The Cave and the Light

by Arthur Herman

  Did Rousseau believe his idyllic picture of primitive man had any basis in reality? Certainly he could, and did, recite pages of research about tribal societies in America and Africa to bolster his point. But in the final analysis Rousseau wanted to use his noble savage, whose “ignorance of vice prevents him from doing evil,” to act as a kind of Platonic ideal: a model of human perfection who sets the shortcomings of modern man in sharp relief.

  In Rousseau’s world, natural man is strong, virile, and altruistic, in addition to being fully in touch with his own feelings. Civilized man turns out to be weak, effeminate, greedy, and self-interested to the point of cold cunning. Like the stereotypical New Yorker, he is incessantly asking: “So what’s in it for me?” If natural man is Tarzan mixed with Dances with Wolves, civilized man is Ebenezer Scrooge, Simon Legree, and Wall Street’s Gordon Gekko rolled into one (indeed, Charles Dickens’s moral outlook as well as Oliver Stone’s owes a great deal to Rousseau).

  The Scottish Enlightenment, of course, made this passion for self-interest, whatever its faults, the driving engine of progress and improvement. For Rousseau, by contrast, it is the engine of man’s downfall. It makes a wasteland of his primeval Garden of Eden. Like the modern green activist, Rousseau saw the destruction of the environment and the pursuit of profit going hand in hand. Thanks to man’s greed, “vast forests were transformed into pleasant fields which had to be watered with the sweat of men,” and slavery and misery sprouted up among the crops.†

  “It is [the invention of] iron and wheat,” Rousseau wrote, “which first civilized men and ruined the human race” (he had already lambasted the invention of the printing press in his first Discourse) and enabled “a few ambitious men” to subject the rest of the human race “to labor, servitude, and misery.”14 Working for a living becomes man’s greatest curse, symbolized by the daily drudgery of the “nine to five” routine: the bleak cave of capitalism.

  Because in Rousseau’s world just as in Plato’s, the less we have, including material possessions and new technology, the healthier, stronger, and more moral we are. And the less we think about our own selfish needs and wants, and the more we think about the needs of others and the group, the more our inner humanity and innate virtue will come out.

  That led to Rousseau’s second insight. If men are to be happy, love of self must be replaced by the love of community. Here he came down firmly on the side of ancient versus modern liberty and on the side of the ancient Greeks and Romans, who assume the proportions of a race of superheroes in his mind.15 “What prevents us from being the kind of men they were?” he asked. “The passions of self interest,” which, “along with an indifference to the welfare of others,” have been set loose by a corrupt modern society. Replace them with the right kinds of laws and institutions, Rousseau believed—those of an earlier, simpler age—and we might become our own race of superheroes.

  Still, critics like Voltaire had a point. Even if Rousseau was right and men really were stronger and happier in earlier times and under more primitive conditions, did he truly think we could turn back the clock? Yes, we can, Rousseau affirmed, thanks to the most powerful tool modern man has to shape the kind of society he wants. This is compulsory education.

  Rousseau’s own treatise on education, a series of letters addressed to an imaginary new parent named Émile, did not appear until he was fifty. But in a profound sense, the theme was already present in his other work, as was his debt to Plato’s Republic. It was not laws or constitutions alone that held the ancient free polis together, Rousseau asserted. It was a passionate commitment to an ideal of unity, which all the children of ancient Athens, Sparta, and republican Rome were compelled to learn and absorb from birth: “with their mother’s milk,” as Rousseau liked to say.

  By a similar reform of education, the Émile argues, we can craft the same kinds of citizens. They will not grow up to be the well-fed, prosperous individuals of commercial society. Instead, they will live to become lovers of virtue and passionate defenders of liberty. Instead of saying, “What’s in it for me?” they will constantly ask, “What can I do for others?” They will become impervious to the corruptions and temptations that come with adulthood. Like an army of little Socrateses, they will learn to obey the “inner voice” of conscience instead.

  Rousseau’s other educational doctrines (he thought book learning and the study of math and science largely a waste of time) don’t bear much scrutiny today. However, his belief that through education we can insulate children from the bad influences of the society around them, and retard adverse social processes, left a deep imprint on Western pedagogy. Anyone who’s been forced to take sex education or antidrug or anti–drunk driving classes in school, or participate in a Let’s Recycle bottle drive, has experienced the Rousseau formula firsthand.

  Rousseau’s own agenda, however, was far more ambitious. He foresaw the day societies would have an entire compulsory education system like that drawn up by Plato in the Republic, in which every citizen will learn how to dedicate himself or herself to a life of virtue, meaning a devotion to the freedom of his or her nation, from the day he or she draws a first breath: “The newly born infant, upon first opening his eyes, must gaze upon the fatherland, and until his dying day should behold nothing else.” For this reason, Rousseau’s political works are hymns of praise to Plato’s favorite Greek city-state, ancient Sparta.

