Historical Context_21 June 2010_Philip Orr

‘We are Formed with a View to the General Good’ Francis Hutcheson and the Irish dissenting tradition – a political legacy – Philip Orr

‘We are Formed with a View to the General Good’ | Philip Orr

‘We are Formed with a View to the General Good’ Francis Hutcheson and the Irish dissenting tradition – a political legacy Philip Orr

The Irish philosopher Philip Pettit has posed many valid questions about our systems of value in western political culture. Amongst his most subversive arguments has been the proposal made in a book co-authored with Geoffrey Brennan that our economic models are deeply flawed because they do not acknowledge the role played by the psychology of esteem in human behaviour. Pettit suggests that for human beings, a desire for recognition and regard by colleagues, peer groups, family and friends - and even the approval of imagined future generations - very often trumps the desire for personal wealth and material gain - and that modern capitalist theory not only fails to take this into account but may actually debilitate a society by setting up monetary and material acquisition as the sole motivator in economic decision-making and the sole badge of national success.

Amongst the many causes of uncertainty in Irish life within the past few years has been the growing sense that a high-powered capitalist model of economic growth, whilst it did offer spectacular advances in some areas of national development, did not bring economic stability, nor did it offer higher levels of personal satisfaction or promote social cohesion and a more intelligent and innovative political life. The time is ripe for examining arguments such as Pettit’s, which go to the very heart of the paradigms which govern Anglo-American capitalism and which Irish decisionmakers so swiftly bought into, with the fairly disastrous consequences that we see all around us today. I would wish to argue that another Irish philosopher will help us to ask questions about the basic tenets of Irish economic and social policy, though in this case the thinker was born in the late 17th century and wrote his most significant work during the 1720s. *** Francis Hutcheson is associated with the Scottish Enlightenment of the 18th century, due to his professorial role at Glasgow University, during which he mentored the philosopher David Hume and the economist Adam Smith. However, Hutcheson was born in 1694 in County Down and spent his most creative period in charge of the dissenting academy in Dublin’s Drumcondra Lane during the 1720s, at which time he was part of a circle of thinkers and writers who were encouraged in their work by Viscount Molesworth of Brackenstown, near Swords.

Molesworth was an influential figure in the Irish establishment, the owner of a beautiful and innovatively designed country estate and a friend of the brilliant 3rd Earl of Shaftesbury. Shaftesbury was opposed to the theories of Thomas Hobbes and Bernard Mandeville, in which human nature is seen as nakedly and intrinsically self-centred, requiring stern contractual governance in order to stem the tide of anarchic egoism. For Shaftesbury, ‘man’ was a sociable and relatively benign being, 1 The Flourishing Society

Frances Hutcheson and the Irish Dissenting Tradition – a Political Legacy who desired the network of what we now call ‘the community’ in order to thrive. Shaftesbury claimed that ‘out of society [man] never did, nor ever can exist.’

As part and parcel of his optimistic social philosophy, Shaftesbury argued for the benefits of a considerable degree of tolerance in matters of religious belief and the expression of heterodox political opinions. *** In the 1720s, as Francis Hutcheson was establishing himself in Dublin, he was placed in a difficult position. As a leading dissenter he had - under the Williamite settlement - a marginal position within Irish society. Yet the intellectual circle within which he would move contained Church of Ireland clerics such as Dean Swift and establishment politicians such Molesworth, who most certainly did not challenge the political preservation of the Protestant Ascendancy.

Hutcheson had been born into an able Ulster Presbyterian family and was educated at the dissenting academy in Killyleagh, County Down. He completed his studies at Glasgow University in preparation for ministry in the Presbyterian church, as was customary in an era when no practising Roman Catholic or dissenter could attend university in Dublin. Returning to Ireland, he swiftly moved from clerical duties into a teaching role, in charge of the dissenting academy in Dublin. In this era of stringent penal laws, such academies devoted themselves to training the offspring of local dissenter families to a high intellectual standard, often equivalent to that found at university level.

During his time in Dublin, Hutcheson established his reputation as a writer of real quality, both in several short articles published within the Dublin Weekly Journal and more extensively within two books of philosophy published in the 1720s – the Enquiry into Beauty and Virtue and the Essays on the Nature and Conduct of the Passions and Affections, with Illustrations on the Moral Sense. *** At the heart of Hutcheson’s writings is a careful argumentation of the view, also expressed by Lord Shaftesbury, that human nature is not in fact intrinsically self-seeking. This is of course an argument with implications for public governance and social and economic structures.

