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The Alternative Tradition
Wilson Carey McWilliams
Professor, Political Science, Rutgers University
Saturday, June 25, 1977
I suppose I should begin by telling a story that is one of
the reasons I got into political theory in the first place. I'd
just gone into graduate school--it is 1958. 1Q58 was the first
time in 70 years we elected a Democratic Governor in
California--Pat Brown, the father of the present Governor. He
beat Bill Knowland--carried 56 counties--won by about a million
votes. After the election, we had a dinner for Pat with a bunch
of intellectuals who had supported him. And my friend Stanford
Lyman, now at the New School, was sitting next to Brown, talking
about the election. Finally,Brown turned to him and said, "Mr.
Lyman, what I want to know is, why is it every time I talk to a
social scientist, he tells me how to get elected. God damn it--I
know how to get elected. I have just won the Governorship of this
State by a million votes. What I want to know from
social-scientists is now that I am elected, what
in God's name do I do?"
. That struck me as a significant question, one which most
social scientists-haven't addressed--and certainly which all the
skills that I've learned about political activity and about
political organizing have not really addressed in any way that is
satisfactory. One of the questions that struck me as most
interesting in this afternoon's discussion was the question of
whether all values might disappear in ten years. I'm not sure
that it wouldn't be better if they would. Because the problem is
not that we're not going to have values in ten years. We're going
to have lots of values...oodles of values. This economy and
society generates values at a rate even faster than it generates
bad automobiles and air pollution. It generates a mass attack on
philosophy and on values of a kind which previous tyrants could
not have imagined. Not so long ago the Coca Cola Corporation
announced that its product was noumenon--the real thing--thereby
solving that problem of philosophy. Miss Clairol has been
telling us that there is an interesting phenomenon known as,
"natural hair dye"--which is a mind boggling concept all by
itself.
One of the things we have to face about this society is the
extent to which there is a powerful public dimension which
generates statements about values, theories about values,
assertions about values and first principles. There is a world of
political metaphysics in the dominant society. And this world is
taught all the time, constantly, and it is taught to very young
people. You can't deal with the statistic that we recently got
access to that the average young American child now watches 400
television commercials per week without recognizing the assault
that is made through the dominant institutions, through the
media, through the economy, through the life of this society on
people's lives.
The problem is not that there aren't values. The problem is
that there is not an alternative to the dominant set of values.
Or certainly, if there is an alternative, it has lost the
coherence that it once had, the organization that it once had.
When an organizer touches the almost geologic strain of
alternative values in America, he has to recognize that that's
what has happened--that there is a kind of geology; that you
suddenly strike a level where people did have an alternative
tradition and a way of seeing things which has increasingly
become incoherent, inaccessible, inarticulate, and consequently
not available for political life. What seems to be the meeting
point of the organizer and the educator is that whatever their
differences, they are both engaged, or ought to be engaged, in
rendering this alternative tradition articulate, coherent, and
available to people. That doesn't mean they have to agree
with it. They just have to agree that it would be sort of nice if
people were not trapped by the dominant school of things.
Let me just talk a little bit about this kind of
alternative, whith certainly did characterize American politics
in the past--characterized it at the time of the American
Revolution. We have been told often enough that the American
Revolution was devoted to the ideals of individual liberty; and
that individual liberty and the pursuit of gain is the American
way. But, after all, in 1776, Sam Adams set it down that his goal
for the United States was for it to be a Christian Sparta. If you
read individual liberty and the pursuit of gain in that, your
intellectual history needs some correction. That image says
restraint, authority, self-discipline. It's a quite different
tradition, but remember that in 1776, it was this tradition that
looked radical, revolutionary, and popular. And the tradition of
individualism, private gain, and so forth, was perceived for what
it was--a tradition dominantly of the cities, dominantly of the
elites, dominantly of the literatti--of those who had been
educated in new and fashionable currents, and who believed
--then, as now--that any view other than theirs was the product
of force and fraud.
I think that we have to recognize that this alternative,
this sense of another possible organization for America, was a
live one down through most of our political history. I want to
talk a little bit about some of the distinctions that are
involved.
For the dominant school of thought that shaped our
institutions --the Constitution, for example--and that shapes our
political thinking today- chool which Louis Hartz called,
"irrational Lockeianism"--there is no question that human beings
are born free. They are born, in this tradition, with no moral
limits outside the self. That's what one means by, "born free."
There are no natural moral limits, there are no natural moral
rules. Indeed, there are no moral ru1es at all. What exists by
nature is the desiring, yearning, passionate, willing, acquiring
self, that wishes to impose its will on all things around it.
