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From: JamesD@cup.portal.com (James A Donald)
Subject: Re: How Do we Derive Rights?
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Date: Sun, 28 Feb 93 09:47:53 PST
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Natural law and Natural rights
A short explanation of natural law in modern language, covering two
thousand years of philosophical debate, scientific enquiry, and bloody
wafare.
By James A. Donald
JamesD@cup.portal.com
Natural law and Natural rights follow from the nature of man and the
world, not from some divine revelation.
Natural law has objective, external existence. It follows from the ESS
(evolutionary stable strategy) for the use of force that is natural for
humans and similar animals. The ability to make moral judgments, the
capacity to know good and evil, has immediate evolutionary benefits: just
as the capacity to perceive three dimensionally tells me when I am
standing on the edge of a cliff, so the capacity to know good and evil
tells me when my companions are liable to cut my throat. It evolved in
the same way, for the same straightforward and uncomplicated reasons, as
our ability to throw rocks accurately.
Natural law is not some far away and long ago golden age myth imagined by
Locke three hundred years ago, but a real and potent force in today's
world, which still today forcibly constrains the lawless arrogance of
government officials, as it did in Dade county very recently.
The opponents of natural rights often complain that the advocates of
natural rights are not logically consistent, because we continually shift
between inequivalent definitions of natural law. They gleefully
manufacture long lists of "logical contradictions". Indeed, the
definitions we use are not logically equivalent, but because of the nature
of man and the nature of the world, they are substantially equivalent in
practice. These complaints by the opponents of natural rights are trivial
hair splitting, and pointless legalistic logic chopping. It is easy to
imagine "in principle" a world where these definitions were not
equivalent. If humans were intelligent bees, rather than intelligent
apes, these definitions would not be equivalent, and the concept of
natural law would be trivial or meaningless, but we are what we are and
the world is what it is, and these definitions, the definitions of natural
law, are equivalent, not by some proof of pure reason, but by history,
experience, economics, and observation.
In this paper I have used several different definitions of natural law,
often without indicating which definition I was using, often without
knowing or caring which definition I was using. Among the definitions
that I use are:
1. The medieval/legal definition: Natural law cannot be defined in the
way that positive law is defined, and to attempt to do so plays into the
hands of the enemies of freedom. Natural law is best defined by pointing
at particular examples, as a biologist defines a species by pointing at a
particular animal preserved in formalin. (This definition is the most
widely used, and is probably the most useful definition for lawyers)
2. The historical state of nature definition: Natural law is that law
which corresponds to a spontaneous order in the absence of a state and
which is enforced, (in the absence of better methods), by individual
unorganized violence, in particular the law that historically existed (in
so far as any law existed) during the dark ages among the mingled
barbarians that overran the Holy Roman Empire.
3. The medieval / philosophical definition: Natural law is that law,
which it is proper to uphold by unorganized individual violence, whether a
state is present or absent, and for which, in the absence of orderly
society, it is proper to punish violators by unorganized individual
violence. (Locke gives the example of Cain, in the absence of orderly
society, and the example of a mugger, where the state is exists, but is
not present at the crime. Note Locke's important distinction between the
state and society. For example trial by jury originated in places and
times where there was no state power, or where the state was violently
hostile to due process and the rule of law but was too weak and distant to
entirely suppress it)
4. The scientific/ sociobiological/ game theoretic/ evolutionary
definition: Natural law is, or follows from, an ESS for the use of force:
Conduct which violates natural law is conduct such that, if a man were to
use individual unorganized violence to prevent such conduct, or, in the
absence of orderly society, use individual unorganized violence to punish
such conduct, then such violence would not indicate that the person using
such violence, (violence in accord with natural law) is a danger to a
reasonable man. (This definition is equivalent to the definition that
comes from the game theory of iterated three or more player non zero sum
games, applied to evolutionary theory.) The idea of law, of actions being
lawful or unlawful, has the emotional significance that it does have,
because this ESS for the use of force is part of our nature.
Utilitarian and relativist philosophers demand that advocates of natural
law produce a definition of natural law that is independent of the nature
of man and the nature of the world. Since it is the very essence of
natural law to reason from the nature of man and the nature of the world,
to deduce "should" from "is", we unsurprisingly fail to meet this
standard.
The socialists attempted to remold human nature. Their failure is further
evidence that the nature of man is universal and unchanging. Man is a
rational animal, a social animal, a property owning animal, and a maker of
things. He is social in the way that wolves and penguins are social, not
social in the way that bees are social. The kind of society that is right
for bees, a totalitarian society, is not right for people. In the
language of sociobiology, humans are social, but not eusocial. Natural
law follows from the nature of men, from the kind of animal that we are.
Penguins innately have property rights in relation to other penguins
because they, like us, are innately property owning animals: They rightly
act as if ashamed when caught stealing nest building materials, and they
are rightly enraged and rightly attack when they catch another penguin
stealing nest building materials. In the same way people innately have
property rights in relation to other people. We have the right to life,
liberty and property, the right to defend ourselves against those who
would rob, enslave, or kill us, because of the kind of animal that we are.
Law derives from our right to defend ourselves and our property, not from
the power of the state. If law was merely whatever the state decreed,
then the concepts of the rule of law and of legitimacy could not have the
meaning that they plainly do have, the idea of actions being lawful and
unlawful would not have the emotional significance that it does have. As
Alkibiades argued, (Xenophon) if the Athenian assembly could decree
whatever law it chose, then such laws were "not law, but merely force".
The Athenian assembly promptly proceeded to prove him right by issuing
decrees that were clearly unlawful, and with the passage of time its
decrees became more and more lawless.
In the nineteenth century, in the English speaking world legislatures
claimed the right to create, rather than merely discover, criminal law.
They claimed that they could make what had been lawful unlawful, and what
had been unlawful, lawful. By the end of the nineteenth century most
judges came to more or less accept this claim. Inevitably a power so vast
and hubristic must be abused, today as it was two thousand years ago.
Philosophers usually try to reason from reason alone, as is done in
mathematics, though it was long ago proven that this cannot be done,
except in mathematics, and perhaps not even there.
To draw conclusions about the world one must look both without and within.
Like the chicken and the egg, observation requires theory and leads to
theory, theory requires observation and leads to observation. This is the
core of the scientific method, in so far as the scientific method can be
expressed in words.
Natural law derives from the nature of man and the world, just as physical
law derives from the nature of space, time, and matter.
As a result most people who are not philosophers or lawyers accept natural
law as the ultimate basis of all law and ethics, a view expressed most
forcibly in recent times at the Nuremberg trials. Philosophers, because
they often refuse to look at external facts, are unable to draw any
conclusions, and therefore usually come to the false conclusion that one
cannot reach objectively true conclusions about matters of morality and
law, mistaking self imposed ignorance for knowledge.
