The Birth of Nations
There are only three means of forming a government: by birth, by conquest, and by covenant.
Clans and tribes forming a kingdom by electing or acclaiming a chieftain or high king from their midst is an example of the first. Such groups spring from a common ancestor. The Normans ruling the Saxons in England after William the Conqueror, or the castes of India are an example of the second: the children of the conquerors rule over a lower class of the children of the vanquished.
In history, there are only two examples of government formed by covenant: the first is the USA. The other is ancient Israel.
In the first case, the various colonies of England in America, each who had the right of self government granted by royal charter when the colony was formed, after rebelling, covenanted with each other to surrender a significant but not total degree of their sovereign power to a general government for the express purposed of protecting their innate, natural rights.
Ancient Israel was formed by a covenant between Abraham and God Almighty, as witnessed by the Bronze Age ceremony of dividing sacrifices and passing a fire between the severed halves (Genesis 15:1-15) ; it was on the basis of that covenant that God rescued the children of Abraham from Egyptian slavery. Additional covenants with Moses established additional laws, customs, and regulations.
As with American naturalization, among the Israelis, a stranger or sojourner could become a Jew, and enter the covenant, if he submitted to their laws and ceremonies.
After the fall of the Empire in Europe, local tribal groups and conquered peoples, now freed, had to maintain law and order against roaming armies of unpaid veterans, and raids from barbarians tribes, and so elected or acclaimed a “rex” or “dux” usually the wealthiest landowner or patron in the area, that is, a military leader, to organize amateur militia. Passing the post from father to son made the “rex” and “dux” into Kings and Dukes, that is, medieval titled nobility.
In modern times, we use the word “nation” to mean a sovereign state, but originally the word meant a group that shared a common vulgar language, their native tongue aside from the Greek and Latin used by the literate or for public business. A “nation” was a local group, say, the Saxons or the Franks or the Longobards, having its own vulgar or local tongue, local saints, local customs. There laws were based on customary use, or Common Law, or Canon Law, or on the Imperial Code of Justinian, that remained from more civilized times.
The kingdoms formed in the Middle Ages took their legal theory from the fallen Empire, which continued only in the East. The idea that each “nation” that is, each should have its own sovereign territory, this is a modern notion somewhat alien to the rule by princes or rule by kings of the Middle Ages and the Reformation. Having a Holy Roman Emperor who did not speak your language was not unusual, nor a source of any real objection, at any point before the modern period.
Roughly in the mid Eighteenth Century, the idea gained prestige that each language group, as the French versus the English versus the Germans, should all be gathered into one territory and ruled by one king.
It was hoped that such nationalism would act as a cease fire to the disagreements and wars between Protestant and Catholic kingdoms. A related idea was to glorify the nation into an object, if not of worship, at least of reverence and respect, akin to the glories paid to kings. In America, this idea makes sense, since it is a covenant nation, where the member states have agreed to certain shared principles or ideals, and if those ideals are not glorified, the Union will fail.
In European nations in the modern age, such nationalism is not based on glorifying an ideal, since their nations are not based on ideals, but on ethnic identity.
This ideal of ethnic nationalism reached its peak with the German program in the 1930s to have, in effect, all political issues based on race, and to glorify race as once kings were glorified. Rather than an established church, the modern idea of nationalism was to have all loyalties directed at the nation-state. After two world wars, the nationalistic ideal was largely discredited in Europe.
In the American Revolution, this idea of a cease fire between national churches, dissenters, nonjurors, and so on, was carried one step further, by explicitly expelling the general government from the question of the national church. In short order the prohibition on establishment was applied to state and local governments as well. Government coercion was abolished from the sphere of religion, albeit, the modern myth revises this separation to say that religion is abolished from the sphere of government, which has grown to encompass all aspects of life, from education to economy to environment.
The French Revolution and Russian Revolution established governments which are best described as satanic mockeries of the American Revolution; they have the form of Roman Republicanism as the American Republic does, even using the name, and take the rhetoric of being a democracy, of the people and by the people. But they are merely what the Greeks called Tyrannies, that is, governments based on the rule by the strong, not an established dynasty. These are not government, but are dysfunctions of government: such revolutionary governments are merely an anarchy of the governing junta, whose excesses are restrained by no law nor custom, and whose crimes never come to reckoning.
In the modern day, the cease fire no longer applies: Social Marxism or Social Justice or whatever name the philosophy of the rebellion of Lucifer is using these days to mask itself, as promoted by schools, and enforced by the Civil Rights Act, is the unofficial but quite clearly established church of the United States, and takes steps to remove all signs of fealty and faith to Christianity from the public square.
About John C Wright
John C. Wright is a practicing philosopher, a retired attorney, newspaperman, and newspaper editor, and a published author of science fiction. Once a Houyhnhnm, he was expelled from the august ranks of purely rational beings when he fell in love; but retains an honorary title.
