SPEAKING
FREELY Know your enemy - and
yourself By C Mott Woolley
Speaking Freely is an Asia Times
Online feature that allows guest writers to have
their say. Please click hereif you are interested in
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In her excellent new
book Knowing the Enemy: Jihadist Ideology and
the War on Terror, Mary Habeck explains that
if we are to understand what happened on September
11, 2001, we need to know the intellectual history
of jihadis like al-Qaeda.
For the same
reason, in another era, the intellectual history
of communism was studied intently in order to try
to understand why, for example, Josef Stalin
attacked and sought to destroy
the
landowners known as kulaks. We learned the
answer to that dreadful horror by understanding
the influence of Karl Marx on Stalin.
Now we need to know of the relation between
Sayyid Qubt to Osama bin Laden. And that relation,
as Habeck's study shows, is akin to what Marx was
to Vladimir Lenin or Stalin. If, as the Koran
says, "war is deceit", let not the enemy deceive. To
that end Habeck has provided an enormously informative
study.
Pivotal to Habeck's study is a
fundamental question: If secular law permits what
the command of God does not, which must give way?
For the jihadis the answer is clear: all secular
law at odds with the Koran is void. Indeed, in a
remarkable observation Habeck notes: "The group
[Hizb al-Tahrir] has argued that adopting Western
laws and democratic rules is so evil that even if
laws identical to those of the sharia [Islamic
law] were legislated, the fact that they were
adopted in a democratic system would make them
wrong and kufr [unbelief]."
Democracy is evil. Thus it will not do to
simply rely on Henry Kissinger's sweeping
observation in Does America Need a Foreign
Policy? that "moral purpose was a key element of
motivation behind every American policy and every
war in the 20th century". As Habeck notes, "The
separation of religion and state explains for the
jihadis why the West (and the United States in particular)
have no moral sense ..."
If knowing the intellectual history of the
enemy is vital, is it not doubly vital that we
know the source of our own beliefs? What is that
source and what do we believe? Are we, as Kissinger
has said, just naturally so beneficent that for
every policy and every war in the entire 100 years of
the last century our purpose is accurately
describable as "moral"?
Suppose the advice
Habeck gives to us - know the enemy - were to be
given to the jihadis. Suppose like us Habeck asked
them to set aside preconceptions and hate (as
Habeck rightly admonishes us to do if we are to
learn jihadis' ideology), and they were to study
our ideology with the open mind Habeck says we
must bring to bear to know the enemy. What would
the jihadis learn about us? And if one were to
undertake a thumbnail sketch of the West's
intellectual heritage, what would jihadis learn?
They might learn (or at least hear) that
when Sir Thomas More refused to take an oath
affirming the supremacy of England's parliament to
papal bulls emanating from Rome, he affirmed that
no person should obey secular law if their
conscience tells them to do otherwise.
But
more than that, the jihadis would learn that this
solitary man defied a king by holding true to his
conscience, and from this example religion and
state in America are kept separate not to destroy
a person's conscience but to assure that no one be
executed for conscience, as was Sir Thomas More by
King Henry VIII. And what a horrid death it was.
As noted by Peter Ackroyd in the The Life of
Thomas More, the king did say:
Sir Thomas More, you are to be drawn
on a hurdle through the City of London to
Tyburn, there to be hanged till you be half
dead, after that cut down yet alive, your bowels
to be taken out of your body and burned before
you, your privy parts to be cut off, your head
cut off, your body to be divided in four parts,
and your head and body to be set at such places
as the king shall assign.
Fortunately
for More, the king commuted this sentence from
being drawn and quartered to simple beheading.
Let us look at another example from our
intellectual history.
Lenin's biographer
Robert Service tells us that Lenin's favorite book
"was none other than Harriet Beecher Stowe's
Uncle Tom's Cabin", and that this "tale of
a Negro slave's attempt to flee the cruelties of a
cotton plantation in the American south was given
pride of place in his room".
Were the
jihadis to know us they would see that this novel,
which so deeply affected Lenin, affected the United
States deeply, and that it describes how in its Civil War
America faced the same moral dilemma Sir Thomas
More faced: when southern American slave masters
hunted and found runaway slaves in the north,
which command were northerners to follow? The
secular Fugitive Slave Law requiring them to
"deliver up" the slaves or the commandment of
religion imploring them to hide and then free the
runaway slaves? Is not this, albeit in a different
form, the same "pivotal" question posed above that
is said to haunt the Islamic world?
