Natural Law vs. Natural Rights with Jared Lovell

Modern Liberalism and the Roots of Social Collapse

Welcome, once again, to the Conversations That Matter podcast. I am your host, John Harris, as always. Some of you know that we did a series, now it's going back maybe two months, maybe three months actually, when we did a series on classical liberalism and liberalism more broadly, trying to understand what exactly liberalism is, Enlightenment rationalism, and that was helpful for many of you.

I know some of you didn't, you had to take like three Advil to get through some of those podcasts, getting all the information in, and it's outside the box. I think those who made it through, though, knew at the end, okay, this makes sense.

This is why the conservative critique of wokeism or social justice seems so anemic sometimes, because actually, some of the foundational elements of social justice are already embedded within the right in America today and in the Western world.

I could not help myself but invite our guest today on, Jared Lovell, who is a teacher. He teaches at the Memorial Academy, and he is a deacon in the Reformed Episcopal Church, because I heard you, Jared, on a podcast, the Chronicles Magazine podcast, talking about some of these issues, and you covered an angle we didn't really get into, which is the difference between natural rights and natural law.

And so I figure we'll talk about that and then go any direction that you want to go, but I thought you did a fantastic job. So thank you for joining me.

Thanks for having me. Happy to be here.

Appreciate it. So I thought maybe a good launching pad for our discussion today is this tweet from R. N. McIntyre. So there's someone, it doesn't matter who, it's someone on Twitter who's, or X, I guess they call it now, complaining that there was a doctor who was stripped of his license because of political views, or I think maybe it was COVID stuff.

And so R. N. McIntyre, though, responds, and this is the important thing, and says, I feel bad for the classical liberal holdout sometimes. They don't know that we've already passed on almost comical number of point of no returns at this point.

Then I remember that they encouraged most of those revolutions, and I don't feel so bad anymore. And so then he goes on in this thread and he talks about what he thinks some of those are and how we got to basically where we are.

And there is this narrative on the right now, on the new right, that things didn't start being bad in 2006, 2015, 2020, that actually the foundations for all of the collapses that we're seeing around us, whether it's the family or our institutions, have been in motion since, some would say, the 1100s.

So this is a narrative, though, I think it needs to be explored more because it's very hard for people who aren't classically trained or don't have a little bit of philosophy under the belt to understand exactly what's being talked about here.

And so I think that's where you're very helpful at explaining some of these things. I mean, what's your reaction to a tweet like that? Do you agree with that?

I do, mostly. And to be fair, I would assume that there's a decent portion of your audience that would identify as being classical liberal. So I don't want to paint with too broad of a brush to say that if you're a classical liberal and you're a fan of the American founding and you're a fan of liberalism of the 1700s, 1600s or something like that, you're just part of the problem.

But there is a definite difference between classical liberalism and modern liberalism, which is probably not what we're going to explore today. And I recognize that is there. And so I just want to put that out there that for listeners who might think, oh, you're just equating Enlightenment liberalism with modern liberalism and you're just painting over a huge swath of differences and saying, I'm not.

I recognize there's a difference between conservative classical liberals and modern liberals. However, there's a reason we both we use liberal in both of those terms. One did grow out of the other, and they're not as inconsistent as you would think at first glance.

And so one example of this is, you know, if you read Thomas Paine and you read Woodrow Wilson, you can find a lot of overlap there. It's not a you would think that these are poles apart, right? These are the opposite ends of the spectrum, libertarian kind of Thomas Paine and progressive Woodrow Wilson.

But at the end of the day, they argue from similar premises but come to some different conclusions. And the reason somebody like a Woodrow Wilson or progressives writing in his age would come to a different conclusion on some things is because they say, hey, we were going through the Industrial Revolution, so we just need to to change some things to adapt to the Industrial Revolution.

We need more government in this case, for example, than somebody like Paine would argue because we have new circumstances. But their philosophical assumptions about who man is and how the world began and how man relates to each other, men relate to each other within society are very similar.

And even Thomas Paine, by the end of his his life, is writing that he's finding that the idea of just getting rid of all of authority and freeing man to be the individual he was supposed to be, freeing him from the burdens of political and social institutions, he finds out that this doesn't bring the equality that he was hoping for.

