Keynes My Early
Beliefs - excerpt
I said that we were
amongst the first to escape from Benthanism.
But of another eighteenth-century heresy we were the unrepentant heirs
and last upholders. We were among the
last of the Utopians, or meliorists as they are sometimes called, who believe
in a continuing moral progress by virtue of which the human race already
consists of reliable, rational, decent people, influenced by truth and
objective standards, who can be safely released from the outward restraints of
convention and traditional standards and inflexible rules of conduct, and left,
from now onwards, to their own sensible devices, pure motives and reliable
intuitions of the good. The view that
human nature is reasonable had in 1903 quite a long history behind it. It underlay the ethics of self-interest –
rational self-interest as it was called – just as much as the universal ethics
of Kant or Bentham which aimed at the general good; and it was because
self-interest was rational that the egoistic and altruistic systems were
supposed to work out in practice to the same conclusions.
In short, we
repudiated all versions of the doctrine of original sin, of there being insane
and irrational springs of wickedness in most men. We were not aware that civilization was a
thin and precarious crust erected by the personality and the will of a very
few, and only maintained by rules and conventions skillfully put across and
guilefully preserved. We had no respect
for traditional wisdom or the restraints of custom. We lacked reverence, as Lawrence observed and
as Ludwig with justice also used to say – for everything and everyone. It did not occur to us to respect the extraordinary
accomplishment of our predecessors in the ordering of life (as it now seems to
me to have been) or the elaborate framework which they had devised to protect
this order. Plato said in his Laws that one of the best of a set of
good laws would be a law forbidding any young man to enquire which of them are
right or wrong, though an old man remarking any defect in the laws might
communicate this observation to a ruler or to an equal in years when no young
man was present. That was a dictum in
which we should have been unable to discover any point or significance
whatever. As cause and consequence of
our general state of mind we completely misunderstood human nature, including
our own. The rationality which we
attributed to it led to a superficiality, not only of judgment, but also of feeling. It was not only that intellectually we were
pre-Freudian, but we had lost something which our predecessors had without
replacing it. I still suffer incurably
from attributing an unreal rationality to other people’s feelings and behavior
(and doubtless to my own too). …
from pp 95-96 of this work
