1
ON SOVEREIGNTY
Pope Innocent X was horrified when he learned that the Peace of Westphalia meant that Rome's universal values would no longer hold sway over temporal sovereigns. Many political thinkers today would agree. On the other hand, many pundits decry the loss of sovereignty to immigrant invaders and/or international institutions. Others say that the term is too elastic to be meaningful. To me, the word embodies the enlightenment project – human freedom, says Immanuel Kant – and, like most concepts developed in these early centuries of the free human future, as we come to understand sovereignty with Cartesian crystal clarity, it will aid us in ending mankind's eternal values wars and wars for commercial advantage. Or so I shall argue.
Every political theory begins with a hypothesis about human nature, and these days that means understanding the human mind, which in turn means understanding the human brain. I argue that the freedom project goes hand-in-hand with the West's expanding knowledge of this brain. More to the point, I argue that the freedom project goes hand-in-hand with the work of neurology, psychiatry, psychology – both their science and their metaphysics (yes, metaphysics).
Human Nature
The better we validate our hypotheses about the influences of genes, environment, experience, and self-will, the more effectively we can theorize about compatible social institutions. The concept of sovereignty is no exception. To understand why it serves the freedom project, we should have an idea of the human nature it is configured to serve.
I read that a couple of million years ago the human brain, unlike any other animal, inexplicably began to become larger and that it continues to get larger and that the only thing holding back further development is the size of the bipedal female pelvis. The prevalent use of Caesarean sections may launch a new era of development and produce a brilliant new species; but, whatever the future, I argue that our ever-enlarging brain has something to do with the nature of our ever-changing consciousness about ourselves and thus the ever-changing forms of governance that best suit us.
I read that an analysis of ancient texts and civilizations indicates the development of language led to concepts and notions of cause and effect, space and time. These concepts enabled human cooperation in survival; and, more importantly, helped understand that there is an ordered relationship between objects in the world. Mankind started naming objects, perhaps in order to categorize them, even, as Hegel surmised, to possess them, most importantly to begin the treacherous road toward shared meanings. Men started naming themselves, as individuals to signify that they were different entities from other individuals. They conceived of anthropomorphic and animistic explanations for natural phenomena and human pains, dreams, feelings, and death. With those explanations came priests and rites, and death rites tied men to their ancestors. Men with common antecedents were corralled into the common narrative, which created standards and order, accorded value to the actions of the ancestors, and provided precedent by which the tribe would survive. The tribal name almost always meant "human being" – from the beginning, it seems, the only persons of value were those in the extended family.
Julian Jaynes (Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind) argues that humans did not act from self-will but from the voices – female voices – that arose in the right side of their brain. Men and women organized communities, even cities, even civilizations, for the sole purpose of serving those voices and their manifestations. Jaynes says that for the most part this general condition of schizophrenia stopped when the synapses connecting the left and right sides of the brain snapped creating the bicameral mind. That was when consciousness and concepts became ideas, when men discovered relationships – chords, harmony, geometry, reason – and ushered in what Karl Jaspers called the Axial Period.
During this six-hundred-year instant in the human story, Socrates, Buddha, Confucius, the Semitic Prophets, the Veda writers, and Zoroaster gave men ethics based on human reason and experience, not on the caprice of gods or the imaginations of priests and oracles. Societies based on the new ethics would still serve the gods or the good (the font of prescriptive norms). Individuals still had identity and meaning only in the context of their communities. But normative behavior was predicated on maxims digested from centuries of experience or principles self-evident to human reason or God's commandments that happened to be compatible with experience and reason. Of course, experience, as John Locke was to point out, arises in a cultural context; thus the ethical principles that devolve from experience are cultural specific. Similarly, reason applied to ethics, as David Hume was point out, serves the preconceived ideas or principles that accrue from our experience. That is why Axial societies remained closed systems, exclusive clubs for initiated members, whose ethics inculcated values, speech, standards, manners, and modes of behavior that were deemed superior to those outside the system. These were the ethics – I call them the Axial Ethic – that guided human civilization for the two-and-a-half millennia I call the Axial Era.[1] These are the ethics for which troubled peoples today, struggling to accommodate the age of technoscience, remain so nostalgic.
By allying reason to nature, Stoicism endeavored to elevate reason above a particular community's good to grounds for a universal civil law. For five hundred years this philosophy undergirded a set of laws that applied to all cultures in the Roman Empire (Ius Romanum). But because these laws did not address rules of custom, the Romans allowed all these cultures to have their own laws (Ius Gentium) as long as they did not contradict the transcendent law. Rome provided a model of empire by which one dominant people maintained the peace between the many peoples. Roman transcendence did nothing to elevate individual consciousness beyond its culture, but it did open the way to a Christian conscience that did allow a glimpse of the independent, worthy self.