Although philosophers like to pretend that Newton created the law of
gravity, that Einstein created general relativity, this is obviously
foolish. Universal gravitation was discovered, not invented. It was
discovered in the same way a deer might suddenly recognize a tiger
partially concealed by bushes and the accidental play of sunlight. The
deer would not be able to explain in a rigorous fashion, starting from the
laws of optics and the probabilities of physical forms, how it rigorously
deduced the existence of the tiger from the two dimensional projections on
its retina, nonetheless the tiger was there, outside the deer, in the
objective external world whether or not the deer correctly interpreted
what it saw. The tiger was a discovery, not a creation, even though
neither we nor the deer could prove its existence by formal logic. And
proof of its concrete external existence is the fact that if the deer
failed to recognize the tiger, it would soon be eaten.
A determined philosopher could obstinately argue that the perception of
the tiger was merely an interpretation of light and shadow (which is
true), that there is no unique three dimensional interpretation of a two
dimensional image (which is also true), and that everyone is entitled to
their own private and personal three dimensional interpretation (which is
false), and would no doubt continue to argue this until also eaten.
Something very similar to this happened to a number of philosophers in
Cambodia a few years ago.
History
Natural law was discovered (not invented, not created, discovered) by the
stoic philosophers. This was the answer (not their answer, the answer) to
the logical problems raised by Socrates. The doctrines of the stoics were
demonstrated successfully by experiment, but political circumstances (the
Alexandrine empire and then the Roman empire) prevented a clear and
decisive experiment.
Frequently politicians or revolutionaries use natural law theory, or some
competing theory to create institutions. Such cases provide a powerful
and direct test of theories. Advances in our understanding of natural law
have come primarily from such experiments, and from the very common
experience of the breakdown or forcible destruction of state imposed
order.
The bloody and unsuccessful experiment of Socrates disciple, Critias,
showed that the rule of law, not men, was correct. This renewed the
question "What law, who's law." Not all laws are arbitrary, there must be
laws universally applicable, because of the universal nature of man. Laws
governing human affairs, or at least some of those laws, must derive from
some objective and external reality, not subject to the arbitrary will of
the ruler or the people. If this was not so, then it would be impossible
to make an unlawful law. Any law duly decreed by a legitimate ruling
body, such as the Athenian assembly, would necessarily be lawful, yet
history shows that this was obviously false. Some laws are clearly
unlawful. Proof by contradiction. Alkibiades used this argument against
Pericles' claim that property rights derived from the state, and the state
could therefore seize whatever it pleased, and use the property as it
wished.
"There is in fact a true law - namely, right reason - which is in
accordance with nature, applies to all men, and is unchangeable and
eternal." (Cicero) Cicero successfully argued before a Roman court that
one of the laws of Rome was unlawful, being contrary to natural law,
creating a legal precedent that held throughout the western world for two
thousand years. Although it was frequently violated, it was rarely openly
rejected in the West until the twentieth century.
The arguments and reasoning of the Stoics were generally accepted, but not
thoroughly put into practice and therefore not vigorously tested, for over
a thousand years.
A philosopher can choose to disbelieve in Newton's laws, but this will not
enable him to fly. He can disbelieve in natural law, but political and
social institutions built on false law will fail, just as a bridge built
on false physical law will fall, just as the deer that does not notice the
tiger gets eaten, just as the Marxist philosophers who voluntarily
returned to Cambodia to aid the revolution were for the most part murdered
or tortured to death by the revolutionaries. The most extreme failure in
recent times was the attempt of the Cambodian government to increase the
rice harvest by central direction of irrigation, also known as "the
Cambodian Autogenocide".
During the dark ages, the knowledge of natural law, like much other
ancient knowledge, was kept alive by the church. This knowledge proved
very useful. Hordes of armed refugees wandered this way and that, thus
tribal and customary law was often inadequate for resolving disputes.
Sometimes a king would rise up and impose his peoples customary law on
everyone around, but such kings came and went, and their laws and
institutions faded swiftly like the spume of a breaking wave in the midst
of a vast ocean.
In those days the church persistently and rightly claimed that natural law
was above customary law, and that customary law was above tribal law and
the law of the kings (fiat law). Natural law was taught in the great
Universities of Oxford, Salamanca, Prague, and Krakow, and in many other
places.
In England the theory of natural law led to the Magna Carta, the Glorious
Revolution, the declaration of right, and the English Enlightenment. It
was the basis for the US revolution, the US constitution, and the US bill
of rights, but now the US supreme court has now rejected this doctrine and
claims that fiat law is above natural law, and that the authority of the
constitution is not derived from natural law, and that the right to
private property is granted by the state, not innate in the nature of man,
and that the state is above the law.
The next major advance in our knowledge of natural law after the dark
ages came with the Dutch republic. The success of this experiment is
almost as illuminating as the failure of Critias. The failure of Critias
showed that the rule of law, not men was correct. The success of the
Dutch Republic showed that the medieval understanding of natural law was
sufficiently accurate.
The long revolution by the Dutch against Spain obliterated or gravely
weakened those people and institutions responsible for enforcing customary
law and fiat law, and little was done to replace these institutions for
two generations. But it is everyone's right and duty to forcibly uphold
natural law, thus in order to get a law enforced, or to get away with
enforcing it oneself, ones lawyer had to argue natural law, rather than
customary law. Thus the Netherlands came to be governed by natural law,
rather than by men or by customary law.
Society ran itself smoothly. This showed that natural law was complete
and logically consistent. Of course since natural law is external and
objective it has to be complete and consistent, but our understanding of
natural law is necessarily incomplete and imperfect, so our understanding
of it might have been dangerously incomplete, inconsistent, or plain
wrong. The experience of the Dutch strongly supports the belief that our
understanding of natural law, the medieval theory of natural law, is
fairly close to the truth. If natural law was just something that
somebody made up out of their heads, it would not have worked. Internal
inconsistencies would have lead to conflicts that could not be resolved
within natural law, requiring the man on horseback to apply fiat law or
customary law to resolve them. Incompleteness would have lead to
unacceptable lawless behavior. None of this happened, powerful evidence
that natural law is not just something invented, but something external
and objective that we are able to perceive, like the tiger, like the law
of gravity.
For a long time people advocated natural law merely because they thought
that if people pretended to believe it, it would lead to less bloodshed
and other desirable consequences, and no great effort had been applied to
the assumptions and methods of natural law theory. Now people started to
advocate natural law because they had convincing evidence that our
understanding of it was true. Thus came the English enlightenment, John
Locke and Adam Smith.
