Tom West – who, I want to make clear at the outset, can easily run circles around me in his knowledge of Locke’s writings – does well to remind us of the (now) conservative, pro-family conclusions that Locke draws from his very modern philosophical premises. And these conclusions are (or should be) still relevant to contemporary debates regarding the family, since they make the case that the public, and therefore government, has a legitimate interest in stable families (up to a point, that is, the point at which children have been raised) and therefore in the sexual morality that protects the marital bond.
The limitation of this argument, however, is that it can never transcend its constructivist and utilitarian (not to say nihilist) premises. It might show that it is useful to be faithful in marriage (up to a point) and to perform one’s familial duties, but it cannot show that it is good. If we start with consciousness as a blank slate that then evolves (whether as an individual or as a species) to adapt to the necessities of its self-preservation (as an individual or as a species), we will never get to an argument for the goodness of fidelity, fecundity, etc.
Scott Yenor lays out the problem nicely in the introduction to his very important and carefully argued Family Politics: The Idea of Marriage in Modern Political Thought. As Yenor argues, the goods of family can never be grasped either from a standpoint that reduces all goods to personal satisfactions, nor from one that sees marriage and family as “social institutions” performing a necessary function. For if a necessary function is only necessary, then it is possible, indeed it is even in a way noble, to defy nature. (Such defiance, Peter Lawler notices, can even be understood as inspired by a lingering trace of Christian, “personal” transcendence of nature. Indeed, I would reply, but any trace that lacks gratitude for the goodness of something greater is not a trace worth praising or even excusing.) A socio-biologist can tell a young woman on the best scientific authority that nature designed her, body and mind, to conceive, bear and care for children, but it he cannot tell her in the name of science that in so doing she will fulfill her human possibilities, and he cannot answer her when she declares war on such natural necessities.
The alternative to arguments from “personal” satisfactions on the one hand and necessary social function on the other is not, admittedly, easy to name – Yenor calls it “communal,” that is, an understanding that shows how personal satisfaction is bound up with the social goods marriage produces. In order words, some kind of recourse to a broadly Aristotelian argument is unavoidable – that is, an appeal to a good grounded in the kinds of beings we are, and one that bridges the gap between lower needs and high purposes, that links necessity with transcendence.
January 29th, 2013 | 1:33 pm
[...] Tom West – who, I want to make clear out the outset, can easily run circles around me in his knowledge of Locke’s writings – does well to remind us of the (now) conservative, pro-family conclusions that Locke draws from his very modern philosophical premises. And these conclusions are (or Source: Postmodern Conservative [...]
January 29th, 2013 | 3:53 pm
The natural rights theory of Locke is: First, the recognition that the “good” (it might be better to say “noble”) without any support in nature is only dubiously good, and Second, is an attempt to find a point of intersection between them. Locke attempts to find a natural justification of placing the polity before yourself.
The birth and rearing of children is not only beneficial to the polity (strictly “utilitarian”), it is forced upon people by nature. If human beings, by Nature and Nature’s God, have a certain nature, it can be only right – if anything is right – to answer to that nature.
Now, I’m not of the opinion that Locke accomplishes this for the following reason: When you look at the other two natural duties Locke supplies, they truthfully boil down to the preservation of self. Those duties are: First, respect the equal station of other human beings and Second, preserve your life. Why do you respect the equal stature of other humans? To preserve your life. You don’t want to make them angry, because when there is an abundance of goods (which there is in Locke’s S.o.N.) it is a needless endangerment (a vainglorious one) to oneself. Revisiting the Third duty, why are human beings called to bear and rear children? It has to do with women (remember, this is in the S.o.N.) attempting to secure the male for her and her progeny’s preservation, and manipulating the male sex drive to accomplish that end. (I am fully aware that this is a rosy view, but we do see such things in the animal kingdom.)
In sum: Locke makes duties to others out of the desire for self-preservation. He accomplishes this by placing natural man in a condition of material abundance – which therefore makes it unreasonable to do things that seem malicious to other human beings, there being no need. (And dangerous to needlessly withhold aid to others, which would view this as malicious.) These duties break down once a condition of scarcity develops, wherein the right of self-preservation asserts itself over any and all duties to others. And when, in such a state, men find themselves with no common judge, when political leaders find themselves in such a state with no common judge, this scarcity might even be used to justify the enslavement of other human beings.
