Real Change-Rejecting the Politics of Submission

[This is a further installment of the series Real Change. For the previous post in the series visit Real Change-Replacing the Federal Reserve. To read the whole series from the beginning click on "Real Change" under Topics in the sidebar.]

Though for the time being we still maintain the institutional semblance of constitutional self-government, the United States no longer has a political process consistent with its survival. This isn't a matter of structural features (two-party vs. multiparty, proportional vs. winner-take-all representation, regional vs. group representation and so forth.) Rather it has to do with what we understand to be the purpose of politics; the nature of citizenship in light of that purpose; and the means and methods most likely to produce actions consonant with good citizenship.

As things stand today, the only purpose of politics is to get elected. In order to get elected, you must get more votes than your opponents. The most efficient way to achieve this result is to find out what people want to see and hear, then fabricate and project an image that corresponds to their desire. The electoral process has become an information exchange between self-centered hedonists and self-promoting liars: people willing to expose their selfish desires choose from a menu of fictional satisfactions offered by candidates pursuing their own selfish ambitions. On Election Day the electorate selects the candidate whose fabricated image most effectively seduced their self-serving judgment.

Prior to Election Day the focus of the political process is on the candidates. The term politics is therefore used to refer mainly to the activities undertaken by and on behalf of those competing for political office. Besides the candidates themselves, the people involved in politics, are the pollsters and analysts of opinion who figure out what the people want to see and hear; the media consultants whose work is to produce and project an image of the candidate that corresponds to their preferences; and the money people who gather from every possible source the funds needed to pay and equip the rest. But there are obviously two other groups of people who actively participate in the process: those who control access to the media, and those who control access to the money. They have become the only electorate that really matters, the praetorian guard, as it were, whose choice ultimately determines which candidates shall be lifted up for the adulation or opprobrium of the selfish rabble. I say they are the only electorate because the people who determine the choices actually determine the choice. This paradigm of politics therefore effectively abandons the idea of government of by and for the people. Instead we have government over the people, manipulated by the media, who are owned by money powers that therefore control both the process and its results.

For our present purposes two things are especially noteworthy in this political paradigm. The first is the essentially passive, and ultimately superfluous, role of the people as a whole; the second is the concentration of political activity in the hands of a relatively small group of elite participants who in effect become the only real citizens. This paradigm represents the end of the democratic era in human affairs, and a return to the oligarchic rule (using those words to refer to government by the few, but with the usual implication of power in the hands of the wealthy) characteristic of societies before the institution of the American republic. As long as this oligarchic paradigm predominates, the American experiment is suspended. Once the paradigm has been consolidated, it will be over and done.

If this analysis of our present political process is accurate it means that as far as truly representative government is concerned American politics has become an imaginary exercise. Candidates for office have essentially been degraded into mere images. The final choice made by the people is also imaginary, since they select from alternatives predetermined by an exclusively elite process in which they play no active role. The aim of the imaginary process is to determine which representatives of the elite powers project an image more likely to mollify people, and make them less resistant to the will of those who in fact now exercise sovereign control. Though imaginary in its outward form and content, the process therefore aims at a very real advantage. It is less expensive (both in material and emotional terms) to control a people induced to vent its frustrations and ambitions in what amounts to a virtual reality. Such virtual politics adds the finishing touch to the welter of preoccupations and distractions offered by technological toys and sexual hedonism (keeping in mind, of course, that much of that is also virtually enacted, through internet pornography, and such vicarious satisfactions as following the antics of "stars" in the entertainment and information media.)

At the moment, this imaginary political process appears to serve the goal of establishing a system of global governance that will ultimately eliminate the need for the charade of representative institutions (or at least make it entirely optional.) From the oligarchic point of view, the advantage of such a global system lies in the concentration of sufficient power in the hands of a global elite to deter, co-opt or suppress opposition. This requires that a background network of globally minded elites becomes, in effect, the last remaining superpower, with no lesser power capable of standing alone against it. The American union has the wherewithal to be a lasting superpower, but on a national basis incompatible with the globalist principle of the New World Order. Therefore, the continued existence of the United States is an obstacle which must be removed by reducing the power and destroying the unity of the nation.

Whatever his rhetoric, the policies being pursued by Barack Obama are intended to achieve this deflation of the relative power and cohesion of the United States.

His critics have been quick to see the destructive implications of his agenda, especially in the economic realm. But few if any have seen, or at any rate been willing to articulate, the purposeful intention behind it. The two party system effectually dampens any inclination toward such candor, since it represents an imaginary (or virtual) opposition of elements with no more real difference between them than two heads on the same body, or two eyes in the same head. However different they look, they move together and in the same direction. Though Democrats pretend to care deeply about the welfare of the people, Democrat policies increase the power of controlling elites with little net benefit for the people at large. Though Republicans pretend to care deeply about the liberty and opportunity available to individuals, their policies tend to increase the freedom of controlling elites, with little net benefit for individual liberty on the whole. The telltale sign of the agenda common to both parties is their actual indifference or hostility to the effects of programs and policies on the characteristics that are the essential bases of the people's ability to think and act for themselves: self-discipline, self-sufficiency and self-government.

Self-discipline clearly depends on the formation and encouragement of certain moral characteristics. Self-sufficiency requires economic approaches that preserve and enhance opportunities for individual income and wealth creation. Self-government demands political processes that depend on, and respond to individual initiative in the development and mobilization of representative political networks. Clearly these three components of self-government are interdependent. Unless they control material resources that exceed the bare necessities of life, individuals are unlikely to show much political enterprise. Without a sense of their own worth, and the significance of their own abilities and actions, people are unlikely to see or take advantage of economic opportunity. Even when they do, without a sense of responsibility for the management of their impulses and passions, they are unlikely to focus on and sustain effective action long enough to produce results. Finally, without the self-confidence and courage that arises from the sense of personal responsibility, individuals become the passive subjects of the actions and intentions of others, incapable of the initiatives required 0f true citizens.

In their different ways, both the Democrat and Republican parties advance policies that promote mentalities and ways of life that directly attack or persistently erode one or another of these components of republican citizenship. The Democrats consistently champion undisciplined sexual lust. The Republicans routinely cater to the lust for money and material goods. Both alike agree to serve as masks for the unbridled lust for power. In the more general sense of the term, therefore, lust is the whole purpose of the political system they comprise. It represents the implementation of an Hobbesian vision of human nature as an endless effort to satisfy unquenchable desire, a tyranny of domineering passions, in which the appearance of choice simply registers the prevalent passion of the moment. But Thomas Hobbes reasoned logically to the conclusion that absolute despotism is the political system that corresponds to this vision. He would not be at all surprised to see that both major Parties to the politics of lust tacitly agree on a path that leads humanity under the yoke of global tyranny.

The American republic was not founded upon a simply Hobbesian concept of human nature. The American founders acted on an understanding (profoundly influenced by Christian and Biblical precepts) that saw natural right, rather than passion, as the ruler or measuring rod of choice. This different conception of nature leads to a different conception of choice. Rather than arising from the welter of competing passions, it reflects the possibility of deliberation, the process whereby one consciously chooses which passions shall be constrained, and to what degree. But such deliberation assumes a standpoint not subject to passionate forces, an eye in the storm of passion, free in some sense from its prevailing winds because it represents the point of origin from which passion itself derives substance, force and meaning. In the understanding articulated in the American Declaration of Independence, this is the standpoint of the Creator. The concept of right arising from the authority of the Creator assumes that this original position represents more than the sheer force of real existence. It represents an intention, an inwardly formed purpose that foresees, and at every moment constitutes, the destination of existing things. The assertion of right represents the presence of this intention in action, along with just the force needed to carry it out. From this juxtaposition of intention and forcefulness arises a concept of justice that supplies the reason for constraining and ordering the passions, a reason that looks beyond the prevalent disposition of passion itself.

