Lockean Men - American Reformer

On American Equality and Civil Rights Regime

Contrary to popular assumptions (even on the right), the Lockean view of the American Founders does not commit us to the Civil Rights regime established and developed in the sixties and seventies. This is an important fact because the Civil Rights Regime (CRR) does commit us to a program of collapsing the private sphere into the public, under the pressures of anti-white, anti-Western, and anti-Christian politics.

Currently, effective political action by conservatives is difficult because conservatives are attempting the impossible, namely, trying to prove that they are the true heirs of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and best conform to the original intent of the CRR, the most faithful to the legacy of MLK, exhibit the true pieties of equality, and so on.

Conservatives, ever desirous of the moral high ground, are committed to this genuflection and false historical equivalencies because they are trapped in the moral outlook of their opponents. They believe that inequality of any kind is injustice and should be abolished. In other words, conservatives operate in a moral universe that guarantees their failure. (Progress is always just on the horizon in this world.) Once this moral outlook has been accepted, the left-wing (“woke”) view follows logically. This explains the string of conservative losses culturally and politically.

Consider that the Civil Rights Act of 1964 forbids any legal discrimination. However, according to the late Justice Scalia, writing in Johnson v. Transportation Agency (1987), the Act served this function for merely 23 years before being converted into an instrument of coercive equalization. “Today the Court completes the process of converting Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 from a guarantee that race or sex will not be the basis for employment determinations, to a guarantee that it often will.”

This transformation, to be as complete as it was, as fast as it was, had been undertaken even before the passage of the Act—already the legal and academic professions held to the view that legal equality without social equality is a sham equality—equality must be total. Once America committed itself to legal equality for all, it committed itself, perhaps unwittingly, to affirmative action and reparations (political and social equality). Political and social equality, as embedded in legal equality, requires the abolition of poverty and discrimination or, barring that, the abolition of wealth and power altogether.

There seems to be a direct line: natural rights, the legal equality of citizens, coercive equalization of all citizens through various redistribution and levelling programs. This apparent connection is troubling. Is the poison really found in the root? Was it always going to be this way? Do we have to reject the Enlightenment, and thereby the principles of the American Founding, to avoid this coercive equalizing process that is making everything worse? Some right-wing critics—especially Roman Catholics—adopt this assumption and, to be fair, it is effective in its own way. A dichotomy is presented: either founders “built better than they knew” or they built far worse than anyone ever realized.

It would be strange, however, if conservatives, marked by their patriotism and fidelity to the Constitution, were required by that very fidelity to reject the original principles of the Constitution. Or put in other words, it would be strange if the Constitution wasn’t complete or consistent until the Reconstruction Amendments, and then again that these weren’t truly understood and applied until the legislation and jurisprudence of the 1960s.

Thankfully, faithfulness to the Enlightenment, to Locke and our Founders, allows us to oppose the legal and philosophical errors that make up America’s postwar Civil Rights regime.

The Lockean Regime

No coercive equalization is found in Locke. Lockean equality had a definite character that never reached to “natural endowments” or inequalities wrought by time, fortunes of birth, or historical circumstances. The political society shaped by this view of equality—the Lockean “commonwealth”—likewise never concerned itself with the inequality arising from “natural endowments” or “history” or circumstance. Rather, it concerned itself with the only way men were genuinely equal, with the only type of equality that commands unyielding respect: man’s natural “state of liberty.”

Man’s state of liberty was not a state of license. So, while all men are naturally equal, they are all equally required to live up to the law of nature. A corollary of this equality was that no man is required to respect any other man unless he acquits himself in a civilized manner according to the law of nature. The meaning, then, of Locke’s statement—“though this be a state of liberty, yet it is not a state of license”—is that all are equally required to live up to the law of nature, and equally at liberty to treat other men accordingly. All men are equally “men,” but whoever cannot live up to the law of nature is a criminal. Men are morally required to tender some level of respect and even deference to other members of mankind who observe the law of nature, but to whatever extent a man fails to live up to the law of nature, to that extent he is “criminal” and therefore not in a position to demand respect, much less deference, from his fellow men.

