Who Should Have the Helm

I happened upon a video last night about political philosophy, different from what you might expect. The philosophy PhD, David Wood, who’s doing the Philosophy Underground video, talks about Plato’s suggestion that we ought to be ruled by philosophers. I don’t agree. Practically no one in Plato’s time or since fully agrees. And yet, there is an argument to be made. 

Wood describes an analogy Plato gives in Book 6 of The Republic. There is a ship on the high seas on which various people are fighting to take the helm. But none of the fighting men is a navigator. None of them has the skills to guide the ship where it needs to go, or to handle it in rough seas. What they are good at is fighting. So whoever is the best fighter wins the right to man the helm. But since this best fighter does not know how to navigate or steer, the ship is in dire straits, along with everyone on it. Then, of course, another fight ensues, until another fighter gets the chance to man the helm—a position for which he also has no skills.

pirates fighting for the helm
promotional image found here

The comparison is, in our world, the people who get to rule us—who get elected as our representatives in government—are not the people trained in running a country, or possibly even a large, complex organization; they are the people best at “fighting” a good campaign. They are skilled at talking people into voting for them.

Why would a philosopher, also untrained in how to run a country, be any better? The theory is that he would be better trained at thinking. He thinks about deeper meanings. For example, he sees a beautiful woman or a beautiful sunset, and he asks, “What is beauty?” Why, he wants to know, do certain things strike us as beautiful? How do we recognize beauty in the first place? And so on.

Plato's The Republic
image found here

If such a person were to recognize that something was either good or bad in a country, he would ask how we identify it as good or bad. And if it’s bad, what would need to be different to make it good? And so on, until he gets to a core principle somewhere deep within the problem. In Plato’s Republic, he gets to the bottom of these basic questions: What is justice? and Why is it better to be just than unjust?

And if you can get to a core principle—on something such as what it takes to make certain aspects of a country good to live in—you might get someone able to rule. Or at least someone who could teach a person the principles that would make for good rule.

It just so happens that the political philosophy that is the Spherical Model may supply those core principles.

Here are the principles, divided up into the three spheres: Political, Economic, and Social. Abiding by these principles will lead to freedom, prosperity, and civilization—instead of the ubiquitous alternatives of tyranny, poverty, and savagery.

 

Political Sphere:

·       The purpose of government is to protect and preserve the God-given rights to life, liberty, and property of each person individually and as a people within that government entity.

·       The government can do only those duties delegated to it by the people in written and binding law.

·       The government cannot have a right to do something that the people individually do not have the innate power to do, and therefore do not have the power to delegate to the government. Ex. 1: Government cannot confiscate property owned by one person and bestow ownership of that property on another person, because individuals do not have that right; it would be theft.  Ex. 2: Individuals have the right to defend their own lives and property, so they have the right to delegate that defense to government; delegating to government does not remove that right from individuals.

·       Governing should be done at the lowest level possible. Ex. 1: protecting local property should be done by local police. Ex. 2: protecting borders from foreign invasion should be done by the national government.

·       The government cannot cede power to any entity larger than the nation; international issues must be handled by diplomacy, preferably, or military defense when necessary.

These principles can be used by people when deciding on candidates to vote for, or on ballot propositions. The questions to ask candidates are found here. 

And the principles can be used by elected officials. The questions representatives ought to ask about policies are here. 

 

Economic Sphere:

·       The person who earned, accumulated, and owns wealth is the person who gets to decide how it is spent.

·       Taxes are acceptable only when limited to funding the duties of government enumerated in written principle-abiding law.

·       Government’s economic responsibility is limited to protecting property. (This can include the coining of money to be used as a form of exchange.)

·       Government must lawfully prevent monopoly or other economic tyranny, but otherwise must allow people the open exchange of legal goods and services.

·       Using the people’s money to achieve political aims goes against the proper role of government.       

Let’s add in a Spherical Model maxim related to that last one:

Whenever government attempts something beyond the proper role of government (protection of life, liberty, and property), it causes unintended consequences—usually exactly opposite to the stated goals of the interference.

Again, there are questions to ask a candidate to learn whether they understand the right economic principles. They can also be found here. 

 

Social Sphere:

·       Civilization requires a people who honor God, life, family, truth, and property ownership. (These are a summary of the Ten Commandments.)

·       While not all religious societies are civilized, all civilized societies are made up of a critical mass of religious people.

·       The family is the basic unit of civilized society. Whatever threatens the family threatens civilization. Therefore, preserving and protecting the family is paramount in laws and social expectations in a civilized society.

