Our broad ideals of equality and toleration, individual freedom and scientific advancement, are accompanied by three prejudices about the nature of human beings and the conditions of human fulfillment. These are so widely shared and casually accepted that we barely notice them. They are affirmed with an arrogant self-confidence that puts them beyond the range of debatable propositions. They appear to belong to our ideals themselves—to be part of them and to possess the same authority. The first of our prejudices is that equality is the highest of all values. The second is that we have no reason to honor the past for its own sake. The third is that religion is a matter of personal opinion.
In each case, we need to separate the prejudice from the ideal to which it seems so closely joined and diagnose the damage it does to our humanity. This is more difficult than it seems. Our prejudices are masked by the appeal of the enlightened ideals in whose company they travel. They are hidden by the glare of our brilliant achievements. Yet the pride we properly take in our ideals blinds us to the ways in which our prejudices make the humane age in which we live so strangely inhuman.
When the young French nobleman Alexis de Tocqueville visited the United States in the early 1830s, he was astonished by the extreme “equality of conditions” he observed. He was struck by the fluidity of wealth and social standing that made America a scene of constant motion. What most impressed him, though, was the supreme importance that many of those he met, both rich and poor, assigned to the ideal of human equality. They recognized, as anyone must, that there are grades of achievement in almost every human pursuit—that some are better farmers, doctors, mechanics, traders, and teachers than others. But they emphatically denied the existence of a rank order among human beings in general and insisted that all men and women are entitled to a meaningful measure of equal respect. This seemed to Tocqueville the moral and political cornerstone of the new civilization aborning in America.
There were, of course, striking exceptions. Many considered Blacks and American Indians less than fully human. The position of women was equivocal, at once exalted and unseen. Tocqueville was sensitive to the condition of all three groups and wrote about each at length. But the new American ideal of equality was more important, he thought, than the exceptions to it—in part because it armed critics with a norm to challenge those exceptions.
The ideal of equality that inspired the fight against slavery and later for women’s rights sprang from the same belief that lay at the heart of American democracy in the 1830s. It rested on the conviction that there is no class or caste of human beings that is superior to others simply and without qualification—no group that is better on account of its overall condition or status. That such a class or caste exists and is entitled to the obedience and respect of lesser men and women was the premise of the aristocratic societies of nineteenth-century Europe, of their feudal predecessors, and of the civilizations of classical antiquity. The new order of values that Tocqueville discovered in America begins with the repudiation of that age-old belief.
Tocqueville saw America as the leading edge of a global revolution. He prophesied that its ideal of human equality would transform the older societies of Europe and, in time, the rest of the world. Events have largely borne him out. There have been convulsive, bloody campaigns to restore the idea of inequality to a commanding position in the order of human values. The Confederacy fought for it in the American Civil War; the Nazis nearly destroyed Europe for its sake. But these great reactionary movements, and many lesser ones, have been defeated, if at immense cost.
The restoration of a social order based on the belief that some human beings are indelibly inferior to others, not in this or that particular respect but altogether, is logically conceivable. We can imagine it happening, though today the prospect seems remote. Even the populist movements that have roiled American and European politics in recent years affirm the ideal of human equality. They merely interpret it differently from the liberal elites whose cultural values they angrily challenge. The fight between them is over the meaning of equality, not its authority as a value. The ideal of human equality is here to stay.
Its most important practical corollary is that every adult ought to have an equal say in the political affairs of his or her community. We now take the principle of universal suffrage for granted. In America and elsewhere, constitutional arrangements slow and deflect the immediate expression of popular will. The practice of judicial review is a striking example. But none of these devices challenge the fundamental assumption that, whatever their level of ability in other respects, all citizens are equally competent to form and express their views about matters of public concern and entitled to have their votes weighed equally with others’.
