Abomination!

I love the word abomination.  It’s like sin to the Nth degree.  Technically the word means something horrible or shameful usually with religious undertones.  An abomination is not merely a sin against God, it is the product of a violation of the very laws of Nature.  See here our dear monster created by Dr. Frankenstein as an example.

This concept of Natural Law is held by all the Abrahamic religions, though the credit goes to St Thomas Aquinas in the Thirteenth Century.  The theory is that God created a world of order, nature, and any action that is in keeping with nature is good and any that goes against it are evil.

However Aquinas is not the originator of the theory but merely the one who Christianized it.  The origin lies with Aristotle and the Stoics, who in turn influenced Roman Law.  We can trace the theory of Natural Law from Aristotle and the Stoics to Aquinas to Thomas Hobbes, John Locke, and Thomas Jefferson.

Although Natural Law is imbedded within Christian thought, its origins are non-Christian.  The order of the Natural world, whether created by God or mere trial and error causality, does exist – it is a rational reality.  Therefore when Thomas Jefferson declared “that we are endowed by our creator with certain inalienable rights” he is making an appeal to Nature, whether this Nature is created by God or not is largely irrelevant, though it certainly adds weight to the argument if there is an all-powerful divine being behind it.

Many of my regular readers will be aware that my token deity is Athena, the goddess of Truth, Justice, and Reason.  Of course I do not believe in a literal Athena.  She is more of a symbolic belief, along the lines of Santa Claus.  I might just have easily chosen El, aka “God”, as my deity, for he too is a God of Reason.

The first verse of the Gospel of St. John reads, “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God”.  The original Greek text uses the word Logos for Word, meaning:  speech, oration, discourse, quote, story, study, ratio, word, calculation, reason.  In Stoicism, logos referred to the active, material, rational principle of the cosmos.  These meanings would not have been lost on John’s Greek speaking readers.  What St. John was declaring here is that Jesus was the physical manifestation of divine Reason, the source of Natural Law.

For centuries Christianity held Western Europe together, and in many ways it still holds Western Civilization together.  It may surprise some that the Vatican has always supported the sciences.  This was derived from the notion that God gave man a rational mind to understand a rational God and the rational universe that He created.  Galileo was not locked away for his theories.  He was locked up because he wouldn’t shut-up.  The Church did not believe that people were ready for the idea that the Earth revolved around the sun.

The problems came when the understanding of Nature through the sciences contradicted Christianity itself.  Today the Church largely subscribes to the theory of Deistic Evolution.  This states that the creation story of the Bible is not to be taken literally and that evolution is the means of God’s creations.   Fundamentalist Christians however still subscribe to the literal creation and see evolution as an error because it goes against the word of God as outlined in the Bible.

This is the first of two contrary sets of laws opposed to Natural Law and is called Divine Law.  Until the Nineteenth Century both Natural Law and Divine Law were seen as complimentary, and for the most part they were and still are; however as our understanding of reality expanded through scientific discovery, the Divine Law of God as declared through religious institutions became increasingly irrelevant to the equation.

When was the last time you heard someone make an appeal to Natural Law?  I certainly don’t hear it outwith arguments against homosexuality, even though appeals to Natural Law were once common.  In Western Culture the Natural Law is kind of like a cop.  The police officer is just a man in a uniform carrying a badge.  So what.  But his uniform and badge are symbols of state authority.  This makes the cop more than just some guy.  He is a representative of state power and force.

Likewise Divine Law backed Natural Law.  Once the two parted company the Natural Law became viewed as a matter of opinion.  It required an understanding most people lacked.  It was easier to say, “Don’t steal because God says so” rather than, “Theft is wrong because it destroys social relations, and man is by nature a social animal (i.e. theft does not support the subsidiary precept of living in society).”

Another aspect that devalues the concept of Natural Law is our Artificial Reality.  This is the reality of the man-made, either material or social, and requires human time, energy, and skill to maintain.  The wealthier a society is the better it is able to shield itself from the effects of Nature and therefore the consequences of violating Natural Law.  But this state only exists as long as there is enough human time, energy, and skill to sustain it.

This brings us to the second contrary set of laws known as Positive Laws.  No, this does not mean positive as in optimistic.  Positive Laws are man-made laws as opposed to the laws of Nature or the Divine.  Where this distinction is most apparent is in the field of human rights.

The proponents of both Natural and Divine Law would argue that the rights to life, liberty, property, and the pursuit of happiness are innate and inalienable because they are given by either Nature or God respectively.  The theory of Positive Law would argue that rights are man-made and therefore granted via the man-made laws of the State.