It may accurately be said that the people most responsible for the American founding were obsessed with justice. They saw it as the overriding purpose of political life, to which the freeways of passion would ultimately be forced to submit. But if, by deliberation, people recognize and submit to its requirements, their freedom of choice becomes the basis for government, rather than forced submission. The extent and degree of their self-determination with respect to the requirements of justice establishes the extent of individual freedom in their society. In this respect, the more good individuals are willing to do of their own volition, the less the force of government will be called upon to do for them. Conversely, the less justice they reflect in their individual choices, the more the force of government will be called upon to dictate and impose upon their actions. Freedom depends on individual responsibility.

The politics of lust (using the term in its general sense, as we have in this essay) represents the complete abandonment of this responsibility. Because we have accepted it, our freedom is being overthrown. If we wish to save and restore our freedom, we must become, like America's founders, partisans of justice; people willing to answer in word and deed for the right use of freedom in our own lives and the life of our nation. But we cannot restore the concern for right if we abandon the standpoint from which the concept of right arises: the standpoint of the Creator and of respect for the authority implied by His intention for our lives. This is the true fault line along which shall be determined the fate of American liberty. On one side move the forces that reject the premise of the Creator's will. On the other those firmly committed to its defense. And in between, so many who shift to and fro between the false promises of unbridled passion and the common sense of justice that inclines them toward the path of responsibility and true liberty. Though the partisans of justice cannot pander to the falsehoods, we can do our best to make clear the solid happiness that can only be achieved through liberty. This is the practical challenge that our derelict elites have brushed aside, but which those who are loyal to liberty must be ready to address. To see their work in progress, visit AIPnews.com. Then look for my further description of the real change they are working for in the next installment of this series, Real Change- Restoring the Politics of Justice.

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Generation X and The Tenets of Conservatism

Ed Said:

Conservative powerbrokers must accept the new reality on the ground: Generation X Conservatives have a different philosophical view of the world. Do not fear us; embrace us; we are the breath of fresh air the Conservatives so desperately need…

For the most part, Generation X leans to the right when offered Reagan Conservatism; it's when the religious right shows up, most check out.

Conservatives lose all credibility to fight every nanny state issue because of abortion. Or are Conservatives for a nanny state when the rules play into their preferences? Why alienate millions of women because of our pro-life stance? The pro-life movement has its own inertia, why do Conservatives need to help? It would be great to get some more women in the Conservative tent.

In our battle to advance Reagan Conservatism how does promoting Christian morality help our cause?

March 8, 2009 10:16 AM

In response to my post about Sam Brownback's retreat from principle, this comment from Ed arrested my attention. He asks an important question; one that I'm sure reflects the thinking of millions of people like him. I believe that answering it is not at all difficult, though the reasoning involved requires several steps, in the course of which we recapitulate the tenets of conservatism.

1. The preservation of Freedom- In order to know whether promoting morality advances the cause, we must first think about the nature of the cause. Reagan conservatism is first and foremost about preserving freedom. It begins, like the United States itself, from the premise that as individuals all human beings have unalienable rights (rights inseparable from their humanity), among them life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. To state the principle in this way begs a question however. What justifies the claim to these rights? As a matter of historical fact, America's founding generation justified it by reference to the will of the Creator, to whose Providence they trusted, and whom they regarded as the ruler and ultimate judge of the universe. All this they made clear in the Declaration of Independence, at the moment the United States came into existence as a free and independent nation. If members of Generation X embrace the American doctrine of freedom, they must either embrace this justification for it, or make the case for some other. Of course, they may be content to assert it as an existential act of will, without justification. But how does it promote conservatism to reduce its foundation to an arbitrary whim? If the claim to freedom is an arbitrary whim, why should it be preferred to the whims of wealth and power that are the basis for oligarchy, military tyranny or other forms of despotism? If there is no rational basis for the preference, how do we preserve it from the whirlpool of relativism, which in the end sucks political life into a maelstrom of perpetual conflict intermittently relieved by those eras of calm during which superior might reduces all to slavery and subjection?

   
   

2. Securing the blessings of liberty- Contrary to the inclinations of the more shallow libertarians, conservatism has nothing in common with anarchism, since it is based on preserving freedom, which means firmly establishing it on sustainable grounds. Anarchy is not sustainable, but inevitably produces first chaos, then tyranny. So, while respecting the premise of unalienable individual rights, conservatism also requires respect for the limits implied by the reasoning used to justify our claim to those rights. Put simply, if the claim to rights rests on the premise of God's authority, we cannot preserve the claim if we use our rights in a way that destroys respect for God's authority. The premise of freedom is equal rights. The premise of right is God's authority. Freedom exercised with respect for God's authority is liberty. Thus exercised it produces good results, which the preamble to the U.S. Constitution calls "the blessings of liberty." This of course implies that there are curses, or bad results that arise from the abuse of freedom, which abuse the Founders often referred to as licentiousness.

   
   

3. Establishing limited government- Conservatism respects the goals for our government set forth in the U.S. Constitution. It therefore seeks to secure the blessings of liberty and avoid the curse of licentiousness. In order to achieve this goal, freedom, whether for one individual or a large number, must be limited by respect for the rights that are inseparable from our humanity. Free government, though based upon consent, is therefore not the instrument of unbridled free will. It is government limited by respect for the right use of freedom (which is, by the way, the proper definition of a right), and for the authority that substantiates it.

   
   

4. Promoting respect for law- Government limited by respect for the right use of freedom is lawful government. This does not mean government in which people slavishly obey whatever their rulers declare to be the law. It means first of all respect for the premise of lawfulness. Lawfulness is the right exercise of freedom, so that when individuals conform their choices to what is right they behave lawfully. If they form a community on this basis, they constitute a society in which they literally govern themselves. But when individuals voluntarily behave in a lawful fashion they act morally. Morality is therefore the effective basis of self-government.

   
   

5. Preserving the moral basis of freedom- As individuals acting lawfully do what is required by right, others are obliged by their respect for what is right (and ultimately by respect for the authority of God which substantiates the claim of right) not to interfere with what they do. The exercise of right thus limits the actions of others. But the government is nothing more than the instrument of individuals when acting as a community. So when individuals act lawfully government is, like all others, obliged to respect their rights (that is, not to interfere with the actions they take in order to do what is right.) Whatever its powers, its exercise of those powers is limited to actions that are consistent with this obligation. Self-government is thus the effective basis for insisting upon limited government. But since the essential substance of self-government is moral action, morality is the effective basis for insisting upon limited government. Conversely, where morality and therefore self-government fail, the power of government must expand in order to restore respect for right. Such expansion must extend as far as the disorder produced by licentiousness requires. Given the ingenuity of human wickedness, this implies no limitation but what is required to maintain superior power.

   
   

   The promotion of morality thus appears to be an essential prerequisite for limited government. Limited government is the key practical goal of conservatism. One advances a cause by actions that bring closer the achievement of its goal. Therefore the promotion of morality advances the cause of conservatism. It's worth noticing that the logic used to reach this conclusion, while consistent with Christian beliefs, is entirely based upon the understanding of rights and government contained in the fundamental civic documents of the United States (in particular the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution of the United States.) If Generation X conservatives have a philosophical view of the world that rejects this understanding, they are not conservatives at all, at least not in any sense that Ronald Reagan or any other American conservative would comprehend. I also wonder whether their views are, in the true sense, philosophical. Opinions asserted without reason may be deeply felt. They may be authentic expressions of an individual's real identity, convictions or needs. But if old Socrates was any guide, when it comes to philosophy none of these attributes is a substitute for the simple willingness to accept the discipline of the search for truth. One of the greatest obstacles to this acceptance is the worship of one's own opinion.
   

