The Political Dimension and “Human Nature”
OUR LENGTHY ANALYSIS OF capitalism and Western socialism has led to one principal conclusion: the dangers of the human prospect seem likely to affect the two systems differently in the short run, but surprisingly alike over a longer time horizon. As we have seen, this conclusion rests on the central place which we have assigned to industrial technology, the source of social and economic pressures that impose common problems on both social orders, regardless of their different institutions and ideologies. Beyond that conclusion, however, our analysis becomes blurred. The logic of socio-economic analysis takes us a certain distance, and then leaves us with a sense of indeterminacy and incompletion.
The reason is clear enough. Our inquiry has been entirely conducted by tracing out the “logical dynamics” of a system of profit-seeking firms and individuals, or of efficiency-minded ministries of production. What we have omitted has been any consideration of a political dimension—that is, any systematic introduction of the problem of political power, either in terms of the “logical dynamics” of the behavior of nation-states or of those imperatives of behavior or capacities for response that involve the rather ill-defined areas of life we call “political.”
The reasons for this omission, in turn, are easy to understand. We live in an age in which the very capacity for socio-economic analysis marks us off from the past. We read with amusement or shock the historical prognoses of the classical historians or political philosophers, into which socio-economic dynamics do not enter at all (for the very good reason that the relevant social systems had not yet evolved) and in which, instead, we find purely political predictions, usually of dynastic rise and fall, and so forth. But however more “scientific” our socio-economic method may seem by comparison, its omission of a political dimension is nonetheless crippling, even fatal, for a comprehension of the human prospect.
For the exercise of political power lies squarely in the center of the determination of that prospect. The resolution of the crises thrust upon us by the social and natural environment can only be found through political action. The dependence of the underdeveloped nations on strong governments has been sufficiently emphasized not to need repetition here. But the very same considerations apply to the nations of the developed world. Here too the most active use of political power will be inescapable, in part as a necessary response to any threats directed at them by the underdeveloped world, in part as the only means to meet and control the challenges of a threatening environment. Certainly the expansive thrust of a market system can be contained and coordinated only by the direct assertion of a greatly expanded domestic national power, as we have indicated; and it is hardly necessary to rehearse the similar conclusions that we reach for industrial socialist nations. As David Calleo and Benjamin Rowland write: “The nation-state may all too seldom speak the voice of reason. But it remains the only serious alternative to chaos.”1
It is one thing, however, to determine that a political dimension must be added to socio-economic analysis; it is another to provide that dimension. For what is there to be said about the exercise of national power that can compare with the “logical dynamics” of socio-economic reasoning? The classical historians unblushingly likened the course of national history to the life of man, writing of the youth, middle age, and dotage of nations, or took for granted the “human nature” that made the behavior of princely states as predictable as that of man. But we cannot accept the metaphorical comparisons or the psychological assumptions of these philosophers. What is then left to put in their place? What can be said predictively, or even analytically, about the use of political power?
At the outset we must recognize that there is an aspect of the political dimension that totally eludes our grasp; alas, a vitally important aspect. When we look to the political future to foresee the specific deployment of political power, we are in even greater ignorance than the classicists, who at least thought they knew how men behaved, schemed, and responded with respect to power. We know only that we cannot predict the idiosyncratic behavior of national leaders and therefore cannot foresee the national behavior that is still so much the lengthened shadow of individual leaders. We cannot even predict mass phenomena, such as the “flash points” at which political discontent turns into revolution, or the probabilities that any given regime will muster the support of the people. Thus, over large and critical areas of political behavior, both among and within nations, we are thrown back on our intuitions, hunches, or “wisdom,” sometimes presciently, more often not.
But that is not quite an end to it. If the boldest and most far-reaching exercise of political power will be unavoidable over the future, this does more than introduce a random element about which nothing can be said. It also raises the question of whether this exercise of power will be successful, in the sense that it will be accepted by those over whom that power will have to be exercised. One cannot have political power without political obedience; one cannot have strong government without a sense of national identification. How do we know that the use of power, which emerges as such a central necessity for the survival of mankind, will be in fact accepted? What can we say about those traits of political obedience and national identification that we suddenly discover to be the preconditions for the effective mobilization and use of power, whether for evil ends or for life-saving ones?
