Positive Liberty

[Author's note: I'm going to hell for writing this.]

Literate people usually assume that John Locke demolished the last remaining arguments for divine-right monarchy when he published his First Treatise of Civil Government in 1689. The First Treatise aimed at refuting the arguments made by Sir Robert Filmer in his work Patriarcha, or the Natural Power of Kings, which was taken by Locke and others to be the best contemporary statement of the theory of divine right.

But very few students ever read Locke’s First Treatise any longer. Indeed, even in college, most never get more than a few watered-down excerpts from the Second, in which Locke proposed his own theory of government.

I take this appalling ignorance as one sign among many that liberalism is no longer capable of perpetuating itself. If a system of government cannot even teach itself to the rising generation, how can it ever hope to endure? Clearly, liberalism is failing the test.

Meanwhile, the principles of divine right are all around us, and we have no need of a Locke to explain them. Nature and the Bible are more than sufficient. For those, however, who still believe in the peculiar theories of Mr. Locke — and who usually believe without reading them — I have written the following essay.

Let us start with the Bible. In Genesis, Adam is described as having been created in the image of God; we may thus infer that he was perfect in all his attributes:

Then God said, “Let us make man in our image, in our likeness, and let them rule over the fish of the sea and the birds of the air, over the livestock, over all the earth, and over all the creatures that move along the ground.”

So God created man in his own image,
in the image of God he created him;
male and female he created them.

God blessed them and said to them, “Be fruitful and increase in number; fill the earth and subdue it. Rule over the fish of the sea and the birds of the air and over every living creature that moves on the ground.”

Sovereignty being an attribute of God, this attribute was likewise passed to Adam, such that the first man was also the first earthly sovereign.

Likewise, Eve was the first subject. We also know that she was never intended to be an equal or a co-ruler, for nowhere did God grant Eve any rulership over the world. On the contrary, we are clearly told that Eve was merely an assistant, albeit a necessary assistant, to Adam:

The LORD God said, “It is not good for the man to be alone. I will make a helper suitable for him.”

Now the LORD God had formed out of the ground all the beasts of the field and all the birds of the air. He brought them to the man to see what he would name them; and whatever the man called each living creature, that was its name. So the man gave names to all the livestock, the birds of the air and all the beasts of the field.

But for Adam no suitable helper was found. So the LORD God caused the man to fall into a deep sleep; and while he was sleeping, he took one of the man’s ribs and closed up the place with flesh. Then the LORD God made a woman from the rib he had taken out of the man, and he brought her to the man.

In other words, we find nothing whatsoever about rulership — and everything that needs to be said about obedience. Thus if you call yourself a Christian, a Jew, or a Moslem, then you are compelled to recognize that the first family of mankind was also its first kingdom, with one ruler and one subject. Not only that, but because all of this happened before the Fall, it is clearly the way that God intended us to live.

I know, I know, I’m being politically incorrect, and I’m terribly sorry, but that’s just how it is. The good book says so, and nature confirms it by making women weaker and more timid on average. I know that these facts are terribly distressing to liberals, but facts are always distressing to liberals. And yet they remain factual nonetheless.

The sounder course is not to shy away from inconvenient facts, but rather to find the courage to live as they dictate. And — please hold your feminine tempers for a moment — the fact of Eve’s subjugation shows the way toward greater happiness for both men and women. I will have more to say on this below.

Eve’s subjugation also brings me to a very important point, one that will be key to understanding the rest of this essay.

Man’s rulership over woman is a type of sovereignty, an attribute that comes in many varieties: A man is a king in his household just as kings are kings over nations — and just as God is king over us all. What is above is like what is below; the universe is best understood as a series of echoes, with one excellence calling out to another excellence that occupies a different station in the great chain of being. The captain has his ship, the alpha male has his pack of wolves, the brain has the other parts of the body, the conductor has the orchestra, the patriarch has his family; all are reflections of one another, and each one reflects the great principle of sovereignty, whose source is God.

