We moderns are awash in technology. Technology frames our lives physically and mentally, and often — despite its benefits -- dominates us to our detriment, reaching farther into us than we care to admit -- even into our inner depths, spiritually.
More than mere inventions and devices, technology in its deepest sense is a mode of life and of living. It is a powerful and seductive force —ever promising greater ease and convenience and pleasure and titillation and thrill, in limitless or infinite series. An aggressive force with a momentum of its own, it competes with and often overwhelms and overshadows other, healthier, and more civilizing values and ways and rhythms of living.
Seeing beyond inventions and devices to their source in human nature and mind, the ancient Greeks, more reflective than we, spoke of "techne" as "practical (as opposed to theoretical or speculative) knowledge" — and derived the philosophical concept of making or doing. Technological thought is restive and unsettling and is the antipode of artistic and poetic and philosophical contemplation.
But for better and for worse, like it or not, we of 21st Century America are, of course, physically dependent upon technology, and often mentally addicted to it, whether we confess the addiction or not. And prizing technological prowess and imagination above all else, our highest honors and accolades go to techno-revolutionists like Elon Musk, Sam Altman, and Bill Gates. And just when we think, "they've gone bout as fer as they can go", another marvel of human ingenuity appears to invade and transform our lives.
But every dependence and addiction comes with costs. And a modernist, "progressive", Star-Trek mindset that accepts every material-technological innovation uncritically, as morally neutral at worst, or as morally good merely by virtue of invention, should be stopped and questioned at every turn. But going further, modern techno-progressives embrace all new technologies as necessarily empowering and emancipatory, and actively support the convergence of technological change and social change. And while claiming concern and capacity for duly regulating technology, they lack deeper political scientific understanding -- including a solid anthropology, an understanding of the deep causal operations of political structures, and a grasp of the dialectic between man and political-institutional structures.
And so, the real value or disvalue and danger of any technology can be determined only by reference to a sound and deep understanding of the nature of fallen man in this fallen world. All else is mindless and self-destructive futurism, techno-fetishism, and sterile and pointless innovation for its own sake. Cloning, digitization of currency, facial recognition, artificial intelligence, Al drones, robotism, hacking and mass surveillance devices, weapons of mass destruction, gain-of-function research: this is but a short list of the newer powers now tempting and seducing and imperiling sinful and fallen man.
The alarming nature of the potential threats to human survival and well-being posed by these "higher" technologies understandably inclines the sober-minded to enact, per case, either absolute or conditional prohibition as public policy, with the latter employing a rigorous vetting or "guilty-until-proved-innocent" presumptive standard. And further complications, of course, will emerge because all polities do not legislate identically, or enforce with equal and sufficient rigor.
So, our modernist tendency— an ultimately deeply carnal and sinful tendency -- to invent and innovate without measure and without reference to a fully human standard and scale, has landed modern man in deep troubles and intractable problems that no amount of technology itself can overcome.
Over-zealous to invent and innovate, the modern mind, by a fundamental imbalance, neglects the more important, non-material aspects of human life and purpose. The disgraceful modern techno-fashion of recording violent crimes against others by smart phone with intent to distribute, not to assist law enforcement, but merely for personal attention and morbid thrill, is but one example of such imbalance. In his mad, modern, and often dehumanizing and Godless interactions with technology, man tends to forget or to never discover his true nature as precious created being —the very center of creation --with a Divine calling.
So, our modern world's fundamental problem -- as philosopher Martin Heidegger and technologist-whistleblower Edward Snowden and others have suggested -- is that technological imagination and invention have far outstripped existing political forms and man's actualized spiritual solidity and substance. And, in a nuclear age, a too-great disparity in development between the technological and the governmental or political is morally dangerous and, potentially at least, physically calamitous.
The practical remedy to this danger —over a Luddism that is techno-phobic and regressive, as well as impracticable and arbitrary -- is a resurgence and renascence of political imagination, rooted in serious political-historical study.
