Socialist Man: A Psychological Profile

Socialism is a coherent philosophical doctrine, but more than that it is a political program to be achieved. Its philosophical roots, identifiable in their own right, must be distinguished from its social and cultural aspirations and, further, from its political programs. It cannot be viewed as merely an alternative to a capitalist free-market economy. Its revolt goes much deeper, challenging not only the economic but the moral and cultural traditions of peoples wherever it has gained ascendancy. Initially a Western movement (the term itself appears to have come into use in the early part of the nineteenth century), it has penetrated every part of the globe.¹Given the socialists’ ascendancy in Europe and American propensities to imitate Europe, it behooves us to look carefully at the origins of socialism for the ideas which the socialist mind takes for granted, commonplace ideas we find among our intellectual elite.

Not all socialist programs are as radical as those of Stalin or Mao Tse-tung, yet socialism is universally marked by certain features. Its creed, like other belief systems, may be imperfectly understood by its political adherents, but its power to motivate to determinate ends cannot be doubted. Those who subscribe to it do not have to communicate to know which cause to advance, which to oppose. They act in unison out of a shared conviction.

Like much of Enlightenment thought socialism may be characterized by what it repudiates as well as by its utopian goals. To focus on the West alone, the socialist creed is based on a denial of the existence of God and the transcendent end of human existence, features that until the eighteenth century characterized the Western mind since antiquity. Implicitly socialism denies a natural moral order to which man is accountable. Denying that man is self-directing, it affirms that individual choice is determined by psychological and social forces over which man has little or no control. Denying the reality of a universal and timeless human nature, it places no value on the lessons to be gained from the study of history, repudiating in effect the value of the Western literary canon. From its codification in eighteenth century France it has sanctioned sexual license. This seems to be if not an essential feature, one that is nevertheless always a part of its social agenda. Socialist governments wherever they come to power sanction pornography, divorce, abortion, and in recent decades assisted suicide and euthanasia.

The socialist has long recognized that the success of his revolutionary agenda depends on control of information, primarily education; hence, his efforts to suppress parental rights in education. Control of the media is likewise a desirable objective because the socialist recognizes that in free and open debate, socialist ideas are not likely to prevail, given that many of its tenets fly in the face of the common perception of the good. In both Europe and North America, and wherever the socialist mind prevails, obstacles are thrown up to prevent religious education, and throughout the West major media outlets in the hands of the left are grossly biased in a socialist direction, preventing a fair treatment or a hearing for alternative views.

That socialism in its purest form can only be maintained through coercion is evident from events of the past century. We have notorious examples in the police states created by the Soviet Union, Nazi Germany, the Eastern bloc nations under Soviet control, Cuba, China, and North Korea, to name only the most obvious. In the democracies of the West coercion is subtle where socialist objectives are advanced through state control of education and through a sympathetic media. Media bias itself needs to be explained. The history of how the socialist mind-set captured the quasi-educated class which determines the outlook of the media has yet to be written. That history may be identical with the history of the secularization of modern culture, as Christopher Dawson has suggested. The mind of the secular majority, writes Dawson, has been so deeply affected by the process of secularization that it cannot view that process in an objective historical manner.²Without doubt the roots of socialism are deep in Enlightenment soil, nourished by Rousseau, Feuêrbach, and Marx.

In his Origin of Inequality (1753), Rousseau attributes all the ills of man not to man’s own sin or to ignorance but to social injustice and the corruptions of an artificial civilization. Rousseau in this and subsequent works pleads the cause of the individual against society, the poor against the rich, the common man against the privileged classes, the cause of love against convention, and the intuition of the religious mind against the orthodox philosopher and ecclesiastical authority.

Rousseau fired the minds of his generation with the ideal of democracy not merely as a system of government but as a new way of life, a vision of social justice and fraternity. With boundless optimism he preached a social idealism, a religion of humanity, with a defined though simple body of dogma, designed to take the place of Christianity as the creed of a new age. His call for the complete reorganization of the social order became the creed of the French intelligentsia, a rationalized, humanitarian version of Christianity. Marx picked up the theme.