   Now I can hear you saying that the Founders reliance upon the authority of God was no more than their own opinion. But even Socrates did not hold that philosophy required the possession of truth, only the willingness constantly to submit to the examination made necessary by respect for it. Since thousands of years before the American founders, people who call upon the name of God have submitted themselves to this examination, as I do on the pages of this site. When the "philosophic view" of Generation X can make the same claim, it might be less unwise to consider trusting the fate of the world to their opinions. When they articulate and find some justification for their view that moves men to righteousness, and to give their all, in pain and war and martyrdom against injustice as the Christian gospel of love, or the American creed of freedom has done, it might be wise to do so. For now all we see is people who demand all so that their lusts may be satisfied, their fragile egos comforted, and their self-indulgent intellectual fantasies indulged. Such people lean toward the materialist version of conservatism as a way of avoiding the one discipline on offer from those now lifted to leadership, supposedly with the support of their Generation. I mean the discipline of government dependency, slavery and domination. Sadly, they do not realize that there is no sustainable choice that will respect their licentious whims. The real choice we face is between totalitarian government based ultimately on force, and self-government grounded upon respect for what is morally right.
   

   One final word: Conservatives don't believe in the nanny state, but in the free republic, which requires among other things, respect for the authority of the Creator God on which our claim to freedom relies. In any case, I think it may be a mistake to refer to what leftists like Obama intend to impose as a nanny state. Sometimes nannies have been a more than adequate substitute for mothers who think they have things they can do better. However if, as a free people, we have reached the stage when we have better things to do than to preserve our rights and respect the discipline implied by them, I see nothing in the history of humankind to justify the assumption that the resultant tyranny will be an adequate substitute for the loss of our individual and national dignity. When I'm tempted to think otherwise, I remember the moral degradation that Frederick Douglass and others held to be the greatest misery of my slave ancestors, and I think again.
   

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The Strategy of Right, Number 3

[Part of a series, see also The Strategy of Right, Number 2]

So God created man in his own image, and in the image of God created he him; male and female created he them. And God blessed them, and God said unto them, Be fruitful and multiply, and replenish the earth and subdue it... (Genesis 1:28)

And Adam knew Eve his wife; and she conceived, and bare Cain, and said, I have gotten a man from the Lord. (Genesis 4:1)

Thus far in our reflections on the Biblical account of the law ordained by the Creator for human nature we have made out two primordial strands: the law of love and the law of retribution. We have referred to the latter as the first law of nature, to indicate that it corresponds to the rule usually referenced by that name in the works of other writers (Locke and Rousseau for example) who sought to develop an understanding of human right or justice grounded in the natural law. But in order to assure that our understanding is faithful to the original, we must respect the Bible's full account of God's creation of human nature as we experience it, which is to say in particular what it tells us about the human condition after human beings acquired knowledge of good and evil.

When God addresses humanity after the fall, He speaks of two different kinds of labor. He says to the woman that henceforth her labor in childbirth will cause her more intense pains; and that she will be inclined to crave male companionship and accept male domination. To the man He apportions a painful sustenance: the labor of procuring food from a cursed and reluctant soil until as dust he returns to that ground from which the Creator first withdrew him. Together these commands implant or constitute a law of labor governing the preservation of human life, in the individual and in the species as a whole. But that which preserves life reflects God's intention for man's good, the free determination of God's will for man's existence. So, despite their disregard for His warning not to eat fruit from the tree of knowledge, the Creator still sees the good in their continued existence. However, as a result of their mistake it can only be preserved through painful labor. The law of labor arises from the Creator's goodwill towards man. It is therefore an aspect of the law of love. However, our acquaintance with evil disrupts the appearance of freedom in our submission to this law. Since it is connected with the preservation of life, we submit willingly. But because of the pain involved, we do not submit without struggle.

From beginning to end, the whole spectacle of life, as it arises from the labor of procreation and is sustained by the labors of economic life, represents this ambiguity. Men and women wrestle in the throes of love. They desire union but resent surrender. They rejoice in their offspring, but chafe against the bonds imposed by their dependency. They take pleasure in the work of their own hands, yet inwardly dwell upon the sandy shores of paradise where work involves no more labor than the contemplation of lives effortlessly fashioned by their own imaginations. They take pride in the products of their labor, but are inwardly crestfallen as the perishable perfection of their material works calls to mind the ultimate fate of death that will complete their own material lives.

The ambiguous appearance of the natural law in this context necessarily affects our understanding of the human community to which it gives rise. Family life is at one and the same time the most comforting and the most distressing facet of human experience. On account of it we seem to know who we are, yet on that same account we seem unable to discover our true identity. In the curious search for self-knowledge we are driven from its midst into the world, yet time and again recalled from the world by the longing to journey home again. We may never feel as free as when we yield to the bonds of loving obligation that constitute its strength. We may never feel more confined than in the moments when its duties bar us from the pursuits and pleasures that would otherwise fulfill our longings and ambitions. What makes this ambiguity even more acute and inescapable is the fact that the compulsions of family life spring from the ground of love. They always express our freedom and therefore involve an element of choice, a crisis of will, a burden of responsibility.

Our present purpose does not allow us to explore the implications of this natural law for every aspect of human individual and social life. Indeed, those implications imply the rejection or reformation of almost every area of science (using that term in the broad sense of knowledge systematically developed and accounted for) that purports to study human affairs. But though our focus is on its implications for the understanding of human right and government, the way we proceed as we explore those implications may be a useful example to others as they seek to revise the basic concepts of their areas of study along lines that respect and build upon the Bible's account of the principles of human nature.

In the most widely read of his political works, the French philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau famously proclaimed that "Man is born free, yet everywhere he is in chains." Real experience suggests, however, that everyone is born in bondage, but everywhere survives by human choice. The umbilical cord that connects every nascent infant to its mother perfectly represents this bondage, the precursor of that dependency which binds every new born child to its parent by needs that it is utterly helpless to satisfy on its own. Natural instinct moves the child's mother to provide for those needs, beginning of course with warmth and nourishment.

But humanity involves self-consciousness, so that in human beings, instinct does not guarantee action. In the context of this self-consciousness, the body is an object that we identify with ourselves by a complex process that requires that we also stand apart from it, experiencing its impulses and pains from a vantage point of observation that seems to allow us to take a stand with regard to them, one that is distinct from the mere fact of observation. We can assume an attitude of inclination or aversion; say yes or no; accept or deny what our experience sets in motion. Insofar as we follow it, our reaction determines the nature of the future (with respect to the moment of observation) we see unfolding from it. This we take to be our will (our present determination with respect to a future state or condition). By thus taking it for our own, we consent to the action that follows in order to produce it. We make a choice favoring such action.

In mother's case, the result of this inner process of self-determination appears to an observer in actions that respond to the child's needs as if they were her own, thus recognizing and claiming the child as belonging to her in much the same way that her own body belongs to the being that constitutes her consciousness. Given that the child emerges from her body, and has for some time functioned as a part of it, the extension of her self-consciousness to encompass the child is not hard to comprehend. In the broad sense of the term she claims the child as her property, that is, as something that fits or is properly a part of her being. Those familiar with Rousseau's work will notice that, because of the more accurate examination of the birth of man the Biblical account inspires, it is not so difficult for us to imagine the first assertion of human property as it was for Rousseau. In a sense though, like Rousseau and others, we see labor as the constitutive basis of this assertion, but it is labor that acknowledges an already extant proprietary relationship. It does not arbitrarily assert a new one. Property thus derived has a natural basis, since it is the direct consequence of physical reproduction. But it also originates in a determination of human will with respect to that consequence, as the mother consents to act upon her natural impulse to care for the child.

