Background
The human pursuit of power, wealth, and empire derives from a fundamental aspect of life on Earth. It originated with life itself as a response to the need to survive and a desire to flourish. At its birth, its coming to life, every organism grows and exploits to the fullest every useable resource it encounters to serve its need to survive and desire to flourish. It does so until it encounters other living and/or physical environmental constraints. This results in that life form being contained or killed, or its continuing to exploit all it encounters to the point of destroying the resources and life systems that give and sustain its life.
Humans have been no exception. With our “sapient” emergence beginning about 300,000 years ago we brought this fundamental drive to survive and desire to flourish with us – something genetically inherited and behaviorally learned from all other life forms that preceded and nourished us. What Old World primate has not encountered a tree full of ripe figs and once fully engorged herself with sweet fruit, not imagined encountering other such trees, perhaps an entire forest of them, tomorrow?
It has been thus for Homo sapiens, the wandering, searching, exploiting, dreaming primate, from our beginning up to today. Hallmark events and periods exhibiting this have been semi-settled agriculture after 9,000BCE and city-state collective farming beginning 5,000 years ago in Mesopotamia, independent agrarian-based civilizational empire building elsewhere in Asia, and in Europe and the Americas that followed, and the European Age of Exploration and Colonization. In every instance we find the pattern of pursuing power and wealth in the service of the ostensible need to survive and the desire, the dream, of flourishing. In each context the pattern of confronting constraints resulting in flourishing, containment, or annihilation has also happened. Underlying it all, in every instance, has been the language and symbols humans have created for what surviving and flourishing mean; and the various stories and rationalizations that have been used to try and make them manifest in the minds of others and the physical realities of Earth. An imposition of human power in order to survive, flourish, and persevere. Words and meanings have and continue to be woven into stories that over time and through enculturation become lasting myths and figurative and literal institutions. Consider nation-states and doctrines such as US Manifest Destiny.
One period and its story that has surpassed all others in its impact on all humankind and all of Earth’s environments has been modernity. That being dominant notions and events in the history of Europe – the Scientific Revolution, the Industrial Revolution, and notions of human flourishing and perfectibility as found religiously in Christianity and secularly in the Enlightenment. In the West, modernity had its conceptual origin in patterns of conquest and colonization begun in the Middle East (including Egypt), and subsequently in Ancient Greece and Imperial Rome.
By the 15th Century European ship building, navigation, and weaponry had reached a point of sophistication and power to allow circumnavigation of the Earth and the besiegement, conquest, and subjugation or enslavement of most of the indigenous peoples the Europeans encountered. The story of European conquest and enrichment was begun and led by the wealthy and powerful. Those who felt entitled and sanctioned by their God and the civilizing prescriptions of the Enlightenment, and rationalized by their self-declared European cultural superiority as evidenced by their science and technology.
The European myths of the North American frontier - masculine heroism, personal freedom, White privilege, and entitlement - live on. More than that, they have been resuscitated, dusted off, and patched up from the harsh countercultural criticism they had been taking in the US before and especially since the 1960s. That is, from ideological and legal challenges mounted by civilizing, liberating, fair-playing-field agendas of governments, women and minority activists, and most educated urban liberals.
The Canadian truck blockaders of February 2022 in Ottawa, Alberta and elsewhere, no doubt thought of themselves as heroic illiberal Hopalongs. American actor William Boyd and his Wild West good-guy movie and TV character Hopalong Cassidy in the mid-20th Century US were champions of certain Western virtues and morals, including racial equality & justice. Many White Americans and others at the time idolized Boyd and Hopalong but disagreed with and kept mum on the actor’s liberal views, especially his anti-racism.
Not anymore. Ultra conservative Hopalongs have become the John Waynes and Dirty Harrys of the Proud Boys and others, such as those in the US Senate and House of Representatives, and their racism has become open for some and thinly coded for others. Consider the almost daily language and symbol skirmishes raging within the US culture wars and smoldering in Canada, Europe, and elsewhere. To this confusion add that a large part of the world’s working public has insufficient time or energy or is unwilling to think deeply about anything. During his first presidential campaign Donald Trump declared he was the "least racist person you'll ever meet" while at the same time courting and evoking the tribal emotions of White supremacists, and later telling them to “stand by.” Most of his supporters from various quarters on the right had no problem with that.
