For those of you who missed it, an interesting argument broke out in response to Darleen’s posting of Dennis Prager’s Prager University “American Trinity” video.
To quickly summarize, Prager talks about what he’s identified as the three foundational American “values” (e pluribus unum, liberty, God), using the word “values” as a kind of colloquial synonym for “principles” — specifically, the foundational principles of the US experiment. He then differentiates the US system from the (generic) European system, using as a foil the French Revolution and what he describes as its conception of equality.
Overall, the 5 minute video acts as a decent overview for those being introduced to the subject (sadly, there are many who would indeed benefit from even such a brief overview), but I can’t help but feel by its structure and word choice that what Prager is moving toward is a socially conservative view of the US, which differs in some respects from the classical liberal conception — most notably, at least in today’s parlance, in its desire to see a certain “value system” promoted and, in many cases, codified.
As Sdferr points out in the comments to Darleen’s post,
Far from clarifying, the introduction of values talk (or perhaps better, the fact-value distinction) may tend to bear a freight that the Classical Liberal principles of American government cannot admit. As an illustration of that absence from our foundational principles and as a demonstration that it may be a concept foreign to them, for instance, we won’t find this term in either the Declaration of Independence or the Constitution. The word “valueâ€, however, is in the Constitution, twice, at Art.1, Sec.8: “To coin Money, regulate the Value thereof, and of foreign Coin…†and at Amendment VII: In Suits at common law, where the value in controversy shall exceed twenty dollars…â€
— the argument being that the use of “values” over, eg. “principles” adds a certain rhetorical baggage to Prager’s incipient argument, one that in the long run may detract from the usefulness of the exercise inasmuch as it conflates values and principles. In response, Jonas Sedlar makes the relevant point that Prager seems to be using “values” perhaps too casually, and I believe him to be doing so — though I don’t believe he is being sloppy so much as he wants us to see values and principles as one and the same.
Of course, that is just conjecture on my part, and I’d have to see the series progress before I was able to develop an argument around the premise; but whether intended or not, or whether sloppy or not, the use of “values” — as well as Prager’s failure to disinguish between “égalité†as it was intended by those who wrote the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen, and the inverted concept of egalitarianism that has since grown out of it (equality before the law / equality of opportunity vs. equality of outcome) — could potentially undermine the entire venture. (With egalitarianism, Prager misses the opportunity to note how original French intent has been entirely subverted; and that we are seeing the same kinds of things happening here in the US with respect to the idea of “tolerance” and the First Amendment.
I understand that Prager meant this piece to be a short lesson — a rough overview that he is going to develop more fully — and so I don’t mean to be too critical. Nevertheless, it matters that what he proffers withstand the kind of hostile, superficial scrutiny that leftist academicians use to dazzle their charges — even on the introductory level. And that can be accomplished merely by choosing the proper formulations.
To wit, it would be easy to pressure Prager’s use of “values” to show how it is both subjective and fraught with religious presumptions; and once that step is accomplished, the “values” upon which our country were founded create fodder for precisely the kind of subjectivist (and ultimately collectivist) argument that give power to progressive thought.
Conversely, when we speak of founding principles, we are speaking of points that, once agreed upon, create a compact. These principles are subjective as well, but only in the weak sense that all propositions, in a world built on language, are dependent upon human evaluation. That being said, what cannot be argued is the objective description that these principles were collected and deployed as the building blocks of a national entity; as such, they cannot be reconceptualized without essentially — and ontologically — changing the US into something else, some new “text.”
In short, principles can afford to glory in their adopted and defended subjectivity; values, on the other hand, strive for metaphysical rectitude.
Our inalienable rights we conceive of as proceeding from God / Natural Law. These rights, we believe, cannot therefore be subverted by man.
But importantly, one does not need believe in God to accept this premise. One needs only to agree to the terms of our national contract — to accept the premise as a foundational premise for living and acting within the laws that make us US. And by conceiving of our principles as acting in this way, we take away the power of those sophists who would, by showing that they are the product of man and not of some higher power (or an earthly desire necessarily to please that higher power), attempt to raze the entire foundation as insecure.
Prager’s idea is a good and useful one. But to make it work as a useful tool for spreading classical liberal thought, it needs to be far more rigorously presented.
Discuss.
Please note that this is my first time really beginning to develop this argument in writing, so discussion and feedback is welcomed and encouraged.
I’m really just kinda spitballing. But I think it necessary to deal with the US founding principles from the perspective of the linguistic turn in order to short circuit easy leftist arguments that depend on a simplistic view of relativism.
Taking your conjecture about Prager’s destination as such (“…moving toward is a socially conservative view“), what are the key bits in his presentation that give you that sense about it Jeff? I must confess I wasn’t paying close enough attention to his meta-message – focused as I was on grinding my teeth through the values stuff — to have picked up on it, whatever it was.
I think this at the crux of many of our political problems these days. Many on the left have rejected G-d, or at least, “put Him in His place” as it were. As a result, they seem to have also carried along the notion that since there is no G-d, these rights must have been granted by some other entity. It’s a short leap from that to making the rights-granting entity be the State.
The fact that one need not believe in G-d to accept the premise of inalienable rights does not seem to alter their conclusions any. The idea of inalienable rights as a premise in and of itself, and not coming from G-d but stemming from the fact of our existence, needs to be strengthened. I have the feeling that the founders threw in the idea of those rights proceeding from G-d mostly because it was understood what that meant, and that G-d didn’t have a lot to do with it in their minds either. However, I haven’t read the Federalist papers (it’s on my list) so I cannot speak too much to that.
Watched it again and I find the semi-throw-away line “the god that we’re talking about, that’s another course for another time…” so I’m reckoning on that. It is odd though, to premise the hinge at god as Prager does, when in fact no small part of the beginning of the idea of the equality of men comes from an outright atheist (Hobbes) through a slippery possible one (Locke). And too, in the face of “the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God”
Barack Obama has broken any compact the United States government may have had with its peoples by charting a laughably ruinous on its face financial course. What’s left is the hard work of demonstrating to the American peoples that this is a bad thing even if their dirty socialist media doesn’t say so.
You don’t have to believe in God, but you do have to believe in the immutability of human nature, which is something the reactionary left doe NOT.
Think “New Soviet Man” or “New Aryan Man” and see how well they turned out.
The vanguard of the proletariat always turn out to be greedy cocksuckers, too, even if they don’t wear a top hat and a monocle.
Your comment at 10:35 in the other thread seems on to me.
One thing I think Sdferr and the others missed: We aren’t the audience, here — or, if we are, Prager is sermonizing the choir. The piece does no good whatever if it isn’t seen by Progressives, and that being the case it’s necessary to speak their language.
“Principles”, to a Progg, are a straitjacket, an unnecessarily repressive restriction on behavior. They therefore substitute “values”, meaning a consistent basis from which to produce an argument, which is what we mean by “principles”, but with a loosey-goosey interpretation not just suggested but included in the concept.
It remains to be seen whether Prager can lead that particular equine to the Fluss and just what the H20 uptake will be, but if you’re trying to communicate you are wise to try to use the intended recipient’s language.
Regards,
Ric
cranky-d, here‘s a nifty searchable FP. A search of god there got this.
Dropping God from the universe of founding principles begs the question about inalienable rights: if no authority greater than human endows rights, then rights may be understood to be mere human constucts and things humans create, regulate, and remove. Isn’t this the rationale of the left which creates new rights for every victim it can conjure? Isn’t this rationale the basis for defining rights as properties of the government, to be defined and assigned as required by the benefits of the unwashed masses? Or does mere existence magically produce rights?
If he’s going after a progressive or leftist audience though Ric, the choice of background music is going to have an awful lot of them snapping off their virtual radios pretty quick, I’d bet. The muddled middles may be another case however.
It was precisely the talk of values that leads me to conjecture that Prager will move toward a metaphysical conception of right and wrong, and thus toward a socially conservative argument. I think it important to take away the easy “postmodernist” critiques first and foremost and re-focus on what the principles are, not whether or not they are immutable.
Here’s the Federalist’s answer Geezer:
The fact that the founders conceived of God or Natural Rights as immutable is what’s important here. It is the basis of our laws and of our American concept of rights. To change that is to redefine the US and its basis for governance.
You can believe in Natural Rights without believing in God. What you can’t do is forego the idea of Natural Rights and pretend that you haven’t changed the United States into something else entirely.
Sdferr
I find the assertion that Hobbes was an outright atheist interesting. Even more so in this context, in that in Leviathan, in which Hobbes lays forth his take on natural rights is riddled with religious argumentation.
Precisely. This is why I like the “man alone” argument.
A man alone in the forest is able to do things without let or hindrance except those inherent in the nature of the forest. He can speak as he will, he can go where he pleases, he can defend himself, he can establish a living-place and defend that — and these (and others you might think of in that context) are the “natural” or inalienable rights. It doesn’t matter how he got there.
Regards,
Ric
Makewi, please forgive my crappy shorthand here, but let me use it anyhow, if I may — what need would an orthodox believer have of philosophical pursuits the like of which Hobbes undertakes? None, I’d submit, as the orthodox belilever would already have whatever answers he can want. On the other hand, I’m not at all surprised that a man of his era would conceal his atheism, that is, so long as he wants to move freely through his society, or even in the extreme case, to continue to move at all.
Yes. Not to repeat myself, but repeating myself, I think this is a valuable point of argument. We need to get back to first principles and move forward from that. Most people assume their premises are understood, but the premises of classical liberals and those of progressives are very different. Hence, we often have trouble communicating across the aisle.
A strong argument on immutable rights might help, and just looking through the comments above I can see that a compilation of many of them might provide a start.
But also the strong possibility exists that we have become largely a nation of dirty socialist cocksuckers what just want to steal shit.
Unless he were questioning his beliefs. Religious folks do that from time to time.
You can believe in Natural Rights without believing in God
How?
I am an agnostic.
Inalienable rights are anything but inalienable! What the state can give the state can take away. It is fine rhetoric to say that men are equal for example, but it is equally clear they are anything but!
By what standard is a capable, extremely moral, intelligent man with the body of a Greek god equal to a stupid, incompetent, evil, and rather ugly man? Equal What? What is equal about them? I can see a Christian’s argument when he says they are equal before God being endowed with equal portions of spirit. What I cannot see is how you get there from atheism.
Makewi, Sdferr — again, consider language in context.
