On November 4, 1995, at Victoria Hall, in Santa Barbara, California, Daniel Sheehan launched a new political party in the United States, the Natural Law Social Democratic Party.

It was the first speech of a series to be given every month until the 1996 elections. Analyzing them, he predicted more of the same in American politics, and made a case for a new party with a new approach. He expects Ross Perot to run for President again, and he expects that as a consequence of the Perot vote, the Democrats, Bill Clinton and Al Gore, will be re-elected. He expects Perot to get nearly 25% of the vote, and that the majority of those who vote for him would otherwise have voted Republican. In the House and Senate the Republicans will retain their majority.

More importantly, the drift of American politics to the right will continue. The right wing will increase its influence in the Republican Party, and the Democratic Party will respond by assuming moderate positions, while the definition of "moderate" will move to the right as the Republican movement to the right changes the location of the middle of the spectrum.

The right wing has a coherent ideology, which is, in its essentials, an updated version of the 19th century Social Darwinist philosophy. Their ideology provides a rationale for saying that it is not the government's business to redistribute wealth and income, from rich to poor; rather income is to be redistributed from poor to rich, as Nature, God, and economic science intend; while the government attends to its real business: war, police, and prisons.

The center and left have no alternative to offer. For several decades they could appeal to Anti-Communism, arguing that help for the poor was needed to keep them from being recruits for the international revolutionary left. Now that Communism has collapsed, Anti-Communism is no longer available to be the American ideology, and the Democrats can only agree with the right wing in principle, while urging pragmatic moderation in practice.

The drift of the terms of American political discourse to the right is due, most fundamentally, to the lack of any solid normative values at the core of American political culture. Raw moral vices, the institutionalization of self-interest, dominate politics because there is a moral vacuum. The political passivity of the majority of the American people - now composed overwhelmingly of Baby Boomers and their children the Sonic Boomers - is both a consequence and a cause of the moral vacuum at the center and on the left.

The Natural Law Social Democratic Party will gather together the majority for political action guided by an historical and philosophical alternative to the emptiness at the core of contemporary western political culture. The historical and philosophical alternative is natural law.

Natural law affirms that there are knowable and real normative values. It was regarded as the mainstream of the western tradition until a time early in the 19th century when the dialectic became the mainstream. The dialectic, denying in principle the possibility of discerning ethical truth, made force the ultimate source of authority.

Let this suffice as a brief summary of what Daniel Sheehan said in three and one half hours. The entire talk is available in print and on videotape from William Martin at Wisdom Keepers Publishers, 101 East Victoria Street, Santa Barbara CA 93101.

In this commentary I will not focus on the problem, but on the proposed solution. My comments will have three parts:

In his speech he made several statements which could easily be proven false. If future events turn out to be different from what he expects, for example if Ross Perot decides not to run, then it will follow that he was wrong. Encouraged by his candor, I will also make several statements which can easily be proven false. Since he is nearby, he can easily correct my interpretation of what he said, and therefore my account of what he really meant will be proven false because he will have said that what I said he really meant was not what he really meant.

In proposing natural law as an historical and philosophical alternative to conservatism, Sheehan means to select some natural law traditions and to reject others. In history, natural law has been conservative at least as often as it has been progressive, and at the present time there are few right wing positions that are not buttressed by some reference or other to what someone takes to be natural law.

The whole point of Social Darwinism is that the survival of the fittest is a natural law. Social Darwinists conclude that because the unfit ought not survive, compassionate politics is wrong. Sheehan opposes Social Darwinism but supports natural law; therefore he means something different by the term than what Herbert Spencer, for example, meant by it.

Another proof that Sheehan selects certain natural law traditions and rejects others is that he describes as "raw moral vice" the "institutionalization of self-interest." But for the founder of modern liberal secular natural law, the Dutch jurist Hugo Grotius, to act from self-interest is what is natural. Finding the pursuit of self-interest natural does not prevent Grotius or other liberals from constructing an ethic, nor from developing a system of international law. Rather, one of the foundations of the liberal social order we actually have is the assumption that self-interested individuals coordinate their actions through contracts in a world organized by markets. Liberal natural law has a normative basis, but it is not the normative basis Sheehan advocates, because it consists precisely of the institutionalization of self-interest. Of course, it is not called self-interest. It is called "freedom."

I do not believe that Sheehan wants to deny altogether the legitimacy of acting from self-interest, the legitimacy of contracts, of markets, or of liberal social philosophy. I do believe that he affirms that a social order can - and in history often has been - built on both love and freedom. It is not necessary to choose one over the other - but in order to synthesize the two it is necessary to base politics on a higher ethical plane than that of the "raw moral vices."

