The Conservative Sensibility

by George F. Will

  Holmes and Darrow, however, agreed that the human condition, properly understood in the light of modern science, left little room for the concept of human agency. It did, however, leave a lot of room for manipulating the human material. Remember the youthful Walter Lippmann’s enthusiasm for dealing “deliberately” with “life” itself, in all its complexity, guided by modern science. This facet of progressivism put it on a straight path to eugenics, the science of straightening out the crooked timber of humanity.

  Progressivism, in its initial semi-utopian confidence, held that history follows a path of improvement, generally toward enlarged liberty, as progressives understood this. Although the theory of ineluctable improvement was considered a social analogue of Darwinism, it was crucially different. Darwin’s fundamental insight was that species do change by natural selection but do not change on a predictable trajectory or toward a predetermined end. Rather, they change over time in response to the promptings of local conditions, which themselves can change over time. Progressives held that by using government power to change social conditions, predetermined social ends could be attained. It was a short step from here to the project of not just reforming social conditions but directly modifying the human stock. Progressivism in politics not only developed in tandem with, but also shared intellectual sources with, the late nineteenth-century and early twentieth-century interest in eugenics.

  The term “eugenics,” the root of which is the Greek word for “well born,” was coined by a cousin of Charles Darwin. Darwinism had quickened interest in racial and ethnic differences, and in the possibility of racial evolution or degeneration. Woodrow Wilson, in his first book, The State (1889), said his interest was in the government of the “Aryan races,” which included the English colonists who in America had let their “race habits and instincts have natural play.” Richard T. Ely was a progressive economist who spent most of his career at the University of Wisconsin but who also taught at Johns Hopkins, where Woodrow Wilson was one of his students. Ely and Charles Van Hise, the president of the University of Wisconsin, were exemplars of what early in the twentieth century was called the Wisconsin Idea. Under Governor Robert La Follette, a Republican progressive, the University of Wisconsin became a source of expertise for America’s first “administrative state,” at the state level. “By 1908,” Thomas C. Leonard says, “all the economists and one-sixth of the University’s entire faculty held appointments on Wisconsin government commissions.” Ely was thirty-one when, in 1885, he cofounded the American Economic Association, which he envisioned as an instrument for advancing the social gospel, the agenda of liberal Protestantism that included social regeneration through applied science. “God,” he said, “works through the state.” And in doing God’s work the state must not be squeamish. Leonard, an economist and historian of the tangle of race, eugenics, and economics in the Progressive era, writes that the duties of the state “would regularly require overriding individuals’ rights in the name of the economic common good.” This was especially so regarding those whom Van Hise called “human defectives.” His confidence was striking: “We know enough about eugenics so that if that knowledge were applied, the defective classes would disappear within a generation.”40

  The problem of the social costs of mentally inferior people became a preoccupation of reformers. Robert Yerkes was president of the American Psychological Association, which had been founded in 1892 as part of the proliferation of professional academic associations. At Yerkes’ urging, the US Army did intelligence testing of draftees during World War I and concluded that 47 percent of white and 89 percent of black conscripts were “morons,” defined as mental defectives who were sufficiently high-functioning to pass as normal. This posed a problem for persons hoping to improve the nation’s human resources. Ely praised the army testing for enabling the nation to inventory its human stock just as it does its livestock. Plato in the Republic wondered why cattle were bred but humans were not. Eugenicists also wondered. Eugenics was not a fully developed science but, Ely said, “we have got far enough to recognize that there are certain human beings who are absolutely unfit, and should be prevented from a continuation of their kind.” Progress depended on this.41

  After the war, when Congress set about restricting immigration, the army’s test results influenced the setting of national quotas. In 1902, the final volume of Woodrow Wilson’s widely read History of the American People contrasted “the sturdy stocks of the north of Europe,” who arrived before 1880, with southern and eastern Europeans who had “neither skill nor energy nor any initiative of quick intelligence.” Carl Brigham, a Princeton psychologist, said the army’s data demonstrated “the intellectual superiority of our Nordic group over the Mediterranean, Alpine and Negro groups.” Severe immigration restrictions, which excluded immigrants from an “Asiatic Barred Zone,” were legislated in 1924.42

