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“Might makes right,” goes the saying — with disapproval. Every boy in the old schoolyards could tell you about it. And there’s our Word of the Week, not might, which should be a subordinate, a servant, but right.
“Might makes right” is the motto of a bully, a toady, a liar, or a slovenly B+ sophomore who doesn’t want to think beyond his first supposedly daring thought. We find the notion set up for analysis and criticism and rejection in Plato’s Republic, where it is espoused by the surly sophist, Thrasymachus. Plato sets his dialogue during the later years of the Great Peloponnesian War, which his city Athens was destined to lose, and the Athenians surely remembered how they had tried to bully the neutral island of Melos, threatening to destroy them unless they truckled to their will. When the Melians protested that that would not be right, the Athenian ambassadors, according to the historian Thucydides, laughed at them, saying that they knew very well that right, as people say, is only in question between equals in power, because otherwise “the powerful do what they can and the weak suffer what they must.”
Shakespeare puts the idea on the lips of his most villainous king, Richard III, trying to rally his dispirited troops before his fall at Bosworth Field:
Conscience is but a word that cowards use,
Devised at first to keep the strong in awe!
Our strong arms be our conscience, swords our law!
In Greek legend, the fellow who said that was the foolish king Capaneus, one of the Seven Against Thebes, who held the gods in contempt. When Capaneus was first to scale the wall of Thebes, he raised his right arm to heaven and said that that was his god. “Oh really?” said Zeus, and a single bolt of lightning thrust Capaneus to the earth, dead before he hit the ground.
Nobody will deny that powerful people often use the law for selfish or wicked purposes. But it seems to me that we must finally choose one of two alternatives. The first: There is an unchanging right beyond law, visible to reason though of course usually clouded by human folly or passion. Law must submit to that right if it is to demand not just our compliance but our honor. The second: The schoolyard bully has the field, and the only question is who is the biggest or cleverest or most effectively treacherous bully, because then all appeals to kindness and niceness are just a weakling’s method of getting his way — bullying by other means.
There’s a further consideration, and we may call upon the Psalms here, or the wisdom of the ancient Chinese sages, or Plato and Aristotle — for this requires no special revelation. If we are made so as to thrive, as individual persons, only by conforming ourselves to what is right, then what is wrong will cripple us whether we admit it or not. And that crookedness, by the way, is the inner meaning of English wrong, as of Latin pravus, and don’t we call a lawbreaker a crook? Richard Crookback, as his enemies called him, was warped in his soul, not just in his body. (But if you want to learn about a brilliant genius in many areas of inquiry, and a holy man, who was so badly crippled at birth with cerebral palsy and spina bifida and a cleft palate, that he couldn’t even talk before he was five years old, check out Blessed Hermann of Reichenau, otherwise known as Hermann the Cripple, scientist, historian, mathematician, musical composer, and theologian. He died in 1054, so he didn’t get the benefit of modern medicine or technology, either.)
I remember one year, a long time ago, when I was still a very happy professor at Providence College, my friend Robert George came to town to deliver the convocation address to the assembled faculty. And he spoke precisely about this. He said that we had to choose: either “reason gets the whip-hand over the passions,” in his words, to reject them, temper them, sometimes encourage them, often redirect them to worthy ends, or — well, then the very grounds for a civil society are swept out from under us, and in one form or another it’s the war of all against all. There were some dark looks he got from some members of the faculty that day! But Lao-Tzu and Confucius and Mencius, had they been there, would have smiled. So also David and Solomon, and my good friends Dante, Shakespeare, Milton, Wordsworth, Dickens, Dostoyevsky, Sigrid Undset — I’ll take them over the disgruntled academic nihilist every time!
But you know what? Everybody really does believe in the right, just because it is right and not because it happens to fill or empty your wallet. People can talk all they want about not being able to believe that right exists, but let their auto mechanic overcharge them fifty bucks for the transmission job, and all at once right shines out again “as constant as the northern star.” Every human language will betray anyone who would deny it. Our word right, from Old English riht, comes from an Indo-European root denoting what is straight, with all kinds of moral and civil meanings. “Are you being straight with me?” we say, relying on that same universal understanding. You hire a good mason to make sure that the wall is at a right angle to the floor, because you’re quirky that way; you like walls that stand and endure better than those that lean and buckle. What’s right is true, like a plumb-line used by a master carpenter; “That’s right,” we say, meaning “That’s correct,” and Germanic right and Italic correct are close cousins. So also Welsh rhaith, meaning the right you have to something — another cousin, this time from the Celtic. So also Sanskrit raj, to rule, because to rule properly speaking is to render straight judgments, to promote what is right.
To all of which this LEFTY agrees with all his heart!
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