The American Crisis: Origins-
The Failure of Modern Science and Our Historical Dilemma
Miscellaneous Notes and Summary
Journal Entry #29

Upon his entry into the 2012 presidential campaign, Congressman Paul Ryan observed that the United States of America began as an idea. In this he was right on track. Sadly, this observation is not emphasized enough; really, it’s not emphasized at all. We seldom get past the economics of politics. However, the idea of self-government, the polity of which “deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed”, was the unique product of the Age of Enlightenment.

As Jay Winik describes in his outstanding book The Great Upheaval; America and The Birth of The Modern World 1788-1800 (2007), “…scarcely had there been an age so skeptical toward tradition, so confident in the powers of human reason and science, so firmly convinced of the regularity and harmony of nature, and so deeply imbued with the sense of civilization’s advance and progress. The evidence of this was all around.”

“The literate public greatly expanded…As the 1700’s unfolded before them, their thoughts turned to the question of governance and the human condition. And mostly to this basic notion- that the existing state of society could be improved.” Through the intellectual influence of the French philosophes Montesquieu, Voltaire and Rousseau, and their distinguished followers “d’Alembert, Buffon, Turgot, Helvetius…and Diderot”, Western thought took an entirely new direction.

This new direction inspired a novel belief, “one that radiated outward, radically and exponentially, in Europe, east and west, off to Russia, and far away to the colonies in North America, which would set minds ablaze and soon help kindle two great revolutions, not to mention a counterrevolution. The crux of this belief eschewed [avoided; shunned] an order based on the direct will of God and the fixed nature of the universe. Instead, it focused a bright light on man-made law and man-made authority.”

The new worldview of the French philosophes notwithstanding, the luminaries of the North American colonies- Franklin, Jefferson, Hamilton, Adams, Madison, and especially Washington- respected the “direct will of God and the fixed nature of the universe” as they embraced the libertarian (as opposed to the communal-collectivist) version of the emerging European democratic tradition, according to Klaus Fischer in his fascinating work Nazi Germany; A New History (1995), in the chapter entitled The Origins of Totalitarianism.

“Libertarianism and its various permutations gave rise to the Anglo-American style of thought with its emphasis on representative government, freedom, equality, and human rights, while collectivism informed the rising Socialist and Communist movements and their demands for the abolition of private property, the communal ownership of goods, and ‘true’ equality.”

For the American Founders therefore, all “man-made law and man-made authority” could derive its legitimacy only from “the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God”, as the American Revolution’s Declaration of Independence read. This distinction incidentally, between two philosophical versions of democracy is supported in the writings of Thomas Jefferson, who saw a clear distinction between the twin Revolutions of the later eighteenth century.

Jefferson regarded the American Revolution as a conservative political revolution because the pre-war colonial legislatures and representative assemblies were extended and preserved. The subsequent French Revolution he thought a radical social revolution, because it advocated and implemented the dissolution of the Old Regime (ancien regime) as well as the overturning of the older, traditional social order.

As the streets of Paris became awash in blood in the Reign of Terror, many hapless souls were condemned to execution- nobles, bourgeois and commoners alike, even King Louis XVI and his wife Marie Antoinette- all receiving the due process of the guillotine. Of course, in this radical revolutionary madness the Church also was attacked, its property confiscated.

According to Fischer, with the onset of the nineteenth century, global European imperialism combined with aggressive nationalism and the gathering Industrial Revolution, accelerating the scientific, secularized direction of Western thought begun in the Enlightenment. Unlike the mercantilist economic order of Europe’s earlier colonialism period, nineteenth century imperialism saw the organization and implementation of capitalist economic arrangements integrating the geographic and cultural areas of overseas investments.

“In practical terms, this meant investing vast amounts of capital in overseas ventures and in setting up the instruments of production and exchange: mines, factories, docks, warehouses, refineries, railroads, steamboats, and banks.” Reciprocal construction was engaged in the increasingly industrialized European cities to receive the raw materials from these overseas ventures and facilitate production, transport, manufacture and export of finished products.

In the process of establishing these “instruments of production”, the physical excavation of large areas of the earth to accommodate mines, railroads, canals, bridges and tunnels began to reveal strata or earlier surface layers of the earth of apparently great antiquity, which gave impetus to the study of geology. The English surveyor and canal builder William Smith pioneered the systematic study of the stratification of the earth's crust with his book, Strata Identified by Organised Fossils (1816). And of course, within these strata were found layered evidence of differing climates in addition to the fossil remains of long extinct species, giving rise to the study of paleontology and the work of Georges Cuvier.

