does not claim that the many are always wiser than the few, simply that they can be under certain conditions (1281b15).

The analogy of the potluck supper is instructive (cf. 3.15, 1286a28–30).[2] A potluck supper can be better than one provided by a single person if it offers a greater number and variety of dishes and diffuses costs and labor. But potluck suppers are not always superior–that is the “luck” in it. Potlucks are often imbalanced. On one occasion, there may be too many desserts and no salads. On another, three people may bring chicken and no one brings beef or pork. The best potluck, therefore, is a centrally orchestrated one which mobilizes the resources of many different contributors but ensures a balanced and wholesome meal.

Likewise, the best way to include the many in political decision-making is to orchestrate their participation, giving them a delimited role that maximizes their virtues and minimizes their vices. This cannot be accomplished in a purely popular regime, particularly a lawless one, but it can be accomplished in a mixed regime in which the participation of the populace is circumscribed by law and checked by the interests of other elements of the population.

Aristotle’s second analogy–which likens the intellectual and moral unity of the many to a man with many feet, hands, and sense organs, i.e., a freak of nature–does not exactly assuage doubters. But his point is valid. While even the best of men may lack a particular virtue, it is unlikely that it will be entirely absent from a large throng. Therefore, the many are potentially as virtuous or even more virtuous than the few if their scattered virtues can be gathered together and put to work. But history records many examples of groups acting less morally than any member on his own. Thus the potential moral superiority of the many is unlikely to emerge in a lawless democracy. But it could emerge in a lawful mixed regime, which actively encourages and employs the virtues of the many while checking their vices. This process can be illustrated by adapting an analogy that Aristotle offers to illustrate another point: A painting of a man can be more beautiful than any real man, for the painter can pick out the best features of individual men and combine them into a beautiful whole (3.11, 1281b10–11).

Aristotle illustrates the potential superiority of collective judgment with another questionable assertion, that “the many are better judges of the works of music and the poets, for one of them judges one part and another another and all of them the whole.” Again, this seems preposterous. Good taste, like wisdom, is not widely distributed and is cultivated by the few, not the many. Far more people buy “rap” recordings than classical ones. But Aristotle is not claiming that the many are better judges in all cases. Aristotle is likely referring to Greek dramatic competitions. These competitions were juried by the audience, not a small number of connoisseurs.

A jury trial or competition is a genuine collective decision-making process in which each juror is morally enjoined to pay close attention the matter at hand and to render an objective judgment.[3] Although each juror has his own partial impression, when jurors deliberate they can add their partial impressions together to arrive at a more complete and adequate account. To the extent that a jury decision must approach unanimity, the jurors will be motivated to examine the issue from all sides and persuade one another to move toward a rationally motivated consensus. A jury decision can, therefore, be more rational, well-informed, and objective than an individual one.[4] The market, by contrast, is not a collective decision-making process. It does not require a consumer to compare his preferences to those of others, to persuade others of their validity or defend them from criticism, or to arrive at any sort of consensus. Instead, the market merely registers the collective effects of individual decisions.[5]

7. Freedom and Stability

Another argument for popular government in Politics 3.11 (1281b21–33) is that it is more stable. Aristotle grants the Aristocratic principle that it is not safe for the populace to share in “the greatest offices” because, “on account of their injustice and unwisdom, they would do wrong in some things and go wrong in others.” But then he goes on to argue that it would not be safe to exclude the many from rule altogether, since a city “that has many in it who lack honor and are poor must of necessity be full of enemies,” which would be a source of instability. Instability is, however, inconsistent with the proper aim of politics, for the good life requires peace. The solution is a mixed regime which ensures peace and stability by allowing the many to participate in government, but not to occupy the highest offices. In Politics 2.9, Aristotle praises the Spartan Ephorate for holding the regime together, “since, as the populace share in the greatest office, it keeps them quiet. . . . For if any regime is going to survive, all the parts of the city must want it both to exist and to remain as it is” (1270b17–22; cf. Aristotle’s discussion of the Carthaginians in 2.9, 1272b29–32; see also 4.13 [6.13], 1297b6).

