Motus Mentis

Two posts ago we read Michael Anton’s emailed reply to a collection of questions I’d posted in Part 1 of this series.

I mailed back a response, and received another reply in return. (There the correspondence stands, for the moment, as I’ve been traveling and working the past couple of days. I’d also like to re-read Mr. Anton’s original review of the Thomas West book before continuing.

Below are some excerpts of my reply, and then of Mr. Anton’s response to it.

Over the past several years I’ve taken a deepening interest in the Founding, the men involved, and the history of the different cultures settled in America in the centuries leading up to the Civil War; my interest at first has been to trace the origins of 21st-century-style “liberalism” from early Massachusetts, though the expansion across the Upper Midwest, the Great Awakenings, and a gradual evolution though various moral missions of different eras into what I now regard as a national, secular cryptoreligion. Of late, though, I am more and more interested in the Founding itself; I’ve just finished reading the complete Adams-Jefferson correspondence, and am looking forward to reading Professor West’s book…

I have also taken an interest in the history of slavery, and in the interest of a breadth of perspectives, recently read Robert Dabney’s Defense of Virginia, and am halfway through Ulrich Bonnell Phillips’s American Negro Slavery, written in 1913. Both of these raise questions about equality and justice that I am sure Jefferson et al. grappled with.

Another book that has been influential for me is Henry Sumner Maine’s Popular Government, which (as quoted here) argues that a relentless expansion of suffrage is an ineliminable consequence of the dynamics of power in democratic systems — and so:

“…the signs of our times are not at all of favourable augury for the future direction of great multitudes by statesmen wiser than themselves. ”¦ The leaders may be as able and eloquent as ever, and some of them certainly seem to have an unprecedentedly ‘good hold upon commonplaces, and a facility in applying them’; but they are manifestly listening nervously at one end of a speaking-tube which receives at its other end the suggestions of a lower intelligence.”

I think there is good reason to imagine that the near-total transformation of what the Founders created into something that would be utterly unrecognizable to them may have been all along an inherent and unavoidable liability; this question is why I am so interested to read Professor West’s book.

Regarding 1), then: how is the idea of equality of rights commensurable with involuntary slavery, unless the natural inequality of the African in the civilized West — and nobody of the era would have imagined that such inequality of capacity and dispositions was not glaringly obvious — meant that such rights simply entitled a person to live in such station, or under such subordination, as Nature had fitted him for?

As for 2), I have been influenced here by Erik von Kuehnelt-Leddihn’s Liberty or Equality, in which he wrote that:

“Nature’ (i.e., the absence of human intervention) is anything but egalitarian; if we want to establish a complete plain we have to blast the mountains away and fill the valleys; equality thus presupposes the continuous intervention of force which, as a principle, is opposed to freedom. Liberty and equality are in essence contradictory.”

Likewise, Will Durant:

“Nature smiles at the union of freedom and equality in our utopias. For freedom and equality are sworn and everlasting enemies, and when one prevails the other dies. Leave men free, and their natural inequalities will multiply almost geometrically, as in England and America in the nineteenth century under laissez-faire. To check the growth of inequality, liberty must be sacrificed, as in Russia after 1917. Even when repressed, inequality grows; only the man who is below the average in economic ability desires equality; those who are conscious of superior ability desire freedom; and in the end superior ability has its way. Utopias of equality are biologically doomed, and the best that the amiable philosopher can hope for is an approximate equality of legal justice and educational opportunity.”

So – equality under the law, then. But is the man of intelligence and foresight, who grasps the law in its subtlety, and knows how to thrive and prosper in it, not naturally more free than the one who, in ignorance and impulsive unwisdom, collides with it at every turn? Does not the mere fact of his perspicacity give him more “degrees of freedom”? I think this is what Jacques was getting at. You make a distinction between caring for the incapable and ruling them; but might it not be that what is most just for the less capable is to buffer their freedom against hazards that they do not even see, and could not avoid if they did? Do we know that this is not how men like Jefferson and Washington squared their ownership of the labor of other men with their sense of rights and justice? That is what complicates 3) for me.