But more important for the development of Marx’s thought was his reading of Ludwig Feuêrbach’s Das Wesen des Christentum (1841),³which denied the supernatural and everything in religion not of a naturalistic and human origin. In that influential work, Feuêrbach systematically translated all statements about God into statements about man. Man is the measure: God conceived as a morally perfect being is the realized idea, the personified law of morality, the moral nature of man taken for absolute being. In the person of God, man celebrates his own personality in its limitless strivings. The word “God,” Feuêrbach explains, is but a designation for man’s highest aspirations, a changing “ideal” that men establish for themselves. Put crudely, since the political and economic life of man is incapable of fulfilling his true self, he creates the illusory world of religion and its promise of eternal fulfillment.

In the eyes of the young Hegelians of whom Marx was one, Feuêrbach appeared to have demolished Christianity and with it the social and political institutions grounded upon it, and in doing so prepared the way for a humanism freed from traditional moral and social constraints. This teaching was to leave its mark on a company of men who played an important role in the shaping of the modern mind, including Nietzsche, Scheler, Freud, Sartre, Fromm, and Dewey. Feuêrbach aimed to change the friends of God into friends of man, worshippers into workers, believers into thinkers. Anthropology would replace theology, politics, and religion.

It is in this context that Marx will say of religion that it is man’s self-administered opiate. Inasmuch as religion prevents man from seeking happiness when it can be found in this life, it must be attacked, and not merely at the theoretical level but in action. We cannot change society for the good simply by philosophizing about it; we must act. Philosophy must leave the plane of theory and with the help of the intellectual class tutor the masses. It must culminate in social revolution, a revolution of the proletariat against the established order. It is significant that in the Communist Manifesto Marx and Engels never use the word “capitalism.” The terms employed are “bourgeois society” and “oppressing class,” among others.

When Marx as a member of the Communist League was commissioned with Engels in 1847 to draw up a summary statement of socialist principles, elements of the socialist movement were well underway. Although socialism was a widely discussed theoretical topic, it was up to that time merely a collection of insights and perceptions, still shapeless and inchoate. The resulting systematization became the Communist Manifesto.⁴The Manifesto itself refers to the writings of P.J. Proudhon, Claude Henri St. Simon, Charles Fourier, and Robert Owen. A half century later Lenin was to write, “The theory of socialism grew out of the philosophic, historical, and economic theories that were elaborated by the educated representatives of the propertied classes and intellectuals.”⁵The working class, Lenin was convinced, is unable to develop a social consciousness on its own. It must be “impregnated” with this consciousness from without. For Lenin this requires not only the unwitting cooperation of an intellectual class but the effort of persons engaged in revolutionary activities as a profession.

Marx and Engels in the Communist Manifesto were willing to sanction violence to attain socialist goals. Later, Marxists found legislation to be a surer path. Violence, they found, may be quicker, but legislative reforms are more lasting. In recent decades judicial decree has proved to be an even surer means. The legislative process is one of give-and-take, often leading to unwanted compromise. The judiciary by contrast can create law to reflect ideas pure and simple. Thus the battle in the United States for the ideological control of the Supreme Court, a court all too willing to ignore constitutional limit in pursuit of idealistic goals.

The propensity to use the law to achieve socialist goals is not a new phenomenon. Marx was aware that many of his objectives could not be achieved without a complete restructuring of the then current legal system. His critique of bourgeois law was intended to show that the law of his day was the product of the capitalist ruling class, a class that created the law to sustain its mode of economic organization. Marx’s critique focused on nineteenth-century tort law, which he thought tempered entrepreneurial risk with a doctrine that places accidents and product defects not on the maker but on the user.

Tort law is, of course, but one facet of a vast legal system, a system built upon an ancient philosophy of law and notions concerning the function of law in society. Marx’s larger blueprint for the establishment of a socialist order called for the overthrow of the inherited in favor of laws that would promote his egalitarian conception of society. He recognized that before the socialist revolution could occur, the theoretical groundwork for it had to be laid. First, the structures of belief that prevail have to be shown to be historically contingent. This he found easy, for they can be shown not always to have existed in their present form. Once contingency is recognized, the door is open to change: legal structures, just and unjust, are thus seen to be alterable. It may take courage and cunning to organize with others the struggle against the received, but once the new ideological structure is in place, the practical may be advanced.

