Historical narratives will typically note that the Magna Carta was a result of struggles between an unpopular king and a group made up of secular lords and lords of the Catholic Church in England. It’s actually a pretty complicated story which played out over centuries and also had a long prologue, but the point is that noblemen struggling against the excessive centralization of many kingdoms and empires were only tangentially concerned with the liberty of commoners, and then mostly the merchants and bankers with whom they were allied. The serfs or free peasants, even blacksmiths and owners or managers of large textile mills or large grain mills, were of little concern to anyone. In the short-run.
So it was that European elites gained positive rights and liberties while most Europeans were repressed to a lesser or greater extent with some being essentially enslaved. But our history books tell us that, in the long-run, through the efforts of many, various sorts of positive rights and liberties were granted to wider and wider groups of residents becoming true citizens. Is this for real?
Partially. We need to recognize that the formal granting of positive rights and liberties doesn’t, in and of itself, mean that those rights and liberties will be truly honored. More importantly, a people freed from serfdom or even less oppressed states might not be capable of properly exercising their newly gained rights and liberties. In the American political tradition, the common voter chooses from a small slate of candidates chosen in a process managed by the political-machine operators captured in literature (The Last Hurrah) and cinema (The Candidate but perhaps more clearly if more comically in Miracle on 34th Street). More recently, the system seems to be largely in the control of managerial-elites reporting to the national committees of the two-headed monster, Republican and Democratic. (Rogues who are either scoundrels or honest and courageous men have disrupted the system, but the system rapidly returns to business as normal as soon as the better sorts such as Eugene McCarthy and Pat Buchanan and Ron Paul are cast aside with greater or lesser showing of respect. Or disdain.)
This was made possible and continues to be made possible by the moral irresponsibility of clergy and professors and authors and musicians and painters and—perhaps most of all—parents. In one of the most important and oft misunderstood books of the modern world, The Revolt of the Masses, Jose Ortega y Gasset claims—with good backup—that the elites of Europe failed the liberated masses of Europe in the 19th century. The failure has become an outright betrayal, but I’ll just describe quickly how they failed the recently liberated commoners, noting first of all that it is parents who have the primary responsibility to see that their children are well-educated and that the moral characters of those children are well-formed. Training one’s children to be fans of one or more teams of the National Football League is, at most, optional.
But let’s go back to the 19th century when European school systems were expanding and peoples of at least a little literacy were trying to make sense of this greater world they were discovering, often after leaving behind farm or village to seek employment or perhaps higher education in Edinburgh or Berlin.
People who knew only their own villages and parish churches were suddenly exposed to, and sometimes sent out into, a world of many villages and parish churches of slightly different cultures as well as the Cosmopolis of the West in its different manifestations such as London and Paris and Rome. This was a world in which the old myths, of the Heavens as well as of tribal chiefs become national founders and pagan gods or heroes become Christian saints, were increasingly being seen as implausible, to say the least. (We now know that many of these myths held truths about, say, the founding populations of Europe, but that’s another story.)
Those peoples were struggling out of states of illiteracy and of ignorance of the world outside of their villages and outside of their small stock of myths and legends and old housewives tales and so on. As Ortega y Gasset pointed out, those with the responsibility to integrate their peoples into what might be called Western Civilization chose instead to drop down to the level of a vulgar and parochial peasantry. So it is that we have the blind trying to lead the blind. For example, we have Christians trying to recover the glories of Christendom with pep-rallies and music which sounds as if written for television commercials; none can understand, perhaps few know, that those glories of Christendom began with an entire culture aiming for the Heavens. The early music came from the anonymous composers (monks?) of Gregorian chant and early forms of polyphony and other modern music; the later music came from Palestrina and Bach, Handel and Mozart, Beethoven and Mahler. Similar statements can be made about literature and architecture and even political thought—even the powerful and erroneous ideologies of modern politics and economics emerged in a healthy Christendom as it started to catch colds and other minor ailments; the future diseased state was likely hard to see at the time.
Can the people resulting from this failure to hold on to what was good and to improve it be able to understand `it’? Can they even understand liberty as more than a chance to look at dirty pictures or to choose a church community with more lively fellowship—independent of any effort to seriously think about the theological or moral or cultural issues?
If we accept the likelihood that there are scoundrels who wish to exploit others, then a regime of positive rights and liberties could easily be turned to a fraud in which the powerful and wealthy exercise their rights and the common folk are treated as sheep for the shearing and slaughter.