more imports from exitingthecave and elsewhere

content/post/adams-vs-dickinson-where-do-you-fall.md

@@ -1,14 +1,15 @@
 ---
 title: "Adams vs Dickinson: Where Do You Fall?"
-date: 2020-07-04T22:34:43Z
+date: 2020-07-05T22:34:43Z
 tags: ["1776", "american revolution"]
 topics: ["philosophy", "politics"]
+image: /img/patriot.jpg
 draft: false
 ---
 
 {{< youtube RDzwtl5Z2cA >}}
 
-Are you a Dickinson or an Adams? Today, we all think we'd be on Adams' side of the debate. However, given the relationship between the colonies and the British crown, and the people who populated the Continental Congress, I don't think the choice is really all that clear cut.
+Are you a Dickinson or an Adams? Today, we all think we'd be on Adams' side of the debate. However, given the relationship between the colonies and the British crown, and the people who populated the Continental Congress, I don't think the choice is really all that clear-cut.
 
 Imagine it this way: you live in a small territory recently purchased and controlled by the United States. You moved there from your home state where you'd lived most of your life, in order to set up a US outpost, and make a new life for yourself.
 
@@ -21,3 +22,5 @@ You send a peace offer to the US, asking again for redress, this time, directly
 I submit, that John Dickinson was, hands down, one of the bravest, one of the most loyal, and one of the most tragic figure of all of the Revolutionaries. He wanted desperately to remain loyal to his homeland - as any one of us Americans would, now. He held out hope against hope that George would come to his senses. And he lost almost as many friends in the colonies for this stance, as Tom Paine would later lose because of his outspoken atheism.
 
 Watch this, and tell me that Dickinson doesn't at least have a respectable position...
+
+```[Imported from extitingthecave.com on 27 November 2021]```

content/post/an-average-day-imperative-only-exercise.md

@@ -0,0 +1,35 @@
+---
+title: "An Average Day (An Imperative Only Exercise)"
+date: 2006-12-14T22:01:22Z
+tags: ["fiction","writing"]
+topics: ["literature","art"]
+image: /img/average-day.jpg
+draft: false
+---
+
+Look at yourself in the mirror this morning. See the lines of failure drawn out from the points of your eyes. Remember that face before they were there. Ask yourself what you were doing before those were there.  Consider, for a moment, what you could be doing today, instead of what you have to do. 
+
+Think of something encouraging to shake off the melancholy. Chuckle at the silliness of this ritual of self-pity, turn toward the shower, and step in. Feel the ceramic chill of the bathroom, as it rattles your frame. Hear the grumbling of the apartment building’s pipes, as the water prepares to vent out the shower nozzle. Prepare yourself for the shock. Wince, and clench your fists. 
+
+Play with the buttons on your shirt just long enough to wonder if it might be better to call in sick today. Fasten the last button. Groan a little, as you bend over to pull your pants on, and change your mind about calling in. Remember: today you have your annual review. Sigh deeply, because you know exactly what will happen in the meeting. Imagine yourself sitting in your latest boss’s office, leaning forward, with your elbows on your knees, and your face tight and intense, as though every word that comes out of his mouth matters to you.
+
+Tie your shoes. Look at the clock. grab the arm of the couch, and pull yourself up. Walk to the bedroom. Snatch your coat from the bed, and throw it over your shoulder. Carry it out to the car today; it’s too warm to wear it. Grab your backpack, too. Don’t forget your laptop again! 
+
+Stare at the pile of garbage bags at the front door to the apartment for a moment, and wonder if you’ve got time to take any of them out. Look at the clock again. Shrug. Walk out. Lock the door behind you, but don’t bother double-checking it. Stare at the floor, as you march out of the apartment building. Notice how the hall carpeting never seems to change. Muse about the age of the building for a moment, and then, let the thought pass. 
+
+Push the exit door hard. Relish the raucous blast of the door, as it strikes the foyer wall, and allow yourself to be filled with that familiar, but momentary sensation of power, again. Suck in a deep, thick breath of pale morning air. Feel it crystalize in your throat and lungs. Exhale. March yourself to your truck, with the determination of a soldier, and press the lock release on your key ring. Pull the truck door open, and swing yourself into the driver’s seat. Drop your bag between the seats. 
+
+Knife the key into the ignition slot, and turn it hard. Refuse to release until the engine turns over at least once. Take a pause after a good 30 seconds. Sigh again. Turn the key again. Let go,  as the groggy engine finally fires up. Take a deep breath. Turn to your backpack, and partly unzip the small flap in the front. Reach in and feel around. Pinch your iPod between your thumb and forefingers, and extract it from the pouch. Fumble around the dirty truck floor for your cigarette lighter audio attachment. 
+
+Jack the iPod in, and turn on the stereo. Dial up your favorite podcast. Grimace, because you notice that he’s not posted anything new yet. Sigh. Realize it’s only Monday, and that you’ll have to grind it out until at least Tuesday night before you can expect anything new. 
+
+Look out the driver’s side window for a moment. See the neighbor’s labrador panting and pacing at the fence line. Think for a moment about getting yourself a dog. Speculate about ways you might be able to hide it from your landlord. Shake your head hard, as a dog shaking water from his coat, in order to clear the thought from your mind. 
+
+Look back down at your iPod. Dial around for a recent favorite, and poke it up. Set the volume on the stereo. Shift the car into reverse, and back out of your spot. Check your rear view. Make sure you don’t hit the stone garden barricade yet again. Shift back into drive, and pull to the edge of the parking lot. Pause. Think one more time about calling in sick. Squeeze the steering wheel tightly, and push down on the accelerator. 
+
+Screech out of the parking lot and down the street. Pray you can make it all the way through another day.
+
+
+
+```[Imported from archived writing journal on 28 November 2021]```
+

content/post/change-technology-and-society.md

@@ -3,6 +3,7 @@ title: "Change, Technology, and Society"
 date: 2021-05-19T07:17:45+01:00
 tags: ["society", "change", "ludditism", "lunduke", "internet", "consistency bias"]
 topics: ["philosophy", "sociology", "technology"]
+image: /img/Narcissus-myth.jpg
 draft: false
 ---
 

