02 October 2008
Law and Liberty
Can we Legislate Morality?
The statement, “You can’t legislate morality,” is a dangerous half-truth and even a lie, because all legislation is concerned with morality. Every law on the statute books of every civil government is either an example of enacted morality or it is procedural thereto. …We may disagree with the morality of a law, but we cannot deny the moral concern of law. Law is concerned with right and wrong; it punishes and restrains evil and protects the good, and this is exactly what morality is about. It is impossible to have law without having morality behind that law, because all law is simply enacted morality.
Now, our increasingly humanistic laws, courts, and legislators are giving us a new morality. They tell us…that morality cannot be legislated, but what they offer is not only legislated morality but salvation by law… Wherever we look now, whether with respect to poverty, education, civil rights, human rights, peace, and all things else, we see laws passed designed to save man. Supposedly, these laws are going to give us a society free of prejudice, ignorance, disease, poverty, crime, war, and all other things considered to be evil. These legislative programs add up to one thing: salvation by law.
Man cannot be changed by statist legislation; he cannot be legislated into a new character…this is a spiritual matter and a task for religion. …while a man can be restrained by strict law and order, he cannot be changed by law.
Now humanistic law has a different purpose. Humanistic law aims at saving man and remaking society. For humanism, salvation is an act of state. … Any who oppose the humanist in his plan of salvation by law, salvation by acts of civil government, is by definition an evil man conspiring against the good of society.
As a result, our basic problem today is that we have two religions in confliction, humanism and Christianity, each with its own morality and the laws of that morality. When the humanist tells us therefore that “You can’t legislate morality,” what he actually means is that we must not legislate Biblical morality, because he means to have humanistic morality legislated. …For humanism is a religion, even though it does not believe in God. It is not necessary for a religion to believe in God to be a religion; as a matter of fact, most of the world’s religions are essentially humanistic and anti-theistic.
…when the function of law is changed from the restraint of evil to the regeneration and reformation of man and society, then law itself begins to break down, because an impossible burden is being placed upon it. Today, because too much is expected from law, we get less and less results from law, because law is put to improper uses.
Liberty: Limited or Unlimited?
Liberty is defined as “The state of being exempt from the domination of others or from restricting circumstances.” But this definition, like all others, presents problems. After all, who is free from the domination of others, and free from restricting circumstances?
…unlimited liberty for man is destructive of liberty itself. Can we give any man the unlimited liberty to do as he pleases? …Man’s total liberty is always anarchy, and anarchy is the death of both law and liberty. Unless every man’s liberty is limited by the law, no liberty is possible for any man. The criminal law and the civil law impose mutual limitations on all of us in order to provide the maximum liberty for all of us.
There are all kinds of legitimate and necessary restrictions on every kind of liberty man has, and these are necessary for the maintenance of liberty, because liberty cannot be equated with anarchy.
One of the basic premises of the American system, and a basic article of Christian faith, is that man’s liberty is under law. The purpose of law in the United States has, historically, been to further liberty by law. Basic to all moral anarchism is the insistence that liberty can be gained only be freedom from law. …this belief in liberty as freedom from law runs deep. To prove that they are free, these immature and perverse minds insist on breaking some laws to demonstrate that they are free men. But moral anarchy is always the prelude to statist tyranny, and this vaunted freedom from law ends always in a freedom from liberty!
Liberty goes hand in hand with responsibility. The laws limiting freedom of speech and freedom of press are laws requiring responsibility. Responsibility and liberty reinforce and strengthen each other.
Law and Authority
…there is no possibility of any thinking without authority. The only question is, which authority? For many of these supposedly anti-authoritarian persons, their basic authority is the individual. In other words, they recognise no God or man as authoritative, and they exalt their own thinking to a position of ultimacey. They become gods in their own eyes. In essence, their faith is that every man should be his own god, but that no man can be free or become his own god unless he agrees with them.
Science is as authoritarian as any religion. Science rests on certain authoritative beliefs that undergird all science. Science holds, for example, to the faith, first, that reality is measurable. In other words, what is real is that which can be measured. Second, science holds that reality has unity, uniformity, so that knowledge of reality is possible because reality does not contradict itself. These and many other axioms or presuppositions of science as basically religious beliefs, and they provide the authority for science.
Most authorities revered by men today are human authorities: the individual, the people, the elite thinkers and planners, science, reason, or the state, these are all humanistic authorities.
