Positive Liberty

This post (found via VC) reminds us of a great passage from the Federalist that eloquently answers the idiocy of Stephan Kinsella’s statements regarding me and Ed Brayton:

An enlightened zeal for the energy and efficiency of government will be stigmatized, as the off-spring of a temper fond of despotic power and hostile to the principles of liberty…. It will be forgotten, on the one hand, that jealousy is the usual concomitant of love, and that the noble enthusiasm of liberty is apt to be infected with a spirit of narrow and illiberal distrust. On the other hand, it will be equally forgotten that the vigor of government is essential to the security of liberty; that, in the contemplation of a sound and well-informed judgment, their interest can never be separated; and that a dangerous ambition more often lurks behind the specious mask of zeal for the rights of the people than under the forbidden appearance of zeal for the firmness and efficiency of government. History will teach us that the former has been found a much more certain road to the introduction of despotism than the latter, and that of those men who have overturned the liberties of republics, the greatest number have begun their career by paying an obsequious court to the people; commencing demagogues, and ending tyrants.

Pennsylvania’s religious test in its Constitution written in 1776 illustrates why I am suspicious of viewing the Founding (as it regards religion, but other important issues as well) through the lens of federalism. The original Constitution was extremely limited in power and left the states lots of room to engage in practices entirely contrary to Founding ideals — the worst practice, of course, being slavery.

The Founders separated Church and State at the federal level: The unamended Constitution abolished federal religious tests and left religion entirely unempowered in a Constitution of limited enumerated powers. The amended Constitution prohibited a federal establishment and guaranteed against federal free exercise violations (things that most agreed the federal government didn’t even have the enumerated power to do under the unamended Constitution). But they left the states free to violate free exercise, erect establishments and pass religious tests. While a few notable founders (Washington and Adams) thought a mild establishment didn’t violate “the rights of conscience” (while Jefferson and Madison thought all establishment did), all notable Founders agreed that free exercise ought to apply universally (to religions, whether Christian or not) and that all such religious tests violated the rights of conscience. States, alas, under the original power scheme, were permitted to violate the rights of conscience. But make no mistake, when states did these things like passing a religious test for holding public office, our Founders viewed this as violating the natural rights enunciated in the Declaration of Independence. Continue Reading »

This is classic, a Youtube video showing John McCain contradicting himself left and right, saying one thing to one audience and the opposite to another audience. Of course, one could make an identical video about virtually every major politician in the country. And I think they should. I’ll be glad to post similar videos about every politicians they’re made about. The video below the fold.
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“Gentlemen, as you all know, we have a problem,” said the Information Minister.

The scene: a dictatorship. It doesn’t really matter which one. All that matters is that the leadership is assembled, and that for once they are talking freely. The iPods are stowed, and the cognac is out. The cigars are Cuban, of course.

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At the opening of chapter 18 of The Theory of Money and Credit, Mises writes:

Admittedly, the question does arise: Are there any persons whose capacity to pay is so completely certain as to be quite beyond all doubt? And it may be pointed out that more than one bank, whose solvency nobody had dared to call in question even the day before, has collapsed ignominiously; and that so long as the remembrance of events of this sort has not entirely vanished from human memory, it must evoke at least a small difference between the valuation of money and that of claims to money payable at any time, even if, as far as human foresight goes, these latter are to be regarded as completely sound.

It is undeniable that such questions reveal a possible source of a certain lack of confidence in notes and checks, which would necessarily result in money substitutes having a lower value than money. But, on the other hand, there are reasons which might cause individuals to value money substitutes more highly than money, even if demands for the conversion of money into money substitutes were not always satisfied immediately.

Fair enough; I can see both sides of this. But….

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When Bishops, a generation after Hobbes’s death, almost naturally spoke the language of the state of nature, contract and rights, it was clear that he had defeated the ecclesiastical authorities, who were no longer able to understand themselves as they once had.

– Allan Bloom, The Closing of the American Mind, pp. 141-42

Jay Rogers, the Christian Reconstructionist from my previous posts, and I have been cordially exchanging emails. His info seems to confirm what I already knew: except for Gary North, all of the other major figures in that movement argue that “theonomy” is completely in line with Founding principles and they otherwise swallow hard the “Christian America” thesis.

I find this ironic because I always considered CRs to be the most “literal” of the fundamentalists who argue for the “purest” reading of the Bible, even willing to defend those “scary” verses that other evangelicals argue are no longer relevant in today’s day and age. (And yes, I know I have conservative evangelical and Catholic readers who think the CRs’ reading of the Bible to be unsound).