The natural law required men to show a rational respect for certain rights of other men. The most famous of these rights were “life, liberty, and property.” Locke also deduced other rights in other contexts. For example, he held there was a right to religious toleration and right of assembly; these are kin to the American view that there are natural rights to freedom of religion, speech, press, assembly and petition. The question is, is our Civil Rights regime a necessary consequence of all this? Do property rights and freedom of conscience compel us to accept equalization?

Civil Rights and Law

Our Civil rights Regime is essentially opposed to lawfulness, natural or civil is immaterial, because said regime constantly discovers that lawfulness is more difficult for the poor and marginalized. Therefore, expecting lawfulness is an act of oppression meted out by the propertied classes or unjustly privileged races, classes, and sexes. The Lockean assertion that there is a natural law runs contrary to the purposes of our Civil Rights mindset because it operates as a foundation for “discrimination,” i.e., a foundation of injustice. The CRR is about confronting this natural equality and replacing it with legal and political equality.

Though, let us suppose there is a Civil Rights version of “natural law” such that all men are required at all times—because of their need to respect the “life, liberty and property” of others—to discover what obstacles the poor and marginalized face, and to abolish those obstacles even if it means abolishing the very existence of wealth and power. Since it seems possible that this is a potential consequence of Locke’s natural law—since at least such a pretext has been furnished to connect civil rights theory with the Lockean theory of the American founding—I will not stop at pointing out that Lockeanism includes a natural law. We must see why that law and the deductions from it are incompatible with the premises and hopes of the American CRR.

The Lockean Regime

In a Lockean commonwealth, the society, and each man in the society, know and live according to the natural law. The men of a Lockean commonwealth are capable of respecting the property of others; they do not use the government to plunder their fellow citizens’ wealth. Thomas Jefferson expressed this view when he openly worried that large centers of manufacture, large urban areas, would multiply shiftless and dependent men, who would not be able to be Lockean. That is, they would unable or unwilling to respect the property of others.

In great cities, like London or Paris, where there are great numbers of people who have no property, nor work, nor means of subsistence, but depend on charity, or chance, or the government, people become tools of the ambitious, to be wielded for any purpose, good or evil. This was the source of all the riots, and tumults, and disorders, in the great cities of Europe. (Jefferson to Madison, 1785).

The great cities of Europe were not Lockean because they contained “great numbers of people” whose condition in life prevented them from living according to the natural law. The American nation was meant to include men capable of respecting the liberty of their fellows by respecting the property of their fellows. A proper Lockean has no need of equalizing property, nor, of course, does he wish it. A Lockean nation cannot be made up of men who clamor for coercive equalization.

If a CRR proponent were to argue with Locke, and say that impoverished and marginalized citizens do not enjoy the same “property rights” as those that have property, and that a coerced equalization is required before the government could fairly respect all property rights equally, Locke would reply that they might effect a momentary equality in this way but never a legitimate government. The point of both Locke’s and Jefferson’s view is that citizens must be good enough to leave the state of nature, the rule of mankind, and have a genuinely political society of their own.

If a nation’s laboring classes groan under crushing poverty such that nothing can stop them from lashing out at the propertied classes, Lockean government isn’t possible. When America embraced the welfare state it took a significant step away from its Lockean constitution. Let it be granted that it was necessary for that step to be taken; nevertheless, a Lockean commonwealth is not made by necessity but by the men living up to the Lockean ideal, that is, according to the law of nature. A wife might, of necessity, divorce a wicked husband; yet only a mad man would say it were possible to both divorce the husband and be the ideal wife. If a group of men want to be Lockeans, they have to rise above being guided by mere necessity.