On November 9, 2016, enough of the US voting public gave assent to his agenda to put Trump in the White House via the electoral college. On January 6, 2021, he emboldened his followers to invade the US Capitol to nullify a democratic election he lost. In doing so he demonstrated his willingness to subvert the Constitution, violate US law, and undermine historically inviolable American institutions and storied practices. All to keep himself, his minority party, and their minority point of view and vision in power. Their goal being to end the democratic process the US has had since it was founded. In varying degrees from place to place around the world, populist politicians like Trump present a veneer of freedom, justice, and flourishing for all. The truth at its core, however, is carefully hidden – a doubling down on the story of privilege and patriarchy.
We are story-animated animals. Stories, and the myths and legends that time and events turn them into, are necessary. We cannot live without them. They are shorthand guides humans use to comprehend, navigate, and survive modern life’s overwhelming, incomprehensible complexity and at times, absurdity. They do not, as some claim, come from and are based on a cosmic moral arc tending toward good. There is no unequivocally convincing evidence for such a teleological universe. Stories are invented by those living among us. Most often stories with the greatest effect are those presented by persons and institutions having immense power and wealth. The filters we use to learn about and critique our culture's stories and myths, as youths and throughout our adult lives, are targeted and manipulated by the powerful. For example, seeking higher education and engaging in independent, skeptical thinking are denigrated by many conservative populists as elitist, unpatriotic pursuits.
Few are those who can step outside of such manipulation and intimidation and objectively critique their society’s stories, myths, and institutions. Many of the best at it teach at our universities. Far more are without credentials and outside academia. From inherent intelligence, common sense, a strong will, and a determination to think clearly and independently, a majority of the public can see when their culture’s ideals are perverted to the will of nationalist, racist populism supporting White privilege and patriarchy.
We all must
throughout our lives remain skeptical of the myths and stories we are told, the
cultural sustenance by which we can claim humaneness. We live according to
what we allow our minds to be fed and what we accept as truth. Story narratives
are necessary, but they are not sufficient for human survival and flourishing. They
must also present a moral stance, a declaration of what are good and bad
relations between people. Some stories are better at this than others.
Spinoza
Portuguese Dutch philosopher Baruch Spinoza (1632-1677) has far more to offer than his view that God is Nature. He also proposes a model describing how humans live out their groups’ stories, personally and socially. His “model of human nature” describes a process of striving on the part of the individual to increase his/her power to persevere. He called this the individual’s conatus [koh-NAH-tuhs]. This model or template, claimed Spinoza, is inherent in every individual. It is also a story of individual freedom and virtue having a moral stance. The following is from a 2020 book about Spinoza's moral philosophy by American philosopher Steven Nadler.
If the [Spinozian] model of human nature is a metaphysically
grounded, objective standard for judging how successful a human being is in
doing what human beings necessarily do, then it can also serve as a standard
for objective judgments about what is good and bad. Something is good if it is
a cause of joy, of an increase in one’s condition. Of course, it may be good in
only a partial or temporary sense—it causes an increase of power in only a part
of one’s being or for only a short period of time. Too many sweet desserts may
be pleasurable and a source of joy for the moment, but in the end they bring
about a deterioration in one’s condition. By contrast, something is truly good
if it contributes to and facilitates a human being’s holistic striving to
maintain and increase its overall power and come closer to the model human
being, and something is truly bad if it interferes with, or even diminishes,
such striving. ... Joy itself is good only for the individual who
experiences it. ... Things are good or bad or perfect or imperfect only
relative to some ideal model, and especially a model representing an individual
of maximal conatus, or power of persevering. - Steven Nadler[1]
We humans do our striving with the goal of persevering within groups that give us birth and material, mental, and emotional sustenance. The holders or seekers of governmental and economic power impose their morals through publicizing, enacting, and enforcing a political agenda. Of course, not all political agendas are good for the striving and perseverance of all or most individuals in society. Only some agendas provide the Enlightenment standard of the greatest good for the greatest number for the longest time.[2]
Political agendas claim to lead to a greater good for the greater number in order to get the public’s buy in. History has shown however that once a significant number of the public supports an agenda through the ballot or the bullet, be it one proposed by the left or the right, those who subsequently receive the greatest good are not in fact the greatest number. Whether it is the Bolsheviks, the Chinese Communist Party, FDR’s New Deal, LBJ’s Great Society, Nixon’s New Federalism, or Reaganomics the result is the same. Once in power all governments work to manipulate a nation’s laws and institutions for the purpose of codifying and normalizing their understanding of the “greater good,” perpetuating their party’s retention of power, and controlling the governmental and institutional ways and means to achieve their greater good. As for the “longest time,” the only time frames that matter are those between elections in democracies which are used for campaigning and manipulating the masses through the media, and forever once populist autocracies are established and locked in.