It is common, of course, to grumble about the ignorance and venality of those with whom one disagrees. But few openly say that some should be deprived of the right to vote because of their lack of intelligence or virtue. Those who want to restrict the franchise always fly under a different flag. Whatever their secret motive, they give lip service, at least, to the ideal of human equality, whose authority is at a maximum in the area of political and civil rights, including, most importantly, the right to vote.
Here, the ideal does a great deal of good. It is a counterweight to privilege and an antidote to pretension. It protects against abuse and exploitation. It honors our sense of solidarity with all who share the human condition. As a practical matter, the principle of universal suffrage is the only one on which a large and diverse society can approach, even distantly, the goal of democratic self-rule.
All this belongs on the positive side of the ledger. But Tocqueville worried that the principle of human equality has a destructive aspect too. Even as he applauded the spirit of egalitarianism that had given birth to a society “more just” than the aristocracies of Europe, he protested against the extension of the principle of equality beyond the realm of politics and law to that of cultural fabrication and enjoyment. Here, Tocqueville insists, the belief that no human being is superior to any other encourages a leveling of appraisal and appreciation in which distinctions of beauty and character become more difficult to acknowledge and perhaps even to see.
People often disagree about what constitutes excellence in a particular pursuit—fly-fishing, for example, or welding or the practice of law—but there is no moral awkwardness in praising it. Achievement of this sort is what distinguishes experts from incompetents and beginners. If there is even a modest tension between the judgment of rank implied by such distinctions and the principle of universal equality, it is dulled by the limited nature of the first, which always exists within a circumscribed field.
The ideal of human equality is more directly challenged by the belief that some men and women stand out on account of the superiority of their character or the splendor of their lives as a whole—of the closeness with which they approach a state of human greatness or realized power. The judgment that they do has an aristocratic look. Less controversially, one might say that it expresses a “perfectionist” ideal. However one describes it, the affirmation of superiority in this sense assumes the existence of a hierarchy among human beings that reflects their differing success not in this or that particular activity but in what Aristotle calls the “work” of being human. Collaterally, it assumes a similar order in their literary and artistic works, the beauty of art differing from the utility of a tool in the same way that nobility of character differs from expertise—as a kind of splendor that rises above the demands of all local pursuits to reveal something general and lasting about ourselves and the world.
Tocqueville believed in the existence of this hierarchy among persons and things. He believed that its denial or suppression can only produce a world that is thin, banal, unfulfilling—inhuman in an elementary sense. He shared this belief with many others, then and since, some of whom have been the sworn enemies of the new egalitarian order he admired.
What sets Tocqueville apart is his qualified verdict. When it comes to voting and the law and perhaps even the distribution of resources—though this is more controversial—the principle of equality takes precedence. It is not the only principle at work even here, but it comes before every other. It is the first and highest of political values.
In the realm of culture, though, it has a destructive effect. It devalues what ought to be honored and invites a spirit of plebiscitarian rule where judgments of rank should prevail. In the moral realm, which stands between that of culture and politics, of beauty and justice, the principle of universal equality simplifies the work of judgment by reducing all questions of proper behavior to those of duty and right, draining the notion of character (which bears a resemblance to the idea of beauty) of much of its ethical force.
Tocqueville worried that the sweeping egalitarianism he encountered in America was likely to encourage a casual and often mindless extension of the principle of equality from the realm of politics, where it belongs, to that of culture, where it does not. The extension happens when equality is asserted to be the highest of all values, not in this or that domain but absolutely, universally, in every human pursuit. The abstractness of the idea invites the extension. If we accept the priority of equality in one sphere, why not in every other? The burden shifts to those who would resist it.
In a democratic society, the belief that equality is the value that justifies and explains every other has a hydraulic force that promotes its authority in all departments of life. To many this belief is a “self-evident” truth, but in reality it is a prejudice. A commitment to full equality before the law and to greater equality in the distribution of resources does not entail it. It is perfectly possible to be an enthusiastic egalitarian in these respects but reject the idea that equality is first among goods in the realm of culture and the only or even principal one in the sphere of moral judgment. Neither logic nor duty compels it. This is not, moreover, an unimportant confusion. The belief that equality occupies the highest rung in the explanatory order of values is a threat to human fulfillment. This was Tocqueville’s somber, at times despairing, judgment. Many readers of Democracy in America may wish to forget it, but if they do they miss the most unsettling truth of his wise and balanced book.
