A few days ago I heard a young friend of mine utter the phrase "I don't believe in natural rights. There are no such things." Hearing my own self from a year ago, I began a conversation with him about what exactly he meant by it. Having come to hold the ideas of natural rights and equality to be inseparable from liberty in our time myself, the irony of this is not lost on me.
I wrote a letter on the subject to a friend of mine on the subject of my own journey out of that position. I post the text of it below with his permission. Apologies for the copy errors, as I originally wrote it by hand.
Dear Thomas,
My friend, you asked me how I came, from a firm opposition to the very idea of natural rights, to hold true and precious that very doctrine as the last, best hope for freedom.
I laugh to say it that way, but it is true. I feel no need to reacquaint you with the reasons by which aristocracy can commend itself, nor to remind you of the beautiful, serene harmony that a hierarchical view of the world provides.
My journey began when I told Arnn that I did not believe in natural rights, though at times I would like to—I simply could find no argument for the existence of these magical primary substances by whose possession we are entitled to X and Y and Z.
He stopped me and said, “Jody, of course you believe in natural rights.” He said it gently, paternally, and with more than a little amusement, as one speaks to a child or an adolescent who has discovered one of the fundamental problems of adult life and consequently lost all perspective.
“You are not a dog,” he continued, “and so you ought not to be treated like a dog. You are not a horse and so you ought not to be treated like a horse. You are a man, and so you ought to be treated like a man. This is the essence of natural rights: that there are certain ways it is right for men to treat each other, because it is according to their nature.”
A slightly longer explanation can be taken from the middle of Alexander Hamilton’s editorial, “The Farmer Refuted”:
“Good and wise men, in all ages, have embraced a very dissimilar theory. They have supposed, that the deity, from the relations, we stand in, to himself and to each other, has constituted an eternal and immutable law, which is, indispensibly, obligatory upon all mankind, prior to any human institution whatever.
This is what is called the law of nature, [he now quotes Blackstone] "which, being coeval with mankind, and dictated by God himself, is, of course, superior in obligation to any other. It is binding over all the globe, in all countries, and at all times. No human laws are of any validity, if contrary to this; and such of them as are valid, derive all their authority, mediately, or immediately, from this original" [Hamilton then continues].
Upon this law, depend the natural rights of mankind, the supreme being gave existence to man, together with the means of preserving and beatifying that existence. He endowed him with rational faculties, by the help of which, to discern and pursue such things, as were consistent with his duty and interest, and invested him with an inviolable right to personal liberty, and personal safety.”
The first thing I must say is that Hamilton’s understanding of the self-evident law of nature causes as many problems for a systematic treatment of justice and for the realization of justice in human affairs as does free will itself.
Men disagree about the law of nature and they fall victim to the temptation to claim their own part and interest as nature and justice. This diminishes neither its reality nor its beauty. Virtue and justice are easily missed and fallen short of, but no glorious thing comes with the guarantee that we may obtain it.
It is a common argument made that there are no rights but only authority and responsibilities—at least; it is common at Hillsdale, usually among those who believe the American Revolution illegal and unbiblical. This argument, I think, is not the serious stumbling block it seems, but merely a combination of a poor understanding of the theory of natural rights and a desire to feel intellectually superior. It has, at least, been the case in my own life and most of those I have seen. I will let your experience of Hillsdale students—particularly Stewart students—argue for me on this point.
To my own thought, rights are shorthand for the way we ought to live and be treated which is in accordance with our nature. dikaiosyne is a right ordering of all things, is it not—whether in the soul, in relations between two men or in a political body?
Rights bring with them inseparable duties. God has given us life and faculties, and our responsibility is to use them well—how absurd it would be to say that we lack the authority to do so! A right is not a mere entitlement—for it can be violated—and those who think they should be rejected seem to me to be throwing out the Declaration because the progressives perverted it. To the Protestant who claims there is no natural law but only divine revelation and the laws of man, I ask the following questions:
Say that your government orders you not to worship God, or to worship false gods. You will disobey, and rightly so. But is this simply because it is against the Scriptures? Even had it not been explicitly revealed in them, would you not still rebel against such manifest wrongness? This, then, is the law of nature, written on the hearts of men. This is why evil laws are an affront not only to the Divine Legislator but to mortal men, you and I, as well.
So I have come to agree with Arnn that all well educated men in our day believe in natural rights, whether they acknowledge it or no. But I owe you more of an explanation: I have not told you why I have accepted equality and democracy.
The short answer is that I read Democracy in America, which was written to persuade aristocrats that such times are over and we must learn to live in the new world. The long answer is in the following quotes:
“After the general idea of virtue I know of none more beautiful than that of rights, or rather these two ideas are intermingled. The idea of rights is nothing other than the idea of virtue introduced into the political world. It is with the idea of rights that men have defined what license and tyranny are. Enlightened by it, each could show himself independent without arrogance and submissive without baseness. The man who obeys violence bows and demeans himself; but when he submits to the right to command that he recognizes in someone like him, he raises himself in a way above the very one who commands him. There are no great men without virtue; without respect for rights, there is no great people: one can almost say there is no society; for what is a union of rational and intelligent beings among whom force is the sole bond?”[1]
I think Tocqueville is right that all societies have had some notion of rights—not “equal for all” certainly—but the point I wish to make is that there are such things, though they are not any more primary substances than legal rights are.
My metaphysical misgiving put to rest, I came finally across the passage which I think is—of all of them—most responsible for the change in my own views.
Tocqueville is writing about the differences between artistocracy—inequality, not the Aristotelian regime—and democracy, or a social state of equality like ours today.