In 1830 Charles Lyell published the first volume of his Principles of Geology, a copy of which was given to a young English naturalist named Charles Darwin by his Cambridge botany professor, to read on his famous voyage of exploration on the HMS Beagle. In the pages of this seminal book, “Lyell had opened to [Darwin] the vast and exhilarating prospect of nature- ‘no vestige of a beginning, no prospect of an end’- first unfolded in James Hutton’s Theory of the Earth in 1788”, wrote Professor John Greene in The Death of Adam; Evolution and Its Impact on Western Thought (1959).

According to the concept of uniformitarianism- advanced by Buffon in his 1749 work Natural History- Charles Lyell “reconstructed the history of the earth based on processes still continuing; uniform actions through time implied a uniform rate of change”, observed the historian James Burke in The Day the Universe Changed. Because “only natural causes could be used to explain geological events”, Lyell’s work “shattered the biblical complacency of the Victorian intellectual world.” It also increased the popular misconception that religion and science were very much incompatible.

Awaiting Charles Darwin upon the Beagle’s return in 1832 was the second volume of Principles of Geology, in which Lyell extended the definition of geology “to include the study of organic change as well”, wrote Professor Greene. With the publication in 1838 of Thomas Malthus’ Essay On The Principle of Population, the fossil evidence confirmed in Darwin’s mind Lyell’s view that “In the universal struggle for existence, the right of the strongest eventually prevails”.

For Western thought, what began in 1687 with Isaac Newton’s theory of universal gravitation in Principia Mathematica had come full circle. According to James Burke in The Day the Universe Changed, Newton’s system- predicated as it was upon a rationally operating universe, understood by human reason alone- sought how, not why, the universe operated. Universal gravitation destroyed the medieval picture of the world as a structure moved by the unseen and ever-present hand of God.

Man was no longer at the center of a universal system operated for his edification by the Almighty. Earth was just one small planet of many in an incomprehensibly vast universe that behaved according to mathematical laws. There seemed, for the first time, no place in the cosmos for the Providential involvement of God in the affairs of mankind. The human race was quite alone.

Charles Darwin’s 1859 publication of Origin of Species, though it was concerned with the origin of the plants and animals found in the fossil record, required little imagination in order to be applied to human beings. If there were no Adam and Eve, then Man was subject to the same evolutionary rules as any other organism. Consequently, humanity was no longer a special creation made in God’s image; if this were so, there would be little use for the religion that taught such a lie…

Montag

The American Crisis: Our Continuing Plight
A Brief Interlude
An Observation on the Recent Election
Journal Entry #28

In their inscrutable wisdom, the majority of American voters have returned Barack Obama to the Presidency to serve a second term. I have no doubt that the Americans who voted thus are sincere people and upstanding citizens who, given the limitations inherent in any candidate seeking high office, nevertheless desire by their vote to achieve hope and change, and a better day in America. This is what they desired; I’m compelled to tell you what they will, in fact, receive.

Before the first day of his new term, before he does anything great or small, President Obama will arrive- like the proverbial blind date- encumbered with a great deal of baggage from the previous engagement. Chief among this encumbrance is that eight-hundred pound gorilla so sweetly overlooked by his erstwhile opponents, done certainly in the spirit of patriotism and magnanimity. This gorilla is what they call nowadays a “done deal”. And like the blind date, we are forced to take all of him or none of him, and that includes his “family”.

That gorilla’s name is the Affordable Health Care Act which, with Mr. Obama’s reelection, has received a guaranteed four year stay of execution- definitely a long enough period of time to graft itself onto the national body politic. And from there, to inextricably intertwine its powerful tendrils with the otherwise necessary nerve-system pathway traversing the spinal column so wisely devised by the original thirteen colonies and codified by the U.S. Constitution.

The Affordable Health Care Act will achieve several things- none of which are good, insofar as good governance is concerned. This Act will, in one mighty stroke, reduce health care quality and availability, dramatically increase health care cost with a reciprocal decrease in the citizen’s overall material standard of living, and enormously increase the power of the STATE- done always at the expense of personal liberty- with the promotion of the STATE’S ability to coerce any and all arbitrarily (thanks to the Supreme Court) in order to force compliance. If that’s not Tyranny, I’ll eat my hat. If we were living in the Islamist regions of the world, this Act would be called a Fatwa.

Montag