What is the first principle of nature? James Madison says it
is, "the external and inexorable law of self-preservation," which
is the first premise of all science and all philosophy. So for
Madison; so, for a great many. Man, in their view, is
self-seeking, self-preserving, concerned to maximize his private
satisfactions, his gains, the satisfaction of his desires. Human
beings have desires which are, in principle, infinite--or so this
school sees them. And if you don't doubt that people still do,
read an elementary economics text. It will tell you that there
are no such things as surpluses, there are only surpluses at
given prices. Why is that? Because people are infinitely
acquisitive. They would like seven billion match boxes, if only
the price were low enough. That this sounds silly doesn't keep
people from believlng it. As you know, intellectuals can believe
anything, given enough time. Since people have desires that are,
in principle, infinite, it means that they are constantly at war
with nature. It means that they are constantly at war with one
another. At least, by nature they are at war with one another.
The whole elaboration of the dominant theory of American in-
stitutions goes on to say that human beings learn at some point
that it is impractical--that it lacks utility for them to be con-
stantly bashing one another, because one doesn't get very far
that way. The life of man, Hobbes said, would be nasty, mean,
poor, brutish and short. But the argument goes that people
consequently combine and form organizations as contrivances.
Politics is not natural. Social life is not natural. It is a
contrivance--a convention--designed, as Thoreau was to say, for
the device of letting one another alone--for shutting people out
of one another's lives. For saying, in effect, I will not attack
you.
Some way or another society, or public life, excludes
violence. It allows us to pursue our private, individual gains.
And secondly, --and never leave out secondly--it allows us tp
combine for the delightful purpose of despoiling others. There is
still a third one--it permits us to engage in almost the only
positive goal set down in the Constitution of the United States
for government--the pursuit of science and the useful arts.
Because if there is some question about how human beings ought to
behave toward one another, there is no doubt in that dominant
tradition that human beings are at war with and ought to seek
mastery over nature.
What you have is a picture of human beings, yearning for mas
tery, yearni!ng for power--power after power until death. Hobbes
said, and so they saw it. Yearning for a kind of control that
would allow them the assurance that nature, the natural
condition, denied them: of a complete and immediate
self-satisfaction to the extent that one can get it--a world
without frustration; a world without limitations; ultimately, a
world without death. The displacement of limitations--a world of
total private, individual satisfaction--consequently becomes the
goal of human life. Government is considered valuable to the
extent that it contributes to the progressive realization of this
goal; and not, to the extent that it does not.
Law--what is law? It is a device like all others--a device
by which bad men, bad human beings, who have not reasoned through
this theory, are constrained. And other people, of course, are
constrained to read the law, are constrained to think of the law,
are constrained to think of their relationships to the law as bad
men think of them. Not, in those eloquent words which Justice
Holmes rather literarily spoke of laws as beauties; but of a kind
of practical necessity--of a conventional life, a life lived
conventionally, designed to maximize private satisfactions.
Now as soon as you start defining the way that the
framers--the authors of the Federalist; the dominant
intellectuals of the 18th Century--talked about these things, it
becomes quite clear how powerful the alternative tradition is,
because most of us don't really agree with their argument. There
is something wrong with the dominant formulation. The fascinating
thing, however, is that when we are asked to think about public
or political questions, the'view of politics that I have just
outlined--of politics as fundamentally a set of external checks
upon power; power balancing power; a utilitarian set of
contrivances enabling us to let one another alone; to maximize
power; to pursue the war against nature--that's still the way we
think about politics.
Six or seven years ago, the College where I teach got a
bunch of self-selected, self-named radicals together--radical
students, radical faculty--sat them down together in the middle
of New Jersey and said, "This is a radical institution. Design a
set of institutions." You know what they came up with? A two
house legislature--checks and balances. Indeed, with a judiciary
designed to watch carefully over the behavior of the two other
houses. And so forth and so on. Radical thought about politics,
when it doesn't stop with John Locke, goes a stage further and
carries into the theory of John C. Calhoun--with various
authorities checking one another, and balancing one al;other, and
so forth and so on.
Now contrast this with the theory upon which most of
American society operates. Obviously, part of what I'm talking
about is a religious theory, but it's not just the churches that
were organized this way. The churches taught and articulated a
view of human beings and a view of society which was planted in a
whole private order of institutions--planted in the family,
planted in the local community,in local economies, in the
day-to-day life of ordinary people. And to a very large degree,
still is, because for the ordinary life--that ordered kind of
life--survives.
This traditional view sees human beings born, not free, but
subject--that it is the nature of human beings to be born into a
world in which they are dependent. Not inter-dependent--notice
that weasleword. They are dependent They need and depend upon one
another, on authorities, on things that were given--unasked.