In affirming that caring and bonding have roles to play in politics, Sheehan rejects another natural law tradition, that of the pessimistic theologians. For them humans are by nature bad. As Martin Luther once wrote, "Most men, baptized or not, are bad." If humans are capable of real love at all, it is not because of their nature, but because of supernatural grace. Even then love does not extend to the public sphere, the sphere of politics - precisely because the public sphere is governed by natural law - that is to say, by what they (not Sheehan) call natural law. Natural law in this tradition is the law of sinners, the law of this fallen world; the saved live not under the law, but in the spirit.

In the context of Sheehan's thought both "natural law" and "spirit" take on a different significance. He proposes to "make being filled with the spirit real in the political process." For him natural law is not the antithesis of spirit; it is its product.

The natural law that Sheehan advocates is one that could have been called until a few centuries ago the mainstream ethical tradition of the West. With roots in Greek philosophy and in mystical communities Greek and non-Greek, going back in time far beyond the beginning of philosophy, it was first formulated as natural law by the Greek and Roman stoics. From there it entered Judeo-Christian-Islamic theological traditions. It is still carried on today in the social teachings of the progressive wings of the mainline churches - Methodist, Presbyterian, Catholic, Lutheran, UCC, Unitarians, Quakers, Jewish, among others - and in secular humanism as expressed, for example, by M. Scott Peck. It is a tradition which holds that bonding is natural to human beings, that people come together in societies to live the good life based on friendship (Greek: filia; Latin: socius - I mention these older terms because the English term "friendship" connotes a less committed relationship than what the ancients meant), love, and distributive justice.

Whether natural law thus conceived as the rational working out of a love ethic in politics and in society is still mainstream today depends on who is counted when defining what is mainstream. If voice and vote in calculating who is in the majority are accorded, for example, to Buddhist social teachers, to feminists, to Taoists, to the savants of tribal peoples, to Hindus, and to other so-called "minority" voices, then what Danny Sheehan is advocating is still mainstream. It is not the mainstream ethic of white patriarchal capitalism.

Sheehan's version of natural law offers an alternative to the right. It offers an alternative for the center and the left. The right wing, with all its faults, does not - except for a few crass opportunists - live in an ethical vacuum. It is the center and the left which have no set of publicly articulated and persuasive core normative values with which to resist the constant drift of American politics to the right. Hegel's concept of the dialectic, on Sheehan's account, bears much of the blame for the left's moral weakness. Hegel made a clean break with natural law traditions, and viewed history in a way that excluded the discernment of ethical truth as it had previously been understood. I would add that skepticism about the possibility of basing political action on ethical vision stems also from other thinkers, in addition to Hegel, and above and beyond all the influences of all the thinkers it stems from the experiences of the masses in living daily life in modern society.

Sheehan proposes a people's politics grounded in a theological rationale for democracy. We do not have democratic rights to participation in society because of our needs - at least not just because of our needs. Nor are we voting members of society because of our minds - at least not just because of our minds. Our capacity for discernment of right and wrong entitles us to be a co-rulers, members of the government. Sheehan articulates a new criterion for human dignity: the possession of the faculty of the spirit. He proposes a new task for a political party: conducting a serious dialogue on normative values; becoming the catalyst for bringing out the inherent capacity for ethical action of a populace which is now discouraged, disenfranchised, and cynical.

He does not mean to advocate just any natural law, and not just any set of normative values. His vision of natural law is optimistic. His values emphasize the virtues of caring for others and commitment to relationships, which have been associated in recent years with listening to the voices of women.

The question remains whether Sheehan should be talking about natural law at all, or about normative values at all. Some other vocabulary might work better, and might have less tendency to be mistaken for what he does not mean.

I take it as a premise that any vocabulary he could choose would have its drawbacks. We live in a corrupt society, and one of the consequences of our society's corruption is that our language fails us. We live in the ruins, accompanied by the sick nouns, the wounded verbs, the poisoned adjectives, the strangled adverbs.... Danny Sheehan has chosen to revive one of many weak and failing vocabularies. Specifically, he has chosen to talk about the "Natural Law Social Democratic Party." Whether the words he has chosen can do the work he has assigned to them remains to be seen. He is betting that certain traditional ideas he identifies with "natural law" will prove to be attractive to the people of the 21st century, and that they will in time become the name of a shared dream that will inspire millions of people to work together for good. That is Sheehan's wager.

