Treatise on Government

Now for another semi-political post in this non-political blog because I read some John Locke.

(On an only tangentially related topic, I may someday start a current events blog. I would write it in the character of a mid-level bureaucrat of the lizard-men who had been tasked with clandestinely ruling the Earth and was doing a very poor job of it and knew he was doing a very poor job of it and was constantly in fear of loosing his job. But that's really neither here nor there.)

Anyway, Locke was not what I expected. I expected him to be interesting, which he was. I expected him to be well-reasoned, which he was. I expected him to argue for government by common consent, which he did.

What I wasn't expecting was for him to be quite so Biblical. This is a man who took the Bible deadly seriously, and who expected his audience to, also. Both Locke and the people he was responding to in the treatise took it for granted that they had a moral duty to figure out what kind of government God wanted us to have, and that they could figure that out by studying scripture.

This is what I found most interesting: Today, Locke's arguments are more or less turned on their heads. His conclusions are basically taken for granted. No one in the modern United States (okay...maybe not absolutely no one...the internet is a big and weird place...but no one of any real influence) is arguing that all men are born slaves to a single divinely appointed monarch who by right ought to rule the rest of humanity with absolute authority. Yet this was a view that was apparently sufficiently common in Locke's day that he spends fifty pages arguing against it. It's a good argument, too, if you accept its premise. It's just totally irrelevant to our current political discourse.

But about that premise...It's that the Bible is true, and that society should be organized according to the precepts therein. This was a fascinating concept because, as a premise for an argument of this scope, it would be rejected out of hand today. Religion does occasionally play a role in arguments about particular issues, but it is seldom used to form a comprehensive view of the nature of political society. (Admittedly, the very nature of political society doesn't actually come up all that often generally--of necessity, we spend a lot of time talking about the details rather than the grand view.)

The surprising thing was that, based on a very close reading of the Old Testament, Locke was able to derive, with almost mathematical rigor, a society of free equals, governed by common consent as embodied in written laws, administered by a magistrate who was as subject to them as anyone else. I would not have expected that (though, full disclosure, I am not really a very good student of the Old Testament).

Honestly, I would have been a little afraid to take the Bible quite that seriously, and I think there's good reason for that fear. Do it wrong, and you get absolute monarchy, or Mosaic theocracy. But Locke has broadened my view.