America's Novus Ordo Seclorum

Part 1

In “Founding the American Way of Life,” I demonstrated that all political communities—knowingly or unknowingly, intentionally or unintentionally, directly or indirectly—promote and produce a certain form of moral character, a unique social type, and a  distinctive way of life. Every human society recognizes and promotes in one way or another certain forms of good and bad, right and wrong, virtue and vice, excellence and mediocrity, and superiority and inferiority. This means that every society generates and is governed by principles, values, customs, manners, and mores that are unique to it. Sometimes these folkways are immediately visible to outsiders and sometimes they are not. That they exist, however, is not in question. These manners and mores are either immediately self-evident or they are discoverable sociological facts.

What is less well known is how and why different political communities generate a particular ethos or way of life peculiar to that society even though human nature is everywhere the same. Benjamin Rush, one of the founding period’s great Enlightenment thinkers, understood the complexity of the issue this way: “Human nature is the same in all ages and countries,” he observed in 1773, “and all the differences we perceive in its characters in respect to virtue and vice, knowledge and ignorance, may be accounted for from climate, country, degrees of civilization, forms of government, or accidental causes.”

But how? That is the question.

Each nation or political community forms its own peculiar ethos or way of life over the course of centuries based on a myriad of interacting and mutually reinforcing factors (e.g., philosophy, religion, politics, climate, topography, technology, modes of production, etc.). In other words, the coming-into-being of different cultural folkways is a complex and sometimes mysterious process. This essay attempts to give at least a partial explanation for this unfolding course of human events.

How do we determine or measure the relative importance of the various and different factors that contribute to the development of a unique culture or a distinct way of life?

The central claim of “Founding the American Way of Life” is that constitutional forms and formalities (i.e., the ways in which governments are constituted) provide the central, if not the decisive factor, in determining the unique way of life associated with different political societies. In support of this position, we can turn to the ancient Greek philosophers, who placed particular emphasis on the role played by constitutions and legislation in shaping a community’s definitions of justice and the good life, its cultural mores, and its standards of excellence. It was generally believed by the Greeks (as well as the Romans) that different forms of government produced different kinds of laws, which in turn produced different kinds of citizens.

I think this is right, or at least mostly right. As I explained in “Founding the American Way of Life,” I consider constitutions and forms of government to be the efficient cause creating a particular way of life and philosophy or moral ideas as the final cause.

As Alexis de Tocqueville wrote in Democracy in America, “The influence of the social and political system on manners [and mores]” is a subject “worth serious examination.” Hence it is with great interest then that we consider the kind of citizen or way of life generated by the constitutional order created by America’s founding fathers in the years between 1776 and 1791.

Before we do that, though, I think it might be helpful to first examine, by way of contrast, how ancient lawgivers and philosophers understood the causal relationship between constitutions, governments, and laws on the one hand and cultural forms and formalities on the other.

Constituting a Way of Life

The ancient view of the relationship between politics and ethics can been seen clearly in the writings of Plutarch, Plato, and Aristotle. Their primary challenge was to address what they considered to be the problem of human nature, namely, man’s propensity to self-regarding if not rapaciously grasping behavior. More specifically, the puzzle confronted by the ancient lawgivers and philosophers was this: if human life is improved by living with others in civil society, how shall man’s anti-social selfishness be tamed, channeled, and put in the service of the community? (I shall address how America’s founding fathers answered this specific question in my next essay.)

This is what I call the “Thrasymachian problem,” which was first raised in Books I and II of Plato’s The Republic. Thrasymachus was, of course, Plato’s famous interlocutor in Book I of The Republic. Thrasymachus there famously defined the just as “nothing other than the advantage of the stronger (338c).” Unpersuaded by Socrates’s initial response to Thrasymachus, Glaucon and Adeimantus (Plato’s brothers) “restore,” “polish,” and perfect Thrasymachus’s argument that “the life of the unjust man is . . . far better than that of the just man (358c).” The Thrasymachian problem or challenge can be summed up in this way: all men will lie, cheat, and steal if they think they can get away with it. In other words, built into this assumption is the premise that all men are inherently selfish and grasping. This is and has been the chief operating assumption of most moral and political philosophers throughout history, and it is and has been the moral and political problem to be solved.

How did the classical Greek lawgivers and philosophers address the perennial problem raised by Thrasymachus?