In his speech Sheehan stated two postulates of natural law. The first is the attraction of matter to itself. Every unit of reality is physically attracted to every other.

Ancient natural law theories were embedded in a context of assertions of this type, i.e. very general assertions about reality, sometimes called metaphysical statements, such as, "every unit of reality is physically attracted to every other." For Aristotle, for example, it was literally true that love made the world go 'round. The stars in the heavens moved for the love of God, and the same attractive force functioned also on earth and among us.

In general, simpler societies have had simpler cultures (although even simple societies can have amazingly complex symbolic structures - as shown, for example, in Levi Strauss's account of genealogies of the Australian bush people in The Savage Mind). Part of their relative simplicity is that they employ a relatively unified discourse, in which the same explanatory principles unify accounts of natural phenomena and accounts of interpersonal relationships.

Aristotle's Metaphysics laid foundations for a unified worldview in a society that already was developing technology and commerce, and the mainstream natural law tradition Sheehan seeks to revive is to a great extent influenced by him. For more than a thousand years his unifying natural law concepts and those of the Stoics helped to unify society by unifying its symbols. The normative values that governed conduct were part and parcel of philosophical and theological stories that located human emotions in the context of a vision of the place of the human in the cosmos.

Now, in nearly the year 2000, it is harder than it was to produce a unified worldview. Whatever the units of physical reality may be, they are something known only to specialists in the study of physical reality. If they exist at all, they can be described, if they can be described at all, only by theoretical physicists or chemists who talk to each other in the language of higher mathematics. America's fundamental normative principles - leaving out of account for the moment the rest of the world - are described, if they can be described, by constitutional lawyers who talk to each other in legalese. If Fritjof Capra and Daniel Sheehan, a theoretical physicist and a constitutional lawyer, get together and talk about natural law, there is no guarantee that they will find a common language in which to talk to each other, and it will not be easy for them to come to any common conclusions that the educated public - leaving out of account for the moment the uneducated public - is prepared to understand.

Even more importantly, during the 20th century the leading schools of philosophy have been animated by a profound liberal conviction that the dream of a common language would be a nightmare if it were ever realized. The logical positivists, the analytic philosophers, and now the postmodernists, have considered it their mission in life to save the world from nonsense and from authoritarianism by extirpating metaphysics. As the Santa Barbara philosopher John Wilkinson used to say, according to the most prominent philosophical tendencies of our century in the Anglo Saxon world, a concept like "the attraction of matter to itself," was a concept that "lacked the dignity of being false." It would not be false because it would be deemed to be meaningless nonsense, and therefore not even a candidate eligible to be proven to be either true or false.

We can believe about Sheehan's first postulate of natural law that in it he has told us which side he is on. He intends natural law to be a unifying historical and philosophical alternative to fragmentation and isolation. If we could find in nature a great principle that explains the cosmos and at the same time prescribes valid norms for human conduct, then it would be a great civilizing myth, not an evil totalitarian ideology. And if that is what we want, then talking about "attraction" and "bonding" is a good place to begin. Even lay people know about gravity, and what is gravity but the attraction of everything to everything else? Capra, Brian Swimme, Ilya Prigonine, and other scientists who know more about physical reality than we do have encouraged us to interpret the latest findings of research in ways that provide metaphysical comfort to the human soul. Why not ?

The second postulate of natural law is that humans have a faculty (i.e. a power) to discern the unitive force, the unitive phenomenon. It is a biological faculty, a faculty of the spirit. It is analogous to hearing, which discerns sounds, and to seeing, which discerns lights and colors.

The faculty affirmed in this second postulate is not identical to - although perhaps it includes - Kant's rational faculty which gives every human being an a priori understanding of human dignity in herself or himself, and which therefore grounds a liberal ethic based on respect for human dignity. What Sheehan and the tradition in which he stands affirms is a faculty of compassion, which goes beyond liberal respect for rights, and affirms, in line too with the mainstream of feminist philosophy, an ethic of sharing and caring.

Sheehan's second postulate is similar to Karl Marx's assertion that the human species is by nature social, and that consequently the pro-social tendencies of our species-being (Gattungwesen) can be expected to assert themselves under historical circumstances more favorable to their flowering than those that obtain at present. This is why Marx says that in capitalist production and exchange humans are alienated. Alienated, we are not who we really are, because the deep natural impulse of our real nature is to express through our work our love for each other.

Unlike Marxists, however, Sheehan does not emphasize consciousness-raising in the sense of making the working people aware of their true historical situation and real interests as members of an oppressed class. Instead, Sheehan proposes "making the salvation dynamic real in the political process." In making moral progress fundamental to political progress, he is closer to Gandhi than to Marx. The aim is to create a new political and spiritual culture, in which the empowerment of the people goes hand in hand with respect for the people's capacity to see the good and to act according to it.

