geof
Regarding the Founders, they only way I could buy that their
morality is not
based on Judeo Christian principles would be if they had no exposure to
these philosophies of any kind. If they had been educated with only Greek
philosophy and been shielded from all else, and developed the government
they did, then I would say their morality is based on Greek principles.
I have this partial from Rand's Disciple:
The modern world, including America, is a product of two of these
periods: of Greco-Roman civilization and of medieval
Christianity. So, to enable us to understand America, let us first
look at the historical evidence from these two periods; let us look
at their stand on religion and at the practical consequences of this
stand. Then we will have no trouble grasping the base and essence of
the United States.
Ancient Greece was not a religious civilization, not on any of the
counts I mentioned. The gods of Mount Olympus were like a race of
elder brothers to man, mischievous brothers with rather limited
powers; they were closer to Steven Spielberg's Extra-Terrestrial visitor than
to anything we would call "God." They did not create the universe or
shape its laws or leave any message of revelations or demand a life
of sacrifice. Nor were they taken very seriously by the leading
voices of the culture, such as Plato and Aristotle. From start to
finish, the Greek thinkers recognized no sacred texts, no infallible
priesthood, no intellectual authority beyond the human mind; they
allowed no room for faith. Epistemologically, most were staunch
individualists who expected each man to grasp the truth by his own
powers of sensory observation and logical thought. For details, I
refer you to Aristotle, the preeminent representative of the Greek spirit.
Metaphysically, as a result, Greece was a secular culture. Men
generally dismissed or downplayed the supernatural; their energies
were devoted to the joys and challenges of life. There was a shadowy
belief in immortality, but the dominant attitude to it was summed up
by Homer, who has Achilles declare that he would rather be a slave on
earth than "bear sway among all the dead that be departed."
The Greek ethics followed from this base. All the Greek thinkers
agreed that virtue is egoistic. The purpose of morality, in their
view, is to enable a man to achieve his own fulfillment, his own
happiness, by means of a proper development of his natural
faculties-above all, of his cognitive faculty, his intellect. And
as to the Greek estimate of man-look at the statues of the Greek
gods, made in the image of human strength, human grace, human beauty;
and read Aristotle's account of the virtue -- yes, the virtue of pride.
I must note here that in many ways Plato was an exception to the
general irreligion of the Greeks. But his ideas were not dominant
until much later. When Plato's spirit did take over,
the Greek approach had already died out. What replaced it was the
era of Christianity.
Intellectually speaking, the period of the Middle Ages was the exact
opposite of classical Greece. Its leading philosophic
spokesman, Augustine, held that faith was the basis of man's entire
mental life. "I do not know in order to believe," he said, "I
believe in order to know." In other words, reason is nothing but a
handmaiden of revelation; it is a mere adjunct of faith, whose task
is to clarify, as far as possible, the dogmas of religion. What if a
dogma cannot be clarified? So much the better, answered an earlier
Church father, Tertuilian. The truly religious man, he said,
delights in thwarting his reason; that shows his commitment to
faith. Thus Tertullian's famous answer, when asked about the dogma
of God's self-sacrifice on the cross: "Credo quia absurdum" ("I
believe it because it is absurd").
As to the realm of physical nature, the medievals characteristically
regarded it as a semi-real haze, a transitory stage in the divine
plan, and a troublesome one at that, a delusion and a
snare-a delusion because men mistake it for reality, a snare because
they are tempted by its lures to jeopardize their immortal
souls. What tempts them is the prospect of earthly pleasure.
What kind of life, then, does the immortal soul require on
earth? Self-denial, asceticism, the resolute shunning of this
temptation. But isn't it unfair to ask men to throw away their whole
enjoyment of life? Augustine's answer is: what else befits creatures
befouled by original sin, creatures who are, as he put it, crooked
and sordid, bespotted and ulcerous"?
What were the practical results-in the ancient world, then in the
medieval of these two opposite approaches to life?
