Positive Liberty

I recently finished the The Adams-Jefferson Letters and Andrew Sullivan’s The Conservative Soul. Below are some thoughts on each.

Perhaps the most striking thing about the Adams-Jefferson letters was how both of these founders thought of American Revolution. They differed in two important ways from what I take to be the popular understanding of that event. They differed, too, from what I understand to be scholarly consensus. Although Jefferson and Adams disagreed on many political issues, they were united in these two shared considerations on the Revolution.

The first point on which they agreed was that, by the time the fighting began, much of the real work of the American Revolution had already been achieved. This was not meant to disparage the sacrifice of those who fought and died for the new country; Adams and Jefferson alike held them in the highest reverence. But they also placed an extraordinary weight on the intellectual changes that preceeded the war: Even as early as the first settlements, they suggested, the foundations had been laid for a limited government, built on divided powers and the rule of law.

This, they thought, was the real achievement of the Revolution. The fighting was a necessary, logical, and even heroic consequence, but it was only a consequence, and the great work of their generation could never have happened through fighting alone. Both ultimately looked to the French Revolution, and to the horrors of the Napoleonic Era, as a confirmation that the ideas had to come first, and that they had to be the right ideas, else all the fighting would be for nothing: As I posted earlier, divided government and the separation of powers were crucial to them, the features that distinguished the American Revolution from the French and from the English Civil War, which had both seen undivided sovereignty in the form of a representative assembly.

Yet this was only one of the accomplishments of the American Revolution. There was another as well, one they regarded as an equal and maybe even a greater world-historical event: the separation of government from religion. Adams and Jefferson vigorously agreed that this was the other key reason for their struggle: that they could be free from ecclesiastical government, from subsidized Churches and of religious tests for office, from the tyranny that religion inevitably becomes when it is united with government power.

For them, natural reason was unequivocal on this point: Compulsion has no place in faith. Indeed, any proper understanding of God cannot possibly accommodate a Being who forced his followers into Heaven on the point of a bayonet. God himself, and the natural law He ordained, dictated that government should stay out of religion.

As many will note — and a few with satisfaction — Adams, Jefferson, and their contemporaries did not fully achieve this aim. But they remained confident, well into their old age, that 1776 was the beginning of the end, not just for personal or arbitrary government, but also for the alliance between priestcraft and statecraft. At the Massachusetts constitutional convention of 1820, Adams — then 84 years old — tried, unsuccessfully, to insert a provision for complete religious disestablishment. (It finally passed in 1833, seven years after Adams’ death.)

They believed, in other words, that a natural law pointed the way toward human liberty, a law that might be stated as follows: Order the government so that its powers are divided; banish it from the spiritual realm. Our natural ambition will thereafter serve to limit the size of government rather than expanding it. And our natural interest in the spiritual side of life, stripped of the use of force, will produce a more decent, charitable, and humble religious culture than the world had ever known.

Predictably, I think that they were right. This is where my praise for Adams and Jefferson ends — and my criticism of Sullivan begins. For all its merits, The Conservative Soul never takes seriously the oldest and most important claim of liberalism, namely that we are indeed naturally ordered so that liberty is the best state of affairs and the only proper one for us. To liberals — of almost all persuasions — liberty is a profound part of natural law. And it’s achieved at least in part through the mechanisms that Adams and Jefferson praised in their letters.

For Sullivan, liberty and natural law are antithetical to one another, and natural law is to be viewed with suspicion. In all likelihood, says the conservative of doubt, the idea that men are endowed with inalienable rights is just another rationalist system, another grand scheme to remake all of society. We know how those turn out.

It’s an old, old conservative argument, one that can as easily be seen in Burke as in Sullivan. Yet while this certainly is certainly true in the case of some forms of natural law, it never really touches the natural law arguments of Adams and Jefferson.

Let’s first consider where this argument works best. Early in the book, Sullivan reviews Thomistic claims about the nature of reproduction — and the natural laws said to spring from this aspect of human biology. These so-called natural laws forbid homosexuality, masturbation, oral sex, anal sex, pornography, and any other form of sexual contact that does not include a penis entering a vagina and depositing sperm. Naturally, say certain natural law philosophers, there should be governmental laws that will enforce those parts of natural law that nature herself declines to police. Sullivan writes,

[A]lmost no contemporary biological scientists even come close to viewing human nature this way. A philosophy derived, with some haphazard modern patches, from the natural history of an ancient Greek and an early medieval scholar can be forgiven for ignoring the scientific revolutions that have ocured in the past few centuries. But the ovewhelming scientific view is that sexual reproduction has to be seen within the prism of Darwinian natural selection; that its goal is to diversify the human genetic pool to render it more resistant to changes in its environment; and that an integral part of this program for genetic survival is a massive superfluity of human sexual life and activity… In other words, nature itself as we have come to understand it, points far more emphatically toward the ubiquity of nonprocreative sex as the objective norm of human sexuality [pp 92-93].

