The Crooked Timber of Humanity

"Philosophy," Ludwig Wittgenstein once said, "leaves everything as it is." It was not his wisest remark. Man has always been eager for--and is often alarmed by--new theories about the world: why and how it came to be and where it is going. Philosophers--from Democritus through Plato to Marx and Nietzsche--have rarely left things as they were. Marx, for instance, alleged that previous philosophers had only described the world; his mission was to change it. In fact, earlier philosophers had, in various ways, shaped the world he now proposed to revolutionize.

Would Marx ever have believed that mankind was ripe for radical remodeling if John Locke, two centuries earlier, had not maintained, with liberating plausibility, that men are born with minds like blank slates? Experience alone, Locke insisted, loads them with the information from which they later compose images of reality. A consequence of the blank slate was that there could be no inherited nobility. How could one newborn blank reasonably claim to be innately better than another?

Locke came at the right moment for democracy. His views emboldened America's Founding Fathers when it came to "self-evident" truths. He seemed to promise that everyone began life at the same starting line. Although challenged in detail, his empiricism appeared, for many decades, both common-sensical and scientific. It may still appear the first; it is not the second. Science and common sense seldom tell the same story.

Genetics has now established what Locke's contemporary, Gottfried Leibniz, had immediately suspected: Men's and women's (and animals') minds are elaborately "wired" long before they are born. And some have capacities that others do not. In their "selfishness," genes do not invest in level playing fields or universal human rights. Justice and fairness may be desirable; they are not natural.

If the theory of the blank slate is no longer tenable, must democratic theory collapse with it? Fortunately, and unarguably, there is no logical connection between how the world is and what values man chooses to impose on it and on himself. The only link between ethics and facts is that "ought entails can": We should not require of ourselves, or others, what it is beyond human capacity to achieve. It is not within our power, for instance, to be identical to our neighbors, neither more intelligent nor more comely; not even if our neighbor is our clone. Absolute equality is contrary to human nature. Why would anyone have to watch his back when saying something so matter-of-fact?