Greece created philosophy, logic, science, mathematics, and a
magnificent, man-glorifying art; it gave us the base of modern
civilization in every field; it taught the West how to think. In
addition, through its admirers in ancient Rome, which built on the
Greek intellectual base, Greece indirectly gave us the rule of law
and the first idea of man's rights (this idea was originated by the
pagan Stoics). Politically, the ancients never conceived a society
of full-fledged individual liberty; no nation achieved that before
the United States. But the ancients did lay certain theoretical
bases for the concept of liberty; and in practice, both in some of
the Greek city-states and in republican Rome, large numbers of men at
various times were at least relatively free.
They were incomparably more free than their counterparts ever had
been in the religious cultures of ancient Egypt and its equivalents.
What were the practical results of the medieval approach? The Dark
Ages were dark on principle. Augustine fought against secular
philosophy, science, art; he regarded all of it as an abomination to
be swept aside; he cursed science in particular as "the lust of the
eyes." Unlike many Americans today, who drive to church in their
Cadillac or tape their favorite reverend on the VCR so as not to
interrupt their tennis practice, the medievals took religion
seriously. They proceeded to create a society that was
antimaterialistic and anti-intellectual. I do not have to remind you
of the lives of the saints, who were the heroes of the period,
including the men who ate only sheep's gall and ashes, quenched their
thirst with laundry water, and slept with a rock for their
pillow. These were men resolutely defying nature, the body, sex,
pleasure, all the snares of this life-and they were canonized for it,
as, by the essence of religion, they should have been. The economic
and social results of this kind of value code were inevitable: mass
stagnation and abject poverty, ignorance and mass illiteracy, waves
of insanity that swept whole towns, a life expectancy in the
teens. "Woe unto ye who laugh now," the Sermon on the Mount had
said. Well, they were pretty safe on this count. They had precious
little to laugh about.
What about freedom in this era? Study the existence of the feudal
serf tied for life to his plot of ground, his noble overlord, and the
all-encompassing decrees of the Church. Or, if you want an example
closer to home, jump several centuries forward to the American
Puritans, who were a medieval remnant transplanted to a virgin
continent, and who proceeded to establish a theocratic dictatorship
in colonial Massachusetts. Such a dictatorship, they
declared, was necessitated by the very nature of their religion. You
are owned by God, they explained to any potential dissenter;
therefore, you are a servant who must act as your Creator, through
his spokesmen, decrees. Besides, they said, you are innately
depraved, so a dictatorship of the elect is necessary to ride herd on
your vicious impulses. And, they said, you don't really own your
property either; wealth, like all values, is a gift from Heaven
temporarily held in trust, to be controlled, like all else, by the
elect. And if all this makes you unhappy, they ended up, so
what? You're not supposed to pursue happiness in this life anyway.
There can be no philosophic breach between thought and action. The
consequence of the epistemology of religion is the politics of
tyranny. If you cannot reach the truth by your own mental powers,
but must offer obedient faith to a cognitive authority, then you are
not your own intellectual master; in such a case, you cannot guide
your behavior by your own judgment, either, but must be submissive in
action as well. This is the reason why, historically faith and force
are always corollaries; each requires the other.
The early Christians did contribute some good ideas to the world,
ideas that proved important to the cause of future freedom. I must,
so to speak, give the angels their due. In particular, the idea that
man has value as an individual -- that the individual soul is
precious -- is essentially a Christian legacy to the West; its first
appearance was in the form of the idea that every man, despite
original sin, is made in the image of God (as against the
pre-Christian notion that a certain group or nation has a monopoly on
human value, while the rest of mankind are properly slaves or mere
barbarians). But notice a crucial-point: this Christian idea, by
itself, was historically impotent. It did nothing to unshackle the
serfs or stay the Inquisition or turn the Puritan elders into Thomas
Jeffersons. Only when the religious approach lost its power-only
when the idea of individual value was able to break free from its
Christian context and become integrated into a rational, secular
philosophy -- only then did this kind of idea bear practical fruit.