Human beings live in a world of indebtedness--and, hence, are
obliged. Their world and life is given, as their name was given.
They are supplied and given throughout a period of nurturance. In
a way, their merits, their abilities, have nothing to do with it,
for they could not survive without this dependence. Human beings
are naturally part of a world of social relations and
obligations, and a universe of laws which are obligatory on
individuals. The natural state of the people in that alter-
native tradition, then, is to owe, to be obliged, to be
dependent, to live in a world of society.
Freedom, for the alternative tradition, is something which
has to be learned--and which consequently has to be earned.
Because the ordinary person, the person born simply into the
world, or so the alternative tradition sees it--does not
understand freedom. The self-willing, self-preserving,
self-seeking person of the liberal tradition is not a free
person. The argument goes something like this:
To will to live forever; to will be be preserved forever; to
will to be freed of limitations is to will to be something other
than what human beings are or can be. To hate the limitations on
the mortal self, to hate its mortality, is consequently, to hate
the self; and to regard onesself as in prison, and a hateful
prison at that--to regard the self as hateful. The aim of those
who woiuld live forever, who would master nature is, in fact, to
destroy the self rather than to free it.
Therefore, for the alternative tradition, beings are never
more free than when they will to sacrifice for others and when
they will that ultimate sacrifice which is their own death.
Because in that ultimate act of freedom they cease to be merely
functions--predictable on the basis of their desires. To the
extent, you see, that you let Adam Smith define your nature, and
you do become a self-seeking, acquisitive animal concerned with
maximizing your material interests, you become safely
predictable. Even economists can understand you then, The whole
point is that human beings are tricksy-tricksy, and there is an
extent to which when they act freely, economists do not
understand them.
Let me tell you a story that Mark Twain told. It's a story
called, "The Turning Point of My Life." Twain was asked to write
on this rather sappy subject by Harper's Magazine at a time when
he needed the money, so he wrote it. He described how the turning
point of his life was when Caesar crossed the Rubicon. It was an
example of marvellously iron Twainian determinism. He proves how
Caesar's crossing the Rubicon inevitably led to Mark Twain
writing this article. He says, "Well, I should really go back to
Adam, but Harper's has only given me 5,000 words, so I had to
stop with Caesar."
Then Twain goes on to describe his early life at a point
when he got the measles. His mother, acting according to the
codes of the time, shut the door to the room so it would be dark,
and so would be a restful atmosphere, and she went downstairs and
played hymns on the organ. "Then surely," Twain said, he decided
that life on these miserable terms was not Worth living, and he
couldn't stand being alone. He went next door, and he got in bed
with a friend who had the disease and said, "There. Now I've got
it over with, and it will be done with." And, indeed, Twain did
get the disease, and he goes on talking about this at great
length in his article. And at the end of the article he says,
"And so, gentle reader, you will notice that the turning point of
my life was that I got measles when I was twelve years old."
Indeed so. What he's telling us is that by getting measles
when you're twelve--by deciding that life on certain terms is not
worth living--you become free. As long as you believe that life
is worth living on any terms, you are not a free person. You're a
predictable function. So the alternative tradition always saw it.
It said that human beings are free to the extent that they can
sacrifice anything--their illusions, their property, their
self-conceit, and ultimately, their lives.
To the alternative tradition, correspondingly, the economic
logic of things was austerity, because it sought inward growth,
not external expansion. And consequently, it taught us that we
should live according to the limits of nature--that we should pur
sue a law which is naturally right to the exclusion of our
concern for natural rights. In a similar sense, politics was for
the alternative tradition profoundly natural. The law and public
institutions were designed to shape, perfect, and encourage the
moral and civic character of human beings.
The alternative tradition understood, in ways that we do
not, that law always has such an impact. There is no such thing
as an amoral law, or a neutral law. All law educates morally.
What, in God's name, does it do to say if you move forty miles in
the United States, the federal government allows you to take a
tax exemption for the cost, except to say that the government of
the United States regards mobility as a desirable goal? When did
the government of the United States say that if you've lived in
an inner city neighborhood for ten years, you ought to be able to
deduct the depreciation on your property? The only way to deduct
it is by selling your property and moving out. But there's
somehow something rather self-destructive when, in fact, we say,
via the tax law, that mobility is desirable; and stability,
undesirable. All laws teach moral lessons and what the
alternative tradition wanted us to do was to have laws that
taught good moral lessons, and not bad ones. Perhaps not a very
profound point, but one which is, nonetheless, at odds with the
dominant tradition.
