Jeffrey Sachs: The Anglo-Saxon Philosophy And The Struggle For Power

Regular readers here will be familiar with my core theme that the current crisis of the West can be traced back to the late Medieval breakdown of Christian philosophy, and the rise of voluntaristic and nominalistic types of thought. These strains of thought have deep roots in the Platonic tradition of Western thought that was mediated to Christian thought in the West by Augustine. What is important for our purposes is that this tradition of thought leads inevitably to the radical skepticism that is so typical of the modern West. In fact, most of Western thought can be viewed as one long attempt to come to terms with the skeptical implications of Plato’s thought.

This development led, on the one hand, to the breakdown of a united Christian faith—since the early “Reformers” were deeply distrustful of human reason (Luther himself was a professor of nominalist philosophy)—and on the other hand, in the newly secularized public sphere of the nation states, to an aggressive assault on the entire past of Western civilization and a search to establish a new society and a new learning on entirely new principles.

This attempt was led on the continent by the likes of Descartes, but the English popular thinkers—Hobbes, Locke, Hume—soon became favorites of the French philosophes. Hold that thought regarding the influence of English or Anglo-Saxon thought, because the philosophical champions of voluntarism and nominalism were English clerics—John Duns Scotus and William of Occam.

This trend of thinking culminated in the agnosticism of Immanuel Kant, from whom most modern and post modern thinking of both Right and Left derives. As so often happens, the attempt at a brand new start led only to a rehash of the past. Descartes’ famous ‘I think, therefore I am’, Berkeley’s radical skepticism regarding the real world of sense, and Kant’s ‘categories of thought’ are all clearly rehash’s of core Augustinian themes. They all deepen the problem of skepticism rather than solving it.

All this is leading up to a transcript of a talk that the economist Jeffrey Sachs delivered on the subject of renewing Western civilization through ‘virtue ethics’:

Jeffrey Sachs Interview - The Struggle for Power

Sachs, of course, isn’t a professional historian or philosopher, but he has clearly thought seriously on these issues. As we’ll see, he begins his account of the breakup of Western culture around the year 1500, bypassing the background that I presented above (admittedly in a sketchy form). The relation of the virtue ethics that Sachs espouses and the nominalist bulldozing of Western thought is very important. Virtue ethics is based in the idea that human beings are able, through reason, to come to a sufficient knowledge of our common human nature, so that we can identify the character traits or virtues that make for a full and good human being. I’m fairly certain that this is what Sachs has in mind in referring tot he key role of ‘reason’ in virtue ethics. After all, there’s no lack of ‘reasoning’ in any of the thinkers described above, but the role of reason in virtue ethics is quite distinct. Here are two typical descriptions:

Virtue ethics is primarily concerned with traits of character that are essential to human flourishing, not with the enumeration of duties. [Duties is a direct reference to Kantian thought]

Virtue ethics is an ancient ethical theory that focuses on the development of good character traits, or virtues, to lead a meaningful life.

No philosophical skepticism can accept such a program, no matter how much they reason around the issues of ethics. Which is exactly why the notion of development of virtues is not a part of Western education any longer.

With this in mind I present my transcript. Sachs, by the way, is no fan at all of Donald Trump. And yet … As you read, consider whether Sachs’ ideas of virtue and cooperation and the fellowship of citizens (he doesn’t use that term, but it’s implicit in everything he says) just may resonate with a lot of very Trumpian themes. Trump, as I hear him, is no Social Darwinian. Again, Sachs is raising issues that are at the heart of our cultural crisis, and it’s worth considering whether Trump and Sachs may, in the final analysis, actually be allies of a sort.

What happened to Western values? Because it's a very interesting and important—and strange—story in a way, and it's worth reflecting on. The values that we heard about both Buddhist and Confucian thought clearly find some resonance in Christian thought, especially in gospel teachings of Jesus, and also in Greek thought because, if you look at Aristotle's philosophy as was seen you would find some connections that are quite important, actually, and I want to draw them out. But then Western philosophy took an odd turn, or Western thinking took an odd turn, and it's important to understand that change of values that took place starting around 1500 to today, because there really was a change of the Western philosophical approach and a divergence that is, I think, quite harmful in many ways.

