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Natural Law
1 December 2012
This section 5.2 Natural Law is taken from the “Draft Constitution of the Commonwealth of Canada” §5.2 Natural Law The notion of natural law, opposed to Aristotle, consistent with republican law, is centred for human understanding in the following terms of reference. The rational individual locates the source of that rationality in the individual’s perception that each individual life is mortal, a mere ephemeral in the breadth and duration of humanity and within the universe as a whole. To rise above the moral condition of a mere beast, the individual must contribute to an enduring Good beyond the limits of merely any immediate benefit to his or her mortal passions, to some Good which radiates from the practice of the individual into the breadth and duration of humanity and the universe in which humanity as a whole is situated. It is only as the individual rises above hedonism and hedonism’s intrinsic irrationalism, to become the instrument for a higher purpose greater than the individual’s mortal life, that morality, rationality, and true law become possible for mankind. The problem confronting each moral individual is the problem of discovering in what way the consequences of the individual’s acts, and acts of omission, are ordered in respect to the breadth and duration of reality outside the scope of the ephemeral mortal life of that individual. To this end, there can be no efficient morality or law, unless the individual is governed by knowledge of the lawful composition of cause and effect in the universe more broadly. It happens, that mankind proves the efficiency for good or bad of the policies of societies in the rise and ebb of cultures and nations over thousands of years. Mankind proves the appropriateness or failure of adopted policies by the effect of those policies in determining what is most efficiently named the potential relative population density of mankind, man’s progress in greater mastery of nature, expressed as an increase in the power of the individual, an increased power expressed as an advancement of the individual’s knowledge of practice. These advances prove that certain directions of improvement in knowledge governing practice are in greater agreement with the lawful ordering of the universe. Although man’s knowledge at any time is always imperfect, always waiting to be superseded by the next scientific revolution in technology of human productive practice, there is a facet of such progress which endures all such scientific revolutions: the provable principles of discovery which order a succession of advances in such knowledge. Thus, although we usually view technological progress as a source of increased material benefits to the nation and its individual persons, accompanying the possibility of such benefits, there is something divine. That divine correlative is the increase of agreement between man’s actions of Creation and the lawful ordering of Creation. Man becomes in this way, equipped to be the more efficient Gardener in the service of the Creator, ordering changes in the universe according to those lawful principles embodied in the lawful composition of Creation. The Erasmian tradition in education has demonstrated that a classical education in literate language, accompanied by classical principles of poetic and musical composition, painting, sculpture, architecture, and geometry, produces in the graduate of secondary schools so ordered an individual in whom all of the potentialities have been cultivated, an individual empowered, in the words of Shelley, to impart and receive profound and impassioned conceptions respecting man and nature. The superior aptitude of the person benefiting from such a classical education for science is but an inseparable facet of a larger whole. Technology is man’s duty, man’s day to day work. It is the whole individual’s divine potentialities which are the self-evident object served in an indispensable manner by technological progress. It is the coherence of scientific progress with the conceptions of great poetry, music, drama, painting, sculpture, and architecture, which the people of a great nation seek to perfect and to celebrate in common, as a reflected expression of the Goodness of which man’s divine potentials render mankind capable. It is that Goodness for which the constitutional republic is properly the instrument. The special significance of the Golden Renaissance for mankind’s present comprehension of these conceptions of natural law is the emphasis placed upon the development of the sovereign nation-state republic.A people speaking one of a collection of relatively brutish local dialects or argots is a brutalised people, morally incapable of self-government. The development of the individual in terms of a literate form of language, in the power to think and to impart and to receive profound and impassioned conceptions respecting man and nature, is the necessary basis for ordering the affairs of mankind. The proper ordering of human affairs must be based on sovereign nation-states among peoples sharing appropriate moral principles in common and also deliberating matters of self-government in a common literate form of language. We republicans of today are the heirs of St. Augustine, of Italy’s Golden Renaissance, and of the great Erasmian movements of sixteenth century England and France, typified for France by Henri IV, Richelieu, Mazarin, Colbert and the Oratorian teaching-order. It is only by avowing the unity of an English-speaking and a French-speaking population in terms of that Erasmian heritage that the Commonwealth of Canada finds a basis for a unity that may endure. O, Canada, let the common use of literate English and French for national affairs be the rule, but this can be durably accomplished only if the noblest form of the English and the French languages are the standard of popular literacy, and if the rich contributions of your immigrants from numerous parts of the world are lovingly assimilated as the shared heritage of all of your people. Where two languages exist as they do in Canada, the differences arising from language must be bridged by a powerful unity in conscious perception of shared moral principles, and in which each of the languages is raised to the highest degree of literacy of which it is capable. |