The Mask of the Beast

Every civilized society has laws which prohibit its members, or anyone else for that matter who happens to be within its jurisdiction, from murdering, kidnapping and raping other people and stealing, damaging, or destroying their property. These laws are universally considered to be just. I do not mean that every single person who has ever lived has agreed with this consensus. I mean that every civilized society, considered as a collective entity, has agreed with the consensus. Uncivilized societies and the forces of barbarism within civilization, such as the Marxist Critical Theorists who regard civilization itself as being fundamentally unjust and who would disagree with the laws protecting property, are obviously outside that consensus.

What is it about these laws which makes them just?

The classical liberal answer is that they can all be derived from the harm principle. In classical liberalism, that is to say eighteenth - nineteenth century liberalism, the securing of the rights and freedoms of individuals was made to be the sole purpose for the existence of the state. From that perspective, laws which by their very nature restrict the rights and freedoms of individuals, must be justified by the necessity which arises out of the harm done to others by the violation of those laws. John Stuart Mill’s On Liberty is the classic exposition of this theme. Unlike many twentieth and twenty-first century progressive liberals, who often give the impression of agreeing with the Marxists and other socialists on this matter, the classical liberals saw harm done to property as being harm done to the property’s owner.

While the harm principle was not entirely an invention of Mill or even of liberalism in general – what is arguably an early form of it can be found in the writings of thirteenth century Scholastic theologian St. Thomas Aquinas – its spread in the Modern Age of liberalism is indicative of a shift away from the older paradigm of thinking. In the older tradition, laws of this sort were considered just because the actions which they forbade were regarded as wicked. This meant more than just that these actions were wrong, although that was obviously included. It meant that they were sufficiently wrong to warrant suppression by the force of law. The difference between wickedness and wrongness in general pertained to both degree and kind, but with regards to the latter difference, the older tradition perceived in these acts a threat to the peace and security of the society as a whole and emphasized this over the harm done to the individual.

It could be argued that in theory, the older tradition would have less of a problem than liberalism with other laws, and more specifically with laws which are against acts which are merely mala prohibita, that is to say, bad or wrong because they are against the law, rather than mala in se – bad or wrong in themselves, regardless of the law. If, in the older tradition, the wickedness of an act which justifies its suppression by law is to be found in the threat to the peace and security of the society more than in the harm to the individual, then any violation of the law could be said to qualify as wicked because by breaking any particular law, it breaks the law as a singular whole, and the law as a singular whole is what maintains peace and security within the society. Those who read history through the lens of the Whig Interpretation, in which the events of the past are perceived as progressively moving towards greater freedom today and in the future, would be particularly inclined to accept this argument.

The reality, however, does not bear out the Whig Interpretation. The transition into the Modern Age which had liberalism as its zeitgeist, made government a much larger and more intrusive presence in the lives of the governed rather than less of one. I am not referring only to the hard totalitarian aberrations that arose out of the radical and revolutionary branches of Modern continental thought in Germany and Russia in the early twentieth century. In the English-speaking liberal democracies, governments exert regulatory control over a far larger portion of people’s everyday lives today than they did prior to the English Civil War, much of the distinction between private and public spaces has been eliminated, and people have become accustomed to paying taxes at levels that are exponentially higher than what would have been considered unbearable tyranny prior to the Modern Age. In other words, by the standards with which the pre-liberal tradition measured freedom, we are much less free today than before liberalism.

In the last decades of the twentieth century those who attempted to argue against this conclusion pointed to areas in which they maintained there were far fewer restrictions on individual choice than ever before. Since this basically reduced to a single area – sexual behaviour and preferences – this argument had been rebutted before it was ever made by Aldous Huxley, in his 1932 novel Brave New World, which depicted a totalitarian world in which every individual’s life was planned out by the state from the moment of genetic engineering until death, and the state prevented people from rebelling against this total lack of freedom in all other areas of their lives – or even noticing it – by encouraging maximum sexual freedom – and providing them with ample amounts of a euphoria-inducing substance called soma. Today, we are less likely to hear this sort of argument, not so much because everybody has been persuaded by Huxley’s book as because sexual liberation has so obviously morphed into a form of totalitarianism that seeks to suppress all dissent from those who believe in more traditional mores.

I have often discussed how the noun in liberal democracy has contributed to this trend of maximizing government control and decreasing freedom. While small-r republicans like to blame kings like Henry VIII and Louis XIV for the omnipotent Modern state, and it is true that the centralization that these sovereigns introduced, by upsetting the more de-centralized feudal balance, contributed to the problem, this was made far worse when the elected assemblies usurped most of the royal powers. While Parliament as an institution that evolved in the pre-Modern era was a safeguard of freedom, the Modern abstract ideal of democracy is not, because the idea of popular government contradicts the idea of limited government. There can be no rational limits to government, when government of and by the people is made to be the ideal, for this eliminates the distinction between government and governed which is the very foundation upon which the idea of limiting government power rests. John Farthing was right and liberalism was wrong – freedom wears a crown.

