The Alternative Tradition
Wilson Carey McWilliams
Professor, Political Science, Rutgers University
June 25, 1977

I suppose I should begin by telling a story that is one of the reasons I got into political theory in the first place. I'd just gone into graduate school--it is 1958. 1t was the first time in 70 years we elected a Democratic Governor in California--Pat Brown, the father of the present Governor. He beat Bill Knowland--carried 56 counties--won by about a million votes. After the election, we had a dinner for Pat with a bunch of intellectuals who had supported him. And my friend Stanford Lyman, now at the New School, was sitting next to Brown, talking about the election. Finally,Brown turned to him and said, "Mr.
Lyman, what I want to know is, why is it every time I talk to a social scientist, he tells me how to get elected. God damn it--I know how to get elected. I have just won the Governorship of this State by a million votes. What I want to know from social-scientists is now that I am elected, what in God's name do I do?"

That struck me as a significant question, one which most social scientists-haven't addressed--and certainly which all the skills that I've learned about political activity and about political organizing have not really addressed in any way that is satisfactory. One of the questions that struck me as most interesting in this afternoon's discussion was the question of whether all values might disappear in ten years. I'm not sure that it wouldn't be better if they would. Because the problem is not that we're not going to have values in ten years. We're going to have lots of values...oodles of values. This economy and society generates values at a rate even faster than it generates bad automobiles and air pollution. It generates a mass attack on philosophy and on values of a kind which previous tyrants could not have imagined. Not so long ago the Coca Cola Corporation announced that its product was noumenon--the real thing--thereby solving that problem of philosophy. Miss Clairol has been telling us that there is an interesting phenomenon known as, "natural hair dye"--which is a mind boggling concept all by itself.

One of the things we have to face about this society is the extent to which there is a powerful public dimension which generates statements about values, theories about values, assertions about values and first principles. There is a world of political metaphysics in the dominant society. And this world is taught all the time, constantly, and it is taught to very young people. You can't deal with the statistic that we recently got access to that the average young American child now watches 400 television commercials per week without recognizing the assault that is made through the dominant institutions, through the
media, through the economy, through the life of this society on people's lives.

The problem is not that there aren't values. The problem is that there is not an alternative to the dominant set of values. Or certainly, if there is an alternative, it has lost the coherence that it once had, the organization that it once had. When an organizer touches the almost geologic strain of alternative values in America, he has to recognize that that's what has happened--that there is a kind of geology; that you suddenly strike a level where people did have an alternative tradition and a way of seeing things which has increasingly become incoherent, inaccessible, inarticulate, and consequently not available for political life. What seems to be the meeting point of the organizer and the educator is that whatever their differences, they are both engaged, or ought to be engaged, in rendering this alternative tradition articulate, coherent, and available to people. That doesn't mean they have to agree with it. They just have to agree that it would be sort of nice if people were not trapped by the dominant school of things.

Let me just talk a little bit about this kind of alternative, which certainly did characterize American politics in the past--characterized it at the time of the American Revolution. We have been told often enough that the American Revolution was devoted to the ideals of individual liberty; and that individual liberty and the pursuit of gain is the American way. But, after all, in 1776, Sam Adams set it down that his goal for the United States was for it to be a Christian Sparta. If you read individual liberty and the pursuit of gain in that, your intellectual history needs some correction. That image says restraint, authority, self-discipline. It's a quite different tradition, but remember that in 1776, it was this tradition that looked radical, revolutionary, and popular. And the tradition of individualism, private gain, and so forth, was perceived for what it was--a tradition dominantly of the cities, dominantly of the elites, dominantly of the literatti--of those who had been educated in new and fashionable currents, and who believed --then, as now--that any view other than theirs was the product of force and fraud.

I think that we have to recognize that this alternative, this sense of another possible organization for America, was a live one down through most of our political history. I want to talk a little bit about some of the distinctions that are involved.

For the dominant school of thought that shaped our institutions --the Constitution, for example--and that shapes our political thinking today-a school which Louis Hartz called, "irrational Lockeianism"--there is no question that human beings are born free. They are born, in this tradition, with no moral limits outside the self. That's what one means by, "born free." There are no natural moral limits, there are no natural moral rules. Indeed, there are no moral ru1es at all. What exists by nature is the desiring, yearning, passionate, willing, acquiring self, that wishes to impose its will on all things around it.

