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To Begin the World Anew, by Bernard
Bailyn. Knopf, 2003, 185 pages.
The Virtue of
Provincialism by Timothy
Sandefur
The American frontier of the 18th century was more
isolated than modern Americans can readily imagine. News traveled slowly,
books were rare, colleges rarer. Even the aristocrats, pampered and
educated as they were, lived on the margins of the West, physically and
intellectually, and were far below the level of European nobility. In "To Begin
The World Anew," Bernard Bailyn argues that this very provincialism
accounted for the originality of America's Founders' thinking.
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Timothy Sandefur is a College of Public Interest Law Fellow at the
Pacific Legal Foundation. |
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This combination of rustic and refined accounts, Bailyn argues, for
America's unique political heritage: it led to a special combination of
idealism and realism that reveals itself in several aspects of the era. The
Federalist Papers, for instance, the most important book on politics America
has produced, is not a lengthy rumination on abstract philosophy, but the
product of a political campaign, written in a frenzy to get the Constitution
ratified. That Constitution was itself the product of a convention whose
debates are surprisingly devoid of abstract arguments. This has led some
conservatives to exaggerate the Framers' pragmatism, and to ignore their
deep philosophical backgrounds. Bailyn happily avoids this extreme. The
Framers may have been rustics, but they were extremely well-educated
ones, who knew what went on in Europe's capitals. Bailyn thus analogizes
the Founders to art historian Kenneth Clark's description of provincialism in
art: the artistic trends of cities set the artistic standards, "but in time
metropolitan art, for all its successes — and in part because of them
— becomes repetitive, overrefined, academic, self-absorbed. . . . Artists
on the periphery introduce simplicity. . . . [They] are concrete in their
visualization, committed to the ordinary facts of life as they know them . . .
they celebrate the world around them and strive to realize their fresh
ambitions." In Bailyn's view, the Founders reacted toward European
intellectual traditions in the same way — both skeptically and
creatively.
Americans have long been proud of their pioneer roots, and have
celebrated common sense over the pomp of aristocracy. This is just one of
the more visible results of our founding provincialism. In fact, from the
beginning, observers noted the salubrious consequences of America's
distance from Europe. Thomas Paine wrote in "Rights of Man" that:
"As America was the only spot in the political world where the principle
of universal reformation could begin, so also was it the best in the natural
world. . . . Its first settlers were emigrants from different European nations,
and of diversified professions of religion, retiring from the governmental
persecutions of the old world, and meeting in the new, not as enemies, but
as brothers. The wants which necessarily accompany the cultivation of a
wilderness produced among them a state of society, which countries long
harassed by the quarrels and intrigues of governments, had neglected to
cherish. In such a situation man becomes what he ought. He sees his
species, not with the inhuman idea of a natural enemy, but as kindred; and
the example shows to the artificial world, that man must go back to Nature
for information." |
| The Framers may
have been rustics, but they were extremely well-educated ones, who knew
what went on in Europe's capitals. |
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The ethic of rugged individualism is not the only manifestation of
American provincialism. Another is the contrast between the American
Revolution and the European revolutions which followed it. The French
Revolution, for instance, differed disastrously from its American
predecessor in at least two ways: first, France, unlike America, had a social
system built up around centuries of European aristocracy. Although America
had a degree of social hierarchy, it reached nothing like the extremes of
Europe, where mores and family histories had become completely
entangled with feudalism and its aftermath. Simply eradicating government
interventionism was enough for most (white) Americans, but in France,
generation after generation of ill-gotten gains had been piled up by
monarchs and their rivals, and this led to the second difference: France,
unlike America, embraced a notion increasingly popular among
18th-century intellectuals: that government should redistribute wealth and
opportunity as a means of freeing men not only from unjust laws, but also
from unfair poverty.
The Jeffersonian emphasis on the self-reliant farmer was built in
conscious contrast to such collectivist thinking. City dwellers, Jefferson
thought, were dependent and meek; farmers were independent and proud.
Of course he exaggerated, as always — claiming once that "our farmers
are the only ones who can read Homer" — but there was a kernel of
truth to it. Jefferson well knew the lessons of Roman history; how a
dependent urban proletariat had grown around increasing demands for
wealth redistribution, while politicians came to depend on their votes, and
thus to pander to them by giving them other people's money. The result was
the death of freedom. Provincialism, therefore, had an important political
purpose in Jefferson's eyes: it kept the people honest, and skeptical of their
rulers' honesty.
