Rousseau, rats, and the cuckoo-clock

A month ago I posted an interesting observation. In his famous work The Social Contract, Jean-Jacques Rousseau proposes a simple criterion to establish the best governments in the world. "What is the purpose of any political association?" he asks. "The preservation and prosperity of its members.… [Therefore] other things being equal, the … best government is the one under which the population increases most…. The government under which the population shrinks is the worst. Over to you, Statisticians—count, measure, compare!" 

A simple lookup of countries ranked by rate of natural increase then shows us that—according to Rousseau—the best-governed countries in the world today are Niger, Uganda, Angola, and Benin. All have a rate of natural increase over 33‰.* If you want to pick one of these countries to move to—because they are so well-governed, I mean—you might make your choice based on what languages are available. (Looking only at European languages, you could choose from French, English, Portuguese, or French, respectively.)

But what are we to learn from this fact? Those of us who live today in the modern, advanced West are likely to view with alarm any suggestion that we move to one of these countries. Economically they are poor and struggling; politically they are far from free; even in the best country of the four, 17% of the population do not have access to an improved water supply.** Would Rousseau really have stuck to his guns, if he had known these facts, or would he have changed his mind about what criterion indicates the best government? Put more simply, was Rousseau merely ignorant, or was he crazy?

Or is there something more to these results than we see at first?

Between 1958 and 1962, the American ethologist John B. Calhoun conducted a series of studies on rats. Specifically, he created "rat utopias"—artificial environments with unlimited amounts of food and water (but finite living space), and with no risk from predators. After a couple of generations, the rats went crazy. They stopped reproducing: many female rats could no longer carry babies to term, and many male rats lost interest in sex. There were other dysfunctions too. Rats stopped grooming; heart attack and cancer rates soared; some turned to cannibalism or "frenetic overactivity," while others fell into "pathological withdrawal." These results seemed to correlate with overcrowding, but in fact the rats voluntarily increased their own overcrowding by choosing to eat all at once rather than waiting till others were not around. All kinds of discipline broke down; normal social behaviors vanished. The "rat utopias" became nightmares.***

No analogy is exact. But how hard is it to see the modern, advanced West as a human version of the "rat utopias"? Of course there are still pockets of poverty and deprivation in our societies, but many of us have all the food and water we need, even while we live in confined spaces. Many of us have minimal experience of violent crime, and none at all of warfare (the two most obvious forms of "predation" to which humans are subject in modern societies). And sure enough, our numbers are dropping—just like Calhoun's rat populations did. If Rousseau were evaluating Calhoun's experiments, he would have had no trouble at all concluding that the rats were miserable. He would have had no trouble at all identifying this misery as the source of the declining numbers.

Why shouldn't the very same argument apply to us? Because we like having enough to eat? Because we like being free from predators? 

I mean, … sure, of course we like those things. I like them! But if our objective behavior looks pathological, isn't it at least possible that we are confused or mistaken about what is good for us? Isn't it at least possible that we like peace and plenty the way a drunk likes his whiskey even while it is poisoning him? (For a further consideration of the ways in which modern Western society creates profoundly anti-natural stresses, see the extended discussion in this post here of the thought experiment from Frederica Mathewes-Green.) 

I don't want to argue in favor of hunger and repression, scarcity and warfare, as ideals necessary for human thriving. Really, truly, I don't. Show me where the argument is wrong.

Of course it is possible to spin this result in an idealistic direction, or in a coldly cynical one. As an example of the first, John Eldredge argues in his book Wild at Heart that we are built for combat and conflict because God created us in the middle of a world at war; and so long as Satan continues his war against God, so long will our lives require us to fight hard to win and guard everything good in them. Eldredge uses this idea to construct a spirituality that is at once modern, martial, and Christian. And yes, idealistic.

There's another way to interpret the insight that we somehow need deprivation and conflict to rise to our human potential. It's an interpretation put into the mouth of Harry Lime, in The Third Man. I think you know how it goes:

Like the fella says, in Italy for 30 years under the Borgias they had warfare, terror, murder, and bloodshed, but they produced Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci, and the Renaissance. In Switzerland they had brotherly love - they had 500 years of democracy and peace, and what did that produce? The cuckoo clock.

Show me where the argument is wrong. 

__________

* That's 33 per thousand. 

** The respective percentages (of people without access to an improved water supply) are: Niger, 31.43%; Uganda, the best of them at 16.86%; Angola, a whopping 33.54%; and Benin, 25.27%.   

*** For a more detailed account of the results of Calhoun's experiments, along with some of the lessons for human populations, consider for example this article here.