John Locke made a major advance to our understanding of natural law, by
emphasizing the nature of man as a maker of things, and a property owning
animal. This leads to a more extensive concept of natural rights than the
previous discussions of natural law. From the right to self defense comes
the right to the rule of law, but from the right to property comes a
multitude of like rights, such as the right to privacy "An Englishman's
home is his castle." Further, Locke repeatedly, in ringing words, reminded
us that a ruler is legitimate so far as he upholds the law.
A ruler that violates natural law is illegitimate. He has no right to be
obeyed, his commands are mere force and coercion. Rulers who act
lawlessly, whose laws are unlawful, are mere criminals, and should be
dealt with in accordance with natural law, as applied in a state of
nature, in other words they and their servants should be killed as the
opportunity presents, like the dangerous animals that they are, the common
enemies of all mankind.
John Locke's writings were a call to arms, an assertion of the right and
duty to forcibly and violently remove illegitimate rulers and their
servants.
This provided the moral and legal basis for many great revolutions, and
many governments. After the American revolution the North Americans were
governed more or less in accordance with natural law for one hundred and
thirty years.
John Locke was writing for an audience that mostly understood what natural
law was, even those who disputed the existence and force of natural law
knew what he was talking about, and they made valid and relevant
criticisms. In the nineteenth century people started to forget what
natural law was, and today he is often criticized on grounds that are
irrelevant, foolish, and absurd.
Today many people imagine that natural law is a code of words, like the
code of Hammurabi, or the twelve tables, written down somewhere, on the
wall of an ancient Greek temple, or some medieval vellum manuscript,
perhaps revealed by God or some divinely illuminated prophet. Then when
they find that no such words exist, no such prophets are recorded, they
say there is no such thing as natural law, because no one wrote down what
it was.
Natural law is a method, not a code. One does not reason from words but
from facts. The nearest thing to a written code of natural law is the
vast body of natural law precedent. But a precedent only applies to
similar cases, and is thus rooted in the particular time and circumstances
of the particular case, whereas natural law is universal, applying to all
free men at all times and all places.
In the middle ages the Medieval scholars defined natural law in a
deliberately circular fashion. There was "Ius Divinum", "Ius Commune",
and "Ius Naturale". "Ius Divinum" means, more or less, the divinely
revealed will of God. "Ius Commune" means, more or less, the long
established customary law of nations, peoples, and states that are
generally regarded as reasonably civilized.
Note that "Ius Naturale" does not derive from the customs of civilized
peoples. Instead it provides with a ground on which to judge which
peoples are civilized. It does not derive from the divinely revealed will
of God. It provides us with a ground to judge the plausibility of claims
of divine revelation concerning the will of God.
"Ius Naturale" is the law applicable to men in a state of nature. It
precedes religions and kings both in time and in authority. "Ius
Naturale" does not derive directly from the will of God. As Hugo Grotius
pointed out in the early seventeenth century, even if there was no God, or
if God was unreasonable or evil, the natural law would still have moral
force, and men would still spontaneously back it with physical force.
Natural law derives from the method and approach then called natural
philosophy. Today, in the language used by modern sociobiologists natural
law is the ESS (Evolutionary Stable Strategy) for the use of force,
employed by our species and by like species, applied by us by means of
reason to problems and circumstances that confront us today. In older
language, it comes from the tree of knowledge, which made us as gods.
Although natural law is an integral part of Christianity, at least of the
Christianity of Augustine and Aquinas, Christianity is not an integral
part of natural law. If you went through Locke's treatises of Civil
Government and substituted the phrase "chance and necessity" for the
phrases "divine providence" and "judgment of heaven", there would not be
any great change in the meaning or force of his argument.
Many of the key themes of modern sociobiology first appeared in Locke's
treatises on government, for example Second Treatise 79-81, First
Treatise 56-57. Some parts of the second treatise are often consciously
or unconsciously echoed on Public Broadcasting System nature and science
videos whenever they discuss the family lives and social interactions of
non human animals.
Locke and the other Christian advocates of natural law believed that
natural law was in accordance with the will of God not because they
claimed a divine revelation concerning the will of God, but because they
believed that the nature of man and the world reflected the will of God.
The stoics and Grotius believed in a universe governed by chance and
necessity, as do most modern advocates of natural law. Augustine,
Aquinas, and Locke believed in a universe that reflected the will of God.
It makes little difference. The stoics and Saint Augustine started from
the same facts and came to the same conclusions from those facts. They
merely used slightly different language to describe their reasoning.
Throughout most of our evolution, men have been in a state of nature, that
is to say. without government, hierarchically organized religion, or an
orderly and widely accepted means of resolving disputes. For the past
four or five million years the capacity to discern evil lurking in the
hearts of men has been an even more crucial survival capability than the
capacity to discern tigers lurking in shadows.
The primary purpose of this capability was to guide us in who we should
associate with, (so as to avoid having our throats cut in our sleep), who
we should make alliance with (to avoid betrayal), who we should trade
with, (to avoid being cheated), who we should avoid, who we should drive
away, and who, to render ourselves safe, we should kill.
It would frequently happen that one man would, for some reason good or
bad, use violence against another. When this happened those knowing of
this event needed to decide whether it indicated that the person using
force was brave and honorable, hence a potentially valuable ally, or
foolish and eager for trouble, hence someone to be avoided, or a dangerous
criminal, hence someone to be driven out or eliminated at the first safe
opportunity to do so. Such decisions had to be made from time to time,
and making them wrongly could be fatal, and often was fatal.
A secondary purpose of this capability was to guide us in our own conduct,
to so conduct ourselves that others would be willing to associate with us,
ally with us, do deals with us, and would refrain from driving us away or
killing us.
The capability to perceive good and evil has the same direct, immediate
and concrete evolutionary force behind it as the ability to throw rocks
accurately.
Not all things that are evil, or contrary to nature, are violations of
natural law. Violations of natural law are those evils that may rightly
be opposed by force, by individual unorganized violence.
The Medievals took for granted that natural law was morally and legally
binding on freeholder, Emperor and Pope alike, and during the dark ages
and for a little time after, men often attempted to enforce natural law
against the Holy Roman Emperor, and these attempts were sometimes
successful. On one occasion the Holy Roman Emperor was briefly imprisoned
for debt by an ordinary butcher, locked up with the beef and mutton, and
held by the butcher until the bill was paid, and this action was mostly
accepted as lawful and proper, though such actions were safer against some
emperors than others.
The definition of natural law that I have just given is similar to that
used in the middle ages, but this definition is not obviously scientific.
It fails to show that natural law is legitimately part of science. To
show that the study of natural law is part of science - part of
sociobiology, it is necessary to restate the definition in the same value
free, game theoretic, terminology that we would use to describe a
reproductive strategy in male dolphins.
