Vivek The Cartesian

Reframing a recent debate

I. The Heart of Policy

Policy debates are often dull in their wonkishness, but when driven to a sufficiently fundamental level they inevitably touch on larger questions of historical or even simply human importance. In these moments, understanding these debates requires gaining a broader grasp of political and intellectual history, above all of the history of political philosophy.

This seems very much true of the recent immigration debate that Vivek Ramaswamy kicked off on X. What followed was a discussion that homed in on H-1B visas, along with a flurry of charts and graphs. That flurry was all-too-familiar, given the technical aspects of the problem, though per usual it smacks rather of how little we can resist the temptation to approach social and political issues using the methodological model of modern natural science. More on that later.

Far more revealing than any of these charts was the popular backlash among MAGA Republicans against both Ramaswamy and Elon Musk, who came to his DOGE-collaborator’s defense. Typically one has to probe a bit to get at the heart of an indignant response, to identify the signal among so much noise. But here it was evident to anyone paying the least attention.

Everyone’s aware that an increasing number of Americans believe that their own government, a government that claims to be republican, to represent the interest of the people, of We the People, has sold them out for foreign labor. This has generally occurred in two ways, either by sending jobs overseas, where manpower is cheaper, or by turning a blind eye to illegal immigration, allowing for cheap labor with jobs that can’t be shipped overseas, at least not so easily at present. But expanding the H-1B visa program involves higher-paying jobs. And so, many Americans are frustrated, angry, even outraged that their government seems eager to give each and every career path away to non-citizens, even the most lucrative.

Even more revealing, however, is that the anger directed as Ramaswamy and Musk has focused on their ethnic/national and professional backgrounds. There seems to have been a sudden realization that they are not, as they initially seemed, the hoped-for allies, but that they instead represent but another variation on the globalist and technocratic theme that this movement had emerged in part to combat. They claim that H-1B visas should be expanded because America does not on its own supply enough of the talent our economy requires, and this for various reasons. But for MAGA Republicans this is evidence of the same contempt Hillary Clinton exhibited when she declared them all deplorables upon their emergence some eight years ago.

At the heart of this outrage is a sense of powerlessness before trends beyond our control. Outrage at the disappearance of factories, outrage at the stream of illegal immigrants crossing our border, and outrage now at the proposed expansion of the H-1B visa program. That outrage naturally vents itself on the proximate causes of these trends, at present on Ramaswamy and Musk. Naturally, I say, because anger always looks for causes, it certainly wants to have its reasons, but it inevitably stops much too soon, on the proximate rather than the underlying causes, to say nothing of the ultimate causes.

Underlying this feeling of powerlessness is our unease about the possibility of republican government in our time and its fate in the time to come, a time increasingly upon us. What room can there be for a closed, self-governing community of free citizens, when that community depends, for its very survival, on a global infrastructure with its own momentum, beyond our control, in truth, beyond anyone’s control? What can we do, when the demands made by healthy politics conflict with, and cannot but lose to, the demands made by a global economy committed to growth? This is a question not for empirical social scientists, with their charts and graphs, but for political philosophy.

II. René The Machiavellian

In thinking about this larger, underlying issue, I was recently driven to reconsider my understanding of the relationship between John Locke and René Descartes. For some time, I believed that Descartes had misunderstood the relationship between politics and the new natural science he had helped invent. In an essay titled “Modern Science and Classical Liberalism,” I observed that Locke understood the core ethical principle of Descartes, liberality or generosity, as going above and beyond justice, which is more narrowly concerned with what’s mine and what’s yours. This led me to conclude that Machiavelli might have criticized Descartes’ Machiavellian appropriation of Christian charity as yet another “imaginary republic,” one bound to crumble beneath the weight of the propagating, Machiavellian psychology of fear and greed. In short, Descartes was Machiavellian, but insufficiently so. Thus I concluded, rashly:

Descartes’ expectations of human nature were destined to be lowered, and lowered they were by Locke, who made concessions to material self-interest that are foreign to Descartes’ ethical reflections. It seems, therefore, that classical liberalism is indeed the necessary political corollary to modern science. Machiavellian psychology demanded it.

