A Conflict of Visions About the Nature of Man

“One of the curious things about political opinions is how often the same people line up on opposite sides of different issues.  The issues themselves may have no intrinsic connection with each other.  They may range from military spending to drug laws to monetary policy to education.  Yet the same familiar faces can be found glaring at each other from opposite sides of the political fence, again and again.  It happens too often to be a coincidence and it is too uncontrolled to be a plot.  A closer look at the arguments on both sides often shows that they are reasoning from fundamentally different premises.  These different premises – often implicit – are what provide the consistency behind the repeated opposition of individuals and groups on numerous, unrelated issues.  They have different visions of how the world works.”  Thomas Sowell, A Conflict of Visions: Ideological Origins of Political Struggles. 1987/2007

A vision here is defined as a pre-analytic cognitive act.  It is what an individual senses or feels before he has constructed any systematic reasoning that could be called a theory.  A vision is a man’s sense of how the world works.  Visions are the foundations on which theories are constructed. Initial visions are highly subjective; but they are crucial for a man’s glimpse of insight into the way the world works. The simpler the vision, the more effective it will tend to be in influencing the direction of a man’s  deduced theories about society at large.

According to Thomas Sowell, social visions differ in their basic conceptions of the nature of man.  While recognizing that there are a multitude of differing visions across mankind, Sowell suggests that one can isolate and define two  broad categories – the constrained vision and the unconstrained vision.  In this column, I review Sowell’s attempt to  isolate and define these two visions, paying particular attention to the nature of man. 

1.  The constrained vision of man

Adam Smith, writing as a philosopher in 1759, almost 20 years before he became famous as an economist, encapsulated the constrained vision of man in terms of his likely response to how someone in Europe would react to a dreadful calamity, for example the swallowing up of the great empire of China by an earthquake:

“He would, I imagine, first of all express very strongly his sorrow for the misfortune of that unhappy people, he would make many melancholy reflections upon the precariousness of human life, and the vanity of all the labours of man…And when all this fine philosophy was over, when all these humane sentiments had been once fairly expressed, he would pursue his business or his pleasure, take his repose or his diversion, with the same ease and tranquility as if no such accident had happened.  The most frivolous disaster which could befall himself would occasion a more real disturbance. If he was to lose his little finger tomorrow, he would not sleep tonight; but, provided he never saw them, he would snore with the most profound security over the ruin of a hundred million of his brethren.” Adam Smith, The Theory of Moral Sentiments, 1759

Smith did not lament over the moral limitations of man in general, and his egocentricity in particular. Nor did Smith view these limitations as things that must somehow be changed.  He treated them as inherent facts of life, the basic constraint in man’s vision.  In Smith’s judgment, the fundamental moral and social challenge was to make the best of the possibilities that existed within that constraint, rather than to waste time and energy in an atempt to change human nature.  Such a latter attempt, in Smith’s judgment was not only vain, but completely pointless:

“Nature, it seems, when she loaded us with our own sorrows, thought that they were enough, and therefore did not command us to take any further share in those of others, than what was necessary to prompt us to relieve them.” (ibid.)

In this regard, Smith approached the production and distribution of moral behavior in much the same way in which he would subsequently approach the production and distribution of material goods.  In both instances, the goal was one of maximizing subject to perceived contraints.  Well, if Smith was already thinking like an economist, others who shared his vision certainly were not. Smith’s contemporary in politics, Edmund Burke, brilliantly summarized the constrained vision from the political perspective when he spoke of “a radical infirmity in all human contrivances.”  Similar views were expressed by Alexander Hamilton in The Federalist Papers:

“It is the lot of all human institutions, even those of the most perfect kind, to have defects as well as excellencies – ill as well as good propensities.  This results from the imperfection of the Institutor, Man.”

Smith, Burke and Hamilton, together with the large majority of those who have shared, and who continue to share, in this constrained vision of the nature of man, fully recognize that a society cannot function humanely, if at all, when each person acts as though his little finger is more important than the lives of a hundred million other souls. The crucial word, however, is act.  In practice, people on many occasions sacrifice their own interests to the greater interests of others. But this sacrifice is due to such intervening factors as devotion to moral principles, to concepts of honour and nobility, rather than to loving one’s neighbour as oneself.

Through such artifacts,  man  might be persuaded to do, for his own self-image or inner needs, what he surely would not do for the good of his fellow men.  To achieve such outcomes, what is required is a set of moral incentives designed to move man to look to his better angels. Surely what is not possible, and not to be contemplated,  is to try to change the underlying selfish nature of man.

2. The unconstrained vision of man

Thomas Sowell chooses, as an exemplar of the unconstrained vision of mankind another eighteenth century contemporary of Adam Smith, William Godwin, whose 1793   Enquiry Concerning Political Justice proved to be an immediate success in England, only to collapse under the revealed outcome of the unconstrained vision of man in the French Revolution as it collapsed first into the Terror and subsequently  into the unconstrained dictatorship of the Emperor Napoleon.

Godwin’s vision could not have been further distant from that of Adam Smith.  According to Godwin, man was a perfectible creature, capable of intentionally creating social benefits.  The desire  to benefit others, indeed, is  the essence of a man’s virtue,  and the road to a man’s happiness.  Godwin’s vision is without question the unconstrained vision of  the nature of man. Man is capable of directly feeling the needs of others as being more important than his own, and of acting on those feelings even directly against his own and his family’s interest. Godwin referred to  “men as they hereafter may be made”:

“Men are capable, no doubt, of preferring an inferior interest of their own to a superior interest of others; but this preference arises from a combination of circumstances and is not the necessary and invariable law of our nature”

and

“If a thousand men are to be benefited, I ought to recollect that I am only an atom in the comparison, and to reason accordingly.”

In consequence, Godwin viewed man’s apparent selfishness as artifically created by false incentives in society. His proposed solution is to exert effort to have people do what is right because it is right, not because of economic or pyschic payments to divert the great weight of self-interest. The nature of man is not at all constrained by selfishness. It is completely receptive to perfectibility by exposure to ideas such as those advanced by Godwin and like-minded  advocates of such a gospel.

3.  The great divide

Thomas Sowell briefly dissects political philosophers and political economists into these two alternative visions of the nature of man. Among those sharing the constrained vision, he identifies Thomas Hobbes, John Locke,  Adam Smith, Edmund Burke, Alexander Hamilton, James Madison, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Friedrich von Hayek and Milton Friedman.  Among those espousing the unconstrained vision, he identifies William Godwin, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Voltaire, Condorcet, Thomas Paine, Saint-Simon, Robert Owen, George Bernard Shaw, Sidney and Beatrice Webb, Thorstein Veblen, Harold Laski, John Kenneth Galbraith, Ronald Dworkin and Earl Warren. Others, such as John Stuart Mill and Karl Marx, he claims, do not fit so easily into the dichotomy.

That this dichotomy is important for debates over policy, Sowell has no doubt:

“These different ways of conceiving man and the world lead not merely to different conclusions but to sharply divergent, often diametrically opposed conclusions on issues ranging from justice to war. There are not merely differences of visions, but conflicts of visions.”

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Tags: a conflict of visions, constrained vision of the nature of man, implications for the debate over policy, unconstrained vision of the nature of man