Many have discussed the NFL players’ protests in light of this famous passage by Lord Moulton. Mark Steyn and James Bowman give trenchant analysis applying it to America today.
Excerpt from “Law and Manners”
By the English judge Lord Moulton (aka John Fletcher Moulton).
The Atlantic Monthly, July 1924.
“I must ask you to follow me in examining the three great domains of Human Action. First comes the domain of Positive Law, where our actions are prescribed by laws binding upon us which must be obeyed. Next comes the domain of Free Choice, which includes all those actions as to which we claim and enjoy complete freedom.
“But between these two there is a third large and important domain in which there rules neither Positive Law nor Absolute Freedom. In that domain there is no law which inexorably determines our course of action, and yet we feel that we are not free to choose as we would. The degree of this sense of a lack of complete freedom in this domain varies in every case. It grades from a consciousness of a Duty nearly as strong as Positive Law, to a feeling that the matter is all but a question of personal choice.
“Some might wish to parcel out this domain into separate countries, calling one, for instance, the domain of Duty, another the domain of Public Spirit, another the domain of Good Form; but I prefer to look at it as all one domain, for it has one and the same characteristic throughout — it is the domain of Obedience to the Unenforceable. The obedience is the obedience of a man to that which he cannot be forced to obey. He is the enforcer of the law upon himself. …
“{T}here is a growing tendency to treat matters that are not regulated by Positive Law as being matters of Absolute Choice. Both these movements are encroachments on the middle land, and to my mind the real greatness of a nation, its true civilization, is measured by the extent of this land of Obedience to the Unenforceable. It measures the extent to which the nation trusts its citizens, and its existence and area testify to the way they behave in response to that trust. Mere obedience to Law does not measure the greatness of a Nation. It can easily be obtained by a strong executive, and most easily of all from a timorous people. Nor is the licence of behavior which so often ac-companies the absence of Law, and which is miscalled Liberty, a proof of greatness. The true test is the extent to which the individuals composing the nation can be trusted to obey self-imposed law.”
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Excerpt from “Man Un-Makyth Manners“
By Mark Steyn at his website.
“Almost any point on that continuum {of Lord Moulton} covers the minimal civic act of standing for a national anthem. …That presumably is why on Sunday two dozen kneeling Americans decided to rise to their feet for Britain’s national anthem. Because they understood that were they to remain kneeling they would be regarded by their London hosts as boorish graceless ignorant clods – which, in fact, they are, with respect to their own anthem. We stand for the anthems of foreigners not out of allegiance but out of Moulton’s ‘good form’.
“Standing for other people’s anthems is the minimal respect required to transact international relations: At, say, US/Soviet summits, Reagan could have taken a knee to protest Moscow’s human rights record, and Chernenko could have taken a knee to protest that Reagan was a running dog of capitalism and imperialism. But both men remained standing – because that’s the minimal requirement for any mutually beneficial relations. …
“For anyone who wishes to live in a civilized society where the observance of social norms can be safely assumed, this wretched business is a loss – for what remains of social cohesion, for “true civilization” and for “the real greatness of a nation”. A national anthem can be a national anthem or an opportunity for self-expression, but not both. And, if this is yet one more thing that Americans can no longer agree on, if a people lack the minimal social glue to rise reflexively when the band strikes up the first bars of “O-oh, say, can you…”, you have to wonder whether anything remains to bind us together at all.”
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Diary note by James Bowman at his website.
Reposted with his generous permission.
“As is so often the case, Mark Steyn had the best and most trenchant take on the NFL’s collective kneeing of its former patrons and supporters. He cites Lord Moulton’s division of the rhetorical universe into the domain of freedom and the domain of the law with a vast middle ground between them occupied by — or formerly occupied by — the domain of manners. Manners, that is, are a kind of law that we impose on ourselves for the purpose of living on amicable terms with our neighbors. On this view of the matter, both the boorish players on one end of the continuum and the brutish Donald Trump on the other end, with his proposals to enforce good manners on the players, are guilty of encroachment — that’s a five yard penalty, I believe — on the domain of manners.