Above all, disciplined political study and imagination must grapple successfully with a primal and central anthropomorphic and political fact: the tendency of all men to sacrifice the interests of others to themselves, a tendency that, if not counteracted, leads to universal conflict between individual men and between nations. To understand more fully this tendency to conflict, and to learn how this tendency may be counteracted effectually, and the conflict either resolved or prevented in our highly technological age, we must consult the political thought and wisdom of America's greatest statesman and philosopher, John C. Calhoun (1782-1850).
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A man of the Christian and agrarian antebellum South, Calhoun was a product of the last great non-materialist and non-business civilization of the West. Contrary to popular stereotypes of rural and slaveholding Southrons, Calhoun was an active-minded and forward-looking man -- and a staunch friend and advocate of progress, rightly understood as material and moral and intellectual progress combined.
Calhoun cheered the scientific and technological advances unfolding in his time across the Western world. For excited description of the marvels and potentialities of applied science, no one has waxed more eloquent than Calhoun. But Calhoun's socially conservative Southern pedigree, in its moral and physical and intellectual and religious influences, gave Calhoun the political philosopher a deep solidity of character and insight, including right balance and prioritization of values. This was a solidity and depth and balance missing in the political thought of his contemporaries in the North and across the Atlantic, including Emerson and Thoreau, and Marx and Mill.
In 1851, with the posthumous publication of Calhoun's Disquisition on Government, political philosophy in the West — and in the world at large — reached its apex in full development, systematicity, and insight.
The Disquisition was the climactic culmination of two and a half millenia of political thought that began in earnest with the reflections of Socrates and his student, Plato. Modern philosophers like Kant and Hegel, in their political works, alluded to the need and possibility of philosophically and scientifically treating of political phenomena as Calhoun, in crowning achievement, would in his Disquisition. Calhoun's object in the work was to lay a solid, Newtonian foundation for the science of politics; and to render politics, by the identification of certain laws of nature, as rigorously scientific and lawful as astronomy and chemistry and physics.
The British historian Lord Action, immensely learned and famous for his maxim that power corrupts, called Calhoun's Disquisition one of the best 100 books ever written, alongside Plato, Shakespeare, and the Bible. If there is a single philosophical work on politics that expresses and encapsulates and raises politics to the level not only of a science worthy of the name, but to the height of architectonic science that rules all other sciences -- by masterful system and concision -- it is the Disquisition.
Calhoun explained, with unequalled rigor and razor-sharp clarity, the fundamental and foundational principles of governments that are genuinely and truly constitutional, as opposed to absolute, with the difference that in the former and not the latter, rulers are held responsible to the ruled.
A short work as political treatises go, Calhoun's Disquisition — of around 70 pages -- is a powerful distillation that answers, in the clearest and most concise language, many of the most fundamental, long-standing, and vexing problems posed by human social and political phenomena. Calhoun explains how polities and their human participants and leaders become united or divided, virtuous or vicious, and enlightened or savage. In Copernican fashion, disparate and seemingly unconnected phenomena are given their ultimate and definitive explanation in terms of fundamental principles that reflect basic laws of human nature.
The Providential progress of man toward full actualization of God-given moral and intellectual potential, including technological and political progress, is a central theme of the Disquisition.
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In his Disquisition Calhoun highlights the deep, causal, Providential connection between technological progress and political progress. Writing in the 1840s, Calhoun said:
"When the causes now in operation have produced their full effect, and inventions and discoveries shall have been exhausted — if that may ever be —they will give a force to public opinion, and cause changes, political and social, difficult to be anticipated. What will be their final bearing, time only can decide with any certainty. That they will, however, greatly improve the condition of man ultimately, it would be impious to doubt. It would be to suppose, that the all-wise and beneficent Being —the Creator of all — had so constituted man, as that the employment of the high intellectual faculties, with which He has been pleased to endow him, in order that he might develop the laws that control the great agents of the material world, and make them subservient to his use — would prove to him the cause of permanent evil — and not of permanent good. If then, such a supposition be inadmissible, they must, in their orderly and full development, end in his permanent good."