Hutcheson stresses that human beings do care passionately about others and that they gain much of their satisfaction from seeking the welfare of those around them, including family, friends, neighbours, associates and indeed total strangers.

He asserts that there is a faculty called the ‘moral sense’ in all of us, which possesses a ‘natural disposition’ to ‘desire the happiness of any known sensitive creature’ as long as we see ‘no oppositions of interest.’ He is at pains to point out that we are far more often ‘employed about the state of others’ than seeking our own ‘private good’. He asserts that most of us like to think we are making a contribution to the world around us and we often ‘measure our own self-esteem by the benefits we bestow on those closest to us.’

2 The Flourishing Society

‘We are Formed with a View to the General Good’ | Philip Orr For Hutcheson this benign disposition in human beings can extend outwards towards the rest of the human race and we can - when we are at our most perceptive - recognise that ‘mankind is insensibly linked together and makes one great system by an invisible union.’ Hutcheson argues that some positive theological deductions can be drawn from this, proclaiming that – ‘we are formed with a view to the general good and may in our own nature discern a Universal Mind, watchful over the whole.’

The implications of such warm speculations about natural altruism are considerable. Here is a discourse in which virtue can be measured in terms of kind and caring behaviour rather than conformity to the strict, eternal laws of an exacting deity, something which eventually brought Hutcheson into confrontation with orthodox Calvinistic teaching within his own denomination. But there is also the implication in Hutcheson’s work that human beings both require and desire a range of what one might call ‘affective communities.’ Within these communities, humans practise their capacity for fellow-feeling, exercise their moral sense and engage in a range of everyday - and often ‘virtuous’ - activities.

Throughout several of his writings, Hutcheson stresses the importance of understanding the benign behaviour manifested in the earliest of all human conditions – childhood. He observes that, given the right kind of nurture, children are ‘ever in motion while they are awake’ and that ‘they observe whatever occurs...remember and enquire about it....’ He notes that amongst children, ‘kind affections soon break out towards those who are kind to them’ and that they show ‘strong gratitude and an ardour to excel in anything that is praised....they are prone to sincerity and truth and openness of mind.’ The implications of this for pedagogy are considerable, suggesting that we must raise children within a positive and encouraging ‘affective community’ rather than an abrasive and punitive one, based on notions of inherent human malignancy and ‘original sin’. *** As I have already observed, Francis Hutcheson has been characterised less as a key person in Irish philosophy than as a presiding figure in the intellectual life which flowered in Scotland during the 18th century. This is largely due to the role he occupied during his tenure at Glasgow University in the 1730s and 40s and the influence he had on writers such as Adam Smith. The great economist is well known for his book, The Wealth of Nations, but his earlier text – The Theory of Moral Sentiments – was considered by its author to be the superior document.

In his study of morality, Smith argues that although we do often pursue self-interest, we also have a profound capacity for sympathy with other beings and that the ability to use our imagination and ‘stand in their shoes’ enables us to act altruistically. So, ultimately, out of the consequences of sympathy, we construct a moral code that is to the long-term benefit of everyone. Although he did not think that human beings possessed a specific and quantifiable ‘moral faculty’ as Hutcheson did, Smith clearly inherited from his teacher a strong sense of the centrality of moral behaviour within the life of the individual and within society – and the importance of the emotions in sustaining that behaviour .

3 The Flourishing Society

Frances Hutcheson and the Irish Dissenting Tradition – a Political Legacy Contrary to the belief that Adam Smith’s writings may be used to licence the growth of a freemarket capitalism where everyone merely pursues their own ‘enlightened’ self-interest, there is plenty of evidence that Smith saw human beings as predisposed to social concern just as much as they were concerned with personal acquisition.

In The Theory of Moral Sentiments he tells us that ‘howsoever selfish man may be supposed, there are evidently some principles in his nature, which interest him in the fortunes of others and render their happiness necessary to him, though he derives nothing from it except the pleasure of seeing it.’

