The Time Freedom Almost Won: A Near-Miss in Obtaining a Bill of Rights

The long struggle for freedom includes great milestone achievements over the centuries and millennia: Hammurabi, Moses, Greco-Roman legal thought, the Magna Carta, the Tübinger Vertrag, the English Bill of Rights of 1689, the United States Declaration of Independence, The United State Constitution, The United States Bill of Rights, and the Emancipation Proclamation, to name merely a few.

But there were also some great failures along the way.

In 1628, the British Parliament created a document called the ‘Petition of Right.’ It incorporated many of the ideas from the Magna Carta, and anticipated many of the ideas of the later ‘Bill of Rights’ documents. Both houses of Parliament approved the petition and sent it to King Charles I.

Previously, Charles had promised to honor the already-stated rights enumerated in the Magna Carta; but at the same time, Charles had warned that Parliament should not question, or infringe upon, what he considered to be the absolute authority of the monarch. Parliament was unwilling to rely merely on the king’s assurance, especially when the king limited that promise with his claim to absolute authority.

Sir Edward Coke led the effort of drafting and obtaining passage through Parliament for the document. Coke championed the rights of the people against the crown during the reign of James I, the predecessor of Charles I. His surname is pronounced ‘Cook’ despite its spelling.

The petition was a brilliant move, as historian John Barry writes:

Parliament would not rely on his word, especially with that limitation. Coke suggested that Parliament require the king to acknowledge English liberties in a legislative way. He proposed sending a “Petition of Right” to the king to define the rights of his subjects and Parliament and limits on the royal prerogative. Though called a “petition,” it was not to be a request granted by the king’s grace; it would be a resolution voted by Parliament and assented to by the king. King and Parliament together, representing a unified nation, would give it the strongest possible legal force and make it binding upon the crown.

Had Charles signed the document, it would have confirmed and acknowledged due process, property rights, and a slew of other freedoms. It would also have probably avoided the English Civil War, and thereby saved many lives — including the king’s: Charles was beheaded in the uproar which he partly caused by at first failing to agree to the petition, then by begrudgingly agreeing to it, and finally by reneging on his agreement to it.

1628, then, was the year in which freedom almost triumphed. But almost triumphing is actually losing.

It would require the bloody English Civil War (1642 to 1651) and the abdication of James II (1688) to finally bring about the English Bill of Rights. An additional 61 years were needed to implement the ideas of the Petition of Right.

Civilization’s Most Impressive Developments: ‘Natural’ Does Not Mean ‘Good’

In the early twenty-first century, many people have come to have positive associations with the word ‘natural’ and with the concept it represents. There are, however, circumstances in which ‘natural’ is bad.

To organize a society around the belief that every person should have equal rights and be afforded equal opportunities is unnatural. What is natural, and what comes naturally to people, is to treat people unequally, to give people unequal opportunities, and to assume that people have unequal rights.

Human nature leans toward the organization of systems in which some people receive preferential treatment, have disproportionate influence, and exercise favoritism in their treatment of others.

The organization of a government composed of freely-elected representatives — which corresponds to an intuitive notion of ‘fair and just’ — is unnatural. It is also the way in which civilization has managed to achieve its greatest accomplishments.

The benefits of this unnatural pattern are relatively new in history, as scholar Jonah Goldberg writes:

Capitalism is unnatural. Democracy is unnatural. Human rights are unnatural. The world we live in today is unnatural, and we stumbled into it more or less by accident. The natural state of mankind is grinding poverty punctuated by horrific violence terminating with an early death. It was like this for a very, very long time.

The achievements of the last century or two are significant: both in terms of percentage and in terms of absolute numbers, fewer people are living in poverty around the world. Average lifespans are increasing worldwide. Literacy is rapidly expanding around the globe.

Humans are experiencing the benefits of free market economics and free enterprise system — what is generally called ‘capitalism,’ although strictly defined, ‘capitalism’ is something broader than free markets and free enterprise.

The growth of market economies correlates to, and parallels, the growth of the arts, the expansion of civil rights, and better standards of living even for the poorest of people.

Economics is the best way to tell the story of humanity’s quantum leap out of its natural environment of poverty. Until the 1700s, humans everywhere — Europe, North and South America, Asia, Africa, Australia, and Oceania — lived on the equivalent of one to three dollars a day. Since then, human prosperity has been exploding across the world, starting in England and Holland with the rest of Western Europe and North America close behind. Debate climate change all you like. This is the most important “hockey stick” chart in all of human history.

The natural status of humans is poverty, disease, violence, and ignorance, as fans of Thomas Hobbes know. Advances and developments in civilization occur despite human nature, not because of it. It is by opposing nature that benefits are accrued for people in general, and for the most vulnerable of people in particular.