What is the first principle of nature? James Madison says it is, "the external and inexorable law of self-preservation," which is the first premise of all science and all philosophy. So for Madison; so, for a great many. Man, in their view, is self-seeking, self-preserving, concerned to maximize his private satisfactions, his gains, the satisfaction of his desires. Human beings have desires which are, in principle, infinite--or so this school sees them. And if you don't doubt that people still do, read an elementary economics text. It will tell you that there are no such things as surpluses, there are only surpluses at
given prices. Why is that? Because people are infinitely acquisitive . They would like seven billion match boxes, if only the price were low enough. That this sounds silly doesn't keep people from believing it. As you know, intellectuals can believe anything, given enough time. Since people have desires that are, in principle, infinite, it means that they are constantly at war with nature. It means that they are constantly at war with one another. At least, by nature they are at war with one another.

The whole elaboration of the dominant theory of American institutions goes on to say that human beings learn at some point that it is impractical--that it lacks utility for them to be constantly bashing one another, because one doesn't get very far that way. The life of man, Hobbes said, would be nasty, mean, poor, brutish and short. But the argument goes that people consequently combine and form organizations as contrivances. Politics is not natural. Social life is not natural. It is a contrivance--a convention--designed, as Thoreau was to say, for the device of letting one another alone--for shutting people out of one another's lives. For saying, in effect, I will not attack you.

Some way or another society, or public life, excludes violence. It allows us to pursue our private, individual gains. And secondly, --and never leave out secondly--it allows us to combine for the delightful purpose of despoiling others. There is still a third one--it permits us to engage in almost the only positive goal set down in the Constitution of the United States for government--the pursuit of science and the useful arts. Because if there is some question about how human beings ought to behave toward one another, there is no doubt in that dominant tradition that human beings are at war with and ought to seek mastery over nature.

What you have is a picture of human beings, yearning for mastery, yearning for power--power after power until death. Hobbes said, and so they saw it. Yearning for a kind of control that would allow them the assurance that nature, the natural condition, denied them: of a complete and immediate self-satisfaction to the extent that one can get it--a world without frustration; a world without limitations; ultimately, a world without death. The displacement of limitations--a world of total private, individual satisfaction--consequently becomes the goal of human life. Government is considered valuable to the extent that it contributes to the progressive realization of this goal; and not, to the extent that it does not.

Law--what is law? It is a device like all others--a device by which bad men, bad human beings, who have not reasoned through this theory, are constrained. And other people, of course, are constrained to read the law, are constrained to think of the law, are constrained to think of their relationships to the law as bad men think of them. Not, in those eloquent words which Justice Holmes rather literarily spoke of laws as beauties; but of a kind of practical necessity--of a conventional life, a life lived conventionally, designed to maximize private satisfactions.  Now as soon as you start defining the way that the framers--the authors of the Federalist; the dominant intellectuals of the 18th Century--talked about these things, it becomes quite clear how powerful the alternative tradition is, because most of us don't really agree with their argument. There is something wrong with the dominant formulation. The fascinating thing, however, is that when we are asked to think about public or political questions, the'view of politics that I have just outlined--of politics as fundamentally a set of external checks upon power; power balancing power; a utilitarian set of contrivances enabling us to let one another alone; to maximize power; to pursue the war against nature--that's still the way we think about politics.

Six or seven years ago, the College where I teach got a bunch of self-selected, self-named radicals together--radical students, radical faculty--sat them down together in the middle of New Jersey and said, "This is a radical institution. Design a set of institutions." You know what they came up with? A two house legislature--checks and balances. Indeed, with a judiciary designed to watch carefully over the behavior of the two other houses. And so forth and so on. Radical thought about politics, when it doesn't stop with John Locke, goes a stage further and carries into the theory of John C. Calhoun--with various authorities checking one another, and balancing one al;other, and so forth and so on.

Now contrast this with the theory upon which most of American society operates. Obviously, part of what I'm talking about is a religious theory, but it's not just the churches that were organized this way. The churches taught and articulated a view of human beings and a view of society which was planted in a whole private order of institutions--planted in the family, planted in the local community, ,in local economies, in the day-to-day life of ordinary people. And to a very large degree, still is, because for the ordinary life--that ordered kind of life--survives.

