A Tale of Two Men

Our rights come from nature, the greatest of thinkers seem to say in unison. But what is our nature? Can it be boiled down to the individual struggling alone against the world, or do our rights correspond with other people and only come about when we enter relationships and build communities? The great philosophers are divided as to the answer.

On one side we have Rousseau, Locke, and Hobbes, who though differing on what the state of nature was like nevertheless all agreed that it is something different from what we are living in today. In Hobbes’s state of nature, man was brutish, and it was good for him to form society. In Locke’s state of nature, man was free, but it was necessary for him to form society. In Rousseau’s state of nature, man was noble, and it was degrading and corrupting for him to form society. Both Locke and Rousseau sowed the seeds of discontent: society, to which we all belong, is an encumbrance on man’s freedom. All relationships and obligations are suffocating and serve only to obscure the truly natural man.

No wonder Voltaire, himself no lover of ties that bind, wrote to Rousseau about his “new book against the human race,” and that to read it “makes one long to go about all fours.”

Fortunately there is another answer about our nature, an answer that doesn’t deny the goodness of our relationships. Aristotle says that man is a political animal. He is at his most natural when he is in the city, living, loving, and contracting with others. The man outside of civilization who prefers acorns to people is not a man at all but an ignoble savage. He is not the natural man. The natural man falls in love, has children, forms friendships, works with others, and builds cities. As Cicero tells us, “We desire to make human life safer and richer by our thought and effort, and are goaded on to the fulfillment of this desire by nature herself.”

To understand our rights, we must understand our nature. Our real nature. It’s not about you or I the individual. It’s about the community and the relationships that make our lives worthwhile. Failing to understand this puts us in danger of coming to a false understanding of our relationships, our rights, and ourselves.

Why do we live together? Is it out of necessity, as Locke says? Out of spite, as Rousseau says? Or because we love each other?

“When the Stranger says: ‘What is the meaning of this city?

Do you huddle close together because you love each other?’

What will you answer? ‘We all dwell together

To make money from each other’? or ‘This is a community’?

And the Stranger will depart and return to the desert.

O my soul, be prepared for the coming of the Stranger.”