content/post/facts-values-rights-and-humans.md

@@ -0,0 +1,36 @@
+---
+title: "Facts, Values, Rights, and Human Beings"
+date: 2020-06-22T21:28:16Z
+tags: ["ethics","metaphysics","moral-psychology","rights","self-knowledge","animal rationality"]
+topics: ["philosophy","politics"]
+image: /img/jane-goodall.jpg
+draft: false
+---
+
+The human animal is thought by some to have a “divine spark” in him. What is this? I don’t mean in a metaphysical or definitional sense. I mean, what do humans do, what capacity do they have, what power are they endowed with, that sets them apart from the other animals so much so that they are thought to have this spark? Why on earth would anyone say humans are “touched by the divine”?
+
+You can see hints of what this might be, in the story of Genesis. Not that God made Adam. But that God gave Adam the *task of naming all of the animals*, and later, that Adam and Eve took for themselves the *knowledge of good and evil*. But I’m getting ahead of myself.
+
+When you look at other animals – the dolphin, or the chimpanzee, or the bear, or the dog, for example – you can see a great deal of cognitive functionality in its behavior. It knows what it desires, it knows how to maneuver around in its environment, and it has the calculative capacity to figure out how to manipulate that environment (to the extent that its body will allow) to get at what it desires. Sometimes it fails, but more often than not, it succeeds (otherwise, by natural selection, it would have perished as a species). Mankind has these abilities, too. In fact, they are orders of magnitude more sophisticated than any of the other animals. Mankind has so refined his knowledge of his surroundings, and how to manipulate those surroundings, that there is almost nothing among his array of infinite desires, that he cannot achieve, including traveling to other planets, to start the process all over again.
+
+But this is only a difference in degree from the other animals (albeit, vast); only weakly warranting an accolade like “divinity”. There is one capacity man has, however, that the rest do not have. As I said, the dog is smart enough to know what it wants, and smart enough to figure out ways to get what it wants. Just look at any well adjusted pet, and his ability to manipulate his master, to see what I mean. But there is one thing Rover cannot do, that his master can. Rover cannot look at the shmorgasbord of his own desires and ask himself, “Are these the right desires? Why do I yearn for the things that I do? Should I yearn for something different?” In short, Rover has no conscience.
+
+This is why Socrates made such an obsession out of the Delphic Oracle’s famous edict to “know thyself”. Many of his contemporaries were busy staring at the stars, or scrabbling in the dirt for the smallest thing they could find, or speculating about the true nature of water, or fire. But Socrates realized that the most perplexing question in the whole universe, was man’s own self-conscious moral ego. Why did he have one? How did we know that it was telling us the truth or not? Where did it come from? How do we exercise it properly (a meta-moral question, in itself)?
+
+To be fair to Rover, he certainly has many emotions we would call “moral emotions”. He gets angry when his pack mates are threatened. He gets sad when his pack mates are hurt or die. He cowers when the pack leader chastises him. He jostles, challenges, and manipulates other pack mates, for a chance at the leadership position, and displays confidence when he earns it. I do not think that it is purely anthropomorphism to recognize these for what they are. But these are only rudiments. Building blocks. A loose assemblage of some of the *necessary components* of a moral conscience, not sufficient in themselves. Frans de Waal recognized this in his work on primates, and wrote about it in his books, “Our Inner Ape”, and “Primates and Philosophers”.
+
+It is the joining of a sufficient degree of cognitive capacity with a sufficient amount of practical reasoning, and the coupling of both of those things to conscious self and other unique among primates, that has given rise to the capacity to question desires and interrogate emotions, and to alter behaviors based on those inquiries. This is what our “divine spark” is. It is our moral sensibility; our conscience. It is this conscience that is both our gift, and our curse. And that is why the story of Eden is so compelling to us.
+
+This capacity for moral self-inspection also gives us a special capacity that animals do not have. The capacity to *value*. Animals certainly desire things, as we do. But lacking the capacity for self-inspection, and the reasoning needed to engage in that activity, they cannot *value* what they desire. They are more-or-less “hard wired” to desire the things that are necessary to their own survival, in the environment within which they arose as a species. Some species are more adaptable to other environments than others, but that is somewhat beside the point here. Which is, that no animal, no matter how adaptable, can *choose what to desire*. We can, and when we do, we create something called a “value”. Those things that we consciously choose to desire, are those things that we value, because in order to determine which desires to satisfy, and which desires to deny, we must *evaluate them*.
+
+The question of how we discover a standard by which we can effectively evaluate the various desires, is the responsibility of the discipline of moral philosophy. It is beyond the scope of these remarks to examine the various theories, except to say that it is this question that rests at the heart of *every other human question we can ask*. Now, moral psychologists like Jonathan Haidt will tell you that this inquiry ultimately just comes to (in metaphorical terms) the bony little Indian boy of reason, eventually finding the right levers with which to manipulate the elephant of emotional baggage. Maturation, for them, is simply becoming aware of how the preset knobs on your panel of sensibilities is set, and acting accordingly. But this is only half the picture. While it is true that we are born with “presets”, and that pressures in the environment can alter them, it is also true that with practice, *we can alter our own presets*. In fact, we can add or subtract from the array of knobs available. Haidt and others think there is a fixed set of dials, over which we have little control. This is a mistake. And it is this sort of deterministic thinking that leads to the kind of suffering we are experiencing as a civilization.
+
+In any case, returning from that digression, the point here is the *creation of value* that occurs in the process of evaluating and choosing desires. This is perhaps the one fundamental idea for which Ayn Rand deserves at least some credit. This is not quite the same thing as what Nietzsche and Sartre were arguing for. Theirs is an arbitrary selection, anchored in the submission to desire itself. To put it in Haidt’s metaphor, it would be like the rider just choosing to prefer wherever the elephant happens to go, because it’s easier than trying to manipulate the elephant. This is not at all what is meant by the creation of value in evaluation. But here’s where Rand would have parted company with me. That creation is a *metaphysical* reality. Not a physical one. The relationship we are dealing with here, is between three separate parties: the desire, the world, and *the conscience*. The animal appetite desires something in the world, the conscience stands between them, and arbitrates the relationship. That arbitration does not discover values (as Rand would have said), it *creates* them. Without the conscience, in otherwords, there is no value. There is only desire, satisfied or denied.
+
+Animals have a limited range of possible desires. They are more-or-less programmed into them, and meant to meet the basic needs of survival for the animal. This is because they have no self-conscious ego, and no imagination. But, because man is equipped with an imagination and the cognitive capacity to realize his imagination, his desires are infinite because his reality is infinite (in a practical sense, if not in principle). The conscience, then, is the mechanism by which we narrow the choices down to a finite set of achievable ends, relative to a time preference. And, in that selection process, create the list of things that are *valuable*.
+
+This is interesting, because it suggests a reason why centering moral worth in the capacity to reason is, while not quite sufficient, pointing in the right direction. It explains why doing so is not simply planting a flag in a matter of fact about human beings and declaring “here, be moral worth!”. This capacity for moral self-evaluation of our desires by way of our cognition is *categorically different* from, say, the capacity to run fast or the capacity to play the piano, or even the capacity to start a fire, because it is the union of *fact* and *value*. It is the bridge between what is, and what matters.
+
+If we’re not careful, however, it would be easy to jump immediately from this, to some form of subjectivist relativism, or Randian egoism. But, as I said, this is neither Nietzshean existentialism, nor Randian egoism. There is more to this part of the story than I have space for here. It will have to wait for another day.
+
+The point of this entire trek, is that what we have in this, at a minimum, is a basis for Lockean self-ownership that need not rely explicitly on biblical exegesis for its justification. And, from there, a firm foundation for political rights. Though I am sympathetic to Locke, because I find myself unable to dismiss the God hypothesis as easily as some others, I think that a political system like the American one needs a secular grounding, because it cannot take for granted the religious presuppositions Locke relied upon to get to self-ownership. If we are to conscript agreement in the fundamental dignity of man and the “natural” rights that flow from that, from a population of pluralistic individualists, then we cannot take anything for granted, really. The justification must begin from as few assumptions as possible. This exploration offers at least one possible approach to solving that problem.

