11

The Roots of Natural Law
in American History

December 5, 1997.   It is such a relief to get out of Washington, D.C. I am making the eight-hour drive south to the Blowing Rock region of northwestern North Carolina for a conference of Natural Law Party leaders, and to spend a morning with Mike Tompkins to find out about the roots of natural law in American history. As I drive, the present disappears into the past, and nature slowly reclaims her domain. I sweep by the town of Manassas, 30 miles outside of the District, and the site of Bull Run, where Union soldiers were routed in the first battle of the Civil War. I pass the turn-off for the Natural Bridge in western Virginia where Thomas Jefferson would ride to escape the pressures of government and seek spiritual renewal. And I make my way up into the Blue Ridge Mountains, crossing the New River several times, as it winds its way northward through mountains cherished as sacred by the Cherokee Indians.

It may be a half-day drive from Washington to the balcony where I am standing in the shadow of Grandfather Mountain, scanning the snow-covered vista of rolling mountains that stretch out southeastward 90 miles towards Charlotte, but I am in a different world.

Above me, seven planets and the moon are strung out like pearls on a string across the evening sky. Astronomers say it will be a hundred years before anyone will see a sight like this again.

I should probably just kick back and enjoy the panorama. But I've just been in Washington, and I'm thinking politics. I can feel the sharp contrast to our nation's capital where lawmakers enact laws that bear little resemblance to the natural laws that surround me now-and I'm feeling frustrated and angry instead of easy and relaxed. The laws coming out of Washington are not rooted in the eternity and balance of nature's laws, they are dangerous, misguided laws that are rooted in short-term economics. Regulations that govern our precious resources-energy, food, environment, and human-can be bought and sold to the highest bidder.

The role of natural law in public policy has been the foundation of democracies dating back to the early Greeks. It even dominated the writings and speeches of America's founders. But today, it's given a back seat by politicians and lawmakers. The Natural Law Party believes that this is dangerous for the nation, and that it is not what most people want. Natural Law Party leaders are working hard to change it. I am here to find out what needs to be done.

What Is Natural Law?

I never understood, when I was in school studying American history, what the words "laws of nature" actually meant. I knew they showed up frequently in the writings and speeches of America's founders. They are, after all, carved in stone in the Jefferson Memorial-the same words that appear in the opening lines of the Declaration of Independence. Were they some religious term that has since grown irrelevant-or politically incorrect? Or were they archaic scientific terminology? I never got it. I never realized that natural law was the driving force that shaped the American democracy. I also never took the time to read in depth about the men who founded the nation-George Washington, Benjamin Franklin, John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison and the others. What were the subtle forces that shaped them? What did they study in school, what so inflamed them against authoritarian British rule and inspired them to invoke the term "natural law" as they wrote the Declaration of Independence and the U.S. Constitution?

In a few minutes I'm going to find out. Mike Tompkins and I are off the beaten path but are searching for one. We are working our way down the side of a steep ravine, looking for a path through woods to a huge rock I've been told about that overlooks a hundred miles of mountains. There we're going to sit and talk about natural law. We find the path, if you can call it that, and we continue straight down a rocky cut through the woods, dodging and dipping through a thicket of brush and branches of hickory and oak, poplar, hemlock and pine. The trees are grand and huge, even though the region was clear cut in the 1930s. That happened about the same time that President Franklin Roosevelt lauched a huge public works project to build the Blue Ridge Parkway. It has to be one of the most beautiful roads in America. No billboards, no gas stations, no fast foods. It's an elegant 469-mile, two-lane ribbon that twists like a high country river through these ancient mountains, starting in North Carolina and running dry not far from Washington. During the spring, summer, and autumn months, caravans of cars make their way along the Parkway, their passengers stopping to picnic and to gape and gaze at the vistas. No one in a hurry takes the Parkway. This is a pilgrimage with no destination in mind other than the natural spectacle around the next bend.

We find our rock. I sit and Tompkins stands quietly for a moment. He is a healthy-looking 49-year-old; over six-feet tall; with handsome, well-chiseled features; thick, black hair and not a hint of gray in sight. "He's very vice presidential," one television news anchor told me after an interview in Denver.