It also said to us that justice was substantive--that goi
into courts, which had attorneys for both sides; in which there
a jury; indeed, in which the Miranda rule had been observed, in
which judges were fair, and so forth, was really not equivalent
to justice. Somehow, justice did not take place until the guilty
were punished, and the innocent, acquitted. It should not have
taken Mario Puzo to remind us of this fact in the first chapters
of the Godfather.
In the same way, there's a profound difference between these
two traditions inthe way that they treat equalitv. It's
significant enough to deserve comment. Equality for the dominant,
liberal tradition is a rule of treatment. It says we should be
treated equally before the law. But if you look carefully at
Locke, Hobbes, or the Framers, you'll discover that they didn't
really believe we were equal at all. They believed it was a
necessity. In the state of nature, we are all equally free--in
the sense that we are not morally bound to one another. And we
are all roughly equal in power. Hobbes said that the weakest had
the strength to kill the strongest, whether by secret
machinations, or by confederacy. Even the strong go to sleep
sometime--you can drop a rock on their head.
Therefore, in order to get people to accept civil society--
to get them to accept this contrivance of the law--the
contrivance of politics--you have to treat them as if they were
equal. And once in society, thank God, all the real inequalities
will emerge--the inequalities of intelligence, of ability, of
moral virtue. But for the liberal tradition, and certainly for
those who framed our institutions, it's equality that defines
public institutions as unnatural and second-rate. Because they
are based on the untrue, false, conventional, but necessary,
doctrine of equal treatment.
In the traditional view, in a very profound sense, human beings
are equal. They are equal in moral worth. They are essentially
equal, if you like, for all of their accidental differences. They
are not the same--no one ever said, as Chesterton pointed out,
that human beings are equally tall or equally tricky or whatever.
But they are essentially equal morally. And that means in an
internal and profoundly true sense which has to do with their
dignity--with what way that they are treated; with the sense of
emotional sharing and collective sense of themselves, which goes
into the making of political community.
Aristotle criticized an egalitarian of his time, because, he
said, it is more important to harmonize and equalize the desires
of men than to equalize their properties. Because, Aristotle went
on to say, why equalize their properties without equalizing their
desires. All you'll have is a lot of resentful people who are
equal in property, which won't last long. If you would harmonize
their desires, and make them equal, it may turn out to be
unnecessary to equalize their properties. People who have a
genuine sense of common sharing and of equal worth will not
resent the functional inequalities that may have to exist in any
ordered society. It has not come to my attention that on a good
football team, guards resent the fact that quarterbacks give
orders. And the definition, in some ways, of a good football
team, is that the equal dignity of people is respected whatever
the exterior differences of station.
The alternative tradition was not egalitarian as we
understand it, in many ways. It certainly made room for powerful
inequalities of treatment. But in very important ways, it
insisted on a kind of respect, a kind of sense of sharing, an
emotional perception of unity, which we have deeply lost, and
which we suffer for the loss of. After all, De Tocqueville spoke
of a certain depraved taste for equality. By this he meant the
person who says, "Since I cannot get to be superior to you, I
will settle for equality." That's what the dominant tradition
does. It says in public, "You are no better than me ;" and in
private, "I am really better than you." You are not allowed to
claim superiority, but I accept equality only because I despair
of being a master. Because for the dominant tradition, it is
mastery and not equality that's the goal. For the alternative
tradition, freedom and equality were perhaps the highest
mysteries--not things men were born with, but things that they
learned. And, perhaps, the ultimate mysteries of human existence.
You can see these two traditions arguing in the language of
the Declaration of Independence. Notice how carefully Jefferson
was steered away from a pure theory of natural rights. He knew
that the alternative religious tradition was a powerful force, so
he stuck in that nice weasle Protestant word, "instituted." "God
made us naturally political, but he left it to us to institute
governments." So if you go through all of that great litany of
the Declaration, you'll find the strange phenomenon of an
alternative tradition making its claim in public language being
felt even in these fundamental documents of our lives.
I think the problem is simply this: the earliest framers of
our institutions assumed that there would always be a private
order of families, of churches, and of local
communities--powerful; coherent; close to the individual; shaping
that individual's fundamental moral and social orientations. And
because they took it for granted,they worried much more about the
self-evident fact that this private order of families, churches,
and communities can be and sometimes iS repressive.
But they never doubted that it was necessary to provide the
substantive moral orientation for human beings who would live in
a liberal society. John Adams said, "our institutions are
designed for a moral and religious people, and are utterly
unsuited to the government of any other." It was exactly what De
Tocqueville meant later on when he said of Americans, "their
customs were vastly more important than their laws." It was not
simply that Americans had a liberal constitutional instrument,
which as De Tocqueville pointed out, Mexico had copied in 1824.
