Bergoglio the Positivist - Okay with Nicolas Maduro, Xi Jinping

[The following text is the talk given by Sandro Magister at the study conference organized on June 4 2019 in Rome, at Palazzo Giustiniani, by the Fondazione Magna Carta, on the theme: “Catholics, politics, and the challenges of the third millennium”].

About politics Joseph Ratzinger has written and said a great deal, as theologian, as bishop, as pope. But to grasp his overall vision it is enough to review the speech that he gave on September 22 2011 in Berlin, to the Bundestag, on the last of his journeys to Germany.

He began by citing the prayer of the young king Solomon on the day of his ascent to the throne, when he did not ask God for success or wealth but “a listening heart so that he may govern God’s people, and discern between good and evil” (1 Kings 3:9). A request that is “the decisive issue facing politicians and politics today”.

Then Benedict XVI summarized as follows, in history, the role that Christianity has played in this question:

“Unlike other great religions, Christianity has never proposed a revealed law to the State and to society, that is to say a juridical order derived from revelation. Instead, it has pointed to nature and reason as the true sources of law – and to the harmony of objective and subjective reason, which naturally presupposes that both spheres are rooted in the creative reason of God. Christian theologians thereby aligned themselves with a philosophical and juridical movement that began to take shape in the second century B.C. In the first half of that century, the social natural law developed by the Stoic philosophers came into contact with leading teachers of Roman Law. Through this encounter, the juridical culture of the West was born, which was and is of key significance for the juridical culture of mankind. This pre-Christian marriage between law and philosophy opened up the path that led via the Christian Middle Ages and the juridical developments of the Age of Enlightenment all the way to the Declaration of Human Rights.”

“There has been a dramatic shift in the situation in the last half-century, of which Hans Kelsen was a great theoretician. A “positivist conception of nature” has been imposed, from which “no ethical indication of any kind can be derived” and in which “the classical sources of knowledge for ethics and law are excluded.” With the result that we find ourselves living as if in “a concrete bunker with no windows, in which we ourselves provide lighting and atmospheric conditions, being no longer willing to obtain either from God’s wide world.”

But we need not resign ourselves to this outcome: “The windows must be flung open again, we must see the wide world, the sky and the earth once more and learn to make proper use of all this.” With a journey of reconstruction that Benedict XVI described as follows, with a surprising reference to ecology:

“I would say that the emergence of the ecological movement in German politics since the 1970s, while it has not exactly flung open the windows, nevertheless was and continues to be a cry for fresh air which must not be ignored or pushed aside, just because too much of it is seen to be irrational. […] We must listen to the language of nature and we must answer accordingly. Yet I would like to underline a point that seems to me to be neglected, today as in the past: there is also an ecology of man. Man too has a nature that he must respect and that he cannot manipulate at will. Man is not merely self-creating freedom. Man does not create himself. He is intellect and will, but he is also nature, and his will is rightly ordered if he respects his nature, listens to it and accepts himself for who he is, as one who did not create himself. In this way, and in no other, is true human freedom fulfilled.”

Which leads to the final question: “Is it really pointless to wonder whether the objective reason that manifests itself in nature does not presuppose a creative reason, a ‘Creator Spiritus’?”

It is difficult, if not impossible, to find even a trace of Ratzinger’s vision in the idea of politics that is ingrained in Pope Francis, born instead from his experience of life, beginning with the Argentine ’68:

In Argentina, the student and labor uprisings flared up shortly after those in Paris or Los Angeles, in 1969, the year in which Bergoglio celebrated his first Mass, and immediately the militias joined the fray, the Montoneros, who in 1970, when he took his vows, kidnapped and executed former president Pedro Aramburu.

Precociously appointed novice master, the then 34-year-old Bergoglio completely espoused the cause of bringing back Juan Domingo Perón, who in those years was in exile in Madrid. He became the spiritual director of of the young Peronists of the Guardia de Hierro, who had a powerful presence at the Jesuit Universidad del Salvador. And he continued this militancy after his surprise appointment as provincial superior of the Jesuits of Argentina in 1973, the same year in which Perón returned to the country and won his triumphant reelection.

