Note: This and the next post reference a discussion in the post below titled "God", which you can read (or not) depending on your preference for giving a context.
Conservatives like to mock Jean-Jacques Rousseau for being a horrible individual; he never married his mistress of many years, and the children that issued from their years-long affair were all given over to others to raise. Of course, libertinism is neither new nor restricted to political and moral philosophers. It is just that Rousseau was earnest in his insistence on a certain social morality that his own amorality (some would call it immorality) would, at the very least, point to a level of hypocrisy only equaled by Bertrand Russell in the 20th century (another philosopher conservatives love to hate because of his personal flaws).
I, on the other hand, am no fan of Rousseau because of the phrase in the title above. In his The Social Contract, Rousseau argues for (a) a universal human nature; (b) the necessity of social and political life flowing from the roots in natural life; and, (c) the importance of bringing all those recalcitrant enough to deny these universal truths to a recognition of the possibilities inherent in social life stemming from (a) and (b). He believed, or at least wrote, that it is necessary for the good of society to use coercion to force those who refuse to conform to do so, for the health of soceity as a whole. It is right here that the roots of so many of the horrors of the previous century lie. It is here that I stand and protest, demanding that we surrender our simplistic ideas of human nature, and the hubris that comes from assuming (a) there are answers to questions that, in the end, aren't questions, so therefore no answers are needed; and (b) there is one right answer to any question at all.
The last point, at least in the west, goes back at least as far as Aristotle, who insisted on what came to be known as "the law of the excluded middle". A question about a certain state of affairs ecludes the possibility of the answer containing two distinct and mutually exclusive states. Thus, a person cannot be both alive and dead simultaneously (in a classic example). From the idea that questions not only do, but must, have only one correct answer, we arrive at the killing fields of Cambodia, the insanity of Maoist China, Stalin's crimes, and Auschwitz, with a prelude in the guillotine of Committee-led Revolutionary France. If all questions have only one correct answer, including questions about what is the best, most human life possible in society, those who answer incorrectly (a) have to be re-educated or, (in a 1970's phrase of equal condescension if not of eqaul horror) have their "consciousness raised"; (b) if that fails, they are deliberately refusing to give assent to universal, normally self-evident Truth and are a threat to the well-being of society, and need to be removed permanently.
There is no answer to the question, "What is the best society?". There is no answer to the question, "What is the most representative human life?". The reason there is no answer to these questions is because the questions themselves are non-sensical, based upon an absurd and unprovable assumption that there are criteria accessible to all persons in all times and all places that we can use to judge the correct and incorrect answers. They are nonsensical because life is not a problem to be solved, but just living, making wrong and right choices, or making no choices at all. What makes humanity, and the individual, is not the full realization of some abstract set of potentialities, but full participation in life - eating, drinking, sleeping, spewing, screwing, defecating (in the words of a VanDerGraf Generator song). That's really all there is to it.
There are many on the left who would disagree with this position. They would argue that allowing individuals to make "wrong" choices creates social turmoil and conflict. They want to "educate" people so that they have more facts, more information from which to make decisions. In the end, of course, decisions are no more than answers to questions, and there can only be one correct decision. This point of view, to me, is as nonsensical and irrelevant and absurd as the whole question-answer business. People live their lives based on a whole host of things, many of which are not only unspoken, but inaccessible to any kind of rational reflection. Sometimes we are like Topsy in Uncle Tom's Cabin - we just growed.
I am not an adherent to abstract principles (or at least very few; no one, I think is free from all abstractions), but rather to real human life, lived in the day-to-day, here-and-now. If some people make decisions I would not, or some societies choose practices I would not, I am free to argue with them, to say why I believe those choices are wrong, and why alternatives might be better for them. I do not base those arguments in fictions life human nature, though, for a very good reason. If there were a universal human nature, accessible to all persons in all times and all places, this should automatically beg the question of social conflict. As social conflict is real, I accept what is real over some philosopher's idea of what is true any day of the week. In the end, if others still make choices different from those I make, well, so what? Am I the font of wisdom or the source or prophet for truth? I can only do so much, and I have other things to do as well, such as loving my family, working forty hours a week, listening to good music, reading good books, etc. Life is a complicated business that does not require thought or planning. It just requires living.
Once we surrender the idea that there are questions and answers, and based on these answers plans that can and should be made as to how we should live our lives, we surrender the idea that others must be forced, through imperial invasion or internal coercion, to be free, because freedom is no longer an abstraction, but the small, domestic, tidy reality we all actually live. No one needs to be forced to be free.
