All Episodes
Previous Next
Aug. 22, 2017 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
18:37
3800 John Locke: An Important Voice
| Copy link to current segment

Time Text
Hey everybody, Stefan Mullen.
You hope you're doing well. Going to talk a little bit about one of the most influential political philosophers of the modern period, John Locke, 1632 to 1704.
So much of what you talk about, what you think about, what you debate, your very, very thoughts on the nature of the state and a political organization, whether you know it or not, are informed by John Locke.
Now, full disclosure, I have a very strong discussion Genetic influential tie to Mr.
Locke himself. My ancestor William Molyneux was John Locke's best friend.
And they reasoned and fled from the authorities together.
So you can check that out if you want.
And he had a very powerful...
A voice in a pivotal moment in Western political history.
Because prior to this, and I'm not sort of going back to the ancient Greek, ancient Roman model, sort of dark ages, early middle ages and so on.
What was the purpose of government?
Well, the purpose of government was to shepherd you to heaven using the power, the secular power of the aristocracy of the royalty of the kings and queens and the lords and ladies and so on.
And the wisdom of the priesthood.
You know, Satan walked all over the world and you were supposed to be confined and herded to heaven using the power of the secular authority that God had placed over you.
It was called the divine right of kings.
That God had placed the ruler over you and to obey the ruler was the same as obeying God in the same way that obeying the Pope was the same as obeying God.
And this was a very powerful aspect of thought and of reason and of the entire structure by which people understood their own society.
This came under significant pressure in Europe after Martin Luther nailed his 99 thesis, 91 thesis, 94 thesis, I think it was, to the church in Wittenberg.
And you had the Reformation, the breakup of Christendom as it stood at the time, and then you had a lot of religious warfare.
Multi-religion within the state was the equivalent of multiculturalism or where it may be going in the sort of modern West where you have each group vying for state power to benefit itself and to harm those in opposition.
You have a zero-sum game or a negative-sum game given that the state takes a lot of its resources from this kind of stuff.
And along came John Locke and others who Who had a very, very different conception of what the state was and what it was for.
So he said, no, no, no, people are naturally free and equal.
They should not be subject to a monarch that is imposed upon them by God.
People have rights to life and to liberty and to property.
And, I mean, he had a huge influence, of course, on the American revolutionaries.
The original draft, of course, was life, liberty, and property.
But that, of course, flew in the face of slavery and therefore it became life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.
And this is an interesting question between natural and positive law.
So positive law, answering the question, what is legal?
Positive law says, well, what's in the law books?
You know, that's what's legal.
Natural law says that the law must reflect universal principles of justice and freedom and liberty and property and so on.
And therefore, what is legal are the laws that conform to virtue, to morality.
If it does not conform to virtue and morality, it may be technically legal, but it's not morally valid.
And that is very, very different.
There was, of course...
Something which we don't recognize as much in the West, although it's certainly in other cultures.
There was natural law, positive law, divine law.
Divine law are those lords that God has revealed through his prophets, through writings and so on, to a particular group of people.
Now, that has a very tough time becoming universal.
And we can see this, of course, in the questions that theologians ask.
He's mulled over in the Middle Ages, which was, you know, did Socrates get to heaven?
Well, he hadn't known Jesus Christ, of course.
He was born 2,500 years ago.
So did he get to heaven?
So there's natural law, which is free, equal justice for all.
There's positive law, which is, well, whatever the king says is legal.
And then there's divine law, which is whatever is...
Given to a particular population by the prophet, by God.
Now, what Locke said was that natural law is rational, it's empirical, it's philosophical.
Natural law can be discovered by reason alone, and natural law is universal.
It applies to everyone at all times.
And that is a very, very powerful notion.
Now, back in the day, I've actually read the biography of my ancestor.
Back in the day, my ancestor and John Locke We're talking about the need to prove natural law, natural morality from first principles.
And they did not think it could be done, whether they didn't do it because they didn't think it could be done or whether it would kind of muscle in on the purview of the state and the religion of the time, which had a monopoly on the definition of virtue and obedience and law.
We'll probably never know, but it is something that my work in philosophy doesn't come out of nowhere.
The fact that I worked enormously hard over decades to develop an easily comprehensible rational proof of secular ethics.
I call it universally preferable behavior.
It's a free book, free audio book.
You can get it at freedomainradio.com slash free.
You can get a hard copy too if you want.
This sort of doesn't come out of nowhere.
My work doesn't come out of nowhere.
The need for being able to prove natural law and natural morality from first principles has been known in philosophical circles.
Whether they admit the need for it or not is another matter, but it's been known for a long time.
So this Is Locke's approach.
He says, look, there's a natural set of rights and morality and freedoms and the right to property and the right to be free from violence and so on that is embedded in everyone.