Most important, the unbelieving jihadis would see,
or at least have an opportunity to see, that
in trying to come to terms with this pivotal
question America has not simply dismissed unthinkingly
the path the jihadis would have the US follow - that
governments at odds with the Word must be
destroyed.
The
United States destroyed a slave
culture within its midst because that culture,
although lawful under the constitution, was evil.
Despite the jihadis' derision for American values
(or purported lack thereof), the US did draw and
quarter its very soul in coming to grips with the
moral dilemma the Islamic world finds so
troubling: an inexact congruence of what is lawful
and what is divine.
If, as it is said,
America has no moral sense because it separates
state and religion, why for four years would
Americans take to the killing fields? In a June
18, 1999, interview with the Academy of
Achievement, leading Civil War historian Shelby
Foote noted, "There were 1,095,000 casualties in
the Civil War. If today you had that same ratio,
you'd have something like 10 million casualties,
to give you some idea of what happened."
Let us probe further into this "pivotal"
question. Speaking on the floor of the Senate
shortly before the Civil War, William Seward said
of American slavery, "But there is a higher law
than the constitution, which regulates our
authority over the domain and devotes it to the
same noble purposes." Abraham Lincoln, who
defeated Seward in race for his party's
presidential nomination 1860, initially rejected
this call to a higher law. To Lincoln's mind,
Seward's notion went too far. If America were to
embrace Seward's idea, Lincoln feared liberty
would end; for liberty is but a proposition, as
Lincoln would later famously say at Gettysburg.
We know that when Lincoln did free the
slaves he did not speak of equality. As historian
Allen Guezlo has pointed out, "Instead, the
Emancipation Proclamation is written in the flat
legal language of whereas and therefores and
military necessity."
Historian Richard
Hofstadter has said, "The Emancipation
Proclamation of January 1, 1863, had all the moral
grandeur of a bill of lading." As noted, in his
proclamation Lincoln invoked military necessity
not moral imperative; only those slaves living in
territory controlled by the rebels would be freed.
Under this criterion, border state slaves were not
freed; to do so, Lincoln feared, would drive those
states out of the Union.
William Seward,
serving as Lincoln's secretary of state at the
time and dejected because Lincoln had not gone far
enough, commented, "We show our sympathy with
slavery by emancipating slaves where we cannot
reach them and holding them in bondage where we
can set them free."
Shall we stop the
story here or shall we continue even if we should
come to know of ourselves as well as Habeck says
we must know of the enemy?
Thomas
Jefferson and Sayyid Qutb Habeck says of
Islam, "Mankind is not allowed to question the
Koran, use reason to determine its validity, or to
pass judgment upon it ... in its scope, the Koran
is universal ... the Koran is for all humanity
throughout all time." How well this also describes
the Declaration of Independence. "We hold these
truths to be self evident; that all men are
created equal; that they are endowed by their
Creator with certain unalienable rights ...
[which] whenever any form of government becomes
destructive of these ends, it is the right of the
people to alter or abolish ..."
Like the
Koran, the Declaration of Independence is, to
borrow Robert Middlekauff's phrase, "a sermon
disguised as a political tract"; it is universal
in application, and like the Koran its truths,
being self evident, deny to reason the power to
determine its validity or to pass judgment on it.
Under both the Koran and the Declaration of
Independence toleration of a form of government
that violates the Creator's endowment entitles or
requires such a government to be destroyed.
On this narrow but telling point, Sayyid
Qutb and Thomas Jefferson agree. While Qutb says
such a government must be destroyed, Jefferson
says such a government should be destroyed. But is
not that simply a distinction without a
difference? Do not both Jefferson and Qutb assert
there is an overarching set of principles
paramount to any secular law man might devise?
Moreover, like Qutb, Jefferson asserted that any
attempt by man to alter the word, or endowment, of
our Creator is void.