This traditional view sees human beings born, not free, but subject--that it is the nature of human beings to be born into a world in which they are dependent. Not inter-dependent--notice that weasel word. They are dependent They need and depend upon one another, on authorities, on things that were given--unasked. Human beings live in a world of indebtedness--and, hence, are obliged. Their world and life is given, as their name was given. They are supplied and given throughout a period of nurturance. In a way, their merits, their abilities, have nothing to do with it, for they could not survive without this dependence. Human beings are naturally part of a world of social relations and obligations, and a universe of laws which are obligatory on individuals. The natural state of the people in that alternative tradition, then, is to owe, to be obliged, to be dependent, to live in a world of society.

Freedom, for the alternative tradition, is something which has to be learned--and which consequently has to be earned. Because the ordinary person, the person born simply into the world, or so the alternative tradition sees it--does not understand freedom. The self-willing, self-preserving, self-seeking person of the liberal tradition is not a free person. The argument goes something like this:

To will to live forever; to will be be preserved forever; to will to be freed of limitations is to will to be something other than what human beings are or can be. To hate the limitations on the mortal self, to hate its mortality, is consequently, to hate the self; and to regard onesself as in prison, and a hateful prison at that--to regard the self as hateful. The aim of those who would live forever, who would master nature is, in fact, to destroy the self rather than to free it.

Therefore, for the alternative tradition, beings are never more free than when they will to sacrifice for others and when they will that ultimate sacrifice which is their own death. Because in that ultimate act of freedom they cease to be merely functions--predictable on the basis of their desires. To the extent, you see, that you let Adam Smith define your nature, and you do become a self-seeking, acquisitive animal concerned with maximizing your material interests, you become safely predictable. Even economists can understand you then, The whole point is that human beings are tricksy-tricksy, and there is an extent to which when they act freely, economists do not
understand them.

Let me tell you a story that Mark Twain told. It's a story called, "The Turning Point of My Life." Twain was asked to write on this rather sappy subject by Harper's Magazine at a time when he needed the money, so he wrote it. He described how the turning point of his life was when Caesar crossed the Rubicon. It was an example of marvellously iron Twainian determinism. He proves how Caesar's crossing the Rubicon inevitably led to Mark Twain writing this article. He says, "Well, I should really go back to Adam, but Harper's has only given me 5,000 words, so I had to stop with Caesar."

Then Twain goes on to describe his early life at a point when he got the measles. His mother, acting according to the codes of the time, shut the door to the room so it would be dark, and so would be a restful atmosphere, and she went downstairs and played hymns on the organ. "Then surely," Twain said, he decided that life on these miserable terms was not Worth living, and he couldn't stand being alone. He went next door, and he got in bed with a friend who had the disease and said, "There. Now I've got it over with, and it will be done with." And, indeed, Twain did get the disease, and he goes on talking about this at great length in his article. And at the end of the article he says, "And so, gentle reader, you will notice that the turning point of my life was that I got measles when I was twelve years old." Indeed so. What he's telling us is that by getting measles
when you're twelve--by deciding that life on certain terms is not worth living--you become free. As long as you believe that life is worth living on any terms, you are not a free person. You're a predictable function. So the alternative tradition always saw it. It said that human beings are free to the extent that they can sacrifice anything--their illusions, their property, their self-conceit, and ultimately, their lives.

To the alternative tradition, correspondingly, the economic logic of things was austerity, because it sought inward growth, not external expansion. And consequently, it taught us that we should live according to the limits of nature--that we should pursue a law which is naturally right to the exclusion of our concern for natural rights. In a similar sense, politics was for the alternative tradition profoundly natural. The law and public institutions were designed to shape, perfect, and encourage the moral and civic character of human beings

 The alternative tradition understood, in ways that we do not, that law always has such an impact. There is no such thing as an amoral law, or a neutral law. All law educates morally. What, in God's name, does it do to say if you move forty miles in the United States, the federal government allows you to take a tax exemption for the cost, except to say that the government of the United States regards mobility as a desirable goal? When did the government of the United States say that if you've lived in an inner city neighborhood for ten years, you ought to be able to deduct the depreciation on your property? The only way to deduct it is by selling your property and moving out. But there's somehow something rather self-destructive when, in fact, we say, via the tax law, that mobility is desirable; and stability,undesirable. All laws teach moral lessons and what the alternative tradition wanted us to do was to have laws that taught good moral lessons, and not bad ones. Perhaps not a very profound point, but one which is, nonetheless, at odds with the dominant tradition.

