In a recent podcast, the American-born Spectator columnist Lionel Shriver spoke about her growing dismay with the authoritarian tendencies of the Left in American politics as it tries to destroy the electoral chances of Donald Trump. She compared the efforts of leading Democrats to ensure that the American electorate does not make the 2024 election repeat the 2016 election. No fan of Mr. Trump, she like many others of the punditry class, voiced dismay that Democrats are using the judicial system as a weapon against Mr. Trump, charging him with offenses of a dubious nature using questionable legal theories. Her greatest concern seemed to be that the Democrats have morphed into a party of authoritarianism, willing to use any and all means to remain in power. She also opined that the Democrats justify this “victory at all costs” effort by citing the need to prevent the electorate from committing what Democrats see as a grievous error - the election of Donald Trump as President of the United States.
But the politics behind this obvious overreach by Democratic Party hacks at local, state, and federal levels, whether elected or appointed, whether Attorney or Judges, is not the focus of this essay. Rather, I want to comment on what Lionel Shrive almost said about why we have reached the point in Western politics where wining at all costs, even the destruction of norms and traditions that sustain our liberal democracies, by using immoral means has become common place in Western societies.
In response to a question from the Podcast’s moderator, the Spectator’s Deputy Editor, Freddy Gray, Ms. Shriver alluded to the loss of a consensus on objective standards of right-and-wrong. She almost arrived at the fundamental problem now confronting the West, or rather bearing its poisonous and rotten fruit after years of festering in the gardens of academia. If there is not objective moral standard, if the fundamental principles of fairness and justice have been chucked onto the ash heap of history to make way for rule by the powerful with the will to use power unrestrained, then Western Civilization is dead, and we are on the cusp of a true Dark Ages, one in which a minority of men and women with no moral compunctions whatsoever impose their will on others almost solely because they can, not even claiming that they are doing so out of compassion for the less-fortunate such as the non-degreed deplorables who cling to their traditions and antiquated notions of fairness and justice.
Alas for Ms. Shriver, unlike the historian Tom Holland, she remains stuck in a secular humanist construct that says we can dispense with faith in divine revelation to know the truth. Like dedicated humanists that formerly observed human beings were distinct from other species living in our common home, Earth, and honest cultural anthropologists that noted all human societies had inherent notions of fairness and justice, Ms. Shriver cannot seem to reach the logical conclusion that human distinctiveness combined with universal norms of justice points to an extra-human origin for our beliefs of what is right and wrong.
It would be futile to try to learn the reasons why she and millions of other Westerners cannot bring themselves to accept the extra-human, properly called divine, origin of natural law, a law written in the hearts of all persons, as noted by Paul of Tarsus. More importantly, what are we to do to return the West to an acceptance of the universality of natural law? How do we restore natural law to its proper place as the recognized foundation of our legal and judicial systems? Of the basis for the conduct of relationships in the political, business, social, and personal spheres?
First, we must recognize the there are many allies of a sort, like Ms. Shriver, who recognize that no society, or rather no society beneficial to the vast majority of its members, can endure in which the powerful make the rules with no reference to long-standing formulations of justice and fairness.
Second, we must engage with them as allies in confronting those who purvey a society based on grievance and the re-definition of justice and fairness based on the relative value of a person due to membership in a discrete identity group. We must steadfastly maintain the inherent equality of dignity of every human being, affirming that each person has infinite value.
Third, we must have the courage to speak the truth, knowing that we will be pilloried for daring to claim that there is a universal natural law of justice that has been written on each human heart by the divinity rather than accept the lie that we can design a better system of right-and-wrong with no reference to nature or nature’s Creator.
In sum, we have taken a wrong turn, so we must go back to where we made that wrong turn and get back on the right road. Where did we turn wrong? For each of us it was at a different point, but it always involved a self-exaltation versus a humble acceptance of my dependency on others, or the Other. How to do it? I recommend The Abolition of Man by Mr. C. S. Lewis, in which he foretells what would come of an abandonment of adherence to the universal natural law embodies in the ethical prescription to “do unto others as you be done by.”