Hobbes lived in a time when the philosophical literature was much thinner on the ground than now, and when the Bible was for all practical purposes the only work of philosophy all his readers had in common. It wasn’t, and isn’t, necessary for him to be a believer to use the arguments, tropes, and examples in the Bible — but it was necessary for him to phrase his arguments in a language his readers would understand. Jefferson had much the same problem, and much the same response to it.
Regards,
Ric
Each one is capable of killing the other while he sleeps.
I know this much, that Prager could do no better than have Jeff on as a guest, regularly, to discuss these matters. He devotes one hour of most of his three hour shows to isolated topics, and none is more important than this. I suppose we can all write brief e-mail messages to Dennis to promote this, but who knows if it will do any good. Can’t hurt.
dennis@pragerradio.com
Each one is capable of killing the other while he sleeps.
So they can come to a bargain not to murder one another in their sleep. That acknowledges the leftist argument that rights are what we say they are. If we choose to change them later, then it is all good.
By believing that no man has he power over certain of your rights and by defending that premise. Just as you can be moral and an atheist, you can be an atheist and believe in a certain state of nature without ascribing that natural state to a higher intelligence.
But even that is not required. Just agree to take part in the compact.
Travis,
If you get what Lovelace is driving at (clearly anybody wanting to build a prison is going to call up iron bar suppliers first thing) the principle is clear.
You have an inalienable right to free speech. If the State sticks a gun in your face and demands that you shut up, they haven’t taken the right away because they can’t — that’s what “inalienable” means. They have only compelled you, by force, not to exercise that right, and that compulsion is what the Framers intended to forbid in the Constitution.
Regards,
Ric
I honestly don’t think there’s anything that can be done to educate the Progressives as to the real meaning of liberty. It’s not in their interests to, and there’s no group better at ignoring and burying facts contrary to their interests.
We’re talking about people who consider slavery the ultimate, original sin from which the US can never recover, yet see no issue with confiscating your labor to provide for themselves and their clients.
Sdferr, I changed the bolding:
Removing God from that sentence creates a void in which there can be no transcendancy from which a natural law may proceed to exist. Nature’s God arguably must be the author of transcendant law of nature, so God ostensibly is the antecedent for which in the following dependent clause: it seems that nature’s God declares the purpose for all political institutions.
Well said. I agree. I’m such a godbotherer, however, I do not agree with the next paragraph’s first sentence, but that’s just me. In my understanding, an uncreated Natural Law is a slipperly existential slope. Just sayin’.
I think of those things as capabilities rather than rights. An insightful idea, good food for thought.
By the way, thank you all for an excellent discussion. I’m in up to my chin, however…
Not unless you subscribe to the idea of a Living Constitution.
Yes, you can insist that there are no such things as inalienable rights. But when you try to govern that way, you are governing in a way that is necessarily at odds with the foundational principles of the country. At which point it is fair to say that you have created a new country entirely.
And yes, you’ll recognize in this formulation analogues to the argument I make for intentionalism.
Ric,
Your “Man Alone” argument is the most succinct statement of what constitutes a right that I have ever heard.
And I will shamelessly steal it.
I am frequently frustrated by Prager’s imprecision when it comes to terminology. I can’t count the number of times his callers disagree with him because their understanding of a particular term is different from his. Check out his arguments against “unconditional love” to see this phenomenon, plus Dennis’s inability to see that a lot of the problem is can be chalked up to a conflict between Christian and Jewish approaches to understanding something.
By all means Geezer, change the bolding to suit your tastes, dig in your heels if you must, just allow the founders themselves a little leeway to think outside your bounds.
You’re buying into the corrupted sense of “equal”. “Equal” means the government will not consider the Adonis any more worthy than the Mortimer. It does not mean they have the same abilities, attitudes, etc.
If you need a rationale behind what is, in reality, axiomatic, then start from the position that no member of our species should be favored over another, as we are all the result of the same amount of evolutionary effort and all contain the elements of reason or the genes to carry on those elements.
What’s weird is, flaming liberals think free-range chickens lay higher quality eggs.
Weirder still — they believe in the spontaneous generation of order via evolution, yet oppose it in society.
Well
putzinged Rob!Precisely. “Evolved” vs. “Created” is a magician’s handwave, designed to get your eye off his other hand so he can pull the dove out of his sleeve without you noticing. The sincerely religious often don’t discover that until too late.
However we got here, we all got here by the same process, and that’s what’s important in talking about rights.
Regards,
Ric
Not unless you subscribe to the idea of a Living Constitution.
If the constitution is just the random opinion of some guys who won a war, then are they not correct in their assumptions? What makes their words of greater value than someone else’s? We have advanced in knowledge and society has changed in the intervening years so why would the words of the founding fathers have greater force than that of a wise man today?
Yes, you can insist that there are no such things as inalienable rights. But when you try to govern that way, you are governing in a way that is necessarily at odds with the foundational principles of the country. At which point it is fair to say that you have created a new country entirely.
The question I am asking is what makes inalienable rights inalienable? Why is one right inalienable, when another, say the right to work is not?
What authority do the founding fathers have that their words should stand immortal?
Why are the foundational principles of the country authoritative?
Because they’re the axioms under which our system operates. If you reject the axioms, OK — just understand you’re not talking about the American system anymore.
“random opinion”? Hardly.
“a wise man”? Where do we find one of those, and how will we know we have when we do?
This struck me during the Values vs Principles thread.
Principles are something you subscribe to, of your own volition. It is a decision made in the context of rationality and reason. You can also choose to violate your principles, though at some cost, and still espouse them. Or you can abandon them entirely.
Values seem both more fluid and more attached to your person, more of an emotional than reasonable attachment. Violating your values is something others can do and seem to do to you but not something you can do to yourself.
This may have something to do with this comment I made in the Cemented Homophia thread. “One of the ingenious things the Left did is take something which is simply part of a persons life, a part that doesn’t change or doesn’t change much, their sexuality, their skin color, and attach, no, weld to that a political view. So that any attack on that political view becomes an attack on something that is an intrinsic part of your self.”
Values are the welding together, the fusion, of self-identity and political identity. With Principles these two things remain separate.
I have to go but will check back to see how torn apart I become. This issue is of interest and should be.
CLANG CLANG CLANG ******* THREAD DIVERSION ALERT *********************
Evolution has no effort. It is, simply. Undesigned, emotionless, unconscious. The ability to reason may have resulted from it, but there is no reason for it. With observation and research, the accidents of evolution result in the survival or destruction of specii. Individual survival is not important or even necessary, if the mechanisms of reproduction for a species produce enough offspring to survive to the next reproduction event for the species.
******** YOU MAY NOW SAFELY RESUME NORMAL THREAD FUNCTION ********
Are the foundational principles of the United States more authoritative than fascist shit what George Soros pulls out of his ass and orders Barack Obama foist on our little country? There is no clear consensus.
oh. *to* foist that should be.
It is their founding.
Because they’ve been inscribed in the laws of the compact.
Travis,
The Constitution is not the random opinion of some guys who happened to win independence. It’s the foundational compact by which our various states agree to unite into one nation.
One does not change the terms of such a compact without the express consent of all parties. Fortunately, the random old guys foresaw exactly the problem you raise, and built into the compact an ability to change the terms if a majority of the state agreed to it.
Just because Washington has been able to push the boundaries without going through the proper procedures doesn’t make it right.
Ric
Another explanation applicable in both cases (Hobbes & Jefferson) is that they were unwilling to subscribe to other peoples interpretations of what the texts meant, because they were acutely aware of how it was being perverted for individual personal gain. This would make them reformers or pioneers rather than heretics.
In any case, it’s a side argument.
i have no idea if prager was being sloppy or not, but i think this is precisely correct:
and, also, that word ‘values’ is like cryptonite to proggs, and more importantly to anyone in the mushy middle who had been indoctrinated by them. it screams of ‘value voters’ and uptight church ladies and other hated stereotypes of conservatives. and actually it made me cringe, reading it. not because i think values (including the judeo-christian ones) are a bad thing. i absolutely don’t. but because the word is too loaded at this moment in history. and using it is, i think, counterproductive. preaching, choir, etc. whether that was prager’s intention or not.
I promise, someday I’ll argue about this. But for now, the usual…
“Foundation,” instantiation of the Law, however it talks, whatever its “principles,” follows violence, rationalizating it, repeating it, and enlarging its scope until and unless it’s countered by a better, if not necessarily greater, violence. Some of the Founders understood this, said it, tried to sabotage it, and failed. Failed pretty well, considering, but failed.
Because the only law — the Law — is Submit or die. It can be found issuing from God, if you like, or Nature, if God annoys you (or fails to). So can the refusal or rejection of Law. But no conception of Law will change it, move the gun from your head to its.
“Rights” is a last word. The Man Alone doesn’t know it.
Which is exactly what Hobbes is up to here, geoff:
What authority do the founding fathers have that their words should stand immortal?
Could it be that their experience with tyranny inspired them to hold certain truths to be self evident. The resurgence of tyranny is something fairly new, so not everyone can recognize it. But the moderately observant who are willing to point out what should be obvious are known as cynics in some circles.
It’s not intended as a zing towards religious conservatives, though. There’s no inconsistency between Christianity (as it has developed) and belief in liberty. Christianity has largely squared itself with Free Will, and has even embraced the idea that forced piety is not really piety and is, itself, a form of impiety.
The inconsistency lies with the folks who reject any possibility but the Earth’s ecosystem having self-organized, yet demand that a system nearly as complex is comprehensible and manageable.
I knew that, or need I say?
Jimmy Nothing never went 2 school
They made him pledge allegiance
He said it wasn’t cool
Nothing made Jimmy proud
Now Jimmy lives on a mushroom cloud
The problem I have with the argument that “Hey, that’s just the way we roll“, is that it leaves us vulnerable to the counter-argument “Hey, times have changed, and we don’t roll that way any more“.
One is not inherently more true than the other.
Under these conditions the living constitution argument (which I despise) makes sense.
I don’t follow, psycho. Although I do get a nihilist vibe.
Does #50 strike anyone else as gibberish?
You never know these days.
#50 wasn’t gibberish at all I didn’t think, not at all at all, nor was it particularly helpful.
I’m trying to think of a country what has displayed greater self-contempt than what our little one has shown the last couple months or so. Maybe the U.K. is all I can think of but the whole royalty thing gives them a head start.
Actually, one can’t be proven to be more inherently true than the other.