An influential contemporary expression of Marxist legal theory is one which has come to be known as “critical legal studies.”⁶Such studies emerged in the curriculum of some of the nation’s most prestigious law schools in the 1960s and 1970s as thinly disguised socialist programs. Their intent, like that of Marx, is to challenge received notions of the nature of law and its function in society. Their proponents, known as “Crits,” recognize that law reflects, constitutes, and legitimizes commonly perceived notions of right and wrong. In pursuit of their own ends, the Crits seek command posts in the courts and in the law schools, and when it becomes possible, they do not hesitate, against precedent and constitutional restriction, to instantiate law that reflects their social objectives. In their hands law becomes a political instrument, allowing the courts to invade the democratic process. We have become accustomed to hearing judges described as “conservative” or “liberal,” designations usually ascribed to politicians.

While judicial intrusion is destructive of the rule of law itself, equally serious is the fact that the political objectives in question are not likely to be those chosen in any democratic referendum. The objectives sought are most likely to have been framed by an intellectual elite and are often contrary to the judgment of the common man. Witness the many policies governing the use of land and policies determining university admissions, employment, and the awarding of contracts for public service. Such policies have been introduced by judicial fiat rather than through the legislative process. Activist judges can easily find confirming legal rationalizations for their choices by drawing upon purely academic intelligence. It is clear that in undergirding such judicial activism there is a conflict between belief systems, that is, between alternative views of human nature, human perfectibility and responsibility.

A theoretical aim of law shared by socialists in Europe and North America is the correction of social imbalance and the leveling of natural inequality. Thus understood, the law may be used to remove inequalities, to redistribute income, and to remove as far as possible the ill effects of natural handicaps. The question that can only be settled in the light of a philosophy of human nature is: Should this be an aim of law, particularly of judge-made law?

As Marx clearly saw, tort law is an important part of legal theory because it affects not only the litigants but the economic activity of a region or nation. The traditional notion of tort law held it to be an instrument of corrective justice. Its intent was the restoration of the status quo that existed before any infringement of a person’s right. Aristotle called this “rectificatory justice.” The plaintiff in a tort action, it was thought, should recover because of an unlawful interference with his individual right and not because of any general public goal of the state. By contrast, tort law from the socialist perspective is called upon not only to respond to the victim’s injury as a result of negligence but also to send a “moral” message to the perpetrator and beyond, perhaps to an industry.

Already in the nineteenth century Francis Wharton (1820–1889) objected to the use of tort law to achieve social objectives,⁷which he saw rashly placed upon capital the burden of not merely its own want of caution but of the want of caution of everybody else. Wharton distinguished between two views with respect to the nature of tort law: (1) the first holds a person liable for all the consequences that flow in an ordinary sequence from his negligence; this is the normal view of accountability; and (2) the second holds a person liable for all the consequences that could be foreseen as likely to occur, the “foreseeable test doctrine,” as it came to be known.

The second view, Wharton argues, opens a Pandora’s box of philosophical as well as legal issues. If we cannot predict the actions of others viewed as individuals, we may be able to predict the actions of others taken as a class. As insurers well know, behavior is so governed by natural laws that certain actions, including negligence, can be accurately predicted for the class, provided the class is large enough. Yet predictions relevant to the aggregate tell us nothing about the likely outcome of an individual act. A manufacturer may be certain that a given number will abuse his product, but that does not make him responsible for the abuse. “To require us to act,” writes Wharton, “in such a way that no action on our part may be the conditions of negligence on the part of strangers, would require us to cease to be.”⁸If we do nothing, we are apt to omit something we ought to do.

If we do something, owing to the imperfection of all things human, there will be some taint, no matter how slight, of imperfection in the thing we do. Yet whether in doing or omitting, we touch more or less closely multitudes of persons each with a free will of his own, each with idiosyncracies with which we have no acquaintance, each of whom may by some negligence cross our path and make action on our part which is innocuous in itself injurious. ⁹

The consequences of making one man liable for another’s fault would lead to mischief. “Where would such vicarious liability end?” Wharton asks. “The consequences of this would be that capital would be obliged to bear the burden, not merely of its own want of caution but of the want of caution of everybody else.”¹⁰Afraid that tort law interpreted through the socialist’s prism could be used to destroy the economic underpinnings of society, Wharton wrote: “Here is a capitalist among these antecedents; he shall be forced to pay. The capitalist, therefore, becomes liable for all the disasters of which he is in any sense the condition, and the fact that he is held liable, multiplies these disasters.”¹¹

