The Law of the Decalogue

Preface to Patrick Simon, Can one be Catholic and liberal?, Paris, 1999.

By François Guillaumat

The core of liberalism (classical liberalism, libertarianism) consists in subjecting all members of society to those four articles of the Ten Commandments that concern Law, politics:

—thou shalt not steal;

—thou shalt not covet thy neighbor’s wife, or his male or female servant, his ox or donkey, or anything that belongs to your neighbor;

—thou shalt not kill;

—thou shalt not bear false witness.

This last norm is included in politics because most lies actually violate Law or are necessary for injustice.

Liberal Law, therefore, is known to everyone, and everyone follows it in their everyday life, including politicians and other state officials, when they are not acting as state officials. Those who do not comply with it: who strike their neighbor, attack passers-by in the street to rob them, or kill their wife, they end up in prison, in the hospital, or in the morgue. The liberal definition of justice is thus the normal definition of normal people. So by what aberration should we endure the plundering and other abuses of a State that is more socialist than ever? And by what schizophrenia do so many clerics, so-called “Christians,” and others aware and respectful of Natural Law in their everyday life, approve of all these offenses and crimes on the part of government agents?

The reasoning is typical of the deceptions of the Evil One: “Everyone is against theft,” explain the sophists who serve him, “but theft doesn’t exist in itself, it’s ‘the law’ that defines it.” To be clear, it would be the men of the State who decide who is a thief and who is not. Just as with abortion, they determine today what is murder and what is not. As if it were is up to them to define Good and Evil.

This is where liberalism opposes statism: for liberalism, a thief, a murderer is not merely someone who does not go through recognized state procedures to rob their neighbor or murder them; for the liberal, in stark contrast to the social-democrat who often pretends to be one, the thief is the one who takes someone else’s property without their consent; regardless of who is the aggressor, the victim, the motive for the theft, the destination of the loot, the “needs” of the receivers, or even the number of people who approve of this theft or deny that it is theft. And according to the same rational principles of objectivity and universality, a murderer is anyone who deliberately kills an innocent person. End of story: necessary and sufficient definitions. And to know which side the Christian Decalogue is on, one only needs to ask if it commands: “You will do as the men of the State say,” “You will worship Democracy,” or if, on the contrary, it repeats: “Thou shalt not steal,” “Thou shalt not kill,” etc.

Another aspect of the eritis sicut deus blasphemy that the clergy no longer seems to condemn as liberalism does: the refusal to apply to government agents the universal prescriptions of morality and Law. For the statists, there would apparently exist a sorcerer’s hat, with the words “GOVERNMENT AGENT” written on it, which would transform all lies, all thefts, all murders into a form of “superior justice” as long as it is worn.

Is it conceivable, however, that the Decalogue does not address government agents? Should these prohibitions against doing evil exempt them because they are the ones who can do the most harm, being the only ones who can use aggressive violence with impunity? Are they not human beings like everyone else, and even more prone to error and crime, being those who can force others to bear the consequences in their place? Are they not supremely the ones who can lie, steal, and murder?

Let our clergy not protest too quickly against the “simplism” of this “caricature.” For this is indeed what their own invocation of the “common good” against liberalism implies. It merely adds a ritual formula as a condition for the hat’s efficacy, but the magical inconsistency is the same: yes, they say in essence, governmetn agents have the “right” to dispose of others’ property against their will, provided they claim a particular destination for the loot. But the destination is indefinable and the pretext absurd, since the liberal principle of non-aggression, as discovered by the late Scholastics, is precisely the solution to this research program that is the question of the “common good.”