That doesn’t mean one isn’t more inherently true. It is, as I intimated in the post, elevating a description of subjectivism (weak) to a prescription for subjectivism (strong).
The practical “truth” of our foundational proposition is that it’s worked and has engendered the kind of freedoms it was developed to protect. That is, until we started deconstructing it by moving further and further away from the intent of the founders.
“a wise man� Where do we find one of those, and how will we know we have when we do?
Are you saying the pygmy’s in Washington don’t meet you lofty standards of a wise man?
No, Rob, #50 is not gibberish — it’s central.
It’s old-fashioned, though, and takes concentration to work through. …a certain impulsion of nature, no lesse than that whereby a Stone moves downward… is the central point.
Regards,
Ric
These things, once they get moving, do tend to roll along kinda fast, given the complexity of the subject matter.
As to psycho’s comment, (and he can correct me if I’m wrong) it happened as an accidental circumstance that I replied to geoff on psycho’s heels, but I think we can hear an echo of psycho’s argument (such as it is) in Hobbes. Killing and being killed is there at the root of it, come what may.
Who’s making the “that’s just the way we roll” argument?
The principles laid down by the founders are the, um, foundation of the United States as a nation. Those who want to abandon them are abandoning that foundation. I don’t give a rat’s ass if they make the “time’s have changed” argument; that’s immaterial to the existence of our foundational principles.
Hey, great discussion on a very worthwhile topic.
From personal experience, I’ve known a number of other agnostics and atheists who ended up moving leftward because this issue was never explained to them from a classically liberal perspective.
For me, things are the way they are (men kill and steal from each other, always have, always will) so we agreed to permanently agree that we each had the right not to be killed or stolen from.
It makes sense on this level alone.
What a pity it’s such a word salad, then.
The inconsistency lies with the folks who reject any possibility but the Earth’s ecosystem having self-organized, yet demand that a system nearly as complex is comprehensible and manageable.
I like that, Rob. It reminds me of the epiphany my beloved wife had a few years ago: “If I am pro-choice about abortion rights, something that others find reprehensible, it stands to reason that I must allow others the choice to pursue activities that I may find reprehensible.” Since then, she’s decided that she has to be content to let others carry firearms, say nasty things about people, join unsavory associations, and the like. She may not like it, but it’s something we all have to live with if we’re to be “free to choose.” It’s a major breakthrough that seems far too rare among our fellow citizens.
I believe that if we’re able to put classical liberal ideas into terms that contemporary (Progressive) liberals take for granted, we may enjoy some real success at converting our neighbors to our cause. Calling Obama “The Intelligent Designer” and gun-controllers “Anti-Choice” could shake loose a few unexamined assumptions and cause a bit of introspection exactly where it’s needed. At the very least, the cognitive dissonance should be fun to watch.
Nope.
To wit, it would be easy to pressure Prager’s use of “values†to show how it is both subjective and fraught with religious presumptions;
All of Dennis’s arguments are fraught with religious presumption, and quite on purpose. He is the one who argued vigorously against Keith Ellison’s use of the Koran for a swearing-in on the grounds that the U.S. is founded on Judeo-Christian values. (You would have to look at his series of essays for the particulars.)
The Obama administration warned corporate America on Monday that the government will more aggressively investigate big firms that hurt smaller competitors, contending that lax enforcement by the Bush administration contributed to the current economic troubles.
Holy Smoke. When it’s exactly the opposite. HEAVY regulation helps large corporations triumph over the upstarts, not the other way around.
But Oprompta can reverse causality to the point of cursing a river for running upstream and his mob of cleaner wrasse won’t even flinch.
You’re buying into the corrupted sense of “equalâ€. “Equal†means the government will not consider the Adonis any more worthy than the Mortimer. It does not mean they have the same abilities, attitudes, etc.
And you have to remember that they’re emerging from a rigid class structure in which the nobility was thought to be objectively better than the peasants. In that formulation, if the gypsies steal a baby from a noble family, the child will grow up to be well-mannered and educated and refined, regardless of his rough upbringing. The Enlightenment smashed that concept to smithereens.
We have advanced in knowledge and society has changed in the intervening years so why would the words of the founding fathers have greater force than that of a wise man today?
We have advanced in areas of technology, but human nature remains the same. We have the same weaknesses as our ancestors did: power still corrupts us, we’d rather be comfortable than not, we find it convenient to lie, and a certain percentage will always have no problem robbing from the others or outright killing if it suits him.
The founders built this country on a sound understanding of human nature — specifically, that you cannot trust any one person or entity with too much power or they will inevitably use it to oppress others. Proggs believe that they can change us into nobler people through force of will alone (and lots of parades).
In other words the Founders took gravity into account when building their bridge, whereas Proggs treat gravity as a variable that they can change at will if you put the right people in charge (them).
Please flesh this out for me. Because I confess I don’t see how this pressures my statement, “governing in a way that is necessarily at odds with the foundational principles of the country.”
I mean, if psycho can recognize this enough to provide metacommentary, why would we assume those who provided the foundational assumptions of the country couldn’t do the same and factor this in to their conception of laws proceeding from The Law, as well?
And if that’s the case, what’s the problem?
“We have advanced in knowledge and society has changed in the intervening years so why would the words of the founding fathers have greater force than that of a wise man today?”
Because human nature doesn’t change.
Ever read Aeschylus? Shakespeare? Homer, for that matter?
What possible insight could a collection of bronze age small holding farmers and proto-kingdoms have to teach about the human condition?
I’m alittle confused here. If we are talking about the Declaration of Independence (We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain UNALIENABLE rights, etc), aren’t we talking about “unalienable rights”? There is a difference between “unalienable” versus “inalienable”, no?
I thought “unalienable rights” were rights which are not capable of being surrendered, a gift from the creator to the individual and cannot be surrendered or taken.
“Inalienable rights” are rights which are not capable of being surrendered without the consent of the one possessing such rights. Inalienable rights are not inherent to man and can be alienated by governments.
Maybe it doesn’t matter if the discussion is about inalienable rights. I just thought its a distinction with a difference.
Wow. Those agnostics and atheists must fit the worst stereotypes of same.
I’m agnostic. I don’t know, don’t pretend to know, and don’t see a reason to force my ignorance of the matter on anyone else. Yet I have an absolute touchstone of where “inalienable rights” start.
Rape. Slavery. The taking, by force, of another’s body against their will. That’s the ultimate evil, the thing we must organize society to prevent.
The rest flows from that — for example, theft is evil because you are taking from someone the results of their labor, labor which comes from their finite resource of time.
If all rights stem for the central concept that you have a right to live, and to do those things that allow you to do so (liberty), then it follows that any attempt to regulate this at any level is a limitation on one or the other. The only way to enforce limitations on these natural rights is to be willing to use violence.
The principles laid down by the founders are the, um, foundation of the United States as a nation. Those who want to abandon them are abandoning that foundation. I don’t give a rat’s ass if they make the “time’s have changed†argument; that’s immaterial to the existence of our foundational principles.
Times have changed and women should be given the right to vote.
Women were not granted this right by the original constitution, but by a later interpretation of the principles found there.
The leftists are arguing that subsequent interpretation are not out of bounds.
They further argue that if the founding fathers overlooked something like this, then is it unreasonable to assume they may have overlooked other things as well?
The ff created an amendment process.
And importantly, they’d already provided the outline for women’s suffrage and an end to chattel slavery.
I think the argument goes like this:
A free society cannot exist if it be populated by people who would steal from others, were they not restrained by the threat of force, should they be caught in the act. Such a people could only be governed by a state with far more power than classical liberals deem legitimate. In order to be free, we must be possessed of sufficent self-control that such force is not required, save for a tiny fraction of the populace.
It is often said that “character” is defined by one’s behavior when no one is watching. The utilitarian argument for religion is that belief in an omniscient and omnipotent being means that for the believer someone is always watching. The question is whether a person who does not literally “fear God” can recognize that any violation of the person or property of others, in the long run, threatens his own person or property. I think we can all conceive of extreme circumstances under which we would do things that we normally would not, especially in life-or-death situations. The willingness to risk one’s own life is said to be enhanced by faith that the ultimate sacrifice will not go unnoticed. So even if one does not personally believe in such a Higher Power, sharing a polity with those who do has value.
Rob, I’m not sure if I’ve given offense here. I’m an agnostic myself and, yes, in college and in the following years “a number” of my agnostic and atheistic friends were confused on this point. I don’t see why that’s stereotypical or why I’d want to be insulting myself.
You’re leaving out the purpose of government, Travis, which (theoretically, at least) is to protect those inalienable rights. A government that takes my money to provide health insurance to the children of deadbeats can hardly be said to be protecting my property rights or my right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.
I beg to differ. The Constitution does not specify “men” as being sole possessors of the right to vote. It also does not specify that said men be white.
Makewi, to your “it follows that any attempt to regulate this at any level is a limitation on one or the other. The only way to enforce limitations on these natural rights is to be willing to use violence.” I’d point to Fed no. 2,
squid — if i ever get to meet you, you had better bring your wife along. she gets it. and i want to buy her a drink, or a something.
“Times have changed and women should be given the right to vote.”
The vote? Hell, we should never given them shoes.
It’s stereotypical because it’s the way the “godless” are expected to behave: to drift towards the idea of the State being the Ultimate.
I’m not saying it’s true. Just that it’s a common stereotype. Hell, how often do you find lefties who are utterly incapable of comprehending an agnostic/atheist conservative?
Principles are something you subscribe to, of your own volition. …
Values seem both more fluid and more attached to your person, more of an emotional than reasonable attachment.
I would use the word “value” as the priority you choose of your own volition. Liberty over safety, for example, or the individual over the collective.
A principle is something that is reliably true: What goes up must come down. You can’t enlighten people by first alienating them. Power corrupts. A single man in possession of a good fortune must be in want of a wife.
Jeff, I’m approaching the matter from a different direction. You’re saying the foundational principles of the country are the foundational principles, and they ought not to be changed on whim. I’m starting from “what constitutes a Right in the first place”, and that’s what Hobbes is talking about.
You are correct, of course, but it doesn’t address the case where your interlocutor says, “Ah, so, it’s written. What has been written can be edited or erased.” To answer that, you have to argue that the Founders weren’t establishing (or — horrors — granting) rights, they were recognizing them, and to do that you have to have a place where the rights come from. That’s what I’m addressing.
