Can an individual improve themselves by becoming, for instance, more forgiving, less ill-tempered, more considerate towards others, harder-working, fitter etc? Can a company or a government department or a school or hospital improve itself by becoming more efficient, more focussed on pupils and patients, more considerate towards its staff, generally more fit for purpose?I suspect we would all readily assent to both propositions - life would be distinctly unappetising if we couldn’t imagine being able to improve ourselves and our institutions.
But now for the big one: can we improve human nature itself? Can we, by a combination of education, example, listening to the right experts, having the right people in key positions, introducing the right laws and the right rewards and punishments, fundamentally change humanity for the better?
Obviously, the political class thinks it’s possible: Labour – with the acquiescence of the other two main UK political parties, the mass media, an enormous civil service and a vast quangocracy – has set out to create a kinder, more caring, greener, anti-racist, more accepting people within the framework of a more equal, compassionate and less judgmental multi-cultural society.
And my God, has it ever been a bloody disaster.
We used to have nurses who looked after patients and cleaned up their messes. We used to have police who protected us by pounding our pavements and nabbing wrong ‘uns. We used to have teachers determined to dun some learning into their charges, no matter how unpromising those charges were. We used to have a society that accepted immigrants into its ranks with far less angst than any other country in the world. We used to have a society where people would occasionally become unemployed, but, after a hiatus, would find themselves back in work. We used to have excellent universities where bright young people from all sorts of backgrounds would receive a world-class education.
So how did we manage to screw all that up?
Well, the state believed that by giving the nurses and police more money, a better career structure, and more status, they’d repay the rest of us by doing an even better job than they used to do.
Result? Nurses no longer clear up messes and police no longer bother to catch criminals. The recipients of all this largesse (obviously there’s no need to thank us) simply banked the wedge and turned their attention to paperwork.
Next, the state turned its malevolently compassionate focus on state education. Teachers were paid more, facilities were improved, exams were reformed to make them “fairer”, tens of thousands of new university places were created, and battalions of “experts” and bureaucrats were wheeled into position to make sure it all worked brilliantly.
The result? Legions of chronically ignorant, bone-idle, casually criminal young people who, having been rendered unemployable, will remain a burden on the state for the rest of their unpleasant, meaningless, achievement-free lives. And, of course, we have dumbed-down exams, and a mass of pseudo-universities with huge drop-out rates teaching pseudo-subjects.
As for immigration – well, there isn’t space here. Let’s just say that, while one hears fewer unpleasant racist remarks these days, there is a vast groundswell of resentment building up which, I would imagine, must worry the large majority of productive, decent, law-abiding, assimilated incomers who genuinely add to our national life. As for the criminals, the democracy-haters, the system-cheaters amongst the immigrant population – well, a grossly inefficient immigration apparatus, the silly old CRE, the idiotically PC nature of our police, and the introduction of totalitarian “hate crimes” have ensured that they won’t be brought to account, while being positively encouraged to ignore what’s left of the shared culture of this country.
When an outfit espousing beliefs as repellent as the BNP’s thrives, you just know that the state has thrown common sense out of the window in favour of some deluded experiment in social engineering.
In search of an explanation for this collective leap through the looking-glass, I turn to an 80-year old American academic, Thomas Sowell, whose theory is that there are two basic visions of human nature underlying conflicting political approaches: the constrained and the unconstrained. The unconstrained vision sees human beings as infinitely improvable: they can be re-engineered, re-wired, re-moulded to be better. Given time, cruelty, racism, competitiveness, the over-riding imperatives of self-interest and looking after our own, can be bred out of us. If we create institutions based on this belief, and put the right people in charge of them, humanity will step up to the plate and start operating on a higher level.
Yes we can! Change is now! Things can only get better! A future fair for all!
All it takes is money and experts and leadership. Adherents are very keen on leadership – get a decent, clear-headed, compassionate person in charge who can intuit what is best for us, and they can ignore those fuddy-duddy laws and traditions that lesser politicians pay lip-service to. The unconstrained are in a hurry: to hell with the forces of conservatism; to hell with relying on the lessons of the past – who needs ‘em?; to hell with silly, outmoded, pessimistic models of human nature – if we just all join hands and invoke the healing strength of Gaia, well, we can achieve anything! (See any episode of Dr Who from the past five years to get a flavour of this sort of dewey-eyed, “aren’t people great if you just unleash their basic goodness” tosh.
Nazis, Bolsheviks, Fascists and Socialists all believed in the perfectibility of mankind (although the prevailing theories of what constituted perfectibility differed in some respects - mainly on which sections of society needed to be butchered to achieve perfection). “Europe”, of course, believes in it (if we just choose the most boring left-wingers from each country and stick them in a room together and give them limitless power, everything would be, like, so great!). In the UK, it’s hard to identify a party that doesn’t (UKIP?). In the States, the Democrats, inevitably, are keen adherents.
The constrained vision sees Man as fundamentally flawed – “fallen” in religious terms: it is in our nature to be selfish, clannish and violent. Our institutions need to be designed to take this into account, in order to work with and around our inherent proclivities (obviously, there’s a plus side: when provided with the right light-touch framework, we’re also creative, generous, energetic, loving and resourceful, and perfectly happy to come together, freely, to achieve great things).
Professor Sowell cites the two basic attitudes to war as a litmus test of which side of the constrained/unconstrained divide we’re on. “Unconstrained” visionaries – largely those on the Left – are always amazed when war breaks out, whether or not they declared it. It flies in the face of their basic belief that any problem can be solved if people just talk about it. War, to them, is unnatural, an aberration, often caused by one side (usually America) being too powerful. To “constrained” visionaries – largely those on the Right – human beings, given half a chance, will fight, and can often only be deflected from bloodshed by the threat of a superior force capable of thrashing them. (To the unconstrained, having a large prison population or a mighty arsenal are evils in themselves, rather than a sign that the state is trying to protect its citizens from internal and external threats.)
Sowell traces this dichotomy in our basic views of humanity back to Aristotle and Plato: Aristotle dealt with the world as it is (constrained), while Plato posited idealised forms as reality (unconstrained). French enlightenment thinkers of the 17th century believed in the perfectibility of man (unconstrained), while British and American thinkers and politicians of that era tended to be sceptical about the limits of human nature (constrained).
Sowell, who is the Rose and Milton Friedman Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University, presented his theory in full in the 1987 book, A Conflict of Visions. He has written around thirty books and is a prolific columnist: a good place to start is his own website. Fortunately, the Hoover Institution has recorded an array of interviews with the Prof and uploaded them to YouTube: they’re well worth a listen.
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