content/post/john-lockes-property-rights.md

@@ -0,0 +1,33 @@
+---
+title: "John Locke's Property Rights"
+date: 2020-06-05T21:48:41Z
+tags: ["ethics","natural law","government","property rights"]
+topics: ["philosophy","politics"]
+image: /img/john-locke-wide.jpg
+draft: false
+---
+
+Does Locke offer a convincing account of an individual’s right to property? In his Second Treatise on Government, John Locke constructs a theory of property rights from two explicit arguments for the divine source of the moral claim of ownership, and one implicit argument for the divine source of value in labor. This essay will summarize each of these arguments, offer offer an assessment of the three arguments in combination, and conclude that Locke’s case is unconvincing in isolation. However, there are remedies which could make the case more convincing.
+
+The first of the three arguments begins with an exegesis of passages of Genesis. Locke concedes that we could only conclude that God’s initial grant of dominion over nature, from the story of the Garden of Eden, was a grant in common to all humanity, and not merely a right of absolute rule granted to Adam’s successors, or an open license to private acquisition by individuals. This may seem like a problem for Locke, but he goes on to argue from the story of The Fall, that when God cursed man to scrape his living out of the soil by the sweat of his brow, he implicitly granted men an implicit right to appropriate as much from nature as was necessary to the achievement of that living. He says that, were this not the case, then God would have left us in a double-bind: forced to live in a continual state of injustice by appropriating the common inheritance for our own self-preservation, or starving to death for the sake of justice. Thus, at a minimum, we must have a right to appropriation for the sake of self-preservation, granted implicitly to us by God, when he condemned us to live off the land.
+
+The second argument picks up where the first left off. Locke argues that this right of self-preservation is evident in our impulse to survive. God would not have imbued us with a desire to preserve ourselves, if he had not intended for his creation to endure. God, being the creator of man, has an absolute right of property over us, and obeying the impulse to self-preservation is thus an imperative to respect his right of ownership over his creation. The next move in this argument is to say that this imperative implies self-ownership in each individual by virtue of the fact that the impulse is personal (rather than common), and the fact that God’s absolute ownership over each individual precludes the possibility of any individual claiming ownership over any other individual. That self-ownership thus implies ownership of the actions of the self by way of common sense, and by extension, responsibility for the products of those actions. It is in that responsibility, that property rights arise.
+
+Finally, Locke claims that “something is mixed” with what we appropriate from nature, when we manipulate it to proper ends (the end of self-preservation). That “something”, is typically described as our labor. But this seems too superficial an understanding. If that were all Locke had to say about it, his argument would be weak indeed. Rather, it is not the labor as such that is “mixed”, but something intangible generated by the labor. That something seems to be an imputed value in the effort employed in transforming nature into a product. That value, by extension, entails an implicit moral claim to exclusive control over the result of our effort. Appealing again to biblical justifications, Locke claims that God’s grant to take what we need is limited to that *which we thus improve*. It is in that improvement, that the right of property inheres in the possession. This, in combination with the responsibility inferred in the second argument, offers a compound case of both material necessity and moral obligation, for the right of private property.
+
+Locke’s skill as a logician is, in some ways, his own worst enemy. The clarity of his syllogistic style of writing makes the problems in his arguments crystal clear. It is one thing to ask whether his arguments are syllogistically valid (most of which are, in fact). It’s quite another to ask whether his arguments are *convincing*. What does Locke need to be convincing? The criteria for that is much broader than it would be for logical analysis and brings in a number of external concerns that significantly weaken the strength of his case.
+
+To begin with, why should we take biblical exegesis seriously as a basis for the major premises in his case for the moral claim of property? If we were judging relative only to the poor sop he throttled in his First Treatise, then he certainly has the much stronger scriptural case. But again, why should I take the myth of The Fall and The Flood as basis for the moral authority for property? For that matter, what justification is there to accept the existence of the God found therein? Now, it is true that, absent that God, and absent those scriptural justifications, we would be hard pressed to find new ground on which to stand if we wanted to preserve property. But that would be to defend Locke on the basis of an appeal to anxiety provoking consequences. This author might be willing to grant the premises, but what about the rest of the world? Thus, the most significant of Locke’s major premises radically undermine his own case, with audiences that are not already predisposed to take them for granted.
+
+The second problem with Locke’s case, lies in the transference claims. Even if we grant exegetical justifications, there are a number of places where scripture would challenge his claim that ownership of self can be inferred from God’s ownership of the souls he creates. He is probably correct about the fact that we have no authority to claim ownership over one another, based on divine dominion, but many theologians (even in his own time) would claim that we are not independently autonomous (self-owning). We are *subjects* of God, serving at his pleasure, and as such, no autonomous ownership could be inferred, any more than the subjects of a terrestrial king could claim to be autonomous of the king’s edicts. In addition to this, the transference of the moral claim of ownership over actions to ownership over products is dubious without a theory of moral agency. Now, Locke might have had one himself. But he did not specify it in this treatise. But without that theory, it is not clear either how responsibility is assigned, or how ownership over products is inferred from that responsibility. Given how much scriptural support Locke provided in his critique of Robert Filmer, surely he could have mustered something in defense of biblical free will?
+
+Lastly, we move on to Locke’s third argument. While his case for labor-mixing is superficially compelling, it turns out to be missing an essential insight. Namely, value is not conferred by labor alone. Locke is (perhaps unintentionally) overestimating the contribution of the creator, in the process of “improvement”. Locke offers two examples to illustrate his case. First, is 100 acres of cultivated wheat. The second, is 100 acres of fallow woodland. In the first case, he claims, the improvement made by the landholder gives it it’s value, because its product is conducive to the end of self-preservation. But, curiously, Locke seems to only be referring to the farmer himself. What would the farmer need, himself, with 100 acres of harvestable wheat? No single human being could possibly consume all that in the form of bread flour, even over the course of an entire winter. Now, imagine, instead of 100 acres of wheat, the farmer had cultivated 100 acres of dandelions (or whatever your favorite noxious weed is). This makes the problem much more vivid. Despite nearly identical amounts of labor in plowing, fertilizing, tending, and harvesting, the wheat field would have orders of magnitude more value than the dandelion field. Why? Because of the need of others, not the effort of the farmer. Value is imbued in a product by a process of combining what the farmer is willing to spend his effort on, **and** what the consumer is willing to trade for it. In other words, “improvement” is determined by a criteria of negotiation between the producer and those who seek his products, not exclusively by the producer. As such, that value could not be traceable exclusively to an obligation to God, but would be a mixture itself, of divine obligation and social agreement.
+
+What is interesting about this insight, is that Locke could have grounded the third argument in his own principle of natural proportional reciprocity (one of the Laws of Nature he enumerated). When the farmer estimates the expense of his effort and it coincides with the estimate of, say, the baker’s desire for flour for his bread, they are able to benefit each other in equal measure. What’s more, if the baker hired goons to appropriate the wheat from the farmer in the dead of night, the farmer could complain of injustice on the basis of a violation of reciprocity. No appeal to divine authority would be needed in such a case, beyond the justification of the Law of Nature itself. The state would also have the benefit of empirical grounds for determining the amount of retributive justice needed to reconcile the two.
+
+This dual-source understanding of value would outfit the farmer with multiple justifications for sharing his produce, since the exchange of value would be isomorphic (if you will). The farmer need not rely entirely on his altruistic instinct to serve the “common good”. He would see explicitly what share he has in the common good, by way of the pricing (or bartering) mechanism that tokenizes the negotiated estimates of value. Without a notion of property, this kind of negotiation would be impossible.
+
+Ultimately, Locke’s theory of property will only be convincing to those who already accept the religious foundations of his arguments – that we are creations of God, that our participation in the ‘divine spark’ makes us all valuable in an absolute sense, and that the work we do to satisfy the conditions of the divine penury derived from The Fall – naturally transfigure our possessions into property. This is unfortunate, because as I have shown in at least the case of reciprocity, there are ways to make the case for Natural Law that do not entirely rely on scripture or divine mandate. A more naturalistic rendition of Locke’s theory might thus be more convincing to a broader audience.
+
+```[Imported from extingthecave.com on 28 November 2021]```
+

content/post/linux-civil-war.md

@@ -3,6 +3,7 @@ title: "A Response to Bryan Lunduke"
 date: 2021-05-16T16:13:06+01:00
 tags: ["wokism", "critical theory", "christendom", "civil war"]
 topics: ["philosophy", "religion", "culture"]
+image: /img/notre-dame-burns.jpg
 draft: false
 ---
 

content/post/potpie-for-dinner.md

@@ -1,11 +1,11 @@
 ---
 title: "Potpie for Dinner"
-date: 2021-04-18T11:09:34+01:00
+date: 2007-02-08T11:09:34+01:00
 tags: ["writing", "fiction"]
-topics: []
+topics: ["literature","culture"]
+image: /img/fruit-flies.jpg
 draft: false
 ---
-From my old journal. Enjoy...
 
