Do You Want to Understand the World or Control it?
Two famous speeches that outline the fundamental concepts of our political divide.
Late historian Henry Bamford Parkes described the roots of political debate throughout Western civilization as a contrast between two classic ideas. One laid out in Plato’s Republic and the other in Pericles’ Funeral Oration. One philosopher sought to control the world and one sought to understand it.
Pericles’ speech was interlaced with appeals to our deeply seeded emotions and the unending tragedy of humanity. Plato’s Republic was an appeal to focus on what may be humanity’s ability to use reason to create a world that should exist. Two-thousand years later the themes and appeal to the nature of humanity, and if humanity even truly has a nature, are still at the core of fundamental differences between the poles of political thought today.
Author Valint Vazsonyi aptly labeled these lines of political thought today as Anglo-American and Franco-German. These basic underlying views of humanity and politics are what still lay deep beneath our political disagreements, so long after Plato and Pericles expressed these pivotal views in front of their ancient audiences.
Anglo-American or Constrained
“Standing beneath this serene sky, overlooking these broad fields now reposing from the labors of the waning year, the mighty Alleghenies dimly towering before us, the graves of our brethren beneath our feet, it is with hesitation that I raise my poor voice to break the eloquent silence of God and Nature. “ — Edward Everett at Gettysburg
Edward Everett served his country in many fashions for many years. But he will always be best known as the orator who spent just over two hours speaking to a crowd of Americans during the dedication ceremony for the Gettysburg National Cemetery in 1863. Everett’s two hour marathon sermon was followed by President Lincoln’s two minute Gettysburg Address, perhaps as a means to no longer beleaguer his audience following the lengthy discourse on the nature of humanity in history.
“But, in a larger sense, we can not dedicate — we can not consecrate — we can not hallow — this ground. The brave men, living and dead, who struggled here, have consecrated it, far above our poor power to add or detract.” — Abraham Lincoln, Gettysburg Address
Similar to what Everett spoke of, Lincoln also honored the concept of human action over words. He believed self sacrifice is the highest form of devotion, and that the sacrifice of our brethren should be honored by our continued actions towards the noble goals for which they died. Brevity, being the soul of wit, Lincoln’s speech is the one we today more often remember and refer to, even though they both have very similar roots not just in their content, but in their themes and from whom they borrowed.
Five thousand miles away, across an ocean and two seas, in the same year Everett and Lincoln spoke to the mourning Americans, an excavation worker just outside of Athens, Greece, accidentally dug up a stele.
A stele is an ancient monument that ancient people used much like headstones for their dead. And it was here, during a funeral for soldiers who sacrificed their lives in the first year of the Peloponnesian War more than two thousand years ago, that Pericles, the father of Democracy, gave his famous oration from where many of our most revered speeches are rooted.
“…I should have thought that the worth which had displayed itself in deeds would be sufficiently rewarded by honors also shown by deeds.” — Pericles’ Funeral Oration, from Thucydides, The Peloponnesian War
As did Everett and Lincoln, so did Pericles regard his words as but mediocre attempts to describe that which only actions of sacrifice could truly communicate. And this was the essence of all three of these famous speeches: a recognition of the nature and story of humanity as a triumphant tragedy with its peaks marked by sacrifice for ultimate goals which we may never witness ourselves.
It’s a recognition of our innate limitations not necessarily as something to overcome, but something to embrace, understand, and revel in. This identification of human nature and its permanent state is the essence of this first line of two basic political viewpoints, described as Anglo-American.
Anglo-American “regards human reason as bounded by limitations, and in need of moral guidance as it attempts to provide for the future.” It is characterized by limited but attainable goals and does not presume the existence of an end state. There is no promise of utopia.
This is similar to what economist Thomas Sowell referred to as the “Constrained Vision.” It’s a view of humanity based on the limits of our ability to reason, constrained by human nature, and having what he called realistic expectations based on trade-offs, not solutions to social problems.
The Founding Fathers sought out as little government authority as possible, valued individual freedom and each person’s ability to reason for themselves, all while understanding the limits of that ability. But they also acknowledged the tendency towards tyranny if too much power is gained by any individual or group of people, and created separate institutions to guard against the inevitable concentration of power.
They assumed no vision of a perfect society, but an acknowledgment of a best case scenario based on trade-offs. This acceptance of the limits and tragic nature of humanity is why many who are opposed to this line of thought characterize it as “defeatist.”
Anglo-American thought looks to the past and takes the results of implemented ideas as an empirical guide to the efficacy of those ideas themselves and does not see imperfection as evidence of general failure.
This is often referred to as “conservatism,” as its adherents look to the past, and wish to enshrine the lessons learned as permanent structures of society.