Here, fortunately, we are not quite in the dark. For the behavioral traits that “permit” the use of political power lie within our scrutiny, even to a certain extent within our predictive capabilities. Therein lies, therefore, the direction in which we must go if we are to introduce the missing political dimension into our inquiry.
Such an effort takes us in the direction of that shadowy concept we call “human nature,” but along a very different route from that of the classical historians. We are interested in an examination of man that may throw light on certain attributes of his political behavior. Hence we must begin by focusing our attention on a central fact of human existence—the extended period of helplessness and development through which all human beings must pass and in which the elements of their adult personalities are first molded.2
The essential features of this crucial period are familiar from the work of Freud and his successors, and can be rapidly summed up. As an infant, still unable to move, the human being experiences (as best we can imagine its scarcely formed consciousness) a sense of infantile omnipotence, in which it “believes” that the world is only an extension of itself, responding to its cries with food, warmth, tactile support, and so on. Moreover, if this “belief” were not in fact based on reality, the infant would perish. Later, as the infant begins to recognize the independent existence of an outer world, it gains the frightening awareness that far from being omnipotent, it is virtually powerless, literally dependent for life itself on the ministration of adults over whom it has no control whatsoever. Later still, as the child seeks to control and direct its physical and psychic energies, it learns to model its behavior on that of adults whose presence is still indispensable and whose wills are irresistible.
In this universal crucible of experience, as we well know, are forged those tendencies in the human personality that later reveal themselves in various sexual, intellectual, aesthetic, moral, and other attitudes. What interests us here, however, are those aspects of the conditioning process that find their vent in the traits of obedience and the capacity for identification—the necessary preconditions for the successful functioning of political institutions in mobilizing individuals for tasks of both peace and war.
The first of these “political” aspects of “human nature—the trait of obedience—is surely simple enough to locate in the first few years of experience. What is perhaps less obvious is its expression in adult behavior. The phenomenon to which I wish to call attention is the normal willing acquiescence of men in the exercise of political authority itself. The nature of the “legitimacy” of this authority has been, of course, the object of an extensive discussion, emphasizing such purposes as the preservation of property, the conduct of war, the establishment of law, or, in our own case, the safeguarding of a society threatened by the environment. I have no intention of entering further into this area of “functional” political analysis. Rather, I wish to stress an aspect of political authority that may be obscured by an exclusive concentration on its objective purposes. This latent function is to provide a sense of psychological security by re-creating the accustomed relationships of sub- and superordination to which our long period of helpless dependency has accustomed us.
Certainly we find evidence of this in the ascription of majesty to kings and queens, who are obvious substitutes for our parents, or in the childlike attitudes of mingled resentment and admiration with which the lower orders of society characteristically regard the higher orders, or in the “cult of personality” to which the peoples of the world show such willingness to succumb. Anyone who has seen the wild excitement of a crowd caught up in the adulation of a political leader cannot fail to recognize the rekindling of childhood feelings of awe and obedience in the behavior of these cheering adults.
I am aware, of course, that I tread here on dangerous ground. The experience of childhood is also the source of those drives for self-assertion that contend with obedience, both during and after childhood. Further, it is apparent that the conditioning experience imparts only a very general “tendency” toward obedience—one that finds manifold expressions in adult political behavior, as the most cursory examination of political life reveals in, say, England compared with Italy.
Nor does a stress on the biopsychological underpinnings of political submissiveness deny the importance of other elements which are inextricable from the acquiescence in power. One of these is the presence of force, overtly or covertly employed by the ruling elements to establish and maintain their authority. Another is the differential social conditioning to which different classes in society are exposed. Still another may be the unequal distribution of personality characteristics that lead to power and submission. At still a different level are the hierarchical orderings we observe in many other species.
Nevertheless, a ready admission as to these, or still other, more “positive” reasons for the acceptance of political authority does not explain the phenomenon to which my speculations are addressed. This is the perplexing readiness, even eagerness, with which authority is accepted by the vast majority. An acquiescence, in, or search for, a hierarchical ordering includes not only the lower and middle reaches but also the upper levels of society, who regularly look for “leadership” to someone still higher in the world. Indeed, it finds striking expression in the habit of rulers, including the most dictatorial and absolute, to declare their own “submission” to a will higher than their own, whether it be that of God, of “the people,” of some sacred text or doctrine, or of voices audible to themselves alone.
