Two inaugural addresses and natural law

As I was reading President Bush's second inaugural address, I was struck by its similarity to one delivered by a predecessor exactly 44 years earlier. Here is John F. Kennedy speaking on 20 January 1961 after being sworn in as president:

Let the word go forth from this time and place, to friend and foe alike, that the torch has been passed to a new generation of Americans—born in this century, tempered by war, disciplined by a hard and bitter peace, proud of our ancient heritage—and unwilling to witness or permit the slow undoing of those human rights to which this Nation has always been committed, and to which we are committed today at home and around the world.

Let every nation know, whether it wishes us well or ill, that we shall pay any price, bear any burden, meet any hardship, support any friend, oppose any foe, in order to assure the survival and the success of liberty.

And now President Bush:

We are led, by events and common sense, to one conclusion: The survival of liberty in our land increasingly depends on the success of liberty in other lands. The best hope for peace in our world is the expansion of freedom in all the world.

America's vital interests and our deepest beliefs are now one. From the day of our Founding, we have proclaimed that every man and woman on this earth has rights, and dignity, and matchless value, because they bear the image of the Maker of Heaven and earth. Across the generations we have proclaimed the imperative of self-government, because no one is fit to be a master, and no one deserves to be a slave. Advancing these ideals is the mission that created our Nation. It is the honorable achievement of our fathers. Now it is the urgent requirement of our nation's security, and the calling of our time.

So it is the policy of the United States to seek and support the growth of democratic movements and institutions in every nation and culture, with the ultimate goal of ending tyranny in our world.

Aside from the strong sense of national purpose invoked by both speeches, both manifest a commitment to an expansive, interventionist foreign policy which would see the United States playing a substantial role in the defence/advance of freedom outside its own borders. Both employ rhetoric manifesting a weak sense of the limits of government and the limits of the resources at the disposal of even a global superpower. We ought not forget that the idealism of Kennedy's administration was soon followed by the debacle in Vietnam. Hard on the heels of Camelot came Chicago 1968, Kent State and Watergate.

Napoleon had virtually the whole of Europe under his control. But he overextended himself and his military by invading Russia in 1812. The US currently has troops in Afghanistan and Iraq, where they are finding it difficult to keep even a semblance of order. Now we hear rumours that covert operations are occurring in Iran. Threats have been directed at North Korea as well. Is Bush in danger of making the same error as Napoleon, Kennedy, Lyndon Johnson and many others? Time will tell, but one would be foolish to deny the possibility.

In the meantime, there are a number of voices in the media castigating Bush for bringing "too much God" into his inaugural address. Joseph Bottum, writing in the Weekly Standard, argues that Bush's speech had just the right amount of God. Far from sounding like a theocrat, Bush is appealing to a natural law tradition extending as far back as Thomas Aquinas. Writes Bottum:

So, we've got an enduring and universal human nature ("ancient hope"). We've got final causation ("meant to be fulfilled"). We've got a moral problematic (the "ebb and flow of justice"). We've got intelligible formal causes (the ideal of "liberty" as shaping a "visible direction" for history). And we've even got a prime mover ("the Author of Liberty"). There isn't much more a natural-law philosopher could want in an American president's inaugural address about nature and nature's God. I'd guess not a lot of gloating is allowed around the throne of the Maker of heaven and earth, but somewhere in the vicinity, St. Thomas Aquinas must be smiling. . . .

Yet Bottum admits there is much in the address to cause discomfort to the more devout believers in his audience.

The president's Evangelical supporters may have been reassured by the public religiosity of the occasion--the prayers, the Navy choir singing "God of Our Fathers," the bowed heads. But the god of the philosophers ain't much of a god to be going home with. A deistical clockmaker, an impersonal prime mover, a demiurge instead of a redeemer: This is hardly the faith Christian Americans imagine the president shares with them. There was not a mention of the Divine in Bush's speech that Thomas Jefferson couldn't have uttered.

So has Bush embraced natural law theory? If Leo Strauss (no, I am not a Straussian) were alive today, he would probably say no, underscoring the considerable distance between the mediaeval notion of natural law and the peculiarly modern notion of human rights: "In the modern development, 'natural law' is as it were replaced by 'the rights of man,' or in other words the emphasis shifts from man's duties to his rights. Whereas pre-modern natural law was on the whole 'conservative,' modern natural law is essentially 'revolutionary.'" There is, of course, more to Strauss' argument than these two sentences, but it would seem truer to observe that Bush is more evidently the heir of Jefferson than of Thomas Aquinas and his scholastic followers. In this respect at least, Bush's speech is unexceptional in his country's history.