It also said to us that justice was substantive--that going into courts, which had attorneys for both sides; in which there a jury; indeed, in which the Miranda rule had been observed, in which judges were fair, and so forth, was really not equivalent to justice. Somehow, justice did not take place until the guilty were punished, and the innocent, acquitted. It should not have taken Mario Puzo to remind us of this fact in the first chapters of the Godfather.

In the same way, there's a profound difference between these two traditions in the way that they treat equalitv. It's significant enough to deserve comment. Equality for the dominant, liberal tradition is a rule of treatment. It says we should be treated equally before the law. But if you look carefully at Locke, Hobbes, or the Framers, you'll discover that they didn't really believe we were equal at all. They believed it was a necessity. In the state of nature, we are all equally free--in the sense that we are not morally bound to one another. And we are all roughly equal in power. Hobbes said that the weakest had
the strength to kill the strongest, whether by secret machinations, or by confederacy. Even the strong go to sleep sometimes--you can drop a rock on their head. Therefore, in order to get people to accept civil society-- to get them to accept this contrivance of the law--the contrivance of politics--you have to treat them as if they were equal. And once in society, thank God, all the real inequalities will emerge--the inequalities of intelligence, of ability, of moral virtue. But for the liberal tradition, and certainly for those who framed our institutions, it's equality that defines public institutions as unnatural and second-rate. Because they are based on the untrue, false, conventional, but necessary, doctrine of equal treatment.

In the traditional view, in a very profound sense, human beings are equal. They are equal in moral worth. They are essentially equal, if you like, for all of their accidental differences. They are not the same--no one ever said, as Chesterton pointed out, that human beings are equally tall or equally tricky or whatever. But they are essentially equal morally. And that means in an internal and profoundly true sense which has to do with their dignity--with what way that they are treated; with the sense of emotional sharing and collective sense of themselves, which goes into the making of political community.Aristotle criticized an egalitarian of his time, because, he said, it is more important to harmonize and equalize the desires of men than to equalize their properties. Because, Aristotle went on to say, why equalize their properties without equalizing their desires. All you'll have is a lot of resentful people who are equal in property, which won't last long. If you would harmonize their desires, and make them equal, it may turn out to be unnecessary to equalize their properties. People who have a genuine sense of common sharing and of equal worth will not resent the functional inequalities that may have to exist in any ordered society. It has not come to my attention that on a good
football team, guards resent the fact that quarterbacks give orders. And the definition, in some ways, of a good football team, is that the equal dignity of people is respected whatever the exterior differences of station. 

The alternative tradition was not egalitarian as we understand it, in many ways. It certainly made room for powerful inequalities of treatment. But in very important ways, it insisted on a kind of respect, a kind of sense of sharing, an emotional perception of unity, which we have deeply lost, and which we suffer for the loss of. After all, De Tocqueville spoke of a certain depraved taste for equality. By this he meant the person who says, "Since I cannot get to be superior to you, I will settle for equality." That's what the dominant tradition does. It says in public, "You are no better than me ;" and in private, "I am really better than you." You are not allowed to claim superiority, but I accept equality only because I despair of being a master. Because for the dominant tradition, it is mastery and not equality that's the goal. For the alternative tradition, freedom and equality were perhaps the highest mysteries--not things men were born with, but things that they
learned. And, perhaps, the ultimate mysteries of human existence.

You can see these two traditions arguing in the language of the Declaration of Independence. Notice how carefully Jefferson was steered away from a pure theory of natural rights. He knew that the alternative religious tradition was a powerful force, so he stuck in that nice weasle Protestant word, "instituted." "God made us naturally political, but he left it to us to institute governments." So if you go through all of that great litany of the Declaration, you'll find the strange phenomenon of an alternative tradition making its claim in public language being felt even in these fundamental documents of our lives.

I think the problem is simply this: the earliest framers of our institutions assumed that there would always be a private order of families, of churches, and of local communities--powerful; coherent; close to the individual; shaping that individual's fundamental moral and social orientations. And because they took it for granted,they worried much more about the self-evident fact that this private order of families, churches, and communities can be and sometimes is repressive.

But they never doubted that it was necessary to provide the substantive moral orientation for human beings who would live in a liberal society. John Adams said, "our institutions are designed for a moral and religious people, and are utterly unsuited to the government of any other." It was exactly what DeTocqueville meant later on when he said of Americans, "their customs were vastly more important than their laws." It was not simply that Americans had a liberal constitutional instrument, which as De Tocqueville pointed out, Mexico had copied in 1824. It lasted through one Presidential term. What De Tocqueville said, in effect, was that to understand the working of American institutions you have to go beyond the laws to those customs rooted in society that form the substantive heritage of American life.