As I’ve learned in the email exchange, their embrace of the “Christian Nation” thesis arguably has diluted the “purity” of their reading of the Bible. Mark Noll, the premier evangelical scholar once noted, similar to the above quotation by Bloom, “In 1700 religion had been an ‘exporter’ of ideas and behavior patterns to American society; by 1800 it was an ‘importer.’”

Reconstructionists and Christian America advocates argue that even men of the Enlightenment like Jefferson and Franklin were influenced by the “Biblical worldview.” And while that is true to some qualified extent, the converse, suggested by Bloom and Noll, is likewise true: that even “men of the Bible” — the orthodox Christians — were influenced by “Enlightenment” ideas. Contra the claim that it was the “Great Awakening” that sparked off the American Revolution, the leading clergy preaching “patriotic” sermons — Mayhew, Chauncey, Gay, and West — were theological opponents of Edwards and his Great Awakening. Arguably, as theological unitarians, they weren’t “Christians” at all. By 1776 unitarianism, universalism, and Arminianism were already firmly entrenched in the New England Clergy. And Calvin’s influence had begun to wane. These “enlightened” preachers, like our key Founders, elevated man’s reason over revelation and otherwise took a cafeteria approach to the Bible, especially when they argued, contra Romans 13, for a right to revolt.

One orthodox Christian committed to defending the notion that a right to revolt is “Biblical” told me that even if Mayhew et al. weren’t “Biblical” in their unitarianism, their sermons on the right to revolt were (hence, Mayhew and company were “Biblical” in their worldview). I argued, again, we could view the issue conversely. Calvinism and Christian orthodoxy, though on the wane in New England by 1776, certainly weren’t dead. And some/many notable patriotic Whig preachers were traditional orthodox Christians and Calvinists. Ezra Stiles comes to mind. Samuel Langdon (I’m still reading up on him) was also a notable patriotic preacher and I think an orthodox Christian. Yet, Stiles and Langdon likewise “imported” Enlightenment philosophy not only into their patriotic preaching but into their readings of the Bible itself.

Mr. Rogers, while attempting to argue that the Founders modeled our government on Biblical principles, seems to endorse wholesale the contents of Samuel Langdon’s sermon entitled THE REPUBLIC OF THE ISRAELITES AN EXAMPLE TO THE AMERICAN STATES. From the title alone we should see a problem with the soundness of Langdon’s sermon as the Ancient Israelites did not have a Republic. This sermon, while sounding very nice, constitutes a mythic account of the Ancient Iraelites, not at all supported by the text of the Bible. In short, even orthodox Christians could, like the unitarians whose specialty was an unorthodox/cafeteria biblical hermeneutic, play “fast and loose” with biblical texts to fit their Whig-republican propaganda. Nothing in the Bible suggests that the Israelites as “a people” consented to the Kings or elders that God unilaterally put in charge to rule over them. Though, this is exactly what patriotic preachers like Langdon argued.

As I noted to Mr. Rogers, of course, in a nation with many orthodox Christians and where the Bible was important, and given the natural religious impulse in man, the revolutionaries would argue that God/the Bible was on their side. The anti-revolutionary Tories also had preachers on their side and without question their “literal” interpretation of the Bible was as sound if not sounder than the Whig/republican interpretation.

Arguably, this importing of “a-Biblical” Enlightenment philosophy into the Bible constituted an “abuse” of the Bible. And one would think that Christians devoted to a “pure” reading of the Bible would reject it.

No, not that terrible pop-song by the American Idol what’s her name, but the one that rocks done by Ritchie Blackmore’s Rainbow. What’s notable about this video is how Graham Bonnet is a great rock/metal singer without at all fitting the image (and unfortunately when we are talking about making it big with multi million dollar record contracts, that is something that can kill your chances). He looks like Jim Carey up there. If a rock musician is unattractive or otherwise doesn’t fit the “image” they are supposed to, that probably means they are good because they have to make it in spite of all that.

I think because of the popularity of the American Idol song with the same name that some DJ has done a dance remix of this classic Rainbow song.

Here is Bonnet playing this tune with guitar legend Yngwie Malmsteen who was in Bonnet’s band Alcatraz. I always thought Malmsteen worked better in this band type of environment where he wasn’t in charge and solely responsible for writing all the lyrics and melodies. While his solo stuff has some cool instrumental tunes like Blackstar, he also has many songs with God-awful lyrics and badly written attempts at commercial-like metal songs.

While I am not too keen on the anti-capitalist politics of this move, Glengarry Glen Ross has great acting. Alec Baldwin (just the man to play this character) is surprisingly good here.