 [BRADLEY] “Jerry?“
 

content/post/steele-on-the-history-of-the-culture-war.md

@@ -1,6 +1,6 @@
 ---
 title: "Steele on the History of the Culture War"
-date: 2020-07-05T16:45:50Z
+date: 2020-07-06T16:45:50Z
 tags: ["culture war", "liberalism", "conservatism"]
 topics: ["philosophy", "politics", "sociology"]
 image: /img/steele-shame.jpg

content/post/the-declaration-of-independence-part-1-a-decent-respect.md

@@ -0,0 +1,27 @@
+---
+title: "The Declaration of Independence, Part 1: A Decent Respect"
+date: 2020-07-01T20:41:16Z
+tags: ["independence day","jefferson","locke"]
+topics: ["philosophy","politics"]
+image: /img/jefferson-franklin.jpg
+draft: false
+---
+
+> *When, in the course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another, and to assume, among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the laws of nature and of nature’s God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.*
+
+Everyone is familiar with the famous rights passage, but this passage is the first thing actually written on the paper. There is quite a lot assumed in what Jefferson is asserting at the outset of the document. For starters, what is a “political band”, and is it dissolvable? Also, note that he is *already* speaking in the language of separation: “one people” and “another people”, as if they weren’t English citizens, but some sort of natural ally that has chosen to break the alliance. Bernard Bailyn, in his book “*The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution*“, masterfully details how this separate mindset formed gradually over the course of just over one hundred years, beginning with the crown charters that settled in New England in the early 17th century, and ending with the Declaration in the late 18th century. So, the dissolution was probably already present at the penning of this document. Jefferson just codified what had already happened, or was bound to happen soon, inevitably, regardless of whether he wrote it or not.
+
+Next, he says that when these bands are dissolved, the separated group assumes “…among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the laws of nature and nature’s God entitle them…” There is a lot packed into this assertion. What are the “powers of the earth”, the “laws of nature”, and “separate and equal station”? Why are we “entitled” to that station? What does it mean to be entitled to anything, in a situation where we are bound by no law but “the laws of nature”?
+
+Jefferson, here, is weaving two separate traditions of Enlightenment political thought. First, the ideas of John Locke, who in his Second Treatise on Government, published in 1689 (literally 100 years nearly to the month, prior to the Declaration), provided the first substantive philosophical argument for self-ownership and property, on the basis of our relationship to God (as described in Genesis). This is where Jefferson gets his “laws of nature” from, as well. Locke assumed from the fact that we could codify the regularities of nature (as demonstrated in work by Leibniz and Newton), that *moral laws* were just as discoverable as physical laws, and that clues for where to begin this work were all to be found in the Bible. The “separate and equal station” is a reference to Locke’s belief that, having been created by God, each of us is an end in himself, who could only ever be the property of God, and therefore *entitled* by the sovereignty of God, to the life he is given. But, in addition to this, by virtue of the curse laid on Adam and Eve in the garden, man is also responsible for (and therefore entitled to) the products of his labor.
+
+But there is a second, more subtle thread running through both the phrases “powers of the earth” and “separate and equal station”. Namely, Rousseau’s conception of the state of nature. Rousseau takes the ancient Greek view, that “powers” (in humans) are simply the capacity to realize the aims of the will, and that, whenever your body satisfies the aims of the will, you are realizing what is yours by right of your nature (see Callicles’ monologue in the Gorgias, for an example). In a state of nature, each of us has the “separate and equal” freedom to exercise the will, and to pursue its ends, in any way we see fit. Whether that would result in a “war of all against all”, or a pastoral utopia, is a debate for another time. The point here, is that this capacity is the human manifestation of the “powers of earth”; the other manifestations would be disease, natural disaster, degeneration, and weather, for example. Rousseau believed that, as a species, we came together in bands to shield ourselves from these physical forces, and the way that we did this, was to incorporate into a “general will”. I don’t have the space to explain the process of general will creation, but suffice to say here, this is the concept that Jefferson is appealing to, albeit obtusely, in the transition between “one people” and the “separate and equal station” of each of the individuals of that “one people”, when the “one people” have dissolved.
+
+Having laid the ground for the “causes which impel them”, Jefferson is free to declare them in an enumerated fashion. But from where does he derive this “decent respect to the opinions of mankind”? Why does he think this impels an explanation? Why should it matter what the English on the other side of the Atlantic think (particularly now that the colonists view themselves as a separate people)? Or, for that matter, the opinions of the French, or the Spanish, or the Dutch? Why not just rationalize the decision to break with the crown to yourself, and leave it at that?
+
+Well, setting aside the simple tactical wisdom of soliciting for new allies in a war they surely knew they were going to foment with this document, there is also the matter of the laws of nature, and nature’s God. Jefferson and his colleagues were steeped in the ideology of Enlightenment. That is to say, they believed that the universe was a place that was *governed by reason*, in the ancient Greek sense of this term. Leibniz and Newton had proved this definitively, with their study of the laws of motion (which is also why Jefferson uses the phrase ’causes that impel them’ in this part of the passage). Men are all universally equipped with a capacity to recognize, and to exercise, reason. Thus, they are necessarily a part of that order. But it’s not simply that “man is the rational animal”, as Aristotle put it, and so should be reasonable. It’s that reason is the basis for *all order* both physical and moral, and as such, man had a *duty to conform himself* to that order as much as was humanly possible. Anyone who acted rashly or arbitrarily, or in ways that were inexplicable, did not deserve to be treated as a free and equal rational agent. So, when Jefferson says that they have a ‘decent respect of the opinions of mankind’, what he is implying is that he saw it as his duty to prove to the community of reason, that their actions are reasonable.
+
+Thus, in the span of a single run-on sentence, Jefferson managed to encapsulate nearly a hundred years of philosophical rumination on the nature of the state and its relation to its people, from three separate and disparate traditions (Locke, Hobbes, and Rousseau), into a single conceptual motivation for independence. All that remains now, is the justification. Which I will cover in part 2.
+
+```[Imported from exitingthecave.com on 28 November 2021]```
+