But, Calhoun emphasizes, for technological advances to prove permanently and ultimately salutary, and not temporarily harmful by imbalance or misuse, they must come with or be accompanied by concomitant political advances. And so he proceeds:
"But this [achievement of permanent good] cannot be, unless the ultimate effect [of the causes now in operation], politically, shall be, to give ascendency to that form of government best calculated to fulfill the ends for which government is ordained (which, for Calhoun, are the protection and perfection of society). For, so completely does the well-being of our race depend on good government, that it is hardly possible any change, the ultimate effect should be otherwise, could prove a permanent good."
Implicit to Calhoun's account here is the view that technological innovation is not, eo ipso, or in and of itself, technological advance. Improvement of the condition of man is the standard by which a given innovation is determined to be an advance or not. And, inherent to this innovation/advance distinction is the possibility that some innovations, as products of fallen human nature, are inherently evil by conception, or rather, by sinful misconception. So, change or innovation, of itself, is not progress or improvement.
And so, more even than the brilliant Heidegger, Calhoun the Christian and Southerner was a far-seeing philosopher of technology.
But Calhoun's optimism about human progress was not the facile optimism of the "Enlightenment" philosophes. It was not the shallow and material -- and ultimately murderous -- pied piper's march into the dark techno-atheist forest of Voltaire and Condorcet and Bayle -- a chimerical fancy that blithely and foolishly and fatally discounts the Fall and sin nature. Instead, Calhoun's optimism about technology, constitutionalism, and human progress was deep and metaphysical, as well as thoroughly circumspect and pious, since, at its religious core, it pointed to God's Providence for His elect and invisible bride the Church, the crown and center of His creation. In these ways, Calhoun's Providential conception of human progress agrees far more with the deep, Christian, monadic unfolding of creation by entelechy -- under Divine grace -- of Leibniz and Kant and Hegel.
But, in the Disquisition, before he underscored, as philosopher of technology, the vital Providential connection between the technological and the political or governmental, Calhoun the political philosopher had already given definitive explanation and solution to the problem of conflicting interests.
Conflict between individuals and between groups and between nations is caused ultimately by human limitations in understanding and feeling and perspective, and is greatly exacerbated by man's fallen, sinful nature. As Augustine put it, "... the human race is, more than any other species, at once social by nature and quarrelsome by perversion." In the Disquisition, Calhoun surpassed all others in explaining how human conflict in this earthly life may be minimized, if not prevented.
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Everyone knows what a simple or numerical majority is. It is a subset of a set consisting of more than half of the set's elements. Hence, 16 is a numerical majority of 30. But very few people have ever heard of and understand that other kind of majority, the concurrent majority, that is the foundational principle of all constitutional governments in history. Indeed, ignorance of this vital principle extends to nearly all modern politicians and degreed "political scientists."
The English world "concurrent" comes from the Latin "cum + currere", which means "to run together." This other kind of majority —the concurrent majority — is an institutional organization or framework or organism, as Calhoun called it, by which the sense or opinion of all the various interests of a community or society about their own good is registered and required to initiate and maintain governmental action.
Because a simple numerical majority can register the opinion or sense of only slightly over half of a society, it is inherently tyrannical because neglectful of the large (almost half) minority subset of that society. Rule by numerical majority leaves the minor institutionally defenseless and ever at the mercy of the major that possesses and wields the powers of government. Legislation by the major invariably tends to disregard and plunder and exploit the minor in its interests. By contrast, in a concurrent or truly constitutional system of government, the minor possesses a veto over the enactments of the major.