This line of thought has several consequences for the political dimension of the human prospect. To begin with, it offers a substantive basis for our view that the problem of political power exists, not as a mere epiphenomenon of socio-economic relationships, but as a “reality” in its own right whose roots and characteristics can be, at least to some extent, analyzed and applied to the general prognosis for mankind.
In turn this argument has special relevance for several matters we have encountered. One of these is the political outlook for revolutionary socialism, among whose aims is a desire to destratify society to an unprecedented degree. As the example of China illustrates, there is no reason to doubt that impressive changes can be achieved in lessening the social or economic gradations among classes or individuals. But it is useful to consider that the Chinese effort to minimize social and economic hierarchies has taken place within a political framework whose over-all hierarchical structure is as pronounced as that of any society in history. The virtual deification of Mao made China very nearly a personal theocracy, and its striking egalitarian achievements must therefore be viewed in the context of a political order that satisfied the hunger for authority by concentrating it on one remarkable order-bestowing figure. If our speculations are justified, it would follow that revolutionary regimes will be able to perpetuate extreme egalitarian structures only through a succession of leaders endowed with tremendous authority, or else must move in the direction of reestablishing the legitimacy of relations of authority that are now regarded as violations of the revolutionary spirit.
Further, our analysis affords some understanding of the difficulties of democratic governments in managing social tensions. As the histories of the United States, or Switzerland, or modern Scandinavia all illustrate, democracies can provide stable and strong government that assuredly offers some satisfaction for the “political hunger” of mankind. Yet, even in these cases, strong leaders provide a sense of psychological well-being that weak ones do not, so that in moments of crisis and strain demands arise for the exercise of strong-arm rule. As the histories of ancient and modern democracies illustrate, the pressure of political movement in times of war, civil commotion, or general anxiety pushes in the direction of authority, not away from it. These tendencies may be short-lived, or may give rise to totalitarian governments that in time collapse, but I do not think that one can deny that these pressures are a persistent fact of political life. One reason for them may indeed lie in the belief—itself perhaps a consequence of the phenomenon of conditioned obedience—that centralized authority will cope with crisis and unrest more “successfully” than less authoritarian structures. But another reason, I venture to suggest, lies in the capacity of powerful “parental” figures, successful or not, to re-create the emotional and psychological custody of one’s early years.
I am acutely conscious that this general line of arguments smacks of the worst kind of reactionary ideology: one of the most familiar excuses for dictatorship is that the masses are “children” and must be treated as such. Nonetheless it would be foolish, as well as hypocritical, not to admit that tendencies toward authoritarian rule seem to be a chronic feature of political life: how many egalitarian revolutions have not ended in the creation of a political establishment every bit as authoritarian as that which they originally displaced? It behooves us therefore to understand this “logic” of political behavior as well as possible, particularly in view of the extraordinary difficulties with which democratic governments will be faced in the coming decades and generations.
Finally, and with great reluctance, I must advance one last implication of my argument. It is customary to recognize, but to deplore, the authoritarian tendencies within civil society, especially on the part of those who, like myself, are the beneficiaries of the freedoms of minimally authority-ridden rule. Yet, candor compels me to suggest that the passage through the gantlet ahead may be possible only under governments capable of rallying obedience far more effectively than would be possible in a democratic setting. If the issue for mankind is survival, such governments may be unavoidable, even necessary. What our speculative analysis provides is not an apologia for these governments, but a basis for understanding the critical support that they may be able to provide for a people who will need, over and above a solution of their difficulties, a mitigation of their existential anxieties.
Let me now advance a second suggestion with regard to the psychological underpinnings of political life. As we have already said, this element concerns the capacity for identification—and in particular national identification—which is, like the adult sublimation of childhood obedience, an indispensable precondition for the exercise of political action.
