Constrained vs Unconstrained Vision of Human Nature

Discussion

Jonathan Haidt:

"In his book A Conflict of Visions, the economist Thomas Sowell offers us a detailed and profound analysis of these two views of human nature. He calls them the “unconstrained vision” and the “constrained vision.” The key is whether you think that people need constraints to behave well, or whether constraints cause people to behave badly. Here are my paraphrases of Sowell, crafted to complement the Lennon and Durkheim quotes above.

Sowell explains his use of the term “vision” as a “pre-analytic cognitive act.” A vision is “what we sense or feel before we have constructed any systematic reasoning that could be called a theory.” Sowell’s use of a visual metaphor makes good psychological sense. When we open our eyes, we see the world effortlessly, without any awareness of the computation and guesswork that our visual system was doing behind the scenes. Reality presents itself to us as a fact, not an interpretation. Therefore, if someone else sees the physical world differently, it can be quite upsetting, as we learned in the Internet craze of 2015 when the world debated whether a dress in a photograph was black and blue or white and gold.

Sowell’s point is that social and political perception is like visual perception: social reality presents itself to us as fact, not as interpretation. People who hold the unconstrained vision believe that people are fundamentally good, and they think it is obvious that all have the same potential to succeed. Any inequality we find in the world is therefore obviously caused by institutionally entrenched racism, sexism, or some other form of injustice. This is why the unconstrained vision is usually held by people on the left; it underpins and gives rise to the progressive impulse to question, challenge, and replace existing institutions in the name of “social justice.”

But people who hold the constrained vision of human nature see things differently. They start from the presupposition that people are deeply flawed, egocentric, irrational, and prone to violence. They see peace and civil order as hard-won accomplishments; barbarians and chaos are always waiting to crash through the gates. Furthermore, it seems obvious to them that people are different—some are smarter, stronger, or harder working than others, and therefore the mere presence of inequality in the world is not proof of injustice. This is why the constrained vision is usually held by people on the right; it underpins and gives rise to the conservative impulse to maintain the status quo, even when that status quo contains inequalities, and even when the person him or herself seems (to a progressive) to be a victim of that status quo.

Edmund Burke’s Reflections on the Revolution in France describes the constrained view succinctly:

Society requires not only that the passions of individuals should be subjected, but that even in the mass and body, as well as in the individuals, the inclinations of men should frequently be thwarted, their will controlled, and their passions brought into subjection. . . . In this sense the restraints on men, as well as their liberties, are to be reckoned among their rights."

(https://www.humansandnature.org/the-ethics-of-globalism-nationalism-and-patriotism)