In Politics 2.12, Aristotle offers another reason for including the populace in government. Solon gave the populace, “the power that was most necessary (electing to office and auditing the accounts), since without it they would have been enslaved and hostile” (1274a4–6). Here Aristotle makes it clear that he values liberty, and he values popular government because it protects the liberty of the many.

8. Expert Knowledge

In Politics 3.11 Aristotle rebuts the argument that the many should not be involved in politics because they are amateurs, and decisions in politics, as in medicine and other fields, should be left to experts. In response to this, Aristotle repeats his argument that the many, taken together, may be better judges than a few experts. He then adds that there are some arts in which the products can be appreciated by people who do not possess the art: “Appreciating a house, for example, does not just belong to the builder; the one who uses it, namely the household manager, will pass an even better judgment on it. Likewise, the pilot judges the rudder better than the carpenter and the dinner guest judges the feast better than the chef” (1282a19–22). If the art of statesmanship is like these, then the best judge of the quality of a statesman is not the few political experts, but the many political laymen who are ruled by him. The judgment of the populace should not, therefore, be disdained.

9. Resistance to Corruption

In Politics 3.15 Aristotle argues that popular regimes are more resistant to corruption. Even in a regime in which law ultimately rules, there are particular circumstances which the laws do not anticipate. Where the law cannot decide, men must do so. But this creates an opportunity for corruption. Aristotle argues that such decisions are better made by large bodies deliberating in public: “What is many is more incorruptible: the multitude, like a greater quantity of water, is harder to ruin than a few. A single person’s judgment must necessarily be corrupted when he is overcome by anger or some other such passion, but getting everyone in the other case to become angry and go wrong at the same time takes a lot of doing. Let the multitude in question, however, be the free who are acting in no way against law, except where law is necessarily deficient” (1286a33–38). Aristotle’s argument that the many may collectively possess fewer vices than the few is merely a mirror image of his earlier collective virtue argument. Here, as elsewhere, Aristotle defends popular government only under delimited circumstances. The populace must be free, not slavish, and they must decide only when the laws cannot.

10. Delegation and Diffusion of Power

Politics 3.16 is devoted to arguments against total kingship. One of these arguments can be turned into a case for popular government. Aristotle claims that total kingship is unsustainable: “It is not easy for one person to oversee many things, so there will need to be many officials appointed in subordination to him. Consequently, what is the difference between having them there right from the start and having one man in this way appoint them? . . . if a man who is serious is justly ruler because he is better, then two good men are better than one” (1287b8–12, cf. 1287b25–29).

Since total kingship is unworkable, kings must necessarily appoint superior men as “peers” to help them. But if total kingship must create an aristocracy, then why not have aristocracy from the start?

This argument could, however, be pushed further to make a case for popular government. An aristocracy cannot effectively rule the people without the active participation of some and the passive acquiescence of the rest. As we have seen above, Aristotle argues that the best way to bring this about is popular government. But if aristocracy must eventually bring the populace into the regime, then why not include them from the very beginning?

11. When Regimes Fail

In Politics 4.2 (6.2), Aristotle returns to his list of pure regime types. The three just regimes are kingship, aristocracy, and polity; the three unjust ones are tyranny, oligarchy, and democracy. Aristotle proceeds to rank the three just regimes in terms of the kinds of virtues they require. Thus Aristotle identifies kingship and aristocracy as the best regimes because they are both founded on “fully equipped virtue” (1289a31). Of the two, kingship is the very best, for it depends upon a virtue so superlative that it is possessed by only one man. Aristocracy is less exalted because it presupposes somewhat more broadly distributed and therefore less exalted virtue. Polity depends upon even more widespread and modest virtue. Furthermore, the populace, unlike kings and aristocrats, lacks the full complement of material equipment necessary to fully exercise such virtues as magnificence.

By this ranking, polity is not the best regime, but the least of the good ones. But Aristotle then offers a new, politically realistic standard for ranking the just regimes which reverses their order. Kingship may be the best regime from a morally idealistic perspective, but when it degenerates it turns into tyranny, which is the worst regime. Aristocracy may be the second best regime from a morally idealistic perspective, but when it degenerates it turns into oligarchy, which is the second worst regime. Polity may be the third choice of the moral idealist, but when it degenerates, it merely becomes democracy, which is the best of a bad lot.

