On Language and Liberty

“The American constitutions were to liberty, what a grammar is to language: they define its parts of speech and practically construct them into syntax.”

A recent article in the San Francisco Chronicle talks of how much of the language used in our modern political discourse threatens the very principles of liberty that our nation and Constitution is founded upon – indeed our destiny as a nation.

When language is too often used to deceive and confuse, to say what we do not entirely mean, to marginalize thought and opinion, it eventually erodes the ability to truly understand or believe anything that is said. Faith in government and our leaders – and, perhaps, in anything at all – falls victim to apathy, ignorance, and disbelief. If we can’t be sure if any particular iteration is true, then how can we believe if anything is true? If what is said is actually intended to obfuscate instead of inform, then how are we to truly understand the issues of our day and the right course of action in solving the problems we face?

The article quoted the essay Politics and the English Language by George Orwell:
“Political language… is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind”…
“The great enemy of clear language is insincerity. When there is a gap between one’s real and one’s declared aims, one turns as it were to long words or exhausted idioms, like a cuttlefish squirting out ink”.

In making an analogy between constitutions and language as frameworks upon which humans endeavor to live in civilized society, Thomas Paine understood that the two are inexorably intertwined, and that the degradation of one was at the peril of the other.

On Why Being Mean is Stupid

“There is something in meanness which excites a species of resentment that never subsides, and something in cruelty which stirs up the heart to the highest agony of human hatred”

These words, written in Thomas Paine’s The Crisis referred specifically to the British Empire, the tormenter of his place and time. Nonetheless, as with so much of Paine’s writing, his thought applies to all times and all places.

Cruelty merely begets more cruelty in a never-ending cycle of hatred and violence. Attempting to claim a moral high ground while engaging in cruelty, killing, and torture, does not make such actions moral.

Whether it is the Bible, the Koran, or the Constitution of the United States, there is no legitimate cover for unnecessary acts of cruelty.

And in all cases, to put it colloquially, mean people suck.

On War – Good God Ya’ All

“When we take a survey of mankind we cannot help cursing the wretch, who, to the unavoidable misfortunes of nature shall wilfully add the calamities of war. One would think there were evils enough in the world without studying to increase them, and that life is sufficiently short without shaking the sand that measures it.”

There is no shortage throughout history of Man’s folly in the pursuit of bloodshed, violence, and destruction. Nearly a century after the “War to End All War’s”, 65 years after the attack on Pearl Harbor, the “infamous” day that plunged the United States into the Second World War – a war that brought death to tens of millions of people, an unprecedented genocide in prison camps like Auschwitz, and the dawn of the nuclear weapons – we see few signs yet of Man’s collective wisdom overcoming the propensity toward war.

From religious factions, Islamic fundamentalist terrorism, sectarian and tribal hatreds, to misguided super-power megalomania-driven foreign policy, the calamities of warfare continue, seemingly unabated. Even while the sands of time wind down on each of our short lives.

Would Thomas Paine see our world today and marvel? Not at the amazing advances of technology, or even the social progress of women’s suffrage and civil rights, but at how little we have come in ending the scourge of war.

On the Findings of the Iraq Commision

“If there is a sin superior to every other it is that of willful and offensive war”

Thomas Paine’s words written in The Crisis are no less true today than they were two centuries ago.

While the finding released to the public today by the Iraq Commission certainly didn’t characterize our adventure in Iraq as Paine may have if he were witness to it today, it is clear that we have committed sins of needless aggression, arrogance, and incompetence.

It is time for a tragically failed policy to change so that we might “manage the disaster”.

Next time we feel so compelled to bring about unprovoked warfare on a nation, we would do well to remember Paine’s words.

On Giving Yourself a Break

“Reason and Ignorance, the opposite of each other, influence the great bulk of mankind”

We act with reason when we do what we know is right. We act with ignorance when we do what we are told is right.

And for most of us, it is an ongoing internal battle. Hang in there. Everybody else is struggling a little bit as well.

On Living in an Age of Revolution

“It is an age of Revolutions, in which everything may be looked for”

As Thomas Paine wrote this, he had already lived through the American Revolution, and now was witnessing first-hand the French . HIs time was indeed one of revolutionary change.

We, too, live in extraordinary times. It becomes clearer with each passing decade, and then each passing year, that our imminent survival as a civilized species depends on revolutionary changes, in our own time. We must embrace what is now called upon us and look for everything. It is in the least expected corner of our minds, of any collective wisdom we may be graced to posses, that we will find the road out of the wilderness.
It is incumbent on each new generation not to turn back, but to forever seek that road.

On Faith, Free Will, and the Tyranny of the Soul

“Of all the tyrannies that afflict mankind, tyranny in religion is the worst. Every other species of tyranny is limited to the world we live in, but this attempts a stride beyond the grave and seeks to pursue us into eternity.”

The right to believe as one sees fit, to observe any faith tradition, or no faith tradition, and allowing others to do the same was an ideal for which Thomas firmly believed.

That he was highly critical of organized religion reflected his fear that an institutionalized, hierarchical structure of belief lends itself too readily to a tyranny even more destructive than those of governments and political tyrant

Believe as I tell you or you are condemned to eternal suffering creates a lifeless faith based on fear and despair.
As we know by his writings, most especially The Age of , Paine was a . Where he found God was in the life all around him.
He allowed men to aspire to their highest nature, and in so allowing without prejudice, their faith. Thus, he was secure in his own.

While some claim this to be a “moral ” can it just as easily serve as the core moral value – the truth – that we claim to seek?

To declare earthly war or eternal damnation in the name of an angry, vengeful God certainly cannot be the only answer.

On The Right (and obligation) to Your Own Opinion

“I have always strenuously supported the right of every man to his own opinion, however different that opinion might be to mine. He who denies another this right makes a slave of himself to his present opinion, because he precludes himself the right of changing it.”

Thomas Paine did not shy away from expressing his opinion or of commenting on the opinions of others. He reveled in the ideas blossoming in the Age of Enlightenment with a zeal that helped foment revolution on two continents. He forcefully challenged those that refused to open their minds to the changing world around them, those that would condemn him simply because his ideas did not always conform to the mainstream of his day. For that he was reviled by many.

But if we deny the right of others to express their own opinion, most especially when it differs from our own, do we diminish the validity of our own ideas?

Paine understood that to agree with an opinion is far less important than having one of your own in the first place.

On Fools, Thinking for Ourselves, the Limits of Power, and the Preservation of Liberty

“When men yield up the privilege of thinking, the last shadow of liberty quits the horizon.”

Thomas Paine did not suffer fools lightly. He did not think highly of the “sunshine patriot”, and understood that the liberty he fought for and for which he inspired others to fight can only persist where there is ongoing diligence toward its preservation; where there is direct and ongoing limits of power. That once we abandon that diligence and give up the privilege of thinking for ourselves, giving in to distraction and comfort, allowing others to order our minds, then we will look up only to find our liberty and freedom disappearing over the horizon.

Questioning power is not sedition; it is not giving aide to any enemy. It is a patriotic duty, lest unquestioned, untested power exceed its bounds and infringe the rights that Paine and others fought to win for us hundreds of years ago.

What would Paine think if he were here today to look out over the landscape of our public and political discourse?