Christian Historical Lessons: Jean-Jacques Rousseau
Jean-Jacques Rousseau has had a profound influence on philosophy, culture, and politics in the west and even in the Communist nations of the east throughout the last 250 years. But his conception of a benevolent State that instructs the thoughts and intuitions and morality of the citizens it claims sovereignty over is particularly relevant in 2022. Paul Johnson, in his book on the secular intellectual bent of modern philosophy and the cultural elite, Intellectuals, describes Rousseau’s ideal government this way:
Rousseau’s state is not merely authoritarian: it is also totalitarian, since it orders every aspect of human activity, thought included. Under the social contract, the individual was obliged to ‘alienate himself, with all his rights to the whole of the community’ (i.e., the State). Rousseau held that there was an ineradicable conflict between the man’s natural selfishness and his social duties, between the Man and the Citizen. And that made him miserable. The function of the social contract, and the state it brought into being, was to make man whole again: ‘Make man one, and you will make him as happy as he can be. Give him all to the State, or leave him all to himself. But if you divide his heart, you tear him in two.’ You must therefore, treat citizens as children and control their upbringing and thoughts, planting the ‘social law in the bottom of their hearts.’ They then become ‘social men by their natures and citizens by their inclinations; they will be one, they will be good, they will be happy, and their happiness will be that of the Republic.’
Paul Johnson, Intellectuals
The idea of any human agent being so thoroughly benevolent that it can be trusted to shape men’s hearts while being free of any accountability or an institution of equal authority which can check its influence is horrifying. Yet Rousseau apparently thought it was the right path for humanity, and many in our own day agree. The federal government, and all her scientists and Department of Education employees and bureaucrats, must be trusted with our bodies and our futures and convictions about ethics and teleology and eschatology, with what we believe about what men and women are, what a human being is, and what our moral obligations to each other are. We are to accept that two men can form a marriage because her Supreme Court has ruled so and that she can mandate we get Covid vaccines. We are to accept that when she tells us a school a boy can enter a girls’ restroom her word is final since she has deemed that boys who say they are actually girls are indeed girls by, merely by their own fiat.
And our culture-shapers, those who make the shows most of us watch and form the pantheon of our celebrity gods and goddesses, they have influenced most of our hearts to agree that it is not God who determines truth and His Word and eminent reason that help us to see it, but the public will. Twenty years ago, none of us would have allowed a boy to go into our daughter’s locker room. Today, such boys are told they are brave for living their truth. What has happened in between? Did we learn from the Creator and His Word and through reasoned argument that boys can become girls? No. The public will and her governmental manifestations declared something, and they informed the minds within their control that what they declared was true.
Rousseau said, “Those who control a people’s opinions control its actions.” Our American citizenry finds her judgments increasingly under the control of men and women who do not seek God for truth, but the vacuum of their own secular conjecture. They are like Rousseau. And like him, they seek the children of their fellow citizens as a way of controlling the opinions and future actions of their neighbors. Again, Johnson writes:
The educational process was thus the key to the success of the cultural engineering needed to make the State acceptable and successful; the axis of Rousseau’s ideas was the citizen as child and the State as parent, and he insisted the government should have complete charge of the upbringing of children. Hence – and this is the true revolution of Rousseau’s ideas brought about – he moved the political process to the very center of human existence by making the legislator, who is also a pedagogue, into the new Messiah, capable of solving human problems by creating New Men. ‘Everything,’ he wrote, ‘is at root dependent on politics.’
Paul Johnson, Intellectuals
Ask yourself two questions: What are the odds your local public school will spend even one moment teaching young boys how to be good men and young girls how to be good women? And does the education your children receive reflect the worldview and political convictions of your home? The apparent answer to each is revealing.
It is clear to me that we are living with the fruits of the ideology Rousseau prescribed. We have adopted the belief that the government is responsible to teach our children. And as their opinions are shaped, so are their actions.