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The Integration of America’s Revolutionary Mind and Body Includes Liberty, Justice, Truth, and Freedom.

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The first chapter of Brad Thompson’s 2019 book, America’s Revolutionary Mind is titled The Enlightenment and the Declaration of Independence. In it, the radical 17th century achievements of John Locke are featured. Then his principles, put into action by 18th century American political philosophers led by John Adams, are explicated. The second chapter begins the logical reduction down the conceptual ladder toward axiomatic truth, and is titled The Laws of Nature.

Here, Thompson draws distinctions among natural law and the moral laws of nature, and then describes how America’s Founders formed basic propositions about them: self-preservation and reciprocity for the rights of others. While the consequences regarding the laws of nature meant individual survival, the rewards and punishments for violating the law of reciprocity were social admiration or contempt.

Yet moral recognition for what is good, particularly the productive virtues measured as profit, is woefully lacking in America today. In its place, mediocrity is celebrated. The 2020 presidential election outcome being its latest crowning glory.

As important as natural law and the moral laws of nature are to peaceful human progress, our Founders knew they do not carry the weight of statutory law. They do not protect individuals from force applied by others, which is the only threat to acting on one’s rational self-interest. Because of this, only objective statutory law was worthy of America’s Founders pledging their “lives, fortunes and sacred honor.”

More specifically, they demanded law rooted in the axiomatic and discoverable truths of life itself – Self-Evident Truths, and the title of the third chapter. Quite fittingly, Thompson begins it by quoting Thomas Jefferson, and his 1824 letter to John Cartwright, an English Whig,

Rather than “musty records, royal parchments, or laws of institutions of a semi-barbarous ancestry,” Americans appealed to “an album on which we were free to write.” Americans did not claim “the inspiration of heaven, but the use of reason and the senses.”

According to John Taylor of Caroline, America’s Founders established government “rooted in moral or intellectual principles, not orders, clans, or castes.” For evidence of this, Continental Army Chaplain Enos Hitchcock wrote, “Justly it may be said, the present is an age of philosophy, and America the empire of reason.”

It is no wonder, that in our postmodern era, philosophy and reason are sacrificed for the pragmatic whims of political power in the name of social justice. Thinking is hard.

The essence of this chapter lies in the four moral and political truths of the Declaration, the ones marvelously titled, “We hold these truths to be self-evident.” Thompson’s explanation of basic self-evidence that follows, and its less obvious forms, would be an appropriate test of anyone’s claim for being a thinking American.

Of course, the first one states “that all men are created equal,” yet are we? No two individuals (other than identical twins) are born with the same physical strength, esthetics, cognitive skills, and family resources. In fact, this kind of inequality is the natural state of human existence. Accordingly, it is the subject matter for Chapter 4 titled Equality, and the meaning and acceptance of the concept of “truth” must come first.

According to Locke’s Essay Concerning Human Understanding, truth is revealed “when these signs are joined as our ideas agree; and when our ideas are such as we know are capable of having an existence in nature.” For America’s Revolutionary Minds,

There is a necessary connection between truth and freedom of the mind. The freedom to think is both an aspect and requirement of human flourishing. Because truth is not innate, the human mind must be free to discover the truth.

The corollaries to this are themselves revolutionary. Truth and freedom, liberty and justice, self-ownership and property rights, the laws of nature and moral law – and in fact, the human mind and body, are all integrated and co-dependent units. The latter being sovereign is proven by the former. In Federalist 31, Alexander Hamilton explains there “certain primary truths or first principles upon which all subsequent reasonings must depend.” After citing the natural law of geometry as an example, Hamilton explains that in ethics and politics,

There cannot be an effect without a cause; the means ought to be proportioned to the end; every power ought to be commensurate with its object. A government ought to contain in itself every power requisite to the full accomplishment of the objects committed to its care.

This is where Thompson explains the self-evident nature of the third and fourth assertions of truth in the Declaration – governments are instituted to secure rights, and if they fail, governments may be altered or abolished. These “are contingent and necessary based on the deductions from the self-evident axiom” (all men are created equal) “and the moral first principle” (all men are endowed with certain unalienable rights). ”

They were not self-evident to the Declaration’s statesmen as a form of intuitive knowledge or by virtue of the meaning and relations of the terms themselves. It was only over time that the Declaration’s truths became self-evident to the leaders of the revolutionary movement.

Thompson found the power of the Declaration’s meaning in the phrase, “We hold these truths to be self-evident.” The emphasis on “hold” is because “they were grasped and acquired over a period of time, i.e. in the course of human events, the American people discovered and came to accept these truths over the course of many years.”