Lest there be doubt
as to Jefferson's meaning, consider the very
carefully worded language in the Virginia Statute
on Religious Freedom he wrote:
And though we well know that this
assembly elected by the people for the ordinary
purposes of legislation only, have no power to
restrain the acts of succeeding assemblies,
constituted with powers equal to our own, and
that therefore to declare this act to be
irrevocable would be of no effect in law; yet we
are free to declare, and do declare, that the
rights hereby asserted are of the natural rights
of mankind, and that if any act shall be
hereafter passed to repeal the present, or to
narrow its operation, such act shall be an
infringement of natural
right.
Jefferson's effort to convert a
mere state statute into a sacred text and condemn
in advance anyone who would challenge his
separating state and religion is but to borrow a
page from Qutb himself: it is an undemocratic
attempt to establish an idea for all time
unalterable by man. This is a precept which partly
defines Western civilization. Compare the chilling
effect of Jefferson's language to what Habeck has
told us about the jihadis:
Because the sacred texts are
unchanging - and unchangeable - Islam, the
sharia, and, by extension, jihadis ideology can
never be altered. The tenets of the ideology,
based on the Koran and hadith, are the
very thoughts of God sent down to mankind and
are the givens on which humanity must base every
action to create a moral and just
society.
Despite what the Declaration
of Independence says, and despite Jefferson's view
as expressed in the Virginia Statute of Religious
Freedom, the notion of a higher law has never been
well received in America. And for good reason. A
doctrine premised upon "higher law" of self
evident truth mocks reason; it is illimitable and
for that reason, in the wrong hands, it can be
dangerous.
Although the Declaration of
Independence served its purpose in severing the
political band which bound the colonies to
England, it was unsuited to the altogether
different task of forming an American government.
Thus, although the framers had at hand the
Declaration of Independence when the constitution
was written (Jefferson at the time was in Paris
serving as American minister to France), they
refused to incorporate Declaration of Independence
principles lest the purpose of the document,
ordered liberty, be undermined by the stated
purpose of the Declaration of Independence,
legitimate anarchy.
Indeed, while his
brethren were at the constitutional convention in
Philadelphia, Jefferson was in Paris secretly (and
quite improperly) helping Lafayette and others at
night write France's Declaration of the Rights of
Man. The wisdom of our founders as compared to
Jefferson when left to his own devises can be seen
in how the French Revolution unfolded unhampered
by a constitution which rejected the notion of
self evident truth.
When the framers
completed their work, they did not say they had
formed a perfect union, they said in the Preamble
they had formed a "more perfect union". They did
this because they knew there is no such thing as a
more perfect self evident truth. For this reason,
the constitution provides for its own amendment.
In superseding the Declaration of
Independence by a more mundane instrument, the
founders' purpose was to restrain power, not exalt
it. We have seen that there is no provision in the
Declaration of Independence allowing it to be
amended. Indeed, were it to be amended - by its
very terms - the amendment would be void. This is
sometimes forgotten.
In contrast to the US
constitution, the jihadis seek to exalt on earth
the power of God through man by an elite vanguard.
This brings Lenin to mind. Given the nature of the
jihadis' God, if a government is formed on the
basis of his command, its laws must per force be
accepted without question. The vanguard would kill
those who would question the laws. The people
would have no say. As explained by Habeck:
For jihadis (as well as most
Islamists), the Koran and hadith (the
traditions about the life of Mohammed) also have
implications for the political life of the
Islamic community. The extremist groups assert
that the state they create will base its legal
system, governing bodies and foreign policy on
the sacred texts alone. "The Koran is our
constitution," is a well-known slogan, first
articulated by Hasan al-Banna and supported
today by Islamists and jihadis from [Ayatollah
Ruhollah] Khomeini to Hamas. What exactly this
means is debated by every one of these groups.
The jihadist interpretation is that they will
reject any system of laws not based on these
texts, particularly democracy, which is the
ultimate expression of idolatry.
It
bears stressing that the constitution has been
amended many times. Even the Bill of Rights may,
in theory, be amended. Those sacred rights stand
intact not because they are perfect or because
amending them would run afoul of a divine order,
but because reason suggests they make sense.
