“Were a man to be totally deprived of memory, he would be incapable of forming any just opinion.”
There is the memory of a singles person’s life, that of whole nations and tribes, and the collective memory of all humanity.
In all cases, to forget what has gone before is to deny the light of day to wisdom, learning, and justice.
It is as if we have just dropped down from the trees for the very first time, and begin all over again to walk upright.
“Arrogance and meanness, though in appearance opposite, are vices of the same heart.”
Through arrogance we find a haughty sense of pride that disregards all but itself. Through meanness comes cruelty and malevolence that lashes out and injures others.
Both are torn from the same soiled cloth of a heart despairing for its own compassion.
“It ought not to be, that because we cannot do everything, that we ought not to do what we can.”
The scale of the problem is almost beyond our perception; poverty, genocide, environment, resources – simply finding our place in this world.
But it is not sufficient to say that we can not ever do enough to end hunger, stop killing or trod this earth lightly. It is to do something, while with the full realization that it will never be enough, that is important.
“For as certainly as a man predicts ill, he becomes inclined to wish it. The pride of having his judgment right hardens his heart, till at last he beholds with satisfaction, or sees with disappointment, the accomplishment or the failure of his predictions.”
It is a disquieting tendency, one we’d rather pretend didn’t exist; but it does and is only made worse if it is ignored.
It isn’t that the assumed worst would not have happened anyway. Events are set in motion that most of us have little control over. In our frustration at what we see as a clumsy, misguided lurch toward disaster (or worse) we voice outrage, indignation, and anger .
Indignation soon turns righteous. Our hearts are pure and our cause is just.
But pride and a desire for vindication belies the truer nature of our professed righteousness and makes that cause less just than we’d care to admit. Being proved right becomes more important than the real cause we claim to believe in; our compassion is diminished for we lose sight, even if just a little bit, of an underlying tragedy.
Even though we’d certainly disavow such feelings, we must acknowledge the darkness that lies buried in all of us.
When we don’t face the frailties of human nature head-on those frailties harden and grow and become the true enemy that we embolden.
“No human foresight can discern, no conclusion can be formed, what turn a war might take, if once set on foot by an invasion.”
Now, almost four years since the invasion of Iraq, and in light of the reasons given for it at the time of its commencement, the reassurances years ago of a mission accomplished, and the assumptions of positive outcomes through the use of minimal force, it is clear that from arrogance and negligence of judgement has come the abandonment of foresight, reason, and truth.
“Give to every other human being every right that you claim for yourself – that is my doctrine”
Thomas Paine’s doctrine reflects a truth that runs through philosophy, religion, and generally right thinking. It is simple, yet profound; easy to grasp – and yet so very hard to truly achieve for humankind.
That doesn’t mean, of course, that we should ever stop trying.
“Can we possibly suppose that if Governments had originated in a right principal, and had not an interest in pursuing a wrong one, the world could have been in the wretched and quarrelsome condition we have seen it?”
Thomas Paine believed in the tendency of concentrated power to corrupt and that the power of any government should be derived from those governed.
In his day, more revolutionary than the war between the American colonies and Britain was the government born out of that conflict. A government for the people, by the people was eventually hammered out at the Constitutional Convention of 1787 in order to form a more perfect Union
It can be argued, I believe, that herein lies the true American Revolution. But of course, the devil is in the details.
It was a long, hot summer, and what came out of the Philadelphia State House was a document that, as close as any produced by Mankind, brings the high ideals set forth eleven years earlier in Thomas Jefferson’s Declaration of Independence down to brass tacks. Okay, this is how we’re going to do this
The cornerstone of reigning in unchecked power is the concept of spreading it around, through a three-pronged government built on the concept of checks and balances.
It is not only the right, but the duty, of each branch of government to check the power of the other two. Otherwise, we can but remember the words of Thomas Paine.
The President is Commander-in-Chief of the armed forces (and, incidentally, only of the armed forces, and not of the citizenry in general), and executes the laws of the United States. Congress writes those laws, holds the purse strings and conducts oversight on the executive. The judiciary interprets the law and insures that the Constitution is at all times upheld.
It is only through diligent adherence to the idea and practice of checks and balances that any government can stay true to the principals of the American Experiment. When any one branch of government flags in their duty, or strives to reinterpret the law to serve their own grasp for more power, then the experiment is in jeopardy
And what of the people? This is, after all, a government for and by the people. It is incumbent upon every citizen, therefore, to do their part in assuring the balance of power.
