Читать книгу Our Founders' Warning - Strobe Talbott - Страница 11

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Heaven, Earth, and the Mind

Know then thyself, presume not God to scan, The proper study of mankind is Man.

—Alexander Pope, An Essay on Man

When Donald Trump accepted the Republican Party’s presidential nomination in Cleveland, Ohio, in July 2016, his peroration brought down the house. It consisted of four one-syllable words, starting with his favorite: “I am your voice!” At a minimum, the punch line rang of hubris.

The founders would have gone further: they would have sensed the acrid odor of tyranny. In a republic, citizens must retain their voices and exercise their right to think for themselves. That principle was at the core of the founders’ philosophy, and had been inculcated in many of them from their youth. They guarded it like a shield to the end of their days.

When Thomas Jefferson retired to his beloved Monticello overlooking Charlottesville, Virginia, he had a large collection of busts and paintings of his heroes in history. The English Enlightenment was well represented. High on the parlor wall, near the entrance, were three portraits: Francis Bacon, the father of empiricism; Isaac Newton, the father of modern science; and John Locke, the father of liberalism. Jefferson called them “my trinity of the three greatest men the world had ever produced.”1

By dubbing these eminences a trinity, Jefferson might have been taking a sly jab at religion in general and Christianity in particular. After all, he was one of the more forthright figures of the time and took a dim view of spiritual dogma.

Jefferson was a latter-day proponent of a radical movement at the end of the sixteenth century and early seventeenth whose adherents came to be called freethinkers. They trusted reason and logic, questioned conventional wisdom, and resisted conformity, especially religious doctrine.2

Over the decades, British philosophers, scientists, and political activists claimed mastery over their minds. By the eighteenth century, that ethos had permeated the intellectual climate of the British colonies in America. Thomas Paine, the English-born political theorist and pamphleteer for the Revolution, put the matter succinctly: “My own mind is my own church.”3

The personalization of faith was crucial to the liberalization of politics—most consequentially, in what would become the United States of America. Many major founders were steeped in political and philosophical ancient Greece and Rome, but they also turned to their ancestral country and its reformers and scientists of the preceding century. A thirty-year-old John Adams asserted that the people “have a right, an indisputable, unalienable, indefeasible divine right to the most dreaded and envied kind of knowledge, I mean of the characters and conduct of their rulers.”4 He was making the case for the sovereignty of individual thought. Freethinking, which had begun on the fringes of the early Enlightenment, was transformed to be an essential element of an American credo.

Throughout previous periods, piety was often fused with patriotism, and ecclesiastical and secular orders reinforced each other. Rulers exercised their authority in the name of an all-powerful divine force that favored and protected their realms and thrones. The effect often galvanized and stabilized communities that became nations, enabling them to make great strides in science, philosophy, morality, civics, culture, education, and governance. But for millennia, the authoritarian symbiosis between princes and priests set limits on individual thought and teaching.

As the Enlightenment modernized and rationalized governance, it also constrained religion from influencing politics, laws, diplomacy—and war. The Protestant Reformation weakened Catholicism’s claim to being the “universal” church of Christendom and limited the papacy’s extensive temporal power. The Wars of Religion, starting in the sixteenth century, and the Thirty Years War, in the seventeenth, left millions dead.5 Prompted by exhaustion, the combatants came together to end religious wars in Europe in a diplomatic marathon that led to the Peace of Westphalia between May and October 1648.

Intellectuals and scientists of seventeenth and eighteenth century Europe were more likely to question reigning orthodoxy if there was little risk of the ax, the gibbet, or the stake. They distributed their ideas while absorbing or disputing those of their peers.

The result was an international network of knowledge, often called the Republic of Letters. The unfettering of reason and imagination created a vast, kaleidoscopic configuration of science, philosophy, literature, music, architecture, theater, art, and medicine. At its center was the presumption that if answers to questions about the universe and humanity were to be found anywhere, they would only come from the mind of Homo sapiens sapiens, “man who knows that he knows.” The human being is also Homo curiosus: before questioning, exploring, experimenting, and inventing, Homo sapiens yearns to know what is not known.