Since degeneration is inevitable, the political realist ranks regimes not only in terms of their best performances, but also in terms of their worst. By this standard, polity is the best of the good regimes and kingship the worst. Kingship is best under ideal conditions, polity under real conditions. Kingship is a sleek Jaguar, polity a dowdy Volvo. On the road, the Jaguar is clearly better. But when they go in the ditch, the Volvo shows itself to be the better car overall.

12. The Middle Class Regime

Aristotle displays the same political realism in his praise of the middle class regime in Politics 4.11 (6.11): “If we judge neither by a virtue that is beyond the reach of private individuals, nor by an education requiring a nature and equipment dependent on chance, nor again a regime that is as one would pray for, but by a way of life that most can share in common together and by a regime that most cities can participate in . . . ,” then a large, politically enfranchised middle class has much to recommend it: “In the case of political community . . . the one that is based on those in the middle is best, and . . . cities capable of being well governed are those sorts where the middle is large . . .” (1295b35–36).

Since the middle class is the wealthier stratum of the common people, Aristotle’s arguments for middle class government are ipso facto arguments for popular government. Aristotle makes it clear from the beginning, however, that he is not talking about a purely popular regime, but a mixed one compounded out of a middle class populace and those elements of aristocracy which are not out of the reach of most cities (1295a30–34).

Aristotle’s first argument for the middle regime seems a sophistry: “If it was nobly said in the Ethics that the happy way of life is unimpeded life in accordance with virtue and that virtue is a mean, then necessarily the middle way of life, the life of a mean that everyone can attain, must be best. The same definitions must hold also for the virtue and vice of city and regime, since the regime is a certain way of life of a city” (1295a35–40).

In the Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle makes it clear that the fact that virtue can be understood as a mean between two vices, one of excess and the other of defect, does not imply either that virtue is merely an arithmetic mean (Nicomachean Ethics, 2.2, 1106a26–b8), or that virtue is to be regarded as mediocrity, not as superlative (Nicomachean Ethics, 2.2, 1107a9–27). Here, however, Aristotle describes the mean not as a superlative, but as a mediocrity “that everyone can attain.” This conclusion follows only if we presuppose that the morally idealistic doctrine of the Ethics has been modified into a moral realism analogous to the political realism of Politics 4.2.

Aristotle then claims that in a regime the mean lies in the middle class: “In all cities there are in fact three parts: those who are exceedingly well-off, those who are exceedingly needy, and the third who are in the middle of these two. So, since it is agreed that the mean and middle is best, then it is manifest that a middling possession also of the goods of fortune must be best of all” (1295b1–3). Aristotle is, however, equivocating. He begins by defining the middle class as an arithmetic mean between the rich and the poor. He concludes that the middle class is a moral mean. But he does not establish that the arithmetic mean corresponds with the moral.

Aristotle does, however, go on to offer reasons for thinking that the social mean corresponds to the moral mean. But the middle class is not necessarily more virtuous because its members have been properly educated, but because their social position and class interests lead them to act as if they had been.

First, Aristotle argues that “the middle most easily obeys reason.” Those who are “excessively beautiful or strong or well-born or wealthy” find it hard to follow reason, because they tend to be “insolent and rather wicked in great things.” By contrast, those who are poor and “extremely wretched and weak, and have an exceeding lack of honor” tend to become “villains and too much involved in petty wickedness.” The middle class is, however, too humble to breed insolence and too well-off to breed villainy. Since most injustices arise from insolence and villainy, a regime with a strong middle class will be more likely to be just.

