1.  People Aren’t God. We often forget that ancient people thought everything was sacred; Mesopotamians had 65,000 gods. In Egypt, cats were gods. (Imagine that! Perhaps it was because cats act like lords?) Our ancestors worshipped trees and imagined swamp gas as fairies. One Mesopotamian myth has the worm appearing before the great sky-god Anu to ask for something more interesting to eat than ripe apricots (and Anu gave it people’s teeth—which explains that nagging toothache). If worms are gods, it isn’t too difficult to make the leap that we regular humans are not so ordinary after all: we are divine too! The Romans deified Caesar Augustus after his death, and Caligula one-upped him and declared himself a living god; within a century the emperor Domitian demanded that all Roman subjects address him as “Our Lord and God.” The Hebrews seem to have first suggested otherwise: the created is not the Creator. And if you or I are not deities, we cannot act like Kim Il Sung or Mao or Fidel Castro, or even like a well-intentioned nanny, in foisting our “good ideas” on others.

 

2.  Trees Aren’t Gods, Either. This insight is also reflected in Genesis, which declares an “I-It” relationship to nature rather than an “I-thou” relationship to nature. Natural phenomena like trees, cats, and worms are “its,” and humans actually have dominion over nature. The Greeks termed this oikos nomos, (economics), which involves stewardship, not rapine and pillaging. We can cut trees down. But we plant replacements as well, at least if they are growing on our land.

 

3. People Aren’t Merely Animals. Humans may be human—from the earth, from hummus, literally, but we have dignity. Murder is wrong because people have a soul. There’s a long, slow, always inconsistent (to this day; look at Ukraine) march to understand this truth, starting, again, in Genesis, moving through a host of important thinkers. John Locke and Thomas Jefferson developed the notion that humans are not “given” rights. We are born with rights; they cannot be taken away. Martin Luther King’s orations beautifully polished the concept that all people, regardless of ethnicity, IQ, or faith, deserve dignity. Humans never become unpeople.

 

4. The Golden Rule Rules.

This idea flows from #3, recognizing individual dignity. Confucius gave a negative version of this 500 years before Jesus (“do not do unto others what they would not do to you”). Jesus’s version is more powerful, more positive. We should be thinking not merely of ourselves, but of others as well. And the Lower School’s prayer —“to treat others at all times with kindness and respect”—reflects this noble goal.

 

5. Laws Should Rule, Not People. None of us want law makers or law enforcers to make up law on the fly, treating their friends like royalty and their enemies like dirt. This powerful idea has roots with the Jews, with Rome developing it. St. Paul, when he was about to be illegally whipped, would figuratively whip out his Roman citizenship card, which halted the abuse quite quickly (though not forever, of course, since he was executed). In 1974, the Supreme Court ruled that President Nixon had to turn over his taped recordings. Nixon, who certainly loved political power, acquiesced. And later, resigned. When the Supreme Court ruled after the 2000 election that George W. Bush had won Florida and therefore the election, those who thought otherwise did not strap on their guns to protest alleged bad chad counting. The rule of law is precious. We always want laws, not people—ideally, laws that emerge from human experience more than legislative fiat.

 

6. Separate Those Powers! With distinct origins in the Roman Republic with its Senate, dual Consuls, and Assembly, this idea recognized human fallibility by counting on checks and balances to help limit ambition. In the Enlightenment, Montesquieu revived that old idea, and of course the Founders ingeniously structured it into our American system. “Ambition,” Madison concluded in Federalist 51, “must be made to counter ambition.” We might think political gridlock is awful, but perhaps we all should appreciate its messy elegance.

 

7. The Invisible Hand Is There! Where? If you look hard enough, you can see it everywhere. The Daoist philosopher Laozi, in 400 BC, hinted at this long before Adam Smith ever did by asking, “Why do children put beans in their ears, if the one thing we told them not to do is to put beans in their ears?” In proposing Wu Wei, the idea of “doing nothing,” he didn’t (always) mean sitting in your hammock; he meant that when busybodies and busy bullies mind their own business. And when they do, much—maybe more—actually gets done. We should “govern a nation as one would cook a small fish, ”with tender care rather than brute force. Two thousand years later, Adam Smith coined the term invisible hand to describe this mysteriously spontaneous order in his two long and monumentally influential books.

 

8. Everyone Has A Comparative Advantage. A century after Smith, David Ricardo developed a revolutionary concept: though you might be four times smarter than me, and thrice the party animal, and twice as good looking, I am relatively better at lookin’ good. So, don’t ignore people with few apparent skills or countries with little production. Trade with them. If we all specialize in what we are relatively best at, and trade for what we are relatively worse at, everyone benefits!

 

9. Subsidiarity Matters. One of the beautiful concepts that arises from the idea of natural law and expanded upon both by Thomas Aquinas and the encyclical Rerum Novarum is this principle of governance. If we can do something at the lowest possible level (say, a church helping a homeless person or a destitute single parent), we should. We shouldn’t, literally, make a “federal case” over every problem. People at a local level tend to make fewer mistakes, tend to have better knowledge, and tend to produce better results.

 

10. The right to say “NO.” George Orwell supposedly wrote in an unpublished preface to Animal Farm that “If liberty means anything at all, it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear.” President Reagan attributed the following quote to Orwell: “Freedom is the right to say no.” I’m unsure that Orwell said that elegantly simple definition of freedom, but I do like it. Of course, every parent knows that children don’t have to be taught the word “no!” It’s not necessarily a bad word. About 2000 years ago, during the collapse of the decadent Roman Republic, Cicero refused to go along with the corrupt politicians surrounding him, and lost his head. Similarly, Luther’s rejection of indulgences in 1517 sparked a huge change in history that—albeit over many centuries—led to religious freedom. In the early 20th century, Gandhi refused to sit in the “Indian” section of a South African train, Rosa Parks said “No” in an Alabama bus decades later. I always have my students read a bit of Charles Fried, President Reagan’s Solicitor General. Fried observes that infringements on our liberty are really infringements on our dignity; and rather than our focusing only on extreme outliers like Hitler or Stalin, he suggests re-considering more “gentle challenges” to liberty, like Vermont’s banning Wal-Mart. And why is that offensive? (After all, some people think Wal-Mart itself is offensive!) Fried argues that in the modern era, we infringe on liberty by “enlistment into a cause one does not share,” which is a bit like enlisting Ted Nugent in an anti-hunting vegan rally. Just say no, once in a while, though adding a “thanks” after your “no” would be nice.