“It is of great use to the sailor to know the length of his line, though he cannot with it fathom all the depths of the ocean.” — John Locke
Franco-German or Unconstrained
From both Everett and Lincoln, who were aware of and likely utilized Pericles’ speech as a model, we hear Grecian echoes of the triumphant and tragic human sacrifices from Homer’s famous poems in Iliad and The Odyssey. And this is perhaps why Plato, in Republic, described a perfect society that would censor ideas from Homer as they could possibly “corrupt the youth.”
Plato’s Republic is a blueprint for a very different type of society that would have been barely recognizable to Pericles, Everett or Lincoln. A blueprint created solely by the reason of man as opposed to using the constantly revealed nature of man as our guide.
Plato’s Republic takes place as a dialogue between Socrates and several of his companions. This dialogue is centered around defining justice. Socrates takes this opportunity to describe justice in the form of a just city. His proposal to create this just city is largely centered around the pursuit of perfection guided by perfectly shaped citizens he calls guardians.
These guardians would be identified and taken by the state as children and shaped by education that centered on the pursuit of truth. This truth was best known through the highest and purest form of reasoning similar to ideas in mathematics and geometry, and in the spirit of what was practiced by the Pythagoreans.
Here is where we see the assumption of a perfect state of being. Much like the abstract idea of the perfect triangle created with the Pythagorean Theorem, they would use these tools of reason so their accounting of reality would be “for the sake of knowing what always is, not what comes into being and passes away.” Shaping the ideas using abstract ideas of perfect shapes and states of being would be central to their goals.
Guardians would then be responsible for identifying the needs of citizens and assuring that the needs of the individuals and the city were met, according to what their needs were assessed to be. Or as Karl Marx said, "From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs." Each person would have an identified role, and those roles would all cascade down from a singular goal as prescribed by the guardians.
“And won’t their sole aim in delivering judgments be that no citizen should have what belongs to another or be deprived of what is his own?” — Socrates, from Republic, 433e
In sharp contrast to the world view held by Pericles, Socrates proposes censorship of Homeric poetry, as it would “corrupt the youth.” The heroism and identification with human passions is not something to be identified and embraced as endemic to humanity, but as a problem to be suppressed and replaced by reducing art to a curiosity, and not reflective of the human experience. Art and poetry are referred to as “third removed” from reality in that they are poor imitations of a perceived reality which itself is removed from truth. These forms of art should be controlled and shaped to influence the guardians and citizens as decided by those in power.
Franco-Germanic “may be characterized as attributing to human reason an unlimited capacity to comprehend, evaluate, and arrange the affairs of our world.” The only limits to humanity are those limits which the structure of society places on the human spirit. Proper sequence in charting the future course calls for the theory to be developed first, and for people and events to conform to it.
This is what Thomas Sowell referred to as the “Unconstrained Vision.” The idea is that humanity, when not constrained by artificial bounds, would be able to use its reason to solve all social problems. It is often called “progressive,” as it is forward looking and does not focus as much on the experiences of the past. When humanity is not seen to have an inherent nature, then there is no nature to understand by reviewing the past as empirical evidence of that nature.
Franco-Germanic is well suited for a person that believes people can be molded into good people and good citizens. It requires a "clean-slate" view of humanity. It is therefore incumbent on those who know the way to be guides to do just that. This is why the Franco-Germanic world view is popular with academics and intellectuals.
Not only do they feel a heightened sense of understanding society, they can even long to be recognized for that ability through influencing public thought and policy. It allows for the shaping of the future as opposed to accepting what is seen by the Anglo-American thinkers as a permanent limitation of human nature.
“Man is born free, and everywhere he is in chains.” — Jean-Jacques Rousseau
Policy goals which include the idea of an end state of social equity are reflective of this thought process. If people were not bound by the corruption of institutions and other humans, they would be free to be good citizens in their natural state. Any idea that assumes individual people are the problem or solution would be antithetical to this world view because the problem would be seen as a failure of society’s structure. People on “the left” in America tend to view the world through this lens, and are often referred to as “social constructionists.”
This is why we hear declarations such as, "First of all, gender is a social construct," or “Yes things are good, but they can always get better!”, or “If we can go to the moon, we can make this happen too.” When there is no human nature, it becomes important to deconstruct the concept that anything about humans is inherent and permanent or that we have limits.
One speech, one discourse, and more than two thousand years of old ideas posing as new ways to govern human societies. One view appeals to the unending tragedy of humanity, and our emotional attachments to those peaks and valleys. It acknowledges our limitations, and creates barriers to limit our natural tendencies towards ill behavior. Another focuses on our ability to reason and assumes that it would be without limits if properly guided.
Somewhere in-between lies a space where we can value our reason, and understand not only its abilities, but its limitations, and maintain realistic expectations for our future.