In his view, equality comes about when you get these manmade institutions, governments, church, whatever, you get them out of the way. They're the corrupting influence. If you get them out of the way, the individual can be free and there will be a leveling out.

There will be a greater equality. And by the time you get to the end of Thomas Paine, Paine recognizes that it hasn't quite worked out that way. And so he says, well, everything has been so skewed for so long because of the existence of institutions in the West that we actually do need a government to step in and redistribute because it hasn't brought about the equality we're looking for.

So stuff has been so wrong for so long that we actually do need to do some of this. So a libertarian mind, common sense, Thomas Paine, American Revolution, you think of, you know, get the government out of here.

By the end of his life, he's actually advocating some kind of welfare program that redistributes money to ensure that there is a basic something like what we would call a universal basic income, something like that today, because man being freed from institutions hasn't really solved the problem in his view.

So you can even see in Paine how progressives could come along and how liberals could come along later and say, yeah, let's let's flesh this out. Let's continue. We need to reinterpret the Constitution for a new age.

I mean, Thomas Jefferson, I love Thomas Jefferson, but even Jefferson said that, you know, we should have a constitution written every 20 years at one point that you can't expect people to abide by decisions made by their parents because they're free to, you know, to to to speak their truth, as we would say it today, or to live their truth in their generation.

And so Paine was very much like that as well. And so it's not a leap for the progressives to say, yes, the Constitution was great for the founders. We want to continue that and rewrite everything for today and every generation hereafter.

So it's not a huge leap from the classical liberal to the modern liberal, as some would make it. And so while I recognize there's a difference, there's a lot of continuity there as.

Well. Well, you know, the French Revolution and the American Revolution, which I prefer to say the War for Independence, but they were both in this kind of in-between world between the medieval period and then the modern world.

And I know conservatives have typically tried to make big and maybe appropriately so at times, big distinctions between the two of these things. But what I was hoping to do is to maybe get to that point.

We don't have to get into the modern world, but to get to that point, but to also though begin where the story starts, where do you see the story starting? Is it with like Richard Weaver's thesis? Is it William of Ockham that brings about sort of this post-Enlightenment rationalism and then all the things that have come from that today?

Or who is it? What group of people?

Yeah, so I now I I'm familiar with Richard Weaver's thesis, I agree with a lot of it, and Ockham is is a decent place to start. However, I would say that I think Ockham sometimes gets more abuse and serves as a whipping boy more than he should.

And I know it was I think it was Rod Dreher in his Benedict Option also heavily goes after Ockham as basically the start of where everything goes wrong. I get it and I agree to a point, but the the issue for me is I don't think everybody's thinking in terms of Ockham, you know, down through history, that he gets a disproportionate amount of the grief and the blame.

And and you can take some of his premises and you can go far with them and you can run far with them. But I'm not sure everybody is thinking in terms of of Ockham, although that is one culprit.

So Abelard or.

Yeah, so what I would what the focus I had in and when I was trying to discover, you know, what was going on. Well, let me say first what it was that that motivated motivated my interest in my my research into these things.

And that was this confusion between natural law and natural right. So what I mean by that is is this you you will hear people talking a lot today about, you know, my God given rights, even among conservatives.

What are my God given rights? I have a God given right to, you know, speak. I have my God given right to carry a weapon. I have these are our God given American right to protect our border right now.

What's that? Protect our borders.

I just. Yeah.

Someone on the news saying that or or you have this God given right to to to cross any border you want to move. That's true. And so we all like to speak of rights. And oftentimes we will, at least on the conservative side, more is we will also use natural law language.

And there and say, you know, because of the natural law, God's natural moral law, I have these rights. And so this language was used a lot. And yet there was so much disparity in what people meant by what natural rights were.

I have a natural right to marry anybody that I want who, you know, I I can love who I want to love. You know, I have rights to abort my child. I have rights to do anything. I have rights to protect my land, rights to to travel wherever I want.

And I there was a time I was in more of the theonomy world. And the answer to that subjectivity when it came to rights or natural law was, well, there is no natural law. And you see what happens when you have natural law or speak of natural right.

It's just a wax nose. Anybody just says whatever they want to do is they're right. There's nothing objective about it. It's just completely subjective. So the answer then to clear up all this confusion is we just look to biblical law and there's your answers.

There they are. You know, they just this is what the law is. And then anybody claiming natural law is just opening the door for the chaos we have.