Bergoglio was among the writers of the “Modelo nacional,” the political testament that Perón wanted to leave after his death. And for all of this he drew the ferocious hostility of a good half of the Argentine Jesuits, more leftist than he, especially after he surrendered the Universidad del Salvador, which was put up for sale in order to stabilize the finances of the Society of Jesus, to none other than his friends of the Guardia de Hierro.

It was in those years that the future pope developed the “myth” - his word - of the people as protagonist of history. A word that by its nature is innocent and a bearer of innocence, a people with the innate right to “tierra, techo, trabajo” and that he sees as overlapping with the “santo pueblo fiel de Dios.”

But in addition to his experience of life, Bergoglio’s political vision also took shape thanks to the instruction of a teacher, as he confided to the French sociologist Dominique Wolton in a book-length interview that Wolton also edited, entitled “Politique et societé,” released in 2017:

“There is a thinker that you should read: Rodolfo Kusch, a German who lived in northwestern Argentina, an excellent philosopher and anthropologist. He made one thing clear: that the word ‘people’ is not a logical word. It is a mythical word. It is not possible to speak of people logically, because that would mean making only a description. In order to understand a people, to understand what are the values of this people, one must enter into the spirit, into the heart, into the work, into the history, and into the myth of its tradition. This point is truly at the basis of the theology called ‘of the people.’ That is to say, to go with the people, see how it expresses itself. This distinction is important. The people is not a logical category, it is a mythical category.”

An author of both anthropological and theatrical works, Rodolfo Kusch(1922-1979) took his inspiration from Heidegger’s philosophy to distinguish between “being” and “dwelling,” describing with the first category the rationalistic and domineering vision of Western man and with the second the vision of the indigenous Latin American peoples, in peace with nature and animated by none other than a “myth.”

For Kusch, the first of the two visions, the Eurocentric one, is intolerant and incapable of understanding the second, which he instead wanted to accentuate and to which he dedicated his most important studies. For this reason too he found himself at the margins of the culture of the dominant elites and instead found an admirer in Bergoglio.

So according to Bergoglio, “it takes a myth to understand the people.” And he has recounted this myth, as pope, above all when he called around him the “popular movements.” He has done it three times so far: the first time in Rome in 2014, the second in Santa Cruz de la Sierra, Bolivia, in 2015, the third again in Rome, in 2016. Every time he rouses the audience with endless speeches, of around thirty pages each, which when put together now form the political manifesto of this pope.

The movements that Francis calls to himself are not ones that he created, they preexist him. There is nothing overtly Catholic about them. They are in part the heirs of the memorable anti-capitalist and anti-globalization gatherings in Seattle and Porto Alegre. Plus the multitude of rejects from which the pope sees bursting forth “that torrent of moral energy which springs from including the excluded in the building of a common destiny.”

It is to these “discards of society” that Francis entrusts a future made of land, of housing, of work for all. Thanks to a process of their rise to power that “transcends the logical proceedings of formal democracy.” To the “popular movements,” on November 5, the pope said that the time has come to make a leap in politics, in order “to revitalize and recast the democracies, which are experiencing a genuine crisis.” In short, to upend the powerful from their thrones.

The powers against which the people of the excluded are rebelling, in the vision of the pope, are “the economic systems that in order to survive must wage war and thus restore economic balance,” they are “the economy that kills”. This is his key for explaining the “piecemeal world war” and even Islamic terrorism.

It can be added that at the first meeting in Rome and at the one in Santa Cruz there was present, in his capacity as “cocalero” activist, president of Bolivia Evo Morales, a champion of the populist left in Latin America.

