Government, for Rousseau, is a largely fraudulent contract imposed by the rich on the poor, and the founder of civil society was simply the first man to say “This is mine” of a piece of land and found people credulous enough to believe him. How much crime, war, murder, misery and horror, he reflects, could have been avoided if someone had pointed out that the fruits of the earth belong to everyone, and the earth itself to nobody at all? Progress is an illusion, and science the ruin of humanity. Civilisation has made us neither happier nor more virtuous. Yet once we had been expelled from the happy garden, there was no way back.

Some may see this view as a trifle one-sided. What’s surely more convincing is the suggestion that civilisation has made us both better and worse. If it holds the solution to some of our troubles, it also creates problems all of its own. It tempers and restrains our more anti-social impulses, but in doing so brings with it forms of devastation beyond the scope of “primitive” humanity. If their problem was weakness, ours is power. “To be able to overpower the monstrous progeny of our own intelligence,” writes the art historian Malcolm Bull, “has always been the condition of human survival.” Humanity is constantly in danger of overreaching itself and bringing itself to nothing. Its abiding defect is hubris. The monstrous progeny of our own intelligence is now known as AI.

For a certain strain of conservatism, human nature is mostly degenerate and has always been that way. “It is not that our age is particularly corrupt,” remarks the Anglo-Catholic Tory T.S. Eliot. “All ages are corrupt.” This isn’t to say you can’t squeeze something valuable out of people, but to do so you need order and discipline, sometimes of a draconian kind. Goodness exists, but only the incurably bright-eyed see it as spontaneous.

Classical liberalism takes the opposite view. People fare best when they are left alone to develop their talents. Repressing them will simply stunt their growth, whereas spiritual laissez-faire will allow them to flourish. Human beings may abuse their freedom, but they are not truly human without it. If they are to go right, you have to allow for the possibility of their going wrong. Romanticism is a particularly affirmative instance of this creed. Men and women have certain creative capacities which demand fulfilment, and most of the world’s evils stem from the fact that these powers are being obstructed. The names of the obstructers are legion: the state, religion, colonialism, patriarchy, capitalism, ethnic supremacism, the dominant class and so on. Revolution is the moment when energies which have been suppressed burst triumphantly through these barriers and come into their own.

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Despotism is a beast of capitalism

By Terry Eagleton

There are a number of things wrong with this theory. Are all human capacities to be realised? What about my ability to assassinate the Pope, along with my burning desire to do so? Some of our powers are clearly noxious, but how do we distinguish these from the more life-affirming ones? And what if some of our capabilities are at war with others? As for repression, there are those like Freud who claim that a certain amount of it is necessary for our functioning. Repression can be good for you, even if too much of it is likely to make you ill. It will also be good for the Pope if I manage to stifle my urge to topple him from the balcony of the Vatican.

And if all we need is for expression to break through repression, why doesn’t it happen more often? One answer is because the Law is already present within desire, disciplining and restraining it. Patriarchy, colonialism and the like aren’t just external powers; it’s because they persuade us to internalise them that they can thrive so vigorously. The aim of the Law is that we should love it, not simply obey it. By identifying our own desires with those of authority, a trespass against authority feels like a violation of ourselves. It’s partly because this identification can never be perfect — because we hate the Law of the Father as well as loving it — that states, empires and sovereignties are brought low from time to time.

Radicals agree with conservatives that liberals are too sanguine about human nature. But they also agree with liberals that conservatives downplay its positive potential. One can see the argument in religious terms. There are happy-clappy Christians who bash tambourines, play down sin, ooze moral smugness and rejoice in their own salvation. For these rather weird types, faith is mostly a matter of grinning. There are also gloomy Christians for whom human nature is entirely corrupt, and for whom we would be heading towards hell-fire were it not for the arbitrary fact that Christ has redeemed us. The general sense is that Christ succumbed to a moment of liberal sentimentalism in rescuing us from the Devil, and may well have been better advised to let us fall into his clutches.

Both of these cases are deviations from mainstream Christianity, for which human beings have the potential to be virtuous but need radical self-transformation in order to be so. Goodness is neither spontaneous nor non-existent; instead, it requires a degree of hard labour. It doesn’t come automatically, but when it does come, we recognise it as a fulfilment of the creatures we are. So the bad news is that we won’t do as we are right now; the good news, however, is that virtue requires a transformation that we have the potential to achieve, which rules out the idea that we are utterly degenerate.

