Genius of Western Civilisation Ep 3 The Rule of Law 4K 6 part Celebration of The West

We've got to be unembarrassed, Mark. And that's one of the reasons I'm using my immigrant privilege to make this point. We've got to be unembarrassed about saying what we believe in. What are British values? What are Western values? And I'm afraid we've lived through a period of time when it's become unacceptable. Every contingency is catered to by being in the West. The fact that there's a rule of law, that the police aren't supposed to... I mean, sometimes they do, but the police aren't supposed to kind of screw you over. Like, as a woman, you can expect to be safe. You have rights. Even most of the wokesters who are sort of constantly engaging in this indulgent assault on the West, I think they might get a nasty surprise when they discover what a world not fundamentally governed by Western principles is like. The West is under attack. We live in the freest, healthiest and wealthiest societies in human history. Yet as authoritarian and oppressive regimes threaten us from without, a new movement within tells us to feel nothing but shame for who we are. I think that there are a lot of people who, partly through ignorance, want to tear it down, want to belittle the West's achievements, want to misrepresent it. And so I think a threat in many ways comes from a misremembering of what the West is, how it came to be. The American conservative Russell Kirk said that he was conservative because he was a liberal. It seems paradoxical, but it really isn't. What he meant by that was that he was liberal in the sense that he believed in individual freedom. The word liberal has that root of, you know, libere free in it. And he believed in that. And in order to foster those values, you know, colorblind justice, advancement according to merit, the rule of law, all of those things depend upon an attitude toward your civilization that is conserving, that is conservative in the sense that it tries to maintain those values, those institutions which provide a field in which these values can thrive. Welcome to the West. This is my take on the great and still unfolding adventure of who we are and why it matters. This is a history of how our extraordinary, unconventional civilization came to be and why it must be defended. It's a fascinating and often unexpected journey stretching back 15 centuries to the fall of Rome. The first Westerners were barbarians, but the barbarian West would have been nothing without the faith that transformed it, Christianity. Now our epic journey continues to an age of royal power. Here, a party of rebel barons brought King John to seal the great charter, Magna Carta. But in the West, even kings were finally forced to kneel before the law. Where the power of the executive is constrained by law, and so you have a well-ordered society where individuals within constraints have the freedom to think and to innovate and prosper. So that's part of it. The idea of human freedom, the idea of the fact that the individual is sacrosanct and should be free from government tyranny, is a revolutionary idea still unpracticed in most of the rest of the world. I mean, in Russia and in China, the idea that you as an individual have rights and that you having the wrong opinion, for example, does not mean you should be murdered doesn't really exist at a practical level. If you're a significant public figure in either of these two countries and you speak out against the regime, you are at best going to be forced out or prosecuted under some false pretenses or criminalized in some other way or killed or poisoned or put in a camp. I'm filming this on the 12th of July, 2022. On this day, 848 years ago, the King of England, Henry II, came here to the outskirts of Canterbury in disgrace. He was dressed simply as a pilgrim with no silk robes or gold thread or jewels. Before he entered the city, he stopped and took off his boots and walked the rest of the way barefoot. King Henry walked three miles like that all the way to Canterbury Cathedral. You can imagine the filth and the rubbish he must have trod in as he walked through the streets of a medieval city. By the end, he left a trail of bloody footprints. When the king reached the great cathedral, he went straight to the shrine of Thomas a Beckett, the late archbishop and his former friend who had been martyred here four years earlier, not quite by Henry's command, but certainly in line with his wishes. Beckett had been resisting the royal will, standing up for the rights of church courts and the liberties of the English clergy. After a final outrage to his authority, Henry cried out, What miserable drones and traitors have I nourished and brought up in my household who let their lord be treated with such shameful contempt by a low-born cleric. Now Henry was the one who knelt before the low-born cleric in front of the martyr's splendid tomb, closed his eyes in prayer and told the monks there, some of them eyewitnesses to Thomas's murder, to whip him for his crime. It is said he received three lashes each from eighty monks and five more each from the higher-ranked clergy. These must have been more like ceremonial taps or he wouldn't have made it out alive. But what's remarkable is that Henry, the king, felt the need to abase himself like this at all. It wasn't even by order of the Pope he had done a penance to him two years earlier in the cathedral of Avranches in Normandy. But Henry was facing a series of domestic revolts and a Scottish invasion. This humiliation was his bid to regain