In searching for new knowledge and testing the old, these pioneering thinkers gave wide scope to inquisitiveness and skepticism.

One of them, Francis Bacon, was a devout Anglican who composed holy meditations and religious tracts, while his scientific work concentrated on phenomena that he could see, measure, and prove. Although Bacon believed in God’s existence, he acknowledged that his rational methods could not prove it. He worshipped the almighty, all-wise creator of everything, but he did not look to the scriptures as he sought a way to explain the machinery of the universe.

Bacon’s experiments worked inductively from a controlled collection of facts to general principles. Though devout, he emboldened some scientists and other freethinkers to question religious faith and put their trust in empiricism. Anthony Pagden, a professor of intellectual history, has written that those who made the transition to scientific and philosophic secularism were entering a “fatherless world.”6

Enter Thomas Hobbes, growling. In his youth, Hobbes served Bacon as an amanuensis. While learning much from the renowned scientist, the two parted ways over Bacon’s straddling of spiritual faith and rigorous logic. Hobbes was a staunch materialist, with the firm belief that matter, including gray matter, matters, and that conjuring incorporeal concepts, including God, was a waste of time.7 Heaven and its celestial beings, he believed, were figments of imagination or, worse, superstitions foisted onto gullible minds.

Hobbes comes across in his writings as a philosophic curmudgeon of Enlightenment noir. He perceived “the life of man solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short” and his own birth the arrival of “the little worm.”8 Even moments of joy and mirth are viewed as schadenfreude or mere relief from misery: “Laughter is nothing else but a sudden glory arising from sudden conception of some eminency in ourselves, by comparison with the infirmities of others, or with our own formerly.”9

In keeping with his grim, unforgiving view, Hobbes considered nature selfish, cruel, and ruthless competition. He was fond of the Latin proverb “Man is a wolf to man,”10 and he translated Thucydides’s Peloponnesian War, with its bleak implication that history itself is an epic of disasters.11

To fend off chaos and “the war of all against all,” he envisioned Leviathan—a gargantuan, authoritarian state—after the sea creature that swallowed an errant Old Testament prophet as punishment for disobeying God. Whereas Jonah was reprieved, the populace of a Hobbesian state would live out their lives in the belly of the beast—an authoritarian “commonwealth.”12 A ruler should “be their representative,” with absolute power to keep order and protect the subjects from both external enemies and their own animal instincts.13 If individuals had the latitude to determine their rights, mayhem would ensue, and neither state nor the individual would be safe. Therefore, in exchange for order and protection, a subject would have to swear an oath: I give up the right to govern myself.

This compulsory variant of the social contract put Hobbes at odds with the optimistic aspect of the zeitgeist. A prescription for dictatorship, albeit meant to be a benevolent and competent one, did not suit many of the era’s intellectuals and reformist politicians. While Hobbes was preparing Leviathan for publication, he expected vehement criticism if not outrage from colleagues and successors, and he was not mistaken.14 It is little wonder that he is often characterized as the Enlightenment’s prince of darkness, and his name has come up in academic debates in the early twenty-first century with the rise of “illiberal” democracies, first in central Europe and then in the current American presidency of Donald Trump.

Thomas Hobbes was also controversial, in his own time and beyond, because he doubted that there was a God. In contrast, Baruch Spinoza’s concept of God was so radical that even his venturesome and open-minded contemporaries often shied away from him. So did the revolutionaries who would lay the ground for an independent America in the next century.