The first human society thus appears to have its origins in a relationship formed both by nature and by human will. To borrow a phrase from Aristotle, the family "is made by man, but by the sun as well." It arises in part from the free choice of the parents, and in part from the instinct implanted in them by the will of the Creator. Since he does not first experience the child as part of his own body, the element of self-conscious choice is especially important as the basis for the father's relationship with the child. In the Biblical account, the man first sees the woman as flesh of his flesh, and bone of his bone. Then in the bond of love expressed in their physical relations, they become as it were one flesh, overcoming by their consensual consciousness the difference between their separate bodies. The man's identity with the child is an extension of this consensually conscious unity, which the woman at first represents to the man as subjective thought and feeling, but after the child's birth, also as an objective fact. The child belongs to the man, therefore, in a sense that corresponds almost exactly to the concept of property as we know it, which is to say as the assertion of identity between an agent and the object affected by it on account of the appearance of the mark, or evidence of substantive change, the agent's action produces. The child is that mark, and the woman the substance in which it is made, so that the appearance of the child is a token of the consensual unity of man and woman, the proof that they have come and belong together (that is, that they have formed and are part of a common whole, understood respectively as the family and the human race.)

The family brings together three distinct manifestations of humanity: man, woman and child. Like the three persons of God according to Christian theology, they are three separable aspects of the self-same being, human being. Like the drawstring devised to make a circle of cloth into a purse, humanity runs through them and draws them together, forming their unity. But in our human perception, this unity never completely erases their differences. Though the purse is one, we still perceived it front and back, bottom and top and sides, and so on. In our self-consciousness we assume a vantage point in relation to which these separable aspects emerge, upon any one of which we may choose to center our attention, thereby establishing the relative identity of the rest.

This is best imagined if we think of two people, stretched out in outer space, face two face but with their legs extending in opposite directions. Place an object between them, and what one would call its top, is its bottom for the other, and so on. Yet by agreement between them, they may choose to establish a common vocabulary, and with it a common understanding. From their common perspective, therefore, the top of the object is such only as a result of their mutual consent. Consent is therefore in one sense the basis of their community, though it is not what brings them together in the first place with a certain orientation with respect to one another.

In this same way, consent and pre-existing obligation are both of them at the origin of the family's existence. On that account, it is at one and the same time a product of the natural predisposition that reflects the will of the Creator, and of human consensus, which is the mutual agreement of human wills. In this respect it simply represents the ambiguity of humanity itself which consists partly in common physical characteristics (featherless and bipedal, for example) and partly in the mutual acknowledgement of an inner worth and meaning that transcends these characteristics. Insofar as its identity depends on natural predisposition, the family expresses and is subject to the law of nature, which obliges the will. Insofar as its existence depends on consensual acknowledgement, the family expresses and is subject to the law of love, which expresses the will's free self-determination. Yet in the nature of the family these two laws are so inextricably expressed that they operate almost as one. Like the persons of God whose way of being they reflect, there is between them a distinction that at once asserts and overcomes their difference. For what the natural law makes possible the law of love freely accepts and perpetuates. What the law of love freely acknowledges and respects, the natural law takes for granted as the product of pure self-determination. In this way natural right and freedom come together, with the family as the first paradigm of their substantive co-existence.

We will explore this in greater detail in our next essay. Already however, we begin to see why those who take the view that an understanding of politics that respects natural rights can do so without respect for the form and integrity of family life understand neither rights nor family. As their mistake is already destroying the fabric of our liberty, we have good reason to pay careful attention to the discussion ahead.

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Real Change: Rebuilding the Dream (Part 1)

In the 2008 Presidential election, America's so-called two-party system offered the voters no real choice. Obama offered empty rhetoric that masked a lifelong commitment to the treacherous allure of shiftless communism. McCain offered empty rhetoric that masked his total abandonment of the American principles the Republican Party pretends to uphold. Both candidates joined in support of the so-called bank rescue package that is now acknowledged by all to have been America's fateful leap into full fledged socialism. (As usual, when we said so at the time, people like me were ridiculed by the thought enforcers in the media, who exist to make people timid and ashamed of their own common sense.) The election was a stage play of phony fisticuffs, like some of the wrestling matches we see on TV. The two parties are like baseball teams or racing cars held by the same owners. Despite the appearance of competition, they are two puppets moved by one pair of hands, sharing a common goal- to maximize profits for the self-serving special interests that pull their strings. America doesn't have two parties, but one party with two heads. Their lips feign disagreement, but they sit atop a body whose feet move only one way- toward government dictatorship that once and for all overthrows the sovereignty of the people.

Of course, many people who support the Democrats have no problem with this outcome, so long as the government dictators promise a job (though for all too many a reliable handout will do), a roof over their heads and the freedom to fornicate in whatever manner they choose. They even applaud mass slaughter, so long as it's directed against human life in a way that flatters their timidity and pride to exempt them from immediate harm ("not to worry, you're in no danger, only your inferiors"). But some Democrats and a large number of Republicans have enough self-respect to reject the small pride that fearful prejudice makes possible. They want to feel part of something noble, something that invokes a better destiny than survival, a better hope than simply being spared the butcher's knife. Some of these give in with pleasure to empty words of hope and change, spoken in tones that smack of something grand, they know not what. Some surrender to slogans that exalt liberty; promise greater responsibility; that even (dare we say it) mention God and imply that yes, there's more to life than passing fantasies of never lasting pleasure. These latter mostly vote Republican. They long for the real substance of that old American dream, our liberty. I like to believe that there are still enough of them to constitute a governing majority, if ever they would come together in earnest to vote for what they say they long to see. But even now, faced with the prospective triumph of everything they profess to deplore, they remain passive, hesitant, divided, confused- filled with noble appetites but all unwilling to risk moving toward the highlands where nobility can be satisfied. They hear with pleasure the echoes of Ronald Reagan, calling to America as that 'city on a hill'. But mired by love of pleasure in their suburbs on the plain, though they hear, they will not climb.

Such people have a decision to make, not unlike the one that faced Lot's congregation when the Lord gave them leave to escape the fate of Sodom and Gomorrah. Will they be Lot or Lot's wife? They must choose between the steep path to hope that dwells in the highlands, or the memories of pleasure tugging at their heartstrings, pulling toward the plains and hope's destruction. It is of course only the memory of pleasure that beckons: a vain delusion. For us the surest indication of this is the little grain of truth in the alleged usurper's State of the Union address. Amidst improbable promises of future messianic wonders, he admitted that the likely and immediate prospect was one of debt, dearth, and government inflicted discipline. The real question therefore is not whether we will suffer, but whether we will do so to help Obama overthrow our liberty or to help ourselves restore it.

In slavery times some masters' prized possession was a dark skinned overseer whose appearance lent some color of legitimacy to the brutal reality of enslavement. Their greatest nightmare was one who rose to be a rallying point against this clever deception. Against this nightmare, the most clever and enslaving deception of all was the preacher who appealed to the longing for freedom in order to enmesh the enslaved in a soulish disposition that sings hymns to freedom in the land of bye and bye, but does nothing here and now to assert or pursue that freedom. Such was the caricature of Christianity often encouraged amongst their "chattel" by skillful slaveholders. Such sadly is the role the Republican Party now plays in the drama that depicts the fate of America's liberty.

Happily, the best antidote to the false Christianity used to facilitate the tyranny of earthly masters, is the true faith that represents the liberty of God's creation. God's liberty offers every human being the chance to be their own master with no provision except that they respond to the goodwill that God offers them by accepting it themselves and extending it to all others. In doing so they constitute a self-governing community for which God's goodwill becomes the law. This is the clear, straightforward vision of republican liberty that America's founding generation sought to implement. In the Declaration of Independence they eloquently set forth its principles. In the war for Independence they proved their dedication to its truth. In the Constitution of the United States they strove, as best they could, to fashion a framework for its construction.