What ended the Middle Ages? My answer is: Thomas Aquinas, who
introduced Aristotle, and thereby reason, into medieval culture. In
the Thirteenth century, for the first time in a millennium, Aquinas
reasserted in the West the basic pagan approach. Reason, he said in
opposition to Augustine, does not rest on faith; it is a
self-contained, natural faculty, which works on sense
experience. Its essential task is not to clarify revelation, but
rather, as Aristotle had said, to gain knowledge of this world. Men,
Aquinas declared forthrightly, must use and obey reason; whatever one
can prove by reason and logic, he said, is true. Aquinas himself
thought that he could prove the existence of God, and he thought that
faith is valuable as a supplement to reason. But this did not alter
the nature of his revolution. His was the charter of liberty, the
moral and philosophical sanction, which the West had desperately
needed. His message to mankind, after the long ordeal of faith, was
in effect: "It is all right. You don't have to stifle your mind
anymore. You can think."
The result, in historical short order, was the revolt against the
authority of the Church, the feudal breakup, the Renaissance.
Renaissance means 'rebirth', the rebirth of reason and of man's
concern with this world. Once again, as in the pagan era, we see
secular philosophy, natural science, man-glorifying art, and the
pursuit of earthly happiness. It was a gradual, tortuous change,
with each century becoming more worldly than the preceding, from
Aquinas to the Renaissance to the Age of Reason to the climax and end
of this development: the eighteenth century, the Age of
Enlightenment. This was the age in which America's founding fathers
were educated and in which they created the United States.
The Enlightenment represented the triumph (for a short while anyway)
of the pagan Greek, and specifically of the Aristotelian,
spirit. Its basic principle was respect for man's intellect and,
correspondingly, the wholesale dismissal of faith and revelation.
Reason the Only Oracle of Man, said Ethan Allen of Vermont, who spoke
for his age in demanding unfettered free thought and in ridiculing
the primitive contradictions of the Bible. "While we are under the
tyranny of Priests," he declared in 1784, "... it ever will be their
interest, to invalidate the law of nature and reason, in order to
establish systems incompatible therewith."'
Elihu Palmer, another American of the Enlightenment, was even more
outspoken. According to Christianity, he writes, God "is supposed to
be a fierce, revengeful tyrant, delighting in cruelty, punishing his
creatures for the very sins which he causes them to commit; and
creating numberless millions of immortal souls, that could never have
offended him, for the express purpose of tormenting them to all
eternity." The purpose of this kind of notion, he says elsewhere,
"the grand object of all civil and religious tyrants ... has been to
suppress all the elevated operations of the mind, to kill the energy
of thought, and through this channel to subjugate the whole earth for
their own special emolument." "It has hitherto been deemed a crime
to think," he observes, but at last men have a chance-because they
have finally escaped from the "long and doleful night" of Christian
rule, and have grasped instead "the unlimited power of human
reason"-"reason, which is the glory of our nature." Allen and Palmer
are extreme representatives of the Enlightenment spirit, granted; but
they are representatives. Theirs is the attitude which was new in
the modern world, and which, in a less inflammatory form, was shared
by all the founding fathers as their basic, revolutionary
premise. Thomas Jefferson states the attitude more sedately, with
less willful provocation to religion, but it is the same essential
attitude. "Fix reason firmly in her seat," he advises a nephew, "and
call to her tribunal every fact, every opinion. Question with
boldness even the existence of a God; because, if there be one, he
must more approve of the homage of reason, than that of blindfolded
fear." Observe the philosophic priorities in this advice: man's mind
comes first; God is a derivative, if you can prove him. The
absolute, which must guide the human mind, is the principle of
reason; every other idea must meet this test. It is in this approach
-- in this fundamental rejection of faith -- that the irreligion of
the Enlightenment lies.
The consequence of this approach,was the age's rejection of all the
other religious priorities. In metaphysics: this world once again
was regarded as real, as important, and as a realm not of miracles,
but of impersonal, natural law. In ethics: success in this life
became the dominant motive; the veneration of asceticism was swept
aside in favor of each man's pursuit of happiness -- his own
happiness on earth, to be achieved by his own effort, by self-reliance
and self-respect leading to self-made prosperity. But can man really
achieve fulfillment on earth? Yes, the Enlightenment answered; man
has the means, the potent faculty of intellect, necessary to achieve
his goals and values. Man may not yet be perfect, people said, but
he is perfectible; he must be so, because he is the rational animal.