Spinoza was born in 1632 to a Sephardic family in Amsterdam. His parents had fled the Portuguese Inquisition and settled in the Netherlands during its golden age of culture, global trade, prosperity, and military prowess. Thanks to the Peace of Westphalia, the United Provinces of the Netherlands became an independent republic in the vanguard of religious diversity and free speech. The governors of the provinces—Calvinists in ruffled starched collars—welcomed temporary refugees as well as permanent immigrants, like the Spinozas, who were escaping political heat in their own countries.

When he was twenty-three, Spinoza’s synagogue excommunicated him for his audacious insistence that biblical law was not true and God “only existed in the ‘philosophical’ sense.”

So he created his own philosophy for a new definition of God in a ninety-thousand-word treatise titled Ethics and circulated it through the Republic of Letters.15

Spinoza hewed to a rigorous, deductive, a priori path, moving from definitions and axioms through demonstrated propositions to arrive at the stunning conclusion that God is everything and everywhere, literally and, he was convinced, indisputably. God, he asserted, is not just in every atom, cell, star, thought, event, act of charity or barbarism, pain or joy, truth or lie, human disaster, whether manmade or a new deadly virus. Rather, everything that exists, material or abstract, is in God and, therefore, is God. A bleak thought to many, but not to Spinoza. His signature phrase, “God, or Nature,” was not a dichotomy but synonyms to convey one thought—a very big one. God was as impersonal as Nature. “He, who loves God, cannot endeavor that God should love him in return.”16

There was no heavenly shepherd looking out for mortals and caring for them in the eternal life to come. It was this kind of blunt, unsparing assertion that led the British scholar Jonathan Israel to call Spinoza “the supreme philosophical bogeyman of Early Enlightenment Europe.”17 Steven Nadler takes a more expansive view: “Spinoza has a rightful place among the great philosophers in history. He was certainly the most original, radical, and controversial thinker of his time, and his philosophical, political, and religious ideas laid the foundation for much of what we now regard as ‘modern.’ ”18

Spinoza lived during the emergence of deism, a movement that attempted to integrate theology and science, belief and reason. Instead of worshiping the Lord of Heaven and the scriptures, deists accepted a creator of the universe who does not interact with humanity. Although the movement was roundly condemned in the seventeenth century, it appealed to many figures of the European Enlightenment and to many leaders of the American Revolution in the eighteenth.

As Catherine Drinker Bowen wrote in The Miracle at Philadelphia, her widely read account of the Constitutional Convention in 1787: “Deism was in the air. Two generations ago it had made the westward crossing, to the immense perturbation of the faithful. Here was a religion free of creed: the Newtonian universe, the classical revival, the discovery of new seas and new lands had enlarged the world but crowded the old dogma rudely.”19

Spinoza, who crowded it more rudely than anyone, remained a name that was rarely whispered except by the bravest freethinkers (Franklin, Adams, and Jefferson). It took the German Enlightenment in the eighteenth century and its Jewish spin-off to appreciate where Spinoza’s relentless logic had taken him. On both sides of the Atlantic in the nineteenth century, some Jewish congregations treated Spinoza with the same interest and respect as they did Maimonides.20

Modern deists often claim Albert Einstein as one of their own. He demurred, being drawn instead to the outcast Jew who posited divinity not as a supreme being but as the essence of all creation existing in nature, animate or otherwise. This would encourage Einstein to pursue the unified field theory even though it remained elusive—or perhaps because it was elusive. Spinoza’s God could coexist with Einstein’s universe.21

In contrast with Spinoza’s mind-bending metaphysics, his views on liberal government were down-to-earth. They were also ahead of his time. More than most Enlightenment philosophers, he studied the masses, combining empathy for the downtrodden and awareness of the danger to society if they were ignored. In Ethics, he urged the political powers and the intelligentsia to pay attention to the populace’s emotions, especially their fear and frustration.

