Colonize Your Bookshelf, Part I
Everyone please welcome Edward Maxwell III, editor-in-chief of Imperium Press, our fifth additional writer at Zeroth Position.
Please note: where references in this series are from forthcoming Imperium Press editions, page numbers have been given from Cambridge University Press editions.
Decolonization is like wallpaper. It has become such a part of the background of life that we notice it like a fish notices water—we are swimming in an ocean of decolonization. And like the tidal wave it is, it has not only reached your doorstep but threatens to carry your bookshelf (and you) away with it. The powers that be have taken aim squarely at both, so you had better colonize it yourself while you still can.
Liberal elites are not stupid. We have a tendency to underestimate the enemy, but they do not run the show without reason. If they do not want you to read old books (and they do not), then they have good reason for this. Frank Zappa, unlikely friend to the political right, was a lifelong conservative. We should not begrudge him that; we can all admire a man who makes a career of dunking on hippies. In one of his interviews he donned his prophet’s cap and foretold of the end of days, telling of “Death by Nostalgia,” where the gap between “The Event” and “Nostalgia for the Event” would continue to narrow until it were so small that the man in the street could not take a single step without being nostalgic for the previous step, and we would reach a kind of maximal entropy where all possible states would be exhausted—everything stops.
We could tweak Zappa’s end-times scenario to where the gap between “The Event” and “Recollection of the Event” should continue to narrow until we reach a state where one could not remember what happened seconds before, where the man in the street would have the historical horizon of a goldfish—at this point we have entered into the mind of the ideological liberal. Let us call it “Death by Amnesia” in honor of Zappa. Liberalism can be characterized in many ways, but one will not go too far wrong in thinking of it as simply amnesia raised to the power of an ideology. Liberalism does not want you to remember the past because a sufficiently long temporal horizon renders it powerless. Liberals do not want you to read old books because everything they believe, every argument they make, has been refuted in a manner more or less definitive some 340 years ago by a man who spoke six languages (two of them dead), saw more of the world than they have, had read more widely than they ever will, and probably held a rank or a post beyond what they could ever achieve had they been alive for all 340 of those years. The only response to such a thorough spanking is to boldly declare “We…uhh…WE’RE DOING IT ANYWAY!”and then run a rapier through our aristocrat, which is just happens to be the approach one observes both in the streets and in institutes of higher “learning” today.
So one had better colonize one’s own bookshelf while still possible. This is not rhetorical; the days of the internet-as-Wild-West are well and truly over. Peak “open web” was probably about 2013—resources available even last year are quickly disappearing. We at Imperium Press know this firsthand, as we have seen multiple online sources cited in our book Nemesis (Zeroth Position review here) go up in smoke since publication in September 2019 (more on this book later). Hopefully, curious readers got to them while the getting was good! We have your back though: we have scrapped actually, you know… publishing books for the moment to focus on a project of archiving books worth reading while they can still be found on the web (and some of those have disappeared as well since starting this project). You did not think this was going to be an academic exercise, did you? As a companion to this archival project, we have selected a few key texts that can serve as your maiden voyage in colonizing your own bookshelf.
Robert Filmer: Patriarcha, or the Natural Power of Kings (1680, posthumous)
Filmer is a good place to start because he a) was brilliant, and b) occupies an important position in the development of liberalism. Most people know Filmer as Locke’s target in the first of his Two Treatises of Government, and most think of him as having been trounced by Locke here. This is because most people have been colonized by liberalism, which is not unlike having been colonized by cordyceps. So let us colonize the terra nullius of the liberal mind; perhaps we can civilize the savages there, or at least give them a few warm blankets for the winter. But first, we must place Filmer in his proper context.
The standard (liberal) account is that it was all “divine right of kings” this and “silk slipper on your neck” that from time immemorial until the stunning and brave Locke stood athwart history and yelled “Stop!” with such force that everyone (or at least everyone who counted) simply could no longer believe that kings should rule, and spontaneously decided to organize society on the basis of human rights, consent of the governed, and rule of law. But of course, the reality is somewhat different. Divine right of kings has never been standard operating procedure, and was in fact something quite new in Filmer’s time. Does this come as a surprise? Good thing you decided to colonize your bookshelf.