The only part of the constitution which
can never be amended for any reason is Article V
which irrevocably entitles the people to amend the
US constitution at any time for any reason. That
is as far down the road to totalitarian rule as
America is willing to go. As will be seen in due
course, America at one point in its history came
hauntingly close to allowing Article V to work its
totalitarian potential. For present purposes, it
is enough to say that Article V in the US
Constitution is to America what the Koran is to
the jihadis.
Why church and state must
be kept separate If it is true that America
has not lightly dismissed Islam's legitimate
concern about the moral implication inherent in
separating religion and state, how then has
America come to terms with this concern? How can
morality hold sway if its undeniably meritorious
principles lack the force of law? If law enjoys
the backing of the state and a religious command
would defy the law, what then? This goes to the
very heart of what America is and all that America
means.
Henry Adams in his magnificent
study of the Jefferson era, History of the
United States of America During the
Administrations of Thomas Jefferson,
articulates how acutely Americans understand the
danger in separating religion and state. What
Henry Adams has written is poetry itself:
To this doctrine [separation of
church and state] the New Englander replied,
"What will you do for moral progress?" Every
possible answer to this question opened a chasm.
No doubt Jefferson held the faith that men would
improve morally with their physical and
intellectual growth; but he had no idea of any
moral improvement other than that which came by
nature. He could not tolerate a priesthood, a
state church or revealed religion.
Conservatives, who could tolerate no society
without such pillars of order, were, from their
point of view, right in answering, "Give us
rather the worst despotisms of Europe - there
our souls at least may have a chance of
salvation!"
To their minds vice and
virtue were not relative, but fixed terms. The
Church was a divine institution. How could a ship
hope to reach port when the crew threw overboard
sails, spars, and compass, unshipped their rudder,
and all the day long thought only of eating and
drinking. Nay, even should the new experiment
succeed in a worldly sense, what was a man
profited if he gained the whole world, and lost
his own soul?
The Lord God was a jealous
God, and visited the sins of the parents upon the
children; but what worse sin could be conceived
than for a whole nation to join their chief in
chanting the strange hymn with which Jefferson, a
new false prophet, was deceiving and betraying his
people: "It does me no injury for my neighbor to
say their are 20 Gods or no God!"
Nevertheless, it is the decided American
view that if those who would say what is good and
what is evil have within their grasp the state's
power to control a person's conscience, liberty is
at an end. Sir Thomas More's death means that much
to America.
Of all the accomplishments in
his life, Jefferson said that next to the
Declaration of Independence nothing - not even his
two terms as president - meant more to him than
writing the Virginia Statute on Religious Freedom.
Separating religion from the power of the state,
he believed, frees the mind to fulfill itself and
allows science and philosophy and religions full
leeway to explore and understand the universe.
Americans do not separate religion and
state to furtively elude morality; rather, the two
are separated because of the opportunity it
provides to humankind to fulfill itself. In Qubt's
elite vanguard religion and state are one.
Americans believe that for Qubt to arrogate unto
himself the exclusive power to determine and then
enforce what is the Word is to destroy the Word.
Such, at any rate, is the theory of the
Reformation.
This is best explained by
Supreme Court Justice Joseph Story. In his
Commentaries on the Constitution, he states
that Article VI, Clause 3 has as its object "to
cut off forever every pretense of any alliance
between church and state in the national
government." This article provides that: "[N]o
religious test shall ever be required as a
qualification of any office or public trust under
the United States." Despite all that has been
written by Qubt and his followers as to the need
to unify state and religion, Justice Story
explains why they are dead wrong:
The framers of the constitution knew
that bigotry was unceasingly vigilant in its
stratagems to secure to itself an exclusive
ascendancy over the human mind; and that
intolerance was ever ready to arm itself with
all the terrors of the civil power to
exterminate those who doubted its dogmas or
resisted its infallibility. The Catholic and the
Protestant had alternately waged the most
ferocious and unrelenting warfare on each other;
and Protestantism itself, at the very moment
that it was proclaiming the right of private
judgment, prescribed boundaries to that right,
beyond which if any one dared to pass, he must
seal his rashness with the blood of martyrdom.
In referring to war between Catholic
and Protestant, Justice Story is referring to the
Thirty Years War. In The Thirty Years' War
edited by Geoffrey Parker it is noted that, "Until
1939, the Thirty Years' War remained by far the
most traumatic period in the history of Germany.