his subjects' trust. As well as God's pardon. And it paid off. At least for a while. The West would not have developed this unique, for the time, notion of the separation of spiritual authority and political authority without Christianity. And that goes right back to the beginning when Jesus tells his followers there are some things that belong to God, there are some things that belong to Caesar. Give Caesar what he's due, but don't give him what he's due to God. Now, it took hundreds of years to work out the implications of that. And the examples you mentioned, the scourging of Henry II after the assassination of Thomas Beckett, the Holy Roman Emperor in the snow at Canossa and all of that, I mean, these were key moments in nailing down the distinction between spiritual and political authority. And I believe these were the first vaccinations into the body politic of the West of an anti-totalitarian principle. Those antibodies would not have been in the Western bloodstream of the Western body politic without Christianity, without Gregory VII, without the bishops who called King Henry to repentance. The everyday freedoms of the West today can be easy to take for granted. But the life everyone here is enjoying is made possible because in the West, no king or pope has ever been able to keep all the power for themselves. And also because the one power we have set, even above kings, exerts a tremendous equalizing and liberating force, the power of law. The crucial fact of the West was the absence of a single empire and the rise instead of a patchwork quilt of states and principalities. Even within states, the power of rival nobles as well as the church provided a check to total control. Absolutism could descend in some territories for a time, but never everywhere. Western liberal democracy emerged, so to speak, from the furnace, from the fire of conflict between religions, between nations, between ethnicities, as a way of allowing human beings to live together in peace. The West's divisions were always its greatest strength. Centuries later, the philosopher David Hume would write in praise of the stop which such limited territories give both to power and to authority. Limits of authority meant more room for dispute, invention and competition. The important thing to note about the West, and it's often a point not appreciated by its critics, is that they view the West as being a sort of monolithic still product of straight white men that constantly says the same thing, whereas of course the West is incredibly dynamic and it's evolved and it's had battles with itself. Its leading countries have been continually at war with one another. Its leading thinkers have continually torn shreds out of one another. Tolstoy didn't like Shakespeare, yet both belonged to the West. Nietzsche didn't like Plato, yet both belonged to the West. If you care about speaking your mind freely and testing received orthodoxies, if you care about society and culture being a place where received orthodoxies can be tested and challenged and changed, then for that reason alone you should care about the West. Divided powers was a theme of every great historian of Western civilization through the 18th and 19th centuries. Montesquieu started the ball rolling. He focused, for one thing, on the fact that nation states in Europe were more numerous, more compact, more competitive, more evenly matched, so to speak, than the sprawling and centralized empires of Asia. But Montesquieu was also very interested, famously interested, in the division of powers within any given country, the division between the executive, legislative, and judicial functions. These were not equally divided in all parts of Europe, so Montesquieu focused in particular on England, which had brought this idea of the division of powers to a high point. And it was to this division of powers that Montesquieu attributed the development of liberty in Europe. And of course America's founders were deeply influenced by Montesquieu's writings on the separation of powers and followed it when they drew up America's constitution. Division and competition also meant endless war. But desperate and bloody as those conflicts were, the arms race helped to develop the military superiority that supported the West's rise to global dominance and kept it safe from losing out to rivals with less interest in innovation and individual expression. In the West, there were always far more chances for intellectual heretics to find a bolt hole or a backer. It wasn't a world where emperor says no was the end of the matter, and quite possibly of your life. That could happen here too. It often did. But in the West, there were also always rival powers where you could try your fortune. It made all the difference. There's never been in the history of the world, I think, a civilization that is more self-critical than the Western tradition. That's part of who we are. It's part of who we are that we would produce a Karl Marx, for example, whose, were his philosophy ever to really be instantiated, would destroy the West. But we thrive on that dialectic. We thrive on that give and take. Self-criticism is essential to the West. You could argue that ever since Socrates, the West has been engaged in constant conflict with itself. That's one of the great things about the West. It's one of the things that makes the West dynamic. When Christopher Columbus went looking for a backer for his expedition of discovery across the ocean sea, he tried every royal house he could. His brother actually secured the support of England's King Henry VII, except that by the time he got back with the good news, Columbus had already sailed, funded by Ferdinand and Isabella of Spain. It is an interesting counterfactual how different history might have been if the New World was an English discovery. But what matters is that Columbus had options, and no monarch had the power to forbid such voyages, quite the opposite if they wanted to stay ahead of their neighbours. After Columbus's sensational discovery, King Henry VII of England, keen not to be left behind, promptly commissioned John Cabot to sail from Bristol and try his luck further north. In 1497, Cabot's expedition encountered the coast of Newfoundland. 