What Kind of Society Do We Want

In the antebellum South, a man named George Fitzhugh wrote an essay entitled “Sociology for the South, or, The Failure of Free Society.” In it, he makes a defense of slavery that is as outlandish to modern sentiments as it is removed from the true deplorable condition of being a slave. However, he paints a picture of what life is like in the South because of slavery. I’ll quote him at length here.

“We have no mobs, no trade unions, no strikes for higher wages, no armed resistance to the law, but little jealousy of the rich by the poor. We have but few in our jails, and fewer in our poor houses. We produce enough comforts and necessaries of life for a population three or four times as numerous as ours. We are wholly exempt from the torrent of pauperism, crime, agrarianism, and infidelity which Europe is pouring from her jails and alms houses on the already crowded North. Population increases slowly, wealth rapidly…High intellectual and moral attainment, refinement of head and heart, give standing to a man in the South, however poor he may be. Money is, with few exceptions, the only thing that ennobles the North. We have poor among us, but none who are over-worked and under-fed.”

All of this is possible, he contends, because the South is more aligned to the natural existence for human beings. He argues, “Nature compels master and slave to be friends; nature makes employers and free laborers enemies.” This is predicated on his idea that, “A state of dependence is the only condition in which reciprocal affection can exist among human beings — the only situation in which the war of competition ceases, and peace, amity and good will arise. A state of independence always begets more or less of jealous rivalry and hostility.”

To summarize his position, being dependent is mankind’s natural condition, and slavery is the most pure example of this relationship. Dependency exists between master and slave for if the slave refuses to labor and produce, the master loses his livelihood and lifestyle. There’s a reciprocity there that doesn’t exist in a free labor relationship — the owner just replaces the worker with someone else. There’s no real mutual sense of dependence; the dependence only exists from the worker to the owner. When a slave can no longer produce, they weren’t often euthanized — they were housed and fed until they died. That’s not the case in free labor. This is until Progressivism, the New Deal, and the reconstruction of the purpose of government in America.

The question that continues to plague me — and it’s something that was constantly alluded to by the candidates running for the 2016 election — is what kind of society do we wish to live in? The New Deal, in certain critical ways, has made the populace dependent on the government. Libertarians bemoan this development and, in this case, are often aligned with many of the Founding generation. But what if Fitzhugh was correct — that mankind really must exist in a condition of mutual dependence and that the idea of independent self-sufficiency is not only undesirable but unnatural? Our society today is far more benign to idiosyncratic personalities and lifestyles than ever before, and we are also more dependent on the government than ever before. We are a more benign, tolerant, and placid people than any time in our history, but we also look to the state to solve more of our social dilemmas than any other time. Have we, in the modern age, collectively chosen to abandon the notion of independent self-sufficiency and replace it with a sense of dependence, a muted semi-autonomy?

It seems as though both American liberals and conservatives wish to have a society that mirrors Fitzhugh’s glowing idealized antebellum South. It nearly goes without saying that neither desire slavery nor the caste society that existed with it. However, it does seem that they do desire a society which mirrors his idealized account: no one is destitute, less prisoners, more law-abiding citizens, social harmony, and strong moral and intellectual character for even the most poor among us. How do we accomplish this, however, if we are unwilling to make a portion of the society the ‘substratum’ as Fitzhugh describes it? And, more uncomfortably, does Fitzhugh’s criticism of the North and of the overwhelming drive of capitalism not continue to ring out certain truths of our own age — the acquisition of money being the great virtue of our people and our metric for success, the callous condition between labor and owners, a one-sided dependence of workers to ‘job creators?’ Has our response been, then, at least in a certain way, to acknowledge that a politics based on the independent, self-sufficient person leaves far too many in the dregs of society and that we have to abandon that model for a more humane existence for more people?

And yet, we are unwilling to admit Fitzhugh’s premise that we need an ‘underclass’ to function as a society. Does this mean that we are now using the state to prop up that ‘substratum’ — for us, it’s no longer slaves but those who teeter on being destitute without the state — therefore bringing back into our society a sense of perpetual dependence replacing the owning class with the state and the slave class with the economically disadvantaged? While this certainly may be true, it also doesn’t actually go far enough. Is it merely just the economically disadvantaged that make up the ‘substratum’ or have we returned to a closer parallel to the Romans — having plebians and patricians — or even the Marxist language of the proletariat and the bourgeois? These things, while perhaps true in their own right, don’t seem to capture the social cleavages of modern America. While we don’t have a caste system like existed in the antebellum South, our laboring classes have more in common with the description Fitzhugh gives of slaves than we are perhaps comfortable with.