The loss of people was proportionately greater
than World War II; the displacement of people and
the material devastation caused were almost as
great; the cultural and economic dislocation
persisted substantially longer." Describing the
Thirty Years' War, historian Bryan Moynahan in
The Faith: A History of Christianity
writes:
The Protestant forces of Bernard of
Saxe-Weimar burned every village they passed
through as a matter of policy; priests were tied
to wagons and made to crawl on all fours until
they dropped. Bavarian Catholics under Johann
Weert set the town of Calw on fire and then
stood outside the walls, shooting those who
tried to escape. For thirty years, unprovisioned
armies had used Germany to slake their thirsts,
for women, wine, food, horses, carts, plate and
gold. "The German Empire, including Alsace but
excluding the Netherlands and Bohemia, probably
numbered about 21 million in 1618," the
historian C V Wedgwood wrote, "and rather less
than 13.5 million in 1648". The population of
Marburg, eleven times occupied, was halved; the
citizens of Augsburg, 48,000 in 1620, were
reduced to 21,000; Osterburg and Werben lost
two-thirds of their people; a quarter of
Berliners were lost.
That is why America and the West
separate religion and state.
A difficult question How could Abraham
Lincoln also say in his first inaugural address,
"I understand a proposed amendment to the
constitution - which amendment, however, I have
not seen - has passed Congress, to the effect that
the federal government shall never interfere with
the domestic institutions of the States, including
that of persons held to service [slaves]. To avoid
misconstruction of what I have said, I depart from
my purpose not to speak of particular amendments
so far as to say that, holding such a provision to
now be implied constitutional law, I have no
objection to its being made express and
irrevocable"?
By this, remarkably, Lincoln
expresses a willingness to make slavery in America
constitutionally irrevocable. Does this not
confirm the jihadis' criticism of the American
polity: that in separating religion and state it
has no moral bearing? The short answer is that
America did not amend its constitution to
perpetuate slavery; it amended it to end slavery.
Nonetheless, as Michael Vorenburg has
observed in Final Freedom: the Civil War, the
Abolition of Slavery, and the Thirteenth
Amendment: "The secession crisis had so
unnerved Lincoln and other Republicans that they
were willing to take seriously an unamendable
amendment. Harold Hyman has accurately assessed
the amendment as a 'measure of how low secession
had brought the constitutional ethics'."
The power inherent in Article V of the US
constitution brought America that close to what
America does not want to become. So did September
11. And the result of September 11 Habeck
explains, is born of the ideology of the jihadis.
Habeck's book should be required reading.
In further describing jihadis, Habeck
says, "That Mohammed was the last prophet means as
well that there will be no more divine revelation
to alter or adapt Islam to fit in the modern
world. It is, rather, the world that must be
changed to reflect the truth of Islam."
And so the Marxist-Leninist kulak
solution reemerges in modern history. She
continues, "Mankind is not allowed to question the
Koran, use reason to determine its validity, or to
pass judgment upon it. Again, in its scope the
Koran is universal. Islamic jurists believe that
the Torah and Gospels were sent down for a
particular people at a particular time, while the
Koran is for all humanity throughout all of time."
There she has described Lincoln's irrevocable
constitutional amendment. There she has described
a world the West in its history has known in other
times and forms.
The jihadis are a
palimpsest of evil in every century of history; of
the side of us we see when we glimpse a hallowed
president of the United States admitting to a
troubled nation he will make what was only implied
in constitutional law irrevocably permanent; or
the side of us we see when the land which brought
forth the Reformation later undertakes to destroy
an entire race.
In condemning the West for
failing to unify religion and state jihadis
misperceive how intimately the West understands
the jihadis ideology. Because it is understood it
is repugnant. While our understanding is greatly
enhanced by Habeck's fascinating study, the
historian Paul Johnson explains in The History
of Christianity we have been where the jihadis
would have us return:
Augustine was the dark genius of
imperial Christianity, the ideologue of the
Church-State alliance, and the fabricator of the
Medieval mentality. Next to Paul, who supplied
the basic theology, he did more to shape
Christianity than any other human being ... the
idea of a total Christian society necessarily
included the idea of a compulsory society.