Today, however, it is evident how the adjective in liberal democracy has contributed to the same trend. While Mill saw his harm principle as a protection of individual freedom against the encroachment of expanding government, it has become the very basis of a new totalitarianism.

I introduced this essay by talking about the type of laws against mala in se crimes such as murder, rape, kidnapping, robbery, etc. which have universally been considered to be just among civilized societies. Let us think about what the opposite of this type of law would look like. Obviously laws which are the opposite of those universally considered to be just, would be laws which, to paraphrase the Vincentian canon so as to apply it to a political rather than an ecclesiastical contest, would be considered unjust by all civilized societies in all places and all times. Such laws would not prohibit mala in se crimes, or even acts which might be considered morally neutral, but acts which are bona in se, that is good in themselves. What kind of laws might these be?

Laws against going to Church to worship God. Laws against shaking someone’s hand or cheering someone up with a hug. Laws against holding gatherings of your large extended family. Laws against meeting up with your friends in person rather than online. Laws against opening your business or going to your job so as to support yourself and your family rather relying upon the public purse. Laws, in other words, against normal, basic, everyday good human behaviour.

Laws which were almost universally imposed, even outside totalitarian hellholes like Red China and North Korea, over the past four months.

How did our governments justify these insane prohibitions of the good?

They used the harm principle, of course. Engaging in ordinary, decent, human social and economic activity, they claimed, would put people in danger of contracting a new coronavirus which had escaped from China and was rapidly spreading around the globe. While the dangers this virus posed were themselves grossly exaggerated, the very idea of prohibiting almost all ordinary, good, human behaviour in order to prevent harm from a virus is warped. The restrictions and regulations of these “public health orders” are, by the standards of civilization since time immemorial, fundamentally unjust. Indeed, there can be no word more appropriate to describe rules that prohibit the good than the word evil. Make that Evil with a capital E.

It is not over yet. After four months of this abominable universal house arrest which treats all law-abiding citizens as criminals, government health officials are finally considering letting people go back to Church again. Most businesses were allowed to re-open long before this. All sorts of restrictions are being imposed upon the re-opening Churches, and all of them are restrictions that any true believer in Jesus Christ will immediately recognize as vile obscenities that were thought up in the fiery pit of hell by the devil himself. Limiting attendance. Requiring people to register in advance. Prohibiting the Sacrament, in one or both kinds. (1) Prohibiting congregational singing. Prohibiting physical contact like the customary handshake or hug in the Pax. Requiring mask wearing as a condition of attendance. The specifics vary from jurisdiction to jurisdiction (2) but the evil spirit behind these restrictions is the same everywhere.

It was through liberalism, including and especially Mill’s harm principle, which is clearly not remotely as innocuous and benign as it seems, that this evil spirit has so pervaded the governments of what used to be Christendom. It was through the same ideology, wearing theological garb, that it has so pervaded the Churches that they are willingly submitting to these requirements, as they willingly submitted to the governments’ orders to close in the first place. This is not the obedience to the civil authority that is enjoined upon believers as individuals and as Churches in the New Testament, but a rendering unto Caesar of that which is God’s.

In the eighteenth chapter of the Gospel according to St. Luke, the Lord Jesus concludes the parable of the Unjust Judge by saying “And shall not God avenge his own elect, which cry day and night unto him, though he bear long with them? I tell you that he will avenge them speedily.” He then asks this question “Nevertheless when the Son of man cometh, shall he find faith on the earth?”

If He were to come back today, then judging by the behaviour of the Churches in this pandemic, the answer to His question is clearly no. If He were to come back tomorrow, He would likely find His Church wearing the mask of the Beast.

(1) Restricting the Sacrament to the one kind would be less of an issue for the Roman Communion, which broke with the universal practice of the Church from the first to the twelfth centuries almost a millennium ago. The Byzantine Communion has maintained the early Church practice all along, and the Anglican Communion, in returning to the practice in the Reformation, forbade the restriction in the Thirtieth of the Articles of Religion of the Elizabethan Settlement. Communion in both kinds is also the doctrine and practice of the other Churches of the Magisterial Reformation, as well as practically all of the sects.
(2) Some, but not all of the ones listed, have been put in place here in the province of Manitoba. For a much longer list, see Laurence M. Vance’s “CDC Churches.”