Behind every system of law there is a god. To find the god in any system, locate the source of law in that system. If the source of law is the individual, then the individual is the god of that system. If the source of the law is the people, or the dictatorship of the proletariat, then these things are the gods of those systems. If our source of law is a court, then the court is our god. If there is no higher law beyond man, then man is his own god, or else his creatures, the institutions he has made, have become his gods. When you choose your authority, you choose your god, and where you look for your law, there is your god.
Authority is inescapable. The basic question is, which authority, the authority of God or of man? If we choose man, we have no right to complain against the rise of totalitarianism, the rise of tyranny—we have asked for it. If we choose God’s authority, then we must submit to it without reservation; we must accept His infallible word and must in all things acknowledge His sovereignty. On this foundation, we are “founded upon the rock,” Jesus Christ, and we shall not fall (Matt. 7:24-27).
Law and Evolution
Law for the Christian is thus absolute, final, and an aspect of God’s creation and a manifestation of His nature. In terms of this, the Christian can hold that right is right, and wrong is wrong, that good and evil are unchanging moral categories rather than relative terms.
…statistics give us an average and a mean which determine normality, and our ideas of law are governed by what is customary and socially accepted.
As Moses said, “the Lord commanded us to do all these statues…that he might preserve us alive” (Deut. 6:24). Again, “Justice, and only justice, you shall follow, that you may live” (Deut. 16:20).
If man is no more than biology (according to Comte), then man’s law is no more than a phase of his social evolution and will change as man changes. There is thus no absolute right or wring in any evolutionary system of law, so that evolution is in essence hostile to the very idea of law. Law implies an unchanging order, a final standard, whereas evolution insists that law is social experience, custom, and mores. As a result, evolutionary thinking is unable to formulate a concept of law; it uses law as an instrument of social change. Evolutionary thinking makes law relative and changing, but the mechanism of change is thereby made absolute.
Evolution thus leads not only to revolution but to totalitarianism. Social evolutionary theory, as it came to focus in Hegel, made the state the new god of being. …The world therefore is committed to revolution because it is committed to evolution. The world is dedicated to change without meaning because it is governed by law without God. Crisis succeeds crisis, because revolutionary change is man’s new idea of health, and, in every change, the state emerges more powerful and more clearly as man’s new god and savior.
Law and Academic Freedom
No institution can be free to maintain its faith and philosophy when the total right of subversion is insisted on by the doctrine of so-called academic freedom. All the rights, all the power, are placed in the hands of subversives by this idea of academic freedom. The right to hold to a particular faith and philosophy, and to maintain a college in loyalty to that position, is specifically denied. The doctrine is called academic freedom, but it is actually academic totalitarianism.
This doctrine insists that freedom belongs only to that which is new and revolutionary, and it denies freedom to that which insists on loyalty to a given faith and philosophy. It is a viciously intolerant doctrine which, be a semantic trick, calls itself freedom when it is actually slavery.
Now humanism has proved itself to be one of history’s most savage and intolerant faiths. The history of humanism is one of terror, slavery, and persecution, but, in its rewriting of history, is accuses all other of these things. …The doctrine of academic freedom is one aspect of this totalitarian humanism. It is a doctrine advocating freedom for humanism only. It offers only destruction to all others, plus the requirement of continuing to support institutions which have betrayed the supporters.
Truly free education mans that colleges must have the freedom to be themselves, to establish colleges based on a particular philosophy and to maintain that position against subversion. Atheistic colleges do not allow orthodox Christianity to be taught by their professors, but they call it a violation of academic freedom if a professor in a Christian college is not allowed to teach atheism. Call this by its right name; it is not a doctrine of freedom but of subversion and totalitarianism. True freedom involves the freedom for a college to be true to its faith. But the champions of this so-called academic freedom are not interested in freedom; they are for slavery, because they themselves are slaves, and their doctrine is one of academic enslavement. Beware of men who defend it.
The Family and Property
…replacing Christian schools with state-controlled and state-supported schools was for Marx a necessary step towards destroying the family and private property.
As against God’s Ten Commandments, Marx, very self-consciously, states his new law in ten points or laws:
2. A heavy progressive or graduated income tax.
5. Centralization of credit in the hands of the state, by means of a national bank with state capital and an exclusive monopoly.
6. Centralisation of the means of communication and transport in the hands of the state.
Except for Marx’s program for a new form of child labour, every one of these points is in operation in part or in whole in our country today, and the Communist Manifesto is a better expression of our social and political goals and direction than anything said by either political party. We are very clearly drifting into communism.
If civil government is given power over property, then that government becomes free from the control of its citizenry and controls them instead.
Marx was right: property is power, and when the state grows in its controls over property, it grows in the same degree towards totalitarian power.
