John Locke’d & Loaded

Is the Constitution binding? John Adams wasn’t just bloviating when he wrote ”Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.” Even more important than the words “moral and religious people” is the indefinite article “A”. Our Constitution was made only for A People. Here is why: The Constitution was based upon John Locke’s optimistic enlightened philosophy as opposed to Hobbes’ Divine Right of Kings. Hobbes believed that without “a common power to keep them all in awe, they are in that conditions called war; and such a war, as if of every man, against every man. The state of Nature in Hobbe’s mind is “…no account of Time; no Arts; no Letters; no Society; and, which is worst of all, continual fear and danger of violent death, and the life of man solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.” Locke was far more optimistic. See box below.

Locke assumed that the large majority of social cohesion arises organically. The morés or norms are found in the culture. Until very recently most Americans never had the pleasure of having to hire a lawyer. Most of our behavior was determined by our sense of right and wrong. How often did people consult the legal code? Rarely. How this is possible is that Society organically creates (or IS) order. The Constitution was constructed for an organically created society of rational men and women working together to improve the lot of all in order to improve their own particular lot. The designated powers of the Federal Government are very few. And it was possible because all Americans behaved in an orderly manner based on social custom. Only a tiny percentage of society’s codes were written. We required little government because our Anglo-Saxon culture esteemed individual liberty, and private property. But there are those who seek to impose their “better” systems on the rest of us. They know that it requires coercion to force the masses into allowing the intellectual “vanguard of revolution” to lead its into a ”golden age”. This requires a far more intrusive government. And in turn that requires the demolition or “deconstruction” of the unwritten codes of behavior. It is for instance not “homophobia” responsible for the anger towards gay marriage but rather the concept that the State has coopted the power to reach upward to change the culture, when it was the culture that created the State. The Left has made America ungovernable by liberal (classic) philosophy. And it is their dream to destroy the relevancy of the Constitution. The Left has weaponized the State. The State which was merely a veneer overlying the Nation has now become the enemy of the Nation. The politicization of bathrooms for example the politicization of everything is part of the State’s war to replace Nation with government. The Globalists in Europe seek to bring Muslims into every European nation. Why? Why: to diminish the differences between say Italy and Denmark, Spain and Sweden. And the Left’s fixation on more and more Hispanic and Muslim migration is the American equivalent of an attack on the NATION!

The Journalist’s Lament: Yes, There is An American Culture!

This is an article in the NY Times Aug. 8, 2016. HERE.   It purports to be a handwringing mea culpa confessing the predicament of the tortured soul of the professional Journalist in reporting on Donald Trump.
Why is there an issue? There is an issue because the very philosophic underpinnings of J-School make opposition to Trump a baked-in conclusion. How so? I shall attempt to explain.
The Golden Rule of J-School is OBJECTIVITY. The Journalist presumes his view is objective. But to be truly objective one must be in a vantage point above the level upon which the news happens.
J-school is the ultimate expression of the post-Modern education philosophy. And that is the effort to demonstrate that all societies are built upon arbitrary cultural symbols, whether sounds, letters, pictures, body language, facial expression and so on. But since J-school is essentially a Western phenomenon and in our case an American one it directs its de-constructive lens upon American culture.
Objectivity is the attempt to perceive the arbitrariness of the symbols of culture. It is like trying to hear English as sounds devoid of meaning. To attempt to do so is frightening for if one succeeded it might be impossible to come back! Or, try looking at our written language as a series of squiggles and lines. Impossible.
Yet what is culture other than arbitrary actions, sounds, patterns of group movements? J-school is where students go to complete their self de-privileging program. To compare New Guinean war steps with the ballet: both merely arbitrary movements conveying cultural information, might be true. But so what?
A graduate of such a culturally-self-abnegating program will indeed be unable or unwilling to concede any superiority of one set of arbitrary cultures over another.
A Nation is a People sharing a culture, which is a language, a common literature, a common sense of history etc. Our American political culture has been based on the Lockean principles in vogue in Britain at the time of our origin. In Locke’s view humans are capable of self-assembly. We create an organic culture over time. To better protect our rights in a more complicated society we form governments. We are not naturally at war ourselves against all, as Thomas Hobbes would have us.
Here is the key to the journalists’ inability to report on Trump. Nations are Peoples with Cultures. Cultures are based upon arbitrary signs and symbols. Once deconstructed it is like Humpty Dumpty! It is as if one were able to hear English as merely the inherently meaningless sounds which it is, and not be able to get back!
How could graduates of a deliberate self-inflicted cultural lobotomy fail to see Trump as a dinosaur? “Make America Great Again” does not compute. They would require multiple layers of quotes to write that! But Trump asks DO WE HAVE A COUNTRY OR NOT?
Are we a Nation, a People with a particular culture (within a range of cultures, yes) and a particular language, with a particular sense of private property, and Rights?

John Locke said a People self-organize to produce an organic society and only much later is formal legalistic government created. 99% of our daily lives proceeds without recourse to the legal systems. That vast preponderance of the social glue is vested in the culture. The De-Construction of a particular culture by demonstrating its basis in arbitrary symbols is not compatible with “having a country”!

This explains why Journalists are leftists, and why leftists are totalitarian. Normal societies operate on a subliminal level, as stated above.  99% of our activities and interactions are culturally determined.  Rarely do we require legal opinions in our daily lives!  However, once cultural norms are dismissed as “merely” arbitrary understandings what remains to counter the centrifugal force of individuals devoid of cultural cohesion?
Only the State remains.  And in a republic unmoored from a Constitution restricting the arena in which majoritarianism presides, the NATION is subjugated to a purely a POLITICAL entity.  When all human interactions are considered political… that is Totalitarianism!