  In 1907, Indiana became the first of thirty states to enact a forcible sterilization law. In 1911, Governor Woodrow Wilson signed New Jersey’s, which applied to “the hopelessly defective and criminal classes.” In 1927, in Buck v. Bell, the US Supreme Court upheld a Virginia sterilization law, saying that a state’s police power that extended to compulsory vaccination was “broad enough to cover cutting the Fallopian tubes.” Justice Holmes, whose jurisprudence of restraint pleased progressives by removing judicial impediments to the force of majorities, famously wrote in his opinion for the court that “three generations of imbeciles is enough.” In a letter to Harold Laski, a leading light of Britain’s Fabian socialists—a group also tempted by eugenics—Holmes wrote that in affirming the law requiring the sterilization of imbeciles he “was getting nearer to the first principle of real reform.”43

  Progressives believed that science, which is cumulative expertise, should hold the reins of society, determining the “human hierarchy,” ranking groups from those with the most aptitudes to those with the least.44 There was, of course, a contradiction in this. Progressives dismissed the idea of deriving natural rights from the facts of a fixed human nature, yet they were confident that racial groups had fixed natures that were pertinent to the formulation of various public policies. Progressives resolved this contradiction when they, like most of the rest of society, abandoned racialism, the belief that race determines human traits and capacities, a belief often associated with polygenism, the faux science that purported to prove that the human races are tidily distinct, that each race was created independent of all the others, and hence that each race is a separate species.

  In his book The Winning of the West, Roosevelt wrote that the vanquishing of Native Americans had proven the continuing vitality of the Anglo-Saxon stock that traced its valor back to battles in Europe’s forests: “Its true significance will be lost unless we grasp, however roughly, the past race-history of the nations who took part therein.”45 At the turn of the twentieth century, progressivism’s racial doctrines intersected with, and influenced, US foreign policy. In a Senate speech in 1900, Senator Albert Beveridge of Indiana, who twelve years later would be the keynote speaker at the Progressive Party convention that nominated Theodore Roosevelt for president, argued that an American withdrawal from the Philippines would “renounce our part in the mission of our race, trustee under God, of the civilization of the world.” C. Vann Woodward wrote that among the strangest aspects of “the strange career of Jim Crow” was the permeation of foreign policy under President William McKinley by “Southern attitudes on the subject of race.” This was noted at the time by the Boston Evening Transcript, which on January 14, 1899, acerbically wrote that Southern racial policy was “now the policy of the Administration of the very party which carried the country into and through a civil war to free the slave.”46 America’s first significant legislation restricting immigration was passed to exclude Chinese. Theodore Roosevelt supported this, in part because he thought Chinese immigrants would depress American wages, but also because he believed that they would be “ruinous to the white race.”47

 
Eugenics was one manifestation of progressivism’s repudiation of the Founders’ individualism, which asserted the natural equality of human beings in their capacity to reason and their right to choose and pursue their interests. Progressives preached a different, and they thought richer, understanding of freedom as each person’s realization of his or her potential through immersion in collectivities. That is, freedom is not something individuals are born into, it is something individuals must attain by diluting or shedding their individualism. Eugenics entered the picture through progressives’ belief that science was demonstrating that different races had different inherent capacities. For that reason, and for cultural reasons, different races were collectively becoming free—fulfilling their potentials—in different degrees and on different schedules. Therefore “rights granted at law must vary in relation to the relative development of the group in question.” And “whereas those deemed more advanced could be allowed to exercise a higher measure of control over their own most immediate concerns, as well as public decision-making, those groups lagging furthest behind could not.” So it is not astonishing that the Jim Crow regime in the South “was not only catalyzed, in important part, by Progressive academics, but was also explicitly championed by Southern Progressives.”48