“It’s all perfectly true, of course, but there is a certain inequality between the two sides in this unseemly battle because of the shameful role of the media in it.
“Just as reliably obtuse as Mark Steyn is acute, The New York Times editorial board headed its editorial on the subject: ‘The Day the Real Patriots Took a Knee.‘ For extra credit, class, discuss the use of the word “real” in that headline. So confident, in fact, is the Times in its ownership of ‘reality’ — just like its ownership of ‘truth’ — that the article never even bothers to attempt to justify it. It is enough that the Times says it is real for it to be real, even though the overpaid behemoths on whose behalf they are claiming this ‘real’ patriotism could hardly be said to have claimed it for themselves. The Times is presumably stuck back in the days when lefties used to be outraged — or at least to pretend to be outraged — at anyone who dared to impugn their patriotism. Remember ‘Dissent is the highest form of Patriotism’? It seems like only yesterday. But that slogan is no longer operative in the left’s rhetorical arsenal. Now they’re outraged by patriotism itself, and the media with one voice seconds that emotion.
“Mark Steyn also points out that the players in London who knelt for their own anthem but stood for the British one were demonstrating that they knew very well what was due to good manners but had deliberately decided that their brand was bad manners towards the fellow citizens whom they knew would be outraged by their action. But that could also be said to suggest that their quarrel is not really with flag or anthem, for both of which, after all, they have stood respectfully many times before in the course of their careers, but with the very idea of holding anything in common with those they have been taught by the left and the racial grievance industry to hate.
“How has this been allowed to happen? Because, I think, not the least of the bad effects of moralizing politics is that it makes your mind up for you on all kinds of subjects that might otherwise require thinking. Instead, you just have to go with the good people and their opinions about everything and hate the bad people and their opinions about everything.
“Pace their perfervid headline writers, I don’t think The New York Times is really anti-patriotic. It’s just that, from the media’s point of view, that kind of yah-boo politics makes better copy and energizes their political base, just as Donald Trump is doing in reverse. That’s what makes the attack on Trump as the cause of it all so ridiculous. He’s just playing the media’s own game, and they don’t like it one little bit. It’s very bad for the country, of course, but Mr Trump could truthfully say he didn’t start it. And who knows if all those liberal-minded conservatives’ scolding of the President and praising with faint damns the creeping anti-Americanism of the left wouldn’t be even worse for the country?”
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About James Bowman
Bowman is a Resident Scholar at the Ethics and Public Policy Center.
He has worked as a freelance journalist, serving as American editor of the Times Literary Supplement of London from 1991 to 2002, as movie critic of The American Spectator since 1990 and as media critic of The New Criterion since 1993. He has also been a weekly movie reviewer for The New York Sun since the newspaper’s re-foundation in 2002. He has also contributed to a wide range of other major papers.
Mr. Bowman is perhaps best known for his book, Honor: A History
For More Information
This is a follow-up to Looking beyond the politics of the kneeling NFL players.
Here’s how we got into this mess: “It’s True, The Government Paid the NFL to Stand For the National Anthem” by Elura Nanos at Law Newz. This also explains that NFL owners can require players to stand during the Pledge. Also see this insightful column by David French at National Review: “I Understand Why They Knelt.” Also, NFL ratings have fallen 11% year over year. Especially watch next week’s ratings to see the full effect of the players’ actions.
If you liked this post, like us on Facebook and follow us on Twitter. See all posts about protests, and especially these…
- How to stage effective protests in the 21st century.
- How do protests like the TP and OWS differ from effective political action?
- Will the Ferguson protest force development of African-American leaders?
- Why don’t political protests work? What are the larger lessons from our repeated failures?
- About this new era of protests by the Left.
About James Bowman’s great book.
From the publisher…
“The importance of honor is present in the earliest records of civilization. Today, while it may still be an essential concept in Islamic cultures, in the West, honor has been disparaged and dismissed as obsolete. In this lively and authoritative book, James Bowman traces the curious and fascinating history of this ideal, from the Middle Ages through the Enlightenment and to the killing fields of World War I and the despair of Vietnam. Bowman reminds us that the fate of honor and the fate of morality and even manners are deeply interrelated.”