People could not choose to belong or not to
belong ... [Augustine] insisted that the use of
force in the pursuit of Christian unity, and
indeed total religious conformity was necessary,
efficacious, and wholly justified .... He wrote
to a ... friend that he had seen his own town,
originally Donatist, "brought over to the
Catholic unity by fear of the imperial edicts".
That had convinced him ... And then,
this was Christ's own way. Had not he, "by great
violence", "coerced Paul into Christianity?" Was
not this the meaning of the text from Luke
14:23: "Compel them to come in?" It was
Augustine who first drew attention to this, and
a number of other convenient texts, to be
paraded through the centuries by the Christian
apologists of force ... Here, first articulated,
is the appeal of the persecuting Church to all
the authoritarian elements in society, indeed in
human nature.
In Augustine's world to
allow differing interpretations of the Word would
be to undo the Word; in Augustine's world Christ's
truth was the sole allowable credo; in his world -
most ominously - only Rome could know and say what
is the Word. It is an ideology (to rearrange
historian Paul Johnson's words just quoted) of a
total Islamic society which necessarily includes
an unavoidably compulsory society. In the jihadis
world: "People could not choose to belong or not
to belong."
Although the chasm separating
the West and the jihadis may seem vast, in even
America's most liberating experience did not
Lincoln, as to the Union, adopt as his method that
of Augustine's Christianity? Did he not compel the
seceding states to remain in the Union even though
the only difference between Lincoln and the
seceding states was the pang of conscience some
felt over slavery and some did not feel?
Though some would quibble with that
characterization, Lincoln would not. As he said in
the Second Inaugural address: "These slaves
constituted a peculiar and powerful interest. All
knew that this interest was somehow the cause of
the war." Could not the jihadis aver that Lincoln
coupled the power of the state with the command of
religion - do not unto others - and so empowered,
compelled those who would deny the Word to be
killed?
In the Foreword to Volume III,
Essays in the History of Liberty, Selected
Writings of Lord Acton, edited by J Rufus
Fears, it is said Lord Acton (power corrupts and
absolute power corrupts absolutely), of all
persons, would have, like Lincoln almost did,
perpetuated slavery in the name of promoting
liberty:
His [Lord Acton's] early
publications include a penetrating study of the
origins of the Civil War in America. Republished
here for the first time ... Acton's reports on
the American Civil War detail his belief that
"the one ruling element in the American war,
which reduces all others to comparative
insignificance, is the defense of the rights of
self-government against the theory that there is
a supreme, irresistible, and irresponsible
power. Fidelity to the spirit of our own
institutions ought to decide the part Englishmen
take in such a controversy." Out of this
conviction, Acton later wrote to Robert E Lee:
"I saw in States Rights the only availing check
upon the absolutism of the sovereign will, and
secession filled me with hope not as the
destruction but as the redemption of Democracy
... Therefore I deemed you were fighting the
battles of our liberty, our progress, and our
civilization; and I mourn for the stake which
was lost at Richmond more deeply than I rejoice
over that which was saved at
Waterloo."
If state and religion in
America are separate, on what conceivable basis
could Lincoln insist that the state may compel a
citizen to believe that slavery is contrary to the
design of our Creator? Is that not precisely what
William Seward anticipated when he spoke of a law
higher than the constitution? And is that not
precisely why at the outset of the Civil War
Lincoln rejected Seward's siren song? Oh, Lincoln.
Francis Fukuyama and Lord
Acton Since the West did emerge from the
Dark Ages, and America from Civil War, is not
Francis Fukuyama right in saying history is moving
to a better place; that human nature can and does
evolve with it? But how can something which is an
immutable moral standard evolve? Does not the
capacity of a principle to evolve belie its verity
as an absolute principle?