Second, Aristotle argues that the middle class is best suited to ruling and being ruled in turn. Those who enjoy, “an excess of good fortune (strength, wealth, friends, and other things of the sort)” love to rule and dislike being ruled. Both of these attitudes are harmful to the city, yet they naturally arise among the wealthy. From an early age, the wealthy are instilled with a “love of ruing and desire to rule, both of which are harmful to cities” (1295b12), and, “because of the luxury they live in, being ruled is not something they get used to, even at school” (1295b13–17). By contrast, poverty breeds vice, servility, and small-mindedness. Thus the poor are easy to push around, and if they do gain power they are incapable of exercising it virtuously. Therefore, without a middle class, “a city of slaves and masters arises, not a city of the free, and the first are full of envy while the second are full of contempt.” Such a city must be “at the furthest remove from friendship and political community” (1295b21–24). The presence of a strong middle class, however, binds the city into a whole, limiting the tendency of the rich to tyranny and the poor to slavishness, creating a “city of the free.”

Third, Aristotle argues that middle class citizens enjoy the safest and most stable lives, imbuing the regime as a whole with these characteristics. Those in the middle are, among all the citizens, the most likely to survive in times of upheaval, when the poor starve and the rich become targets. They are sufficiently content with their lot not to envy the possessions of the rich. Yet they are not so wealthy that the poor envy them. They neither plot against the rich nor are plotted against by the poor.

Fourth, a large middle class stabilizes a regime, particularly if the middle is “stronger than both extremes or, otherwise, than either one of them. For the middle will tip the balance when added to either side and prevent the emergence of an excess at the opposite extremes” (1295b36–40). Without a large and powerful middle class, “either ultimate rule of the populace arises or unmixed oligarchy does, or, because of excess on both sides, tyranny” (1296a3; cf. 6.12, 1297a6ff).

Fifth is the related point that regimes with large middle classes are relatively free of faction and therefore more concerned with the common good. This is because a large middle class makes it harder to separate everyone out into two groups (1296a7–10).

Finally, Aristotle claims that one sign of the superiority of middle class regimes is that the best legislators come from the middle class. As examples, he cites Solon, Lycurgus, and Charondas (1296a18–21).

Conclusion: Aristotle’s Polity and Our Own

If the proper aim of government is to promote the happiness of the citizen, Aristotle marshals an impressive array of arguments for giving the people, specifically the middle class, a role in government. These arguments can be grouped under five headings: virtue, rational decision-making, freedom, stability, and resistance to corruption.

Popular government both presupposes and encourages widespread virtue among the citizens, and virtue is a necessary condition of happiness. Middle class citizens are particularly likely to follow practical reason and act justly, for they are corrupted neither by wealth nor by poverty. Popular participation can improve political decision-making by mobilizing scattered information and experience, and more informed decisions are more likely to promote happiness. In particular, popular government channels the experiences of those who are actually governed back into the decision-making process.

Popular participation preserves the freedom of the people, who would otherwise be exploited if they had no say in government. By preserving the freedom of the people, popular participation unifies the regime, promoting peace and stability which in turn are conducive to the pursuit of happiness. This is particularly the case with middle class regimes, for the middle class prevents excessive and destabilizing separation and between the extremes of wealth and poverty.

Popular governments are also more resistant to corruption. It is harder to use bribery or trickery to corrupt decisions made by many people deliberating together in public than by one person or a few deciding in private. This means that popular regimes are more likely to promote the common good instead of allowing the state to become a tool for the pursuit of one special interest at the expense of another. Furthermore, if a popular regime does become corrupt, it is most likely to become a democracy, which is the least unjust of the bad regimes and the easiest to reform.

All these are good arguments for giving the people a role in government. But not just any people. And not just any role.

First, Aristotle presupposes a small city-state. He did not think that any regime could pursue the common good if it became too large. This is particularly true of a popular regime, for the larger the populace, the less room any particular citizen has for meaningful participation.

Second, he presupposes a populace which is racially and culturally homogeneous. A more diverse population is subject to faction and strife. It will either break up into distinct communities or it will have to be held together by violence and governed by an elite. A more diverse population also erodes a society’s moral consensus, making moral education even more difficult.

Third, political participation will be limited to middle-class and wealthy property-owning males, specifically men who derive their income from the ownership of productive land, not merchants and craftsmen.

Fourth, Aristotle circumscribes the role of the populace by assigning it specific legal roles, such as the election of officers and the auditing of accounts–roles which are checked and balanced by the legal roles of the aristocratic element, such as occupying leadership positions.

If Aristotle is right about the conditions of popular government, then he would probably take a dim view of its prospects in America.

