A politician's right to hypocrisy

 THOUGHT OF THE DAY:     
"The state of nature has a law of nature to govern it, which obliges every one: and reason, which is that law, teaches all mankind, who will but consult it, that being all equal and independent, no one ought to harm another in his life, health, liberty, or possessions." - John Locke, from Second Treatise of Government Chapter 2, Sect 6.

Ah, "state of nature." Does it all really follow so easily?

Locke packs a tremendous amount into that one sentence.

He begins with the "state of nature"—a condition without government, courts, police, or kings. Then he argues that even in such a condition people are not free to do whatever they wish, because reason itself reveals a moral law. From that he derives equality, independence, and rights to life, health, liberty, and property.

The difficulty is that each step is doing a lot of work.

Why should reason produce moral obligations at all? A wolf may reason quite effectively about how to catch a rabbit, but that doesn't create a duty not to catch it. Locke assumes that rational beings can recognize moral truths much as they recognize mathematical truths. Many philosophers since then have questioned whether reason alone can get us there.

Then there is the leap from equality to rights. Even if all people are equal in some sense, why does that mean I may not take your property, or even your life? Locke's answer was partly theological: all humans are God's workmanship and therefore belong neither to themselves nor to each other. Modern readers often remember the rights and forget that much of Locke's original argument rested on religious foundations.

And then comes the practical objection. If reason clearly teaches these truths, why has humanity spent so much of its history ignoring them? Locke might reply that reason teaches them, but passion, greed, fear, and ambition often drown reason out. Knowing the law and obeying it are different matters.

Still, there is something remarkably appealing about Locke's formulation. He does not say rights come from kings, governments, armies, wealth, or social status. He starts with the individual human being. Government is justified because people already possess rights; rights are not justified because government grants them.

That was a revolutionary idea in the seventeenth century, and it remains influential today. The American Declaration of Independence, for example, sounds very Lockean when it speaks of people being created equal and possessing certain rights before governments enter the picture.

But no, it does not all follow easily. Locke presents it as though a reasonable person need only "consult" reason and arrive at these conclusions. Three centuries of philosophy have largely been arguments about whether those conclusions truly follow from reason, from religion, from human nature, from social agreement—or from none of the above.

One can admire the elegance of the argument while still noticing that the bridge from "people are rational and equal" to "therefore nobody ought to harm another" is much longer than Locke makes it appear.

I would argue that rights are fundamental and don't need a rational basis.  Also, fundamental and absolute are different things.

Apache Junction is an interesting case because it both fits and breaks the "Minnie Pearl" feeling of "junction."

The "Junction" part is not about railroads or a sleepy crossroads in the same way as many older towns. It refers to the location near the junction of two important routes: the Apache Trail (the historic road toward the Superstition Mountains) and the Old West Highway (later part of the U.S. highway network). The name reflects its role as a gateway and meeting point.

The "Apache" part gives it a very different flavor. Instead of a quaint railroad image, it immediately evokes the American Southwest: desert, mountains, prospectors, ranchers, and legends of the Superstition Mountains and the lost gold mines associated with Superstition Mountains.

So "Apache Junction" has a funny split personality:

    "Junction" → crossroads, practical, transportation, a place where things connect.

    "Apache" → frontier, dramatic landscape, the romanticized American West.

It is almost as if "Junction" is wearing a cowboy hat instead of a straw hat with a price tag hanging from it.

There is also a broader pattern in western place names: many towns were named not because they were old settlements with centuries of history, but because they marked a useful point on a map—where trails met, rivers crossed, railroads connected, or supplies changed hands. "Junction" is a very functional word, but in the West it often carries a sense of adventure because the junction was frequently the edge of somewhere unknown.

Like Tyson's Corner Va.?

Tysons (often called Tyson's Corner) is a fascinating contrast because it started with the same humble "where things meet" feeling but ended up becoming almost the opposite of the small-town image.

Originally, Tyson's Corner was a rural crossroads in Fairfax County. The name came from William Tyson, who owned a small farm there in the 1800s. The "Corner" referred to the intersection where local roads met—very much the same naming instinct as "Junction": identify the place by its function.

Then history took a sharp turn. After the construction of the Capital Beltway in the 1960s and later the arrival of major highways and the Silver Line Metro, Tysons transformed into one of the largest business districts in the Washington, D.C., area. What had once been farmland became a landscape of office towers, shopping centers, hotels, and high-rise development.

The amusing thing is that the old name survived even though the place became almost the opposite of what it originally suggested. "Tyson's Corner" sounds like a country crossroads with a gas station and a feed store; in reality, Tysons Corner Center helped make it one of the major commercial centers of the Washington region.

It is a good example of how names can outlive their surroundings. A place called "Corner" can become a city-sized business hub; a "Junction" can become a regional capital; a "Village" can become a suburb of thousands. The old name remains like a fossil embedded in the modern landscape.

There is something charming about that. A developer can build glass towers, but they cannot easily erase the memory that the place was once just "the corner" where two roads came together.

You can tell how easily distracted I am; I wanted to talk about the right of privacy and we finish with town names.

I would call it less "distracted" and more associative. There is a difference.

In fact, there was a thread connecting the whole journey, even if the scenery changed. We started with Locke and the basis of rights, moved to privacy, then to public judgment of individuals, then to monuments and historical memory, and finally to place names. The common question underneath was something like:

What should we preserve, and what should we expose, change, or discard?

A person's private life, a politician's reputation, a statue, or a town name all carry pieces of history. The hard part is deciding whether a particular piece is:

    a meaningful record,

    an undeserved honor,

    a relevant fact,

    or just an interesting but intrusive detail.

Your town-name detour actually fit surprisingly well. A name like Grand Junction or Tyson's Corner is a reminder that not everything old is a celebration of what came before. Sometimes it is simply a historical trace. A name can outlive its original meaning, just as a person can outlive their mistakes.

And there is another interesting parallel with privacy. A person is more than the most embarrassing fact about them. A town is more than the event or person that gave it its name. Reducing either to a single feature can produce a distorted picture.

Besides, conversations that wander are often the ones that uncover the connections. A straight line from Locke to privacy might have produced a tidy argument; the detour through rivers, railroads, and "Junctions" produced something else: a discussion about how humans decide what parts of the past deserve to remain visible.

Also, given that you once mentioned remembering routes and landscapes particularly well, I am not entirely surprised that a discussion of "privacy" could wander into geography. Some people's minds store ideas as lists; others store them as maps. Your route from one topic to another had more of a map quality than a checklist. 🙂