A few years ago I did a series on why honoring God, life, family, truth, and property ownership are necessary for civilization. You can read that series here:

·        Part I: Life 

·        Part II: Truth 

·        Part III: Property Ownership 

·        Part IV: God and Freedom of Religion 

·        Part V: Civilizing Religion  

·        Part VI: Repenting as a Civilization 

·        Part VII: Family Perpetuates Civilization 

·        Part VIII: Marriage 

There are also a few questions you can ask candidates concerning their understanding of civilization values, here. 

 

The US Constitution

It also just so happens that the Declaration of Independence and the US Constitution were written by philosophers who had read and studied and worked their way down to the core principles on which to govern. Thomas Jefferson, George Washington, James Madison, Benjamin Franklin, and others were thinkers who asked the questions that would lead to core principles.

Howard Chandler Christy's "Scene at the Signing
of the Constitution of the United States"
image found on Wikipedia

This coming Sunday, September 17, will mark 235 years since our Constitution was signed. So it would be worth celebrating with a post dedicated to how well that document aligns with the principles of freedom, prosperity, and civilization. Look for that later this week.

Timeless Constitution

Saturday was the 229th anniversary of our US Constitution. That’s remarkable, considering written constitutions in countries around the world have lasted an average of 17 years, since 1789. 

Several days ago I listed to an Uncommon Knowledge interview titled “Is the Constitution Out of Date?” Since the answer, to me, is obviously NO, I expected maybe something valuable I could share for Constitution Day. While Uncommon Knowledge offers a variety of opinions, they’re usually in the range we think of as conservative. The interview was with political scientist Terry Moe, author of the recent book Relic: How Our Constitution Undermines Effective Government—and Why We Need a More Powerful Presidency. He has been a fellow at the Hoover Institute. So I was surprised when his premise was that the Constitution is outdated. He made claims that we usually hear only from the opposition.

One of his main complaints was that the executive branch doesn’t have enough power. After nearly eight years of Obama’s illegal executive orders, that seems wildly wrongheaded. He suggests that the president should be able to put forth his agenda items, and get them fast tracked through the legislature. The legislators could still vote these things down, but they’d be required to put them up for a vote, without amendment, within a certain length of time.

If that was to be the only change, I might not put it in the southern hemisphere of statist tyranny. But he also asserts that because we are a democracy, we ought to make it easier to enact the will of the majority.

I was waiting for Peter Robinson, the interviewer, to say, “But we’re not a democracy.” I guess he was just trying to allow the interviewee to get his point across, but it got me talking back at the screen.

We are not a democracy—i.e., government by majority rule—we are a constitutional republic. That means we have a written law limiting government, to prevent the majority from imposing injustices on the minority. For example, an evil majority might choose to enslave a particular minority group; in a democracy, the majority vote would rule.

Our Constitution purposely limits government, and purposely lists some of our God-given rights that government must not infringe upon, and adds that any powers not enumerated as given to the federal government are maintained by the states or the individual citizens. That is on purpose.

Moe thinks the Constitution is just a relic of a formerly simpler society, when America was smaller and more agrarian. That those simpleton founders couldn’t possibly have prepared for our complex, technological society.

I’ve been reviewing Hillsdale College’s Western Heritage 101 course (free online), and listened to lecture 4 this week, on Socrates and Plato—which were read and understood by our founders. All of them. The founders heeded the Greeks’ warnings about the despotism of democracy.

In the follow-up Q&A session, lecturer Terrence Moore gives an example of how democracy leans despotic (starting at about 13:40):

You might say, “Well, we’ve gotten beyond that. We’re America. We can handle this.” Today is the day after the election. It’s Wednesday, and I’m reading an editorial that comes straight out of The Washington Times. Here is what it says.

“The most disturbing issue of the election was how President Obama managed to win re-election in places like Ohio and Pennsylvania and Michigan by talking about the highly unpopular bailout of General Motors, by taking billions of dollars in hard-earned money from taxpayers during a deep recession and giving it to a couple of huge companies, Obama managed to buy the votes he needed to eke out a re-election.”

“Taxpayers remain on the hook to the tune of $25 billion.”

That’s just the reporting, but here is what happened behind it, according to this author.

“This is the Achilles heel of a democracy. Politicians simply tax those who do not support them and give the money to those who do or give the money to those they would like to have support them. It is the end of the line. Game over.”

That’s a pretty bleak after-election sentiment, but it would not have surprised Plato, and it would not have surprised the Founding Fathers. So, among other things, the recent election should cause us to think very hard constitutionally about what kind of framework of government the Founding Fathers set up so that elections can’t be bought with other people’s money.

If it’s that kind of democracy, which is the kind that Plato describes, we’re in trouble.

