Spinoza foresaw America, our spiritual if not our physical topography.
The North American continent, during Spinoza’s time, was a spattering of experiments, religious and rapacious, intermixed with indigenous settlements and impenetrable swaths. That it would coalesce within a few centuries into a few durable states was implausible and still is. E pluribus unum? – Not a chance!
Spinoza believed that free men (and it was still men) would gravitate toward virtue and that virtue would be fertilized by freedom. “The ultimate aim of government,” he wrote, “is not to rule, or restrain, by fear, nor to exact obedience, but contrariwise, to free every man from fear, that he may live in all possible security; in other words, to strengthen his natural right … not to change men from rational beings into beasts or puppets, but to enable them to develop their minds and bodies in security, and to employ their reason unshackled; neither showing hatred, anger, or deceit, nor watched with the eyes of jealousy and injustice. In fact, the true aim of government is liberty.”
Such confidence in human potential must have struck the bosses of Spinoza’s hour as lunacy: humans were sheep who needed shepherds – or wolves, incapable of collaborating for the betterment of all. Spinoza wrote, “Those who are governed by reason desire nothing for themselves which they do not desire for the rest of humankind.” He must have been kidding! Humans were grabby, grubbing tots requiring stern parents, whom God in His gracious wisdom, in the person of kings and other superior beings, had supplied. Humans had “a natural right,” which none could abjure or abridge? Lock that man up – or break his neck! God help society if such impiety caught on!
Spinoza’s belief in reason gradually blossomed in his spiritual descendants. Our Founders were Spinozists, whether they realized their debt. Over centuries, the lonely notion of free thinking had gathered into a consensus. Freedom to think made us ceaseless inventors and experimenters in every walk of life. We invented wondrous machines, unprecedented methods and systems, concepts to contain our burgeoning might. Progress seemed inevitable – who could stop it! Hitler, Communism, tyrannies were aberrations, blips in an inevitable tide.
Only something happened. Societies predicated on human freedom started sliding from that faith. More and more nations rejected democracy in favor of shackles. Tyrants resumed control, insisting on their divine necessity. “Citizens are not born, but made,” Spinoza had written. But making citizens wasn’t easy. Civilization had grown too complex, confusing, dangerous, time-consuming. Bring back the Big Guy so we can shop and golf and doze. Hush with reason, let us sleep!
“The purpose of the state is really freedom,” Spinoza wrote – a truism, when I was a young, today a jittery thesis. Maybe the purpose of the state is enforcing conformity and encouraging indolence, opulence, indifference to any but our selfish selves. “Those who are governed by reason desire nothing for themselves they do not desire for the rest of mankind,” Spinoza wrote. Maybe that was pie in the sky. Maybe free thinking whooshed us not to goodness but greed, the advantage of a fortunate few, not the betterment of all.
Spinoza’s calm confident clarity makes me wince. He thinks so well of us, so much better, perhaps, than we deserve. “Everyone is by absolute natural right the master of his own thoughts,” he wrote, “and thus utter failure will attend any attempt in a commonwealth to force men to speak only as prescribed by the sovereign despite their different and opposing opinions.” Would it were so! Nearly half of today’s Americans say they’d opt for a form of government that would deploy repression, segregation, thought police to impose order. Yes, we’ll be enslaved by lies and superstition, bigotry, hostility, prejudice, but so?
This is the sixth of seven reflections on my new pal.