Let us begin with Plutarch’s portrait of the great Spartan lawgiver, Lycurgus, in The Lives of the Noble Grecians and Romans. According to Plutarch, Lycurgus introduced various laws that sought to create a new kind of man, one who would be dedicated in body and soul to serving the common good of the Lacedaemonian’s hornet-like, military republic. Lycurgus’s laws were designed to produce warrior citizens by abolishing “extreme inequality,” “arrogance and envy, luxury and crime,” “avarice” and other vices associated with the pursuit of wealth and power, so that all Spartans could “live all together on an equal footing; merit to be their only road to eminence.” To achieve these ends, Lycurgus introduced a series of “reforms” that included: 1) abolishing the oligarchy’s monopoly of land and wealth by dividing and redistributing their property; 2) replacing gold and silver with near worthless iron coins so that no one individual could hold or carry much money; 3) requiring all men, women, and children to “eat in common”; and 4) regulating marriage, child-rearing, and funerals. Lycurgus used the coercive force of the State to produce a highly collectivized society, where the citizens “neither would nor could live by themselves.” Instead, “they were to make themselves one with the public good, and, clustering like bees around their commander, be by their zeal and public spirit carried all but out of themselves, and devoted wholly to their country.”

Likewise, in Plato’s Republic, Socrates builds an ideal “city in speech” in which great attention is paid to producing a certain kind of citizen—the so-called “guardians,” i.e., those who are to guard the city not only from external attack but also from internal corruption. The Socratic “regime” devotes much of its time and energy to educating the guardian class from childhood to adulthood in order to eradicate man’s inherent selfishness. To that end, the founders and rulers of the city must “supervise the makers of tales,” approving and rejecting different stories told to the guardian children in order to “shape their souls (377b-c).” Plato’s Socrates insists that the founders and rulers of good cities “must do everything” to ensure that what the children guardians “hear first, with respect to virtue, be the finest told tales for them to hear (378e).” As with Lycurgus, Plato believed that the State must proactively mold the moral virtues of its citizens. Character formation is the heart and soul not only of the ancient view of ethics but of politics as well. Ethics and politics were indistinguishable for the ancient philosophers.

So too with Aristotle, who, in The Politics, describes how the formation of human character is dependent on the regime under which one lives. In other words, it is the nature of a given regime’s constitution, its institutional arrangements, and the “spirit” of its laws, that have the greatest effect on the development of a national ethos and individual character. As with Lycurgus and Plato, Aristotle viewed the highest purpose of government as soul formation. In Book V of his Nicomachean Ethics, he claims that “what the law does not command, it forbids (1138a7).” The suggestion here is that the purpose of law is to play a positive role in forming the moral character of the citizens. In other words, the purpose of government for Aristotle is to make men good and just as defined by those who rule. And in Book III of The Politics, Aristotle argues that the best statesmen will give “careful attention to political virtue and vice (1280b-5).” Political communities exist, according to Aristotle, “not only for the sake of living but primarily for the sake of living well (1280a-32),” which means that the “political partnership must be regarded, therefore, as being for the sake of noble actions, not for the sake of living together (1281a-1).” Accordingly, the laws must regulate all aspects of life, both private and public. The State would regulate education, religion, festivals, dress, families, marriage, behavior, and the economy. There could be no separation of church and State, school and State, culture and State, or economy and State. The laws must penetrate every aspect of community life to promote human excellence.

Rethinking the Problem

Throughout history, most governments have viewed character formation as a principal object and function. In addition to the republics of classical antiquity (at least as they were imagined by philosophers), Calvin’s Geneva, Puritan New England, Nazi Germany, Mao’s China, and post-revolutionary Iran all instituted political systems with a view to fostering a certain kind of individual or community ethos. Government officials in all these regimes sought to control directly or indirectly the content of children’s education (e.g., laws determining what children learn about their nation’s past), speech (e.g., censorious libel and slander laws that protect government and religious leaders from criticism), the arts (e.g., laws determining the moral appropriateness of what is read, seen, and heard in literature, painting, music, etc.), architecture (e.g., laws mandating standards of beauty and ugliness), fashion (e.g., sumptuary laws defining acceptable forms of dress), family and civic mores (e.g., laws promoting marriage and childrearing), and economic behavior (e.g., laws regulating production, trade, prices, wages, etc.). To one degree or another, virtually all governments throughout history have assumed some authority for regulating these areas of civil life.

