Outright opposition to modernity is often dismissed as backward-looking or “reactionary” and associated with a rigidly hierarchical or aristocratic outlook. But there is another tradition of resistance to the modern world that has very different ideals and can serve as the basis of an old-new radical philosophy of natural and cosmic belonging, inspiring humanity to step away from the nightmare tranhumanist slave-world into which we are today being herded. In this important series of ten essays, our contributor W.D. James, who teaches philosophy in Kentucky, USA, explores the roots and thinking of what he terms “egalitarian anti-modernism”.
…two contrary tendencies are to be traced in everything, the one descending and the other ascending, or, in other words, one centrifugal and the other centripetal.
– René Guénon, The Crisis of the Modern World
Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712-1778) can be thought of as the first egalitarian anti-modernist. What distinguishes Rousseau from many anti-modernists is that he was writing so early that modernity was not yet fully formed. So, he cannot formulate an overall picture of modernity to compare to a pre-modern or primordial alternative. He is writing from within the emergence of the modern world and critiquing many of the developments and trends he sees going on. For this same reason, unlike most later anti-modernists, he is not careful to adopt philosophical principles that are not themselves entangled with modernity. Hence, he mostly operates within the same philosophical framework of nominalism and individualism that characterized the 17th century social theorists like Thomas Hobbes and John Locke, that we looked at in the preceding essay.
What distinguishes Rousseau’s thinking is not that he was adopting a completely anti-modern theoretical framework from within which to operate (though we will see that he intuitively reverts to pre-modern exemplars and is not consistent in his nominalism), but that instead of employing the ‘new modes’ of thinking to defend emerging modernity, he uses them to critique those same developments and values. Rousseau’s thought is especially pertinent to our time of transhumanism and the coordinated attack on ‘nature’ and all things natural or given. To recognize nature is to recognize stubborn facts and potentially natural purposes and limits to our activities. This seems to be what many in our current cultural moment find it most important to undermine. He teaches us a healthy distrust of human artificiality. He is especially good at identifying basic social pathologies that may be universal, but seem particularly characteristic of our modern civilization.
Rousseau was born in Geneva. While he left that city in adolescence, it remained with him and served as a model of a virtuous society. Jean-Jacques was nothing if not a ‘complicated’ personality. Though he never subscribed to the Calvinism undergirding Genevan society and politics, and though he was denounced and banished later in life by the Genevan authorities for his subversive and unorthodox ideas, he continued to identify himself as a ‘Citizen of Geneva’ in the preface to some of his works. What interested him about Geneva was that there was a measure of genuine popular rule, republican independence, and a moral, if rigid, citizenry.
He was at once both a participant in the development of new ‘Enlightenment’ ideas and provided a radical critique of many of those same ideas. He was friends with many of the philosophes of the day (as the radical French thinkers were called), but also their intellectual enemy. He got into trouble wherever he went, usually being pushed into exile, and then quickly wearing out his welcome with whoever took him in, as was the case with the Scottish philosopher David Hume.
On the personal front, Rousseau had numerous affairs and engaged in other scandalous episodes. At about age 16 he was made the lover of the almost 30 year old Madame de Warens, a noblewomen who also hosted fashionable salons which provided his initiation into the intellectual currents of the day, in addition to whatever other initiations he was provided. He later took as his mistress, and common-law wife, a servant woman with whom he had up to 6 children; all of whom Rousseau had committed to the orphanage. From his uniquely unvarnished Confessions, we know this morally tortured him for the rest of his life. He did provide financially for her, her mother, and otherwise large family. Perhaps much of his diagnosis of the ways that ‘society’ can undermine individual authenticity and morality stem from first-person experience.
Rousseau’s basic stance
As noted above, Rousseau operates largely within the parameters of a modern philosophical framework. He is a not altogether consistent nominalist and the individual is the basis of his political thought. He even carries on the ‘state of nature’ and ‘social contract’ traditions established by Hobbes and Locke. However, his constant aim is to serve as an iconoclast of modern society, morality, and cultural norms. He is always animated by the attempt to recover some sort of simpler, more authentic, more moral and happier way of life.
