Future Primal. Louis G. Herman
The search for meaning and value — the quest — requires integration and synthesis, which rests on the nonsyllogistic, contradictory logic of seeing how opposites give each other meaning. There is no up without connection to down, no hot without cold, no black without white, no A without not-A. Not surprisingly, we see this as a foundational principle in non-Western philosophies like Zen Buddhism or Taoism, where the meaning of yin is in relationship to its opposite, yang: female requires male, outer requires inner, matter requires mind, and so on. Such logic is common in primal and shamanic cosmologies, where knowledge based on direct experience and the closeness of wilderness immediately confronts one with the paradoxical structure of consciousness. We can call this dialectical as opposed to dualistic logic. This is the logic that is expressed in the dialektike of Socratic discussion, which recognizes that meaning begins and ends with unique, fully embodied human beings who inevitably experience the world differently. Understanding comes through face-to-face discussion, where the partial truth of thesis is challenged by the partial truth of antithesis, so that both can be integrated and transcended in a more-inclusive synthesis. This then becomes a new thesis, and so on. Western thinkers typically stumble over dialectical thinking and get stuck on one side or the other of paradoxical dualisms — mind-body, civilization-wilderness, human-animal.
In practice, we engage in dialectical synthesis all the time; it is necessary and unavoidable. Yet we have also failed to honor it and to cultivate it as a habit. This is striking in higher education, where one hears endless calls for teaching analytical and critical thinking skills but almost nothing about synthesis and constructive and creative skills. Without these complementary opposites we remain stuck. Wholistic, big-picture thinking is either neglected or produces frozen structures of meaning, blocking an understanding of integrated, organic, growing wholes — the whole person, the whole society, the entire species, the planet.
“There Is No Such Thing as Society”
Descartes helped eliminate the method for making meaning from the inner, emotional, qualitative data of the wisdom quest. Classical Liberalism eliminated the motive for even pursuing it. The clearest argument for this comes through the lineage of the classical Liberal philosophers, starting with Thomas Hobbes and proceeding through John Locke, Adam Smith, and America’s founding fathers, who embodied these ideas in the Constitution of the United States. American democracy offers the clearest example of a society created de novo according to the principles of Lockean Liberalism. This model is now in the final stages of globalizing under the guidance of the United States as the world’s preeminent superpower. In this sense the United States is the paradigmatic modern polity, demonstrating with great clarity both its most life-affirming and destructive aspects. While the following discussion focuses on America, in principle it is increasingly applicable globally.
As I’ve said, the creation of the political vision of Liberalism emerged from the truth quest — from a reflective, passionate concern with the good of the whole. But the Liberal values of personal freedom, private property, and competitive individualism were presented in Cartesian fashion as absolutes, abstracted from the whole without a living connection to their opposites: altruism, generosity, service to and responsibility for others, and love of community. As a result, the less-tangible, hard-to-measure, supreme values — love, beauty, and truth — were increasingly ignored. As Plato and Socrates made clear, any value pursued in isolation as a supreme good inevitably becomes a supreme evil.25 Any political order that forgets this and assumes certainty becomes deformed and ultimately deadly.
In 1787, after the success of the American Revolution, representatives from the various states gathered in Philadelphia to draft a constitution for a revolutionary theory of government. They were realists and pragmatists, familiar with the struggles among self-interested individuals in the marketplace. They were also aware of the latest advances in science, steeped in the writings of Hobbes and Locke, and imbued with a sense of their historical mission. Following Locke, the writers of the Constitution recognized that in a condition of freedom, where people are born into different social situations, with different abilities and dispositions, some will inevitably acquire more property and others less. Inequality was an inevitable consequence of competition. Thus, government was needed to stop the have-nots from robbing the haves. As Locke put it: “The great and chief end therefore of Mens uniting into Commonwealths, and putting themselves under Government, is the Preservation of their Property” (emphasis in the original).26 He assumed reasonable men, recognizing this, would come together to form a social contract and agree to give up some of their natural freedom for the security of a common authority. Such an authority needed to be strong enough to provide protection and order, but not so strong as to quash individual freedom and initiative. Adam Smith put it even more bluntly: “Civil government, so far as it is instituted for the security of property, is in reality instituted for the defense of the rich against the poor, or those who have some property against those who have none at all.”27
The members of the Constitutional Convention saw themselves as exactly such reasonable men, coming together to draft a social contract for a government that would not attempt to improve human nature but would simply work as a kind of institutional clockwork. A complicated set of checks and balances would ensure a government strong enough to protect private property and to foster trade and commerce, but not so strong as to unnecessarily cramp freedom, enterprise, and initiative.28 The case for ratification of the draft constitution was laid out in a series of some eighty-five anonymous essays published in New York newspapers, collectively referred to as The Federalist Papers. Its authors, now known to be John Jay, Alexander Hamilton, and James Madison, document a remarkable example of applied political philosophy — how institutions of government can be crafted from a philosophical paradigm of the good life.
Much of the focus of the Constitution is on the right to acquire and hold material property as the primary expression of individual freedom. In Federalist No. 10, James Madison argued that the most important function of the Constitution would be to prevent social chaos by guarding us against the violence of the competing interest groups he called factions. Following Locke and Smith, he noted, “The most common and durable source of factions has been the various and unequal distribution of property. Those who own property and those without property — i.e. the rich and the poor — are the most significant of the potentially violent factions.”29 We could say in this sense that class conflict was a founding assumption of the Constitution. Madison rejected the idea of direct democracy, criticizing the small, self-governing “pure” democracies of the ancient Greek polis for their instability and failure to protect inequalities in wealth: “Such societies …have ever been found incompatible with personal security or the rights of property and have in general been as short in their lives as they have been violent in their deaths.”30 Instead, the Constitution established a republic that offered the advantages of “a scheme of representation,” where the popular will would be refined and enlarged through a process of selection — “a chosen body of citizens, whose wisdom may best discern the true interests of their country, and whose patriotism and love of justice will be least likely to sacrifice it to temporary or partial considerations.”31 The Federalists assumed that the electoral process itself would somehow select the wisest. But would it? And what was wisdom, anyway?
Madison quickly passed over the challenging question of wisdom and moved on to the practical problem of mechanics. He identifies the structural advantage of a republic over a (direct) democracy in protecting private property. Because republics were large they included a greater diversity of interests, particularly the diversity of those factions based on different kinds of property — land owning, slave owning, mercantile, banking, and simply landless. With greater diversity, there is less chance that any particular interest will form a majority and violently impose its will on a minority. Like many of those attending the convention, Madison was deeply disturbed by the nation’s postrevolutionary financial crisis and no doubt had in mind Shay’s Rebellion, an uprising of impoverished war veterans and poor debtor farmers who took up arms and called for the abolition of debts.
The solution was, as Madison put it, that “ambition must be made to counteract ambition,” so that it would be virtually impossible for a single passion to overtake