REDUX: The Natural Law President

Some more thoughts on the inagural address. The ever-insightful David Adesnik gives an insightful account of how this new mission statement will transform American foriegn policy, complete with a very apt historical parallel. Mainly it is an informed defense against the knee-jerk reaction of "But we're hypocrites! We're friends with all these bad guys." Austin Bay comments on how important this kind of mission statement -- the calling of our time -- is in order to wage this war. Good stuff.

If you've tired of the U.S. press' angles, you can always look to the State Dept.'s International Information Program, Foriegn Media Reaction. You will find the depth and breadth of international media opinion. Two highlights:

GERMANY: "High Mass Of The Republic"

Michael Stürmer penned in right-of-center Die Welt of Berlin (1/21): Because he received a majority of votes, Bush sees himself confirmed in his war on terror and the invasion in Iraq. But at the same time, the presence of thousands of security forces shows that the invisible war on terror has by no means been won. The concerns not only of Americans but also of the rest of the world were reflected in the parades. The deficits are out of control.... Iran is striving for nuclear weapons, the Iraq war has only been half won--and this also means it has been half lost. The proliferation of WMD can at best be slowed down, but cannot be stopped. But who, with the exception of America, is really turning this into its own problem? The old allies are lost in doubts. George W. Bush's speech was a sermon that was full of confidence in the spirit of freedom. The Europeans in their skepticism and their secret envy of the superpower should save themselves any malice. Some of this spirit would be good for the political apparata in the Old World and help them renew themselves."

IRELAND: "In The Name Of Freedom"

The center-right populist Irish Independent declared (1/21): "George W Bush began his second term as American president yesterday with a remarkable inaugural address. Critics who were hoping that he would get mired in detail about Iraq were mistaken. Instead he went back to basics, reaching out to the belief of most Americans in the fundamental importance of freedom and using that to explain his policies at home and abroad. At times it sounded more like a sermon than a speech. Mr Bush may not be much of a speaker. But sometimes the message is more important than eloquence and what he had to say yesterday had the power of real conviction. For George Bush, America's present stance in the world is a reflection of its deepest beliefs from its earliest days.... America was founded on these ideals, Mr Bush said, on this belief in freedom and democracy. Now America finds that its future liberty depends on the expansion of freedom in all the world. The reason, according to Mr Bush, is that there are whole regions of the world which ‘simmer in resentment and tyranny,’ with ideologies that feed hatred. Left unchecked, he believes, this violence will ‘multiply in destructive power and cross the most defended borders.’ The only way of preventing this is to confront the threat, he said. That must be done not only because it is in America's interest but also for the sake of those who are oppressed. The ideals on which America was founded demand no less. So in the Bush view, America's present foreign policy is not an aberration; it is part of a continuum based on its fundamental beliefs. No doubt the Bush credo will be dismissed as simplistic in many quarters. But is he wrong?“

For my money, however, the best analysis of the speech that I have seen so far, comes from Mr. Joseph Bottum. While he's no Abraham Lincoln, Bottum argues, it is nonetheless the case that "George Bush delivers the most philosophical inaugural address ever."

On a cold, bright day in January 2005, with the sun off the snow crinkling his eyes, President Bush gave his second inaugural address. And it seems he did actually mean what he had said before. The speech was as clear an assertion of a particular Christian political philosophy as we're likely to hear in these latter days. "We go forward with complete confidence in the eventual triumph of freedom," the president declared. "Not because history runs on the wheels of inevitability; it is human choices that move events. Not because we consider ourselves a chosen nation; God moves and chooses as He wills. We have confidence because freedom is the permanent hope of mankind, the hunger in dark places, the longing of the soul."

There's even a name for this kind of theistical philosophy. It's called natural law. An inaugural address, by its very national purpose, walks the tightrope between powerful abstractions and empty platitudes, and sometimes it's hard to tell the difference. "In America's ideal of freedom, the exercise of rights is ennobled by service, and mercy, and a heart for the weak," Bush said, and is that a truth or a truism? A wrenching call to greatness or a self-congratulatory pat on the back?

A little of both, no doubt. But the most interesting things in Bush's inaugural rhetoric are the moments where justifications are offered for the various truths and truisms. The chain of explanation in his speech is always the logical progression of the natural-law argument. "Americans, of all people, should never be surprised by the power of our ideals," Bush insisted. And why? Because there is, in fact, a universal human nature: "Eventually, the call of freedom comes to every mind and every soul." If "across the generations we have proclaimed the imperative of self-government," the reason must reside in the enduring essence of human beings as simultaneously corruptible and morally valuable: "Because no one is fit to be a master, and no one deserves to be a slave."

As it happens, a natural-law explanation carries philosophical reasoning a step beyond the mere assertion of a nature for human beings. The problem for ethics is always how to match empirical and logical claims ("Humans want to be free") with moral claims ("Humans should be free"). And, within philosophy, natural law is a way of bridging the gap by asserting a unity of fact and value--based on the endowment of human nature with moral worth by the model on which humans are based. "From the day of our Founding, we have proclaimed that every man and woman on this earth has rights, and dignity, and matchless value," as President Bush explained. And the reason? Well, "because they bear the image of the Maker of heaven and earth."

Now, any philosopher would point out that this is possible only if the moral law itself is real: a set of eternal truths that vary not in content but only in application as the temporal order changes. And, sure enough, there the necessary postulate is in Bush's speech: "Americans move forward in every generation by reaffirming all that is good and true that came before--ideals of justice and conduct that are the same yesterday, today, and forever."