Now, he himself did not, again, work these principles from first principles.
He sometimes tied them into religion and sometimes he said they were self-evident and so on.
But that is how he approached this issue.
Now, the question then, if everyone's naturally free and equal, the next question is, this goes back to the sort of state of nature stuff, which is, again, really, really important.
And it's important that whether this is a thought exercise or what people actually believed happened is a topic for another time.
For the moment, just pretend it's like a thought exercise.
Because the question is, if everyone's naturally free and equal, how on earth do we end up with this hierarchical pyramid called state power?
If everyone's free and equal, why don't we exist in a state of perfect equality?
Why are there policemen, rulers, magistrates, jail guards, politicians?
Why are there people who rule over others?
Good question, says Locke.
Here's how it kind of went.
So... Let's talk about the state of nature.
The state of nature is the idea of how did human society look before the state came along?
It's a big question. Now, the general approach, and this is taken by Hobbes as well, although he had a sort of different view of it in some ways.
So he says, look, we're all roaming around the woods.
We're naturally free and equal. Everyone has the right to property.
Everyone has the right to justice.
Like, if somebody harms you, if somebody steals from you, you can then go and harm them back.
He said, the problem is, though, we kind of have blood clans.
You sort of think of Afghanistan or other places where these blood clans in Somalia as well.
And what happens is you end up with, because people's loyalties are their own family.
The family was the first, the very first example of social organization, according to Larkin.
When people are curious as to why I talk about the family in a philosophical show, well, it's a very long tradition in Western philosophy, at least, of starting with the family, starting with the state of nature and working from there.
And he said, look, if you've got people in a state of nature, it's kind of a war of all against all.
And Because people are passionate and people get angry and there's revenge and all of that.
Somebody harms you, it may not be proven to you.
Someone may just convince you that Bob killed your cow or something and then you go and kill Bob's cow and Bob says, hey, I didn't kill your cow.
It escalates from there. You end up with this war of all against all.
So there's this challenge because when everyone's equal, there's no overarching authority that...
It mediates disputes between people and those disputes are naturally going to arise.
So what do you do? What do you do?
What do you do? Well, Locke says, you do this.
You say, look, given that people are passionate, given that people make mistakes, given that people escalate, given that we have blood clan ties to our own family, our own tribe, the state of nature is not going to work very well.
People are going to end up scrabbling along this bare subsistence level and never get anywhere and never build a society, never build a civilization.
Also, when it comes to justice, given that there's blood clans and people have local disputes, who can be the objective third party to resolve those disputes?
Almost everyone involved has some conflict of interest, so it can't really work out that well.
So, what Locke says, he says, well, where does government come from?
Government comes from a rational decision made by the people to say that We are going to surrender some of our rights in order to gain more rights.
Like you know how you'll give money to a financial investor who invest in himself in order to reap more money.
You're not setting fire to your money, you're investing it to get.
More. So there's a social contract where people say, I'm going to give up some of my rights of retaliation, I'm going to give up some of my rights of adjudication, of revenge, and so on, to the government, so that my life becomes more stable, and my property is better protected, and we have one central power that is so strong that retaliation becomes virtually impossible.
You know, like the Hatfield and McCoy clan warfare that kind of goes on.
If you have one state that's all-powerful, Well, nobody can really take revenge against the state because it's more powerful than any individual.
So there's a lot of reasons, he would say, to do this.
Now, because he had seen, as everyone had seen, these religious warfare, particularly in Germany, brutal, brutal stuff going on in Germany during this time, The question of freedom of conscience with regards to religious belief, freedom of religious belief, separation of church and state, for want of a better phrase, that was a big, big question at the time.
And he said, here's the problem.
We have reason, we have philosophy, we have empiricism, and of course science was making great strides.
It was only 200 years until it was safer to go to a doctor than to not go to a doctor.
So his epistemology, the study of knowledge, was very informative to Locke in this way, because he said...
Look, we can't know the truth about that which is based on faith.
I mean, objective, empirical, prove to other people scientifically.
You know, we can scientifically prove that the Earth is a sphere.
We can scientifically prove the sort of objects fall to the Earth at the same rate of acceleration.
We can prove a wide variety of things, but we cannot prove revelation.
Revelation is subjective.
It is innate. It is beyond the bounds of reason.
And therefore anyone who claims to objectively and decisively know the truth of certain religious ideals or precepts or tenets is wrong.
And because you cannot decisively, objectively, scientifically, rationally, philosophically prove We must all follow our own conscience with regards to this.
You cannot allow churches to have coercive power over their members.
And, of course, he pointed out in the Bible, certainly with Jesus, there's no example of forcing people into particular beliefs.