Regards,
Ric
That’s an interesting take, dicentra, and it is entirely contra to what I’ve argued. I posited that principles are proudly subjective, and that values aspire to metaphysical truths.
I’d need to be more thoroughly argued out of this conception.
It’s nature good peoples. And this is the usual point where I pop out with that ridiculous reminder that there ain’t any nature (physis) in the Bible.
Times have changed and women should be given the right to vote.
What changed, exactly? The passage of time means nothing, unless the timeline is a one-way street to human glory and achievement instead of the endless cycle of societies rising and falling (that history demonstrates).
It was a matter of steps, Travis, and that fact that humans can’t learn everything at once. Making the leap to a society where there would be NO deference to position, wealth, or “breeding” was a pretty big step right there. After we got the hang of equality on those terms, we were ready to see that the equality thing applied to people from Africa and then later to women.
You’re leaving out the purpose of government, Travis, which (theoretically, at least) is to protect those inalienable rights. A government that takes my money to provide health insurance to the children of deadbeats can hardly be said to be protecting my property rights or my right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.
That is the purpose of decent governments. There are far too many states who have governments whose existence is largely an elite group using their power to hold sway over those less fortunate.
That sort of government is becoming more likely in the United States as every decade passes. I find the atheist argument somewhat weak in defending why the founding principles should stand.
I do agree the results should speak for themselves, but a pampered electorate tends to get bored, and starts craving the newest thing.
The argument from the utility of the constitution, or ‘just because’ is vulnerable, and the leftists are taking advantage of it.
I’d need to be more thoroughly argued out of this conception.
Well, you’d agree that there is some process by which one voluntarily prefers something over another. What I call “values.”
You’d also agree that there are things that are observably true, once you’ve learned them.
And there would also be a third category, wherein you’d posit a transcendent, omniscient locus from which to either prioritize things or observe what’s true.
That we use different terms speaks to the fact that the terms are not used precisely by any formulation, casual or scholastic.
one needs only to agree to the terms of our national contract — to accept the premise as a foundational premise for living and acting within the laws that make us US.
I’ve always thought the best word for this was “assent”. We assent to be governed by the US Constitution. It’s more formal, I think. Plus it has a religious overtone that would really bug the type of person who reads Slate. If they got it. If they didn’t then it makes me giggle.
No, Travis, it isn’t any more vulnerable than the idea that rights are granted by a God.
As a matter of fact, I think it takes the steam out of the argument for throwing over those rights as simply man-made and therefore open to “reform.”
Do you really think arguing with a leftist that redefining inalienable rights is a slap in the face of God is more potent, given the interlocutors, than saying that redefining the idea of inalienable rights is to affect an overthrow of the United States itself?
There are far too many states who have governments whose existence is largely an elite group using their power to hold sway over those less fortunate.
That’s called a Prime Divider society, and it’s the default state in the human condition, for the precise reason you stated earlier: that we’re not all “equal” with regard to our abilities. Some people crave power more than others, and still others have the ability to acquire and exercise it. The U.S. is all anomaly like that, and if we lose it, it will be damned hard to get it back.
What changed, exactly? The passage of time means nothing, unless the timeline is a one-way street to human glory and achievement instead of the endless cycle of societies rising and falling (that history demonstrates).
I agree that the linear concept of history is absolutely false. I am pointing out that this is the leftists default position, derived from Marxism and to a lesser extent from the Enlightenment.
I would say that firearms, automobiles, and labour saving devices made it easier to rationalize women’s suffrage.
than saying that redefining the idea of inalienable rights is to affect an overthrow of the United States itself?
Well, the Leftist would say, “dude, that’s the idea; get with the program.”
They already know what the foundational principles are and they don’t like them, because they want a prime divider society where smart people like them get to control the masses.
Oh, I forgot the other part: “HOW DARE YOU QUESTION MY PATRIOTISM?”
What I hear you saying, Travis, is that it’s difficult to convince the left that they have rights and that they should be interested in protecting them.
Short of an epiphany about self-ownership, I’m not sure what to suggest in that regard. Although at some point, despite their willingness to sell themselves into slavery, they may find others not so willing to play along.
Okay, I hear what you’re saying, Rob. Thought I had pissed you off for a second.
Yeah, it’s always a wacky conversation. “You’re not a believer AND you’re conservative?” Then it’s all anti-religious bigotry, with the implication that I share the sentiment. Lefties are such charming people.
I once took the wind out of my brother’s “there are no absolute wrongs” spiel by asking him under which circumstances rape is the correct thing to do.
I don’t think this is the way Prager conceives of values.
Principles are things we believe to be true even though we cannot ever prove them to be. We know them to be subjective but we nevertheless choose to build around them regardless of whether or not there is a metaphysical referee available to declare their truthfulness.
That’s what I mean by proudly subjective. Values, when used in place of principles, suggests something that is more resistant to pluralism.
At least on the gut level. I’ll have to think more on this point, though.
I would say that firearms, automobiles, and labour saving devices made it easier to rationalize women’s suffrage.
Granted. Without the rise of technology, a single woman like myself would have no option but to live with my parents for the rest of my natural life, if my family had any money, or turn to prostitution if they didn’t.
I don’t think this is the way Prager conceives of values.
As mentioned upstream, Prager drives me crazy with his usage of terms. That and the fact that he pronounces the dictator of Venezuela’s name as “sha-VEZ,” as if he were French.
Precisely. Now, don’t let them get away with under the guise of contesting religious notions.
Make them spell out what they are up to: they want the US, as a design, to fail.
I need to go service my swamp cooler.
Don’t say anything interesting for a couple hours, K?
Whence a values problem comes:
Have you read any of Tom Kratman’s books, perhaps?
IMHO he goes a bit overboard on the symbolism — to the point it’s hard to consider it “symbolism” — but he makes some damned good points. The author’s notes at the end of “Carnifex” are damned good, and more than a bit chilling.
(I’ve probably got some of his arguments mixed up in my head with the ones Ringo makes in “The Last Centurion”, which I just started. I tried to put a vastly different book between them, but it apparently Just Didn’t Work.)
Sdferr,
I would submit that the mechanism by which people “cede a portion of their natural rights” to the government is through the measured use of violence, or the threat of it. Otherwise people could just say no.
Makewi, if only “through the measured use of violence, or the threat of it”, then what can be the point of writing the Federalist Papers? Or perhaps we ought to say “there actually isn’t any point to it”?
Haven’t had time to read all the wordy posts yet, but as for this one
What’s weird is, flaming liberals think free-range chickens lay higher quality eggs.
This is one of the few cases where the hippies are right. True free range chickens that get to forage for bugs and worms along with scratch feed lay much tastier eggs.
Do you really think arguing with a leftist that redefining inalienable rights is a slap in the face of God is more potent, given the interlocutors, than saying that redefining the idea of inalienable rights is to affect an overthrow of the United States itself?
Well I have never found arguing with leftists to actually have any point at all. They operate in an almost religious mystical sense in their reasoning. I don’t think ANY rational argument will have an impact on them as they are approaching from an irrational basis.
In some ways I see them as fundamentally religious people in an age of cynicism. They are more comfortable in a more communal society and strive to create, or mythologise primitive lifestyles. They feel as they do, and no logical argument will move them from that emotional response.
What I am afraid of is that the principles upon which the American, and western governance was founded cannot survive the loss of faith in God.
Communism and fascism are secular responses to that loss of faith and loss of community. They are an attempt to have a religious community without God.
Obama was elected, based not on rational considerations, but what looked like a yearning for unity in a divided nation. He was semi-deified in a seriously creepy way.
The constitution was created by a people of faith, and it may not be capable of surviving that loss of faith.
I don’t really know that I have a scalable sense of egg tastyness. Mostly they’re better if someone else makes them.
So F.N. wrote:
That’s an interesting way of putting it. I’ll have to remember that.
Jim in KC
What I hear you saying, Travis, is that it’s difficult to convince the left that they have rights and that they should be interested in protecting them.
That’s an interesting way of putting it.
I do wonder sometimes if they even want rights. They want comfort and community, but do they want the duty and obligations that go with rights?
He was semi-deified in a seriously creepy way.
That’s an interesting way of putting it. For real I think he deified himself. It wasn’t something done to him.
Honestly, Travis, I don’t see a huge difference, for the purpose of our country’s conception of inalienable rights, between belief in, say, Deism, and a belief in agnosticism or atheism.
To conceive of God as a blind watchmaker doesn’t mean we have to give up the idea of natural rights. Neither does being a materialist require one to surrender the idea of natural rights. It just asks us to conceive of some other rationale for claiming natural rights. And a foundational compact in which we agree to accept the notion of natural rights as foundational is as good a rationale as any, from a materialist perspective.
happyfeet
He was semi-deified in a seriously creepy way.
That’s an interesting way of putting it. For real I think he deified himself. It wasn’t something done to him.
Entirely coincidental.
I agree that Obama used, and was used by others in a political game, but the desperate need of people to believe in this fantasy wasn’t something he created.
Sdferr,
The necessity or advantages of setting up a social contract is different from the mechanisms used to enforce it. The Federalists and the anti-Federalists used argumentation to convince others and to find common ground with the group that would eventually become large enough to use or threaten the use of violence with those who wouldn’t fall in line.
“duty and obligations that go with rights”
I’m not certain about this, but I think that there is an argument over these things, raging between the ancients, on the one hand (who insist there are such) and the moderns, on the other, who say there aren’t. In a small indication of the modern way, we just don’t insist on virtue in our peoples.
Off to pick up my kid from school. More later from me.
Thanks for the very interesting discussion thus far. Plenty for me to think about.
“used argumentation to convince others and to find common ground with the group”
So, we’d say there was a point to it after all? But then we’ve committed to a sort of “reason”, apart from the simpler offering of violence, operative in human affairs, no?
I’m ducking out to get smokes. brb
What I hear you saying, Travis, is that it’s difficult to convince the left that they have rights and that they should be interested in protecting them.
One of the arguments that Hobbes put forth for the necessity of a social contract was that people weren’t rational enough to recognize that they have natural rights, or to understand what they mean.
That’s an interesting way of putting it. I’ll have to remember that.
For the love of all that’s holy, do NOT tell me what you mean. :D
I consider my journey to atheism to have cemented my notion in inalienable rights and self-ownership. Believing there is no god elevates the individual. If I exist, why would I not “own” myself?