In ancient times God, king, and country were unified, and so sovereignty, such as it was, was clear and indivisible. The king was necessarily high priest, and so there could be no division between sacred and secular rulership, no “divine right” of kings any more than there is “wet water”—the kingship being a priestly office, no one ever thought to ask whether it was filled by divine favor. Later, with the advent of Christianity, came the first inkling of a sacred vs. secular in the form of Augustine’s “City of Man vs. City of God”. The Early Middle Ages, from the Byzantine Papacy through the Frankish period to about the 11th century, is the story of sacred and secular struggling for dominion one over the other.
At every stage in this power struggle, divine right (conspicuously lacking the genitive) was invoked, whether by Emperor or by Pope, to justify his rule over the other. The struggle reached a tipping point in the excommunication of the Holy Roman Emperor by Pope Gregory VII, placing himself under no authority but that of God. Not to be outdone, secular apologists pointed to the Augustinian “City of Man” distinction to justify a sort of division of labor between papacy and earthly ruler, justifying their attempts to reform the church’s “lapsed standards.” This struggle continued, culminating in the Reformation, which was patronized into existence by Frederick III, Elector of Saxony, among other secular authorities. In response to this blow against the papacy, we see a landmark in the rough beast slouching toward liberalism: the rise of consensual theories of governance.
We should note here that consensual theories are still divine right theories, just not divine right of kings—but rather of the people. The foremost champions of these consensual theories of governance were Francisco Suarez and Cardinal Bellarmine, and it is here that Filmer enters the picture, responding to these proto-liberals. Having spent enough time sketching out the background, I will provide the punchline right up front: popular sovereignty is idiotic if it is coherent at all; rule of law is even worse.
“Rule of law” is a widely misunderstood concept, often taken to mean simply “law and order” rather than, in the words of Thomas Paine, that “the law ought to be King” instead of that “the King is law.” Paine would have the law be supreme and sovereign, whether common law, constitution, or otherwise, and that no man can subordinate it to himself; he must always be subordinated to it. We take this so far for granted today that it is like our proverbial wallpaper—we can hardly imagine an alternative. And yet, under examination, this lofty idea falls apart. Filmer leaves the notion of rule of law in tatters by simply pointing out:
“It is not the law that is the ‘minister of God,’ or that ‘carries the sword,’ but the ruler or magistrate. So they that say the law governs the kingdom may as well say that the carpenter’s rule builds the house and not the carpenter, for the law is but the rule or instrument of the ruler.”[1]
This is the well-worn argument, so familiar to conservatives, that guns do not kill people, people kill people—but applied to the notion of sovereignty. The law cannot be sovereign because a sovereign is an agent, and an agent has will. Men are ruled by men, not by a piece of paper. At most the piece of paper can serve the man as a tool, but it cannot rule by itself any more than Filmer’s hammer can cave in someone’s skull by itself.
If that were not enough, Filmer also reminds us that laws were originally unwritten, which seems like a very odd way to bind kings. How can the highest power in the land be bound by something with no formal existence? It was not until the time of the lawgivers—Draco and Solon for the Greeks, the decemviri for the Romans—that these peoples had anything like a piece of paper that could “rule.” So as to drive the “sovereign as agent” point home, Filmer recalls that these laws could not even be formalized without granting to the lawgiver the sort of absolute power that “rule of law” seeks to limit. Bodin, whose notion of sovereignty-as-maiestas heavily influenced Filmer, pointed out that the sovereign can no more bind himself than a hand can hold itself down; the very idea does not even make sense. It seems that law was never meant to bind the ruler, because it cannot. Rather, it was meant to bind the people. Kings are above the laws; the only law they are bound by, according to Filmer, is what he calls the “natural law of a father,” which leads us to his main thesis: that popular sovereignty makes no sense.
As with rule of law, popular sovereignty is so much a part of the modern scenery that it is almost never justified, as though such a thing is self-evident. But to the credit of Bellarmine and Suarez, they at least offered arguments in support of it. Unfortunately, their reasoning is as convoluted and tortuous as one might expect, but Filmer, who quotes them at length, gives them a fair hearing. He then simply points to the natural dependence of children on fathers, and notes that this dependence is exactly the same for the sovereign-subject relation as for the father-child relation. As his opponents are concerned to argue for elective monarchy, not democracy, he points out that there is no scriptural precedent for elective monarchy, no philosophical precedent, no historical precedent, no precedent at all, really. There is no historical or scriptural case to be made, so the case must be made by way of reason. How is elective monarchy to work?
