It’s been a good week for natural law. People are talking about it even if they do not mention it by name.
David Brooks, at the Aspen Ideas Festival, spoke about the pattern of “rupture and repair” that has characterized our society. Brooks said that we are in a moment of rupture now, and offered some ideas about how we commence the work of repair.
America’s core understanding of freedom has always been a negative freedom, a “freedom from.” Our revolution aimed to free us from British control. American liberalism through the 19th century and first half of the 20th century sought freedom from the overly large influence of the business interest. Our involvement in two world wars was about making the world free from tyranny. Throughout, freedom of religion and speech and assembly were understood as freedoms from government control.
In the years after World War II, that shared conception of the moral order evaporated as the personal became political. There was a shift in our conception of freedom to something not just more individualistic but more volitional. We believed we could “choose” and “invent” the morality that worked for us.
How do we recover a shared sense of the moral order that is built into the universe? I am not sure, but dusting off the idea of a natural law might allow us to at least find a shared moral vocabulary again. That might lead to the discovery of shared moral ideals, without which any project at renewal and repair after Donald Trump will be stillborn.
For Catholics, natural law has its origin in divine law. We believe this because we are told so in last Sunday’s second reading, Paul’s Letter to the Colossians: “Christ Jesus is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn of all creation. For in him were created all things in heaven and on earth, the visible and the invisible.”
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With thanks to the National Catholic Reporter (NCR) and Michael Sean Winters, where this article originally appeared.
