After the Renaissance came the “Scientific Revolution” of the 17th century and then the “Enlightenment” of the 18th. Philosophers increasingly based their speculations not on our relationship with God, but on human nature. What are we like, and what motivates our behaviour?
The picture that emerged was that we are autonomous individuals, ambitious, perhaps a bit selfish, thinking first and foremost of our own material wellbeing, then of our family and friends, then of the wider community and so on outwards, like the rings of an archery target, with ever-diminishing commitment. Furthermore, because there aren’t enough material goods around to satisfy everyone’s wants, we are all in competition with each other for what we can get. This philosophy has been called POSSESSIVE INDIVIDUALISM.
How to keep this individualistic competitiveness under control in a peaceful society?
The discovery of America. (This is a particular idea of mine)
Unlike the Spanish explorers, who found the great cities of the Aztecs and the Incas, the British, French and Dutch, landing much further north, found only Stone Age hunter-gatherer tribes, without metals, written language, permanent towns, agriculture or any government beyond the tribal level. Nothing had prepared them for this! There was nothing like it in the Bible, or in what they knew of ancient Greece and Rome, or of Islamic civilization. They began to ask themselves searching questions: Did our remote ancestors live like this? Yes, probably. If so, why don’t we live like that any more? How and why did civilization arise in some parts of the world but not in others?
The North American tribes were believed to be living in a STATE OF NATURE, before civilisation and government had been invented. But at some stage, our ancestors must have got together and agreed to change things. There must have been a SOCIAL CONTRACT: an agreement to live together under some form of government. Why? Because they believed they would be better off as a result. All the philosophers agreed that life in civilized society was better, with the sole exception of Rousseau, who maintained that civilization was all wrong and the N. American tribes, still living in a state of nature, were much healthier, freer and happier than us!
Questions
Is Possessive Individualism actually correct as an assessment of the human personality?
Hegel was perhaps the first philosopher to point out that people in the past didn’t necessarily think like us. He saw history as a series of giant steps upward, determined by these changes in human consciousness.
Marx believed that human nature was determined by economic circumstances. The vast economic expansion from the end of the Middle Ages created capitalism, and Possessive Individualism was a state of consciousness appropriate to capitalist society. After the coming of Communism, human consciousness would change again, towards co-operation rather than competition.
Mill believed that P.I. was an innate part of human nature, and because of this, Communism was unlikely to succeed.
Darwin’s ideas on evolution, particularly the notion of “Survival of the fittest” were interpreted by some to lead to “Social Darwinism”, where it was argued that it was not only inevitable, but beneficial, that the weak should be exterminated, thereby creating more room for the strong and successful. This led to the ideologies of Imperialism and Fascism.
Prince Kropotkin, the Russian anarchist, thought that P.I. was a natural philosophy for Britain: a small overcrowded island with inadequate natural resources for its population. Russia, by contrast, had almost limitless natural resources, but with a harsh climate and only a small population, where success could only be achieved by co-operation, not P.I.
Hitler dismissed P.I. as “Jewish philosophy”! This was how Jews behaved! He believed Germans had a superior ideology, based on mutual trust, comradeship and patriotism.
Vladimir Putin presumably sees P.I. as a clear sign of Western decadencen and that he stands for an older and more moral code: the service of Holy Mother Russia
An animal behaviourist would argue that the whole concept has been grossly exaggerated. Humans are essentially herd-animals, like chimpanzees or sheep, not solitaries like tigers or bears. By instinct and desire, most of us prefer to live as part of a group, and this means (especially since the development of human speech) that we both need to and want to get on well with our immediate neighbours
Writers on the idea of a Social contract include:-
Thomas Hobbes: “Leviathan”, 1651
John Locke: “Two Treatises of Government”: written in the late 1670s but not published until after the “Glorious Revolution” of 1688
Thomas Jefferson and others: “The American Declaration of Independence”, 1776.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau: “The Social Contract”, 1762. Rousseau’s Social Contract is quite different from the others.
We have already discussed Jefferson: we shall be examining these other writers over the next few meetings
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