But then we’ve committed to a sort of “reasonâ€, apart from the simpler offering of violence, operative in human affairs, no?
We’ve said “these are the principles on which we stand and which we’re willing to use violence to enforce.” Unlike most of human history, where the elite declared themselves divine or divinely appointed to justify the use of violence.
Government by the consent of the governed. That’s the core, right there.
Honestly, Travis, I don’t see a huge difference, for the purpose of our country, between belief in, say, Deism, and a belief in agnosticism or atheism.
It just asks us to conceive of some other rationale for claiming natural rights.
I see it as a problem of authority. God is the authority and cannot be rationally questioned. That is the greatest strength of that position. The Marxist, or fascist concept is to subscribe to the authority of the ‘People’. This is a rather amorphous concept which serves a similar purpose.
Rationality may not get the job done.
It hasn’t in the past as the French revolution led to the guillotine, the Russian revolution led to the Gulag, and the fascist revolution led to the gas chamber.
So, we’d say there was a point to it after all? But then we’ve committed to a sort of “reasonâ€, apart from the simpler offering of violence, operative in human affairs, no?
I am not suggesting that there was no point, or that reason wasn’t used. I am suggesting, as I believe psycho was that it is absolutely the threat of violence that enforces the social contract that we have agreed upon. What else could it be?
Is Travis gone? I’m sure he is nice to his mother, but his original ignorance, then demonstrated as willful, makes my head hurt so.
Conversely, what fool questions personal freedom as an essential? Or to put it another way; please exercise choice if you disagree and step away from the principle rather than experimenting with it on my life and times. You have that option, progg. Use it.
My apologies Makewi, I think I misunderstood this “the mechanism by which people “cede a portion of their natural rights†to the government is through the measured use of violence, or the threat of it” as pointing at the vote taken to ratify or in the alternative, as you put it, “just say no”. Where you mean, what happens after the vote is taken.
I think you guys are mistaking Travis for someone else there. He’s asking questions that ought to be asked, that we should be capable of asking ourselves, in order that we come to firmer grips with what it is we profess to believe. I don’t think he would differ from this, but if he does, he can say so.
Is Travis gone? I’m sure he is nice to his mother, but his original ignorance, then demonstrated as willful, makes my head hurt so.
No he isn’t gone.
Easy to say but what exactly am I not getting?
‘Just because’ isn’t much of an argument.
Yes, the founding fathers wrote the constitution as they did, but that does nothing to address the question as to why it should stand unchallenged. The left are challenging it and a convincing counter-argument might come in handy.
Where you mean, what happens after the vote is taken.
I do, because the social contract isn’t operative until after that point. Beforehand it is either some other social contract (also enforced through violence) or ye olde state of nature in which we all must be willing to use violence ourselves to protect our life and liberty.
(My comment at 131 was rhetorical, Sdferr, and derived from Travis but not directed at him…)
Also Travis did that why does it always rain on me song that got on my last nerve.
Unless you can make a breakthrough using the Socratic method, Travis, I don’t know how you convince someone that they have inherent rights.
Simple: Force of majority. Perhaps like you, I wouldn’t give a dime for anything whatsoever expected to actually reason with the pathologically unreasonable on the nature of liberty and property, especially via abstracts like God and rights. Rights are declared; so is the enforcement of rights.
I think I remember Ayn Rand making a pretty compelling argument about how natural rights flow from the nature of man, but it mostly escapes me at this moment.
But it has something to do with the nature of man as man. And cares little if that nature just is or was created by God.
In these types of discussions, I always try and think about why dogs don’t have the same rights as people.
Simple: Force of majority. Perhaps like you, I wouldn’t give a dime for anything whatsoever expected to actually reason with the pathologically unreasonable on the nature of liberty and property, especially via abstracts like God and rights. Rights are declared; so is the enforcement of rights.
One difficulty with that is they are the 52% of the voting electorate. Unless the 48% are willing to enforce the founding principles by force of arms, they have the advantage.
Rationality may not get the job done.
It hasn’t in the past as the French revolution led to the guillotine, the Russian revolution led to the Gulag, and the fascist revolution led to the gas chamber.
I wouldn’t use the term “rationality” within a country mile of those revolutions. These were prime-divider societies whose revolutions were designed to wreak revenge on the privileged. Any talk of being “scientific” was merely rhetorical cover, as there was no serious effort at scientific rigor.
Whereas the American revolution, which started out on the blank slate of the American continent, was all about self-governance, not toppling their betters. That made a whole lotta difference.
Which is why Glenn Beck warns that if we think it would be a good idea to take up arms against today’s elites, we won’t get the same result as our founders did: we’ll get the Terror instead.
Hmmm. That “cannot be rationally questioned” part wants something more I think. I’m no theologian, but wasn’t the Pope’s Regensburg Address contending that the Muslim view would tend toward “not rationally questioned” in matters of, say, a violent command from Allah’s authority, where the Christian view would be nuanced toward, “unnecessary to question” on account of God’s utter and eternal consonance with reason, or something along those lines? Anyhow, it wants a lot of backgrounding.
dicentra
I wouldn’t use the term “rationality†within a country mile of those revolutions.
Well rationality has always been a cheap date. It can take you pretty much anywhere you want to go. The term ‘educated idiot’ embraces part of the problem. Rational people are still emotional people. They have the intellect to justify their wants and desires in new and interesting ways, but the end result doesn’t differ all that much from lesser folk.
Which is why Glenn Beck warns that if we think it would be a good idea to take up arms against today’s elites, we won’t get the same result as our founders did: we’ll get the Terror instead.
I think he is absolutely correct about this. It will take on a life of it’s own and will be fought by those who are most willing to kill or be killed, and they are not always the ones you want deciding the fate of the nation.
The American revolution is just about the only revolution that actually worked.
Please to be not forget the Texas Revolution.
Sdferr
God is the authority and cannot be rationally questioned.
Hmmm. That “cannot be rationally questioned†part wants something more I think.
You are right.
I mean only his authority and his existence.
There is clearly a body of theological work that questions both the meaning of God’s commands, and scripture.
#49 louchette
Yes the term “value voter” is used to mean a stereotype of the social con. voter. However the word “value” is used quite a bit in writings on the left with various modifiers like “gay” or “black” attached.
I see the word as signifying an identity as in the term identity politics. Used to mean a thing so basic to the person that it cannot be reasoned around or argued with or out of, but must, if it is a political enemy’s “value”, be forcibly suppressed.
Now we’re talking about “rights”. As instructive as the “lone man on an island” scenario is, it’s not really as helpful as it may seem. In isolation, “rights” are irrelevant, because a lone man is limited solely by the nature of the other things in his environment, and his ability to master them to further his own life.
The notion of “rights” really comes into play in the interactions between two or more humans, defining the morality thereof. The best, most compact definition of a “right” I’ve seen is this one (let’s see who recognizes it): A “right” is a moral principle defining and sanctioning a man’s freedom of action in a social context. The primary right is the right to (one’s own) life, and the rights to liberty and property are logical consequences of that right and the nature of H. Sapiens.
That statement is wrong so many different ways. First of all, rights aren’t “given”; they are inherent in how the universe in general, and our species in particular, operate, which (zeroth of all) haven’t changed. Second, there is no such thing as a “right to vote”, any more than there is a “right to serve on a jury”. It is unfortunate that Constitutional Amendments use such phraseology, which is at variance with the use of the word Right in the original text.
There definitely are rights involved in voting and serving on a jury, but they are not the rights of the voter nor of the juror qua voter or juror. The right is of the parties to a dispute to “trial by a jury of one’s peers” rather than an elite class of “noblemen”, and the right of free men to have the laws against which juries and judges measure their conduct to be promulgated by the same common men or their elected representatives, rather than the exclusive province of a privileged class.
When one steps into a voting booth or a jury box, he is no longer exercising his personal liberty, which is his inalienable right as a human. Instead, he wields power over his fellow citizens, occupying for the duration of the vote or trial one of what I consider the lowest tier of offices in our system of government. It is the purpose of the constitution of a republic to limit the powers of government officials (even when they only hold their office for days or seconds).
Language that conflates powers with rights makes it difficult to understand the bedrock principle of Federalism that is horribly misnamed “States’ Rights”. States are not people; they are governments. People have rights; governments have powers. Just powers are those which secure those rights, derived from the consent of the governed. No consent can justify a power destructive of those rights, no matter the size of a majority.
An unjust power can violate a right but it can’t change the fact that the right (the moral principle) exists, and that violating a right is wrong. That’s what it means for these rights to be inalienable. No pronouncement by any king or commissioner, potentate or president may change the morality of his conduct toward those whom he governs.
“Communism and fascism are secular responses to that loss of faith and loss of community. They are an attempt to have a religious community without God.”
Interesting.
Jonah Goldberg called Nazism and Leninism herasies of Marxism.
There is clearly a body of theological work that questions both the meaning of God’s commands, and scripture.
I’m an absolute believer in a creator. I have the proofs that work for me, but which cannot be shared with others absent you having faith in my telling the truth and/or not being, however temporarily, crazy. For others, absent a first person announcement by God, any body of theological work will also require some level of faith.
If the proggs were that majority, we wouldn’t be having this conversation. Rather, 52% voted for one guy and of those I talk to, they regret it — check The One’s dismal approval rating curve over the last four months. (Interestingly, swearing an oath to uphold the Constitution serves the greater point that force of majority — in this case the “majority” of precedents and traditions — counts.)
P.J., if you’ll look back upthread, my post about the “man alone in the forest” is pretty much a restatement of the Randian/Objectivist viewpoint. Note that I don’t agree wholeheartedly with the Randites, but a stopped clock’s right three times a day…
The man alone in the forest is, like Mr. Bennett at the end of the book, quite at liberty. It requires some other force to prevent him from exercising his rights, one of which is the right to pick up a rock (“keep and bear arms”) and to smash something with it, including that new person who magically appeared… nobody ever said that all rights were good things to do, or, if they did, they were wrong. We are animals. We have the same rights as any other animal, with the right to roar when we please and to defend ourselves among them.
We have learned, over the millenia, that we are better off in the long run if we don’t exercise our right to commit murder. In general, yer hyoomin bean is a fairly delicate critter, lacking claws, fangs, and armor, and being fairly weak as critters go; it is to our advantage to cooperate with one another, in order to accomplish things we cannot do alone. That’s why the man alone in the forest is a starting point; it has to be developed further in order to support the concept of “society”.