Every society, no matter how homogeneous the interests and occupations and pursuits of its constituent individuals or people, consists of at least two distinct interests as regards the fiscal action of its government: the tax-payers and the tax-consumers. Taxation and disbursement, by their combined action, and even in a system most just, necessarily result in net gain for tax-consumers and net loss for taxpayers. In less just systems, taxation and disbursement have been corrupted into systems by which consumers tend to systematically plunder the payers.
Government by concurrent majority -- whether democratic, aristocratical, or monarchical, or some combination of these -- is government that does not plunder any portion of the community it is charged to protect. Government that promotes interests rather than plundering them is government that enhances the moral and physical power of the community it was established to protect and perfect. Concurrent government unifies society as regards all its disparate individuals and subgroups and interests.
Government by concurrent majority means every interest in society possesses the power of self-protection in the form of a veto; and this veto is backed ultimately by a willingness and ability on the part of that interest to wield physical force in self-defense. The English word "veto", from Latin, means "I forbid." Through its veto power, an interest can nullify or strike down proposed legislation it deems prejudicial or harmful to its well-being.
For Calhoun, an interest is any portion of society that can be beneficially or harmfully effected by the action or inaction of government. The English word "interest" comes from the Latin "inter + esse", meaning, "to be among." It is the responsibility of the members of each societal interest to "be among" and understand its own good or interest. They should endeavor to understand what laws, which are general rules enforced by government, promote or hinder their well-being. Providentially, a nascent interest is awakened into self-consciousness, leading to self-organization and effectual political self-assertion, by the sting of governmental abuse or neglect that originates in and is driven by other, previously awakened and governmentally empowered interests.
The veto possessed by an interest, to command acknowledgement and respect from other interests and from the government, is ultimately backed by the physical force that interest is willing and able to project self-protectively in behalf of itself.
So, the right of veto is not an abstract "natural" right that comes automatically or without effort. It is not apportioned out arbitrarily and gratuitously as a boon by government, which, rightly understood, is merely an agent of the people. The concurrent right of veto secures rights and protections for individuals, but these rights are not in social isolation and without established institutional teeth — so their guarantor is not, and cannot be, impotent words on paper.
In the concurrent system, an interest -- and the individuals that constitute it -- obtains a formal or constitutional veto by skillful self-assertion, or by winning the right by intelligent and courageous and self-sacrificial exertion. And then -- to make liberty last -- vigilance, in turn, must maintain what skillful assertion has won.
This is why liberty — true liberty — is a Providential reward for moral and intellectual virtue; and why governmental tyranny and slavery in society, so common among men historically, is the just providential punishment for ignorance, sloth, and depravity of whole peoples or portions. Providentially, it is the sting of tyranny — the painful experience of being abused and oppressed — that stirs the individual and social feelings of the abused and oppressed to skillful self-assertion and then vigilance.
But tyranny and slavery should not be conflated, since the former, and not the latter, is inherently abusive, and since the protection and direction entailed by humane (and especially Christian forms of) domestic slavery is right and just and good for all who cannot handle more extensive liberty responsibly, as well as for general society.
Finally, as Calhoun shows, real constitutional government, via its concurrent majority system or element, is an exercise in self-knowledge. Individuals within interests are challenged to consider what laws redound to their good or ill. This system compels individuals to reflect on their own nature and good with respect to the physical and moral effects of laws. Also, truly constitutional or concurrent majority governments promote unity and virtue and augment society thereby with moral and physical power.
Concurrent systems encourage the elevation of leaders of virtuous character gifted in identifying and articulating the interests of those they represent. In a concurrent system, individuals of all interests, being confident and secure in their own rights and powers of self-protection, are willing to work closely and cordially with other interests to promote the common good of all. In such happy systems, a friendly competition emerges, even, to promote the good of the other and of all.