Provincialism, balanced by a deep understanding of European
civilization, made the Founders into practical idealists rather than utopians;
they were both speculative philosophers and practical men. Thus "Dr."
Franklin — world-famous scientist and man of letters — had no
formal schooling and was not a "Dr." at all. He was a printer and an
eminently practical man, originator of clever technological improvements
that mattered to real people. The Founders' more abstract pursuits reveal
their constant desire to make ideas matter in the real world. "The blending
of realism and idealism permeates the entire history of the Revolutionary
era," writes Bailyn. The Constitution, for instance, a practical document,
setting out the rules for political order, was thus appended with a Bill of
Rights which has become an icon of founding idealism. It "is two documents,
one creating the powers necessary for survival, the other expressing
enlightened aspirations . . . it reflects precisely the creative tension
between idealism and realism in American life. . . . "
| Provincialism,
balanced by a deep understanding of European civilization, made the
Founders into practical idealists rather than utopians; they were both
speculative philosophers and practical men.
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Thus Bailyn rejects the fashionable myth that the Constitution was a
retreat from the radical ideology of the American Revolution, a politically
motivated misreading which has unfortunately gained adherents even
within the libertarian world. There are three causes of that myth's survival:
first, a misunderstanding of the American Revolution; second, a
misunderstanding of the Constitution; third, an anachronistic tendency to
see the 20th century's abuses of government as the inevitable result of the
Federalists' creation. This is understandable; it's hard, when reading
"Brutus"' essay on the federal taxing power, to resist the feeling that he was
right; that we should have heeded his warning and refused to ratify the
Constitution; that the seeds of the New Deal and Great Society were sown in
1788. But surely this is throwing the baby out with the bath water. The
American Revolution was not some proletarian uprising for the
redistribution of property and the exile of capitalist exploiters, and the
Constitution was not a humbug put over on the working class to lure them
back under the yoke. The revolution's principles were extremely
well-formulated, and the drafters of the Constitution candidly relied on
them when writing the Constitution. At the Massachusetts Ratification
Convention, one delegate complained that "[t]hese lawyers, and men of
learning, and moneyed men, that talk so finely, and gloss over matters so
smoothly, to make us poor illiterate people swallow down the pill, [will] . . .
get all the power and all the money into their own hands, and then they will
swallow up all us little folks, like the great Leviathan. . . . " But another
delegate rose to calm him:
"I am a plain man, and get my living by the plough. . . . I beg your leave to
say a few words to my brother ploughjogger. . . . I have lived in a part of the
country where I have known the worth of good government by the want of it.
There was a black cloud that rose in the east last winter, and spread over
the west . . . and produced a dreadful effect. [Shays' rebellion] brought on a
state of anarchy. . . . People that used to live peaceably, and were before
good neighbors, got distracted, and took up arms against government . . .
and then, if you went to speak to them, you had the musket of death
presented to your breast. They would rob you of your property; threaten to
burn your houses; oblige you to be on your guard night and day; alarms
spread from town to town; families were broken up; the tender mother
would cry, 'O, my son is among them! What shall I do for my child. . . !' Our
distress was so great that we should have been glad to snatch at any thing
that looked like a government. Had any person, that was able to protect us,
come and set up his standard, we should all have flocked to it, even if it had
been a monarch; and that monarch might have proved a tyrant; — so
that you see that anarchy leads to tyranny, and better have one tyrant than
so many at once."
This is the sort of common sense that laid the foundation for the
American experiment. Political philosophy served the practical needs of real
life, rather than changing people to fit utopian fantasies. The Constitution, as
written, created a limited government of enumerated powers, with checks
and balances to protect the prerogatives of the states and thus prevent
centralization. It recognized and built upon the known weaknesses and
strengths of real human beings. It prevented states from taking property
from some people and giving it to others. It forbade the income tax and
paper currency. It protected the free flow of commerce between states, and
the right of private property. That we have fallen from these principles
reveals the degree to which plain common sense has been subverted as
provincial America (the red spots on the famous 2000 election map) grows
into the urban (blue). But the Framers warned us about this. For instance,
writes Bailyn, "the phrase 'general welfare' . . . is no open-ended license to
prey on the community. It is specifically explained and qualified, Madison
wrote, by the enumerated particulars in the clauses that immediately
follow. Shall these 'clear and precise expressions,' Madison asked, 'be
denied any signification' and only 'the more doubtful and indefinite terms be
retained in their full extent'? That, he said, would be absurd."
| The corruption of
constitutional understanding has led to this point: the court no longer has
access to the reason of the Constitution, so instead it appeals to authority.