Undoubtedly, this is what John Adams was writing about in his comment that the true revolution “was in the minds of the people, and this was affected in the course of fifteen years before a drop of blood was shed at Lexington.” Oddly enough, this is how long it takes for government progressive education to convert young and talented lovers of life into selfless declarers of lives that matter, except their own it seems. Thompson well summarizes Adams and his contemporaries, and today’s intellectual bankruptcy, when he writes,

At the very least, Americans should study the history of liberty, the nature of that power, the cruelty that drove their ancestors from their homes in England, and the views and ends in exchanging their native country for a dreary, inhospitable wilderness.

For readers of this article, it may start with becoming an active participant in the Waking America’s Revolutionary Mind study group.

 

 

Waking America’s Revolutionary Mind!

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In July, Center for Individualism created a Facebook study group centered on Ayn Rand’s 1936 novel, We the Living. The group analyzed the novel’s characters and their circumstances, its historical backdrop, and the lessons that can be drawn for 2020 Americans from 1920s Russia. The weekly series of articles that resulted from the group’s analysis is titled Reliving We the Living.

The blog posts included the impressions of our study group members, and related the experiences of the novel’s heroine, Kira Argounova, to today’s Gen Z and Millennials. This combination of features had never been attempted or achieved, and was wrapped with the superlative bow of Natalie Schroder’s Foreword to the eBook, which was released last month. To Reliving Ayn Rand’s We the Living we added an essay about Stalinist Russia’s great poet Anna Akhmatova and occupied Poland’s poet laureate Czeslaw Milosz.

There are several reasons why we chose this novel, but none is more important than the necessity of great art, and particularly great literature, for living in a truly civilized society. As the wonderful educator Lisa VanDamme explains in her essay Teaching Values in the Classroom,

Extensive knowledge of the consequences of history’s ideas and actions, and what they made possible; of the classics of literature and the characters and situations they describe; these are the raw material from which rational moral principles are drawn.

Yet a vicious assault on moral principles (not Puritan, but rational) continues to decivilize America, and it has only accelerated in the last twenty years. The evidence is stark – the New York Time’s 1619 Project in public schools, the anti-concepts “Wokism” and “Whiteness,” Modern Monetary Theory in universities, and the “peaceful protests” of the progressive left’s BLM and Antifa terror wings.

For those reasons, it is clear that the moral foundations of America must be retrieved from the dust bin of history, for us to shine bright lights on them, and to celebrate the Benevolent Universe they represent. To achieve that modest goal, we are forming a new Facebook study group, and its centerpiece will be America’s Revolutionary Mind by political science professor, C. Bradley Thompson. As he writes in his essay, What Exactly Was the Spirit of ’76?

Having made their case against despotism and for freedom, it should be clear why revolution was necessary for the Americans, why they would not compromise. They had to act because of who and what they were, and the moral law they chose to live by.

Our online forum is an open group on Facebook, and we will begin reading and analyzing this “Moral History of the American Revolution and the Declaration That Defined It” on December 1st. The group is called Waking America’s Revolutionary Mind, and there are three simple questions to answer for automatic membership.

As Administrators, we will remove any member who is disrespectful to America’s founding principles or other members of the group. However, because it is an open group, membership will be visible, and not suitable for people lacking self-esteem. As John Adams also taught, “Liberty, according to my metaphysics, is a self-determining power in an intellectual agent. It implies thought and choice and power.”

Arbitrary power is what the progressive left, formerly known as Communists, represent. Yet the source of their power lies within us. They are weak; they rely on us to surrender ourselves as intellectual agents for our own self-determination. In Part II of Chapter 10 of We the Living, Timoshenko describes the progressive left’s character to Comrade Morozov,

Don’t let them know that yours is not an army of heroes, nor even of fiends, but of shriveled bookkeepers with a rupture that have learned to be arrogant. Don’t let them know that you are not to be shot, but to be disinfected.

The choice and power are yours, and to learn more, please consider being active in our Waking America’s Revolutionary Mind study group.

The Father of Classical Liberalism Whose Ideas Are Inscribed In Our Souls

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On nurturing children, we “should well study their natures and aptitudes and see, by often trials, what turn they easily take and what becomes them, observe what their native stock is, how it may be improved, and what it is fit for.” This attitude could have been expressed by the renowned educator and Poetic Justice Warrior Maria Montessori, but it is not hers. However, it is a radical shift away from the Renaissance emphasis on Classical Greek philosophy, and toward the Enlightenment view of human beings as unique individuals.