500 years earlier, a band of Vikings led by Leif Erikson had landed at almost exactly the same spot and established a short-lived village at L'Anse aux Meadows. But that was long gone. Its memory lost, except for vague hints in legend. Cabot and his men became the first Westerners to step ashore on the mainland of the Americas. It must have been terrifying. Columbus had brought back rumours of cannibal tribes further south. Cabot saw two running figures vanish into the forest. But were they beasts or men? They found some traps and a needle used to make fishing nets. They believed they were in China, which, in a sign of the West's isolation from the wider world, they still thought of as the land of the Great Khan. But there was no sign of its fabled wealth or anyone to trade with, which was what they really wanted. Just the ash of an old fire and an unstrung bow, its wood dyed red. They fired one of their crossbows, a far more sophisticated and powerful weapon, into the silent undergrowth. Then they planted the banners of the English king and Pope Alexander VI in the ground before beating a hasty retreat. Just as competition made all the difference in encouraging the voyages of exploration, in Europe, too, the political division created opportunities for dangerous new ideas to survive and spread. Now, François Guizot continued this theme of the division of powers, but did it in a somewhat different fashion. Guizot wrote about the unresolved contest between four centers of power in medieval and early modern Europe, meaning royalty, the aristocracy, the church, and the middle classes. It was the conflict between these four centers of power that gave rise to liberty in Europe, according to Guizot. Now, it was John Stuart Mill who updated this theme for his own Victorian era, and I think for our era as well. Mill, at first, believed that Europe ought to be ruled by what Mill called the clerisy, the educated classes. But after reading Guizot's account of the dependence of liberty on unresolved competition between different forces, Mill changed his mind. Mill came to believe that domination of Europe by the educated elite would be a great threat to liberty and civilization. And so when Mill wrote his defense of free thought in discussion in his great classic on liberty, he structured his argument around an idea that had been inspired by Guizot, that the liberty of the West depended on this unresolved competition. But there was an even more powerful force at work in the West than just the division of power and the frenzy of competition and potential for dissent that created. Ever since, the Roman church and the barbarian tribes had begun to come together to form this strange, ever-changing civilization. Law had been at its heart. I always think of Ayaan Hirsi Ali's narration in Infidel of her making it to the Netherlands as an asylum seeker from Kenya at that point, and how she, the sort of incredible moment when she realized that she could approach the policemen for help, and they would help her, and that there was no way that they would try to do anything horrible to her, to bribe her, to kind of put her in a situation that was dangerous, to trick her, hoodwink her, or otherwise endanger her. And so that always stayed with me as a kind of absolutely basic, simple difference between some other orders, world orders, and the Western one. Winston Churchill attempted to define the Western idea of civilization in a speech to the University of Bristol in 1938. What is at the centre of Churchill's definition? The rule of law. Violence, the rule of warriors and despotic chiefs, the conditions of camps and warfare of riot and tyranny give place to parliaments where laws are made and independent courts of justice in which over long periods those laws are maintained. That is civilization, and in its soil grow continually freedom, comfort and culture. In the West, law that applied equally to all was a force that over the centuries would work to guarantee property, stimulate invention and even encourage democracy and science. It would also limit and even humble kings. The conversion of King Ethelbert in Kent at the very dawn of the West was followed almost immediately by the first written document in English, the Law of Ethelbert. These laws would be an inspiration to Alfred the Great as he formed his nation anew in the aftermath of war. Today, the inns of court in London dating back to the 14th and 15th centuries are a peaceful tribute to that long English tradition. In England too there was another extraordinary idea, common law, emerging from the people, not imposed from above. The other thing which I think is an underrated miracle in the English-speaking world is the wonder of the common law. This system that grows like a coral with each case serving as the starting point for the next. I mean, nobody would invent it. If you're trying to come up