The View From 1776

UK reader Richard W. Symonds sent me a link to FIVE PRINCIPLES FOR HUMANITY’S SURVIVAL, an extract from C.E.M Joad’s Principles Of Peace, which he wrote 16 August 1940 (Edited By Richard W. Symonds - 14 October 2007).

Professor Joad was an interesting personality.  In England, he was as widely known as George Bernard Shaw and Bertrand Russell, also prominent socialists.  Beginning as an advocate of destroying capitalism, he was in and out of the the Fabian Socialist group from the 1920s and into the 1940s.  By the time of his death in 1953, he had repented his former atheism.

Professor Joad’s views, like those of most socialists, sound unexceptional until they reach the point of enforcement.  In his case that is handing over our political liberties to a world government, run by who other than socialist intellectuals.

Professor Joad’s early socialist faith led to his Oxford Union debate victory on the resolution “under no circumstances to fight for king or country” and, thence, to Herr Hitler’s conquest of Western Europe.

Today Senator John Kerry and his sympathizers advocate the same policy.  The United States is not free to determine its own foreign policy; only the UN, in socialist theory, has the authority to direct American actions.

The following is the full text of the extract:

I cannot believe that what I am going to say will not already be familiar...that it is not, indeed, the last word in commonplace. Nevertheless, I propose to say it, if only for the good and sufficient reason that, commonplace or not, nobody else does say it.

There are certain principles which form the heritage of our Western civilisation, principles which are derived partly from ancient Greece, partly from Christianity; so deeply are they woven into the texture of our civilisation, that most of us have grown up as unconscious of their existence as we are unconscious of the air we breathe; but just as air is an essential condition of physical existence, so the acceptance of these principles seems to me to be an essential condition of any tolerable political existence.

What are these principles ?

First, that the individual is entitled to respect as an end in himself, with a right to happiness in this life, and a chance of salvation in the next. No claim of the State is entitled to override this right.

For, secondly, the State is made for Man and not Man for the State. Its function is to establish those conditions of order, law, security, justice and economic opportunity in which alone the individual can live the good life as he sees it, develop his personality and realise all that he has it in him to be.

Thirdly, that the individual should have a voice in determining the nature of the society in which he lives; that through his elected representatives he should make the laws under which he is governed, and that, if he disapproves of them and can persuade a sufficient number of his fellow-citizens to his view, he should be able to change them.

Fourthly, that he should not be arrested save for offenced prescribed by the law of the land; that, if arrested, he should not be held in prison without trial, and that his trial should be by an independent judiciary.

What, it may be asked, is to be gained by publishing to the world a series of commonplaces ?

First, the principles are derived in equal measure from Magna Carta and Habeas Corpus, on the one hand, and from the French Revolutionary Declaration of the Rights of Man on the other…
Secondly, all the principles are embodied in the American Constitution...the principles from which America derives her political being.
Thirdly, all the principles are such as are consonant with Christian teaching; and the first we owe directly to Christ. Indeed, respect for the individual person as an end in himself constitutes the distinctive contribution of Christianity to political philosophy…

I add one final consideration :

The (four) principles that I have mentioned are, I should say, the indispensable requisites of civilised life in a civilised society. What is more, they are principles which are widely accepted among us.
But though their acceptance is a necessary condition, both of European revolution and of the establishment of a civilised order...it is by no means clear that it is sufficient.

It seems to me inconceivable that...we should ever again allow a single nation to threaten the world’s peace; inconceivable that we should permit so destructive a weapon...to be let loose upon civilisation by...one irresponsible sovereign State.

I deduce that if civilisation is to avoid destruction, it must set up a Federal Government to control armaments and foreign policies.

This means adding to my four principles (which are accepted), the principle of federalism (which is not)...a spontaneous unity of free nations, in which each unit retains its national functions and national characteristics, while surrendering to a common government the right, which it at present possesses, to plunge the world into war.

This principle stands on a different footing from the other four, in that, while they are accepted, it is controversial…

It seems to me difficult to envisage a durable peace in the world, unless this principle is coupled with the other four.

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