It seems as though we have created a kind of owner/slave relationship in America without maintaining the barbarism of chattel slavery nor the reciprocal dependence inherent to that caste system. What we do see is the rhetoric in the Democratic Party primary, which Republicans often bemoan as class warfare, highlighting this relationship, particularly in the campaign of Senator Sanders. What’s odd, however, is the society that Democrats often advocate most ardently for mirrors closely the idealized dependent society of the antebellum South. Republicans often revile the language of class warfare, but support policies which create the economic condition that allows for a dependent society. The Democrats want the benefits, the Republicans want the systematic condition.

But what does this say of what we value for our society? Are we willing to give up the ideal of an independent, self-sufficient condition (the world desired by people like Thomas Jefferson, George Washington, John Adams) in order to create a more benign and placid existence for more people? The answer of modernity seems to be overwhelmingly yes. But does this trap us into the Fitzhugh understanding of dependence? Have we stripped ourselves of the blight of racial slavery only to create a society that is now dependent on the state to create the kind of comfortable lifestyle, once enjoyed by the slave owners, for the masses? Have we not shifted the threshold of what we will consider a tolerable existence and now use the state as the means of creating that condition for the ‘substratum’ while the owning class, the ‘job creators,’ benefit from this benign existence by living more lavishly and extravagantly, with their sole desire being to protect their way of life from the tumult of the bottom? Are modern political elections not about how much can be given to the working and middle classes by those who are at the economic top (either directly on the part of Democrats in idealized social programs or indirectly on the part of Republicans through the idealized form of trickle down economics)? Have we not placed ourselves back into a condition similar, though with critical differences, to the antebellum South without the moral depravity of slavery? Though, haven’t we replaced slavery with a kind of benign dependence on the state to satiate the desires of the ‘substratum’ and stabilize the lifestyle of the owners?

Is this the kind of society we wish to live in? Does the desire to make more people live like the aristocrats of old justify the existence of a new, more concentrated aristocratic class? A class which lives more lavishly but with less regard to their social duty because the state now protects the masses from the extremes of discomfort. Our society seems to be desiring some of the social goods of the idealized antebellum South without requiring the sense of social and political duty that existed amongst the owning and ‘substratum’ class — we wish to be free of the obligations that define a dependent society while preserving the social goods that come from it and while maintaining the elitism of capitalist economics.

We have destroyed the blight of slavery in our country, but it seems like we may have granted that Fitzhugh was correct — human beings more naturally need dependence than independence. Instead of placing our dependence on another human being, we place it in the leviathan of the state. Tocqueville predicts that we would come to live under a benign despotism in America — what Fitzhugh seems to understand even more than Tocqueville did is that the relationship between owners and workers and masters and slaves are, at their core, the same but the former is stripped of its reciprocal obligations that exists in the latter. Our benign despotism gives us the illusion of duty and obligation between the owning and working classes, but actually just preserves the sense of dependence without the virtues of duty and sacrifice that were hallmarks of a dependent society. Fitzhugh’s celebration of slavery must be condemned loudly and in an unequivocal manner, but his understanding of the failings of a free society should give us pause. It should cause us to ask if we are truly living in the kind of society that we desire or if we are merely living under an illusion, one which exists to placate the ‘substratum’ for the benefit of the ‘job creators’ with the government picking up the slack for those whose lives have been consumed by the consumer society.

Have we, in essence, tried to construct a more noble society without having to admit the dark cost that so frequently comes with nobility? Have we created a condition that has alienated our dependent people from one another, tasked them with devoting their lives to laboring to preserve themselves and their families, while the excess of their labor creates a leisure class who lives a lifestyle as different from the laboring class as a slave did from the master? In our desire to provide a more dignified lifestyle for more people, have we actually institutionalized the very dependence that undermines dignity? Is it a terrible surprise, then, that we see the rise of a Donald Trump or the enthusiasm for Senator Sanders — there is a great deal of unrest amongst the ‘substratum’ because the kind of lifestyle they were promised for their dependence on the state did not come to be. The virtue of reciprocal dependence has been eliminated from our modern lives, evidenced perhaps most glaringly by the bank saving measures of 2008, where the owning class was saved by the state, a task nearly unilaterally done only to save the bottom from falling out for the purpose of keeping the top from falling with it. The resentment and anger that began then and has matured into the populism we see today is derived from the dissatisfaction far too many feel about the state of our society. What Fitzhugh makes us ask ourselves is what kind of society do we wish to live in, and what facet of human dignity are we willing to sacrifice for it.