with a legal system from first principles you would say you write down the law, you make the general abstract principle and then you apply it to a specific case. The idea that no one does that, that it just kind of grows organically, I mean, who would invent that, right? Where did it come from? We don't really know, right? It predates written history. But again and again in the story of the English-speaking peoples it has turned out to be the real hero, the force that has held autocratic government at bay and preserved personal freedom. And it wasn't just here in England. Across the West a new kind of law was taking shape. In 7th century Spain the Visigoths rejected separate barbarian and Roman legal traditions in favour of a single territorial law, the Forum Iudicum. The barbarians, under Christian influence, were shedding their tribal identities and becoming national communities bound by law. This was a law for one territory, neither imperial nor universal, and the Christian ideal of equal worth of all people before God was starting to produce the practical reality that all should be equal before the law. Under the code, women could inherit land and manage it for themselves. And once they turned 20 they could choose their own husband. But the code went further, binding even the most powerful. It said, Willingly, therefore, carrying out the divine commands, let us give temperate laws to ourselves and to our subjects, so that no person, of whatever rank or dignity, may refuse to submit to the power of the law. This very Christian idea surely also appealed to the barbarian, Gothic sense that the king was one among peers, not an exceptional, semi-divine lawgiver. In time, the feudal kingdoms of the Middle Ages offered even more limits to absolute power. Oh, kings might assert their divine right to rule, but the ruler's power was never total. Instead of living under despotism, the West was already a complex civil society with reciprocal legal obligations that travelled up, as well as down, the social ladder. And the best place to see that is outside the West, in Jerusalem, after the First Crusade. Yet again, the West, even at its most apparently barbarous, contains within it the seeds of something far greater than its more highly civilised rivals. The temple church behind me has been in use since 1163, and throughout its long history has been close to the heart of the English tradition of law and liberty, including a key role in the struggles that led to Magna Carta in 1215. Its round shape is modelled on the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem, the holiest site in Christianity. The First Crusade reclaimed that city in 1099, in a torrent of blood. Afterwards, the Western victors established the Kingdom of Jerusalem under Godfrey of Bouillon. But Godfrey was no Mongol khan or Roman emperor. He shunned even the title of king, refusing, he said, to put on a gold crown, where his saviour Christ had worn a crown of thorns. Instead, Godfrey chose to be known as the Supreme Magistrate, the advocate of the Holy Sepulchre, and his first act in office was to compile, with the help of learned Latin pilgrims, a law code. Edward Gibbon called these Assizes of Jerusalem, a precious monument of feudal jurisprudence, a model of political liberty carried for the first time outside the boundaries of the West. The Crusaders placed this law code in the most precious place they knew, the tomb where Jesus' corpse had been laid before the Resurrection. And they guarded its promises as fiercely as they did the Holy Sepulchre itself. As they did so, the restless West was about to embark on the most important legal transformation of its history. In the 11th century, beginning with the Church, and thanks to its respect for Roman law, new legal ideas began to reshape how power worked in the West. It began with a rediscovery of Roman civil law. In about 1070, the Corpus Uris Civilis was recovered in northern Italy and began to gain influence, including over the Church. But the Church's lawyers soon ran into a problem. How to reconcile the various contradictory legal traditions into a single canon law? Well, in the 11th century, an Italian lawyer-monk called Gratian compiled the Decretum. It was an astonishing feat, the first definitive statement of a harmonized canon law, and it began a revolutionary tradition. Unlike the closed system of Roman law, this was a Western innovation, open, evolving, and questioning. The canon law of the Church was very complicated, a highly developed intellectual system of legal practice. And the Church also, Christianity also, taught the West that positive law, what the king says, what the legislature says, what we would call here in America black letter law, what's on the statute book, ought to reflect the natural moral law. What I called a moment ago those deep truths built into us and into the world, which include moral truths. So the responsibility of positive law to a higher moral law is, I think, something that Christianity can rightly claim to have helped build into the civilizational structure of the Western world. The canonists' moral rationalism also created a new science of law, one that would in time provide a template for scientific discoveries about the world beyond the courts. Here, there were no final answers. Investigators proceeded with organized skepticism in line with values of objectivity and integrity. There was even an experimental element to their work, studying natural experiments from the history of law to gauge real-world effects. In the West today, we