Tocqueville was particularly concerned about the fate of institutions of high culture—those devoted to knowledge, taste, connoisseurship, and refinement. These depend on the acceptance of an order of perfection among works and personalities. Can the appreciation of this order survive in a society that puts equality before all other values? Tocqueville feared that the coming age would be one of more and better-protected rights but of mediocrity too, an age in which the splendid and rare is reduced to a level with the undistinguished and common.
There is an obvious response to Tocqueville’s anxiety. So long as culture remains a realm of personal pursuits and private enjoyments, no problem arises. Trouble begins only when exaltation and splendor assert their authority in public life. This leads to subordination, enslavement, or worse. To prevent this, the claims of high culture and the values of political life must be kept strictly apart. Even within the realm of high culture, we need to remind ourselves from time to time that equality is the highest of all values. Doing so is a kind of preventive medicine.
This sounds reasonable, but it contains a poison pill. The moment judgments of excellence are subjected to this kind of egalitarian supervision, the realm of culture, instead of being tolerantly indulged, becomes a venue for the vindication of the principle of equality itself. It becomes ripe for colonization in the name of equality. The judgment “She is an outstanding human being and he an ordinary one” or “This work is beautiful and that one coarse or kitschy” loses its authority and is met with the morally devastating reply, “That is your opinion; you are entitled to it; I feel otherwise; we should agree to disagree.” In this way, the principle of equality extends its sway over the dominion of beauty and truth, sapping them of their power to command our admiration and deference—as it should, say those for whom the value of equality is the measure by which every other must be judged.
Tocqueville rightly saw that institutions of high culture are jeopardized by an over-extension of the principle of human equality, driven by the prejudice that equality is not merely a good but the highest one, sovereign among values. But he failed to see that even where equality comes first in practical terms (as it does in law and politics), it never comes first in the order of explanation. If equality is good, here or anywhere else, that is because it is good for the pursuit of some other, higher good on whose account we assign equality the derivative value we do. The only way to unseat the prejudice that equality is the highest of all values is to install excellence on the throne of sovereignty instead.
Rather than allowing equality to put excellence in its place, the order must be reversed. This leaves plenty of room for the enthusiastic endorsement of most forms of legal and political equality and a commitment to greater fairness in the distribution of wealth and opportunity but blocks the hegemonic extension of the principle of equality to other dimensions of life on the grounds that it is the highest of all values in the order of justification. The suggestion sounds extravagant, but nothing less will do. More half-hearted measures are too weak to counter the reduction of culture to politics that is the most destructive effect of the first of the three prejudices that darken our enlightened ideals.
Every society progresses and conserves. We move forward, adapting as circumstances require. We try to make the best of things under continually changing conditions. In the process, we ourselves change. Yet every new departure draws on whatever resources we already possess. These have to be conserved to be of any use at all. No society stands still or starts from nothing.
In this elementary sense, we are all progressives and conservatives, not by choice but by necessity. Before we have begun to reflect on the meaning of these terms, or to ask where our allegiance lies, human nature has enrolled us in both parties. Many eventually do ask, though. The question arises in a natural way.
Even our most primitive plans employ the power of reason. A plan is a reflective strategy for using the inheritance of the past to attain some future result. It is a common if not irresistible extension of this power to ask how the future is related to the past, not in this or that particular case but in general. The answers we give begin to divide us into the parties we conventionally call “progressive” and “conservative.”