First and foremost, Aristotle would deplore America’s lack of concern with moral education. Aristotle’s disagreement would go beyond the obvious fact that the American founders did not make moral education the central concern of the state. America has neglected to cultivate even the minimal moral virtues required to maintain a liberal regime, virtues such as independence, personal responsibility, and basic civility.

Second, Aristotle would predict that multiculturalism and non-white immigration will destroy the cultural preconditions of popular government.

Third, Aristotle would reject America’s ever-widening franchise–particularly the extension of the vote to women, non-property owners, and cultural aliens–as a sure prescription for lowering the quality of public decision-making in the voting booth and jury room.

Fourth, Aristotle would be alarmed by the continuing erosion of the American working and middle classes by competition from foreign workers both inside and outside America’s borders. He would deplore America’s transformation from an agrarian to an industrial-mercantile civilization and support autarky rather than free trade and economic globalization.

Fifth, Aristotle would be alarmed by ongoing attempts to disarm the populace.

Sixth, he would condemn America’s imperialistic and warlike policies toward other nations.

Finally, Aristotle would likely observe that since genuine popular government is difficult with hundreds of thousands of citizens it will be impossible with hundreds of millions.

In short, if Aristotle were alive today, he would find himself to the right of Patrick J. Buchanan, decrying America’s decline from a republic to an empire. Aristotle challenges us to show whether and how liberty and popular government are compatible with feminism, multiculturalism, and globalized capitalism.

To conclude, however, on a more positive note: Although Aristotle gives reasons to think that the future of popular government in America is unpromising, he also gives reasons for optimism about the long-term prospects of popular government in general, for his defense of popular government is based on a realistic assessment of human nature, not only in its striving for perfection, but also in its propensity for failure.

Notes

1. For useful discussions of the arguments of Politics 3.11, see Mary P. Nichols, Citizens and Statesmen: A Study of Aristotle’s Politics (Lanham, Maryland: Rowman and Littlefield, 1992), 66–71, and Peter L. Phillips Simpson, A Philosophical Commentary on the Politics of Aristotle (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1998), 166-71.

2. On the potluck supper analogy, see Arlene W. Saxonhouse, Fear of Diversity: The Birth of Political Science in Ancient Greek Thought (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), 222–24.

3. I wish to thank M. L. C. for suggesting the model of a jury trial.

4 . For a beautiful description of the deliberative process of a jury, see John C. Calhoun, A Disquisition on Government, in Union and Liberty: The Political Philosophy of John C. Calhoun, ed. Ross M. Lence (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 1992), 49–50.

5. Friedrich A. Hayek’s classic essay “The Use of Knowledge in Society,” in his Individualism and Economic Order (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1948), argues that the market is superior to central planning because it better mobilizes widely scattered information. The market is, of course, larger than any possible jury and thus will always command more information. However, if one were to compare a market and a jury of the same size, the jury would clearly be a more rational decision-making process, for the market registers decisions based on perspectives which are in principle entirely solipsistic, whereas the jury requires a genuine dialogue which challenges all participants to transcend their partial and subjective perspectives and work toward a rational consensus which is more objective than any individual decision because it more adequately accounts for the phenomena in question than could any individual decision. It is this crucial disanalogy that seems to vitiate attempts to justify the market in terms of Gadamerian, Popperian, or Habermasian models and communicative rationality. For the best statement of this sort of approach, see G. B. Madison, The Political Economy of Civil Society and Human Rights (New York: Routledge, 1998), esp. chs. 3–5.

