The Nomadic Perspective

Preliminary Reading:

The social contract is predicated on conservative consent, but to admit as much doesn't make one a conservative. It is a mere acknowledgment of reality. Only when we understand things as they really are can we intuit a path forward.

This work is written from the perspective of a nomad; a man who has no home; whose ancestors have roamed the Earth since time immemorial. We have citizenship, yet doubt its solidity. Our suitcases are always packed, ready to move on when the Cloud of Glory beckons us.

We would prefer to stay put; to contribute to our community and to build our State. We seek nothing but the betterment of the co-citizens around us. But history has shown us that the future is cruel; that there is no solution to the nomadic dilemma. Should we remain apart, they will suspect us. Should we integrate, they will envy us. Should we become more German than the Germans, they will exterminate us. There seems no path forward; only the anxiety of despair.

Yet although the powers of a clairvoyant elude us, we doubt not of the following maxim: that the stability of society is not only in their interest, but ours also. We would like to agree with Ayn Rand that rights inherently rest with the individual; that all should be compelled to follow the example of the United States and submit government to moral law. We would like to agree, but we may not; for she describes what ought but not what generally is.

She explains that the freedom-removing government is “criminal”, but not how we may prevent its criminality. Although we may wish to live in a utopia - or failing that in the freedom of America - we may not force it, for we have no power, only vulnerability. Our imperative is to guard that which we already have and to affirm all positive change that has garnered conservative consent.

Rand’s thesis, memorably stated in her essay Man's Rights, has an intuitive moral appeal. Where the individual is sacrificed to the will of the state, there our “natural rights” are offended; rights, according to her, that are neither gifted by neither God nor Society, but rather are inherent in our rational nature. A tyrannical dictator, ruling only in his own interest, clearly sacrifices the individual for a collective interest only he defines, but such, affirms Rand, is also the case in a majoritarian system. Here the majority decides what is in the interest of the State and the minority individual is left with no choice but compliance.

Should they see the majority decision as injurious to their individual moral purpose, they may protest, but to no avail; for in our modern societies it is the State that has the unique monopoly on violence. This being so, government is only legitimate insofar as it protects an individual’s freedom of action. That is the Randian concept of rights.

Rand’s case is compelling, but it ignores the ingredient which can bring about such a state of affairs: power. Power can be used to sacrifice the individual or be employed to bring about the common good. Furthermore, it can be deployed in the defence of different conceptions of the common good. Many have been the historical instances, Catholicism, communism and Islamism among them, of the powerful instituting what they consider to be the common good to the disapproval and actual harm of minority subjects.

The American Experience, which marries the common good with the individual right to life, liberty, property and the pursuit of happiness, is an exceptional retort to the general rule. Here, the powerful consented to individual political rights and saw that as the basis of their Constitution. Such is to be lauded in most congratulatory of terms, not least of all by the powerless, wandering nomad.

Yet, in defiance of Rand's thesis, this was not “nature”, but declaration. The American Declaration of Independence, as its name suggests, brought into being a political reality that didn't previously exist. It was explicitly founded on the basis of Biblical Freedom, which in and of itself was a political reality that didn't previously exist. American society gifted those rights that we always ought to have had, but never did.

Its powerful thereby created a city on a hill; a prototype of a New Jerusalem. To maintain that Jerusalem both respects the conservative foundations of the original contractors and the individual rights of the current citizenry. Yet had the American State never arrived at that state of political development, those rights would never have existed.

It is here that we must marry the Randian conception of political organization with the conservative attitude of Roger Scruton. On the surface they could not be more different or opposed. Indeed Scruton describes the “bigoted” liberal as even more of an adversary than the power-seeking socialist. Yet it is in understanding the Scrutonian analysis that we resolve the dilemma: how Anglo-conservatives wound up supporting individual rights.

Roger Scruton is emphatic: natural rights do not exist and freedom is a secondary, if not tertiary, goal. The English philosopher sees the nation as an evolutionary organism with its own purpose and will. Through involving themselves in the life of the nation, the conservative identifies the national will with this own. The national posture is defined by its laws and the institutions created by those laws. Freedom, thus understood, is not an abstract principle granted to each person individually, but the space of action permitted by the statutes and customs of their land. That which is not specifically proscribed is permitted and that which will harm the nation, will be proscribed indefinitely.

Thus the British “freedom” of speech is defined by the boundaries of its prohibition. Sedition, incitement of violence and so on - harmful, as they are deemed to be to the nation - are forbidden, but that which is not forbidden is necessarily permitted.

In this way, Scruton firmly contradicts the analysis of Rand. It is not the nation that is subject to individual liberty, but individual liberty that is subject to the higher authority of government. Yet the apparent incompatibility of these doctrines only manifests itself outside Anglo shores, for the natural organism of the Anglo-State was the creature that birthed liberty. Scruton is correct to argue, as I do within my work, that it is the law - not nature - that grants liberty, yet the Anglo powerful have consented to such liberty, both in the United Kingdom and even more dramatically in the American context.

The compromise between Scruton and Rand, which is to say the living reality, comes in accepting the meeting of is and ought. The individual ought be granted a right to life, a right to liberty and a right to pursue (though not the entitlement to be given) happiness. Rand is correct about property too; that it is the individual means to live out an genuinely independent life. Yet those rights only exist because they were in fact granted; because they were birth organically by the liberty-striving Anglo State.

Seeing individual freedom as the expression of its purpose and inscribing that development in the text of constitutionally agreed law, the powerful of Anglo-lands gifted us our rights. Only by remaining without the bounds of their constitutionally framework do we maintain those rights so as protect the freedom of the powerless.

Yet there is a postscript and it challenges the conservative conception that Scruton is so wont to promote. It is understood that it is for the law to grant rights, but it is argued that there is a moral duty to advance towards rights over time. The reason for this is simple: not everyone has a home. The social conservative may automatically identify his own will with that of the nation and seek to live in “friendship” with his nation through affirming conservative principles, but what would his response be to those without a land?

We too live in friendship with our adopted homeland, but do so knowing that we don't have a stake in political decision making. Our voice is meaningless; a drop in the ocean. We try to stay silent, minding our own business and accepting the majority will, but sometimes that isn't enough to save us. If no nation in the world were prepared to go on a journey towards rights, then what future would we have? How could we live with individual dignity?

If no State deigns to go on a journey towards Randian America, then the nomad - a human, rational individual - is thereby treated as a means towards an end. A thing, a chattel, a slave. Rights must be won - consented to - but their achievement is the moral objective of any society with decency. Patience is the antidote to destabilising revolution, but it is challenged by permanent injustice.

The nomad is a person.

The nomad deserves rights.

We call on the social conservatives to agree.