I note here as an aside that left-wing intellectuals understand Locke’s concern for property quite clearly and believe that he was either evil or short-sighted for this reason. And then there are today’s right-wingers, who also think Locke was short-sighted because they do not believe America’s middle class is morally obligated to respect the “property rights” of an international elite class that is gobbling up American property and wealth for purposes contrary to America’s interests. While the left-wingers and right-wingers have completely different reasons for turning their backs on property rights, some very shallow commentators and intellectuals pretend they are “spiritually the same” and call both “woke.”

It should be clear and understood that a class of shiftless and indigent men, using a bare majority vote to take property from a commonwealth’s class of gentlemen farmers is not the same thing, not nearly the same thing, as a citizen class taking property away from non-citizens and hardly-citizens whose interests are undoubtedly distinct and often contrary to the interests of the commonwealth itself. While this condition of things certainly complicates our ability to be faithful to Locke, and while our jet-setting class of worldwide technocrats represent a new phenomenon, Locke was a sensible man and would support the citizens of a commonwealth keeping the property of the commonwealth under the auspices of their political society and out of the hands of an “international elite” or “mankind” in general.

To continue, the material independence of men in a Lockean commonwealth is the basis for their spiritual independence. The American founders enshrined both material and spiritual independence in the Constitution as defining characteristics of the American order.

Lockean men practice religions that all rational and godly men might respect. Lockean men are to be respected by their peers rather than suffer a dictated, and therefore false, conformity. To be more specific: rational and godly men tolerate all religions that respect the law of nature, whose adherents live up to the requirements of the law of nature. Lockeans do not tolerate irrational and ungodly religious dogma and rites.

Thus, in a Lockean commonwealth, all religious dogma and rites are respected because they are respectable. This statement will undoubtedly shock people as either overly exclusivist or overly tautological, but this what Locke taught. This is what is means to be the Lockean man so many liberals and conservatives alike claim to want to be. In a Lockean commonwealth, only tolerable religions are tolerated. Since all religions have the ability to shed their superstitious beliefs and irrational practices and become respectable, all religions are potentially tolerated in a Lockean commonwealth.

For example, there are religions that practice human sacrifice. A Lockean magistrate would explain to the priest and practitioners of such a religion that they will be going to prison for their religious convictions. Similarly for religious beliefs that deliver the believers over to foreign powers, an example of which in Locke’s time was the “mufti of Constantinople.” If a religion disposed its adherents to betray (or potentially betray) the commonwealth on behalf of the mufti, who was a foreign potentate, its priests and practitioners would be expelled from the commonwealth or put into prisons for failing to renounce their religious convictions.

Locke argued that reason and the Gospel alike taught the same morals and manners to men. All other religions had to hew close enough to these teachings to be respectable and tolerated. This discriminating form of toleration has been noticed and derided by modern scholars. Jacob De Roover and S.N. Balagangadhara complain that Locke’s “political thought is Christian to the core” and urge their readers to exchange Locke for a more Rawlsian approach so that “pluralistic societies” can “stop looking at the world through Christian glasses.” Davis Lorenzo echoes a common complaint about Locke: “he retained customary, marginalizing descriptions of Catholics and atheists.”

These “marginalizing” descriptions are thought by many to “contradict” Locke’s religious toleration, but that is only because people fail to see toleration as itself a standard of conduct that atheists and Catholics (especially during Locke’s time) routinely violated. Locke taught that atheism involved a denial of the law of nature and that Catholicism involved subjection to a foreign potentate. He also taught that Catholics and others could shed their intolerable beliefs and become, by that fact, tolerable religions.

This is not “religious diversity” according to the general demands of our CRR. Nowhere is there to be found legally or morally required accommodations or exemptions from the law. George Washington put the Lockean view well when he explained to Quakers that their pacifist convictions would be tolerated so long as they could be tolerated, but that the commonwealth was not required to tolerate pacifism. “While men perform their social Duties faithfully, they do all that Society or the State can with propriety demand or expect; and remain responsible only to their Maker for the Religion or modes of faith which they may prefer or profess.”

The First Amendment, rightly understood, is a document that defines the American as a man capable of freedom of religion and freedom of speech, i.e., as a rational and fastidious type of man not easily given to insecurities or cruel enthusiasms. Sensible speech and respectable religion are required by the First Amendment. At the time, Americans were deemed men capable of these sentiments. Therefore, their government had no authority over them in these matters.

Lockean Regime Today?

Generally speaking, American citizens today are not capable of being Lockeans. There cannot be any Lockean solution to our present difficulties without a Lockean citizenry. Nevertheless, we can get our bearings through ideals even if we cannot live up to them. A political theory that was faithful to the founders and the Constitution would promote Lockean types: rational and industrious men. The promotion of a type necessarily means the type is raised above other types, and that any type incompatible with that type are not only lower but, perhaps, excluded. A Lockean regime criminalizes the quarrelsome and contentious men who are either unable or unwilling to live according to the law of nature.

That Locke clearly elevated some types of men over other types of men, according to their ability to live by the natural law, goes some distance but not all the way. It seems to me still possible that Locke could be harmonized with a Civil Rights style regime.

Consider this argument a proponent of the civil rights regime might make: it is true that Lockean law is not neutral with respect to types and ways of life, such that good men are preferred by the law of nature and the law of the commonwealth over bad men. The law is therefore not neutral, but teaches a way of life, which is popularly called “a morality.” Lockeans work hard. They save, they attend religious services in respectable churches, they live and support powerful commonwealths whose physical might is the foundation for the cultivation of the soul. All that is granted. But all of that is commensurate with American-style Civil Rights. Not our current form of civil rights, but still, one can imagine an exacting law that expects men to be “industrious and rational” and resolutely refuses to see anything but individual men. Is that what Locke required?

It is not. Think again of the example of religious groups. Locke did not disarm the magistrate. If men professing a generally unacceptable faith were to beg admission to the society, the people and the magistrate have the right to refuse admittance even if the men asking admission promise to be different from their co-religionists, to not really pledge their allegiance to a foreign power or not really practice polygamy. Of course, the Lockeans might believe them, but there is no moral or legal requirement that they believe them.

In general, the government and society may rightfully assess groups of people inside and outside the commonwealth. If they believe that admitting the group will immediately or eventually lead to the introduction of that group’s typical infirmities and vices, then they are under no obligation, upon their own assessment, to grant citizenship or equality to individual members of that group, however exceptionally excellent and virtuous a few individuals may be. There is no moral obligation, for instance, to admit Muslims even if there might be moderate members of that group capable of shedding their unreasonable convictions, allegiance to foreign power, and intolerance of Christians.

Make no mistake, Locke believed in admitting foreigners. He even suggests that it is wise to use imported immigrant labor to depress wages and provide cheaper commodities. But he always makes it clear these kinds of decisions need to be made with the interests of the commonwealth in mind. Assimilation is essential. Locke thought it was a good idea to import new people if they were capable of living up to the laws of the land and he granted the society and government the right to make a critical assessment of the relative congruity of applicants for admission and the established way of life. Never does Locke say a society is required, under any circumstances, to accept anyone into an equality of citizenship. There is no “right to be included” for individuals or groups.

Conclusion

Our present regime, guided as it is by the Civil Rights morality of coercive equality of the sixties and seventies, makes unreasonable demands on men. American citizenship and identity now include people who flaunt the law of nature and lack informed affection for the commonwealth. Under present logic, the more foreign or anti-American a person is, the more American they are. Equality is detached from the duties of the law of nature, the requisite sentiments for equality, and presents an all-around levelling tendency. American agency has been revoked—no longer is admittance discriminatory in any way.

So let the basic position of the “propositional nation” be granted, that anyone who can assimilate to Americanism can become American: even in that case, Americans have a right to assess who they do and do not call their legal equals. And if Americans themselves do not live up to the proposition? That is an argument for national repentance and discipline, not an argument to throw out American rights and surrender the American identity to the whims of mankind.

Image: Portrait of John Locke (1697), Godfrey Kneller. Wikimedia Commons.