The natural affinity between the pragmatic naturalistic temperament, found in the disciples of David Hume and John Stuart Mill, and the socialist outlook is seen in Wharton’s engagement with Nicholas St. John Green. Green was then a young instructor at the Harvard Law School and a member of the Metaphysical Club of Cambridge when it included William James, Chauncey Wright, and Oliver Wendell Holmes, well-known American pragmatists. Green, following John Stuart Mill, directly challenged the allied notions of “objective causation” and “causal chain.” The legal implications are obvious. If no distinction is to be made, as Green argued, among occasion, condition, and cause, the true mechanism responsible for the effect is impossible to determine. In a court of law, without these distinctions, it becomes easy to argue for assessment of damages by the defendant with the “deepest pockets.”¹²If Green’s view were to prevail, Wharton argues, no factory would be built. “Making the capitalist liable for everything, therefore, would end in making the capitalist, as well as the non-capitalist, liable for nothing; for there would soon be no capitalist to be found to be sued.”¹³Wharton saw that in divorcing responsibility from liability, capital is likely to be either destroyed or compelled to shrink from entering into those large operations by which the trade of a nation is built up.

Convinced that no corporation could be ruined without grave communal effects, he argued for a limit to entrepreneurial liability. He rejected the “foreseeable test” doctrine because it could only be made on a statistical basis. From a statistical point of view, he argued, all risks are predictable in the aggregate. In a world of randomness where there is no necessary connection between particular causes and particular effects, all that can be done is to correlate acts statistically in the aggregate with consequences in the aggregate. Moral causation and free agency are replaced by probabilities and statistical correlations.

Wharton adamantly challenged the tendency to look upon misfortune, whether inflicted by nature, by lack of self-discipline, or by accident, as somehow a social problem that ought to be rectified. If one begins with the principle that all loss should be compensated, the temptation is to search for a corporate or other affluent defendant at the expense of blurring the causal chain or placing all antecedents on an equal footing where there is no recognition of the distinction among occasion, condition, or cause.

Wharton, and the legal tradition he represented, assumed certain general principles, namely that causes can be discerned; that to the extent that they can be identified, responsibility can be assigned; and that accidents do occur in which no one is at fault in any sense. An accident, by definition, is an unintended event, the intersection of independent causal chains. Wharton recognized that lack of intention may or may not mitigate liability; he would not abandon the “prudent-man test.” Still, in any transaction there are at least two parties; intelligence must be assumed on all sides. Put another way, both buyers and sellers have reason to beware, lest hidden and unknown dangers become a reality.

Much has happened both in law and in the marketplace since Wharton’s day, but clearly he was prescient. Whereas lack of caution or misuse of product in the nineteenth century would not have been allowed to serve as a basis for a claim, given shifts in legal theory, corporate leaders recognize that both judges and juries are likely to be swayed differently today and act accordingly.

Another front on which the socialist outlook is particularly pronounced is in the area of “civil rights,” where in the formulation of welfare policy, we have the state being called upon to remedy self-inflicted wounds. In the delivery of health care, we find numerous claims to benefits, for example, to publicly supported care where lifelong negligence in the care of one’s health or reckless sexual behavior has contributed to illness or disability. The burden of an individual’s want of prevention or proper care of health is thus placed upon the public, penalizing in effect through taxation those who exercised proper care. It makes a difference whether one speaks of “inalienable rights” or considers “rights” to be but a shorthand symbol for social practices that are espoused for political objectives. In the United States inalienable rights are protected by the Constitution, but they are limited in scope and do not entail the numerous rights claimed by the disaffected.

Similarly, the propensity of the socialist to legislate equality flies in the face of acknowledged differences between men and women in native intelligence, health, physical ability, and acquired skill, including moral and intellectual virtue. Other than equality before the law, equality is not necessarily a social value. It would be a strange world if all were equally athletic, equal in musical or artistic ability, or equally adept at manual labor. A well-ordered society can incorporate a wide variety of native talent and disposition. It is naive to assume that all are capable of high level management skills or of the professional skills of a surgeon or theoretical physicist. To categorize artificially on the basis of color, gender, or physique and then expect to find among the successful a proportionate number from each group would be merely nonsense if it were not for the socialist’s propensity to legislate to achieve favored outcomes.¹⁴

The failure of socialism to promote prosperity wherever it has been tried does not seem to dissuade new adherents. Neither does its statist and totalitarian tendencies disturb those who in the pursuit of idealistic goals are willing to sacrifice personal and communal freedom.