 

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Roman 20-50, revue d'étude du roman du XXè siècle

Roman 20-50, revue d'étude du roman du XXè siècle

 

La revue Roman 20-50, revue universitaire d'étude du roman du XXè et XXIè siècle publiée par l'équipe d'accueil « Analyses littéraires et histoire de la langue » et du Conseil Scientifique de l'Université Charles-de-Gaulle - Lille 3, a consacré son numéro 17 de juin 1994 à Louis-Ferdinand Céline. Sous la direction d'Yves Baudelle, ce numéro, toujours disponible, réunit une quinzaine d'études sur Voyage au bout de la nuit. Voici son sommaire :

 

DOSSIER CRITIQUE : Voyage au bout de la nuit de L.-F. Céline

Études réunies par Yves Baudelle

 

Henri GODARD

Céline à l'agrégation

 

Philippe MURAY

C'est tout le roman ce quelque chose

 

Jean-Pierre GIUSTO

Louis-Ferdinand Céline ou le dangereux voyage

 

Michel P. SCHMIDT

Un texte méchant

 

Gianfranco RUBINO

Le hasard, la quête, le temps dans le parcours du moi

 

Philippe BONNEFIS

Viles villes

 

Denise AEBERSOLD

Goétie de Céline

 

André DERVAL

La part du fantastique social dans Voyage au bout de la nuit : Mac Orlan et Céline

 

Judith KARAFIATH

Les héritiers indignes de Semmelweis : médecins et savants dans Voyage au bout de la nuit

 

Isabelle BLONDIAUX

La représentation de la pathologie psychique de guerre dans Voyage au bout de la nuit

 

Philippe DESTRUEL

Le logographe en délit

 

Yves BAUDELLE

L'onomastique carnavalesque de Voyage au bout de la nuit

 

Catherine ROUAYRENC

De certains "et" dans Voyage au bout de la nuit

 

Günther HOLTUS

Les concepts voyage et nuit dans le Voyage au bout de la nuit de L.-F. Céline

 

LECTURES ÉTRANGÈRES

Marc HANREZ

Céline, Sand, Shakespeare

 

ÉTUDE DE LA NOUVELLE

Marie BONOU

Histoire d'un crime : La Nuit hongroise

 

ROMAN 20/90

Yves REUTER

Construction/déconstruction du personnage dans Un homme qui dort de Georges Perec

 

COMPTE RENDU

Catherine DOUZOU

 

Commande (le numéro 15 € franco):

ROMAN 20-50

1, Bois du Vieux Mont

62580 VIMY

 

 www.septentrion.com

Conférence Piero san Giorgio et Michel Drac à Bordeaux

Conférence

Piero san Giorgio et Michel Drac

à Bordeaux

Éducation : le grand abandon

Éducation : le grand abandon

par Pierre LE VIGAN

Depuis Jacques Ellul, nous savons que la modernité consiste à croire que tout problème a une solution technique. Il suffit en tous domaines de trouver la bonne technique : celle qui est la plus efficace. En matière d’éducation, nous en sommes là. Les pédagogues ont développé l’idée qu’il faut expérimenter le plus possible, et que des méthodes nouvelles permettront de surmonter les échecs de l’école. Il faudrait ainsi « apprendre à apprendre ». Comment ? Par petits groupes, par le travail « collectif », sous le patronage d’un « prof-animateur » et non plus de Monsieur ou Madame le Professeur. Le tuteur remplace l’enseignant, qui était déjà une version dégradée du professeur. Le travail en petits groupes évite de se poser la question des notes individuelles, remplacées au mieux par une « évaluation » collective voire plus simplement par la validation d’un savoir-être : s’intégrer au groupe, réciter les mantras sur les « droits citoyens », les « écogestes », etc. Les petits groupes valident aussi la communautarisation de la société : chacun dans son groupe, c’est au fond l’individualisme à une échelle collective, soit ce qu’il y a de pire dans le communautarisme, à savoir non pas la communauté mais la tribu, et la juxtaposition des tribus sans lien entre elles. C’est en d’autres termes la fin de l’espace public. Nous allons ainsi vers « un pays libanisé », dit Natacha Polony (dans Le pire est de plus en plus sûr, Éditions Mille et une nuits, 2011). C’est le règne du chacun pour soi et du chacun chez soi, chacun dans sa communauté – celle-ci n’étant qu’une caricature des liens communautaires anciens. Avec la fin de l’espace public c’est bien sûr aussi la fin de la France qui se profile. C’est le grand abandon.