It lasted through one Presidential term. What De Tocqueville
said, in effect, was that to understand the working of American
institutions you have to go beyond the laws to those customs
rooted in society that form the substantive heritage of American
life.
What I think we have to recognize is that we have come to a
point wkere it is no longer sufficient to say, as the Framers
said, "Well, society will always take care of itself. It will
always be powerful--close to the individual--performing a
dominant educational role." It seems to me clearer and clearer
that it's not, and that at this point, society--churches,
families, local communities--need the active help and support of
government in doing their job. They need state activity which is
not hostile to them.
The problem is that our formal institutions are shaped in a
tradition that always defines the role of government as hostile.
It always is in a position in which at best, it tolerates the pri
vate order, but, more often, it breaks the private order up in
the name of individual liberty--to free us for a life as one
citizen among 200 million. And it doesn't take a great course in
social science methods to realize that a free, single
individual--one out of 200 million--is statistically
insignificant.
Our public institutions are designed to free us for insig-
nificance, rather than permitting public government to create, or
strengthen, or reconstruct, a private order in which we would
gain at least some alternative sense of moral orientation in the
society. They are particularly unsuited to providing a sense of
continuity--a sense that communities continue beyond the
self--beyond the immediate family. A community is not a thing
created for now and tommorrow; but it is created for long periods
of time. Indeed, so far as human prudence can contrive. It's a
bond of people which endures, and for which sacrifice is valuable
and meaningful and significant and worthwhile.
One of the great problems in this society is that it is no
longer true, as it was in the 1950's, that we merely cannot find
people who are willing to sacrifice for the common good of Amer-
ica as a whole. It is difficult to find people who are willing
to sacrifice for the common good of families. We are even uncer-
tain as to whether the family, that most intimate of all institu-
tions, is worthwhile. And if this is true--if sacrifice for the
next generation is uncertain--then certainly sacrifice for that
much broader public order, in which I'm necessarily
insignificant, is uncertain. Somehow, the sense of continuity
that there is a reasonable relationship between the present and
the future, and between the future and the past, has to be
established in our public institutions, in our social life, and,
I would suggest', in our law.
I think that we have to recognize that people do live in a
world of incomprehensibility; of insignificance; meaninglessness;
a world which, in some cases, is a world of terror. And without
a public order which respects and a private order which can teach
some kind of more coherent and more secure view of the
world--which can give people the sense of alternatives and
choices--that world of terror, I suspect, is going to be with us
for some time.
In America, in a country like the United States--
mous country--principles and doctrines have always been
important. You cannot feel the United States. It is too vast, by
farr to be taken into the small human heart. If you want to move
beyond local communities, beyond the Trash Abatement Leagues, and
the concerns to have hassled your local policeman--if you want to
deal with the country as a whole, you must deal with abstractions
and you must deal with the classroom and you must deal with
formal education, because that's the only way it can be
apprehended. That is why local community organizers have fallen
on their face time after time, because they can't move beyond the
l'ocal Trash Abatement League to deal with the phenomenon of the
United States, which is a damn sight more than 565,000 local
neighborhoods.
The phenomenon I think we have to deal with is how coherence
is provided; how people learn to see and how they feel secure
that the private world in which they live, the local world in
which they live, not only makes sense to them locally--as I think
it must--but ls heard, and respected, and carries power at
national and state levels. It once did. And I suspect that with
the reconstruction of society--and it requires virtually nothing
less than that--it could again. But certainly it requires a
radical change in our attitude to society. It requires a
recognition that a whole set of institutions that we once thought
of as essentially private--not matters for government to
interfere with--things to be left alone--matters only for
society--are matt:ers that now need the nurturance
of government; and, indeed, the nurturance of all of us, if we
are to return to the kind of dynamism that informed our public
life in the past.
One last story--because it's designed to illustrate the kind
of lovely dynamism that used to exist between public and privatel
orders. You know, in the 18th Century, John Adams, when he
defended Captain Preston on the matter of the Boston Massacre,
fell back on the defense that Captain Preston and the British
troops at the Boston Massacre had acted in self-defense.
And Adams expatiated at great length on John Locke's
doctrine of self-preservation. He said that Locket had
argued--and here he was quoting Locke correctly--that if there
were two men clinging to a plank in the open ocean, one would
have the right to push the other off to save himself, even if he
were his own brother, he said. And Adams looked at his audience
and he said, "And for this doctrine of the absolute right of
self-preservation, I would lay down my right arm--nay, my own
life!"
Well, it's out of magnificent contradictions like that that
the great moments of American politics happened, and I would like
to see us have a chance to restore as many of them as possible.
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