He writes that a desire to see the redistribution of wealth is often present in those who have accumulated it – ‘They are led by an invisible hand to make nearly the same distribution of the necessaries of life which would have been made had the earth been divided with equal portions among all of its inhabitants.’ *** The claim that Hutcheson was in fact the father of the Scottish Enlightenment is not without substance. By focusing so intensely on both the interior and the relational life of the individual human being and placing his or her moral development within the context of ‘community’, Hutcheson was arguably laying down the ground for the concept of ‘civil society’, which is elaborated by several other Scottish thinkers and is one of the Scottish Enlightenment’s greatest bequests to the modern world.

Arguably the Irish philosopher also bequeathed a not dissimilar heritage to a whole generation of young Irishmen who were educated at Glasgow University within a Hutchesonian atmosphere, during subsequent decades. These young men picked up on other facets of his ethical writings, including his arguments against slavery and his disquisitions on the right of any oppressed nation to seek redress.

Several passages from Hutcheson’s writings make such opposition clear. He argues that the only possible reaction to the practice of slavery is one of ‘abhorrence and indignation’ and he also claims that – ‘Civil power can scarcely be constituted justly any other way than by consent of the people....rulers have no other sacred rights or majority than what may arise from this....the people have the right of defending themselves....the people’s right of resistance is unquestionable.’

Several students at Glasgow returned to Ireland as Presbyterian clerics, convinced of the need for social, economic and political reform in the land of their birth and possessing a profound belief that human well-being is always a function of the well-being of the national community. Clerics such as 4 The Flourishing Society

‘We are Formed with a View to the General Good’ | Philip Orr James Porter, Archibald Warwick and Steele Dickson became key figures in the United Irishmen, whose early aims are well expressed in documents such as the one devised by the newly formed Dublin branch of the movement in December 1791.

This document stated enthusiastically that its members are all agreed – ‘in thinking that there is not an individual whose happiness can be established on any other foundation so rational and so solid as the happiness of the whole community.’

The document went on to declare a desire to ‘make all Irishmen citizens – all citizens Irishmen...’

Without more representative parliaments and the introduction of universal male suffrage, the recent proud achievement of legislative independence by Ireland in 1782 would be quite inadequate, leaving Ireland with a mere ‘servile majesty and ragged independence.’

Other significant United Irishmen, although not falling directly under the influence of the Hutcheson legacy through this Glasgow connection, nonetheless grew up in a political atmosphere that owes much to the culture of Irish intellectual dissent. The academy in Killlyleagh, which the young Francis Hutcheson attended, was founded by the wealthy Hamilton family in the late 17th century. Almost a century later, Archibald Hamilton Rowan, the descendant of the academy’s founder, would imbibe the values he encountered as a boy in his father’s London home, where the reformer John Wilkes and the Dublin radical Charles Lucas were frequent guests.

Rowan went on to experience tuition by the political reformer and dissenting clergyman, John Jebb, and then - on his return to Ireland - he became a founding member of the Dublin branch of the United Irishmen before his imprisonment and subsequent exile. Amongst Rowan’s friends was a man who was both a pupil and a teacher in the network of English dissenting academies. This was the political radical and innovative scientist, Joseph Priestley.

Rowan also maintained close links with the early feminist, Mary Wolstonecraft and her partner, the brilliant theorist of democracy, William Godwin. He gave Godwin financial help at the time when he was setting up what amounted to the world’s first ever ‘educational shop’, selling satchels, pens, jotters and schoolbooks written specifically for children.

So Ireland’s dissenting tradition was not only quite capable of contributing creatively to social change in the national environment but was linked to positive social change within a global field, in areas as diverse as pedagogy and gender politics. *** But by 1795, in the context of the Anglo-French war, the United Irish movement was being vigorously suppressed and its leaders had already turned their minds and energies towards armed insurrection, with French help. The Republican project was thus preoccupied by carrying out a revolution against a powerful empire. Ruminations on the exact nature of an ensuing Irish republic where the Irish capacity for civic virtue and lasting happiness could be truly nurtured - were few and far between.

5 The Flourishing Society

Frances Hutcheson and the Irish Dissenting Tradition – a Political Legacy Arguably, during the years that followed, the Irish independence project, whether in its constitutional campaigns or militant phases, also had little time to devote to imagining an Irish civil society and articulating exactly what it would look like, once Irish freedom had been achieved. There were, instead, the accumulated challenges of the fight for religious emancipation, the campaign for the return of an Irish parliament, and the struggle for a system of land tenure that would break the back of landlordism. There was the task of retrieving and re-animating Gaelic culture. For each generation of leaders, there was a joint challenge of plotting a campaign and winning over the Irish people to the venture.

