Statue of Niccolò Machiavelli

In the brand new building where I work, the lights go on and off, the shades go up and down, and the toilets flush, automatically, without your having to turn a switch or push a handle. Rational control has replaced individual virtue, which is subject to vagaries and may not be active or awake. The building where I used to work was shared with economists, who, living the sort of life they describe, had no incentive to flush and sometimes failed to do so.

Such virtue is so minimal that it hardly deserves the name, but even actions that are very obviously in your self-interest may be done for you if there is a chance that you might not perform them. As instruments of rational control, the seat belts in your car are inferior to air bags because the former you have to buckle up and the latter save you without your having to lift a finger. In this case your life is involved (though one wouldn’t say at stake), and the point is to save you the inconvenience of having to be mindful. All of us are treated as if we were absent-minded on the chance—of course, the good chance—that some of us might be.

These examples are small matters of convenience, but they add up. In the first set of building controls, you might save a lot of money; in the second, a good number of lives. But as intrusions into your privacy, your own control over your life, your virtue, they also add up. In their very minuteness they reveal the comprehensiveness of rational control. And another thing: They often don’t work. This is particularly true of the automatic flush, just one measure in the never-ending war against the human smell. That the tools and formulas of rational control often don’t work, that we must constantly have recourse (first to husbands and then) to repairmen, does not, for us, cast doubt on the whole idea of rational control. With undaunted optimism, we just try something else of the same kind.

All of us are treated as if we were absent-minded on the chance—of course, the good chance—that some of us might be.

What is rational control? The examples I have given are the tail end of something very big, the idea of modernity. That idea requires subjecting our entire lives, holding nothing back—which means holding nothing sacred as exempt—to an examination by our reason as to whether we can live more effectively. What this means, Francis Bacon said best: “The enlarging of the bounds of human empire, to the effecting of all things possible.” This single idea was conceived and promoted by a group of philosophers, or rather, first by one philosopher, who held the grand ambition of using philosophy or science to change the world. This idea would be stated and restated in different versions that would compete with one another, and partly by intent, partly by accident, it would develop in its own inner history as later philosophers criticized and perfected earlier versions. The inner history of the modern idea, the idea of modernity, has been told by Hegel, but his history was spoiled by too much sympathy for modernity.

Rational control certainly makes use of technology, as in the examples above, which means that it depends on science, modern science. But modern science and technology serve the end of “social engineering,” as we say when we designate certain, often clumsy and narrow-minded, attempts to affect behavior. These attempts need to be understood broadly as “enlarging the bounds of human empire.” Technology is the means, and science understood technologically is the end, of enlarging human empire.

But why enlarge human empire? Science and technology take for granted that such an end is necessary and inevitable. But it is not; the idea of rational control was a choice, made at a certain moment and for reasons that are moral and political, not merely technological. The spirit of modern science antedates modern science. The spirit does not have to be formulated mathematically, though to be sure the most characteristic modern science is mathematical physics. Nor does it have to be serious. It can be seen in literary form, as a comedy.

Let’s have a quick look at Machiavelli’s comic play Mandragola, first shown in 1518. Machiavelli arranged to publish after his death his two main works, The Prince and the Discourses on Livy, which contain the amazing novelties in morals and politics that earned him his evil reputation. But in Mandragola we can find all the spirit of modern science without any of its apparatus.

While in Paris, Callimaco, a young blade, hears of the Florentine beauty Lucrezia, and begins a conspiracy to seduce her. But as Lucrezia is a pious, married woman, how will he manage it? It turns out that Lucrezia and her husband, Messer Nicia, want to have a son but cannot, because Messer Nicia is impotent. Here are two desires—Callimaco’s for adultery, which is evil, and the couple’s for a child, which is good. At the end of the play, both desires are satisfied. Callimaco gets to enjoy Lucrezia with her consent, and not just for one night but for the indefinite future, and Messer Nicia and Lucrezia get a son (we learn in the sequel play) so that their family can continue and maintain its political standing. Now by the ruling morality of that time, that of the Catholic Church, it is wrong to try to save a family by resorting to adultery. Having children is good, but adultery is wrong, and you are not permitted to do evil to get a good result. This doctrine means that “family values” might lead to the extinction of a family; a very pious couple might not be able to “be fruitful and multiply,” as the Bible wants it to do.

Machiavelli conveys to us, without telling us, that this situation is irrational. The solution in his play is to relax the moral prohibition against adultery in order to save the family. The Bible, seeming to oppose the solution, contradicts itself by commanding the end (reproduction) while forbidding the necessary means (adultery). In the play, Lucrezia’s conscientious refusal is overcome by the argument of a crooked priest, Brother Timothy, who points out to her that God permitted Lot to have intercourse with his daughters because they believed he was the last man on earth. So, if incest, why not adultery? When confronted with necessity, God finds a way around morality.