Progressives say that yesterday exists for the sake of today and tomorrow. Where the past is a help, we should exploit it; where it stands in the way, we must discard it. Where its values differ from our own, we should ignore or repudiate them. No one thinks we can live wholly free of the past. From a progressive point of view, though, the practical value of our inheritance depends on its availability as a resource for our present and future needs and its moral value on the degree to which it anticipates the enlightened ideals we now embrace.
The resource may be material—an accumulation of physical capital. It may be intellectual—the storehouse of knowledge built up by earlier thinkers and workers. It may be moral—the ideals of duty and decency to which previous generations subscribed. Whatever the nature of the resource, though, the progressive attitude toward it is one not of reverence but of potential use, and this must always be decided from the standpoint of our current needs and values.
What reason can we have, the progressive asks, to be loyal to the past for its own sake? The past has no dignity or authority of its own. We have no duty to conserve the past or honor the dead unless doing so serves our present purposes. All our moral and practical energies should be directed toward the future. This is the only attitude that makes sense from a progressive point of view.
We need not go far back to find a very different idea of the past. All forms of traditional authority rest on the belief that we should act today as our ancestors did, because they did, and for no other reason. This is the cornerstone of every archaic system of ancestor worship and of the religions of revelation that displaced them, which, whatever their revolutionary potential, begin with the demand that their followers honor the word of God, regardless of its present or future utility, because he spoke it at a decisive moment in the past.
In broad historical terms, the displacement of all such views by the progressive belief that the past has value only as a moral and practical stepping stone to the future is a relative novelty. Its triumph is a consequence, in part, of the rise of modern science, which is a novelty too.
The modern science of nature is only four hundred years old. In this short time, it has reshaped our understanding of the meaning of truth and of the methods for discovering it. Today, the principles of scientific verification are accepted by all. They represent a universally acknowledged standard of objectivity—one that transcends our moral, political, and religious differences. The president of the United States and the supreme leader of Iran may be prepared to take their countries to war because they disagree about democracy and God. But neither doubts the truth of the laws of atomic physics.
One of the premises of scientific research is that the past is valuable only as an aid to the future. We must reject its lessons the minute they are experimentally disproven. A participant in Galileo’s Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems tells the story of a friend who, after having been shown by an anatomist that the nerves originate in the brain rather than the heart, as he had supposed, declares that he would believe what he has seen “if Aristotle’s text were not contrary to it.” The anecdote is meant to illustrate the absurdity of assigning the past any authority of its own in a serious scientific inquiry.
In this sense, modern science is progressive by definition. Today, its assumptions enjoy an unrivaled prestige, largely on account of their astonishing success. The practical and intellectual triumph of scientific research has in turn given the progressive view of the past greater credibility in other realms of human action, including that of politics, where until recently the authority of tradition always carried greater weight.
In the second half of the nineteenth and early part of the twentieth centuries, many European and American reformers, inspired by Enlightenment thinkers as diverse as Condorcet, Bentham, and Marx, insisted on a more scientific approach to the solution of social, economic, and political problems. They envisioned different futures and proposed different strategies for reaching them, but agreed that an enlightened society must be governed by deliberate planning for tomorrow rather than blind obedience to the “eternal yesterday” of traditional norms.
The past, they said, is a catalogue of moral, cultural, and economic experiments. It shows that some work and others do not. But this exhausts its value as a source of inspiration and instruction. Custom and tradition must yield to the rational design of administrative programs and objective methods of review, analogous to those used in a laboratory.
This was the heart of Western liberal progressivism, which in this respect at least resembled the Bolshevism that many of its advocates despised. In the West, progressivism meant a qualified deference to the market and the benefits of competitive pricing. In the Soviet Union, it meant centralized planning. This was a difference of historic importance. But it rested on a shared belief in the need for a scientific approach to the problems of political life—one that treats the past as a stockpile or “standing reserve” whose contents have value only as moral, cultural, intellectual, and physical material to be used or discarded, as reason demands, in the pursuit of a fairer and more prosperous future.