Since popular sovereignty turns on the natural right of the people to self-determination, we must first ask ourselves, what people? Is the whole of humanity the self-governing community in question? Suarez admits that this is frankly impossible, or, maybe early on this was the case—he is not sure. But perhaps we can bracket this historical problem and simply ask how the assembly of “the people” should come to any decision. Would it require a simple majority? A supermajority? Could this done by delegates or representatives? A majority of them? A supermajority? etc. The law of nature is troublingly silent on whether it is 50%+1 or some other number. We can agree with Suarez that surely we cannot expect all members of the community to be present at the popular assemblies, but if even one man is missing, we must admit that his tacit approval is legitimate, and if tacit approval is legitimate, the usurper is legitimate to the extent the people dare not dissent.
Thus far, popular sovereignty is not adding up on paper; we cannot seem to articulate how things ought to be done without running into absurdities, but at least we can articulate how things have been done in the past. Let us take the strongest example of a republic—Rome—and see if we can raise a structure around it. As it turns out, Rome’s halcyon days as a republic lasted at most 482 years. This sounds impressive to us today, but is quite short by historical standards. To put it in perspective, the entire Roman Republic lasted half as long as the Byzantine Empire, less than half the length of the Assyrian monarchy, and almost exactly as long as the Egyptian New Kingdom alone. And even granting Rome its 482 years, those years were hardly filled with stability and democratic rule. First we have the consuls, then the tribunes and consuls, then the decemviri, then the tribunes and consuls again, occasionally dictators, military tribunes, etc. Normally, 5–10% of possible voters took part in electing magistrates or passing laws in the Centuriate Assembly, and of this number, the knights and first class alone comprised half the voting units, often making the rest of the vote unnecessary. Moreover, only Rome itself had “democracy,” with its vassals and provinces excluded from popular assemblies and denied self-determination. Imperfect though it was, it was at least powerful, no? Let us recall that Rome did not even gain its imperium under democracy—this would have to await the Principate, which was simply monarchy by another name. And the greatest Roman endorsement of monarchy? That in her greatest peril, Rome created herself a dictator. This is a good point to stop because the historical, rational, and scriptural case for democracy and rule of law has effectively collapsed and there is not really anything left to critique.
The consensus among most political observers is that any political discourse much before the 19th century—and especially from the pre-modern period—is more or less a waste of time to anyone except specialists who enjoy hairsplitting disputes over historical trivia. Granted, Filmer does spend a fair bit of time in Patriarcha discussing issues like regal succession from Adam, but he offers a great deal of rational and historical argumentation which too often goes unremarked upon in favor of the narrative that Locke argued rationally against a Biblical literalist who confined himself to scriptural exegesis. So we should take with a grain of salt the Wikipedia entry on Filmer that characterizes him in just this way.
Before we leave Filmer, we would be remiss if we did not mention his quarrel with the Catholic Church as the main force arguing against divine right of kings and for consensual theories of government. This throws into stark relief the Jouvenelian dynamic whereby center (e.g. kings) and intermediaries (e.g. church) are locked in a power struggle in trying to wield the periphery (e.g. “the people”) as a tool, and makes clear Filmer’s otherwise mysterious statement:
“Late writers have taken up too much upon trust from the subtle school-men, who to be sure to thrust down the king below the pope, thought it the safest course to advance the people above the king, that so the papal power may more easily take place of the regal.”[2]
It also throws into question the simplistic paradigm of “Catholic red-pilled, Protestant blue-pilled,” as one will take great pains to find a more red-pilled political observer than Filmer. But so as not to leave our Catholic brethren out in the cold, we have taken those pains for you, and shall turn in Part II to a good Catholic lad who offers us even stronger meat than Filmer.
References
- Filmer, Robert (1680). Patriarcha, or the Natural Power of Kings. Cambridge University Press. Ch. 3, §3, p.39.
- Filmer, Ch. 1, §1, p.5.
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