  PROGRESSIVISM’S WEDGE

  Progressives would quickly and thoroughly disentangle themselves from racialism and eugenics, so progressivism should not be judged by this dark detour. But this walk on the wild side by progressivism should be contemplated for what it says about the peril of severing political philosophy, and hence political practices, from the concept of a fixed human nature that was the Founders’ anchor. Remember Calvin Coolidge’s summation of their vision and sensibility on the 150th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence: It was in opposition to the ideas that Coolidge espoused that John Dewey spoke eight years later in “The Future of Liberalism,” his December 1934 address to the American Philosophical Association. Dewey consigned to history’s dustbin the liberalism that he described as emphasizing “individuality and liberty.” It had, he said, rendered “valiant service” but the “fundamental defect was lack of perception of historic relativity.” This lack was “expressed in the conception of the individual as something given, complete in itself, and of liberty as a ready-made possession of the individual, only needing the removal of external restrictions in order to manifest itself.” Dewey said that the fatal flaw of this liberalism, which had “degenerated,” was its “absolutism,” meaning its “denial of temporal relativity.” A more enlightened liberalism would, he said, recognize that “an individual is nothing fixed, given ready-made.” Rather, an individual is something “achieved not in isolation, but with the aid and support of conditions, cultural and physical.”49

  Read one way, this is anodyne, even banal. Read another way, it is the thin end of a wedge of the most dangerous radicalism, a wedge enormous enough to chisel away the Founders’ intellectual legacy and to unleash totalitarian aspirations. The banal reading is that people are to some extent marked, shaped, socialized, conditioned—pick your verb—by their circumstances. Who denies, or ever has denied, this? Certainly not Plato, whose Republic has been well described as a book about education and its powerful potential for countering the influence of malign social factors. Jefferson certainly agreed that “conditions, cultural and physical,” have shaping effects on individuals. This is why he lauded rural yeomen and deplored cities. He thought the sturdy—because it was based on ownership of land—self-sufficiency of farmers nurtured the habits, mores, customs, and dispositions requisite for self-government. And he thought cities and factories bred a dependency inimical to the democratic spirit. Jefferson’s great rival, Alexander Hamilton, was Jefferson’s intellectual companion in stressing the moral effects of physical conditions and the cultural milieus that are shaped by physical conditions. Hamilton, however, praised the effects of conditions that Jefferson deplored. Jefferson, a slaveholding son of the Virginia gentry, desired the social stasis of an agricultural society. Hamilton, an upstart immigrant doing well in bustling Manhattan, welcomed the churning of capitalism as a solvent of social hierarchies that blocked the ascent of strivers like him. But regarding philosophic fundamentals, Jefferson and Hamilton were more than just compatible. Both spoke the language that progressives like Dewey wanted to retire, the language of natural rights. Dewey’s real aim was not merely to insist what no one disputed—that an individual’s social context has consequences. Rather, his radical aim was to assert the limitless plasticity of personhood under the prompting of properly calibrated and manipulated social conditions. His intellectual project had a European pedigree.

  In 1883, delivering the eulogy at Karl Marx’s grave in London’s Highgate Cemetery, Friedrich Engels said: “Charles Darwin discovered the law of the development of organic nature upon our planet. Marx is the discoverer of the fundamental law according to which human history moves and develops itself, a law so simple and self-evident that its simple enunciation is almost sufficient to secure assent.”50 In his preface to Das Kapital, Marx wrote that his “standpoint, from which the evolution of the economic formation of society is viewed as a process of natural history, can less than any other make the individual responsible for relations whose creature he socially remains, however much he may subjectively raise himself above them.”51 Marx, the archetypal modern radical, was, in his fascination with laws of history, not altogether unlike a great conservative. “We must all obey the great law of change,” according to Edmund Burke.52 If, however, we must obey it, human agency is circumscribed, if not nullified. Much, therefore, depends on how much of the life of society is thought to be under the sway of this or that “great law.” The nineteenth century was to be the arena of competing historicisms, of Hegel and Marx and others who postulated dialectics and other ways by which laws of change worked their wills. Burke, fortunately, stopped short of erecting such an ambitious intellectual architecture. For him, as Yuval Levin correctly reads him, “nature offers not a source of principles and axioms, but a living model of change.”53 It is a model functioning as an admonition; a model of how change ought to occur, not how it must occur. So Burke was an eighteenth-century man, but one decisively unlike America’s Founders, who did distill principles and axioms from nature, including human nature.