This second political element in “human nature” also finds its origins in the universal conditioning period when the very young child draws its strength and security from those familial figures with whom it mingles its own identity. From this identificatory capacity of the child there flowers, in adult life, an extraordinary array of behavior traits, ranging from the merging of one’s self with one’s possessions to the capacity for love and sympathy and fellow-feeling. Indeed, the generalized capability of identification is the soil in which are rooted all possibilities of morality.
But we are interested here in the specifically “political” behavior traits that can be traced to this elemental human attribute, and now we find a striking fact. Although the capacity to empathize widens and becomes ever more disciminatingly applied as the child grows older, within every culture of which I have knowledge there seems to be a limit beyond which this general identificatory impulse is blocked. This limit divides those within a society from those beyond it, and demarcates the members of a group among whom a shared concern exists, even though the members may be unknown to one another, from those for whom no such concern is felt.
Once again, it seems possible to trace this otherwise inexplicable fact to the persistence of early childhood attitudes. The child divides the world into two—one comprised of its original family and its subsequent extension of that family; the other of non-familial beings who may exist as human objects but not as human beings with whom an identificatory bond is possible. These same attitudes persist in the political phenomenon of “peoplehood,” a phenomenon we find in every culture, ancient and modern. For reasons that we do not fully understand but must accept as a patent fact, nation-states—often with the most heterogeneous populations—can serve as psychologically valid surrogates for the family and therefore as the beneficiaries of a powerful uniting bond that enables national authorities to concert the actions of diverse individuals. Equally important, nations (or other groups such as tribes or clans) also evidence the limitations to the bond of identification, and look upon members of other states or groups with the same unseeing eye that the child fastens on someone who is merely an object and not a person.
The implications of these remarks for the problem of political prognosis seem clear enough. The feeling of national identity adds another independent underpinning to the suggestion that the nation-state must be considered as the embodiment of purely political, as well as socio-economic, behavioral forces. Once again this suggestion bears with special relevance on the prospects for revolutionary socialism. For all their socio-economic doctrinal orientation, revolutionary movements most effectively attain their capacity to unite and motivate people when they are welded to the unifying political capabilities of the state. This welding helps us understand the tendency of revolutionary movements, such as the Cuban or Chinese, to infuse their socio-economic teachings with patriotic flavor, together with authoritarian elements of catechism and unimpeachable moral prerogatives. Much of the success of such revolutionary efforts therefore depends on appeals to “primitive” elements—a comment in no way intended to downgrade the actual improvements that these revolutions may bring but to help us understand the nature of the motives on which they are forced to rely.
On a larger scale, the power of the political fantasy in drawing boundaries between those who matter and those who do not carries its disquieting freight for the human prospect in general. For this manifestation of the political element in “human nature” makes it Utopian to hope that we will face the global challenges of the future as an international brotherhood of men. If it were possible to imagine the future in terms of the expectations of the 1950s—a “manageable” world in which expert administration would gradually replace the clumsy ignorance of the past—one could hope that the demarcative power of national identification would gradually recede before a kind of international fraternity of administrators and technicians.
The mounting tensions and eventual major transformations that await industrial societies greatly weaken that fond hope. Given the magnitude of the changes that we have sketched out and the competitive struggle for existence that portends, it is unlikely in the extreme that mankind will enjoy a setting in which the identificatory potential within “human nature” can be extended to embrace men and women of other “peoples” or that considerations of a pan-humanistic kind will displace the narrowly familistic basis on which identification is today founded.
For all these forebodings, it is important to recognize that nationalism, despite its potentially vicious application, is not solely a destructive force, and that political identification, with all its problems, is by no means only a dangerous element in “human nature.”
Certainly in the underdeveloped world the bond of peoplehood provides an indispensable agency for the mobilization of energies needed to break decisively with the past and to muster the sacrifices needed for the future. And in the developed world, as well, related considerations apply. For when we turn to our own plight, we also face a need to identify with a special group—not one outside our borders, but beyond our reach in time—namely, the generations of the future. A crucial problem for the world of the future will be a concern for generations to come. Where will such a concern arise? Economists speak of the phenomenon of “time discount” as describing the inverted telescope through which humanity looks to the future, estimating the present worth of objects to be enjoyed in the future far below their worth if they could be instantly transferred to the present. This consequent devaluation of the future is generally considered to be an entirely rational response to the uncertainties of life. But if we apply this same calculus of “reason” to the human prospect, we face the horrendous possibility that humanity may react to the approach of environmental danger by indulging in a vast fling while it is still possible—a fling entirely justified by the estimation of present enjoyments over future ones. On what private, “rational” considerations, after all, should we make sacrifices now to ease the lot of generations whom we will never live to see?