Politics runs in Tompkins' veins. He is a descendent of Presidents John Adams and John Quincy Adams, and Daniel Tompkins, who was governor of New York and vice president for eight years under President James Monroe. Tompkins graduated from the prep school Andover in upstate Massachusetts as a Presidential Scholar and National Merit Scholar, with a perfect "1600" on his SAT exam and a ticket to Harvard. At Harvard he studied philosophy, anthropology, and literature, participated in the political reform efforts of the late '60s, and graduated with honors.

Tompkins has spent nearly two decades studying, writing, and lecturing on natural law, and promoting to government leaders in Washington, D.C. a natural-law based approach to education, health care, and crime prevention. He has also worked closely with John Hagelin at the Institute of Science, Technology and Public Policy.

It turns out I am not alone in my ignorance about natural law. In fact, few people have any understanding about what natural law is-or what it meant to our founders. So people enjoy it when they hear Tompkins talk on the campaign trail about natural law. And they seem deeply satisfied when they hear him talk about how the ideas about natural law that were central to the founding of America are the same ideas that are central to the Natural Law Party today.

Tompkins sits down. I make an obvious statement: American democracy changed the world. I ask him to put it into context. What was happening in the world at the time?

Tompkins paints a picture of an exceptional time, of an America "imbued with an atmosphere of extraordinary optimism about human knowledge.

"A new world had been discovered and explored-new lands, new plants and animals, new languages, new cultures, all grist for the mill of the new scientific method," Tompkins says. "Sir Isaac Newton had discovered the laws of planetary motion binding all celestial bodies in a harmonious unity. Political thinkers asked, 'Aren't there universal laws that unite all moral and political phenomena in a similar way, and can't we design the state so government doesn't get in the way of those laws?'¹

"That was the mood of the time. Franklin and Jefferson were scientists, among the greatest of their day, on the cutting edge of this spirit that there was nothing we could not know-that all that exists is perfect, that the best way to do things is nature's way. There's a delightful story about a resolution passed on the eve of the Declaration of Independence in a town meeting in Ashfield, a small town in western Massachusetts. In their resolution, the citizens declared 'that we do not want any Goviner but the Goviner of the univarse and under him a States Ginaral to Consult with the Wrest of the united States for the Good of the Whole.'²

"The founders knew that what they were attempting in building this new federal republic was novel. They saw it as an experiment in self-government that would be watched by the rest of the world with skepticism and a touch of envy, because never before had this type of government been attempted over so large a territory. They were practical men-lawyers, businessmen, farmers-who also knew they had to build carefully if their experiment was to stand the test of time. And in every decision they made, in every action they took, they felt the guiding hand of providence. Though most were not Churchmen, most did believe in a divine intelligence, and their compass was the philosophy of natural law."

Tompkins pauses to take in the view. It's a spectacular panorama up here-waves of deep blue mountains. The sun pokes its way through a big tuft of clouds down low on the horizon, and I can feel its warmth on my face. I take off my bulky parka. It's so easy to think up here. I remember reading that Thomas Jefferson and others had the nation's capital moved out of New York to the then remote swampland of Washington, D.C., to get it away from the stress of urban living. I'm not sure that lawmakers in D.C. would be willing to pack up their offices right now and move to a more pastoral setting, but regular trips to the Blue Ridge would serve the nation well. We all need reminders of the precious covenant we have with nature-but for lawmakers it shouldn't be considered a luxury, it should be part of their job description.

Tompkins talks about how the influence of natural law pervaded the thinking of our founders. He says they thought of natural law as the supreme government.

"John Adams called natural law 'the Great Legislator of the Universe,'" Tompkins says.³ He also says that our founders located the source of all our rights in natural law.

"They believed that our individual rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness don't come from man-made law or from the tradition of customs and practices known as common law, but belong naturally to all individuals by virtue of their participation in a universe ruled by eternal principles of order.

"Our founders also derived our political rights from natural law-the right to form a government, to vote, to have a say in the running of the country. These were all radical ideas when America was founded," Tompkins says. "In the first sentence of the Declaration of Independence, Thomas Jefferson attributes to 'the Laws of Nature' the right of the American colonists to establish their own government-'to assume among the powers of the earth a separate and equal station.'"

And finally, Tompkins says that the founders also saw in natural law a model for this government.

"John Dickinson, a delegate from Delaware to the Federal Convention in Philadelphia that drafted the U.S. Constitution, told his fellow delegates, 'Let our government be like that of the solar system. Let the general government be like the sun and the states the planets, repelled yet attracted, and the whole moving regularly and harmoniously in their several orbits.'⁴ This was more than a metaphor for federalism; it reflected a deep-seated belief among the founders in the order of the universe and our place in it."