That is not a perspective shared around all religions around the world.
But yeah, true faith, you can't force true faith.
It must be chosen. And no one has any right to believe that they're more correct than anyone else with regards to objective and empirical law.
I mean, he gave an example, and this wasn't just Locke who did this.
He gave an example and said, look, look at the Ten Commandments.
If you look at the Ten Commandments, and there's a lot of Old Testament law, but if you just look at the Ten Commandments, are they binding on all people?
Well, no. The Ten Commandments begin with the phrase here, O Israel.
O Israel, not all mankind.
And therefore, they're really only binding on the people that they're addressed to.
They're only binding on the believers within that.
So, this was a big challenge that he overcame by just saying tolerance is necessary for these ideas.
Now, he was a big fan of property, and this is a huge change from the Middle Ages, harkens back really to Roman law, at least early Roman law before the welfare state.
He was a huge fan of property, and this is kind of a new middle class concern.
Property was managed in the Middle Ages by basically having the people be bound to the land.
They were freer than slaves, but not as free as urban workers in the 19th century.
They were serfs. But the problem was that, you know, when agricultural improvements began, you had a lot more children who survived to adulthood, and therefore you had to keep subdividing your land, and the land became increasingly inefficient.
You had these little, you know, like jigsaw puzzle pieces of land, this sort of like, think of a sort of stained glass depiction of a phoenix with all the slivers of fire and so on.
The land became completely unmanageable.
And so property rights became a huge issue with the excess of agricultural productivity that occurred in the mid to late Middle Ages.
Huge! I mean, unbelievable.
Five times the agricultural productivity.
Ten times. In some cases, 15 to 20 times more food was produced by more rational property, by the introduction of winter crops, turnips, and so on.
And they figured out crop rotation and letting the land lie fallow.
as a huge improvement and a lot of it had to do with more of a free market and land and a rationalization of the land.
Of course, what this did was it kicked a lot of people off the land because, you know, if you're rationalizing the land, you just need fewer people to farm it.
So this created the flight to the cities where there were waiting industrialists who wanted to put the new urban labor force to work in someone.
So it really was a wild and crazy time and a lot of suffering.
But the suffering was more visible, right?
When people dying on a farm 100 miles away in the Middle Ages, nobody knew, and, you know, only the local community cared.
When you get a bunch of writers and people with new communications technology, seeing all of these poor kids in a city, well, you get this Dickensian horror of child labor and so on, but it wasn't that there was new child labor.
It's just that children weren't dying, and therefore they were working, and they were only not dying because they were working.
So, Locke said that the primary purpose of government is to protect people from violence and to protect their property rights.
There's a huge change from the Middle Ages that the purpose of government is to keep Satan at bay and shepherd people to heaven under the power of an absolute ruler who is given his power by God and under the We give up some of our rights in order to end up with more.
We give up some of our freedoms, the freedom to seek revenge upon our own.
And so we give up some of our freedoms in order to Get more freedoms.
Now this is very interesting because there were a lot of revolutions going on at the time.
A lot of fermentation, a lot of discontent because you had this rising new industrial class, middle class and so on.
So what's fascinating about this and where John Locke deviates from Hobbes.
Hobbes says, oh yeah, nature red and tooth and claw, state of nature sucks.
It's like Mad Max beyond the Thunderdome from here to eternity.
So what we need to do is we surrender our rights and we can never get them back because the state of nature is always worse than anything the government has to offer so you surrender your rights you never get them back it's in perpetuity Locke said no no no no if you surrender your rights to the government in order to protect your property if that government no longer protects your property you pull those rights back you have a revolution you change your government because the government is a tool by which you protect your property rights and if the government ends up Harming your property,
taking your property, ends up being tyrannical with regards to your property.
It's no longer a legitimate government.
Sort of like, I hire a security guard to protect my property.
If I find out that security guard is stealing from me, then he's not protecting my property.
He's stealing from me, and therefore I'm going to fire the security guard.
So that's how it works with regards to the state.
So this is very powerful stuff.
And of course, again, think of the American Revolution, this question of no taxation without representation, and so on.
So this sort of social contract, of course you can't ask each individual to sign it, so this sort of voting and majority rule and so on became the way that it worked out.
And Locke has some really, really fascinating stuff to say about property and what's viable and valid property and so on, but I really wanted to spend a few minutes just helping you to understand that.
Just how powerful this idea is, and of course very relevant now, that property rights are being horrendously overturned and stripped of people by their states, that modern governments were formed in many ways on the premise that if the government isn't protecting your property rights, it's a bad contract, and you have a right to change your government.
That is a very, very powerful notion, something to And I hope that this helps you at least understand some of the basis of where and how people think with regards to modern political philosophy.
▲
Export Selection