Owing to these
contradictions, Lord Acton has said good and evil
do not evolve, by their nature he maintains they
cannot. Upon this fundamental understanding, in
Lord Acton's view, the survival of western
civilization depends. In his famous lecture on
this point, Lord Acton has said:
[Some say] we have no common
code: our moral notions are always fluid; ... If,
in our uncertainty, we must often err, it may
be sometimes better to risk excess in rigor than
in indulgence, for then at least we do no injury
by loss of principle. As Bayle has said, it is
more probable that the secret motives of
an indifferent action are bad than good; and
this discouraging conclusion does not depend
upon theology, for James Mozley supports the
skeptic from the other flank, with all the artillery
of Tractarian Oxford, "A Christian," he says, is
bound by his very creed to suspect evil, and
cannot release himself ... He sees it where
others do not; his instinct is divinely
strengthened; his eye is supernaturally keen; he
has a spiritual insight, and senses exercised to
discern ... He owns the doctrine of original
sin; that doctrine puts him necessarily on his
guard against appearances, sustains his
apprehension under perplexity, and prepares him
for recognizing anywhere what he knows to be
everywhere."
History, says Fronde,
does teach that right and wrong are real
distinctions. Opinions alter, manners change,
creeds rise and fall, but the moral law is written
on the tablets of eternity. And if there are
moments when we may resist the teaching of Fronde,
we have seldom the chance of resisting when he is
supported by Goldwin Smith: "A sound historical
morality will sanction strong measures in evil
times; selfish ambition, treachery, murder,
perjury, it will never sanction in the worst of
times, for these are the things that make times
evil. Justice has been justice, mercy has been
mercy, honor has been honor, good faith has been
good faith, truthfulness has been truthfulness
from the beginning."
The doctrine that, as
Sir Thomas Browne says, morality is not
ambulatory, is expressed as follows by Burke, who,
when true to himself, is the most intelligent of
our instructors, "My principles enable me to form
my judgment upon men and actions in history, just
as they do in common life; and are not formed out
of events and characters, either present or past.
History is a preceptor of prudence, not of
principles. The principles of true politics are
those of morality enlarged; and I neither now do,
nor ever will admit of any other."
Lincoln's legacy After Lincoln's
death his secretary John Hay found a note among
Lincoln's papers. The editor of The Collected
Works of Abraham Lincoln, Roy P Bassler,
suggests this note (now to be quoted) was written
on September 2, 1862, after Lincoln learned of the
Union defeat at the Second Battle of Bull Run:
The will of God prevails. In great
contests each party claims to act in accordance
with the will of God. Both may be, and one must
be wrong. God cannot be for, and against the
same thing at the same time. In the present
civil war it is quite possible that God's
purpose is something different from the purpose
of either party - and yet the human
instrumentalities, working just as they do, are
of the best adaptation to affect His purpose. I
am almost ready to say this is probably true –
that God wills this contest, and wills that it
shall not end yet. By his mere quiet power, on
the minds of the now contestants, He could have
either saved or destroyed the Union without
human contest. Yet the contest began. And having
begun He could give the final victory to either
side any day. Yet the contest
proceeds.
At some point in the Civil War,
precisely when is not known, Lincoln changed his
mind about the constitution. Aware of what America's
founding fathers had wrought - a well-ordered
but immoral slave based culture -
Lincoln resolved that on an issue as fundamental
as slavery and liberty God and state are
inseparable.
Nothing in Lincoln's
time endorsed, even remotely, the idea of the
president utilizing state power to end slavery; witness
the three-fifths clause in the constitution (whereby slaves
were counted for census purposes as three-fifths of a
person). The precept do not unto others, a moral
idea, appeared in Lincoln's time in the Bible but
not in the constitution. As a result of the Civil
War in its 13th and 14th amendments the document
now prohibits slavery and guaranties to all
persons an equal status in law. That is as God
intended, or so Lincoln's Second Inaugural says.
Wherefore be you now Islam?
Importantly,
Lincoln did not turn to the Bible alone. Lincoln
believed all along that slavery was evil and
unjustly denied some of humankind liberty. To
support this view, Lincoln relied on the
Declaration of Independence even though the Dred
Scott decision said Lincoln was wrong to do so.
And, even though the framers of the constitution
refused to infuse the document with the higher law
of the Declaration of Independence, Lincoln took
that fateful step. This could not have come as a
surprise to anyone at the time. What did surprise
everyone, particularly William Seward, was how
deftly Lincoln got where he was going without ever
veering off course.
