Pillars of Human Happiness

We live in a strange time. A time when wrongs are defended as rights, when bondage passes as freedom, and when experience is outmoded. A time when history drives evolution with omnipotence, but no one seems to know any. A time when people board the good ship Progress, unaware that she is headed upriver and sure to run aground in the shallow streams of lessons already learned; streams that long ago poured their wisdom and safety into the river that cut the course of constitutional law through the rocks of ages past. All the while the passengers marvel to each other at the new and revolutionary scenery and the banks of the river grow ever closer to the hull.

Self-Governance

Many in America wake up each morning, wash, dress, eat, and pass the schedule of the day's events through a consciousness so accustomed to freedom that it scarcely notices the warm water, the fact that there is a choice of what to wear, what to eat, and in what to spend time. Such a consciousness most often allocates little thought to exactly what produces and maintains the freedom that shapes nearly every aspect of its environment. Freedom is not the kind of thing that springs up out of the ground like the flora of Eden, spilling forth fruit in abundance and exacting no sweaty price from its beneficiaries. Rather freedom can only exist under certain conditions, it requires constant care, and it has many times been choked out by the thorns and noxious weeds of despotism and unbridled human passions.

For any society to exist, there must be order. Without it, poverty, death, starvation, and misery would rage in every corner of the earth and the possibility of any measure of lasting prosperity would be snuffed out. If there is to be order, it must come from one of two loci of power. It must either be intrinsic or extrinsic; either the people must order themselves individually or else be ordered by an outside force. For the vast majority of the history of mankind, the latter has dominated the landscape of political communities and nations. In such instances, the political sovereign enforces order through arbitrary rules based on his, her, or their will, establishing a condition in which sovereignty is continually transferred to whoever has the strongest will and the most power. And so history is filled with Chiefs, Kings, Queens, Emperors, Czars, Priests, Furhers, Dictators, Generals, and sovereigns of any number of other names acquiring power and imposing order on the society over which they rule. On occasion a benevolent ruler would grace the scene, blessing the lives of his or her subjects. But on the whole, complete power would corrupt completely, as rulers let their passions take the reins.

However, from time to time a people would arise that sought to establish a society based on the intrinsic induction of order. In these communities, the rules would be agreed upon by society as a whole, and the large majority of the enforcement of the rules would take place freely within each heart and mind. Individual volition, not fear of force, would drive compliance to the law for most people. Each person could live their life in Liberty, comporting himself or herself according to what promotes both their own happiness and the common good, learning along the way that those two interests are linked together. Thus, freedom would burst into the world amidst abundant oppression and scanty progress, briefly illuminating the horizon like a flash of lightning and revealing to humanity the outlines of what is possible. Though each flash got seemingly brighter, each would eventually be overcome again by the inertial darkness of human nature unchecked by reason and conscience.

By the late 1700's, the previous failures of free societies had cast long shadows of doubt as to whether or not a lasting regime based on self-government was possible at all. In America, the men and women of the founding generation felt that conditions existed in the New World unlike any other time in history, giving them a chance, that may never happen again, to establish an enduring free nation. Alexander Hamilton stated:

"It has been frequently remarked that it seems to have been reserved to the people of this country, by their conduct and example, to decide the important question, whether societies of men are really capable or not of establishing good government from reflection and choice, or whether they are forever destined to depend for their political constitutions on accident and force." (Federalist No. 1)

And so, knowing that the whole world was watching, the great task the Founders faced was to understand how to get lasting political order to arise consistently from the individual intrinsic activities of reflection and choice.

Fundamental Principles

The first step needed to establish their new land of Liberty was to establish government's proper and true relationship to man. The Declaration of Independence accomplished this in 1776, proclaiming boldly that government sits in a lower sphere than mankind, intended to be a servant, not a master. It states that governments are instituted among men to secure for them unalienable rights which God gives them, among which are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. This means that the rights of Man exist outside and above government, and that both Man and government are accountable to God through the natural and supernatural laws He has put in place. 

This understanding of government's relationship to Man and God is crucial to human happiness. Without it, government reigns supreme and can do whatever it likes to men, women, and children everywhere, without committing any wrong. We are all intuitively aware of this relationship. This is evidenced by the fact that whenever a regime somewhere in the world oppresses its people or infringes upon their rights, we all instinctively hold that regime up to a standard inside ourselves and we know it to be a bad and unjust regime.  