This view draws seemingly irrefutable support from the norms of scientific research, whose authority can be felt in every corner of life. It also makes practical sense. When faced with a political problem, what choice do we have other than to decide what we currently want and believe, and which course will bring us closer to our moral and material goals? In most policy debates, the progressive view of the past is not an option but a necessity. This is true even when progressives say that the satisfaction of our present needs requires the conservation of something from the past, for in that case too, the value of the past is fixed from the standpoint of current requirements. That it seems impossible to proceed in any other way gives the reduction of the past to a storehouse of utilities the appearance of a self-evident truth.
But it is not, at least not when this view of the past, which science commands and the challenges of practical decision-making appear to confirm, is taken to be a general truth about the human condition. That is a prejudice. The belief that we have no reason to honor the past for its own sake may be unavoidable in the precincts of science and policy, but its extension to the whole of human life is required neither by reason nor experience. Like the belief that equality is sovereign among values, it illegitimately elevates an idea that makes sense in certain settings to the status of a universal truth. In the process, it discounts an essential dimension of human fulfillment, which depends on our capacity for friendship with the dead as much as with the living, and on a tempered piety toward their achievements.
A measured friendship of this kind is a condition of family loyalty. It is a part—though only a part—of patriotic devotion. Progressives deride these attachments or redescribe them in ways that strip them of the implication that affection for the dead is ever a proper emotion. But their deracinated portraits show how inhumanly thin the world becomes when we eliminate this feeling from our view of the past and reduce it to what we can use and approve.
Friends take an interest in one another’s well-being for the friend’s sake, not their own. Living friendships fit the pattern. So do our relations with the dead. Any feeling of loyalty to them, however qualified, depends on the friendly assumption that their lives matter to us apart from their serviceability and rectitude as measured by our current needs and values. Even the weakest form of patriotism, constrained by the strongest moral commitments, rests on this assumption.
There is a personal analogue. Integrity is partly a matter of living up to one’s chosen principles, but only partly. It is also a matter of honoring those elements of character that fall on the side of destiny rather than choice—that constitute one’s inheritance. “Honoring” does not mean blind obedience in a personal setting any more than in a political one. Reflection and selection are always involved. But it does mean, in the one case as in the other, an attitude of friendly care for the fate that befalls us. No fully human life is possible without it, for individuals and political communities alike.
The belief that we should approach all the problems of life, as the scientist and policymaker do, in a liberated spirit free from the gratuitous entanglements of fate is a prejudice that works like acid on this attitude of care. It mocks and demeans the instinct of piety, which even in our enlightened age has something to teach us about the conditions of human fulfillment.
The third prejudice, that religion is a matter of personal opinion, is one of the causes (or symptoms) of what Max Weber calls the “disenchantment” of the world—the relegation of religion to the sphere of private belief and the disestablishment of every public institution whose authority depends on its claim to preserve and teach the truth about God.
This is a spur to toleration. The members of a multi-confessional society are more likely to tolerate one another’s religious views if they agree that belief and disbelief are personal choices the state may neither command nor forbid. There is, of course, room for debate. What exactly does the separation of church and state require? The British believe it is compatible with the existence of a national church. The French believe it is incompatible with the wearing of headscarves in public schools. Americans believe it compels the opposite conclusion in both cases. Yet despite these disagreements, there is a broad consensus in the enlightened societies of the modern West that the existence of God is a question of conscience that we must each be left free to answer on our own.
For many, agreement on this point is part of the definition of enlightenment itself. There are still a few defiantly theocratic regimes, like Iran and Saudi Arabia, that reject this consensus. They continue to fight to uphold the public truth of religion in a world increasingly united by an ethic of personal choice. But they are battling against the tide of enlightenment. In the end, they cannot prevail.
This does not mean that religion is bound to disappear as enlightenment spreads. Even in the world’s most progressive societies, churches and believers exist in very large numbers. They are likely to continue to do so for the foreseeable future. Their numbers may even grow, if more seek the comforts of religion as an antidote to the anomie of modern life.