So real quick, and this is where I think right now, just so people see how this is relevant, a lot of the angst and opposition to Thomas Aquinas seems to come from. Is that right? Yes, exactly.

Exactly. So and I I was right there. I was right there in in saying those same sorts of things. So but but it bugged me that as I looked at some older sources and philosophers like Aquinas, like Richard Hooker, talk about natural law, I got the sense that they're not talking about the same thing that we often do today when we talk about natural right or however that's construed.

And so I spoke with people. I had the opportunity to speak with some people today. I mentioned one in the Chronicles podcast. I don't mean to throw him under the bus in every podcast, but it was enlightening because I talked to Judge Andrew Napolitano.

Some of your listeners might know who that is. He used to be a show on Fox. He's a libertarian judge. And I got to speak with him one on one and ask him this question that had been bothering me, got to sit down in front of his desk and talk to him.

And I said, you talk about natural law all the time. You're a very old conservative Catholic, well-versed in Aquinas and all this. And you talk about natural law and but yet you say natural right. You're against any state having a law restricting marriage to one man and one woman because it's natural right to get married.

Like, how do you get there? And I was I came away very unsatisfied with the answer because he said, well, there's several versions of natural law. And, you know, we and then it was saying, well, we can't apply the same penalties that Aquinas would because Aquinas was in favor of, you know, hanging people for theft.

So we've lightened up since then. So we don't want to follow that exactly. I'm saying, OK, then what I'm still I have no foundation here. I'm still. I don't have an answer to my question, so so I started researching this while I was in law school and thought, you know what, instead of just repeating all the negative lines about Aquinas that I've heard from secondary source, I'm going to read Aquinas.

And so I got into Aquinas. And what I found there is not, you know, you think, oh, you know, this is for the really smart people to read Aquinas. He's not that hard to read. He's really actually easy to read and how he lays out his arguments.

He gives you objections to his position. Then he quotes a source and then he lays out his position and answers the objections. I mean, you do not have to be, you know, as they say, do rocket surgery to to read.

Aquinas. So the almost tedious, though, and because I've read a little bit of him and I'm like, really another like it's like a formula over and over and over.

Right now, it can be because he defines things so specifically and makes so many distinctions. It can feel tedious in that he's dealing with other objections that you wouldn't have thought of. And you thought, right, I've heard this already.

You know, you had six questions previously. I think you're just. No, he's actually making another objection, another fine point distinction, but it's not you're not wading through, you know, Nietzsche or something like that.

What he's saying, this this esoteric language that you're just lost in. So so I start reading Aquinas on natural law and maybe it would be best in order to show the distinction to lay out a couple of conclusions that, you know, I've come to from Aquinas.

And so so I'll say this. So Aquinas starts with this idea that. You know, God's has an end, just as, you know, Westminster Confession, what's the chief end of man to glorify God and enjoy him forever?

Right. So God also has an end. There's history is going somewhere. God has ordained and God rules and makes every decision. Everything he does is aimed toward an end. What is God's end? To receive glory for himself.

That is his end. And it's our end to glorify him and enjoy him. So God's end is his glory. That's his telos. That's what he is aimed at. Then what are the means to that end? And Aquinas emphasizes God's reason.

God ordains everything to that end. And the means to that end is his his reason. And Aquinas makes a distinction between reason and will. God does not act out of just his will. And he does not. God's not all powerful and say, and for that reason says, you know, I feel like doing this today.

And so therefore you're going to hell. You know, you're going to heaven. He doesn't he doesn't act in an arbitrary fashion. Everything he does is a product of his mind or his nature. He can't act inconsistently with his nature, with who he is.

And so those silly atheistic kind of objections you hear today, can God, you know, create a rock that's too big for him to lift? You know, or can God tell a lie? No, he can't. Because God does everything in consistency with his his nature.

He's not arbitrary will. You know, there's things he does not do and he cannot do. He cannot lie. He cannot sin. Right. So everything that he does is in accordance with his nature. There's an internal logic to everything that he does.

He cannot consist inconsistently with who he is.

So you have reason.

And then Aquinas uses that as the basis for man's reason that man created in the image of God is given this kind of reason and coherence and the ability to think through things and come to proper conclusions.