For Enlightenment liberals, moral and material progress go hand in hand. Nobody believes this any longer, if you take it to mean that the more washing machines you have, the more merciful and compassionate you become. Even so, there is a kernel of truth in this mythical shell, which is that material scarcity breeds violence and exploitation. People who aren’t afflicted by famine and disease are more likely to be altruistic than those who have to fight over a crust of bread. They are too busy staying alive to bother fishing you out of the river. For some conservatives, by contrast, moral progress is in inverse proportion to the growth of prosperity. The more civilisation advances, the more greedy, selfish and heartless it becomes. The radical sees this as true of our present form of social life, but not as a judgement on civilisation as such.

The so-called state of nature which preceded our Fall into war and private property was a blessed time for Rousseau but a nightmare for Thomas Hobbes. In Hobbes’s view, it is a condition of unending conflict in which every individual’s hand is raised against every other; and only by collectively agreeing to become subject to unlimited government, in the so-called social contract, will peace ever be established. (There is a logical problem about how people can come to make such a contract without having the concepts of contract, law, authority, obedience and so on in the first place, in which case they would seem to be already in a state of civilisation.)

Despite being a genial fellow who enjoyed a drink and liked a good laugh, Hobbes is commonly seen as the most pessimistic of English philosophers, though the contemporary thinker John Gray runs him a close second. His latest book, The New Leviathans, argues that we have returned to Hobbes’s state of nature in artificial form. Liberalism is finished, and the practice of tolerance has passed into history. (He seems to have wokeness in mind here, which is to ascribe world-historical status to a passing phenomenon.)

It is good, however, that liberal individualism is washed up, since as Hobbes would agree, unfettered self-determination is a fantasy. In luridly apocalyptic language, Gray speaks of “a spectacle of self-immolation, at once tragic and farcical”, taking place in the West. Hobbes was mistaken to believe that there was any deliverance from the brutal state of nature, since “the war of all against all begins in every human bring, and it never ends”. The book ends with a lame concession that human beings can “act in the service of life”, a proposition it has spent some time trying to demolish.

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Ludwig Wittgenstein's war on philosophy

By Terry Eagleton

Pessimism isn’t popular with governments, since disillusion can lead to disaffection. So this won’t be Rishi Sunak’s book of the year, not least because it pushes pessimism unnervingly close to nihilism. All the same, it confronts the truth that no politician dares utter: that things are very bad with a world in which, in Gray’s words, either market forces are directed by the state or the state has been captured by corporate power.

The myth of a benevolent state of nature was shattered a long time ago. More recently, a version of it known as childhood innocence was challenged by the psychoanalysts. Infantile sexuality had been known about for some time, not least by infants. But we had not been prepared for the work of Freud’s disciple, Melanie Klein, who writes of the baby’s murderous fantasies of pounding the mother’s breast to pieces.

Yet even if infants are indeed mini-murderers, at least in potential, this is not all there is to say. They are also able to recognise and respond to the love of their carers, a love without which they will fail to flourish. They experience a gratitude for it which in Freud’s view plants the seeds of human morality. Later on, this instinct will need to be educated into conscious moral awareness, a highly precarious enterprise. If we are not complete villains, it is because what greets us upon entering a violent world is something which points beyond it.

In one, a white supremacist shot anti-racism protesters in cold blood, and was acquitted because of his skin colour. In the other, a teenager tried to defend a community from violence, and ended up shooting two criminal lunatics in self-defence.

But why are these stories so irreconcilable? It’s a good rule of thumb that where people find it impossible to agree, it’s usually because there’s a fundamental difference in their assumptions about the world.

The Rittenhouse argument is just such a case. It’s powered by a profound disagreement about human nature: one that fuels many of the most intractable modern culture wars, from Mumsnet bunfights about babycare to arguments about classroom discipline and what the police force is for.

Are humans naturally good given the right circumstances? Or are we flawed and in need of threats and guidelines to keep us on the straight and narrow? The split is a legacy of radical ideas stretching back to the revolutionary 18^th century.

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By Mary Harrington

Perhaps the most famous proponent of intrinsic human goodness is Rousseau, who claimed in Emile (1762) that children are born virtuous. As Rousseau sees it, we only need freedom, love and the right environment to spontaneously come to an understanding of what’s right.

When Emile was first published, it stood in stark challenge to the then-dominant view, emerging from the Christian tradition, that humans are tainted by ‘original sin’. From this vantage point, we’re naturally flawed, and must always struggle against our less virtuous instincts. Rousseau’s claim so appalled adherents of this then-dominant view that copies of his book were burned in the street.

Today, though, the boot is on the other foot. The high-status view among contemporary elites is unmistakeably Team Rousseau.

