Symposium: What’s Natural about Natural Law?

This article is in response to Go Radical or Go Home and is part of the symposium on “Conservatism: What’s Wrong with It and How Do We Make It Right?”

George Neumayr is certainly right to point to a natural law—rooted in reality—as the philosophical core of conservatism. But it concerns me when he says this comes from God. “God” has become such a bad word in this country, and we “extremist” Christians are shunned the second we posit any sort of objectivity when it comes to morals or religion. We are too often characterized as a religious ideology for saying such things, and I am so tired of it. Aren’t you? I never thought I’d be saying this, but our approach–at least when it comes to presenting the Conservative movement–needs to shift from God to finding that natural law within ourselves.

Why is it called natural law, anyway? I’d say, because it points to something fundamental about man, something in line with his very nature and from which he can never truly separate himself. For instance, who would deny that man always seeks what he perceives as good, and that he will not be happy unless he rightly judges this as truly good? It is only one step further to say that this must not be altogether subjective but rather have an objective basis. If you really think about it, any other conception of this good makes human government logically and practically impossible. This is commensurate with human flourishing: a principle which is not at all neglected by the Conservative movement.

If you want good you must attain what is good for you as a human being.

See? I just said that without mentioning God once. This is what we need to show others. We need to remind them of who they are and that human goods and general flourishing are possible through certain laws and ways of living life. Ultimately, all this is inseparable from the notion of a Creator to whom we are all ordered. But we can still do this without seeming like Christian extremists. We must remind our brothers and sisters of their hearts.

Empedocles—a philosopher who walked this earth centuries before the dawn of Christianity—managed to come to this when he stated:

Nay, but, an all-embracing law, through the realms of the sky
Unbroken it stretcheth, and over the earth’s immensity…

Maybe, just maybe, he was on to something.