He elaborated in the Theologico-Political Treatise, one of his works published in his lifetime: “In a Free Republic everyone is permitted to think what he wishes and to say what he thinks.”22 In this work, published anonymously, Spinoza also defended freedom of speech as a corollary to sovereignty of the individual: “If, then, no one can surrender his freedom of judging and thinking what he wishes, but everyone, by the greatest natural right, is master of his own thoughts, it follows that if the supreme powers in a republic try to make men say nothing but what they prescribe, no matter how different and contrary their opinions, they will get only the most unfortunate result.”23 Moreover, if the authorities of the state tried to muzzle free expression, it would backfire, possibly in rebellion: “It simply couldn’t happen that everyone spoke within prescribed limits. On the contrary, the more the authorities try to take away this freedom of speech, the more stubbornly men will resist.”24

Elsewhere, he reiterated the key component of a social contract: “The end of the Republic … is not to change men from rational beings into beasts or automata, but to enable their minds and bodies to perform their functions safely, to enable them to use their reason freely, and not to clash with one another in hatred, anger, or deception, or deal inequitably with one another.”25

Ever the realist, he urged that a sturdy government must have enough processes and institutions to survive periods of malfeasance: “For a [state] to be able to last, its affairs must be so ordered that, whether the people who administer them are led by reason or by an affect, they can’t be induced to be disloyal or to act badly.”26

By “administration,” Spinoza meant sturdy institutions of government that would restrain incompetent, harmful, or overbearing rulers. This principle would find its way into the heart of the American Constitution in the form of federalism and separation of powers.

Spinoza was a liberal with no romantic illusions of rebellion or populist rule. If the populace is ignored, upheaval will ensue: “Tyranny is most violent where individual beliefs, which are an inalienable right, are regarded as criminal. Indeed, in such circumstances, the anger of the mob is usually the greatest tyrant of all.”27

His advice for dealing with populists and their adherents reads well today: elites should get over their snobbish notion that the hoi polloi are ignorant and unfit to judge what is good for the polity or themselves. “[E]veryone shares a common nature,” he asserted, suggesting that elitism was a dubious category, especially if the intellectual class determined what was good for the “inferiors.”28

In this regard, Spinoza was wary of his own profession. If his fellow philosophers in their cloisters continued to extol cool reason and dismiss the passions of the crowds on the streets, as was their wont, they would stir up resentment and incite demagoguery. To avert that, he put the onus on government and the elites themselves. In their civic roles, they should study the people’s lives and needs.

Spinoza’s quest took him to a distant, lonely corner of the philosophical universe in a relatively short life. He died at the age of forty-four, about the average lifespan of a seventeenth-century European.29 In death, he would become part of God/Nature. A passage from the Ethics serves as a fitting epitaph: “A free man thinks of death least of all things, and his wisdom is to meditate not on death but on life.”30 It took several generations for Spinoza to be widely rediscovered, mainly in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and, in some cases, reinterpreted for purposes that would be alien to his philosophy.31

John Locke was born the same year as Spinoza and shared fundamental beliefs with this bold outsider, notably the inalienable rights of all human beings, including the right to rebel against tyranny. However, Locke was a proper Anglican. He welcomed the patronage of aristocrats, who, in turn, might have looked dubiously on his work had they known Locke was influenced by a renegade Jew with a reputation as a pagan.32

While Spinoza was a shooting star in the firmament of the Enlightenment, Locke’s ascent started gradually. After studying medicine at Oxford, Locke entered an upper-class medical practice before turning to epistemology and political philosophy. He wrote slowly, meticulously, and prolifically. And because of the dangerous Stuart reign, with its entangled power plays between Crown and Parliament and between Protestantism and a revived Catholicism, he wrote discreetly, encrypting his notes and hiding manuscripts in a secret compartment of his desk. Such precautions did not, however, remove him from suspicions that he was plotting against the Crown, so Locke slipped off to Holland, the most liberal nation in Europe.