And watch it all come together as Bush reaches toward his peroration in the speech's penultimate moment: "When our Founders declared a new order of the ages; when soldiers died in wave upon wave for a union based on liberty; when citizens marched in peaceful outrage under the banner 'Freedom Now'--they were acting on an ancient hope that is meant to be fulfilled. History has an ebb and flow of justice, but history also has a visible direction, set by liberty and the Author of Liberty."

So, we've got an enduring and universal human nature ("ancient hope"). We've got final causation ("meant to be fulfilled"). We've got a moral problematic (the "ebb and flow of justice"). We've got intelligible formal causes (the ideal of "liberty" as shaping a "visible direction" for history). And we've even got a prime mover ("the Author of Liberty"). There isn't much more a natural-law philosopher could want in an American president's inaugural address about nature and nature's God. I'd guess not a lot of gloating is allowed around the throne of the Maker of heaven and earth, but somewhere in the vicinity, St. Thomas Aquinas must be smiling.

Now, all the "God-talk" worried many, me and Peggy Noonan included. But it is not the inaguration of Jesusland which should worry folks. Mr. Bottum explains:

Still, all that God-talk--all that natural-law reasoning--was heading somewhere in Bush's speech, and the president's cultured despisers, those who tremble or rage at any trace of divinity in public, are right to be afraid. Just not for the reason they think. It would take an act of perverse will to suppose that the 2005 inaugural address signaled the onset of a Christian theocracy in America. Every rhetorical gesture toward God was either universalized up into a sectless abstraction ("Author of Liberty"? Which faith group can't say that?) or spread down in careful pluralistic specificity ("the truths of Sinai, the Sermon on the Mount, the words of the Koran, and the varied faiths of our people").

No, President Bush's opponents should be afraid of this speech because it signals the emergence of a single coherent philosophy within the conservative movement. Natural-law reasoning about the national moral character gradually disappeared from America in the generations after the Founding Fathers, squeezed out between a triumphant emotive liberalism, on the one side, and a defensive emotive Evangelicalism, on the other. Preserved mostly by the Catholics, natural law made its return to public discourse primarily through the effort to find a nontheological ground for opposition to abortion. And now, three decades after Roe v. Wade, it is simply the way conservatives talk--about everything. With his inaugural address, President Bush has just delivered a foreign-policy discourse that relies entirely on classical concepts of natural law, and, agreeing or not, everybody in America understood what he was talking about.

In other words, the argument over abortion changed the way the nation speaks of every moral issue. "We will persistently clarify the choice before every ruler and every nation: The moral choice between oppression, which is always wrong, and freedom, which is eternally right. America will not pretend that jailed dissidents prefer their chains, or that women welcome humiliation and servitude, or that any human being aspires to live at the mercy of bullies," the president declares--and thereby carries natural law out to the world.

This is a claim about the universal, which the old foreign-policy realists rejected. This is a claim about the moral, which the libertarians despised. And this is a claim about the eternal, which the Social Darwinists renounced. But these older strains of conservatism have lost the battle to set the nation's rhetoric. They are welcome to come along for the ride, but George W. Bush announced, there in the bright cold of a Washington January, that the nation would be moving to the beat of a different political philosophy.

An unintended consequence of Roe v. Wade? Call it what you will. The fact remains that this speech marks the seizure of the political heights in the public discourse by Bush and the Republicans.. Enshrining the rights and dignity of men, embracing the goal of ending tyranny, and promoting liberty and freedom, all as inalienable elemets of the human spirit (and consequently, the Divine) resonates deeply with the Decleration of Independence:

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.

By aligning himself, his party, and his program with the founding political philosophy of this nation (as well as with the Enlightenment in general), Bush puts many of his opponents in an incredibly shitty position. How can one really be opposed to these things? Other than Abu-Musab Al-Zarqawi, who successfully manouevered himself into political suicide by his hositility to these ideals. That's why the majority of the criticism against this speech was aimed at the gulf between our words and our actions: because if you're against the substance of the speech, then you're a real asshole.

I think in many reasons this is why liberals, or left-leaning folks out there, have such trouble with Bush. He reminds them that the majority of their own deeply-held values are and remain inherently Christian. Throughout all of the ascendancy of modernity, the values where scrubbed fresh of any stink of theology, or were replaced by the "science" of communism and dialectical materialism, but they remain Christian. That's why people are so hopping mad!

Think of it like this: what morality or value-system could one divine from science, or from natural selection, or from environmentalism, or from anarchism, that is not first and foremost a Christian value that has proved so breathtakingly resiliant so as to hide, masked underneath perspectives hostile to it? Why save the whales, the seals, or the heal the planet is not for the meek and downtrodden who cannot defend themselves? And, in the most perverse irony and twist of history, because the Christian values were so thouroughly merged with Classical Philosophy, even the "humanism" from "secular-humanism" is completely informed by these very same concepts. To divorce Christian social responsibility and humanism from many of the scientist paradigms results in a worldview that is against life -- anti-life -- not just in terms of abortion,but that actually holds that some lives are worth more than others, whether for morphological, cosmological, or political reasons.

Bush's America rejects this postulate, instead bellowing from the top of its lungs, "We Choose Life!" It's a good thing.