content/post/the-declaration-of-independence-part-2-self-evident-truths.md

@@ -0,0 +1,80 @@
+---
+title: "The Declaration of Independence, Part 2: Self-Evident Truths"
+date: 2020-07-02T20:47:03Z
+tags: ["unalienable rights","natural law","consent of the governed"]
+topics: ["philosophy","politics"]
+image: /img/jefferson-and-locke.jpg
+draft: false
+---
+
+> *We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. That, to secure these rights, governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed. That, whenever any form of government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the right of the people to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new government, laying its foundation on such principles, and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their safety and happiness.*
+
+This is, of course, the passage that everyone is (more or less) familiar with — at least the first sentence. In the United States, the first sentence has been crystalized into a kind of religious creed, similar in tone and meter to opening lines of the Apostle’s Creed: “We believe in one God, the Father almighty, creator of heaven and earth…”, and so forth. But Jefferson had *philosophical* notions in mind when he wrote this, however pious he may (or may not) have been. To understand what’s going on in this paragraph, I’ll need to break it into multiple pieces, beginning with the very first word, and ending with dissolution.
+
+**We, The People**
+
+So, who exactly, is the “we” that Jefferson presumes to be speaking for? There are two schools of thought on this question. First (the Bailyn argument), that Jefferson and his compatriots were republican (small “r”) partisans, who sought to divest themselves of English rule, on account of its incorrigible corruption, and in pursuit of a more virtuous government. There is some evidence for this. For example, this snippet from a letter Jefferson wrote to Richard Henry Lee, in 1825 (a year before his death):
+
+> “…with respect to our rights, and the acts of the British government contravening those rights, there was but one opinion on this side of the water. All American Whigs thought alike on these subjects…”
+
+But it is equally as plausible that he was referring, at the time, to the “common good” idea of the “we”, found both in Locke and in Rousseau. Given the overwhelmingly obvious parallels in the language between the Declaration and Locke’s second Treatise (and Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding), I am inclined to take this interpretation. But it’s still entirely possible that Jefferson was simply conflating his identification with the Whigs, as synonymous with the “general will”.
+
+**The American Mind**
+
+In any case, what follows the “we” is an assertion of axiomatic (arguably dogmatic) commitment to Locke’s conception of natural rights, as set out in his Second Treatise on Government, and Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding. Jefferson admits as much, himself, in the same letter to Lee:
+
+> *“…This was the object of the Declaration of Independence. Not to find out new principles, or new arguments, never before thought of, not merely to say things which had never been said before; but to place before mankind the common sense of the subject, in terms so plain and firm as to command their assent, and to justify ourselves in the independent stand we are compelled to take. Neither aiming at originality of principle or sentiment, nor yet copied from any particular and previous writing, it was intended to be an expression of the American mind, and to give that expression the proper tone and spirit called for by the occasion. **All its authority rests then on the harmonizing sentiments of the day, whether expressed in conversation, in letters, in printed essays, or in the elementary books of public right, as Aristotle, Cicero, Locke, Sidney**, etc…”*
+
+If Jefferson himself says his influences were Aristotle and Locke, who am I to object? In fact, a battle still rages in both political philosophy and academic history, over whether Aristotle or Locke was the more important influence to the founders in the formation of the American republic (and, is in fact the source of the division between Liberals and Conservatives in America). But one thing is certain: Locke is the star of the show in the Declaration of Independence.
+
+**Self-Evidence**
+
+Before moving on to the enumeration of unalienable rights, I want to briefly pause here to explore the idea of “self-evident” truth. The one-line dictionary definition of this term is “*evident without proof or demonstration; axiomatic*“. It is tempting to interpret Jefferson’s use of this term in a theological way. As in, truths that are known by the grace of God, or by special revelation or beatific vision. It is also tempting to imagine that Jefferson had in mind some sort of Cartesian notion of “*clear and distinct ideas*“, in which no syllogistic steps were necessary to arrive at a single piece of firm knowledge (e.g. “cogito, ergo sum”).
+
+The story is actually much simpler than that, I’m afraid, and it is confessed again, in that snippet to Lee: 
+
+> “…*the common sense of the subject, in terms so plain and firm as to command their assent*…”. In other words, Jefferson and his colleagues were stating what they took to be the commonly accepted, received wisdom of the day, as simply axiomatic. In modern terms then, the opening of this paragraph might have been written, “*We take the following things to be well-established common sense among politically thoughtful people*…”
+
+In short: they took Locke and Cicero to be the equivalent of *average common sense*, in 1776. Let that sink in.
+
+**Unalienable Rights**
+
+Sometimes it is fashionable to point to the “pursuit of happiness” as a divergence from Locke, who in the Second Treatise, used the term “property” in connection with the other two “unalienables”. But both Locke and Jefferson considered it synonymous with “property,” when property is conceived in a broad sense, rather than simply as the ownership of material goods. Locke puts it this way, when explaining the origin of the contract, in chapter IX of the Second Treatise:
+
+> “…*though in the State of Nature [each man] hath such a right [to absolute freedom], yet the enjoyment of it is very uncertain, and constantly exposed to the invasion of others. For all being kings as much as he, every man his equal, and the greater part no strict observers of equity and justice, the enjoyment of the property he has in this State is very unsafe, very unsecure. This makes him willing to quit this condition, which however free, is full of fears and continual dangers: And ’tis not without reason, that he seeks out, and is willing to joyn in society with others who are already united, or have a mind to unite for the mutual **preservation of their Lives, Liberties and Estates, which I call by the general name, Property***…”
+
+And again a bit later, he reiterates:
+
+> “…*By Property I must be understood here, as in other places, to mean that property which men have in their persons as well as goods*…”
+
+So, all three of the “unalienable rights” enumerated in the Declaration are “properties” of man. In the sense that lead has the property of high density and high malleability, man has life and the liberty to pursue the fulfillment of that life, because God has endowed these things to man. Indeed, as I mentioned in another essay, Locke goes so far as to insist that being ultimately the property of God, we are all individually bound by the curse of Adam to strive for a good life. So, the properties are more than material facts, they are *moral facts*. Which is to say, these properties confer not just causal powers, but *moral powers*. We are granted the liberty to exercise certain powers, so that we can fulfill the duty imposed upon us by nature’s Creator.
+
+One more thing must be said about this. Today it is fashionable to think that the “right to life” means literally that one is entitled to be alive, or to have a life. Even on Locke’s conception, this cannot be the case. God grants us life as a *gift*, not an *entitlement*. For Locke, we all serve at His pleasure, not our own. But, once granted, no man has the authority to rescind the gift, not even oneself (which is one of the reasons Locke opposed slavery and indentured servitude). So, the right to life is really only the right not to have one’s life taken away by other men (either by forced labor or by death), not an entitlement to living (or any particular life), in any absolute sense.
+
+**To Secure These Rights**
+
+Continuing the list of axiomatic commitments, Jefferson goes on to summarize Locke’s theory of social contract. You can see it in the quote above, but just to resummarize, in a state of nature, we have “natural rights”, but the state of nature leaves no means by which to defend those rights. So, we join together in a society, and create institutions that are meant to function collectively as the machinery of preservation. But the key phrase of interest in this passage is, “the consent of the governed”. This too, comes directly from Locke (though, to be fair, it is conceptually present in Hobbes, Rousseau, and many classical writers like Cicero – who Jefferson mentions as well):
+
+> “…Men are naturally free, and the Examples of History shewing, that the Governments of the World, that were begun in Peace, had their beginning laid on that foundation, and were **made by the Consent of the People**;..”
+
+Locke is making a moral claim from a historical argument, here: “This is how it’s always been done”. That is typical of the English. It’s the basis of the concept of “Common Law”, and our own American principle of Stare Decisis. Unless you have a really good reason to do something differently, you stick with what you know already. You can see this sentiment echoed, again, in that Jefferson letter snippet, and indeed in the next paragraph of the Declaration itself. But this question of the “consent of the governed” is more conceptually complex than either Locke or Jefferson are willing to admit, here (or, for that matter, anywhere in Locke’s writings).
+
+What does it mean to have the “consent” of the “governed”? Rousseau argued that, to be considered consent at all, it must be unanimous. Only when all of the people, without exception, concede to some proposition which places them subordinate to a governing body, is proper consent acquired. This is prior to any institution of decision-making authority like democratic voting, for example. It is only once this unanimous consent is aquired, that we can even begin to negotiate what form the government should take. Hobbes imagines something similar, only instead of mutual concern, the motivation is simply the terror of lawlessness. Locke’s view, as vague as it is, seems to be that all right-thinking people, once shown the utility of a just government, would simply consent to it. So, up-front consent is not really needed, because you can demonstrate that utility at any time. Jefferson and his compatriots appear to take this approach, as well.
+
+But early American history is littered with examples of ostensibly rational people who did not see the utility of the separatist project. In fact, about a third of the colonists were vehement Royalists. Many of them were forced to flee to Canada, when the war for independence broke out. They had to surrender large estates and lost fortunes, in the process. Some even lost their lives. It is one of the tragic paradoxes of the liberal nation-state, that it must violate its own principles, in order to establish and defend itself. To “We, the people”, is attached the addendum, “who happen to accept the new political regime”. Which gets us to the next clause…
+
+**To Alter Or Abolish**
+
+If the revolutionary colonists are to establish a new contract amongst themselves, they need to be able to explain how it is that the old contract with the British people can be justly dissolved. Having established the duty purpose of a just government (to secure the natural rights of the governed), Jefferson logically concludes from this, that the failure to meet this duty is tantamount to invalidating the contract. But Locke makes an interesting point that suggests a justification may be irrelevant in some circumstances:
+
+> …*He that will with any clearness speak of the dissolution of government, ought, in the first place to distinguish between the dissolution of the society, and the dissolution of the government. That which makes the community, and brings men out of the loose State of Nature, into one politick society, is the agreement which every one has with the rest to incorporate, and act as one body, and so be one distinct commonwealth… there wants not much argument to prove, that where the society is dissolved, the government cannot remain; that being as impossible, as for the frame of a house to subsist when the materials of it are scattered, and dissipated by a whirlwind, or jumbled into a confused heap by an earthquake*…
+
+One could argue that, by virtue of the growing disconnect between the American colonies and the British homeland, the *society* had already dissolved. This is roughly the case that Bernard Bailyn makes in his book. If that was the case, then Jefferson was simply pronouncing the patient dead on the table, with the Declaration, rather than justifying a killing. Still, Locke does indeed provide an argument for dissolution “from within”, that Jefferson cribs for this passage in the Declaration:
+
+> …*For, since it can never be supposed to be the Will of the Society that the legislative should have a power to destroy that which every one designs to secure by entering into society, and for which the people submitted themselves to the legislators of their own making; whenever the legislators endeavour to take away, and destroy the property of the people, or to reduce them to slavery under arbitrary power, they put themselves into a state of war with the people, who are thereupon absolved from any farther obedience, and are left to the common refuge, which God hath provided for all men, against force and Violence. Whensoever therefore the legislative shall transgress this fundamental rule of society; and either by ambition, fear, folly or corruption, endeavour to grasp themselves, or put into the hands of any other an absolute power over the lives, liberties, and estates of the people; by this breach of trust **they forfeit the power the people had put into their hands for quite contrary ends, and it devolves to the people, who have a right to resume their original liberty, and, by the establishment of a new legislative (such as they shall think fit) provide for their own safety and security**, which is the end for which they are in society*…
+
+The highlighted passage points to the language that Jefferson borrows, and gives us an actual argument for why the dissolution is justified: we don’t institute governments in order that they may trample on our natural rights, we institute them in order that they may protect them in some fundamental way. So, any institution that would “transgress” this purpose ceases to be an institution of government, and becomes an institution of tyranny. The latter being illegitimate, the people are free to throw it off.
+
+But, Jefferson knows that even this is not enough. He cannot simply assert that George III has transgressed the duties of natural right, he has to demonstrate it with reasons. So, to make that case, the remainder of the document is literally a catalogue of grievances against the crown.
+
+For this, you will have to wait for part three.