Here follows a definition of natural law in properly scientific terms,
value free terms:
An act is a violation of natural law if, were a man to commit such an act
in a state of nature, (that is to say, in the absence of an orderly and
widely accepted method of resolving disputes), a second man, knowing the
facts and being a reasonable man, would reasonably conclude that the first
man constituted a threat or danger to the second man, his family, or his
property, and if a third man, knowing the facts and being a reasonable
man, were to observe the second man getting rid of the first man, the
third man would not reasonably conclude that the second man constituted a
threat or danger to third man, his family, or his property.
Note that in order to define natural law in a value neutral fashion we
require three people, not two.
This is well illustrated in the recent events in Dade county, Florida
(September - October 1992, three months before I wrote this), where
property holders gave other property holders guns in the well founded
expectation that those guns would be used to prevent, rather than to
facilitate, unlawful transfers of property. To define natural law in Dade
county you would need one looter or one corrupt official, and two home
owners. In value free language, one Dade county home owner and one
corrupt official is a property dispute. Two Dade county home owners and
one corrupt official is natural law in action. Two Dade county home
owners with nobody bothering them is spontaneous order, and of course part
of the definition of spontaneous order is that it is a stable order that
arises spontaneously from the action of natural law.
The scientific definition is equivalent to the medieval definition because
of the nature of man and the nature of the world. The two definitions are
equivalent for our kind of animal, because if someone uses violence
"properly", and reasonably, he does not show himself to be dangerous to a
reasonable man, but if someone uses violence "improperly", he shows
himself to be a danger. This is obvious by direct intuition, and there is
also overwhelming historical evidence for this fact. For example compare
the American revolution with the Russian or Cambodian revolution. The
surviving American revolutionaries prospered. The communist
revolutionaries were soon executed by their new masters. Almost everyone
who played a significant role in the 1917 revolution was executed or died
from brutal mistreatment.
The varying definitions of natural law are clearly consistent on the issue
of individual violence. On the topic of collective violence, the
questions of what are just grounds for making war, how may a just war be
conducted, and what may a just victor do with an unjust loser, the various
definitions of natural law often seem cloudy and contradictory. There are
two reasons for this apparent cloudiness. One is that there is no natural
definition of a collective entity, so it all depends on what gives the
collective entity its substance and cohesion, how the individual is a
participant in the acts of the collective entity. The Nuremberg trials
contain extensive discussions of this point. The other reason is that
there is a large difference between what the victor should do and what the
victor may lawfully do. The victor should be magnanimous and lenient, as
at Nuremberg, but may lawfully be strict and harsh. On the questions that
most commonly arise in practice, all the different definitions of natural
law give clear, consistent and straightforward answers: The usual reason
for war is that one group defines another group as enemy, and then uses
organized collective violence to seize the property of the members of that
group, and to enslave or kill them. In such case it is open season on the
aggressor because they constitute a clear danger to their neighbors. In a
just war it lawful to napalm bomb enemy civilians in a defended city, but
it is unlawful to massacre prisoners under any circumstances, though
individual prisoners may be executed for broad reasons. It is sometimes
lawful to refuse to take prisoners, depending on the circumstances. The
apparent contradictions evaporate when we ask the questions that we are
actually interested in, about the kind of situations that actually occur
in practice. We only get apparent contradictions when we ask artificial
phony questions about unrealistic situations concocted to "prove" that
natural law is logically inconsistent.
When we apply the value free theory of iterated non zero sum two player
games to the value free theory of evolution we get such value loaded
concepts as trust, honor, and vengeance. In the same way, when we apply
the value free theory of iterated three player non zero sum games we get
such value loaded concepts as natural law.
Natural law theory is a valid part of science, because any n person
natural law statement about values can be expressed as an explicitly
scientific, value free statement about rational self interest, evolution,
and n + 1 player game theory. It is also a valid part of the study of law
and economics, and the study of law and society. However academics
working in the latter fields are afraid to stray in the direction of
natural law, because of the threat of repercussions. Natural law
delegitimizes most grant giving authorities, and people who stray too far
towards the study natural law were also often threatened with physical
violence not too long ago, for example E.O. Wilson was repeatedly
threatened and often physically harassed primarily because he reviewed the
long established and overwhelming evidence that property and self defense
are innate in human nature, something that has been known for uncounted
centuries.
The study of law and economics is a desert, where academics debate pure
theory without any reference to the real world, without any attempt to
observe what actually happens in practice, because when you attempt to
observe dispute resolution in actual practice, you start to look at cases
where people eventually employ physical force, as individuals, but, in a
measured, appropriate, and socially approved way, (Ellickson), and if you
look at such cases too closely, you are looking at natural law in action,
your grants are likely to dry up, and you may get a "delegation" with base
ball bats banging on your office door.
The study of law and society is a swamp, for the same reason as the study
of law and economics is a desert. Whereas those who study law and
economics carefully avoid the arduous and dangerous study what really
happens in practice, and devote themselves to pure theory, those who study
law and society are drowning in a sea of meaningless and pointless
observations, that make no sense because they dare not examine where
social norms come from, and what the real consequences of social norms
are, and instead take norms as arbitrary givens, without origins or
consequences. These two fields have separate journals, and go to separate
conferences, for between the two areas of study is the forbidden zone -
natural law. To avoid this forbidden zone the law and society people
avoid theory, the law and economics people avoid facts.
Those academics who study sociobiology have been a little braver, perhaps
because those who work in the hard sciences are sometimes better at
looking after their own, or, as in the case of E.O. Wilson, they simply
did not realize they were poking a hornets nest. Also hard science people
tend to be tougher, more obstinate, stubborn, and intransigent than
fuzzies.
Hobbes Criticism of natural law
The existence and force of natural law has been continually disputed by
those who claim that the state should exercise limitless power over
individuals.
Early in the seventeenth century Thomas Hobbes argued that the nature of
man was not such that one could deduce natural law from it. Hobbes
claimed that in a state of nature, it is a war of all against all, and
life is "poor, solitary, nasty, brutish, and short". Therefor, he argued,
the state is entitled to unlimited power, and right is whatever the state,
through its laws, says is right, and wrong whatever the state says is
wrong.
It is true that during the dark ages, spontaneous order often failed, with
bloody consequences, but even a few examples of spontaneous order suffice
to demonstrate the existence and force of natural law, just as any number
of non tigers cannot disprove the existence of tigers, but two tigers are
sufficient to prove existence. In fact a state of nature is very rarely
the war of all against all, as Locke pointed out. Spontaneous order held
much more often than it failed. Natural law was the norm, both morally
and in practice. Of course was not effective all the time, but it was
effective often enough that its existence is an indisputable fact. Hobbes
history was simply wrong. He took the dramatic events of history, and
ignored the commonplace, and treated the dramatic events as the norm. In
addition, those dramatic and bloody breakdowns of order that did happen
during the dark ages were often the result of armies of refugees fleeing
the lawless and criminal activities of states.
