Wednesday, November 14, 2007
The Operation Of The Moral Law
Standing unnoticed on the edge of the group, Rearden heard a woman, who had large diamond earrings and a flabby, nervous face, ask tensely, "Senor d'Anconia, what do you think is going to happen to the world?""Just exactly what it deserves."
"Oh, how cruel!"
"Don't you believe in the operation of the moral law, madame?" Francisco asked gravely. "I do."
[From Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged]
You can fool all of the people some of the time,
And some of the people all of the time,
But you can't fool Mom![Penny Rowland]
There are persons who believe, some quite firmly, that there are no laws that are impossible for humans to break -- that is, that Nature's laws are just as mutable as the emissions of Congress, subject to evasion, modification, reinterpretation, and repeal as it may suit us. It's a consequence of the overloading of the word "law." Man-made laws have certainly undergone enough convulsions and special-interest distortions to lose all pretense to permanence or universality. If a "law" is something that requires the construction of a thesis and the assembly of a consensus, then why shouldn't natural laws be as elastic as the legislated variety?
The problem is indeed semantic. Strictly speaking, Nature has no "laws." The concept of "law" is a human one, founded on the purposeful behavior called enforcement. Nature has behavior. Men observe that behavior, note the patterns in it, and propose that it follows various "laws." But no one enforces those laws, not even God. He merely decided how matter and energy would behave, and turned it, and us, loose to find our own way.
When Rand spoke of the "moral law," she understood what she was saying better than most of her readers. Whereas man-made law must be enforced to be of significance, "natural law" is self-enforcing; there's no way to "slip one past Mother Nature."
Moral law is natural law; it proceeds from the nature of Man.
Some aspects of the moral law seem to require analysis. For example, consider the one we call the Fifth Commandment: Thou shalt not murder. It is in the nature of Man that, in the face of lethal aggression, he will either take up arms and slay the aggressor, or he will be slain in his turn. No other conclusions are available. In the former case, the defender/punisher appears to be enforcing the moral law, but the existence of the alternative -- that he submit to aggression without resistance -- alters the picture considerably. After all, no one has to oppose an aggressor. What happens if everyone in his path declines to do so?
In that case, the moral fault of the aggressor is matched by an even greater moral default by his victims. In refusing to defend themselves and one another, they forfeit all right to claim that they are moral agents. They become morally indistinguishable from rocks and dirt.
There's little dispute about the morality of answering deadly force with deadly force. The alternative, when tried, has literally handed the world over to the villains. Even persons opposed to the execution of murderers will concede that a killer on the rampage must be stopped, if necessary, by killing him.
Which brings us to a sharp observation from Lawrence Auster:
[Historian Victor Davis Hanson] tells us that what we're fighting for in this war is a "free and tolerant mankind." Apart from the wildly hubristic fantasy that we should fight to transform the whole of mankind, Hanson's notion that what we're trying to do to mankind is make it "tolerant" should not be passed over lightly. This is the language of post World War II liberalism, arising from the fatally wrong-headed notion that what was objectionable about the Nazis was their "intolerance"--rather than their utter barbarism, tyranny, and inhumanity. Having defined the ultimate evil of Nazism, not as the ultimate violation of the moral law as traditionally understood, but as the violation of liberal tolerance, postwar liberalism then set about dismantling all the existing ordinary particularisms of our own society (including, in the case of the EU, nationhood itself) in the name of preventing any resurgence of Nazi-like evil. This was the birth of political correctness, which sees any failure on our part to be completely open to and accepting of the Other--and thus any normal attachment to our own ways and our own society--as the equivalent of Nazism.
There's more insight in those two hundred words than in the entire Congressional Record.
"Tolerance" is a leading shibboleth of the Left. As they do with nearly all their nostrums, leftists wield it in a self-contradicting fashion. As Auster notes above, their command to be "tolerant" equates to an acceptance of the moral validity of any and every form of behavior. It proclaims that there are no moral absolutes, thus forbidding moral evaluation absolutely. Indeed, the Left is so intolerant of moral standards that it deems itself licensed to expunge them, and the promotion of them, by any means expedient. It appears that there is a moral absolute after all: Thou shalt not blaspheme against the Gospel of Universal Tolerance.
To the extent that well-meaning Americans have internalized this concept, we have become our own gravediggers.
A single-point thesis such as mandatory undiscriminating tolerance cannot be defended by logic; it must stand or fall according to its consequences. In practice, leftist tolerance leads to the triumph of Nazism; the subjugation of the world by Communism; the relentless penetration of the West by totalitarian Islam. Ponder a map of Europe, and the tides that have covered it this century past, and see if you can disagree.
From a few paragraphs later in Atlas Shrugged:
"But when a society establishes criminals-by-right and looters-by-law -- men who use force to seize the wealth of disarmed victims -- then money becomes its creators' avenger. Such looters believe it safe to rob defenseless men, once they've passed a law to disarm them. But their loot becomes the magnet for other looters, who get it from them as they got it. Then the race goes, not to the ablest at production, but to those most ruthless at brutality. When force is the standard, the murderer wins over the pickpocket. And then that society vanishes, in a spread of ruins and slaughter."
Through Francisco d'Anconia, Rand stated the inexorable truth about Man-made "laws" that contravene the moral standard built into our natures. Nature cannot be overruled; attempts to do so will always conclude in disaster. Whether the subject is the right to one's money or the right to one's life, extending legal privileges to any group, under which its members may violate the moral law without being called to account, deed the world over to the worst men in it. And then that society vanishes, to be replaced by something none of us would care to inhabit.
The worldwide anti-terror campaign will produce fleeting gains indeed if we fail to proclaim the moral commandment that belongs beneath it: Thou shalt not oppress thy fellow man, in God's name or any other. That commandment renders a harsh verdict upon the pseudo-religion called Islam: a verdict of condemnation as absolute as we ever laid upon Nazism or Communism. Absolutes chafe; they ignore our attempts to negotiate or compromise. But our discomfort at confronting this one will be nothing compared to the sorrows we'll reap should we yield to leftish "tolerance" and wish it away.
The work will not be finished when we've put paid to Islam. It will be imperative that we take fresh stock of our own societies and the legal avenues we've paved for the elevation of oppressors and the enrichment of thieves. But all things in their proper time.