Despite the clear interest shown by figures such as Thomas Davis in generating a new, autonomous civic entity that would constitute the Irish nation and stressing the importance of education within that project, few detailed elaborations of the nature of a proposed body politic ever emerged.

But when looking at the life of the one towering figure in the struggle for Irish independence in the 19th century - Daniel O’Connell - it is interesting to see that his deepest intellectual influences included Hamilton Rowan’s friend, William Godwin, and the Cromwellian philosopher, James Harrington, whose work ‘Oceana’, was much admired at Glasgow University during the period when several United Irish clergymen were studying there. A debating society called ‘The Parliament of Oceana’ flourished in the university.

And it should be understood that the popular movements which O’Connell founded are inconceivable without his deep faith in the capacity of vast numbers of ordinary people to work together, bonded by fellow-feeling with total strangers and convinced of the moral power of a grand struggle for justice.

This faith has well-springs that rise in the territory we have explored in this essay. While there is no evidence that Hutcheson directly influenced O’Connell, nonetheless it may be argued that in his campaigns, the ‘Great Liberator’ was attempting to create the ‘res publica’ – the public spaces - in which citizenship could begin to blossom and in which the civil society which is potentiated by Hutcheson’s philosophy might start to take root.

The omens seemed quite positive, once the Irish Free State was established. In particular, there were reasons to believe that the new Irish polity would establish the kind of egalitarian vision dear to the heart of James Connolly and a vision of ‘affective communities’ where the children of the new Irish nation might flourish, as seen in the work of Patrick Pearse, co-leader of the Rising, who had been a progressive educationalist. Indeed the founding document of 1916 had spoken of the need to ‘cherish all the children of the nation equally’.

The Program for Government, drafted during the emergence of the First Dail in January 1919, was also an auspicious document. The authors declared that it was the ‘first duty of the Government of the Republic to make provision for the physical, mental and spiritual well-being of the children.’ And it enunciated a version of the new Ireland in which to act as an individual citizen for the collective good would be a duty, an honour and a pleasure – 6 The Flourishing Society

‘We are Formed with a View to the General Good’ | Philip Orr ‘We affirm the duty of every man and woman to give allegiance and service to the Commonwealth and declare it is the duty of the Nation to ensure that every citizen shall have opportunity to spend his or her faculties in the service of the people.’

To both its citizens and to onlookers in the outside world, the subsequent Free State and the ensuing Republic were presented as places where successful ‘affective communities’ were in place.

Ireland was spoken of by many of its leaders as a place of strong extended families and rooted rural communities. Ireland had proud, and (in theory) inclusive cultural institutions such as the Gaelic Athletic Association. It was a place that supposedly boasted a welcome to the stranger, warm and hospitable shops and public houses, strong and evident bonding rituals to do with birth, death and marriage. It was a place where church practice was seen as bringing social unity and encouraging charitable actions.

*****

Sadly, the dire dilemmas of modern Ireland must now prompt questions as to whether all of these ‘affective communities’ did indeed nurture what Hutcheson would have called the ‘moral sense’ of Irish citizens and whether, as a result, a robust civil society was ever created. It is now clear that many of the most vulnerable and impoverished young people in Irish society did not receive the care that was needed and instead, throughout the early decades of national freedom, experienced what one recent writer has described as a ‘precarious childhood.’

What is more, it may be argued that placing the nurture of most Irish children in the hands of the Catholic church simply did not provide several generations of young Irish boys and girls with an education that was rooted in respect for childhood emotion, moral tolerance and a pervasive if cautious optimism about human nature. Yielding up so much of the care of Irish children to a church dominated by celibate priests and nuns and structured in the form of a feudal monarchy, may now be thought of as a profound mistake, given the bleak stories that have emerged in recent years of lives damaged by various kinds of abuse, ranging from the sexual predation practised by a minority of priests through to the more widespread enforcement of a submissive and de-sensualised piety by means of fear and inculcation.

