The Disposition of Power I

There was a time, not so long ago, when knowledge of classical authors was common among the people,
both young and old regardless of the level of formal education, of the United States. From elementary
school, through to college, even private tutors or independent readers, Americans became familiar with
numerous ancient authors and their heroic characters found within the renditions of the ancient world.
How many today have read or are reading the authors Homer, Cicero, Plutarch, Livy, Caesar and many,
many others? How many Americans today have dove into the writings of the European enlightenment –
reformers like Rousseau, Montesquieu, Voltaire, or Locke? Yet, these same, so-called knowledgeable,
individuals with momentous levels of criticism, cannot cite one sentence of what was written, nor
present a synopsis of what they were addressing. Known today as social justice warriors, they are
individuals who claim the past is the past, or nothing more than old white men whose words no longer
have meaning in today’s world. No longer have meaning?! How would they know?!
In Chapter One of Theodore Beale’s, “An Introduction to the Social Justice Warrior,” he describes what
SJWs are truly all about:
“In the universities, in the churches, in the corporations . . . free speech and free thought are under siege
by a group of fanatics as self-righteous as Savonarola, as ruthless as Stalin, as ambitious as Napoleon,
and as crazy as Caligula.” He added, “They are the Social Justice Warriors, the SJWs, the self-appointed
thought police who have been running amok throughout the West since the dawn of the politically
correct era in the 1990s. Their defining characteristics:”
o a philosophy of activism for activism’s sake.
o a dedication to rooting out behavior they deem problematic, offensive, or unacceptable in
others.
o a custom of primarily identifying individuals by their sex, race, and sexual orientation.
o a hierarchy of intrinsic morality based on the identity politics of sex, race, and sexual orientation.
o a quasi-religious belief in equality, diversity, and the inevitably of progress . . .
In writing after writing, the ancients and Enlightenment reformers expressed their views on natural
rights and the social and government contracts. Montesquieu wrote on the character of liberty, and the
institutional requirements for achieving it. Voltaire on the evils of religious oppression, Blackstone on
law, and many others such as Pufendorf, Burlamaqui, and Vattel, on the laws of nature as well as nations,
including the principles of civil government which Americans revered since the early days of the republic.
To them, law was not a science – something few but the educated could understand. Instead, law
became a warehouse of the human experience in apportioning the principles of justice, equality, and
rights. But more than anything else, law was a history that helped explain the movement of events that
gave meaning to the present.
The influential thoughts of the early years of the republic motivated confidence in the ideal America had
a special place in the world. A place where the People sought to establish right by appeal to precedent to
the unbroken traditions from the dawn of humanity. They anticipated the amassing of time, the
incumbrance of custom, confined within of a greater wisdom than any individual or group of individuals
could conceive through the influence of their ability to reason, for what lays behind every sensation of
politics is the fundamental explanation of political debate – the disposition of power.