We can get a sense of how he differs from these other early modern theorists by comparing their views of ‘nature’. Hobbes put forth that our natural state was one of conflict and misery and the whole point of civilization and political power was to allow us to get out of our natural condition. Locke had a more sanguine view, but still thought that nature was filled with ‘inconveniences’ (essentially lack of security and settled legal structures), so that the move to the civil condition did not completely separate us from nature (we had ‘natural rights’ that we wanted to protect by setting up distinctly limited governments), but it was certainly not the ideal. Rousseau on the other hand holds out nature as a positive good. His natural human living in the ‘state of nature’ is strong, good (or at least not at all evil), at one with themselves, and most importantly, happy.
As Rousseau sees it, it is society, not something in human nature itself, that is the root of evil and our problems. He paints a picture of the human move to form societies, first very simple and more less beneficial, but containing the seeds that will grow flowers of evil as society becomes more sophisticated. Rousseau will argue that we lose much of human nature in society, especially a corrupt society, and structures of domination develop as a result. He provides a merciless critique of the pathologies of domination and hypocrisy. He does not think we can return to our natural simplicity. He does think though that we could radically reform our social practices and institutions so as to regain a measure of simplicity, authenticity, virtue, and much more happiness than our current society allows.
Over this and the next couple of essays we will explore Rousseau’s thinking in a good bit of detail, typically focusing on one major work in each. Here we will look at The Discourse on the Arts and Sciences, or simply The First Discourse,as it is sometimes called.
Discourse on the Arts and Sciences
The story goes that Rousseau was walking to the outskirts of Paris to visit his friend Jean D’Alembert, co-editor with Denis Diderot of the Encyclopédie, a compendium of all useful knowledge and the centerpiece of the French Enlightenment project, who had been imprisoned by the authorities for his ideas and publications. Rousseau and D’Alembert were friends and intellectual sparring partners. Along the way he came across an announcement that the Academy of Dijon was sponsoring an essay contest. The proposed question was: “Has the restoration of the sciences and arts contributed to the purification of morals?” Rousseau later reported that “Within an instant of reading this, I saw another universe and became another man.”
Essentially, the essay competition was an invitation to provide a moral foundation for the Enlightenment expansion of human power. The very framing of the question, assuming that the arts and sciences were non-existent in the medieval world, begs the question. Rousseau chose to take up the contrary view that the Enlightenment was a catastrophe for human goodness, tranquility, liberty, and happiness. To their credit, the professors of the academy awarded him the prize for his essay and Rousseau commenced his career as an enfant terrible. Here he first lays out many of the themes that he will spend the rest of his developing and expanding upon.
Domination
Rousseau starts with the observation that the arts and sciences, the fruits of the mind, can make life more pleasant. However, his skeptical suspicions immediately come to the fore. While the despotism of “the government and the laws” is more overt, an effect of the “sciences, letters, and arts” is that they “spread garlands of flowers over the iron chains with which they [people] are burdened, stifle in them the sense of that original liberty for which they seem to have been born, [and] makes them love their slavery…”.i High civilization, while making life more pleasant in some regards, introduces customs of “politeness” and “propriety” which “give orders; without ceasing”.ii So, while the arts and sciences of the Enlightenment might be adding something to human life, he asks us to question what are the negative effects? What are they covering up? Are they really increasing our liberty or only making domination more bearable?
Perhaps Rousseau is wrong here, but he always sees a contrast between what people naturally are and what they become within society. That line of thinking can go wrong if we assume that people are not social by nature. However, if we interpret this as a distinction between what people are innately, regardless of social context, and then see this as the basis upon which we can evaluate whether a particular social structure has a more or less beneficial effect, it might be more useful. As we will see in more detail in the next essay, Rousseau sees society, especially modern European society, as a great danger. His ability to launch a profound critique of particular social formations is a great contribution Rousseau makes to our thinking.
Authenticity and Duplicity
Another important observation Rousseau makes is that our ‘social selves’ and ‘our real selves’ are often quite different. In other writings he will try to work out how to reconcile those. Here he is mainly interested in pointing out this fact. In the polite, enlightened, cultivated society of eighteenth-century France (for example) “One no longer dares to seem what one really is; and in this perpetual constraint, the men who make up this herd we call society will, if placed in the same circumstances, do all the same things unless, stronger motives deter them. Thus no one will ever really know those with whom he is dealing”.iii
There is a lot going on here. For one, social domination and social inauthenticity are somehow bound up with one another. Secondly, Rousseau believes that it is through social pathologies that we seek to appear to be what we are not. We care about our ‘image’ in situations where the judgments of others will affect how well we prosper materially and even psychologically.