The second step in the creation of a nation of self-governance was to establish a framework that would keep government in its bounds and ensure that it carries out the purposes stated in the Declaration. The Articles of Confederation were a good, but ultimately unsuccessful first attempt at establishing that framework. And so the Constitutional Convention of 1787 was called to amend the Articles. However, they found that amending them was not possible, and they came to see that an entirely new constitution would be required to achieve a lasting free society.

In accordance with the Declaration, the new government had to be a representative one, ensuring that it derived "its just powers from the consent of the governed." It had to separate the powers of government into distinct branches, as the Declaration affirmed God alone to be capable of being entrusted with their consolidation. It had to be limited only to the enumerated powers that would allow it to secure natural rights, making sure that government would always remain a servant of the people under whose delegated authority it acts. And so, after much deliberation and the synergy of some of the greatest political minds in the history of the world, the Constitution of 1787 coalesced, outlining the framework that would amass enough power in government to protect rights, while limiting that power enough to protect rights.

Reflection and Choice

Though having the right matrix of government was crucial for the perpetuation of freedom, a matrix designed to both foster and to protect the exercise of human agency, our forefathers had the even greater task of actually achieving the kind of "reflection and choice" that would produce "good government" continually over time. Drafted by Thomas Jefferson in 1777 and adopted into law in 1786, the Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom states that "Almighty God hath created the mind free; and manifested his supreme will that free it shall remain by making it altogether insusceptible of restraint." Understanding thus that the mind was free, the founding generation knew that creating within people the right disposition for good reflection and choice was something that could not be legislated, engineered, or coerced in any way. It could only be achieved if the vast majority of citizens came to a knowledge for themselves of what is good, right, and true and if they valued that truth enough to follow it. That process had to occur within each individual heart and mind.

The challenge to create a freedom that would endure, therefore, depended on the early American's ability to establish a culture and a tradition outside the government, in the body of the people, that would facilitate the pursuit of truth and goodness. They knew that only a virtuous people could abide freedom and "that all attempts to influence [the mind] by temporal punishments, or burdens, or by civil incapacitations tend only to beget habits of hypocrisy and meanness, and are a departure from the plan of [God], who being lord both of body and mind, yet chose not to propagate [religion or virtue] by coercions on either, as was in his Almighty power to do but to extend it by its influence on reason alone" (Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom). Thus building a culture conducive to freedom had to include the means of conveying the influence of virtue to the reason of each individual mind.

By what means, then, is the evidence of the goodness of virtue best brought to the human mind? What vessels carry her there? There are a few, but only two will be our focus today. They are speech and religion. Both are very powerful and the Founders thought that both warranted special protection.

Speech

Many people today contest the idea that we live in a moral world, where the moral opposites of good and bad, of right and wrong, are fixed and constant for everyone. Instead they either teach that morality is relative to individual experience, allowing each person to define it for themselves, or they do away with the concept altogether, contending that there is no truth that transcends beyond individuals and moments in history. To understand the reality of the moral world you have to understand key elements of the role of speech in human nature.

In his book Politics, Aristotle discusses how our ability to speak makes us more fit for gregarious life than any other creature on earth and how it, coupled with reason, gives rise to the moral world. We are able name things, to categorize them and give them a name. Inseparably connected to that name is the nature of that object, and as it loses aspects of that nature, it loses its capacity to be that thing. Take a car, for example. When we hear that word, we all instantaneously have in our minds the essential elements of a car; four wheels, a motor, etc. But if you take a car and start taking wheels away from it, it becomes less like a car and more like a motorcycle. If you take its motor, it stops being a car and starts being a cart. We can have preferences in the color of the car or in the material covering the seats, but there are certain elements of a car that are non-negotiable, elements tied to its nature, that all cars must have in order to be considered good. And so, once we categorize an object, we can start talking about whether it is a good one of those objects or a bad one. A safe without a lock is not a good safe, but it might be an okay box. Thus, the good of something and it's being that thing are convertible terms, and the moral world is made visible.