The most extreme examples of this come from Hitler’s Germany, Stalin’s USSR, Mao’s China, and Castro’s Cuba where the State decided whether you lived or died.  A less extreme picture comes from our modern mixed economies where the State decides that you have a right to an education, a place to live, healthcare, and in some places even a job.  All of these “rights” are paid for through the forced redistribution of wealth thus violating the individual’s Natural Right to the results of his time, energy, and skill – his property.

In the traditional model, Natural Law was superior to Positive Law and Divine Law trumped them both, however today the Positive Law is the law of the land.  First off Divine Law only applies to Christians or other religious folk, so that’s out.  Unless of course the religion in question is Islam and we are afraid that they might blow us up if we depict Mohammed or appear racist.  As for Natural Law, well that can be cruel.  We do not want people being poor, uneducated, or without healthcare and we certainly cannot trust people with freedom of speech because they might hurt someone’s feelings or someone might say something socially deemed “hateful”.   Also Natural Law favours the strong and adaptable, and sometimes those people are not very nice (in my opinion), so we need Positive Laws to make sure we have social, as opposed to natural, justice.

The problem with that view is that Reality is a harsh mistress.  You may feel that you can violate Natural Law because you have the human time, energy, and skill at your disposal to fend off Reality, but like a man hiding in a tree from a patient tiger every civilization must one day answer to Nature and pay the piper.

I find it amusing that Nature sells.  People talk of “getting back to nature” or eating “all natural foods”.  And yet generally speaking these same people are against the concepts of Natural Law.  The Natural world is one of cause and effect, action and consequence, and sometimes it’s not very pretty.  Nature favours the strong, the adaptive, and among humans the rational.  There is no special dispensation for the cute, nice, weak, foolish or the well-intentioned.

Likewise, as anyone who has ever played a “god game” such as Civilization or Age of Empires can tell you, the size of the population is dependent upon the level of production.  If the production falls below a certain level, then people die.  The population contracts to match the level of production.

And yet the deniers of Natural Law believe that they can decrease production because of some moral or environmental concern without consequence.  From my limited experience, the people who want to save the trees and stop logging live in cities hundreds, if not thousands, of miles away from the small towns dependent on forestry.  Likewise California is still in the midst of a two year self-imposed drought cause by diverting the water supply from farmlands to protect the “endangered” bay smelt – a two inch long fish.  The once number one agriculture producing area in America now boasts a 40% unemployment rate.  According to Natural Law this is an abomination.

I am fond of saying “Neither God nor Man” in reference to the Romantic.  We stand defiant of both.  We deny the power of any religious institution over us and we deny the authority of the State.  We reject both the laws of the God and the laws of the Man, the Divine and the Positive.  This is why Romantics are historically seen as being “evil” – a label that this “Evil Dandy” embraces with ironic relish.

But the Romantic is not godless or lawless or evil.  The laws of God and Man may be accepted and obeyed, provided that they do not violate the Natural Law as the supreme law.  For the Romantic, “In the beginning was Reason and Reason was with God and Reason is God”.

The Romantic philosopher Rousseau believed that nature was pure and civilization evil.  It is from this that Romantics came to so embrace the notion of the noble savage living in harmony with nature as being pure.  There is even the theory that Columbus did not dub the American natives Indians because he thought he was in India, rather it was from the Spanish “In Dios” or “with God”.

I would argue that a civilization cannot exist, rise and prosper without being attuned to Natural Law.  The fall comes from the arrogant belief that Artificial Reality is a permanent state independent of the human time, energy, and skill required to maintain it.  I think of the foolish King Xerxes who ordered the sea to be whipped with 300 lashes as punishment for preventing his invasion of Greece, and the wise King Cnut who demonstrated the foolishness of his flatterers by “commanding” the tides not to advance.  One king thought his power supreme over Nature and the other knew better.

Human arrogance is not found in building a great civilization.  It is not in the glorious monuments or in the feats of engineering.  It is not in the great cities or in the mass of industry.  It is not found in its people, their production, or their achievements.

Human arrogance is found in halls of kings, princess, presidents, legislators, bureaucrats, and their flattering courtiers in the ivory towers and the newsrooms who believe that they can legislate and regulate the hearts and minds of men.  Positive Laws can govern the Artificial Reality of man, but those laws cannot alter Nature any more than King Cnut could order the tides to cease.

It is this inalterability of Natural Law which makes it supreme.  It can be flexible, but it cannot be broken without consequence, unintended or otherwise.  This poses a problem for ideologues that prefer the subjectivity of Positive Law to the obstacles to their ideology posed by the objectivity of Natural Law.

