Of Laws And Men

Weekends tend to be lower-traffic days here at Liberty's Torch, for which reason I try to reserve my more abstract and philosophical emissions for those periods.

Hey, guess what? It's Saturday!

---

Many generalizations can be made about law, legislation, jurisprudence, and associated subjects. Most of them are irrelevant and the majority of those that remain are simply wrong.

I omit natural laws from the above, of course. There are very few generalizations to be made about those, though most of them are irrelevant as well. The only demonstrably incorrect generalizations one can make about the laws of nature are that:

• There aren't any;
• We know them to their fullest extent.

However, we can discuss Man's laws in an abstract, generalized fashion. Indeed, there's a great deal of insight available even from making the attempt.

In the 1932 movie Island of Lost Souls, derived from H.G. Wells's classic The Island Of Dr. Moreau, the mad doctor catechizes his beast-men with a simple three-part law code:

"What is the law?"
"Not to eat meat. That is the law. Are we not men?"
"What is the law?"
"Not to go on all fours. That is the law. Are we not men?"
"What is the law?
"Not to spill blood. That is the law. Are we not men?"

We have here:

• A Lawgiver whose authority is deemed beyond question;
• A code of laws he promulgates and enforces;
• A rationale for them.

This is the pattern for all law, however made, pronounced, or enforced, among men.

---

All three components in the pattern are necessary. Every attempt known to history to enforce a law code behind which stood no rationale, or a rationale in which its subjects ceased to believe, eventuated in the fall of the regime, often by a bloody revolution. Moreau's Beast-Men needed to believe that men must abstain from certain acts, just as much as they needed to believe that the Law would be enforced against those who dared to violate it.

Societies need to believe in the founding rationales of their law codes just as strongly. However, only one rationale will hold men's allegiances for very long:

This is the one and only right way for men to behave.

In short, man-made law must conform to Natural Law. No mortal Lawgiver can remain forever beyond question without that foundation beneath his decrees; ultimately, all will fall.

The reason is not hard to find: Laws compel and constrain, and men dislike compulsion and constraint. The Natural Law is built directly into our souls; its dictates are ultimately irresistible. All man-made law will either express a dictum derived from the Natural Law, or will somehow contradict it. To maintain laws of the latter sort, the Lawgiver must articulate a rationale with which he can replace or occlude the Natural Law...but no such can long endure.

---

I asked one of the members of Parliament whether a majority of the House could legitimize murder. He said no. I asked him whether it could sanctify robbery. He thought not. But I could not make him see that if murder and robbery are intrinsically wrong, and not to be made right by the decisions of statesmen, then similarly all actions must be either right or wrong, apart from the authority of the law; and that if the right and wrong the law are not in harmony with this intrinsic right and wrong, the law itself is criminal. [Herbert Spencer, The Proper Sphere of Government]

Herbert Spencer was an ethicist above all other things. He was passionately concerned with "intrinsic right and wrong:" what the late Clarence Carson called "the moral order of the universe." Legions of detractors have attempted to destroy his Natural Law-based ethical edifice; none have succeeded, for which reason the accusations universally leveled at him are that he "lacked compassion" or was "a Social Darwinist." Those accusations are leveled at present-day spokesmen for the Natural Law, as well; no objective case can be made against them.

Some of the most foolish, ultimately self-contradicting assaults on Natural Law have been fallaciously claimed to rest on Christian ethics. Yet C. S. Lewis, the greatest Christian apologist of modern times, defeated all such notions utterly. In his mighty essay The Abolition of Man, Lewis lays out a perfect secular argument for the Natural Law:

