In response to my recent post about political philosophy, Jack Lance replied as follows,

Enlightened Self-Interest and Two Caveats

The first idea I carried home from the Aspen Institute in 1988, and the one that gave me the most hope for our country, came from Walt Whitman, as presented in the Institute’s own materials. Whitman argued that the secret of democracy lies in the largeness and generosity of the citizens’ spirit. The founding fathers believed, as Whitman did, that citizens could rise above narrow personal interest and recognize the common good — that a citizen who honors the same rights for others that he claims for himself, who accepts the primacy of the community’s decision while reserving the right to appeal to a higher law through non-violent means, is in fact pursuing his own interest in its fullest and most enlightened sense. Not selflessness. Self-interest broad and far-sighted enough to see that one’s own flourishing is bound up with the flourishing of the whole. I came home from Aspen believing this — believing that enough of us were capable of it.
But Aspen did not let that hope stand unexamined, and two other voices in our readings placed important caveats on it.

The first caveat came from Machiavelli, who observed that the way men actually live and the way men ought to live are so far apart that anyone who governs himself according to how men ought to live will be brought to ruin by those who do not. Whitman’s vision assumes citizens can rise to enlightened self-interest. Machiavelli assumes most will not — that self-interest, left to itself, tends toward the narrow and the immediate, and that a society built on the hope of widespread civic virtue is vulnerable to those who simply take advantage without restraint. The caveat is this: enlightened self-interest requires enlightenment. Without it, you simply have self-interest — and Whitman’s entire structure depends on enough citizens possessing the former rather than settling for the latter.

The second caveat came from Goethe, who wrote that the question to ask is not whether we are perfectly agreed, but whether we are proceeding from a common basis of sentiment. This caveat operates differently from Machiavelli’s. There is no doubt that people can rise above narrow interests. It asks whether people share enough common ground to begin with for the phrase “the common good” to mean the same thing to different people. Enlightened self-interest presumes some shared sense of what is good, true, and important. If that common basis of sentiment erodes, two people — or two parties, or two halves of a country — can each sincerely believe they are acting from enlightened self-interest while pursuing entirely incompatible ends.

It appears that Whitman saw man’s nature as basically good. Machiavelli may have seen man’s nature as evil, aggressive, tribal, or egocentric, or a combination of these. It is hard to tell how Goethe may have viewed the nature of man, maybe tribal or egotistical.
Whitman gave me hope. Machiavelli questioned whether people would rise to it. Goethe questioned whether we would even agree on what rising to it looked like. In 1988, the hope was uppermost in my mind.

I will say only this much about the years since: the two caveats have, I think, overtaken my hope.

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