So, we aren’t—or shouldn’t be—a democracy. Our Founding Fathers knew better. They purposely set up a government to avoid tyranny of the majority, which is easily swayed by lies, money, or enticements.

The progressive arguments are only worth considering if human nature has changed since our founding—or since Plato. Progressives seem to have a bias against anything that isn’t contemporary, which is a closed-mindedness that pretty well disproves their assertions.

Progressive arguments against the Constitution aren’t new; they’ve been around at least since the late 1800s to early 1900s, from the onset of the “progressive” movement. In other words, opposition to the Constitution has been claiming it is outmoded for about as long as the Constitution existed without that argument against it.

It is probably true that opposition to freedom has been claiming the Constitution was somehow inadequate since day 1.

Yet, unlike most of the constitutions in the world, ours continues. And to those who appreciate the skilled precision with which it was written, it is as timely today as it was in 1787.

As I was considering how to refute the claims of Terry Moe, the next morning I came across a piece with the title “No, the ConstitutionIsn’t Outdated,” by John York for the Daily Signal. My first thought was that York must be refuting the same interview I had seen. He isn’t; he just happens to refute Moe’s claims, because they are the standard attempts to denigrate our Constitution by those who would like us to have less freedom.

York lays out the basic argument and refutes it:

As Richard Stengel, former president and CEO of the National Constitution Center, wrote in a splashy 2011 article in Time Magazine:

Here are a few things the Framers did not know about: World War II. DNA. Sexting. Airplanes. The atom. Television. Medicare. Collateralized debt obligations. The germ theory of disease. Miniskirts. The internal combustion engine. Computers. Antibiotics. Lady Gaga.

Stengel’s list is instructive as it gives the reader a sense of the changes liberals think our Constitution does not adequately account for. Take for instance: “airplanes, the atom, the internal combustion engine, and antibiotics.” These all represent technological or scientific innovations unknown to the Founders that, purportedly, have some relevance to structuring a government.

Some scientific and technological changes do require that we think carefully about the Founders’ intent when they were writing the Constitution. For instance, new technologies allow police to peer into homes without physically entering them, intercept an email or a text message, or track your car from their computer back at the precinct. Whether these things constitute a search or seizure of citizens’ “houses, papers, and effects” under the Fourth Amendment is an important question the Founders do not answer for us directly.

But by no means are we merely left to guess how the Constitution speaks to these modern conditions. Through the Founders’ own writings contained in the Federalist Papers, notes on the proceedings of the Constitutional Convention and correspondence, thoughtful judges and legal scholars get a clear sense of the spirit behind the words on the page.

Given the Founders’ concern that government would use warrantless searches to harass and condemn political dissidents, it is hard to imagine James Madison or Alexander Hamilton would approve of warrantless wiretaps, drone flyovers, and email dragnets conducted by federal agencies.

Much of the rest of York’s piece deals with social/cultural issues. And he reassures on that front as well:

While the Constitution was not meant to steer the development of American culture in every sense, the Founders did think a free society demanded certain qualities of character among the citizenry: habits of self-governance, respect for the rights of others, and reverence for the law. But within those brackets is allowed some latitude for culture to develop organically and locally without the heavy hand of government at the helm.

If he were using Spherical Model terms, he might have said that the culturally civilized ability to rule ourselves is a necessary prerequisite to freedom and prosperity. It’s close to what James Madison meant in Federalist 51, which York also quotes:

From Federalist 51, image from here

“If men were angels, no government would be necessary. If angels were to govern men, neither external nor internal controls on government would be necessary.”

I agree with York’s final conclusion, that

human nature is still as fallible as it was 229 years ago. Thankfully, our nation was blessed with a generation of men who had insight to perceive the essential character of man vis-à-vis government and the wisdom to craft institutions rooted in those unchanging realities.

I thank God for the miracle of our Constitution, and the men who were prepared to write it. I pray that we can honor God by appreciating and restoring that miracle.

Tradition vs. Progress

Traditions can be good or bad. Progress is typically called good, but when it’s misapplied to what is actually regression, it’s bad.

Progressivism needs some definition, because the word progress in it is misapplied. In short, it’s the version of socialism adopted by Woodrow Wilson, both Roosevelts, Hillary Clinton, and many of today’s socialists who know better than to use the word socialism, which has provably failed everywhere it has been implemented.

There’s a connection to Darwinism in progressivism; it posits that culture always moves in a forward direction, ever closer to perfection. This assumption ignores some rather huge examples to the contrary like the decline and fall of the Roman Empire. Or the disappearance of Mayan culture. Or Detroit, Michigan.

Progress requires going in the right direction. And there’s no way to know if a direction is right when everything being tried is supposed to be new, untried, and ignorant of history.