Who was again invited to Rome, in April of 2016, as a speaker at the conference organized by the pontifical academy of sciences for the twenty-fifth anniversary of the social encyclical of John Paul II “Centesimus Annus,” together with fellow populist leader Rafael Correa, the president of Ecuador, neo-Malthusian economist Jeffrey Sachs, and the far-left Democratic candidate for the American presidency, Bernie Sanders:

Pope Francis received as a gift from him a letter from unspecified representatives of the “popular movements” and three books on the health benefits of coca, of which Morales himself is a fervent cultivator. And the farewell between the two - the agencies reported - was “very affectionate,” just the contrary of the opposition that the bishops of Bolivia have been carrying out against him there, going so far as to accuse him openly of “bringing drug trafficking into the structure of the state.” With the result that, back in Bolivia, Morales advised the bishops to “form openly a pro-capitalist and pro-imperialist party.” While on his side he exhibits the pope. Who “is content with what we have done and has told me: You always stand with the people”.

To the drawn-out speeches to the “popular movements” can be added the one Pope Francis gave on November 27, 2015 to the young people of the Nairobi slums, there too with the exaltation of the native “wisdom found in poor neighbourhoods,” as also, in the same perspective, his incessant gestures, journeys, and speeches concerning migrants.

But one must also take the same tack in reinterpreting the speech Bergoglio gave at the summit of Latin American judges convened at the Vatican in early June of 2019 - one year after a similar summit held in Buenos Aires - on the theme of social rights and of “Franciscan doctrine” (in reference not to Saint Francis of Assisi but to the pope who bears his name).

This too was a long speech, with extensive references to the second of the three addressed to the “popular movements,” the one given in Bolivia, and plainly written by a hand not his own even if in full agreement, perhaps by one of the Argentine judges present, Raúl Eugenio Zaffaroni, a prominent figure, member of the Inter-American Court of Human Rights, and supporter of a “critical theory” of criminology that traces the genesis of crime and the nature of justice back to the structure of the social classes and to inequality.

“There is no democracy with hunger, there is no progress with poverty, there is no justice with inequality”: this is how Francis summarized his vision, to thunderous applause.

At this point, how to evaluate Francis’s political vision? Among the most persuasive critical voices it should suffice to cite here that of Sergio Belardinelli, professor of the sociology of cultural processes at the university of Bologna and a former protagonist of that “Cultural Project” which occupied the Italian Church during the years of Cardinal Camillo Ruini’s leadership.

Belardinelli says, in the book he wrote together with his sociologist colleague Angelo Panebianco, “At the dawn of a new world,” published by Mulino on the eve of the European elections of 2019:

“We do admit that the magisterium of the pontiffs previous to Pope Francis has been too concentrated on so-called ‘nonnegotiable’ themes, like life and family. But are we sure that the fact of now favoring other themes, like environmentalism, the critique of market capitalism or third-worldism, is to be considered a step forward? […] I have the impression that the denunciation of the causes of these evils that is coming from the Church today is too ‘human.’ It is a bit as if pointing out the market and laissez-faire as the main culprits - charges that for that matter are rather debatable - attenuates the tremendous, tragic seriousness of the evil that is being denounced. With the result that the prophetic impulse of the denunciation is weakened precisely through the fact of appearing too bound to the logic of the world, too political and not eschatological enough.”

And further on – in the footsteps of Niklas Luhmann, according to whom in a secularized society it is natural that “religion, politics, science, economy, in a word, all the social systems, specialize more and more in their own function” – Belardinelli writes:

“Secular society, as surprising as the thing may seem, has an urgent need that somewhere there should be someone who talks about God in a language that is not too mundane. […] But of what God must one speak? With Pascal it is certainly opportune to get out of the unjust perspective of the ‘God of the philosophers’ and get into that of the ‘God of Abraham and of Jesus Christ.’ However, it does not seem reasonable to me that this God who is love and mercy should be conceived of in stark contrast with ‘the perfect being, creator and lord of heaven and earth,’ as recited in the catechism. […] A God who is not all-powerful and did not create the world cannot be God. As Leo Strauss and Joseph Ratzinger well understood, just to mention two significant names, the world has meaning only because it was created by God. […] But in order that this God may return to being a concept generative of forms of ecclesial and social life, what is needed above all is faith.”

Charles Rice: Beyond Abortion:
The Theory and Practice of the Secular State. 1979.