What we can do with objects, we can do with less tangible things. For instance, we can categorize behaviors. We can observe a behavior that falls in the category of "ways to treat a friend", and then we can discuss whether it was a good way or a bad way. The less that behavior looks like how to treat a friend, the more it looks like how to treat an acquaintance, stranger, or perhaps, enemy. Again, we can make a category of "how to uphold an agreement." Then, through talking with each other, through conscience, reason, and experience, we can discover what is the right way to uphold an agreement. Just like in the example of the car, there are elements of rightly upholding an agreement that are not for us to change, elements tied to the good in its nature. Those things are for us to discover, not to shape to our own preferences. With this capacity to recognize things and categorize them, the rich moral world opens at once to our view; and with that moral world comes a great need to be free to talk with others in order to discuss, debate, and identify together what makes something good. Once we identify the good in something, we can conform our lives to it, and thereby be blessed and grow more virtuous, both in the individual soul and in society.

Conscience and Religion

Conscience and religion are just as vital to self-perpetuating societal virtue as speech and reason are. If there is to be a large majority of the people that chooses freely to obey the law, without needing outside enforcement, there must be some other source of accountability. Certainly education alone does not ensure virtue, as the educated ruling class has often been oppressive, criminal, and murderous throughout the span of human history, including the past one hundred years. Many people that decry religion defend their position by claiming that a high quality education in these enlightened times is all that is needed for a virtuous people. The individuals that make this claim must have, during that quality education of theirs, missed the days their history teacher discussed the Nazis, Lenin, Stalin, Mao, and many other highly educated people and regimes that have all committed unimaginable atrocities in the past century. They must not take the paper, watch the news, or check the Internet, as they seemingly don't catch wind of the almost daily scandals that occur among the educated elite in supposedly enlightened western nations. Though the right kind of education can help lead reason to virtue, the evidence to negate the idea that education alone will foster virtue is incontrovertible.

If we can't count on a person's education only to hold them accountable to Virtue's standards, and if ever present law enforcement would abolish liberty, then in what can Freedom rest its hopes? The answer is found in religion. A belief in an omniscient and loving God, whose teachings are compatible with Justice and Virtue, and who will at some future date hold each person responsible for their choice to follow those teachings is the best way to create internally motivated obedience to the law and the adoption of virtuous principles into the lives of a large majority of the people in society.

Religion, when left free, has been shown throughout history to be the most powerful means of disseminating an understanding of the nature of individual virtues and the most reliable motivator to pursue them. Studies have shown the United States to be the most generous nation in the world, and religion and religious institutions have long been the biggest source of charity behind that generosity. For the majority of our history, religious institutions have been the driving force behind the establishment of schools, both of K-12 education, as well as colleges and universities. These are just two of many possible examples of how people are motivated by their faith to act virtuously.

Religion also powers the prosperity of the Free Market. The following is a quote by Clayton Christensen, a professor at the Harvard Business School and highly sought after consultant. He gives an account of a conversation that he had with an economist from China. He stated:

“I learned the importance of this question in a conversation 12 years ago with a Marxist economist from China who was nearing the end of a fellowship in Boston, where he had come to study two topics that were foreign to him: democracy and capitalism. I asked my friend if he had learned here anything on these topics that was surprising or unexpected. His response was immediate. . . . ‘I had no idea how critical religion is to the functioning of democracy and capitalism.’ . . . He continued, ‘In your past, most Americans attended a church or synagogue every week. These are institutions that people respected. When you were there, from your youngest years, you were taught that you should voluntarily obey the law; that you should respect other people’s property, and not steal it. You were taught never to lie. Americans followed these rules because they had come to believe that even if the police didn’t catch them when they broke a law, God would catch them. Democracy works because most people most of the time voluntarily obey your laws.' ‘You can say the same for capitalism,’ my friend continued. ‘It works because Americans have been taught in their churches that they should keep their promises and not tell lies. An advanced economy cannot function if people cannot expect that when they sign contracts, the other people will voluntarily uphold their obligations. Capitalism works because most people voluntarily keep their promises.’ . . . [Such expressions mirror those of] Lord John Fletcher Moulton, the great English jurist, who wrote that the probability that democracy and free markets will flourish in a nation is proportional to ‘The extent of obedience to the unenforceable.” (Clayton Christensen, “The Importance of Asking the Right Questions,” commencement address, Southern New Hampshire University, Manchester, N.H., May 16, 2009. )

Thus, both political order and advanced free market economies are sustained in large measure by religion. Due to their unique and powerful contribution to the correct “reflection and choice” that is required for free government to endure, religion and religious institutions deserve special legal protection.

