As our country is engulfed in the flames of discord, our task is more than merely reporting on events, calling for an end to racism, or making emotional appeals to unity. We go wrong when the advancement of human goods is parasitic to an emotional response that impairs our reason as we attempt to guide our actions. As Thomas Aquinas reminds us, wrongdoing is found in the repugnance of feelings toward reason’s commands. When our passions fetter reason and make it their slave, we cannot see how others are using us as pawns in an ideological game.
Against the reign of passions, reason acknowledges two principles—both included by Aquinas as a second set of the principles of practical reason: (1) The Golden Rule (Do unto others as you would have them do to you.); and (2) Do not answer injury with injury.
Doesn’t it feel right to say, as Antifa militants allege, that we don’t debate with fascists, we just defeat them? That we don’t reform the present order—irreformable as it is—we just break it into pieces? The utopian vision informing radicalism cannot admit any other response than rabid activism and destruction. Anyone who fails to realize the obvious truth, according to this approach must be acting in bad faith and their destruction appears as the only solution for the benefit of the whole. If they fail to see the pervasive truth, they are denying my humanity and are tokens of forces whose existence impedes my actualization and the affirmation of my dignity. That is the logic of the radical ideologue, and its enemy is rational dialogue and democratic compromise.
Yet, it is so much easier to let appetite run wild, resulting in injustice and violence while appearing as justice and righteousness! What we see in many cities today—the looting, burning, assaulting and killing—is what we get when we misunderstand justice and become instruments in the hands of ideologues whose task is to inflame and destroy. Their understanding of human advancement depends on the dialectics of history—that the only way to advance is to burn down the present order. What can be better for ideologues than to utilize a real injustice to channel anger and use the manpower of those who otherwise might have different aims?
As ideologues are both revolutionaries and very patient soldiers, they will wreak havoc now and lay in wait afterwards, as a pack of hyenas stalking wounded prey. In the process, they have changed the collective consciousness to accept as true their analysis of history, which will facilitate and ignite the next round of violence. When the flames momentarily subside, their dialectics have won the day. More and more people will understand as reasonable the radical vision of causality and historical analysis. The one challenging that paradigm will no longer be accepted as reasonable or decent. After all, we need to do something.
This is Rousseau and Hobbes fused with the keen distortion of human nature perpetrated by Marx. Just over a century before Hobbes, Jean-Jacques Rousseau affirmed that human nature is essentially good, and that people were naturally capable of happiness and peaceful coexistence well before the development of the modern state. Man is good and society corrupts him. In the Discourse on the Origin of Inequality Among Men, Rousseau describes the state of nature as one where man is self-sufficient, worry-free, and cultivates his plot of land freely. Peace informs this pre-civilizational state. But one day someone places a stake to divide the land and property is born, and with it the downfall of humanity.
In 1651, at the opposite intellectual end, Thomas Hobbes famously wrote that our natural condition outside the authority of a political state was ‘solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.’ Not being hardwired for living in large-scale societies we are not naturally political animals. Instead, we’re naturally selfish and in need of guidance not to descend into voracious competition over scarce resources. That being our natural condition, Hobbes argued, we must submit ourselves to an authoritative body with the power to enforce laws and resolve conflicts.
Hobbes and Rousseau represent opposing poles in the great questions of human nature. However, their positions are forced compatible in the thought of Marx and later in Lenin. For Marx, the nature of the human species was not obvious in every individual, being instead a sort of spontaneous order created and always determined in a specific social and historical formation, with some aspects being biological.[1] The very nature of the human person is collectivized in Marx, thus avoiding Rousseau’s question of the place of society in the discussion of what impedes individual human flourishing. Whether everyone is naturally good or not is irrelevant because what is important is the collectivized economic structure. However, with Rousseau Marx indicts the social order. Capitalism turned us into enemies who endlessly compete with one another and private property is poison.
With Hobbes, Marx and Lenin affirmed the need for a strong collective leading entity pushing the march of socialism. The collectivized self needs guidance, a vanguard, to lead the masses—and use them for the task—toward the ultimate destruction of the capitalist social order. The goal is to erase the present order and, in an inevitable clash, erect a new order, with its own tensions and antagonisms. After all, for Marx violence is the great instrument for progress.
The individual is meaningless because the very nature of the person is collective and the collective needs a guiding force to lead them in the inevitable historical forces that necessitate conflict for advancement. This guiding force within the group cannot evolve organically; it needs to be imposed. As Lenin taught, the economic evolution of capitalism into socialism is impossible. There is the need of a single-minded group of revolutionaries that rises from the more or less chaotic mass of the class as a whole. The groups now leading the looting and burning are those whose hearts are sewn with the thread of vanguardism. They have found that all-encompassing truth that we are racial victims and the present order is intrinsically racist, in need of eradication. In Marx the key was class, in these neo-Marxists it is the irreducible concept of race. From systemic racism theory to “whiteness” studies to Critical Race Theory, they have been able to count the ways that make us dispossessed and called to end the dialectic.
Extremism in the solving of problems emerges frequently as the result of believing that we have found the truth, the all-embracing solution, one that is never reformist, only radical. Once one has found this exhaustive answer it is imperative to actualize it, both in learning and in action. How can we be true to self if one does not acknowledge the priority of activism? When we reach this point, we have been swallowed by the dictatorship of appetite. The last step is to finish the scorched-earth task. The dictatorship of appetite begins with imperfect reality, escapes into emotional appeals, is directed by the ideological aims of the few, and ends up in unbridled passion and destructive action.
We are seeing the dictatorship of appetite in full swing as you read. There is no doubt that a real injustice was recently committed against a man named George Floyd, and other injustices have been committed against others. What is not real is the interpretation at the base of that reality.
The early civil rights movement was not infected with the seed of dialectical materialism as the interpretive model of black reality. The movement was imbued with a reformist embrace of the American ethos and a natural law understanding of the human person and of the social order. Early in the movement, Dr. King approached the microphone of Holy Street Church in Montgomery, Alabama, to proclaim black dignity and demand a generational change. “When the history books are written in future generations,” he declared, “the historians will have to pause and say. ‘There lived a great people—a black people—who injected new meaning and dignity into the veins of civilization. This is our challenge and our overwhelming responsibility.” The present generation has betrayed such honorable aims.
[1] Marx, Karl, Theses on Feuerbach (1845)
