Motus Mentis

My last two posts (here and here) were in response to an extensive review, by Michael Anton, of Thomas West’s new book on the American Founding, and to a comment by our reader Jacques.

In Saturday’s post I laid out some questions that I thought the review, and Jacques’ comment, had raised. I did not answer any of them, although of course I have thought about them for quite a while now, and am settled in varying degrees about what the answers to them ought to be. That post was intended as a preamble to a closer look at each of them in days and weeks ahead.

I was very pleasantly surprised on Sunday evening to find a substantial email from Michael Anton, responding to Saturday’s post. Having obtained Mr. Anton’s permission to publish it here, I will do so below.

Since receiving this I have replied to Mr. Anton’s email in some detail, and have received another reply in turn. I have, however, been traveling all day today, and will need more time to organize it all, to post excerpts from my reply and his, and to explore some particularly difficult questions more deeply. I am grateful to Mr. Anton for taking the time to open the conversation.

Here is his initial note to me. I present it, for now, without any comments of my own.

I think your questions are mostly answered in West’s book, in my review, and in my follow-up responding to a reader question. But since — as I also said — important points require frequent restatement, I shall try again.

West surely covers (1) exhaustively, as — I thought — did I. So I am not going to go on at great length here. Equality to the founders meant equality of rights. All men are born with equal natural rights, which include but are not limited to the rights specified in the Declaration. Men are manifestly not equal in talent, wisdom, virtue, strength, or a host of other traits. A regime that secures equal natural rights will allow these naturally unequal traits to flourish in ways that lead to inequality of outcomes. Equality fundamentally means that there are no natural rulers and no natural slaves, or natural “ruled.’ All actual aristocracies are inherently conventional, not natural.

The key here is to establish a just basis for government, a true claim to legitimacy. At the peaks, political theory posits only two such claims. For the ancients, the only just claim to rule is wisdom and virtue (and in the final analysis, according to the classics, wisdom is virtue, and vice versa). For the moderns, or at least for the moderns before they go completely off the rails, the only just claim is consent.

These two ideas sound contradictory but are actually closer to one another than they first appear. The initial reaction of the ancients to the modern claim would be to object that non-wisdom cannot give meaningful consent to wisdom. Wisdom knows what is best while non-wisdom does not. Therefore non-wisdom must submit to wisdom. But the ancients also know that this is not easy to accomplish. Non-wisdom does not readily submit to wisdom, and wisdom does not want to rule. Wisdom (the philosopher) prefers to philosophizing to ruling and so must be forced to rule by non-wisdom, which has no interest in forcing wisdom to rule because it does not want to be ruled. To further complicate things, only the wise truly know what wisdom is and who is wise. But the wise lack the power to make this widely known. The unwise cannot recognize wisdom and cannot be made to see when, where and in whom wisdom is genuine. So we have the paradox of two mutually incompatible, even antagonistic, camps mutually forcing the other to do something neither side wants done.

Another — perhaps the most important — problem with wisdom as a claim to rule is that many who are not wise but who want to rule will claim to be wise in order to rule. In fact, the classics all but assert that anyone who claims to be wise in order to rule is ipso facto not wise. The claim itself is proof of non-wisdom, and of fraud.

As a practical matter, then, the ancients know that wisdom’s title to rule — which is theoretically the soundest and most just claim — is all but impossible to implement. The classical “best regime” that is meant to be practicable is an attempt to steer as much wisdom as possible into government in the absence of direct rule of the wise. It does so through a variety of means which Aristotle explains in the Politics, for instance. Above all, through equality before the law.

The failure of wisdom as a title to rule in any practical way points to the necessity of consent, which the ancients do not make explicit but the moderns do. There are many reasons for this explicit change, and I am not sure I understand them all, but the most important is the complete change in the Western world wrought by the Roman conquest of the ancient world and the advent of Christianity.

The American founders use language very similar to the classical argument for wisdom’s title to rule when they say that a perfect being — God or an angel — could rule men without consent but no actual man is a perfect being (even the best men are a mixture of reason and passion), and so consent is always required.

Your commenter Jacques objects to this, saying that “the highly intelligent, for example, are naturally more free and independent in many key respects than people who are borderline retarded.’ That’s just an assertion, he doesn’t say why, how, or in what way. In any case, for the founders “equally free and independent” is a claim to moral status, to justice. The highly intelligent does not have a natural right to rule the borderline retarded. If Jacques thinks that is wrong, and there is such a natural right, he should explain how and from what it is derived, just the founders explain where they think the natural rights they cite come from.

The “borderline retarded” person he invokes sounds something like Aristotle’s “natural slave” (a person who cannot take care of himself) but for Aristotle there is less a natural right to rule such a person than a moral obligation to care for that person. Even Nietzsche, arguably the greatest philosopher of inequality, does not ground his argument in favor of inequality in any natural right. He admits frankly that it must be willed because there is no natural right.