Each of us, as human beings, is born with a phenomenon acting within us that is commonly referred to as Conscience. It is tied to our reason, as well as our emotions, linking both together to give us a sense of the accountability that will surely come at some future date. It calls us to seek after the Good in all things and helps to hone our ability to perceive that which is Good through reason and the revelations of God. It stings our souls when we choose not to follow the Good, as a reminder that we are meant to be better and to live better than our errant path directs. It gets more distinct and clear the more we follow its enticings, and it fades into silence the more we ignore it. If we choose to follow its voice consistently over time, it will produce within each of us the character traits of Virtue and make us more capable of freedom and self-government. But, that process has to come from within each of us through individual volition.

If you are trying to produce virtuous people in a society, you must leave them free to choose virtue. If you attempt to legislate or force it, you will destroy the virtue you are trying to produce. You will never produce the moderation of pleasure if you lock someone in a room and eliminate the opportunity for pleasure. You will never produce kindness if you force people to do the acts of kindness. You will never produce generosity if you take someone’s money to give it to the poor. You will never produce piety by forcing people to pray. In free societies, founded on self-government, all of the virtues are necessary; you have to have them. But they can’t be made, because each individual must choose them for themselves. That is why religion and conscience must always remain free.

Conclusion

In the milieu of differing voices and interests contending for influence today, every group evokes the authority of individual rights in defense of their position. Often they do so without an understanding of what rights are. Rights are things that you can justly claim against others without infringing on what is theirs by nature. As the Declaration teaches, we are all endowed by God with certain rights from which we are not able to be alienated. These rights require a universal moral standard that defines right and wrong and makes the violation of those rights wrong. Some things claimed as “rights” today are not rights at all, while other bona fide rights are claimed to be wrongs. All true rights exist in a hierarchy, with those that are fundamental taking precedence over lesser rights. That order is made distinguishable by “the laws of Nature and of Nature’s God.”

When forming the Bill of Rights to amend the original Constitution, the Founders considered carefully what rights would be included and how those rights would be presented. Knowing that they had already established the right to “Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness” in the Declaration, they felt that the first rights to be elucidated in the Bill of Rights would be rights that pertain to the creation and perpetuation of morality and virtue in the people’s lives. Thus, they first protected freedom of speech, freedom of the press, and freedom of religion. They understood that without moral and virtuous people, their experiment in self-government was over before it started. And so, they carefully placed at the top of the list those rights that protect the elements in our nature that lead us to virtue. These rights are absolutely vital to the survival of any free nation. Without them, the external imposition of order on society is the only other choice, which brings in its wake the tyranny, oppression, and suffering that has dominated the majority of human history.

While teaching a group of soldiers about the importance of religion and morality in our republic’s survival, John Adams stated:

“we have no government armed with power capable of contending with human passions unbridled by morality and religion. Avarice, ambition, revenge, or gallantry, would break the strongest cords of our Constitution as a whale goes through a net. Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.”

In his “Farewell Address,” George Washington stated among his last words to the American people that:

“Of all the dispositions and habits which lead to political prosperity, religion and morality are indispensable supports. In vain would that man claim the tribute of patriotism who should labor to subvert these great pillars of human happiness - these firmest props of the duties of men and citizens. The mere politician, equally with the pious man, ought to respect and to cherish them. A volume could not trace all their connections with private and public felicity. Let it simply be asked, Where is the security for property, for reputation, for life, if the sense of religious obligation desert the oaths which are the instruments of investigation in courts of justice? And let us with caution indulge the supposition that morality can be maintained without religion. Whatever may be conceded to the influence of refined education on minds of peculiar structure, reason and experience both forbid us to expect that national morality can prevail in exclusion of religious principle.”

Without religion and morality, neither Liberty nor Happiness can long endure. As a Nation, we are at a critical juncture in the perpetuation of these “great pillars of human happiness.” There are many seeking to subvert morality and religion to other ideas and pursuits, doing so in the name of “rights.” As in the time of Lincoln, we live in a house divided, which cannot stand if the trends of recent decades continue. We must decide which direction we will take as a Nation. Either we choose internal order through religion and morality, or we choose external order through the imposition of the State. The former will produce a continuance of Liberty and the general happiness and prosperity for which we have been the envy of all the world in times past; while the latter will lead to sorrow, poverty, and oppression. As we make this decision, we would do well to remember that “He that troubleth his own house shall inherit the wind” (Proverbs 11:3).