Within this historical essay are patterns which can be seen in the current U.S. President's character. Delusions of righteousness, denial of ability to be an oppressor, reluctance to tolerate competing opinions on issues, are clearly present.
[From article]
But the French revolutionaries, Burke warned, have torn away “the decent drapery of life, . . . the superadded ideas, furnished from the wardrobe of a moral imagination, which . . . cover the defects of our naked, shivering nature, and . . . raise it to dignity in our own estimation.” Laws there must be backed up with force, or else people will rob, kill, and rape; and if you take away the realm of inherited custom, belief, religion, and manners—the realm of unexamined but deeply held prejudice and even superstition—that makes government mild and people habitually law-abiding and civil to one another without force, then “laws are to be supported only by their own terror.” So the French revolutionaries, by demoting religion and monarchy and by stamping out “the old feudal and chivalrous spirit of fealty, which by freeing kings from fear, freed both kings and subjects from the precautions of tyranny,” will bring about a society, Burke predicted, in which, “at the end of every vista, you see nothing but the gallows.”
Anyone who thinks that human reason can supply the place of this cultural fabric woven and passed down over so many centuries from the dead to the living to the yet-to-be-born is deluded.
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So the early governments buttressed force with fraud, for they knew as well as Burke that security of rule depends on power over subjects’ minds as well as over their bodies. Indeed, some of the first governments arose entirely out of hocus-pocus. “When a set of artful men pretended, through the medium of oracles, to hold intercourse with the Deity, as familiarly as they now march up the back-stairs of European Courts, the world was completely under the government of superstition,” Paine contended. And Burke’s appeal to the inherited fabric of belief and culture is merely the modern version of such humbug. “Every Ministry acts upon the same idea that Mr. Burke writes, namely, that the people must be hood-winked, and held in superstitious ignorance by some bugbear or other,” wrote Paine.
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Though man may be kept ignorant, he cannot be made ignorant.” As soon as people see through a mystique, its power evaporates. For instance, said Paine, in an image that prefigures The Wizard of Oz, “Monarchy always appears to me a silly contemptible thing. I compare it to something kept behind a curtain, about which there is a great deal of bustle and fuss, and a wonderful air of seeming solemnity; but when, by an accident, the curtain happens to be opened, and the company see what it is, they burst into laughter.”
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Events proved Burke tragically right in thinking such an outcome unlikely, however. The individual’s store of reason is indeed modest, as Burke had argued—man being more a reasoning than a reasonable animal—and men behave morally not because they are naturally pacific and cooperative, or because their reason tells them how to treat their fellows, but because the beliefs they inherit from their long-developed culture impel them to behave in socially useful ways. With those beliefs stripped away, men will commit violence on their neighbors, unless controlled by force.
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Gouverneur Morris, who had come to Paris on business in 1789, stayed, and became America’s minister to France in 1792, formed a particularly acid view of the culture of the French: “The great Mass of the common People have no Religion but their Priests, no Law but their Superiors, no Moral but their Interest.” Take these away, and “Tyranny” or “Anarchy” will result, Morris predicted—and, in fact, both ensued.
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the Framers of the American Constitution had seen clearly what they called the “depravity of human nature,” and, in forming a government powerful enough to afford society the protection it needs from man’s natural aggression, both foreign and domestic, they recognized that the officials who would wield that force would be as imperfect as anyone else and thus likely to become oppressors. Hence they sharply limited their authority to what was absolutely essential for effective government, and they set the various branches of government in tension with one another, so that each would serve as a watchdog against any attempt of the others to overreach. They recognized as well that society is a collection of individuals, all with equal rights but with competing interests and passions, so they strove to poise interest against interest, to prevent any single group from invading the rights of other groups or individuals.
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[Paine noted] the French revolutionaries seized “power before they understood principles. They earned liberty in words, but not in fact.”
http://www.city-journal.org/2013/23_4_urb-thomas-paine.html
MYRON MAGNET
Tom Paine’s Two Radicalisms
And their consequences—for his era and ours
Autumn 2013
Vol. 23, No. 4
