Know yourself? Yikes!! (Swift, Gulliver's Travels, Vol. 36, pp. xv - 184)

My book group decided to read Candide, and so I skipped ahead in my reading to Swift's Gulliver's Travels.  I will get things back in order (Montaigne) in my next post.

Neither Swift nor Voltaire thought too much of man and his nature.  Check out some of these quotes from Candide:

• “Pangloss still maintained that everything was for the best, but Jacques didn’t agree with him.  It must be said, said he, that men have somehow corrupted Nature, for they are not born wolves, yet that is what they become.  God gave them neither twenty-four pound cannons nor bayonets, yet they have manufactured both in order to destroy themselves.”  Voltaire, Candide, p. 9.
•  “Ask every passenger on this ship to tell you his story, and if you find a single one who has not often cursed the day of his birth, who has not often told himself that he is the most miserable of men, then you may throw me overboard head first.”  Voltaire, Candide, p. 24.
•  “… man [is] bound to live either in convulsions of misery or in the lethargy of boredom.”  Voltaire, Candide, p. 73.

And then there is this little nugget from Gulliver's Travels:

• “He looked upon [men] as a sort of animals to whose share, by what accident he could not conjecture, some small pittance of reason had fallen whereof we made no other use than by its assistance to aggravate our natural corruptions, and to acquire new ones which nature had not given us.  That we disarmed of the few abilities she had bestowed, had been very successful in multiplying our original wants, and seemed to spend our whole lives in vain endeavors to supply them by our own inventions.”  Swift, Gulliver’s Travels, p. 278.

Are Swift and Voltaire correct in their evaluations?  Are we the miserable, corrupt beings described?  If so, what are the consequences of this in the way we conduct our lives?  In the way we know things?  In the way we decide to govern ourselves?  I happen to be reading another book that addresses some of these issues.  Gordon Wood, in his excellent Creation of the American Republic tracked the political thought of the framers of the Constitution from 1776 to 1787.  This quote by Noah Webster in 1787 was revealing:

      "... government 'takes its form and structure from the genius and habits of the people; and if              on paper a form is not accommodated to those habits, it will assume a new form, in spite of all the formal sanctions of the supreme authority of the State ... A paper declaration is a very feeble barrier against the force of national habits and inclinations" (Wood 377).

So, what did the framers think about the "genius and habits of the people"?  Wood argues that the framers were disappointed that the Americans  immediately following the revolution proved themselves to be less than virtuous.  William Van Murray, in responding to Montesquieu's argument that republicanism was dependent on virtue, argued that "[t]he republics of antiquity failed because they had 'attempted to force the human character into distorted shapes'" (Wood 611).  And in synthesizing many of the arguments of the late 1780s, Wood argued: "America would remain free not because of any quality in its citizens of spartan self-sacrifice to some nebulous public good, but in the last analysis because of the concern each individual would have in his own self-interest and personal freedom" (612).

In the end, the founders did not design the constitution for a virtuous people nor is virtue necessary for the success of our republican democracy.  The checks and balances and the separations of power and other doctrines create incredibly inefficient government processes.  But because we are self-interested and by nature corrupt, the founders thought it necessary to put these controls in place.  "If men were angels," argued Madison in The Federalist 51, "no government would be necessary."  This is not to say that public virtue is non-existent.  Nor is it to say that it is unnecessary (yes, I strongly disagree with Ayn Rand and her philosophy of selfishness).  It is to say, though, that it is unrealistic to rely exclusively on public virtue as the foundation of good government.

Swift, and to a lesser extent Voltaire, clearly do not think highly of humanity.  The framers are for the most part in their camp.  The divisiveness and conflict present today is not new nor will it go away soon.  But because our constitution is designed to our habits and inclinations as self-interested and often selfish creatures, I think our republican democracy will weather the current (and future) storms.