The right to bear arms
During the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries natural law was accepted
in men's heads and in courts of law, as it always has been accepted in
men's hearts. The advocates of absolutism were defeated, first
intellectually, then politically, and then by force of arms. Kings who
claimed to rule by divine right were killed or forced to flee.
The Glorious Revolution of 1688 guaranteed an Englishman's right to bear
arms (a right now lost), and more importantly, prohibited the state from
using what we would now call a police force. The people were armed, state
was unarmed. Individuals, not the state or the mob, applied lawful force
when needed. This worked well, disproving the doctrine of monopoly of
force, which derives from the absolutists, notably Hobbes
In the medieval period the state had never had a large role in maintaining
order. Often it was a source of disorder. The Glorious Revolution
eliminated its role in enforcement for about two hundred years, while
legitimizing its role in judgment.
In a society where there is pluralistic use of force, respect for natural
law, and hence for natural rights, is essential to avoid strife and civil
war. Similarly a belief in natural rights tends to result in pluralistic
use of force, because people obviously have the right to defend their
rights, whereas disbelief in natural rights tends to lead to an absolute
monopoly of force to ensure that the state will have the necessary power
to crush peoples rights and to sacrifice individuals, groups, and
categories of people for "the greater good". Conversely a monopoly of
force leads to the denial of natural rights (by making it safe, and
profitable to disregard natural rights) and the disregard of natural
rights necessitates a monopoly of force to avoid frequent violent
conflict.
For a society where there is plurality of force to work peaceably and
well, there needs to be both respect for natural rights and also a
substantial number of people with a strong vested interest in the rule of
law.
A yeoman was the lowest rank of landowner, one who worked his own land or
his families land. In modern terminology a peasant farmer. A villain was
a sharecropper, a farmer with no land of his own. Naturally yeomen had a
strong vested interest in the rule of law, for they had much to lose and
little to gain from the breakdown in the rule of law. Villains had little
to gain, but less to lose. People acted in accordance with their
interests, and so the word yeoman came to mean a man who uses force in a
brave and honorable manner, in accordance with his duty and the law, and
villain came to mean a man who uses force lawlessly, to rob and destroy.
In practice free societies only arose where there was no monopoly of
force, the most notable and important examples being seventeenth century
England and eighteenth century North America. England, in the late
seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, exemplified the medieval ideal
of liberty under law, and Kingly rule under law. In the English speaking
world, government started to display disregard for natural rights about
fifty years after they introduced a police force, about the time that
people took power who had grown up in a state where police enforced the
law
The best present day example of a society with strong social controls and
weak government controls, a society with plurality of force, is
Switzerland. (Kopel) In peacetime the Swiss army has no generals, no
central command. Everyone is his own policeman. By no coincidence
Switzerland is also the best modern example of the right to bear arms.
Almost every house in Switzerland contains one or more automatic weapons,
the kind of guns that the American federal government calls "assault
rifles with cop killer bullets". Switzerland has strict gun controls to
keep guns out of the hands of children, lunatics and criminals, but every
law abiding adult can buy any kind of weapon, from handguns to bazookas,
cannons, and howitzers. Almost every adult male owns at least one gun,
and most have more than one, because of social pressures and the
expectation that a respectable middle class male citizen should be well
armed and skillful in the use of arms. It is also no coincidence that
respect for property rights in Switzerland is amongst the highest in the
world, possibly the highest in the world. Switzerland also has lower tax
levels than any other industrialized country.
Today the state is losing cohesion and its ability and willingness to
maintain order and enforce the law is visibly diminishing. We can once
again expect to see armed conflict between the modern equivalent of
villains and yeomen. Indeed we are already seeing it. The recent LA
riots (April 1992, eight months ago as I write this) are often described
as a race riot, and to some extent they were. Yet there was as much
violence by unpropertied Mexicans attacking Mexicans possessing small
businesses, as there was violence by unpropertied blacks attacking Koreans
possessing small businesses. Black shop owners had their shops looted and
burnt by blacks in the same way as Korean shop owners had their shops
looted and burnt by blacks. This was an attack by villains on yeomen,
caused by the flight of the police, not a black versus Korean race riot.
Civil Society and the State
At the time that Locke wrote, natural law was about to become customary
law, because the state was disarmed and the people armed. For the most
part the common law of Locke's time was already consistent with natural
law, but on some matters judges had to perform contortions to render the
form of common law consistent with the substance of natural law. Much
common law came from Roman law, and the law of the late roman empire was
often quite contrary to natural law. Freedom of association is a right
under natural law, a crime under Roman law. Under the law of the roman
empire any association not compulsory was forbidden. In order to avoid
repudiating roman law without violating natural law, the English courts
had to perform elaborate contortions, and today the 59th sole prerogative
of the holy roman emperor still lives on in America, in the form of the
concession theory, which holds that a corporation is a part of the state,
a portion of state power in private hands. This bizarre and convoluted
legal fiction is highly inconvenient for businessmen, vastly lucrative for
lawyers, and is a dangerously potent weapon in the hands of irresponsible
bureaucrats and lawless judges.
Under the code of Justinian a corporation is a fictitious person created
by the fiat of the holy roman emperor. Under natural law a trust is
created by the promises that the officers of the trust make to it. (In
the latin of the early dark age "trustis" meant "band of comrades".)
Hobbes argued that what we would now call civil society was nonexistent,
or should not exist, or existed only by the fiat of the state. He argued
that voluntary and private associations should be suppressed, as a threat
to the power of the state, and hence a threat to order, or should only
exist as part of the apparatus of the state.
Locke argued that the legitimate authority of the state was granted to it
by civil society, that the state existed by the power of civil society,
that this was its source of power morally and in actual fact.
Until the twentieth century Locke's position was widely accepted as self
evident. When the state was unarmed and the people armed, as in
eighteenth century England and America, it was indeed self evident.
During the nineteenth century the utilitarians and the absolutists (then
calling themselves political romantics) argued that the state derived its
power from its capacity for large scale force, and only that, and that in
order to impose the greater good on reluctant groups and individuals the
state should have a total and absolute monopoly of all force. They
therefore argued that the power and authority of the state came from force
alone, and should come from force alone, that the state did not derive its
substance from the civil society, that what appeared to be private and
voluntary associations in reality derived their cohesion from the power of
the state, and therefore the state could and should remake them as it
willed, that contracts derived their power from the coercion of the state,
not from the honor of the parties to the contract, and therefore the state
could decide what contracts were permissible, and had the power and the
right to remake and change existing contracts.