This doubles back to create incentives and structures to conform. It doubles back yet again to heighten our alienation: from others and even ourselves. The Rousseau of the First Discourse is still young and just getting his feet under him, but already his seductively suspicious intuitions are working their magic on us.
Civilization and Morality
Having made these initial observations, he is ready to take head on the question of the essay competition about the purification of morals. Rousseau roots the origins of the arts and sciences in a Promethean pride:
“Astronomy was born of superstition, eloquence of ambition, hatred, flattery, and lying, geometry of avarice,; physics of vain curiosity; all of them, even moral philosophy owe their birth to our vices; we would be less in doubt about their advantages, if they owed it to your virtues.”iv
Their effects include “undermining the foundations of faith and annihilating virtue.”v Finally, they grow from the same ground as “Luxury” and contribute to its development: “Luxury seldom thrives without the sciences and the arts, and they never thrive without it.”vi
Thoreau at Walden Pond
As these essays progress, I will throw side glances at other significant thinkers in the egalitarian anti-modernist tradition I am mapping to further flesh out the terrain. With Rousseau’s emphasis on Nature, simplicity, and authenticity, I think of Henry David Thoreau’s (1817-1862) experiment at Walden Pond. Thoreau adjourned to the pond, just about a mile outside the town of Concord, Massachusetts, where the American war of independence had commenced, to see how authentically one could still live in the face of rising industrialism. Thoreau wrote:
“I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived…to live so sturdy and Spartan-like was to put to route all that was not life…”vii
He too wanted to question civilization:
“If it is asserted that civilization is a real advance in the condition of man, -and I think that it is, though only the wise improve their advantages, -it must be shown that it produces better dwellings without making them more costly; and the cost of a thing is the amount of what I shall call life which it is required to be exchanged for it, immediately or in the long run.”viii
And on luxury: “It is the luxurious and dissipated who set the fashions which the herd so diligently follow… if he [the average man] resigned himself to their tender mercies he would soon be completely emasculated”.ix
Thoreau states that he hoped to escape the hustle and bustle of overly active social life and rediscover the sort of Principles that were worth living by. He seems to have found some. When his thoughts turn back outward to society again, as they do in On Civil Disobedience, he is ready to take his stand. He asserts:
“I heartily accept that motto, -‘That government is best which governs least;’ and I should like to see it acted up to more rapidly and systematically. Carried out, it finally amounts to this, which also I believe, -‘That government is best which governs not all;’ and when men are prepared for it, that will be the kind of government which they will have. Government is at best but an expedient; but most governments are usually, and all governments are sometimes, inexpedient…. The government itself, which is only the mode which the people have chosen to execute their will, is equally liable to be abused and perverted before the people can act through it.”x
On reading Rousseau today
Rousseau’s logic in the First Discourse can be summed up as follows: as civilization increases in sophistication, the more it increases in disparity and oppression; the more it does this, the less virtue there is; as virtue decreases so does human happiness. It is the logic of exposing how things go wrong and end up subverting their aims. He is good at bringing into focus the pathologies that can develop in society. He is also good at showing how deep the political reaches: into the psyche and into our identify formation. Hence, social pathologies become individual pathologies; sources of inauthenticity.
He also breaks the hold on us of the modern superstition of unending progress and the notion that increases in sophistication and technology will necessarily serve the cause of human freedom and happiness. In the process, he reopens Nature as a possible source of value and inspiration. Who can better aid us in unmasking the pathologies of the transhumanism which would completely replace the natural with the artificial, the real with the make believe, the authentic with the inauthentic, the natural with the prescribed and enforced?
As Guénon observed in the opening quote, here in our ordinary world, all movements toward decay and disorder generate movements in the opposite direction, towards recovered order. We can see Rousseau as a contrary force called forth by the Enlightenment project itself. Perhaps we are starting to see similar healthful signs in our own time of cultural insanity and societal suicide.
i Jean-Jacques Rousseau, The Basic Political Writings, translated and edited by Donald A. Cress, Hackett Publishing, 1987, p. 3.
ii Ibid, p. 4.
iii Ibid, p. 4.
iv Ibid, p. 11.
v Ibid, p. 12.
vi Ibid, p. 12.
vii Henry David Thoreau, Walden and Other Writings, Edited by Joseph Wood Crutch, Bantam Books, 1962, p. 172.
viii Ibid, p. 128.
ix Ibid, p. 132.
x Ibid, p. 85.
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