The Resurrection of Jean-Jacques Rousseau

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It was, I suppose, Jean-Jacques Rousseau who introduced the modern world to the idea that persons from the lower ranks of society generally outrank persons from the higher and more privileged ranks in moral goodness.

Rousseau had in mind a contrast between peasants living in rural France and the aristocrats and higher bourgeoisie living in Paris.  The peasants were more natural, the higher classes more artificial.  Nature is good, and everything it makes was therefore good, including human beings.  Peasants, being poor and simple, had not traveled far from their native condition of goodness.  The higher classes, by contrast, were rich, and their wealth enabled them to travel a long way from their native condition.  Their artificiality had corrupted their native goodness.  They had become morally wicked, as anyone who (like Rousseau) had closely observed them in Paris could testify.

It may be noted that Rousseauism is the diametric opposite of Augustinianism.  St. Augustine had taught that humans, due to the fall of Adam and Eve, are born into a condition of sin, but they can be made good by the freely given grace of God.  Rousseau, by contrast, taught that we are born good but get corrupted by a kind of anti-grace — namely, civilization.  If we can return to nature, we can return to goodness.

Rousseau’s theory provided a justification for democracy.  After all, if the masses were more likely to be good than the higher classes, wouldn’t it make sense to allow the plain people to govern society?

When Robespierre presided over the Reign of Terror, causing countless heads, including two royal heads, to fall into the basket, he did this in what he conceived to be the spirit of Rousseau.  These were socially privileged heads, therefore bad heads.  The more they were eliminated, the more likely it was that the goodness of the lower orders would prevail in France.  Robespierre (whose honorific was “the Incorruptible”) was one of history’s great champions of moral goodness.

In the 19th century, socialists adopted Rousseau’s contrast between society’s more and less privileged classes, although for socialists, especially Marxian socialists, it was the urban proletariat, not the peasantry, that embodied goodness.

Anarchists, some of whom were peasants and others proletarians, were also Rousseauvians.  In moments of revolution (e.g., in the early days of the Spanish Civil War of the 1930s), they were pleased to conclude that their innate goodness justified their impulses to destroy churches and to murder priests and nuns.

Lenin too was a Rousseauvian — even though it is certain that Jean-Jacques, being a tender-hearted sentimentalist, would have been shocked by Lenin’s cruelty, even more than he would have been shocked by Robespierre’s cruelty.  But Lenin could have explained to Rousseau: “Our Russian proletarians are, on your theory (when applied to the 20th century) good people, and our proletarians have delegated their goodness to us Bolsheviks, and therefore I and my comrades Trotsky and Stalin and the rest of our gang are good men, from which it follows that anything we do, including murder and enslavement, is morally well done.”

Rousseau’s theory of the all-important contrast between the good lower classes and the wicked privileged classes is alive and well today.  The theory, it seems, will never die.  Today the line between the two is a color line.  The bad people are the white people of the world, who also happen to be the practitioners and beneficiaries of capitalism — which also makes them bad from a Marxist point of view.  The good people today are the “persons of color” (POC) of the world, who are systemically victimized by white oppressors.

Now, there happen to be some difficulties with regard to the definition of POC.  For instance, what about the people of Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, and Singapore?  At first glance, they seem to be not quite white.  Yet they don’t seem to be victims of white oppression, and their societies seem rather like white societies of the West — I mean capitalism and liberal democracy and that kind of thing.  Are they POC, or are they the functional equivalent of whites?

And what about Arabs and Persians?  They may be a shade or two less white than Meryl Streep, but they are hardly POC if one is to judge by skin color alone.  But from a leftist “let’s make a revolution” point of view, it is important to count them as POC.  And so they are thus counted.

Using the Rousseauvian template as updated for the 21st century, we can see that Israelis, being white, are wicked oppressors, whereas Arabs — above all Palestinian Arabs — being victimized POC, are therefore good.  As for American Jews, they are of course bad.  For they are white, and they are beneficiaries of capitalism, and with only rare exceptions, they sympathize with Israel in its oppressive struggle against Arabs.  This last factor (their strong pro-Israel bias) makes them worse than the typical white American. 

Therefore, from an updated Rousseauvian point of view, one who loves the POC portion of the human race will hate Israel and will hate Jews generally, except for that rare Jew who himself hates Jews.  (Marx was such a Jew.  Bernie Sanders may be another.)

But if being a POC victim is what makes a person good, what hope is there for American young persons who have grown up in affluent families and have benefited from white privilege all their lives?  How can they ever be morally good?  Is salvation beyond their reach?

Not quite.  Let them sympathize with the POC of the world.  Let them hate Israel and American Jews.  Let them hate the USA, an incurably racist nation.  Let them demand open borders, so that in time the USA may improve itself by colorizing itself.  Let them demand that Palestine be free from the river to the sea.  And let them set up tents on the campuses of our best universities.

Let them do enough of this, and soon they will become quasi-POC.  They will become almost as virtuous as a Hamas terrorist.

Carlin, a retired professor and politician, has authored a number of books, the most recent being Atheistic Humanism, the Democratic Party, and the Catholic Church.

Picryl.

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Image: Jean-Jacques Rousseau.  Credit: Picryl.