Abraham Lincoln's legacy has been falsely played upon and manipulated a good deal in recent weeks. But are there really any Americans left truly committed to government of, by and for the people, the form of government to which Lincoln dedicated all the sacrifice, suffering and death of the American Civil war? If so, the most critical and desperate need of our times is a vehicle for their action that is truly, faithfully, wholeheartedly committed to its preservation. Yet, though by name the Democrats invoke the people's strength, they embrace an ideology that betrays that strength for the sake of government power. Though by name the Republicans invoke the common good that is the people's liberty, they have sold out the faith and fear to act on the creed that is the foundation of our free republic. If we mean to restore it, then we must reject the betrayal of the Democrats and the sold-out timidity of the so-called Republicans. We must cease to be the consumers of their political lies, wallowing in the throes of the nightmare they have brought upon us. We must become instead the re-builders of a fresh republican hope, the real American dream.

In light of this challenge, it is surely providential that contemporary science and technology now offer tools exactly suited to the practical challenge at hand. Next, we'll take a look at the characteristics of a structure of political action that makes use of these tools. It must be designed from the ground up to be consistent with the goal of rebuilding the ark of liberty. Otherwise it will not survive the flood of lies, debt and delusions that now threatens to overwhelm our freedom. As background for this discussion, pay a visit to http://AIPnews.com. Explore what you find there. After all, the old saw is sometimes right on. A good illustration saves more than a thousand words.

Worth considering? Then don't forget to DIGG IT!!!!Worth considering? Then don't forget to DIGG IT!!!!

Real Change-Replacing the Federal Reserve

Our thinking about the fair tax approach has reminded us of the fact that in our society money is a commodity generally distributed throughout the land, not in the first instance pooled in the hands of a few. The contrary impression has been created by the centralized banking system, which along with the income tax obscures the simple fact that goods and services (and therefore the money that represents their value) start life as widely distributed as the individuals who actually produce and perform them. The first economic question therefore is not about the distribution of money (the false pretense of socialist and communist thinking) but about the mechanism for gathering it. Just as the income tax gathers money for government without regard to the choice of the people making it, the centralized banking system absorbs money from people that is then used (circulated in channels) without regard for choices they should make based on the actual circumstances of their lives. By disconnecting bankers' choices from the real life conditions of the people whose money they employ, the centralized banking system encourages the existence of the seemingly lucrative, but illusory assets whose corrupting weaknesses have caused its present crisis.

We're told that some banks and other financial institutions are too big to fail. But like a mass of cells growing in a way that burdens and harms the body (we call it a cancer), the question is, what allows the existence of something that continues to grow without regard for any contribution it makes to the real health and strength of the body (in this case the community or society in which it exists)? When the body must tax itself to exhaustion to maintain a tumor, we don't generally rush to rescue the tumor, or re-enforce the processes that encourage its growth. No, we seek to stop and reverse its growth, or by other means to kill it or remove it from the body. Even when dealing with the body's cancers we are finding that the real answer lies in re-discovering and strengthening the healthy functions and processes that respect the organic nature of the whole, rather than, at its expense, nourishing unproductive cancerous growths.

What we need is a fair banking system that, like the fair tax system, would make the flow of money more dependent on the choices of the individuals (and private associations) that produce its value in the first place. Step by step, let's try to envisage it. Private individuals make money. At first they may store it away about their persons, or in their homes, but experience teaches them that as the amount increases their individual ability to ward off thieves can't keep pace with the incentive others have to steal it away. Let's suppose that a family with a very large store of money has built a safe house for it. The neighbors approach them, asking whether, on some terms of mutual advantage and trust they could deposit their money in the safe house. They agree to share the burden of defending it (the cost of its security). Naturally, just as the store of money attracts interest from people willing to steal it, it attracts interest from others who, averse to stealing, are willing to ask for a loan. The owners of the store of money see the advantage of making such loans, on terms that help to defray the cost of its security, and eventually generate a profit. They agree to share in the profits in some way commensurate with the contribution each makes to the store. They also agree to let someone (perhaps the original owner of the safe house) make decisions about the amount and terms of lending, provided always that they make sure enough is available to meet the needs of the depositors as they arise.

Clearly, everyone involved can benefit from these arrangements, so long as sufficient care is taken to keep the lending practice strictly in line with the needs and interests of the depositors. If for example the depositors are farmers, the person in charge of the lending will make sure more reserves are on hand before planting season, when withdrawals will have to be made to buy seed, refurbish equipment and so forth; or at harvest time when more hands may be needed to bring in a particularly abundant yield. Of course those are also times when the demand for loans may rise. Therefore, loans have to be carefully prioritized to help the original depositors maintain their productive capacity, provided they're doing what's needed to make a good harvest more likely. The properly responsive local bank, tied to local needs and realities, has few opportunities to outgrow the health of the community in which it arises. By and large those temptations will be kept within bounds by due regard for the survival of the depositors whose productivity is the mainstay of its existence. Such a bank is like a healthy organ, interacting with the body whose health it reflects and helps to maintain.

A society whose financial life rests on a base composed of such institutions (independent local banks, sanely integrated with the communities they serve) has no special charm to avoid all calamities. Harvests will fail, lending decisions prove wrong, the occasional crooked professional bank schemers more dangerous than thieves in the night. But the impact of failures will be more localized, their effects more contained and transitory. This kind of bank failure was fairly common in nineteenth and early twentieth century America, before the creation of the Federal Reserve set up the conditions for a far more generalized and longer lasting form of failure.

I'm not saying that all more centralized financial institutions are intolerable. In fact, when the realities of life lead to the amassing of very large fortunes (as the discovery of large gold and silver deposits did in the U.S.) the community based banking model proves inadequate. Where one or a few individuals largely capitalize a bank (fill the store with their money), its practices will be driven by their desire for a good (and often a quick) return on their money. But there needs to be a sign marking the region occupied by such banks that says "enter at your own risk". Anyone who deals with them should have to live with that warning, including enterprises willing to depend on them for working capital. Moreover, this region should be hedged about in ways that prevent individuals and families from much involvement with them. People whose lives depend on their income (they live on a paycheck) need banks that keep an eye on conditions close to home. Properly understood, such individuals include business enterprises (including the affiliates of large, diversified corporations) located in a community and structuring a labor force that depends upon their operations. Such locally rooted enterprises should have to store their operating capital and reserves where they live, and get a return for it related to the health of their immediate environment.

In practice such a hedge might involve restricting certain banks to individual depositors above a specified deposit threshold, or to dealings with the corporate entities that float above and tie together locally based outlets and production units. The money available for such investments would be limited to the net profits (after seasonally adjusted local reserves are met) sent on to such corporate entities in return for the services they provide to their affiliates.

Instead of setting conditions that allow banks (or other enterprises) that are too big to fail, we need to structure the system purposefully so that failure is the natural consequence of bad decisions and actions, but no failure is catastrophic for people not directly involved with the institutions whose management decisions occasioned it. We need to structure it so that local communities benefit from the healthy result of their own efforts, rather than seeing those results siphoned off for uses that have little or no regard for their needs and interests. We need to structure it so that the folks who live at the grassroots deal with banks that rise or fall on the strength of the community, and which therefore have a vital interest in making responsible decisions that contribute to its strength. Finally we need to structure it so that the investments available to people who live on their income mainly take the form of equity in the enterprises they themselves depend on, so that they not only profit from their work but from the overall success of the business that makes use of it.

As we consider this kind of banking structure, one question looms: what about the large deposits and flows of money the national government requires to perform its functions. Well, if we think about the reasons people have for putting their money in the bank, instead of keeping it at home, none of those reasons apply to government. The Federal government has the wherewithal to safeguard and manage its own money. It also has a functional imperative (service to the people and national community as a whole) different than the more narrow, profit-oriented perspective of the private banking system. Government money should therefore be placed in a government bank, staffed and run like any other government department or agency. The hybrid monstrosity that is the Federal Reserve (a private system capitalized with public money) is a contradiction in terms that invites the kind of crack-up we're currently witnessing.