 

De quoi s’agit-il pour les maîtres de notre politique éducative ? De déconstruire le concept de nation au nom de la diversité. Entendons-nous : la diversité des origines existe, et en France existent même les « petites patries » locales dont parlait Jules Ferry (et qu’il ne niait nullement mais voulait lier en une nation tel un bouquet), et a fortiori la diversité des origines avec l’immigration de peuplement. Mais à partir du moment où des millions de personnes ont été amenées à vivre en France et à s’y installer définitivement, il est prioritaire de leur donner les moyens de s’y acclimater. Comment ? En enseignant d’abord l’histoire de France et d’Europe, la géographie, la langue française. Et en enseignant d’une certaine façon. Parce qu’il ne suffit pas de se mettre ensemble autour d’une table pour apprendre. Il n’y a pas à désamorcer l’angoisse de ne pouvoir arriver à apprendre. Qui ne l’a pas connue ? Cette angoisse est naturelle. Elle peut justement être desserrée en avançant sur des bases fermes, solides, universelles dans notre pays. Il fut une époque où tel jour à telle heure tous les écoliers de France faisaient la même dictée. Ce n’était pas si idiot. Cela indique un chemin : une éducation dans un pays doit être universelle, commune, en continuité d’un bout à l’autre du territoire. Elle doit créer un socle de références communes, et cela d’autant plus que les origines de chacun sont diverses. En effet, ce socle commun est d’autant plus nécessaire que manque la culture commune entre les élèves, d’autant plus nécessaire quand elle se résume au consumérisme et à l’américanisation des mœurs. C’est pourquoi la tendance actuelle dans l’éducation est néfaste. Quelle est-elle ? Elle est de valoriser les expérimentations, les autonomies des établissements d’enseignement. C’est le discours de la dérégulation appliqué à l’école après avoir été appliqué à la finance à partir des années 1980 – 90. Dans l’école post-républicaine, chacun expérimente, et chacun s’évalue. Au nom de la créativité. Un beau mot pour dire la fin d’un socle commun de connaissances. Depuis la loi Fillon de 2005, cette tendance s’accélère. Les expérimentateurs libéraux se retrouvent au fond d’accord sur la même politique que les « innovants » libertaires. Daniel Cohn-Bendit est l’archétype politicien de cette convergence. Tous deux, libéraux et libertaires, ont cessé de croire à l’espace public de l’éducation. Du fait de leur action conjointe, culturelle pour les libertaires, politique pour les libéraux (de droite ou de gauche), la tribalisation des établissements est en marche, en phase avec la tribalisation-barbarisation de la société. Dans le même temps, l’idée de savoirs à connaître est abandonnée au nom de l’efficacité économique, que défendent aussi bien la droite que la gauche. Les savoirs laissent la place à des « compétences », concept flou à la mode. C’est un processus de dé-civilisation : il s’agit non plus de maîtriser des connaissances, de les évaluer par des notes forcément individuelles, de progresser vers un savoir donnant la capacité d’être citoyen mais d’acquérir un savoir-être utilitaire, bref d’être adaptable dans le monde de l’entreprise. Fluide et flexible. Dans ce domaine, la démagogie face à la préoccupation de l’emploi fait rage, surfant sur l’angoisse des Français. On ne parle d’ailleurs plus de métiers, qui supposent des connaissances précises mais de l’emploi, qui suppose une malléabilité continue. Il s’agit donc de créer l’homme nouveau flexible. Dévaloriser les connaissances précises et valoriser les « savoirs-être », c’est la révolution anthropologique de l’école nouvelle, l’école d’après la France et d’après la République, l’école d’après les nations (en tout cas les nations d’Europe). Curieusement la campagne électorale de 2007 s’est jouée sur d’autres thèmes. C’est en défendant, dans la lignée d’Henri Guaino, les principes d’une école républicaine que Nicolas Sarkozy a gagné, y compris en séduisant un électorat de gauche sur ces questions. (Il n’est pas exclu qu’il tente la même manœuvre). A-t-il appliqué ses principes affichés dans les meetings et discours ? Aucunement. La droite, malgré quelques tentations de bonnes mesures sous Xavier Darcos, est vite revenue avec Luc Chatel à la conception de l’enseignant-animateur, une conception plus en rapport avec l’air du temps.