Goodness on the part of the leader is not the same thing as goodness on the part of the followers; as everyone knows, too many cooks spoil the broth. Propriety for one is not propriety for the other — and the better part of wisdom, for most men, is to learn and accept their humble place in life. How excellent are kings, who must learn to exceed the everyday rules; even if they fail, they have failed at something ordained of God.

This principle of types is very important, because Locke’s demolition of Filmer’s argument rests on a near-complete and probably deliberate misunderstanding of it. Notice, those few of you who have read the relevant documents, how Locke continually equated monarchy with slavery. Often he argued as follows:

Monarchy is like slavery.
Slavery is bad.
Therefore, monarchy is bad.

This is the logical fallacy known as the weak analogy. With help from the Fallacy Files, we might dissect it as follows:

A raven is like a writing desk, because Poe wrote on both of them.
Ravens can fly.
Therefore, writing desks can fly.

Now slavery — I freely admit — does possess some attributes of the original archetype of sovereignty, which is the relationship that we all have toward God, but it is absurd to suggest that this faint resemblance to slavery disqualifies monarchy as a legitimate and divinely ordained system of governance: If Locke is right, then the example of slavery would also invalidate religion itself, which is an absurd conclusion.

Locke also objects that in the course of human history, the Adamic kingship has so often been interrupted that it is no longer binding upon us: That, it being quite impossible to find a literal, unbroken line of patriarchs from the present day back to Adam’s, no line of kings should be considered to take their power from Adam. Even the obligations that we clearly owe to our families do not translate into anything larger, because kings are such distant relations to everyone else, and because they have all — suspiciously — been unable to demonstrate unbroken succession from the many kings ordained in the Bible.

Yet the principle of types clearly refutes this objection: If Adam’s literal descendants by primogeniture cannot be found, still it is necessary (and a positive divine command!) to find others who will serve in their stead, will do their best to fill the ideal role set out for them, and who will ask God with all due humility to guide them in the right paths. It is the type that matters, not the literal succession; the type is written upon the universe itself, and quibbling over primogeniture doesn’t change things one bit.

Now, if the Adamic line were the only thing that resembled divine sovereignty, the argument from lack of unbroken succession might perhaps be sound, but kings are as natural, and no more evil, to mankind than ship captains; indeed, they are as natural as your brain telling your hand to write. In truth, all things are set up on the principle of sovereignty — how strange it would be, if our governments were the only things not to be so arranged!

In any case, Adam is our first father as well as our first king, and, while Locke claims that all men are born free, this too is manifestly a false observation. We are all born in thrall to our parents, and to our fathers above all, by the explicit command of the Christian religion, and by nature, which renders us helpless at birth. Because we have been helped into adulthood, we are forever the thralls of our parents — who could just as easily have decided never to raise us, and who, in ancient times, possessed the power of life and death over their children.

Similarly, kings are but the fathers of their countries, who sustain their subjects, and who therefore incur a continual, inalienable debt from all those who live in their kingdoms. Nothing could be more familiar or more proper; just as all men have fathers, so too, all nations should have kings.

Whence, then, comes the written law, which is now often made to compete with kingly authority? As Locke quotes Filmer to have said, “The reason why laws have been also made by kings, was this; when kings were either busied with wars, or distracted with public cares, so that every private man could not have access to their persons, to learn their wills and pleasure, then were laws of necessity invented, that so every particular subject might find his prince’s pleasure decyphered unto him in the tables of his laws.”

Law, therefore, is an instrument of convenience only, and it exists for the sake of the sovereign, who today must rule a much larger and more fractuous polity than Adam ever needed to rule. Locke’s objections to this are all feeble, being based on the idea that people are “born free,” which clearly they are not. Let babies legislate for themselves; let feral children make the laws — and then I will admit that we are born free. Until then, we are all servants of the one who granted us society, and whom we name the sovereign.

Now Adam was of course above all earthly laws — for, if anyone had made the laws, it would surely have been Adam himself, and it is ridiculous to suppose that he, a mortal man, could have alienated something that was given to him by God. Indeed, Adam needed no laws whatsoever, because even after the Fall, all that he did, spoke, and thought was the height of earthly justice — and no one could possibly have said otherwise.

