It Is Dangerous to Be Right When the Government Is Wrong (2 page)

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What are these truths, but “natural laws”? What other laws are there, with which human commands must accord? As we shall see, there are natural rights every human possesses by virtue of being human which protect our essential “yearnings” from government interference. And as we shall also see, man-made laws are only valid to the extent that they comport with and are subject to these natural rights. This is all known as the Natural Law.

This scheme is in contrast to the legal philosophy of Positivism, which says that laws need not pass any kind of moral muster to be considered valid. In other words, laws are purely “posited” by human beings, and governments are not constrained by principles such as human rights, fairness, and justice when making those laws. Not only is this philosophy that “law is whatever the government says it is” untrue, but it has facilitated mankind's biggest catastrophes and legitimized the most malevolent regimes in human history. Why were Hitler and his policies “evil”? After all, they were enacted by a popularly elected government that followed its own procedures to acquire power and enact lawful laws. Positivists have no answer to this question, because they cannot tell us
why
killing millions of innocent civilians is wrong: For Positivists, the Final Solution was just as valid as a law prohibiting jaywalking. Thus, under the Positivist scheme, our rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness are only as safe as our government would care to have them.

Why do we even care whether a law must comport with the Natural Law to be considered valid? After all, if the consequence of not obeying a law is imprisonment, then we will obey that law regardless of whether it is valid or not. The answer is because, like Khrushchev's corn plan, every time the government's commands flout the Natural Law, evil occurs, and we lose sight of the dream which our Founders enshrined for us in the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution. We must hold the government accountable for its violations of our natural rights if we are ever to have liberty. As Jefferson once said, “Eternal vigilance is the price of liberty.” And as St. Augustine said and St. Thomas Aquinas taught, “An unjust law is no law at all.”
¹

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This Congress Hereby Declares Gravity to Be Illegal: It Is Too Much of a Downer

Before we can discuss what precisely the Natural Law encompasses, we must examine its basis in the Eternal Law. The Eternal Law can essentially be thought of as those laws which govern the functioning of the universe, such as the laws of physics, anatomy, chemistry, mathematics, and biology. These laws are imprinted into the very order and nature of things. As an example, molecules of water can only ever be comprised of two hydrogen atoms and one oxygen atom. Change that composition, and you no longer have water. Moreover, the laws of chemistry also dictate that when water is cooled to below thirty-two degrees Fahrenheit, its molecular structure shifts, and it turns into ice. Whether one thinks of these laws as scientific rules, or the product of the divine and infallible will of God, it cannot change the following: These “truths” are immutable, and the universe is and always will be subject to them.

Furthermore, these rules are self-evident, which is to say that although we may attempt to understand their workings, their truthfulness requires no explanation or proof. When humans study science, they are essentially trying to recognize and explain those rules to which we are subject, and thus be able to predict the future outcome of an interaction between two or more “things.” The field of medicine, for example, tries to understand how a bacterial infection will respond to a particular antibiotic. If we do so, then we can know when and under what circumstances a particular antibody should be prescribed to restore the body to its normal, healthy state. We are therefore operating within the Eternal Law; and as any scientist will tell you, scientific rules don't change. Only man-made theories for what those rules are and how they operate may change.

However, without an explanation or understanding, those rules remain just as “true”: Penicillin will combat certain infections, and gravity will always pull things toward the center of the earth, regardless of whether or not we understand how. In other words, explanation and human understanding cannot make those truths more “true”: They rely on nothing human for their existence. If they did, then they would change along with all of the vagaries in taste and flaws in reasoning of the human mind. Thus, these laws transcend the temporal human mind and all of its imperfections. Although this may seem abstract now, it will make more sense when we explore other kinds of laws which do require an explanation for their truth, and a basis for their existence.

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Consider what would happen if, based upon legislative findings that gravity was causing too many injuries to falling senior citizens, Congress declared that henceforth all things shall fall at a slower speed. Clearly, this would not change the way that matter interacts with gravity, and thus the manner in which the universe functions. Rather, it would just distort other (man-made) calculations of the force of gravity: Although gravitational force would no doubt be calculated at lower numbers due to Congress's laws, falling would hurt just as much. Consequently, we would sadly have just as many injured senior citizens as we did before, but we would have the illusion that Congress was doing something positive to protect seniors.

It would be equally ridiculous if Congress tried to declare that 2 + 2 = 22, or by printing money, there was more “value” in an economy with which to purchase goods and services. As St. Thomas More's character states in Robert Bolt's play
A Man for All Seasons
, “Some men think the Earth is round, others think it flat; . . . . But if it is flat, will the King's command make it round? And if it is round, will the King's command flatten it?
No
.” Clearly, the Eternal Law is an absolute limit on the will and power of the government. Thus, it is another self-evident truth that humans can never alter, and are always trumped by, the eternal and natural laws, or if you prefer, God's laws and nature's laws, or as Jefferson said, “The Laws of Nature and of Nature's God.”

The Yearnings of Mankind

St. Thomas Aquinas stated that the Natural Law was the role in which human beings play in the Eternal Law. The primary distinction between human beings and other objects of the Eternal Law is that we are in possession of reason and free will. As stated above, human beings are able to recognize self-evident truths about the world in which we live through observation and the application of reason to those observations. Thus if we go to bed at night and the ground is dry, and we observe the next morning that the dirt has turned into mud, we are able to reason that it rained during the night. Moreover, we exercise reason and free will in order to realize all of our fundamental human yearnings, such as life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. This inclination to reach a proper end (our yearnings) through the application of reason is the Natural Law; it is our human nature. Although this may all sound abstract, we experience this process on a daily basis: Since we have a human yearning to provide for ourselves and our loved ones, we have learned through the exercise of reason that we can best accomplish that “proper end” by going to work nearly every day. Thus, it is a fundamental human inclination to exert energy to meet one's natural needs. If we don't, we die.

