“The veneer of civilization is always very thin, while the innate barbarity of humankind is forever very deep,” wrote the historian Victor Davis Hanson in a recent essay on the Russia-Ukraine war.[1]
Russia’s brutal destruction of civilians illustrates how thin the veneer of civilization is. There are many other examples—from the Holocaust in a country that had achieved a peak of intellectual sophistication to the protection of slavery in a country founded on the concept of freedom. And more.
So, are we barbarians or civilized? We are both.
While I can’t explain why barbarity must involve war and torture, I can offer some understanding of why our veil of civilization is often so tattered.
My source is Friedrich A. von Hayek (1899–1992). Although Hayek received a Nobel Prize in economics in 1974, he is known mostly to people of a libertarian bent, like me. To us, he is the greatest. Continue reading “The Skull Beneath the Skin”
I have been studying the poor laws of England. From 1601 to 1834 England was unique among European nations in that people in need could receive financial aid, paid for by taxes. Other countries relied almost entirely on charity.
But the cost of relief kept going up. As early as 1662, an act was passed limiting relief to the poor who were born or in the local parish or had lived there long enough to be “settled.” Those from elsewhere had to go home if they wanted relief—or even if the parish overseers suspected they might want relief in the future. The immobility of the poor made it hard to find jobs.
The poor (who became known as paupers) were increasingly viewed as idle and vicious. Over the years, prominent people from John Locke to Jeremy Bentham came up with fanciful schemes for correcting the bad behavior of the poor—educating them, working them, punishing them. Little change occurred, however.
Frédéric Bastiat was a classical liberal who lived in France from 1801 to 1850. (For more information about Bastiat, see a previous post). His writing—which was rediscovered by American libertarians in the 1940s after years of disdain and neglect—is witty and insightful. It provides fables that help teach economics, such as his “Petition by the Manufacturers of Candles, Etc..” which carries protectionism to absurd lengths: Candlemakers petition the government to command people to cover their windows and stop letting in sunlight (thus “protecting” them from sunlight), because the sun is ruining the candle business.[1]
Bastiat was as harsh on French education as he was on protectionism. He split with classical liberals who accepted publicly provided education; he didn’t think the government should be involved in teaching.
But that is not what is extraordinary about his educational views. Rather, he challenged the French secondary-school curriculum because it revered the classical civilizations of antiquity. To Bastiat, the Greeks (both Athenians and Spartans) and Romans were violent, military, and disdainful of work—not worth the study that was slavishly given them. This is extraordinary because respect for antiquity permeated the views of educated Europeans. Among French educators, there were some intellectual disagreements along the lines of whether Athens or Sparta was “better,” but studying classical civilizations was the bread and butter of proper education.
I was fortunate to spend a semester studying the work of Frédéric Bastiat, the great nineteenth-century French economic pamphleteer. Beloved by libertarians, he is unequalled in his ability to defend freedom and personal responsibility.
Even Frédéric Bastiat, an insightful libertarian thinker, could not imagine communism of the twentieth-century kind.
Much can be said about Bastiat, but here I’d like to mention his discussion of communism, for two reasons. First, it illustrates the fluidity of the terms socialism and communism in the mid-nineteenth century—something historians should not forget. For another, it illustrates how brilliant people can be both unusually perceptive about what is around them, but still blind about the future.
Warning: Like most writers about Bastiat, I find it hard not to quote him at length. He says things much better than most of us can.