The problem of course is that the indebtedness of the Federal government conjures the hybrid monster into existence. At the end of the day, the government ends up being like the house many people live in- because you owe more than you own, the bank owns the house, not you. Unless you can service what you owe, the bank owns the house, not you. This means that unless the American people have a government that lives on the revenues generated by their activities, they don't' own the government, its creditors do. In generations past political leaders who cared about preserving liberty (that is, government of, by and for the people) hated and feared large government indebtedness. Politicians today pretend that they can spend without regard for the indebtedness which results. They seem content to lead the American people into permanent debt slavery, effectively overthrowing the form of government based upon their freedom. Having quietly turned control over to creditors (including potentially hostile foreign governments) they are no longer free to act as representatives of the people.

By abolishing the income tax, we give people back control of the money they make. By restoring a locally based banking system, we give communities back control of the money the people of those communities supply. By establishing a properly public bank for public monies, we restore to the American people institutional control of and responsibility for monies intended for public use. But we will not restore the real liberty all these steps envisage until we discard the notion that the national government must be the servant of all our aspirations. Instead we must limit its activities to those functions directly related to its true purpose. According to our Constitution, the U.S. government's job is to secure (make safe) the blessings of liberty. It cannot produce them. That's our work. The Federal government is somewhat like the security team at a factory. The fact that its activities are vital to the operation of every shop in the factory doesn't mean that the head of security should make decisions best left to the people responsible for those shops. Even where centralization makes sense, it isn't sensible to make the national government the focus of centralization except in those areas (for example, border security, military preparedness, and international relations) where the Federal government rightly claims responsibility based on the provisions of the U.S. Constitution.

I conclude therefore that the current economic crisis requires these bold steps:

1. Abolish the income tax and replace it with a fair tax system such as that proposed in the Linder bill;
   
2. Abolish the Federal Reserve and replace it with a) a locally rooted banking system for people who live off their wage or salary income and for locally rooted enterprises b) a private, at your own risk banking system for rootless corporate investors and individual depositors who live off their wealth, not their income; c) a U.S. government bank for managing the government's money.
   
3. Thoroughly restructure the Federal government's activities so as to eliminate every activity, department and agency not strictly related to its specifically mandated Constitutional responsibilities. We must end, not extend the failed socialist experiments of the last century.

This is not a prescription for populist hand-outs and other lying policy delusions. It implies a return to individual, family and local responsibility. It implies restoration of the central role of private business, and religious and charitable associations. It implies an end to the pretense that government makes money, or progress or prosperity. It implies, in a word, a return to liberty- with all the hard work, risks and challenges liberty entails. But we all know that in many ways the present trends of our political and social life undermine the disposition and virtues people must have to accept these challenges. Therefore, economic restoration cannot occur unless our political system and moral identity are restored at the same time. Otherwise, real change will not come about, and would not be sustainable if it did. We must discard the political system that has failed and betrayed our liberty. We must reclaim the moral character that can produce energy and courage enough for the new politics that must replace it. No more manipulative, so-called Republicans. No more insidiously delusional Democrats. Just Americans striving as best we can to be decent human beings. Strong enough to be independent. Wise enough to stand united. Good enough to be free.
Obviously, we've got a lot more to think through. Stay with me.

Worth considering? Then don't forget to DIGG IT!!!!

Real Change Step One: Abolish the Income Tax

I saw today that Rep. John Linder (R, GA-7) and 44 Republican co-sponsors have introduced a bill in the U.S. House of Representatives to abolish the income tax and replace it with an implementation of the fair tax proposal. As they say, this represents real, positive change. It is a critical element of the agenda that could avert the economic collapse made imminent by our country's long and damaging flirtation with socialism. Unfortunately, with Obama occupying the White House and the Democrats in control of Congress, what we're likely to get at the moment is just the opposite: a short engagement followed by a shotgun wedding that forces America into a Soviet-style marriage of inconvenience, then prolonged depression and a psychotic break.

Obama's Soviet-style communist state is a Tyrannosaurus Rex on parade in the Jurassic Park of dangerous political excursions. For a moment it's exciting to get close-up and touchy-feely with something so old that we thought of as extinct. Then we remember that at feeding time, we're on the menu. Okay! That's no fun. But if the prospect means we're ready to end the vacation and get on with real life, what's to do? Well, it would be nice to make sure we get out of the Park alive. For this, just like the characters in the movie, we need to apply the know-how that made our little excursion possible. We need to remember our home address (that may strike you as a gimme, but don't forget how easily the mind goes blank during a life and death encounter with a resurrected monstrosity.) Once we retrieve the address, we need to remember how to get there. Then, we head for home. We open the place up, air out all the rooms and get back to being ourselves, that is, the first and greatest free people in human history. Now, being ourselves is hard work, but doing it well has been a source of great satisfaction in our lives. Smart people take vacations mainly to remind themselves of that. Unfortunately some people voted absentee in the last election, while their brains were still on vacation. Hence, the Obamasaurus hex.

There's been a noticeable spike in hate mail from the Obama worshippers since I called his communist agenda by its right name. I've also gotten a lot of encouragement and thanks from Americans who want to preserve liberty in this country, and the prosperity that goes with it. Typical is this brief comment from someone reacting to a WND.com story on my remarks: "I read your WND article, and I agree with you regarding stopping this mess, my question is what do you propose for a solution to stopping this? Thanks for all you do, and I think we need to start to pull together and get things turned around in a hurry."

In one remark, I see what I love and admire about Americans, but also what I find so frustrating. When we see a problem, immediately we ask the question- "What's the solution?" Wallowing in the mess is thankfully not the disposition of real Americans. On the other hand, we are, quite frankly, an impatient bunch anxious to get to the action in a hurry. Because of the first trait, we want a solution badly. Because of the second, we'll grab at a bad solution. But for the latter impulse, Obama would not be resident in the White House. During the election, people would have stepped back from his empty rhetoric to ask hard questions about just what kind of change he is proposing. They would have examined it long and hard enough to see that it's not change at all- just the same ugly grab for power and control that has marred every socialist movement in the world, and produced the sort of results that toppled the Soviet Empire and that have taken other countries (like Zimbabwe, for example) from prosperity to starvation.

Anyway, African countries provide at least a bit of evidence for the simple truth that electing a leader with a black skin is no guarantee of progress. (No, really, I'm not kidding.) In fact, in Africa it has occasionally been the harbinger of personality cults, repression and economic ruin. (Okay, now I am kidding.) Racial preoccupations have deeply wounded the American psyche, but the guilt induced delusion that we're putting a little pathetic salve on those old wounds hardly warrants national suicide. We don't need a phony savior. What we need is a reminder that, with God's help, ordinary folks built this great land, with government from time to time as their instrument, not their master. Though the socialist minded tinkerers of the twentieth century concluded that industrialization and urbanization meant doom for the culture of liberty, the technological leaps of the last thirty years have produced just the tools needed to prove them wrong. Government of, by and for the people- based on self-confident individuals, the God-ordained family, and other private associations now has more potency for economic and political success than ever before in human history. One person with a good idea can literally reach out and offer their ingenuity to the world. Maybe that's why the forces of elite tyranny are so anxious to get a stranglehold on our economy and government. These days, people motivated by a common cause can form a national network to advance it overnight. The information needed to substantiate their thinking and inform their actions is at their fingertips. Remembering the old Latin motto, "Festina Lente", let's get busy.

So much for introductions: tomorrow, I'll go more fully into the three revolutionary changes we need to get America on the way back home, starting with the one the Linder bill seeks to implement: ABOLITION (of the income tax, that is.)

Worth considering? Then don't forget to DIGG IT!!!!

The Strategy of Right, Number 2

[See also The Strategy of Right, Number 1]

 
 

 
 

For I delight in the law of God, in my inner being, but I see in my members another law waging war against the law of my mind and making me captive to the law of sin that dwells in my members. Wretched man that I am! Who will deliver me from this body of death? Thanks be to God through Jesus Christ our Lord! So then, I myself serve the law of God with my mind, but with my flesh I serve the law of sin.