The vote of the Review Committee was 3 to 0. The Doctor, who was secretary of the meeting, marked the patient’s card “MR” and added his initials and the date. This “Merciful Release” had been provided by the Congress almost two years ago in the Geriatric Welfare Act of 1996, which was part of an overall revision of the bankrupt Social Security system.

Under the law, Social Security retirement benefits were reduced by the full amount of any outside income received from whatever source. The only persons, therefore, who actually received Social Security benefits were those whose outside earnings, gifts from relatives, and other income totaled less than the ordinary Social Security benefits. As a result, only the poor received Social Security retirement checks. But still there were too many of them. The Geriatric Welfare Act of 1996 provided that each recipient of Social Security retirement benefits over the age of 65 who was “confined to any hospital or infirmary” for more than three consecutive days “shall be entitled to a Merciful Release on his or her own request or on a decision by the Review Committee that prolongation of life is a meaningless burden.”

The patient was a 71-year-old retired carpenter. His arthritis, thought the Doctor, was what did him in. He had been assigned to the infirmary in the Golden Age Center for “observation” when he became unable to work effectively at his trade. The Geriatric Welfare Act provided that recipients of retirement benefits “are encouraged to be usefully engaged at a task of social significance” for at least the equivalent of three full days a week.

The patient’s wife was in good health for her age. Her four-hour a day job in a public school cafeteria was socially significant. She was therefore not a total burden on society. The couple had two grown sons. Both were married with children of their own and had declined to contribute to their parents’ support. “We love them,” said the elder son, “but we have to look out for our own. Let nature take its course.”

“I see that orange is your favorite color.“

The Doctor returned to the examining room, where the patient sat in his infirmary gown. He ushered the patient into an adjoining treatment room “for further tests.” There, another Doctor on duty would administer the Merciful Release by injection. Because the patient was not in severe pain and had expressed no wish to die, his widow would be informed that he had “passed away unexpectedly in his sleep.” In a few days, she would be asked to report to the Golden Age Center for “consultation.” They would explain to her that she had the option to choose a Merciful Release for herself. They would explain its advantages for a lonely widow. A surprising number of spouses chose that course.

The Doctor sometimes wondered whether all this was wrong. But it was, after all, the law. And its beneficiaries would be better off with a Merciful Release than they would be struggling on the borderline of poverty. There were too many old, poor people. Social Security could not support them because there were too few young wage earners.…In 1977, five states relaxed their euthanasia laws to provide for voluntary “death with dignity.” It was all in the name of individual rights and all for the benefit of the patient. Predictably, however, the shift came from voluntary withdrawal of life support from the terminally ill to the presumption that the senile would want such release were it available to them.

Soylent Green is PEOPLE!

Then the involuntary killings began. The change was hardly noticed. In part this was because Americans had become…”a violent people.” They had “lost a sense of the sacredness of life. There is a love of death, injury and hurting.” A psychiatrist described the violence by fans at athletic contests as used “not as a means to an end, but for pleasure. It’s an end in itself.”

…A British physician, Dr. John Goundry, urged in 1977 that doctors be allowed to give a “demise pill” to elderly patients. The “demise pill,” he predicted, “will be obligatory within 50 years. People are horrified by my statements. Today’s emotions cannot be equated with how people will think in 2025.” The doctor was sharply criticized for his views, but he knew better than his critics. “The economics” of elderly care, he wrote, “are devastating and the standard of care is rapidly falling.”…There were too many old folks, too few young workers to support them, and the young were not willing to sacrifice their lifestyle for their elders.

John Adams: “A Government of Laws, and not of Men”

Suppose you are a member of the House of Representatives in 1996. The Geriatric Welfare Act is on the floor for debate. It would subject to death all aged recipients of Social Security whose lives are officially found to be “meaningless.” How would you argue against it?

The first thing you might say is that it is unconstitutional, a violation of the Fifth Amendment’s guarantee that no person shall be deprived of life without “due process of law.” But the act provides that the subject who refuses to request his own Merciful Release shall be presumed incompetent. So if the Review Committee decides to grant him a “merciful” death, it is really carrying out what he would desire if he were competent to choose. A similar presumption of incompetency had been developed by the Supreme Court in a 1987 case upholding the Merciful Release of handicapped patients in public hospitals.