Those who follow the old way of piety and morality do good, but receive evil; those who follow the new way do evil—but is it so evil?—and secure good. By following the new formula, one can in principle make the family perpetual, so as to reduce or eliminate our dependence on the chance of reproduction and thus increase both human power and human liberty. The family, of course, is not a sovereign body, but Machiavelli in his Discourses on Livy refers to the possibility of securing a perpetual republic that would have a remedy for every risk of dissolution or defeat. All it has to do is to adhere to the new formula: Lower the moral standard to improve your chances and secure better results. Of course, as we shall see, it is also necessary to apply certain devices in the operation of this formula.

The idea of rational control was conceived by Machiavelli and continued by a series of modern philosophers who followed him and considered themselves a movement. The agenda had two aspects—liberation and reform, deconstruction and reconstruction. Regarding the first, why would one say “liberation” rather than “liberty”? Liberty in the movement of modernity appears as liberation, a liberation from irrational control. Modernity did not begin from chaos but from a certain order, an irrational order, the order of custom. (No doubt it sometimes suited modern philosophers to contrast their order with no order, so that they could begin anew and thus conceal the order they had destroyed.) Custom is what you learn from your parents. Where did they learn it? From their parents. For the ultimate source, one must go back to their ancestors, who descended from gods, from God. God is the foundation of the irrational order. Modern liberation is liberation from God as the source of irrational custom.

Yet modern liberation is not total because men still need a guide, having rejected the guide of irrational tradition. Liberation is a release from prejudice and superstition, but these sources of irrational control must be replaced by something better, by forms of rational control. That is why the religious question is central to modernity. It was the first and fundamental question because human rights must be asserted against divine right, against the principle that God is in some way our ruler. All pre-modern regimes are more or less based on divine right, on appeal to a principle that says men do not control themselves, that they are controlled by a higher power. To liberate us from subjection, modernity must show that men can control themselves. For if men cannot act effectively on their own, they will have to return to divine right, notwithstanding the objections that philosophers might propose. Liberation leads to reform. Liberation is not merely skeptical or negative; it is positive and progressive.

It appears that the two aspects of modernity are liberty and progress, and that the two are linked. Liberty means liberation from unreason, which is progress; progress means expanding the scope of liberty. Is there no difficulty here? Yes, there is, and not a small one. There is no liberty to be irrational or to be satisfied with less liberty. For example, women today are equal to men, or closer to equal than they used to be. Men, however, are less free to be their old sexist selves. No doubt this is all for the good, but men are still less free in a sense. Moreover, having abandoned the “traditional stereotypes,” we have set in place new, non-sexist stereotypes. These are to be taught to children by parents, to parents by the mainstream media. Recently, on a CBS nightly news program after an eventful day, the largest segment was devoted to portraying women who were deputy general managers of professional sports teams, and who were poised to become the first women to be named general manager of one. Progress was called for and touted before it came. This is the kind of convention promoted for rational control, one that gives women a gentle push ahead instead of holding them back, like the traditional convention that frowned on women general managers.

It appears that the two aspects of modernity are liberty and progress, and that the two are linked.

Progressives have a problem, then, in dealing with conservatives, who resist rational control. How should these resistors be treated? Should they be repressed or tolerated? It’s clear that those who show racial prejudice should be repressed, their sentiments condemned, their arguments denied a voice. But what of sexist or anti-gay conservatives? Their prejudice seems at the moment less grave, just as it is more widespread. Your grandfather, even your father, might be one of them. Advocates of equality for women and gays try to give such prejudice the same disrepute as racial prejudice, but they have not yet succeeded. Liberals, believing in progress, are less likely to tolerate conservatives than vice versa because liberals are impelled to believe that those in the way of progress (racists) are prejudiced and do not deserve respect. At the same time, liberals are inclined to relativism, wishing not to judge others (sexists, perhaps). In this mood, they maintain that all values are equal, forgetting the superiority of their own; the values of oppressors are held to be equal to those of liberals. As progressives, liberals are too hard, as relativists they are too soft.

Progress toward rational control requires innovation—the new toilets that flush on their own. Progress thus requires receptivity to innovation, the willingness to give up the old way of custom and prejudice. Francis Bacon said that science proceeds by its light and by its fruits. Those who benefit from innovation—the plumbers who fix the automatic toilets—will welcome them; others who have to use them will probably tolerate them, wryly and with an occasional kick. “Standing in the way of progress” is not a respectable stance these days. In morals, however, progress is not so easy to obtain or accept. Looking again at Machiavelli’s Mandragola, we note that the Biblical excuse given to adultery is intended to shock the audience by its effrontery. We are expected to laugh at the gravest prohibitions of society and religion. Yet of course the audience will not be shocked if it does not believe in the Bible as God’s Word.