There is only one possible answer to this question. It lies in our capacity to form a collective bond of identity with those future generations.
Contemporary industrial man, his appetite for the present whetted by the values of a high-consumption society and his attitude toward the future influenced by the prevailing canons of self-concern, has but a limited motivation to form such bonds. There are many who would sacrifice much for their children; fewer who would do so for their grandchildren. Indeed, it is the absence of just such a bond with the future that casts doubt on the ability of nation-states or socio-economic orders to take now the measures needed to mitigate the problems of the future.
Is it possible that in another kind of society—one in which it is no longer permissible to indulge in high consumption, perhaps no longer in vogue to set such store by the calculus of selfishness parading as reason—such an identificatory sense could be strengthened? We do not know. Nor do we know to what degree the freedoms and delights of individual self-expression could survive the pressures that would intensify upon the individual in such a community Yet, if the stakes are not those of pleasure but of survival, if the absolute top priority becomes the matter of self-preservation rather than the preservation of the more agreeable aspects of our self-indulgent culture, then I am inclined to believe that the saving element in “human nature” is likely to be that very capability for identification which, in its present political manifestations, also poses some of the most dangerous challenges for the immediate future.
I am quite certain that we have not begun to exhaust the generalizations that can be risked with regard to the political forces at work in history, and I must stress as strongly as possible that I do not have in mind the formulation of an all-embracing “theory” of political behavior. I have entirely omitted for example, the crucial problem of aggression, individual or national, first examined by Freud and since elaborated by many others. I have left unexplored the work of Max Weber or Michels and their followers on the political dynamics of bureaucracy. I have done so in part because the two attributes of “human nature” that I have singled out seem to me to have been neglected, and still more because these attributes seem especially relevant, in a positive sense, to the long-term prospect for survival.
Admittedly, the capacities for submission to power and for identification lack the sense of a clear-cut “dynamics” that is the special characteristic of socio-economic behavior. Yet in calling our attention to the presence of primal elements in the shaping forces of the political future they serve the useful purpose of tempering our expectations with regard to the capacity of socio-economic orders, as such, to cope with the future. That capacity must reckon with the need for—perhaps the ultimate reliance on—welcomed hierarchies of power and strongly felt bonds of people-hood, to the discomfiture of those who would hope that the challenges of the human prospect would finally banish the thralldoms of authority and ideology and foster the “liberation” of the individual. Our analysis provides a warning that these hopes are not likely to be realized, and that the tensions immanent in socio-economic trends must be worked out within and through the political elements in “human nature.” Thus our analysis gives substance to some of the “conservative” reservations with respect to historical change that we find in classical political philosophy, and thereby constitutes a sobering counterbalance to the “radical” expectations that are founded to a large extent on the dynamics of socio-economic change.
The point is important enough to warrant some further elaboration. An essential difficulty in our estimate of the human prospect is the apparent conflict between our intuitive sense of the fixity of “human nature” and our knowledge that behavior can be altered. According to one of the radical tenets, “man makes himself,” and is therefore capable of far-reaching changes in his “nature.” The conservative takes a more pessimistic view, stressing the presence of a core of “human nature” that offers limits to the possibilities for change. I have sought to avoid the rather vague, and often theological, foreboding that equates this core with “evil,” and to suggest that it is better regarded as the psychological substratum of the human personality whose presence we have come to recognize in many areas of behavior and should therefore acknowledge in the sphere of political attitudes as well.
From another view, moreover, I am not so sure that the conservative view is tantamount to a pessimistic view. “Pessimism about man serves to maintain the status quo,” writes Leon Eisenberg.3 Our speculations enlighten us with regard to certain aspects of the “status quo” in all societies, such as the susceptibility of men to the submissive requirements of political power and to the fantasies of national “identity” or “purpose,” but they do not in themselves offer justification for any particular institutions such as private property, nor do they serve as rationales for the immoral use of political power.
