The undermining of common sense, and Satan in elementary schools
This is part three of a five-part exploration of natural law. Links to all five parts will be at the beginning of part one.
John Locke’s influential writings combined a philosophy of government centered on Christian natural law and liberalism, including religious freedom and toleration for all who respect God. Perhaps it would be more accurate to describe liberalism itself as an aspect or derivative of Christian natural law, to paraphrase Larry Siedentop, but for for the sake of my narrative I will discuss them as separate ideas. The genius of Locke’s system is the tension and balance between Christian natural law and liberalism. Locke’s Christian natural law was checked by liberal toleration, and his liberalism was checked by Christian natural law. As an example of the latter, Locke wrote in A Letter Concerning Toleration that “those are not at all to be tolerated who deny the being of a God.” In context, this doesn’t mean summary execution of non-believers, but he does imply limits to freedom of expression. (Locke uses a similar expression “have no right to be tolerated” to describe would-be theocrats and clergy who teach intolerance for other faiths.) Of course, the Overton window has moved since Locke’s day but I share this to illustrate that liberalism and tolerance for him did not mean secularism and nihilism.
On the other side of the coin, natural law itself must be balanced by liberalism, including rule of law. Natural law would not give the Supreme Court license to re-interpret or strike down laws that are in contradiction to natural law but not in violation of the Constitution. Rather, natural law should be a guide for the legislative and rule-making processes themselves.
Locke’s twin ideas of liberalism and Christian natural law became highly influential, especially in the great American foundation of 1776 and 1789. America was not perfect but thrived like no other, creating great prosperity and casting off its moral baggage like slavery, under the guiding influence of liberalism and natural law moral philosophy. But something happened between 1789 and today that eroded and destroyed the Christian natural law basis for American government and society. As I see it, this first began as increasing secularization of the elites and intellectual classes. Then, no longer “immunized” by Christian natural law common sense, and even actively antagonistic to Christianity (often under the name of “dogmatism”), many intellectuals and artists brought Postmodernist influences from Europe into US academia, culture, education, and the law in the 20th century.
Postmodernism is or was a coordinated attack on the Christian and Western concepts of virtue, beauty, truth, and purpose. With no purpose for man and no discernment of objective good in public administration, the postmodern victory spelled the end for natural law in the West and for the “common sense” political tradition in America. As a somewhat silly example, “The Satanic Temple” has organized “After School Satan” clubs in elementary schools of several cities over the last couple of years, and is seeking to expand into more schools. When applications are rejected, The Satanic Temple files lawsuits in expectation that the law as it exists today will force public schools to accept clubs for kids bearing a name that represents pure personified evil. After School Satan exists (we can hope) just to tweak Christians and not to overtly proselyte kids into Satanism, but either way it serves as a strong case-in-point that the natural law basis for public administration is dead.
No, I can’t write a viewpoint-neutral rule that allows a Good News club and not a Satanist club. But that is exactly the point I am making — in the choice between good and evil, natural law and the old common sense tradition sought to promote the good. In the absence of discernment of the good, there can be no natural law. You don’t have to be a believing Christian to recognize that Jesus would make a better role model for kids than the devil, but the law today has no place for common sense. In its place, since the 1960s, viewpoint neutrality has become the primary standard. In the choice between good and evil, our legal framework chooses… neither? … both?
It is important to reiterate that prior to the 20th century viewpoint neutrality was not the standard. A 19th century Satanist club in a public elementary school is laughably unthinkable, for better or for worse. (A 21st century government sponsored satanist club for kids is no less absurd, but here we are.) Jud Campbell gives a detailed history of the rise of viewpoint neutrality in US law and the corresponding demise of natural rights in the Yale Law Review. Prior to the 20th century, First Amendment law “did not prevent the government from imposing socially defined boundaries on expressive freedom.” More recently,
“in a liberal era of secularism, individualism, and social fragmentation, what gradually emerged by the early 1970s was a notion of rights as spheres of personal liberty, free from socially prescribed ideas of morality. The very idea of a “right” thus came to embrace a sense of neutrality with respect to values.”