The Constitution of the United States is based on Natural Law.  This posed a problem for those Americans who advocated the supremacy of Positive Law.  So the academic apologists created the idea of the “living Constitution”.  According to this theory, the Constitution is not so much a code as a guideline to be uniquely interpreted by each generation.

How can a legal system based on Natural Law be taken as a guideline?  An aeroplane must be designed and built within the parameters dictated by the laws of nature as determined through science.  These are laws and not guidelines.  Break the laws and the plane either does not fly or it crashes.    The same holds true of the US Constitution.

When a society or civilization comes to the belief that thoughts, feelings, laws, legislation, and regulation can change the natural forces inherent in the physical world, the human mind, or even the market derived from them both, then that society is on the road to collapse.

Of course it is easy for me to write this in the isolation of my secluded little world, but what about practice?  You my reader might agree whole-heartedly with the principles of Natural Law and Natural Rights, but what about in the practical day to day when these principles go against your social conditioning or morals?

This past week, candidate for the Kentucky US Senate seat, Rand Paul, a libertarian-wing Republican, just got caught in a special little trap designed especially for a libertarian.  Libertarians hold the Natural Rights of life, liberty, property, and the pursuit of happiness to be innate, inalienable, and paramount.  Sounds great in theory, but what about practice?  If you have the right to use and dispose of your property as you choose, then what if you choose to use your property in a manner that is deemed immoral by society?

On Rachel Maddow's program Rand Paul was asked his views on the portion of the 1964 Civil Rights Act which prevents the owners of businesses from refusing to serve customers solely because of their race.  According to the idea that Natural Rights are paramount, the government is in the wrong to force business owners to serve anyone that they do not wish to serve for any reason, including race.

Rand Paul held to his libertarian philosophical principles and walked right into the trap.  The next day the media declared that Paul is against the Civil Rights Act, which is often seen as a landmark piece of legislation.  Furthermore, by being against the act, then he must be a racist and in favour of segregation, not to mention the usual name-calling of crazy, out-of-touch, and extremist.

Paul can argue his points philosophically, as I am doing here on his behalf, but the mass media does not allow for the level of education required to bring the masses to where they can understand his point.

In a society that is taught that Positive Law is supreme, the Natural Law seems cruel and unpleasant on a gut level.  For them, it is morally superior to pass a law to forbid segregation than to honour the rights of a bigot.  The counter to this is the famous summary of Voltaire’s work, “I may not agree with what you have to say, but I will die for your right to say it.”  In other words, people have the right to be assholes, racists, bigots, and jerks, provided they do not violate the rights of another person.

If you go into a place of business open to the public and cause a disturbance, the owner of the property, through his agents, may have you removed from the premises on the grounds of trespassing.  You the customer are only allowed to be on the premises because the owner permits you to be on his property.  Likewise, he has the right to refuse service to anyone for any reason.  Many pubs in the United Kingdom have a sign posted outside forbidding football colours.  Many businesses in the United States have a policy of “no shirt, no shoes, no service”.  Some places in the UK forbid “hoodies”. The customer does not have the right to be served and the owner does have the right to refuse service.  We accept this on every level except when it comes to discrimination.

Because Positive Law trumps Natural Law in our society, a business owner does not have the right to refuse service to someone based on race, religion, or sexual preference.  He does not have the right to permit smoking on his premises or the consumption of other legal products in some cases.  At this point the State becomes the moral arbiter using the force of law to dictate behaviour and the extent of your rights.

Should the State be the supreme moral arbiter?  Do you agree with the aspect of the Civil Rights Act pertaining to business?  You cannot in principle answer yes to both.  Rand Paul recognises this and is branded a racist.  The general public does not recognise this, so the mass media driven mob goes on the rampage.

Is discrimination wrong?  Yes.  However the libertarian argument is that the means of change is not the force of government and the violation of individual rights but  through force of persuasion.  According to Natural Law you must fight for what you want.  It may be easier to fight for government legislation, but the moral course of action is to persuade each business owner individually that such discriminatory practices are bad for business and if need be organise a boycott to press the point.  This approach forces each individual to act rather than passively expecting the government or some special interest group to sort things out for you.

Another key component of Natural Law is personal responsibility.   The Natural Rights are innate and inalienable.  If you believe that these rights are from God, then any violation of these rights makes you answerable to Him and you might go to Hell for the trespass.  If you believe that these are from Nature and simply part of the human condition, then what is necessary to claim, defend, and sustain these rights?  You may have a right to your property, but what are you going to do if I take it from you?  The answer is force.  It is your responsibility to claim, defend, and sustain your rights and if necessary be prepared to use force as a last resort.

