A Shooting Star

The Deconstruction of Thomas Paine

The late eighteenth century has been called the decades of revolutions.  In the course of that particular season we are treated to a luminary, Thomas Paine rising brightly in the eastern sky only rapidly to become a burning, falling star in the west.

Paine had played an active role in the American Revolution.  He advocated strongly the merits and justice of the American colonies against the belligerence of England.  He based his argument upon the ground of universal human rights in the abstract.  He took his arguments and assertions to England itself and called for a similar revolt against the lords and the monarchy.  Whilst he found many supporters, there were not nearly enough to produce a revolution.

Then events in France undid his arguments and appeals.  The French Revolution, which Paine supported ardently, turned bloody and people saw first hand what radical revolution sanctioned by appeals to abstract human rights and inflamed with violence could accomplish.  It was not a pretty sight.  Paine's popularity in England evaporated.

. . . the gruesome "September Massacres" of 1792 (in France), when hundreds of men, women and children were butchered in the streets and prisons of Paris as suspected traitors, the execution of Louis XVI and Marie-Antoinette in 1793, the escalating Terror, war and economic disaster mocked Paine's confidence that "they order these things better in France."  He himself, at first feted in Paris, was imprisoned and sentenced to the guillotine--a fate he narrowly escaped due to a change of government.  [Robert Tombs, The English and Their History (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2015), p.387]

Suddenly the abstractions of Paine's Rights of Man had come face to face with human depravity at its worst and Paine, overnight, was exposed as little more than a deluded fanatic.   The effect upon England was substantial.

Burke Vs Paine Part 6: Ticky-Tacky Houses That All Look Just the Same

Abstract Principles and The Tyrannies They Produce

In the matter of government and governing Thomas Paine had a simplistic, rationalistic approach.  He took hold of some core philosophical principles (for example, the equality of all human beings) and insisted that a government reflect that abstract principle in all its operations.  The consequence was a concentration of power in the hands of a governing elite.  In other words, the paradox of Paine's simplistic nostrums was that government, ostensibly subject to the rights of all men, inevitably became a Leviathan subjugating all men to its will.

Burke's approach was far more moderate.  Things came to be the way they were over a long time.  Overnight, sudden change would inevitably destroy conventions, habits, practices--and the beliefs upon which they were based.  An example of the difference between the two was the debate between Paine and Burke over the intent of the revolutionary assembly in France to divide that country into perfectly square districts, rather than govern according to Frances traditional, messy regions.

The eradication of traditional attachments and practices that would follow such a move . . . would not eliminate prejudices and attach people to their national identity, as the revolutionaries hoped.  Instead, Burke argues, it would crush all attachment to community and leave an unrestrained Paris government in charge of a greatly weakened nation.  [Yuval Levin, The Great Debate: Edmund Burke, Thomas Paine, and the Birth of Right and Left (New York: Basic Books, 2014), p.132.]

The ancient Assyrians understood the implications of this basic idea.

The Great Debate: Burke Vs Paine, Part IV

Human Freedom

Every political party, every social organization has a particular view of human nature and what is intrinsic to being human.  Most of us never stop to think what those respective views might be--so we end up accepting a view without thought.  Alternatively, we wander round in a confused haze.

Tom Paine represents the world view of human nature as atomised.  We come into this world without obligations being foisted upon us, or imputed to us.  We come into this world as tabula rasa, a blank slate.  This, according to Paine, represents true human freedom.

Burke, on the other hand, argued that we come into this world as a slate upon which a great deal has already been written and laid down, long before we were born.  Human nature is shaped and controlled by spiritual and societal and natural forces which, in effect, we inherit (for good or evil).

The role of consent in this view of society is secondary at best.  Social relations flow out of natural relations, and consent is assumed where it cannot be expressed, not because the individual chooses to accept his obligations, but because the consent of every rational creature is assumed to be in line with "the predisposed order of things."  This vision of society begins with the family--not the individual--and moves up toward society.  [Yuval Levin, The Great Debate: Edmund Burke, Thomas Paine and the Birth of Right and Left (New York: Basic Books, 2014),  p. 103.]

It's worthwhile pausing and addressing a question to you, dear reader: Which view do you believe is right?

The Great Debate: Burke Versus Paine, Part III

The Enlightenment and Its Tyranny

Most Western political philosophers from the Greeks through to Enlightenment liberals and their successors have a view that the origin of a state or nation is critical.  There is an emphasis upon the founding of a nation: whether it be in the form of a "Declaration of Independence" or a Constitutional Convention producing founding constitutional documents.

This emphasis upon the beginnings of a nation is a reflection of what is found in Scripture.  In the Bible, it becomes apparent that God is a covenant making and a covenant keeping God.  A covenant in Scripture is a solemn, formal agreement between parties which provides the foundation, the "basic law" or "higher law" of how the nation will cohere together.  It sets the goals, the motivation, and the standards which will govern the various parties.