There is therefore now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus. For the law of the Spirit of life has set you free in Christ Jesus from the law of sin and death.

Romans 7:22-8:2

 
 

The first law of nature impels people to act against the person who assaults the image of God represented in another. It is right to follow this impulse, because as human beings we are bound and determined (obliged) by God's will to do so. It is our nature. Thus the first right of nature provides the paradigm for the definition of a right, as a natural predisposition to act in accordance with God's will. This predisposition corresponds with our obligation to God and is the same in all who are of the same nature as we. We are disposed to come together (covenant), to agree in the same course of action, which is to say we one and all mutually consent to the performance of it. Properly understood, therefore, such consent is not an arbitrary determination of our will. Rather it is a consequence of our natural inclination to do God's will.

By this consent, we spontaneously form a community. This community of action, which emerges from the executive impulse encoded by God into our nature, is the archetype of the first lawful human societies not strictly arising from procreation. It emerges in the context of bloodshed, by means of a reaction that acknowledges the image of God in others, and therefore recognizes their humanity. It is the shedding of man's blood that gives rise to the reaction, and only in other men. The operation of the first law of nature therefore presumes consanguinity, a community of blood. But though this community includes all humanity, humanity is clearly recognized only after the fact.

We will understand this better after looking more carefully at the Bible's account of God's promulgation of the law of retribution. He says that He will require an accounting for the destruction of human life from every man and beast. At first, the notion of holding the beasts accountable may seem odd. But as in our mind's eye we look more carefully at the scene being called into account, we understand. We are out hunting with a group of others from our village. We all see from a distance a beast crouching to feed upon the body of another beast. We approach the crouching beast from behind, thinking to surprise and slay it for its meat. As we come closer to the scene, we recognize in the lifeless form stretched out upon the ground someone we know to be a man like ourselves, perhaps a son or brother. Apprehension mingles with the excitement of the kill, and we move at once to strike dead the wild beast that seems to feed upon him. Alerted by our sudden move, the creature turns and we note with horror the bloody features of another who seems to all appearances, like one of us. Our blow is falling. Do we stay our hand? It looks like a man, but in the slaying our brother for food, it behaves like a beast. The indignity of it stokes our indignation. As one man we strike and strike, as if to annihilate the shame, pouring his blood, like our brother's, into the cursed ground.

In the Biblical account the promulgation of the first law of nature occurs in consequence of God's proclamation of the dietary dispensation that characterizes human nature after the Great Flood. As a concession to the evil inclinations of humanity, God adds meat to the human diet, and the hunting of beasts for food to the catalogue of human activities. It makes sense then to imagine the application of the law of retribution in the context of the hunt. In that context arises the need to distinguish man from beast, so that hunting does not become an excuse to re-introduce among mankind the untamed violence that contaminated the world before the Great Flood. So by the law of retribution God encodes a check into the nature of man, a telltale sign that flags our recognition of humanity in others and so confirms our own.

This reactive basis for our recognition of common humanity is not, of course, the only one. In the scene we have just imagined, we recognized the victim as someone like ourselves because we were already familiar with them. They came from our community. In this respect, the human community arising from procreation takes precedence over that which forms in reaction to transgressors. It is based upon the positive recognition of humanity in consequence of which the mother, on account of a bond arising from her physical predisposition, acknowledges the humanity of her children and consents to preserve and care for them.

This means that there are two natural principles of human community. One flows directly from the physical predisposition of the human body; the other from our emotional reaction to its destruction. The first defines community in terms of all that is required to produce and preserve the body. The second is defined by what God commands us to do in reaction to a murderous assault upon it. The first conceives community in the context of the law of love which is the principle whereby God rules the universe. The second produces human community in the context of the code, dictated by God's will, whereby man governs man. Obviously, we do not use the word "law" in the same sense in both cases, for the law of love is the consequence of perfect freedom, while the law of man is a reaction against his abuse of its reflection. In a sense, therefore, the law of love is not law at all, at least not in the sense of a rule enforced to constrain wrongdoing. True love can do no wrong, but seeks only to serve and preserve what is good. The good of each particular being consists in that which respects the form and substance of its existence. Love does this, respecting the limits and boundaries of particular being, without which that being's existence becomes inconceivable. As a rule operating in conformity with this respect, love takes on the form of a law, though without any implication of force or constraint. For that which respects the limits and boundaries required for the existence of a particular being frees rather than constrains it, unless particular existence itself be regarded as constraint. But every particular exists by the will of God, which is absolutely free. Therefore the law of love is freedom.

Still, though every man is a particular being, in whom the freedom of God is realized as a fact, each is also a person, which is to say an image of God in whom the freedom of God is only reflected as a possibility. Now a fact is what it is. But a possibility is only what it will be, what the will (understood with reference to the future) determines it to be. So each man experiences the freedom of God as a will determined in such a way as to bring about the possibility; therefore, as a choice suspended among ways of being not yet determined by it. This human experience of the will (with reference to the future)is of course, not identical with that of God, as God is not bound by the prerequisites of human existence, such as time and space. And therein lies the dilemma. For God, the will is being, absolute and unquestionable. But of our humanity the Bard said accurately, "to be or not to be, that is the question." We question that which is, in the will of God, unquestionable, starting with the possibility of our own existence. Like Eve, or Cain or the one who sheds innocent blood, we may choose to act upon a possibility that contradicts the possibility we ourselves represent. The extremes of murder or suicide simply epitomize the enduring dilemma of our special nature: the imperfection of our existence coincides with the perfection of our nature, and vice-versa.

To understand this better, we must remember that in its origins the word "perfection" refers to something finished or complete. Because we are made in the image of God, freedom is in our nature. But in the absolute sense, freedom must include every possibility, including the possibility that denies or contradicts the image of God in us. (When Eve ate the forbidden fruit, she chose to act as if her likeness to God required something other than what God had already provided. Her intention was Godly i.e., consistent with God's intention for her. But by substituting herself for God as the agent of that intention, she effectively denied its fulfillment, because only God could provide the substance required for it. In like manner, Cain sought in his sacrifice to acknowledge his dependence upon God, as his Godliness required of him. But by the murder of his brother, he ends up denying the unity with God that is the cause of that dependency, especially in those who like himself are persons, and who therefore represent the image of God.) If we refrain from the choice that denies God's will for us, the freedom that is in our nature seems to us to remain unfulfilled. Our nature seems to us imperfect. But If we exercise the choice, though we seem to fulfill the freedom inherent in our nature, we actually deny the will of God that alone makes this freedom appear possible for us in the first place. The dilemma is resolved only when we forego trying to remedy our seeming imperfection in our own way, and trust instead that God's will coincides with our perfection. Our trust is rewarded with the appearance of Christ, the one whose appearance in human form proves the coincidence of God's will with our seeming imperfection, thereby opening our eyes to the Godly perfection God first offered and still intends for us.

According to the Biblical account, the origin of nature as we now know it is the human decision to complete our freedom of choice by denying God's choice for our freedom. Thanks to this choice, we live in the context of sin, evil and death. Having denied the presence of God within us, we must be constrained by force to respect the will of God for us, which is to say for our existence, life and good. We live therefore under the law that takes account of our inveterate inclination to sin and that relies upon the force of retribution to discourage and repress the destructive actions occasioned by it.

Thus arises the need for external government, for which the first law of nature supplies the wherewithal. This comes in the form of a natural community that arises in response to transgression, as people of goodwill come together, all motivated to provide for this response. This covenant community of goodwill is the seed which, properly cultivated by reason, becomes a civil society. Proper cultivation involves first of all the recognition that righteous passion alone cannot subdue those whose fatal prowess has already dispatched at least one victim. People of goodwill must therefore provide against this prowess, outfitting and preparing themselves effectively to prosecute wrongdoers. The will to repress and discourage their wrong actions (to govern their unruly behavior) must be armed with an instrument devised to achieve the intended result. The different powers of government, and the organizations instituted to apply them supply this instrument.