  For Plato, Sparta’s constitution came the closest in reality to his own political ideal, that of a “total community,” as he puts it in the Laws, in which “everybody feels pleasure and pain at the same things, so that they all praise and blame with complete unanimity.” It is also the one most able to hold corruption in check, by banishing its primary source: individuality. In war and in peace, Plato argued, no citizen should “get in the habit of acting alone and independently” and instead must obey his leaders “even in tiny details, just as they did in Sparta.”16

  Likewise for Rousseau, Spartan man is the one closest to primitive man in his mental and physical toughness17 and in his ignorance of corrupting civilized comforts, including self-pity. In Émile, he tells the story of the Spartan mother who learned that her five sons had all been killed in battle. Don’t worry about that, she says. Did Sparta win? Rousseau concludes that Plato only taught posterity how to cultivate virtue. The Spartans showed us how it’s actually done.18

  For the rest of the Enlightenment, Sparta had come to symbolize “ancient” liberty at its most barbaric and brutish.19 A casual observer of a movie like 300, with its blood-drenched picture of Spartan warriors at the battle of Thermopylae, has to agree. But Rousseau would see something else. He would see a people dedicated to defending their freedom regardless of the personal cost; a nation trained not only for a life of self-sacrifice, but also for single-minded victory over tyranny and evil. The result was a dedication to virtue that could conquer every enemy or obstacle. It is the true victory of mind over matter—just what Plato’s idealism was all about.

  Indeed, what repelled the rest of the Enlightenment about Sparta, its crude anti-intellectualism and its closed nature, was precisely what appealed to Rousseau most. Here was a society in which man’s natural instinct for self-love was ruthlessly and categorically suppressed. In its place sprang up a passionate love of community, including an instinctive hostility toward outsiders. “Every patriot hates foreigners,” Rousseau wrote with relish. “They are nothing in his eyes.… Abroad, the Spartan was selfish, grasping, and unjust, but unselfishness, justice, and harmony ruled within his walls.” Indeed, as Plato pointed out, of all ancient cities Sparta had no need of walls, because the other Greek cities knew that war against the Spartans meant instant defeat.20

  Therefore, the goal for all education must be to give the nation walls of muscle and steel (as Plato might put it) rather than stone: a citizenry focused entirely on preserving the social contract in its original form. Rousseau composed his version of The Social Contract in 1761. It is still probably the most widely read
of his works, but it is also the easiest to misunderstand.

  Like John Locke, Rousseau saw the social contract as a mandate for overthrowing any tyranny that violates its terms. However, its character could not be more different. Instead of securing individual rights, Rousseau’s contract creates a community bound to a collective will and destiny, which he termed the General Will. Under its shelter each citizen receives his share of personal liberty, but also public obligations. Because we are human beings, the conflict between our individual will and the General Will becomes inevitable. In Rousseau’s case, however, it is the individual, not the community, who must give way. He must learn that this General Will is actually his true, better self. This in turn requires a compulsory training, so that obeying the General Will becomes the leading passion in our lives.

  The Enlightenment rested its entire worldview on Locke’s updating of Abelard’s dictum (ultimately derived from Aristotle) that we must understand in order to believe. Rousseau told eighteenth-century Europe that it had its priorities backward. It is not our reason or our understanding that allows us to change the world, but our passions, our emotional commitment to an idea or cause. Building for the future therefore must be about cultivating the passions and the feelings, not the mind, so that we can embrace the life of virtue (literally) body and soul.

  I feel, therefore I am. Here Rousseau parted ways with Plato—and pointed the way to the Romantics. The orthodox Platonist, after all, is bound to believe that the source of all virtue is knowledge and reason. Rousseau, by contrast, saw reason and virtue as locked in permanent conflict. If we are to be free and pure in heart, our reason will have to take the backseat: “The mind is a Sophist who leads virtue to the scaffold.”21 It is that “inner voice,” which for Rousseau meant the conditioned conscience, that must take charge.

  This is not to say that Rousseau ignored the utility of reason. Reason will show us how to replace the corrupt old order with a new virtuous one; it allows us to act as a Platonic statesman,22 drawing up political blueprints for the future with almost mathematical exactitude. Rousseau even compared the problem of how to make men obey the law with squaring the circle in geometry: a Platonic conceit if ever there was one.23

  So when a Polish nobleman asked him to draw up a model constitution for a future independent Poland, Rousseau was pleased to oblige. It was his chance to play Philosopher Ruler, and he made the most of it. The constitution he drew up could not be more different than the one James Madison would draw up for the fledgling United States (which was influenced, as we know, by his reading of David Hume). Instead of limiting the power of government, Rousseau’s extends it in every possible direction. In fact, it reads a lot like the first three books of Plato’s Republic—which is hardly a coincidence. Children must be trained to love their fatherland and its liberty “with their mother’s milk.”‡ Education must be compulsory and include military training from an early age, since in a true republic every citizen must be a soldier, trained to fight and die for the nation. There must also be constant rounds of civic festivals and public rituals to make people proud of their country and its customs, and in which participation is compulsory.