I also find this to be completely unpersuasive in rebutting the founders’ argument: “Trump or Hitler or Napoleon seem far more naturally suited to ruling and leading than some other people I’ve met.” This is meant to refute the claim that nature does not delineate the natural rulers and the natural ruled. One can raise all sorts of objections to this. For instance, if Trump is such a natural ruler, why did he lose the popular vote by three million votes? That’s not a criticism of Trump but an acknowledgement that lots of people did not recognize his superiority and did not want to submit to his rule. This is a problem that all leaders face. Tyrants, such as Hitler and Napoleon, address it with oppression and suppression. Which they may be very good at, I acknowledge. Is Jacques saying that a talent for tyranny is a title to rule?

Certainly it is true that some are more talented at ruling than others. But this does not give them a right to rule without others’ consent. It does mean that those societies tend to be the most successful that steer the wise and virtuous into government. As Jefferson put it, “May we not even say that that form of government is the best which provides the most effectually for a pure selection of these natural aristoi into the offices of government?” (Read that whole letter. He is very clear that what passes for aristocracy in Europe is anything but. This is a problem with making virtue the title to rule without consent. The non-virtuous will abuse the claim for their own ends.)

Jacques waves aside the argument that there are no natural slaves but does not provide any counter argument or evidence. If they exist, who are they? How does nature delineate them? Why is that this delineation seems to be hidden from the great mass of mankind, including the alleged slaves themselves? He says that people often consent to slavery. Really? Who? When? Where? Then he compares slavery to being ruled. That is just silly. We are all ruled, especially in a rights-based republic. Even presidents leave office and become private citizens again. We consent to rule in order to accomplish things together as political community that we could not do, or not do well, by ourselves. Accepting and obeying the law or following a leader is not slavery.

That is what the founders meant by equality. In the narrower sense they meant: they are no natural kings or rulers. All men are equally free from the just rule of others without their consent. Of course the founders knew that men are ruled without their consent all the time. That is, they argued, the predominant situation of mankind most of the time. But it is not just. They were founding a new government which they intended to rest on just principles. That’s the broader sense for what equality meant for them. Not just “we’re not going to do things the way Europe did them.’ It also means, “the foundations of our political order will be rested on a true understanding of nature.’

As for (2), this is also covered in the book and in my review. No, they are not antagonistic. Equality demands liberty, both in the individual sense and in the national sense. Our equal natural rights limit this just powers of government. Government exists to secure rights. It should be limited to doing that and that alone. Of course we’re way beyond that now, but that was the founders’ view. Government secures our rights so that we may utilize our natural liberty as we see fit, consistent with the moral law. Jefferson again: “in the state of nature, men are inherently independent of all but the moral law.” Which is to say, freedom is unlimited. Men are free to live as they choose but always bound by morality, which is natural. This is an idea fully consistent with classical thought.

At the societal level the people form a social compact, then a government, to secure their own rights but not those of any other people. That people, once established, is a free nation independent of any other. It may not be justly ruled by other nations nor may it justly rule other nations (except perhaps in some kind of national emergency).

As for (3), I am not sure what you are asking, but my quick answer is no. Why would it? Do you mean that those of lesser ability within the same society ought to have less liberty than those with greater? According to the founders, no. We are all equal before the positive law and subject to the same moral law. Keep in mind though that the founders did not have the same broad conception of modern liberty as do today’s liberals. So for instance the last two of FDR’s “four freedoms” they would not have recognized as freedoms or rights at all. So it’s possible that what you’re getting add would be consistent with the founders’ views. A lot of the stuff that we today insist is essential to liberty, they would have denied has anything to do with liberty.

(4) Why isn’t it? We all consent as members of the social compact. We consent with one another, not with any outside power. The act of forming the social compact through consent it what establishes sovereignty. The compact forms us as a people, distinct from other peoples. As the Declaration say, we stand in relation to other nations in a “separate and equal station.” They don’t rule us and we don’t rule them. The founders would have found absurd the notion of transnational bodies such as the EU or UN eroding sovereignty. When we need to make international commitments in the national interest, we do so by treaty. Period.

(5) Also covered at length by West and me. He and I both say yes, as do the founders. If you change the terminology from “natural rights” plural (which the ancients would not have recognized) to “natural right” singular (which they surely did), then pretty much all political philosophers until late modernity did as well. Some were atheists. Some were deists. Some were believers. They all made the case for rationally knowable principles of justice which do not require, but are consistent with, recourse to God.

(6) It means that those rights come from nature and are not the grant of government. We establish government to secure natural rights which belong to us by nature. Government cannot justly take them away. We have to surrender a portion of our rights for government to work but that surrender is conditional. If government fails or becomes oppressive, we can remove from government the power to curtail our natural rights. The right of revolution is inherent. It is always available as a recourse against tyranny.

(7) I tried to give some reasons here.

(8) I think what the [founders] accomplished was one of, if not the, greatest achievements in political history. I don’t know how they could have done better. The headwinds that we are facing are pummeling the entire West. Even of the founders had established an entirely different regime, I think we would still be facing those headwinds.

(9) I ask myself — and others — that every day!