But what of a constitution and government that does none of these things? What of a political system that does not proactively regulate behavior (except to punish rights-violating, criminal behavior and resolve disputes) and instead gives its citizens maximal freedom to pursue their self-interest? What kind of citizen or human type is produced by a political system that protects private property, upholds contracts, and frees individuals to pursue material and spiritual wealth?  In other words, what kind of citizen will be produced by a laissez-faire constitution?

Returning to Aristotle for a moment, the Peripatetic philosopher suggests in Book III of The Politics that a political community founded primarily to protect agreements, alliances, compacts, justice, private property, and trade is not and cannot be a legitimate political community, regime, or polity in the proper or full sense. Such a political community would be akin to what Socrates describes in The Republic as the “city of necessity” or the “city of sows,” where individuals are free to pursue comfortable self-preservation, entertainment, and their own selfish material interests with no care for the highest moral qualities. This sort of sub-political community might very well be peaceful and even prosperous, but none of the ancient Greek philosophers would have considered such a community to meet the necessary desideratum—namely, that community members share a commitment to common manners and mores, to the “public interest,” and to pursuing a common vision of moral excellence. The implication, of course, is that America’s constitutional system of government and cultural way of life is akin to Plato’s “city of sows.”

What are we to make of this? What would Aristotle say of the American “regime” and the American way of life? From the ancient perspective, did America’s founders establish a suboptimal or even a debased polity?

I agree with the ancient lawgivers and philosophers that the way in which a nation constitutes itself politically will have a decisive influence on the kind of society it is, but I disagree (as did America’s founding fathers) with Lycurgus, Plato, and Aristotle and their modern followers in thinking that the coercive force of government must be used to promote moral virtue in the citizenry and to create a certain kind of citizen or culture.

As we shall see forthwith, American revolutionaries rejected and abandoned the last remnants of a two-thousand-year-old philosophic and political tradition that gave to government a positive role to play in the formation of moral character. To that end, I examine in the remainder of this essay how American revolutionaries began to dismantle what I call the Puritan-monarchic State and to lay the groundwork for a new vision of government and society unlike any other in world history. Then, in the two essays to follow this one, I will argue that the American founders’ laissez-faire constitution does in fact promote (indirectly) a certain kind of moral virtue and way of life that is both honorable and noble. In fact, as I have already suggested in “Founding the American Way of Life,” it may very well be the case that the American way of life that issued from the Constitution was morally superior to the reality of the ancient Greek way of life.  

Revolutionizing a Way of Life

The operating premise of this essay is that the American Revolution followed by the constitutional and political founding of the United States was the formative cause in the creation of distinct American way of life. The American Revolution revolutionized American society, and the American Founding institutionalized that revolution.

The Revolution and the Founding can be viewed as discrete events or moments, but in the most important ways they were part of the same general movement. As distinct events, I’m dating the American Revolution from 1761 (i.e., James Otis’s speech at the Writs of Assistance Case) to 1783 (i.e., the signing of the Treaty of Paris) and the American Founding from 1787 (i.e., the framing of the federal Constitution) to 1791 (i.e., the ratification of the Bill of Rights). To make sense of the social revolution that followed the political revolution of the Founding, we should first know what the American Revolution revolutionized.

As the imperial crisis and the War of Independence approached, long-held understandings of political organization and authority were brought into doubt. The Puritans’ utopian vision of a bottom-up, collectivist society based on Christian love was fading fast as was the aristo-monarchical world with its top-down hierarchies based on status and dependent personal relations. These post-feudal societies were held together by folkways, prescription, kinship, and sentimental ties, and they took the “common good” as their moral and political polestar. The traditional hierarchy of the transplanted ancien régime now seemed less natural, more conventional, and ultimately arbitrary to Briton’s mid-eighteenth-century American colonists.

The Revolution ended the remnants of the Puritan-monarchical State that had dominated life in Britain’s North American colonies for 150 years. (I recognize that only the New England colonies were run, strictly speaking, by Puritans, but I am using the term here in a general sense to refer to all seventeenth- and eighteenth-century American Christians who took their piety seriously and who were more than willing to use government coercion to enforce Christian norms. The Pennsylvania Quakers, for instance, shared many core views with the Massachusetts or Connecticut Puritans about how to organize society politically.)