Regarding 4), we can see all around us that the idea of general “consent”, or the Rousseauian notion of a “general will”, is falling to pieces. I live in the “belly of the beast”: Brooklyn, New York, and Wellfleet, MA, and most of the people I know around here would say that they did not “consent” to being ruled by Donald Trump, despite his being elected according to the usual Constitutional process. Indeed, nobody raised in the United States ever gave their consent to any of it; it was just handed to them, willy-nilly.

It seems to me that sovereignty implies power, in particular the capacity to originate and compel policy, laws, and dynamic action. The masses in a democracy have none of that; at best they can choose among a handful of pretenders. Hillary Clinton vs. Donald Trump??? That shabby choice is, as of 2106, the means by which “the people” are sovereign? Meanwhile, the unelected managerial Leviathan rumbles on, accountable to nobody. Where’s my consent there?

The question, again, is: might all this, under the extraordinary system given us by the genius of the Founders, been avoided? I am not sure that it might have been. That is not to say that the Founders could have done any better; I agree with you that the Founding was perhaps the greatest act of political genius in human history, and I cannot offer any constructive criticism. They attempted an act of creation wholly unexampled in all of history, and what they created was an incandescent success. For a time.

Regarding natural rights: how can rights “come from nature”? How does indifferent Nature, which simply is, give us any such “oughts”, other than by mere intuition?

As for inalienability, I understand it in the Stoic’s narrow and practical sense that there simply is no way for anyone to seize control of my inner state; it is simply unreachable by any external power, if I will it so. I realize also that if I am murdered, one can say that my right to life has not been alienated, but violated. But I am equally dead in either case, and this tempts me to agree with Bentham that the idea of natural, inalienable rights is “nonsense upon stilts”. I would like it to be otherwise — very much so — but it is hard for me to see, in the absence of something transcending mere Nature to hang them on, how rights are anything but conventions.

Michael Anton replied:

Equality of rights is not compatible with slavery. There is a flat contradiction there, which the founders recognized. Slavery was for them simply a fact, a given that they had to deal with. It predated the Revolution by 150 years. No one was thinking about equality or liberty or separation from Britain when they starting bringing slaves in the 1610s. When the founders sought a true basis for justice and legitimacy and concluded that equality was it, they knew it contradicted slavery. But they didn’t have the political power to abolish slavery at that moment. So they faced a dilemma from which there was no easy exit. Had they insisted on immediate abolition then (a) they would have killed the Revolution by disuniting the country and (b) would not have achieved abolition anyway because they lacked the power. The most likely outcome would have been a separation into northern and southern blocks, with the southern block uniting with Canada (or what is now Canada) and Britain to re-subdue the North. In other words, a Civil War, but earlier, and won by the slave power.

Regarding the evident inequality of capacity at that time, many Founders discussed it. None thought that it meant blacks lacked equal natural rights. Here is a classic statement on that theme:

Be assured that no person living wishes more sincerely than I do, to see a complete refutation of the doubts I have myself entertained and expressed on the grade of understanding allotted to [black slaves] by nature, and to find that in this respect they are on a par with ourselves. My doubts were the result of personal observation on the limited sphere of my own State, where the opportunities for the development of their genius were not favorable, and those of exercising it still less so. I expressed them therefore with great hesitation; but whatever be their degree of talent it is no measure of their rights. Because Sir Isaac Newton was superior to others in understanding, he was not therefore lord of the person or property of others.

The founders knew slavery was wrong. But (a) they had no power to get rid of it quickly and (b) they feared that if they did, they would be subject to retribution. West makes this point. There is a natural right for the slave to be free, but also a natural right to life for all person. If a likely outcome of manumission is violence, then two natural rights conflict. It’s not always easy to know what the right thing to do is in such situations. The modern liberal would dismiss this concern out of hand but the founders did not.

The founders did everything they could to restrict slavery in the hope and expectation that it would go away within a few decades. Most northern states abolished it (it was legal in all 13 in 1776). They severely limited the slave trade and gave Congress the power to abolish it after 20 years, which Congress did immediately.

