It has been suggested, that democracy allows us to vote in our own judgement; or even, ruin. Indeed, that was the verdict of educated people for two thousand years, given the sobering lessons of Athens' marches of ruinous folly during the Peloponnesian War. Or, Bible students may note the repeated fickleness, folly, error and outright injustice of the many crowds, mobs, riots and ill-considered assemblies in the New Testament.
(Of these, the voyage of folly leading to shipwreck in Acts 27 is paradigmatic, indeed a study in miniature of follies of governance on the ship of state. Not too far behind, is Festus' plaintive plea for help from Agrippa and Bernice: Ac 25:"24 And Festus said, “King Agrippa and all who are present with us, you see this man about whom the whole Jewish people petitioned me, both in Jerusalem and here, shouting that he ought not to live any longer. 25 But I found that he had done nothing deserving death . . . " Is it, then, any surprise, that only a few years later, the Jews rose up in suicidally foolish rebellion, ending in ruin and exile?)
So, then,
Q: how do we avert the deterioration of democracy into the march of folly madness and injustice of the mob?
ANS: Through the core, natural, built-in law.
For, it is easy to make the mistake that "the majority" [Ac 27:] is always right -- or else, in despair, to assume it is always wrong or always the result of dirty manipulation. Instead, what seems an empty tautology is so:
SOUNDNESS: What is right is right.
That is, our challenge is to soundly, reliably discern the right and to have the integrity and courage to do it even in the face of the notoriously "conflicting thoughts" of Rom 2:15.
In turn, that points to " the work of the law" that are "written on [our] hearts" of v. 14.
That is, it is manifest that there are intelligible, knowable . . . but often inconvenient . . . core first duties and first law that emerge as we soundly reflect on key issues and challenges. Duties -- first duties -- that, as they are built into our rational, responsible, conscience guarded freedom, are universal and utterly binding. No king, judge, parliament or referendum can reverse these principles; though of course -- never mind how ill advised it may be -- we are free enough to act contrary to them, at least for the time being until shipwreck (all too predictably) results.
Those who have followed this blog and my other thinking over the years will know, I here allude to the Ciceronian summary of first, branch on which we all sit, duties and principles. Though, today, I want to probe deeper thanks to the foreword by Daniel Mahoney for a translation of a recent (2020) book by Pierre Manent. However, it may be helpful to work our way in by the back door.
First, let us remind ourselves of one of Dawkins' telling cat-out-of-the-bag moments:
Yes, the establishment evolutionary materialist scientism of our day is self-defeatingly absurd. It cannot account for the necessary freedom to be credibly rational, much less for the resulting challenge of moral government, that we must strive to do the right (though we often stumble). This then allows us to understand the destructive, utterly unprincipled, unsound man:
By contrast, Cicero -- as teased out -- is manifestly right:
Of course, some will object to such boldly stated first principles. On what grounds?
-- That they err? (= appeal to truth, right reason, warrant and wider prudence)
-- That they are an imposition against freedom? ( = appeal to conscience, neighbour, fairness, justice)
-- That we have no right to impose our "views" or "values"? (= appeal to neighbour, fairness, justice, conscience, and often to implicit imposition of another view!)
-- That theism is suspect, and this is a rush to theism? (= appeal to right reason, warrant, truth; also, failing to appreciate that the IS-OUGHT gap can only be bridged in the root of reality, requiring an IS that is inherently good and utterly wise . . . if you doubt, propose another _____ and show how it bridges ________ . . . rather than ending in immorality, amorality or the notion that right/wrong or good/evil is essentially arbitrary)
-- and the like? (= invariably, an appeal to such said first duties)
Anyway, as we come in the backdoor (having picked the lock), we now find some food for thought posted on the refrigerator door by Mahoney summarising Manent:
Manent reflects on “political action and the common good,” contending that the human good is not unsupported, and that we do not live in a merely arbitrary world; political action, he maintains, should be guided and informed by the old cardinal virtues: courage, prudence, temperance, and justice. As Manent put it in a 2014 essay, | . . . .
“If we have the right to speak of humanity as a species sharing a common nature, this is because of this pattern of practical virtues, by which we recognize a courageous and just per-son in the human being born in the most distant and apparently dif-ferent latitude.” . . . .
Manent reflects on the steady displacement of the natural law by the modern conception of human rights. [--> Ironically, your right to say life entails my duty to respect and uphold your life] He questions the widely shared notion of human rights that radically separates them, legitimate as they are in their own sphere, from the ends of human freedom. [--> the civil peace of justice is due balance of rights, freedoms, duties] Manent rejects the fiction of human “autonomy”—a groundless free -dom, without reasons or purposes, to make our way in the world. Nor is he a partisan of “heteronomy,” where acting human beings take their direction from the will of others. Such categories are far too ab-stract; they tell us nothing about the “rules” inherent in human action itself. Those rules become clear as we act conscientiously in the world, trying to do justice to the sense of right and wrong that defines us as human beings. Starting from moral and political philosophy, from an eminently “practical world,” and not from theology or metaphysics (although Manent is in no way opposed to metaphysical reflection), Manent sets out to recover natural law as the key instrument vivify-ing free will, human choice, and moral and political action. [ Natural Law and Human Rights: Toward a Recovery of Practical Reason (Notre Dame Press, 2020), foreword pp. vii, viii.]
This is already provocative food for thought. But just in Chapter 1, he already goes deeper. As he argues on:
“Why Natural Law Matters,” Manent highlights the incoherence of a rights project that combines apolitical universalism and a thoughtless cultural relativism. Commentators such as Olivier Roy condemn, for instance, Christian opposition to LGBT rights [--> claims?] but welcome, in the name of cultural tolerance, a far more vociferous opposition to them from European Muslims. The West is always judged severely, in this way of thinking, while the “Other” gets a free pass. As Manent demonstrates, politically and ju-ridically imposed same-sex marriage was not a modest change in the law to make marriage more “inclusive” but a systematic assault on the idea of a normative human nature. It changed the very nature of mar-riage, undercutting its natural foundations. Marriage—“the crucial institution of a human world organized according to natural law”— no longer acknowledges the complementarity of the sexes or the natural foundations of family life. Transgenderism continues this re-jection of the very idea of human nature and an authoritative natural moral law, where sex is radically separated from “gender.” That is surely worthy of reflection and debate before gender ideology be -comes a tyrannical orthodoxy beyond dispute.
He goes on to indict:
Machiavelli’s evocative rhetoric and audacious theorizing helped decisively to un-dermine the gap between what people do and what they ought to do, which is the horizon and precondition of all reasonable choice. In his assault on “imaginary principalities” (such as the perennial notion of natural law) in chapter 15 of The Prince, he frees “virtuosos of action,” daring revolutionaries of a new type, from adherence to the natural law. “Necessity,” a willingness to move back and forth between good and evil with an exhilarating alacrity, and immoral daring, become the trademark of those “princes” freed from the constraints of the moral law. They feign respect for that law—see chapter 18 of The Prince—but have no real place for it in their souls.
There is of course, much more (especially on the pivotal question, "conscience"), but already we have much food for thought towards sound reformation. END
