From One Ignorance to the Next
Is humanity a herd of animals, doomed to follow its rulers to slaughter?
There is a tendency to view history as if it were a personified being, as if it has a mind of its own and is trying to accomplish predetermined goals for humanity. One version of this view is that history moves toward liberating man from oppressive regimes. Marx claimed that history moved determinately through stages according to prevailing modes of production, roughly going from slavery, to feudalism, to capitalism, to communism, and ultimately to socialism. Modern neoliberals or neoconservatives might say that history is a process of “the people” being given more of a voice in their government—a view that conveniently means the current system that provides the elite with power and job security is the ultimate end of history.
Personally, I view history as ultimately a product of Providence. However, God works in mysterious ways, and allows us to be the agents of change within whatever His ultimate plan for history is. Thus the question for what causes change from one period of history to the next is not as simple as saying it is whatever God wills. Even embracing Providence, we can still ask whether any patterns emerge in how human beings ambulate from one period of history to the next.
Thus, it occurs to me that a case can be made for viewing the progression between historical periods as the product of a series of “veils of ignorance” being removed from people’s minds, only to be replaced with new ones under which they can still be ruled but under new systems of government.
Consider how the average person living at a time and place in which slavery was the norm might have understood things. He might have had no understanding that his place in life could be anything other than what his rulers told him it was. He was from a certain tribe or or worshipped a certain god or had been defeated in a certain battle, and that was good enough for him to believe the natural order of things was just as the world actually existed. He might have been ignorant to the possibility that things were only how they were because it benefitted those powerful enough to keep them that way. If he had suspected this…well, there were usually more of him than there were of those in power who benefited from keeping him there.
It is only due to a veil of ignorance over the minds of both the slave and the non-elite free population that this arrangement could exist. Power is rarely held by the sheer physical might of the one who holds it. At some point the one in power needs others to enforce it for him, and he needs enough of them to hold back everyone else who is shut out of power. Enough people must believe in either the rightness or the inevitability of the existing system so that nobody thinks to transgress it and test the ability of the ruler’s relatively few enforcers to stop them.
But, once he and enough others discard the veil, the institutions that rely on the existence of the veil cannot exist for very much longer. As the ruler’s claims to legitimacy are more widely disbelieved, he is forced to either abdicate power or change his claims to legitimacy. If his subjects all stop believing in the natural superiority of master to slave, then he will have no means to rule. He will be one man barking orders everyone has stopped listening to. He, or likely another would-be ruler to take his place, must supply the people with a new idea of a rightful form of government to which they should submit themselves. That is, they must be supplied with a new veil of ignorance so that they will believe in the legitimacy of the new form of government and allow themselves once again to be subject to it.1
Further, the sight of the new veil of ignorance may be required to open his eyes to the old veil. The appearance of the new system, democracy for example, as the true path to legitimate government may be the thing that for the first time enlightens him to the idea that the existing system could be wrong. Yet, ironically, it is his very ignorance about the new system and the flaws in it that he cannot see that makes it just another veil of ignorance like the old one. And it is his belief in the new veil that allows him to shed the old veil, fully unaware that he is just doing the same thing his ancestors did before him when they put on the old veil. As in virtually every other instance, he is again allowing himself to be fooled into adopting the new, more “enlightened” idea so that others can continue to rule over him with his consent.
I would hypothesize that, viewed in this way, we can see how man is rarely allowed to do away with one veil of ignorance until another one is created for him to put on instead. We only laid aside empires when we were offered democracy in its place. The old way was not released until ideas of liberalism and democracy had evolved enough for us to slip ourselves into. And we threw off the veil of ignorance of empires for the veil of ignorance of democracy.
It seems the reason for this is that, in the end, human beings will be led. We cannot help it as a species but to put leaders before ourselves. We naturally believe in the legitimacy of whatever system in which we find ourselves—it would not be “the system” if it were not right. Fish don’t know they are wet. And even those of us who do see through this must accept the fact that most people do not.
There will always be a ruling class because of this trait in humanity.
So, if there is a pattern to history, then perhaps it is that we exist under some form of social organization for so long as the veil of ignorance required to keep the people subject to it will last, until finally they break free of it only to adopt a new veil of ignorance that holds them in the next form of social organization.
This is no universal law of history. There is no reason a group of people cannot organize themselves under an informal system in which their values determine how they are governed. I imagine primitive tribes, religious communities, and even some hereditary kingdoms founded on Divine ultimate authority, have been much this way. But for most of history, it is more like a law of human nature that comes into effect once a society becomes large and diverse enough for many of its people not to know one another or recognize any shared common values.
And perhaps none of this is a bad thing. In a way, this seeming design flaw in humanity may actually serve a purpose. To the extent we view certain epochs of history as bad examples of rulership, other times and places would serve as examples of good rulership. And even under nominally bad rulership, the simple coordination of society that rulership provides may make it better than nothing at all.
When our rulers have no legitimate right to rule us, we might be entitled to throw them off. But then what? We would rule ourselves? No, we would quickly elevate new rulers, likely under even worse systems of government. Our ease of mental entrapment as a species may have actually helped us avoid even bigger disasters than we in fact had. Rather than barrel through progressively worse forms of government at lightning speed, our veils of ignorance at least kept us in place and slowed the process long enough to at least make course corrections from time to time.
Yet nothing could justify the disaster our rulers have placed us in today. Today our rulers do not simply coordinate society, they use their powers of coordination to plunder their subjects in order to create massive client casts who entrench them in power. The former concession that even bad rulers benefit societies by providing a central point of coordination now no longer applies.
What will the next veil be? Perhaps we will finally escape ignorance by simply being fed up with the current system rather than by being tempted by the next new idea. Perhaps we will finally adopt a system that allows people to simply be human beings. Let them do as they will and administer justice according to what they know is right. But I doubt this. We seem to have surpassed the maximum individual liberty that large societies will tolerate, and the current state of American society is so filled with contradictory views and retributive instincts that any system which depends on wisdom to prevail rather than defined limits on government power is destined to devolve into a post-apocalyptic hellscape.
If anything, those on the Left are more likely to view themselves as powerless and oppressed and thus be easily convinced to adopt an even more Leftward veil of ignorance. It is capitalism or whiteness or heteronormativity that despoils them, and they will only be truly free once their rulers govern under a system of class and racial retribution.
This is certainly an unattractive future, but we must admit that there is at least a pathway for it to come to pass.
Much of this discussion is roughly adapted from ideas in Discourse on Voluntary Servitude, by early French political writer Étienne de La Boétie.