The Pursuit of Certainty. Shirley Robin Letwin
everything that makes human life a pleasure. Worst of all, he insists on remaking all men to fit the one image he admires. All the rogues and villains that Hume discovered were somehow tainted by puritanism. The men he admired were averse to anything like dogma or rigid definition; they preferred the near to the far, the seen to the unseen; they valued a steady judgement and a lively capacity for enjoyment; they accepted and were even amused by the variety and vicissitudes of human life. They were pagans who respected the power of their gods, but expected no mercy, not even justice, from them.
Hume thus denied the possibility of demonstrating the superiority of any single way of life, or of any set of rules. There was no ideal to be enforced on all, nor any City of God to be reached. And nothing very exalted was left for politics to do. Government has to look after certain things that individuals cannot do for themselves. Without these activities, civilization cannot survive, but they are no more than an indispensable condition of a good life. For the purposes of politics, society is merely a web of interests that has to be managed so as to let each man live as he likes without fearing either his neighbours or his rulers. To reach for perfection, to seek an ideal, is noble, but dangerous, and is therefore, according to Hume, an activity that individuals or voluntary groups may pursue, but governments certainly should not. Politics is just one of many social activities, by no means the highest, concerned with the ordinary business of life, with things as they are, not as they should be.
What was fixed in Hume’s politics was not any set of policies, not even any general principles about the best form of government or constitution, but simply the conviction that the office of government is to protect men against arbitrary interference, or, in other words, to enforce the rule of law. Everything else had to be subordinated to this, for where there is no rule of law, force prevails and civilization is impossible. One is obliged to remember how dangerous it is to unsettle established rules, but beyond that politics offers neither any absolute truth nor any fixed goal. The politician never can choose between good and evil, but merely between greater and lesser evils. What he ought to choose cannot be known beforehand because what is right today might be wrong tomorrow. There is no escape from the uncertainties of politics either through technical knowledge or esoteric learning; one can rely on nothing more than political wisdom, that is, a good working knowledge of what men are like, and how to deal with them, a sense of proportion and delicacy.
Those who hold this view of politics would never criticize a government for failing to be daring, bold, or inspiring, but rather for being rash, crude, or dishonest. Nor are they likely to encourage glorious deeds or to want sweeping reforms; they are reluctant to go to war or to inflict suffering. They leave great changes to take place over a long time, and content themselves with making piecemeal and somewhat haphazard adjustments to circumstances. The world never appears to them as divided between saints and villains, because they expect even virtuous and reasonable men to differ.
Some of these sentiments continued to rule in Jeremy Bentham. He was as anxious as Hume to preserve diversity in opinion and action, to protect liberty and the rule of law. Nevertheless a new temperament was at work, a temperament that could not bear either uncertainty or the intrusion of personality. While Bentham’s work was inspired partly by a sensitivity to injustices that had been allowed to accumulate, the way in which he proposed to deal with them reflected more than a desire for justice. He represented in England the spirit that possessed France in the late eighteenth century, the urge to remake the world according to a rational pattern. There is perhaps no better evidence of the nature of the British temper than the fact that in England this urge took the form of Benthamism.
For Bentham concerned himself even less than Hume did with men’s souls; he did not undertake to make them secure of bliss in the hereafter, not even on earth. But within the limited province he allotted to politics, essentially the same as Hume assigned to it, he proposed to change the character of politics. It was no longer to be an art, or left to gentlemen amateurs. It was to become a technical activity. Not merely the particular reforms he outlined, or his insistence that English law needed reform gave Bentham such influence and reputation, but the suggestion implicit in everything he did that political wisdom could be reduced to a technique. This technique would enable men to dispense with experience; it could be put down complete and self-contained in a book, so that anyone could learn it and apply it almost automatically. Unlike Hume, Bentham did not expect political needs to be constantly changing. He was certain of having discovered the key to perfection, to a system of law that would need but minor correction once in a hundred years.
Moreover, Bentham taught his successors to equate political order with one kind of order. Only in the realm of economic affairs was he content to accept another sort of order, and his interest in mechanisms enabled him to explain, as lucidly as anyone has, how from the self-interested activities of individuals social order could result without recourse to mystical natural harmonies or unseen hands. About law, however, he thought very differently. He denounced the Common Law not only because of its complications and inefficiencies, but because he opposed the whole notion of law as the product of growth, necessarily unpredictable, never complete or perfect. Instead, he advocated another concept of law, as the product of purely logical operations. The issue raised by Bentham was not whether the law was to be reformed, not even whether it ought to be codified, but in what manner it was to be reformed. Bentham did not want slow, limited innovations that would continue to be made always, but one grand sweep. Change was to come not in response to some specific defect, some particular injustice or inconsistency. It was to throw aside what had grown up over the centuries as simply chaos; it was to create a perfect, comprehensive, new design. For Bentham, legislation ought above all to be an activity of invention and logic, free of any need to consider what went before. It should make politics largely a matter of technical skill.
Thereby politics could also, Bentham hoped, be made impersonal. All his suggestions were designed to limit or eliminate the need to make judgements. Whereas the old Whig rulers believed they had something better than brains to rely on, Bentham’s politician was to be pure brains. Yet this love of impersonality grew out of the same interest that moved Hume to emphasize personal qualities. Hume argued that motives and character must always be considered because no two men do the same thing for the same reasons; Bentham’s sensitivity to the wide variation in human behaviour was expressed in a desire to rule out any question about a man’s character or motives even from ethics, and certainly from politics. He would have confined ethical judgements to the impersonal question of how a man’s actions affect others, without presuming to say anything about the man himself. In politics, his techniques were designed to make any personal judgement about a politician or the people he ruled irrelevant. He hoped in this way to free men altogether from subjection to anyone else’s opinion.
Nevertheless Bentham’s sensitivity to the feelings of real people came to haunt his dream of reducing politics to a technique. In the end, for all his preaching, he himself produced mainly a great number of ingenious devices, more nearly gadgets for reform than sweeping panaceas. He opened the door, however, to a world where politicians need not be men of prudence and taste, but merely qualified technicians.
A more profound change was introduced by John Stuart Mill, who endowed politics with a new meaning. Altered conditions made Bentham’s theories seem less relevant, while modifications introduced by disciples gave them a more vulnerable character. At the same time, young intellectuals were being exposed to influences from abroad. All this led Mill to question the central tenet of the British political tradition, never jeopardized by Bentham, that the City of Man has no connection with the City of God. Within a century the protest against puritanism fashioned by Hume became the foundation for the revival of puritanism in a new form. Mill reminds us that puritanism is as permanent a strain in the British temper, at least since the seventeenth century, as is the tolerance opposed to it.
Although Mill’s renunciation of his early beliefs is celebrated, he never rejected the puritanical discipline that James Mill had quite unconsciously taught him. It was a secular puritanism, unconnected with God, but just as the older forms did, it dismembered human nature and made repression, rather than harmony, its moral ideal. Like all latter-day puritans, Mill tried to give the emotions their due, but for all his efforts, he could think of them only as naturally hostile to reason, unless curbed by it. Although he cultivated an interest in art and poetry, he never could accept a full, spontaneous reaction