I’ve long enjoyed Hadley Arkes’ writings on natural law, although I strongly disagree with much of what he says. But I’ve always recommended his The Return of George Sutherland as one of the best books on law I’ve ever read. In the current issue of The Claremont Review of Books, he has an essay which, again, has much that is disputable, but also has some choice observations. I particularly enjoyed this:

[H]ow do we know that [the Constitution trumps statutes]…since this understanding, so critical to the practice of our law, is not contained in the Constitution. As Hamilton put it, these rules to guide the law are “not derived from the positive law, but from the nature and reason of the thing.”

Might this have been what Blackstone had in mind when he referred to “the laws of reason and nature”? But conservatives seem serenely unaware that they are doing natural law when they bring to bear on the cases at hand a rigorous application of the canons of reason…. In [Rapanos v. United States, Justice Scalia] had to remind Justice Kennedy that that which is “like navigable waters” is not itself “navigable waters,” under the statutes of the United States—or, we might add, the statutes of any other place. So compelling, in fact, was his argument, that it is quite plausible that courts in exotic places, in Zimbabwe or Hungary, could find their way to the same ground in settling their legal judgments. The law of contradiction is universal because it is logically necessary. When jurists bring to bear the canons of reason, grounded in that law of contradiction as its anchoring point, they furnish the ground for a law that is no less universal in its reach. They are doing in effect the law of the dreaded N-word (nature, natural law). Or we might say, the Law of You-Know-What—just as long as we don’t say the word and acknowledge that we may be doing natural law, even while we spend a certain genius in deriding that enterprise.

Hadley Arkes, The Constitution And Mr. Bush, Claremont Rev. of Books 57-58 (Winter 2007).

Marcel Proust has been my guilty pleasure lately. This morning I was fascinated to read the following passage from Le Côté de Guermantes, which describes a thought I have had almost every single night for years on end as I fall asleep. The translation is mine:

Despite everything, the world we inhabit in our sleep is so different that those who have trouble sleeping try above all to leave our own. After rehashing desperately, for hours on end, with eyes closed, such thoughts as might otherwise be had with open eyes, they regain their courage if they perceive that the moment before was preoccupied with a reasoning in formal contradiction to the laws of logic and the evidence of the present, this short “absence” signifying that the door is open through which they can perhaps escape in time from the perception of the real…

And that’s it — that’s exactly how I notice that I’m falling asleep. I would only add to this that I have wondered, when I have had this thought, if I in fact am not already actually asleep, albeit still with the power to perceive my surroundings and to awaken if I desire.

I’m not going to fawn all over Proust. His narrator is a picky, prissy, snobbish wannabe aristocrat, which he named after himself in what should have been a serious red flag to some editor somewhere. Wannabe aristocrats disgust me. And “Marcel’s” observational eye is good enough to spot the many foibles of others, but never of himself. I’m hoping he gets his comeuppance in the next volume, because it isn’t looking that way in this one. Heck, Russel Baker was even right, at times.

Still, I like reading Proust. Just not with any particular sense of purpose: You don’t read Proust to finish reading Proust. You read Proust so you can tell everyone — often, for the rest of your life — that you are reading Proust. And also so you can enjoy little observations like the above, which are so ordinary that perhaps no one before Proust ever thought to record them, yet so true as to be compelling, even if the plot isn’t going anywhere at all.

That’s enough for today. I’ve got a question on Mises lined up for this weekend, but I want to think it over a bit more carefully before I post.

Jay Rogers, the producer of the Reconstructionist video featured in my last post, has responded.

He appears to argue that the Recons are a bit kinder and gentler than we give them credit for.

It’s interesting. None of the “Christian Reconstructionists” interviewed in the God’s Law and Society video told us that they held the view that God requires the execution of these capital offenders mentioned here [homosexuals, adulterers, recalcitrant children, and those who openly worship "false gods"]. Steve Schlissel explains that even in Old Testament times, with the exception of murder, these were probably the worst case offenders that received the death penalty. We see in several passages in 1 and 2 Kings that homosexual temple prostitutes were banished rather than executed. King David was pardoned by God himself. Jesus forgave the woman caught in adultery. And so on.

What we do believe is that God’s Law is just. If God commands execution for a capital crime, then it is a just punishment. We can’t be squeamish about these Old Testament capital laws. This is what our God commanded.

Now whether our society today ought to enforce these laws “lock, stock and tablets” is another argument. There has been a change under the New Covenant regarding certain Old Covenant Laws. Every theonomist we interviewed agreed with this idea. I have always found it strange that people who are opposed to Christian Reconstruction always jump to the claim that we want to stone incorrigible children. No Reconstructionist has argued that we ought to do that.