Machiavelli’s provocative blasphemies in this play and elsewhere in his writings imply a certain protection for the dominant religion even as it is made fun of. In Mandragola, the institution of marriage is improved and therefore retained, its conventional character altered but not abandoned. Rational control in this case does not require a rational marriage that can withstand every objection to marriage, such as the open marriage of our day to which you are obliged only so long as you can find evident reason for being obliged. Machiavelli contemplates that conservative resistance to his monumental change will exist and continue—and even contribute to progress.

Conservatism in the form of prejudiced opposition to innovation ensures that there will be risk to every advance of progress, hence that there will be virtue in the new prince (as Machiavelli calls him) who promotes that advance. Machiavelli says in The Prince that nothing is more difficult or dangerous than to be an innovator, for the innovator “has all those who benefit from the old orders as enemies, and he has lukewarm defenders in all those who might benefit from the new orders.” Yet the beneficiaries of the old orders can be won over to the new ones, “satisfied and stupefied” as Machiavelli says, precisely if they are shocked. Most such beneficiaries are filled with wonder at a person or a deed that is bolder than they are. Despite their conservatism, they attend to their fears and welcome whatever, whoever, can awe them with seeming power over them. In his political works, Machiavelli recommends periodic sensational executions as a way for a regime to gain attention from its people and make them obey.

Aristotle argues that innovations are bad because they undermine the good effects of habit, and habit is necessary because people do not always see an evident reason for doing what they should. Machiavelli replies that disrupting the habit, say, of marital chastity, can renew its original purpose of providing both sexual satisfaction and reproduction. Perhaps, as in Mandragola, you cannot always have them together, but the action of the play is intended to freshen our appreciation of the advantages of marriage. Marriage, while still conventional, becomes more rational than it has been traditionally. In our time, progress itself has become a habit, and we all—conservatives as well as liberals—expect to be excited if not shocked by next year’s car. Human beings are creatures of habit and at the same time desirous of novelty, and the idea of progress appeals to both sentiments while improving them. Habit is no longer arbitrary and reactionary, and novelty is progressive, building on past innovation rather than being merely new.

With the idea of progress, novelty takes the form of conquest. To do something new is to be the first, to be a pioneer. Machiavelli, a man of thought, compared himself to the explorers of the new world. He was another Columbus, supposedly sent by a prince, but actually acting on his own and for himself. His new undertaking (impresa) was an adventure introducing the idea of adventure. Others would follow in his path, he believed, because, though he had the idea, he left something for them to do, adventures for them, too, together with the glory that results. That rational control could be an adventure is not what we would expect from a notion that seems to remove adventure from our lives, leaving us with nothing to do and no virtue to practice. Rational control locates all reason in the controller, none in the nature and fortune that he controls. The universe is open, and so is the future. Nature, being subject to chance, has a bemusing regularity, an off-and-on intelligibility, that you cannot depend on. It’s in our nature to be sexually potent, but as with Messer Nicia in Mandragola, sometimes nature is thwarted. Abandoning reliance on nature, and adopting the mood of seeking security, you fasten on yourself, your reason, as the only thing dependable. You transform your search for security into an adventure into the unknown. “I think, therefore I am”—there’s an intrepid spirit in that.

Still, the consequence of adventure brings routine, and is intended to do so. “A trip to the moon on gossamer wings” is just one of those crazy things, but a NASA mission to the moon is intended to “make a giant step for mankind.” The path of the pioneer is accessible to the rest of us, not right away, but, in principle, some time in the future. Today, with a little money, you can take an African safari, a trip to the Himalayas, once fairly recently a feat of adventure. The reason for this is the simplification that is at the heart of rational control.

The Marxists used to say that the market allowed capitalists to rule liberal society through exploitation, but the truth is the contrary.