Tompkins stands up to stretch. The rock is still cold but the air is getting warm. Little patches of snow remain from a huge storm that dropped 40 inches several weeks ago. We start climbing up a ravine, switching back and forth, back and forth. In a few minutes, with another panorama in sight, we find dry ground, and sit down against some trees.

Probably I should know this already, but I wonder where the founders got their ideas about natural law.

Tompkins says they studied them in school and were very widely read throughout their lives. I'm sure he could talk for hours but he gives me a five-minute history of natural law in the West.

"America's founders studied the classical literature of Greece and Rome and were schooled in the Judeo-Christian tradition," Tompkins says. "One of the earliest ideas about natural law is found in Greek philosophy. The term used is 'logos'.⁵ It means the unity, order, and destiny of the universe. This idea was developed by later philosophers who believed that each individual has a nature and at the same time is part of the larger nature, that each individual is developing the full potential of his or her nature in harmony with everything else. The purpose of law in a society is to preserve order so the individual can develop fully. For this to succeed, man-made law must be in tune with natural law. This is what justice meant to Plato and Aristotle.⁶

"A century later the Stoics took the concept of natural law a step further. They coined the term, 'cosmopolis,' from which have our word, 'cosmopolitan'. Their idea was that we don't belong just to a particular town, state, or country, but are citizens of the cosmos. We live in the cosmic city state, and in this state we're all equal. Male or female, rich or poor, we all have the same fundamental right to the full development of our potential as essentially cosmic beings. For the Stoics, happiness comes from living our full potential, which is the same thing as living in accord with natural law-the two are one and the same.

"Natural law was at the basis of the most pervasive and successful legal system of classical times-Roman law. The civil law of Rome as well as the law between Romans and foreigners were held up to the standard of the 'jus naturale', the natural law, which was eternal and universal. A Roman jurist would examine a case and ask, 'Is my judgment in accord with the universal principles of natural law?' If it wasn't, he knew that the man-made law he was applying needed adjustment.⁷

"This natural-law based system maintained the 'Pax Romana'-the Roman peace, and it endured as the foundation of legal systems throughout Europe for more than 1500 years."⁸

I marvel at Tompkins' words. How could it be that I never learned this in my unabashedly liberal arts education? Natural law pervaded the Western philosophical, legal, and political thought that led to the founding of our republic. I had no idea of its influence until Tompkins started stitching the whole thing together.

"Christianity brought a new layer of understanding about natural law," Tompkins says. "Christian thinkers distinguished between the absolute, eternal natural law of God, which had prevailed in the Garden of Eden, and a more relative natural law of latterday man. This was the law that the individual discovered when he tried to understand God's eternal law and lead a good life. This gave great dignity to the individual, and was the seed of later ideas about the natural rights of man.⁹

"Throughout the Middle Ages, legal systems were based on natural law-on a combination of Roman law and Christian doctrine," he says.¹⁰

Tompkins says that during the Renaissance, the Church began to lose its hold on secular governments. So European political thinkers sought a new justification for state power in yet another set of ideas about natural law. One crucial idea was 'the state of nature.'

"The state of nature was somewhat like the Garden of Eden or the cosmopolis," he says. "In this abstract state, all were free and equal in exercising their rights to pursue happiness. In order to protect these rights, individuals formed a community. Once they had formed that social compact, they made a contract with an authority-a prince or sovereign-whose job it was to protect their rights. They loaned that sovereign some of their rights, and thus the state gained legitimacy. None of this actually happened-it was a theoretical model-until the founding of America."

Tompkins says that natural law theory so dominated the thinking of the 18th century that many universities in Europe established professorships of natural law. Many scholars and political activists wrote about natural law and the natural rights of man, and described how, if those rights were not being protected, the social contract was void and citizens had the right to revolt and set up a new state.¹¹

Clouds are gathering in the southeast. Thunder rumbles in the distance. Five minutes ago we could see the glint of sunlight reflecting off the office towers in Charlotte 90 miles away. Now we can't. In these mountains the weather changes quickly.

Tompkins brings the story of natural law home to America. He says that all these influences-from the ancient Greeks to the modern thinkers-came into focus in the Declaration of Independence and the U.S. Constitution.