  Dewey and likeminded progressives rejected, root and branch, the constriction of politics implicit in the Founders’ principles. “Liberalism,” Dewey said, referring to the new and supposedly improved liberalism he was outlining, “knows that social conditions may restrict, distort, and almost prevent the development of individuality.” It follows that better social conditions can foster an individual’s undistorted development. Liberated from the Founders’ “absolutism” about nature and natural rights, and embracing historical relativity and what Dewey called “experimentalism,” progressives could get on with a politics muscular enough to nurture a better humanity. The Founders, Dewey said, “assumed that history, like time in the Newtonian scheme, means only modification of external relations; that it is quantitative, not equalitative and internal.” The business of Dewey’s “thorough-going social liberalism” would be to superintend and shape the whole person and the entire society. This liberalism is committed to experimental processes, and hence to the “continuous reconstruction of the ideas of individuality and of liberty in intimate connection with changes in social relations.”54

  The continuous reconstruction of basic categories of political thought means a constant revision of political practices and social life. This cannot be, to use Coolidge’s language, restful. But, then, progressive politics is exhilarating to its practitioners precisely because it has dismissed the confinement of any finalities. A progressive’s work is never done because everything is progressivism’s business. This is partly because, in political philosophy, epistemology is destiny. “Let us then,” wrote Locke, “suppose the Mind to be, as we say, white Paper, devoid of all Characters, without any Ideas; How c
omes it to be furnished?”55 How indeed. Locke’s epistemology suggested an unavoidable political project and a dangerous temptation. Government can hardly be altogether indifferent to the processes by which the white paper is written upon. Neither, however, can it be entrusted with comprehensive supervision of these processes.

  Suppose someone construes very broadly the extent to which people are shaped by their situations. Suppose someone subscribes to an especially severe form of Lockean sensationalism—more severe than did Locke, who postulated a certain sociability that presupposes some innate, and hence universal, human qualities. Suppose, that is, that someone believes individuals are almost entirely blank slates on which the external world writes what it will—that the world writes with the pen of external stimuli that are recorded by, and that act upon, the senses. Even such a person does not need to deny any fixity to human nature and need not postulate limitless human malleability. There still remains room for constancy in the human makeup, some universality in the mental mechanism by which people process the world’s promptings. Dewey, however, was staking out quite different and more exotic intellectual terrain. It was terrain on which Rousseau had first trod.

  An important pivot in modern political thought occurred when Rousseau argued that in the formation of human beings, human nature was supplanted by culture, which gives human beings a second nature, for better or worse. Politics thereby acquired the enormously important and deeply dangerous task of trying to fine-tune culture in order to tune the citizens’ second nature. If you wish to know precisely what the Founders and Framers did not intend, read Rousseau: “He who dares to undertake the making of a people’s institutions ought to feel himself capable, so to speak, of changing human nature, of transforming each individual…into part of a greater whole from which he in a manner receives his life and being; of altering man’s constitution for the purpose of strengthening it.…He must, in a word, take away from man his own resources and give him instead new ones alien to him, and incapable of being made use of without the help of other men. The more completely these natural resources are annihilated, the greater and the more lasting are those which he acquires.”56 There you have, with remarkable concision, the germ of the European radicalisms, of the left and the right, that would become twentieth-century totalitarianisms. The politics of consciousness exuded the confidence that inherited traits can be scrubbed away by a determined government and replaced by more desirable ones. The crux of modern radicalism is that human nature has no constancy, that it is merely an unstable imprint of the fluctuating social atmosphere. This fallacy emboldens political actors to adopt agendas of ambitious social engineering.