The Politics of Human Nature

        G. K. Chesterton once observed that we are a race of inveterate worshippers.  Simply because we cease to believe in God does not mean that we begin to believe in nothing.  Rather, we begin to believe in anything, however vapid, foolish or evil.  Consequently, every nation, age and people gets the god it deserves, the god of its own making, of its own choosing.
         Human existence is never a god-free zone.  The vacuum left by the exile of God does not -- indeed cannot -- remain a vacuum.  In a secularized, post-Christian age like our own, that vacuum is filled by science and by the state, upon the shoulders of which we seem all too eager to drape the mantle of omni-competence.  The bloody rags and scented grave clothes of the dying and rising Savior have been replaced by the lab coat and the three-piece-suit; the Sermon on the Mount by scientific experimentation and by the seven-second political sound bite.  And if ideas have consequences, so also do deities, all but one of which make horrible and gruesome taskmasters.  The ravages of scientism and statism surround us on all sides.  Whenever these twin gods of our age converge, as they did, for example, in the death camps of the Third Reich, where the likes of Mengele and Hitler unite, the consequences are beyond telling, beyond imagination. 
         But that horrible fact seems rarely to have been adequately perceived or understood.   Our age is noted not only for its embrace of scientism and statism, but also for its gullibility.  We are not only inveterate worshipers, we are a nose of wax in the hands of nearly every quack and charlatan who comes down the pike.  Despite their dismal and oppressive record, the gods of this age are not now in danger of being overthrown, though almost nothing could do us more unmitigated good than their banishment.  Our age needs desperately to hear the truth about its gods -- and about ours.  Our duty as Christians is to make that God known, and to explain as clearly and compellingly as we can the difference God makes in every arena of human enterprise or endeavor, including politics.  Therefore, in a post-modern, post-Christian culture like ours, a culture that denies the very existence of truth, we must not be content merely to have a hearing, merely to have a place at the table.  By no means; for Christ owns the table.  Christ is not one god among many:  He is the one true God, the King of King and the Lord of Lords, and your task, if you are a Christian, is to bring every thought captive to his lordship, as uncomfortable as that might make you feel, or as unpopular as that might make you become.  You must address yourself convincingly and compellingly to the marketplace, to the public square, to the academy, to the arena, and to the laboratory.  For far too long the community of Christians in America has been content to accept cultural marginalization both for themselves and for their religion.  To the extent that they have permitted this banishment, even secretly welcomed it as a shield for their cowardice, they are guilty of dereliction of duty and of unfaithfulness to Christ as the Lord of the universe and all that is within it.  Because He is the Lord of all things, both great and small, nothing is properly secular.  Anything pursued in a secular fashion is therefore at least partly, if not wholly, mispursued.  The modern world needs desperately to know that Christ is not someone in addition to politics, but that He is someone in relation to it.  Politics finds its proper role and function only when it relates itself properly to Him and to his revelation.           One of the chief and most important points of that revelation pertains to human nature and its notorious intractability, to which we now turn.
         The first and greatest political heresy of our time is what Jeane Kirkpatrick once labeled “the fallacy of misplaced malleability,” by which she meant treating complex political and social institutions as though they can be restructured on demand to fit a master plan existing inside our heads -- a common mistake among those whose insist upon tinkering with our fundamental ideas and institutions.  The modern change-mongers and novophiles do not understand that human institutions arise from human action; that human action arises from human nature; and that human nature cannot be fixed by political or social tinkering, no matter how hard we try, and no matter how badly it needs fixing.
         In other words, the most important and most enduring problems facing human government almost always derive from human nature.  Good government cannot ignore human nature, which means that wise political theory must take account both of human depravity and human difference.
         To revert to Chesterton once more, one of the Christian doctrines most easily demonstrated is the doctrine of human depravity, variations on which could be the headline over almost every major news story every day.  Good governance, therefore, establishes policies and laws that recognize that human beings cannot always be trusted to do the right thing, that they are not governed by reason only (or even largely), but by twisted and sometimes untrammeled personal appetite.  That is, while human beings are capable of reason and of goodness, they are rarely reasonable and rarely good.  Some type of control must be set on human appetites, desires and actions, which is why Edmund Burke wrote that the moral state of mankind filled him with dismay and horror.
         Our depravity cannot be removed by legislation or by revolution, much less by humanistic political tinkering.  Pride, ambition, greed, deceitfulness, appetite:  these are the vices that cause most of the world's turmoil, trouble and suffering, and not merely some inefficient or allegedly under-funded public program.  Evil is not simply systemic; it is systemic and more.  That “more” is we ourselves, which is why Burke also insisted that politics ought to be adjusted not to human reason but to human nature, of which reason is but a part, an oft-neglected and frequently underdeveloped part.
         Therefore, the statesman must know more than philosophy, more than economics, and more than political science.  The statesman must know human nature.
         Once properly aware of the intractability of human nature, the wise statesman soon realizes that most of the ills that plague us have no real or final political solution, that we almost always are forced to choose between greater and lesser evils (or greater and lesser goods).  To most political problems, there are no perfect answers.  Government cannot change human nature; it can only take human nature wisely into account when it contemplates and enacts public policy.  But human nature is one thing about which the modern world seems to have precious little knowledge.