What it does mean is that religion is destined to decline to the status of a private opinion, which society ought to honor for moral and practical reasons, but only as a choice to be indulged outside the realm of public life—from which, as Weber famously remarked, the process of scientific rationalization and the morality of individual freedom have chased the old gods once and for all. The world’s enlightened societies have reached this point already. Its few remaining theocracies are being carried along toward it, loudly protesting.
That toleration is a great good few will deny. That its achievement on a historically unprecedented scale is one of the outstanding triumphs of enlightened thought is uncontroversial. That it depends on the separation of church and state seems obvious.
It does not follow, though, that the existence of God is a matter of personal opinion. The process of disenchantment may have proceeded on this assumption and been hastened by it. But the belief that the assumption is true is a prejudice, closely associated with the enlightened ideal of toleration but neither necessary to nor justified by it.
There are other justifications for religious toleration than this one. The most obvious is that people are often so attached to their beliefs about God that they are willing to spill blood in their defense. Treating belief as a matter of private opinion helps curb religious violence.
But the utility of this assumption does not entail its truth as a proposition. Those who insist that God exists understand this. They are happy to take advantage of the protections the separation of church and state affords. But the idea that the existence of God is a private belief is in their eyes a blasphemy. God is not an opinion. He is the truth about the world. From a religious point of view, the enlightened assumption that the question of God’s existence must be settled in the tribunal of individual conscience is itself an expression of the disenchanted secularism that is the cause of our spiritual woes.
Disbelievers respectfully respond that this is merely an opinion too, to which the religious are entitled. That is the enlightened position. Those who defend it occupy the high ground in these interminable debates. But in one crucial respect they are wrong.
It may be impossible to establish the truth of any religious doctrine beyond dispute. But every religion is a response to the universal human longing for a connection to eternity. The longing is not an opinion. It is part of our makeup. Reason itself confirms this, if we follow its path to the end. Immanuel Kant (who went far along the path) puts it well. It is obvious to every observer, he says, that no finite rational being, like ourselves, can ever be satisfied with the merely temporal. We long for what cannot be found within the horizon of time. That we do is an essential component of our human being. To deny it is degrading.
The assumption that belief in the existence of God is a private opinion obscures this basic truth. It encourages the idea that our longing for eternity is as dependent on personal choice as the decision to become a Roman Catholic or an Orthodox Jew. No one need become either. But we are all driven by an irrepressible desire to reach what Kant calls the “unconditioned,” his synonym for God. The drive takes many different forms. The desire itself, though, is not an option. The belief that religion is a matter of individual conscience and a choice like any other is a prejudice that leads from toleration, which is a virtue, to the depreciation of an essential dimension of human fulfillment, which is a terrible loss.
This is the third of the prejudices that make our humane and enlightened world so inhospitable to the human beings who live in it. Accredited by the enlightened ideals with which they are often associated, our prejudices enjoy an ersatz authority that gives them the appearance of solid truths. In reality, they are groundless and harmful. True enlightenment means freeing ourselves from their grip.
By this measure, it is not the progressive who is enlightened. He rightly insists that our ideals are precious and worth preserving. But he cannot see the prejudices that accompany them and underestimates the damage they do. The truly enlightened person is the one who recognizes our prejudices and feels the need to conserve the human goods they threaten. She loves what is splendid and rare, rising above the mediocre and banal; feels a friendship for the dead and a loyalty to her inheritance; and longs to come closer to the eternity we all seek by different names. For her, these feelings are not embarrassing or criminal. They are not a blow to human dignity but elaborations of it. Nor are they incompatible with the love of democracy, science, and toleration. If she is an enlightened conservative, she loves all these things and sees no contradiction in doing so. Today, the balance of enlightenment lies with her view of life. She is the one, in Tocqueville’s memorable phrase, who sees “not differently, but further.”
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