January 29th, 2013 | 3:55 pm
So Locke’s liberationism is chastened but not really compromised by a kind of sociobiological faith that understands human marriage on the model of that of the other animals (who don’t stay together after the children are grown). Nature, when it comes to marriage, doesn’t speak specifically to our species–and so it doesn’t depend on love or a relational bond stronger than that associated with chimp pair-bonding. But human marriage is also a free contract between individuals–the content of which is determined wholly by the free consent of two independent wills…. What’s missing is an understanding of marriage rooted in friendship or distinctively human EROS.
January 29th, 2013 | 4:18 pm
Part of what seems to complicate the Lockean account of marriage is the political context of the argument: weakening an understanding of government on the model of family/paternity but strengthening the significance of consent. One way to do that is to assimilate familial bonds into contractual agreement. Overall, Locke’s position seems to stake out pretty radical
January 29th, 2013 | 4:21 pm
So that got sent without my full consent. Here is the rest:
…..ground in that it explores the possibility that marriage (and even family as a whole) is reduced to consent but he also chastens that radicalness by showing the somewhat horrible consequences. There’s a lot of rhetorical hyperbole there that both sells and subsequently limits the scope of individual autonomy.
January 29th, 2013 | 5:16 pm
So I enjoyed the comments above: But part of Locke is a criticism of “civil theology,” taken over from Christianity. The person is not by nature or in truth part of some political whole. Lockean “regime” isn’t quite an oxymoron I guess, but the idea of being regime-dependent deep down doesn’t express the truth about who each of us.
January 29th, 2013 | 10:35 pm
“The person is not by nature or in truth part of some political whole…” So there is something of the person that is pre-political? There is also something “fallen” about the human person that is often understood “weakly” in Locke and much of political theory and philosophy, hence leading to an overly optimistic view of human freedom. Oops, maybe too Lutheran in my thinking?
January 29th, 2013 | 11:54 pm
Well, the move to government by consent versus government by nature is both a critique of Aristotle and of civil theology. In a very paradoxical way Locke radicalizes the Augustinian critique of classical philosophy by radicalizing a strain within classical philosophy itself: the ancient tension between eros and law or justice, which required a philosophic account of transcendence, gets repeated and expanded in modernity as the universalization of every individual’s transcendence via the popularization of enlightenment and the rights of man. The ancient view of the liberation of man through philosophy is replaced by the political liberation of man via natural rights and rational liberation by science. And the family turns out to be a complex and important problem for Locke for several reasons, not the least of which is the combination of nature and convention in marriage (repeated by a child’s free decision to grant or deny honor to parents). It complicates family even more that, in its XN expression, it is traditionally understood sub specie aeternitatis.
January 30th, 2013 | 12:02 am
So I will get to Ivan’s dense and smart comment soon. Timothy, You’re right about Locke being overly optimistic about our freedom because he misunderstands or seems to misunderstand the indispensable relational conditions of human freedom–not only does he slight or deny sin but he fails to see what sin is.
January 30th, 2013 | 11:01 pm
“The person is not by nature or in truth part of some political whole. Lockean “regime” isn’t quite an oxymoron I guess, but the idea of being regime-dependent deep down doesn’t express the truth about who each of us.”
I wonder if instead of “Lockerstotle” a more productive direction would be “Lockestine” – Lockean Augustine – inasmuch as mankinds predilection for political communities and relationships may find a better explanation as a fallen attempt to cobble together in the City of Man some vestige of what our natures (absent special revelation) recall of the City of God.
But then that would cut against the whole point of the enlightenment which was to extricate western society’s foundations from sectarianism.
On the otherhand, maybe that’s the problem…
January 31st, 2013 | 12:06 pm
I think Ivan Kenneally last post nicely summaries the Ancient/Christian/Modern political problem and Locke’s/Hobbes’ role in it. I think Hobbes’s consent as the solution to the problem of justice–the problem that lays at the heart of classical natural right–puts an end to the question with his definitive answer. Hobbes definitive answer is the nail in the coffin to classical natural right and classical political theory in a way Machaivelli did not.
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