Some have conjectured that before Jesus began his teaching, he became acquainted with Buddhism. Certainly, it seems to me, that insights expressed by both entail glimmers of self-consciousness, the essential precondition for rights awareness. The Hebrews and the Greeks had notions of self ("Know thyself" and "As I walk through the valley of the shadow of death"), but neither had a notion of a complete, meaningful self, viable independently of the tribe. To each, consequences of all human action inured to the tribe; the consequences of all tribal history were endured by the individual. The Greeks believed that all human behavior stemmed from upbringing and education (and, if necessary, rehabilitation). Behavior contrary to the expectations of the collective was simply pathological. The Hebrews believed that God had invested mankind with the propensity to sin and had obligated Hebrews to be the ethical beacon for salvation. Behavior that did not correspond to fulfilling this obligation was sociopathic.
The power of the Axial consciousness eventually configured both Buddhism and Christianity to accommodate the Axial Ethic. But before Christianity succumbed, the Welsh monk Pelagius was in Rome advocating a free will concept that suggested that the individual could find meaning for his life in his own, unmediated individual concourse with God ("my house has many mansions.") His views had a marked affect on a young Augustine, who wrote one of the seminal arguments for a free will, but whose views changed when he realized the ramifications for the Roman church. He declared Pelagianism a heresy, and the Church buried Western self-consciousness for a thousand years.
During the three centuries before the American Founders launched their "world begun anew," Martin Luther put the individual into a direct, unmediated relationship with God; and Galileo and Newton demonstrated that mechanical laws, arguably impervious to any external will, governed objects in the universe. Rene Descartes used the mathematics that ordered the universe to analyze the individual self or soul.
To be sure, the soul had been a key feature of the Axial belief about human beings. It was a mystical, immortal something that existed prior to informing the human body and that persisted after death. It was Homer's emotive thumos; it was Aristotle's animating spirit. It was the backdrop to the human mind. Socrates argued that it retained a permanent memory of transcendent principles allied to the Good. And the Good was the only truth, or so Plato argued. This transcendent Good meant that all humans, wedded in a collective soul, share meaningful innate knowledge. Our lives become meaningful by discovering that knowledge, and the function of society is to educate humans to realize that knowledge. "The man who sees the good, cannot act otherwise," went the Greek maxim. Even though the Hebrew notions of original sin and evil were central to the Western concept of human nature, after Thomas Aquinas, the belief began to circulate that this defect could be overcome.
Descartes' analysis made the self or soul independent of both the mortal body and the separated it from all other souls. While opening the way to solipsism, he gave the individual meaning in his or her own self, independent of the environment. He argued that truth was accessible only through analytical introspection that cleanses concepts of the distortions caused by our senses and knits them logically together into truth.
In England, Francis Bacon countered that reason explained truth, but that it was only validated by our experience with it. John Locke followed with his Essay on Human Understanding, arguing that, except for intuitive self-evident propositions and know-how to arrive at mathematical conclusions, the mind is a blank slate. It has no innate ideas and the mind and its memory is informed only by experience, through the senses. To Locke, memory is the hallmark of individual identity and belief systems. Because all individual experience, though similar to others, is distinctly unique, each individual is unique in his or her identity and beliefs.
The enlightenment derided superstition to the extent that God was relegated to the role of Creator, a hands-off Creator, with an uncertain role in the affairs of mankind. Galileo and Newton removed God from the day-to-day machinations of the universe. Locke wanted to do the same for the mind of man. Thomas Hobbes organized society not to serve God but to protect the individual's right to life. Moreover, Hobbes had raised the specter of human behavior absent the constraints of the state (that is, humanity in a "state of nature"); and he did not paint a pretty picture. Hobbes agreed with Aristotle that humans are rational animals; but, buttressed by the doctrine of original sin, he argued that in a state of nature we employ our rational faculty only in the pursuit of satisfying short term interests (either avaricious, passionate, vainglorious, or paranoid). That pursuit, in turn, leads to conflicts that result in making life miserable ("nasty, brutish, and short"). Men and women, Hobbes famously argued, submit to an all powerful, even draconian sovereign to save their lives, the ultimate self-interest, and, in so doing, realize the most basic of all rights, their right to life.