So, a written constitution, by itself, cannot make or keep a government constitutional. Paper and ink cannot stay the hand and power of those who would sacrifice the interests of others to their own interests. Nor can a simple division of the powers of government into executive and legislative and judicial departments render government constitutional. Government is made and kept constitutional when portions of the society or community assert themselves and obtain the power of self-protection. Government is made constitutional when it is internally organized or structured to prevent its abusing and oppressing and plundering any portion(s) of the community.
Perfecting human government, by constructing and maintaining government that is truly constitutional, is arguably man's greatest challenge in this earthly life.
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After writing the Disquisition, Calhoun wrote a longer work, his Discourse on the Constitution and
Government of the United States. In the Discourse, he systematically explained and critically assessed the Framer's work, in its actual operation, from the vantage point of the late 1840s. Calhoun underscored how the country's growth in territory and population, combined with certain imperfections in the original constitution and organization of the government, warranted amendment to re-affirm and re-establish the principle of concurrent majority within the document and organization, to ensure that all interests or sections of the Union retained the power of self -protection.
To redress the emergent sectional imbalance in power between South and North, Calhoun proposed a dual executive with a mutual veto power. Secession of the Southern States occurred only after the North rejected all calls for just and equitable amendment.
Following Southern secession, constitutional government in America and in the world reached its historical apex in the Southern Confederate States constitution and government. The Confederate Constitution, in its provisions, is a compendium of lessons learned from the United States Constitution and government experience. In its government, the Southern Confederacy was a methodizing and correcting of the United States — a further refinement of truly constitutional or concurrent majority government. Confederate framers were well-versed in Calhoun's Disquisition and Discourse.
In this and in other ways, Calhoun the philosopher led the South more after his death in 1850 than Calhoun the statesman had led it during his lifetime. Widely eulogized and referenced, and appearing on Confederate currency, Calhoun, by his overwhelming moral and intellectual influence in the South, was the de facto founding father of the Confederacy.
But, with the military defeat of the Confederacy in 1865, the cause of constitutional government was eclipsed, in America and around the world, by the rise of the highly centralized and absolutist and consolidated nation-state model of government.
Since 1865, enormous effort and thought and monetary capital have been invested in technological innovation and application. Meanwhile, comparatively very little intelligent thought and effort has gone into reducing or preventing conflict between self-interested individuals and groups and nations, even as technological advances have heightened the need for conflict resolution and prevention by rendering conflicts exponentially more dangerous and destructive.
To redress this perilous imbalance, men must now draw upon the Western political-philosophical tradition of constitutionalism — including the Federalists and the Anti-Federalists, and most of all, Calhoun. Hope for such redress comes as we see the aging Yankee Empire fumbling domestically and overseas, as it, in turn, is being eclipsed by an emerging multipolar world dominated by BRICS and the global south.
By resolving and preventing human conflict in the future, Calhoun, by the long reach of his sound and brilliant philosophy of government, will help save the world over and over up until the Judgment, when perfect and direct and Divine government will supplant forever man's biased and flawed governmental contrivances and improvisations.
Dust-covered for nearly two centuries, neglected by all but the most dedicated lovers of truth, Calhoun's Disquisition is the best guidebook to constitutional government. A Southern white master and defender of Negro slavery who was profoundly right on all fundamentals, Calhoun will ever be the bane of fools and knaves bewitched by false egalitarian philosophy. But fools and knaves notwithstanding, the Disquisition will soon, very soon, be read and appreciated even more than in Confederate times. And moving forward into the future, the appreciation of Calhoun's brilliance will be, not merely Southern, but global.
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Winston McCuen is a metaphysician and political philosopher and Christian apologist. He is a Reformed believer, native South Carolinian, proud son of the Confederacy, and outspoken Southern patriot. He holds a Ph.D. and an MA, in philosophy from Emory University, is a John C. Calhoun scholar, and a Phi Beta Kappa graduate of Furman University in history and philosophy. Formerly a welding instructor, philosophy instructor and Latin teacher, he holds multiple welding certifications and is a senior certified nuclear metallurgical welding engineer.