Such were the watchwords of the period: not faith, God, service, but
reason, nature, happiness, man.
Many of the founding fathers, of course, continued to believe in God
and to do so sincerely, but it was a vestigial belief, a leftover
from the past which no longer shaped the essence of
their thinking. God, so to speak, had been kicked upstairs. He was
regarded now as an aloof spectator who neither responds to prayer nor
offers revelations nor demands immolation. This sort of viewpoint,
known as deism, cannot, properly speaking, be classified as a
religion. It is a stage in the atrophy of religion; it is the step
between Christianity and outright atheism. This is why the religious
men of the Enlightenment were scandalized and even panicked by the
deist atmosphere. Here is the Rev. Peter Clark of Salem, Mass. in
1739: "The former Strictness in Religion, that ... Zeal for the Order
and Ordinances of the Gospel, which was so much the Glory of our
Fathers, is very much abated, yea disrelished by too many: and a
Spirit of Licentiousness, and Neutrality in Religion ... so opposite
to the Ways of God's People, do exceedingly prevail in the midst of
us." And here, fifty years later, is the Rev. Charles Backus of
Springfield, Mass. The threat to divine religion, he says, is the
"indifference which prevails" and the "ridicule." Mankind, he warns,
is in "great danger of being laughed out of religion." This was true;
these preachers were not alarmists; their description of the
Enlightenment atmosphere is correct.
This was the intellectual context of the American Revolution. Point
for point, the founding fathers' argument for liberty was the exact
counterpart of the Puritans' argument for dictatorship -- but in
reverse, moving from the opposite starting point to the opposite
conclusion. Man, the founding fathers said in essence (with a large
assist from Locke and others), is the rational being; no authority,
human or otherwise, can demand blind obedience from such a being-not
in the realm of thought or, therefore, in the realm of action,
either. By his very nature, they said, man must be left free to
exercise his reason and then to act accordingly, i.e., by the
guidance of his best rational judgment. Because this world is of
vital importance, they added, the motive of man's action should be
the pursuit of happiness. Because the individual, not a supernatural
power, is the creator of wealth, a man should have the right to
private property, the right to keep and use or trade his own
product. And because man is basically good, they held, there is no
need to leash him; there is nothing to fear in setting free a rational animal.
This, in substance, was the American argument for man's inalienable
rights. It was the argument that reason demands freedom. And this
is why the nation of individual liberty, which is what the United
States was, could not have been founded in any philosophically
different century. It required what the Enlightenment offered: a
rational, secular context.
When you look for the source of an historic idea, you must consider
philosophic essentials, not the superficial statements or errors that
people may offer you. Even the most well-meaning men can misidentify
the intellectual roots of their own attitudes. Regrettably, this is
what the founding fathers did in one crucial respect. All men, said
Jefferson, are endowed "by their Creator" with certain unalienable
rights, a statement that formally ties individual rights to the
belief in God. Despite Jefferson's eminence, however, his statement
(along with its counterparts in Locke and others) is intellectually
unwarranted. The principle of individual rights does not derive from
or depend on the idea of God as man's creator. It derives from the
very nature of man, whatever his source or origin; it derives from
the requirements of man's mind and his survival. In fact, as I have
argued, the concept of rights is ultimately incompatible with the
idea of the supernatural. This is true not only logically, but also
historically. Through all the centuries of the Dark and Middle Ages,
there was plenty of belief in a Creator; but it was only when
religion began to fade that the idea of God as the author of
individual rights emerged as an historical, nation-shaping force.
What then deserves the credit for the new development -- the age-old
belief or the new philosophy? What is the real
intellectual root and protector of human liberty-God or reason?
My answer is now evident. America does rest on a code of values and
morality -- in this, the New Right is correct. But, by all the
evidence of philosophy and history, it does not rest on the values or
ideas of religion. It rests on their opposite.
ForumWebSiteAt http://groups.yahoo.com/group/Libertarian
Yahoo! Groups Links
<*> To visit your group on the web, go to:
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/Libertarian/
<*> To unsubscribe from this group, send an email to:
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
<*> Your use of Yahoo! Groups is subject to:
http://docs.yahoo.com/info/terms/