And just as Adam’s power was given to him by God, so too the power of all other earthly kings is given by God. It is neither in their power nor in ours to alienate this sovereignty — and when we do, we violate the Christian religion. In other words, “constitutional monarchy” is a contradiction in terms.

Consider, finally, the words of Christ himself:

“Give to Caesar what is Caesar’s, and to God what is God’s.”

Not only is this a clear example of the principle of types, but note how it also says nothing about rights, or freedom, or elections, or any such liberal nonsense. On the contrary, it likens even a debauched and tyrannical regime to the very authority of God. Knowing all things, Christ knew well that the Roman regime would soon have Him unjustly murdered — yet He did not advise its overthrow. And we should therefore strive to be like Christ in all things, and to obey our rulers even if they would murder us. Anything less would be un-Christian.

In any case, unjust monarchs are not a strike against monarchical government, both because it is always possible to rule justly — and because, whether our rulers are just or unjust, we who follow them faithfully will be rewarded for our humility in the afterlife. In the world to come, we will all either worship and serve God continuously — as we should a monarch — or else we will be declared rebels, fit only for eternal punishment.

Do you find worshipful humility and obeissance unpleasant? My, how you’re going to hate the afterlife, which consists of nothing but! And worse: You’re supposed to enjoy it. To prepare for the inevitable, it’s best to get used to abasing yourself right away, and the easiest way to do this is to institute a monarchy.

The Science of Divine Right. Our obedience may even be rewarded in this life: Just as we are designed to love God, so too, we are designed to love our kings. And yet, the vast majority of people living in the industrialized world either have no kings at all, or have merely symbolic monarchs who wield no genuine political power.

I take this grave deformation of man’s natural state to be the cause of much modern suffering and the root of almost every modern evil. Why is modern man unhappy, despite all his conveniences? Why has he experimented with communism, fascism, and so many other varieties of government? It is because he is lost — lost without the kings that his nature demands. In the second part of this work, I will demonstrate how divine right may be discovered through social science as well as religion.

I admit that there is not much social science work being done today that directly supports the thesis of the divine right of kings, yet even the work that is being done today in other fields, when supplemented with a few commonsense observations, will more than prove the point.

Let us first consider the one area of life that is governed most by necessity, the one area where the consequences of either success or failure are the greatest. I refer of course to the military, where it will readily be seen that the principles of authority and obedience are still in place more or less as they always have been. Is this not a tacit admission, on the part of liberal societies, that monarchy is effective? Because they would not trust their security to the liberal principles they profess to uphold, we may conclude that these societies are hypocritical, and that only monarchies are being fully consistent.

Further, a monarchy can be expected to have a stronger military than a liberal society, for in a monarchy, all people are accustomed to the military discipline and hierarchy that must be painstakingly taught and re-taught in a liberal society. In a monarchy, every man knows his place, and this makes a nation strong.

Now let us consider another instructive example. Dr. Stanley Milgram ran a series of famous experiments that proved nearly everything I have set out to argue today. As Milgram explained,

The legal and philosophic aspects of obedience are of enormous import, but they say very little about how most people behave in concrete situations. I set up a simple experiment at Yale University to test how much pain an ordinary citizen would inflict on another person simply because he was ordered to by an experimental scientist. Stark authority was pitted against the subjects’ [participants'] strongest moral imperatives against hurting others, and, with the subjects’ [participants'] ears ringing with the screams of the victims, authority won more often than not. The extreme willingness of adults to go to almost any lengths on the command of an authority constitutes the chief finding of the study and the fact most urgently demanding explanation.

Here is Wikipedia’s description of the experiment:

For the experiment, subjects were recruited by newspaper ads and direct mail to participate in a study at Yale… The experiment was advertised as taking one hour, for which those responding would be paid $4.50. Participants were men between the ages of 20 and 50, coming from all educational backgrounds, ranging from an elementary school dropout to participants with doctoral degrees.