The Imaginative Conservative had a piece by Joseph Pearce that describes the type of bigotry that is progressivism:

If, for example, we were to visit a village in a remote corner of Africa and were to witness children playing with crudely crafted toys and presumed from our observations that these Africans must be inferior to Americans because American children have iPods and smart-phones we would rightly be accused of racism. Yet this is exactly what “progressivists” do when observing cultures separated by time instead of space. The past is deemed to be inferior and can be treated with scorn or, which is perhaps worse, with patronising condescension.

Pearce goes on to imagine what an experience Plato would have visiting our time. He would take a couple of days to master some of the technology and dress. And then it wouldn’t take long to notice some modern failures:

Plato
image from here

The Philosopher would soon come to the inescapable conclusion that this strange race of “progressives” were in fact barbarians who adorned themselves with the baubles of technology but had no concept whatever of the meaning of life or the nature of reality. Feeling his exile from civilization intensely he would long for the profundities of the Lyceum.

In contrast, when we honor those who have gone before, and stand upon what they have learned, then we have actual social progress. That’s what we enjoy when we cover most of the math and science we get before college—and much of what we study in college as well. We don’t have to start from scratch. Pythagoras did some of the work. And Euclid. And Newton.

Pearce quotes the wise G. K. Chesterton on the value of tradition:

Tradition may be defined as the extension of the franchise. Tradition means giving votes to the most obscure of all classes, our ancestors. It is the democracy of the dead. Tradition refuses to submit to the small and arrogant oligarchy of those who merely happen to be walking about. All democrats object to men being disqualified by the accident of birth; tradition objects to their being disqualified by the accident of death. Democracy tells us not to neglect a good man’s opinion, even if he is our groom; tradition asks us not to neglect a good man’s opinion, even if he is our father. I, at any rate, cannot separate the two ideas of democracy and tradition.[i]

Traditions can be changed—when we learn something previously unknown and provably true. But throwing out truth because it’s old is foolish and ignorant.

This concept of tradition reminds me of the word conservative, which is another word that can be either good or bad, depending on what you’re conserving. If we’re conserving a dysfunctional status quo out of fear of change, then being conservative may be a bad thing.

But when we conservatives talk about what we conserve, we’re talking about preserving—or often in our day restoring—freedom, prosperity, and civilization. (I wrote about what we conserve in October and February.)

In the political sphere, we need a representative government strictly limited to its proper role of protecting our life, liberty, and property. Government doesn’t grant our rights; those come from God. And good government protects and guarantees our God-given rights. Among these are freedom of religion, freedom of speech, freedom to assemble, the right to armed self-defense, freedom to work and engage in commerce, freedom from illegal searches and seizures, and freedom to see to the education and upbringing of our own children.

We have a US Constitution designed to protect our God-given rights. If we conserve/restore our Constitution, we get more political freedom than most of the world’s historic and present-day cultures have ever known.

In the economic sphere, we need a system that allows us to work and earn wealth, and then decide for ourselves how to spend it. Government doesn’t make the economy work. We need government to safeguard property (including intellectual property, such as with patents and copyrights), protect against monopoly, standardize money for ease of exchange, and otherwise get out of the way of the free market.

Government ought to have nothing to do with charity, since government isn’t capable of emotional care and can only coerce, by forcibly taking from some and giving to others—what we call theft, which the people empowering the government have no power to grant.

Of course, since the poor are always with us, we do need a way to care for the truly needy. But it must be voluntary. So people who are prosperous enough must willingly give to those in need.

We have had the best economy in the world. If we conserve/restore our free market, we return to prosperity.

In the social sphere, we conserve some very old ideas, hearkening back at least to the Ten Commandments. In summary, we need a critical mass of righteous people—people who love and honor God, family, life, truth, and property.

We’re not going to “progress” to a better way to raise children than under the care of their own married mother and father.

We’re not going to “progress” to a better way to distribute wealth than the right to our earned property combined with an ethic of charitable giving.

We’re not going to “progress” to a better way to decide when life is worth preserving than gratefully valuing all human life and leaving God to decide when death should come. Abortion—which kills more black babies than are born, as designed by the eugenics movement—is savage. Killing the aged, infirm, or burdensome is callous. Any time we decide some innocent lives are inferior, we’ve fallen out of civilization into savagery.

Progressivism doesn’t lead to progress; the name itself is a lie. Tradition, on the other hand, may be worth conserving. The default, when we don’t know, ought to be keeping the tradition. When we have the principles to measure whether traditions lead to freedom, prosperity, and civilization, such as with our US Constitution, we can wisely choose to conserve.

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[i] G. K. Chesterton, Collected Works, Vol. 1, San Francisco: Ignatius Press, p. 251.