Our Founders' Warning. Strobe Talbott
the United States of America. Many major founders were steeped in political and philosophical ancient Greece and Rome, but they also turned to their ancestral country and its reformers and scientists of the preceding century. A thirty-year-old John Adams asserted that the people “have a right, an indisputable, unalienable, indefeasible divine right to the most dreaded and envied kind of knowledge, I mean of the characters and conduct of their rulers.”4 He was making the case for the sovereignty of individual thought. Freethinking, which had begun on the fringes of the early Enlightenment, was transformed to be an essential element of an American credo.
Throughout previous periods, piety was often fused with patriotism, and ecclesiastical and secular orders reinforced each other. Rulers exercised their authority in the name of an all-powerful divine force that favored and protected their realms and thrones. The effect often galvanized and stabilized communities that became nations, enabling them to make great strides in science, philosophy, morality, civics, culture, education, and governance. But for millennia, the authoritarian symbiosis between princes and priests set limits on individual thought and teaching.
As the Enlightenment modernized and rationalized governance, it also constrained religion from influencing politics, laws, diplomacy—and war. The Protestant Reformation weakened Catholicism’s claim to being the “universal” church of Christendom and limited the papacy’s extensive temporal power. The Wars of Religion, starting in the sixteenth century, and the Thirty Years War, in the seventeenth, left millions dead.5 Prompted by exhaustion, the combatants came together to end religious wars in Europe in a diplomatic marathon that led to the Peace of Westphalia between May and October 1648.
Intellectuals and scientists of seventeenth and eighteenth century Europe were more likely to question reigning orthodoxy if there was little risk of the ax, the gibbet, or the stake. They distributed their ideas while absorbing or disputing those of their peers.
The result was an international network of knowledge, often called the Republic of Letters. The unfettering of reason and imagination created a vast, kaleidoscopic configuration of science, philosophy, literature, music, architecture, theater, art, and medicine. At its center was the presumption that if answers to questions about the universe and humanity were to be found anywhere, they would only come from the mind of Homo sapiens sapiens, “man who knows that he knows.” The human being is also Homo curiosus: before questioning, exploring, experimenting, and inventing, Homo sapiens yearns to know what is not known.
In searching for new knowledge and testing the old, these pioneering thinkers gave wide scope to inquisitiveness and skepticism.
One of them, Francis Bacon, was a devout Anglican who composed holy meditations and religious tracts, while his scientific work concentrated on phenomena that he could see, measure, and prove. Although Bacon believed in God’s existence, he acknowledged that his rational methods could not prove it. He worshipped the almighty, all-wise creator of everything, but he did not look to the scriptures as he sought a way to explain the machinery of the universe.
Bacon’s experiments worked inductively from a controlled collection of facts to general principles. Though devout, he emboldened some scientists and other freethinkers to question religious faith and put their trust in empiricism. Anthony Pagden, a professor of intellectual history, has written that those who made the transition to scientific and philosophic secularism were entering a “fatherless world.”6
Enter Thomas Hobbes, growling. In his youth, Hobbes served Bacon as an amanuensis. While learning much from the renowned scientist, the two parted ways over Bacon’s straddling of spiritual faith and rigorous logic. Hobbes was a staunch materialist, with the firm belief that matter, including gray matter, matters, and that conjuring incorporeal concepts, including God, was a waste of time.7 Heaven and its celestial beings, he believed, were figments of imagination or, worse, superstitions foisted onto gullible minds.
Hobbes comes across in his writings as a philosophic curmudgeon of Enlightenment noir. He perceived “the life of man solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short” and his own birth the arrival of “the little worm.”8 Even moments of joy and mirth are viewed as schadenfreude or mere relief from misery: “Laughter is nothing else but a sudden glory arising from sudden conception of some eminency in ourselves, by comparison with the infirmities of others, or with our own formerly.”9
In keeping with his grim, unforgiving view, Hobbes considered nature selfish, cruel, and ruthless competition. He was fond of the Latin proverb “Man is a wolf to man,”10 and he translated Thucydides’s Peloponnesian War, with its bleak implication that history itself is an epic of disasters.11
To fend off chaos and “the war of all against all,” he envisioned Leviathan—a gargantuan, authoritarian state—after the sea creature that swallowed an errant Old Testament prophet as punishment for disobeying God. Whereas Jonah was reprieved, the populace of a Hobbesian state would live out their lives in the belly of the beast—an authoritarian “commonwealth.”12 A ruler should “be their representative,” with absolute power to keep order and protect the subjects from both external enemies and their own animal instincts.13 If individuals had the latitude to determine their rights, mayhem would ensue, and neither state nor the individual would be safe. Therefore, in exchange for order and protection, a subject would have to swear an oath: I give up the right to govern myself.
This compulsory variant of the social contract put Hobbes at odds with the optimistic aspect of the zeitgeist. A prescription for dictatorship, albeit meant to be a benevolent and competent one, did not suit many of the era’s intellectuals and reformist politicians. While Hobbes was preparing Leviathan for publication, he expected vehement criticism if not outrage from colleagues and successors, and he was not mistaken.14 It is little wonder that he is often characterized as the Enlightenment’s prince of darkness, and his name has come up in academic debates in the early twenty-first century with the rise of “illiberal” democracies, first in central Europe and then in the current American presidency of Donald Trump.
Thomas Hobbes was also controversial, in his own time and beyond, because he doubted that there was a God. In contrast, Baruch Spinoza’s concept of God was so radical that even his venturesome and open-minded contemporaries often shied away from him. So did the revolutionaries who would lay the ground for an independent America in the next century.
Spinoza was born in 1632 to a Sephardic family in Amsterdam. His parents had fled the Portuguese Inquisition and settled in the Netherlands during its golden age of culture, global trade, prosperity, and military prowess. Thanks to the Peace of Westphalia, the United Provinces of the Netherlands became an independent republic in the vanguard of religious diversity and free speech. The governors of the provinces—Calvinists in ruffled starched collars—welcomed temporary refugees as well as permanent immigrants, like the Spinozas, who were escaping political heat in their own countries.
When he was twenty-three, Spinoza’s synagogue excommunicated him for his audacious insistence that biblical law was not true and God “only existed in the ‘philosophical’ sense.”
So he created his own philosophy for a new definition of God in a ninety-thousand-word treatise titled Ethics and circulated it through the Republic of Letters.15
Spinoza hewed to a rigorous, deductive, a priori path, moving from definitions and axioms through demonstrated propositions to arrive at the stunning conclusion that God is everything and everywhere, literally and, he was convinced, indisputably. God, he asserted, is not just in every atom, cell, star, thought, event, act of charity or barbarism, pain or joy, truth or lie, human disaster, whether manmade or a new deadly virus. Rather, everything that exists, material or abstract, is in God and, therefore, is God. A bleak thought to many, but not to Spinoza. His signature phrase, “God, or Nature,”