But we don’t cede those rights (yes, Federalist no. 2 is full of s*t in that respect); we don’t give them up or yield them. We agree not to exercise them in order to get along with the society of other humans. And we don’t cede them precisely because they are inalienable; they cannot be ceded or taken away. The only thing coercion can do is force us not to exercise our rights in public.
What we do is deputize — we cede to others the privilege or power and the responsibility to exercise those rights on our behalf. “Governments are formed among men, gaining their just powers from the consent of the governed.”
God is shorthand. Our ancestors, living over the ten or twenty millenia since we started picking up rocks and stacking them instead of bashing one another, have developed methods and procedures that are useful when people are living together in a society, and have codified them — and, lacking pencil and paper and Hobbes, that encoding took the form of religion. The religions of today are codifications of different ways societies found for getting along as societies. That doesn’t mean there isn’t a rational approach to the same end; it does mean that we shouldn’t simply ignore religion, because it’s our ancestors’ way of telling us what worked for them.
Start with the man alone in the forest, and add other people one by one. Recognize that there are rights that those people rightfully possess that, if exercised, would damage the society they are trying to form. Yes, we have the right to murder. No, it isn’t a good idea to exercise it in most cases.
And, just as there are rights we shouldn’t exercise if we want to have a viable society, there are things we ought to do to build a society that aren’t “rights”. One of the places I differ most strongly from the Objectivists (and the libertarians) is that I put “private property” in that category. Private property, in the sense of owning land and the extended metaphor following from that, is a construct that has been found useful by multiple societies in order to create and maintain wealth, and as such ought to be recognized — but anything beyond “my loincloth” is extremely questionable as a “right”.
Regards,
Ric
Rights are abstracts. Without humanity, they do not exist. They are declared.
That is true. The key is man, not nature, and from our perspective, neither God nor gods.
Further enforcing the fact that rights are both man made and fallible. My point is that we’ll never argue reason with the unreasonable and we’ll never therefore argue the sheer idiocy of the right to education, food, shelter, or medicine with the progressive.
I’m curious as to why. Is that position driven by the “Tragedy of the Commons” or because the land itself is more or less immutable, while the boundaries used to impute ownership are not?
Travis.
The mechanism to challenge the document is inherent in the document itself. The ability to amend it. the exception is the first ten amendments our Bill of Rights. Do you want to challenge the validity of those rights? Is there an inalienable right to life? If there is doesn’t it follow that there is also an inalienable right to liberty?
N. O’Brain
Jonah Goldberg called Nazism and Leninism herasies of Marxism.
They were though there was clearly some cross-pollination going on. Marxism has roots in some of the Christian sects such as the Diggers and others. I have read that it is linked to the Gnostic view of life as well.
Gnostics believed the world was the work of a false creator and they were required to become aware and help transform the world. Actually in some ways it sounds like Scientology.
Many sects believed in a earthly communal paradise with truth, love, justice and equality being triumphant.
I have heard that Marxism is a Christian heresy. I have always felt that ideology and religion are not as different as many would like to believe.
Jim in KC —
Property has to be defended, because Proudhon was right: it’s theft — that is, it’s an assertion that B cannot use A’s property, and thus is deprived of the beneficial use of that property. B naturally wants that use, so A must discourage B from taking the property.
So we have “personal property” (“my loincloth”) which is defended on the same basis as self-defense of life. “Real property” (land, and the resulting extended metaphor) derives from an entirely different source.
Humans originally lived in societies dominated by goons, in which the biggest, strongest people (usually men) controlled the others — we know that the control wasn’t complete, but it was there. Real property was originally the result of the head goon distributing the largesse to his sycophants and toadies. An odd thing happened: societies in which that happened got wealthier than societies which did not, especially when the principle was extended to actual land management; it made agriculture possible. Imagine the reaction of the farmer when the local hunter-gatherer tribe came over the hill… private property is a deal between the ruler and the individual, in which the State guarantees assistance in defending the property so long as the “owner” continues to hold up his end of the deal — in today’s world, pay the property taxes.
So personal property is an extension of the right of self defense, whereas real property is a function of the State.
Regards,
Ric
B Moe on 5/11 @ 2:54 pm
I can confirm this from my experience. Although, the organic eggs at our local grocery stores suck almost as bad as the mass harvest ones. A local farmer sells free range eggs that I buy now and then. The yolks are as orange as can be and more flavorful; no comparison to the store eggs.
I think the approach Prager has taken so far is smart. Simple yet effective. I look forward to more depth in the future as I have enjoyed the depth of the discussion here.
OT: Speaking of the Pope, Benedict done a good on ’em thing today.
Do you want to challenge the validity of those rights? Is there an inalienable right to life? If there is doesn’t it follow that there is also an inalienable right to liberty?
I get the utilitarian argument and agree with it. Life is a lot better if we as a group pretend we have these rights and everyone goes along with it.
What I do not get is where these rights are supposed to come from. Simply saying that they issue from the aether and arrive in our person is mystical nonsense.
I have read Leviathan, and Hobbes argues for the existence of rights in that work. I don’t think he means rights in the same sense we do. He claims that the only ‘natural right’ is that of self defence. All other ‘natural rights’ are surrendered to the state when the individual enters into a social compact. This is not what is being argued here as far as I can tell.
The question regarding a right to liberty is tough. I believe liberty is an essential component in a decent society and any social compact should include it as a legal right.
What makes it a natural right? Where does that logically come from? Most human being don’t possess liberty as we understand it and haven’t throughout much of history.
If it is a useful myth, then I am fine with that. If you are arguing for more than that, then I would ask where it issues from.
BTW, some of what I have argued here are leftist positions, not those I hold myself.
Ric @ 152 & 157
Well said on both accounts. I have never thought about real property in that way. I wonder if it might be better to say that a person has the right to attempt to acquire property lawfully (as opposed to the more general “right to property”).
This discussion is fascinating.
Hobbes, de Cive, Chapt1, vii, viii & ix:
So essentially, Ric, if I’m getting you, the point you’re making is that real property can’t be a “right” in the same sense as self-defense because it couldn’t or wouldn’t exist at all without a legal framework to support it. And the legal framework, or social contract, requires the individual to have ceded certain rights in order to exist; it’s a successor to natural rights, not a predecessor.
But saying they come from God or nature doesn’t have that same effect on the non-believer?
That these rights are inalienable requires a leap of faith no matter what, because there is no mechanism for determining beyond question what are natural rights.
I can’t stand this indecision married with a lack of vision I don’t think.
But saying they come from God or nature doesn’t have that same effect on the non-believer?
It does have that same effect which is why a people of faith may be required for rights to be respected in the long term.
The atheistic states that have come into existence tend not to respect those same rights. The more faith recedes from the public square the greater the erosion of personal liberties.
Again I am an agnostic, but I am not sure I would trust people like me in power.
So, we can attempt to pin down our understanding of Hobbes’ understanding of nature, in an effort to get to the “source” Travis is looking for. No one here, nor does Hobbes, speak of aether, for instance. Hobbes speaks of nature, we speak of nature (sort of following him, though with a tremendous burden of confusion about the term “nature” to be careful about, to sort through, so to speak, due to the intervening years and the layer upon layer of novel turns that term has taken.) We can inquire further, why it is that Hobbes turns to nature to ground his new political ideas, rather than, turning to Scripture.
Sdferr
Hobbes doesn’t seem to believe in the idea of natural rights sans the state. He believed that we surrender most of the rights we possess in nature when we sign onto the social compact. We are granted legal rights as we surrender the right of private vengeance, etc.
Nonsense. Unless by people of faith you mean people who are willing to take a leap of faith.
And given that we all must, there is no reason to think that we wouldn’t take that leap with respect to natural rights, even should be give up the idea of a particular type of God, or the idea of “God” altogether.
OK. Let’s assume your’re a reasonably intelligent person. Stripped of everything that society gives you- you are alone in nature. Just you and your wits. Who tells you what to do? Say you thrive on your little piece of forrest or savannah. Who tells you where to go or what you can have? What are the limits on your desires? No one. Nothing. Only your abilities limit you. You are free. All that you have worked for is yours. There is no one to tell you what to say. No one to tell you what to believe.
Liberty is a condition we are all born into. That’s the logic of it right there. I don’t think it’s a myth, more of a hard reality.
My next door neighbor had one of those Austin Healey 3000’s, would take me out for a spin now and then. Fun car, good smell to it too.
Off for a bit. Will check back later.
I don’t like the bias in this thread against violent anarchic rebellion. Even if you feel that way you shouldn’t let on I don’t think.
Nonsense. Unless by people of faith you mean people who are willing to take a leap of faith.
And given that we all must, there is no reason to think that we wouldn’t take that leap with respect to natural rights, even should be give up the idea of a particular type of God, or the idea of “God†altogether.
Perhaps you are right, but we have as yet seen few if any such atheistic state come into existence that were willing to observe human rights.
We have seen many examples of atheistic states who most certainly do not respect human rights.
If I was a betting man I know where I would put my money.
I need to go service my swamp cooler.
OK. Whats a swamp cooler?
It’s just I got a vision of you clomping through the bog in your wellies with a pair of pliers and a look of fierce determination.
You cracked me up at #22, sdferr. That’s a classic “it’s funny because it’s true”.
Somehow, I can’t help but find myself confused by that.
Somehow, I can’t help but find myself confused by that.
Sorry legal rights.
And they’ve failed with respect to securing freedom.
Atheists can learn, too. Best they get busy.
Me, I’m agnostic, and really not at all religious. And yet I have no problem accepting the idea of natural rights. And you won’t see me lighting off for territories where natural rights aren’t secured.
Ah, yes, that’s a different horse.
Would it be correct to say that “rights” as we are discussing them in a political system are akin to axioms in a mathematical system. The a priori assumptions that underlay all else that comes after. That the actual rights that start the system will determine what form the system will take. That if these rights do not in some way conform to nature and human nature that the government system will be un-natural and inhuman.
Sorry to do this, but several people upthread argued that rape is, in all circumstances, wrong.
Consider the limiting case in which there is but a single man and a single woman left in the world. At that point, should the man allow the human race to go extinct, should the woman refuse sex?
An elaboration of that case:
A community is facing constant attack from enemies who cannot be bought off, such that its men are rapidly dying off and there is a preponderance of women. The women, brought up in a monogamous culture, refuse to join polygamous families. Should the men simply leave it at that, and thus accede to the extinction of their community?