In the twentieth century this view came to widely accepted. People came
to believe that civil society only existed by fiat of the state, that the
state existed because its army and police were armed, and the people were
unarmed, that the state existed by force. Even people who loved freedom,
such as Hayek, reluctantly accepted this idea as true.
During decolonization the UN created governments in accordance with this
false idea, the idea that all a state required to exist was firepower
superior to that of private citizens, and that with superior firepower it
could create a civil society, if needed, by fiat. The newly created
governments attempted to remake or eliminate civil society in accordance
with this false idea.
As a result of this false idea, in the third world and in the former
soviet empire, a number of governments have collapsed or are close to
collapse. Leviathan derives his cohesion from civil society, Without a
strong civil society the police, the army, the bureaucracy and the
judiciary tend to dissolve into a mob of individual thieves and hoodlums,
each grabbing whatever he can, and destroying whatever he cannot. It is
civil society that holds the state together. The state does not hold
civil society together. Society is not a creation of the state. The
state is a creation of society.
Locke has been proven right, Hobbes proven wrong, by an experiment much
vaster and bloodier than that of Critias, but equally clear and decisive.
Many states have attempted to use something other than the civil society
to provide the glue that hold them together, to provide them with the
cohesion they need. Some have succeeded for a time, usually by using
religion or the personal charisma of the leader in place of civil society.
Those rulers that succeeded in using these substitutes put very great
effort into their substitutes, showing that they were conscious of the
weakness of their building materials, and, more importantly, showing that
they were conscious that the state cannot hold itself together. It must
be held together by something external to itself. It cannot give order to
the rest of society, it must be given order by something outside itself.
Rulers that use something other than civil society to provide cohesion for
their states are in practice a danger to their neighbors, and an even
greater danger to their subjects. For this reason civil society is the
only legitimate material from which a state may be made. A state based on
something else is illegitimate. The neighbors of such states rightly and
reasonably regard themselves as threatened, and so they should seek, and
for the most part they have sought, to undermine, subvert, corrupt, and
destroy such states, and to assassinate their rulers. History has shown
that not only was Locke correct factually, he was also correct morally.
Not only are states normally based on civil society, they should based on
civil society.
The soviet empire used the religion of communism to give their state
cohesion, while the state obliterated civil society and physically
exterminated the kulaks (the Russian equivalent of the English yeoman).
When the rulers had faith, they were a danger to their neighbors. When
they lost their faith their empire eventually fell, and their statist
society is collapsing as I write, showing that democracy without economic
liberty is worthless and unworkable, whilst Chile, Taiwan and Thailand
show that economic liberty eventually leads to all other liberties,
because most natural rights are derived from the right to property. A
civil society can only exist if there is a reasonable degree of economic
freedom, if property rights are respected.
Modern opposition to natural law and natural rights.
During the nineteenth century the advocates of limitless state power made
a comeback with new rhetoric, (the utilitarians) or the same old rhetoric
dressed in new clothes (the political romantics,], and in the twentieth
century they were politically successful, but militarily unsuccessful.
The absolutists keep adopting new names as each old name starts to stink,
but in the nineteenth century, the time when they were intellectually most
successful, they mostly called themselves romantics, identifying
themselves with the then fashionably artistic and cultural movement,
although most of the political "romantics" were as talented at poetry or
painting as Hitler was. When the fascists came to power the romantics
totally disappeared, mostly calling themselves relativists. The name
relativist failed to shake the stink of the gas ovens where the Jews were
exterminated, and they are changing it yet again. Since the extermination
camps set up again, in what used to be Yugoslavia, relativists have almost
disappeared, by the time you read this there will be no more relativists,
they will all be Post Modernists. The seventeenth century absolutists
argued that to deduce natural law and natural rights from the nature of
man was wrong, because the nature of men was wicked. The romantics argued
that there was no such thing as a universal and constant nature of man,
that every nation had its own nature, and it was therefore right for each
nation to do as its own particular nature required, the relativists argued
that man had no innate nature, and the post modernists claim that
everything exists by convention alone, having no external objective
existence, and that such conventions can be changed by arbitrary power.
Regardless of the name, and regardless of the rhetorical flourishes used
to make the doctrine sound different from what it is, their doctrine
remains the same: that justice is whatever courts do, that any law
whatsoever is lawful, that right and wrong is what the law says it is and
the law is whatever the nation says it is. This is the doctrine of
absolutism, and anyone who advocates this doctrine is an absolutist, no
matter how many names he thinks up for himself. Because these ideas
acquired a bad odor in the seventeenth century, people are always finding
new and different ways to express these ideas, so that they sound
different, whilst remaining the same.
The doctrine called relativism is the same as seventeenth century
absolutism, but the rhetoric that the "relativists" used to defend it
sounds superficially like the rhetoric used by the opponents of
absolutism, just as the name sounds as if they are opponents of
absolutism. In particular, the "relativists" aped John Locke's Letter
concerning Toleration, but where Lock was arguing for the liberty of the
citizen, the "relativists" used similar sounding language to argue for the
license of nations. Clearly the choice of name was dishonest and
intentionally misleading. "Absolutist" was a well defined and well known
word when the "relativists" defined themselves. The "relativists" opposed
Locke, while draping themselves in Lockean symbols.
In the same way the "Post Modernists" use a name that claims that their
doctrine is entirely new and unconnected with what went before, and they
claim that to examine modern doctrines and compare them to medieval
doctrines is a foolish waste of time ("Studying dead white males"), and
that one should not compare the current doctrines of "Post Modernists"
with the earlier doctrines, even earlier doctrines preached by the same
people. When they defend their two thousand year old positions with three
hundred old arguments, they liberally decorate their arguments with
meaningless and irrelevant references to the latest fashions and newest
music stars, so as to give the sound and appearance that these doctrines
and arguments are brand new, and absolutely unconnected to earlier
doctrines.
The absolutists/ romantics/ relativists/ post modernists continually
change their name and plumage in a vain effort to escape their past, but
the stink of piles rotting dead lingers on them.
The utilitarians have a more plausible and attractive appearance. They
say that any act of force and coercion by the state is proper and lawful
if it aims for the greatest good of the greatest number. Sounds pleasant
and reasonable, does it not? Such a doctrine would be sound if the world
were not what it is. It would be a fine doctrine if humans were
intelligent bees instead of intelligent apes, but we are not, and it is
not.
Utilitarianism has two serious problems, problems that most utilitarians,
especially communists, regard as advantages. The idea of the greatest
good for the greatest number implies that someone should be in charge,
with the authority and duty to sacrifice any one persons property,
liberty, and life, for the greater good. It also assumes that a persons
good is knowable, and that other people can judge this good for him, make
decisions on his behalf, and balance that good with other peoples good.