Non-aggression is the only definition of a just act that is observable by all: defining as legitimate property everything that has not been objectively stolen, that is, acquired by violence and deception, this principle is universal and exclusive of all others. By admitting it “but within certain limits,” because they claim to make it depend on other supposedly “higher” norms, such as the “common good,” the “right to life,” and other “universal destination of goods,” the clergy not only throws logic overboard: by rejecting it, they abandon the entire objectivity of the Just. They deliver all political and social rules to arbitrariness and thereby, whether they realize it or not, embrace not only subjectivism but also the utilitarianism they otherwise profess to abhor. For to define justice beyond the criteria of the Decalogue, they would need to be able to search the hearts and minds. And, of course, he who tries to be an angel becomes a beast. This is what happens when one finds it more reasonable, less extremist, to pretend, as Cardinal de Lubac would say, that two and two make four and a half.

The Anti-liberalism of the clercs offers them many other opportunities to deny the principles and values of Christianity: confusing morality with justice, they invoke its recommendations against the rights of others, forgetting —or pretending to forget —that this right to choose is a necessary condition for moral action, and they take this alleged “solidarity” as charity, which, to borrow a word from Saint Augustine, is merely state-sponsored plunder. Is stealing from others supposedly for the benefit of the poor truly what Christ demanded of the powerful? And how can it be believed that they admit this out of concrete concern to help the needy, when their “realism” mainly consists of swallowing all the pious declarations of the men of the State, as if political redistribution were not by definition about the strong stealing from the weak, with the poor always being the main victims?

Dismissing the obligation to serve others for one’s own benefit that characterizes voluntary relationships in liberal society, ridiculing the “mythical invisible hand”, they praise the men of the State who destroy this real necessity of service to others amid speeches about the supposed “public service”, an institution that, by nature and vocation, is effectively exempt due to their subsidizing and monopolistic violence: non serviam! Accusing those who take seriously the political prescriptions of the Decalogue of “idolizing the market”, they reject its definition of just action in favor of utopias of “social justice” implying that the men of the State would be Omnipotent, Omniscient, and Infinitely Good, finding themselves wading in their practical materialism, as it is they who seriously reason from supposed “measures” of human projects with sums of money, having lost all awareness of the moral abyss that separates honest money from that which they stole. And when speaking of a “market”, who but themselves is constantly on about it? The rule of life they would disqualify being the simple principle of non-aggression, intimately known and recognized by everyone, how can they turn it into a monster, unless they dress it up with a name that nobody understands, starting with themselves?

However, the Christian values most spectacularly renounced by clerical anti-liberalism are the primary ones: love, and notably the love of truth. Liberalism is first and foremost the object of falsifications. The most serious, alas, was committed in the last century by our Holy Mother Church, which, instead of recognizing in liberalism its legitimate child, mistook it for the opposite of what it is: for subjectivism because, when it said that those who are mistaken have rights, it believed it heard that error would have rights. Yet, after two centuries of clarifications by so many liberals explicitly or implicitly supportive of Natural Law (following Locke), what to think of descriptions that still confuse it —or pretend —with an absurd rejection of all norms and constraints, with the miserable rationalizations of libertarian anomie, still refusing to do liberals the charity of considering them capable of thinking political norms? Or calling “liberals” precursors of totalitarian statism like Hobbes or Rousseau, plutocratic pseudo-conservatives like Guizot, and even —it has been seen! —authoritarians like Bismarck? Or seeing “neo-liberalism” in the theft of land from peasants, the collusion of state monopolys into supranational super-monopolies, or the personal hoarding by those in power of wealth stolen from the people by their socialist-communist predecessors?

Is it for these willfully ignorant, who shirk their of state, and more so for their countless dupes, whom they have been busy confusing for decades, that Patrick Simon wrote this book. Rest assured: it is with much more restraint that he tries to bring his readers closer to some of the harsh truths that I have just thrown in their faces. Through facts, examples, and quotes patiently developed, he demonstrates that the liberal political norm is at least compatible with Christianity. It’s like trying to clean our French economic illiterates with a spatula, a very small wooden spatula, authors and readers of pompous denunciations of a liberalism of which they know nothing and to which they understand nothing. And if among them there are those who have not entirely forgotten the time when Truth interested them, they will emerge from his reading considerably smarter than when they entered.