Rape can be the “right” (better, necessary) thing to do under extreme circumstances. What makes it wrong to do is not the sheer mechanics of the act, but the moral context which renders the act abhorrent.
Just a question.
If natural rights are granted then how do we logically say that the Gitmo scum shouldn’t be accorded the same rights Americans hold?
If the constitution lays down, but does not grant these rights then do they not hold those same rights?
I don’t have anything against violent anarchic rebellion. I merely think putting the image of a cute kitten on the front of the proposed uniform sends the wrong message.
Another way of validating the concept of insisting on Natural Rights is to use Sowell’s clash of visions paradigm: the constrained (human nature is fixed) versus unconstrained (human nature can be changed).
You can demonstrate that these two visions are really the only options we have: either human nature is fixed or it isn’t. You can also demonstrate that the constrained vision is the ONLY one that does not lead to one kind of tyranny or other.
So it’s highly practical to insist on Natural Rights, regardless of whether you can work out the metaphysics or lack thereof. There is no Third Way, because the Third Way is really the unconstrained vision wearing a new frock and mimicking the voice of the constrained vision.
In a really irritating falsetto, I might add. That right there is a reason to reject it.
It’s possible, or it seems likely to me, that Hobbes sees the political philosophy that had gone before as an utter failure, sees that it just couldn’t get to where it purported to go. So he’s after something that will work, something new, something better. But better how? Better in the sense that it fits the world as it is better? Less a function of cloud-cuckoo-land? Something like that.
Travis, fail to respect the rights of others, we’ll fail to respect yours. Generally with attempts at proportionality. That covers everything from capital punishment to being fined for theft. The rights are still there, they’re simply not respected for past misdeeds.
Geoff, that is pretty much how I consider it. Correct or not.
No, we have the right to kill in defense, which is not “murder”. Words mean things. Murder violates another’s right to life. By initiating the use of force, an aggressor has shown his lack of respect for others’ lives, and forfeited any respect otherwise due his.
More crap. Property can’t be “theft” because “theft” is “the wrongful taking and carrying away of the personal goods or property of another”. There’s no way to define “theft” without first defining “property” or a synonym thereof.
Property rights are a direct consequence of the fact that the farmer owns his labor, which gives him a moral claim to the product of that labor. If the gatherer has the same right to the crops as the farmer, then there is no reason to be a farmer, and therefore there will be no farmers. Agriculture can support roughly 30 times the population in a given area as hunting/gathering, but only if the citizens respect that moral claim of the farmer to the product of his labor, or the chief thug can hire enough muscle to make people work the fields who have no stake in how good the harvest is. The chief may think he can pay the muscle less than he’d pay the farmer, but that’s only one side of the equation….
There is a word for someone who is systematically deprived of any compensation for his labor: “slave”. They tend to do just enough to keep from getting beaten by the overseers. The further the effort rises above raw muscle power, the more it requires some mental effort to judge the best course of action, the greater the gap between the productivity of the slave and the free man. This is all observable; time and time again it has been proven, perhaps most famously when Germany was divided between a system under which the rule of law protected individual rights, and one which enslaved the masses in the name of liberating them. The contrast was as night and day.
Violating a man’s right to property does not invalidate that moral principle embodied in the right. It demonstrates (heh) the principle.
If natural rights are granted then how do we logically say that the Gitmo scum shouldn’t be accorded the same rights Americans hold?
They have the same natural rights. It’s just that since they weren’t willing to agree that we did as well they had to be locked up.
That’s my guess.
The main characteristic which separates man from the other animals is his ability to reason. A terrorist (or criminal of any type) has, in some way, initiated the use of force or coercion against his fellow man. To the extent that he does this, he is acting in a manner that is less than human.
He thus forfeits that which is granted to him as a human (granted by nature of God).
of = or
Whence we come to the question, blowhard, “what is it as it is”, and really, we still don’t have a very good (complete) answer. So, in consequence, we’re sort of still at sea and getting now and then, a bit green about the gills as we rise and fall with the swells.
Sdferr
I could be wrong, but since Leviathan was an argument against a new way and in favor of monarchical rule I would argue that Hobbes was attempting to use reason for the continuance of the status quo (or rather the return to it). In fact, on this point his argument is very similar to Aquinas’s descriptions of natural law as being the need for humans to do good and avoid evil where rebelling against an unjust ruler creates a situation which is just as unjust, or worse.
Or something. Personally, I prefer Paines “you aren’t the boss of me, past history” as a clear rebuttal to this line of thinking.
In the most extreme case, that of a cold-blooded murderer, by his actions he has forfeited his right to life. A peaceful citizen, minding his own business, presumed innocent of any wrongdoing, has the right to be left to his own devices unless and until, via a due process of law, it is shown that he has violated the person or property of someone else. The rights of the accused as enumerated in our Constitution apply in their entirety only to such a person. The GITMO scum were captured on the battlefield, levying Warre against The United States, without any uniforms or other distinctive identification as lawful combatants, as provided by the Geneva Conventions and other treaties to which the US is a signatory (but the Taliban and al-Qaeda are not). The Conventions require those uniforms to protect innocent civilians. The deliberate location of mortars, IEDs, and missile launchers in mosques and residential areas, as done by Jaish al-Mahdi and Hisb’Allah, is a violation of those Conventions for the same reason.
By their acts, they have placed themselves into an entirely different category. Not only are they entitled to a presumption of innocence, they are actually entitled to be summarily executed. Unlike domestic criminals, who are enemies of the State, unlawful combatants are enemies of all signatory nations. Like pirates, they are enemies of civilization itself.
Actually, sdferr, after thinking about your question, it reminds me subtly of Moral Sentiments. In the way that Smith is interested in the interactions of people who are roughly equal to one another. Not really mentioned but it’s their throughout.
So, the old system Hobbers surveyed was one of ownership. Kings owned subjects, landowners owned serfs, husbands owned wives, adults owned children.
But, Hobbes is speaking of an agreement, a social compact. Which is not something you do with something you own. It’s a bit subversive in that way.
their=they’re, obviously.
“the status quo”
Not exactly I think (think for instance of the “divine right of kings” dealio. That’s not going to survive Hobbes too well). And too, he lives under a regime, the interests of which may run counter to the places his thought (properly construed) may take him (places he may understand, but his king may not), so Hobbes might just be hiding the full exposition from the powers that be, yet leaving all the clues for them’s can read (for instance, Locke).
In other news, The Anchoress manages to find some scratch paper left over from the last night’s shindig.
Which is yet another vote for the notion of right as an abstract. Lacking basis in a concrete cause for man to exist, which is the case here (bear with me) rape cannot yet be condoned, ever.
As with the overall subject, the whole thing goes metaphysical soon enough.
With some many trillions bilked from us by our monetary system, would that we’d take that principle more seriously when we voted. The average citizen in Dubai is apparently worth $17,000,000. The average American owes about a hundred grand.
“Which is why Glenn Beck warns that if we think it would be a good idea to take up arms against today’s elites, we won’t get the same result as our founders did: we’ll get the Terror instead.”
Which is why Glenn Beck has obviously never studied the actual history of the American Revolution in any detail.
Does he actually think that truly horrible things were not done on both sides? I suggest he watch The Patriot for a taste.
We use the term “tar and feathers” so casually these days. I promise that having hot tar poured over your body was a guarantee of second and third degree burns; I leave it to your imagination what that meant given the medical care of the time. Why did the Loyalists flee to Canada? Because they and their families risked being burnt alive in their homes.
I want a damn preview button…
Not only aren’t they entitled to a presumption of innocence
Sdferr
I dunno. Perhaps I’m getting it wrong, but to me Hobbes is arguing for absolute unlimited power in the hands of a single ruler. The only “right” under the social contract that is afforded to individuals is the right to defend their lives from unjust attacks.
…there is no reason to think that we wouldn’t take that leap with respect to natural rights, even should be give up the idea of a particular type of God, or the idea of “God†altogether.
I can comprehend agnosticism supporting natural rights, but with respect, Jeff, if you give up God altogether, I think you’re abandoning “endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights,” and thereby agreeing that the founding principles need tweaking. That ambivalence strikes me as why many of us feel we are losing the country we grew up in — though we want the edifice we live in, we are beginning to doubt the foundation, and we’re not sure what to do.
Saying there is no God behind those natural rights strikes me as potent as pretending your finger is a pistol; it works as long as everyone pretends together. Or, as the old joke goes, like crossing a Jehovah’s witness with a Unitarian and getting someone who walks around knocking on doors, but they don’t know why.
For some reason, what also comes to mind is when Flannery O’Connor said about Jesus — “Either he was who he said he was, or he got just what he deserved.”
Cheers,
Can a citizen distinguish between a sovereign king and a tyrannt? Why accede to a contract making oneself a slave?
It’s the same thing as currency or language. Both of those concepts are millennia old.
Safety.
Salt Lick, see…
The argument for God doling out rights behaves just as poorly, actually. What motivated the Founders is today vastly less important than the fact they were motivated when they were.
The evidence for Jesus’ supernaturality is significant. And it’s relatively useless as a tool to turn back secular, progressive humanism in an age of postmodern, morally-variable, meandering solipsism.
I’m coming into this way late (and way burned out), but has anyone here read The Evolution of Political Thought by C. Northcote Parkinson?
Which is one reason, there are other examples, I despise the use of the word “violence” which is designed to conflate those two different things so that they can be considered and thought of as identical. A rhetorical masque.
Why? Can not the “Creator” be, say, natural selection? Historical materialism? Alien design?
what created the “big bang”
“It hasn’t in the past as the French revolution led to the guillotine, the Russian revolution led to the Gulag, and the fascist revolution led to the gas chamber.”
And the American revolution led to 230 years of a belief in individual freedom, traditional religion, democratic (small d) government, property rights, the rule of law, free markets, laissez-faire economics and market competition.
And the richest, most diverse, most welcoming people on Earth.
sdferr and I were (I think it was us) talking about this awhile back in some random thread but let’s reintroduce it. Let’s say that Nietzsche wasn’t totally all wet with his thoughts on the transmutation of values problem. Might it not be that Hobbes, Locke, and onward, understood this and proposed a fix by formalizing an argument of natural rights. As in, you might be morally required to turn the other cheek, but not if someone wants to kill you or steal from you… in some cases you don’t have to be so nice. It fixed the hole in the existing paradigm, how to deal with assholes.