  It is here that Rousseau saw religion as important. A truly civic-minded religion is not about moral teaching—the State will take care of that—or private consolation. Its role instead is to offer a set of rituals and dogmas that teach people that the best way to worship God is to worship the community: nothing more and nothing less. Modern mass politics, with its self-conscious public rituals, from the French Revolution’s Cult of the Supreme Being to Hitler’s Nuremberg rallies, had been born—and with it its leading rationale. For “everything that destroys social unity is worthless,” Rousseau declared, “and all institutions that set men at odds with himself are worthless”—including the belief in God. One of the secrets of Sparta’s success, Rousseau tells us, is that it never left its citizens any free time of their own. We can be either individuals or citizens, but not both.24

  And like the ancient Spartans, Rousseau’s Poles must be trained to dislike foreigners and not engage in trade with them. “Cause money to be an object of contempt, and if possible, useless besides,” he wrote, along with all forms of luxury and “womanly adornment.” Teach people to tend their fields and not bother their heads with anything else. There will be no need to abolish private property as Plato’s Republic did, because if the citizens’ passions are properly conditioned, it will be unnecessary. As a result, the Poles may be poor and cut off from the rest of the world. “You will live, however, in an atmosphere of true abundance, of justice, and of freedom,” with happy hands and hearts and minds, which are the foundations “of a strong state and a prosperous people.”25

  Strength through joy; work makes you free. It is Rousseau who first points the way toward those chilling formulations. Today we are only too aware of where this story ends. But it is important to realize that those who read him in the three decades before the French Revolution did not. They saw only a refreshing new political vision, a way to think about man’s progress apart from the materialistic values of commercial society—in short, a vision of humanity freed from the ever-expanding “getting and spending” that the neo-Aristotelians of the Enlightenment had seemed to forecast for Europe’s future.

  Indeed, the admiration for Rousseau started at the top of the intellectual pyramid. Immanuel Kant was the most respected philosopher in Germany. Yet in forty years, Kant interrupted his daily postluncheon walk only once, when his copy of Rousseau’s Émile arrived. His austere office had no picture or decoration—except for a portrait of Rousseau.

  “What Kant prized in Rousseau,” writes historian Ernst Cassirer, “was the fact that he had distinguished more clearly than others between the mask that man wears [in commercial society] and his actual visage.”26 Kant, of course, realized that Rousseau’s picture of the noble savage was an ideal construct: “This wish for a return to an age of simplicity and innocence,” Kant concluded, “is futile.” We are what we are, as modern human beings.27

  But Kant did agree with Rousseau that the growth of civilization adds nothing to man’s moral makeup; instead, it usually ends up becoming a distraction from our moral duty. So the task ahead lies in creating institutions that will reflect our true moral nature, the voice of conscience that recognizes certain moral actions as an urgent duty without room for reflection or compromise.

  Kant termed that voice the categorical imperative. It is really a more sophisticated version of Rousseau’s “inner voice,” which ultimately answers the call of the General Will.28 Kant’s goal, however, was far grander and more utopian. He did not want to throw out enlightenment or commercial society or progress; instead, they should be fused together with our higher moral nature to create a brand-new stage of civil society, that of a single cosmopolitan culture and a single world government. Kant summed up the goal of this world government in the title of his tract Perpetual Peace, published in 1795; in which no nation may breach the peace of another and whose guarantor is Nature herself, as a reflection of divine providence, whose aim “is to produce a harmony among men, against their will and indeed through their discord.”29

  Unfortunately, until then, Kant wrote, “human nature must suffer the cruelest hardships under the guise of external well-being.” No wonder Rousseau preferred man’s savage state, Kant observed, so long as this last stage to which the human race must climb is not attained.30 Over Kant’s reading of Rousseau flutters the flag of the United Nations, but also the first pages of Georg Friedrich Hegel’s Philosophy of Right and Auguste Comte’s Positive Philosophy, not to mention Marx’s Das Kapital. With the fusion of Kant and Rousseau, the European mind was on the brink of a new way of visualizing the direction and purpose of civil society: toward the abolition of the self-interested individual, instead of his ultimate triumph.

  Rousseau’s influence cut in many, sometimes unexpected, directions. In France itself, after his death in 1778, intellectuals by and large fell i
n line with his political evangelism. Many, like the Count de Mirabeau, Jean-Paul Marat, Maxmilien Robespierre, and Louis-Antoine de Saint-Just, would become leading prophets of the French Revolution.31 Others resisted, especially ordinary people. Perhaps they sensed that like many reformers, Rousseau loved humanity more than he liked human beings and that if his plans for their happiness and welfare were really implemented, they might have the opposite result.

  Above all, they were shocked by his complete deprecation of Christianity and his clear insistence that God, Christ, and Church played no part in helping men and women to be moral and free. As a result, Rousseau had his house stoned and his windows broken and found himself assaulted in the street. His native city of Geneva turned against him and revoked his citizenship. Still, the man who said, “It is easier to force people to do good than to induce them to do it out of their own free will,” couldn’t have been surprised if le peuple took a dislike to him.32

  A far bigger surprise was how young middle-class readers turned to his books with an enthusiasm bordering on hysteria, both men and particularly women. Rousseau himself had a strong dislike of educated women.33 He blamed them for most of the corruption of contemporary society; their place was in the kitchen and in the nursery, not shopping or organizing salons or reading books. Yet they read Rousseau in droves, especially his blockbuster novel published in 1761, The New Heloise (La Nouvelle Héloïse).