few decades later, John Locke in his Second Treatise on Government softened this bleak understanding by recognizing that human beings also had a natural urge to be productive: to work rationally with hands and tools, crafting wilderness — which he considered simply wasteland — into useful, and thus valuable, products. Value accrued through labor. “Thus the Grass my Horse has bit; the Turfs my Servant has cut; and the Ore I have digge’d in any place where I have right to them in common with others, becomes my Property, without the assignation or consent of anybody.”9 Inspired by the physics of Isaac Newton and Enlightenment ideas of rationality, Locke provided the philosophical foundation for government based primarily on protecting individual rights and freedoms, most especially the right to hold and dispose of property and to enjoy the fruits of one’s labor in security. Individual rights increasingly meant property rights, and as we shall see, property rights became the organizing value for the writers of the Constitution of the United States.
From this baseline the Liberal philosophers constructed a theory of society, economics, and government providing for maximum individual liberty. Rebelling against the oppressiveness of aristocratic privilege and the divine right of kings, they sought a political order in which the individual would be neither beholden to nor responsible for others. Government was simplified into a social contract among such rationally calculating, independent, self-interested individuals, who came together to create society by giving up some of their freedom. In so doing, they gained the security necessary to hold and enjoy their wealth. This system made no appeal to altruism or generosity; it had little faith that self-interested individuals would take responsibility for the good of the whole. An impersonal mechanism — the invisible hand of the free market — was assumed to operate according to a semiscientific law of supply and demand, converting individual selfishness into growth in collective wealth. Since corporations barely existed, the threats to individual liberty were seen to come from social chaos on the one hand and big government on the other. It was a minimal vision of government giving maximum rein to self-interest.
During the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the North American continent offered Liberal revolutionaries a clean slate — a “state of nature” that from the European perspective was also a political vacuum. Settlers arrived in what appeared to be a vast game-filled wilderness, blessed with an incredible wealth of natural resources and peopled by “savages” who could be easily defeated or “civilized.”10 Under these idealized conditions, without a counterrevolutionary feudal aristocracy, the American Revolution produced the paradigmatic Liberal polity.
A potential counterrevolutionary force existed in the form of spiritually developed, but technologically undeveloped, Native American societies. Within a few centuries this living contradiction to the founding assumptions of Liberalism was crushed by mass immigration and industrial technology. When European settlers first arrived, North America contained about five hundred different indigenous tribes with a total population of perhaps five million. Vast herds of buffalo — some thirty million — covered the continent from east to west, from the current Canadian border to Mexico. As the United States transformed and expanded into an industrialized society, it saw both the native populations and the buffalo as obstacles to progress. By the 1860s, as the final Indian wars approached, the great herds had been destroyed and the survivors were confined to the Great Plains, where they provided subsistence for about three hundred thousand free Native Americans who still resisted the Europeans surrounding them.
Resistance ended with the final slaughter of the herds. Between 1872 and 1874, 3.5 million buffalo were killed. Of these only 150,000 were taken by Indians for subsistence.11 The rest were shot by Europeans for meat, hide, tongues, and sport and as a matter of military tactics. General Sheridan exhorted the US Congress to pass a bill to exterminate the herds, saying that “every buffalo killed is an Indian less.” By the 1880s, the buffalo were virtually extinct. Only a handful of pure specimens remained in the United States. Native Americans saw this blindness to the sacredness of the natural world as a kind of psycho-spiritual disease. The words of Lakota visionary Black Elk capture the gulf between a primal and industrial ethic:
That fall [1883] … the last of the bison herds was slaughtered by the Wasichus [Europeans]. I can remember when the bison were so many that they could not be counted, but more and more Wasichus came to kill them until there were only heaps of bones scattered where they used to be. The Wasichus did not kill them to eat; they killed them for the metal that makes them crazy, and they took only the hides to sell. Sometimes they did not even take the hides, only the tongues and I have heard that fire-boats come down the Missouri River loaded with dried bison tongues. You can see that the men who did this were crazy. Sometimes they did not even take the tongues; they just killed and killed because they liked to do that. When we hunted bison, we killed only what we needed. And when there was nothing left but heaps of bones, the Wasichus came and gathered up even the bones and sold them.12
From the primal point of view, wilderness is the closest face of the mystery of creation. From the Liberal point of view, the primary value of wilderness is in its potential for the private production of wealth — ultimately, marketable commodities. Part of the immediate universal appeal of Liberalism comes from its simplicity and the directness of its appeal to the most basic of human impulses: freedom, power, comfort, and wealth. Another part of its appeal is the fact that it presented itself as rational — the application of an empirical, scientific approach to government. A year after Isaac Newton published his monumental Principia Mathematica, the grand synthesis of mechanistic science, Locke modestly presented his own work as the contribution of a mere “under-labourer” to the “incomparable Mr. Newton.”13
But science offered a profoundly materialistic definition of truth, based on measurement and control of the natural world in the service of the production of material wealth. Such a science could not, by definition elucidate the good life. This separation of value and fact, paralleling the separation of church and state, or spirituality and politics, is at the heart of Liberalism’s abandonment of the quest. To understand how the use of science is implicated in our crisis and how it might serve in its transcendence, we need to look more closely at the conditions under which it emerged.
Deformation of the Soul: The Scientific Revolution
The revolutionary founders of the modern Liberal state understood science as the fruit of God-given rationality and the key to human liberation. They were also for the most part devout Christians who still believed in the literal truth of the Bible as God’s word. But the practical importance of science as a method of “certain knowledge” grew, and as science increasingly contradicted literal biblical descriptions of the natural world, the political relevance of the entire religious, ethical, and philosophical sphere declined. Religion and philosophy became private matters, as did all questions of value and meaning, other than the self-evident value of Liberal institutions as impersonal, legal mechanisms for checking and balancing individual self-interest. Science became equated with publicly reliable knowledge. The Liberal principles of minimal government and the invisible hand of the market further undermined the role of religion and philosophy.
In 1543 Copernicus initiated what was to become the scientific revolution by publishing an obscure mathematical text, De Revolutionibus de Oribum Celestium, in which he argued that the movement of the heavenly bodies could be more elegantly explained, using a simpler geometry, if one assumed that the earth and the planets rotated about the sun rather than the other way around. Copernicus had been inspired to consider this radical hypothesis by the rediscovery of classical Greek texts and the mystical Pythagorean notion that the world was constructed according to mathematical laws. Since medieval Christian cosmology regarded the heavens as the realm of divine perfection, and since mathematical laws were perfectly true, it seemed obvious to Copernicus that God would construct the heavens mathematically. At bottom Copernicus was as much persuaded by the mathematical elegance of this new model as he was by its practical capacity to explain