In a civilized society we out-source the use of force to groups such as the police who act on our behalf.  In wilder times, one might hire a strong man or gunslinger as an agent.  This is all natural and normal.  The problem comes when we become so complacent in the arrangement that we forget that we are ultimately solely responsible for our rights and that the company we out-source to works for us.

Every Saturday the socialists, communist, and alleged anarchists gather in Glasgow City Centre with their tables all set-up, flags and banners waving, and selling copies of “The Socialist Worker”.  Every time I walk past them I feel my righteous anger and calculate all sorts of arguments that I never speak.  They have a right to be there and advocate slavery.

One day a few years ago two members of the British National Party stood a safe and respectable distance away holding up copies of their newspaper, about 50 yards/meters off.  The BNP is basically a NAZI party, socialists with a racist policy.  It did not take long for the other socialists/communists to respond.  Soon a mob of about twenty people gathered around these two men chanting, “Nazi scum get-off our streets”.  To their credit, the BNP men did not engage but simply stood stoically.

When the police arrived they rightly defended these men who had a right to be there no matter what they were advertising.  Eventually the police did not believe that they could protect these men any longer and helped them leave.  The crowd cheered.

The two BNP men were outnumbered and in no position to defend their right to free speech against an angry mob.  Fortunately, the police were there with the force of government behind them to protect and defend their rights when they could not.

What would have happened if the socialists were in charge?  We see an example in Article 10 of the European Convention on Human Rights.

Article 10 – Freedom of expression

1. Everyone has the right to freedom of expression. This right shall include freedom to hold opinions and to receive and impart information and ideas without interference by public authority and regardless of frontiers. This article shall not prevent States from requiring the licensing of broadcasting, television or cinema enterprises.

2. The exercise of these freedoms, since it carries with it duties and responsibilities, may be subject to such formalities, conditions, restrictions or penalties as are prescribed by law and are necessary in a democratic society, in the interests of national security, territorial integrity or public safety, for the prevention of disorder or crime, for the protection of health or morals, for the protection of the reputation or rights of others, for preventing the disclosure of information received in confidence, or for maintaining the authority and impartiality of the judiciary.

This is an example of Positive Law.  Your rights come not from God or Nature but from the State.  According to Article 10 you have the freedom of speech, except in certain circumstances.  And who defines these circumstances?  Who determines what kind of speech is a threat to health or morals?  Why, the State of course.

Compare this to the First Amendment of the US Constitution based on Natural Law:

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.

Under Natural Law the government is an agent of the individual out-sourced for the protection of his Natural Rights.  Under Positive Law the government is the source of the rights and therefore its enforcer.  Rights are subject to the dictates of the ruling establishment or the whim of the majority in the case of a social democracy.   If the State determines that the BNP is immoral, then they forfeit their freedom of speech.  If the State determines that the shop owner is a racist, then he forfeits his property rights.  This works great if you agree with the State, but if not then you are screwed.

Another important document based on Natural Law is the US Declaration of Independence.  It is basically a very polite and reasoned declaration of war.  It accuses the British government of violating the Natural Rights of the people of the thirteen colonies and as all rights are secured and defended by force and all peaceful attempts at reconciliation have failed, the only alternative is for the colonists to reclaim their rights through force.  This is sometimes called the right to revolution.

At present the people of the West have come to tolerate abomination because we have been socially conditioned to do so.  I would venture that the Romantics of the Nineteenth Century were they alive today would not.  The intrusion of government through laws and regulation would no doubt be seen as over-extending their brief.  The arrogance of claiming the superiority of Positive Law, and by extension the law-makers, over the laws of God or Nature would be abhorrent to them.

When Obama’s Secretary of the Interior, Ken Salazar, can use language like, “Our job basically is to keep the boot on the neck of British Petroleum” in regards to the recent explosion on the BP oil rig and not be seen as fascist is beyond me.  It is not enough for there to be an accident which BP is cleaning up.  No, the government has to come out against the “evil” oil company and play the tough guy to the morally outraged public.

Sir Francis Bacon observed that nature to be commanded must first be obeyed.  We live in a man-made world and a man-made society governed by man-made laws.  This is natural.  We are creatures of reason and through that reason emerges civilization.  However the parameters of human creation is defined, dictated, and limited by the Laws of Nature.  We may debate and argue the essence and tenacity of these laws, but we ignore, violate and deny them at our peril.  To do so will result in an abomination.