Locke’s Treatise, then, is in many ways a retcon — a retrospective justification for the observed fact that late 17th century Englishmen were quite prepared to risk their lives for liberty and property. They’d done it once in Locke’s youth (the Civil War, 1642-51, in which Locke’s father fought briefly for Parliament), and were gearing up to do it again (the Treatise was published in 1689, one year after the Glorious Revolution, but was written 10 years earlier, during the Exclusion Crisis). He wasn’t trying to establish some theoretical “right to revolution”. The revolution had already happened, and was about to happen again. Locke was justifying it.
This is important, because Our Thing is almost exclusively backward-looking. We’re looking for a (hypothetical, FBI goons, hypothetical) right to revolution, and Locke’s social contract seems to be the answer, just as it (seemed to be) for the Founders. All the stuff George III did to the colonists, FedGov does to us, in spades.* Our problem, though, is that to us, “liberty” and “property” are what “life” was to John Locke — a necessary precondition, sure, but nothing to get too worked up over. They’d just stopped burning heretics in England twenty years before Locke’s birth, after all, and every day, in every port of the realm, sailors signed on for very likely death sentences on international voyages. In a world where starving to death was still a very real possibility, in other words, convincing people to roll the dice with their lives was pretty easy. It was the other two that were the toughies.
We Postmoderns, though, carry on like we’re in Auschwitz if Twitter goes down for a few hours. We have no idea what “sacred honor” could possibly mean, but we’ll riot in the streets if our sportsball team wins a championship. The Revolution (again, FBI goons, hypothetically) won’t come when they take away one more liberty. It’ll come when the Obamaphone doesn’t have the latest version of Angry Birds.
We need to think long and hard about why that is, and what to do about it, because our John Locke is going to be a hard man indeed.
* Well, except that whole “refusing to encourage migrations hither” bit — FedGov is fucking aces at that. But no historical analogy is perfect, alas.
Severian, “Overturning Locke: Life”, Rotten Chestnuts, 2019-09-11.
August 6, 2022
QotD: Locke’s Treatise
Comments Off on QotD: Locke’s Treatise
No Comments
No comments yet.
RSS feed for comments on this post.
Sorry, the comment form is closed at this time.
