Bill Whittle:

Transcript of "A Tale of Two Revolutions: The War of Ideas & Tragedy of the Unconstrained Vision"

You know, we've been talking a lot of politics lately, so why not just for a change, why don't we talk a little bit about some of the philosophy behind the politics.

Some questions are eternal. Why has there always been war and conflict? What drives men to destroy each other over ideas? Is conflict the result of a giant, horrible misunderstanding between peoples? Is there a universal right and wrong? A code that all of humanity can agree upon?

Well, I'm not smart enough to know the answers to those questions, but I know someone who is. An American philosopher and raw genius, Thomas Sowell has a theory: Sowell says that beneath politics and party, beneath even ideology and morality, lies "a conflict of visions" about the very nature of what humanity is and about how the human heart is constructed. It's this fundamental view, not of who we are but of what we are that determines the trenches we will inhabit when were confronted with a war of ideas.

Now, during the Age of Reason, endless thought was given to the nature of mankind, because needless to say, the kind of government one vision of mankind required was very different, opposite even, to the one best suited to a different vision of the human animal.

One school of thought held that mankind is inherently flawed, limited by his personal fears and desires; man as a being constrained by the essential, unchangeable weakness of his nature.

Now according to the constrained view of humanity, primitive man lived a life doomed in the words of Thomas Hobbes to be ". . . Solitary, poore, nasty, brutish and short." And it was largely this pessimistic view of mankind as having inherent irredeemable flaws that so greatly influenced the founders of the American Revolution, to design a society that would prevent this vision of a flawed mankind from accumulating too much power.

That political vision became coupled with the equally constrained economic views of Adam Smith who saw common good coming from what is essentially selfish individual pursuits.

Now after a great deal of thought and debate, adherence of this constrained view shook the world in 1776 with the American Revolution. Let's call that the "constrained revolution."

Now opposing this constrained vision was the belief that man in a state of nature was not a brood at all, but rather virtuous, compassionate, sharing, noble and kind.

The Swiss philosopher Jean Jean Rousseau wrote ". . . You are undone if you once forget that the fruits of the earth belong to us all, and the earth itself to nobody." Well now. That is a very different view of the natural state of mankind; it's a different vision than that of the power and money-grubbing creature espoused by Adam Smith in the constrained view.

Now although the phrase the "noble savage" is often attributed to Rousseau, he never actually in fact used that term, but he did believe that man in his natural state was a virtuous creature and that all of the wars and conflicts that have arisen were merely the inevitable result of people staking claims to property and ownership that primitive man never envisioned let alone practiced.

This man, Rousseau's man, was unconstrained by his past or his biology, and therefore free to become whatever he could imagine for himself. And remarkably, just a few years after the birth of the constrained revolution in the New World, in France, this romantic, optimistic view of the nature of man also erupted into revolution; the French Revolution; the "unconstrained revolution."

So, which vision of man comes closest to the mark? Is man a fatally flawed creation whose constrained by his nature to act selfishly and whose best hope is to cobble together a series of checks and rules that allow him to pursue his own self-interests with the least damage to others? Or, conversely, is man a fundamentally good and wise and generous creature, unconstrained by nature, wanting only a just society and freedom from the superstitions of the past to achieve heaven on earth?

Because if you accept the constrained vision, then history is a catalog of trial-and-error, it's a vast storehouse of wisdom from which to draw upon. You would view all that's gone before as experiments that test an unchanging human nature against various forms of government, and from this data you would pick the least flawed elements and try to make a culture from those. You would want to conserve this wisdom.

But, if you side with the unconstrained vision of humanity, then mankind's past would not be a source of wisdom to be conserved, but rather philosophical and political shackles that one must be liberated from through a process of reasoned debate and introspection; that was the outgrowth of what many have called the "cultivated mind." Nothing would be beyond the power of a few such reasonable, virtuous men.

And it was this unconstrained view of a new man free from the chains of decadent bourgeois morality and religion that through the French Revolution would light the way to a future of liberte, egality, and fraternity: liberty, quality, and brotherhood.

So which is it? Well, here I must leave Thomas Sowell behind to draw my own conclusions.

