Paine's ideology was the antithesis of the ethos that produced our Constitution.
Responding to "A View From the Left," Kenneth T. Ellis wrote:
Mr. Brewton,
As a member of the Thomas Paine Assn. I am appalled when I see what has happened to the U.S. and its downtrodden masses.
These words by Thomas Paine should ring out loud and clear to every American that today is in want.
When it shall be said in any country in the world,
my poor are happy, neither
distress nor ignorance
is to be found among them;
my jails are empty of prisoners,
my streets of beggars;
the aged are not in want,
the taxes are not oppressive…
…when these things can be said,
then may that country boast its constitution
and its government
(Rights of Man, part 2, 1792)
Then will also introduce you to a poem written by Thomas Pain.
See Africa's wretched offspring torn
From all that human hearts hold dear.
See millions doomed in Chains to Mourn
Unpitied, even by a Tear.
See Asia and her fertile plains
Where once the Brahmin dwelt serene
Now ravaged by the thirst for Gain
Till famine ends the dismal scene.
These food for thought by those of you that have forgotten why Thomas Paine left England and came to America in 1774. To renew the spirit of what freedom really means to each and everyone of us on earth.
So, Mr. Brewton, always keep that mind and it will make a better person of you..
Now please do publish this letter on your website, to let those who have forgotten the true meaning of freedom.
Sincerely,
Kenneth T. Tellis
While Thomas Paine's stirring prose helped to rally public opinion in support of the War of Independence in 1776, his later writings were 180 degrees out of synch with the Christian ethos that prevailed in the United States.
It was in those later writings after the War of Independence — The Rights of Man and The Age of Reason – that Paine expressed the sentiments which Mr. Ellis holds forth as the true values of 1776.
Paine's social and political ideas were essentially the revolutionary and bloody socialism that afflicted the world in the 1789 French Revolution.
His The Age of Reason is an attack upon Christianity and all spiritual religion, a panegyric to the minds of intellectuals as the source of human perfection via the collectivized political state.
Paine was a great admirer and supporter of the French Revolution and an advocate of cutting everyone down to the lowest denominator of poverty in order to achieve economic equality. This, of course, remains a guiding principle of today's Democrat/Socialist Party and of liberal-progressives on both sides of the political aisle.
Paine admired the French Revolution's abstract Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen, a document penned by a people who had never had so much as five minutes' experience in self-government during their entire history. Ironically, Voltaire, one of the celebrated voices leading to the Revolution, had to flee to England to escape persecution in France for his advocacy of greater political liberty. Living in England in the 1720s, Voltaire described it as the society that had the greatest degree of political liberty to be found anywhere in the world.
It was no accident that Americans writing the Constitution in 1787 took England, not France, as the model for our government. Nor is it surprising that the American public, having witnessed the barbaric savagery of the French Revolution, were repelled by Paine's support for it. When he returned to the United States, he was deservedly ostracized.
As I wrote in "Judeo-Christianity and the Constitution":
Students are taught that the Declaration of Independence was a hypocritical document, because Thomas Jefferson wrote that all men are created equal (this is a deliberate misrepresentation, as Jefferson was speaking not of slavery but of the estate of mankind under God). Students are taught that the French Revolution’s Declaration of Rights of Man and of the Citizen expresses the true aspiration of American democracy, which in liberals’ view ought to be the French-style socialistic welfare-state.
Such falsifications are the ideological basis upon which the mythology of our present-day left-wing liberalism rests.
The truth is starkly different.
Bancroft Prize-winning historian Clinton Rossiter, who described himself as a centrist, somewhere between labor union radicals and the late Senator Barry Goldwater, wrote in The First American Revolution:
“Finally, it must never be forgotten, especially in an age of upheaval and disillusionment, that American democracy rests squarely on the assumption of a pious, honest, self-disciplined, moral people . . . Whatever doubts may exist about the sources of this democracy, there can be none about the chief source of the morality that gives it life and substance. From Puritanism, from the way of life that exalted individual responsibility, came those homely rules of everyday conduct – or, if we must, those rationalizations of worldly success – that have molded the American mind into its unique shape . . . The men of 1776 believed that the good state would rise on the rock of private and public morality, that morality was in the case of most men and all states the product of religion, and that the earthly mission of religion was to set men free.”
Aspirations of Thomas Paine and his fellow liberal-progressives toward economic equality as the necessary condition for earthly social perfection gave us the bloody French Revolution. More than 70,000 French citizens – from children to the elderly – were murdered on the guillotine, by hanging, and by firing squads, in the name of "Liberty, Equality, Brotherhood."