However, Ireland generated a new parliamentary democracy and a state governed by common law – a situation that would survive with admirable continuity from the 1920s to the present day. But would this prove enough to install a genuine and pervasive sense of citizenship, in which Irish political, business and religious leaders would be held morally accountable, where cronyism and corruption would be deemed unacceptable, where Irish civic spaces would come to be cherished in proud common ownership, and where the gulfs between the rich, the poor, the sick and the well would gradually be bridged as the state matured?

7 The Flourishing Society

Frances Hutcheson and the Irish Dissenting Tradition – a Political Legacy Or was post-independence society, despite its democratic credentials, a place that had outsourced its morals to Rome and - in due course - would outsource its economics to Wall Street or even Las Vegas? In the absence of an indigenous and well-worked philosophy of civic virtue, was modern Ireland always going to end up ceding to new ‘imperial’ systems - such as the one based in the Vatican, or the one centred on New York - what it had prised out of the grasp of another, earlier system, based in London?

Further consideration of way that since independence, Ireland has merely changed imperial masters, will be of immense value, if the ongoing political and financial roguery that had once been so admired under colonial subjection is to be finally abolished and, the ongoing acquisitive despoliation of the native Irish environment - as if it still belonged to the foreign landlord - is to come to an end.

I believe that only in going back, in the company of Hutcheson, to the deepest sense of ourselves as social and moral agents, can we find helpful ways of addressing the failures that have emerged.

*****

Of course, a study of the philosophy of moral agency devised by Frances Hutcheson and reworked

by Adam Smith will not in itself be enough to spark a regeneration of the Irish Republic. However, re-integrating his philosophy back into the Irish cultural narrative will be of great assistance to radical Irish thinkers as they seek to generate a vision of a ‘civic republic’ that is not merely an imported antidote to ‘post-tiger’ gloom but is a locally sourced, ethically grounded and participatory polity, guided by wise paradigms of human well-being rather than the lure of ill-shared surplus wealth.

Hutcheson’s great insight is that human beings are often naturally and happily prone to virtue. We can now suggest that this happiness occurs not when they are striving to be ever more ‘wealthy’ but when they feel engaged in a wide set of positive, uplifting and unthreatening social networks, which promote and facilitate human excellence but do not conflate affluence and success or valorise competition at the expense of collaboration.

This insight does not of course mean that Irish political philosophy should ignore the fact that there is a human capacity for selfishness and indeed for crime, which it is the duty of the state to restrain.

Nor should we ignore the capacity of political ambition and self-aggrandisement to subvert benign political dreams at every cut and turn. In all too many societies, during the 20th century, blithe dreams of a new post-materialist golden age ended up, in the hands of cunning and ruthless leaders, as dystopian collectivist dictatorships. Advocates of reform who come from the left of the political spectrum must acknowledge this. Otherwise, legislation based on a belief in the importance and efficacy of human virtue will end up being lampooned as leading to the ‘North Korean option.’

8 The Flourishing Society

‘We are Formed with a View to the General Good’ | Philip Orr

Jesuit social activist Peter McVerry has spent much of his life with young people who are struggling in the context of contemporary Irish life.

Asked recently to say why he thought the number of homeless people in Ireland doubled between 1996 and 2008, he said – ‘Excessive individualism was government policy at every level...the attitude was ‘the world is at your feet, go out and make the best o it. Don’t worry about anyone else. ‘They led us to believe that security was to be found in material assets, in our houses, in our cars, and as people subsequently discovered, that was a mirage. Security is not to be found in your assets, it’s found in community.

But during the Celtic Tiger years was sold young people a very dubious message and left them, I think, feeling insecure. It put a lot of pressure on them: what if I don’t do well at school? What I can’t get a job? They had no sense of being part of a society that would watch over them. They were left feeling isolated and alone.’

In listening to what McVerry has to say, it is of interest to note that the site of the dissenting academy where Hutcheson taught and wrote throughout the 1720s was Drumcondra Lane, which approximates to the highway now known as Dorset Street. Here in inner city north Dublin, with its manifest problems, lies the site of one of the city’s most interesting vanished buildings. It is a site which offers an invitation not just to contemplate the archaeology of Dublin or the genealogy of modern ethics but to think about the conditions that are needed for the establishment of a new Irish Republic in which all its citizens have both the desire and the chance to flourish.

9 The Flourishing Society