At the tiniest scale, it’s expressed in the school of parenting that believes it’s wrong or even cruel to teach children how to live. I’ve written before about the currently popular ideas of ‘attachment parenting’ and ‘gentle parenting’, which emphasise self-discovery in a loving environment over routine, authority or punishment — and about how these views skew wealthy and liberal.

In education settings, the same idea appears as ‘child-centred pedagogy’, an approach that emphasises individual pathways and discovery over rote learning and teachers as authority figures. And at the biggest scale, it crops up as the claim that all the root causes of crime are external to humans: poverty, trauma, discrimination and so on. From this perspective, if we could only replace policing with tailored community services that eliminated these root causes, there would no longer be any crime.

Even outbreaks of mass public disorder are treated by Team Rousseau as an unfortunate-yet-understandable response to bad governance: when BLM protesters in Baltimore toppled a statue of Christopher Columbus last year, the Democrat politician Nanci Pelosi responded by shrugging it off as a natural expression of that community’s wishes. If the community doesn’t want the statue, she said, “the statue shouldn’t be there”. From this vantage point, public unrest is something akin to the weather: a naturally-occurring phenomenon in which leaders must strive to create the conditions for goodness, or else “people will do what they do”.

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If angry 18^th century moralists burned Rousseau’s book on education, today the moral majority is more likely to dogpile people who disagree with the belief that we’re all born good. Katherine Birbalsingh, headteacher of ‘Britain’s strictest school’, Michaela Community School in London, recently faced demands that she be fired after she referenced ‘original sin’ in the context of teaching. From the Team Original Sin perspective, as Michaela’s deputy head Jonathan Porter argued last year, providing empathy and interesting lessons won’t guarantee you good classroom behaviour. To Porter, children aren’t so much naturally good as capable of being habituated to the good. But that, he suggests, means making clear statements about what you believe to be good, setting rules on that basis, and enforcing them consistently.

This might be doable within a single school with a strong leader, such as Michaela. What happens, though, when a sizeable proportion of the ruling class think this approach is not just misguided but immoral?

Last summer, rioting broke out first in America and then worldwide —prompting US Senator Tom Cotton to write an op-ed arguing that order was important in and of itself and suggesting the army should be deployed to quell the riots. The ensuing shouting-match between Team Original Sin and Team Rousseau ended the career of the NYT’s comment editor.

Implicitly, then, for Team Rousseau, disorder is understandable when people are oppressed, while order is a nice-to-have, and only attainable if you create the right conditions to draw out people’s natural goodness. In schools, we can only expect pupils to behave if the teacher’s doing it right. And in the public square, we can only expect people not to riot if we abolish systemic oppression.

Applying this model to policing means diverting resources from enforcing order to addressing social issues. San Francisco, for example, voted last year to redirect $120m of funding from policing to community projects, with the aim of eliminating the causes of crime rather than simply punishing criminals.

But there’s always the nagging worry: what do you do with people who persistently refuse to have their natural goodness drawn out? And here, perhaps, we find a clue as to why Team Rousseau tends to skew wealthy: it’s easier to believe people are naturally good if you’ve led a sheltered life.

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What our leaders don't see

By Mary Harrington

As a child, Rousseau himself wasn’t allowed to play with other children. And it’s conceivable that more daily rough-and-tumble with his peers might have tempered the rosy view of natural childish virtue presented in Emile. When people who have led sheltered lives apply Team Rousseau beliefs in less rarefied settings, the result isn’t always as salutary as hoped. Even innocent experiments and self-discovery can impact negatively on others — especially where the experiment (innocent or otherwise) is in how far you can push one of your classmates.

For Team Original Sin, Birbalsingh advocates dealing with such schoolyard conflicts by imposing norms of public order: that is, ‘tight behaviour systems’ and ‘high expectations’. For Team Rousseau, though, it’s less clear what to do.

Research suggests that empathy-based ‘restorative justice’ approaches to school discipline yield mixed results at best. And when applied to law and order, Team Rousseau likewise runs aground on the problem of those who refuse to be rehabilitated. In San Francisco, as the focus of law and order has shifted to rehabilitation, incidences of burglary are rocketing — a fact that seems down to a minority of repeat offenders.

What can be done about this, especially where police no longer get involved? One plausible consequence is rising vigilantism. We can’t know definitively what motivated one teenager with an assault rifle to travel to a riot zone; perhaps he really was just attracted to the mayhem, and looking for a reason to join in. Or perhaps he thought he was making a last, heroic stand for order and in defence of those unable to defend themselves.

For when public norms of order collapse, or are undermined in the name of empathy, the only law that remains is that of brute strength. In San Francisco, even previously committed opponents of gun ownership are now responding to the disintegration of public order with talk of buying weapons.

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Would you sell a kidney to be famous?

By Mary Harrington

Most of the Rittenhouse culture war boils down to an argument over whether Rittenhouse was the bully, or the one who stands up to bullies. But what this argument ignores is the fate of those who are neither bully nor challenger. The weak, the old, the frightened or otherwise defenceless.

Perhaps the empathetic elites of Team Rousseau are simply secure enough in their leafy suburbs or gated compounds to ignore any unfortunate side-effects of treating order as secondary to freedom. But this raises the troubling possibility that sacrificing public order for empathy and individual freedom is, in practice, less high-minded than a dereliction of care to those that can’t defend themselves.

Worse still, the lesson from Michaela is that at root this isn’t really about scruples at all. It’s about a crippling lack of moral self-confidence. For you can’t set clear rules and form habits unless you have a clear idea of the good — and it’s this vision of the good that is the true missing piece.

Team Rousseau insists that human goodness is natural rather than ordered and enforced, and this in turn affords its believers the right to withhold judgement, and avoid making clear statements about the good. In practice, then, this amounts to an elite right — a duty, in fact — to shirk the central responsibility of elites since time immemorial: moral leadership.

And in the absence of clear moral leadership, the alarming prospect is that instead we’ll witness a proliferation of Rittenhouses: self-appointed individual guardians of a public order abandoned by the elites whose responsibility it is to uphold.

The notion that humans are born with an inbuilt collection of social and moral presets, that represent the optimum “natural” way of being human, is deeply influential in our culture. But is it really possible to establish, objectively and scientifically, the best way to ensure a child is raised according to “nature”?

In Some Thoughts Concerning Education (1693) the philosopher John Locke argued that rather than (as medieval wisdom had it) being born sinful, infants were in fact tabula rasa — a blank slate. He believed it was the duty of parents to ensure children developed in ways that habituated them to their environment, for example by regularly bathing their feet in cold water so they would not find wet boots unbearable as adults.

Some seven decades later, in 1762, Jean-Jacques Rousseau went considerably further. Children, he said, are not tabula rasa but bearers of divine virtue that is only corrupted by contact with culture. In Emile, or On Education he argued that “God makes all things good; man meddles with them and they become evil”. The purpose of child-rearing and education is thus to do as little damage to natural human goodness as possible.

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How motherhood put an end to my liberalism

By Mary Harrington

Are humans blank pages upon which parents should try and write the best possible version of a social being? Or does the introduction of culture corrupt a higher, purer, innate nature? This debate still rages today, across spheres as varied as education and criminal justice, but the most intimate battleground for the ongoing contest between Locke and Rousseau is the so-called “mummy wars”.

On the side of Locke, for example, you see sleep experts such as Richard Ferber or routine advocates such as Gina Ford, who advocate parental authority, structure and boundary-setting to train a child’s habits along lines that will ensure development as flourishing members of their community. On the side of Rousseau, you see William Sears and Sarah Ockwell-Smith, advocates of “gentle” or “attachment” parenting, that “allows the natural, biological attachment-promoting behaviors of the infant and the intuitive, biological, caregiving qualities of the mother to come together”.

This has arisen in tandem with a whole ecosystem of scientific research oriented toward establishing in some definitive way which parenting methods produce the best “outcomes”. As Ellie Lee argues in the 2014 anthology Parenting Culture Studies, since the twentieth century there has been a turn away from the validation of “a mother’s instincts, virtue and affection” toward parenting as a “scientific enterprise”.

It should be noted at this point that the polite euphemism “parenting”, in practice, almost always means “mothering”. I have written previously in these pages about the asymmetric physiological burden of child-rearing; and the main asymmetry, once a child has been gestated and delivered safely, is of course breastfeeding.

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Science is unequivocal about the benefits of breastfeeding. But fathers cannot breastfeed, a non-negotiable biological given that throws down the gauntlet to modern ideals of equal parenting. This poses difficult questions for modern families. Is it best to breastfeed even if it conflicts with mothers’ desire — or need — to work? Is it more feminist and “natural” to embrace the unique biological role of a woman’s body in breastfeeding, or to bottle-feed in the interests of equal parenting?

Even public policy gives mixed messages. Should mothers stay close to their babies or hand them over and go back to work? The NHS promotes breastfeeding via poster campaigns even as breastfeeding services remain under-funded. Meanwhile, family policy across all the main parties focuses on subsidising childcare, and the rising cost of living makes stay at home mothering unaffordable for many on lower incomes.

Positioned as it is on the fault-lines between choice and necessity, biology and culture, breastfeeding also creates an ideal battleground for the conflict between Locke and Rousseau over the best way to raise a child. Should we impose a structure on when babies feed, or encourage breastfeeding on demand?

In this light it was refreshing to read  a study, published in January, that stepped outside the usual parameters of the “mummy wars” — that is, the question of absolute benefit to the baby of a given parenting practice — to look at the social meaning of breastfeeding.

The study explored the different relationships of mothers to breastfeeding in developing and developed economies, as well as across time, to conclude that as well as being a means of feeding a baby, breastfeeding also has sociocultural meaning among mothers themselves, functioning as a site for competition and status-seeking.

In poorer societies where formula milk is expensive and clean water hard to come by, the study showed that breastfeeding is perceived a low-status means of feeding your child. In contrast, in developed societies with ready access to clean water but where staying at home with a baby is unaffordable for many, breastfeeding uptake is far higher among middle and upper class women as it serves to signal wealth.

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By Mary Harrington

Breastfeeding, then, is laden with complex meanings that vary across cultural and economic contexts. And here we can see what the “mummy wars” repeatedly miss out, in their hyperfocus on the authority of science: the dimension of social meaning.

Viewed through the social lens, it becomes clear that supposedly scientific debates about optimum mothering are heavily class-inflected. Consider the two principal UK parenting forums: Mumsnet and Netmums. Spend more than a few minutes browsing the discussions there and it is clear (as articulated in this thread) that the culture of Mumsnet skews middle- to upper-middle-class in its aesthetic and register. Netmums, on the other hand, skews more lower-middle or working-class.

Explore further, and it becomes apparent that Netmums is for Locke, while Mumsnet is more Rousseau. Even mentioning Gina Ford on Mumsnet will get you called “brave”. Indeed, so passionate is the consensus against routine and structure in babycare on among Mumsnetters, that in 2007 Ford herself threatened legal action against the website if its forum members did not stop insulting her. On the more working-class Netmums, by contrast, Gina Ford gets a relatively warm write-up.

Thus a suspicion begins to emerge that notionally scientific parenting questions are in truth vehicles for class and cultural debates. In addition, the middle and upper classes skew toward a liberal, “instinct”-oriented “natural” Rousseauesque philosophy of motherhood, while lower and middle-class mothers are more drawn to a structured, authority-based model. Are there broader political parallels to be drawn?

It is tempting to extrapolate from the class-inflected contest between Rousseau and Locke across Mumsnet and Netmums, and the “open” vs “closed” (or alternatively “Anywhere” and “Somewhere”) tussles evident throughout contemporary politics. To put it another way, Mumsnetters are raising Anywheres, while Netmums are raising Somewheres.

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By Giles Fraser

Does any of this matter? Well, a young mother from a poor background who feels guilted and judged by the middle-class mummies she meets at Sure Start for putting her baby into a routine from birth, so granny can care for her while she works shifts, might well think so.

“There is no such thing as an infant,” wrote paediatrician and psychoanalyst Donald Winnicott in 1960, “only a nursing couple”. That is to say, very young children are so absolutely dependent on a caregiver that it makes no sense to speak about a baby in the abstract. It follows from this that it makes no sense to conceive of a baby’s wellbeing as distinct from the wellbeing of its mother. And in that light, whatever the science says, sometimes breast may not be best.

Just as newborns cannot meaningfully be abstracted from their caregivers, nor can humans (perhaps especially babies) meaningfully be abstracted from their social and cultural relations. It is not known what happened to the Inchkeith babies, but a 13^th century version of the same experiment, by the ghoulish Empereror Frederick II, resulted not in the emergence of natural language after all. Rather, the poor infants whom Frederick commanded to be raised with food but no other interaction simply died, presumably of lack of love.

Rather than being a corrupting influence on the intrinsic goodness of infant humans, culture and relationship are as essential to the nourishment of babies as milk and regular sleep. With this in mind, we should stop using science as an ideological stick with which to beat mothers into compliance with Locke, Rousseau or whoever. Maybe instead we could accept that childrearing is an intricate dialogue between biological necessity and cultural meaning.

Rather than treating feeding or nap-time as a proxy for ideological arm-wrestling over the nature of human beings, we can leave families to suit their parenting to their circumstances and – perhaps – even trust that in most cases mother really does know best.