It is necessary to ask whether there are good reasons for believing that humans as a species have a biologically given capacity to discern the unitive phenomenon, in other words, "a faculty to discern the truth," that is at the same time a "bonding phenomenon." Here, as always, we have a choice of vocabularies. Given that the biological makeup of the human species is what it is, is it appropriate to say the things about it that Sheehan says?

One hard fact about the biological makeup of the human species is that it took hundreds of thousands of years for our characteristic genetic endowment and physical structure to become what they are, and for most of that time humans were hunters and gatherers who lived in small groups. It seems probable, then, that culture developed as a means to cooperate in order to survive; thus Thomas Berry's dictum that "humans are biologically coded to be culturally coded" fits together with Clifford Geertz's dictum that "culture is the ecological niche of the human species." A great deal of evidence has been amassed to show that humans did in fact biologically evolve to be physically inclined to live in harmony with each other and the environment. Some of it is found in Nancy Tanner's On Becoming Human, and in Robert Axelrod's The Evolution of Cooperation.

Another hard fact about the biological makeup of the human species is that wherever homo sapiens sapiens appears on the planet, religion appears. You may dislike religion as much as you will, and you may consider yourself to have no need of it, but the fact remains that it is, as Emile Durkheim put it, the mother matrix out of which human thought and institutions have evolved. It is older than philosophy, older than science, older than capitalism and socialism; it follows that it is more firmly rooted in our physical nature.

From these facts it can be deduced that something like Sheehan's second postulate of natural law is valid. Humans are inclined to solidarity, and to spirituality, and to combine their solidarity with their spirituality. As a choice of vocabulary Sheehan's language, "a faculty to discern the unitive phenomenon" the disadvantages and the advantages of being unusual. Among the disadvantages is the likelihood that his hearers will simply dismiss the phrase because they have no frame of reference for assigning a meaning to it. Another disadvantage is that it does not clearly refer to several bodies of research that Sheehan might refer to as evidence proving his point, such as research on moral development and research in comparative religion. Another disadvantage is that it does refer to a rather specific set of views on quantum physics which, whether they are true or not, select only a very limited part of the available evidence and rationale for regarding humans as beings who discern ethical truth.

It is easiest to believe that what Sheehan is saying is true if one emphasizes the advantages of speaking of the "unitive phenomenon." The novelty of the phrase makes it a good umbrella term, which can be taken as a stand-in for any of many ways in which people experience and talk about their understanding of what it means to be in right relationships. The Hindu can speak of Atman, the secular humanist of "caring,' the research psychologist can speak of "Stage 6 of moral development," or of "faith development," the Baptist can speak of "Christ-centered living," and the orthodox Jew of "the faith of our fathers," and so on. They are all exercising their biologically-given spiritual faculty to discern the "unitive phenomenon." Another advantage of Sheehan's second postulate is that by speaking of a "faculty" (i.e. of a power), and of "discernment" it describes a process, not a final truth arrived at once and for all. Hence it helps us to regard each other as pilgrim souls searching for truth in our own ways and on our own paths, who need not be divided by our differences.

If we wanted to act according to the beliefs Danny Sheehan expressed in his first speech - without waiting for the coming eleven speeches - we might, if we understood the speech on a superficial level, conclude that what we should do is what the liberal Democrats used to do, in the days before the voters turned en masse to support more conservative candidates.

We would reverse the right wing's priorities, reducing spending on war, police, and prisons; increasing spending on education, health, and national parks. We would echo the Ted Kennedys, the Mario Cuomos, and everyone who calls for a compassionate politics, with the difference that we, unlike they, would have in natural law an historical and philosophical rationale giving us a solid set of normative values, in the light of which compassionate policies could be justified. The policies themselves would be those of the liberal Democrats.

Heard in this superficial way, Sheehan's speech can be heard as a call to support the traditional legislative program of the liberal wing of the Democratic party, by providing it with a philosophy.

But this would be to overlook the fact that the right wing is winning for more than one reason. The right wing has, at least, a one-two-three punch:

"Friedman's Guillotine" is a concept I have invented to name one of the most persuasive of conservative arguments, as articulated by Milton Friedman, Nobel prizewinning economist and economic adviser to Ronald Reagan. Although it appears at first to be fairly simple, it is not an easy concept to understand; it is certainly not easy to understand its full consequences and implications. Here I will only introduce it; I will not attempt to give a full explanation of it.