Most notable on the right over the past fifty years are the populist political agendas and methods of Richard Nixon in the 1970s, Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher in the 1980s, and Trump, Boris Johnson, Turkey’s Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, Viktor Orbán of Hungary, Brazil’s Jair Bolsonaro, and Rodrigo Duterte of the Philippines. All were voted into office using ostensibly greater-good, greatest-number political agendas. In established autocracies such as Russia and China, elections only matter as a façade for their false claims to being democratic. A comparison of the language of the constitution of China to its government’s practices within the country such as in Xinjiang Region and Hong Kong and externally toward Taiwan reveal this pseudo-democratic veneer of a greater good for the majority.
Russian President Vladimir Putin justifies having invaded Ukraine in 2022 for the greater good of Ukraine. This is based on his false claim that their land and its people are historically Russian, and that Ukraine is lacking longstanding and stable traditions of nationhood and statehood. His invasion is in pursuit of a greater good for the greatest number of Russians as he defines that ethnic group. He sees the invasion as part of a greater historical, ideological, and geopolitical agenda known as Eurasianism[3] led by Russia.
Spinoza’s Social Agenda
For Spinoza, the best social agendas and stories are those that are guided by individual reasoning. That is, says Nadler paraphrasing Spinoza, an agenda that allows "a life in which an individual, on the basis of his 'adequate ideas'[4] - a clear and distinct and true understanding of things, as opposed to the inadequate ideas that come (passively) by way of sense experience and the imagination - actively does and pursues only what is truly beneficial and useful for himself (as well as for others)." This “clear, distinct, and true understanding of things” does not allow one person or group to take away another person or group’s freedom to strive and persevere toward a state of joy, happiness, and freedom. Spin, alternative facts, pseudo-reasoning, and illogical rhetorical contradictions within populist movements are not part of such a morally pluralistic agenda. What Spinoza is recommending is free compassionate reasoning.
When Nadler says Spinoza’s notion of striving must be beneficial for the individual and others, he and Spinoza are ruling out efforts that promote types of individualism, tribalism, and nationalism that decrease the striving and persevering of others. Those efforts that allow only one race, class, ethnicity, religion, or political belief to strive and persevere. Despite the claims of ultra-conservatives within the minority US Republican Party, progressive liberal Democrats are not trying to undermine all Republican individuals’ striving and perseverance. The Democratic agenda is pluralistic and truly pursues the greatest benefit for the greatest number for the longest time. Since the 1960s, their agenda has been shown repeatedly to be in line with the desire and will of most Americans.
Yes, the Democrats currently led by President Joe Biden, according to what I described above and call the rule of political entrenchment and perpetuation, are doing all they can to manipulate US laws and institutions to codify and normalize their “greater good,” perpetuate their party’s incumbency, and command the ways a means of power to achieve and sustain their notion of the greater good. However, there is an important difference between the US right and left. Compared to that of the right, the greater good of the left is the view of the nation’s majority by almost every measure. The conservative claim of their persecution at the hands of the left is a red herring intended to deflect attention from their own autocratic, anti-democratic goals and efforts. In modern times human governance, given enough time, tends toward autocracy pursued and controlled by the right or left. Even leftist democratic socialism can be subverted and become autocratic and totalitarian.
Spinoza’s “Free Person”
The moral stance of Spinoza’s model of human nature is based on his notion of the free person. Becoming a free person is to have maximal striving power and to act according to reason. A person becomes free through his active personal effort to obtain “adequate ideas,” not in response to external causes. She is in command of herself and self-determining. Her adequate ideas are clear, distinct understandings, not inadequate ideas obtained passively through the senses and imagination. The opposite of freedom is being compelled or constrained by emotion alone or an external power. The person who is not free, Spinoza says, is she who is passive and “in bondage.” A free person behaves in accordance with what she knows, not in response to how she is made to feel a certain way by external forces or encounters.
In Spinoza’s view striving to persevere as an active thinking free person is inherent in all humans. But individuals vary as to their ability to respond and the degree to which they succeed. Many achieve partial freedom at different rates and at different times during their lives. What matters says Spinoza is not just what a person knows but how powerful that knowledge is. Every idea either increases or decreases a person’s conatus, his success at striving to persevere and live as a free person. However, according to Spinoza, the influence of an idea is only as great as its influence on our affect, our emotions – “No affect can be restrained by the true knowledge of good and evil insofar as it is true, but only insofar as it is considered an affect.” Thus, Nadler concludes “a person is therefore free when his adequate ideas are more powerful, affectively speaking, than his passions or inadequate ideas. Only then do his adequate ideas constitute the dominant desires and the determining factors in what he does.”