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This, of course, begs the question of what are those “proper ends” that God has dictated we as humans
naturally
strive for, or—for our secular readers—what nature has dictated that we instinctually strive for. Indeed, it is the perceived subjectivity of the answer to that question which has made Natural Law an unappealing philosophy to many. As was mentioned above, one of the traditional answers was “all of those things which we yearn for.” To begin with, all living things strive for self-preservation. Thus, it is a natural inclination to consume food and water, and to defend oneself from attacks. However, as humans possess certain traits which are peculiar to themselves, there are additional “ends” which we do not share with other animals. For example, it is a natural yearning to love, to acquire knowledge, and to express oneself creatively. Those yearnings, however, do not lend themselves to being “listed.” In fact, to do so is to tread into dangerous territory because if we only recognize those listed yearnings, then we are in danger of disparaging others that we leave out. As we shall discuss below, the Founders recognized this problem and provided a solution to it with the Ninth and Fourteenth Amendments.

Since I first read the Declaration of Independence as a high school student, I have been fascinated with the concept of self-evident truths. If we agree with the generally accepted definition of self-evident truths—those which do not require hard evidence in order to evince acceptance—we run into two problems. The first is that at some time there surely must have been some evidence that caused universal acceptance of these truths; as in, it is self-evident that the Sun rises in the east every morning because the ancients and we have seen it there; as in, every human being has material needs to stay alive because the ancients and we have gotten hungry and cold and awkward at nakedness; as in, all things are subject to the laws of cause and effect, except for the uncaused cause, whom believers call God and our secular colleagues call Nature. These observations of the Sun and realizations of our own self-needs are, in fact, evidence for their universal acceptance. But the universality of these “truisms” (another way of saying self-evident truths) allows us to dispense with the need to provide scientific evidence in support of them whenever we articulate them. Stated differently, no rational person can seriously challenge truisms when we use them as building blocks for our arguments.

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The second problem we need to confront when commencing an argument with truisms is the realization that many people are willfully blind even to the obvious. Thus, while the truism that “all Men are created equal” may have been self-evident to the Founders
²
, it surely was not self-evident to King George III or to the millions on the planet then and now to whom the divine right of kings provided and still provides a moral basis for tyranny. Moreover, it was not self-evident to the Founders themselves that “all Men are created equal” applied to all human beings, not solely to property-owning adult white males.

From the above we can conclude that not every person in every age is sufficiently exposed to the truth so as to recognize it. Because we are all fallen—that is, our human nature has inherited the imperfections of original sin—we do not always recognize a truism. This is so because the truth is often inconvenient, painful, and upsetting; and it requires rational thought, acceptance of revelation, and personal courage to pursue.

Jefferson's remarkable, radical insistence that “all Men are created equal” and are “endowed by their Creator” with certain “unalienable Rights” and that among those rights are “Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness,” and all these principles are “self-evident . . . Truths,” was surely inconvenient, painful, and upsetting to many and hardly self-evident to the elites of his time. What about women, what about people of color, what about children, what about those without property: Why wasn't the self-evident truth of their equality and their natural rights recognized? And if the king didn't morally have all the power he claimed to have, how did the colonists come to occupy the land that he gave them via their predecessors? Even the most enlightened of men were blind to some truisms.

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What does it take to peel away errors of willful blindness? It takes intellect and free will. That we all possess the free will to pursue the truth, the intellect to recognize and accept it, and that its pursuit is the ultimate goal of human activity, is the ultimate truism. There are many self-evident truths that all rational persons recognize. Some come from human reason (the Sun rising, our needs for food, shelter, and clothing, as examples), and some come from revelation (we have the rights to life, liberty, property, and happiness; it is wrong to lie, cheat, steal, and murder, as examples). Some come from reason and revelation (government is essentially the negation of liberty; humans have free immortal souls while governments are finite and based on coercion and force). But the concept of self-evident truths—or truisms—is absolutely essential to freedom. Truisms reject moral relativism, and American exceptionalism. They compel an understanding of the laws of nature that animate and regulate all human beings at all times, in all places, and under all circumstances. And truisms equal
freedom
.

Once we recognize those human yearnings, we can begin to understand the evil of government commands which infringe upon those yearnings. The Third Reich provides a case study in how governments devise policies and institutions which trespass on just about every human yearning there is, and the human suffering which inevitably follows from those trespasses. It is wrong to detain, torture, and murder humans because they possess an inherent inclination to roam the world freely, to avoid pain, and to preserve their lives. Compulsory sterilization is wrong because humans possess a yearning to reproduce. Proscription of free speech is wrong because it violates the natural human urge to express oneself and communicate ideas to others. Confiscation of property is wrong because humans endeavor to produce things which enrich their lives or can be traded for other things which do so. Requiring accountability or imposing surveillance is wrong because humans desire privacy; i.e., to be left alone. When government interferes with the natural order of things, whether as innocently as planting corn in Siberia, or as atrociously as exterminating persons, there are always disastrous consequences. And even if flouting the natural law benefits a majority (as is typically the claim), there will always be someone who pays the price of having his human nature transgressed upon. Proponents of Positivism and the welfare state have not been able to demonstrate even one credible example to the contrary.