A conservative view of the political element in society must not, therefore, be interpreted as attempting to fix humanity in a vise. Any claim that the quality of social existence is inexorably determined by the “nature” of man is refuted out of hand by the most cursory examination of the range of morality and human sensibility to be found in the various nations of the world. There remains, nonetheless, the contention that this plasticity of culture must accommodate itself in some manner or other to the needs that spring from man’s infant and childhood conditioning, and this does not permit us to assume that the political structure of society can accommodate itself to whatever image we may have of what man should be.
This last consideration is of the essence. The assumption that man ultimately “makes himself” in a benign manner implies that within the raw stuff of the human infant there exists some gyroscopic tendency that will finally guide him, as an adult, in a direction that will accord with the radical’s high moral estimate of mankind. Otherwise, why should we not conclude that the self-made man, stripped of all his false consciousness, divested of the delusions and fantasies that have misled him, will settle into a state of utter existential despair, or relapse into a suicidal solipsism? Indeed, why not conclude that before the terrifying truth of mortal finitude each man must shed the frail moral teachings of the past and finish his life in an orgy of self-indulgence that knows no bounds? As we have suggested, that truly pessimistic possibility must look for its refutation to the persistent promptings of a portion of man’s being that he does not “make,” but that makes him. In this regard it is worth reflecting that the hideous visions of man’s future in Huxley’s Brave New World, or Orwell’s 1984 are both based on the premise of the unlimited plasticity and malleability of the human species.
It is possible, of course, that in the future men may be so altered in their genetic characters, or nurtured in such carefully planned circumstances, that the “class” or “patriotic” attributes of political life would disappear because they no longer answered to an inner need. But at this juncture in history, our attention had better be focused on what men are likely to be, rather than on what they could eventually become. The human prospect forces us to deal with human change within an indeterminate, but not indefinite, time period, and speculations as to the degree of potential change must give way before the degree of change that is imaginable within that period.
So far as the genetic question is concerned, the time required for change is very long indeed, unless we discover chemical means of altering human behavior and apply these on a global scale—a prospect still happily well beyond reach. Writing in a symposium on behavior, E. 0. Wilson presents the following “optimistic” estimate:
[T]here is every justification from both genetic theory and experiments on animal species to suppose that rapid behavioral evolution is at least a possibility in man. By rapid I mean significant alteration in, say, emotional and intellectual traits within no more than ten generations—or about 300 years.4
Unfortunately, three hundred years, however rapid in the eye of the anthropologist, is hopelessly slow for the challenges now gathering on the horizon. Moreover, Wilson does not specify the changes in social institutions that might be required to bring about the accelerated evolution in the direction of social improvement.
As for the rapidity with which these institutional changes can work their effect on behavior, we face the problem of the natural “inertia” of the human condition, an inertia ascribable not only to the presence of a stubbornly persisting substratum of psychological needs but also to the laggard pace of change in the family setting through which those needs are gradually shaped into the attitudes of adult behavior. In his sympathetic but critical summary of Marx’s view of man, Bertell Oilman vividly describes this process:
People acquire most of their personal and class characteristics in childhood. It is the conditions operating then, transmitted primarily by the family, which makes them what they are, at least as regards basic responses; and, in most cases, what they are will vary very little over their lives. Thus, even where the conditions people have been brought up in change by the time they reach maturity, their characters still reflect the situation which has passed on. If Marx had studied the family more closely, surely he would have noticed that as a factory for producing character it is invariably a generation or more behind the times, producing people who, tomorrow, will be able to deal with yesterday’s problems.5
I do not raise these considerations to dismiss the possibility of dramatic transformations in social organization, such as we have seen in China. Indeed, I am persuaded that changes of at least this degree of penetration and revolutionary impact will be required within the time span with which our examination has been concerned. My analysis leads me, rather, to reiterate that these behavioral alterations, much as those in China, will have to allow for, or build on, recalcitrant elements in the human personality, including the two that I have singled out for emphasis, namely, the “hunger” for political authority and the “fantasy” of political identification. Further, it is not genetic evolution or cumulative amelioration in rearing that is likely to be the crucial implementing factor in affecting the behavioral reorientations of the “post-industrial” future, but the use of those primal elements on which political power rests—a belief for which, once again, the Chinese experience provides supporting evidence.