If you look at Aristotle, Buddha, and Confucius, they're all in deep ways--not the same ways, but deep ways--variants of what can be called virtue ethics. The idea of virtue ethics is that human beings have the potential to do good, not the inevitability of doing good, and that virtues need to be cultivated to bring out the best in human beings, and this is a common idea of Aristotle, Buddha, and Confucius. In the teachings in Buddha's eight-fold Noble Path there is the idea of the right view, the right action, the right speech, the right livelihood, and so on as ways to cultivate the underlying virtues. Aristotle was very, very clear that happiness depends on virtue. But virtue must be cultivated--it cannot be taken for granted. And the main virtues in Greek thought were virtues of what's called practical wisdom or phronesis [Prudence], which was the ability to choose the good over the enticing. Temperance, which is moderation, is a common virtue across all of these philosophies. Bravery [Fortitude], which means the ability to defend the good. And Justice, the ability to discern the right allocation for each person. Those became the Cardinal Virtues in Western thought [The Four Cardinal Virtues, Josef Pieper].

Here are three posts from the archives that get into some of this history, as well as their relevance to current events:

The Rise of the World Religions

UPDATED: Christopher Dawson's Profound Understanding Of Modernity

Jacques Baud, The Art Of War, Russia And Beyond

But what was key for Aristotle was the idea that being virtuous is a potential of human beings--not an inevitability, because we are all bound by our bodily temptations, by our animal instincts, but also by our reasons. So in Western Greek thought reason was the predominant notion. This is not the same as in Eastern thought, but it comes to some similar points and Aristotle said one must develop the habits of virtue--in fact virtue, ethics, comes from the word habit in Greek. You practice just as we heard that you become altruistic by practicing altruistic acts, and Aristotle believed in mentorship--in education, in practice, in life experience--as being vital. So here is a common basis that merges Eastern and Western virtue traditions at a quite deep level. Christian thought, especially the teachings of Jesus himself as in the Gospels, are not the same basis--it's not exactly virtue ethics but it is, of course, the virtues that are proposed and especially also the Confucian Golden Rule is also Jesus's Golden Rule, although Jesus states it positively--do to others what you would have them do to you, and love thy neighbor as you love yourself. And that led in the early centuries of Christianity to a tremendous institutional focus of the bishops and the monasteries to care for the poor, and that was a real point because the Christian communities--the Emperors took care of their business and the bishops took care of the poor in a division of responsibility that started around the 4th Century A.D in the West.

In fact, from a very early time Christian thinkers adopted the Four Cardinal Virtues, making them a key part of Christian moral thinking, along with the Three Theological Virtues—Faith, Hope, Charity.

Bear in mind in this next passage that the change in philosophy began well before Machiavelli was born. Nor is it at all clear that Machiavelli influenced the later English thinkers. Since the exact nature of Machiavelli’s thought remains controversial, we’ll skip that.

Skipping ahead a thousand years, things philosophy changed starting around 1500 in a rather deep way. While Aristotle taught, for example, that politics is a field of ethics, and Aristotle's book Politics, which is the first book of Western political thought--no, let me say it's the first book of Western political science, is the better way to say it, because Plato had written the Republic a generation earlier--but it's the first book of political science. It is paired with his ethics, The Nichomachean Ethics, as two joined volumes because, for Aristotle, ethics and politics were the same. Of course in 1514, I think it is, Machiavelli wrote a very different political science. He wrote a handbook for The Prince which was about how to maintain power. Political science in the West began to be the science of maintaining or managing power, not the science of producing the good. And, in fact, Machiavelli was teaching the prince--he was actually making a job application back to the Medicis, because he had been dismissed from the Medicis wanting a job back, he was advising the Medicis how to hold power in Florence.

