The Self-Made Saint

Hypocrisy Beyond Bounds

Jean-Jacques Rousseau is regarded by many as the patron saint of the French Enlightenment.  To this day he is cited as an authority on human rights, on liberty, on education and schooling, and on justice.  Yet he remains as one of the West's most vainglorious hypocrites.

Rousseau sought all his life to be accepted and honoured by the nobility.  He longed for recognition.  He sought attention constantly.  He was besotted with himself.  Few in the modern world recall, if they ever knew in the first place, that his personal home and family life was appalling.  It was meretricious because of Rousseau himself.

Rousseau never married, but he kept a mistress--or, more accurately, he had a mistress keep him.  Therese was dishonoured by him in public, in front of his guests at dinner, and in his general treatment of a poor and vulnerable woman.

Two Roads

Self-Made Saints

Every society believes in the existence of evil.  Every society has a code of right and wrong, good and evil--however different the codes and lists may be.  Where, then, does evil come from?  What are its origins and causes?

There are only two basic positions given in answer to this question:  the first argues that evil is resident in every human being and that unless it is restrained or checked, it will break forth in word, thought, and action.  The second world-view is that every human being is born morally good and pure: corruption comes from the "outside"--society, others, socio-economic conditions.  We well recall serving on a jury in which a child had given evidence.  Some members of the jury argued vehemently that of course the child told the pure, unvarnished truth because children are pure and uncorrupted and without sin.

Jean-Jacques Rousseau was of this persuasion.  He was very sure that, at least as far as he was concerned, his heart was free from any and all evil.  He said he felt that man is naturally good.  But, whatever others may thing or do, he was certain that he was morally and ethically pure.  He felt it was accurate to claim of himself that he was "on the whole the best of men".

Where, then, does evil come from?  It is at this juncture that Rousseau becomes a most notorious false prophet:  evil, he insists, has come into his life from the outside.  It comes from other men.

The Great Lie

Believing Your Own Press . . . Or Not

What did the Enlightenment gurus really believe about human nature?  Remember that the philosophes of the period had faces set like flint against religion in general and Christianity in particular.  Virtually all that was evil in the world, they argued, could be traced back to religious superstition.  "Enlightenment" meant casting off the darkness inflicted upon to the West by the Church.  

But what would replace the Ten Commandments?  No problems at all.  Get rid of religion and mankind would return to his natural state of moral, spiritual, and intellectual innocence.  J. H. Huizinga summarises the Enlightenment world view:

The Foolish Self-Made Saint

The Chameleon Who Inspired Robespierre

Jean-Jacques Rousseau is a name to conjure with.  Many in our post-Christian world remain intensely loyal to him and his writings.  The irony is that Rousseau was in many ways a charlatan, a fraud.  He was an emotionally unstable man.  His biographer, J. H. Huizinga uses the phrase "weathercock nature" to characterize him--meaning, essentially, that Rousseau was a past master at sensing the way the wind was blowing, and setting his sails accordingly.

Consequently, much of his writing was (and remains) chaotically incoherent.  Choose any opinion or position about man and society you wish and somewhere in his writing Rousseau will agree with you, and somewhere else he will attack you.  Here are some of Rousseau's hypocritical behaviours:

Letter From the Land of Cotton

Why The Left (And Donald Trump) Are On A Never-Ending Witch Hunt

George Fields
The Federalist

Leftism always identifies some group as the source of all problems in society, some class that makes all mankind choke.

My kid sister, who does Twitter, took it upon herself to propagate my last article. Several of her friends reacted negatively. One was so utterly silly that I took to the typewriter to concoct a response; but then realized my critic was 14 years old. So I thought better of it and went to bed.

As I arose in the morning, my sister had sent me another critique of my article. It read as follows: “Guys this is cis white male trolling people. Just report block, and move on.” At first, I was thrilled to think leftists had finally determined that my sister and I, being of Sicilian and Vietnamese ancestry, had graduated into being white (the master race, as the Democratic primary would suggest), as opposed to being genetically inferior racial toxins requiring forced sterilization, as Madame Sanger and the Progressives of yesteryear contended.

As I spent the better part of the day waiting eagerly for the official diploma informing me of my change in status, I began to contemplate that, although I had been promoted to society’s ruling class, I had also been demoted to the Left’s newest object of hatred.  I say newest, because “white people” are surely not the first.

Creepy Sanctimony

One of the Greats

"One of the most sanctimonious creeps of all time" would be a fair description of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, or J-JR for short.  But he is also one of the most celebrated intellectuals of the Modern period.  We need to understand why both assessments are fair and accurate.

First, the appellation of über-sanctimonious creep.

Paul Johnson, concluding his essay on J-JR, writes:

Rousseau's reputation during his lifetime, and his influence after his death, raise disturbing questions about human gullibility, and indeed about the human propensity to reject evidence it does not with to admit.  The acceptability of what Rousseau wrote depended in great part on his strident claim to be not merely virtuous but the most virtuous man of his time.

