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Divine Right
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In today’s climate we are prone to introspection about what has gone wrong in our society, our culture and economy. Sometimes it is easier to see what is wrong by looking at history. There is a matrix of ideas beginning with the way the Colonial Powers looked at the world with subsequent layers of ideas originating with the indigenous and African cultures. These are further overlaid by changes in philosophy as the peoples of the New World evolved. Every event and every policy along with the actions of every leader originated somewhere in thought. These ideas are what make up the culture and philosophy of a people. The first questions, therefore, is, what was the thought or philosophy of the empires that sent the Conquistadors? How were they able to even conceive the idea that they had a right to claim the land and to exploit its people and resources?
History is written at the predilection of historians. They may tell the story based on the lives of the leaders that they see as having the greatest influence. The subject matter of the texts carries us through the independence movements, the sporadic democracies, and the military dictatorships. Other historians stress events in relation to the world political scene and show how the history of Latin America has been affected by the combination of internal pressures as well as external pressures. My contention is that all these events as is true in American history are the results of actions and reactions generating from the thought or philosophy of colonizers and leaders who put the process into motion.
Right thought creates with positive results and wrong thought creates destructively. One way or another, what man thinks creates the world he lives in. The greatest teachers and founders of the world’s religions stressed this Universal Law, which I refer to as the Law of Pure Potentiality. Doctors tell us today that what we eat – we become. It is even more to the point that what we think – we become.
The colonization of the New World had three objectives, gold, glory and gospel. Gold was coveted and found in great quantity. Lands were conquered and claimed for the glory of the crown. However, in order to justify their actions the final authority on ideas, the Church, was needed to legitimize the conquests. Barbara Cruz in the Americas Study Guide, notes, “A principal support of the Spanish and Portuguese empire in America was the Catholic Church.” She goes on to write, “In fact, the legal justification used by the Spanish and Portuguese for the conquest and colonization of the Americas was the 1494 Treaty of Tordesillas, by which Pope Alexander VI sanctioned the division of the Western Hemisphere between Spain and Portugal.”
It is not possible to read the teachings of Jesus, such as the Sermon on the Mount or the beatitudes and find justification for conquest, murder, rape pillage, and slavery. However, ample examples of such can be found in the Old Testament. Yahweh had a chosen people. He promised them a land that did not belong to them and promised it would be theirs by conquest. He ordered the massacres of men women and children on various occasions. In Joshua 8:25, for example, “There fell that day a total of twelve thousand men and women, the entire population of Ai. He even punished the Israelites severely on occasion when they saved women and children. He was a fearsome war god that cannot in my mind be equated with God the Creator. To the Jews, however, Yahweh is God and to the orthodox Christian he is the same as God the Creator.
The concept of divine right was well established in the Judeo-Christian philosophy. As far as the Spanish and Portuguese were concerned, the authority of the church was all the authority they needed and they were the chosen people. The King and Queen ruled by divine right. It was therefore their right as well as their obligation to conquer, subjugate and convert the peoples of the New World. The various indigenous peoples that inhabited the land Yahweh promised to the Israelites were the Philistines, Amorites and Canaanites of the Old Testament. The occupants of the land at the time of the conquest of Canaan, in the eyes of Yahweh and Joshua, had no rights to their land or even to live. Why should we be so surprised at the same attitude being expressed by the Spanish and Portuguese? It was their divine right!
The idea of divine right has carried over into our thinking in North America. Even though this country was born of men of higher thinking it was still born from mother countries still steeped in the divine right of kings. At each stage of our development the vestiges of divine right has been chipped away and reinvented. To some degree the power of the Church has weakened but the state has stepped into the void. We have traded the divine right of the elitist Religions for the all-powerful rights of the state. This formula did not and could not lead to the successful development of a system that would benefit the people. The dictator, the state or a system predicated on the divine right of its leaders could not act in the interest of all the people because each had the interests of its base which were held to be more important than the individual. Only in individual responsibility and individual freedom could an answer be found. This philosophy determined thought patterns that predictably lead to the effects of their thought. Therefore, thought or philosophy is the cause and all else the result of actions and reactions.
Ann Rand, in Philosophy: Who Needs It, refers to this philosophy as “Statism” and it’s proponents as “Statist”. Statism says that all good things for the people come from the state. Whether Fascism, National Socialism, Democratic Socialism or Communism they are only variations of statism. The state becomes all powerful and needs no authority from a higher philosophical power such as religion much less that from the individual! From time to time steps are taken by congress and the government that take us back toward the precipice. We must ever be vigilant of encroachments on these individual liberties regardless of how high-minded it may sound to help weaker members of our society. The problem, then and now, is in the thinking of the people and the philosophy of life that has developed. If the principle of individual responsibility is recognized and applied to the whole of society, worker, businessman, farmer, office worker or whatever, without exception, we will have taken the first essential steps away from the quagmire caused by those who thought they had a divine right and those who assume today that they have a divine right.
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