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PDF FormatThis revolutionary outlook was challenged sharply by Plato’s student Aristotle. Aristotle saw society as a worldly thing, which must be rooted in reality and must follow its rules and practices, not merely the “eternal truths” found in the minds of philosophers. Failing that basic understanding, the philosopher cannot hope to understand man. Aristotle formulated this view in his Politics: “In matters of political organization… it is impossible for everything to be written down precisely: What is written down must be in general terms, but actions are concerned with particulars.”15 According to Aristotle, the only meaningful society for human beings is one in which real people can actually live, while “the man who is isolated, who is unable to share in the benefits of political association, or has no need to share because he is already self-sufficient, is no part of the city, and must therefore be either a beast or a god.”16
Their opposing attitudes concerning the role of reason in bringing about a proper social order have led thinkers from both camps into countless disputes over politics, society, culture and values. Two issues, however, of paramount importance to both conservatives and revolutionaries, are seen as crucial in determining the character of a given society. The first is how it relates to the past; the second is its attitude toward the traditional family.
How a society relates to the past reflects its attitude toward humanity’s accumulated experience over the course of history. For conservatives, that experience includes the development over time of social institutions and traditions, society’s principal defense against savagery and corruption. The historical experience is expressed in customs, prohibitions and traditions, as well as prejudices and taboos such as those against murder, incest or cruelty to animals—acts that might well be considered matter-of-course, were the question to depend upon rational considerations alone.
Revolutionaries take the opposite view. They see the past as a source of ignorance and confusion, something which distorts and stifles man’s nature, and should be expunged—if only this were possible. To them, the past stands for backwardness, darkness and all manner of excess baggage which place an unconscionable burden upon human reason and freedom. Some openly seek to destroy all evidence of the past since, they argue, this is the only way to attain the “pure” human condition, one free of nations, religions and states. Others are willing to preserve the past, but only under glass, as a sort of museum piece offering a bit of ethnic flavor but no longer having any meaning for modern life. Either way, to them it is clear that starting over from scratch is the only sure way to advance humans along on their continual ascent toward reason and logic, to help them reach their goal of “enlightenment.”
Revolutionaries’ profound disgust with the past has often led them to conclude that the first and most important thing they should do is eliminate all the books, rules and laws originating in earlier times. Once again, this is vividly formulated by Plato:
The first thing our artists [referring to the philosophers charting the new society] must do... is to wipe the slate of human society and human habits clean. For our philosophic artists differ at once from all others in being unwilling to start work on an individual or a city, or draw out laws, until they are given, or have made themselves, a clean canvas.17
In this spirit, revolutionaries throughout history have sought to burn the writings of the past, and so start with a clean slate, as did, for example, the first emperor of China, Shih Huang-Ti, and caliph Omar of early Islam; and even Voltaire proclaimed that “the only way to obtain good laws is to burn all the existing laws and start anew.”18 Over time, this view—that, in the words of Marx, “the tradition of all the dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brain of the living”19—has led to increasingly extreme revolutionary attempts to create a society that is tabula rasa, culminating this century in the horrors of Communism and Nazism.20 Although the open call for a clean canvas is no longer so popular, many nowadays still seek to “correct” the vernacular by removing undesirable words, devaluing classical texts, or doing away with traditional social institutions, in the name of political correctness or post-modernism. 21
For the conservative, on the other hand, traditions from generations past are neither burden nor nightmare, but rather cause for identification, excitement and emulation. Tradition is not a thing of the past, but a vital, living force that contributes to society now and always, through the cumulative wisdom gained from previous generations’ efforts, successful and not. The conservative believes that this wisdom and the traditions that reflect it should be preserved, and that action must be taken to ensure this—action such as that described in Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451. Bradbury’s fictional revolutionary society has banned books and nearly succeeded in destroying them and all they contain; the texts of the past live on only because individuals dedicate their lives to memorizing them and reciting them to others.
But it is not only the past that stands between revolutionaries and their brave new world. In the present they must surmount another formidable obstacle: The family. Family is the usual forum for fundamental education towards traditional values. It is the foundation of every human society, the individual’s last resort when all else is lost, and the pillar which, once smashed, will bring about the collapse of all other obstacles to the revolution. Yet the intimate arena of the family proves particularly difficult for the revolutionary to penetrate.
Not surprisingly, Plato was very straightforward in formulating his opposition to the family. In The Republic, he sacrifices the family as we understand it on the altar of his ideal political order. In this ideal order, women and children are common property; there are no limits or barriers against homosexuality, the seduction of minors, incest, or any other sexual proclivities; and sexual relations between men and women are obligatory only to the extent necessary to produce the next generation.22 Rejection of the value of family is a salient characteristic of later revolutionary philosophers who follow Plato’s lead, either explicitly or implicitly. Diogenes, Voltaire and Rousseau ignored the family or left little place for it in their theories and social constructs, but did not formally declare war against it. Others reject the traditional family and the sexual norms it represents in principle, and even advocate abolishing it. These include Jan Beuckelson, the leader of the messianic Christian revolt in the German city of Muenster in 1543; the false messiah Jacob Frank and his devotees in eighteenth-century Poland; the more enthusiastic Marxists such as Pol Pot in Cambodia and his followers; and some post-modernist intellectuals.23
To be consistent, the revolutionary worldview must necessarily lean toward destroying the traditional idea of the family, both because it is the pillar of all traditional values of society, and because enlightened rationalism has difficulty finding a principled basis for prohibiting any form of sexual relations between consenting adults, including adultery or even incest. In practice, however, the very power that the family wields in all societies usually ensures that overt anti-family elements in revolutionary thought are played down, or advanced only obliquely. This can be seen in the socialist argument for entrusting the raising and education of children to the collective, not the family; and in the current intellectual fashion calling for abrogation of the traditional definition of “family” in favor of an all-inclusive term which embraces homosexual couples, single parenthood, polygamous households and so forth—a definition so broad that it constitutes a formula for achieving, indirectly and gradually, the revolutionary goal of gutting the family unit of all meaning.
Because it goes to the very heart of the human condition, the polarity between the conservative and revolutionary paradigms is not limited to the political-philosophical realm but can be found in every cultural realm concerned with the situation of man in the world. One side can be seen, for example, in the writings of Edgar Rice Burroughs: His Tarzan, who grows up from infancy in the company of apes, is good, upright and moral, his sterling character attributable solely to his innate nature. The opposite viewpoint is taken in William Golding’s Lord of the Flies, telling of a group of schoolboys who are shipwrecked and find refuge on a desert island; there they shed the behaviors expected of them in civilized society, and gradually degenerate into savagery.
Literary attitudes toward human nature concern not only individuals cut off from society, but also those who throw off the chains of society and its traditions. Tellingly, the views presented in these works do not necessarily coincide with the authors’ professed politics. Ayn Rand, for example, is usually classified with the philosophical “right,” yet her writings consistently depict the individual struggling against conventions that society attempts to impose upon him (as in Atlas Shrugged and The Fountainhead); only by rejecting society’s demands do Rand’s heroes realize their revolutionary greatness. Rand’s opposite in this regard is George Orwell. Orwell is generally considered a member of the philosophical “left,” yet his Nineteen Eighty-Four portrays a deeply conservative view of how the systematic destruction of family, tradition, convention and, above all, the past, leads to the eventual loss of the individual spirit and personality: “We, the Party, control all records, and we control all memories. Then we control the past, do we not?”24