…Or you could argue that to kill the aged is unwise and inexpedient. But that argument, too, is a loser. The bottom line is a money line. In that light, most of them should be killed. They are useless eaters, and those who are not could be spared by the Review Committee for a time. And if you argue that we ought to beware that the same fate might befall us in our old age, you would be told that we are secure as long as we are useful. And who in his right mind would want to linger on into an old age of humiliating dependency?

You have no right to impose your morality on others. Morality is personal and each individual must decide for himself. Who are you to say what is right or wrong for others?Then, if finally you argue that it is simply wrong to kill the innocent, they would laugh at you. You have no right to impose your morality on others. Morality is personal and each individual must decide for himself. Who are you to say what is right or wrong for others?

If they are right, if morality is wholly personal, then the majority may do as they will with the aged and anyone else. If Congress will not admit that some things are always wrong, that there is a law higher than the state, you might as well save your breath.

An act of Congress, a court decision, and even the Constitution itself are forms of man-made law. Are they subject to a higher law, so that they are void if they violate it?

There are two basic approaches to this question. One is positivism, the theory which affirms the validity of human law provided only that it be duly enacted. The other is a natural-law approach that affirms “there is in fact an objective moral order within the range of human intelligence, to which human societies are bound in conscience to conform, and upon which the peace and happiness of personal, national and international life depend.”

The crucial question is one of epistemology–the theory of knowledge. If man cannot know the essences of things, then there is no objective rightness or wrongness which he can know. If man cannot really know what is just in a given situation, he cannot criticize any particular course of action as unjust. Questions of right and wrong will therefore have to be resolved by the political process. If that process produces a Buchenwald…it cannot be said to be unjust. Describing Nazi Germany, Gustav Radbruch said that positivism “disarmed the German jurists against law of an arbitrary and criminal content.” If one believes that he cannot know reality and that he therefore cannot know what is right or wrong in a given situation, he has to be a positivist.

170px-Hans_Kelsen1 This is seen in the writings of Hans Kelsen (1881-1973), who has been well described as “the jurist of our century.” The author of the Austrian Constitution of 1920, Kelsen was very influential in Germany between the two World Wars. Kelsen denied the possibility of natural law. He rejected what he called “philosophical absolutism,” the “metaphysical view that there is an absolute reality, i.e., a reality that exists independently of human knowledge.” He felt that the claim that one can actually know reality, and what is right and wrong, leads to tyranny through the efforts of the rulers to impose on the people what they, the rulers, “know” to be for the people’s good.

Instead, he adopted what he called “philosophical relativism,” the “empirical doctrine that reality exists only within human knowledge, and that, as the object of knowledge, reality is relative to the knowing subject. The absolute, the thing in itself, is beyond human experience; it is inaccessible to human knowledge and therefore unknowable.” This philosophical relativism, “in Kelsen’s view, leads to democracy and the tolerance of divergent views, because ‘what is right today may be wrong tomorrow,’ and the minority must have full opportunity of becoming the majority. Only if it is not possible to decide in an absolute way what is right and what is wrong is it advisable to discuss the issue and, after discussion, to submit to a compromise.”

The problem with this, of course, is that when the majority or those who are in control of the political process decide to oppress a minority, there is neither moral nor legal recourse. When the positivist is confronted by Auschwitz, his only objections are those of utility or esthetics. It is not useful to kill millions of Jews, and the tables might be turned on us some day. Or the slaughter is offensive to his sensibilities. He cannot say it is wrong because he does not believe he can know what is right or wrong.

Law, according to Kelsen, is a system of coercive rules called “legal norms.” These rules are prescribed by the legislator in accord with the “basic norm” or constitution of the community. That basic norm may or may not be a written constitution. Moreover, it is entirely up to the legislator to decide what the basic norm is and whether any particular enactment is in accord with it. Nor is there any restriction on the content of legal rules. “Any content whatsoever can be legal; there is no human behavior which could not function as the content of a legal norm.” The only requirement for a law to be valid and binding is that “it has been constituted in a particular fashion, born of a definite procedure and a definite rule.”