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Today, absurdity is a matter of course in American law, as the plain
words of the Constitution are strained and twisted to suit the needs of the
modern regulatory welfare state. Take the Supreme Court's recent decision
in Tahoe-Sierra v. Tahoe Regional Planning Agency. The Fifth
Amendment does not require just compensation when laws prohibit all
construction for 20 years, wrote Justice Stephens, because government
couldn't afford that. Bailyn writes of Jefferson's letters from France, which
described how government employed "'the flower of the country as
servants,' leaving the masses unemployed . . . while vast lands [were] set
aside as game preserves." What does this sound like if not present day
America? Government is the nation's largest employer, leaving private
schools and other businesses unable to compete for employees; vast areas
of land are put off-limits, to preserve endangered insects, rats, and ferns. It
is not the Constitution that has reduced us to our present state, but our own
failure to keep it. The Framers told us, as Bailyn writes, that "if it ever
happened that [the Constitution's] restrictions [on power] were ignored by
federal officeholders, then the whole Constitution of government would be
at an end and private problems would scarcely matter in the general
catastrophe that would result." That our era has abandoned the
Constitution's limits on government in order to purchase the liberties of the
people with their own tax dollars is our own fault.
Our intellectual class no longer shares the Founders' provincial common
sense — if anything, it scoffs at their alleged primitivism, because (it is
said) they didn't imagine how complex and interconnected our world would
become. Like the Old World elites our Founders reacted against, today's
leaders — including Supreme Court Justices — can no longer really
understand the Framers as anything but quaint historical curiosities. This
accounts for an observation Bailyn makes in a brief note on the influence of
The Federalist on the Supreme Court's jurisprudence. He notes that in the
first few years of American history, The Federalist was rarely cited as an
authority, and then the court disagreed with Publius' analysis as frequently
as it agreed. Over the past decades, references to The Federalist have grown
very common; "twentieth century justices have shown little restraint in
using the papers to support their opinions, and increasingly as an
irrefutable authority." But this should not be surprising. The collapse of
political philosophy in modern America has rendered the court unable to
understand, let alone carry on a sensible conversation with, the concepts in
The Federalist Papers. They are no longer seen as arguments, but as oracles,
expressing some deep and mystical truths inaccessible to the judicial mind.
They are no longer food for thought, but merely time capsules. This parallels
the court's descent from the realm of logical moral philosophy to the
recitation of tradition.
The corruption of constitutional understanding has led to this point: the
court no longer has access to the reason of the Constitution, so instead it
appeals to authority. Bailyn is puzzled that while "respect for the papers'
authority has grown" in recent years, there has also been a growing
"absence of references to papers and arguments that the Federalist authors
themselves believed to be fundamental." But the answer is clear: many
members of the bar are no longer able to comprehend the argument of The
Federalist. It is not that today's judges rely on The Federalist "to guide
the[ir] reasoning," but that they have come to see it as a substitute for
reasoning.
The justices have abandoned the notion that there are any moral truths,
let alone self-evident ones, and, as the court itself put it in a 1984 case,
"[t]he 'natural rights' theory . . . was discarded long ago" (New Hampshire
v. Piper). Instead, to determine what the Constitution protects, the court
analyzes "our nation's history and tradition," which, while often
enlightening, is in the end, deeply cynical: it turns away from what is true,
and asks only what people say is true. So the words, rather than the
thoughts, of the Founders remain. As Josß Ortega y Gasset wrote, "the
advantage of the words which offer material support to thought has the
disadvantage that they tend to supplant that thought; and if, some fine day
we should set ourselves to plumb the repertory of our most customary and
habitual thoughts, we would find ourselves painfully surprised to discover
that we do not have actual thoughts, but merely the words for them."
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