For insight on personal liberty and self-reliance,

If man in the state of nature be so free, as has been said; if he be absolute lord of his own person and possessions, equal to the greatest, and subject to no body, why will he part with his freedom? Why will he give up this empire, and subject himself to the dominion and control of any other power?

This sentiment might easily be attributed to Poetic Justice Warriors Booker T. Washington or Ayn Rand, but it is not theirs. It was however a radical shift away from the notion of the divine right of kings. And it was the precursor for the Great Upheaval of the late 18th century, the one that resulted in a brief experiment with enlightened despotism in Russia, a brutal and failed revolution in France, and according to President John Adams, the successful revolution of the mind to supplant British hegemony in America.

The source of the first quote is Some Thoughts Concerning Education, published in 1693; and the second is from Two Treatises of Government, published in 1689. Both were achievements of Poetic Justice Warrior John Locke. These were truly radical ideas at the time, and they furthered the course of human history toward human flourishing.

All the King’s Men

In 17th century Europe, the feudal system had largely replaced slavery. While serfs had a few basic rights such as access to the legal system, some freedom of movement and church sanctuary, they lived lives of servitude. In England, there was a great deal of political pressure, particularly from the Whig movement, to replace the absolute monarchy of King Charles II with a constitutional monarchy that would limit the authority of the sovereign. Locke had a long and close relationship with a founder of the Whigs, Lord Ashley, for whom Locke and his team of doctors had saved from liver disease by performing surgery.

Because of Locke’s implication in a plot to assissinate King Charles II (there is little evidence that Locke was involved), he exiled himself to the Netherlands for five years in 1683 (or be hung, drawn and quartered). It was during this time in Amsterdam that Locke surrounded himself with the intellectual heirs to the rationalist philosophy of Baruch Spinoza, and in particular Spinoza’s philosophical treatise titled Ethics. While there was conflict between Locke’s empiricism and Spinoza’s rationalism, Locke was impressed with Spinoza’s arguments regarding political and religious tolerance, and the separation of church and state. This period also gave him time to complete his signature achievements – Two Treatises of Government, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, and A Letter Concerning Toleration.

Back in England, there was increasing resentment against a Catholic monarch wielding absolute authority justified by the divine right of kings. In 1688, the Glorious Revolution led by English parliamentarians and an invading Dutch fleet and army organized by the Prince of Orange, installed a constitutional monarchy led by William III and his wife Mary II. It was then that Locke, accompanied by Mary II, returned to England. The following year the English Bill of Rights was passed by parliament and Locke finally published his Treatises, Essay, and Letter. While Locke was associated with the Whig party that controlled parliament, his conception of natural rights (rights not derived from any law or government) were still considered radical at the time.

The Road from Serfdom

Locke’s Two Treatises of Government contain powerful arguments for limited government, separation of powers, and the consent of the governed. But he is not the first to espouse these ideas. According to historian Peter Berkowitz, they can be found in much earlier work. For example, the Bible talks about equality, but it is not based on natural rights. And in classical Greek philosophy, political structures should accommodate human virtues, not personal liberty. It was John Locke who combined seemingly unrelated ideas into a cohesive framework that coalesced into America’s Declaration of Independence and Constitution nearly a century later.

It starts with Locke’s theory of knowledge, known as Tabula Rasa in Latin, meaning that all human beings are born without innate ideas. He asserts that all people acquire knowledge through perception, experience, and introspection. This idea can be traced back to the 11th century Persian philosopher Avicenna, and before that to Aristotle. His theories on education consider the mind and body to be one integrated system, that children should be considered rational beings, and that virtue is taught by delaying gratification. Locke adds to this his theory of every person’s sense of self, or individualism:

Thus, from the consideration of ourselves, and what we infallibly find in our own constitutions, our reason leads us to the knowledge of this certain and evident truth, that there is an eternal, most powerful, and most knowing being; which whether any one will please to call God, it matters not!

This naturally leads to the right of each human being to ownership of their life and property. As Berkowitz explains about Locke’s achievement, political power is rooted in freedom and equality by and for all. For political systems to be legitimate, they must protect natural rights, and it must be by the consent of the governed. Locke proved that no one is born to rule others, and no one is born to serve rulers. But freedom and equality are not absolute, political structures should only protect their citizens from the threat of force imposed by others.

As poetic justice would have it, Locke’s Two Treatises laid dormant in western political thought until the American resistance against British taxation resurrected it. Personal liberty became the subject of debates in both America and Britain, and in 1773, Two Treatises of Government was finally published in America. Consequently, it had profound influence on Alexander Hamilton, James Madison, Thomas Jefferson, and the other great American political philosophers that triggered Adams’ revolution of the mind, and fostered the soul of America.

 

 

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