Subsequent enlightenment thinkers, horrified at what they interpreted as Hobbes argument for tyranny, argued vigorously that human nature was sufficiently rational and moral to warrant only minimal governance. Locke argued that, in general, men and women in a state of nature employ their reason to interact constructively. They submit to a government of magistrates simply to settle incidental conflicts of interest, specifically of property rights, which men acquire through labor by adjoining objects to their essential identity. Because humans also acquire their beliefs through individual experience, Locke argued, and because no experience can logically be superior to another, all beliefs are of equal value. Therefore, humans also have a right to free conscience. Voltaire added that since human actions naturally to avoid pain and pursue pleasure are also their right. Jean Jacques Rousseau asserted that humans in nature are not just rational, but naturally "sympathetic," living lovingly with one another until corrupted by human institutions, which are designed to enslave some humans in the service of the interests of others. Men and women submit to a sovereign in order to reassert the supremacy of that natural sympathy over the inhumanity induced by institutions. Rousseau argues, with Hobbes, that for individuals to enjoy their rights, they must merge them with all others under the sovereign. An individual's rights can be realized only in tandem with all members of the community. The Scottish Reverend Francis Hutcheson argued that humans are equipped with a moral sense, complementing our aesthetic sense. Dr. Richard Price argued that our capacity for love grounds our capacity for a conscience. Because men have these natural traits, they are equipped to live freely, or least under a system of laws and rights.
The American Founders thus inherited a human being far more complex than Aristotle's rational animal, and they focused on fashioning a sovereign to accommodate the animal as they understood him. While they were doing so, employing much the same understanding of human nature, the Scottish economists fashioned an economic system to accommodate that animal. During the same period, Immanuel Kant was clarifying concepts of mind and human nature, and a consequent concept of morals, that, I believe, have been the foundation of the human freedom ever since. Even though there is little evidence that any of the three – the Americans, the Scots, and Kant – had more than a passing acquaintance with the work of the others, I argue that each brings important concepts to the freedom equation, that each complements and completes the other, that they are the triad of the freedom project.
Kant ascertained that the human being is at once a physical creature, a cultural being, and an "autonomous" self. The human material body of material parts obeys the laws of nature. The cultural self (we are all cultural or -- Kant's word -- "heteronymous") submits to the rules, habits, virtues, beliefs, and values that the culture inculcates into each human from birth. Human actions in response to our biology or the physical world have no moral content. Human actions taken under social coercion or induced by heteronymous factors have no moral content (although these actions may be ethical). The autonomous self is our rights-bearing self, the seat of the human will, the font of our conscious choices. This is our moral self; the self that responds to the sublime and finds the path to God. In virtue of choices freely made that accord with the will of God, this self renders human dignity and supreme worth.[2]
Significantly for the future of the freedom project, Kant argued that rights are innate, not natural or God-given. As I see it, these seemingly meaningless distinctions loom large for the future of freedom. By innate, I want to think that he means that rights are an attribute of what it is to be human. Even though innate means that the attribute is buried in the human genome, it is not a physical attribute. Nature binds us to physical, biological, and psychological laws; its laws regulate the motive forces behind body function and habitual and/or conditioned behavior. Nature obviates free choice, a key feature of rights.[3]
In one sense, to say that rights are God-given is a tautology, in that everything in the universe is God-given. But the statement seems to entail something about rights being "given," as were the positive rights granted by medieval sovereigns or the rights accruing in virtue of culture or heritage, as the British and American Whigs argued. God, of course, trumps sovereigns and culture, but there is still a suggestion of privileged humans lurking behind the statement; and where there is privilege, there can be exception. Rather than God looking down on humanity and at some point blessing it (or some of it) with rights, Kant wanted to think that, just as the word "human" entails reason and language and culture, the very meaning of "human" entails rights. Moreover, although not a consideration for Kant, to say that rights are God-given, discounts the possible role of evolution in the development of the human brain and human consciousness.
Had the Founders – especially the Southern Founders – had the benefit of Kant's analysis, perhaps, to be as intellectually honest as (we know) they strove to be, I think they would have had to face the slavery contradiction more squarely. Even though some nineteenth century Southern Americans went so far as to argue that Africans were not human, no one engaged in the debates at the Constitutional Convention or during the ratification process made that assertion. The real problem was that, despite Jefferson's words in the Declaration of Independence, patriots were largely muddled about source of rights (whether from God or culture or some combination of the two). Most, many historians have argued, were motivated more to restore their Whiggish British rights that inured only to "members of society" than to recognize rights inuring to everyone. Africans and Native Americans may have been human, but they were not members of society.