Lucrezia and Messer Nicia simplified their problem of having children without committing adultery. They did it in a way that typifies modern science. They looked at the extreme statement of their problem to see whether it would ever be permitted to commit adultery and found, with the aid of Machiavelli’s “judicious” (i.e., devilish) reading of the Bible, that incest (a greater extreme than adultery) would be allowed in the extreme case when it was necessary to repopulate the world. This necessity in the extreme case is universalized to cover all cases, so that the natural or the normal is newly defined by, or swallowed up in, the extreme as opposed to the usual case. Instead of having to think prudentially about the circumstances of your situation to see whether you really deserve an exception from the moral rule, you can act on a principle that has been stretched by appeal to a rather (comically) contrived “necessity” so as to do away with the truer, more challenging human necessities of thinking and sacrifice. The thinking behind this inflation of necessity is of course self-serving but also, when understood as part of Machiavelli’s plan for mankind, very ambitious. It resembles the scientific method of judging the whole of things by a crucial experiment of an extreme case, if possible a controlled case under laboratory conditions. Mandragola is a laboratory test of the truth of Christianity, which it fails.

The simplification accomplished by rational control issues in a number of devices of governing we can recognize as characteristically modern. Before mentioning them we should note their common spirit of indirectness. Rational control does not care to reason with you. It does not want to explain why you should flush the toilet or, more comprehensively, develop your character so that you will do it habitually or with a flair. It wants results. Its method is not to argue or to educate but to make a bargain with your unreason, to shut out the interference of your reason that comes from forming opinions. The opinions of your faulty, boastful reason will be replaced by incentives to your passions, to your self-interest (a modern concept). In Mandragola, all the characters get what they want, both material satisfaction and public respectability. What they do not receive is any satisfaction proceeding from the activity of virtue.

From this bypass of your opinions, you are satisfied behind your back, as it were, through the motives that really move you by contrast to those you profess. These motives are forcible rather than hortatory; they persuade without argument or rhetoric by “using psychology” as we say. Rather than appeal to your reason with argument or compel you with open force, they avoid direct confrontation and work on you indirectly. Rather than rule you, they make you think you are ruling yourself. There are two general ways to do this: by bureaucracy and through pluralism. Bureaucracy is the administration of scientific reason to unreason. As we have seen with the automatic toilets, bureaucracy seeks to replace your reason with rational control, which is superior to your reason because it is unfailing and considers the problem from more angles (cost, water use, offensiveness) than you could or would. True, it never asks your view of the matter, but you won’t object because your reason is included in the reason of the controller whose scientific reason supersedes yours. Supposedly.

The same wound hurts more if it is also a slight to your self-esteem.

The fact that people do object to the superiority of scientific reason and hence to bureaucracy, sometimes strenuously, suggests the need for another, less obvious, pluralistic method of rational control. Rational control can often succeed better by tolerating irrationality than by replacing it with rational bureaucracy. The best example is the market. The market does not prevent you from getting what you want, but merely compels you to pay for it—and the compulsion takes the form of a trade-off within your mind as you figure your “preferences.” The automatic toilet that seems bureaucratic has actually been bought voluntarily by my employer, and if I liked it I could buy one for myself or make one for others. The latter requires taking a risk; so we see that rational control sometimes allows for risk rather than always suppressing it. Instead of suppressing risk, and with it virtue, one can discount risk, using the science of economics. Just as Machiavelli’s politics posits a contrived “necessity” to do evil, modern economics is based on an exaggerated, universal “scarcity,” as if God had given us nothing. We need a non-economic—a political—view of economics to show how close it is to Machiavelli’s indirect government. The Marxists used to say that the market allowed capitalists to rule liberal society through exploitation, but the truth is the contrary. The market gives capitalists the opportunity to exercise their ambition and love of risk in economic ventures so as to prevent them from ruling.

Representative government is a fundamental device of rational control. Such government claims merely to represent the people, never to rule them. All modern governments, even the totalitarian ones, confine themselves to this modest boast, which signifies that the government merely gives you what you ask for, or would ask for if you were rational. Any demand that the government lays upon you, such as for your life or your money, is for what you have consented to. Quite voluntary, don’t you see? All constraint is indirect because its origin is in yourself. The psychology of this point is again well stated by Machiavelli: “For wounds and every other ill that a man does to himself spontaneously and by choice hurt much less than those that are done to you by someone else.” The same wound hurts more if it is also a slight to your self-esteem.

Rational control saves itself from the worst scientific tyranny when it accommodates our irrational self-esteem, our resistance to being condescended to by those of superior rationality. Self-esteem serves both the people and their leaders. In the people it nourishes love of liberty as opposed to liberation; in the leaders it gives a boost to public spiritedness and laudable ambition. In this way rational control does not merely replace virtue but has virtues of its own. The trouble is that these virtues appear irrational because they are based on resistance to rational control rather than acquiescence. We must discern them and let them flourish despite their disagreement with our modern genius. With this conclusion my article has escaped rational control and become an argument in favor of conservatism, not a scolding conservatism but one suitably restrained, in touch with human nature, and still in love with virtue.

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This article originally appeared in The New Criterion, Volume 25 Number 1, on page 39
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