As Friedman puts it, any responsible social policy must be based on research. There must be evidence that the intervention proposed will have the effect desired.

Friedman's principle, just cited, appears to be necessarily true and unchallengeable. It also appears to be politically neutral, giving an equal chance to conservatives, liberals, and radicals to do research to find out which programs in fact lead to desirable social effects. That is why I call it "Friedman's Guillotine." It is a logical and scientific principle which has one by one beheaded the illusions of liberal nice guys.

The effectiveness of Friedman's Guillotine stems in part from its use as Punch 3 of the right-wing onslaught, in combination with Punch 1, and Punch 2. When you are hit with Punch 1 you are told that you are less than a fully ethical being, nothing but another symptom of the general moral decline, and that your only hope for redeeming yourself is to sign up to join the right wing's campaign to restore traditional values. If you manage to articulate a better ethics than theirs, and thus to resist Punch 1, Punch 2 will tell you that you are unscientific, fuzzyminded, irrational, out of touch with reality; if Nature itself has decided that competition for survival is the rule of life, then your compassionate politics makes you a sentimental dreamer, or a neurotic suffering from "liberal guilt." If you can persuasively articulate Danny Sheehan's version of natural law, then you have a better version of natural law than theirs, and you can resist Punch 2, only to be hit by Punch 3: Welfare programs do not work; rehabilitating criminals does not work; Medicare does not work; minimum wage laws do not work; environmental protection laws do not work. For all of these well-intended programs and more, there are empirical studies showing either that they cost too much, or that they do not accomplish the objective they set out to accomplish, or that they have side-effects worse than the problem that they are supposed to solve.

The power of Friedman's Guillotine is that it allows the right wing to accept, for the sake of the argument, Sheehan's ethics and Sheehan's natural law, and then to attack most of the programs that liberal Democrats and Social Democrats in other countries have put into place since the 1930s. It enables the right wing to win whether you accept their values or deny them. On their values they win. On your values, they win too because your programs do not achieve your objectives.

Liberals can afford to regard Friedman's Guillotine as a fairly minor problem as long as they believe it is an impeccable logical principle which gives them a level playing field - as long as they believe, in other words, that in the long run empirical research will show that social programs do work as often as they don't work, and that it is just a matter of sorting out which ones work and which ones do not. They can play Friedman's game as long as they win half the time.

But they do not win half the time. Both the general public and a major section of the academic intelligentsia today is profoundly convinced that not just that Communism has been tried and has failed, and that socialism has been tried and has failed, but also that the welfare state has also been tried and has also failed. This tendency of opinion has a basis in fact; measurements have been made and statistics have been gathered which tend to show (although they do not uniformly show) that social programs, which as a general rule require some degree of transfer of wealth from rich to poor and some degree of public supervision, do not achieve the results intended, and have undesirable side effects.

I do not have space here to complete my analysis of Friedman's Guillotine and the problems it poses. But I will try to advance the discussion by stating the conclusions I draw - giving references to writings which more fully state the reasons for these conclusions.*

The conclusion is that we need a new, posteconomic paradigm. There are no economic solutions for our economic problems. There are only cultural and spiritual solutions. We need to encourage and publicize alternatives that do work. Alternatives that work consistently and which are able to be generalized so that they could work for everybody, work because they draw on a new paradigm. Part of the program of the Natural Law Social Democratic Party should be to show real, living, working alternatives, which demonstrate the functioning of a new paradigm in practice.

The principles announced in Sheehan's speech are profoundly right. Superficially, they might be taken to be an argument in favor of doing the same things liberal Democrats used to do, but with a more solid set of core normative values to justify them. But what Danny actually said was that we need to move beyond the whole way of thinking about society and culture that was established in the early 19th century. We need to recreate our political culture from the ground up.

Sheehan's wager, as I understand it, includes the hypothesis that the natural law tradition can be revived and extended in ways that will produce a solution to the problems posed by Friedman's Guillotine. It is not just a proposal for justifying compassionate values; it is also a proposal for creating the political culture of a new paradigm, and therefore it is a proposal to develop practical ways to live according to compassionate values.

*Further readings on Friedman's Guillotine:

Dryzek, John, Rational Ecology. Oxford: Blackwell, 1987.

Lindblom, Charles, "The Market as Prison," Journal of Politics, May, 1982.

Richards, Howard, "Governing Wealth," The Center Magazine, May/June 1975.

Richards, Howard, Letters from Quebec. Toronto: Elliot Chapin, 1991. Letters Eight and Nine