If by Reason we mean the process actually employed by Gaius and Titius when engaged in debunking (that is, the connecting by inference of propositions, ultimately derived from sense data, with further propositions), then the answer must be that a refusal to sacrifice oneself is no more rational than a consent to do so. And no less rational. Neither choice is rational—or irrational—at all. From propositions about fact alone no practical conclusion can ever be drawn. This will preserve society cannot lead to do this except by the mediation of society ought to be preserved. This will cost you your life cannot lead directly to do not do this: it can lead to it only through a felt desire or an acknowledged duty of self-preservation. The Innovator is trying to get a conclusion in the imperative mood out of premisses in the indicative mood: and though he continues trying to all eternity he cannot succeed, for the thing is impossible. We must therefore either extend the word Reason to include what our ancestors called Practical Reason and confess that judgements such as society ought to be preserved (though they can support themselves by no reason of the sort that Gaius and Titius demand) are not mere sentiments but are rationality itself; or else we must give up at once, and for ever, the attempt to find a core of 'rational' value behind all the sentiments we have debunked. The Innovator will not take the first alternative, for practical principles known to all men by Reason are simply the Tao which he has set out to supersede. He is more likely to give up the quest for a 'rational' core and to hunt for some other ground even more 'basic' and 'realistic'....

Telling us to obey Instinct is like telling us to obey 'people'. People say different things: so do instincts. Our instincts are at war. If it is held that the instinct for preserving the species should always be obeyed at the expense of other instincts, whence do we derive this rule of precedence? To listen to that instinct speaking in its own cause and deciding it in its own favour would be rather simple-minded. Each instinct, if you listen to it, will claim to be gratified at the expense of all the rest. By the very act of listening to one rather than to others we have already prejudged the case. If we did not bring to the examination of our instincts a knowledge of their comparative dignity we could never learn it from them. And that knowledge cannot itself be instinctive: the judge cannot be one of the parties judged; or, if he is, the decision is worthless and there is no ground for placing the preservation of the species above self-preservation or sexual appetite....

'All within the four seas are his brothers' (xii. 5) says Confucius of the Chün-tzu, the cuor gentil or gentleman. Humani nihil a me alienum puto says the Stoic. 'Do as you would be done by,' says Jesus. 'Humanity is to be preserved,' says Locke. All the practical principles behind the Innovator's case for posterity, or society, or the species, are there from time immemorial in the Tao. But they are nowhere else. Unless you accept these without question as being to the world of action what axioms are to the world of theory, you can have no practical principles whatever. You cannot reach them as conclusions: they are premisses....If nothing is self-evident, nothing can be proved. Similarly if nothing is obligatory for its own sake, nothing is obligatory at all.

I cannot overstress the power and penetration of this magnificent essay. Despite its brevity -- or perhaps because of it -- it expresses the irreducible core of all rational philosophy, and demonstrates the fallacy behind men's unending attempts to build an edifice that could replace Natural Law.

Yet what has Lewis affirmed that Herbert Spencer did not? Not a thing. What innovation in rational thought did he propose? None that I can detect. The two men said exactly the same thing, one at greater length and with more detail:

Right and wrong are absolute.
They are above modification by mortal agencies.
Any attempt to displace, efface or occlude them constitutes hubris.

It's a lesson that, despite millennia of experience, has yet to sink in.

---

I've been counseled against going on for too long in any one essay, so I'll continue the elucidation of these thoughts tomorrow. But before I sign off for the day, I'd like to leave my Gentle Readers with a bit of history to ponder.

One hundred twenty-four years ago today, a child was born in a small town in Austria. His mother had syphilis, which she transmitted to him. Syphilis in its tertiary stage has some remarkable effects:

• It increases abstract intelligence, in some cases by as much as forty IQ points;
• It induces hallucinations and a sense of detachment from mundane reality;
• It correlates with the development of megalomania.

That child, in his maturity, decided that he was capable of reordering the world to his own design, starting with Europe. He marshaled a large nation capable of prodigious things to his cause: the cause of war and conquest. His enterprise took millions of lives. It took the combined might of the largest and most advanced nations of the world to put an end to the carnage his madness caused.

Adolf Hitler took his own life rather than face justice. Perhaps at that point he was completely incapable of recognizing justice, or any other aspect of objective reality. He accomplished great, unprecedented horrors, the world rose against him, and he fell -- but not before inspiring a large and capable nation to rally to his madness and fight for his cause: the cause of Man's will elevated above the Natural Law.

His imitator to the East, who remained an admirer to the last despite the war between them, would transmit his hubris to several generations of inheritors before it collapsed.

More anon.