"These great works were not sudden eruptions of a radically new theme of government," he says. "They were prominences in a broad political culture that had been gradually evolving for thousands of years."

I ask Tompkins what the founders were trying to structure with the new government?

"They believed that the order inherent in the universe could in some measure exist in human society, as long as government was set up in the proper way. They recognized what Madison called 'faction'-the tendency of individuals and groups to pursue their selfish interests to the detriment of the common good. To limit faction they innovated new forms of government, such as the separation of the powers of the state into executive, legislative and judicial branches, as well as a system of elected representatives. They thought that these new features, along with the vastness of America, would dampen the ills and enhance the virtues of democracy. An improved democracy would turn conflicting private interests into a public order that better reflected the order of the cosmos.¹²

"The American experiment succeeded," he says. "Most countries in the world have since copied our model. But today we face challenges the founders never dreamed of: incredibly powerful technologies, much greater population densities, vanished geographical frontiers that leave us nowhere to expand, and an interconnected yet volatile global community."

As a result, Tompkins says, the systems innovated by our founders are no longer operating effectively. He gives several examples.

"With instant communications and rapid transportation systems, sheer size is no longer an impediment to faction. A letter sent across the country no longer takes two months; it goes in a keystroke. The two-party stranglehold on our democracy-something not even implied in the Constitution-has dangerously weakened the separation of powers. Almost all the people who now make up the legislative, executive, and judicial branches of our government are either Democrats or Republicans. If they are on the same side of an issue, such as access to the election process, then the separation of powers has broken down and no longer serves the public interest. And our elected leaders can't effectively represent the people. A Member of Congress in the late 1700's represented 10,000 to 15,000 people. Today that same office 'represents' 600,000 people."

It's time to head back. Tompkins has to give a lecture on this subject in 15 minutes. We jump across a snowy creek bed, push through some brush and get on a paved road. We walk a few hundred yards before the road starts to drop downhill. The conference center is about a quarter of a mile off to the right.

Those are some of our problems, I say. So what are the solutions?

"Basically, there's just one," Tompkins says. "We have to become truly self-governing, and that means we have to learn how to live in accord with natural law. We can never turn back the clock. Our challenge is not to stop progress, but to align it with natural law. For this, we must do today what the founders did in their day. When they wanted a better government, they took an old model of democracy and improved it with the best science of their time. To meet our challenges we have to do the same thing. We must look at the way nature governs in the light of new scientific knowledge and do a better job of harnessing natural law. If our geographical frontiers have vanished, we find there's a new frontier within us. When we start developing our inner potential we become healthier, more creative and more prosperous as a result. If our representatives no longer represent us effectively, we don't need an additional 535 Members of Congress; instead, each of us can become more self-governing. That means each of us can learn to live more in accord with natural law so we don't cause problems for ourselves and others. And if the separation of the powers of government is not protecting our interests, then we need to elect new leaders from new political parties who will ensure that it does.

"Our founders established a structure of government that protected individual rights and allowed the individual to flourish. It's not enough just to maintain the structure they put in place. In our far more complex world we must take the next step. We must empower everyone with knowledge of how to develop their full potential, how to wake up to the totality of natural law within themselves."

Tompkins senses that I need a little more explanation.

"Modern science tells us we are not just a part of natural law but are its totality-that all the laws of nature found throughout the universe are also found in us. When we experience this reality, when we realize that we are cosmic, we begin to live spontaneously in accord with all the laws of nature that govern our health, our environment and the whole universe. We don't make costly mistakes that need a big government to clean up. And then our government will be just like the government of nature-efficient, effective and automatic. It will have 'automation in administration.'"

Tompkins also says that nature's government is nourishing to all.

"Everywhere in nature we see infinite diversity evolving in one harmonious whole. That's nature's government at work, and it's the ideal of democracy as well. Our government, if it's functioning in harmony with natural law, will keep the country unified, while, at the same time, will strengthen diversity and bring satisfaction to everyone.

"The Stoics said we are citizens of the 'cosmopolis', cosmic individuals. When we awaken to this reality, our government will be on a par with what John Adams called 'the Great Legislator of the Universe'. This is the vision of the Natural Law Party. The knowledge is available to realize this vision today; it's up to us to use it."

This is just the knowledge that John Hagelin has been talking about since he started running for president in 1992.