The legislator decides what law will be useful and in accord with the basic norm as determined by himself. Once a law is enacted, it is obligatory. There is no higher law of nature or of God, and the ultimate criterion is force. The positive law can do anything. It cannot be criticized as unjust. For justice, according to Kelsen, “is not ascertainable by rational knowledge at all. Rather, from the standpoint of rational knowledge there are only interests and conflicts of interests.…Justice is an irrational ideal.” It is worthwhile to examine Kelsen, because his “pure theory of law” is the most clear-cut form of positivism. All positivist systems, however, are characterized, in greater or lesser degree, by the denial of the capacity of human reason to know objective truth and to know what is right and wrong. They are concerned only with what the law is, not with what it ought to be.

Nuremburg

The fruits of legal positivism can be seen in the experience of Nazi Germany. Even prior to World War I, positivism was dominant in Germany. “According to this new positivistic jurisprudence, the legislator, and he alone, creates the law. Everything prior to legislative enactment is at best ‘custom,’ but never true law. Thus, law and right became wholly identified, and bare ‘legality’ takes the place of substantive justice as an ideal.” The Weimar Constitution, under which Germany was governed from 1918 to 1933, did not recognize any law higher than itself. Certain principles of the natural law, it is true, were embodied in Weimar constitutional guarantees, but the constitution could be readily changed and it was often disregarded through the enactment of unconstitutional laws. Moreover, the constitution empowered the president to abrogate basic rights in some situations.

But the greatest obstacle to the recognition of natural law was the doctrine of positivism which equated right and might to begin with and, hence, assigned to the legislator full discretion as to the detailed content or provisions of the law, to the point of injustice, indeed to the point of complete, highhanded arbitrariness. A decision of the Supreme Court of the Reich of November 4, 1927, makes this fully clear: “The legislator is absolutely autocratic, and bound by no limits save those he has set for himself either in the constitution or in some other laws.”

Of course, positivism was totally dominant during the Hitler years, from 1933 to 1945. A 1936 decree of the Reich Commissar of Justice epitomized this condition: “A decision of the Fuhrer in the express form of a law or decree may not be scrutinized by a judge. In addition, the judge is bound by any other decisions of the Fuhrer, provided that they are clearly intended to declare law.”

Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.,

Buck v. Bell (1927) U.S. Supreme Court Associate Justice Robert Jackson, a disciple of positivist trailblazer Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., was assigned as a prosecutor at the Nuremburg war-crimes trial. Reviewing the evidence, Jackson realized that under prevailing positive-law theory, many of the prosecutions would be impossible because the genocide and other criminal actions had been duly sanctioned under German law.

The most striking example of Nazi positivism was the extermination program. At first directed against the nonrehabilitatable sick and then extended to Jews, Gypsies, and other political undesirables, it began with an order in a Hitler letter of September 1, 1939, to the doctor and administrator he placed in charge of the program. No law or formal order was issued to authorize it. Yet the German doctors, and especially the psychiatrists, complied with enthusiasm because they had long since accepted the notion that the only life worth living is one that is useful. Nor were they, at least overtly, conscious of doing wrong.

For example, Dr. August Hirt became alarmed at the thought that the Jewish race was about to become extinct and that very few authentic Jewish skeletons and skulls were available for study. He decided that science needed a collection of 150 body casts and skeletons of Jews; so the desired specimens were assembled from concentration’ camps, specially killed, and preserved for science. This collection and the correspondence pertaining to it were captured by the United States Army at the end of the war. Dr. Hirt, a professor of anatomy at the University of Strassburg, was surprised that his project was regarded as different from the collection of fossils for the Museum of Natural History in New York. Since the state had declared Jews to be non-persons, that apparently settled the matter for him.