In his famous debates
with Stephen Douglas, Lincoln had insisted that
even in a free election held pursuant to the terms
of a constitution which sanctioned slavery it
would be wrong nonetheless in territory newly
acquired from Mexico to allow free persons to vote
in favor of enslaving non-whites. Stephen Douglas
in opposition had said if an election in the new
territory is democratic, and if the people freely
vote to institute slavery, the purpose of the
Declaration of Independence will have been served.
There is the reason Jefferson said what he
said about the relation of secular law and any
attempt to infringe on a right deriving from
natural law. It is the logic of Stephen Douglas
which has created the dilemma of Hamas in
Palestine today. Lincoln disagreed with Stephen
Douglas. The Declaration he said gives us our
moral course not our right to say what that moral
course is to be: our Creator created man equal.
That, as we have seen, cannot be amended. Ever.
And were a law to deny this, even a law called the
US constitution, it must be overthrown. And so, in
saving American liberty, Lincoln upheld but
overthrew the constitution. Oh, Lincoln.
As the New Englander cited by Henry Adams
said, "Nay, even should the new experiment succeed
in a worldly sense, what was a man profited if he
gained the whole world, and lost his own soul? The
Lord God was a jealous God, and visited the sins
of the parents upon the children." Unquestionably,
this is the import of Lincoln's Second Inaugural.
How was Lincoln able to overthrow but
preserve the constitution? In denying the right of
secession to uphold the constitution did he not
unavoidably violate its meaning by adopting the
Augustinian doctrine that those who are
unbelievers shall be forced back into the fold?
As noted by Lord Acton that certainly does
not sound like Liberty. As we have seen, it sounds
more like Sayyid Qutb. Unlike Qutb, however,
Lincoln was under no illusion that he was waging a
just war as his handwritten note on warring
parties praying to the same God shows. His motive
was not Augustinian.
To see why, one must
read Lincoln's January 1838 Address Before the
Young Men's Lyceum of Springfield, Illinois. That
address has astounded every thinking person who
has had the good fortune to read it. Instead of
leading America where Augustine would have led
America, Lincoln invoked Jefferson's abstraction
of equality as a proposition not a creature of
natural law. Whether the Islamic world and the
West can successfully withstand the jihadis in
their refusal to do the same is what will
determine the outcome of the terror war.
In all the words ever written by Lincoln,
there is one word which is more telling about the
meaning of America than any other. It is the word
"proposition". In Lincoln's view, as he said at
Gettysburg, we are dedicated to the proposition,
not an immutable moral principle - but to the
proposition - that all persons are created equal.
The Oxford English Dictionary
defines "proposition" as: "The action of propounding
something, or that which is propounded; the
setting forth of something as a subject of
discourse; something proposed for discussion, or a
basis for argument." This is the religion of
America in modern times. And it is a religion
conjoined irretrievably to the state backed by all
the armed force of the United States of America.
There lies the true grievance of the
jihadis; not that America has separated morality
and the state but America's unswerving commitment
to let no man tear asunder this sacred conjoining.
Richard Hofsteder notwithstanding, America is not
a bill of lading.
There is another undated
fragment found after his death in Lincoln's
papers, thought to have been written shortly
before he became president, which no doubt
preoccupied him deeply. The handwritten note says:
If A can prove, however
conclusively, that he may, of right, enslave B -
why may not B snatch up the same argument and
prove equally, that he may enslave A?
You say A is white and B is black. It is
color then; the lighter, having the right to
enslave the darker? Take care. By this rule, you
are to be slave to the first man you meet with a
fairer skin than your own. You do not mean color
exactly? You mean the whites are intellectually
the superiors of the blacks, and therefore have
the right to enslave them? Take care again. By
this rule, you are to be slave to the first man
you meet, with an intellect superior to your
own.
But say you, it is a question of
interest, and, if you can make it your interest,
you have the right to enslave another. Very
well. And if he can make it his interest, he has
the right to enslave you.
Know thy enemy, but know
thyself too.
C Mott Woolley is a
practicing lawyer in Santa Fe, New Mexico. He is a
graduate of the School of International Service at
the American University in Washington, DC, and,
prior to entering law school, served as an intern
in the Bureau of Intelligence and Research, Near
East/South Asia Division, Department of State.
(Copyright 2006 C Mott Woolley.)
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