So it's not this it's not enough to say man is fallen, so therefore he can't think right and he can't think straight. Yeah, man is fallen and the mind is corrupted to a degree. There's always going to be flaws.

We can be wrong about things, but we're also made in the image of God, even fallen man who can. That's why fallen, unbelieving human beings can are capable of all kinds of great things, all kinds of great discoveries, great mathematicians, scientists, everything else.

So can I just stop you for a second? This is you mentioned the theonomy position. They would account for that by saying common groups. Well, you're right that that they're borrowing from the Christian worldview.

They're kind of like Christians, but they don't know it kind of thing. Right. So this is very different.

Yeah. So I so they would say that, yeah, they are borrowing every all everything that they find out. They're just borrowing Christian assumptions. And they are. But in doing so, they are a walking contradiction.

Right. And so since they're a walking contradiction, they are walking around every day seeing black, but thinking white and seeing white and thinking black that that they cannot when it comes to making any conclusions about God.

They're just a walking, incoherent contradiction because they're walking around saying, I see it, but I don't believe it. I see it. I don't believe they're just actively suppressing. Now, it's true from Romans one.

Men actively suppress the truth of God, that's that's true, but I don't I would not go from Romans one to saying that human beings have no sense of what is right and wrong in the world. Like if you see if if human beings were to walk into a third world country in the middle of a civil war and see a massacre of children and human beings, you know, women and children just slaughtered and raped all over.

Everybody would know intuitively that is wrong. Right. And you wouldn't say if somebody came up and said, you know, how is this wrong? You can't you know that you you're a walking contradiction. So you have no right to make judgments about what's right and wrong because you don't believe in God and you don't believe in Old Testament law.

So how can you make a judgment? You're just a walking contradiction. You know, well, you wouldn't know that it's wrong because you're human. Right. There are certain things we know to be true. And and so there is human beings have the capacity to differentiate right from wrong, even if they fully can't explain it.

They can reason to truth. OK, so according to Aquinas, so there are the so that's that's the reasoning part of it. Natural law, natural law, Aquinas says, is humans participation in God's divine law. So God reveals himself in nature and he reveals himself through reason.

And humans participate in that. We see nature and we have the capacity to reason. So we participate in God's knowledge of the world and we participate in in his reason. That's what natural law is. So Aquinas would say that there are natural law principles that we can all know in the world.

But he would make a distinction between the principle and the conclusion and say that you can arrive at different conclusions about things, even reasoning from the same natural law principles. And as you get further on the tradition, somebody like Richard Hooker would explain in more detail how that's true, that this is how you can we can all agree, for example, that human beings have the right to defend themselves.

Right. You know, you have a right to defend your bodily integrity and your property from somebody trying to take your life, taking you, harming your family. You have the right to do that. And that's been true across the board of Christians all throughout Christianity.

You have the right to defend yourself. And even a duty to do so in some cases that some scholars would say some theologians would say throughout the Middle Ages in that scholastic tradition. OK, but does that translate into an automatic right to bear arms?

Now, I by saying that, OK, maybe some people are going to turn off the podcast now and say, OK, this guy is just liberal. I assure you, I am very, very, very pro-Second Amendment. OK, I'm extremely pro-Second Amendment.

But there's a difference between a what I'm trying to say here is there's a difference between a constitutional right. That is a product of English common law, which is a product of unique circumstances in our part of the world, we're descended from Britain and a natural right or natural law that is universal for everyone.

So there what I'm trying to say in this is that the reason you as maybe a conservative value the right to to bear arms and you would defend that right and I would defend that right is not because I'm human, but because I'm I'm an Anglo-Saxon.

I come from that background and where we have determined we collectively speaking in terms of generations, that the best way the means to the end of protecting yourself is by bearing arms. Right. And it comes in our constitution and it's based on the English Bill of Civil Rights before that, which is based on the English common law.

And so it's a particular tradition that we have grown out of. Now, why is that an important distinction? Well, give you a quick application of where this is going. It feels like I'm getting off topic, but I'm not.

But the idea that because it's a universal right that, you know, assuming that's true and it's a universal natural right or something like that, we assume then that people can be interchangeable and that if you have a country called America that's not connected to the English tradition anymore, we'll all still think the same way because it's just universal, right, that everybody that you can bring in large numbers of people from different parts of the world who do not have that deep centuries long tradition.