content/post/the-declaration-of-independence-part-3-a-long-train-of-abuses.md

@@ -0,0 +1,51 @@
+---
+title: "The Declaration of Independence, Part 3: A Long Train of Abuses"
+date: 2020-07-03T20:56:09Z
+tags: ["revolution","insurrection","jefferson","george III","locke"]
+topics: ["philosophy","politics"]
+image: /img/angry-george.jpg
+draft: false
+---
+
+> *Prudence, indeed, will dictate that governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and, accordingly, all experience has shown, that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed.*
+
+> *But, when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same object, evinces a design to reduce them under absolute despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such government, and to provide new guards for their future security. Such has been the patient sufferance of these colonies; and such is now the necessity which constrains them to alter their former systems of government. The history of the present King of Great Britain is a history of repeated injuries and usurpations, all having in direct object the establishment of an absolute tyranny over these states. To prove this, let facts be submitted to a candid world.*
+
+These paragraphs are the final piece of justification Jefferson offers before enumerating his “long train of abuses”. They are the justification for insurrection or revolutionary action. This may seem a vain subtlety, given that he’s already given a justification for dissolution of the contract. But it is significant. These paragraphs are a rationalization for the *means of terminating that contract*. Jefferson is suggesting here that the people are justified collectively in *taking up arms* against the other parties to the contract, in order to effect the dissolution as a practical matter.
+
+Once again, Jefferson is heavily dependent upon John Locke for his arguments, and they also come from chapter XIX of the Second Treatise. Note the highlighted portions of the passages passages:
+
+> …*For till the mischief be grown general, and the ill designs of the rulers become visible, or their attempts sensible to the greater part, the people, **who are more disposed to suffer**, than right themselves by resistance, are not apt to stir. The examples of particular injustice or oppression of here and there an unfortunate man, moves them not. But if they universally have a persuasion, grounded upon manifest evidence, that designs are carrying on against their liberties, and the general course and tendency of things cannot but give them strong suspicions of the evil intention of their governors, who is to be blamed for it?*…
+
+> *…Revolutions happen not upon every little mismanagement in public affairs. Great mistakes in the ruling part, many wrong and inconvenient laws, and all the slips of humane frailty will be born by the people, without mutiny or murmur. But if **a long train of abuses, prevarications, and artifices**, all tending the same way, make the design visible to the people, and they cannot but feel, what they lie under, and see, whither they are going; ’tis not to be wonder’d, that they should then rouze themselves, and endeavour to put the rule into such hands, which may secure to them the ends for which government was at first erected; and without which, ancient names, and specious forms, are so far from being better, that they are much worse, than the State of Nature, or pure anarchy;…*
+
+At last, we get to the list of grievances. I am no historian, and combing over each line-item carefully would be tedious, and take me months of research which would not be anywhere near as good as an actual historian’s work. If you’re motivated to read more about them in detail, I can highly recommend Bernard Bailyn’s book “The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution” (already mentioned here a few times). But I will highlight a few key general issues:
+
+1. The English crown, with George III at the helm, barred the American colonies from exporting finished goods to each other, or to any other nation. They were allowed only to trade raw materials and some limited finished goods amongst themselves as where necessary for subsistence, and were bound by law to ship all unfinished raw materials to England, where final products would be manufactured from them, and shipped back for purchase at a profit. This, of course, is colonial exploitation par excellence.
+2. Parliament barred the colonies from organizing themselves politically, barred them from establishing courts of justice, and barred them from electing governors locally. This was done, ironically, out of a fear that the colonies would begin to function independently of the British government.
+3. The Stamp Acts and the Tea Tax actually had little practical effect on the colonies, but functioned as a symbolic insult piled on top of many injuries. Their intent was simply to let the colonists know “who’s boss”, after a number of earlier insurrectionist uprisings. All it did was to inflame resentment against the crown.
+4. George III was heavily preoccupied with continuous internal political strife, a heavily flagging economy due to the previous war with France and several years of desperately bad harvests, colonial strife in India, and escalating political friction in Ireland. On top of all this, include George’s own alleged mental instability, and disinterest in the operation of the colonies. All of this led to a completely hands-off approach by George, who didn’t even have an explicit policy of his own toward the colonies, until a skirmish in 1774 demanded his attention.
+5. For the sake of proxy wars with the French and Spanish, the British government was using the colonies as an encampment, forcing locals to quarter and feed soldiers at their own expense, and with no hope of recompense later. What’s worse, because of the alienation already present between colonists and the English mainlanders, these soldiers often behaved like an occupying force, raping and stealing as the pleased. Because the colonists had no court system by which to punish them, they were effectively at the mercy of an occupying force, when this happened.
+
+Finally, I should note that the capstone grievence Jefferson wanted to include, ultimately didn’t make the cut in the final draft. That grievance was, what Adams called, a “vehement phillipic” against George’s use of the colonies to traffic in African slavery, which Jefferson called a “*…cruel war against human nature itself, violating its most sacred rights of life and liberty…*“. Here is the full text of that grievance:
+
+> *He has waged cruel war against human nature itself, violating its most sacred rights of life and liberty in the persons of a distant people who never offended him, captivating & carrying them into slavery in another hemisphere or to incur miserable death in their transportation thither. This piratical warfare, the opprobrium of infidel powers, is the warfare of the Christian King of Great Britain. Determined to keep open a market where Men should be bought & sold, he has prostituted his negative for suppressing every legislative attempt to prohibit or restrain this execrable commerce. And that this assemblage of horrors might want no fact of distinguished die, he is now exciting those very people to rise in arms among us, and to purchase that liberty of which he has deprived them, by murdering the people on whom he has obtruded them: thus paying off former crimes committed again the Liberties of one people, with crimes which he urges them to commit against the lives of another.*
+
+Jefferson himself explained in his journals, why the final grievance was deleted from the draft:
+
+> …The clause … reprobating the enslaving the inhabitants of Africa was struck out in complaisance to South Carolina and Georgia, who had never attempted to restrain the importation of slaves, and who on the contrary still wished to continue it. Our northern brethren also I believe felt a little tender under these censures; for tho’ their people have very few slaves themselves yet they had been pretty considerable carriers of them to others….
+
+In a letter to Robert Walsh, in 1818, Jefferson also had this to say about it:
+
+> …“Severe strictures on the British king, in negativing our repeated repeals of the law which permitted the importation of slaves, were disapproved by some Southern gentlemen whose reflections were not yet matured to the full abhorrence of that traffic.”…
+
+In sum, the intention was to paint George the III into the picture of a tyrant, because this was the justification made necessary by the founders’ understanding of social contract, to dissolve an existing polity, and the minimal rationale for constructing a new one. As Jefferson says in the Declaration:
+
+>  *In every stage of these oppressions, we have petitioned for redress, in the most humble terms. Our repeated petitions have been answered only by repeated injury. A prince, whose character is **thus marked by every act which may define a tyrant**, is unfit to be the ruler of a free people.*
+
+Whether they managed to effect that depiction, is a matter of debate amongst historians. What is ironically both tragic and unfortunate, is that the slavery passage is probably the best argument they had available to them. All the rest could be explained away (and has been subsequently, by various historians) as mere incompetence or self-interested mismanagement. What’s more, the Canadian colonies managed to evolve into semi-independent provinces without the need for political dissolution, or a violent revolution. So, without the objection to slavery, it is difficult to maintain the thesis that independence demanded separation.
+
+In the final installment of this series, we’ll go over the final paragraph: what was effectively a declaration of war, and meet the one founder who ended up on ‘the wrong side of history’ for making the objection I just did. Stay tuned…
+
+```[Imported from exitingthecave.com on 28 November 2021]```
+