Thus, when God called Abram and his household from Ur of the Chaldees, He made a covenant with Abraham and his descendants.  [Genesis 17: 1-2]  After God delivered Israel out of Egypt, He re-made His covenant with Abraham's descendants [Exodus 19:5].  Then, again, at the end of the wilderness wanderings over 40 years, He remade the covenant again with Israel, as recorded in the book of Deuteronomy.

Thus, when nations make covenants to define the fundamental structures, processes and laws of their nation, they are reaching back to a biblical construct.  The creation itself and the world of mankind are made to operate within covenantal structures.

The Great Debate: Burke Versus Paine, Part II

Thomas Paine and the Rise of Precious Petals

Thomas Paine was an Enlightenment Rationalist, of an extreme bent.  He really did believe in the autonomy of human reason.  Politics and just government could be sorted out by a bit of good, old-fashioned, hard-headed Reason.  The problem, he argued, with most of the Western European governments of his day (including the United Kingdom) was that they had little rhyme or reason to them--but lots and lots of tradition by which an aristocratic elite oppressed the common man.

Paine was a  believer in radical egalitarianism.  All men were equal--not in silly externalities like looks, height, strength or sizes of the nose, but in the faculty of Reason.  He was in many ways a silly man.  The poorest amongst us could reason just as well as the most educated (or so he argued).

In particular he hated the idea that each generation of mankind was somehow curtailed or bound by what the generation which went before believed and practised.

The Great Debate: Burke Versus Paine, Part I

Victory Does Not Mean The Winner is Right

In our view every civics class in High School should be made familiar with the works of Thomas Paine and Edmund Burke.  Both were actively writing and debating during the time of the American and French Revolutions, in the late eighteenth century.  They took diametrically opposite sides in the debate.

The issues swirled around a just government and the constitution of freedom.  Paine and Burke are intellectual fathers of very modern arguments over the nature, role, and place of the State.  Neither's views were explicitly Christian--more Deist in many ways.  But Paine was the radical democrat; Burke was the conservative.  Their argument has continued down to our present day.

One of the things which immediately confronts the student of this debate is how history and events of the day "disproved" Paine's position.  Yet, ironically, it is Paine's views, positions, and arguments which have held sway over time and are more widely followed today.  Paine argued that the "Rights of Man" trumped all political arrangements, constitutions, laws, and governments.  The European establishments of his day were ruled by elites and vested interests.  Governments were oppressive and stripped freedoms and powers from ordinary citizens.

Paine was, thus, a fierce supporter of the American Revolution.  Ordinary people, exercising fundamental human rights, threw off the yoke of the English crown.  This narrative would be familiar to most Americans.  Paine wanted to see a similar revolution within England itself.  Burke, on the other hand, warned repeatedly that such struggles could (and likely would) lead to the substitution of one form of oppression by a tyranny far worse.

Void of Chaos

The Paine of Secular Atheism

Thomas Paine is the current ideological apostle of the West.  He is its true muse.  He has inspired millions of people down a certain causeway of thought and action.  One cannot understand the modern Western world without understanding Thomas Paine's work.  We are sufficiently bold to assert that the regnant place held by Marx in the collective mind fifty years ago is now held by Thomas Paine.  

Consider carefully the account of Yuval Levin:

For Paine, the natural equality of all human beings translates to complete political equality and therefore to a right of self-determination.  The formation of society was itself a choice made by free individuals, so that the natural rights that people bring with them into society are rights to act as one chooses, free of coercion.

Each person should have the right to do as he chooses unless his choices interfere with the equal rights and freedoms of others.  And when that happens--when society as a whole must act through its government to restrict the freedom of some of its members--government can only act in accordance with the wishes of the majority, aggregated through the political process.  [Yuval Levin, The Great Debate: Edmund Burke, Thomas Paine and the Birth of Right and Left (New York: Basic Books, 2014), p.91.]

Now, consider the following:

The Great Debate: Burke vs Paine

Thomas Paine and Angela Merkel

One of the more interesting aspects of the "great debate" between Edmund Burke and Thomas Paine (which played out in the late eighteenth century) is the currency of the issues to this day.  Of course, Paine and Burke have long since shuffled off their mortal coils, as it were.  But the clash of political ideologies personified by these two continues.  To that extent, little has changed.

We acknowledge that these days Paine's corner has the upper hand.  The characteristics of his ideology relied upon abstract principles such as liberty, equality, and fraternity which were to be pressed down upon all men.  Often they had to be "pressed down"--that is, forced--because people do not know what's best for them.  But once they got a taste of the pudding, they would love it, and would never go back to meat and three vege.

Thomas Paine had a black and white, simplistic approach to human existence.  Historian Robert Tombs describes him: