David Hume and the Prospects of Liberty - Part I

In a comment of great depth, Eric Parks is putting his finger on it:

"My biggest question has always revolved around whether or not people can be willing to embrace principled rule of law (if presented to them as an option) or are most of a instant-gratification mindset wherein force is just fine as long as the results happen now. I fear that the latter has always been inherent in mankind. If so, society will ebb and flow throughout eternity."

For the full context see The Power of a Wilderness Experience.

Writes David Hume:

"To balance a large state ... on general laws, is a work of so great difficulty that no human genius, however comprehensive, is able by the mere dint of reason and reflection, to effect it. The judgment of many must unite in this work: Experience must guide their labour, Time must bring it to perfection: And the feeling of inconveniences must correct the mistakes which they inevitably fall into, in their first trials and experiments."

Liberty is a human project of very recent origin. For millions of years life on our planet evolved. In the 18th century, an event of planetary, possibly even of cosmological significance occurred: evolution had reached a point where it was able to discover itself (through Hume and other "Darwinians before Darwin," the latter having borrowed his paradigm more than a 100 years later from the proto social scientists who studied the growth, the evolution of human institutions such as rules and rites, money, language, law etc. 

BANG! That was the moment when the social sciences were born: an attempt to understand the spontaneous way in which societies evolve. At the same time, it was the moment when liberty was born.

It is felicitous and in a way unlikely that the discovery of a political philosophy as abstract as that of liberty actually became so strong an intellectual and practical force that two countries would be dominated by it for extensive periods of time: Great Britain, and more so, the United States of America.

But as the motto of our blog reminds us:

"Freedom is never more than one generation away from extinction. We didn't pass it to our children in our bloodstream. It must be fought for, protected, and handed on for them to do the same."

Hardly discovered, hardly understood in all vital aspects, liberty was at once at peril, and declined after the 19th century.

Still a success, considering that the emotional apparatus and the habits of thinking that man tends to be dominated by were formed over millions of years in small groups, tribes or hordes.

In its instinctive makeup man is not prepared for freedom, but for leadership and submission, for simple ideas and tasks easily shared by a collective. Man is not naturally equipped to submit to the abstract rules and the impartial justice of general rules that alone are suitable for societies that no longer have the character of a tribal home.

Modern politics successfully caters to the Neanderthaler in us. The transition from the rule of man to the rule of law, requires us to suppress the very instincts to which modern politics appeals.

Liberty is a game of unknown outcome based on certain rules. However, even in the United States, from the very beginning, from the inauguration of the Constitution onward, the spoilsports were given precedence over those prepared to heed the rules, namely by merging in the legislature the definition and protection of the game's strict and inflexible rules with the privilege of legislating decrees (rather than general rules) in a discretionary and politically expedient fashion, the latter (legislation) soon eroding the former (law).

It is not a foregone conclusion whether man will prove mature enough to overcome the primitive in him, the man of impulse and rule-bending self-interest.