The disrespect for the Rule of Law so evident in the democracies of the West today is not a mere accident but rather the direct result of ideas that have been propagated by our “intellectuals” for over 200 years now.
Blake and the Romantics saw emotion, intuition, imagination, as the keys to human fulfillment, those restrictions imposed by Reason being but a form of oppression. Marcuse and his fellow socialists clearly agreed. Not surprisingly Ralston Saul sees the emphasis on the Rule of Law in the Capitalist West today as but a ploy used by our “ruling elites” to maintain a manageable work force.
“In reality there is now a desperate need among technicians, manipulators of systems and profiteers to destroy any remaining evidence that Western society could function on the basis of humanist cooperation. Our elites need to be pessimistic about us in their own best interest.” [Voltaire’s Bastards…..pg583]
Continuing his assault upon the principles of the Enlightenment, he suggests that we “must stop believing that the accomplishments of the last two centuries are the result of rational methods, structure and self-interest, while the failures and violence are those of humanity and sensibility. In spite of the rhetoric which dominates our civilization, the opposite is true.” [Voltaire’s Bastards…584] While Saul constantly derides the tendency of “conservatives” to reduce the world to simplistic polarities, he does so himself with comic regularity.
His endorsement of “humanity and sensibility” over Reason could have been written by Blake or Marcuse, its implication being that Man is inherently good, inherently benevolent, indeed barely in need of the restrictive sanctions of the Law. It may seem that I am contradicting myself given that I have already stated the “progressive” Zeitgeist to be informed by the Darwinian notion that we are predatory animals locked in a never ending struggle for survival. Oddly, bizarrely, these antithetical narratives have both been given academic approval, the one used by the Left to disparage the achievements of our ruling elites, the other to exonerate all those “innocents” whom they have apparently oppressed. If it seems to you unfathomably stupid that anyone should define the species in such stereotypical terms, consider the status of “innocence” presently granted the Indigenous of the Americas in the context of the constant warfare described in Lawrence Keeley’s book or indeed the recent spiel by Candace Owens on the delightful cannibalistic habits of the Anasazi.
Freud deemed the Id, the repository of our various irrational impulses, to be amoral at best and certainly in need of guidance by the Superego, that socially institutionalized expression of Man’s capacity for Reason. Yet books supporting the hypothesis that our instinctual as opposed to intellectual faculties are the key to real human progress clutter contemporary Western culture. Jonathon Haidt in “The Righteous Mind” states that it is Intuition and not Rational thought that is the bedrock of human morality. Joseph Chilton Pearce in “The Biology of Transcendence” ascribes to the human heart mystical cognitive powers far beyond those of our sad, error-prone brains. In “The Empathic Civilization” Jeremy Rifkin predicts that just as rational consciousness superseded the faith-based consciousness of the Middle Ages, so a new “empathic” one will and must replace the dependency on Reason promoted by the Enlightenment. Again, as with Saul, the suggestion that Man’s capacity for Reason is not a legitimate aspect of his consciousness but some sort of aberration that he might simply set aside!
Are there any grounds whatsoever for accepting the vision of the species described above? Must the abandonment of Reason not inevitably lead to a world of chaos? Is the notion that Capitalist “technicians” have invented Man’s capacity for evil in order to justify their dependence on the Rule of Law not repudiated by the incredible savagery of the two thousand years of recorded history that preceded the Enlightenment? Are we either the predatory monsters implied by the Darwinian narrative or the lamb like innocents of Blake’s vision or are we in fact that intelligent/volitional being defined by the philosophers of Ancient Greece and traditional Western Humanism, a being capable of both good and evil, a Being ultimately accountable for the trajectory of his life? To accept that we are such, of course, is to endorse a moral universe, a universe in which the Inner Life of Man rather than “oppressive”external determinants is of preeminent importance, a world utterly incompatible with the superficial visions of Marx, the Post Moderns and our contemporary “progressives.”