And they're all going to think the same way about your constitutional rights. They're not. And take the Chinese, for example. If the Chinese, let's say, became a Christian nation in 100 years that we think of China and that could be possible, the church in China is growing, the underground church.

What if China becomes a majority Christian nation and they start reforming their laws and they are the model that everybody's looking to? What if they don't have any kind of Second Amendment in their country?

Never do. And actually have a lot more restrictions on weapons, less freedoms than we have here. Does that mean they're not truly Christian in their thinking? They're not really Christian because they they didn't accept this law that we have that we Christians, evangelicals in America accept?

No. Right. They they can equally agree you have a right to defend yourself, but maybe they don't have gun culture where they think, well, you need a gun to defend yourself. The unique circumstances of the United States leads us to in, say, China, future hypothetical China, to draw on the same premises, Christian premises, you have a right to defend yourself, but come to different conclusions in our laws about how we enforce that and how we protect that.

You see. So going back to Aquinas, after that long drawn out illustration, going back to Aquinas, you can share the same premises and natural. They're objective. It's not just I think it's this and I have a natural right to this, that and the other.

No, it's objective. But you can't. The subjective element in this, and this is where theonomists get bothered, any kind of subjectivity or uncertainty here. The subjective element is you can come to different applications.

One country has, you know, the Wild West. Everybody carries a gun. Another country, nobody carries a gun, you know, and that doesn't mean that one is is pagan and one is is Christian. You can have differences in application because the way natural law comes down to us is through mediated institutions.

In our our mediated institutions are the English common law that was built up over time based on precedents. There's a bottom up element to our law in that precedent is built on precedent and over time it gains further standing or it is it is rejected and abandoned and we go a different direction.

But that body of law is a collection of wisdom, a wisdom from the ages that doesn't come from just a handful of judges sitting there on the court arbitrarily arbitrarily ruling what you're right is and what it's not.

OK, so Richard Hooker is another guy who's really good and he's he's even better in the sense that he is English. He comes from the English tradition and he's drawing on Aquinas and he goes on to say that human beings desire happiness.

They desire order and human beings associate together and they form governments and they they form rules for associating with each other and but he does this in a way that's different from what we're going to see in a minute from someone like Locke or Hobbes or Paine who say that, you know, in the state of nature, humans get together and they decide what their society is going to to be.

And it's purely based on individuals who are coming together for the first time in a society. No, for Hooker, there's an objective reality already there that you can't come together and have a happy society and say we're going to have open marriage in our.

Society. So just to yeah, just to the kind of since we're going to leave and go sort of to these enlightenment figures, so people understand, correct me if I'm wrong here. So the enlightenment like anthropology, I guess, would be man is born, created and designed.

Design is the big flashing word in my mind that there's certain things that man is programmed almost to know, to fit into, to they have a role to play, a place of belonging. All these things are there.

It's not a blank slate state of nature. It's there's you have responsibilities as you're born to your community, to be fathers and parents and all the rest. So so this is kind of like the basis for some of the knowledge that you're saying modern theories, theonomy being one, by the way, the theonomy is a lot of modern theonomy is, I would say, a result of modernity.

They would look at that as you have to have this kind of mindset, this this filter that you have in your mind to to ascertain what the truth is. But actually you're saying, no, actually, the medieval scholastic tradition, Aquinas being part of that and Hooker, is that no, you're born with already some programming, some to exist in a garden or curse.

But that was the intention. And so when we have things like the Second Amendment or border security or any of the issue, a lot of the issues, I should say, that come up today politically, many of them are.

We are looking at a universal law as much as we can, but we are applying this law through different traditions and in the goal being security, for example, with the gun example. Right. So I think what you're saying is that the people want to be secure, that they have that there is a right to that, that that is the way God intended for things to be for us to pursue security.

Yet it is going to be different in different places. And we even recognize this with jails. We don't give criminals guns in jail. Right. We say that now that you're right, actually doesn't extend into this because you had don't have responsibilities.

So where so we can make these determinations based on based on an outcome. So that's the scholastic tradition. And we're still living with vestiges of this. It sounds like is what you're saying. This is still kind of in our blood, but we've but but now I guess would be the enlightenment time.

We start to question some of these assumptions and it undermines it. Right. So and gay marriage, gay marriage is a good example of that, I suppose.