Re: (2), the founders’ conception of nature does not require any kind of levelling. There is no contradiction, unless one assumes or insists that “equality’ means equal outcomes, which it manifestly did not for the founders. And should not for us today.

Yes, inequalities will result. What’s the alternative? Neither Durant nor von Kuehnelt-Leddihn suggest a way to create a state based on inequality that will be (a) in accord with nature and (b) accepted by its members. Durant hints that the meaner sorts will always desire equality. That’s part of my point. No man CONSENTS to, or welcomes, a state-sanctioned inferiority. It must be imposed. Decades of oppression may lead to a kind of resignation, as in the lower orders of Old Europe. But we also saw that it’s impossible to keep the lid on forever. If it were “natural’ in the sense that these two appear to mean (“the absence of human intervention’), then an unequal natural order would just sprout from the land organically and be accepted by all, or at least by most, whereas manifestly it does not.

Whenever I hear someone (and one does hear it more and more from the “dissident right’) insist that there is a natural order of rank among men, I have the same reaction that Plato and Aristotle recommended regarding the man who claims to be wise so that he can rule: fraud! None of those making the assertion can ever point out how we can easily recognize our supposed superiors. They can give examples of people we can agree were superior in talent, but even that is problematic since often those talents go unrecognized or denied during that person’s lifetime, and when those talents are needed most. If this alleged “natural order of rank’ is to be our guide for a new politics, we have a serious problem, because no one can beyond those making the assertion have the ability to tell natural rulers from naturally ruled and the latter are going to resist being ruled. That’s part of their nature. Which calls into question the alleged “naturalness’ of the whole idea.

As for class conflict, isn’t the founders’ solution the best that can be done? What breeds lower class resentment is the sense of a rigged system. In old Europe, the most talented among the lower orders were stuck there and losers in the upper retained wealth and privilege. The latter is less a problem than the former. The founders’ system addressed the former problem quite effectively, which is why we had so little class conflict here as opposed to Europe. Now we again have a rigged game but it is owing to departure from the founding principles.

Durant’s quote, for all its breathless overstatement, ends in the same place as the founders.

Washington and Jefferson did not rationalize their ownership of slaves. Keep in mind first that both inherited their slaves, they didn’t seek them. Washington, the more prudent man, prepared throughout his life to free his slaves at great expense to himself, which he did. Jefferson, a self-indulgent spendthrift, died in debt and so could not do that. But he knew that slavery was wrong.

The founders’ consent is totally different from the General Will but that’s for another day. Suffice it to say for now that we all consent by remaining a part of the social compact. The old saw “If X wins, I’m moving to Canada’ is actually a statement of the founders’ idea of consent. If your government becomes intolerable to you, you can withdraw your consent by emigrating, which you have a natural right to do. Not that you have a natural right to go anywhere. The country you want to go to must accept you into their compact, which they are under no obligation to do. But you have a natural right to leave. The people who say they didn’t consent to Trump are wrong. They consent by staying.

I agree with you that the people did not consent to the administrative state, which is a very large problem. Trump’s election is in part a reaction to that. It maybe that the administrative state is by this point too powerful to tame. But we ought to at least try. The alternatives are all bad.

As for how rights come from nature, that’s explained in depth by West and in my review. I don’t really have anything to add.

There is much to delve into here: the notion of “exit” as an alternative to consent (which, for people living ordinary lives under political systems, is often the only way one can make “consent” seem to be any sort of actual choice, but is for most people not really an option); how it can be possible that brute nature is the sort of thing that can create and bestow something as abstract as rights (note that Jefferson explicitly declared those rights to be endowed not by Nature, but by the Creator); the existence of natural hierarchies and classes; how to parse the distinction between the establishment of Jefferson’s “natural aristoi” as rulers and the idea of there being those who are, by nature, “booted and spurred” to rule; how a slave-owner legitimately claims the authority to arbitrate for another person the “collision between two natural rights”, and so on. I will take these up in later posts.