What I think we have to recognize is that we have come to a point where it is no longer sufficient to say, as the Framers said, "Well, society will always take care of itself. It will always be powerful--close to the individual--performing a dominant educational role." It seems to me clearer and clearer that it's not, and that at this point, society--churches, families, local communities--need the active help and support of government in doing their job. They need state activity which is not hostile to them.

The problem is that our formal institutions are shaped in a tradition that always defines the role of government as hostile. It always is in a position in which at best, it tolerates the private order, but, more often, it breaks the private order up in the name of individual liberty--to free us for a life as one citizen among 200 million. And it doesn't take a great course in social science methods to realize that a free, single
individual--one out of 200 million--is statistically insignificant.

Our public institutions are designed to free us for insignificance, rather than permitting public government to create, or strengthen, or reconstruct, a private order in which we would gain at least some alternative sense of moral orientation in the society. They are particularly unsuited to providing a sense of continuity--a sense that communities continue beyond the self--beyond the immediate family. A community is not a thing created for now and tomorrow; but it is created for long periods of time. Indeed, so far as human prudence can contrive. It's a bond of people which endures, and for which sacrifice is valuable and meaningful and significant and worthwhile.

One of the great problems in this society is that it is no longer true, as it was in the 1950's, that we merely cannot find people who are willing to sacrifice for the common good of America as a whole. It is difficult to find people who are willing to sacrifice for the common good of families. We are even uncertain as to whether the family, that most intimate of all institutions, is worthwhile. And if this is true--if sacrifice for the next generation is uncertain--then certainly sacrifice for that
much broader public order, in which I'm necessarily insignificant, is uncertain. Somehow, the sense of continuity that there is a reasonable relationship between the present and the future, and between the future and the past, has to be established in our public institutions, in our social life, and, I would suggest', in our law.

I think that we have to recognize that people do live in a world of incomprehensibility; of insignificance; meaninglessness; a world which, in some cases, is a world of terror. And without a public order which respects and a private order which can teach some kind of more coherent and more secure view of the world--which can give people the sense of alternatives and choices--that world of terror, I suspect, is going to be with us for some time.

In America, in a country like the United States--principles and doctrines have always been important. You cannot feel the United States. It is too vast, by far to be taken into the small human heart. If you want to move beyond local communities, beyond the Trash Abatement Leagues, and the concerns to have hassled your local policeman--if you want to deal with the country as a whole, you must deal with abstractions and you must deal with the classroom and you must deal with formal education, because that's the only way it can be apprehended. That is why local community organizers have fallen on their face time after time, because they can't move beyond the local Trash Abatement League to deal with the phenomenon of the United States, which is a damn sight more than 565,000 local neighborhoods.

The phenomenon I think we have to deal with is how coherence is provided; how people learn to see and how they feel secure that the private world in which they live, the local world in which they live, not only makes sense to them locally--as I think it must--but is heard, and respected, and carries power at national and state levels. It once did. And I suspect that with the reconstruction of society--and it requires virtually nothing less than that--it could again. But certainly it requires a radical change in our attitude to society. It requires a recognition that a whole set of institutions that we once thought of as essentially private--not matters for government to interfere with--things to be left alone--matters only for society--are matters that now need the nurturance of government; and, indeed, the nurturance of all of us, if we are to return to the kind of dynamism that informed our public life in the past.

One last story--because it's designed to illustrate the kind of lovely dynamism that used to exist between public and private orders. You know, in the 18th Century, John Adams, when he defended Captain Preston on the matter of the Boston Massacre, fell back on the defense that Captain Preston and the British troops at the Boston Massacre had acted in self-defense.

And Adams expatiated at great length on John Locke's doctrine of self-preservation. He said that Locket had argued--and here he was quoting Locke correctly--that if there were two men clinging to a plank in the open ocean, one would have the right to push the other off to save himself, even if he were his own brother, he said. And Adams looked at his audience and he said, "And for this doctrine of the absolute right of self-preservation, I would lay down my right arm--nay, my own life!"

Well, it's out of magnificent contradictions like that that the great moments of American politics happened, and I would like to see us have a chance to restore as many of them as possible. .