content/post/the-declaration-of-independence-part-4-our-sacred-honour.md

@@ -0,0 +1,34 @@
+---
+title: "The Declaration of Independence, Part 4: Our Sacred Honour"
+date: 2020-07-04T21:05:36Z
+tags: ["adams","dickinson","declaration of war"]
+topics: ["philosophy","politics"]
+image: /img/declaration-signing.jpg
+draft: false
+---
+
+The Declaration of Independence, one paragraph at a time. Conclusion: Our Sacred Honour
+
+> *We, therefore, the representatives of the United States of America, in General Congress assembled, appealing to the Supreme Judge of the world for the rectitude of our intentions, do, in the name, and by authority of the good people of these colonies, solemnly publish and declare, that these United Colonies are, and of right ought to be free and independent states; that they are absolved from all allegiance to the British Crown, and that all political connection between them and the state of Great Britain is and ought to be totally dissolved; and that, as free and independent states, they have full power to levy war, conclude peace, contract alliances, establish commerce, and to do all other acts and things which independent states may of right do. And for the support of this declaration, with a firm reliance on the protection of Divine Providence, we mutually pledge to each other our lives, our fortunes, and our sacred honor.*
+
+The final phrase of this paragraph is almost as famous as the self-evident truths phrase. Again, I am no historian, and so, cannot do justice to the outcome of the signing of this document. Instead, for that, I’m going to refer you to a [1962 article in American Heritage, by Arthur Tourtellot](https://www.americanheritage.com/we-mutually-pledge-each-other-our-lives-our-fortunes-and-our-sacred-honor#1). He was a relatively unknown non-academic historian focusing mostly on colonial America. In the tradition of this blog, Arthur had a day job. He was script writer and television producer for CBS. However, he does an excellent job in this article, describing the vote, the signing process, and the eventual personal consequences of their actions.
+
+What the founding of America — and the Declaration of Independence, in particular — represent, is a debate as old as the Socratic dialogues. Do the rights of men derive from their place in nature and their relationship with God, or are they mere products of social agreement to be defended collectively as preferable to the Hobbesian alternative? Not all the founders agreed on this point. Though Jefferson and his natural rights idealists won the day, many in that second Continental Congress still did not accept “unseen absolutes” as the basis for any rational conception of men’s rights. Security is hard won by experience, and philosophical politics is prone to instability and (paradoxically) interpretation. Tradition, in other words, is a better custodian of men’s freedoms than philosophy, because philosophy is only as deep as the paper it’s written on but tradition is woven into the fiber of every heart.
+
+This debate is exemplified in the exchange between John Adams and John Dickinson, {{< newtab title="dramatized well by HBO a few years back" url="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RDzwtl5Z2cA" >}}. Dickinson was something of a celebrity in 1774. He was the author of a series of “Farmer’s Letters”, famously harshly criticizing parliament on the tax acts — and galvanizing the idea of “no taxation without representation”, in the minds of future generations of Americans. So, it is somewhat tragic and ironic, that it would be Dickinson who stood against the likes of Adams and Jefferson, in the debate around the Declaration of Independence. In the mini-series, Dickinson is a standin for the Burkean position. The first exchange depicted, in 1775, appears to be cobbled together from other public exchanges between the men, and extrapolations from the record of the Congress. But the second exchange, in which Dickinson begged rejection and Adams triumphantly proclaimed his vision of “*a republic of laws, not men*“, appears to be genuine. Today, we Americans all think we’d be on Adams’ side of the debate. However, given the relationship between the colonies and the British crown, and the people who populated the Continental Congress, I don’t think the choice is really all that clear cut.
+
+Imagine it this way: you live in a small territory recently purchased and controlled by the United States. You moved there from your home state where you’d lived most of your life, in order to set up a US outpost, and make a new life for yourself. Gradually, the federal government starts taking arbitrary liberties with your territory. Revoking constitutionally guaranteed rights, on the basis that it’s not “really” the US. Ignoring your pleas for redress. Forcing you to quarter US troops in your home against your will, stationed there because of the strategic importance of the territory. Then, after a brief protest over these rights violations that gets particularly violent, the US cracks down HARD, and kills a bunch of people, including some of your own extended family members. You send a peace offer to the US, asking again for redress, this time, directly from the President. But he sends back to you a message saying that you’re all traitors, and that he’s going to prosecute you to the fullest extent of the law. What would your feeling be, then? What would you do next?
+
+I submit, that John Dickinson was, along with Adams and Jefferson, one of the bravest of the founders. But he was also one of the most tragic figures of all of the Revolutionaries. He wanted desperately to remain loyal to his homeland — as any one of us Americans would, now. He held out hope against hope that George would come to his senses. And he lost almost as many friends in the colonies for this stance, as Thomas Paine would later lose for his atheism. While the philosophers saw themselves as standing alone against the British tide, Dickinson saw himself as standing alone against their tide. And so, it goes.
+
+One could argue from a utilitarian position, that it was a great thing that the colonial revolutionaries did actually win. Liberal democracy and progress won, and we’re all the better for it in terms of freedom, equal justice and prosperity. Even the English themselves have conceded the worthiness of that success to Americans. I am inclined to agree, as an American. But the philosophical question was never really settled, and as long as we keep sitting on it, the ghost of John Dickinson will remain to haunt us.
+
+If you’re curious to follow up on what I’ve covered here, over the last four days, here is the bibliography of books I drew from, to write this:
+
+- Bailyn, Bernard. The Ideological Origins Of The American Revolution. Belknap Harvard, 1992.
+- Gerber, Scott Douglas. To Secure These Rights: The Declaration of Independence and Constitutional Interpretation. NYU Press, 1995.
+- Becker, Carl. The Declaration of Independence: A Study In The History of Political Ideas. Knopf Vintage, 1942.
+- Lasslet, Peter (Ed). Locke, Two Treatises of Government. Cambridge University Press, 1994
+
+```[Imported from exitingthecave.com on 28 November 2021]```
+

