As part of an invited lecture series, I led several seminars on the topic The Best Arguments against Free-market Capitalism. The format is Socratic and the participants are professors at my host, Francisco Marroquín University.
In this second seminar, we take up the arguments that:
a) We live in a world of scarce resources, and
b) Humans are too immoral for freedom (at 23 minutes).
Forthcoming: Three more arguments against free-market capitalism.
One of my professors in graduate school argued that St. Augustine is the most influential philosopher in history. I’m not convinced, though a good case can be made.
I recently re-opened Confessions and came across Augustine’s strong version of original sin. As he exclaims to his God, “no one is free from sin in your sight, not even an infant whose span of earthly life is but a single day” (Book I).
To explain, Augustine tries to reconstruct his own infancy: “What then was my sin at that age? Was it perhaps that I cried so greedily for those breasts? Certainly if I behaved like that now, greedy not for breasts, of course, but for food suitable to my age, I should provoke derision and be very properly rebuked. My behavior then was equally deserving of rebuke.”
And of course the tantrums. Witness “the actions of a child who begs tearfully for objects that would harm him if given, gets into a tantrum when free persons, older persons and his parents, will not comply with his whims, and tries to hurt many people who know better by hitting out at them as hard as his strength allows, simply because they will not immediately fall in with his wishes or obey his commands, which would damage him if carried out?” The little rotter.
Not to forget what kids do to diapers.
Thus, Augustine concludes, “The only innocent feature in babies is the weakness of their frames; the minds of infants are far from innocent.”
Supposing that babies are wicked, the next question is: How did they come to be so?
Western religions start the sordid story with Adam and Eve, but original sin is a puzzle. How can later generations be held responsible for the mistakes of the earlier? A cross-generational collectivism is necessary, and it needs a method for the guilt to be transmitted from one generation to the next.
Here’s a possibility. On standard religious accounts, a human being is an immaterial soul conjoined to a physical body. So sin originates either in the soul or in the body. But if the soul of each person is made afresh by God, then it can’t be corrupt since God is supposed to be a perfect creator. So the source of sin must be in the body. That could make sense, since the original sin was committed by Adam and Eve and we could inherit it from them by being made by their bodies through sexual reproduction. But above Augustine clearly holds babies’ “frames” to be innocent and to locate the sin in their minds.
So we’re back to sin’s source being in the mind. What feature of the mind could be problematic? Free will, Augustine suggests. But other problems arise, since he is also committed elsewhere to God’s omnipotence and omniscience. If God is omnipotent and we are made weak and powerless, how can we be held responsible? Also, free will is a power; but if omnipotent God has all the power, then humans can’t have any. Further: if God is omniscient, then he knows the future, in which case there are no genuine options and so no free will.
But the philosophical puzzles don’t get babies off the hook for Augustine. Their sinful natures develop for the worse until adolescence generates even more sin. “From the mud of my fleshly desires and my erupting puberty belched out murky clouds that obscured and darkened my heart until I could not distinguish the calm light of love from the fog of lust.”
Greed, anger, lust, and the full panoply of sins thus become the lot of weakling mankind. And we know what awaits the wicked.
Intellectual systems and movements are defined philosophically by means of their characteristic claims in the five major branches of philosophy: metaphysics, epistemology, human nature, ethics, and politics. As historical movements, they are defined by the time of their formulation and most vigorous activity.
So in the following table I offer a definitions of pre-modernism and modernism, each with the implicit genus “philosophical system” and a five-dimensional differentia.
[This chart is from Chapter 1 of Stephen Hicks's Explaining Postmodernism: Skepticism and Socialism from Rousseau to Foucault (Scholargy Publishing, 2004, 2011). The full book is available in hardcover or e-book at Amazon.com. See also the Explaining Postmodernism page.]
In my Introduction to Philosophy course we are reading Sigmund Freud’s Civilization and Its Discontents. In Chapter 5, Freud makes the following strong claim about human nature:
“Men are not gentle creatures who want to be loved, and who at the most can defend themselves if they are attacked; they are, on the contrary, creatures among whose instinctual endowments is to be reckoned a powerful share of aggressiveness. As a result, their neighbor is for them not only a potential helper or sexual object, but also someone who tempts them to satisfy their aggressiveness on him, to exploit his capacity for work without compensation, to use him sexually without his consent, to seize his possessions, to humiliate him, to cause him pain, to torture and kill him. Homo homini lupus [Man is a wolf to man]” (68).
Aggression, slavery, rape, theft, sadism, and murder as the center of human nature.
Freud is not making the innocuous claim that we can experience aggressive and anti-social urges. He is making the strong claim that such anti-social urges are inborn and dominant in us.
By contrast, Freud believes, our rational and cooperative capacities are much weaker: “instinctual passions are stronger than reasonable interests.” Consequently, mankind’s history is dominated by crime, war, and atrocity, and “civilized society is perpetually threatened with disintegration” (69). The modest successes of civilization are a tenuously fragile veneer over a mutually predatory intra-species conflict. “Who,” Freud asks, “in the face of all his experience of life and history, will have the courage to dispute this assertion?”
I do; and there are lots of issues worth following up there, but in this post I want to make one sideways connection to another book we read in the course, C. S. Lewis’s Mere Christianity.
Freud is an atheist who disparages the Christian tradition and Lewis is a theist who defends the Christian tradition, but they are in marked agreement in their assessment of human nature.
Go back to the Garden of Eden in the story of Genesis. God has created a place of ease and loveliness and left Adam and Eve free to enjoy it. In their first independent act, they steal from the Tree of Knowledge. In the next generation, Cain envies Abel and murders him. The book of Genesis carries on through several generations until the time of Noah, when “the LORD saw that the wickedness of man was great in the earth, and that every imagination of the thoughts of his heart was only evil continually” (Genesis 6:5).
God is so disgusted with what his creatures have wrought that he wipes them out (even the children) and starts over with Noah. But the humans pick right up where they left off and continue their wicked ways — more theft and murder and deceit and war and every form of nastiness. That is Original Sin: the innate badness in man dominates his existence.
Freud has a secular version of the same view of human nature.
As Lewis puts it in Mere Christianity in commenting directly on Freud’s views, “But psychoanalysis itself … is not in the least contradictory to Christianity” (p. 88). Lewis notes there are metaphysical differences between the Christians and the Freudians — the Christians add a God and a rather ineffectual immortal soul to their ontology — but their view of human nature in action is the same.
On this issue, the key divide is not between dualists and physicalists but between the pessimists (e.g., Freud, the Christians) and the optimists (e.g., Socrates, Rand) about the raw material of human nature.
Posted 2 years, 2 months ago at 3:22 pm. 1 comment
As part of an invited lecture series, I led several seminars on the topic The Best Arguments against Free-market Capitalism. The format is Socratic and the participants are professors at my host, Francisco Marroquín University. 
Stephen Hicks here introduces the five foundational issues of human nature. This is from Part 4 of Professor Hicks’s 