In the godless world of socialism, achievement is necessarily measured in materialistic terms. Goals not achievable in the present generation are thought to be realizable in some future generation and hence worthy of continuous pursuit even though the present belies their attainability. Absent faith in divine providence, financial security and personal health assume exaggerated importance. Things of the spirit are neglected in favor of sensual pursuits. The self-identity provided by singular heritage is lost in the drive for a homogeneity in the proletariat. No more egregious example is to be found than that of Mao Tse-Tung. Under Mao’s regime art collections were considered bourgeois and were to be confiscated. Ancient artifacts representative of past achievement and insight were considered useless and at first Mao established “useless object stations,” and connoisseurs were encouraged to dump precious artifacts and furniture lest they invoke a distinctive heritage at odds with the regime. Later in the 1960s art works were forcibly taken from the people.¹⁵

Although socialism may be intellectually profiled, socialism as a mindset exists in varying degrees among its adherents. Like any creed it may be imperfectly understood in theory and in its practical dimensions. That said, its characteristic dogmas are nevertheless definable and its objectives identifiable. In every generation it behooves those who find their identity in inherited classical Western and Christian culture to examine and understand the surreptitious threat which socialism presents to their accustomed view of life.

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Notes:

1. In Great Britain the term was used to describe the teachings of Robert Owen (1771–1858) and in France the teachings of Charles Fourier (1771–1837) and Henri Saint Simon (1760–1852). Lorenz Von Stein wrote in 1844 a book entitled Socialism and Communism in Present Day France.
2. The Gods of the Revolution (New York, 1972).
3. Translated by George Eliot as The Essence of Christianity (New York, 1957).
4. K. Marx, F. Engels, The Communist Manifesto and Principles of Communism, ed. Paul M. Sweezy and Leo Huberman (New York, 1964).
5. V.I. Lenin, What is to Be Done?, 1902; included as an appendix in Sweezy.
6. Robert W. Gordon, “New Developments in Legal Theory,” in The Politics of Law: A Progressive Critique, Rev. ed., ed. by David Kairys (New York, 1990).
7. A Treatise on the Law of Negligence (Philadelphia, 1878).
8. Francis Wharton, Law of Negligence, 134.
9. Ibid., 134–5.
10. Ibid., 136.
11. Francis Wharton, A Suggestion as to Causation (Cambridge, Mass., 1874), 11.
12. Numerous recent cases come to mind, i.e., the tobacco settlement; the Tylenol tampering case, wherein Johnson & Johnson Co. was held accountable because of the criminal activity of a deranged person who altered its product on a given shelf in a pharmacy; the federal appeals court sitting in Atlanta ruling that financial institutions can be held responsible for the toxic cleanup of tainted properties that they have taken over as a result of the default on a loan; and the case known as Hymowitz v Lilly, wherein the highest New York State court applied the “market-share concept,” holding a manufacturer responsible for a share of the awarded damages even when it could prove that the plaintiff did not use its product.
13. Wharton, A Suggestion as to Causation, 11.
14. In a brilliant essay, “The Eclipse of Excellence,” George Panichas asks, “ . . . how can standards of excellence survive, one must ask, when in fact the cabinet of the president of the United States, in its very composition, must accommodate the idea of diversity and quota systems?” Growing Wings to Overcome Gravity (Macon, Ga., 1999), 32.
15. At first the Red Guards indiscriminately destroyed the confiscated artifacts. The intervention of museum curators managed to rescue from “collection dumps” a fraction of the confiscated pieces. Not surprisingly some items found their way into the homes of communist party leaders. The hard-line leaders of the Cultural Revolution, the notorious Gang of Four, were among the most ardent collectors of confiscated works. Mao’s wife, one of the Gang of Four, allegedly purchased 536 works of art as well as 2,461 volumes for less than the equivalent of five U.S. dollars.