Yes. Yeah. And and, you know, I used the Second Amendment. That's more of a hot button issue that, you know, at least wakes people up the idea of somebody saying that it's it's not it's not Adam was not when Adam was created.

God says, here is your right as a human being that I've breathed into to carry a weapon. Right. They carry a gun in particular. You know, obviously they didn't have guns back then. But the that is not a it's not a fundamental natural right.

But it is a constitutional right that we defend and that the source of that is not because God breathed into you and made you human. The source of that is your your tradition. And this is why we should value our tradition, by the way.

Instead of that's just tradition. And some people say, no, you get rid of tradition and just go to rights. Well, what happens in libertarians, even conservative libertarians in that world want to go to rights?

And the problem is that what we're going to find is rights can say, well, that can go anywhere. Well, what about my right to do this and my right to do that? So valuing your your particular tradition is important.

It's actually the source of why you can do a lot of the things that you can do in our country that you might not in another country. So we shouldn't just discard that and say, oh, that's just manmade.

No, man, God works through human institutions. He has mediated his power and authority through governments and families and institutions. And we should see God's sovereignty there as well and value that.

So another example would be, you know, if we take the First Amendment. The is there a an absolute right to freedom of speech in the natural law? Does God this is this is the other thing that got me thinking initially is that if it's absolute freedom of speech, then what God is saying is I give human beings the right to blaspheme.

He doesn't. OK, so just because he does give he's he's a patient and long suffering God and does not strike you dead when you blaspheme and gives you time to repent does not mean he has given you the right to blaspheme.

And so if some human institution who through whom God has delegated authority like a government says in this land, we do not blaspheme. And if you do, there will be a penalty that is not violating your natural right to free speech because you do not have a natural right to blaspheme.

So the problem is when we think of naturalizing this absolutist kind of sense, we can lead to all kind, you know, is there a right to the Supreme Court pornography, you know, as freedom of speech? No, there are laws and certain kind of speech.

And what the Supreme Court has done, the Supreme Court has said, you know, we have the right to limit speech for certain things. You know, you can't yell fire in a theater being the famous line from the from the one case that they're not the Supreme Court decisions in the 1900s have not recognized where that right comes from and really where those rights stop.

They've based it more on emergencies and the government has the right in emergency to stop you from saying something, you know, right before it's going to start. But it's not based on anything absolute in terms of content.

You can say whatever you want. One of the Supreme Court cases is, you know, you can you can say you can yell Marxist propaganda and and get people to try to riot. But the context is such that, you know, if nobody's listening to you.

It's not a threat, but if somebody is listening to you and they're building buildings, then that can be insightful, inciting a riot and that can be restricted. Well, it's not touching on the content in and of itself.

Right. What it's looking at context and whether somebody's listening or not and people are about to act on your speech. So they've missed it. They've missed where the the line should be in terms of regulating speech, in terms of content.

But anyway, so so Hooker, as I said, was was was good at acknowledging that human beings do come together to to make governments and make rules. But there are, as you said so well, in summing up what I was saying, in there are objective realities that you have to conform to in doing that.

It's not just we can make any society that we want. And Hooker is also good in talking about how God, how our institutions are legitimate institutions in terms of, you know, we can't just say I, you know, no, no king but Christ.

No, no ruler except the Bible. You know, no authority except the Bible. No, I no law except natural law. No, we can't say that as Christians. Right. We're under authority in our churches. These are legitimate authorities.

We're under authority in our governments. Now, we can have another whole podcast about whether our current government is, you know, constitutionally speaking, is a legitimate authority. I want to go there right now.

But but governments are legitimate authorities through whom God extends his rule and his order of the universe. And so the idea that I don't have to listen to you because I've got my natural rights. I've got my Bible and I've got I just follow Jesus.

Right. We know you can't nobody follows that consistently. And Hooker does a great job in providing an explanation of how God works through institutions, proper authorities. OK, so moving into the modern era, when you look at the first modern philosopher, he's we would probably identify him, identify him as Machiavelli is really the first modern philosopher.

But Thomas Hobbes might arguably be the second philosopher. And Thomas Hobbes begins his political philosophy with this state of nature idea. And what Thomas Hobbes is trying to do is provide a modern justification for absolute monarchy that is not based on divine right of kings.