Since any one person is expendable, then there can be no such thing as
human rights, as Bentham frankly argued. Clearly the doctrine of the
greatest good is going to be highly attractive to those intellectuals who
envisage themselves as being in charge of deciding what is good for other
people, deciding whose property shall be confiscated for the greater good,
who shall be imprisoned for the greater good, or for his own good.
Many people have attempted to construct utilitarian arguments for limiting
the authority of the state, most notably John Stuart Mill, but their
arguments are always feeble, implausible, strained, and forced. It is
even difficult to make a convincing utilitarian argument that rape is
unlawful. Feminist utilitarians who attempt to construct utilitarian
arguments against rape have been forced to make unreasonable assumptions
about males and male sexuality. The "rights" deduced by these convoluted,
elaborate, and unconvincing rationalizations are not rights at all, but
are akin to what the utilitarians call "positive rights".
Utilitarianism contains false implicit assumptions about the nature of man
and the nature of society, and these false assumptions lead utilitarians
to the absurd conclusion that a good government should create and enforce
a form of society that in practice requires extreme coercion and intrusive
supervision by a vast and lawless bureaucracy.
Today instead of frankly arguing that human rights are nonsense, as
Bentham did, modern utilitarians use elaborate euphemisms, such as
"positive rights" and "positive freedom". Utilitarians now call natural
rights "negative rights". Who would want a "negative" right? A "positive
right" is in practice the precise opposite of a right. A "negative right"
is the right to be left alone, for example "An Englishman's home is his
castle", "freedom of speech". A "positive right" is, in practice, a
government guarantee that it will supervise, direct, and control you for
your own good, for example the "right to employment", of which Marxists
are so fond. (Or used to be fond back in the days when Marxists existed
outside American universities.) You will notice that the "right to
employment" enjoyed by the workers on Cuban sugar plantations is in
practice very similar to the "right to employment" that they enjoyed when
they were slaves on those plantations. If they run away from the
employment that the benevolent state has so kindly assigned to them, they
will be hunted down, and, if captured, returned, beaten, and set to work
again. In the same way the "right to employment" enjoyed by the workers
on Russian collective farms was very similar to the "right to employment"
that they enjoyed on these farms when they were serfs. Of course these
modern slaves also have the "right" to a guaranteed fair wage, and so
forth. Unfortunately they are not guaranteed that there will be anything
in the shops for them to buy with their guaranteed fair wages. Indeed in
rural areas they are not guaranteed there will be any shops at all. They
are not permitted to go to the shops that the elite goes to, and they are
not permitted to travel any significant distance from their place of
employment, rendering their "salaries" utterly meaningless. "Positive
rights" ape the forms of a free society, without the substance.
Since the fall of communism we have heard less talk about positive rights
and positive freedoms. A right is only a right if, as with the rights to
life, liberty, and property, you can rightfully use necessary and
sufficient force to defend yourself against those who interfere with your
exercise of that right. A right is no right at all if it is granted to
you by the benevolence of your masters. Nonetheless the utilitarians
continue their assault on the language.
The utilitarians started by trying to transform the meaning of "good", and
they have continued to try, with some success, to change the meaning of
words so as to make it impossible to express thoughts that question the
legitimacy and authority of the state. They have partially succeeded with
"law", They are having some success with the word "right". Thus in
America civil rights now means almost the opposite of natural right. For
example being for "gay rights" now means that you are opposed to freedom
of association. Being in favor of freedom of association is now
understood to mean that you are against the right of privacy. It is
difficult to express the idea that the state should neither force people
to accept homosexuality, nor use force to suppress homosexuality. It is
now difficult to express the idea that sexuality is not the proper
business of the state, that morality should be neither forbidden nor
compulsory, that force and violence is the proper business of the state,
not sin or social exclusion. This perversion of the word "rights" makes
everything the business of the state, directly contrary to the normal
meaning of "right". Similarly most people today find it very difficult to
comprehend the meaning of the ninth amendment, because the language has
been so perverted as to make such subversive ideas inexpressible.
The utilitarians have constructed an artificial language in which it is
impossible to express such concepts "the rule of law", "natural rights",
or any idea or fact that would reject the limitless, absolute, lawless and
capricious power of the state, and they seek to impose that language on
the world. They condemn and reject as meaningless nonsense any words
capable of expressing these ideas. In an effort to control peoples
language they have gone beyond the usual academic tactics of censorship,
vicious personal abuse, and career threats, and have on some occasions
threatened actual physical violence against people who persistently use
language potentially capable of expressing subversive ideas.
How could one express in utilitarian speak the idea that the condemnation
orders issued by the government against home owners in Dade county
September 1992 were unlawful, that the home owners had the right and the
duty to resist attempts to evict them with all force necessary, that their
effective and successful resistance was lawful regardless of what pieces
of paper the government manufactured? If I attempted to say this in
utilitarian speak I would end up saying that the government had not done
its paper work correctly, or that government reallocation of land would be
suboptimal!
Those of us who seek to protect and restore freedom must avoid using the
words our enemies seek to impose on us. The only way to escape from this
trap is to use the language of natural law, the language with which a free
society was envisioned and created, the words for which so many people
killed and died. If we submit to using words that prevent us from
expressing the thought of limits to government power and authority, then
there will be no limits to government power and authority.
Words carry with them systems of ideas. The only system of ideas capable
of repudiating limitless and absolute state power is natural law. It is
impossible to speak about limits to the power and authority of the state
except in the language with which such ideas were originally expressed.
No other language is available.
If someone rejects the language of natural law, refuses to use such words,
pretends not to comprehend them, and rejects them as meaningless, then he
is not interested in using words as a medium of communication. He is
merely using them as a method of control. It is pointless to attempt to
communicate with such a person.
Utilitarians have repeatedly attacked the US constitution and the bill of
rights, as a creation of "rich white males". The utilitarians claimed
that the limits on popular sovereignty, were designed to ensure that those
"rich white males" remained wealthy and powerful. The utilitarians have
successfully destroyed many sections of the bill of rights, notably the
fifth amendment (no taking of private property) by denouncing them as a
rich mans plot against the people and by progressively changing the
meaning of the words.
It most doubtful that other peoples good is knowable in principle. It
certainly is not knowable in practice. In practice, whenever any
organization makes a serious attempt to ascertain the greater good it is
submerged in a flood of paperwork, and to defend itself against this flood
of paper it strangles everything it touches in red tape. It unavoidably
finds itself imposing, by increasingly lawless violence, a procrustean and
arbitrary concept of the good. If I take a slight detour on my way to
work I go through rent controlled East Palo Alto, where I can watch my tax
dollars at play, and observe this destructive process in operation.