 

En conséquence, la sélection sociale se fait de plus en plus en dehors de l’école publique, gratuite et laïque. L’abandon de la méritocratie prive les classes populaires de toute possibilité d’ascension sociale. À la place de l’ascenseur social par l’école publique, un leurre est mis en place : c’est la diversité chère à tous nos gouvernants, de la droite américanisée à la gauche multiculturelle à la Jack Lang en passant par l’omniprésent Richard Descoings, patron de Sciences Po – Paris, membre du club Le Siècle et « diversito-compatible » s’il en est. À ce stade, le chèque-éducation représenterait l’officialisation de la fin de l’école républicaine. C’est d’ailleurs pour cela qu’il n’est pas appliqué. Trop voyant. Trop symbolique. Il manifesterait trop clairement cette fin : il s’agit en d’autres termes de maintenir la fiction, le manteau vide de l’Éducation « nationale, laïque et publique ». La diversité participe de l’abandon de la méritocratie. De quoi s’agit-il ? De faire entrer des élèves dans des institutions prestigieuses en les exonérant de l’accès classique, en ouvrant une voie privilégiée. Comme si on reconnaissait implicitement qu’ils sont incapables de réussir le concours normal de ces institutions – ce qui est faux, sauf que ce ne serait sans doute pas les mêmes qui seraient admis. À l’inverse, une bonne politique républicaine serait de développer des aides aux devoirs, des bourses d’étude, des internats d’excellence pour aider à la réussite dans ces concours des jeunes issus de milieux populaires.  Avec la « politique de la diversité », il s’agit en fait de former une petite élite hyper-adaptée au système économique et de lui offrir la collaboration (lucrative : les jeunes de la diversité admis dans les grandes écoles choisissent souvent… la finance) avec le turbo-capitalisme tandis que l’immense masse des jeunes de banlieue resteraient l’armée de réserve du Capital. Nous avons donc du côté des gouvernants, de droite comme de gauche, des pédagogistes ou ludo-pédagogistes pour qui chaque jeune doit découvrir en lui ses « savoirs-faire enfouis » et développer un savoir-être basé sur le « vivre–ensemble », une autre formule magique. Et nous constatons dans le même temps que ce spontanéisme éducatif est prôné tandis que la barbarisation de certains jeunes, pourtant bel et bien passés par l’école s’accroît (cf. l’affaire Ilan Halimi). C’est en fait l’abandon de la dimension verticale de l’éducation qui est en cause dans la perte des repères que l’on observe. Il y a toujours eu des gens rétifs à se conformer à une certaine noblesse d’âme. Mais il fut un temps où on enseignait cette noblesse. Chacun savait plus ou moins qu’elle existait, sans s’y conformer pour autant. Désormais, le nihilisme qui se manifeste dans la société et dans l’éducation tend à dire que tout vaut tout, que l’élève doué et/ou travailleur doit être noyé dans le groupe. Pour ne pas « stigmatiser » les nuls. Face à cela, les instructionnistes sont ceux qui disent : il y a des choses à apprendre, et pas seulement des savoirs-être à acquérir. En d’autres termes, le meilleur apprentissage du « savoir-être » – si on tient vraiment à avancer cette notion – c’est le sens de l’effort et du travail. On appelle aussi les instructionnistes les « républicains ». Je suis républicain. C’est de cela qu’il s’agit : d’affirmer que la République est autre chose qu’une démocratie des ayants-droits où chacun serait réduit à un consommateur tranquille, avec une pondération raisonnable d’insurgés incendiaires, de façon à entretenir la peur sécuritaire (bien légitime face à des agressions bien réelles) et à empêcher toutes luttes sociales, si nécessaires pourtant, si légitimes quand le système de l’hypercapitalisme financier attaque les classes populaires, les salariés et les classes intermédiaires avec une détermination sans précédent.

 

Refaire une instruction publique et républicaine pour former des citoyens qui iraient vers les luttes de libération sociale et nationale du peuple de France, c’est là l’enjeu.

 

 

Pierre Le Vigan

 

• D’abord mis en ligne sur Vox N.-R., le 5 novembre 2011.

 

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Article printed from Europe Maxima: http://www.europemaxima.com

 

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