Happy Father’s Day to all fathers
I started writing 12 years ago because I wanted to document for my children the reasons for my religious and political beliefs. More importantly, the predicates upon which those beliefs are grounded are very important. In today’s world even Christian conservatives pull back a little when talking or writing about their beliefs. Nowhere is this more apparent than in the arguments today about political philosophy, policy and economic theory.
The “efficiency defense” of liberty and economic freedom is not enough. Comparing free societies to totalitarian states is only an empirical observation—just like the theory of evolution. It doesn’t tell us about the “why”. Recognizing that the management of a free society without reference to “the natural law” and the Biblical Principles upon which it rests will eventually prove destructive of liberty itself.
Let me start this series with a quote from Fr. Robert Sirico the founder of The Acton Institute and a Catholic Diocesan Priest:
“No civilization in the history of the world has survived or flourished without a religious foundation (even in Pagen and non-Western cultures—jml). Nor have classical great liberal thinkers neglected the spiritual nature of man. From the writings of the scholastics to the eighteenth-century British economists, they have always discovered a linkage between faith and freedom”—and economic liberty.
The first people who risked their lives and fortunes to cross the Atlantic Ocean—the Puritans, were described as “dissenters and separatists”—they were outliers. They were idealists. Today they would be described as being “radicle”. Their ideals were grounded in a deep faith in God and a moral order prescribed in God’s words and summed up by the Ten Commandments and the Beatitudes. Their political and economic philosophy was grounded by a transcendental single moral standard.
They found out the hard way that socialism didn’t and will not work. Early on the Pilgrims practiced communal farming by sharing property and putting all that was produced into communal warehouses. They found out that when every member of a community got an equal share from unequal productivity, overall productivity would go down. When the rules were changed each family owned their own plot of land and would receive what they produced. Overall productivity increased dramatically, and The Colony survived and thrived.
The platform where the principles of political and economic liberty are first learned, was and always shall be the family. Families can look differently in all cultures but the traditional family with a mother and a father has proven over 8000 years—including in pre-Roman and Hellenistic times and in other non-western cultures, to be the source of moral and ethical teachings and the means by which a population can grow and be improved. As the sociologist Charles Murray says, “the family is where the stuff of life happens”.
Aristotle first wrote about “The Natural Law” and St. Thomas applied principles of Natural Law Theory to Old and New Testament teachings. According to Aquinas “The Natural Law is a Law imprinted into the hearts of all men made known through the faculties of reason and revelation” For Christians the Natural Law’s moral and ethical predicates are embedded in the Ten Commandments and The Teachings of Christ. In almost all the modern theological systems elements of The Natural Law are present. In many countries around the world, and I paraphrase from Judge Scalia. including our own, “Natural Law Theory” is the bases of our legal system. The Natural Law extends into the realm of the physical universe as well but that is for another day.
Our Founding Fathers and everyday citizens during the late 18th century understood deeply the march of civilization from Athens and Rome through Jerusalem and Hastings and into the age of Enlightenment. They understood that civilizations that did not depend on a transcendental moral code never survived. Everyday citizens in early America were conversant in The Bible—New and Old Testaments, Ciscero, The Stoics, Publius, and Livy. Because of the understanding of history, they had a great understanding of human nature. They understood that with God’s great gift of “free will” the bases of our liberty, there was also the opportunity for men to abuse that great gift, and in fact it was a part of their human nature to do so—thus the need for a moral standard and an ethic to build laws around. The bases of our four Founding Documents—Our Great Declaration, The Articles of Confederation, Our Constitution, and The Northwest Ordinance of 1789 were all purposefully informed by “Natural Law Principles.
The major disagreements that I see in our current day political debate center around our misunderstanding of the basic political and economic issues that have been traditionally informed by “The Natural Law”. I hope to address these issues in the coming weeks.
We are hearing little today about the opinions of men and women whose vocation should be centered on issues of philosophy and religion and how they inform our moral nature. How many in the academic and ecclesiastical worlds have ever offered a moral defense of liberty, individual sovereignty, free markets. private property, contract enforcement, unfettered free and fair trade and capital accumulation? Those who lived in our country prior to World War II could.
I am not a professional apologetic. I have no professional theological training nor am I a credentialed philosopher. I hope to ultimately demonstrate the linkage between faith and freedom and between the NATURAL LAW and classical liberal (today we say conservative) political and economic philosophy.
Time to get back to basics. We need a great awakening.