Does this mean that procreation is bad, or wrong, or that it should be forbidden? Of course not. It only means that sex, while instrumental to human life, is clearly not instrumental in the way that Aristotle or Aquinas understood it to be. Thomistic natural law thinking looks downright ridiculous in this area, given what we now know about human evolutionary biology.

So — natural law thinking is quite often wrong, and spectacularly so. Yet Sullivan’s conclusion, that natural law should be rejected in favor of a radically skeptical conservatism in the spirit of Montaigne and Oakeshott, does not necessarily follow: There may yet be natural laws, just not of the Thomistic (or Marxist, or Maoist, or Islamist or whatever) variety. Sullivan is at his very weakest when he attempts to dismiss the one natural law formulation that seems to have done tolerably well over the years. He writes,

There is never any end to those claiming to have discovered the infallible truth, the permanent solution to the human predicament, and a fail-safe way of organizing society so as to perfectly or more accurately reflect this truth. You want a politics that will end all existential alienation? Become a communist. You want a politics that will redistribute wealth and promise social justice and inclusion? Become a socialist. You want a politics that rests its defense of inalienable human rights on a God-given liberty? Become a liberal. You want a politics that affirms divine truth in its governance of human affairs? Visit Iran [p 230].

To begin with, the track records of communism, socialism, and theocracy speak for themselves. As does the track reckord of Jeffersonian liberalism. To lump them all together is perhaps the single weakest argument I have ever encountered against the American founders’ notion of individual rights. And Sullivan is lumping them together; elsewhere, he writes the following of natural rights derived from God:

After all, this bold statement begs an obvious and enormous question. Whose God? And how do you know what he or she, or, more plausibly, it believes about human beings? As soon as a polity contains people who believe in different Gods or who hold different and mutually contradictory doctrines, or who have no faith at all, “God” cannot be the basis for political agreement. In fact, the minute you invoke God as a guarantor of political equality, you immediately turn what might be political disputes about the practical here and now into epic struggles about the meaning of the universe itself… Bringing “God” into the argument merely runs the risk of dissolving a polity into factions that differ with each other on the most profound issues imaginable, and must insist on the inequality of various truths and therefore of various people who hold such truths. It is a spontaneously self-defeating move. It is a law that must almost immediately repeal itself.

How odd it was for me to read these passages. As a student of the Enlightenment, I can certainly understand when that movement’s grandest intellectual pretensions are called out for the rationalist nonsense that they were. I agree that Marxism and socialism offered foolish ideas of human nature, and reaped from them disastrous consequences in the real world.

But the classical liberal idea of natural law was not the product of one man or a small group hoping to reshape all of human society according to some grandiose philosophical vision. Divided government and religious freedom were attempted only out of desperation, when all else had failed, in the exhaustion that came from centuries of religious warfare in Europe. They were putative natural laws, yes — but they were not the kind of greedy, reductionist, dogmatic natural laws that we have seen in the meantime.

Further, wherever these ideas have been given a fair trial, they have brought peace, liberty, and prosperity. The very fact that we are still discussing Jefferson’s formulation today, and that the United States is still formally founded upon it, is ample demonstration of the practical value of natural law in the classical liberal tradition. Should this long and successful history count for nothing among skeptical, world-wise conservatives? I can easily understand Burke’s rejection of natural law/natural rights in his own day. But Sullivan, today? Much less so. Indeed, many conservatives — not all of them Thomists — have happily adopted Jeffersonian ideas on natural law: Few comparable ideas have held up so well for so long, and conservatives tend to appreciate that.

I also suspect that the American founders would have had a ready reply to Sullivan’s question: “Whose God?”

They would have answered that it was the God of nature, the only God that is capable of being understood through simple, honest introspection about man, society, and faith. To the founders, nature’s God was the deity of every religion — and of none. Nature’s God was present wherever religionists of any faith showed decency and kindness toward their fellow man; nature’s God was absent when the faithful were cruel, intolerant, or uncharitable. Nature’s God demanded that every one of us come to Him on our own terms, not under threat of compulsion. Why not? Because it is impossible to imagine a God who wanted compelled, inauthentic, grudgingly given prayers.

As the founders meant it, nature’s God can be the deity of anyone who believes in God. Even atheists can believe that human nature, stripped of the deity, still demands a sincere conscience, free of all compulsion, as the foundation of any legitimate faith, or civil society, or government. Even atheists can believe, as it were, in nature’s God. It’s the one thing we all can agree on, because sincere dialogue, with no imposture or compulsion, is the prerequisite to any good spiritual aim we might have, and because a religion based on force cannot possibly be a good one.

The invocation of natural law, and of a God who decrees it, was therefore meant as a covenant among all people of good will. It was an agreement of all those who promised to renounce force in spreading their political, religious, or social ideas. It was not an invitation to constant strife: It was the only way of warding off strife, while still holding fervent convictions within. Some might argue that today, in an era plagued by religious extremism, this tolerant, humane vision of nature — and of nature’s God — is more important than ever before. Maybe these people simply aren’t conservatives. If so, then I can’t be a conservative either.