The participant and a confederate of the experimenter, who would be an actor pretending to be another participant, were told by the experimenter that they would be participating in an experiment to test the effects of punishment on learning behavior…

The “teacher” was then given a list of word pairs which he was to teach the learner. The teacher began by reading the list of word pairs to the learner. The teacher would then read the first word of each pair and read 4 possible answers. The learner would press a button to indicate his response. If the answer was incorrect, the learner would receive a shock, with the voltage increasing by 15 volts with each wrong answer. If correct, the teacher read the next word pair.

The subjects believed that for each wrong answer, the learner was receiving actual shocks. In reality, there were no shocks. After the confederate was separated from the subject, the confederate set up a tape recorder integrated with the electro-shock generator, which played pre-recorded sounds for each shock level. After a number of voltage level increases, the actor started to bang on the wall that separated him from the subject. After several times banging on the wall and complaining about his heart condition, the learner gave no further response to the questions and made no further complaints.

At this point many people indicated their desire to stop the experiment and check on the learner. Many test subjects paused at 135 volts and began to question the purpose of the experiment. Some continued after being assured that they would not be held responsible. Some subjects began to laugh nervously once they heard the screams of pain coming from the learner…

In Milgram’s first set of experiments, 65 percent (27 out of 40) of experimental participants administered the experiment’s final 450-volt shock, though many were quite uncomfortable in doing so; everyone paused at some point and questioned the experiment, some even saying they would return the check for the money they were paid. No participant steadfastly refused to give further shocks before the 300-volt level. Variants of the experiment were later performed by Milgram himself and other psychologists around the world with similar results. Apart from confirming the original results the variations have tested variables in the experimental setup.

In short, we are designed to obey, and any social system that does not recognize this fact is being naive.

Now, many say that the so-called Milgram experiments were unethical, that they were unfair, and that they should never be repeated. I submit that this is mere cowardice on the part of the accusers, and that Milgram’s work is being wrongly persecuted because of the profound truth it reveals about the nature of man himself: Most of us are simply fit for obedience, not for critical or independent thinking.

What is below is like what is above: Studies also show that, however they may protest to the contrary, women are happier when their husbands are the breadwinners: By implication, women are happiest when they are dependent upon the man of the household. Now this is only natural, as men are made to engage with the world, and women, to engage with men. This evidence dovetails well with the text of Genesis, which declares that woman is to be a helpmeet to man, being created expressly for that purpose and to serve as King Adam’s first subject. Would that all families were so happy!

Indeed, all of these observations almost lead one to conclude that obedience to an absolute monarch has some evolutionary benefit to it, and that, to use the language of modern science, we are conditioned by darwinian processes to follow strong, authoritative leaders. Thus, even if we are wrong about Genesis, and if Genesis does not present a literal history of the earth, still the Creation presents us with a supremely good moral history, one that teaches us our proper place in life: Namely, to obey our betters and not to question their authority.

Note as well that social contract theory has no satisfactory answers to these observations; no, social contract theorists simply proclaim that their findings are “self-evident,” as though some privileged class of observations, namely their own, had no need of proof. They imagine states of nature that never actually happened, and ascribe to them the explanatory power of findings, like the Milgram experiment, that can be readily duplicated at any time. As one author has aptly put it, “there was never so much glib nonsense put together in well-sounding English.” The only remarkable thing about the liberal experiment is that it has been allowed to go on for so long.

One day I think we will come to pity those who live under this liberal experiment: They have been sold freedom in place of decorum — and in place of majesty. Is there not something immature about this constant harping about liberty? Doesn’t a child having a temper-tantrum sound quite the same? It’s high time we grew up — and recognized that being a real adult means accepting one’s proper place in life, which both scripture and nature proclaim.

That we are currently ruled by a liberal democracy is, of course, an aberration. The vast majority of human societies have known neither liberalism nor democracy. And yet they were filled with wise, happy, and virtuous men. Who are we to think that we can do better, with our recent philosophical upstart?

[Whew. That was difficult, particularly the part about "not writing a parody." Thanks to the Liberty Fund, which hosted the only copy of the First Treatise that I could find online. Discussion will follow tomorrow, but for right now, I've got to go floss my mind out. Yech...]

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