Force, Faith, and Custom

 by John MacBeath Watkins

For most of human history, we have been ruled by force, faith, and custom.
Force is easy enough to understand. The man on horseback in the expensive armor, helped by his knights, could physically compel commoners into doing his will (and for most of history, it was men who held this role, especially in young dynasties where someone had to establish dominance.)

Any enemy to liberal democracy will need to align themselves with force, in the form of the police and military. They will also need to align themselves with a politically potent faith community, and assure the people that they will be comfortable with the return to faith, force, and custom by aligning themselves with traditional mores. Sexual mores, in particular, are also tied in with religious teachings.

Allow me to make an aside here. Liberals often mourn that the working class votes against their interest in putting into office politicians whose economic policies favor the rich. If that is what they think, they are mistaken about what interests those voters. Reducing them to their economic well-being simply obscures most of what they live for.

Consider that microcosm of human society, the high school. Students are there (in theory) to learn things that will enable them to be productive members of society, but for many students, that is merely an obligation imposed on them by parents and authority figures. What many students spend most of their time doing is fitting themselves into their social environment, being pecked into their place in the pecking order, and learning and at the same time defining their place in the social order.

When you ask students who self-identifies as a bully, only the most troubled students will claim that status, but when you ask students who bullies them, it is often high-status people like those on the football team. These people don't identify themselves as bullies, but they know there is a pecking order, and they are often determined to be the ones doing the pecking.

Novelist Graham Greene, in Our Man in Havana, wrote a scene in which the protagonist has a conversation with a secret policeman about whether he belongs to the torturable class. One of the main goals of high school students is not to fall into the status of the torturable class of students. Those students will be marked by difference. They may be small, fat, inward-looking, homosexual, or bear other marks that they are not like the others.

Some bullies are not despised, but admired. They enforce social norms by making it clear that if you belong to the wrong group, or have the wrong characteristics, you are bound by the rules but not protected by them. When the state of Washington considered anti-bullying legislation, social conservatives opposed it. In the internal logic of organic conservatism, prejudice against out-groups is the wisdom of the culture, a fact clearly stated by Edmund Burke and generally obscured since then. Bullying may seem brutal, but the cruelty is the point. It is often the enforcement mechanism for social norms.

Composer Frank Wilhoit asserted that this was the central premise of conservatism:

“Conservatism consists of exactly one proposition, to wit:

There must be in-groups whom the law protects but does not bind, alongside out-groups whom the law binds but does not protect.”

He further proposed that anti-conservatism would consist of a different proposition:

“The law cannot protect anyone unless it binds everyone; and it cannot bind anyone unless it protects everyone.”

This is essentially what the U.S. Constitution says in the 14^th Amendment, usually called the equal protection clause:

All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside. No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.

The 14^th Amendment was ratified in 1868. In the wake of the Civil War, states that had been in the Confederacy began passing Black Codes, that is, laws that restricted the rights of blacks. The 14^th Amendment was a response to those laws. It was an effort to keep blacks from being marked as part of the torturable class, those whose difference makes them an out-group that the law binds but does not protect. It was an attempt to legislate fairness, which is usually the purpose of legislation, but it went against the gut feelings and the interests of those who held power in many communities, so at times, the success of the 14^th Amendment has been quite limited.

History can happen quickly. Culture changes more slowly.

Some seem to think that pointing out that a conservative politician is a bully, or is being unkind to the homosexuals, transsexuals, and others who have difficulty being accepted by the wider society, is damning to that politician. But remember, just as in high school, some bullies hold high status. Some bullies enforce social norms. And if you say, must we be unkind to these people?, you may be seen as advocating the violation of social norms. We call some people conservatives because they wish to conserve something, and often, it is social norms. When the right speaks of the 'woke mind virus,' they speak of people deciding that the social norms they hold dear should no longer apply. Such people, by advocating for the morality of better treatment for those who have been cast into the torturable class, associate themselves with those considered by more traditional-minded people to be tainted. They fear that if their children are inculcated with such sympathies, their own flesh and blood may fall into the unclean world of the torturable class.

This is not only a strongly-held social norm, it is a real fear for one's offspring, and a real fear of divisions between generations. A parent does not want their child to be associated with the torturable class because they may be tormented, but they also do not want their child to adopt the view that their parent's norms are wrong, because they want their children to continue to be a part of their parent's social milieu. They therefore do not want their children taught that their parents are wrong in the views of such issues as race relations and sexual mores.

Tradition dictates much of what we view as right or wrong, but it is not the only source of these notions.