Along with the crisis of political authority was a crisis of moral authority. Colonial American society idealized, promoted, and upheld monarcho-aristocratical honor and Christian love to one degree or another, which meant that a moral teaching of self-sacrifice was recognized as the highest moral ideal. Under this older conception of virtue, the coercive force of the State and the terror of the “visible saints” enforced society’s moral code and its social mores.

That moral code and those social mores were grounded in the colonists’ covenants with their God, their kings, and their local rulers. John Winthrop’s famous 1639 “Little Speech on Liberty” summed up well how seventeenth- and eighteenth-century colonial Americans understood the nature and meaning of liberty, which he called “civil,” “federal,” or “moral” liberty. This moral liberty, according to Winthrop, referred to . . .

the covenant between God and man, in the moral law, and the politic covenants and constitutions, amongst men themselves. This liberty is the proper end and object of authority, and cannot subsist without it; and it is a liberty to that only which is good, just, and honest. . . . This liberty is maintained and exercised in a way of subjection to authority.

Winthrop’s view of liberty as permitting only that “which is good, just, and honest” as determined by religious or political authorities should remind us of Aristotle’s aforementioned understanding of justice and law in the Nicomachean Ethics, wherein he claims that “what the law does not command, it forbids.” In other words, the purpose of government is not so much to prohibit what is bad but rather to promote what is good, right, and just.

Interestingly, seventeenth-century Quakers were just as a “puritanical” as the Puritans in their understanding of government’s purpose and function. According to William Penn in his “Preface” to the Charter of Liberties and Frame of Government of the Province of Pennsylvania in America (1682), man’s fundamental corruption and selfishness required a government that used “coercive or compulsive means” to make men good. The goal of Biblical revelation, according to Penn, was to encourage men to “live conformable to the holy law within,” but if they could not do that then they “should fall under the reproof and correction of the just law without.” Penn’s view of government’s role in overcoming man’s selfish nature was perfectly in accord with how the ancient Greek’s understood (broadly speaking) the purpose of government:

This settles the divine right of government beyond exception, and that for two ends: first, to terrify evildoers; secondly, to cherish those that do well; which gives government a life beyond corruption and makes it as durable in the world as good men shall be, so that government seems to me a part of religion itself, a thing sacred in its institution and end.

The most important function of government, according to Penn, was to promote a “virtuous education of youth, for which after ages will owe more to the care and prudence of founders and the successive magistracy than to their parents for their private patrimonies.”

Obviously, the pagan philosophers were not Christians and vice versa, but they did all share a common belief that the purpose and function of government was to overcome man’s selfish nature and to make men good and just. In this sense, the Puritans and Quakers were much closer to the ancient Greeks of the fourth-century BC than they were to the American revolutionaries who came after them by only 150 years.

This traditional view of liberty, justice, law, and politics associated with the Puritan and Quaker communalists and the aristo-monarchists was swept away by the American Revolution. Not all at once, of course, as with the French Revolution, but the Revolution did set in motion a process that would gradually change American society well into the early decades of the nineteenth century.

The Colonial Dialectic

Before we go too far down this path exploring the revolutionizing effects of the Revolution, we must pause for a moment and recall that the psychological and moral groundwork of the Revolution had been silently building and emerging in the two or three decades before the 1760s. While the colonists were living with the dying remnants of the Puritan-monarchical system (e.g., the institutionalization of Christian love and the traditional social-political hierarchy), subterranean moral and social forces were developing in the colonies largely unseen. The tectonic plates of American society were shifting, and British officials were none the wiser.

How did this happen? Again, some context is necessary.

From the first founding(s) of Britain’s North American colonies in the early seventeenth century, the colonists rarely ever saw or felt the long arm of the British State reaching into their daily lives. It was as though they had been forgotten or abandoned by their kings and left alone without supervision. Absent ruling structures from above, the result was predictable: the American settlers established and developed a sense of freedom entirely unique to them. The absence of direct parliamentary and kingly power in America for 150 years left the colonists free to develop their own self-governing institutions at the local and provincial level, of which they would become intensely jealous and protective.

