"There is no country in the world in which the bolder political theories of the eighteenth-century philosophers are put so effectively into practice as in America."
Founders Quote of the Week
I’m taking a bit of a detour here, if you can call it that. This quote was not from anyone we can call a Founding Father, but from Alexis de Tocqueville.
Alexis, along with Gustave de Beaumont, was sent to America by the French Government to study the American prison system. Arriving in May of 1831 and traveling for nine months throughout the country, they used their time to do just that, but to also study American society as a whole. Their studies resulted in reports on the penitentiary system, slavery, and Alexis de Tocqueville’s now famous book, Democracy in America.
He was for sure not a Founding Father, but his book has become a staple for anyone seeking to understand the nature of young America, which fits right in with my weekly study of the words of the Founders. It’s like reading a series of interviews of normal, everyday people in young America then hearing Alexis discuss his observations from an outside perspective.
Here is the full quote from Alexis and what I’m addressing here, which is the heart and mind of the American People:
“There is no country in the world in which the bolder political theories of the eighteenth-century philosophers are put so effectively into practice as in America. Only their anti-religious doctrines have never made headway in that country.” (emphasis mine)
Important to remember is that Alexis and Beaumont came from France, who had just had a somewhat parallel experiment with the philosophy of liberty in action through the French Revolution which ended in 1799. Although based on concepts of liberty, and even borrowing Thomas Jefferson to help author their documents, what ended up happening was a bloodbath. Their streets ran red with blood as the inventor of the guillotine watched his tool of execution sever the heads of 17,000 people including their king and queen.
The French valued liberty and seemed to be on the path to equality, but watching these parallel “revolutions” can help us understand how important little differences in philosophy matter. The French experienced a ten year blood bath while the Americans defeated a mighty tyrant and ratified the Constitution.
Although the French seemed intent on promoting liberty, they did little more than create a fever dream of murderous treachery and bloodshed that only ended when Napoleon took over. When people call for revolutions, they usually have no clue what that really means, or they think that it will be other people who suffer.
What I am starting to understand about the founding of the nation is there is much more to grasp outside of simply reading the political documents. The Constitution, The Declaration of Independence, and any Amendments to follow are for sure important to understand and deserve study.
There was a whole process that produced these documents. That surely includes the character of the Founding Fathers who wrote them down and debated them in the state house of Philadelphia of 1787. However, it also requires an understanding of the character of the people who crossed the Atlantic, settled up and down the coast, and then produced churches, businesses and families.
The documents were articulations of their political minds but there was something as well that animated their spirits and motivated their hearts to sacrifice even their lives for this nation. People don’t generally sacrifice their lives for abstract intellectual concepts about liberty. Our political documents, however secular they may be, are articulations of the political minds of our ancestors. But their hearts were characterized by deeper sacred principles.
“The great Mr. Locke”, as the Founding Fathers often called him, had similar thoughts on the subject.
“tis too hard a task for unassisted reason to establish morality in all its parts on its true foundations…[The] mass of mankind,…[will be unable to follow] the long and sometimes intricate deductions of reason….And you may as soon hope to have all the day-laborers and tradesmen, the spinsters and dairy maids, perfect mathematicians, as to have them perfect in this way. Hearing plain commands is the sure and only course to bring them to obedience and practice. The greatest part cannot know, and therefore they must believe.”
There is a reason the United States is different from Muslim countries in the Middle East. There is a reason Israel is different from its surrounding Muslim countries. There is a reason that Israel is more like the United States than its neighbors. It’s not all arbitrary.
The people’s deepest beliefs in the nature of reality shape what results just as the foundations of a home dictate what can and cannot be built atop it.