The Function of the Family
The family also has a major economic function. The father provides for his family, not for strangers. Welfare agencies maintained by state and federal agencies have provided some kind of economic existence for as many as fifteen and more millions at one time. But daily, far more than a hundred million persons are supported by the family system. Under statist welfare, there is a disintegration of the individual and of the family and extensive demoralization. Under the family system, untold millions are supported ably and well, with the best of social consequences. Under welfare, education declines; there is less interest in the discipline and results of learning, and les ability to progress as a result. Under the family system, children are not only intellectually motivated for the best educational results, but they are economically financed through grade and high school, college, and sometimes graduate school, so that the most ambitious educational enterprise of history is economically dependent on the educational enterprise of history is economically dependent on the family system.
The Anniversary of Communism
In the same article, Lenin described the necessary ingredients for a revolution. …Notice that Lenin placed moral collapse ahead of political collapse. The moral collapse prepares the way for the political collapse. In order to make this collapse possible, everything was done prior to the Russian Revolution to assault, ridicule and deny the religious and moral foundations of the nation. People will not fight to preserve something which is meaningless to them. Hence, by every means possible, the spiritual, moral, and political heritage of a people must be made meaningless to them. This involves an assault on a people’s religion and education, to make them means of undercutting their intellectual and spiritual roots and reducing them to a position of nihilism. The third necessary ingredient for revolution, Lenin declared, is “great vacillation among all the intermediate elements, i.e., among those who are not fully in favour of the government, although they fully supported it yesterday.” This point is a critical one: “great vacillation,” the inability to make a strong stand. Create revolutionary violence among a people in moral and political collapse, and they will tend increasingly to respond with moral vacillation, unable to make a strong stand. Instead of dealing firmly with violence, they will appease it. Instead of condemning violence, they will excuse it. These morally nerveless and broken men will deny they are for violence and revolution, but they will also refuse to make a clear-cut stand against it. They become thereby a great asset to any revolutionary element and a necessary ingredient for revolution.
Lenin’s analysis is an excellent one. It is hardly necessary to add that we have all three ingredients of revolution in our midst today—the revolutionary activity and violence, the moral and political collapse developing, and the great vacillation and inability to make a clear-cut stand dominating our contemporary world scene, as well as the home front.
Law and Liberty, Rousas John Rushdoony.
The statement, “You can’t legislate morality,” is a dangerous half-truth and even a lie, because all legislation is concerned with morality. Every law on the statute books of every civil government is either an example of enacted morality or it is procedural thereto. …We may disagree with the morality of a law, but we cannot deny the moral concern of law. Law is concerned with right and wrong; it punishes and restrains evil and protects the good, and this is exactly what morality is about. It is impossible to have law without having morality behind that law, because all law is simply enacted morality.
Now, our increasingly humanistic laws, courts, and legislators are giving us a new morality. They tell us…that morality cannot be legislated, but what they offer is not only legislated morality but salvation by law… Wherever we look now, whether with respect to poverty, education, civil rights, human rights, peace, and all things else, we see laws passed designed to save man. Supposedly, these laws are going to give us a society free of prejudice, ignorance, disease, poverty, crime, war, and all other things considered to be evil. These legislative programs add up to one thing: salvation by law.
Man cannot be changed by statist legislation; he cannot be legislated into a new character…this is a spiritual matter and a task for religion. …while a man can be restrained by strict law and order, he cannot be changed by law.
Now humanistic law has a different purpose. Humanistic law aims at saving man and remaking society. For humanism, salvation is an act of state. … Any who oppose the humanist in his plan of salvation by law, salvation by acts of civil government, is by definition an evil man conspiring against the good of society.
As a result, our basic problem today is that we have two religions in confliction, humanism and Christianity, each with its own morality and the laws of that morality. When the humanist tells us therefore that “You can’t legislate morality,” what he actually means is that we must not legislate Biblical morality, because he means to have humanistic morality legislated. …For humanism is a religion, even though it does not believe in God. It is not necessary for a religion to believe in God to be a religion; as a matter of fact, most of the world’s religions are essentially humanistic and anti-theistic.
…when the function of law is changed from the restraint of evil to the regeneration and reformation of man and society, then law itself begins to break down, because an impossible burden is being placed upon it. Today, because too much is expected from law, we get less and less results from law, because law is put to improper uses.
Liberty: Limited or Unlimited?
Liberty is defined as “The state of being exempt from the domination of others or from restricting circumstances.” But this definition, like all others, presents problems. After all, who is free from the domination of others, and free from restricting circumstances?
