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The
Importance of Transcendent Law
B.
Traditionalism: The Root of Cosmos
Q.
If positivism is the root of polytheism, as you contend, what is its
opposite? What is the root of theocentric thought and society?
A.
In traditionalist thought, as well as in Islam generally, the queen
of the sciences is law, and specifically transcendent law. The
ultimate framework for philosophy, sociology, mathematics, and
physics, as well as political economy, is the Will of God, which is
another word for law. Some narrow-minded Muslim scholars regard law
as merely part of something broader, but I regard this view as
un-Islamic. Some consider that Tazkiya or even its expression in
various schools of Sufism is the primary category. Traditionalists
hold, however, that one's spiritual life and guidelines for it are
part of transcendent law. The question then is, what is transcendent
law and where does it originate?
Positivism
has reigned triumphant in America for more than a century, and
throughout the world at least since World War II. Arrayed against
this corrosive force, however, worldwide, is a growing
traditionalist movement, rooted in the self-evident truth that
neither the individual person nor the collective of humankind is the
ultimate sovereign in the universe, and in the corollary conviction
that, without an objective right and wrong as the basis for law,
cosmos must become chaos.
The
preeminent modern leader of this traditionalist movement throughout
the last half of the twentieth century was Russell Kirk and his
journal, Modern Age. After launching the journal in 1957, he was
succeeded as editor by Eugene Davidson during the tumultuous age of
the 1960s, by David Collier during the 1970s, and the last two
decades of the twentieth century by George A. Panichas, each of whom
deeply influenced the traditionalist movement in his own way.
My
task in writing a three-volume work on Traditionalism: Force of the
Future has been to analyze the writings of the traditionalist
intellectuals as presented and/or discussed in the first forty years
of the journal Modern Age up to the end of the twentieth century in
order to determine how the basic traditionalist approach has evolved
to address the cutting issues of conscience in contemporary American
life. Six basic issues will be examined in terms of the related
human responsibilities and corresponding rights. These are the
responsibility to respect: 1) the human person, including the right
to life; 2) human community, including the nuclear family; 3)
private property, including the need to reform institutions in order
to broaden share-owning opportunities; 4) political
self-determination, including the second-order issues of responsive
government, responsible electorate, and the tension between judicial
independence and judicial usurpation; 5) human dignity, including
religious freedom and gender equity; and 6) freedom for knowledge,
including freedom of expression subject to recognition of the first
five responsibilities.
The
overarching or paradigmatic background for this task is perhaps best
provided in one of Russell Kirk's last books, first published in
1990 under the title, The Conservative Constitution, and then
thoroughly revised and expanded in 1997, shortly before his death,
under the title Rights and Duties: Reflections on our Conservative
Constitution. The two most pertinent chapters in this book for our
purposes are entitled "Natural Law and the Constitution"
and "The Christian Postulates of English and American
Law." These, as noted above, are the two sources of
transcendent law.
Both
Russell Kirk, and his mentor, Edmund Burke, who lived almost two
centuries earlier, emphasized that traditionalism is not neophobia.
As a pro-Whig and anti-Tory movement it has always supported the
American penchant for social, technological, and economic change.
Yet Americans do not respond well to calls for change as an end in
itself. Americans can relate to revolutions to recover what has been
lost, which, according to Whig historians, was the purpose of the
Revolution of 1688 in England. But they have an atavistic and
primordial fear of Jacobin revolutions, which call for the
destruction of the fabric of society, as did the radicals of the
French Revolution and their amateur counterparts in America during
the 1960's.
Most
Americans were enthused by President Reagan's call for a Second
American Revolution, because they understood that he was really
calling them to complete the First American Revolution by restoring
commitment to what Russell Kirk refers to as the unwritten
constitution of the United States. Although the American
constitution is the only one in the world to survive any lengthy
period of time, even more permanent, because it gave rise to the
written constitution and still sustains it, is the transcendent law
that has always powered Western civilization. Both the written and
unwritten constitutions have survived despite modern positivist
attempts at what liberals and some neo-conservatives call
progressive interpretation of an evolving constitutional order, but
what Kirk and most paleo-conservatives have called "radical and
deformative change" through usurpation by a judicial
aristocracy bent on creating an "ersatz constitution" to
replace both the written and unwritten bases of American life.(16)
Unfortunately,
much of the debate has been carried on as if the issue were the
power of judges. In fact, the American system of government,
following the teachings of Montesquieu, is based more than any
system of governance in history on a powerful judiciary,
deliberately designed, and prudently developed by the first great
American justice, John Marshall, to constrain the irresponsibilities
of both populist and elitist political movements. Certainly, the
framers of the Constitution did not intend to create what Kirk calls
"an archonocracy - a national domination of judges,"(17)
as did perhaps Imam Khomeini with his theory of the wilayat al faqih.
In America the issue is not the power of judges, but the felt power
of the transcendent law that should govern human affairs.
Kirk
makes the critical distinction that judges are bound by the positive
law of the constitution and of the legislature, but the legislators,
those who make the positive law, are entitled, indeed obliged, to
secure justice according to the general dictates of the natural law
that guided the original intent of the constitution's framers. And
the function of judges is to carry out the intent of the law-givers.
Kirk
concludes his work on Rights and Duties with the admonition that,
"No matter how admirable a constitution may look on paper, it
will be ineffectual unless the unwritten constitution, the web of
custom and convention, affirms an enduring moral order of obligation
and personal responsibility." The underlying question is where
does such a moral order come from and how can such a sense of
personal responsibility be maintained. In the Abrahamic civilization
and legal system, rooted in the wisdom of its prophets, is this not
the task of transcendent law with its origins in the right ordering
of the universe and in guidance through revelation and inspiration
from a living, loving, and merciful Creator?
Just
as both judges and legislators in the American system are
subordinate to a formal, written constitution, so the written
constitution is subordinate to its origins. As Kirk comments,
"A sound national constitution does not lay down some system of
theology or moral philosophy, even though certain constitutions
drawn up since the French Revolution have been attempts to do
precisely that. A constitution is a design for government, a general
plan for the political order of a state."(18)
And he notes that, unlike the British Constitution, which
"existed wholly at the will of Parliament," the American
constitution was designed, in the words of Alexis de Tocqueville, to
preserve America from "democratic despotism." Over and
above the will of the people and their representatives rules the
Sovereignty of God and the order, justice, and freedom that can
result only from submission to it.
a. Positivism: The Root of Chaos
b. Traditionalism: The Root of Cosmos
c. Culture War
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