Franklin and Croly on Human Nature

In many ways, political differences can be boiled down to one simple question: what is your view of human nature? Our Constitutional system is based on a skeptical view of human nature; that – as Madison put it – men are not angels, and angels are not governing over men. For that reason, Madison and others saw fit to embrace a complicated system of checks and balances that would admit of the levels of governance necessary to watch over otherwise unruly and contentious creatures, but not give the watchmen so much power that they could rule tyrannically. This balancing of order and freedom would require constant recalibrating, with the idea that the more responsible people could be in the exercise of their freedom, the less formal governing they would need. Their capacity for such responsible use of freedom was the one thing that made democracy possible, but their tendency to abuse that freedom was what made democratic governance itself necessary (to paraphrase Reinhold Niebuhr).

A good example of this skeptical view of human nature, which was typical of its age, if not universally endorsed, can be found in a letter written by Benjamin Franklin to Joseph Priestly in 1782, at the front end of America’s crisis of constitutional governance. He wrote:

I should rejoice much if I could once more recover the Leisure to search with you into the Works of Nature, I mean the inanimate, not the animate or moral Part of them. The more I discover’d of the former, the more I admir’d them; the more I know of the latter, the more I am disgusted with them. Men I find to be a Sort of Beings very badly constructed, as they are generally more easily provok’d than reconcil’d, more dispos’d to do Mischief to each other than to make Reparation, much more easily deceiv’d than undeceiv’d, and having more Pride & even Pleasure in killing than in begetting one another, for without a Blush they assemble in great Armies at Noon Day to destroy, and when they have kill’d as many as they can, they exaggerate the Number to augment the fancied Glory; but they creep into Corners or cover themselves with the Darkness of Night, when they mean to beget, as being asham’d of a virtuous Action. A virtuous Action it would be, and a vicious one the killing of them, if the Species were really worth producing or preserving; but of this I begin to doubt.

Having been raised a Calvinist, I believed that anyone who affirmed the total depravity of man couldn’t be all bad, but this grim telling of the human condition makes even me blanch a little. But Franklin is trying to look here at human beings in their rawest form, red in tooth and claw, outside the conventions of civil life that alone can tame the savage beast.  Franklin concludes the letter with a paean to their friendship, leading him to wonder how in the midst of all the perversity something noble could emerge.

The contrary view, having slowly captured the American imagination in the post-Civil War era, argues that human beings may not be perfect, but they are perfectible, given the rights sorts of conditions. Government, then, is charged with creating the conditions that result in human perfection. The line separating good from evil is not in the human heart, but located somewhere in the external world, where it can properly be erased.

Perhaps the seminal expression of this was made by Herbert Croly in his book The Promise of American Life. Croly sought to undo the complex machinations of the Constitution that he saw as shackles on a sheepdog. Human beings were not naturally corrupted but were corrupted by bad social institutions. Fix those institutions, and you fix human nature. He wrote:

For better or worse, democracy cannot be disentangled from an aspiration toward human perfectibility, and hence from the adoption of measures looking in the direction of realizing such an aspiration.

Even more directly:

Democracy must stand or fall on a platform of human perfectibility. If human nature cannot be improved by institutions, democracy is at best a more than usually safe form of political organization; and the only interesting inquiry about its future would be: How long will it continue to work?

In other words, the purpose of government is not to restrain human nature, but to transform. The founder’s system thus not only unduly restrained human beings, it prevented them from becoming the perfected forms of themselves. This unleashing of government power was the key to the transformation of human beings into perfected selves and of society into a utopia. “The sincere democrat,” he wrote, “is obliged to assume the power of heaven.”

I’ve made my bed with the “crooked timber of humanity” school (“Out of the crooked timber of humanity, no straight thing was ever made”) mainly because experience wills it so. Unlike Franklin, I don’t have to look at the outer world of meanness, war, hatred, misery, and cruelty (“Devils never treat one another in this cruel manner; they have more Sense, and more of what Men (vainly) call Humanity!”) – I can simply look inward and see the truth of that, especially given my belief that I am no better than any other man: I may not be as good as some, but there are very few saints walking among us, and in any case they are unlikely to remain so once they attain power for themselves.

Still, without some belief in the power of human beings to improve both their estate and themselves, it would be difficult to defend any conception of democratic governance, and the world would be a dark and depressing place indeed. Our dependence on non-governmental institutions has long saved us from descent into complete chaos.

Hope doesn’t translate well into optimism and even less well into certainty; the effort to improve ourselves is a difficult enough task, long and laborious and a struggle that ends only with our death. Given the lack of success we have in improving ourselves, one would have to be audacious indeed to believe he or she has the authority to remake society or to remake others. For one thing, you’d have to exempt yourself from the general corruption that afflicts human beings, such exemption being a common feature of revolutionary thinkers. Believing that others or that the world itself is broken but that you – and perhaps, you alone, or at least members of your tribe -- have somehow remained intact is one of the oldest but certainly one of the most pernicious of all human conceits.

Discussion Questions:

1. What is your view of human nature? How have you come about adopting that view?

2. What contrary evidence might you offer toward your view of human nature?

3. To what extent can human beings be improved, and what are the mechanisms best designed for such improvement?

By Jeff Polet

Director of the Ford Leadership Forum, Gerald R. Ford Presidential Foundation

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