Why did not this claim collapse in ridicule and ignominy when his weaknesses and vices became not merely public knowledge but the subject of international debate?

Modern Aristo-Plutocrats

Do As I Say, Not As I Do

Marie Antoinette's infamous, "Let them eat cake" has entered the popular lexicon as a byword for sociopathic disdain for the poor.  There is some serious doubt as to whether poor old Marie ever uttered the phrase.  It was attributed to her by one Jean Jacques Rousseau who never let the facts get in the way of a ripping slander. 

Rousseau's Confessions (in which the slander appears) was written in 1768--two years before Marie Antoinette moved to France.  The line also appears in Rousseau's journal notes "years before Antoinette was born."  Ouch.  But it proved a useful pretext and propaganda tool to stir up envy and anger, inciting the odd riot or two.  [Jonah Goldberg, The Tyranny of Cliches: How Liberals Cheat in the War of Ideas (New York: Sentinel/Penguin, 2012), p.172.]

The picture of an uncaring, wealthy aristocracy who hate the poor abides.  It appeals to our baser instincts.  It certainly appealed to Rousseau who, himself, was an acute despiser of the poor and a "suck-up-to-nobility-kind-of-chap".  If Rousseau could not join the aristocracy, he hated them; when he was welcomed and celebrated in their circles, he fawned over them.  He was a pathetic fellow in so many ways. 

But his bitter word, falsely attributed to Marie Antoinette, lives on.  Ironically, it is amongst modern democrats and socialists that the sentiment conveyed by Rousseau has the most traction.  Uber-wealth and gaudy displays are the hallmark of the modern celebrity culture, along with a fashionable assuaging commitment to socialism.  The latter serves to salve the conscience for all that wealth so ostentatiously on display.  Marie Antoinette had nothing on our modern aristo-plutocrats.

Diabolical Alternatives

In Chains, Everywhere

The ethic of freedom has become the engine of oppression.  At first blush, this seems nonsense.  How could the ideal of being free from compulsion, constraint, and restraint become the instrumental cause of force, compulsion, and oppression?  Unless we work this out, freedom is a dangerous concept.

Let's start with Jean Jacques Rousseau--one of the more pathetic figures in Western annals.  He famously proclaimed that man was born free, but is everywhere in chains.  The image is powerful.  We know what  being in chains means.  We have seen dogs on a leash or chained.  We have seen them leap forward only to crash to the ground as the chain restrains.  Rousseau's idea intuitively conveys the idea of human enslavement; freedom is being released from constraints.  But for Rousseau, freedom meant being released from constraints of any sort. 

If you were to come into your neighbour's house and he asked you to remove your shoes, Rousseau would have us believe that chains were rattling.

Strange Bedfellows

The Metamorphosis of Marx

They say that politics make strange bedfellows.  Never is this more evident in the conflict between Israel and the Palestinians.  There is a strong current of support for Palestinians and Islamic causes generally in the West.  Often-times the support comes from "progressive" components of the political spectrum.  But echoes can also be found in residual anti-semitic groups, the main stream media, and the universities. 

Strangely, what is being defended and implicitly promoted is a cause which has overtly fostered and promoted the killing of innocents to make a political point and to terrorise others.  It is a cause notorious for its authoritarianism, its subjugation of women, its maltreatment of homosexuals, and its authoritarian subjugation of all under its sway.  How come?  How does it come about that Western feminists, homosexuals, libertines, and the licentious apparently are relaxed and comfortable supporting and advocating for those who would snap their necks in a second if they had the chance? 

One possible cause is ignorance and condescension.  Often times progressives in the West are so ideologically hidebound they remain remarkably ignorant of actual humanity and reality.

A Man For all Seasons

Dagon On His Face

Here are some insights from an exceptionally good biography of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, entitled Rousseau--The Self Made Saint by J. H. Huizinga (New York, Grossman Publishers, 1976).

Rousseau is undeniably an important figure in the West.  To this day he is probably the most influential shaper of Western pedagogy and teaching methods.  He, more than any other, is responsible for "child-centred education"--that oxymoron of oxymorons.  Huizinga tells us that modern scholarship is besotted with him.

Never, therefore, was there an intellectual of immense renown whom it is so difficult to take seriously.  Yet few writers have been the object of such painstaking study.  Few have kept and are still keeping so many erudite scholars at work analysing and interpreting the maestro's every word; putting the most ingenious constructions on his chaotic incoherence so as to "unify his thought"; annotating his thousands of letters so as to reveal that words like "I have a cold" in the first draft were replaced by "I have a bad cold"; digging out yellowed documents so as to acquaint the world with the details of the great man's laundry bills (which--believe it or not--fill twelve pages in the latest edition of his collected works); . . . (Op cit., p. 20)

It is ironic that the Unbelieving West has chosen Rousseau as one of its patron saints.  It turns out that he was a self-inflated, opinionated gadfly, his writings riddled with contradictions and his life oozing hypocrisy from every orifice.