This discussion sheds light on the true origin and characteristics of government based upon consent. As derived from the natural law of retribution, government is an external institution that emerges from the consent (common feeling or inclination) of people of good will (that is, God's will) who come together (covenant) to execute his commands, in order to repress and discourage wrongdoers. The consent from which the just powers of government are derived is not a passive token of agreement, but an active acceptance of responsibility for the constitution of those powers. This is in harmony with the language commonly used to signify the development and confirmation of consent, such as "I move that such and such be done," "I second the motion," and "The motion carries." All this language signifies that consent is a continuous activity, reminiscent of the steps required to gather and make successful use of a militia or army in defense of the community.

The reason for the title of this series of essays should now be apparent. The very concept of government derived from the Bible's first law of our nature takes shape in the context of offensive action, undertaken by people of goodwill against those whose actions conclusively demonstrate their opposite disposition (bad will). By putting into practice the will of God, the people of goodwill literally exercise the right. For this purpose they form themselves into a body, that is, constitute civil society and government, just as an army (in the Latin, exercitus ) forms itself for war. Now in warfare, strategy is the planning that clarifies the aims and objectives of the exercise, and that organizes and directs its movements to achieve them. Right (in Latin jus, from which we say justice) as Madison wrote "is the end of government. It is the end of civil society." As the general must think through and implement the strategy whereby his army may achieve its goal in battle, so those responsible for the conduct of government must think through the strategy whereby people of goodwill may win victory for right.

 
 

In light of all this, a question to ponder: How can anyone who claims to approach government from a Biblical perspective offer leadership that removes the issue of right, as God establishes it, from its proper position as the strategic goal and aim of all political action?

 

The Strategy of Right, Number 1

 
  

 
 

[Note: This is the first installment of the serialized presentation of a work in progress. From time to time new installments will appear under the same title. At the beginning of each installment a link to the preceding one will appear, so that readers can catch up or refresh their memory as needed.]

 
 

But be ye doers of the word, and not hearers only, deceiving your own selves. 23 For if any be a hearer of the word, and not a doer, he is like unto a man beholding his natural face in a glass: 24 For he beholds himself, and goes his way, and straightway forgets what manner of man he was. 25 But whoso looks into the perfect law of liberty, and continues therein, he being not a forgetful hearer, but a doer of the work, this man shall be blessed in his deed. (James 1:22-25)

 
 

Among those I call the moral conservatives there is much anguished discussion these days about what to do in the face of the evident exaltation of evil Barak Obama represents. All the moral capital "piled up by the bondsman's two hundred and fifty years of unrequited toil," and the subsequent century of racial injustice and legalized humiliation, Obama now puts in service to the destruction of innocent human life; the suppression of the natural right and characteristics of family life; and the subversion of the form of government required to preserve our life in liberty.

People who care about these essential goods are right to grieve and to raise their cries to heaven from hearts broken and heavy laden. They are not only right, but also wise, who understand that the prayer (that is, the one who prays) must be prepared to be the instrument through which God answers prayers. Such preparedness, as the apostle says, lies first in the willingness to reform our lives in accordance with God's will; to remember as best we can, and in all that we do, the example that, in Christ, God sets before us. Then, following that example, we must offer and give our lives to fulfill God's will, giving the life that ends in order to gain life that doesn't.

This is not only an admonition. It is the key to understanding the strategy of action that wins God's blessing in the deed, and thereby plugs us into the power for good it represents. When we get right with God, and seek to do right according to His will, we are in the right as we act. Others are obliged to respect the right we exercise (i.e., put into practice.) In the strict sense, therefore what they respect is not "our" right but the will of God which accounts for what we do. The right belongs to God, not to us. It passes to us in and through God's act of creation, in the way that He shares His being with us so as to form and constitute our nature. Our unalienable rights arise from the specific requirements of maintaining ourselves in this way of being, which is right for us because it makes our existence possible. Such rights are called "unalienable" because we cannot lose or surrender them without contradicting the distinctive way of being that makes us what we are. Without them we become, as it were, strangers to ourselves, alien to our own identity.

This accounts for the dehumanizing effects characteristic of institutions such as slavery and serfdom. But it also makes clear that this degradation of humanity arises from the failure to respect those aspects of human being that announce a presence in each man and woman that transcends humanity. The key effect of this presence is life itself. Life appears in the form, shape and physical constitution of the body, but we each of us experience life as feelings that perceive, and therefore lie beyond such things. Life appears in feelings. But we, each of us, are conscious of life as thought that observes and therefore lies beyond these feelings. Life appears in thought, but we have knowledge of life as being that lies beyond our thoughts, and therefore beyond the appearances of life that come to us through the mediation of any of our faculties. Whatever we experience, however deeply we feel, however much we think we observe and seem to know, something of life escapes us even as, with certainty, we hold it in our grasp.

The Bible's account of our creation explains this irony of our existence with the simple truth that we are, in the very essence or intention of our existence, that which we appear to be. But this is true only because that which we appear to be determines at every moment what we are. We are made in the image and likeness (that is the appearance and activity) of God, who is the being that in and of itself determines the appearance of all things. We therefore represent that which is within, and yet forever lies beyond, what we are.

In the literal sense, our existence is paradoxical. In the practical sense, this means that whenever we deal with a human being, we are dealing as well with the being that lies beyond humanity. In ancient times, actors held before themselves a mask (in the Latin, persona) of the character they were supposed to represent. Like actors playing a part, human beings carry about the image, and act like the character, they represent. As they do they call upon the resources of the individual carrying the part, whose body, feelings and mind inform the representation. In this analogy, God is both the actor and the character he plays, while we are the person (mask) He carries. We are the mask of His being, our existence the veil through which He appears in the nature of the universe that conforms to the character we are supposed by Him to be.

In this respect, too, the Biblical account makes sense. After the flood, God lays down the first law of our nature as we know it, when He says to mankind "And for your life's blood I will require a reckoning: from every beast I will require it and from his fellow man (brother) I will require a reckoning for the life of man. Whoever pours out the blood of a man, in recompense his blood shall be poured out, for I made man in the image of God." (Genesis 9:5-6) Because each man is a person (an image of God, supported or upheld up Him), God commands retribution for murder. When one human being assaults another, he attacks God. But God is the substance (the upholder) of the attacker's person too. His attack upon another is therefore substantially the same as an attack upon himself. God's declaration of retribution simply reflects this fact.

The flare of indignation we feel on account of murder constitutes the executive power that God intends for the enforcement of the commandment of retribution. Indignation moves us to do what God commands; to carry out what the murderer has begun (which is the annihilation of his own life.) Because it is God's command, we are in the right as we execute it. We have the right to shed the murderer's blood. The first law of nature therefore gives rise to a right of nature, a right of way to the result foreseen in God's will. As it opens to us we are drawn towards this will. We feel strongly inclined to act against the one who violates another's person (image of God).

By this paradigm of right, particular rights are not passive goods stored in our possession. They are active responsibilities, reflected in the emotional forces that incline our will toward action in response to God's commands. As we shall see, this difference has profound implications for the strategy of right. As executors of God's will, we are not supposed, in the first instance, to act in defense of our rights. We act to do God's will. If opposed when we do so, we stand on our rights in defense of our action. We resist whatever denies or draws us from God's right of way. Since the ground of rights is our responsibility to God, we cannot exercise those rights while sitting by the roadside, oblivious to wrongdoing. Nor can we do so by standing aside, letting wrongdoers have their way so long as they leave us in peace. Rights arise in the context of our positive commitment to right action. They are warrants for action, not writs of entitlement.