The most dramatic and devastating demonstration of the difficulty of
knowing the greater good, and the most famous and best known, was of
course the attempt of the Cambodian government to increase the rice
harvest by central direction of irrigation. This led to irrigation
ditches being dug in nice neat straight lines without regard to small
scale topography, with the result that they failed to transport water, it
led to wetland rice being planted on land that remained dry, dry land rice
being planted on land that became submerged, and so on and so forth. The
peasants, foreseeing death by starvation if they continued to pursue the
greater good, selfishly sought to pursue their own individual good,
contrary to the decrees of their masters. Their masters imagined
themselves to be responsible for feeding the peasants, so they were
reluctantly forced to use ever more savage terror and torture to force the
starving peasants to pursue the greater good. For the sake of the greater
good, the peasants were forced to watch their starving children murdered,
for the sake of the greater good they were forced to maim and break those
they loved with crude agricultural implements, for the sake of the greater
good they were brutally and savagely tortured, for the sake of the greater
good they died horrible and degrading deaths in vast numbers, all for the
greatest good of the greatest number.
Similar, though less extreme, events have occurred throughout the vast
majority of the third world. Cambodia was merely the most monstrous of
these of these events, but there have been many others, smaller in scale
but equal in horror and depravity. In countries where people live close
to hunger, most of the third world, state intervention to improve people
lives has invariably resulted in mass starvation, these catastrophes being
most photogenic in Africa. This mass starvation has often resulted in
resistance the these benefits and improvements, which has resulted in
extraordinarily brutal terror and torture, to extort continued submission
to government aid. Especially entertaining is the suffering of the
unfortunate recipients of government to government aid. One notable
example is the World Bank resettlement program in Ethiopia, where hundreds
of thousands of people who failed to appreciate the generous aid their
Marxist government provided them were resettled in extermination camps
built by the World Bank, and shipped to those camps in cattle trucks
supplied by the World Bank (Bandow, Bovard, Keyes). Another amusing
example of your taxes at work providing the greatest good for the greatest
number was the World Bank's Akosombo dam project (Bovard, Lappe 35 37).
Most attempts to determine the greatest good for the greatest number have
had similar outcomes, it is just that in affluent societies the
consequences are less flagrant, less brutally obvious. In a poor society
an attempt to provide for the greatest good for the greatest number
usually results in starvation, death, torture, and maiming. In an
affluent society it merely produces poverty, fatherless children,
homelessness, street crime, and discreet police violence.
Even if it were possible in principle to determine the good of others, and
impose that good on them by force, history shows us that it is not
practical. When one considers utilitarianism in real life, it necessary
to laugh, so as to avoid weeping.
Whereas the absolutists produce mere hills of corpses, and then
hygienically process the hills into useful products like soap and
lampshades, the utilitarians produce them in mountains, but the
utilitarians shake the stench more easily, blandly professing their good
intentions and casually waving away the tens of millions of murdered women
and children.
Whenever the ugly ideas of the absolutists are put into practice the
absolutists change their name and rhetoric, from absolutist to romantic to
relativist to post modernist, Whenever the nice ideas of the utilitarians
are put into practice, the utilitarians shrug their shoulders and say,
"but that is not what we intended, it was all a mistake, and anyway it is
all the fault of the greedy capitalists, if our ideas were put into action
properly all would be well," claiming that professed good intentions
outweigh any number of foul deeds. By their fruit you will know them.
Since the Cambodian irrigation project and the World Bank African
assistance program the utilitarians have been unable to shake the stink
quite so easily, and some utilitarian factions are now trying out new
names. The phrase "the greater good" is at last starting to sound like a
polite euphemism for lawless state violence.
Prediction
In the west, for the last four hundred years, society been shaped by
ideas, with a lag of roughly one human lifetime between the idea and the
social order. Today statism continues to grow at an ever accelerating
rate, but the rationalizations that justified statism are no longer
believed. The professors can fail students who disagree with them, but
they can no longer convince. One can now endorse natural law in a
university without facing physical danger, which was not the case ten
years ago.
The state commands and spends ever more wealth, intrudes into our lives in
ways that are ever more intimate and detailed, exercises ever greater
power, backed by ever more severe punishments, often for deeds that it
only declared illegal a few years ago, while at the same time the states
capacity to coerce, to collect taxes, and to generate legitimacy continues
to decline at an ever accelerating rate. Ever fewer people listen to
political speeches, or feel identification with the winning party. People
are less inclined to imagine that voting can make any difference, less
inclined to believe that legislation or courts possess moral authority.
Both trends are driven by simple and powerful forces that are easy to
understand. Numerous books, both serious (public choice theory) and
humorous, and even a television series ("Yes Minister") have explained
these forces and why they are unstoppable. These two trends will
inevitably collide in the not very distant future, are already beginning
to collide. The states every increasing use of lawless coercion will
collide, is already colliding, with its ever decreasing capacity to
coerce. Dade County, the citizens militia in the LA riots, the tax revolt
in Italy, all foreshadow the coming collision. The citizens of California
noticed that the only Koreans who were killed in the LA riots were
unarmed. There were no casualties amongst those Koreans who defended
their property with gunfire. Gun sales have risen accordingly. If all
goes well in Italy, that government will soon be insolvent, the money that
it issues worthless.
This collision will recreate, over several decades, a situation where
there is plurality of force. Free societies have only arisen where there
is plurality of force. Of course plurality of force does not guarantee a
free society. It merely makes it possible. Social collapse is also
possible. During the coming crisis we must keep our eyes fixed on the
simple ancient truths of natural rights and natural law. We must
discriminate between those who use force lawfully and those who use force
unlawfully, and must act accordingly, we must discriminate between those
who deal honorably and those who deal dishonorably, and must act
accordingly. If we do that then we will have a functioning civil society.
The statists are a string of sand. The Greeks, in their war with the
Persians, demonstrated that the true unity that comes from common
adherence to the rule of law is more powerful than the appearance of unity
that comes from common submission to centralized authority
Bandow, Doug. (1989) "What is still wrong with the world bank?" Orbis
(Winter): 73 - 89
Bovard, James (1988). "The World Bank vs. the World's Poor." The Freeman
(May): 184 - 187
Ellickson, Robert C., (1991). "Order without Law, How Neighbors Settle
Disputes" Harvard University Press.
Keyes, Alan. (1986). "Ethiopia: The UN's Role." Statement by the Assistant
Secretary for International Organization Affairs before the Subcommittee
on African Affairs of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Washington
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Kopel, David B. (1992) "The Samurai, the Mountie, and the Cowboy" 278 -373
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