Throughout the first six decades of the eighteenth century, the Americans were slowly building from the bottom up—whether they intended to or not—a new kind of society that was defined by freedom, individualism, property rights, self-governance, self-reliance, the pursuit of one’s own happiness (i.e., one’s own self-interest), competition, contracts, and voluntary associations. The original “leave us alone” cultural attitude of the Americans was born in the decades leading up to 1760s. The full breadth and meaning of this emerging way of life was still largely unseen and unrecognized in colonial life and it certainly took a back seat to the officially recognized social and political patterns of the Puritan-monarchical State, but it was coming-into-being under the surface of the forms and formalities of the extant political and social order.

When the British State finally made its ominous appearance in the colonies beginning in 1764 with the passage of the Sugar Act an then followed in quick succession by the Stamp, Declaratory, Townshend, Tea, Coercive, and Prohibitory acts, the Americans would have none of it. The Stamp Act in particular served as a kind of psychological and moral tripwire—a kind of early-warning system—that triggered in the colonists a hitherto repressed moral sensibility that they came to call the “spirit of liberty.” This spirit of American liberty is a sentiment, a mindset, a disposition, and a virtue. As a sentiment, it loves freedom and hates slavery; as a mindset, it is watchful, suspicious, and skeptical; as a disposition, it is active, jealous, restless, resolute, protective, and, most of all, vigilant; and, as a virtue, it is defined by integrity, fortitude, perseverance, courage, and patriotism. The spirit of liberty is a sense of life defined by independence in the fullest sense of the term.

Not only did the coming of the Revolution accelerate and intensify the process by which more and more colonists became acculturated to this new kind of moral spiritedness, but it unleashed new social forces that would radically change the American way of life. The Revolution abolished the remnants of the Puritan-monarchical State and ushered in a free society unlike anything else ever seen anywhere or before or since. The forms and formalities of government changed, the manners and mores of society changed, and personal and social relationships changed.

Revolutionary and post-revolutionary American society was built on new a moral philosophy that had effects on all of America’s social, political, and economic institutions. The new republican philosophy launched by the Revolution was summed up by the Virginia declaration of rights, which said that all men would now be seen, treated and respected before the law as “equally free and independent.” In the context of the time, this was a truly revolutionary philosophy. It said that the individual is the primary unit of moral value; that every man is self-owning and self-governing; and that all men, regardless of their birth, wealth, or group affiliation, are free to pursue their highest values and aspirations.

This simple principle meant that the old monarchical society made up of hereditary privileges, various forms of patron-client relations, unequal ranks and degrees of unfreedom, and multiple levels of dependency was done—or, at least, on its way out. The same was true for the old communalist Puritan society that upheld Christian love (i.e., sacrifice) as one’s highest duty. 

American revolutionaries rejected the old order defined by kings with their glory, nobles with their honor, and “visible saints” with their claims to rule in God’s name. In its place, they proposed a new model of political and cultural life for the American people. The founders built a political system that created large spheres of liberty, or what Adam Smith referred to as “the natural system of perfect liberty and justice.” What this meant was millions of ordinary men, once limited in what they could do and earn, were liberated from the political and social system of an archaic past to secure for themselves a place in the world determined by their merit. American revolutionaries wanted to create a new republican world defined and led by those whom John Adams and Thomas Jefferson referred to as the “natural aristocracy.” Birth and blood were to be replaced by talent and ability, and aristocracy was to be replaced by meritocracy.

The greatness of the American Revolution was to remove the artificial barriers that had suppressed the natural talents of ordinary people. All over the United States the natural aristocracy of ability and ambition was set free from their expected roles to see where their aspirations and dreams might take them. The legitimacy of the various forms of traditional political, social, economic, religious, and familial authority was coming apart. The social duties and responsibilities of all Americans were being reordered. The distinction between superiors and subordinates was unravelling, and new men were pushing their way through old barriers and limitations.

As Thomas Paine told the Abbé Raynal in 1782, the Americans had rejected the “prejudices” of the Old World and now “see with other eyes . . . hear with other ears; and think with other thoughts, than those we formerly used.” A war for independence there had been, “yes,” but that was not the true revolution. According to John Adams, the real revolution had occurred “in the minds of the people” and that led to a social revolution that reordered and would forever transform American society. It was a novus ordo seclorum.

This essay will be followed by two more as I continue to think about what was revolutionary about the American revolution.