Thus Postmodernism was written into the very legal codes of the US and Western nations, natural law was erased, and now we quite literally have Satan in our elementary schools. John Locke didn’t know that he was being prophetic when he stated the following in Essays on the Law of Nature:
“without natural law there would be neither virtue nor vice, neither the reward of goodness nor the punishment of evil: there is no fault, no guilt, where there is no law. Everything would have to depend on human will, and, since there would be nothing to demand dutiful action, it seems that man would not be bound to do anything but what utility or pleasure might recommend, or what a blind and lawless impulse might happen perchance to fasten on. The terms ‘upright and ‘virtuous’ would disappear as meaningless or be nothing at all but empty names. Man would not be able to act wrongfully, since there was no law issuing commands or prohibitions, and he would be the completely free and sovereign arbiter of his actions.”
I don’t want to say the viewpoint neutral revolution was wholly bad. Natural law can be problematic. For example, in classical times, the Greeks and Romans had a hierarchical conception of nature that they used to justify slavery. Before Christianity, it was believed that some people were just by nature born to be slaves or born to be rulers. Enslavers in the West and in the American south also tapped into this old classical idea of natural law to justify their slavery. The Christian conception of natural law, on the other hand, uniquely contains a common-humanity egalitarianism that gave rise to the abolition movement and the eventual abolition of slavery. But even Christian natural law can be misused. “Socially-defined boundaries on expressive freedom” can be lead to oppression of minority groups, including for example my own minority faith tradition, the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, which faced intense persecution through government and the law in 19th century America. The combination of liberalism and natural law gains its effectiveness in the balance and tension between the two principles. Because we don’t understand the true natural law in its fullness we can often err in its implementation and differ in its interpretation. A natural law society needs liberalism to balance out our human imperfections and allow for differences of opinion. It was only the combination of the two, however imperfectly applied, that could have brought out the best in the West.
Despite the challenges and uncertainties inherent in natural law, this 20th century rejection of Christian natural law from public administration in the US is very frustrating for Christians and Conservatives. It is clear that our country is fundamentally no longer what it used to be (again, for better or for worse) and that government and the law have changed against conservative and Christian interests and against their notions of common sense — but it is hard to piece together exactly what has changed and how or when. Legal decisions and social trends (despite a few gains from the recent conservative Supreme Court) in many cases actively promote immorality and evil or discourage strong families and child-raising.
Conservatives can’t help but see the outcome as a moral and societal decline — a society and government now directionless, purposeless, and valueless. On top of it all, because much of this shift happened through non-democratic top-down legal opinions and interpretations, Conservatives are left with a sense that we have been cheated and deliberately left out of the new system. Conservatives yearn for a return to a common sense Christian natural law framework for law and society — though they might not know to frame it in these terms — but feel powerless to do anything about it within the system.
In this context the eventual conservative backlash is not surprising, only a matter of time. The New Right seems to be in the early stages of gathering now, but fragmented and without any coherent understanding of what it is they are fighting against other than the “elites” of the current system, or what principles they are fighting for other than pure political power. If the New Right uprising misses the point, they risk igniting chaos for no gain. The danger is that the New Right tends to have lost hope in the current system, and focuses on “burn it all down” sorts of solutions, often including some kind of conservatively-enlightened monarchy or dictatorship to enact by force of will some new system that will be better only by virtue of not being the same as what we have now.
Unfortunately, most “post-liberal” conservatives misdiagnose the problem, and therefore threaten to make things worse. What they really want, as I see it, is a return to the old “common sense” Christian natural law political philosophy. Instead, their rhetoric rejects classical liberalism under the mistaken idea that the valuelessness and secularism of our age are due to John Locke and his liberal ideas of freedom and toleration. As I mentioned before, the success of the modern West and especially the US came from the combination of liberalism and Christian natural law, which tend to check and balance the extremes of the other. In the absence of Christian natural law beginning in the 20th century, liberalism has been distorted into something new and grotesque that was never intended by Locke or the Founding Fathers. The answer is not the complete elimination of liberalism by replacing it with authoritarianism, it is to correct the imbalance by restoring natural law to its rightful place where it can check the extremes and distortions of liberalism.
Another source for the now common misconception that Lockean liberalism is synonymous with viewpoint neutral secularism is political philosopher Leo Strauss, who deserves a post of his own.
Link to part four