Algernon Sidney, a reformist parliamentarian and political theorist, was protesting the divine right of kings, much as Locke made that case in the same period. But Sidney was less discreet and fortunate. In 1683 he was accused of conspiring to assassinate Charles II. He was arrested, and a draft of his treatise justifying revolution was confiscated.33 Sentencing Sidney to death, the presiding judge proclaimed “Scribere est agere” (To write is to act). Sidney’s response from the scaffold resonates today: “We live in an age that makes truth pass for treason.”

Locke’s self-exile in his fifties could have been an anticlimax to what seemed a middling career: a lapsed physician turned into a brilliant but skittish philosopher. Most of the evidence of his genius was in his head or squirreled away. As he contemplated old age, he saw little chance of returning to England, nor could he be sure that several projects he had been working on for nearly two decades would ever be read. Although he was sufficiently comfortable and safe, he seemed unmoored, spending time “much in my chamber alone,” sitting by a fire, reading, and corresponding with friends in a homeland he might never see again.34 And though he returned to medicine, his passion would always remain the study of the mind.

When Charles II died in 1685, the Crown passed to his stunningly inept brother, James II, who wasted no time making powerful enemies. He raised suspicions that he intended to roll back Parliament’s hard-won prerogatives, infuriated the Anglican establishment by promoting his fellow Catholics to high posts, and sidled up to Britain’s archrival, France. After four tumultuous years, James was deposed and replaced by his Protestant daughter, Mary, keeping the Stuart dynasty on the throne. Mary, in turn, insisted that her husband, William of Orange, join her as co-monarch, adding to his status as stadholder (effectively, chief executive and commander of five Dutch Republic provinces) the title King of England, Scotland, and Ireland.

Convoluted as this maneuver was, the reigning couple brought to English politics a measure of stability and liberalism—two trends that do not always come in tandem. It was now possible for Locke to return home and publish his books.

In his masterwork, An Essay concerning Human Understanding, Locke rejected the concept of “native ideas” stamped “upon [our] minds, in their very first being.”35 The mind at birth is a tabula rasa, he believed—a “white paper, void of all characters, without any ideas.”36

Rationality, he concluded, was an innate human faculty that produces ideas as we accumulate knowledge through experience: “Reason must be our last judge and guide in everything.”37 By studying our environment and exercising rationality in our own lives, we gain the capacity and incentive to form ideas on how to cope with the opportunities and challenges of life.38

Locke, along with many of his contemporaries, believed that happiness—or at least an environment in which it could be pursued—was a perquisite for an enlightened polity and society. “Nature, I confess, has put into man a desire of happiness, and an aversion to misery: these indeed are innate practical principles, which (as practical principles ought) do continue constantly to operate and influence all our actions without ceasing: These may be observ’d in all Persons and all Ages, steady and universal.”39

In present-day English, happiness usually carries the connotation of personal good fortune or contentment, fleeting or otherwise. But, in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, philosophers gave it added moral weight. Happiness should be the result of altruism and empathy. A worthy person should care for the happiness of others, and an enlightened government should care for the collective happiness and prosperity of society as a whole.

Locke had been revising the Essay for almost a decade before he launched into Two Treatises of Government. It would not be published until 1689 and even then, anonymously. Despite growing tolerance following the Glorious Revolution, Locke knew his ideas were ahead of his time and therefore dangerous.

The Two Treatises was a model social contract between the governors and the governed. He considered rationality, tolerance, and happiness critical for both. Whether surveying the world around us or probing inward to understand our minds, we are each a monarch unto ourselves, entitled to personal liberty in thought, belief, persuasion, religion, and speech.40

Locke denounced “received doctrines” such as the divine right of kings. He asserted that all individuals are free—and, moreover, obligated—to use their wits to understand the world and cope with it ethically.