content/post/two-custodians-on-the-purpose-of-the-state.md

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+---
+title: "Two Custodians: On the Purpose of the State"
+date: 2020-06-13T21:42:11Z
+tags: ["authority","conservatism","enlightenment","legitimacy","liberalism","tolerance"]
+topics: ["philosophy","politics","history"]
+image: /img/voltaire-reading.jpg
+draft: false
+---
+
+Traditionally, there are two great debates at the core of political philosophy. The first is what justifies political authority, and the second is what should be the form of the institution that assumes that authority. The first debate includes questions of fundamental justice. Issues like what the state owes to its subjects, and what the subjects owe to each other, are central to the debate. The second debate depends somewhat on the answer to the first, in that it seeks to answer how the duties, obligations, rights, and responsibilities of the first debate are to be enacted and enforced. Should offices be permanent or temporary? Should powers be segregated? Should it include democratic mechanisms? Who should be enfranchised? Should it be federated or centralized? Should it monopolize certain goods? And so forth.
+
+But, there is a further even higher level debate that has arisen as a consequence of the political transformation of the west over the last three hundred odd years. It is a debate that seems to be taking place largely unconsciously, near as I can tell, and expressing itself in secondary disputes around things like “tolerance” and “inclusion”. To understand this debate, I need to back up a bit to cover a few points from that three hundred years of history.
+
+Coming out of the Thirty Years war in Europe, most states in the west were fairly well established monarchies governing regional or ethnic constituencies of limited geographical scope. The Holy Roman Empire had more or less disintegrated into dozens of culturally self-identified principalities; the Swiss confederacy, the Habsburg monarchy, the Brandenburg-Prussia monarchy, the Hanoverian kingdom, and of course, the French, Dutch, English, and Spanish crowns. These kingdoms, to some extent, were literally extended families. The royals were all inter-marrying (in order mostly to avoid having to marry the peasantry), and the peasantry identified itself with it’s royal family. This self-identification is actually still present vestigially in England. The English crown provides a kind of vague archetypal template for what an English family should think of itself (in addition to establishing class definitions).
+
+During the height of the Enlightenment, immediately following the Thirty Years war, much of the thinking about the nature of crowns and sovereigns changed radically (though, not quite as radically as might be thought – but more on that later). Thinkers like Hobbes, Locke, Rousseau, and Montesquieu, began to consciously systematize European politics through the lens of their naturalistic, rational philosophical outlook. These thinkers were some of the first since late antiquity to ask fundamental questions about the legitimacy, form, and purpose of the state. The rationalism they took from the Greeks, drove them to seek in quasi-scientific fashion, unifying answers to these questions. Answers that would explain in reductive absolute terms, what the sovereign was for, what duties he must execute, what his subjects owed to him, and how the relationship was to be carried out in practice. Following the lead of Bacon and Newton, they tried to look at the world to discern its order by observation. Only, for them, it was the order inherent in man’s relations that they sought, rather than the relations of inanimate objects in nature.
+
+But we should be clear about what was really going on, here. This was not a disinterested, agnostic, secular examination of political economy. This was work that was informed by training in classical philosophy, and heavily influenced by Anglo-Catholic assumptions about the meaning and purpose of life, and the fundamental value of mankind as a creature touched by the divine. Some will dispute this characterization, pointing to Voltaire, Rousseau, Hobbes, or Hume, and all the rumors of atheism swirling around them. I don’t want to debate that here. What I think we can agree on, was that despite their conscious declarations for or against religion, it is clear from their work, that it was heavily characterized by both the totalizing impulses of Greek rationalism, and the universalizing impulses of Anglo-Catholic religiosity. And this is especially important. Because it points to the new debate I see raging now (albeit a subconscious one). A debate that has very likely been going on in the arena of active politics, since the early 19th century.
+
+Fundamentally, the debate comes down to this: what *philosophical purpose* does the state serve?
+
+The pre-Enlightenment state clearly served as a kind of extension of the family as an organizing principle, and functioned as the standard bearer for a set of moral and political values through which the subjects obtained their own purpose, and organized their lives. In short, the state was a *custodian* of a regional or ethnic tradition, and it’s sovereign was the conservator of that custodial authority. This is why lines of succession are so important, and why identification with the sovereign was essential. If the people did not trust the sovereign to properly conserve the political tradition, he was on very shaky ground. Just ask George I of England, if you need to see this in action.
+
+But the post-Enlightenment state was a different animal altogether, at first at leat, on paper. The Enlightenment state was no longer a custodian of a parochial tradition, but it remained a custodian. Only, this time, it was to serve as the custodian of the universal law of justice, as discovered by the political naturalist, and as expressed in political doctrines. This universal law was to have as its pillars several absolute principles, like the principles of physics that came from Newton or the principles of biology that came from Mendel and Lewenhoek; the primary principles they discovered were, Liberty and Equality. This was the first step toward the modern liberal democracy, which arguably saw its full realization in the federal republic instituted by the intellectual offspring of Locke and Rousseau, in America (but mainly, Locke).
+
+Over the past two hundred plus years, the debate has evolved. The conception of the state as custodian of a parochial tradition, was mutated into the identitarian nationalism of the Nazis, by way of German philosophy (which is too complex to get into here). The conception of the state as custodian of a universal law of justice for all mankind, has been transformed by scientistic approaches to human social-psychology, and post-modern critiques of Enlightenment rationalism, into a sort of value-neutral dispute resolution platform, refereeing between participants in a socio-political football match. It is this conception of the state that I want to pick apart.
+
+The post-modern critiques have some basis to them, which is why they’ve never really gone away. But the consequence has been to drive commitments to principled universalism into remission, mainly because traditional lines of defense for its principles have been rendered mute by the abandonment of a commitment to truth itself. What we are left with is essentially, a political scaffolding that hangs on to nothing but a globally totalized order for order’s sake, as its fundamental value. The purpose of one-world government is, well, just to get to one. Because one is better than many. And, oddly, we’re back to Parmenides yet again.
+
+But there is a problem with this analysis. The impartial broker can only broker justice, if it knows what justice is, and it can only know what justice is, if it is commited to a set of values that express justice. In other words, there can be no such thing as an value-neutral custodian of a universal law of justice, because to be such a custodian requires commiting to certain values from which justice is constituted. Namely, a justifiable arrangement of Liberty and Equality.
+
+This is why the modern liberal democratic state seems to be so obsessed with questions of “tolerance” especially. Tolerance is a proxy debate. What is it that the liberal state is being asked to tolerate, primarily? Generally, what it regards as “intolerance”. What is that “intolerance”, when you look at it closely? Typically, a minority community that acts as a self-subsistent custodian for its own peculiar set of values and traditions, that if the modern liberal state were genuinely value-neutral, wouldn’t concern it at all. But it is very concerned. Often to the point of neurosis. Why?
+
+Because the value-neutral custodian of universal justice isn’t value-neutral at all, but cannot name its values anymore – either because it has forgotten them, or because it has become frightened by its own origin. Or maybe both. Modern liberal democracy yearns for globalization schemes internationally, and “inclusion” schemes domestically, because it still yearns for the universal justice that it was originally tasked with conserving, but now, can no longer identify. So, it scrabbles in the dark for substitutes. And in the process, it will give birth to abominable injustices every bit as horrifying as anything the Nazis ever aspired to.
+
+```[Imported from exitingthecave.com on 28 November 2021]```
+