Similarly, when Dr. Waldemar Hoven was on trial in a Nazi court on charges of having murdered some SS men by poison, the judge proved Dr. Hoven’s guilt by feeding the same poison to Russian prisoners of war. When they died with the same symptoms as the SS men, Dr. Hoven’s guilt was proved. It apparently never occurred to the judge that he, was committing murder to prove murder. The judge, acting for the Nazi state, was the law and murder was whatever the state said it was.

After the Second World War, Gustav Radbruch, who had been Minister of Justice in the Weimar Republic and who had advocated positivism, renounced his former view. “Law,” he said in 1945, “is the quest for justice.” If enactments or decrees deny people their rights, “they are null and void; the people are not to obey them, and jurists must find the courage to brand them unlawful.” The German courts, after World War II, freely applied natural law principles in holding the legislature subject to a higher law.

Montgomery Clift, Burt Lancaster, “Judgment at Nuremberg” (1961)

In the closing months of the war, for instance, a young German soldier was absent without leave. For this offense, an officer shot him without any form of trial and secretly buried the corpse. After the war, the victim’s mother sought to recover damages from the officer for the death of her son. The officer pleaded that he was justified by the so called Katastrophen order of Adolf Hitler, authorizing any member of the armed forces to kill instantly any coward, traitor, or deserter. As it turned out, the Katastrophen order had not been properly promulgated and therefore did not apply; but the court held that the order could not be a defense even if it had been validly promulgated. The “positive legislative act,” said the court, “loses all obligatory power if it violates the generally recognized principles of international law or the natural law.”

Any legal system that rests on a denial of the capacity of the mind to know objective truth must be described as positivistic. It will ultimately entrust the liberties of people to a political process that is unencumbered by higher moral restraints.

Architecture of Authoritarianism: Jeremy Bentham’s inescapable Panopticon

An example is the utilitarianism of Jeremy Bentham (1748-1832), who said the purpose of the law is to achieve the greatest good of the greatest number. The “good” is defined in terms of pleasure. Man’s “only object,” wrote Bentham, “is to seek pleasure and to shun pain.…Evil is pain, or the cause of pain. Good is pleasure, or the cause of pleasure.” Of course, the majority determines what ought to be done to achieve the greatest good for the greatest number. And there is no ground on which one can criticize a law as unjust, for Bentham did not believe that man could know objective right or wrong. “I employ the words just, unjust, moral, immoral, good, bad, simply as collective terms including the ideas of certain pains or pleasures.” In his view, “moral good is good only by its tendency to produce physical good. Moral evil is evil only by its tendency to produce physical evil; but when I say physical, I mean the pains and pleasures of the soul as well as the pains and pleasures of the senses.” For the positivist, the principle of utility is the sole rationale for legislation. Man has no intrinsic worth. His only end is the attainment of pleasure and the avoidance of pain. But if his existence inflicts pain on the community – that is, if he is a nuisance – there is no reason why he must be endured. Ultimately, his value is not in what he is but in what he does. “Producers” are tolerated; “useless eaters” are given a merciful release.

…A positivist will generally be one of two types. One type begins by denying his capacity to know anything beyond an empirical knowledge of individual things. This arid skepticism restricts the mind to the collection and empirical verification of data without coming to any knowledge of the nature of things. The skeptic says, “Nothing is certain.” But this is absurd, because he claims to know at least one thing for certain: that nothing is certain. “I tell you truly that we cannot know what is true.” Or the empiricist will say that, apart from mathematics and formal logic, a statement of fact is meaningful only if it can be empirically verified by observations. But this statement of “fact” is not empirically verifiable. The skeptic….will be a positivist because of his claimed inability to know objective truth.

The second type of positivist begins with materialism. Nothing exists but matter. There is no personal, spiritual Creator; no free will, no free spiritual intellect. “Soul” is a mere label we use for the material activities of the brain. History is the story of the development of matter, explained by one theory or another.

For the materialist, there are no absolute truths. There is no right or wrong, and the idea of justice has no meaning. The state is a wholly natural product of the evolution of social forces or other material elements. The positive law is fixed by the state without reference to any higher standard. Law is whatever the state decrees, and the essence of law is force. He is therefore a positivist.

Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.