Apathy and distraction from a citizenry too complacent to bother are sure to find themselves one day under the thumb of oppression, incompetence, and unresponsive rule for which they can do little but wish they had paid closer attention while they still had a chance.
“It is only by tracing things to their origin, that we can gain rightful ideas of them, and it is by gaining such ideas that we discover the boundary that divides right from wrong, and teaches every man to know his own.”
Thomas Paine, writing in one of his later works “Agrarian Justice” speaks of how, through diligence of thought, by following a logical path back to the origin of a thing, or to what is hidden to any that do not pursue this path, we can begin to learn of the true nature of things.
This concept pervades our daily lives, both of individuals and of nations.
We may see a homeless man laying on the sidewalk early one morning and instinctively feel a sense of mild disgust, or pity, or superiority. But what do we know of this man? It is easy to make wide sweeping generalizations. But unless we know his story, trace back the path of events and situations, decisions this man may have made, or events that shaped his life, we can not know in any real sense what it is that brought him now to lie on the sidewalk with nothing more than the ragged clothes on his back for warmth and a cardboard box for protection.
In such a situation, where we can’t possibly hope to know what is true for this man, we do well to trace back our own route that has led us to be walking by this man just now, and perhaps be thankful of our own fortune, than to be disgusted or pitiful of another’s perceived misfortune.
And from this example we see our days are peppered with such happenstance; where, with just a moment of reflection, we understand that much of what we think we know of something or someone before us is but a facade of the truth that lay beneath. And through that moment of reflection, we are allowed the opportunity to, at the very least, acknowledge that there is much in this world we will never comprehend unless we take the time to stop and really look.
“That government is best which governs least.”
It is hard to imagine what Tom Paine might think should he be witness to the current state of our country and the world if he should see it today.
One thing he would find this year that is different from years past is a George Bush whose power has peaked and is now on the wane as he grapples with what is now generally believed to be an ill-conceived and now intractable war in Iraq, and the declining popularity in his overall presidency that goes along with it.
This is no more in evidence by the woman – Madam Speaker – sitting directly behind the president as he delivered his State of the Union Address to the assembled Congress last evening.
Many have claimed that in proceeding years and in his previous speeches to Congress, Bush has moved to push executive powers to unprecedented levels, even to the direct contradiction of our Constitution and in violation of the law. Many have further asserted that Congress has been bereft of their core responsibility of oversight, letting the president shape and mold a new, some would claim almost monarchical, presidency.
And with the word “monarchical”, we would surely raise the ire of Mr. Paine.
But as one Libertarian has reported, the sight and sound of a chastened president, a Congress no longer willing to blindly do the president’s bidding, and the gridlock in governance that this often produces, is nothing more than the sweet call of limited government; for when an over-reaching president is not balanced by a watchful and prudent Congress, then that government is not best. Not for the people and not for the future state of our Union.
After all the pronouncements, proposals, and rhetorical flourish echoed through the halls of Congress, perhaps this is what Tom Paine would take away if he had witnessed the State of the Union address last night.
The state of our Union will be strong only so long as all participants in the process do their job and uphold their obligation to the American People and the Constitution upon which any and all authority those in government derive their power.
“To preserve the benefits of what is called civilized life, and to remedy at the same time the evils it has produced, ought to be considered as one of the first objectives of reformed legislation”
In Agrarian Justice, one of Thomas Paine’s later works written in 1797, Paine lays out his ideal vision for society, one that combines human equality with respect for the natural world.
Paine could surely have had no notion the impact the birth of the industrial revolution he witnessed would have some two centuries later. The benefits anyone reading this blog has through the hyper-accelerated technological advances of human society since Paine’s time have in turn created “evils” the likes of which could hardly have been imagined in the dawn of the Enlightenment. Not the least of which is the reality of a warming global environment.
Yet, legislation introduced today by the newly-sworn Congress calling for benchmarks toward a drastic reduction of CO2 emissions by 2050 reflect the notion Paine felt so long ago that our natural world is the foundation of all humanity’s higher endeavours.
Is it not an innate sense in all of us that only through the bounty of nature, the aggregate beneficence of our “Mother Earth” that we have any notion at all of life itself, let alone anything resembling the artistic expressions and higher aspirations that we consider civilized life?