The American Left's War With Nature
By trying to destroy Western civilization, the left seeks to destroy nature, natural law and natural rights.
I always marvel at the war the American left always seems to wage with nature.
Nowhere is that more evident than during a Democrat presidency, and as each Democrat presidency since Carter has become increasingly radical, that war against nature and natural law has only escalated and intensified.
It isn’t so much that progressives exclusively disagree with conservatives – it is they disagree with the very concept of natural law – in fact, they disagree with anything representing any sort of logical order or structure based on natural law.
They fight natural laws – biological sex becomes a gender fluidity. The thought that man’s natural state is to be infinitely controlled instead of being free. That everyone is due equal outcomes in life. I swear they would argue against the law of gravity if they could, their primal response is to oppose – no matter what.
And a war on natural law is, by extension, a war on Western civilization and culture.
Since the concept of “natural law” is primary to the Western tradition of thought about morality, politics, and law, we probably should understand what it is and what it means.
Many of my posts refer to natural law and natural rights. I do so because the entire foundation of Western civilization is built upon the idea that law created by fallible humans can be classified as morally good or bad - just or unjust - depending on its conformity to the standards of a “natural” (i.e., moral) law that is no mere human creation.
Natural law then is seen as a “higher” law, albeit a law that is in principle accessible to human reason and not necessarily dependent upon divine revelation, albeit entirely compatible with and illumined by such.
Although the Western tradition is not united around a single theoretical account of natural law, its principal architects and leading spokesmen (Aristotle, Thomas Aquinas and John Locke to Thomas Jefferson to Abraham Lincoln and even Martin Luther King) have shared the fundamental belief that human created formal (legislation) and informal laws (social mores) that operate in conjunction with this “higher” natural law are “good” and when at variance with that law, are “bad.”
Natural law was recognized by the earliest philosopher as unbreakable limits to which all living things are subject. For example, you can’t break the law of gravity just because you want to fly. You can invent airplanes that can fly using the laws of physics, but even that flight is temporary and still subject to the law of gravity – planes fall out of the air when the engines stop (the engines also behaving according to the natural laws of physics, thermodynamics, etc.).
Everything on this planet, humans included, must function within established parameters of natural law.
Many years ago, Dr. Robert P. George, McCormick Professor of Jurisprudence and Director of the James Madison Program in American Ideals and Institutions at Princeton University, explained natural (higher) law in this way:
“…St. Paul, for example, refers to a law “written on the heart” which informs the consciences even of the Gentiles who do not have the revealed law of Moses to guide them (Romans 2:14-15). Many centuries later, Thomas Jefferson appeals to “the law of nature and nature’s God” in justifying the American Revolution. Most modern commentators agree that the Founders were firm believers in natural law and sought to craft a constitution that would conform to its requirements, as they understood them, and embody its basic principles for the design of a just political order.
The framers of the Constitution sought to create institutions and procedures that would afford respect and protection to those basic rights (“natural rights”) which people possess, not as privileges or opportunities granted by the state, but as principles of natural law which it is the moral duty of the state to respect and protect. Throughout the twentieth century, however, a lively debate has existed on the question whether the Constitution incorporates natural law in such a way as to make it a source of judicially enforceable, albeit unwritten, constitutional rights and other guarantees.”
There is absolutely no doubt in my mind that the Founders were well aware of the ideals of Aristotle, Aquinas, Locke, Burke, Hobbes and Claude Frédéric Bastiat. Bastiat is probably the greatest thinker that you have never heard of because the concept of natural law is simply too dangerous to be taught in our government schools.
About governments and theories of governance, Bastiat stated that the sole purpose of government is to defend and protect the right of an individual to life, liberty, and property – the basics of natural rights. From this definition, he concluded the law cannot defend life, liberty, and property if it promotes collectivist policies (he specifically targeted the socialism contemporary to France of his time), which are inherently opposed to these very things. Bastiat recognized that these philosophies and ideologies sought to make men equal by taking from one to give to another and in this way, he says, the law is perverted and turned against the only things it was created and chartered to defend – life, liberty, and property.
The old saying goes that nature abhors a vacuum.
The same is true for violations of natural law.
John Locke (and Thomas Jefferson) noted that when governments violated natural law and natural rights through arbitrary and capricious power through “ ambition, fear, folly or corruption”, it enters a state of war with the people and the people who created that government in the first place had not only the right, but a sacred duty, to dispose of that government and put in its place such methods as would respect and protect natural laws.
It isn’t that the progressives don’t have a sort of “order” – but it is an “order” built on contradiction and changeable whim and fad and when “order” is based on such an ephemeral basis, it isn’t order at all – it is something I have always called “oppressive chaos”, the arbitrary and capricious application of coercive power based on preference rather than principle. It is the process of “do what I say because I am in power.”
Jefferson, Locke, Montesquieu, and de Tocqueville called it tyranny.
You're right. I never heard of Bastiat and was surprised to find that a book he wrote is available as an ebook.
The war against natural law and common sense is more intense than the proxy war in Ukraine. We have children programmed to believe they can change the gender they were born with. We have Modern Economic Theory. The "new" math is being challenged with "Queer math". Nothing seems stable and opinions have replaced facts in all Western societies.
Farmers in the Netherlands are being forced out of existence. Information about the side effects of mRNA "vaccines" is kept from the public. No one has the definitive answer regarding the efficacy of masks in preventing COVID and we will never know whether COVID-19 was intentionally released from the Wuhan lab or if it was an accident.
History always repeats itself and I cannot help but compare our modern world to the one that attempted to build the Tower of Babel.
Thanks Mike. I always learn so much from what you publish! I just wish my old brain could hold on to the knowledge so I could have an intelligent debate with liberal minded friends.