Spinoza’s free person must take a moral stance. A free person pursues human flourishing through reason, seeking what is beneficial and useful to himself and others. “Reason tells us what we are,” writes Nadler referring to Spinoza’s thinking, “what human nature is and how we relate to the rest of Nature. Reason identifies the end of human endeavor and points out the best means of achieving it.” Spinoza’s moral stance, as was that of the Greco-Roman philosophers of antiquity, has virtue at its center as the best way of living, personally and socially. For those ancients practicing the virtues of courage, justice, temperance, and (practical) wisdom allowed the best possibility of achieving human flourishing and happiness, personally and socially.
For medieval Latin philosophers in the Christian tradition and Jewish and Arab thinkers the goal of flourishing and happiness was understood in terms of blessedness and salvation from a providential God. Spinoza’s ideas are clearly within the Greco-Roman tradition, not that of the Abrahamic religions. To Spinoza a life of rationality, freedom, and virtue represents the highest expression of our nature and leads to the best of our flourishing. Writes Nadler, “the overriding goal of Spinoza’s philosophy—what all of his metaphysical, epistemological, political, theological, and religious theories are in the service of—is nothing less than demonstrating the path to true well-being, to a condition of human happiness that is stable, complete, and not subject to the vagaries of chance.”
If there is one theme that runs throughout and unites
Spinoza’s writings, it is freedom. The Theological-Political Treatise is
about freedom of thought and expression—a personal, civic, and religious
liberty whereby neither the political nor the ecclesiastical powers-that-be may
interfere with one’s “freedom to philosophize.” The treatise, in fact,
concludes with perhaps the most remarkable statement of toleration of the early
modern period:
Nothing is safer for the republic than that piety and
religion should include only the practice of loving-kindness and equity, and
that the right of the supreme powers concerning both sacred and secular matters
should relate only to actions. For the rest, everyone should be granted the
right to think what he wants and to say what he thinks. [Spinoza] (ibid.)
As for determinism and free will, Spinoza is a compatibilist in two ways. To him the universe is deterministic, yet individuals can be more or less free depending on how active, self-determining, and self-directed by reason they are. He thought we can resist the determination of external things. The affective strength of the adequate ideas of the free person can be stronger than the passions caused by external things. Spinoza is also compatibilistic in terms of the individual-group dynamic. An ideal individual only does what is for her best interest yet also behaves morally towards others to help herself and them in their respective efforts to strive for perseverance and freedom. In this way, Spinoza believed, both the individual and his fellows have the best opportunity to live according to the universal exemplar of human nature. It is important to note that Spinoza’s free person is not the same as the Stoic’s sage. Unlike the Stoic sage who is said to have achieved complete freedom from his passions, Spinoza’s free person is subject to the influence of passive affects throughout his life, yet always remains in full control of them. It is obvious in this that Spinoza was influenced by the ancient Stoics. After his death it was discovered, he had copies of Epictetus’s and Seneca’s works among his personal book collection.
Spinoza’s
Moral Philosophy
As for Spinoza’s moral philosophy, reason transcends personal differences and offers universal prescriptions for human virtues and morals. These include
- Acting from reason is the same as a virtue. Free persons guided by reason want nothing for themselves that they do not desire for others. Therefore, they are just, honest, and honorable.
- What is good and bad, personally and socially, is to be judged by how well or poorly it aids a person in becoming the model of the free and rationally virtuous person.
- Reason for the free person functions to prescribe ways of dealing with things outside us including other people. It compels the free person of reason to unite with others like him and act to improve others’ lives so that they come to share in his nature. Spinoza says to do this she forms associations and joins herself to others in friendship.
- Conquer hate with love and not repay it with hate in return.
Spinoza’s exemplar of human nature is a high standard to achieve. The difficulty has to do with our ignorance, weakness, or ineptitude. As Nadler calls it, “our failure either to recognize the goal or to successfully implement the means to reach it.” Most of us are not free. Should everyone strive to become free in the Spinozian sense?
It could be argued that it seems foolhardy, even dangerous,
to have everyone acting as if they are free. What is good for the free person
is not necessarily good for the ordinary person; on the contrary, what is good
for the free person might even be bad for the ordinary person. After all,
continued durational existence is necessary for the pursuit of freedom and
perfection, and it may be occasionally necessary to tell a lie or otherwise
deceive someone in order to persevere durationally. … If reason universally
commands everyone to seek his own advantage, to want what will really lead to
greater perfection, and to act in ways that benefit others, then it equally
commands everyone to seek understanding, act honestly, hate no one, avoid the
favors of the ignorant, and so on. … The dictates of reason prescribe modes of
thought and behavior that satisfy a desire that is basic in, even constitutive
of, all human beings: to persevere in the best and highest sense. That is why
one ought to follow them. (ibid.)