I am all too aware that these conclusions may bring dismay to many whom I consider my friends and comfort to many whom I consider my foes. To suggest that political power and hierarchy serve a supportive function in society plays directly into the hands of those who applaud the “orderliness” of authoritarian or dictatorial governments. To find a reason for the appeal of nonrational political beliefs is to encourage those who advocate irresponsible political programs. To stress the psychological roots of peoplehood is to weaken the cause of whose who seek to overcome the curse of racism and xenophobia.
If I nonetheless publish these thoughts, with all their potential mischievousness, it is for two reasons. The first is that the weakest part of the humanitarian outlook, both philosophically and pragmatically, has been its inability or unwillingness to come to grips with certain obdurate human characteristics. As a result we find buried within “humanist” appeals a conception of human nature that is often as reactionary, in the sense of ascribing an inherent element of evil to man, as that of the most unthinking conservative. Let me cite this example from a contemporary radical publication:
In the most profound sense, the proletariat has not one enemy but two—the ruling class and itself. In the absence of a humanizing militancy and a militant humanism, in the absence of a fierce common hatred for the common enemy, and a fiercer common love for the proletariat as a whole, history will degenerate into barbarism.6
Extended commentary hardly seems necessary. The encouragement of aggressive impulses (militancy, fierce hatred, fiercer love), the dehumanization implicit in the admonition to “love” the proletariat “as a whole”, and above all the view of man as engaged in a struggle to the death with himself, open this view to a critique as scathing as any that could be directed against a “bourgeois” conception of humanity. If radicalism is to go to the roots, as the term implies, it must be prepared to examine the “nature” of man in ways much more courageous and much less pietistic than those it uses in the name of “humanism.” Only on such a basis can it hope to build ideas and programs that may be able to withstand the tempest of events whose source lies, both as challenge and response, within men themselves.
My second reason for advancing these views relates to the first. I have tried to take the measure of man as a creature of his socio-economic arrangements and his political bonds. It may be that from some other perspective the prospect for collective human adaptation would seem brighter. But from the vantage point of this book, a failure to recognize the limitations and difficulties of our capacities for response would only build an architecture of hope on false beliefs.
1. America and the World Political Economy (Indiana University Press, 1973), p. 191.
2. For a similarly oriented study, see Harold D. Lass well, “The Triple-Appeal Principle: A Contribution of Psychoanalysis to Political and Social Science,” American Journal of Sociology, Jan. 1932.
3. Leon Eisenberg, “The Human Nature of Human Nature,” Science, April 14, 1972, p. 124.
4. E. O. Wilson, “Competitive and Aggressive Behavior,” in Man and Beast (Smithsonian Institution, 1971), p. 207.
5. Bertell Oilman, Alienation: Marx’s Conception of Man in Capitalist Society (Cambridge University Press, 1971), p. 241.
6. “The Making of Socialist Consciousness,” by the editors of Socialist Revolution (1970), reprinted in The Capitalist System, eds. R.C. Edwards, Reich, and Weiskopf (Prentice-Hall, 1972), p. 505.
THE PROBLEM OF POWER and its relation to “human nature”—that elusive but unavoidable idea—occupies the center of this chapter. There is nothing I can add (and nothing I wish to subtract) from my speculations as to its psychic roots. There is, however, an aspect of the problem that I would like to raise in this Afterword, calling attention to the sharply opposing ways in which power is viewed from the perspectives of the Right and the Left.
The Right has always recognized that power gives shape and force to historical events, but it has typically regarded the exercise of power as nothing but the expression of an invariant human propensity. Therefore conservative writers emphasize the sheer fact of domination as the basic, repeating pattern of history. “Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose,” was Alphonse Carr’s cynical way of putting it; “All power tends to corrupt, and absolute power tends to corrupt absolutely” was Lord Acton’s more genteel statement of the same thought; and in still more abstract fashion Plato and Aristotle, Machiavelli and Hobbes advanced the same generalization: domination is an inescapable tendency in history because man is a dominating animal by his nature (and I use the masculine pronoun advisedly).1
I need hardly add that such a view has a prima facie cogency, for domination in one form or another can indeed be traced through the long human narrative. Moreover, because again and again efforts to overthrow domination in one form end up welcoming, or at least accepting, domination in another form, the conservative view suggests that it is founded on something more substantial than just a jaundiced view of humankind. Indeed, by preparing us for the worst, the conservative perspective helps us to forestall it, by insisting on constitutional barriers, legal barriers, and the like—frail defenses, perhaps, against the assertion of unrestrained power, but the only defenses we possess.