“In this century [viz. the early 19th], when the destinies of the Christian world appear to be unresolved, some hasten to attack democracy as an enemy power, while it is still getting larger; others already adore it as a new god that issues from nothingness; but both know the object of their hatred or their desire only imperfectly; they do combat in the shadows and strike only haphazardly.
What do you ask of society and its government? We must understand each other.
Do you want to give a certain loftiness to the human spirit, a generous way of viewing the things of this world? Do you want to inspire in men a sort of contempt for material goods? Do you desire to give birth to or to maintain profound convictions and to prepare for great devotions? Is it a question, for you, of polishing mores, of elevating manners, of making the arts shine? Do you want poetry, renown, glory? Do you intend to organize a people in such a manner as to act strongly on all others? Do you destine it to attempt great undertakings and, whatever may be the result of its efforts, to leave an immense mark on history?
If this is, according to you, the principal object that men ought to propose for themselves in society, do not take the government of democracy; it would surely not lead you to your goal.”
My whole heart cried yes to those questions. I want glory, execellence, nobility. But I want it for me, for my thymos, not because I think it best for those around me. When I think, I can make arguments that the average peasant was happier than bourgeois man, and I believe them.
There is a tranquility that comes with being ruled, and with having one’s place in a great hierarchy that cannot be found in democracy. The community that aristocracy provides tells a man who he is, what his duties are, and even his destiny.
Democracy provides nothing which does not come from within the man himself. Equality renders us more naturally separate and alone. But the barrenness of it is a wilderness in which men may ennoble themselves in greater numbers than ever before. Still, my preference was for the heights of glory, not a higher average. Tocqueville goes on:
“But if it seems to you useful to turn the intellectual and moral activity of man to the necessities of life and to employ it in producing well-being; if reason appears to you more profitable to men than genius; if your object is not to create heroic virtues but peaceful habits; if you would rather see vices than crimes, and if you prefer to find fewer great actions on the condition that you find enormities [of evil]; if instead of acting within a brilliant society it is enough for you to live in the midst of a prosperous society; if, finally, the principal object of government, according to you, is not to give the most force or the most glory possible to the entire body of the nation, but to procure the most well-being for each of the individuals who compose it and to have each avoid the most misery, then equalize conditions and constitute the government of democracy.”
I doubt my feelings on this choice need any elucidation. I have never been partial to being limited or ignored while the floor is raised. But what Tocqueville wrote next cut me to the quick, and it was this, I think, that impelled me to change my beliefs and whatever in my way of life depends on them accordingly.
“If,” he writes, “there is no longer time to make a choice and if a force superior to man already carries you along toward one of the two governments without consulting your desires, seek at least to derive from it all the good it can do; and knowing its good instincts as well as its evil penchants, strive to restrict the effects of the latter and develop the former.”[2]
It is good that we accept equality, if we wish to be of any use to those outside the scope of our own families. Would even our own friends permit an aristocracy among themselves? I think not.
Though we recognize the existence of natural aristoi, even Hillsdale students who love the past would not permit a legal or inherited inequality to be founded among them. How much less so our fellow citizens?
No, I had to let go my love of old stories of kingship as the best regime, to moderate myself and say with Tocqueville: “all those in the centuries we are now entering who try to base freedom on privilege and aristocracy will fail… nor is there a legislator so wise and so powerful as to be in a position to maintain free institutions if he does not take equality for his first principle and creed.”[3]
It is not, however, a question of learning to live weak, separate and alone. “When plain citizens associate, they constitute very opulent, very influential, very strong beings—in a word, aristocratic ‘persons’.” Political and private associations must take the place of lords.
The answer to the weakness of individuals is to unite them. The press was a great engine of this in his day; the Internet is even more enabling in our own.
The dangers of democracy you have, of course, heard a thousand times. Soft despotism. [The link is actually two good quotes] There are two “fatal ideas” we must avoid (we lovers of the old way). The first is that equality must, of necessity lead to anarchy. The second is that it must end in soft despotism.
I know many a Christian who, “[having] discovered the path that seems to lead men invincibly toward servitude, they bend their souls in advance to the necessary servitude; and despairing of remaining free, at the bottom of their hearts they already adore the master who will soon come.
The first [equality รจ anarchy] abandon freedom because they deem it dangerous; the second because they judge it impossible.
If I [Tocqueville] had this latter belief, I would not have written the work you just read; I would have limited myself to groaning in secret about the destiny of those like me.”
One last quote:
“It is no longer a question of retaining the particular advantages that inequality of conditions procures for men, but of securing the new goods that equality can offer them. We ought not strain to make ourselves like our fathers, but strive to attain the kind of greatness and happiness that is proper to us.”
That is, in so many [11] pages as it took weeks, the story of how I came to embrace democracy.
The means by which equality and liberty can be combined (religions, associations and local gov’t) I will not include in this letter, although I would be glad to do so in the next.
Democracy is not without its problems, and some of the solutions—especially the idea of “self-interest well understood,” which teaches men that their interest is to be virtuous, rather than proclaiming the beauty of virtue—feel alien and even shallow, but I am convinced that it is not my place to reject them, for they are what must keep us free.
We must not make the perfect the enemy of the good.
There is still a need for statesmanship—perhaps greater than ever before in history. But this letter is long enough and I am done for now.
The Lord bless you and keep you.
The Lord make His face shine upon you and be gracious unto you.
The Lord lift up His countenance upon you, and give you peace.
J. Lent
Dear Jody, I read most of this. Thank you. I will try to read it all at some point :)
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