I agree with Nadler, Spinoza’s “right way of living” is both descriptive and prescriptive. It is right for everyone. Even the unfree may free themselves by first acting as the free person would act and assuming the free person’s temperament. This approach, similar to that suggested by Aristotle, is contrary to Spinoza’s model of human nature in that it is a response to external commands. But for Spinoza, following Aristotle, the end justifies the means for eventually the unfree person will acquire a deeper understanding of such dictates and become habituated to reason’s guidance. As such, external oughts will become internal, personal oughts.
One could well ask what might convince an unfree person to try and become free in the Spinozian sense? Some will realize that their life is deficient, hollow, and misguided. That it is guided by their passions and inadequate external ideas and false beliefs about what is valuable. From this they will begin to pursue what they hope is a better way of living. This, to Spinoza, is only natural for they are responding to their inherent desire to persevere and flourish. For others, there may come a personal loss or catastrophe that urges them to redirect their striving and goals.
Spinoza’s goal is to get us to see that the life of the free
person is the right way of living and the best life for a human being. It is an
“active” life of autonomy, virtue, and power. In the free person, desire is
guided by reason and knowledge, not by irrational passions. The free person
does what he knows to be good and what is truly in his own best interest (as
well as in the best interest of others), not what merely appears to be good or
happens to be a source of pleasure. It is also the life of true happiness. It
is therefore the life we all desire to lead, whether we know it or not. (ibid.) JEL
Forthcoming
Part 2 – “Spinoza’s Model of Human Nature and Morality in the Real World: South Africa Since 1994.”
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1 Think Least of Death - Spinoza on How to Live and How to Die by Steven Nadler. Princeton University Press. Kindle Edition, 2020.
2 Jeremy Bentham (1748-1832) is credited with creating the phrase "the greatest good for the greatest number." John Stuart Mill (1806-1873) and others adopted the concept, but first head of the US Forest Service Gilford Pinchot (1865-1946) is said to have added "in the long run.”
3 “As Communism lost its élan, intellectuals searched for a different principle on which the Russian state could be organized. Their explorations took shape briefly in the formation of political parties, including rabidly nationalist, antisemitic movements, and with more lasting effect in the revival of religion as a foundation for collective life. But as the state ran roughshod over democratic politics in the 1990s, new interpretations of Russia’s essence took hold, offering solace and hope to people who strove to recover their country’s prestige in the world. One of the most alluring concepts was Eurasianism. Emerging from the collapse of the Russian Empire in 1917, this idea posited Russia as a Eurasian polity formed by a deep history of cultural exchanges among people of Turkic, Slavic, Mongol and other Asian origins. In 1920, the linguist Nikolai Trubetzkoy — one of several Russian émigré intellectuals who developed the concept — published “Europe and Humanity,” a trenchant critique of Western colonialism and Eurocentrism. He called on Russian intellectuals to free themselves from their fixation on Europe and to build on the “legacy of Chinggis Khan” to create a great continent-spanning Russian-Eurasian state.” From “The Grand Theory Driving Putin to War” by Jane Burbank, New York Times, March 22, 2022.
4 Regarding Spinoza’s adequate and inadequate ideas, Nadler writes: There are, in Spinoza’s scheme, three kinds of knowledge. … The first kind of knowledge consists only in inadequate ideas. These are the partial, perspectival, and variable ideas that come from sense experience and the imagination. Spinoza describes these ideas as “mutilated, confused and without order for the intellect.” This “knowledge from random experience” – so-called because it involves ideas arriving in a way that is haphazard and not under our control—is not really knowledge at all but mere opinion. … Such highly personalized ideas are unreliable guides as to how the world is or how one should act; they inform us only of how things happen to affect us, either at present or in the past. … Knowledge of the first kind is purely subjective. By contrast, knowledge of the second kind and knowledge of the third kind are invariably and necessarily true. Spinoza calls knowledge of the second kind ‘reason’ and knowledge of the third kind ‘intuition.’ Both consist in adequate ideas that represent a deep, metaphysically grounded understanding of things in the world and reveal their true natures. … But if the adequate ideas of reason are to show what things really are, then they must also provide the right kind of causal information and show why things are as they are and why they could not have been otherwise. – Nadler, Steven. Think Least of Death (pp. 42-43).