         Do not miss my point.  To understand that human nature cannot be fixed by legislative or sociological conniving is no counsel of despair; it is liberation.  It means that we are free from bondage to wasted money, wasted effort and wasted lives, which inevitably result from trying to do what can never be done.  Properly and humbly to acknowledge the truth about human nature and its implacable resistance to wholesale improvement by government programs is the first step to a more proper stewarding of scarce resources in a fallen world.  Rather than wasting those precious resources on attempting the impossible, we are free to focus on those things that ought to be done by government and that can be done by government.
         To pursuit the point further:  The fact of enduring human depravity also implies an equally enduring human ignorance and foolishness, a curse from which none of us is exempt, including bureaucrats, policy wonks, office holders -- and writers on political prudence, like me.  In other words, as my late friend Russell Kirk so often pointed out, a human being cannot be depended upon to live uprightly or successfully on the basis of his or her own private stock of reason, because that private stock of reason is small, no matter how smart the person is, and no matter what office that person holds.  Individuals do far better (and so do governments) to avail themselves of the great and general store of wisdom found in the insight of tradition built up over the centuries.  I am simply articulating here the Burkean notion that the individual is foolish, but the species is wise.  As a result, we all do well to take tradition more fully into account.  But postmodernist and post-Christian Americans reject the appeal to tradition and to traditional values because they say it is tradition is undemocratic.  They say it enslaves us with the dead hand of the past. 
         Not so. 
         If the post-modernists thought about tradition even for a moment, they would see that Chesterton was right:  Tradition is really democracy expanded, not democracy denied.  They would see that the appeal to tradition and to the wisdom of the ages simply grants a voice and a vote to the long dead, to those wise and heroic persons who made the world we inherited and enjoy, to those whose piercing intellect, courageous self-sacrifice and towering faith have earned them the right to be heard.  In other words, not to listen to tradition, not to learn from our ancestors -- not to drink deeply from the well of enduring and hard-won wisdom -- is not simply stupid; it is undemocratic.  It limits the vote on the issues that confront us merely to those people who happen to be walking about on earth at the moment, a strange qualification for whether or not one ought to be heard.  After all, the issues that now concern us, and the arguments we now argue (or else their very near relatives), have all been argued before.  We do a singular disservice both to ourselves and to our posterity if we turn our backs on the wisdom of the ages and on those who discovered it.  Whenever we do so, we force ourselves to reinvent the wheel of knowledge unnecessarily, a project of hubris and ignorance for which we pay an enormous price in dollars, time, effort and lives.
         This distrust of an individual's private stock of wisdom and its consequent inability it entails to control the affairs both of oneself and of others also carries over into a distrust of so-called experts.  Our age, characterized as it is by a chronological snobbery that arrogantly dismisses the great minds and time-tested principles of the past, turns instead to the specialist, to the expert, to the demigods before whom our culture bows in ignorant and idolatrous subjection.  Because of our distaste for the ways of our ancestors, our culture does not know that the fetish of expertolatry is an age-old error, one to which Jesus himself alluded twenty long centuries ago when he talked about “the stone which the builders rejected” being made the cornerstone (Luke 20: 17). 
         Notice that the cornerstone selected by God was the very stone rejected by, of all people, the builders themselves, the experts -- not the butchers, the bakers or the candlestick makers -- the builders.  Notice this too:  The words Jesus quotes come from the prophet Isaiah centuries earlier, demonstrating even more graphically that the stupidity of the expert is a fact of long standing.  We ignore it at our peril.   Or, if you prefer a more modern reference, I never tire of quoting William F. Buckley, Jr. on the point.  He said that he’d rather be ruled by the first fifty names in the Boston telephone directory than by the entire faculty of Harvard.   
         In other words, when I insist that although the individual is foolish, the species is wise, I mean it even when the individual in question is an expert.        
         The path of highest wisdom entails preservation of the best moral, economic and political traditions of our ancestors.  Those ancestors are not to be ignored simply because they are not now here.  You must never trust your future to someone who ignores your past, which is precisely what secularized, humanistic, leftists seem intentionally and habitually to do.  A policy or law will not treat your grandchildren well if it mistrusts or maligns your grandparents.  Never mistake "contemporary" for "better." The old should be discarded slowly.  "New" is not necessarily "better."
         In government, we must never confuse the idea of "change" with the idea of "improvement," because not all changes (perhaps very few of them) are changes for the better.  Most schemes for large-scale improvement introduce as many problems as they solve, a phenomenon we now recognize as the principle of unintended consequences.  Reform is difficult; it requires a delicate touch, political and cultural Midas touch.  Most people, and certainly most governments, lack that Midas touch.  Indeed most of what bureaucrats handle turns not to gold but to garbage.
         For that reason, we frequently must defend the established order against those who seek to undermine it or deform it.  This does not mean that we ought to oppose change.  It means we must wisely and prudently distinguish between changes that develop or improve what already is from changes that destroy what is in order arrogantly to replace it.  In short, we must not oppose mere change, only change that undermines the inherited principles of wisdom that grew up over decades, or even centuries, and the institutions in which those principles are now embodied.  Only quite slowly, across many centuries, have we come to understand what things are for, to understand that, despite their pretensions, governments cannot be a proper substitute for families, for churches, for communities, or for schools.  If you ignore that truth, you begin to think that evil is "out there" in the world at large, and in its institutions, not in us, not "in here," in our own intractably evil hearts.

date modified:
5 July 2006