often associate things like constitutionalism and rule of law as characteristic of an enlightened modernity. Well, there is some truth to that, insofar as rule of law and constitutionalism achieved a type of maturity really from the 18th century onwards. But if you go back to the medieval period, it's not hard to find pretty robust expressions of constitutionalism and rule of law, both in the practices and even legal and political systems of medieval states, but also in the writings of different scholars, ranging from Albertus Magnus to his student, Thomas Aquinas. In fact, it's really with Thomas Aquinas that we find this vital distinction on the one hand between rule of law and rule of men. What's important about this is that rule of law, as understood by Aquinas, is really rule by reason. Rule of men, he understands, is rule by arbitrary passion. So what's interesting about this is that Aquinas makes the point that rule of law is really about the rule of reason applied to questions of freedom and justice and what ought to be done in the political, social and economic order. Rule of men is really another way of describing tyranny, of what we would describe as unconstitutional forms of behaviour. And so this, I think, is where you start to find very robust expressions of ideas of rule of law and constitutionalism. We even find this in medieval religious orders who had elaborate constitutions about who may do what in the context of a particular religious order. Whereby you find sort of more democratic versions, more versions that are much more hierarchical, but the point is they thought very seriously about how you arrange relationships of power in a just way. And that is the essence of constitutionalism and that's very much a medieval insight. And one final innovation gave universities and soon many other bodies a new kind of status. The canon law gave collectives a way to form legal entities in their own right, corporations. By 1215 the University of Paris was established as a corporate body with a representative head who could award teaching licenses. And how were members of such a corporation to choose their representatives? The democratic principle of election by consent was the natural solution. In England and America we remember 1215 for another legal milestone, one that led towards a system of representative government that covered an entire kingdom. Magna Carta is a revolutionary point in our cultural and legal history. It sets a tone for the sort of nation that we are today as a constitutional monarchy with checks and balances on parliament, on power. The repercussions of what happened here in Runnymede by the River Thames would echo down the history of the English-speaking peoples. The American Bar Association set up this memorial in recognition of the site's legal significance, not just for Britain, but for America and the world. Here a party of rebel barons brought King John to seal the Great Charter, Magna Carta. It was drafted by the Archbishop of Canterbury, Stephen Langton, and set the power of the king beneath the law. Here are two of the great promises of Magna Carta, still enforced today. No free man shall be seized, imprisoned, dispossessed, outlawed, exiled, or ruined in any way, nor in any way proceeded against, except by the lawful judgment of his peers and the law of the land. To no one will we sell, to no one will we deny or delay right or justice. Other clauses stipulated that a punishment should be proportionate to the offence, and that taxation should not be imposed without the consent of the government. I mean, the Magna Carta has meaning as the still point of an explosion of an idea. Ideas flow outward. People like to go back and point out that the people who said all men are created equal held slaves. Well, yes, because an idea is like a seed. You plant that seed, and it's not like magically the world is transformed, but it grows, and it grows in a certain way. It grows into itself. And Magna Carta begins with a bunch of people who were what we would now call privileged people saying to the king, you know, we don't want you pushing us around all the time. And it ends with the idea that all men are created equal. That is Magna Carta. It's just Magna Carta grown into that great tree from the mustard seed that it begins with. The system of the West is, above all, a legal order. And that might sound dry, but it has proven anything but. In the world of the West, law is our secular king of kings, binding on even the highest authority. At the centre of the West sits not a god-king or an emperor, but a set of overlapping legal orders that share a common principle. One law for all, and liberty under it. This is law as a tapestry of overlapping jurisdictions and evolving traditions, both common law and Roman law in all their open-ended variety. And it is one big reason for the West's astonishing openness. Our ever-emerging legal order, based on equal human dignity, has a capacity to welcome and accommodate outsiders and adapt to new developments. It naturally gave rise to representative democracy and all its blessings. And in the face of the most appalling injustices, it has shown itself able to be self-critical and self-correcting. This open system also releases energy from below, thanks to secure property rights and a system in which anything is permitted unless the law stands in the way. This has helped to make the West a treasure house of invention and discovery. And unsurprisingly, because the law is so important, it even provides a constant source of cultural inspiration.