What the conservative view fails to recognize, however, is that power is rarely a wild card in the game of politics, but a trump suit held by the ruling interests of society. Power has a systematic aspect to it that the conservative ignores—an aspect that brings material, and social rewards to certain elements of society while withholding them from others. Thus the identification of domination as the expression of an eternal aspect of human nature, however useful in alerting us to such a propensity and in preparing us to prevent its abuses, nonetheless usually serves as an apology for the particular structure of power in a given society by diverting attention from its beneficiaries and its victims.
The view of the Left is exactly the opposite. The Left also sees power as a continuing theme of history, but unlike the Right, it sees power as always deployed in the favor of privileged groups against unprivileged ones. When Marx and Engels declare in the Manifesto that the history of all previously existing society is the history of class struggles, they are placing this systematic use of power at the forefront of historical analysis, and directing our attention at the very question of class domination from which the conversatives avert their eyes.
Yet there are also striking weaknesses within the Left’s view of power. One weakness is that the Left fastens on exploitation by ruling socio-economic classes, and ignores the use of power by men to dominate women, or by light-skinned peoples to dominate dark-skinned ones; or by intellectual, religious, or political elites to dominate the masses for reasons that are not primarily material. Moreover, even within its paradigm of domination for the sake of socio-economic privilege, it does not ask what actual pleasures or purposes are served by the exercise of domination or exploitation.
Why do men seek wealth or status? It is only by asking this “simple” question that the ultimate gains and appeals of power can be uncovered and understood. Moreover, it is only by tracing these gains and appeals that the Left can explain not alone the recurrent abuse of power in history, but also the attitudes of those over whom power is exercised. Thus, both the consequences and the possibilities of revolution will remain impenetrable mysteries until the act of, and the acquiescence in, domination have been traced to their sources within the psyche—that is, within human nature, as it is formed and shaped in all societies.
Such an effort is indispensable if the Left is to escape from its besetting weakness—its failure to anticipate the political disasters that have been the curse of Marxist socialism in our time. As long as the problem of power is left unexplored and even unacknowledged, at best shrugged aside as a manifestation of class societies that will disappear under the dispensation of an undefined “participatory democracy,” political catastrophe will dog the heels of all socialist movements.
To state this is in no way to belittle ambitious programs or lofty ideals for human betterment. It is only to warn that human nature must be given its respectful due if these programs and ideals are not to end in terrible surprises and unforeseen miscarriages. The hope is that the psychological insights of conservative thought can be welded to the penetrative social analysis of radical investigation. Here a few promising starts have been made, but there is a vast deal to be achieved.2
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I smile ruefully when I read on page 123 of “efficiency-minded ministries of production.” But in the main I am happy with what I wrote twenty, and then emended ten, years ago. The questions posed in The Human Prospect seem to me still relevant, the answers as good as any I can think of, which does not mean that they are right.
1. Recent work by sociobiologist E. O. Wilson (On Human Nature, Harvard Univ. Press, 1978) has lent support to the genetic basis of social orderings. Wilson’s work has been attacked as ideological rather than scientific; I suspect the issue will be debated for a long time. For interesting reviews see David Pilbeam, “Toward a Concept of Man,” Natural History, Feb. 1979, pp. 100f, and N.J. Mackintosh, “A Proffering of Underpinnings,” Science, May 18, 1979, pp. 735–37.
2. Two path-breaking studies are Dorothy Dinnerstein, The Mermaid and the Minotaur (Harper, 1977), an exploration of the problem of male-female domination; and Joel Kovel, White Racism (Random House, 1971), a Marxian and Freudian exploration of the roots of racism