The modern perverted sense of freedom
Writing by abuhatem on Saturday, 26 of April , 2008 at 5:35 pm
At about the 19th century, many people quit believing in natural law and inalienable natural rights from God. That the origin of freedom, and the right to life and property came from God was the backbone of the classical liberals from Locke to Jefferson. The Declaration of Independence, perhaps the founding document of natural rights classical liberalism, is an illustration of this fact. Rights are not from governments, they are from God, they are inalienable. You have a right to your life and property not due to the government’s mercy but because of God’s mercy, and thus one cannot take away that right.
This was the Pope’s message to the United Nations last week, that we must realize that the origin of all human rights is from God. This was indeed the origin of classical liberal thinking. The first capitalists and democrats were deeply religious people who believed that natural law only justified a market and the rule of law, as well as religious toleration.
In Islam we do find some mirrors of this thinking. In the tenth century, al-Maturidi wrote that human reason could find a “natural law” of the universe - that God created man, that man had a right to the fruit of his labor and stealing was wrong, and that God loaned man his body and thus it was impermissible to kill. Ibn al-Qayyim, Averroes, al-Shatibi, and many others followed in this tradition, while others maintained all rights are only knowable through revealed law of revelation and thus peoples in remote areas were simply not accountable to the “natural law.”
The Pope’s message that the origin of rights is with God is not a novel one. As the Pope said it is perhaps the most classical conception of rights, stemming from Augustine of Hippo and others, even back to the time of the Old Testament Prophets. However, there is a notion today that “freedom” does not come from God, that it is not a natural right. The reason for this is that in the 19th century, people lost faith in the natural law, and attempted to form some sort of defense of human rights. If they did not come from God, then where did they come from?
Jeremy Bentham and the Benthamite party in the British parliament attempted to fill this gap. According to him, and his followers the abominable John Stuart Mill and others, the defense of rights come in giving “the most pleasure to the most number,” or utilitarianism. The defense of rights in human pleasure and passion, instead of God, was the first problem. Now, instead of freedom being rooted in God and being limited by natural rights - such as to life and property - freedom was rooted in the consequentialist notion of “I do everything I want as long as I don’t limit you from doing everything you want.” What a perversion.
The Pope’s words, in this case, deserve to be heeded. John Burgess, the founder of American positivist political science, claimed that rights came from the state and that liberal democracy was the best government. Such thought is dangerous.
Clarence Thomas, when he was appointed as Supreme Court Justice, was ridiculed for stating that he believed in a natural law. As a devout Catholic, he held the notion throughout his adult life. Congressmen, Senators, and the media flooded him with derision questioning how he could believe in such an outdated concept. Thomas replied that you had better hope there is a natural or revealed law, or then all morality and law would just be man-made manifestations of human passions.
This has been unfortunately the main question of political thought for the past decade. All of those who have replaced natural law have really found nothing to replace it with. Eric Voegelin noticed this and wrote that because of this relatavism people were creating their own secular political religions and authoritarian cults and creating immense evil. Voegelin taught Pope Benedict, and I think the Pope understands the dangers of the dictatorship by relativism all too well.
When we return to a notion of natural law and of natural rights, from God, which all of us - Muslims, or even Jew and Christian, we can prevent much of this. The origin of rights are with God. Thomas Jefferson understood this well, as did James Madison and Alexander Hamilton. A cursory glance over the Federalist Papers will find this fact repeated once and again.
Ibn Khaldun writes that the decline of all dynasties comes when the rights of others are not respected, when injustice occurs then civilization is brought to ruin.
Pope John Paul II, when he visited in the United States, said that the ultimate danger for freedom and democracy is an incorrect perception of freedom. Our perception of freedom is now perverted to “doing whatever I want,” and “your morals are yours, and mine are mine,” as if there are no universal moral axioms. The classical Christian notion of freedom, John Paul said, was obedience and love of God through obedience to natural law.
There should be freedom of religion and religious toleration, and we can differ on some moral judgments. For instance a Muslim may find pork immoral while a Christian may find it moral. Yet, vices differ from crimes or from transgressions upon the natural rights of others. On the rights of others (in Islamic terms - huquq al-’ibad) we cannot be relativist. Everyone has a right to life and human dignity, period.
The consequentialist utilitarian revolution in defending rights has been nothing but a cause for injustice.
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