Those same liberal-progressive ideals espoused by Thomas Paine gave us the 20th century, the most savagely sanguinary and oppressive period in human history, all in the name of perfecting humanity.
Dear Mr Brewton,
At last someone puts Thomas Paine in his correct historical perspective.
Although I agree that Paine has had an influence on the 20th and indeed the early 21st century mind-set, I would rank Jeremy Bentham as a far greater malevolent force.
As I am sure you know, both these gentlemen lived and wrote at about the same time. But, to my mind, Bentham’s Utilitarian principle – that human beings are ‘governed’ by the lust for pleasure – has outlived Paine; and is the foundation of the modern Liberal Fundamentalist state.
Emmanuel Kant, with his “Categorical Imperative,” did try to give some substance to the nonsense espoused by the likes of Bentham and the French ‘rationalists,’ but unfortunately made his arguments so cumbersome that he has been confined to the cloisters of academic pontificating.
Nevertheless, I think this quote from Kant fits quite well with your analysis:
“But [man] is not so completely an animal as to be indifferent to what reason says on its own account, and to use it merely as an instrument for the satisfaction of his wants as a sensible being. For the possession of reason would not raise his worth above that of the brutes, if it is to serve him only for the same purpose that instinct serves in them; it would in that case be only a particular method which nature had employed to equip man for the same ends for which it has qualified brutes, without qualifying him for any higher purpose.”
Unfortunately, Kant couldn’t offer up any real alternative to the Utilitarian ethic.
As Schweitzer said: “On the whole [Kant] does nothing more than put the current utilitarian ethics under the protectorate of the Categorical Imperative. Behind a magnificent façade he constructs a block of tenements.”
And that essentially is what we have in the modern Liberal Fundamentalist state – in Europe and the United States – a block of tenements!
Joseph BH McMillan http://www.freedomvrights.com
Thanks for the perspective on Thomas Paine, a true revolutionary.
A revolutionary can be determined as glorious or despicable depending upon the cause and the particular viewpoint from which it is judged.
I now see Paine, in his one lifetime, as both.
This certainly explains why the leftist novelist Howard Fast wrote a laudatory historical novel about Thomas Paine.
I have suspected for some time that the “all men are created equal” part of the Declaration of Independence was a denunciation of the right-wing institution of a privileged, hereditary nobility rather than an espousement of the leftist goal of “racial equality,” i.e., giving preferences to a minority which largely rejects the traditional American values Mr. Brewton describes herein and a significant portion of which is an unassimilable ethic group that is being used by the Left for purposes of ethnic balkanization.
It is really disappointing to read Barry Goldwater’s praise of the Puritans. Daniel J. Flynn’s “A Conservative History of the American Left” makes it clear that the American Left, which shared the views of Tom Paine, sprung forth from New England Puritanism. This is even worse given that Goldwater defended Bill Clinton, a man who supported the Communist victory in Indochina and shared Tom Paine’s views, against the puritanical so-called Religious Right. At that point one could say that the conservative lost his conscience.
As a fifth-grade teacher in Colorado, probably the most important thing I can instill in students is the belief that all their voices are important. Their future does not have to be inevitable. "Little voices" can make dramatic impacts on events. That is Thomas Paine's greatest contribution to our country. His pamphlet, Common Sense, spoke to all the voices in the 13 colonies during a time of great fear and indecision. He gave a vast number of citizens a vision of what each could do, 176 days before the Declaration of Independence. That message is still paramount to all our students today. For that pamphlet alone, Paine needs to be recognized as a intrical part of the American miracle.
Mark Wilensky,
author of "The Elementary Common Sense of Thomas Paine: An Interactive Adaptation for All Ages"
http://www.NewCommonSenseBook.com
With all due respect, Mr. Wilensky, the most important thing you can do for your students is to teach them math, science, grammar, spelling, music, P.E., and reading.
Their self esteem cannot be artifically inflated, this can only come from true achievement.
[...] been exposed to more "intellectual" revisionism than Thomas Paine. I recently read an example of this on intellectualconservative.com by Thomas Brewton. Brewton writes: "While Thomas Paine's stirring prose helped to rally public opinion [...]
Per the comment by Mountain Man, in addition to the subjects he listed, Civics is also taught in fifth-grade. Democracy is a very fragile thing and must be nutured in our newest generations. While teaching reading, I can give my students reading material with depth and meaning. From current material, all the way back to our country's founding documents. In doing so, I am teaching those important subjects he listed, all the while empowering my students to truly understand the meaning of, We the People.