Cimmerians Come and Gone
“But when I observe [free people] sacrificing pleasure, peace, wealth, power, and life itself to the preservation of that one treasure which is so disdained by those who have lost it; when I see free-born animals dash their brains out against the bars of their cage from an innate impatience of captivity; when I behold numbers of naked savages that despise European pleasures braving hunger, fire, the sword and death to preserve their independence, I feel that it is not for slaves to argue about liberty.”
--Jean Jacques Rousseau, discussing his fellow theorists on the development of society from a theoretical “state of nature.”
Rousseau strikes me as a bit of a firebrand, probably a dangerous man. He was respected around Europe—his “Social Contract” was the recipient of prestigious awards from as far as Geneva—but his writings were precursor to the French revolution. He is still highly respected as one of the political thinkers instrumental in the creation of the United States constitution, but he was iconoclastic enough to denounce art and science as the pursuits of vanity and the idleness of the rich.
I will not deny that this man was a dangerous thinker. One can scarcely fault a dangerous thinker for having some ideas that look quaint, or downright foolish after two hundred and fifty years of history and learning. It's the nature of powerful, historical presences like his to act as double edged swords. What truly strikes me about his writing is how scant a distance I feel we've come in that time.
He says, “it is not for slaves to argue about liberty.” He applies this term, slaves, to his fellow authors, Thomas Hobbes, John Locke and Richard Filmer, to name a few. Men of culture, men of letters. These are property owners, men of noble birth and education in their homelands, and Rousseau calls them slaves. He may as well be alive today and calling senators, tenured professors and corporate officers by the same. We're all nothing but slaves to a system. To Rousseau, the death of man's natural state is the end of innocence. It is a black pock mark that cannot be removed. Whatever station we may rise to in this artificial ladder of bodies and names, we'll never have the freedom afforded to the once noble savages.
Leaving aside how it is for Rousseau to argue about liberty, I'm inclined to agree with him on some level. We have all given up freedom. I advocate giving as much of it as possible to everyone. But this is where Rousseau truly confounds me. Despite his meandering, poorly thought through ramblings about the birth of social structures, he is saying exactly what we are learning: the more people there are, the more we need these binding, restricting social agreements to keep us all alive and fed and clothed. If there were seven people on the planet, they could each have a continent, do with it as they pleased and never be concerned with the welfare of another man. They could pump as much secondhand smoke into the sky as they liked, and shoot their guns off in any direction without thinking. Thousands of people could live on the planet. Millions. Tens of millions. But there is a limit.
Despite Rousseau's vitriol and his philosophical agreement with Robert E. Howard's Conan, I do find that he is simply wrong in seeking so hard for each of us to have that kind of liberty. He can want it. We all want it. He can try to live his life in such a way as to emulate it, but so long as we all must be careful not to tread on one another's toes, there will always have to be a government. There will always be assigned roles and specialized labor. I will be forced to sit at a desk somewhere and move numbers around on a screen so that someone else can move prokaryotes from tube to tube with accuracy and precision.
Conan (or Howard, at least) and Rousseau have a great deal in common, with their belief in the superiority and strength of ancient barbaric man. Both say that civilized living makes men soft and week. It "enervates" them. Feminizes. They both hold sacred northern lands-Rousseau wishes he could live among the people of Geneva, and even when he is king, Conan longs for his time in Asgard. They see the confines of walls and parliaments as chains, and that all are bonded to these places as slaves to masters.
Slavery is a relative term, though. As much as I see the beauty and the good in the philosophy they preach, I must disagree. If we were to abandon the structures we have in place, billions would die. I don't know if Rousseau would would approve of the systems we have in place, though clearly his social contract acknowledges that we cannot go without these arrangements. And then he is like Conan upon the throne, all his anger misdirected and misplaced. And so must my own be, I suppose. The anger of every thinking woman or man at what has been lost must be misplaced. We learn to give up total liberty that we might each retain some measure at all.
--Jean Jacques Rousseau, discussing his fellow theorists on the development of society from a theoretical “state of nature.”
Rousseau strikes me as a bit of a firebrand, probably a dangerous man. He was respected around Europe—his “Social Contract” was the recipient of prestigious awards from as far as Geneva—but his writings were precursor to the French revolution. He is still highly respected as one of the political thinkers instrumental in the creation of the United States constitution, but he was iconoclastic enough to denounce art and science as the pursuits of vanity and the idleness of the rich.
I will not deny that this man was a dangerous thinker. One can scarcely fault a dangerous thinker for having some ideas that look quaint, or downright foolish after two hundred and fifty years of history and learning. It's the nature of powerful, historical presences like his to act as double edged swords. What truly strikes me about his writing is how scant a distance I feel we've come in that time.
He says, “it is not for slaves to argue about liberty.” He applies this term, slaves, to his fellow authors, Thomas Hobbes, John Locke and Richard Filmer, to name a few. Men of culture, men of letters. These are property owners, men of noble birth and education in their homelands, and Rousseau calls them slaves. He may as well be alive today and calling senators, tenured professors and corporate officers by the same. We're all nothing but slaves to a system. To Rousseau, the death of man's natural state is the end of innocence. It is a black pock mark that cannot be removed. Whatever station we may rise to in this artificial ladder of bodies and names, we'll never have the freedom afforded to the once noble savages.
Leaving aside how it is for Rousseau to argue about liberty, I'm inclined to agree with him on some level. We have all given up freedom. I advocate giving as much of it as possible to everyone. But this is where Rousseau truly confounds me. Despite his meandering, poorly thought through ramblings about the birth of social structures, he is saying exactly what we are learning: the more people there are, the more we need these binding, restricting social agreements to keep us all alive and fed and clothed. If there were seven people on the planet, they could each have a continent, do with it as they pleased and never be concerned with the welfare of another man. They could pump as much secondhand smoke into the sky as they liked, and shoot their guns off in any direction without thinking. Thousands of people could live on the planet. Millions. Tens of millions. But there is a limit.
Despite Rousseau's vitriol and his philosophical agreement with Robert E. Howard's Conan, I do find that he is simply wrong in seeking so hard for each of us to have that kind of liberty. He can want it. We all want it. He can try to live his life in such a way as to emulate it, but so long as we all must be careful not to tread on one another's toes, there will always have to be a government. There will always be assigned roles and specialized labor. I will be forced to sit at a desk somewhere and move numbers around on a screen so that someone else can move prokaryotes from tube to tube with accuracy and precision.
Conan (or Howard, at least) and Rousseau have a great deal in common, with their belief in the superiority and strength of ancient barbaric man. Both say that civilized living makes men soft and week. It "enervates" them. Feminizes. They both hold sacred northern lands-Rousseau wishes he could live among the people of Geneva, and even when he is king, Conan longs for his time in Asgard. They see the confines of walls and parliaments as chains, and that all are bonded to these places as slaves to masters.
Slavery is a relative term, though. As much as I see the beauty and the good in the philosophy they preach, I must disagree. If we were to abandon the structures we have in place, billions would die. I don't know if Rousseau would would approve of the systems we have in place, though clearly his social contract acknowledges that we cannot go without these arrangements. And then he is like Conan upon the throne, all his anger misdirected and misplaced. And so must my own be, I suppose. The anger of every thinking woman or man at what has been lost must be misplaced. We learn to give up total liberty that we might each retain some measure at all.
posted by Maximillian @ 11:59 PM
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