Later in the next century one of the most influential texts in Western cultural history was written by Thomas Hobbes, The Leviathan, and this was written in 1640 as Western science was taking shape. Hobbes wanted a scientific theory of human beings, but modeled as individual atoms that collide with each other, because for Hobbes there was no longer a cultivation of virtue but rather each individual with insatiable desires. So Hobbes' model of human nature is that it is simply unbounded desire. It can't be taught to moderate desire, it can't be cultivated for virtue. It is individualistic and it is insatiable. And so Hobbes said, unless there is an overarching power people will kill each other. And so we need a Leviathan, he said, to stop human nature from committing non-stop violence. It was a very pessimistic view of human nature but, notice the main point: no longer was there any idea of developing virtue. That was deemed to be impossible. Instead one needed institutions to reflect harsh reality. This is the flip of philosophy. It's no longer about cultivating the good it is about controlling the bad.

Then interestingly and importantly this was amplified at the beginning of the 18th century, first by a very influential public intellectual, Bernard Mandeville, who wrote an essay in London called the Fable of the Bees. In the Fable of the Bees the most aggressive bees win, but they make the hive powerful and great and if you try to control the avarice or the vice or the aggression of the bees the hive actually dies. So this was now a philosophy of Empire--that power seeking was good because it would make the society powerful and wealthy and able to dominate over the other bees. So it was taking Hobbes and adding another element--one beehive taking dominance over others--and clearly this was a philosophy that appealed to the emerging British Empire. Then came Adam Smith six decades later in 1776 and Smith said, in agreement with Hobbes and in agreement with Mandeville, that human nature is individualistic tastes. Our unbounded desire is a great motivator but market forces will tame all of that because market forces will force a kind of competition that will lead to a socially beneficent outcome.

The point is, the Anglo-Saxon philosophy broke free of more than 1800 years of Western tradition. The Western tradition from Aristotle and Christianity was a tradition of the common good, virtue, and care for the poor. With the rise of the British Empire the philosophy became the benefits of power as a philosophy, and then even the idea that this would lead to "the common good", but there are two more steps that are important to state. The poor became an enemy because now they were a drag on society, so John Locke--one of our most esteemed philosophers--wanted very harsh treatment for the poor so that they would not be burdens on society. Then came Thomas Malthus, who wrote after Adam Smith, one generation later in 1798. Malthus proposed something even darker, which is that those hives, those different societies, are actually in competition for survival with each other, because there are more people produced than can be supported, so life is a battle for survival. Trying to help the poor is inevitably to fail because there will just be more poor people. That was his iron law of population, and it's what led to the next step.

Charles Darwin used that idea--brilliantly, from a scientific point of view--to understand natural selection, but the later 19th century philosophers took that idea as a struggle across nations. Now nations or peoples or races were in the struggle for survival, and this became known as Social Darwinism. The idea was that not only should there be no beneficence, if you help your own poor you will weaken your Society compared to others. This gave rise to the worst crimes in history, because Nazism actually is a philosophy which was based on Social Darwinist pseudoscience and this idea: the German people will survive or the Slavic people will survive, so this is a war even to extermination.

This kind of idea led to the worst cruelties, but we are still in a mindset in the Western world where it is competition and struggle that is the absolute underpinning of society. When I studied economics I was taught about perfect competition. I was never taught even one minute about perfect cooperation. The idea doesn't even exist in economics. It's not even developed in one paper that I know of because the idea of cooperation as a norm doesn't exist. It happened this notion of letting greed motivate action perhaps did generate the spirit of innovation to some extent, but the way that it was championed and taught of course led to the worst excesses. So the world became rich and those who were rich became devoid of benevolence and compassion. A terrible writer in the United States, who became quite popular--Ayn Rand, a kind of popular philosopher among young people and among many politicians--wrote a famous essay about the "virtue" of selfishness. So selfishness became the virtue. Actually that's the literal title of an essay. It's unbelievable, and she is championed by many still. These novels are unbearable to read, but they are part of our philosophy.

I believe we've had a deviation from the right path in Western civilization. There are roots of Western culture that we can really use to find a path of virtue and politics that is ethical, but the Anglo-Saxon version deeply lost this tradition. There are many fascinating reasons for this but it was mainly the rise to power of the British Empire--which was in many ways an extremely nasty Empire--and the United States learned everything it knows from the British Empire, because it aimed to be the continuation of the British Empire after World War II. This is what needs to end.