I think that what dicentra broached in #185
is the fifth postulate of political systems. The
means which geometry is the “true” one for humans is an as yet open question. I do know which way I lean, but that is sentiment not evidence.
You know, the guy who wrote the bit about “endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights” also said:
“It does me no injury for my neighbor to say there are twenty gods or no god. It neither picks my pocket nor breaks my leg.”
and:
“Question with boldness even the existence of a god; because if there be one he must approve of the homage of reason more than that of blindfolded fear.”
and:
“Christianity neither is, nor ever was a part of the common law.”
So, there’s that. It’s pretty clear from his writings that Jefferson, at least, was far from being an orthodox Christian.
Madison was a staunch opponent of any sort of institutionalized or established church.
Hamilton may have been a Christian, but does not appear to have been particularly devout.
Jay was an
AnglicanEpiscopalian, who seemed to have a poor opinion of Catholicism in general.Hey, I’m a pantheistic multiple-personality solipsist.
I get the best of both worlds.
Absolutely.
i’m somewhere in between libertarian and conservative, i’m thinking about the phrase “rights proceed from God/Natural Law” wouldn’t the Founders have seen Natural Law differently since they wrote our Founding documents well before “Origin of Species” was written?
Shit, sdferr is dropping F.N. at #106 and he’s talking about changing values.
Always a step ahead of me that guy.
i guess what i’m arguing is that Jefferson intentionally chose the word “Creator” for it’s spritiual implications, some type of grand metaphysical being/force, but i don’t doubt his beliefs in the bounds of personal liberty, i don’t see that the two beliefs exclude one another.
That (FN stuff) was aimed at Prager though, bh. (an aside, I can’t believe what I just saw, a tip-in by Steckel! Wheeeee.)
unbowed by my cretin to
see every slight[hi five yo!
0
Prager is syndicated by Salem Radio. Salem Radio owns Christian radio stations all over the US. They also seem to have bought a chunk of Townhall.com, or they own it outright. Many of the columnists on Townhall happen to be syndicated by Salem (Prager, Medved, Hewitt, just for three).
He meant to conflate values and principles. It fits his radio audience.
And the American revolution led to 230 years of a belief in individual freedom, traditional religion, democratic (small d) government, property rights, the rule of law, free markets, laissez-faire economics and market competition.
Yes, but it wasn’t an atheistic revolution as the others were. Atheists turn murderous when culturally triumphant. The American revolution was an essentially conservative revolt, replacing the power of England with American power.
was an essentially conservative revolt,
“Conservative revolt” is a contradiction in terms. Conservatives (in the generic sense) want to maintain the status quo. Change is desired by revolutionaries.
The axis you’re looking for is liberal vs. autocracy. We went from a monarchy to self-rule.
See den Beste’s article here.
What Prager calls “values” I call urges. While Prager names them “e pluribus unum, liberty, God,” I refer to them as social justice, public morality and freedom.
But Prager has yet to get that while there may be three primary political urges, we only get to choose one. Why? Because when these three urges are translated into policy and action, they eventually and inevitably conflict with one another, and thus in all cases one must be chosen to prevail over the other two. And what holds for groups also holds for individuals. Virtually all of us prefer policies from each of these baskets, within the political ideation of virtually all of us, one of these modes has come to dominate the other two.
When we come to realize that under any government, ONE of these general philosophies WILL dominate the other two at all times, we also come to realize that the important choice we face is not whether we want to submit to a particular dominant rubric or not, but rather which dominant rubric we are better off living under.
I guess it’s good to see Prager getting warmer, but as Jeff points out in the post, he’s hardly red hot.
“For the love of all that’s holy, do NOT tell me what you mean.”
Um…I thought I didn’t want to know what you meant.
Oh yeah, urges.
And when I say one these urges will dominate “at all times,” I don’t mean that policies designed to satisfy one of the urges will totally crowd out all policies designed to promote the other two. For example, it’s very likely that a public morality regime would support public education, and even the vast majority of freedom seeking libertarians support restrictions on abortion. Rather, I meant was that other than the occasional transition period, there will be no gaps or periods of vacuum, and nor is there any countervailing force of equilibrium that works to produce equalization between the three; one will always be dominant.
It’s not like we don’t all know which one is dominant now, right?
SDB almost always had something relevant to say. I was happy to read a post that I had read before.
#229
It was anything but conservative. It was as radical as they come. The only government in the world not ruled by a king or emporer, but by representatives answerable to the people. Written in our constitution is the right to change government by force of arms if it ever comes to that. As radical as it gets.
Whatever It was, surely It had no purpose, router, in the perfect order that ensued. Ask a progg: Surely this conversation is based on the fact that mind is random disorder in a sea of accidents.
Or, I can understand, therefore God is.
Isn’t it ironic that those who most strenuously resist the notion of a Grand Designer are doing their very best to install one?
Jonah Goldberg called Nazism and Leninism herasies of Marxism.
Goldberg is an ass, sometimes. Nazism has nothing to do with Marxism.
Oh, possibly the “social change” part, but that’s not anywhere near the kind of social change Marx had in mind. Nazism’s social-change drive was just the vehicle Hitler found to achieve his ends, much like Mao (who was not by any means any sort of socialist that socialists would recognize) did with socialism.
And, sure, you could argue that communism/socialism things are inherently vehicles to power, because that’s how they’ve been used. I don’t think Marx envisioned power for its own sake. For sure, neither Mao nor Hitler ever desired to reach the dictatorship of the proletariat phase, nor did they desire the classless society. Those guys simply hijacked the then-current dissatisfaction in the peasant/worker classes and used it to install themselves in power.
Further, to meaningfully grasp the concept of an orderly, principled, external Creator requires a position of awareness not found in science as a point of science (save perhaps for the sound of some of the parallel language of quantum physics, which goes mystical right off).
Of course, SecProgs generally deny such and replace Creation with that characteristic closed-ended, morally-variable, relative materialism that gives them, they think, power over their environments. Ironically, progs thereby deny natural selection, natural economies, the problem of power, history, and basically human nature itself.
For such a bunch of cock-sure progressive Darwinians, they sure have an odd, regressive way of practicing it by denying it. Meanwhile, as Rusty said, American classically liberal roots were anything but conservative. They were as radical as they come.
…and they think they can control the climate.
…and you talking about it, you racist denier.
If you have to resort such outre conditions as the end-of-the-species to argue that an act may be moral, it’s safe to assume it’s not moral in any case you’re likely to encounter in reality.
Sure, and that woman you’re raping may just decide to kill you and/or the child out of revenge.
While you’re sleeping.
…or just crush your testicles with a rock, and let you live.
Slart:
You might want to read the damned book, first.
What Goldberg is arguing is that the Baptists, AnaBaptists, Presbyterians, Lutherans, Calvinists, Methodists and Roman Catholics are all Christian religions and all are related to each other in more ways than they are different. That they all have the same roots. His problem is that he is making the argument in the mid 1600’s, in Europe, and he is not a Christian.
BTW under the definition that put Fascists on the Right all of the Left wing movements of today are Right Wing Fascist movements.
And the American revolution led to 230 years of a belief in individual freedom, traditional religion,
democratic (small d)republican (small r)government, property rights, the rule of law, free markets, laissez-faire economics and market competition.FTFY
My point being slightly more meta than snarky.
Certainly it can be argued that democratic principles are enshrined in the Constitution, yet no where are they named as such.
Not that this has stopped progressives, and others, from fetishizing democracy – in the form of the plebiscite – over other more clearly delineated principles.
The Constitution specifically guarantees to each State a republican form of government. Yet in the face of the express statement – one that certainly should carry more value than those more nebulously expressed concepts- progressives chose to alter something as substantive and fundamental as the election of Senators via the Seventeenth Amendment.
I pulled this quote from the Sara Robinson piece Darleen linked in her Warning post, mostly for the interesting “justifies violence” bit. Setting aside Ms. Robinson’s paranoid ramblings about the “far right wing”, is there any sense in which the fact that modern, western political philosophy (starting with Machiavelli say, through Hobbes, to Locke and finally our own founding) recognizes an inescapable necessity of violence in pre-political human relations, that recognition is intended to be taken in the mode of a justification?
There’s something to that, sdferr. Hobbes expressed the strong form of the argument. Locke softened the picture with our natural capacity for reason. But both stand against that noble savage BS.
Okay, gotta run.
I very much regret having been without computer for the past few days, as this is a subject which interests me greatly and I fear I have missed the party. I find it useful to compare the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen, for pace Prager, the French Revolutionaries were also very much of the notion that man’s natural rights emanated from a Creator:
The Declaration predates the US Bill of Rights (but not the Constitution, of course), and there is a great deal in common between the two documents. As Jeff G notes, there has been a shift in meaning associated with the Declaration; indeed it took only 4 years for some of its Articles to become bastardised in the l793 Declaration.
How far did this go, Silver Whistle (and I ask only out of actual ignorance of the case), was it to a man (and woman?), or would you cite instances of individuals among them for whom this was, how to say, a species of lip service?
Sdferr,
The tension between the Church, the deists (embodied by Rousseau, and taken to extremes by Robespierre) and the Cult of Reason (or Hébertistes, after Jacques Hébert) ended up in the September Massacres and the general aim of dechristianising France. I’m not sure there was any need for any individual to pay lip service – the camps were very strongly (and vocally) pro or anti. The piles of bodies would tend to confirm that, as would the papal condemnation of the new constitution for civil clerics. What I find interesting is how quickly Rousseau’s theism evaporated like spit on a griddle, only to end up with pro-religious laws resurfacing by 1795. The original drive of Rousseau and the inclusion of his “Supreme Being” (?) had most of the convention on board, to the radical opposite within a few years, to a more laissez-faire attitude a few years later. C’est bizarre, non?
I mean, it’s almost like the French are psychotic, or something.
(What right thinking man, after all, could resist the appeal of such a Supreme Being?)
Uh..WTF? I wasn’t responding to Goldberg’s book; I was responding tom comment #149. If comment #149 misrepresented Goldberg, then I retract the “Goldberg is an ass” part of my reply, but the rest stands.
any need for any individual to pay lip service
The piles of bodies
QED
Oh, thanks a bunch mate. Now what am I supposed to do?
I think I need some time to reflect on the Supremacy of her Being.
Sorry SW, but you started it.
Robespierre’s Cult of The Supreme Being. Much less stimulating than Leeloo. There, I’m better now.