Honestly I haven’t researched their writings in meticulous detail, but from what I understand, they do support execution for these things because the Bible in the OT does. See this article by Walter Olson on the matter.

And from what I’ve watched in the clips, while they don’t out and out say, yes, we will stone these folks to death, it nonetheless seems implicit in their remarks. For instance, watch this clip by Andrew Sandlin where he notes that folks who believe in false gods would have the “liberty” to worship in their homes but not in public. I’d like to get him on record stating, here’s how we would punish them and no we wouldn’t stone them to death as the Bible commands.

Prof. Lee Strang has published an article in the Penn State Law Review about the role of the Declaration of Independence in constitutional interpretation–a subject I find particularly important. Judging from the conclusion, it looks pretty interesting:

In this Article, I argued that the Declaration of Independence is one of many sources of the original meaning of the text of the Constitution. First, I laid out the background debate over the role of the Declaration in constitutional interpretation. Then I described how appeals to the Declaration have periodically arisen during times of national moral crisis, such as those over slavery or civil rights. I also detailed how scholars have relied on the Declaration to support dramatically inconsistent claims of political morality and constitutional norm.

Assuming an originalist perspective on constitutional interpretation, I then argued that the historical evidence from the Framing and Ratification of the “original” Constitution shows that the Declaration is simply one source of the original meaning of the Constitution. In addition, I argued that the Declaration is not the “interpretative key” to the Constitution because of the inconsistencies between the two documents, and because the Declaration cannot provide sufficient interpretative guidance. Lastly, I advanced arguments to establish that the Declaration is not independently legally binding. In doing so, I rebutted many of the common Declarationist claims.

Jonathan Adler’s discussion of Chris Mooney’s book The Republican War on Science looks very interesting. I hope it receives some respectful consideration. It’s very unfortunate (if often understandable) that so many scientifically literate and otherwise intelligent people regard all Republicans as thoughtless barbarians and semi-literate Bible-thumpers. That sort of stereotyping and smugness is just what liberals claim to detest…until they practice it themselves. Obviously political manipulation of science is a bad thing (and absolutely inevitable as long as scientists accept money from government and seek to influence policy choices). But to portray it as a product of the inherent ignorance of all conservatives, or to use some genuine scientific illiteracy among conservatives (e.g., creationism) as proof that anyone who believes in small government must be a knuckle-dragging moron is counterproductive. Worse, it’s unscientific.

Ladies and gentlemen, the Positive Liberty staff cordially asks you to disengage your irony meters before continuing. Further use may result in irreparable damage.

Oh, and the setup for this one is long, but the payoff is exquisite.

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Or why I believe Islam is compatible with liberal democracy. You can view some of the famous Christian Reconstructionists (RJ Rushdoony, Andrew Sandlin, George Grant, etc.) advocating their theocratic vision of government on this YouTube channel. In their first best world, Old Testament style punishments would be imposed on, among others, adulterers, homosexuals, recalcitrant children, and those who proselytize for the worship of “false gods.” They are really not too far off from the Islamic Mullahs.

You often hear forces from the extreme right arguing that Islam is not compatible with liberal democracy, that the version we see coming from Bin Laden et al. represents true Islam, a “demonic” false religion. (Note: President Bush does not take this position and has argued that Islam, properly understood, is a religion of peace, entirely compatible with liberal democratic norms. Indeed, such a premise seems almost necessary to support his Iraqi War project. Many anti-Islamic Christian rightists like Falwell and Robertson, actually support the war in Iraq. You have to wonder why they support trying to bring democracy to Iraq if Islam by its very nature is incompatible with liberal democracy.)

These Christian Reconstructionists, like many of Muslim fundamentalists, are not stupid people; these spokesman are well-educated, well-spoken and quite Biblically literate. They simply differ in their “literal” interpretation of the Bible with those other Protestant fundamentalists who have made their peace with liberal democracy and interpret the Bible to no longer require the execution of homosexuals, adulterers, recalcitrant children, and those who openly worship “false Gods.”

Watching these folks and their scary arguments and reflecting upon how the Christian Bible and religion still nonetheless became compatible with the liberal democratic order our Founding Fathers gave us makes me believe that the Koran and Islamic religion likewise can be “interpreted” in a way compatible with liberal democracy. (Whether trying to bring liberal democracy by force to Muslim populations unreceptive to its ideals is another issue entirely). And finally, I might add, our key Founders seemed to believe that all world religions, including Islam, taught the same truth as Christianity, were valid ways to God, and provided the moral support that republican governments needed.