…unlimited liberty for man is destructive of liberty itself. Can we give any man the unlimited liberty to do as he pleases? …Man’s total liberty is always anarchy, and anarchy is the death of both law and liberty. Unless every man’s liberty is limited by the law, no liberty is possible for any man. The criminal law and the civil law impose mutual limitations on all of us in order to provide the maximum liberty for all of us.
There are all kinds of legitimate and necessary restrictions on every kind of liberty man has, and these are necessary for the maintenance of liberty, because liberty cannot be equated with anarchy.
One of the basic premises of the American system, and a basic article of Christian faith, is that man’s liberty is under law. The purpose of law in the United States has, historically, been to further liberty by law. Basic to all moral anarchism is the insistence that liberty can be gained only be freedom from law. …this belief in liberty as freedom from law runs deep. To prove that they are free, these immature and perverse minds insist on breaking some laws to demonstrate that they are free men. But moral anarchy is always the prelude to statist tyranny, and this vaunted freedom from law ends always in a freedom from liberty!
Liberty goes hand in hand with responsibility. The laws limiting freedom of speech and freedom of press are laws requiring responsibility. Responsibility and liberty reinforce and strengthen each other.
Law and Authority
…there is no possibility of any thinking without authority. The only question is, which authority? For many of these supposedly anti-authoritarian persons, their basic authority is the individual. In other words, they recognise no God or man as authoritative, and they exalt their own thinking to a position of ultimacey. They become gods in their own eyes. In essence, their faith is that every man should be his own god, but that no man can be free or become his own god unless he agrees with them.
Science is as authoritarian as any religion. Science rests on certain authoritative beliefs that undergird all science. Science holds, for example, to the faith, first, that reality is measurable. In other words, what is real is that which can be measured. Second, science holds that reality has unity, uniformity, so that knowledge of reality is possible because reality does not contradict itself. These and many other axioms or presuppositions of science as basically religious beliefs, and they provide the authority for science.
Most authorities revered by men today are human authorities: the individual, the people, the elite thinkers and planners, science, reason, or the state, these are all humanistic authorities.
Behind every system of law there is a god. To find the god in any system, locate the source of law in that system. If the source of law is the individual, then the individual is the god of that system. If the source of the law is the people, or the dictatorship of the proletariat, then these things are the gods of those systems. If our source of law is a court, then the court is our god. If there is no higher law beyond man, then man is his own god, or else his creatures, the institutions he has made, have become his gods. When you choose your authority, you choose your god, and where you look for your law, there is your god.
Authority is inescapable. The basic question is, which authority, the authority of God or of man? If we choose man, we have no right to complain against the rise of totalitarianism, the rise of tyranny—we have asked for it. If we choose God’s authority, then we must submit to it without reservation; we must accept His infallible word and must in all things acknowledge His sovereignty. On this foundation, we are “founded upon the rock,” Jesus Christ, and we shall not fall (Matt. 7:24-27).
Law and Evolution
Law for the Christian is thus absolute, final, and an aspect of God’s creation and a manifestation of His nature. In terms of this, the Christian can hold that right is right, and wrong is wrong, that good and evil are unchanging moral categories rather than relative terms.
…statistics give us an average and a mean which determine normality, and our ideas of law are governed by what is customary and socially accepted.
As Moses said, “the Lord commanded us to do all these statues…that he might preserve us alive” (Deut. 6:24). Again, “Justice, and only justice, you shall follow, that you may live” (Deut. 16:20).
If man is no more than biology (according to Comte), then man’s law is no more than a phase of his social evolution and will change as man changes. There is thus no absolute right or wring in any evolutionary system of law, so that evolution is in essence hostile to the very idea of law. Law implies an unchanging order, a final standard, whereas evolution insists that law is social experience, custom, and mores. As a result, evolutionary thinking is unable to formulate a concept of law; it uses law as an instrument of social change. Evolutionary thinking makes law relative and changing, but the mechanism of change is thereby made absolute.
Evolution thus leads not only to revolution but to totalitarianism. Social evolutionary theory, as it came to focus in Hegel, made the state the new god of being. …The world therefore is committed to revolution because it is committed to evolution. The world is dedicated to change without meaning because it is governed by law without God. Crisis succeeds crisis, because revolutionary change is man’s new idea of health, and, in every change, the state emerges more powerful and more clearly as man’s new god and savior.
Law and Academic Freedom
No institution can be free to maintain its faith and philosophy when the total right of subversion is insisted on by the doctrine of so-called academic freedom. All the rights, all the power, are placed in the hands of subversives by this idea of academic freedom. The right to hold to a particular faith and philosophy, and to maintain a college in loyalty to that position, is specifically denied. The doctrine is called academic freedom, but it is actually academic totalitarianism.
This doctrine insists that freedom belongs only to that which is new and revolutionary, and it denies freedom to that which insists on loyalty to a given faith and philosophy. It is a viciously intolerant doctrine which, be a semantic trick, calls itself freedom when it is actually slavery.
Now humanism has proved itself to be one of history’s most savage and intolerant faiths. The history of humanism is one of terror, slavery, and persecution, but, in its rewriting of history, is accuses all other of these things. …The doctrine of academic freedom is one aspect of this totalitarian humanism. It is a doctrine advocating freedom for humanism only. It offers only destruction to all others, plus the requirement of continuing to support institutions which have betrayed the supporters.
Truly free education mans that colleges must have the freedom to be themselves, to establish colleges based on a particular philosophy and to maintain that position against subversion. Atheistic colleges do not allow orthodox Christianity to be taught by their professors, but they call it a violation of academic freedom if a professor in a Christian college is not allowed to teach atheism. Call this by its right name; it is not a doctrine of freedom but of subversion and totalitarianism. True freedom involves the freedom for a college to be true to its faith. But the champions of this so-called academic freedom are not interested in freedom; they are for slavery, because they themselves are slaves, and their doctrine is one of academic enslavement. Beware of men who defend it.
The Family and Property
…replacing Christian schools with state-controlled and state-supported schools was for Marx a necessary step towards destroying the family and private property.
As against God’s Ten Commandments, Marx, very self-consciously, states his new law in ten points or laws:
2. A heavy progressive or graduated income tax.
5. Centralization of credit in the hands of the state, by means of a national bank with state capital and an exclusive monopoly.
6. Centralisation of the means of communication and transport in the hands of the state.
Except for Marx’s program for a new form of child labour, every one of these points is in operation in part or in whole in our country today, and the Communist Manifesto is a better expression of our social and political goals and direction than anything said by either political party. We are very clearly drifting into communism.
If civil government is given power over property, then that government becomes free from the control of its citizenry and controls them instead.
Marx was right: property is power, and when the state grows in its controls over property, it grows in the same degree towards totalitarian power.
The Function of the Family
The family also has a major economic function. The father provides for his family, not for strangers. Welfare agencies maintained by state and federal agencies have provided some kind of economic existence for as many as fifteen and more millions at one time. But daily, far more than a hundred million persons are supported by the family system. Under statist welfare, there is a disintegration of the individual and of the family and extensive demoralization. Under the family system, untold millions are supported ably and well, with the best of social consequences. Under welfare, education declines; there is less interest in the discipline and results of learning, and les ability to progress as a result. Under the family system, children are not only intellectually motivated for the best educational results, but they are economically financed through grade and high school, college, and sometimes graduate school, so that the most ambitious educational enterprise of history is economically dependent on the educational enterprise of history is economically dependent on the family system.
The Anniversary of Communism
In the same article, Lenin described the necessary ingredients for a revolution. …Notice that Lenin placed moral collapse ahead of political collapse. The moral collapse prepares the way for the political collapse. In order to make this collapse possible, everything was done prior to the Russian Revolution to assault, ridicule and deny the religious and moral foundations of the nation. People will not fight to preserve something which is meaningless to them. Hence, by every means possible, the spiritual, moral, and political heritage of a people must be made meaningless to them. This involves an assault on a people’s religion and education, to make them means of undercutting their intellectual and spiritual roots and reducing them to a position of nihilism. The third necessary ingredient for revolution, Lenin declared, is “great vacillation among all the intermediate elements, i.e., among those who are not fully in favour of the government, although they fully supported it yesterday.” This point is a critical one: “great vacillation,” the inability to make a strong stand. Create revolutionary violence among a people in moral and political collapse, and they will tend increasingly to respond with moral vacillation, unable to make a strong stand. Instead of dealing firmly with violence, they will appease it. Instead of condemning violence, they will excuse it. These morally nerveless and broken men will deny they are for violence and revolution, but they will also refuse to make a clear-cut stand against it. They become thereby a great asset to any revolutionary element and a necessary ingredient for revolution.
Lenin’s analysis is an excellent one. It is hardly necessary to add that we have all three ingredients of revolution in our midst today—the revolutionary activity and violence, the moral and political collapse developing, and the great vacillation and inability to make a clear-cut stand dominating our contemporary world scene, as well as the home front.
Law and Liberty, Rousas John Rushdoony.
recorded at 00:04
2 insights
2 insights