Religion concerns itself with the greater questions about why we exist and how we should live our lives. It is also concerned with our concept of virtue more intimately than most institutions.
The question of virtue is the question of who is acting rightly. The role of deciding who is acting rightly is a position of great power, determining who shall be stoned to death in the public square and who shall be heaped with praise and rewards. Virtue addresses the question of who may act legitimately and how, and who, if they act, will be acting illegitimately.
It takes a lot less force to rule a willing people, so if the holder of force can get the arbiters of virtue to approve their rule as legitimate, the ruler will have greater stability and require less expenditure on force.
When someone comes along and questions the legitimacy of the Gods themselves, that person is a threat to both church and state. Athens executed Socrates on charges of impiety and corrupting the minds of the youth, because he questioned the accepted notions of justice. Those notions came from the Gods, according to the state and the state religion.
I find it revealing that this happened during a period of Athenian decline, when they were being defeated in the Peloponnesian wars. It is when a society most needs a major rethink that those who have led it into decline are most eager to suppress those who would question their wisdom. Perhaps that is why we so often see this behavior in places where people fear they are weak, such as Germany during the Depression or Islamic State, which viewed Islam as under siege by Western culture. If you think this is a trick elites use to keep power, please review how one gets power in a society such as Athens, famously a democracy. One of the more effective means is to see which way the mob is headed, get in front of them and shout “This way!” while pointing in the direction the mob was going. The problem is that in a time of decline, it isn't just the leaders who feel threatened. A sizable chunk of the body politic is likely to feel the values on which they've based their lives are threatened.
Part of the problem was that Socrates did not live in a secular society, and with no separation of church and state, there was every incentive for those who could use the force of the state to kill him to do so on behalf of those who were the arbiters of virtue. Socrates was a threat to religious authority not just because he questioned their judgment, but also because of the way he did it. He started from a position of doubt, and tried to determine the truth through reason.
Reason is not always a friend to power, and it has not been the dominant means of organizing society for most of human existence.
For most of the time there have been humans on this earth, living with their strange, symbolic world of language and culture, the world has been explained in terms of myth and metaphor. These things deal with truth in a very different way than reason does.
Consider the evolution of culture. Does culture need to be rational or even explicable in order to work? In theory, you could have the people of a culture believing things that are neither rational nor, in any rational or empirical sense, true, and those beliefs could get people to act in ways that produced an orderly, productive society that is able to perpetuate itself and produce generation after generation that hold those same beliefs.
Such a society might not be terribly adaptable or able to deal with a rapidly changing world, but as long as things are stable, this might be the best way for a society to function. For example, little changed in the 1,500 years of the Old, Middle, and New Kingdoms of Egypt. In such a society, kings were gods and priests were servants of God, and things went smoothly, all great and good fun until someone invents iron.^*
The Golden Age of Greece followed the Late Bronze Age Collapse, a dark age in which populations fell and knowledge was lost. The old ways stopped working, the new technology of iron was creating new winners in the world and the old Gods were falling. Doubt set in, and new thoughts flourished. When the old ways didn’t work, people had to find new ways of thinking. Until, or course, the vibrant new civilization started to get old, and to fear the questioning of its arbiters of virtue. From the beginning of the late bronze age collapse in about 1200 BCE to the trial of Socrates in 399 BCE took about 800 years.
But it turned out the Greeks were real pikers when it came to fearing those who questioned the arbiters of virtue. Later Europeans made a regular practice of killing people who questioned the arbiters of virtue, and gained great power by this tactic. And great power led to corruption, and rebellion against corruption, and reformation. One of the things that happened was a 30-year long war that killed off so many people in parts of Europe – Germany in particular – that they had a third fewer people at the end of it than at the beginning.
Does questioning the wisdom of an established religion cause violence? John Locke, in A Letter Concerning Toleration, argued that people believing different things did not cause violence, it was trying to get everyone to believe the same thing that led to religious strife.

That points to a society where religion does not dominate the state, and the state itself is not the ultimate enforcer of religious orthodoxy (such as when a judge in Scotland ordered Thomas Aikenhead to be hanged for making atheist statements in 1697, and an executioner employed by the government did so.)

Locke's insight still holds. Islamic State hoped that a few terrorists could change the way the liberal democracies treat Muslims, and they hoped this would make the very regime some Muslims are fleeing seem more attractive to them. Only if they could spread intolerance would they have a chance of being proved right.

In fact, the tactics of religious terrorists are designed to force their enemies to frame the conflict the same way they do, as if those who hold differing religious views were a direct threat of disorder. Framed in John Locke's logic, it is the effort to impose religious uniformity that causes conflict. Framed in Islamic State or Al Qaeda's terms, only one faith can win, and only people living with one belief system can live in peace. Yet refusing to accept the religious extremist's frame is how the West became wealthy, peaceful, and free.

Locke's insight came from the painful experiences of the Reformation, and the wars that went with it. So, to understand liberalism, we must first review the religious conflicts that made it necessary.

*About 1200 BCE in the Near East.