Martin Luther King and Natural Law

Our educators and much of society have fallen into a subjectivism, where each culture, each group, each individual is to decide for themselves what they “feel” to be right and what is wrong, and is free to act accordingly. This subjectivism, King’s lessons would teach us, leaves us relatively powerless to fight truly immoral laws. If all is subjective, then no laws are truly unjust. Or, perhaps it’s better said that, if all is subjective, all laws are unjust to someone. Neither formula would support true freedom under the rule of law.

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Abraham Lincoln on our Internal Divisions

On this July 4th, Revisit Lincoln's Lyceum Address

This is Lincoln as a 20-something with the wisdom of the ancients and profound messages for us today!

Lincoln began by expressing gratitude to our ancestors who founded and built our nation. Demonstrating conservatism at its very best, he connected the generations of the living, dead, and yet unborn in a community of mutual obligation. It is our task, Lincoln said of the living, to protect and then pass on to posterity what we have inherited.

Where, Lincoln asked, will the threat to our inheritance and our survival as a nation come from? Will it come from an army overseas? Profoundly not, Lincoln asserted. No military force could “take a drink from the Ohio, or make a track on the Blue Ridge, in a trial of a thousand years.” The great danger to the United States will come from inside America, he said. “As a nation of freemen, we must live through all time or die by suicide.”

What are the dangers Lincoln saw that may come to undermine the United States? He warned first of the “mobocratic spirit”—“the increasing disregard for law which pervades the country; the growing disposition to substitute the wild and furious passions in lieu of the sober judgment of the Courts.”
When I recently discussed this text with students, many of them immediately saw parallels with today’s “social media mobs” passionately denouncing those with whom they disagree or sentencing people for perceived crimes of political incorrectness. To counter this spirit of the mob, Lincoln taught a strict dedication to the Constitution and the rule of law, going so far as to say that everyone must remember that “to violate the law, is to trample the blood of his father, and to tear the character of his own, and his children’s liberty.”

Second, he warned in very stark terms of the dangers of political leadership. Rather than celebrating great leaders who would come in the United States, he feared that men would arise with grand ambitions to be satisfied. Where our founders were able to satisfy their ambitions by founding the United States, he feared future leaders, having inherited America already built, would seek to gain their own fame in destruction and rebuilding. Those who scorn “to tread in the footsteps of any predecessor, however illustrious,” he said, belonged to “the family of the lion, or the tribe of the eagle.”

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Juries as Schools for Liberty?

Tocqueville Question of the Day--Juries as Schools for Free Citizens

Juries: "one of the most effective means that a society can use for the education of the people" (448).

How many of you have tried to get out of jury duty? You might rethink that after reading Tocqueville, pages 442-450. Indeed, you might just go volunteer!

If asked about the importance of juries, I think most of us would focus on the rights of the accused and maybe as a protection for us all against arbitrary government decisions. Tocqueville, on the other hand, makes some quite extraordinary assertions that place the institution of the jury near the very core of what makes American democracy work.

He argues that it helps us put on the "mind of the judge" which is the kind of habit that best prepares us to be free. We learn respect for "the idea of right" and learn "the practice of equity." He argues that it teaches us not to retreat from responsibility for our own actions, which he calls a "manly disposition" essential to political virtue. It teaches us our duties to society and combats the "individual egoism" that he calls "the rust of societies."  

In Tocqueville's understanding, this seemingly minor judicial institution becomes "a free school" for the instruction of citizens and free peoples. "I think that the practical intelligence and good political sense of the Americans must be attributed principally to the long use that they have made of the jury in civil matters," Tocqueville argues.  And he concludes, "Thus the jury, which is the most energetic means to make the people rule, is also the most effective means to teach them to rule."

If Tocqueville is right, our challenge, it seems to me, is to find ways to make MORE use of the jury system. If jury trials are a key way of educating our citizens, then we need more opportunities for more citizens to serve and hence to be educated in the dispositions necessary for liberty. 

Teachers: I wonder if you might be moved to try to work jury trials into your curriculum? Has anyone tried that? What do you think of such an exercise? Is there anyone out there with a curriculum using juries? Maybe it is something some center dedicated to civic education might develop if there is a need.

I have long hoped to be called for jury duty. I hope for it even more now that I see how much Tocqueville values the institution. I am eager to participate and test his ideas.  Also interested in hearing from any of you who have served on juries or who have thoughts about Tocqueville's understanding of them.