LOYAL TO LIBERTY ON RIGHTS AND RIGHTEOUSNESS
“All men can see these tactics whereby I conquer, but what none can see is the strategy out of which victory is evolved.” (Sun Tzu, “The Art of War,” Chapter 6)
“Once the principles of government are corrupted, the best laws become bad and turn against the State; as long as the principles are sound, bad laws have the effect of good ones; the force of principle entrains all.” (Montesquieu, “On the Spirit of the Laws,” Book 8, Chapter 11)
The tactics now being used to conquer and overthrow America’s constitutional republican form of government involve attacks against a broad array of ideas and institutions that contribute to America’s material strength. Malicious economic and fiscal policies are depleting America’s productive assets and destroying the nation’s good credit and credibility. Malicious legislative and administrative policies are weakening our people’s confidence in the constitutional offices, processes and institutions that are supposed to represent them. Malicious abuses of the government’s law enforcement powers are assailing the self-respect, confidence and courage of individuals. One after another the constitutional provisions that, with due respect for our unalienable rights, affirm the nature, extent and limits of government’s just powers, are being gutted or cast aside.
In war, a good general can use a properly deployed pattern of attacks to scatter and disorganize the enemy’s forces. This is especially useful for camouflaging his paramount strategic objective, and inducing the enemy to leave it more exposed to decisive attack. In just this way, the various attacks against the components of republican liberty are scattering and disorganizing its proponents. Given this circumstance, the key to successfully defending liberty may be found by suitably converting Sun Tzu’s famous dictum (quoted at the beginning of this column), to wit: All men belatedly perceive the tactics whereby their enemy is defeating them, but those who perceive the enemy’s key strategic intention, and act decisively to thwart it, may unexpectedly pluck victory from his grasp.
In our battle to preserve and perpetuate America’s republican, constitutional self-government, what is the enemy’s key strategic objective? America’s founders successfully established a republic in the United States. Defying the whole tenor of mankind’s prior experience, the republic they established became the basis for the most successful nation in human history. What if, to defend the republic, we must act on the same basis as America’s founders? As they laid the foundations for its unprecedented success they read and applied Montesquieu’s profoundly comprehensive analysis of the different forms of government and the principles that actuate them. His insight into the critical importance of those principles (epitomized by the second quote above) suggests what must be the key objective of the enemies of liberty: To corrupt the principles of republican self-government. Accordingly, we should look for them to do everything in their power to prevent us from recognizing, or dealing with, matters that confuse, obscure and poison our understanding of those principles and/or our allegiance to them.
At its root, the word principle refers to what comes first. With respect to America’s political institutions, the events that came first in our history were actuated by a certain understanding of right and justice. Americans imbued with this understanding were moved to recognize and react against the first inroads against their liberty, rather than belatedly to react to the more extreme oppression produced by its demise. Most essential to that understanding was the logic of God-endowed unalienable right, logic that followed from the recognition of human equality, and that made sense of what would otherwise be an assertion plainly contrary to fact.
After all, is there any material sense in which all human beings are equal? To be sure, at birth we are all equally vulnerable to imminent death. But by and large the natural disposition of our parents compensates for that vulnerability. Of course, different parents are willing and able to react to this natural disposition to a greater or less degree, and to that extent the accident of birth immediately introduces a degree of inequality into the material conditions and circumstances of individual human lives. From thence forward, material inequality characterizes every aspect of human life, so that there is no material aspect of the human condition unaffected by it in some way.
But the natural disposition that, by and large, leads parents to do right by their children points to a human capacity that is equally available to all. This is the capacity to choose to do right, as God gives us to see the right (i.e., in light of natural conscience). Regardless of their circumstances, every human being worthy of the name can be willing to do what is right. Though possessing neither words nor the capacity to move their lips or limbs, a self-conscious individual can still pray that good may come. The choice for good or evil is a matter of the heart, and the heart has a way of making its choices known, even without words or speech or almost any other capacity for action.
In this respect, all men are indeed created equal. Inseparable from the nature of their humanity is the capacity to conform their will to the knowledge of right with which they are endowed by their Creator, in the very substance of the special being they exemplify on account of His goodwill. Because they have the capacity to choose right, they are responsible for choosing rightly. When and if they choose rightly, they exercise (carry out) this responsibility and so may claim, on the highest authority, the right to act as they do.
This is the claim of right that, according to America’s principles, commands respect from each and every human authority. The limits and constraints which that respect imposes are the boundaries that determine the just powers of human governments. In effect, such powers derive their force from the conjoined wills of those who consent to do right, according to the will of the Creator. The strength of any government thus empowered obviously depends on the righteousness of the governed. Paralyze or pervert that will, and every other measure which purports to restore the nation’s strength and prosperity will, as Montesquieu foresaw, turn self-government toward self-destruction.
Wrongdoing
[This is a comment and reply occasioned by my WND piece"On Rights and Righteousness".]
The Comment
I respect Keyes, I really do. He is so wrong here...
