Arwen Spicer's Blog: Diary of a Readerly Writer (and Writerly Reader) - Posts Tagged "rousseau"

A Discourse on the Origin of Inequality (1754) is the first of Rousseau’s essays I've read. (I took a decent swing at his novel, La Nouvelle Heloïse.) It’s remarkable to how thoroughly outdated and yet still current the essay is. For context, Rousseau was about thirty years older than Thomas Jefferson. This particular essay was written when Jefferson was about eleven. Jefferson never knew a social world that wasn’t steeped in the ideas of Rousseau and his intellectual milieu. So if I felt at points like I was reading the same ideology I’ve read (and by and large believe in) in The Declaration of Independence, that’s not surprising.

Many of Rousseau’s basic ideas are truisms of democratic society today: that society is based on a social contract designed (theoretically) to benefit all its signatories, who agree to certain limitations and responsibilities in exchange for advantages of social organization; that if this social organization does not benefit its members, they have no reason to continue to adhere to it; that the divine right of rulers has no basis in reality; that significant inequality is a social construction and natural inequality (in talents, strength, etc.) comparatively inconsequential.

More surprising to me--though I suppose on some level I’ve known this--is how foundational Rousseau is to sociobiology/evolutionary psychology. I don’t mean that he was a major direct influence on E. O. Wilson. But at a greater remove, his influence is pervasive, and he is one of the founders--if not the founder--of the practice of explaining human society in terms of how humans best function in “nature” as a species of animal. Indeed, so vast does Rousseau loom over these ideas that it’s probably fair to call him, in Foucauldian terms, the “originator of the discourse”: if not the first voice, the first whose voice really matters in establishing the sociobiological conversation that’s ongoing today.

As for what he had to say about “savage man” in a state of “nature,” some of it reads to me as loopy and some as fairly plausible. It all reads in that venerable 18th-century fashion of creating great speculative systems without scientific rigor: it was an age of “natural philosophy” when philosophical flights went hand in hand with observations of the natural environment and a hypothesis needed only a well-written essay to become an established theory.

In any case, much of his speculation is loopy. The idea that a species resembling humans could consist of individuals wandering around alone without any social interactions beyond sex, rearing of very young children, and the occasional fight or random act of “pity” shows no awareness of the either the pervasiveness of social structure among many animals (prides, pods, packs, flocks, troops, etc.) or the biological predisposition of humans to be in groups, as for example, lacking much strength to fight off predators alone. The idea that humans in “nature” would not form special bonds with certain individuals also shows a lack of observation of the extent to which other mammals in do. Dogs and cats have their favorite companions; deer often travel around in the same group of two or three does. (I won’t mention species like bonobos Rousseau had some excuse not to be aware of.)

It’s difficult to know what to say about Rousseau’s stance toward women. The words “raving misogynist” come to mind, but that’s not really fair. In the main, he does not so much demean women as erase them. On occasion he says something denigrating, like the female sex was made to follow, but that’s rare. Mostly, he just talks about men, for when he notes that the savage man wanted nothing but food, a female, and shelter, well, he’s not talking about women. At a few points, women are trotted out as passive sex objects or active agents as mothers, but this gets little page space.

Since women are not strongly present, they are not strongly differentiated from men and, therefore, in a “mankind” sort of way, do get tacitly grouped with men as (more or less) subjects of the same sociobiological conditions who respond in the much the same way. Indeed, at one point Rousseau states this explicitly. On one level, this is very egalitarian for his time. When we consider that in his age, many people still believed that Eve had literally been seduced by Satan and, thus, that women were inherently more evil than men and root of all worldly trouble, Rousseau looks very egalitarian indeed. Less than a century away from mass execution of witches, yes, he’s looking quite egalitarian.

