I just finished The Metaphysical Club, and enjoyed it immensely. Menand’s objectivity is sterling. Although I suspect he’s quite sympathetic to the views of the personages who make up the story he tells, he’s honest enough about their shortcomings that I’m not absolutely positive about it. The philosophical foundations of the Progressive Era, he writes, lay in the rejection of the idea of the “naturalness” of ideas; where previous generations believed that “social arrangements are justified if they correspond with the design of the natural world,” the generation following the Civil War rejected this idea, and argued that there are no natural designs to which social arrangements must correspond: “they helped put an end to the idea that…beyond the mundane business of making our way as best we can in a world shot through with contingency, there exists some order, invisible to us, whose logic we transgress at our peril.” But, Menand acknowledges, there are serious flaws with this supposedly modern way of looking at things:
The great movement to secure civil liberties in the United States during the Cold War arose out of a religious community, black Southern Baptists, and it was founded on the belief that every individual has an inalienable right to those freedoms by virtue of being human—precisely the individualism that Holmes and Dewey felt they needed to discredit.
I believe that while people like Holmes and Dewey were right to criticize older notions of “transcendent order”—because such notions were based on theological presumptions which are simply not true, namely, the existence of God—they went much too far. The “moderns” came to think that there was no transcendent order—that there is no hierarchies or distinctions between anything at all, and that our imagining that there are only reveals that we have been corrupted by the capitalist class. (I don’t exaggerate! Menand acknowledges that Dewey, following Jane Addams, believed just this; and certainly post-modernists of the Foucault persuasion do!) The problem is that there are such things; there is a natural order to the universe, even though it is evolving, and even though there is no Consciousness giving it order. Darwin does not mean that there are no essentials—only that there are no metaphysical essentials. (The “brickness” isn’t in the brick or in the observer’s mind, it’s in the interaction between the two!)
But follow the Progressives’ road and soon enough you end up with the neo-Lamarckism of Trofim Lysenko, and the notion that property is whatever the state says it is. Such thinking is revolting on its own merits, but it is also entirely incompatible with the American Constitution, which was founded on the notion that there is such a thing as justice aside from what people think of it. “Justice is the end of government,” says Madison. “It is the end of civil society. It ever has been and ever will be pursued until it be obtained, or until liberty be lost in the pursuit.” To the Progressive this makes no sense. As Menand writes, they “shift[ed] the totem of legitimacy from premises to procedures. We know an outcome is right not because it was derived from immutable principles, but because it was reached by following the correct procedures…. Justice does not preexist the case at hand; justice is whatever result just procedures have led to.” (Notice the question-begging in that sentence! What is a “just” procedure?)
The alienation of such “modern” ways of thinking from the views of those who wrote the Constitution is clear from the following passage characterizing the Progressives’ political premises:
Coercion is natural; freedom is artificial. Freedoms are socially engineered spaces where parties engaged in specified pursuits enjoy protection from parties who would otherwise naturally seek to interfere in those pursuits. One person’s freedom is therefore always another person’s restriction: we could not have even the concept of freedom if the reality of coercion were not already present…. We think…of rights as privileges retained by individuals against the rest of society, but rights are created not for the good of individuals, but for the good of society. Individual freedoms are manufactured to achieve group ends.
One would be hard-pressed to more concisely state the opposite of everything the Constitution of the United States stands for. It is premised on the idea that freedom is natural, and coercion artificial; that society is engineered to more conveniently enable parties to flourish in their own pursuits, and that the state obtains its privileges not for its own good, but for the good of the individuals who comprise it. And the reason that it embodies these ideas is because it builds on the Lockean proposition that “truth, and keeping of faith belongs to men as men, and not as members of society.” If that is the case, if there are certain basic social principles that are universal to man as man, then a universal politics appropriate for human beings can be derived from their nature, and the various human cultures can then be judged by reference to that standard. (It is on this basis that we can say that the Holocaust or Communist atrocities were “evil,” rather than merely contrary to our personal tastes.) And it is only on that basis that rights can be rights, rather than mere permissions as the Progressives believed. Because, when you get down to it, the Progressives are just Hobbesians who have been zapped in the microwave.
Why take the originalist interpretation over the Progressive one, though? Simply because the founders were right. And that they were right is revealed by Menand’s example of Martin Luther King, and by Holmes’ own caving in the Abrams case. (Menand argues that Holmes was consistent in his Abrams dissent, but no. His decision in that case is his attempt to sneak out the back door once he’d finished setting the curtains on fire. It’s funny how, whenever the majoritarianism of that era came around to bite one of the Progressives, or their pets, they suddenly started crying for individual liberty….)
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