Looking at the ideas of Thomas Hobbes and Edmund Burke about politics involves grappling with the idea of natural law: the notion that a morality transcending humankind exists and sets a priori rules we must (should, ought to) obey.
It seems like a transparent claim to divine commandment. A Christian god commanding us to behave in certain ways (Hobbes and Burke were Christians, not some other religious flavour). So it’s theological bunkum. Except, of course, more contemporary commentators have made the entire concept slippery, like a lubricated sex toy (which has at least the virtue of being designed quite sincerely for an honest purpose).
We are told natural law is entirely apprehensible through ‘reason’ alone, where reason is the power to make judgements based on evidence. But citing the Christian Bible (let alone which version of it) is evidence for nothing but superstition. It is akin to citing a fictional story as evidence for a new scientific theorem.
So the religionists today have come up with the notion that there is ‘objective’ morality. That standards of ethics exist which transcend all human approbation. If only they could get even a small fraction of people alive today to agree with this preposterous notion.
They might argue, too, that those dirty lefties (Peter Dutton’s favourite phrase to describe thinking people) have acknowledged natural law by referring to such terms as universal human rights. Except, of course, the claims to universal human rights are entirely political, referring to a hegemonic presumption of enforcing ‘rights’ in specific circumstances, which are invariably about painting some enemy as the bad guys. Universal human rights are rarely so universal as to apply to black or brown skinned Americans, Britons, or Australians. They barely apply to women, even if they are white.
An ideological claim to natural law fails for the same reasons: ontologically, ideology and theology are the same teeth-gnashing beastie. Deterministic, reliant on a priori rules impossible to prove with hard evidence, and ultimately resting solely on personal belief or enforced obeisance.
That much has been evident for centuries, and acknowledged even by the Western academy since at least 1927, when Martin Heidegger, in his Being and Time, proposed that ontology must begin as the phenomenology of existence, not some transcendent supernatural fantasy. In other words, a priori rules are possible only as human intellectual constructs, making them not so very a priori. In fact, nothing ever thought, written, or talked about has any existence outside the realm of human existence. Therefore god, the divine, and all ideology are human inventions. The real kicker is that Heidegger’s phenomenology doesn’t eliminate the possibility of the divine in a transcendent sense, but makes it entirely subject to human experience of it, and in that way removes any claims to universality (if proof were actually needed when considering the history of spiritual ideas and the sheer numbers of gods proposed over time).
So, all this talk about natural law is unadulterated horseshit. It’s as natural as homo sapiens. No more, no less. And as such it will always depend on the interpretation of a person or group, even if offered up as divine revelation, or the commandment of a tyranny imposed on its subjects. As such it is prone to continuous re-interpretation, which is of course an antithesis to the claim of universality in the first place.
Why does any of this matter? Because the premiss of natural law is still embedded in politically Right arguments today, often by way of claims for an ‘objective’ morality. How do you get to any such thing as objectivity in any human activity except through divine commandment or ideological decree?
I was most amused years ago, and again more recently, when I watched a video of a debate between theologian Lane Craig and Christopher Hitchens about the existence of (a presumably Christian) god. Craig holds a PhD in philosophy. Hitchens has a liberal arts degree from Oxford. It was amusing to watch Hitchens run rhetorical rings around Craig because the latter simply could not comprehend that his own arguments for the divine were just logic chopping without any evidence. His demand that Hitchens prove how you get any morality without the divine was evidence only of Lane’s intellectual shallowness, begging the question whether his PhD was in the thinly disguised scientism of logical positivism, which consists entirely of logic chopping. As I recall it, Hitchens was almost bored in replying to Lane that ethics is an innate human quality. Lane could not understand what a quality is, nor that that it could possibly be an evolutionary trait of social cooperation designed, perhaps, for better chances at survival of the species on the whole.
And that point brings us back to Hobbes, the author who proposed an unlikely ‘state of nature’ as unadulterated savagery comparable to war, in which ‘every man is Enemy to every man’ and living in ‘continuall feare, and danger of violent death; And the life of man, solitary, poore, nasty, brutish, and short’.
I wonder how and where Hobbes placed this savagery in the biblical creation: before or after Genesis? And how he accounts for war in distinctly ‘civilized’ empires like the Persian or Roman ones. Let alone among the impeccably civilized participants in both World Wars (yes, unfair, Hobbes was long dead). Nevertheless, the state of nature Hobbes envisioned cannot have been subject to any natural law and still have been quite so savage. Nor was the utopian view Hobbes proposed in Leviathan of a monarchical tyranny by social contract any less savage for the great mass of people.
My conclusion is that anyone who argues from a premiss of natural law is actually arguing tyranny and its concomitant ruthless repression of the great mass of people, who couldn’t care less for ethics rather than food, shelter, and what little joy they find in their families and each other’s company in the face of ruthless exploitation and repression.
You’d almost think that people who argue natural law foundations are actually bent on creating Hobbes’s state of nature, and nasty, brutish, short lives.
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