On another level, this erasure demonstrates how socially skewed a “science” can become by assumptions that a certain group simply isn’t worth studying. Let’s take again the idea that men and women functioned pretty much the same way in a “state of nature”: this ignores the fact that the women would have been pregnant or nursing small children most of the time, which, obviously, has no effect on how you forage for food, how much food you need, how effectively you can flee danger, etc. Apparently, to Rousseau, being pregnant is pretty much the same as not being pregnant, and caring for a small child is pretty much the same as not caring for a small child.

This glaring omission in reasoning has ramifications beyond just women. It invalidates the entire premise that mankind in nature mostly wandered around alone. Because if you spend a large portion of your adult life pregnant (including a risky birth process) and caring for small children and wandering around alone with no companions for help or mutual protection, it will very likely kill you and/or your children--and, thus, the human species. Yes, women do matter to human social evolution. Actually, they matter a lot. Rousseau’s inability to grasp this obvious fact is a good example of situated knowledge as suspect knowledge.

On which subject, it’s also hard to know what to say about Rousseau’s attitude toward the “savages” of his own day, or as we would say, “primary peoples.” Not being one, I’m much less qualified to have an opinion than I am on the subject of women, but here goes. As with women, I would say his attitude is both pernicious and (for his time) genuinely progressive. Yes, he commits many cardinal sins of “noble savagery,” as if would later be called. He vastly oversimplifies the social structures of peoples he knew next to nothing about and had no right to evaluate. One particularly egregious example of this is the assumption that “savage” languages are very simple, which I can only assume he knew because he was fluent in Tahitian, yes? Now, I am not familiar any primary culture’s language, but from what I’ve read, such languages are often among the most complicated. Indeed, language becomes simplified as social units get larger and more peoples (and languages) mix, taking on simplified characteristics as people from different language backgrounds learn to use them. Thus, Old English lost most of its declension when it mixed with Norse, which didn’t use the same kind of declension, etc.

All that said, the bare fact that Rousseau posits that primary cultures may, in many respects, be happier and better functioning than more “civilized” cultures in the 1750s is pretty amazing. This was an age when a more dominant view considered Native Americans to be brutal savages in need of killing. Thomas Jefferson was pretty progressive in putting forward that they merely needed to be completely assimilated as good Euro-Americans and put aside their primitive ways. A century after Rousseau, Charles Darwin was going on about how some races were less highly evolved and naturally more animalistic than others. But Rousseau explicitly discusses all human beings as alike in their basic potential, intelligence, etc. And his basic view that a lifestyle closer to a state of “nature” makes for generally more contented people continues to have merit.

Now, I have to ask myself if I’m making that contention more because I see good evidence for it or because I come from a cultural context massively indoctrinated by Rousseau. No doubt it’s some of both. But the modern sociobiologist in me sees some sense here: humans evolved to fit certain lifestyles for hundreds of thousands of years. It makes sense, to a degree, that the closer we live to those lifestyles, optimizing the use of our natural instincts and proclivities, the better we’ll function. For example, human nature generally leads us to care about people we see in pain: if we live in a smallish community where we routinely encounter people we know, we’ll want to help them out when they’re in trouble. But human nature did not evolve under conditions that required us to worry about the fates of millions we’ll never see. Therefore, we don’t do it very well. We know intellectually that millions starving is terrible, but we usually don’t feel much gut-level impetus to intercede. I think it can justly be said, therefore, that we behave more morally--or, as Rousseau would say, with more “pity”--in a small-scale social unit the like of which we evolved in. While Rousseau’s ideas about the particulars of human nature are sometimes absurd, this basic idea makes a great deal of sense.

All in all, Rousseau was discussing an area of anthropology (as we’d say today) that required more scientific rigor than his era equipped him to give it. Many of the flaws in his thinking are glaring today. Some of his flaws may still be eclipsed by the fact that much of his discourse is still dominant in Western society and his suppositions often taken for granted. Yet still, I cannot help but see a great deal of validity in many of his ideas, and indeed, it may be that many deserve their dominant place in our discourse.