Locke, Hobbes, and Spinoza believed that, in nature, there was no such thing as right or wrong, virtue or sin. It was incumbent upon the state to set rules and to enforce them with punishment or reward. Hobbes did not trust the Leviathan’s subjects to have leverage over their government, whereas Locke (like Spinoza) insisted the opposite. Hobbes believed an authoritarian regime would, inevitably, repress its subjects, whereas an enlightened government would respect the inborn, inherent rights of its citizens: “Being all equal and independent, no one ought to harm another in his life, health, liberty, or possessions.”41

No one meant no one, including the ruler of the state. In the Second Treatise, Locke rejected the belief that the divine creator of the universe also judged the affairs of “man,” and he insisted that man-made law must be based on due processes of government and legislature. This assertion that an abusive monarch is an illegitimate one is essentially the same argument that cost Algernon Sidney his head. It also inspired the American founders to risk their own lives, fortunes, and sacred honor.

Locke’s An Essay concerning Human Understanding also endorsed separation of religion and politics in a chapter titled “Of Faith and Reason, and their Distinct Provinces.” He knew both provinces and was clear about their differences and their boundaries.42 While a dedicated rationalist, he was also a member of the Church of England who was well-read in the Bible. His letters from Holland to friends in England suggest that excluding accounts of supernatural events, he had found wisdom in both the Old and New Testaments. He had faith in God but would never try to persuade others to do likewise, since he could offer no proof of the deity’s existence.

Back in the Province of Reason, Locke could explain and defend his propositions with evidence and logic. Authorities could enact laws and create institutions as long as they did not intrude into the private chapel of the mind. During the first four years after his return to England, he wrote A Letter concerning Toleration, laying down a broad admonition to any government: “The care of each man’s soul, and of the things of heaven, which neither does belong to the commonwealth nor can be subjected to it, is left entirely to every man’s self.”43

Locke believed that no “judge on earth”—rulers and lawmakers—possessed the capacity to pronounce verdicts on spiritual matters.44 For that reason alone, officials of the state had no business forcing citizens to adopt a “true religion” while suppressing adherents of other faiths.45

Publishing the Two Treatises of Government anonymously may not have been necessary, given how little notice it received. The British historian John Kenyon writes that Locke’s ideas were mentioned rarely in the early stages of the Glorious Revolution, up to 1692, “and even less thereafter, unless it was to heap abuse on them.”46

The aging philosopher ached with disappointment as he approached the end of his life. He saw himself as a second-tier figure in the eyes of his contemporaries and likely to be unknown in the future. According to his Essay, when he scanned the landscape of “the commonwealth of learning,” he saw “masterbuilders, whose mighty designs, in advancing the sciences, will leave lasting monuments to the admiration of posterity.” He singled out Isaac Newton, whose discovery of the laws of nature put him in the first rank of physics, astronomy, mathematics, optics, and cosmology. Comparing himself with Newton, Locke was, he said, “an under-labourer in clearing the ground a little, and removing some of the rubbish that lies in the way to knowledge.”47 Locke’s reputation as a master designer of republican government reached its apex well after his death. The Declaration of Independence embraced the concept that all human beings are equal at birth and have unalienable liberties, one of which is the pursuit of happiness. Locke made the argument for the right of revolt against an unjust ruler. The Constitution endorsed Locke’s rationale for separating the branches of government, and the Bill of Rights echoed his promotion of freedom of speech, press, peaceable assembly, and petition for grievances.

The founders of the United States of America were intensely aware that among those Englishmen who prepared the philosophical ground with ideas and ideals for a revolution, a government, and a new kind of nation, Locke had the most influence.

However, Bernard Bailyn, in The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution, lays down a caveat to the loose bond between the thinkers of the Old World and the doers of the New World: “The leaders of resistance … were not philosophers.… They did not write for formal discourses, nor did they feel bound to adhere to traditional political maxims or to apparently logical reasoning that led to conclusions they feared.”48

Moreover, the founders owed a deeper debt to their American ancestors who, in the seventeenth century, braved months at sea, settled for the rest of their lives in a new world, and, unknowingly, spread seeds of a new country.