Sons of Revolution Part II

5/24/11

The Arab Spring is in full bloom. The Street is trying to shake off their oppressors. Yet, as discussed in “Tahrir Square and Andy Dick”, there must be positive values that displace the tyranny. Otherwise, the flowers of the Arab Spring will die and be thrown on the compost heap of history.

In S.O.R. Part I, the values of the Enlightenment: science, reason, and equality, did not help the French create a Great Society. Yet who would discard these values completely? The Enlightenment did, in fact, enlighten. But are these values incomplete? Our own founders would say yes.

Robespierre said, “Vox populari est vox dei” (The voice of the people is the voice of God). However, many of the American founders would more likely say “vox populari est vox idiotes” (at least sometimes). They were not elitists but they believed a pure democracy would lead to tyranny of the majority, a mobocracy. There were partial exceptions, of course. The more utopian minded Thomas Jefferson disagreed sharply with John Adams about the French Revolution. Adams, both a deeply religious man and a man of science who saw no contradiction between the two said, “I know not what to make of a nation of thirty million atheists”. After the French experiment ended in blood and chaos, Jefferson eventually acknowledged the failure.

Though the American founders certainly were influenced by Enlightenment thinkers such as John Locke, (little known fact is that he was a rather enthusiastic and orthodox Christian) it could also be argued that the most influential figure of the American Revolution was actually John Calvin. Fully two thirds of early American settlers were trained in this doctrine that was deeply distrustful of human nature. Humanity was seen as duplicitous and ambitious, selfish to the core. In the book of Romans, Paul stated that no one seeks after God. “No one does good, not one”. Early Calvinists did not view this as hyperbole.

Though the founders were slightly more charitable towards humanity, the record is filled with quotes about the problems of human nature. James Madison viewed man as “wicked and capricious”. Alexander Hamilton wrote, “The passions of men will not conform to the dictates of reason and justice”. He believed that all bodies politik will be mingled with the poison of faction and by men who love power. While the founders read the same philosophers and thinkers as the French Jacobins, they also were influenced by Scottish philosophers Adam Smith and Edmund Burke, who viewed reason and emotion as inseparable. It is not that our founders disbelieved in reason, but that, given man’s fallibility, purity of reason was not only elusive, but impossible.

The American Founders were quite religious compared to the French. An oft repeated lie is that most were deist. According to M.E. Bradford of the University of Dallas, of the 55 delegates to the Constitutional Convention, only two, maybe three were deist. He includes Benjamin Franklin but during the constitutional convention, Franklin pleaded for paid clergy to pray daily over the convention, saying, “God governs in the affairs of men” and, “except the Lord build the house, they labor in vain…” Franklin never fully embraced orthodox Christianity but in his old age, a deist he was not.

Religious as they were, they certainly did not set out to make a theocracy. And with the exception of maybe John Jay, Samuel Adams, and a few others, the founders were not the equivalent of modern day born again evangelicals. However, as a group, they did respect Christianity greatly and had a distinctly different view of separation of church and state than our modern ACLU. Jefferson signed into law funds for Christian missionaries to the Indians. The halls of congress doubled as a chapel. Even that dirty atheist Thomas Payne advocated government funded religious education.

So while equality and liberty were hallmarks of the Enlightenment, our constitution was also founded on the values of the Bible. While France believed that pure democracy would lead to happiness, our forefathers believed in checks and balances, not only for the branches of government but for the people as well. Thus was born republicanism.

What is government but the extension of your view of man? Thomas Sowell’s “Constrained Man” and “Unconstrained Man” and Steven Pinker’s “Tragic Man” and “Utopian Man” both describe the competing views of every political experiment in history: One is that man is unchanging and selfish. The other is that man is malleable and perfectible. The French and the Americans were the first to fully put these ideas in their purity to the test. One failed miserably. The other became the greatest nation in history.