There are at least two meanings of the word "right." One means all that is morally correct to do; the other means all that I have been given the authority to do. When one looks at all that Christ told us is wrong, we realize that the "right to only do right" is incredibly limited, to the point that no man save the Creator has done it. If lust and hate are the same as adultery and murder, and the punishment for these was death, then how can we claim that we have the "right" to even feel or think for ourselves? Why do we call the 1st Amendment a "right" if it says that we can choose something other than God and blaspheme him? By this understanding, a government that only recognized our "rights" would be a theocracy of the worst kind.
We have the "right," as the Founders used the term, to do some wrong things. That isn't to say that we won't be held accountable for them, simply that God gave us the authority to do them and they don't fall under government's purpose. I have no right to murder, as that takes the "right to life" away from another. I DO have the right to do other sins, such as certain addictions, as long as these don't take the rights away from others. It is still wrong, I will still be judged for them, but I have the right to do them. As Jefferson put it, as long as it didn't "pick his pocket or break his leg," he said it wasn't a governmental issue.
What did Christ say we should do about evil in the world? He said we should be salt and light, we should train our children up in the way they should go, he recognized our right to defend ourselves from a direct threat of harm (Luke 22:36-38). He did NOT advocate the use of government to make people good (neither did the apostles). If we (Christians) were to actually do as commanded instead of trying to use force of arms against sinful people (as the Pharisees did), then we wouldn't be in this mess. We have lost our first love....
My reply
In your analysis of the word "right," you confuse things in a way America's founders did not, when they wrote the Constitution. Though we carelessly refer to First Amendment "rights," the Constitution actually speaks of the "freedom of speech and of the press," but the "right...peaceably to assemble." It speaks of "rights" in the Ninth Amendment, but uses the word "powers" in the Tenth Amendment.
Instead of imposing a false distinction on the Constitution, why not carefully think through the distinctions it actually makes. For example, by using the word "freedom" with respect to speech and the press, the Framers avoid the pitfall to which you refer (i.e., referring to wrongs as rights). Also by referring to the free exercise of religion, they allow a certain tolerance with respect to religious practices, without falsely denying the difference between that religion which is true to God, and therefore right, and that which is false.) Do you think this respect for truth was intentional or just accidental? By the same token, people tend to confuse the Ninth and Tenth Amendments, but if they gave careful thought to the distinction between "rights" in the one and "powers" in the other, they would gain great insight into the understanding of human sovereignty the Constitution implements. Sometimes, instead of using the Constitution to make a point, it's important first to consider what point is made by its actual wording.
You also fail to see the very practical reason for my concern about the right meaning of rights. My reasoning helps people to recognize the boundaries of the government's enforcement power, which is properly limited to the business of securing unalienable rights, as they are endowed by the Creator (not human free will). Though the Creator authorizes us to be free, He is precisely not the author of any given use of our freedom. If He were, the choice would not be ours but His. So though He permits us to use or abuse our freedom, He only authorizes uses that accord with His righteous provisions.
By confusing right and freedom, you actually open the door to the claim that unjust government is authorized by God. Why? Because superior power gives people the freedom to do as they please. If God authorizes them to do wrong, victorious conquerors who rule as unjust tyrants are correct when they claim the divine right to do so. But America's founders rejected the species of absolutism based on the understanding that, in and of itself, proven superior human power constitutes divine justice, and must therefore always be reverenced as law.
But if the standard of right is not power, there must be a difference between being free (i.e., powerful enough) to do something and having the right to do it.
According to America's principles, the standard of right is determined by the power of the Creator, not by any merely human power. Those principles further declare that His standard obliges government to confine its use of coercive power to that which is necessary for the security of individuals willing to take certain actions which the Creator encourages in all human beings, as such, and which He therefore authorizes as right for all humanity.
This standard of right allows us to distinguish the individual uses of freedom that government is obliged to protect, from the abuses of freedom government is obliged to curtail – mainly, as you suggest, those which, by endangering the unalienable rights (right usages) of others defy the authority of the ultimate sovereign of all; and to distinguish both the foregoing from exercises of freedom which may be tolerated for good reason, even when in some respect they fall short of the perfect standard of God's righteousness (which, as you say, only God can properly administer).
These days, the main point of resistance against the righteous basis of rights has to do with sexual freedom. Like the tares that Christ advises his disciples to leave to the disposition of the master of the house (Matthew 13:24-30), there are sexual practices best left to God's judgment, for mercy or for punishment. However, when those who engage in such practices falsely promote them under the name of "right," they ascribe to God (who is the author of right) what is in fact the consequence of their own will. They unjustly demand that people willing to exercise their freedom according to right, as God intends, abandon the rights of the natural family and/or purposely raise up children who will not be encouraged to respect the obligations that give rise to them. They abuse the powers of government, which are meant to secure rights, to force such people to deny or disparage that exercise of right whereby the Creator provides for the perpetuation of human nature, individually and on the whole.
Faced with such demands and abuses of power, people determined to exercise their rights are obliged to answer as Peter and the other apostles did: "We ought to obey God rather than men" (Acts 5:29). For obedience to God is service to true liberty. It is the substantive ground of proof for every just claim of right – for the validity of which, when all else fails, we may appeal to Him, as the Supreme Judge of the World, just as America's founders did.
See also: To secure rights, not wrongs
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