One of the men who argued most passionately for the virtue of mankind was one of the architects of the unconstrained French Revolution; his name was Maximilien Robespierre. When he saw the poverty and the ruin inflicted upon the French people by their king, Louis XVI, he argued for his execution saying "Louis ought to perish rather than 100,000 virtuous citizens. Louis must die so that the country may live." And so die he did on the guillotine, followed by his queen, Marie Antoinette.

She in turn was followed by most of the hated aristocracy, and the priests, and the well-to-do merchants. You could be guillotined for having insufficient fervor and in fact, you could be guillotined for having too much.

Innocent people, thousands of them, were often sent to their deaths just based on an anonymous whisper. And Robespierre approved of all of this: "If virtue be the wellspring of a popular government in times of peace," wrote Robespierre, ". . . Then the spring of that government during a revolution is virtue combined with terror . . . . Virtue, without which terror is destructive; terror, without which virtue is impotent."

Robespierre and his fellow revolutionaries with their highly cultivated minds called themselves the "The Committee for Public Safety." (They always call themselves something like that.) And when the unconstrained revolution finally came for Robespierre and his closest confederates (because it always has, and it always will), these disciples of Rousseau and his noble man of nature found themselves barricaded in a small hotel room at 2 o'clock in the morning.

Robespierre's brother Augustin threw himself out of a window. George Couthon was found lying crippled at the base of the stairwell where he hurled himself down in order to escape from the virtuous. Now Robespierre himself tried to shoot himself in the head, but he only succeeded in shattering his own jaw. He screamed in agony the next morning when they tore off his bandages so he could be guillotined cleanly.

And legend has it, that of all the tens-of-thousands that were beheaded in the pursuit of heaven on earth, only Robespierre was executed facing upwards so that he could watch his own death coming to claim him.

Now, if the guillotining of a champion of virtue amid rivers of blood was the moral of the unconstrained revolution, what example can we take from the constrained revolution across the sea in America?

Well, right after the Boston Massacre where the hated British Army fired upon unarmed American civilians, the soldiers accused of this murderous act were put on trial in Massachusetts. That they were guilty of this action is not up for discussion. They shot those people and by the standards of the French Revolution they were infinitely more guilty than the tens-of-thousands of innocent French men and women that were sent to their deaths on a whisper.

But . . . but, a society based upon the constrained vision of mankind which sees him as irredeemably flawed and slaved to his emotions and fears, determined to protect itself against those defects, and devise a system of justice that called for a trial by jury and demanded a competent defense. That defense, was provided in-turn by an obscure lawyer who would go on to become the constrained revolution's second president.

John Adams argued that these hated soldiers were in fear of their lives, and they as individuals did only what any man would do in such a case . . . they simply defended themselves, and John Adams won that case, and those hated enemies were set free.

And a government based upon the constrained vision of a flawed mankind gained another data point with which we can weigh our decision.

Now since that time the unconstrained view of a perfectible, naturally virtuous man and his utopia-on-earth has given us 11 million gassed to death in national socialists death camps, no less than 30 million killed in various purges in government induced starvations in the paradise of equality known as the Soviet Union; 50 million, 50 million killed in the communist Chinese utopia of cultural revolution and the great leap forward, millions more executed for lack of revolutionary virtue in Cambodia under the Khmer Rouge and in Vietnam under the victorious armies that were so celebrated at the time in the streets of America by those most blinded by the beauty of unconstrained virtuous new man and his godless heaven right here on earth.

And yet . . . there in the gloom and pessimism about what and who we are lies the unlovely, stony and narrow path, a vision not of what might be, but rather of what is and always was. It's a road not of ideals in unity, but of messy and imperfect compromise, where scandal and corruption are never defeated but only contained. Where hundreds-of-millions of people going about their own lives and making their own decisions function not without mistakes or tragedy, but only do so far less than they would if only the best and brightest did the thinking for them.

The so-called "cultivated mind" is no match, none, history records none for the collective wisdom, for the common sense, and the common self-interests of imperfect and flawed but fundamentally moral and decent people. It's far from perfect . . . it's merely good. That's all it is.

You see, the shiny golden road of the unconstrained vision leads to the death camp. The gloomy narrow path of the constrained vision leads . . . to Disneyland. Disneyland isn't perfect . . . it's just the happiest place on earth.