About a year ago, however, I realized that I’d not really understood a key passage from Part 6 of Descartes’ Discourse on the Method, even though I had quoted part of it in that very same essay. And it now makes me think that I underestimated Descartes’ Machiavellianism. Here’s the passage, as translated by Richard Kennington (emphasis added):

I am now at the point where, it seems to me, I see well enough what approach must be taken to make the most of those that can serve this purpose [of seeking more experiments]. But I also see that they are of such a kind, and so many in number, that neither my hands nor my income, even if I had a thousand times more than I do, would suffice for them all. So that to the degree that I henceforth have the capacity to make more or less of them, I shall also advance more or less in the knowledge of nature. This was what I promised to make known through the treatise I had written [namely, The World], and to show there so clearly the utility that the public can obtain from it that I would oblige all those who desire in general the good of men, that is to say, all those who are in fact virtuous and do not falsely seems so, to communicate to me experiments they have already made, as well as to help me in the search for those that remain to be made.

I had seen how Descartes here supplies scientific means to the ends of Christian charity, and how this is a version of Machiavelli’s spiritual warfare against the Church. That’s obvious enough. What I didn’t see is that his focus on “hands” and “income,” that is, on labor and money, suggests, in its silence on politics, that he attempted to appropriate the Christian demotion of politics toward the end of erecting a new supra-political order, replacing the Church with a scientifically and technologically sophisticated global economic elite.

On this reading, by no means decisive, Descartes played the long game, while Locke played the short. Locke tied the new natural science to a very English political model, one that would have traction long after his death. Yet Descartes seemed to recognize that it was only a matter of time, even if that time would be measured in centuries, before that model would succumb to his own. The Founders were the heirs of Locke, but our technocratic elite is the heir of Descartes, so that the latter has come to supplant the former. And it’s We who lie in the crosshairs.¹

III. Vivek The Cartesian

What I mean is that these philosophic debates articulate, if they do not also cause, be it in whole or in part, the historical and political tendencies that shape our souls. The powerlessness we feel before the perceived loss of the American republic is the expression of the Lockean longings in our souls fighting against the Cartesian erosion of our politics. The righteous indignation unleashed over the past few days is evidence that a bait-and-switch has indeed occurred. But Vivek and Elon are just the latest heralds; the prophecy itself is much, much older.

Or, to use Descartes’ own metaphor, Descartes is the mind that guides the hands and wallets of the Ramaswamys and Musks of the world. And he does so at a remove of nearly four centuries. I asked GROK, the AI image-generator that is part of X’s platform, to show me Descartes glad-handing in cahoots with Ramaswamy and Musk, and I delighted in the results (even the totally accidental confusion of arms seems fitting, and in more ways than one):

The camaraderie here should be taken as ironic. Descartes has a way of making you think you’re working alongside him when you’re actually working for him. Even as he quietly subverts the European university by remaking it in his own image, rather than that of the Church, he loudly denies that he would ever dream of doing anything of the sort. By failing to capture Descartes’ irony at all, the image succeeds in capturing it beautifully.

IV. Parting Thoughts

If you take only one thing away from this piece, please let it be this: the passions modern politics evoke are better understood when situated not so much in light of recent actors as in light of those visionary founders and re-founders of the modern era. While it is noble to seek relief using the political levers available to us, it is prudent first to uncover the principles informing our priorities and interrogate them for ourselves.

Though often, and in this case surely, the trends prove to have been at work much longer, and therefore to be embedded more deeply, than we’d initially surmised, and though by thus showing the powers vaster and deeper we also increase our sense of powerlessness, such an analysis is the only sound basis for a realistic assessment of the possibilities available to us and the eventualities we’d be prudent to prepare for.

In short, inquiry into the history of political philosophy is manifestly more useful than all the Cartesian charts and graphs Descartes’ borrowed wallets could buy from his borrowed hands. They help with the nuts and bolts, to be sure, but their true success lies rather in how they reinforce our vanity that we know the world and thus make it all the more difficult for us to know ourselves.

1. Caveat subscriptor: this assessment is a working hypothesis advanced with due hesitation. For me to endorse this view finally would require revisiting Locke and others, but above all Montesquieu, with the same attentiveness to irony that I have shown Descartes, something I have not yet done. The question turns, I think, on who correctly identified the new God at the helm of emerging supra-political order.